I'm not going to argue about the memory leaks.
However, I find surprising that only Firefox "chugs" when you try to maximise it. It's a very normal process (especially if it takes more than 200 MB of memory) : it indicates the memory used by the program has been swapped to the disk, and used for more useful purposes, like playing a game.
If other applications maximise quickly, that either mean they don't use much memory (as does Trillian I believe, even though I've never used it), or that for somewhat reason they kept using the main memory (Photoshop being also a memory hog). And the last reason is indeed bad.
You'll be waiting a long time, I think. People have been trying this foolhardy idea of optical computing for a long time, and the field is pretty much dead.
The field isn't so much dead. What is "dead in the water" (at least for now, and as long as there is no further breaktrough) is the idea of building processors using photons the sale way as the current processors are using electrons.
However, optical processing has other applications that could be put into good use. Computing Fourier transforms like Lenslet is doing could be such an example.
Quite surprisingly, modern nuclear balance is not about the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, or at least not in its original form. Indeed, few countries (if any) except Russia would have the power to completely wipe out the United States from the planet.
The logic behind the British and French nuclear arsenal size is the following : make sure that under any circonstances, the disasters caused by the nuclear retaliation of these countries would greatly overthrow the possible gains of initiating a nuclear war against them.
That is why the raw number of nuclear heads each country is having is not really important. That is why the nuclear arsenal of France and the United Kingdom is rather low on number. And that is why treaties between the US and Russia such as START have been able to be negociated.
Getting 5us interrupt latencies is not a difficult feat for an RTOS.
Indeed. One year ago, I participated in the installation of a High Energy Physics (HEP) experiment. We were using PowerPC 604 CPUs running VxWorks (the commercial "industry standard" RTOS).
On that configuration, I was getting interrupt latencies always under 12 us (3 us average), and that was on a 300 Mhz CPU ! 5 us is hardly impressive on the kind of systems they are using.
However, what would be interesting would be to know how the system behaves under load. RTLinux has been known in the past to crumble when heavily loaded by low priority tasks. It might have gone better recently.
Note that RTLinux is not the only Real-time Linux implementation. There's also RTAI released under LGPL.
The worst about that is probably not the spelling (which I remember being more like "jigowatts"), the e problem that watts are power units and not energy units.
Indeed, you are right of pointing out the consequences of skin effect. The cutoff frequency of the Faraday cage would only be limited by the size of its defects - if it was made of a perfect conductor.
However, I do think that you usually compute the skin depth for a e^-1 reduction in strength. That means you don't need really more than 10 mm (around 1/3 of an inch) to get an effective shielding.
The change from 5.x to 6.x is mostly slight of hand, a subterfuge if you will.
Interesting. But actually, the change from 5.x to 6.x means the release is pulled from a different branch in the CVS tree. In this case, from the -CURRENT branch instead of the -STABLE branch.
Of course, that recessive "unprotected sex" gene must be wiped out from the gene pool.
Ignoring the fact that wisdom is most likely not genetical at all.
choice quote from TFA: '"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.'
Isn't this just the equivalent of our natural killers cells or our cytotoxic lymphocites ? Even if they don't really make the bacteria explode, they still pierce its membrane until it "bleeds to death".
In my own and personal opinion, that would just prove that bits of code has been exchanged (or stolen, depends on the way you turn it) between every major UNIX platform during their history, Linux included.
This is why SCO's case is ridiculous. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely no line originating for UnixWare (or another UNIX player) in the Linux kernel.
You know the principle of natural selection which is at the base of evolution (but arguably not the obly one):
every people which are sensitive to the EM radiations of cell phones die, and don't reproduce. The population having a genetical advantage in resisting to the radiations can reproduce, and transmit these genes to their offspring.
Of course, this fails shorts for cell phone because:
- People using cell phones and (potentially) contracting diseases are still likely to reproduce,
- Evolution goes over a course of many years.
To have a better understanding on how wavelength and numerical aperture are limiting the maximum resolution of lithography, here are a few formulas :
If R is the radius of the Airy disk made by the diffraction of light in the objective, then:
R = 1.22 * lambda/(2*NA)
where lambda is the wavelength, and NA the numerical aperture of the lens.
