The thing that I find the most disturbing about the SPEC99 results is that Linux/TUX cleaned everyones clock so easily. It wasn't just the other IIS machines but the full blown UNIX boxes. The machine that came the closest was the IBM RS/6000 with 8 processors running Zeus, and it only had a performance score of 3216.
It is hard to say if RedHat/TUX would best NT in the orginal Mindcraft test. I would tend to believe that it probably would.
What I would like to see is how a Linux box of the same configuration except without TUX would fair. That might be a better indication of exactly how much faster TUX is. If you noticed the only machines that ran Linux were the Dell machines, and all of them had TUX on them.
The OS's I would like to see tested are the following: NT 4.0 with IIS NT 4.0 with Apache Win2000 with IIS Win2000 with Apache Linux 2.2 kernel, Apache w/ TUX Linux 2.2 kernel, Apache w/o TUX Linux 2.4.pre kernel, Apache w/ & w/o TUX Solaris 8 with iPlanet Solaris 8 with Apache OpenBSD with Apache
If you read the full report from Mindcraft they also tested Solaris 7 x86 version and FreeBSD. Where NT scored >2000, FreeBSD scored ~1200, and Solaris scored >6000.
Oh, in case you are wondering Mindcraft did infact help out with the SPECweb99 tests. The information on how their machine faired in the test it is with the rest of the results. Of course it did only have one NIC instead of 4.
Probably because the last thing that we needed was an interview where the questions are coming from a group of really angry, biased, emotional people. The questions that would have made it would probably would not have been constructive.
I know that I would have fired off a couple of nasty questions, and the moderators are human just like the rest of us.
That and the fact that I don't think that they would have agreed.
I hate to be paranoid, but how much do you want to bet that MS is trying to find a configuration right now to show that Win2000 is faster than Linux with TUX?
When they do, and I'm sure that eventually they will, we will hear about it from Mindcraft.
Re:Something you can do (in U.S.) to protect liber
on
Walk-By DNA Testing
·
· Score: 1
If you look at the statistics of DC's murder rate, it started to increase after the introduction of the ban on firearms. The statistics were roughly the same as the rest of the country before they introduced the ban on firearms. In NY, before Gulliani, they had the highest random murder rate in the country (random murder meaning being shot on the street with no connection, not rape or robbery not anything, with the murderer) even with a ban on handguns.
Also, if you look at the states that have conceal and carry laws in place one will find that murder rates, and general crime rates go down. Violent crime rates become disproportately larger but are still lower. Basically, there is less chance for crime but when it occures there is more chance for really bad things to happen. There is an entire book discussing the statistics of what happened in the states that instituted conceal and carry laws. All it does is look at the statistical information and discuss it.
The problem with banning firearms in the US is that there are too many out there already. Anyone who wants one can get one. If you ban firearms then the only people left with them are those that we didn't want to have them in the first place.
Don't believe me, take a look at the statistics for Australia. They also had laws similar to ours regarding guns, when they banned handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic non-hunting firearms a couple years ago the murder rate, and violent crime rate sky rocketed. Maybe it was just a bad few years, or maybe it was linked to the ban.
The 7 day waiting period had the best effect on crime rates that used firearms, unfortunately it is not required anymore now that there is the FBI instant background check computer. In Colorado, one must wait 48 hours before a gun purchase goes through during which time the persons information is sent to a special branch of the sherif's department. Unfortunately that branch is closed Sat and Sun, so gun shows start after it closes Fri send the information that night, and hand the weapons out Sunday night.
If I had my way I would require a 7 day waiting period, and a permitting process that requires several months of training. The training would include how to handle a firearm, how to store a firearm, understanding of the concequenses for neglagence, and a psycological report. Illegal, no, have the Congress dictate that this is required to be considered part of the Militia.
Before you go and flame me look at the statistics, you might be surprised.
Re:Something you can do (in U.S.) to protect liber
on
Walk-By DNA Testing
·
· Score: 2
On top of reminding everyone that violent crime as at a 20 year low, remind them that Washington DC has banned the possesion firearms within the city limits and it has the highest murder rate in the country.
