I've no idea what Linux performance was like pre-GMA X3000, but I'm more than happy with my Intel onboard GFX (G965 chipset). Sure, like the parent says they're useless for games but they have more than enough grunt to run Beryl and XScreensaver/RSS-GLX at 1680x1050. Low power usage, less heat and no noisy fans, and incredibly stable with the newer revs of drivers (the initial releases hard-locked my machine a couple of times when running OGL).
I can see why you'd say they were crappy if you don't have a seperate machine for gaming though.
...that no-one has mentioned some of the other gems from TFA, especially in relation to the *nix builds:
64bit Linux builds Qt4 builds Faster tab switching (my only gripe with the current Opera under Linux)
I've been using Opera since 2001, and on Linux since 2004, and it's great to see a vendor maintaining feature parity across different platforms.
The improvements to CSS et al are always welcome, but as some other users have pointed out it's almost always crappily coded sites that give "alternative" browsers a hard time, so it's also good to see they're apparently factoring in better support for error-ridden sites.
That's certainly the situation in the UK. The new digital TV (DVB-T) has a 7-day programme guide embedded in the stream, which almost all DVB apps on Linux (MythTV, Kaffeine to name two) have out-of-the-box support for. Does the US version (QAM?) not provide similar functionality? Won't solve the problem of OTA analogue or people recording from their cable box, but it's a start I guess...
Personally, I use the free Radio Times service (fully compatible with XMLTV) since it provides more informative listings and a 14 day schedule.
If Dell was allowed to sell Ubuntu to businesses, all businesses with Windows VLK's would buy Ubuntu computers by the truckload in order to avoid having to pay for two Windows licenses.
I'm aware I shouldn't attribute to malice, etc etc, but I imagine MS are keeping Dell on a short leash with the licensing: "Sell Ubuntu to businesses and we revoke your OEM status and you have to pay $XXX per machine instead of $XX".
Heh. I'd love to see a "You wouldn't build your own house, would you?" anti-piracy campaign. Damned self-builders, stealing potential revenue from Proper Approved Offical Builders.
As another poster pointed out, what's missing here is perspective or, as someone more tactless like myself might say, some semblance of reality. People who equte "potential" revenue to "real revenue" are worrying. People who think "copying" is the same as "stealing" must suffer from some kind of sociological disorder. I think any person who thinks that said copying/"stealing" is somehow more of a threat to society than, e.g., having a knife stuck against your throat whilst your money is stolen should be put under medical supervision for delusional fantasy. I don't have any sympathy for these unrelentingly greedy, power-mad fuckwits. They're offering society a noose, and people have been conditioned to think they have to pay for the privilege of being strangled./buying un-DRMed MP3's and AAC's through Bleep, TuneTribe, 4AD and 7digital since 2005, and proud of it (note to electronica fans in the states - if you didn't know already, most Warp artisst are re-sold in the USA through an RIAA affiliate. Try and buy from Bleep if you fancy cutting out the middle man). If your favourite band is still using one of the old dinosaur labels that want to treat you like part of the problem, write them and tell them what a mistake you think they're making. Our artists deserve our support from enriching our lives with their music. The Big Four deserve none of it, and are becoming increasingly irrelavant with every passing second./end rant
I'm as huge a fan of Linux/OSS as anyone, but I have to admit that OSS is severely lacking in the groupware and workgroup department.
In fact, I've been trying to implement something akin to Active Directory at home (not because I need to, but because I wanted to prove to myself and others that Linux is capable of it) using off-the-shelf FOSS, and it's been remarkably difficult. Make no mistake, I now have some remarkably cool features - single sign on for users for a raft of protocols (especially SSH, which rocks) through Kerberos auth tied to OpenLDAP for user info. Kerberised NFSv4 makes secure directory export a cinch. However, setting these up to work was by no means easy.
Implementing groupware and roaming profiles has been nothing but problems. My DE of choice is KDE, and I love Kontact/KMail (sorry guys, I find Evolution nigh unusable - slow, buggy and just generally crap in my admittedly limited experience) and ahve been struggling to find a decent groupware backend for them. Kolab doesn't yet work properly on Gentoo (yeah yeah, I guess I'm making life hard for myself, but still...), and Kolab don't want to support anyone not using openpkg, so that's Debian out of the running too. Similar story for Citadel. KMail's "disconnected IMAP" support still has a few bugs. Granted I've not done too much compiling from source because I firmly believe that package management is the way to go, and I'm not keen on adopting a groupware solution that isn't officially supported on my particular platform of choice, nor one that relies on using a web interface/webDAV/XMLRPC for everything. Yes, I'm prepared to switch to a less finicky distro, such as Debian, if need be.
