I like his idea of minimalist design, but I'm not so sure that I'm as zealous as him. For instance, when it comes to an FAQ, I absolutely detest having to view each answer individually. There is no better way to piss me off than to force me to load twenty small pages one after another. Luckily, there are ways around this, such as wget. It still bothers me that people don't offer me the choice to see everything at once, though.
I also find it quite annoying that people break up articles into five or ten pages, each with just one or two paragraphs on them. Of course, there's two or three banner ads, lots of ads on the left and right borders, and an imagemap running down one or both sides. So, I guess there really is a whole lot of content there. Silly me.
I used to design my pages in two varieties, Netscape-friendly and Mosaic-friendly. With the death of Mosaic, my "light" pages became rarer and rarer, but I still try to remain conscientious of people using Lynx and other alternative browsers. I myself like using Lynx, as it's a handy text-mode app. It also fits on a boot/root floppy. Too many people today ignore every browser but Internet Explorer. It's crazy. I can't believe that there are so many sites out there that cause Netscape to display a blank page, because the Javascript is so poorly written.
Sorry for the ranting. I just broke up with my girlfriend of almost a year, and I'm feeling kind of depressed. *sigh*
I would imagine many women play male characters at least some of the time - I know I do. The traditional heros in most role playing and computer games are male. Men are seen as stronger and more powerful. I have actually not played D&D in a long long time, but I seem to recall that the upper limits on strength for female characters are lower than that for male characters.
And we're supposed to believe you're female?:)
My sister sometimes played male, sometimes played female characters. I tend to like playing male characters. I'll play a female character if I have to, but, in general, I don't know what to do with them. Males are easy.
Barbarian: "Og mad! Og smash" Paladin: "I shall smite thee, foul spawn of evil!" Wizard: "You will regret angering me for the few seconds you have left to live, as your internal organs all turn to stone." Thief: "Hey, sorry, I thought it fell out of your pocket." Female character: "Ummm... is that orc male? I'll seduce him or something."
Guys have no imagination when it comes to playing females.
Hehehe. I'm suprised this wasn't higher. Back in my days of heavy mudding, I always played females. Cause stupid horny guys give you stuff. Yep, that's right, they *give* you stuff. For free. All you have to do is wink at them.
Pretty low, I know, but if you weren't a sneaky sonofabitch people would find a way to unfairly pk you at an early level anyway. You had to take every advantage you could just to stay alive.
Very true. I learned quickly that very few females actually play MUDs. True, because of the social aspects, there have always been a minority of real females, but 90% of the "females" are actually guys trolling for equipment.
This one MUD that I played had a powerful clan for just females. They were allied with another powerful clan, this one just for men. The two clan leaders, after a long period of being adventuring companions, were united in marriage, sealing forever the bond between the two clans.
Then the leader of the female-only clan admitted that he was male. The fallout was hilarious. I almost died laughing after reading all the public messages on the MUD's mail system. The leader of the male-only clan took it like he discovered his newly-wed wife was actually a transvestite. He must have taken 10 showers that first day. Hahaha. "I can't believe I... Oh my God... I did it with a... you bastard! You led me on!!"
Yeah, turning off everything but HTML rendering does sort of suck. However, you have the benefit of HTML4 support. Or most of HTML4, at least.
If you use Lynx, you get a great browser, but it's easy to create a page that Lynx can't navigate. Put in four or five frames, a bunch of images with no alt tags, and extensive use of Javascript. Voila - totally incomprehensible mess to the Lynx user.
If you use Mosaic, you don't even get HTML3.2, which is pretty sad.
If you use Grail, you get HTML3.2, but it's very slow. It's also not maintained any more, so you'll never get HTML4 support.
I don't think the first alpha version of Mnemonic has come out yet. It's only about 5 years late. Maybe they all started running IE instead.
Amaya is cool and all, but it's mostly useless when you try to navigate poorly written HTML pages (and that's most of the web). If you only go to sites that are HTML4 validated, then it works great.
Mozilla... maybe it's just me, but Mozilla seems about ten times as buggy as Netscape 4.x. I don't think it's going to come out this year. And, yes, I've used the latest milestone *and* the latest CVS source. The CVS source didn't even compile. Maybe in 2001.
Konqueror sounds interesting, but it's only in the unstable KDE builds, as I understand it. I already had one bad experience with CVS. I don't need another. I like source code to either compile or be easy to fix. Hundreds of.c and.h files distributed across dozens of directories is not easy to fix.
On the other hand, Netscape 4.7 isn't all that bad for me. It hardly ever crashes at all. I keep Java, Javascript, and CSS on almost all the time. When I hit a site that's so poorly written, it crashes Netscape, I don't ever return there.
I'm using XF86 3.3.6, a Matrox G400, dual P3 450s, 256MB RAM, Squid, and Mandrake 7. Works for me.
