At my school at least, the biggest use of bandwidth seems to be people who leave filesharing programs on all the time, which ends up sharing their download directories by default, even if they haven't configured them to share additional things. Having even a few dozen people sharing DivX movies on a high-speed pipe uses up a large percentage of the school's bandwidth, far more than the network chatter does (we're talking on the order of 30-40 GB/day for a single host).
Enlightenment is kind of nice, and fairly innovative. And even usable if you turn off some of the animations. I especially like being able to drag desktops over other desktops partially, while working on both.
It's too bad they threw out the code and started v17 from scratch 2 years ago, and are still "at least 2 years away" from having another release. But v16 is still pretty good.
My preferred solution would be a platform-independent API that implements its calls using native widgets. For example, you create a menu, and let the native toolkit deal with the menu's behavior as it sees fit (the Mac/Win differences you mentioned). The main problem with this is that the various platforms don't have 1-to-1 correspondences amongst their various native widget sets. For simple things like menus, the Mac menu is essentially a drop-in replacement for the Windows menu, but not all widgets will have the functionality you want on all platforms. The only good ways to resolve this seem to be either implementing your own cross-platform widgets (as Mozilla is doing with XUL, and as wxWindows is doing with a more traditional toolkit library), restricting yourself to a subset of features that do exist in similar forms on all your target platforms, or convincing the OS designers to implement all your favorite features.
...free local calling plus paying $20/mo for internet access still comes out cheaper for any serious usage. So the Egyptians are still getting screwed (then again, so is much of Europe).
Athlons have circuitry to disconnect from the system bus when idle (on a signal from the Northbridge, which gives the signal when the OS enters the ACPI C2 idle state), reducing clock rate and essentially going into a standby mode (~5W power consumption). Unfortunately, it's not enabled by default, partly due to minor performance problems (~3% is the normal performance hit), and partly due to intermittent problems with some motherboards, especially when using PCI bus-mastering cards that require low latency (such as video capture cards). I'm not sure why it's not available as a BIOS option though.
In any case, you can enable it manually by setting the relevant bit in the Northbridge. For Linux, see the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO for a variety of methods to enable it.
For Windows, there's a utility called VCool, whose site was at vcool.occludo.net, but it appears to have disappeared in the past week or two.
When idled using the setpci trick mentioned in the HOWTO, my Athlon 1.33 GHz, which used to idle at 57 C, now idles at 33 C (case temp is 31 C, so it's generating very little heat and by extension using very little power, especially compared to what it used to do).
Well Debian's current version isn't exactly ancient (I'm talking about the current version if you apt-get unstable, not the currently released stable version, which is 6-12 months behind due to rigorous testing).
But in any case, getting the tulip driver to work wasn't a problem. But a newbie installing Linux has likely never heard of a tulip driver, and is unlikely to leap to the conclusion that his LinkSys network card needs it. Auto-detecting it would be nice, or at least having the install say "you probably need either the tulip or the 8139".
As for X, i tried the new "XFree86 -configure" method, but it hung my computer (couldn't switch virtual consoles even; had to ssh in to kill it). So I ended up manually configuring with xf86config. The new config might be nice if it works, but I haven't had a chance to see it in action...
Sure, wind power is non-polluting from a chemical standpoint, but it certainly disrupts the environment significantly. Producing any decent amount of power takes a lot of windmills. California's been experimenting with it a bit, and if you drive along I-10 in the desert east of L.A., you'll see acres and acres covered with windmills every 10 feet or so. Certainly ugly, and probably has an impact on the native wildlife as well. Now multiply that by 100x or so to get enough windmills to actually power California, and you'll have most of the state covered in ugly white towers...
At least with Debian, the precompiled kernel doesn't automatically have CD burning properly set up. You have to load the required modules and pass them the proper arguments, as I described in my previous post (and yes, I got the requisite steps from the CD-Writing-HOWTO). In Windows, it detects the hardware and sets it up for you.
I suppose that'd work too. The reason I did it the way I did is that's how the HOWTO I read recommended. That and Debian has a nice modconf utility for setting up modules and their parameters, while for lilo I'd have to figure out how to edit it properly myself.
And Windows works the same, it just doesn't tell you about it.