The biggest bugbear for me was absolutely no support anywhere for roaming home directories - when I moan about this I'm usually told to just automount my home dir over the LAN (which I already do) - but what about my laptop, which spends most of its time working on foreign networks? I shouldn't have to boot into a seperate local profile. No-one seems to have an answer for this, so I basically had to hack myself some scripts on logon/logoff that attempt to use unison to do a bi-directional sync of my LAN profile with my laptop profile, but it requires interactivity if you don't want it to clobber some things (especially big maildirs, to the extent I've had to write an exclude that keeps the maildirs from syncing), which isn't an option for logon/off IMHO. Do Linux users never leave the house?!;)
If you'd ask me, I'd say that Linux is easily viable for the desktop as long as the user doesn't have any enterprise-level requirements such as those listed above, but as much as I hate AD and Exchange I'll reluctantly admit they're the best solutions I've come across so far. Reasonably idiot-proof to set up, reasonably stable, just ridiculously expensive and hampered by (IMHO) weak client-side software such as Outlook.
Linux/FOSS really need to get a decent and widely supported groupware solution out of the door, pronto,if they ever want to be in the running for the enterprise desktop (discounting proprietary/pay-for products such as OpenExchange or Stalker's Communigate), and I'm not even concerned about using Outlook (which, after Kontact, I find to be one of the most braindead and annoying email clients I have ever laid my hands on IMHO). I'm aware that alot of companies won't even think about using Linux groupware if it doesn't cost at least eleventy grillion groats, but I'm willing to bet there's an equal number of companies that'd be willing to trial Linux groupware of $STEROTYPICAL_LINUX_GEEK set up a groupware system for nowt over the weekend cos he was bored.
/highly expecting to be pilloried as a troll, but I am attempting to show general concern. Please, instead of modding me anything, reply with your own possible solutions or similar problems you've faced!
This post is a product of working for a pro-Linux company with a highly mobile workforce for whom mobile PIM is an absolute must. We've already saved a fortune thanks to replacing file servers and VPN equipment with dirt cheap Linux systems, and we'd like to be able to do the same with Exchange too.
Not only that but in this case the tags get -1, Redundant.
Tags as of now: linux, microsoft Keywords in the article headline: linux, microsoft, interoperability
Not they've been effectively neutered, the tags not only fail to give any contextual/interprative information (such as itsatrap) but actually provide less factual information than the headline. If the current system is going to stay, it should be renamed "categories" rather than tags. Oh wait, doesn't/. already have a categories thingy?
Yeah, yeah, -1 Offtopic, -1 Bitching About Problem X with Slashdot...
AFAIK, the Linux kernel already has the MTD (Memory Technology Devices) framework to support things like flash cache - all that's needed is an additional driver for the Robson/whatever flash tech, and presumably some sort of userspace app to do all the prefetch/caching etc. I imagine the same would be true of hybrid hard drives.
A few people, myself included, already use MTD for using graphics card VRAM as swap (server doesn't have onboard GFX on it and never uses X, so I chucked in a dirt cheap nVidia card with 128MB of VRAM and use it as swap).
I'm not debating the "enthusiasm" of the site, merely his flawed logic/methodology based on that single ridiculous assumption:
Mac users never upgrade, only buy new Enthusiasts always upgrade Therefore, no Mac users are enthusiasts Enthusiasts can't use Macs because they're not upgradable
it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one.:%s/Mac/wintel/g
This is what the ~90% of the non-geek/IT professional/enthusiast populace do if they can't find anyone to do it for them. FTA is biased from the get go.
Heck, if we're going to start pulling usage scenarios out of our arses, I'll stipulate that Macs are inherently less predisposed to the whole becoming slower over time than wintel boxes are. Not that this would wash with the esteemed author.
Or they could even go one better and have a recovery Linux partition instead - including some nice parsers for/var/log. Sure, they'd have to write some of their own analysis software but I imagine a) there's lots of it already knocking about and b) if they gave a spec, the OSS community would probably help considerably in writing parts of it. Heck, there's already bootable Linux recovery discs that'll fit in a 50MB ISO, adding a minimal Xorg setup and a WM is easy. In fact, I winder how many people here first used Linux to help diagnose/recover from problems under Windows using summat like Knoppix?
If Dell is worried that software errors are going to be mistaken for hardware errors, a quick scan of various files in/var/log are likely to tell them what's going on. Doing this stuff from the CLI is pretty easy, so it'd be trivial to write a graphical frontend to it for ease of use. Combine that with a memtest86+ boot option and you've covered alot of bases that would normally require the kit to be sent in.
Anyway, I imagine the story is blown out of proportion and this is probably just a case of (yet another) poorly informed call centre staff. Does the US have anything that approximates to the Sales of Goods Act in the UK where you are obliged to support hardware as "fit for purpose" for a minumum of a year from the purchase date? I see lots of talk about warranties expiring after 90 days, so I guess you have a somewhat shorter minimum time frame for things to die. As I'm sure many of you are aware, 90 days is waaaay too close to the soap dish on that there bathtub curve.