Well, that's not "good", per se, but I wouldn't quite panic over that weight. I used to weigh 130 lbs at 5'10". I was able to peak at 140 lbs with some difficulty. That all changed once I started taking Zyprexa, an anti-depressant/anti-psychotic/miracle pill. It sure helped my depression a whole lot, but I gained some 80 lbs over the course of a year while I was on it. Let me say this... losing 80 lbs is rough. Better to be a little underweight (but not anorexic -- people die from that) than overweight. I'm not sure exactly what your "problem" is, but it sounds like either you're anorexic (rare for guys) or you have weird metabolism (like me and my mom). Until I got to college, I couldn't exceed 130 lbs, no matter how much I ate. If it's not psychological, then just go with it. Your body typically adjusts to things quite well. I agree with the other poster, though, about exercise... it surely can't hurt to build up some muscle mass. I wouldn't get obsessive about it, though. You might burn off too many calories. That would be bad. I hope that you keep us posted about how you're doing... write up an editorial about Geeks And Food or something... I bet the guys will post it here. Remember, if you're at all worried, don't hesitate to talk to a professional nutritionist or doctor. They know about this stuff. Good luck...
I've never before seen such a bunch of whiners! What the hell is wrong with you people? Someone offers you something for free (as in free) and you bitch, whine, and flame about it? I hope that you never get another free (as in free) product again. Damn babies.
Re:Read the article; learn about existing ATA
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Serial ATA and USB 2
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Second, ATA has a limitation of two devices per bus (port). You get four devices by having two ATA ports. Want six devices? Use three ATA ports. Most likely, you'll need to buy an add-in ATA controller, as I've never seen or heard of a mainboard with more then two on-board ATA ports. Of course, ATA is incredibly brain-damaged, and generally requires an IRQ per bus on PCs (or breaks compatibility with many things). The answer to that, of course, is not to use ATA...:)
There's an Abit motherboard or two that have two ATA chips on them, the BX chipset (which has ATA/33) and an HPT chip (ATA/66). The HPT chip allows you to connect another four ATA devices, but it doesn't support booting. This is all from memory, though, so I could have the details wrong. But the point is that you get ATA/66 and 8 ATA ports.
You can afford all that nifty hardware, but you cannot afford an extra $30 per device in order to get a bus that actually works and performs well? Well, your loss.:-) Me, I've been running an all-SCSI system for some time, and I love it. No looking back for me!
I'm all for replacing ATA with SCSI, but let's be realistic here. SCSI devices and host adapters are expensive.
ATA gets the job done, cheaply at the price of doing it gracefully. There's no reason you need SCSI hard drives if you're currently satisfied with your current ATA setup. Likewise for IEEE 1394 and USB. If USB is working just fine for you, then you don't need to worry about all the cool features of IEEE 1394 and what you're missing out on. It's mostly high-end stuff.
The biggest problem of USB and ATA is that they were designed for the average consumer, not power users or servers. This isn't really a 'problem' per se, except if you happen to be a power user and you're trying to wrestle with the limitations of your current hardware. This is when you want IEEE 1394 and/or SCSI. Not if you're an average Joe, just trying to hook up a new mouse.
There's always been room for both ATA and SCSI, and I think there's always going to be room for both USB and IEEE 1394. They serve different markets, really.
By the way, are you still using that sucky 32 bit Intel or Motorola CPU? Upgrade to a real processor, a DEC Alpha 21264, even if you do have to pay an extra $3000 just for the processor and motherboard!
The Linux Media Labs card looks interesting, but it costs $410. Are they crazy? I could buy a new 650 MHz Athlon processor, Asus motherboard, and have enough money left over for shipping.
Four hundred dollars...
Let's at least be realistic here. Anybody making Linux-friendly hardware that isn't priced outside of mere mortals' budgets?
Second, I think the multi-billion dollar ipo linux company's need to put their muscle into this conflict, not just make a few token donations to the EFF. Big businesses have no problem coercing people who threaten their interests. With Red Hat and VA technically being big businesses (who have something at stake if we can't have dvd with our linux) they should do everything barring murder to force the movie companys to stand down. Though it's not likely it'll happen, it would be cool if Bob Young did a hostile takover of movie studio then fired the board of directors, just to make a point.
I wish there were a Linux hardware manufacturing company. Just imagine all the things we could do if someone out there had a couple good engineers, a business-savvy CEO (not a programmer or engineer who founded the company), and a license to use, say, one of IBM's fabs.
We could design our own Linux BIOS or chipset. License a BIOS from AMI and/or a chipset from VIA, then customize it from there. If it ends up requiring an NDA, so be it. But it would be monsterously useful to have Linux-friendly chipsets and BIOSes. I know there's an open source BIOS project, but it seems dead, and they probably have no idea how to manufacture a BIOS chip (nor the money to have someone else manufacture it).
We could design our own SCSI host adapter. License the chips from LSI Logic (formerly Symbios Logic, formerly NCR), and make it the best supported SCSI host adapter in Linux, which shouldn't be too hard, considering that you've got access to the microcode.
Why not manufacture cheap modems or printers that use software drivers under Linux? They'd be insanely cheap to manufacture, and I'm sure someone out there would buy them. You can get a 400 MHz CPU for less than $75 today, so it wouldn't really be such a drain.
