I like running any JVM through NIH's Java Medical Imaging application "IMAGEJ"
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html
I used the mri-stack from the sample images zip directory on a Sony PCG-GRZ615G
Running Java Desktop System 2.0 (Linux 2.4.19 kernel, XFree86 4.3.0, GNOME 2.2.x)
With the preinstalled j2re-1.4.2, I get 63884 pixels per second in imageJ's benchmark. With the 1.5 JRE for linux, I get 70767. ~10% improvement on this AWT app.
With the JRE on MaxOSX...nevermind;-)
P.S. The OSX JRE isn't bad for most applications, but for some reason it has a very hard time with this benchmark.
Forgot the link, and me login:
Toronto's solution will have far less impact than Milwaukee's solution of building more coal power plants which will suck 2.2 billion gallons of water and fish from Lake Michigan every day and convert it to mercury contaminated steam, or discharge it at a much higher temperature... all in order to inefficiently cool buildings to the temperature of lake michigan, a stone's throw away from the power plant. Can I burn some karma points with a duh here?
Canadian industry finally cops onto an idea that every 7-year-old has when his toes are in 40F degree water and his head in 100F air. If only American industry wern't so hung up on our industrial past, we could see the way to the future.
Tadpole's wireless thin client laptop currently boasts 6-8 hours (uses SunRay thin client protocol!) The powerbook G3 "pismo" had dual battery bays with a potential life of 10 hours.
Yes, turn it off, was a quick and clever answer a few years ago. Now television has invaded our school. SPAM, telemarketeers, and popup advertising are subjecting all of us to content that no one asked for.
So my way of influencing a public servant whose salary is paid by my tax dollars is by signing onto a private website? No, thank you. I'll take my chances that I might influence someone here to write their congressperson, or vote him/her out! The FCC has lost sight of some core principles:
The airwaves belong to the people.
Content belongs to the creator. If my first steps were recorded in analog video, the government should not impose a law which would make such content impossible to view. When I create a DVD of my baby's first steps, I should have the right to control and sign that content. I should have the right to make it available to others and transcode that content to whatever the format of the day is in 2021.
Government belongs to the people. All content created at taxpayer expense should be in an open format, not subject to proprietary licensing.
Government should not play favorites. If Howard Stern profits from our airwaves with junior high mentaility, then everyone capable of expressing a junior high mentality should also have this right. If World Harvest Radio uses our airwaves to convince the world that Americans are all right-wing extremists and cultists, than other kooks should have that right.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
Consumers should be able to select from the thousands of public programs available at the Library of Congress and produced by other governments (BBC, RTE, NHK...) without running into a region code "iron curtain".
A broadcast flag is a stupid simpleminded idea. It won't work and it will violate many of the above principles.
Three suggestions:
1) If you don't have a configuration server, turn off APOC
2) Add your hostname to/etc/hosts so that gnome doesn't have to round trip to your DNS server to gethostbyname.
3) Try another theme.
Something is fishy though, the reviewer even had trouble with a Dell 3800 laptop, I'm running it on a dell 3800 laptop and, except for the SATA problem and dodgey ACPI support in the 2.4.19 kernel, I haven't seen any of the problems he mentions.
I hope the reviewer will publish an update if Sun support is able to resolve the problem. Whether its media failure or some spooky installation bug that only affects reviewers, I'd like to know!
Re:The problem here seems to be hardware support..
on
Sun Java Desktop 2 Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
SATA drives are a problem with this kernel, but I have no idea why this reviewer had so much trouble with ATA drives. I've seen installfests where dozens of users installed JDS on _laptops_, all were successful. I've never seen it fail on a non SATA desktop.
Shouldn't labor have the same mobility as jobs in a true free market?
Should the U.S. negotiage a "follow the jobs" quid pro quo provision with its WTO trading partners? After all, why should other nations be able to impose protectionist "tariffs" (i.e. visa restrictions) on the import of U.S. workers and yet be free to export as many workers and import as many jobs as possible?