Sheesh, half of my fiddling time with new computers is finding ways to get the power consumtpion down. My flatmate just inherited a top-end gaming rig (Core2 Extreme, 2GB "gamer" RAM, 8800GTX, 2xRaptors in RAID0) and is saying it only seems marginally faster than his previous Celeron/1GB/6600GT which had a lower power draw at full pelt than this new hulk does at idle. Most users have already stopped noticing (miniscule) speed improvements and only believe a machine is faster because the marketing says it is and the numbers are bigger. The only upgrades they're likely to notice are upping their RAM to a usable figure from the puny defaults usually offered by OEM's and installing an aftermarket GFX card if they've just bought a game and are wodnering why is runs like shit on their "256MB" onboard graphics.
Typically it's only power users that need, let alone notice, this stuff these days. I still reckon that if you gave 90% of home/business computer users a 1GHz P3 and 2GB of RAM they'd be happy as Larry and his whole darned family.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 4, Informative
Someone with a 6 digit UID that doesn't know that compiling something with GCC *doesn't* make the binary GPL'ed? Hand in your geek credentials please.
This is the sort of FUD that Microsoft must be loving. Every piece of code ever written by vi or emacs certainly isn't GPL'ed, just like every track that was finished up in Audacity isn't GPL'ed and just like people who use Visual Studio aren't obliged to hand over their source and binaries to MS gratis.
Please also note that you're only forced to distribute your modifications if you're distributing/selling the modifications. If you edit some bitchin' GPL code and keep it locked away inside a corporate intranet, I don't think there's any obligation (other than the "spirit" of the GPL) to open up your changes.
Well, maybe I'm just lucky - granted I use Linux desktops full time at home, and a homogenised NT5.x/Office setup at work, so I guess I'm more predisposed to see more of the bad side of Linux than anything else. Most problems I have on windows are various chunks of apps hanging when bottlenecked on slow/inaccessible IO resources (which usually leads to users randomly killing processes and/or rebooting). Sometimes happens to a limited extent with KDE, but it's far less noticeable - KIO slaves just plain rock! Hopefully the transition to Qt/KDE 4 will leave me even happier.
Might just be windows-fu on my part; many desktop ailments can be "cured" by killing/respawning explorer, and doing the same thing with stuff like KDE is a little harder - you might have to restart kicker, or dcop, or any host of other things that (very) occasionally die. Incidentally, if explorer.exe crashes windows is usually clever enough to restart it automatically, but I don't think KDE (or Gnome - although don't use it very much) have equivalent functionality to ensure a bunch of "essential" apps are running all the time.
Never really had much experience with 9x - my first computer came with 2k which was generally very well behaved, but my flatmate had WinME, so I'll concede that point to you there:D
As to being far too crash happy for my liking - yes, I'll happily agree with that. But then I'm of the opinion that anything more frequent than a crash every week or so is too many:)
I realise you're semi-joking and for a large part of Linux/FOSS I'd agree with you. I've never had apps like Samba or BIND or OpenSSH fall over on me, even under reasonably high loads, (the only problem I've had recently has been the experimental sky2 driver) but on the desktop things are a bit of a different story.
And I'm not even talking about things like little basement apps written by people like me with little to no programming experience. By far the biggest problem for me are apps like X, with which I've experienced lockups and crashes even when using completely FOSS drivers (i810).
Sure, explorer.exe hangs the entire UI when you're accessing a newly inserted CD or a slow network share in windows, or modal dialogues grab focus here there and everwhere and (if they have the bad luck to end up behind their parent window) give the impression of a "hung" app, or windows without taskbar entries (whose bright idea was that?! Completely ruins the whole WIMP/taskbar paradigm IMHO) vanishing from view, but I haven't had the windows desktop crash on me since NT5 - it's still a far too common occurrence with Linux IME. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but browsing my usual forums shows it still happens with some regularity for other users.
I'm not trying to bitch about X.org (I realise it's very much in it's infancy as regards to opening up the monolithic structure, etc) or anything else, and for the most part the nuts and bolts of what makes Linux cool, especially on the server side of things, are pretty damned bulletproof. But I don't want newcomers to Linux starting with the misapprehension that nothing ever crashses, because sometimes it does.
Flame away, but I like to think that FOSS isn't above some (hopefully) constructuve criticism*:)
*hides under bridge*
* Yes, I do submit bug reports where possible - often the issues are already fixed upstream anyway
Whilst I started out on Myth with a PVR-250 and the very early IVTV drivers, I'm now happy to recommend DVB cards for everyone that gets DVB in their area.