And DVD decoder cards surely wouldn't be a problem. Just pay the license fee for the specs, write a binary driver, and manufacture a few thousand of the decoder cards. Instant DVD under Linux. Of course, it wouldn't be integrated into the kernel, but it's no different than those binary video card drivers for XF86.
I'm really starting to get sick of these millionaires and billionaires doing absolutely nothing for the Linux community. We could be accomplishing stuff here.
Like I alluded to before, I'm not even so interested in bleeding-edge 1.5 GHz processors and designing our own SCSI chipset... what we should be doing is making generic cards that will run under Linux, with a "Designed for Linux" seal. Imagine if everything possible was open, with a minimum of NDAs. I bet it could happen.
It's annoying that people who want to read an interview with the President without seeing the equivilent of "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified" are called whiners, told to get the stick out of their ass, etc.
Some people just don't like seeing trolls and spam along with their more traditional content. If you really feel that strong of an urge to mock the President, why don't you set up your own channel on efnet and log in as "President_Clinton" and parody each of Clinton's answers? Then you can have your fun and leave the "humorless suits" alone. Perhaps that would take too much wit.
It's distressing that so many people on Slashdot seem to think that the internet is their personal playground. "Back years ago, the internet was all about having fun!" No, back years ago, the internet was the same as it is today: it was about sharing information.
I think there's an amusing troll posted on Slashdot every once in a while, and I can't claim to have never trolled or flamebaited Usenet newsgroups when I was younger and stupider, but that doesn't mean that just because you have a wise-ass comment pop into your head that you should post it for all the world to see. Really, we're not all that impressed with your wit.
I can safely say that the concept of partitioning sites into destinct categories is not really all that accurate.
Yeah, but some people have an innate desire to categorize everything. Myself, I enjoy categorizing things, but it's not an obsession. I like putting all my heavy metal compact discs in a different place than my blues compact discs, for instance. Other people might use alphabetical ordering.
At any rate, I think Katz missed quite a few "continents", such as the warez sites, cracking/security sites, etc.
I don't mean this as a flame. Repeat, this is not a flame. But Katz just doesn't have the knowledge necessary to be writing articles like this. He doesn't know enough about the internet or its cultures/sub-cultures.
File encryption and high security just aren't on the minds of the masses, yet. I'm sure many of the people that take part in Ford's program will be overwhelmed with functionality that many of us consider to be extremely basic. High level concepts like public key encryption, firewalling, and enabling/disabling cookies will not be things they easily understand.
So, maybe we should write up instructions on how to do that, put those pages in easy-to-find places, and try to share our expertise and knowledge with them.
That's been the philosophy of my web pages ever since I put them up (though, the first incarnation back 6 or 7 years ago was just pics of me).
I haven't been updating the Linux info on my home page as much as I should (some of it is out of date now), but when it was topical and current, I actually got quite a few hits on my poor, overworked 56K modem.
It's a nice feeling knowing that you're helping someone else develop an interest in your hobby (something as general as 'computer security' or as specific as 'firewalls under linux').
My biggest problem with the proposed scenario (Intel plays their hand, is trumped by AMD, and Intel quickly loses marketshare due to delays, rushed designs, and anti-Intel/pro-AMD market shifts) is that AMD hasn't proven that it can do anything beyond a fast desktop processor.
Right now, I can buy a Slot 2 GX board and put four Pentium III 550 Xeon chips on it. If I spent enough money and did enough searching, I could probably get a server (likely only through Compaq) that had eight Xeons in it.
Now, of course, these systems pale next to an Alpha or SPARC. But we're talking x86-based systems here. And if management wants to run NT, then you're essentially stuck with x86 (Yes, I know, NT4 supports Alphas, but Alpha support is now officially dead).
There is no SMP Athlon chipset. Consumers tend to put down SMP, minimalizing its benefits (much like SCSI); however, you don't see the big iron running a single processor with IDE hard drives. There's a reason for this. Yes, it's often a terrible price/performance ratio, but that's where the big margins come from, not from desktop systems. Just look at the cost of a server-class Xeon-based system. Just the Xeon processor itself costs as much as your whole power-user computer.
AMD needs to break into this market. It will make them lots of money. Desktops won't...
Come on, everyone, say it with me: TOM DID NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE.
Thank you.
(too bad "blink" isn't allowed html *grin*)
p.s. Yes, it does share Tom's biases, but you can tell by the flawless English grammar (Tom is not a native English speaker), exceedingly strong bias (Tom is usually a little more controlled), strange predictions (Tom is usually a little more reality-based), and humor (Tom does not have a funny bone) that it's not Tom.
[this guy] needs to take some jounralism classes, you can hardly read the article because his personal bias is laid on so thick. How come everyone is clamouring for the death of Intel? If it weren't for the x86 series of processors computer technology would not be where it is today, at least night in my livingroom.
Oh, give me a break.
The piece is supposed to be opinion! Isn't that obvious? Do people on the net have to prefix everything they write with "IMHO"?
