One day you will realise that not everyone is a COMPYOOTAR EXPART and you will understand why microsoft does not let new computer users mess around in the system files. May I point out that some distros of linux also hazard you on meddling with core system files.
There is such a warning in windows 2000 and XP, but remarkably, you can turn it off, and it never shows up again. Microsoft windows (to SOME VAGUE extent) caters for people who know what they're doing as well as newbie users (admittedly I would like options to never delete to recycle bin, and to disable irritating confirmation dialogs, but these are minor niggles), and it's very sensible for them to assume you know nothing on a clean install (since if they assumed you were an expert on the first install, new users would be dumbfounded).
If there were no newbies, there would be no experts. Everyone is a newbie at some point. I certainly was. So give them some assistance instead of crapping all over them.
There's definitely a certain amount of fear of change being exhibited by the linux users who've posted before i did. Linux is an evolving OS, if you don't let it change it'll never have the chance to be what you want it to be; a windows-beater. Personally I use windows 2000, though i did spend half a year with only Linux installed on my machine, and I administer linux and BSD servers. My dad recently installed Lycoris linux, and it looked like a step in the right direction. I don't advocate Linux as a good desktop operating system, it simply doesnt have the application base to compete yet, what it does have is a lot of applications that nearly do what the commercial apps do, but don't quite. This is mostly due to a shoddy windowing system (X) and a nonstandard way of programming for window managers (do you use QT, or GTK?).
Do you want more people to use Linux or not? Or are you happy to be an elitist group who prefer to keep linux usage Your Secret. If you pride yourself on being able to navigate the Linux filesystem, maybe you should learn some new skills, like being able to adapt to change.
This post was not directed at the Anonymous Coward above, it's just general observations prompted by his sarcastic response:)
I've always held that the filesystem organisation in linux is the primary reason that new users find it hard to get to grips with. Names like etc, bin, var, usr, are meaningless to newbies, and novice users can get confused with/usr/local/share vs./usr/share
Hopefully gobo have also sorted the Installing-a-program bomb-blast, i.e. as soon as you install something it scatters a million files all over the filesystem in different directories that makes it impossible to keep track of and (sometimes) impossible to completely remove if you compiled it rather than used a package manager.
It's about time this was re-vamped if linux is to become a viable desktop OS.
Sure most people would pay $10, and sure companies might pay $100 or $1000, but you forget that $1000 doesnt much matter for large companies. $1000 is an incredibly cheap advertising campaign, and wouldn't taxing mails effectively legitimize spam? If someone has PAID a reputable organization in order to send each message, the recipient has less of a basis to moan about it.
Truth is, most spam comes from posting up your email address on the 'net and having some sort of spider pick it up. Best way to stop this? Set up a simple website where you register your mail address, it gets MD5ed, and you can then be contacted through a webform using that MD5 key in the URL (the form will then transmit the email to you). This not only prevents spam, it allows people to mail you when they dont have a mail client available to them. Everyone wins, except the spammers. People who want to be anonymous could of course exploit this system (unless HTTP headers were included with the resultant mail).
This page has clearly been created by a solitary person who wants to create the impression that there are indeed many Moist Towelette collectors out there by pretending that there is some kind of Moist Towelette community.
A quick look at his Q & A indicates that there are in fact only two questions, and both are probably faked by him.
My immediate suggestion therefore is to all swiftly contact this gentleman and enthuse on our sudden interest in moist towelettes. His faith in the Internet as a medium for populating his ideas will be boosted 2000 fold, at least until AOL starts charging for the bandwidth.
This should probably not be on slashdot, it should be on somethingawful.com. If slashdot were to cover every crackpot website out there there'd be no space for any real news. If there was any evidence of a community of moist towelette collectors at this site, it'd be news. But since it's clearly just one poor sod on his own and maybe a handful of friends laughing behind his back, it really doesnt qualify as news and is on par with "Exceedingly dull person found on Internet" which wouldnt be much of a surprise.