You cannot print details smaller than the size of the Airy disk. Therefore, decreasing the wavelength of the light used or using a larger numerical aperture will result in more precise lithography.
The numerical aperture can be expressed as:
NA = n sin(a/2)
where n is the refraction index of the medium, and a the angle of aperture of the objective.
As the water has a higher index than air, immersing the wafer in water will result in a higher numerical aperture.
Sure, there are times when players just "go nuts", start messing around and go on random killing sprees, seeing how much carnage they can commit before being caught or killed - but if you persist, the consequences will always, always catch up with you.
Unless you find a can of paint and change the color of your car.
Let me disagree slightly with Ubuntu being "non-geek friendly". Granted, its installer was easier, and there are little tweaks to make the system more usable (some aren't particularly effective as that, like the butchering of spatial nautilus in hoary hedgedhog). And of course, was more up to date. So I used to recommand it to people without broadband, that couldn't pull debian testing from the net.
However, in "non-geek friendlyness", there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made. Most of the configuration helpers are the default gnome ones, and they aren't too great. In particular category, Mandrake is bells and whistles above Ubuntu. Even if it cannot claim the polish that debian-based distros are characterized with.
I would love to own a transmeta laptop, so that the next time i fly oversees and sit next to some kid with an alienware laptop, i can laugh at him when his battery dies after 45 minutes and enjoy my movie, games, or even just solitaire for the next 8 hours.
A very interesting use of the technology, indeed:P
They haven't even updated gaim in woody since MSN updated their protocol, it is a useless package
There is still AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, etc... I wouldn't call it useless yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an introduction for people that don't know (yet) the fantastic game called Diplomacy. It is available as a board game, a computer game , or you can just play it by email. Highly recommanded !
Exactly. You're indeed right.
I'm not going to argue about the memory leaks.
However, I find surprising that only Firefox "chugs" when you try to maximise it. It's a very normal process (especially if it takes more than 200 MB of memory) : it indicates the memory used by the program has been swapped to the disk, and used for more useful purposes, like playing a game.
If other applications maximise quickly, that either mean they don't use much memory (as does Trillian I believe, even though I've never used it), or that for somewhat reason they kept using the main memory (Photoshop being also a memory hog). And the last reason is indeed bad.
You'll be waiting a long time, I think. People have been trying this foolhardy idea of optical computing for a long time, and the field is pretty much dead.
The field isn't so much dead. What is "dead in the water" (at least for now, and as long as there is no further breaktrough) is the idea of building processors using photons the sale way as the current processors are using electrons.
However, optical processing has other applications that could be put into good use. Computing Fourier transforms like Lenslet is doing could be such an example.
But of course, there is still the problem of Direct3D portability.
Quite surprisingly, modern nuclear balance is not about the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, or at least not in its original form. Indeed, few countries (if any) except Russia would have the power to completely wipe out the United States from the planet.
The logic behind the British and French nuclear arsenal size is the following : make sure that under any circonstances, the disasters caused by the nuclear retaliation of these countries would greatly overthrow the possible gains of initiating a nuclear war against them.
That is why the raw number of nuclear heads each country is having is not really important. That is why the nuclear arsenal of France and the United Kingdom is rather low on number. And that is why treaties between the US and Russia such as START have been able to be negociated.
Getting 5us interrupt latencies is not a difficult feat for an RTOS.
Indeed. One year ago, I participated in the installation of a High Energy Physics (HEP) experiment. We were using PowerPC 604 CPUs running VxWorks (the commercial "industry standard" RTOS).
On that configuration, I was getting interrupt latencies always under 12 us (3 us average), and that was on a 300 Mhz CPU ! 5 us is hardly impressive on the kind of systems they are using.
However, what would be interesting would be to know how the system behaves under load. RTLinux has been known in the past to crumble when heavily loaded by low priority tasks. It might have gone better recently.
Note that RTLinux is not the only Real-time Linux implementation. There's also RTAI released under LGPL.
"Works For Me" in Firefox beta1, Camino 2005090404 (0.9a2+) on Mac OS X 10.4.2
Selling below cost is actually forbidden here (France).