Is it really a good idea to have all that weird C malloc/realloc stuff in the third-party directory. O.K. maybe they match every malloc with a free and maybe they never exceed 8192 for huge strings or 256 for ordinary string, but honestly, Setjmp? Yiii, isn't this the 21st century?
Its about time people realized that while hardware has become more powerful and cheaper, the monopolist's OS has taken ever larger propotion of the cost of a new PC. Maybe Sun can bring some balance.
I see this article as great news for the OpenOffice community:
1) Microsoft recognizes OOo as a threat.
2) Microsoft didn't use MS Office to create this document.
It does annoy me to see so many blatent lies in a document that is sure to appear on many CIO desks, but a few of them are so obvious, maybe Microsoft will lose some credibility.
There are a few comparisons I'd like to see:
1) How long does it take to email a 5 page document from each office suite (via modem)?
2) How much disk space does a 5 page document from each office suite occupy?
3) What virii and worms are compatible with OOo vs MSO?
4) Which suite saves in an open XML format?
5) Which is more compatible with older versions of MSO and other office suites?
6) Which runs on more different platforms?
P.S. Yes we Americans also know about the Haliburton pipeline conspiracy that was the cause for the war in afghanistan (being attacked at home had nothing to do with it)
I think Tom Clancy used it in one of his novels, the trouble is the pipeline was marginally strategic when the Soviet Union existed. Now it totally unecessary. Even if it were, Haliburton would find it much easier to maintain an oil pipeline under the totalitarian Taliban regime than under the current flegling democracy.
Don't tell anyone, but the real conspiracy is about freedom.
That's right, when women, men and people of all religions and ethnicities are empowered to make a better life for themeselves, prosperity will follow. If it doesn't, THEN start blaming the U.S. Until then, the problem is far more likely to be caused by your leader.
I'm a U.S. citizen working abroad on an "H1-B like" visa. Here are some differences:
U.S. H1-B Allows free movement between companies, I'm tied to my company.
U.S. H1-B is valid for 6 years, I have to renew every year.
My wife had to obtain her own work visa separately, but it expired during her maternity leave and the company wasn't willing to renew it under the same terms as she held before.
Our baby currently has some citizenship rights in this country, but local politicians are threatening to remove this right retroactively.
A baby born in the U.S. and it's parents have some rights. Our baby has some rights, but we have nothing that wasn't part of our original 1 year visa.
People with children born here are deported every day, in the U.S. we always grant amnesty.
There are thousands of citizens from this country working illegally in the U.S. right now.
Negifeatures && planned obsolecense
on
KISS
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I found this earlier today when I tried to repace my mobile phone battery. "Oh they haven't made that battery for years." (on a 2 year old phone.) So I tried to replace it with a new one but all of the new ones have colour screens which means:
Less battery life
Not easily viewable in sunlight
Not water resistant (even I don't understand this one!)
Manufacturers seem to have forgotten the purpose of mobile phones.
Same issue with laptops. I have an pismo laptop from 4 years ago with as much as 10 hours of battery life. If there exists such a system today, I'll buy it but marketeers find it easier to push Ghz, so we get Ghz. This reminds me of radios from the 1960s when boasting "10 transistors" was so important that some manufacturers soldered in dummy transistors!
/me get's out his souldering Iron and makes a new battery pack for my 3 year old phone.
I'm still trying to figure out what they aren't blocking. They block emails from mac.com even though a valid name, address and credit card number are required for a.mac email account, but they don't block free services like fastmail.fm or mailhaven.com.
If they really want to get a handle on spam, fwd:fwd:fwd Urban folklore... they should really block *@aol.com.
It isn't at all Keynesian economics. Businesses are free to send work anywhere, yet employees are severely restricted by visas and other regulations. Every nation plays games with subsidies and corporate tax breaks to try to make itself appear competitive (to short-term thinkers.)
Here are some things to consider when outsourcing
Support costs
Communication (and miscommunication) costs
Employee safety security/liability
Real Estate costs
Educational infrastructure
Infrastructure costs (e.g. will your employee come to work stressed out by traffic jams)
Demographics (e.g. A temporary population bubble in young grads might be willing to put up with low wages for a few years, but when they're ready to start a family, they will find any way out and take your corporate knowledge with them.)