The link to the news article about the missle shield program didn't work. Here it is. missle shield
Re:Easy solution - ban DNA cross referencing
on
Walk-By DNA Testing
·
· Score: 2
There is a good quote from Ben Franklin on the subject of freedom vs safety. [warning]I may not have the EXACT wording but it will get the point across.[/warning]
"Those who are willing to give up essential liberty in exchange for safety deserve neither the liberty nor the safety."
I think this hits the nail right on the head. If the population of the US is stupid enough to choose temporary solutions to problems in order for a little safety now by giving up their liberty then they deserve to lose both when the temporary solution fails.
Now before people go and flame me about this, I am a US citizen and I am very unhappy about the idea that the general population is giving up my freedoms for temporary safty. I am unhappy with it, but in this representative democracy the minority in the general populous loses. The minority that is the representation generally wins, see missle shield program.
There was another reply with a small exerpt from the Los Almos disk drive incedent that I would like to comment on. It isn't that hard to keep a log of who checks things in and out, if you work with rms then you would know that it isn't that much of a bother, and quite useful if you are looking for the drives. Also, if the information was as important as they say it was, they should have a survalence camara there. Even 7-11 has camara and I know that those Little Debbie Snacks are no where near as important as nuclear secrets. This isn't about freedom vs safety this is about common curtacy, responsability and national security.
You could use the alt-left alt-right, so long as you aren't working with Solaris 7 or greater, or you haven't set those as hot keys. The CDE included in Solaris 7 and 8 have alt-left and alt-right hot-keyed to move to the next desktop.
I believe that lock-in is poor web design and reflects badly on the companies marketing department. If the site is not interesting or useable enough for customers to want to stay, the site should not resort to annoying tricks like lock-in or spawing of windows if the browser is redirected to another site or closed.
Anyone who has had any experience at marketing would know that this may cause some customers to stay an buy, but it will mainly annoy most of them and cause them to not want to return. Bad experiences with web-sites are like bad experiences at stores, if you have one you are less likely to return. The use of these tricks shows immature marketing.
Although I am intellegent and know how technology has changed from being the tool to being the end goal I don't know how to say that without sounding like I have spent my whole like sheltered by science fiction novels
I like lists in case you haven't noticed
I will be redundent
I will be redundent
I enjoy small fonts
The authors is obviously intellegent, and has a very good grasp of how technology develops, but I think he needs to get out of the lab every once and a while. The ideas of how the computers will move towards creating a world like that out of Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash although they are possible for the future, the level of technology and bandwidth of the net is not near to what that sort of future requires.
The closest thing we have to what he discribes is VR, and it is still in its infancy stages right now, we don't even have popular games that require it. Something is going to have to make the push to create a truly 3D environment for the computer using VR type devices, until then it is just a pipe dream. Perhaps it is time to take Linux out of 1976 by creating the first VR desktop. Of course the amount of time and money required to do so is probably impractical for a group of hobbiests like us.
Before you get your feathers all ruffled up, one should really look at what he is saying.
The MacOpinion writer mentions that there are "priests ove the bazaar," which you disagree with. The idea of a "priest" is not necessarily a bad thing. If a religion has no priests the religion would be choatic and without form, by having priest a religion can dictate a more standard form for said religion. The same goes for the operators in RMS choosing what to add and what they shouldn't add. They bring structure to what would be formless, they standardize and help select what they believe would be best for the masses. Their ability to choose what is best depends on other higher "priests" who dictate something more fundemental, perhaps something like the standard libraries. Eventually this reaches the heads of this "religion" who deal with the most fundemental aspects, in the case of Linux it is the kernel development. Structure can be a good thing, especially when the bazaar becomes to big and choatic. One difference between that of Linux and other "religions" is that due to the openness of the structure, the "religion" forms to the peoples desires rather than dictating what the people desire. In essence those who are in charge of certain projects are the priests of that project. Another aspect of religion that enters into the open source model, to an extent, is interpretation. Even after everything has gone through the different levels of the religion the person who believes must interpret what they have been told. Same sort of thing for Linux, if one believes that a certain application needs something then they can add it, and if someone wants to take it literally then that option is also available.