The IVTV drivers have only just been added to the kernel.org tree, which in the past has made setting these cards up something of a pain for people not used to patching their own kernels, or downloading external modules. The DVB stack, however, has had great support for cards for years now, at least for the ones I've used (UK DVB-T, and the Hauppauge Nova-T, Nova-T 500 and Avermedia 771 have all worked straight out of the box for me). DVB picture quality is also far superior to analogue converted to MPEG2, and there's less work for the hardware to do, since capturing a DVB stream is just a matter of dumoing the stream to disc.
Obviously, if you need to do any nasty criminal stealing activities like record from Sky or your cable box you'll probably need an analogue tuner, and the Hauppauge cards seem to be the best supported.
Obviously this might be no good for people in the US since I don't think DVB has much penetration there, but as far as I'm aware it's rolled out through most of Europe by now.
You don't think the talent pool is already somewhat depleted?
Heck, I'm not even old (getting there;)) and I've noticed a sharp drop in the amount of innovative music that's about. Chaning fashions perhaps.
But in any case, the music industry doesn't care if there's no talent pool - they create the market themselves through the hype machine anyway. If all the talent there is is shite, then they will just teach the populace to think shite is good. It's great having a virtual monopoly on communications, isn't it?
I dunno about you, but: i) I buy vinyl because it looks and feels nice (pretty picture discs from The Sundays and the gorgeous OK COmputer gatefold from Radiohead are what got me into vinyl in the first place), I couldn't care much about the sound quality of it. I rarely listen to it. I imagine alot of people outide of the audiophile/DJ circuits buy it for the same reasons. ii) I'm perfectly happy with high quality MP3. Bleep do some very nice 256 and 320kbps MP3's and the occasional FLAC, 4AD do some nice AAC's.
I think most people fit somewhere into the pigeonhole I put myself in - vinyl is a nice thing to own, but a pain in the arse to play back. By offering vinyl and an MP3, these record labels are giving the consumers something that's nice to look at and non-volatile music that'd damned easy to play and sounds good enough for anything but the most discerning ear - the best of both worlds in my opinion. As far as customer satisfaction goes, it gets a thumbs up from me. 99% of the time I'll be happy with the digital files and some nice hi-res JPEG's of the artwork, but for that really "special" album, holding the vinyl is hard to beat.
I'd be nice if things worked like that, but 90% of the time you're bottlenecked on I/O anyway (usually swapping due to insufficient memory to run all those craplets) and you're hard pressed to take advantage of one core, let alone four of the things. Of course, once everyone has their 1GB+ of RAM then SMP might get a better chance to shine...
I've been telling people not to bother buying fast processors for years now, unless I know they're heavily into their gaming or media editing. Every pound they don't spend on that I get them to sink into aftermarket RAM, and soon find their 1GHz/2GB machine at home is "faster" than the 3GHz/512MB machine at work. Only then do they understand that I wasn't mad...:D
I only skimmed the article but what with all the hullabaloo about dual/quad core chips, why didn't they use "exhaustive" as an excuse to check out the parallelisability (if that's a word) of each compression algorithm? IIRC they didn't list the hardware they used or any of the switches they used, which is a glaring omission in my book.
Of all the main compression utils I use, 7-zip, RAR and bzip2 (in the form of pbzip2) all have modes that will utilise multiple chips, often giving a pretty huge speedup in compression times. I'm not aware of any SMP branches for gzip/zlib but seeing as it appears to be the most efficient compressor by miles it might not even need it;)
It's mainly academic for me now though anyway, since almost all of the compression I use is inline anyway, either through rsync or SSH (or both). Not sure if any inline compressors are using LZMA yet, but the only time I find myself making an archive is for emailing someone with file size limits on their mail server. All of the stuff I have at home is stored uncompressed because a) 90% of it is already highly compressed and b) I'd rather buy slightly bigger hard drives that attempt to recover a corrupted archive a year or so down the line. Mostly I'm just concerned about decompression time these days.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
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The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Start > run > gpedit.msc > computer config > admin templates > windows components > windows update > enable re-prompt for restart and set timer to 1440 minutes (the maximum). Restart windows update service.
Annoying focus-stealing box now only appears once every 1440 minutes instead of every 10.
Was about to say the same thing (in fact, I did in some posts a coupla days ago); there's some undeniably interesting stuff going on in the kernel that should undoubtedly make the system feel faster, if nothing else - it's just brought down by a more complex GUI and all the rest of the folderol that most geeks couldn't really care less about.
Disclaimer: have not used Vista on anything but a demo machine in PC World.
Slashdot Mirror
I've no idea what Linux performance was like pre-GMA X3000, but I'm more than happy with my Intel onboard GFX (G965 chipset). Sure, like the parent says they're useless for games but they have more than enough grunt to run Beryl and XScreensaver/RSS-GLX at 1680x1050. Low power usage, less heat and no noisy fans, and incredibly stable with the newer revs of drivers (the initial releases hard-locked my machine a couple of times when running OGL).