Cost of/Ability to terminate employement (e.g. It may take a year or more to terminate an employee in France and Japan, in the U.S. you can do it in seconds, for any or no reason.
Working hours (how much holiday/vacation are you required to provide)
Medical costs
Legal requirements for employee rights. (All of the E.U. and parts of Asia have more humane employee rights laws than the U.S. currently does. Kind of makes you wonder what the U.S. unions did with your union dues, doesn't it?)
Taking all of these into consideration, the U.S. is still quite competitive overall, though silicon valley and a few other hotspots don't come close to reality. That "flyover" country between Silicon Valley and NYC is full of hard working engineers educated at excellent engineering schools. They're willing to work for not much more than an engineer from Bangolore because they can afford a decent house and life on $30/hour wages. The biggest problem I see is inefficient governments siphoning tax money out of the economy and not using it to providide sustainable education or infrastructure. But that's a topic for another day.
came up with this while reading Brian Greenes "Elegant Universe" while working on U.S. taxes:
The Internal Revenue Service has a way of making addition, subtraction, multiplication and division seem like rocket science. CERN and Stephen Hawkings have collaborated to produce this simplified U.S. tax form.
1040-QUARK
1) Enter your Name 2) Enter the number of protons in your nucleus.
3) Multiply the entry in Line 2 by the mass of an electron
4) Check the box that indicates the number of dimensions in your
universe. 0, 1, 11, 15, Infinite
5) Enter the number planck-sized spheres will fit in this universe?
(Use worksheet F-theta) Enter your answer in column 6
NOTE: It may be useful to transform your universe into the mirror
equivalent calubi-yau space in order to simplify calculations.
6)
6a) Add the result of 6a to the winding number of the strings in this
calubi-yau space, subtract the number of holes in odd numbered
dimensions.
Enter your answer in column 7. (Use worksheet J-delta and/or a
Super-Hadron collider)
NOTE: Be careful, you can shoot your eye out with a super-hadron
collider.
8) Enter the value of payments you've made into social security.
9) Use the lorentz social security contraction equation to figure out
how much will remain by time you retire (1-1/SQRT(v^2/c^2) ) where c is
the number of members of congress
36) Add columns 1-6a divide your answer by the rest mass of a photon,
this is how much you owe.
37) Multiply your answer by the rest mass of a neutrino. This is how
much you get back.
Beneath the marble columns and stacks of books, manuscripts, the Gutenburg Bible, the Jefferson Collection, there is a group of Microsoft Window P.C. Kiosks with a sign above it indicating "Information." When we arrived, _all_ of the P.C.s were showing that sky blue screen with white text indicating a fatal exception of some sort.
Priceless! I even have a short video of this and I've written to my Senator with my concern that too much government information was being stored in an undocumented proprietary format.
You may be right about what consumers really want, but marketing often drives consumers to accept what they don't really want. You have a good point on the light bulbs. I just wish there were a more accurate indicator of brightness. I found the "equivalent to a 60 watt" claims on some compact florescents a bit optimistic. And here in 220V land, I could swear that a generic european 40 Watt incandescent puts out more light than a 40 Watt incandescent back in the USA (just costs more to run here!) Maybe it's time for me to start reading up on black body radiation theory;-) In the meantime, how about candlepower, that's something easy enough to get our head around, and what a great marketing tool: "GE 10 candlepower christmas tree bulbs, 100,000 candlepower desk lamps...!"
Cars are still promoted primarily by #valves, liters, horsepower and sheer size rather than mpg, reliability, utility and comfort.
Cordless phones and baby monitors are promoted by Ghz, the more the better;-)
Vacuum cleaners are measured by amps consumed.
Cordless drills and other appliances are measured by volts.
Light bulbs are measured by watts (not lumens!)
Car stereos are promoted by watts (not THD)
Even laptops are measured primarily by Ghz rather than battery life or usability.
