capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
No, it IS telling me how long a distance I can travel. At maximum allowable speed in New Mexico (75mph) I can travel at most 55,800 miles in month (75x24x31) and THAT PISSES ME OFF!
I've been seeing reports of stuff like this for at least two years. Wasn't there someone just a few months ago, probably reported here... hang on a sec...
Anyway, I've been seeing reports like this forever, but zero consumer products. When something hits the market, I'll be interested. Until then I don't care.
OK, ten years to get to something 5 light years away, so we are talking roughly half the speed of light here, yes?
Are there any serious time effects at that speed? Five years for who? Do the astronauts come back and meet their great great great great grandchildren?
I am SO in agreement with you here. I wiped Gentoo1.3 last month to try Mandrake9 -- more or less just to see what it was like. I won't have a spare weekend to put Gentoo1.4 back on this box for two weeks so until then I just have to suffer.
I can't wait to go back because each and every time I have tried to compile something nifty the process has failed because due to irresolvable dependency issues. This is what originally pushed me over to Gentoo from Mdk8.2, and once again I'm being pushed back.
Mandrake is, like all the "latest and greatest" attempts at being a simple install (e.g., lindows, lycoris, redhat, xandros, etc.) FANTASTIC so long as you never plan on using anything not included in the distro, and never plan on upgrading any software package.
That's fine for an office worker I suppose, but given the choice I'll take Debian or Gentoo any day. At least I know that when I get return to Gentoo when I type configure/make/make install I won't have to start crying!
The desktop space however doesn't have a head-penguin and it really shows.
That statement really made me sit up!
What an interesting idea. The first thing I thought was "Hey, vote for me! I'll be head penguin and really sort all this stuff out." It was just a silly thought of course. But then it got me thinking:
How could we have a head penguin?
What if we had an election, via the net, and voted for a Head Penguin?! I'm serious. Give the Head Penguin a term of say, two years... or maybe just one year to start out to see how it all works. And then continue to have new elections ever one or two years. Who knows what the details of all of this would be like, but maybe a little debate about the possibilities would be useful?
4. bestrate loan company makes a "paternship" with joe's porn palace and before you know it your p*nis is being enlarged!
You too?! I've been so embarassed. I've been buying new pants every week but the bulge is getting too large to hide. Today on the bus ride home this little old grandmother kept *looking* at me in *that way*. I'm so freaked out.
Same here. I gave away my VCR that I paid over $300 some years ago. I also gave a away a cheaper one that sat underneath it. Video tape looks horrible compared to a good VCD or DivX. I don't bother with CDRW. CDRs are so cheap I just use them. If I don't want it anymore I'm only out thirty cents or so.
That is exactly what I did. I was just trying to save myself the $27.95+tax that I ultimately paid. I dumped my landline sometime afterwards anyway -- I couldn't see the point when my cell phone, with the same usage, ended up costing me about a third of what I was paying for the luxury of being stuck to cord.
Last year I tried to find linux software to use with my voice capable hardware modem. I looked *hard*. All I could come up with were a few pre-alpha apps that needed to be compiled that worked either very badly or not at all.
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
For a long time now I've been doing a simple trick on my KDE desktop:
Take the Home directory and rename it.Home
Take the Trash directory, drag it into some other folder off the desktop, and then change the path to "Trash" to wherever you moved the folder off to.
Shebang! A totally clean desktop. To delete files of the desktop I just right click delete.
I find it useful when working on small projects to have everything on my desktop. When I'm done, I put stuff I need to keep back where it needs to go, and then drag/grab everything else (no longer having to work my way around the permenant "home" & "trash" icons)and delete it.
XP took icons off the initial desktop (well, except for the "recycle bin" that needs TweakUI to invisify), probably because their usability folks decided they were no longer necessary as people in general are savvy enough to get along without them. I don't see why KDE and GNOME still keep them.
BTW, I don't even bother looking at GNOME any more because there's no way to get rid of desktop icons completely & the extra clutter means that I always take that extra couple of miliseconds to find the stuff I need & after a while it is just too annoying.
OK I've figured out modding now. Let's see: Don't read article. Don't even read summary of article posted on./ Post something unreleated to article. Get many + mod points.