Well that's the point -- it figures out how to get it working, and does so. It'd be nice if Linux did something like that. To get my cd burner working in Linux, I had to read through the relevant HOWTO, and do the following (my cd-r drive is on/dev/hdc):
unload the ide-cd module reload the ide-cd module with "ignore=hdc" load the ide-scsi module change the/dev/cdrom symlink to point to/dev/scd0 instead of/dev/hdc
Not too difficult once you figure out what to do (especially if you use modconf on Debian so your modules and module parameters automatically get saved for the next boot), but not exactly newbie-friendly either.
I know what hardware I have in my computer. But Linux often either labels it strangely, or labels it completely wrongly because of its bizarre way of operating. For example, I have not a single piece of SCSI hardware in my system. Yet for my IDE CD burner to work, I have to load the ide-scsi module, because apparently CD burning in Linux has only been implemented for SCSI burners, so the only way to get IDE burners to work is to emulate them as SCSI burners. Not intuitive.
Not to mention the millions of chipset names. In Windows, you choose the name of your card, and it figures out the chipset (that's in the worst case; usually it just auto-detects it in the first place). In Linux, you have to figure out who made the chipset on your card, which often isn't labeled on the box or in the manual, so requires some guessing or googling. An easy-to-find example is the emu10k1 for Soundblaster Live cards (this is actually documented by Creative); a harder-to-find example is the tulip driver for LinkSys network cards (most of the $10 LinkSys cards don't come with a manual, and the box doesn't mention what chipset they use). And so on for ever.
The Debian way of solving this is by default to build almost everything in the kernel as a module. That way if you discover you need some functionality, you don't have to recompile the kernel; just load the required module. It makes kernel compiling take a bit longer (~20 mins on my Athlon 1.33 GHz), but it's worth it IMHO for never having to recompile it again (until the next kernel upgrade anyway).
Yeah, you know Doom and Duke Nukem 3d were widely renowned for their storylines...
it takes some effort to get a workstation setup
on
Libranet 2.7 Released
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· Score: 2
The default Debian install, since it's designed to handle all sorts of uses of the OS, just installs the base. Your average user wants other stuff -- X11 for example -- that it doesn't install by default. Not sure if this has changed, but when I installed Debian I had to manually install X11 by using dselect after the base install finished. And dselect is not the most user-friendly tool. It also took me a long time to get fonts to look decent (by carefully perusing the Linux Font Deuglification HOWTO), but that may be more a Linux/X problem than a Debian one. Setting up my CD burner was also a bit annoying -- I had to mess with modconf to load the ide-scsi module and pass ignore=hdc to the ide-cd module. Not too hard when reading the HOWTOs, but not something I'd want to explain to a non-computer type person how to do.
I can still see the benefits of software patents for truly innovative creations, but perhaps the terms should be shorter for 20 years due to the nature of the software industry; perhaps something more like 5-7 years would be more reasonable.
It's latin for "thus". It's placed in brackets after quoting something that sounds wrong or odd to indicate that it really is like that in the original you're quoting (otherwise you might think it's a typo or misprint on the quoter's part). Simple errors are usually fixed instead of being marked with [sic], it's used if something is just bizarre and impossible to correct (like when Dan Quayle says something completely non-sensical) or when you're quoting a published work (fixing typos when quoting a published work is okay, but fixing its grammar is generally a bad idea).
It's the only real choice for any app of significant size. Your assembly code will be unlikely to work at all on any significantly-sized app, because of the incredibly complexities of IA-64's pipelining (to improve speed, they took out all the "make sure stuff gets executed in the right order when we parallelize" hardware, so it's up to the software to take care of that now).
Bitzi stores information on files found on P2P networks, indexed by a TigerTree hash appended to a SHA1 hash. Support for it has been integrated into several Gnutella clients (ShareAza, Limewire, etc.), which have also come up with their own URL systems (gnutella:// and magnet:// are the two existing ones right now).
3dfx (you still remember them right?) had a series of ads along these lines a few years ago. They were patterned after those pharmaceutical company ads about how their technology is bettering the planet. Transcript from one:
[file footage of children running through grassy fields, etc.]
What could we do with a chip that performs a hundred billion operations per second? Why, we could bolster the world's food supply. We could use our chip to genetically engineer juicier fruits. Hardy, mineral-rich vegetables. Tastier greens. And tender, all-white-meat chickens. We could use our technology to feed the world.
But then we thought -- hey, we could use it for games!
[All the food disappears from people's plates, and the camera pans to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ricidulous.