As for the GUI issues, I agee that GNOME and KDE are decent designs but the MacOpinion writer does have some teeth in his bite. There is more than just GNOME and KDE to choose, if one looks at the selection of window managers out there one might understand what he is talking about. FVWM, Enlightenment, Sawfish, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Blackbox... there are at least a half dozen major players in the window manager field, all of which act differently. Even the GNUStep brothers, Afterstep and WindowMaker, react differently enough to confuse the average user. Some of these window managers are GNOME complient, some KDE complient, others are complient with both, on top of which Enlightenment is planning on adding its own application manager to compete with GNOME and KDE. As for Eazel, it isn't even out there yet, and when it does finally show 1.0 it won't fix the problem of too many window managers. As for elder GUI's being crappy, if you are talking about the Mac GUI, it may be old but it is still probably the most user friendly GUI on the planet, user being the average joe.
Linux may be a secure, stable, powerful OS, which is why I use it, but it too crashes. Linux is not perfect, it is still a fledgling compared to the major UNICES.
The writer has some good points that we should not ignore because we don't like what he says. One of Linux's strong points is to listen and fix. Even the most skewd infomation like mindcraft is useful.
I cannot remember were I exactly heard this but I believe that the most intellegent bird is not the African Grey but the raven. I wish I could remember where I saw this.
the Argentine government recently killed 450,000 of [quaker parrots] fearing their numbers were too great...
I know one intellegent species, relatively, whos numbers are too great and could probably use some weeding out. Of course the political ramifications would be too large.
MS tried to get help from SCO on POSIX support for what was going to be their next product Windows New Technologies in 1991. SCO basically told them to take a flying leap. Interesting thing, after that MS wouldn't license Word, during its early really crappy days, to them.
I'm not a programmer, but from what I have been told there is only one posix thread, or whatever, available from NT and if it crashes then you are hosed.
The last thing I need to have to deal with is coming home from the lab only to find the parrot, that I plan on buying, has downloaded 1 gig worth of parrot porn.
Or that he's ordered a mail order parrot from Africa with my credit card.
How successful was the running of Quicken 99? My girlfriend is thinking of switching herself and her parents over to Linux but they depend heavly on Quicken. If it runs without too much of a hitch then I'm sure she will be extremely happy to hear that.
Unfortunately because the general populous thinks that the.DOC is the standard it becomes the standard. I have had several occations where I have called up a place to see if they could send me information in a format OTHER than.DOC. No one seems to know what a postscript file is these days. If people transfered files in.ps,.pdf, or even.dvi I would be much happier but that doesn't happen.
It doesn't help that MS Windows doesn't come with any way of creating standardized formats like.dvi's or.ps.
.DOC is a standard because the general populous thinks it is.
WINE's first priority should be running ridiculously overpriced bloatware from a company made infamous for its repeated misuse of undocumented APIs
That ridiculously overpriced bloatware (which, to be fair, it is) controls 90-95% of the office software market share. There are a lot of companies that want to keep that bloatware but remove Windows, and would switch to linux if they new Office ran on it. That is why it is priority #1. Frankly, though, I am disappointed that Quicken and other Intuit products aren't as high up.
The porting of Office products, whether it be MS Office or Quicken, or whatever, should be priority 1 for the Wine team. There are some good reasons why.
The office product market is a relatively stable market. MS Office updates itself ever 2-3 years, and Intuit products every year. The game industry is constantly producing more games every month. The amount of time and effort to port even the most popular of games becomes a nightmare.
Also, even with major updates in the Office products, the ports of those updates become less of a problem because people don't like extremely drastic change in the products that they use. The ability to fix small problems in updates is more reasonable then trying to create whole new ports for each new fangled game.
As someone else mentioned, in order for Linux to make it into the Corparate world, or even the desktop or academic world, MS Office and other major office products need to be ported. By rallying support through the corparate and desktop worlds other products will move to porting their products natively.
Linux is targeting several markets.
Small Business Server
Workstation
Desktop/Home use
Academic
All of these markets have use for office products, but not all of them have the need for games.
Frankly, I would much rather run a game natively on MS then wine it for speed issues.
So Virio handles 20% of the online traffic for S&P 500 report requests. I wonder if the FBI wants wire taps to prevent insider trading of some sort. I have a feeling that if a foreign company tried to buy any US company who's business was to display or allow trading of stock the FBI would be rather upset because it would interfere with their ability to prevent things like insider trading. My guess is this isn't just a, they are an internet company and if a foreign company buys them we can't snoop, but it is due to the fact that it deals with stock and therefore could possible be used for illegal stock trading which could damage the economy.