I've never seen this said before, though I suppose it has been:
In my experience, a program that runs under a Microsoft OS is usually into version 3.x or 4.x until it is anything that could actually be called "stable." And by stable, what comes to mind are programs that don't crash unexpectedly and do what they are actually supposed to do.
Examples under windows of programs that were not really "stable" under at least version 4 are:
Internet Explorer Microsoft Word Microsoft Windows WordPerfect Eudora Lotus123 CoolEdit... the list is nearly endless.
On the other hand, under Linux, I've used software called "beta", and less than version 1.x (heck, sometimes it's like version 0.1alpha) that is just as solid and functional as a 6.x or 7.x version of something in the Microsoft world.
Examples are: Komba Mozilla bbweather WindowMaker flux box mplayer xine.... again the list is nearly endless.
I'm not quite sure what the philosophy is here except to kind of thumb noses at Winsoftware windows versions and commercial software marketing BS in general... but fact is that I'd trust a 0.3 beta version of some linux program just as much as I'd trust a release verison 9.x of anything under Windows.
But then I wonder if this hurts Linux when it comes to getting JoeAverage to run LinSoftware:
Isn't Joe gonna think that version 6 of Internet Explorer might be better than version 1 of Mozilla?
Open IT: Govt to rewrite source code in Linux SUDHA NAGARAJ
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 09, 2002 01:29:29 AM ]
NEW DELHI: If the Chinese have IT, get it. The Indian government seems to be taking a leaf out of China's operating system, and is planning a countrywide drive to promote the open source operating system, Linux, as the 'platform of choice' instead of 'proprietary' solutions.
For proprietory, read Microsoft, which controls over 90% of the desktop software market.
The Department of Information Technology has already devised a strategy to introduce Linux and open source software as a de-facto standard in academic institutions, especially in engineering colleges through course work that encourages use of such systems.
Research establishments would be advised to use and develop re-distributable toolboxes just as Central government departments and state governments would be asked to use Linux-based offerings.
DIT is in talks with leading industry players like IBM and HCL to get a feel of their work in the area and invite proposals for joint projects. "As a first step we are persuading all government institutions to offer courses on Linux and programming for Linux environment. We would also set up Linux Resource Centres in academic institutes (with co-funding from government and industry)," said a senior government official.
Though India has made a name for itself selling solutions, software as a product is expensive within the country. And the cost will bite once India starts implementing IPR protection in earnest, as it has committed itself to.
While redistribution of proprietary software is restricted through a licence agreement, the licensing terms for Linux grants the right to obtain and redistribute copies. Many analysts believe that China's growing dominance in the IT space is fuelled by its low cost open source bias.
The Chinese government has consistently promoted its local software based on Linux, both for cost reasons, and reportedly for 'security' concerns as well.
The source code for proprietory software is not revealed, and this, it is believed, has not found favour with the Chinese, especially in defence and security related applications.
Microsoft, in what many observers and reports say is an attempt to soften the Chinese government's stand, recently committed to investing $750m in China in three years to help set up a software college and put its money into Chinese education.
In comparison, Microsoft has announced investments worth only $75m over a three-year time frame in India. Howver, the Chinese company Redflag Software, which was set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's most prestigious research institute, has often come out with low-cost software based on Linux, in direct competition to Windows-based software.
The Indian government's plan, however, is not driven by security concerns, but by the far more simple arithmetic of costing. To put it simply, India being a developing country needs low cost solutions.
Unlike the Microsoft-developed Windows operating system, Linux code is free and downloadable from the internet. With the addition of special applications, it can be personalized to meet specific needs.
An industry-government-user-developer conference on the subject would be organised to throw up ideas for specific initiatives including funding, reliable sources told ET.
The only issue here is support and services, which Indian government sources feel is not likely to be an issue in a country known for its software support and service skills.
Like China, the government is also eyeing the increasingly lucrative global support and services market for the Linux environment may prove lucrative. While proprietary support agreements govern only the systems purchased (with licences), for free software support is independent of the number of copies owned.
"With applications in security being a focus area, inputs have been sought from the Defence on their experience with Linux. Indian-language based solutions, e-governance, embedded and high performance cluster solutions are other areas. But firstly we want to concretise the position on IPR issues in the use of Linux," the source said.
DIT is planning a three-tier mechanism, with itself as the first, industry, user groups and state governments as the second and a national apex committee headed either by a government representative, an industry expert or an academician to oversee manpower and skill development, applications development and deployment and public policy support, said sources.