Second, if it weren't for Microsoft, you wouldn't have any software on your computer. Do you realize how stupid that sounds? I hope you do. Intel is not the only (or best) microprocessor vendor in the world. They're not even really the first. TI had a microprocessor arguably before Intel did.
We don't owe Intel anything. Intel owes us for making them number one. If we (the market) decide to take our business elsewhere, Intel will fumble and die.
I can't believe this crap. AMD comes up with admittedly good x86 implementations, but has historically failed to execute; i.e. it has failed to deliver enough of any processor family in the quantities required on everything up to the Athlon. The Athlon has been the exception so far, but we're only talking about three quarters. Intel's failure to deliver on processors, on the other hand, is measured in one or two quarters and then the supply matches the market demand.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
Just because AMD has had troubles in the past, doesn't mean they don't have their act together now. In fact, AMD hasn't had a single problem meeting for the Athlon demand yet. That certainly doesn't mean that they won't have trouble in the future, but I think any trouble they will have in this area will be minimal. They've learned the hard way how critical it is to meet demand.
Besides, most of the problems that they had meeting demand were because of the design of the K6 series of chips. The K6-3, especially, had monstrous amounts of trouble. The design was good on paper, but it had pathetic yields. You can compare it to Intel's Pentium Pro, which was also a massive flop.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why does everything have to go on eBay these days? Isn't it easier to just release the domain?
I don't charge people interest on loans. I lend them $10, then a couple weeks later, I collect $10 back. It's simple. No math involved, no accounting, no greediness.
Geez, you'd think that life revolved around little green pieces of paper in this country. There's more to life than little green pieces of paper.
p.s., did you have to pay to register that domain? Probably not.
Intel makes processors, chipsets, motherboards, network cards, video chipsets (used to make video cards, but now they imped the video chips in the motherboard's chipset, so you can't make a choice), etc.
Intel has invested quite heavily in lots of companies in the past ten years. They probably rival Microsoft in investing and buying interesting, up-and-coming companies. Though, Microsoft is a bit more evil about it.
What is it that makes you special enough to be posting articles on Slashdot? For instance, why not Jerry Pournelle, who's been writing about technology since forever? Why not Signal11, who's probably got a karma of 5000 now? Why not a random Slashdot geek, who could probably write something more interesting than an extended rant about "please die" (is that any stronger of an insult than "fuck you" is? I don't think so.)
In short, why are we assaulted with you and your columns everywhere we turn, even after turning you off in our preferences? Can't you just post short, concise followups to stories already submitted to Slashdot, like the rest of us?
The two of them have been playing "tit-for-tat" for some time now... I wonder how long Intel will be able to keep up that game. Not long, I'd wager. I wouldn't be suprised to find that they have no answer for this. Wilamette might be Intel's answer further down the road, but it is hard to say what with the K8 (and, yes, the K9) looking so nice. About production... That has been AMD's problem for a while. Anyone got any links indicating how well they have been able to meet the demand for K7's?
Why do you think that Intel will have trouble keeping up with AMD? The Athlon doesn't even have a good chipset yet. There's no SMP, PC133 support was just announced (I don't see any PC133 Athlon motherboards for sale yet), ditto AGP 4X, and the faster Athlons are running the off-die cache at 2/5 speed! It sounds to me that the Athlon has some catching up to do, really. Yeah, the Athlon is pretty fast, but the engineering leaves a little to be desired. I'd really like to see an SMP Athlon motherboard with PC133 support (or DDR SDRAM). There is no Athlon chipset that can even come close to the i840 chipset. Not even close. Try running dual 733 MHz Coppermines on an i840 motherboard. Then compare that to a single CPU 750 or 800 MHz Athlon. The Athlon will get slaughtered. I guarantee it.
Regular pentium-style ZIFF sockets were standard for a long time. Now we have all kinds of weird proprietary cards, buses, RAM, whatever. I know enough not to mix random RAM, but the complexity has definitely gotten out of hand for all but the up-to-date hardware hacker, and that isn't me.
Oh, come on. It's not that hard to keep up to date with new stuff. Slot 1 CPUs go in... slot 1! Slot 1 has been around for years now. Do you know why Socket 7 was around for so long? Because AMD used it for so long. Intel abandoned it a loooong time ago for their proprietary Slot 1 architecture. AMD couldn't make Slot 1 CPUs. But all you needed to do was buy any old Slot 1 CPU (from 233 MHz to 600 MHz), and it would work in virtually any Slot 1 motherboard. Is that so bad? No, it is not. Which Slot 1 CPUs don't work in Slot 1 motherboards? The new Coppermine CPUs, if you're unlucky. The Coppermind CPUs will work in many (but not all) Slot 1 motherboards! For years now, you could have used the same Slot 1 motherboard, just upgrading CPUs. What are you complaining about? That your 486 doesn't work in a Pentium II motherboard? Oh well.... time goes on.