I have heard people (Sun?) promoting Watts/MFlop and Watts/Webtransaction as a useful benchmark for high end servers, but this is the exception rather than the rule. It is still a very power obsessed marketing culture. Do you remember when VCRs were promoted by the number of heads? I the 1960s, transistor radio manufacturers would actually solder in dummy transistors so that they could boast "10 Transistors!" This is exactly where we are with computers. Bus speed, cache size, instructions per cycle, word size, efficiency, usability, reliability are all ancillary to the primary marketing tool: CPU clock speed.
And the balance is better, more time for family, more job security, more flexible hours, longer vacation, less time stuck in traffic! The funny thing is it's for an American company. Why don't they treat employees at home as well as they do here? Because we put up with it! And our unions are more interested in gathering money for their own fat cats than helping empower labor.
There are disadvantages. If you want to get fast or quality service, if you wan't the latest gadget, the biggest least fuel efficient car, by all means move to America. But more people need to be aware that there ARE alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
I like running any JVM through NIH's Java Medical Imaging application "IMAGEJ" http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html I used the mri-stack from the sample images zip directory on a Sony PCG-GRZ615G Running Java Desktop System 2.0 (Linux 2.4.19 kernel, XFree86 4.3.0, GNOME 2.2.x) With the preinstalled j2re-1.4.2, I get 63884 pixels per second in imageJ's benchmark. With the 1.5 JRE for linux, I get 70767. ~10% improvement on this AWT app. With the JRE on MaxOSX...nevermind ;-)
P.S. The OSX JRE isn't bad for most applications, but for some reason it has a very hard time with this benchmark.
Forgot the link, and me login: Toronto's solution will have far less impact than Milwaukee's solution of building more coal power plants which will suck 2.2 billion gallons of water and fish from Lake Michigan every day and convert it to mercury contaminated steam, or discharge it at a much higher temperature... all in order to inefficiently cool buildings to the temperature of lake michigan, a stone's throw away from the power plant. Can I burn some karma points with a duh here? Canadian industry finally cops onto an idea that every 7-year-old has when his toes are in 40F degree water and his head in 100F air. If only American industry wern't so hung up on our industrial past, we could see the way to the future.
Tadpole's wireless thin client laptop currently boasts 6-8 hours (uses SunRay thin client protocol!) The powerbook G3 "pismo" had dual battery bays with a potential life of 10 hours.
Yes, turn it off, was a quick and clever answer a few years ago. Now television has invaded our school. SPAM, telemarketeers, and popup advertising are subjecting all of us to content that no one asked for.
Three suggestions: /etc/hosts so that gnome doesn't have to round trip to your DNS server to gethostbyname.
3) Try another theme.
1) If you don't have a configuration server, turn off APOC 2) Add your hostname to
Something is fishy though, the reviewer even had trouble with a Dell 3800 laptop, I'm running it on a dell 3800 laptop and, except for the SATA problem and dodgey ACPI support in the 2.4.19 kernel, I haven't seen any of the problems he mentions. I hope the reviewer will publish an update if Sun support is able to resolve the problem. Whether its media failure or some spooky installation bug that only affects reviewers, I'd like to know!
SATA drives are a problem with this kernel, but I have no idea why this reviewer had so much trouble with ATA drives. I've seen installfests where dozens of users installed JDS on _laptops_, all were successful. I've never seen it fail on a non SATA desktop.
Shouldn't labor have the same mobility as jobs in a true free market?
Should the U.S. negotiage a "follow the jobs" quid pro quo provision with its WTO trading partners? After all, why should other nations be able to impose protectionist "tariffs" (i.e. visa restrictions) on the import of U.S. workers and yet be free to export as many workers and import as many jobs as possible?
Is it really a good idea to have all that weird C malloc/realloc stuff in the third-party directory. O.K. maybe they match every malloc with a free and maybe they never exceed 8192 for huge strings or 256 for ordinary string, but honestly, Setjmp? Yiii, isn't this the 21st century?