The actual legislation probably changes from one country to another.
Isn't it a bit paradoxical, considering that Rebel Assault was also mostly made of pre-rendered images - or should I say, pre-rendered videos ?
The parent said that Skype didn't support Linux/PPC.
Which is correct as far as I know, as the supported platforms are :
Windows/x86,
Windows/PocketPC,
Linux/x86,
MacOS X/PPC.
The worst about that is probably not the spelling (which I remember being more like "jigowatts"), the e problem that watts are power units and not energy units.
Indeed, you are right of pointing out the consequences of skin effect. The cutoff frequency of the Faraday cage would only be limited by the size of its defects - if it was made of a perfect conductor.
However, I do think that you usually compute the skin depth for a e^-1 reduction in strength. That means you don't need really more than 10 mm (around 1/3 of an inch) to get an effective shielding.
The change from 5.x to 6.x is mostly slight of hand, a subterfuge if you will.
Interesting. But actually, the change from 5.x to 6.x means the release is pulled from a different branch in the CVS tree. In this case, from the -CURRENT branch instead of the -STABLE branch.
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.h tml
Of course, that recessive "unprotected sex" gene must be wiped out from the gene pool.
Ignoring the fact that wisdom is most likely not genetical at all.
choice quote from TFA: '"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.'
Isn't this just the equivalent of our natural killers cells or our cytotoxic lymphocites ? Even if they don't really make the bacteria explode, they still pierce its membrane until it "bleeds to death".
In my own and personal opinion, that would just prove that bits of code has been exchanged (or stolen, depends on the way you turn it) between every major UNIX platform during their history, Linux included.
This is why SCO's case is ridiculous. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely no line originating for UnixWare (or another UNIX player) in the Linux kernel.
You know the principle of natural selection which is at the base of evolution (but arguably not the obly one):
every people which are sensitive to the EM radiations of cell phones die, and don't reproduce. The population having a genetical advantage in resisting to the radiations can reproduce, and transmit these genes to their offspring.
Of course, this fails shorts for cell phone because:
- People using cell phones and (potentially) contracting diseases are still likely to reproduce,
- Evolution goes over a course of many years.
To have a better understanding on how wavelength and numerical aperture are limiting the maximum resolution of lithography, here are a few formulas :
: /(2*NA)
If R is the radius of the Airy disk made by the diffraction of light in the objective, then
R = 1.22 * lambda
where lambda is the wavelength, and NA the numerical aperture of the lens.
You cannot print details smaller than the size of the Airy disk. Therefore, decreasing the wavelength of the light used or using a larger numerical aperture will result in more precise lithography.
The numerical aperture can be expressed as:
NA = n sin(a/2)
where n is the refraction index of the medium, and a the angle of aperture of the objective.
As the water has a higher index than air, immersing the wafer in water will result in a higher numerical aperture.
Sure, there are times when players just "go nuts", start messing around and go on random killing sprees, seeing how much carnage they can commit before being caught or killed - but if you persist, the consequences will always, always catch up with you.
Unless you find a can of paint and change the color of your car.
You've heard about chsh, haven't you ?
Let me disagree slightly with Ubuntu being "non-geek friendly". Granted, its installer was easier, and there are little tweaks to make the system more usable (some aren't particularly effective as that, like the butchering of spatial nautilus in hoary hedgedhog). And of course, was more up to date. So I used to recommand it to people without broadband, that couldn't pull debian testing from the net.
However, in "non-geek friendlyness", there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made. Most of the configuration helpers are the default gnome ones, and they aren't too great. In particular category, Mandrake is bells and whistles above Ubuntu. Even if it cannot claim the polish that debian-based distros are characterized with.
I would love to own a transmeta laptop, so that the next time i fly oversees and sit next to some kid with an alienware laptop, i can laugh at him when his battery dies after 45 minutes and enjoy my movie, games, or even just solitaire for the next 8 hours.
:P
A very interesting use of the technology, indeed
They haven't even updated gaim in woody since MSN updated their protocol, it is a useless package
There is still AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, etc... I wouldn't call it useless yet.