According to IDC's figures for '00, Microsoft still controlled 94% of the desktop software market and while Linux is expected to overtake the number two -- Apple Mac OS -- by '03, it would still control less than 4% of the market.
In server software, it fares a little better and is expected to control around 30% of the market by '03, according to IDC. Linux, which has established itself in the server space, is an open reliable OS that runs on virtually any platform and was developd by Finnish technologist Linus Torvalds.
After developing the initial source code, Linus made it available on the Internet for use, feedback and further development.
Granted, I am unsure as of yet if Darwin runs 64 bit natively, but when it does, imagine a dual processor of these (with of course, quartz extreme pushing all of the video over to the Graphics processor).
OK, what is wrong here? You the mod are going to mod me down to minus -1 and this numnut gets a 4? I don't care.
IMAGINE A F&CKING BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE!!!!!!!!
I think your assessment is pretty much right on. I'm a classical violinist and can sight read pretty darn well, but even I sometimes wish that something could be done to help make certain things stand out better... and along those lines I've always wondered if something could be done to *augment* standard notation with color?
For example, what if all the notes were a different color (blue for A, red for B, etc...). That might help seeing what's going on in a gazillion 32nd note run all squished together on a line -- or make it easier for folks with eyes that aren't quite what they used to be.
I guess it will never happen because of the associated costs and other PITA factors, but I can dream...
Because if you had read the article you'd realize that this is essentially a zero cost, backwards compatable method of dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude -- so the question is really, "Why not?"
Slashdot Mirror
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
No, it IS telling me how long a distance I can travel. At maximum allowable speed in New Mexico (75mph) I can travel at most 55,800 miles in month (75x24x31) and THAT PISSES ME OFF!
I've been seeing reports of stuff like this for at least two years. Wasn't there someone just a few months ago, probably reported here... hang on a sec...
yea here it is.
Anyway, I've been seeing reports like this forever, but zero consumer products. When something hits the market, I'll be interested. Until then I don't care.
OK, ten years to get to something 5 light years away, so we are talking roughly half the speed of light here, yes?
Are there any serious time effects at that speed? Five years for who? Do the astronauts come back and meet their great great great great grandchildren?
I am SO in agreement with you here. I wiped Gentoo1.3 last month to try Mandrake9 -- more or less just to see what it was like. I won't have a spare weekend to put Gentoo1.4 back on this box for two weeks so until then I just have to suffer.
I can't wait to go back because each and every time I have tried to compile something nifty the process has failed because due to irresolvable dependency issues. This is what originally pushed me over to Gentoo from Mdk8.2, and once again I'm being pushed back.
Mandrake is, like all the "latest and greatest" attempts at being a simple install (e.g., lindows, lycoris, redhat, xandros, etc.) FANTASTIC so long as you never plan on using anything not included in the distro, and never plan on upgrading any software package.
That's fine for an office worker I suppose, but given the choice I'll take Debian or Gentoo any day. At least I know that when I get return to Gentoo when I type configure/make/make install I won't have to start crying!
the FTP post!@1!!!!!!!!
i love no mod totals!
Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..
Uh, that's how it works in general. Or did you think modern CPUs were laid out by hand?
Naturally I laid out my own CPU by hand. I run Gentoo on it too. We all do. What are you, some kind of Mandrake wussy?
The desktop space however doesn't have a head-penguin and it really shows.
That statement really made me sit up!
What an interesting idea. The first thing I thought was "Hey, vote for me! I'll be head penguin and really sort all this stuff out." It was just a silly thought of course. But then it got me thinking:
How could we have a head penguin?
What if we had an election, via the net, and voted for a Head Penguin?! I'm serious. Give the Head Penguin a term of say, two years... or maybe just one year to start out to see how it all works. And then continue to have new elections ever one or two years. Who knows what the details of all of this would be like, but maybe a little debate about the possibilities would be useful?
4. bestrate loan company makes a "paternship" with joe's porn palace and before you know it your p*nis is being enlarged!
You too?! I've been so embarassed. I've been buying new pants every week but the bulge is getting too large to hide. Today on the bus ride home this little old grandmother kept *looking* at me in *that way*. I'm so freaked out.