I can see why you'd say they were crappy if you don't have a seperate machine for gaming though.
...that no-one has mentioned some of the other gems from TFA, especially in relation to the *nix builds:
64bit Linux builds
Qt4 builds
Faster tab switching (my only gripe with the current Opera under Linux)
I've been using Opera since 2001, and on Linux since 2004, and it's great to see a vendor maintaining feature parity across different platforms.
The improvements to CSS et al are always welcome, but as some other users have pointed out it's almost always crappily coded sites that give "alternative" browsers a hard time, so it's also good to see they're apparently factoring in better support for error-ridden sites.
That's certainly the situation in the UK. The new digital TV (DVB-T) has a 7-day programme guide embedded in the stream, which almost all DVB apps on Linux (MythTV, Kaffeine to name two) have out-of-the-box support for. Does the US version (QAM?) not provide similar functionality? Won't solve the problem of OTA analogue or people recording from their cable box, but it's a start I guess...
Personally, I use the free Radio Times service (fully compatible with XMLTV) since it provides more informative listings and a 14 day schedule.
If Dell was allowed to sell Ubuntu to businesses, all businesses with Windows VLK's would buy Ubuntu computers by the truckload in order to avoid having to pay for two Windows licenses.
I'm aware I shouldn't attribute to malice, etc etc, but I imagine MS are keeping Dell on a short leash with the licensing: "Sell Ubuntu to businesses and we revoke your OEM status and you have to pay $XXX per machine instead of $XX".
Heh. I'd love to see a "You wouldn't build your own house, would you?" anti-piracy campaign. Damned self-builders, stealing potential revenue from Proper Approved Offical Builders.
/buying un-DRMed MP3's and AAC's through Bleep, TuneTribe, 4AD and 7digital since 2005, and proud of it (note to electronica fans in the states - if you didn't know already, most Warp artisst are re-sold in the USA through an RIAA affiliate. Try and buy from Bleep if you fancy cutting out the middle man). If your favourite band is still using one of the old dinosaur labels that want to treat you like part of the problem, write them and tell them what a mistake you think they're making. Our artists deserve our support from enriching our lives with their music. The Big Four deserve none of it, and are becoming increasingly irrelavant with every passing second. /end rant
As another poster pointed out, what's missing here is perspective or, as someone more tactless like myself might say, some semblance of reality. People who equte "potential" revenue to "real revenue" are worrying. People who think "copying" is the same as "stealing" must suffer from some kind of sociological disorder. I think any person who thinks that said copying/"stealing" is somehow more of a threat to society than, e.g., having a knife stuck against your throat whilst your money is stolen should be put under medical supervision for delusional fantasy. I don't have any sympathy for these unrelentingly greedy, power-mad fuckwits. They're offering society a noose, and people have been conditioned to think they have to pay for the privilege of being strangled.
Oh dear, yet another "Me too!" post.
;)
/highly expecting to be pilloried as a troll, but I am attempting to show general concern. Please, instead of modding me anything, reply with your own possible solutions or similar problems you've faced!
I'm as huge a fan of Linux/OSS as anyone, but I have to admit that OSS is severely lacking in the groupware and workgroup department.
In fact, I've been trying to implement something akin to Active Directory at home (not because I need to, but because I wanted to prove to myself and others that Linux is capable of it) using off-the-shelf FOSS, and it's been remarkably difficult. Make no mistake, I now have some remarkably cool features - single sign on for users for a raft of protocols (especially SSH, which rocks) through Kerberos auth tied to OpenLDAP for user info. Kerberised NFSv4 makes secure directory export a cinch. However, setting these up to work was by no means easy.
Implementing groupware and roaming profiles has been nothing but problems. My DE of choice is KDE, and I love Kontact/KMail (sorry guys, I find Evolution nigh unusable - slow, buggy and just generally crap in my admittedly limited experience) and ahve been struggling to find a decent groupware backend for them. Kolab doesn't yet work properly on Gentoo (yeah yeah, I guess I'm making life hard for myself, but still...), and Kolab don't want to support anyone not using openpkg, so that's Debian out of the running too. Similar story for Citadel. KMail's "disconnected IMAP" support still has a few bugs. Granted I've not done too much compiling from source because I firmly believe that package management is the way to go, and I'm not keen on adopting a groupware solution that isn't officially supported on my particular platform of choice, nor one that relies on using a web interface/webDAV/XMLRPC for everything. Yes, I'm prepared to switch to a less finicky distro, such as Debian, if need be.