OTOH we could listen to all of the paranoid around here and believe that there is a government conspericy to turn the US into a Orwellian 1984. Just as Y2K destroyed the world, right?
Just a thought. One never knows with these things.
There is more to teaching than just a educational program that learns so that it can teach a student better. There is the whole issue of role models, compassion, and social interaction. I believe that we would need to create a world like what Asimov dreamed about before a computer could take the place of a human as a teacher and source of education.
It wasn't just my introduction into physics that caused me to love it and persue it, it was my high school teacher. His dedication, and passion for teaching, his ability to draw the love for physics out of me is why I believe that it will be a long time before anything can match a human for education.
I did some research on electric cars, and yes the energy does come from some coal or oil burning plant down the road. Before you start spouting off that more polution is produced one should really look the effeciency difference between a power plant compared to that of a car. The difference is quite astounding, not only amount of energy per unit of fuel but amount of polution per unit of fuel. Even with the inefficiency of storing energy in a battery, less fuel and less air polution is produced by using an electric car than driving your average car, and it is especially more eco-friendly than all of those SUV's.
One of the biggest problems with electric cars is that all of the batteries are serious ground poluters. Without proper disposal of the batteries we will just have a different type of pollution.
As for corn type sources, methanol and ethenol, they have their problems as well. Although great when added to existing fuels, by themselves they are rather inefficient and wasteful. Someone posted more information on why it isn't the best idea to use corn on a post labeled as a 5.
I agree that hybrids are the best idea, unfortunately the Honda costs ~$19000, which as a student is out of my price range. I would love to get one and if it were closer to that of the civic I would. The gas milage is 61 for street and 70 for highway, with a 10 gallon gas tank... you do the math.
Although there are several comments discussing the flaws in your argument, I feel compelled to contribute.
Real $$$ is being spent on solar energy research. Lockheed Martin is funding the solar cell research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I have a good friend working on this research, they are trying out ways to mass produces solar cells with an effeciency of 15%, they have 10% right now. The space program needs solar cells and therefore needs research to continue to be done, and so long as we allow for funding of the space program then real $$$ will be spent on solar energy.
As for hydrogen, they tried that in cars once. It worked really good, at least up until the first crash test, kaboom. They are having the same problem with some of the batteries today, like the lithium ion batteries (the material inside reacts violently with water and air) which is why you don't see really big ones being used for electric cars even though they have roughly the same umph per area of material as gas.
Sence when is helium considered a non-renewable resource? I guess that it is, but then so is everything in that case due to entropy. Helium is an extremely abundent resource, don't believe me then look up at the night sky and see all of those beautiful fusion reactors light years away.
There are several major problems with fusion, one is that Nuclear research is a dying field in the US. Next is that we are ~100 years away from having a fusion plant that is able to produce an abundence of energy, right now they can't even get them self suffecient. Third, it is clean, up until the metal used to contain the plasma that has been bombarded by extremely high energy alpha and beta radiation becomes radioactive, and structually unsound? Fusion is a long way away.
Fossil fuels are amazing things. High effeciency for a relatively stable material. Most of the alternatives are either unstable, ineffecient, or not ready due to either cost or the research isn't finished yet.
what could possibly be bad about introducing computers to kids?
A legit question. One of the problems of then and now is the computers out there.
You had your first experience with an Apple ][, which is one of the best educational computers in the world, IMHO, because it allows for kids to explore what a computer is all about. Not just programming but also the hardware. I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there getting Computer Engineering and EE degrees because of good experiences playing with the hardware of the Apple ][.
Today your average kid has access to a much more powerful and complicated machine. One that prevents the creation of new hardware by someone who is not an experience hardware/software person that plugs into the machine and works. Although QBasic is on the machines it is becomeing more and more difficult to reach a DOS prompt, from the Windows that most kids have access to, in order to run it. Chances are, if there is a programming tool on the computer it is Visual Basic, which is not a learning experience.
Anyway, computers are becoming more and more frequent in the homes as prices drop through the floor. Are computers necessary in order to teach grammmer, and basic math? Is a computers beep followed by the screen saying that it is wrong please try again better than a teacher who is not overloaded with 25+ kids, or 20+ for that matter, who can assist the specific needs of that kid?