Its about time people realized that while hardware has become more powerful and cheaper, the monopolist's OS has taken ever larger propotion of the cost of a new PC. Maybe Sun can bring some balance.
I see this article as great news for the OpenOffice community: 1) Microsoft recognizes OOo as a threat. 2) Microsoft didn't use MS Office to create this document. It does annoy me to see so many blatent lies in a document that is sure to appear on many CIO desks, but a few of them are so obvious, maybe Microsoft will lose some credibility. There are a few comparisons I'd like to see: 1) How long does it take to email a 5 page document from each office suite (via modem)? 2) How much disk space does a 5 page document from each office suite occupy? 3) What virii and worms are compatible with OOo vs MSO? 4) Which suite saves in an open XML format? 5) Which is more compatible with older versions of MSO and other office suites? 6) Which runs on more different platforms?
P.S. Yes we Americans also know about the Haliburton pipeline conspiracy that was the cause for the war in afghanistan (being attacked at home had nothing to do with it)
I think Tom Clancy used it in one of his novels, the trouble is the pipeline was marginally strategic when the Soviet Union existed. Now it totally unecessary. Even if it were, Haliburton would find it much easier to maintain an oil pipeline under the totalitarian Taliban regime than under the current flegling democracy.
Don't tell anyone, but the real conspiracy is about freedom.
That's right, when women, men and people of all religions and ethnicities are empowered to make a better life for themeselves, prosperity will follow. If it doesn't, THEN start blaming the U.S. Until then, the problem is far more likely to be caused by your leader.
I'm a U.S. citizen working abroad on an "H1-B like" visa. Here are some differences: U.S. H1-B Allows free movement between companies, I'm tied to my company. U.S. H1-B is valid for 6 years, I have to renew every year. My wife had to obtain her own work visa separately, but it expired during her maternity leave and the company wasn't willing to renew it under the same terms as she held before. Our baby currently has some citizenship rights in this country, but local politicians are threatening to remove this right retroactively. A baby born in the U.S. and it's parents have some rights. Our baby has some rights, but we have nothing that wasn't part of our original 1 year visa. People with children born here are deported every day, in the U.S. we always grant amnesty. There are thousands of citizens from this country working illegally in the U.S. right now.
- Less battery life
- Not easily viewable in sunlight
- Not water resistant (even I don't understand this one!)
Manufacturers seem to have forgotten the purpose of mobile phones.Same issue with laptops. I have an pismo laptop from 4 years ago with as much as 10 hours of battery life. If there exists such a system today, I'll buy it but marketeers find it easier to push Ghz, so we get Ghz. This reminds me of radios from the 1960s when boasting "10 transistors" was so important that some manufacturers soldered in dummy transistors!
Oil that is, looks like mud but doesn't require water. First thing you know old Jed's a millionaire!
I'm still trying to figure out what they aren't blocking. They block emails from mac.com even though a valid name, address and credit card number are required for a .mac email account, but they don't block free services like fastmail.fm or mailhaven.com.
If they really want to get a handle on spam, fwd:fwd:fwd Urban folklore... they should really block *@aol.com.
Here are some things to consider when outsourcing
- Support costs
- Communication (and miscommunication) costs
- Employee safety security/liability
- Real Estate costs
- Educational infrastructure
- Infrastructure costs (e.g. will your employee come to work stressed out by traffic jams)
- Demographics (e.g. A temporary population bubble in young grads might be willing to put up with low wages for a few years, but when they're ready to start a family, they will find any way out and take your corporate knowledge with them.)
- Cost of/Ability to terminate employement (e.g. It may take a year or more to terminate an employee in France and Japan, in the U.S. you can do it in seconds, for any or no reason.
- Working hours (how much holiday/vacation are you required to provide)
- Medical costs
- Legal requirements for employee rights. (All of the E.U. and parts of Asia have more humane employee rights laws than the U.S. currently does. Kind of makes you wonder what the U.S. unions did with your union dues, doesn't it?)