Well, ten years ago, IBM was making high end PS/2 workstations that would have slaughtered the PC you had. They used a high end bus (MCA), hot swappable SCSI hard drives, IBM engineered x86 compatible CPUs (anyone remember Blue Lightning? Clock tripled 486s running at 100+ MHz that beat most Intel Pentiums in SPEC benchmarks), etc, etc. IBM has always had lots of awesome, innovative products, even available to the consumer market. People just ignored them until recently. IBM was always kick-ass. However, nobody really cared about kick-ass. They cared about cheap. IBM computers were expensive. Now, IBM is balancing kick-ass with cheap, with the added bonus of openness.
When, exactly are you going to add two 128-bit numbers? Is this a common occurance for you? It's not for me. I'd rather see a 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI bus in consumer motherboards. There are increasingly more peripherals that exceed the bandwidth of the 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. And they're getting cheaper every week. Adaptec Ultra 160 SCSI adapters are only ~$250. I'd buy one if I could actually handle the bandwidth...
That's ridiculous. Why do you want the fastest CPU on the market? Why do you honestly need it? What's that? You don't need it? You just want to brag to your other 13 year old friends that your computer is faster than theirs? Oh, tough luck to you. Other people, people who are trying to get REAL WORK DONE, are actually happy that technology is moving quickly. Maybe if you can't handle it, you should go buy a Apple Macintosh. I hear they don't innovate very often. You can have a top-of-the-line computer for years and years.
Geez... I have a dual cpu Pentium III 450 MHz system, and according to my research, there isn't anything out there much more than 50% faster than it (say, a 733 MHz Coppermine in an i820 motherboard). When dual and quad CPU Coppermine systems become available, I *might* upgrade to one of those. If I *need* the speed increase, that is. Why upgrade when all I could get is a 50% speed increase, though? It'd cost me hundreds of dollars.
All you need to do is buy a decent computer (Dual or quad CPUs, Ultra2 SCSI, Asus motherboard), and you'll be set for *years*. No need to upgrade every month. It might cost more in the short run, but it'll last a hell of a lot longer than that Celeron/EIDE based computer you bought for $100.
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I like his idea of minimalist design, but I'm not so sure that I'm as zealous as him. For instance, when it comes to an FAQ, I absolutely detest having to view each answer individually. There is no better way to piss me off than to force me to load twenty small pages one after another. Luckily, there are ways around this, such as wget. It still bothers me that people don't offer me the choice to see everything at once, though.
I also find it quite annoying that people break up articles into five or ten pages, each with just one or two paragraphs on them. Of course, there's two or three banner ads, lots of ads on the left and right borders, and an imagemap running down one or both sides. So, I guess there really is a whole lot of content there. Silly me.
I used to design my pages in two varieties, Netscape-friendly and Mosaic-friendly. With the death of Mosaic, my "light" pages became rarer and rarer, but I still try to remain conscientious of people using Lynx and other alternative browsers. I myself like using Lynx, as it's a handy text-mode app. It also fits on a boot/root floppy. Too many people today ignore every browser but Internet Explorer. It's crazy. I can't believe that there are so many sites out there that cause Netscape to display a blank page, because the Javascript is so poorly written.
Sorry for the ranting. I just broke up with my girlfriend of almost a year, and I'm feeling kind of depressed. *sigh*
And we're supposed to believe you're female?
My sister sometimes played male, sometimes played female characters. I tend to like playing male characters. I'll play a female character if I have to, but, in general, I don't know what to do with them. Males are easy.
Barbarian: "Og mad! Og smash"
Paladin: "I shall smite thee, foul spawn of evil!"
Wizard: "You will regret angering me for the few seconds you have left to live, as your internal organs all turn to stone."
Thief: "Hey, sorry, I thought it fell out of your pocket."
Female character: "Ummm... is that orc male? I'll seduce him or something."
Guys have no imagination when it comes to playing females.
Very true. I learned quickly that very few females actually play MUDs. True, because of the social aspects, there have always been a minority of real females, but 90% of the "females" are actually guys trolling for equipment.
This one MUD that I played had a powerful clan for just females. They were allied with another powerful clan, this one just for men. The two clan leaders, after a long period of being adventuring companions, were united in marriage, sealing forever the bond between the two clans.
Then the leader of the female-only clan admitted that he was male. The fallout was hilarious. I almost died laughing after reading all the public messages on the MUD's mail system. The leader of the male-only clan took it like he discovered his newly-wed wife was actually a transvestite. He must have taken 10 showers that first day. Hahaha. "I can't believe I... Oh my God... I did it with a... you bastard! You led me on!!"
Yeah, turning off everything but HTML rendering does sort of suck. However, you have the benefit of HTML4 support. Or most of HTML4, at least.
.c and .h files distributed across dozens of directories is not easy to fix.
If you use Lynx, you get a great browser, but it's easy to create a page that Lynx can't navigate. Put in four or five frames, a bunch of images with no alt tags, and extensive use of Javascript. Voila - totally incomprehensible mess to the Lynx user.
If you use Mosaic, you don't even get HTML3.2, which is pretty sad.
If you use Grail, you get HTML3.2, but it's very slow. It's also not maintained any more, so you'll never get HTML4 support.