The biggest bugbear for me was absolutely no support anywhere for roaming home directories - when I moan about this I'm usually told to just automount my home dir over the LAN (which I already do) - but what about my laptop, which spends most of its time working on foreign networks? I shouldn't have to boot into a seperate local profile. No-one seems to have an answer for this, so I basically had to hack myself some scripts on logon/logoff that attempt to use unison to do a bi-directional sync of my LAN profile with my laptop profile, but it requires interactivity if you don't want it to clobber some things (especially big maildirs, to the extent I've had to write an exclude that keeps the maildirs from syncing), which isn't an option for logon/off IMHO. Do Linux users never leave the house?!
If you'd ask me, I'd say that Linux is easily viable for the desktop as long as the user doesn't have any enterprise-level requirements such as those listed above, but as much as I hate AD and Exchange I'll reluctantly admit they're the best solutions I've come across so far. Reasonably idiot-proof to set up, reasonably stable, just ridiculously expensive and hampered by (IMHO) weak client-side software such as Outlook.
Linux/FOSS really need to get a decent and widely supported groupware solution out of the door, pronto,if they ever want to be in the running for the enterprise desktop (discounting proprietary/pay-for products such as OpenExchange or Stalker's Communigate), and I'm not even concerned about using Outlook (which, after Kontact, I find to be one of the most braindead and annoying email clients I have ever laid my hands on IMHO). I'm aware that alot of companies won't even think about using Linux groupware if it doesn't cost at least eleventy grillion groats, but I'm willing to bet there's an equal number of companies that'd be willing to trial Linux groupware of $STEROTYPICAL_LINUX_GEEK set up a groupware system for nowt over the weekend cos he was bored.
This post is a product of working for a pro-Linux company with a highly mobile workforce for whom mobile PIM is an absolute must. We've already saved a fortune thanks to replacing file servers and VPN equipment with dirt cheap Linux systems, and we'd like to be able to do the same with Exchange too.
Not only that but in this case the tags get -1, Redundant.
/. already have a categories thingy?
Tags as of now: linux, microsoft
Keywords in the article headline: linux, microsoft, interoperability
Not they've been effectively neutered, the tags not only fail to give any contextual/interprative information (such as itsatrap) but actually provide less factual information than the headline. If the current system is going to stay, it should be renamed "categories" rather than tags. Oh wait, doesn't
Yeah, yeah, -1 Offtopic, -1 Bitching About Problem X with Slashdot...
AFAIK, the Linux kernel already has the MTD (Memory Technology Devices) framework to support things like flash cache - all that's needed is an additional driver for the Robson/whatever flash tech, and presumably some sort of userspace app to do all the prefetch/caching etc. I imagine the same would be true of hybrid hard drives.
A few people, myself included, already use MTD for using graphics card VRAM as swap (server doesn't have onboard GFX on it and never uses X, so I chucked in a dirt cheap nVidia card with 128MB of VRAM and use it as swap).
I'm not debating the "enthusiasm" of the site, merely his flawed logic/methodology based on that single ridiculous assumption:
Mac users never upgrade, only buy new
Enthusiasts always upgrade
Therefore, no Mac users are enthusiasts
Enthusiasts can't use Macs because they're not upgradable
Utter tosh.
it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. :%s/Mac/wintel/g
This is what the ~90% of the non-geek/IT professional/enthusiast populace do if they can't find anyone to do it for them. FTA is biased from the get go.
Heck, if we're going to start pulling usage scenarios out of our arses, I'll stipulate that Macs are inherently less predisposed to the whole becoming slower over time than wintel boxes are. Not that this would wash with the esteemed author.
Or they could even go one better and have a recovery Linux partition instead - including some nice parsers for /var/log. Sure, they'd have to write some of their own analysis software but I imagine a) there's lots of it already knocking about and b) if they gave a spec, the OSS community would probably help considerably in writing parts of it. Heck, there's already bootable Linux recovery discs that'll fit in a 50MB ISO, adding a minimal Xorg setup and a WM is easy. In fact, I winder how many people here first used Linux to help diagnose/recover from problems under Windows using summat like Knoppix?
/var/log are likely to tell them what's going on. Doing this stuff from the CLI is pretty easy, so it'd be trivial to write a graphical frontend to it for ease of use. Combine that with a memtest86+ boot option and you've covered alot of bases that would normally require the kit to be sent in.
If Dell is worried that software errors are going to be mistaken for hardware errors, a quick scan of various files in
Anyway, I imagine the story is blown out of proportion and this is probably just a case of (yet another) poorly informed call centre staff. Does the US have anything that approximates to the Sales of Goods Act in the UK where you are obliged to support hardware as "fit for purpose" for a minumum of a year from the purchase date? I see lots of talk about warranties expiring after 90 days, so I guess you have a somewhat shorter minimum time frame for things to die. As I'm sure many of you are aware, 90 days is waaaay too close to the soap dish on that there bathtub curve.