Same here. I gave away my VCR that I paid over $300 some years ago. I also gave a away a cheaper one that sat underneath it. Video tape looks horrible compared to a good VCD or DivX. I don't bother with CDRW. CDRs are so cheap I just use them. If I don't want it anymore I'm only out thirty cents or so.
That is exactly what I did. I was just trying to save myself the $27.95+tax that I ultimately paid. I dumped my landline sometime afterwards anyway -- I couldn't see the point when my cell phone, with the same usage, ended up costing me about a third of what I was paying for the luxury of being stuck to cord.
Obviously I must have one. :^)
Last year I tried to find linux software to use with my voice capable hardware modem. I looked *hard*. All I could come up with were a few pre-alpha apps that needed to be compiled that worked either very badly or not at all.
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
.Home
For a long time now I've been doing a simple trick on my KDE desktop:
Take the Home directory and rename it
Take the Trash directory, drag it into some other folder off the desktop, and then change the path to "Trash" to wherever you moved the folder off to.
Shebang! A totally clean desktop. To delete files of the desktop I just right click delete.
I find it useful when working on small projects to have everything on my desktop. When I'm done, I put stuff I need to keep back where it needs to go, and then drag/grab everything else (no longer having to work my way around the permenant "home" & "trash" icons)and delete it.
XP took icons off the initial desktop (well, except for the "recycle bin" that needs TweakUI to invisify), probably because their usability folks decided they were no longer necessary as people in general are savvy enough to get along without them. I don't see why KDE and GNOME still keep them.
BTW, I don't even bother looking at GNOME any more because there's no way to get rid of desktop icons completely & the extra clutter means that I always take that extra couple of miliseconds to find the stuff I need & after a while it is just too annoying.
Off topic eh? Why don't you look at the parent, idiot?!!!!! Who gave you mod points! Unbelievable.
OK I've figured out modding now. Let's see: Don't read article. Don't even read summary of article posted on ./ Post something unreleated to article. Get many + mod points.
In all seriousness: can someone please explain to me why this was modded down as as troll? I just do not get it.
Actually I don't think it is possible for the human brain to imagine something so hot it would melt the sun.
I've never seen this said before, though I suppose it has been:
... the list is nearly endless.
x box
In my experience, a program that runs under a Microsoft OS is usually into version 3.x or 4.x until it is anything that could actually be called "stable." And by stable, what comes to mind are programs that don't crash unexpectedly and do what they are actually supposed to do.
Examples under windows of programs that were not really "stable" under at least version 4 are:
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Windows
WordPerfect
Eudora
Lotus123
CoolEdit
On the other hand, under Linux, I've used software called "beta", and less than version 1.x (heck, sometimes it's like version 0.1alpha) that is just as solid and functional as a 6.x or 7.x version of something in the Microsoft world.
Examples are:
Komba
Mozilla
bbweather
WindowMaker
flu
mplayer
xine.... again the list is nearly endless.
I'm not quite sure what the philosophy is here except to kind of thumb noses at Winsoftware windows versions and commercial software marketing BS in general... but fact is that I'd trust a 0.3 beta version of some linux program just as much as I'd trust a release verison 9.x of anything under Windows.
But then I wonder if this hurts Linux when it comes to getting JoeAverage to run LinSoftware:
Isn't Joe gonna think that version 6 of Internet Explorer might be better than version 1 of Mozilla?
This poor guy has been collecting disks since 1996. I think it's a more worthy cause!
Open IT: Govt to rewrite source code in Linux
SUDHA NAGARAJ
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 09, 2002 01:29:29 AM ]
NEW DELHI: If the Chinese have IT, get it. The Indian government seems to be taking a leaf out of China's operating system, and is planning a countrywide drive to promote the open source operating system, Linux, as the 'platform of choice' instead of 'proprietary' solutions.
For proprietory, read Microsoft, which controls over 90% of the desktop software market.
The Department of Information Technology has already devised a strategy to introduce Linux and open source software as a de-facto standard in academic institutions, especially in engineering colleges through course work that encourages use of such systems.
Research establishments would be advised to use and develop re-distributable toolboxes just as Central government departments and state governments would be asked to use Linux-based offerings.
DIT is in talks with leading industry players like IBM and HCL to get a feel of their work in the area and invite proposals for joint projects. "As a first step we are persuading all government institutions to offer courses on Linux and programming for Linux environment. We would also set up Linux Resource Centres in academic institutes (with co-funding from government and industry)," said a senior government official.