I don't think the first alpha version of Mnemonic has come out yet. It's only about 5 years late. Maybe they all started running IE instead.
Amaya is cool and all, but it's mostly useless when you try to navigate poorly written HTML pages (and that's most of the web). If you only go to sites that are HTML4 validated, then it works great.
Mozilla... maybe it's just me, but Mozilla seems about ten times as buggy as Netscape 4.x. I don't think it's going to come out this year. And, yes, I've used the latest milestone *and* the latest CVS source. The CVS source didn't even compile. Maybe in 2001.
Konqueror sounds interesting, but it's only in the unstable KDE builds, as I understand it. I already had one bad experience with CVS. I don't need another. I like source code to either compile or be easy to fix. Hundreds of
On the other hand, Netscape 4.7 isn't all that bad for me. It hardly ever crashes at all. I keep Java, Javascript, and CSS on almost all the time. When I hit a site that's so poorly written, it crashes Netscape, I don't ever return there.
I'm using XF86 3.3.6, a Matrox G400, dual P3 450s, 256MB RAM, Squid, and Mandrake 7. Works for me.
Well, that's not "good", per se, but I wouldn't quite panic over that weight. I used to weigh 130 lbs at 5'10". I was able to peak at 140 lbs with some difficulty. That all changed once I started taking Zyprexa, an anti-depressant/anti-psychotic/miracle pill. It sure helped my depression a whole lot, but I gained some 80 lbs over the course of a year while I was on it. Let me say this... losing 80 lbs is rough. Better to be a little underweight (but not anorexic -- people die from that) than overweight.
I'm not sure exactly what your "problem" is, but it sounds like either you're anorexic (rare for guys) or you have weird metabolism (like me and my mom). Until I got to college, I couldn't exceed 130 lbs, no matter how much I ate. If it's not psychological, then just go with it. Your body typically adjusts to things quite well. I agree with the other poster, though, about exercise... it surely can't hurt to build up some muscle mass. I wouldn't get obsessive about it, though. You might burn off too many calories. That would be bad.
I hope that you keep us posted about how you're doing... write up an editorial about Geeks And Food or something... I bet the guys will post it here.
Remember, if you're at all worried, don't hesitate to talk to a professional nutritionist or doctor. They know about this stuff.
Good luck...
Hah. Flaming Borland for giving us a gift is "Insightful", but putting down the flames is "flamebait".
Zealots suck.
I've never before seen such a bunch of whiners!
What the hell is wrong with you people? Someone offers you something for free (as in free) and you bitch, whine, and flame about it?
I hope that you never get another free (as in free) product again. Damn babies.
There's an Abit motherboard or two that have two ATA chips on them, the BX chipset (which has ATA/33) and an HPT chip (ATA/66). The HPT chip allows you to connect another four ATA devices, but it doesn't support booting. This is all from memory, though, so I could have the details wrong. But the point is that you get ATA/66 and 8 ATA ports.
I'm all for replacing ATA with SCSI, but let's be realistic here. SCSI devices and host adapters are expensive.
ATA gets the job done, cheaply at the price of doing it gracefully. There's no reason you need SCSI hard drives if you're currently satisfied with your current ATA setup. Likewise for IEEE 1394 and USB. If USB is working just fine for you, then you don't need to worry about all the cool features of IEEE 1394 and what you're missing out on. It's mostly high-end stuff.
The biggest problem of USB and ATA is that they were designed for the average consumer, not power users or servers. This isn't really a 'problem' per se, except if you happen to be a power user and you're trying to wrestle with the limitations of your current hardware. This is when you want IEEE 1394 and/or SCSI. Not if you're an average Joe, just trying to hook up a new mouse.
There's always been room for both ATA and SCSI, and I think there's always going to be room for both USB and IEEE 1394. They serve different markets, really.
By the way, are you still using that sucky 32 bit Intel or Motorola CPU? Upgrade to a real processor, a DEC Alpha 21264, even if you do have to pay an extra $3000 just for the processor and motherboard!
Elitist attitudes are easy to mock.
The Linux Media Labs card looks interesting, but it costs $410. Are they crazy? I could buy a new 650 MHz Athlon processor, Asus motherboard, and have enough money left over for shipping.
Four hundred dollars...
Let's at least be realistic here. Anybody making Linux-friendly hardware that isn't priced outside of mere mortals' budgets?
I wish there were a Linux hardware manufacturing company. Just imagine all the things we could do if someone out there had a couple good engineers, a business-savvy CEO (not a programmer or engineer who founded the company), and a license to use, say, one of IBM's fabs.
We could design our own Linux BIOS or chipset. License a BIOS from AMI and/or a chipset from VIA, then customize it from there. If it ends up requiring an NDA, so be it. But it would be monsterously useful to have Linux-friendly chipsets and BIOSes. I know there's an open source BIOS project, but it seems dead, and they probably have no idea how to manufacture a BIOS chip (nor the money to have someone else manufacture it).