In high school typing should be necessary, and some basic computer skill should be introduced but schools have enough problems with funding and should probably leave the learning how to program or the more complicated features to out of school studies of the student.
Anyway, there have been studies showing that just introducing computers, even state of the art ones, doesn't help children learn. Until our country decides that we should spend more money on education I think that pens, paper, and paying for good teachers should come before computers.
I have had a computer in my home for almost all of my life, from a Victor 9000 on up. I enjoy computers, they are like a hobby to me, but what was more important to me becoming a better person was reading good literature and learning foreign languages. Both of which computers didn't help one bit.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that I find the most disturbing about the SPEC99 results is that Linux/TUX cleaned everyones clock so easily. It wasn't just the other IIS machines but the full blown UNIX boxes. The machine that came the closest was the IBM RS/6000 with 8 processors running Zeus, and it only had a performance score of 3216.
It is hard to say if RedHat/TUX would best NT in the orginal Mindcraft test. I would tend to believe that it probably would.
What I would like to see is how a Linux box of the same configuration except without TUX would fair. That might be a better indication of exactly how much faster TUX is. If you noticed the only machines that ran Linux were the Dell machines, and all of them had TUX on them.
The OS's I would like to see tested are the following:
NT 4.0 with IIS
NT 4.0 with Apache
Win2000 with IIS
Win2000 with Apache
Linux 2.2 kernel, Apache w/ TUX
Linux 2.2 kernel, Apache w/o TUX
Linux 2.4.pre kernel, Apache w/ & w/o TUX
Solaris 8 with iPlanet
Solaris 8 with Apache
OpenBSD with Apache
If you read the full report from Mindcraft they also tested Solaris 7 x86 version and FreeBSD. Where NT scored >2000, FreeBSD scored ~1200, and Solaris scored >6000.
Oh, in case you are wondering Mindcraft did infact help out with the SPECweb99 tests. The information on how their machine faired in the test it is with the rest of the results.
Of course it did only have one NIC instead of 4.
Probably because the last thing that we needed was an interview where the questions are coming from a group of really angry, biased, emotional people. The questions that would have made it would probably would not have been constructive.
I know that I would have fired off a couple of nasty questions, and the moderators are human just like the rest of us.
That and the fact that I don't think that they would have agreed.
I hate to be paranoid, but how much do you want to bet that MS is trying to find a configuration right now to show that Win2000 is faster than Linux with TUX?
When they do, and I'm sure that eventually they will, we will hear about it from Mindcraft.
If you look at the statistics of DC's murder rate, it started to increase after the introduction of the ban on firearms. The statistics were roughly the same as the rest of the country before they introduced the ban on firearms. In NY, before Gulliani, they had the highest random murder rate in the country (random murder meaning being shot on the street with no connection, not rape or robbery not anything, with the murderer) even with a ban on handguns.
Also, if you look at the states that have conceal and carry laws in place one will find that murder rates, and general crime rates go down. Violent crime rates become disproportately larger but are still lower. Basically, there is less chance for crime but when it occures there is more chance for really bad things to happen. There is an entire book discussing the statistics of what happened in the states that instituted conceal and carry laws. All it does is look at the statistical information and discuss it.
The problem with banning firearms in the US is that there are too many out there already. Anyone who wants one can get one. If you ban firearms then the only people left with them are those that we didn't want to have them in the first place.
Don't believe me, take a look at the statistics for Australia. They also had laws similar to ours regarding guns, when they banned handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic non-hunting firearms a couple years ago the murder rate, and violent crime rate sky rocketed. Maybe it was just a bad few years, or maybe it was linked to the ban.
The 7 day waiting period had the best effect on crime rates that used firearms, unfortunately it is not required anymore now that there is the FBI instant background check computer. In Colorado, one must wait 48 hours before a gun purchase goes through during which time the persons information is sent to a special branch of the sherif's department. Unfortunately that branch is closed Sat and Sun, so gun shows start after it closes Fri send the information that night, and hand the weapons out Sunday night.
If I had my way I would require a 7 day waiting period, and a permitting process that requires several months of training. The training would include how to handle a firearm, how to store a firearm, understanding of the concequenses for neglagence, and a psycological report. Illegal, no, have the Congress dictate that this is required to be considered part of the Militia.