Though India has made a name for itself selling solutions, software as a product is expensive within the country. And the cost will bite once India starts implementing IPR protection in earnest, as it has committed itself to.
While redistribution of proprietary software is restricted through a licence agreement, the licensing terms for Linux grants the right to obtain and redistribute copies. Many analysts believe that China's growing dominance in the IT space is fuelled by its low cost open source bias.
The Chinese government has consistently promoted its local software based on Linux, both for cost reasons, and reportedly for 'security' concerns as well.
The source code for proprietory software is not revealed, and this, it is believed, has not found favour with the Chinese, especially in defence and security related applications.
Microsoft, in what many observers and reports say is an attempt to soften the Chinese government's stand, recently committed to investing $750m in China in three years to help set up a software college and put its money into Chinese education.
In comparison, Microsoft has announced investments worth only $75m over a three-year time frame in India. Howver, the Chinese company Redflag Software, which was set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's most prestigious research institute, has often come out with low-cost software based on Linux, in direct competition to Windows-based software.
The Indian government's plan, however, is not driven by security concerns, but by the far more simple arithmetic of costing. To put it simply, India being a developing country needs low cost solutions.
Unlike the Microsoft-developed Windows operating system, Linux code is free and downloadable from the internet. With the addition of special applications, it can be personalized to meet specific needs.
An industry-government-user-developer conference on the subject would be organised to throw up ideas for specific initiatives including funding, reliable sources told ET.
The only issue here is support and services, which Indian government sources feel is not likely to be an issue in a country known for its software support and service skills.
Like China, the government is also eyeing the increasingly lucrative global support and services market for the Linux environment may prove lucrative. While proprietary support agreements govern only the systems purchased (with licences), for free software support is independent of the number of copies owned.
"With applications in security being a focus area, inputs have been sought from the Defence on their experience with Linux. Indian-language based solutions, e-governance, embedded and high performance cluster solutions are other areas. But firstly we want to concretise the position on IPR issues in the use of Linux," the source said.
DIT is planning a three-tier mechanism, with itself as the first, industry, user groups and state governments as the second and a national apex committee headed either by a government representative, an industry expert or an academician to oversee manpower and skill development, applications development and deployment and public policy support, said sources.
According to IDC's figures for '00, Microsoft still controlled 94% of the desktop software market and while Linux is expected to overtake the number two -- Apple Mac OS -- by '03, it would still control less than 4% of the market.
In server software, it fares a little better and is expected to control around 30% of the market by '03, according to IDC. Linux, which has established itself in the server space, is an open reliable OS that runs on virtually any platform and was developd by Finnish technologist Linus Torvalds.
After developing the initial source code, Linus made it available on the Internet for use, feedback and further development.
PowerBook G3 runs just fine
I'm sure you are satisfied, but I just plugged a new $99 AthyXP2000+ into my old box and it doesn't run just fine any more.
Instead, it blows me away.
For $99.
Let me repeat that and clarify: for $99, shipped and warranteed.
And that is why I switched over to PC hardware from Mac hardware so many years ago -- and still havn't looked back.
I shudder when I think how much I would have to pay to approach that sort of performance on Apple hardware.
Granted, I am unsure as of yet if Darwin runs 64 bit natively, but when it does, imagine a dual processor of these (with of course, quartz extreme pushing all of the video over to the Graphics processor).
OK, what is wrong here? You the mod are going to mod me down to minus -1 and this numnut gets a 4? I don't care.
IMAGINE A F&CKING BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE!!!!!!!!
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!
I think your assessment is pretty much right on. I'm a classical violinist and can sight read pretty darn well, but even I sometimes wish that something could be done to help make certain things stand out better... and along those lines I've always wondered if something could be done to *augment* standard notation with color?
For example, what if all the notes were a different color (blue for A, red for B, etc...). That might help seeing what's going on in a gazillion 32nd note run all squished together on a line -- or make it easier for folks with eyes that aren't quite what they used to be.
I guess it will never happen because of the associated costs and other PITA factors, but I can dream...
The idiots that "play the market" always dump AMD too when Intel stock dives, 'cause Intel is A "bellweather" for the market. So no party.
Because if you had read the article you'd realize that this is essentially a zero cost, backwards compatable method of dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude -- so the question is really, "Why not?"