We could design our own SCSI host adapter. License the chips from LSI Logic (formerly Symbios Logic, formerly NCR), and make it the best supported SCSI host adapter in Linux, which shouldn't be too hard, considering that you've got access to the microcode.
Why not manufacture cheap modems or printers that use software drivers under Linux? They'd be insanely cheap to manufacture, and I'm sure someone out there would buy them. You can get a 400 MHz CPU for less than $75 today, so it wouldn't really be such a drain.
And DVD decoder cards surely wouldn't be a problem. Just pay the license fee for the specs, write a binary driver, and manufacture a few thousand of the decoder cards. Instant DVD under Linux. Of course, it wouldn't be integrated into the kernel, but it's no different than those binary video card drivers for XF86.
I'm really starting to get sick of these millionaires and billionaires doing absolutely nothing for the Linux community. We could be accomplishing stuff here.
Like I alluded to before, I'm not even so interested in bleeding-edge 1.5 GHz processors and designing our own SCSI chipset... what we should be doing is making generic cards that will run under Linux, with a "Designed for Linux" seal. Imagine if everything possible was open, with a minimum of NDAs. I bet it could happen.
Yeah, trolls are so very funny.
It's annoying that people who want to read an interview with the President without seeing the equivilent of "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified" are called whiners, told to get the stick out of their ass, etc.
Some people just don't like seeing trolls and spam along with their more traditional content. If you really feel that strong of an urge to mock the President, why don't you set up your own channel on efnet and log in as "President_Clinton" and parody each of Clinton's answers? Then you can have your fun and leave the "humorless suits" alone. Perhaps that would take too much wit.
It's distressing that so many people on Slashdot seem to think that the internet is their personal playground. "Back years ago, the internet was all about having fun!" No, back years ago, the internet was the same as it is today: it was about sharing information.
I think there's an amusing troll posted on Slashdot every once in a while, and I can't claim to have never trolled or flamebaited Usenet newsgroups when I was younger and stupider, but that doesn't mean that just because you have a wise-ass comment pop into your head that you should post it for all the world to see. Really, we're not all that impressed with your wit.
Yeah, but some people have an innate desire to categorize everything. Myself, I enjoy categorizing things, but it's not an obsession. I like putting all my heavy metal compact discs in a different place than my blues compact discs, for instance. Other people might use alphabetical ordering.
At any rate, I think Katz missed quite a few "continents", such as the warez sites, cracking/security sites, etc.
I don't mean this as a flame. Repeat, this is not a flame. But Katz just doesn't have the knowledge necessary to be writing articles like this. He doesn't know enough about the internet or its cultures/sub-cultures.
So, maybe we should write up instructions on how to do that, put those pages in easy-to-find places, and try to share our expertise and knowledge with them.
That's been the philosophy of my web pages ever since I put them up (though, the first incarnation back 6 or 7 years ago was just pics of me).
I haven't been updating the Linux info on my home page as much as I should (some of it is out of date now), but when it was topical and current, I actually got quite a few hits on my poor, overworked 56K modem.
It's a nice feeling knowing that you're helping someone else develop an interest in your hobby (something as general as 'computer security' or as specific as 'firewalls under linux').
My biggest problem with the proposed scenario (Intel plays their hand, is trumped by AMD, and Intel quickly loses marketshare due to delays, rushed designs, and anti-Intel/pro-AMD market shifts) is that AMD hasn't proven that it can do anything beyond a fast desktop processor.
Right now, I can buy a Slot 2 GX board and put four Pentium III 550 Xeon chips on it. If I spent enough money and did enough searching, I could probably get a server (likely only through Compaq) that had eight Xeons in it.
Now, of course, these systems pale next to an Alpha or SPARC. But we're talking x86-based systems here. And if management wants to run NT, then you're essentially stuck with x86 (Yes, I know, NT4 supports Alphas, but Alpha support is now officially dead).
There is no SMP Athlon chipset. Consumers tend to put down SMP, minimalizing its benefits (much like SCSI); however, you don't see the big iron running a single processor with IDE hard drives. There's a reason for this. Yes, it's often a terrible price/performance ratio, but that's where the big margins come from, not from desktop systems. Just look at the cost of a server-class Xeon-based system. Just the Xeon processor itself costs as much as your whole power-user computer.
AMD needs to break into this market. It will make them lots of money. Desktops won't...
Come on, everyone, say it with me: TOM DID NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE .
Thank you.
(too bad "blink" isn't allowed html *grin*)
p.s. Yes, it does share Tom's biases, but you can tell by the flawless English grammar (Tom is not a native English speaker), exceedingly strong bias (Tom is usually a little more controlled), strange predictions (Tom is usually a little more reality-based), and humor (Tom does not have a funny bone) that it's not Tom.
The piece is supposed to be opinion! Isn't that obvious? Do people on the net have to prefix everything they write with "IMHO"?
Second, if it weren't for Microsoft, you wouldn't have any software on your computer. Do you realize how stupid that sounds? I hope you do. Intel is not the only (or best) microprocessor vendor in the world. They're not even really the first. TI had a microprocessor arguably before Intel did.