OK, stopping rambling now.
Seconded.
Sheesh, half of my fiddling time with new computers is finding ways to get the power consumtpion down. My flatmate just inherited a top-end gaming rig (Core2 Extreme, 2GB "gamer" RAM, 8800GTX, 2xRaptors in RAID0) and is saying it only seems marginally faster than his previous Celeron/1GB/6600GT which had a lower power draw at full pelt than this new hulk does at idle. Most users have already stopped noticing (miniscule) speed improvements and only believe a machine is faster because the marketing says it is and the numbers are bigger. The only upgrades they're likely to notice are upping their RAM to a usable figure from the puny defaults usually offered by OEM's and installing an aftermarket GFX card if they've just bought a game and are wodnering why is runs like shit on their "256MB" onboard graphics.
Typically it's only power users that need, let alone notice, this stuff these days. I still reckon that if you gave 90% of home/business computer users a 1GHz P3 and 2GB of RAM they'd be happy as Larry and his whole darned family.
Someone with a 6 digit UID that doesn't know that compiling something with GCC *doesn't* make the binary GPL'ed? Hand in your geek credentials please.
This is the sort of FUD that Microsoft must be loving. Every piece of code ever written by vi or emacs certainly isn't GPL'ed, just like every track that was finished up in Audacity isn't GPL'ed and just like people who use Visual Studio aren't obliged to hand over their source and binaries to MS gratis.
Please also note that you're only forced to distribute your modifications if you're distributing/selling the modifications. If you edit some bitchin' GPL code and keep it locked away inside a corporate intranet, I don't think there's any obligation (other than the "spirit" of the GPL) to open up your changes.
Well, maybe I'm just lucky - granted I use Linux desktops full time at home, and a homogenised NT5.x/Office setup at work, so I guess I'm more predisposed to see more of the bad side of Linux than anything else. Most problems I have on windows are various chunks of apps hanging when bottlenecked on slow/inaccessible IO resources (which usually leads to users randomly killing processes and/or rebooting). Sometimes happens to a limited extent with KDE, but it's far less noticeable - KIO slaves just plain rock! Hopefully the transition to Qt/KDE 4 will leave me even happier.
:D
:)
Might just be windows-fu on my part; many desktop ailments can be "cured" by killing/respawning explorer, and doing the same thing with stuff like KDE is a little harder - you might have to restart kicker, or dcop, or any host of other things that (very) occasionally die. Incidentally, if explorer.exe crashes windows is usually clever enough to restart it automatically, but I don't think KDE (or Gnome - although don't use it very much) have equivalent functionality to ensure a bunch of "essential" apps are running all the time.
Never really had much experience with 9x - my first computer came with 2k which was generally very well behaved, but my flatmate had WinME, so I'll concede that point to you there
As to being far too crash happy for my liking - yes, I'll happily agree with that. But then I'm of the opinion that anything more frequent than a crash every week or so is too many
Karma to burn, so here goes...
:)
I realise you're semi-joking and for a large part of Linux/FOSS I'd agree with you. I've never had apps like Samba or BIND or OpenSSH fall over on me, even under reasonably high loads, (the only problem I've had recently has been the experimental sky2 driver) but on the desktop things are a bit of a different story.
And I'm not even talking about things like little basement apps written by people like me with little to no programming experience. By far the biggest problem for me are apps like X, with which I've experienced lockups and crashes even when using completely FOSS drivers (i810).
Sure, explorer.exe hangs the entire UI when you're accessing a newly inserted CD or a slow network share in windows, or modal dialogues grab focus here there and everwhere and (if they have the bad luck to end up behind their parent window) give the impression of a "hung" app, or windows without taskbar entries (whose bright idea was that?! Completely ruins the whole WIMP/taskbar paradigm IMHO) vanishing from view, but I haven't had the windows desktop crash on me since NT5 - it's still a far too common occurrence with Linux IME. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but browsing my usual forums shows it still happens with some regularity for other users.
I'm not trying to bitch about X.org (I realise it's very much in it's infancy as regards to opening up the monolithic structure, etc) or anything else, and for the most part the nuts and bolts of what makes Linux cool, especially on the server side of things, are pretty damned bulletproof. But I don't want newcomers to Linux starting with the misapprehension that nothing ever crashses, because sometimes it does.
Flame away, but I like to think that FOSS isn't above some (hopefully) constructuve criticism*
*hides under bridge*
* Yes, I do submit bug reports where possible - often the issues are already fixed upstream anyway
Whilst I started out on Myth with a PVR-250 and the very early IVTV drivers, I'm now happy to recommend DVB cards for everyone that gets DVB in their area.