Before you go and flame me look at the statistics, you might be surprised.
On top of reminding everyone that violent crime as at a 20 year low, remind them that Washington DC has banned the possesion firearms within the city limits and it has the highest murder rate in the country.
The link to the news article about the missle shield program didn't work. Here it is.
missle shield
There is a good quote from Ben Franklin on the subject of freedom vs safety.
[warning]I may not have the EXACT wording but it will get the point across.[/warning]
"Those who are willing to give up essential liberty in exchange for safety deserve neither the liberty nor the safety."
I think this hits the nail right on the head. If the population of the US is stupid enough to choose temporary solutions to problems in order for a little safety now by giving up their liberty then they deserve to lose both when the temporary solution fails.
Now before people go and flame me about this, I am a US citizen and I am very unhappy about the idea that the general population is giving up my freedoms for temporary safty. I am unhappy with it, but in this representative democracy the minority in the general populous loses. The minority that is the representation generally wins, see missle shield program.
There was another reply with a small exerpt from the Los Almos disk drive incedent that I would like to comment on. It isn't that hard to keep a log of who checks things in and out, if you work with rms then you would know that it isn't that much of a bother, and quite useful if you are looking for the drives. Also, if the information was as important as they say it was, they should have a survalence camara there. Even 7-11 has camara and I know that those Little Debbie Snacks are no where near as important as nuclear secrets. This isn't about freedom vs safety this is about common curtacy, responsability and national security.
You could use the alt-left alt-right, so long as you aren't working with Solaris 7 or greater, or you haven't set those as hot keys. The CDE included in Solaris 7 and 8 have alt-left and alt-right hot-keyed to move to the next desktop.
I believe that lock-in is poor web design and reflects badly on the companies marketing department. If the site is not interesting or useable enough for customers to want to stay, the site should not resort to annoying tricks like lock-in or spawing of windows if the browser is redirected to another site or closed.
Anyone who has had any experience at marketing would know that this may cause some customers to stay an buy, but it will mainly annoy most of them and cause them to not want to return. Bad experiences with web-sites are like bad experiences at stores, if you have one you are less likely to return. The use of these tricks shows immature marketing.
I like lists in case you haven't noticed
The authors is obviously intellegent, and has a very good grasp of how technology develops, but I think he needs to get out of the lab every once and a while. The ideas of how the computers will move towards creating a world like that out of Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash although they are possible for the future, the level of technology and bandwidth of the net is not near to what that sort of future requires.
The closest thing we have to what he discribes is VR, and it is still in its infancy stages right now, we don't even have popular games that require it. Something is going to have to make the push to create a truly 3D environment for the computer using VR type devices, until then it is just a pipe dream. Perhaps it is time to take Linux out of 1976 by creating the first VR desktop. Of course the amount of time and money required to do so is probably impractical for a group of hobbiests like us.
it's in English. themoscowtimes.com and themoscwtimes.ru are both in English. Kind of worrysome if you ask me.
Before you get your feathers all ruffled up, one should really look at what he is saying.
The MacOpinion writer mentions that there are "priests ove the bazaar," which you disagree with. The idea of a "priest" is not necessarily a bad thing. If a religion has no priests the religion would be choatic and without form, by having priest a religion can dictate a more standard form for said religion.
The same goes for the operators in RMS choosing what to add and what they shouldn't add. They bring structure to what would be formless, they standardize and help select what they believe would be best for the masses. Their ability to choose what is best depends on other higher "priests" who dictate something more fundemental, perhaps something like the standard libraries. Eventually this reaches the heads of this "religion" who deal with the most fundemental aspects, in the case of Linux it is the kernel development.
Structure can be a good thing, especially when the bazaar becomes to big and choatic. One difference between that of Linux and other "religions" is that due to the openness of the structure, the "religion" forms to the peoples desires rather than dictating what the people desire. In essence those who are in charge of certain projects are the priests of that project.
Another aspect of religion that enters into the open source model, to an extent, is interpretation. Even after everything has gone through the different levels of the religion the person who believes must interpret what they have been told. Same sort of thing for Linux, if one believes that a certain application needs something then they can add it, and if someone wants to take it literally then that option is also available.