But I'm beeing a bit of a killjoy here, the song was at least amusing, and wow does it beat the hell out of the OpenBSD songs!...
The advantage here IS, in fact, in speed.
The reason is with 64bit registers you can store more information in a register: twice as much as with a 32bit CPU. This is an incredible advantage. If you're writing software in assembler, or compiling software with a compiler that is 64-bit aware, you have twice as much space on the chip to play with. Registers are so much faster than RAM that to compare them is simply meaningless. With something that has been sensibly coded and makes use of this extra space on-chip, the speed difference will be phenomenal. You can now store much larger, higher precision numbers in the CPU registers. 64-bit has a similar effect to doubling the number of registers in a 32bit processor. You can therefore keep more of your mathematics on the chip, and you dont have to swap data between the chip and external RAM as often. This is a colossal benefit.
Some people have mentioned that 64bit allows you simply to address more RAM. Registers arent used simply for addressing RAM, and currently the consumer market doesnt typically have 4gb of RAM to play with.
Before 64-bit you would have had to use external RAM to store an extremely high precision number, or two 32-bit precision numbers, and external RAM is unbelievably slow, even L1 and L2 caches are unbelievably slow compared to register speeds. Keeping twice as storage space on-chip means that (if it's exploited correctly) the speed difference will be huge.
Of course, with current software development ideals we will have to see some extremely intelligent compilers before this is exploited to it's full potential. And it will be a long while before 64-bit takes off, despite what AMD say. They can release the chip, but if there's no software that exploits 64-bit technology (and software developers will fear releasing software that only 64-bit CPU owners can run) then the chip will be useless, and I think consumers will realise this. Ok maybe they won't. They'll see 64 bit and think "wow! my 32bit programs will run so much faster!" but what the hell, if it increases AMD's market share then I am all for it.
Fans of motivated lego may be interested in this link to a winning demo for the Assembly '01 "wild demo" competition. Stop frame photography + lego blocks + talent = cute little movie (38mb mpg).
Slashdot Mirror
One day you will realise that not everyone is a COMPYOOTAR EXPART and you will understand why microsoft does not let new computer users mess around in the system files. May I point out that some distros of linux also hazard you on meddling with core system files.
There is such a warning in windows 2000 and XP, but remarkably, you can turn it off, and it never shows up again. Microsoft windows (to SOME VAGUE extent) caters for people who know what they're doing as well as newbie users (admittedly I would like options to never delete to recycle bin, and to disable irritating confirmation dialogs, but these are minor niggles), and it's very sensible for them to assume you know nothing on a clean install (since if they assumed you were an expert on the first install, new users would be dumbfounded).
If there were no newbies, there would be no experts. Everyone is a newbie at some point. I certainly was. So give them some assistance instead of crapping all over them.
There's definitely a certain amount of fear of change being exhibited by the linux users who've posted before i did. Linux is an evolving OS, if you don't let it change it'll never have the chance to be what you want it to be; a windows-beater. Personally I use windows 2000, though i did spend half a year with only Linux installed on my machine, and I administer linux and BSD servers. My dad recently installed Lycoris linux, and it looked like a step in the right direction. I don't advocate Linux as a good desktop operating system, it simply doesnt have the application base to compete yet, what it does have is a lot of applications that nearly do what the commercial apps do, but don't quite. This is mostly due to a shoddy windowing system (X) and a nonstandard way of programming for window managers (do you use QT, or GTK?).
:)
Do you want more people to use Linux or not? Or are you happy to be an elitist group who prefer to keep linux usage Your Secret. If you pride yourself on being able to navigate the Linux filesystem, maybe you should learn some new skills, like being able to adapt to change.
This post was not directed at the Anonymous Coward above, it's just general observations prompted by his sarcastic response
I've always held that the filesystem organisation in linux is the primary reason that new users find it hard to get to grips with. Names like etc, bin, var, usr, are meaningless to newbies, and novice users can get confused with /usr/local/share vs. /usr/share
Hopefully gobo have also sorted the Installing-a-program bomb-blast, i.e. as soon as you install something it scatters a million files all over the filesystem in different directories that makes it impossible to keep track of and (sometimes) impossible to completely remove if you compiled it rather than used a package manager.