Taking all of these into consideration, the U.S. is still quite competitive overall, though silicon valley and a few other hotspots don't come close to reality. That "flyover" country between Silicon Valley and NYC is full of hard working engineers educated at excellent engineering schools. They're willing to work for not much more than an engineer from Bangolore because they can afford a decent house and life on $30/hour wages. The biggest problem I see is inefficient governments siphoning tax money out of the economy and not using it to providide sustainable education or infrastructure. But that's a topic for another day.came up with this while reading Brian Greenes "Elegant Universe" while working on U.S. taxes:
The Internal Revenue Service has a way of making addition,
subtraction, multiplication and division seem like rocket science.
CERN and Stephen Hawkings have collaborated to produce this simplified U.S. tax form.
1040-QUARK
1) Enter your Name 2) Enter the number of protons in your nucleus.
3) Multiply the entry in Line 2 by the mass of an electron
4) Check the box that indicates the number of dimensions in your
universe. 0, 1, 11, 15, Infinite
5) Enter the number planck-sized spheres will fit in this universe?
(Use worksheet F-theta) Enter your answer in column 6
NOTE: It may be useful to transform your universe into the mirror
equivalent calubi-yau space in order to simplify calculations.
6)
6a) Add the result of 6a to the winding number of the strings in this
calubi-yau space, subtract the number of holes in odd numbered
dimensions.
Enter your answer in column 7. (Use worksheet J-delta and/or a
Super-Hadron collider)
NOTE: Be careful, you can shoot your eye out with a super-hadron
collider.
8) Enter the value of payments you've made into social security.
9) Use the lorentz social security contraction equation to figure out
how much will remain by time you retire (1-1/SQRT(v^2/c^2) ) where c is
the number of members of congress
36) Add columns 1-6a divide your answer by the rest mass of a photon,
this is how much you owe.
37) Multiply your answer by the rest mass of a neutrino. This is how
much you get back.
Beneath the marble columns and stacks of books, manuscripts, the Gutenburg Bible, the Jefferson Collection, there is a group of Microsoft Window P.C. Kiosks with a sign above it indicating "Information." When we arrived, _all_ of the P.C.s were showing that sky blue screen with white text indicating a fatal exception of some sort.
Priceless! I even have a short video of this and I've written to my Senator with my concern that too much government information was being stored in an undocumented proprietary format.
You may be right about what consumers really want, but marketing often drives consumers to accept what they don't really want. You have a good point on the light bulbs. I just wish there were a more accurate indicator of brightness. I found the "equivalent to a 60 watt" claims on some compact florescents a bit optimistic. And here in 220V land, I could swear that a generic european 40 Watt incandescent puts out more light than a 40 Watt incandescent back in the USA (just costs more to run here!) Maybe it's time for me to start reading up on black body radiation theory ;-) In the meantime, how about candlepower, that's something easy enough to get our head around, and what a great marketing tool: "GE 10 candlepower christmas tree bulbs, 100,000 candlepower desk lamps...!"
I have heard people (Sun?) promoting Watts/MFlop and Watts/Webtransaction as a useful benchmark for high end servers, but this is the exception rather than the rule. It is still a very power obsessed marketing culture. Do you remember when VCRs were promoted by the number of heads? I the 1960s, transistor radio manufacturers would actually solder in dummy transistors so that they could boast "10 Transistors!" This is exactly where we are with computers. Bus speed, cache size, instructions per cycle, word size, efficiency, usability, reliability are all ancillary to the primary marketing tool: CPU clock speed.
Not much is new since this 18th century scientist investigated thin films on a pond: http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem12/Avogadro/BenFrank lin.html
And the balance is better, more time for family, more job security, more flexible hours, longer vacation, less time stuck in traffic! The funny thing is it's for an American company. Why don't they treat employees at home as well as they do here? Because we put up with it! And our unions are more interested in gathering money for their own fat cats than helping empower labor.
There are disadvantages. If you want to get fast or quality service, if you wan't the latest gadget, the biggest least fuel efficient car, by all means move to America. But more people need to be aware that there ARE alternatives.