As for the GUI issues, I agee that GNOME and KDE are decent designs but the MacOpinion writer does have some teeth in his bite. There is more than just GNOME and KDE to choose, if one looks at the selection of window managers out there one might understand what he is talking about. FVWM, Enlightenment, Sawfish, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Blackbox... there are at least a half dozen major players in the window manager field, all of which act differently. Even the GNUStep brothers, Afterstep and WindowMaker, react differently enough to confuse the average user. Some of these window managers are GNOME complient, some KDE complient, others are complient with both, on top of which Enlightenment is planning on adding its own application manager to compete with GNOME and KDE. As for Eazel, it isn't even out there yet, and when it does finally show 1.0 it won't fix the problem of too many window managers. As for elder GUI's being crappy, if you are talking about the Mac GUI, it may be old but it is still probably the most user friendly GUI on the planet, user being the average joe.
Linux may be a secure, stable, powerful OS, which is why I use it, but it too crashes. Linux is not perfect, it is still a fledgling compared to the major UNICES.
The writer has some good points that we should not ignore because we don't like what he says. One of Linux's strong points is to listen and fix. Even the most skewd infomation like mindcraft is useful.
I cannot remember were I exactly heard this but I believe that the most intellegent bird is not the African Grey but the raven. I wish I could remember where I saw this.
the Argentine government recently killed 450,000 of [quaker parrots] fearing their numbers were too great...
I know one intellegent species, relatively, whos numbers are too great and could probably use some weeding out. Of course the political ramifications would be too large.
MS tried to get help from SCO on POSIX support for what was going to be their next product Windows New Technologies in 1991. SCO basically told them to take a flying leap. Interesting thing, after that MS wouldn't license Word, during its early really crappy days, to them.
I'm not a programmer, but from what I have been told there is only one posix thread, or whatever, available from NT and if it crashes then you are hosed.
The last thing I need to have to deal with is coming home from the lab only to find the parrot, that I plan on buying, has downloaded 1 gig worth of parrot porn.
Or that he's ordered a mail order parrot from Africa with my credit card.
How successful was the running of Quicken 99? My girlfriend is thinking of switching herself and her parents over to Linux but they depend heavly on Quicken. If it runs without too much of a hitch then I'm sure she will be extremely happy to hear that.
.DLLs or Wine only?
Are you running with native
Unfortunately because the general populous thinks that the .DOC is the standard it becomes the standard. I have had several occations where I have called up a place to see if they could send me information in a format OTHER than .DOC. No one seems to know what a postscript file is these days. If people transfered files in .ps, .pdf, or even .dvi I would be much happier but that doesn't happen.
.dvi's or .ps.
It doesn't help that MS Windows doesn't come with any way of creating standardized formats like
.DOC is a standard because the general populous thinks it is.
WINE's first priority should be running ridiculously overpriced bloatware from a company made infamous for its repeated misuse of undocumented APIs
That ridiculously overpriced bloatware (which, to be fair, it is) controls 90-95% of the office software market share. There are a lot of companies that want to keep that bloatware but remove Windows, and would switch to linux if they new Office ran on it. That is why it is priority #1. Frankly, though, I am disappointed that Quicken and other Intuit products aren't as high up.
All of these markets have use for office products, but not all of them have the need for games.
Frankly, I would much rather run a game natively on MS then wine it for speed issues.
So Virio handles 20% of the online traffic for S&P 500 report requests. I wonder if the FBI wants wire taps to prevent insider trading of some sort. I have a feeling that if a foreign company tried to buy any US company who's business was to display or allow trading of stock the FBI would be rather upset because it would interfere with their ability to prevent things like insider trading. My guess is this isn't just a, they are an internet company and if a foreign company buys them we can't snoop, but it is due to the fact that it deals with stock and therefore could possible be used for illegal stock trading which could damage the economy.
OTOH we could listen to all of the paranoid around here and believe that there is a government conspericy to turn the US into a Orwellian 1984. Just as Y2K destroyed the world, right?
Just a thought. One never knows with these things.
There is more to teaching than just a educational program that learns so that it can teach a student better. There is the whole issue of role models, compassion, and social interaction. I believe that we would need to create a world like what Asimov dreamed about before a computer could take the place of a human as a teacher and source of education.
It wasn't just my introduction into physics that caused me to love it and persue it, it was my high school teacher. His dedication, and passion for teaching, his ability to draw the love for physics out of me is why I believe that it will be a long time before anything can match a human for education.