It's about time this was re-vamped if linux is to become a viable desktop OS.
Sure most people would pay $10, and sure companies might pay $100 or $1000, but you forget that $1000 doesnt much matter for large companies. $1000 is an incredibly cheap advertising campaign, and wouldn't taxing mails effectively legitimize spam? If someone has PAID a reputable organization in order to send each message, the recipient has less of a basis to moan about it.
Truth is, most spam comes from posting up your email address on the 'net and having some sort of spider pick it up. Best way to stop this? Set up a simple website where you register your mail address, it gets MD5ed, and you can then be contacted through a webform using that MD5 key in the URL (the form will then transmit the email to you). This not only prevents spam, it allows people to mail you when they dont have a mail client available to them. Everyone wins, except the spammers. People who want to be anonymous could of course exploit this system (unless HTTP headers were included with the resultant mail).
This page has clearly been created by a solitary person who wants to create the impression that there are indeed many Moist Towelette collectors out there by pretending that there is some kind of Moist Towelette community.
A quick look at his Q & A indicates that there are in fact only two questions, and both are probably faked by him.
My immediate suggestion therefore is to all swiftly contact this gentleman and enthuse on our sudden interest in moist towelettes. His faith in the Internet as a medium for populating his ideas will be boosted 2000 fold, at least until AOL starts charging for the bandwidth.
This should probably not be on slashdot, it should be on somethingawful.com. If slashdot were to cover every crackpot website out there there'd be no space for any real news. If there was any evidence of a community of moist towelette collectors at this site, it'd be news. But since it's clearly just one poor sod on his own and maybe a handful of friends laughing behind his back, it really doesnt qualify as news and is on par with "Exceedingly dull person found on Internet" which wouldnt be much of a surprise.
But I'm beeing a bit of a killjoy here, the song was at least amusing, and wow does it beat the hell out of the OpenBSD songs!...
havent read up to see if it's already been suggested, but gnod introduced me to several new bands I'd not heard of.
Hope that's of some use to you.
The advantage here IS, in fact, in speed. The reason is with 64bit registers you can store more information in a register: twice as much as with a 32bit CPU. This is an incredible advantage. If you're writing software in assembler, or compiling software with a compiler that is 64-bit aware, you have twice as much space on the chip to play with. Registers are so much faster than RAM that to compare them is simply meaningless. With something that has been sensibly coded and makes use of this extra space on-chip, the speed difference will be phenomenal. You can now store much larger, higher precision numbers in the CPU registers. 64-bit has a similar effect to doubling the number of registers in a 32bit processor. You can therefore keep more of your mathematics on the chip, and you dont have to swap data between the chip and external RAM as often. This is a colossal benefit.
Some people have mentioned that 64bit allows you simply to address more RAM. Registers arent used simply for addressing RAM, and currently the consumer market doesnt typically have 4gb of RAM to play with.
Before 64-bit you would have had to use external RAM to store an extremely high precision number, or two 32-bit precision numbers, and external RAM is unbelievably slow, even L1 and L2 caches are unbelievably slow compared to register speeds. Keeping twice as storage space on-chip means that (if it's exploited correctly) the speed difference will be huge.
Of course, with current software development ideals we will have to see some extremely intelligent compilers before this is exploited to it's full potential. And it will be a long while before 64-bit takes off, despite what AMD say. They can release the chip, but if there's no software that exploits 64-bit technology (and software developers will fear releasing software that only 64-bit CPU owners can run) then the chip will be useless, and I think consumers will realise this. Ok maybe they won't. They'll see 64 bit and think "wow! my 32bit programs will run so much faster!" but what the hell, if it increases AMD's market share then I am all for it.
Fans of motivated lego may be interested in this link to a winning demo for the Assembly '01 "wild demo" competition. Stop frame photography + lego blocks + talent = cute little movie (38mb mpg).