We don't owe Intel anything. Intel owes us for making them number one. If we (the market) decide to take our business elsewhere, Intel will fumble and die.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
Just because AMD has had troubles in the past, doesn't mean they don't have their act together now. In fact, AMD hasn't had a single problem meeting for the Athlon demand yet. That certainly doesn't mean that they won't have trouble in the future, but I think any trouble they will have in this area will be minimal. They've learned the hard way how critical it is to meet demand.
Besides, most of the problems that they had meeting demand were because of the design of the K6 series of chips. The K6-3, especially, had monstrous amounts of trouble. The design was good on paper, but it had pathetic yields. You can compare it to Intel's Pentium Pro, which was also a massive flop.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why does everything have to go on eBay these days? Isn't it easier to just release the domain?
I don't charge people interest on loans. I lend them $10, then a couple weeks later, I collect $10 back. It's simple. No math involved, no accounting, no greediness.
Geez, you'd think that life revolved around little green pieces of paper in this country. There's more to life than little green pieces of paper.
p.s., did you have to pay to register that domain? Probably not.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about as well.
Intel makes processors, chipsets, motherboards, network cards, video chipsets (used to make video cards, but now they imped the video chips in the motherboard's chipset, so you can't make a choice), etc.
Intel has invested quite heavily in lots of companies in the past ten years. They probably rival Microsoft in investing and buying interesting, up-and-coming companies. Though, Microsoft is a bit more evil about it.
Wouldn't it be funny if Intel bought AMD?
What is it that makes you special enough to be posting articles on Slashdot? For instance, why not Jerry Pournelle, who's been writing about technology since forever? Why not Signal11, who's probably got a karma of 5000 now? Why not a random Slashdot geek, who could probably write something more interesting than an extended rant about "please die" (is that any stronger of an insult than "fuck you" is? I don't think so.)
In short, why are we assaulted with you and your columns everywhere we turn, even after turning you off in our preferences? Can't you just post short, concise followups to stories already submitted to Slashdot, like the rest of us?
Oh, come on. It's not that hard to keep up to date with new stuff. Slot 1 CPUs go in... slot 1! Slot 1 has been around for years now. Do you know why Socket 7 was around for so long? Because AMD used it for so long. Intel abandoned it a loooong time ago for their proprietary Slot 1 architecture. AMD couldn't make Slot 1 CPUs. But all you needed to do was buy any old Slot 1 CPU (from 233 MHz to 600 MHz), and it would work in virtually any Slot 1 motherboard. Is that so bad? No, it is not. Which Slot 1 CPUs don't work in Slot 1 motherboards? The new Coppermine CPUs, if you're unlucky. The Coppermind CPUs will work in many (but not all) Slot 1 motherboards! For years now, you could have used the same Slot 1 motherboard, just upgrading CPUs. What are you complaining about? That your 486 doesn't work in a Pentium II motherboard? Oh well.... time goes on.
Well, ten years ago, IBM was making high end PS/2 workstations that would have slaughtered the PC you had. They used a high end bus (MCA), hot swappable SCSI hard drives, IBM engineered x86 compatible CPUs (anyone remember Blue Lightning? Clock tripled 486s running at 100+ MHz that beat most Intel Pentiums in SPEC benchmarks), etc, etc. IBM has always had lots of awesome, innovative products, even available to the consumer market. People just ignored them until recently. IBM was always kick-ass. However, nobody really cared about kick-ass. They cared about cheap . IBM computers were expensive . Now, IBM is balancing kick-ass with cheap, with the added bonus of openness.
When, exactly are you going to add two 128-bit numbers? Is this a common occurance for you? It's not for me.
I'd rather see a 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI bus in consumer motherboards. There are increasingly more peripherals that exceed the bandwidth of the 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. And they're getting cheaper every week. Adaptec Ultra 160 SCSI adapters are only ~$250. I'd buy one if I could actually handle the bandwidth...
That's ridiculous. Why do you want the fastest CPU on the market? Why do you honestly need it? What's that? You don't need it? You just want to brag to your other 13 year old friends that your computer is faster than theirs? Oh, tough luck to you. Other people, people who are trying to get REAL WORK DONE, are actually happy that technology is moving quickly. Maybe if you can't handle it, you should go buy a Apple Macintosh. I hear they don't innovate very often. You can have a top-of-the-line computer for years and years.
Geez... I have a dual cpu Pentium III 450 MHz system, and according to my research, there isn't anything out there much more than 50% faster than it (say, a 733 MHz Coppermine in an i820 motherboard). When dual and quad CPU Coppermine systems become available, I *might* upgrade to one of those. If I *need* the speed increase, that is. Why upgrade when all I could get is a 50% speed increase, though? It'd cost me hundreds of dollars.
All you need to do is buy a decent computer (Dual or quad CPUs, Ultra2 SCSI, Asus motherboard), and you'll be set for *years*. No need to upgrade every month. It might cost more in the short run, but it'll last a hell of a lot longer than that Celeron/EIDE based computer you bought for $100.