The IVTV drivers have only just been added to the kernel.org tree, which in the past has made setting these cards up something of a pain for people not used to patching their own kernels, or downloading external modules. The DVB stack, however, has had great support for cards for years now, at least for the ones I've used (UK DVB-T, and the Hauppauge Nova-T, Nova-T 500 and Avermedia 771 have all worked straight out of the box for me). DVB picture quality is also far superior to analogue converted to MPEG2, and there's less work for the hardware to do, since capturing a DVB stream is just a matter of dumoing the stream to disc.
Obviously, if you need to do any nasty criminal stealing activities like record from Sky or your cable box you'll probably need an analogue tuner, and the Hauppauge cards seem to be the best supported.
Obviously this might be no good for people in the US since I don't think DVB has much penetration there, but as far as I'm aware it's rolled out through most of Europe by now.
You don't think the talent pool is already somewhat depleted?
;)) and I've noticed a sharp drop in the amount of innovative music that's about. Chaning fashions perhaps.
Heck, I'm not even old (getting there
But in any case, the music industry doesn't care if there's no talent pool - they create the market themselves through the hype machine anyway. If all the talent there is is shite, then they will just teach the populace to think shite is good. It's great having a virtual monopoly on communications, isn't it?
I dunno about you, but:
i) I buy vinyl because it looks and feels nice (pretty picture discs from The Sundays and the gorgeous OK COmputer gatefold from Radiohead are what got me into vinyl in the first place), I couldn't care much about the sound quality of it. I rarely listen to it. I imagine alot of people outide of the audiophile/DJ circuits buy it for the same reasons.
ii) I'm perfectly happy with high quality MP3. Bleep do some very nice 256 and 320kbps MP3's and the occasional FLAC, 4AD do some nice AAC's.
I think most people fit somewhere into the pigeonhole I put myself in - vinyl is a nice thing to own, but a pain in the arse to play back. By offering vinyl and an MP3, these record labels are giving the consumers something that's nice to look at and non-volatile music that'd damned easy to play and sounds good enough for anything but the most discerning ear - the best of both worlds in my opinion. As far as customer satisfaction goes, it gets a thumbs up from me. 99% of the time I'll be happy with the digital files and some nice hi-res JPEG's of the artwork, but for that really "special" album, holding the vinyl is hard to beat.
I'd be nice if things worked like that, but 90% of the time you're bottlenecked on I/O anyway (usually swapping due to insufficient memory to run all those craplets) and you're hard pressed to take advantage of one core, let alone four of the things. Of course, once everyone has their 1GB+ of RAM then SMP might get a better chance to shine...
:D
I've been telling people not to bother buying fast processors for years now, unless I know they're heavily into their gaming or media editing. Every pound they don't spend on that I get them to sink into aftermarket RAM, and soon find their 1GHz/2GB machine at home is "faster" than the 3GHz/512MB machine at work. Only then do they understand that I wasn't mad...
There's this wormhole theory that says all data you send in /dev/null will not be lost, but actually show up on a server in an alternate universe.
/dev/random comes from!
Ah, so *that's* where all the stuff in
I only skimmed the article but what with all the hullabaloo about dual/quad core chips, why didn't they use "exhaustive" as an excuse to check out the parallelisability (if that's a word) of each compression algorithm? IIRC they didn't list the hardware they used or any of the switches they used, which is a glaring omission in my book.
;)
Of all the main compression utils I use, 7-zip, RAR and bzip2 (in the form of pbzip2) all have modes that will utilise multiple chips, often giving a pretty huge speedup in compression times. I'm not aware of any SMP branches for gzip/zlib but seeing as it appears to be the most efficient compressor by miles it might not even need it
It's mainly academic for me now though anyway, since almost all of the compression I use is inline anyway, either through rsync or SSH (or both). Not sure if any inline compressors are using LZMA yet, but the only time I find myself making an archive is for emailing someone with file size limits on their mail server. All of the stuff I have at home is stored uncompressed because a) 90% of it is already highly compressed and b) I'd rather buy slightly bigger hard drives that attempt to recover a corrupted archive a year or so down the line. Mostly I'm just concerned about decompression time these days.
Start > run > gpedit.msc > computer config > admin templates > windows components > windows update > enable re-prompt for restart and set timer to 1440 minutes (the maximum). Restart windows update service.
Annoying focus-stealing box now only appears once every 1440 minutes instead of every 10.
Oracle won't run? Sounds like a classic denial of service attack to me. ;)
So if it was their published policy to anally rape you if you hit your overdraft, you'd be fine with that?
The point of the whole thing is: their published policy was unfair.
Was about to say the same thing (in fact, I did in some posts a coupla days ago); there's some undeniably interesting stuff going on in the kernel that should undoubtedly make the system feel faster, if nothing else - it's just brought down by a more complex GUI and all the rest of the folderol that most geeks couldn't really care less about.
Disclaimer: have not used Vista on anything but a demo machine in PC World.