I did some research on electric cars, and yes the energy does come from some coal or oil burning plant down the road. Before you start spouting off that more polution is produced one should really look the effeciency difference between a power plant compared to that of a car. The difference is quite astounding, not only amount of energy per unit of fuel but amount of polution per unit of fuel. Even with the inefficiency of storing energy in a battery, less fuel and less air polution is produced by using an electric car than driving your average car, and it is especially more eco-friendly than all of those SUV's.
One of the biggest problems with electric cars is that all of the batteries are serious ground poluters. Without proper disposal of the batteries we will just have a different type of pollution.
As for corn type sources, methanol and ethenol, they have their problems as well. Although great when added to existing fuels, by themselves they are rather inefficient and wasteful. Someone posted more information on why it isn't the best idea to use corn on a post labeled as a 5.
I agree that hybrids are the best idea, unfortunately the Honda costs ~$19000, which as a student is out of my price range. I would love to get one and if it were closer to that of the civic I would. The gas milage is 61 for street and 70 for highway, with a 10 gallon gas tank... you do the math.
Although there are several comments discussing the flaws in your argument, I feel compelled to contribute.
Real $$$ is being spent on solar energy research. Lockheed Martin is funding the solar cell research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I have a good friend working on this research, they are trying out ways to mass produces solar cells with an effeciency of 15%, they have 10% right now. The space program needs solar cells and therefore needs research to continue to be done, and so long as we allow for funding of the space program then real $$$ will be spent on solar energy.
As for hydrogen, they tried that in cars once. It worked really good, at least up until the first crash test, kaboom. They are having the same problem with some of the batteries today, like the lithium ion batteries (the material inside reacts violently with water and air) which is why you don't see really big ones being used for electric cars even though they have roughly the same umph per area of material as gas.
Sence when is helium considered a non-renewable resource? I guess that it is, but then so is everything in that case due to entropy. Helium is an extremely abundent resource, don't believe me then look up at the night sky and see all of those beautiful fusion reactors light years away.
There are several major problems with fusion, one is that Nuclear research is a dying field in the US. Next is that we are ~100 years away from having a fusion plant that is able to produce an abundence of energy, right now they can't even get them self suffecient. Third, it is clean, up until the metal used to contain the plasma that has been bombarded by extremely high energy alpha and beta radiation becomes radioactive, and structually unsound? Fusion is a long way away.
Fossil fuels are amazing things. High effeciency for a relatively stable material. Most of the alternatives are either unstable, ineffecient, or not ready due to either cost or the research isn't finished yet.
what could possibly be bad about introducing computers to kids?
A legit question. One of the problems of then and now is the computers out there.
You had your first experience with an Apple ][, which is one of the best educational computers in the world, IMHO, because it allows for kids to explore what a computer is all about. Not just programming but also the hardware. I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there getting Computer Engineering and EE degrees because of good experiences playing with the hardware of the Apple ][.
Today your average kid has access to a much more powerful and complicated machine. One that prevents the creation of new hardware by someone who is not an experience hardware/software person that plugs into the machine and works. Although QBasic is on the machines it is becomeing more and more difficult to reach a DOS prompt, from the Windows that most kids have access to, in order to run it. Chances are, if there is a programming tool on the computer it is Visual Basic, which is not a learning experience.
Anyway, computers are becoming more and more frequent in the homes as prices drop through the floor. Are computers necessary in order to teach grammmer, and basic math? Is a computers beep followed by the screen saying that it is wrong please try again better than a teacher who is not overloaded with 25+ kids, or 20+ for that matter, who can assist the specific needs of that kid?
In high school typing should be necessary, and some basic computer skill should be introduced but schools have enough problems with funding and should probably leave the learning how to program or the more complicated features to out of school studies of the student.
Anyway, there have been studies showing that just introducing computers, even state of the art ones, doesn't help children learn. Until our country decides that we should spend more money on education I think that pens, paper, and paying for good teachers should come before computers.
I have had a computer in my home for almost all of my life, from a Victor 9000 on up. I enjoy computers, they are like a hobby to me, but what was more important to me becoming a better person was reading good literature and learning foreign languages. Both of which computers didn't help one bit.