And from another:
[File footage of doctors and old people and such]
We have in our possession a chip -- a chip that could revolutionize medicine as we know it. By performing a hundred billion operations a second, this chip could help us heal across continents. We could touch more lives, help people live longer than ever, and give us all more time to cherish the journey's truest rewards.
But then we thought -- hey, let's use it for games!
[The life-support equipment stops working and everyone dies, pan to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ridiculous.
[Doctor from the earlier file footage shots says "you know, that game's a little violent for my tastes"]
Most I'm aware are arranged vaguely like a computer's serial port connector, except that the pins are slightly further apart, and each pin is surrounded by a cylindrical plastic casing (the pin itself is recessed a bit below the end of the cylinder). This way the cylindrical plastic pieces align the connector with the socket before the metal pins actually make contact, making it nearly impossible to bend the pins (which is good when you have kids plugging and unplugging them all the time).
They'd be hard-pressed to add support for Tarkin, since it's barely even started, and not currently under active development (the Xiph coders are currently working on Theora, which is a project to integrate the VP3 codec -- which was originally closed-source and patented but has been donated to the Ogg project by the owners -- into the Ogg file format). Tarkin is still on the roadmap, but it's a long-term "what we'll do when we're done with everything else" goal with no timetable to completion.
Hijacking planes, blowing up bombs, etc. inspire terror -- people become afraid to go to public areas (in Israel especially), some people are afraid of flying planes, etc. I can't see how "e-terrorism" could possibly inspire the same sort of terror. "Oh, so the online order-tracking system is down? Not like it's the first time this week..."
If you can get 3x the storage for the same price, it might be worth using the lower-quality components (you can always replace them when they fail, since they're so cheap). Unless you need the absolute fastest performance, in which case you have to go SCSI.
Slashdot Mirror
At my school at least, the biggest use of bandwidth seems to be people who leave filesharing programs on all the time, which ends up sharing their download directories by default, even if they haven't configured them to share additional things. Having even a few dozen people sharing DivX movies on a high-speed pipe uses up a large percentage of the school's bandwidth, far more than the network chatter does (we're talking on the order of 30-40 GB/day for a single host).
Enlightenment is kind of nice, and fairly innovative. And even usable if you turn off some of the animations. I especially like being able to drag desktops over other desktops partially, while working on both.
It's too bad they threw out the code and started v17 from scratch 2 years ago, and are still "at least 2 years away" from having another release. But v16 is still pretty good.
My preferred solution would be a platform-independent API that implements its calls using native widgets. For example, you create a menu, and let the native toolkit deal with the menu's behavior as it sees fit (the Mac/Win differences you mentioned). The main problem with this is that the various platforms don't have 1-to-1 correspondences amongst their various native widget sets. For simple things like menus, the Mac menu is essentially a drop-in replacement for the Windows menu, but not all widgets will have the functionality you want on all platforms. The only good ways to resolve this seem to be either implementing your own cross-platform widgets (as Mozilla is doing with XUL, and as wxWindows is doing with a more traditional toolkit library), restricting yourself to a subset of features that do exist in similar forms on all your target platforms, or convincing the OS designers to implement all your favorite features.
I'm pretty certain that it's first usage...
Time to read up on the apostrophe rules...
...free local calling plus paying $20/mo for internet access still comes out cheaper for any serious usage. So the Egyptians are still getting screwed (then again, so is much of Europe).
Not 120 seconds...his example numbers were more like 12 seconds. (1 s = 1000 ms).
Athlons have circuitry to disconnect from the system bus when idle (on a signal from the Northbridge, which gives the signal when the OS enters the ACPI C2 idle state), reducing clock rate and essentially going into a standby mode (~5W power consumption). Unfortunately, it's not enabled by default, partly due to minor performance problems (~3% is the normal performance hit), and partly due to intermittent problems with some motherboards, especially when using PCI bus-mastering cards that require low latency (such as video capture cards). I'm not sure why it's not available as a BIOS option though.
In any case, you can enable it manually by setting the relevant bit in the Northbridge. For Linux, see the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO for a variety of methods to enable it.
For Windows, there's a utility called VCool, whose site was at vcool.occludo.net, but it appears to have disappeared in the past week or two.
When idled using the setpci trick mentioned in the HOWTO, my Athlon 1.33 GHz, which used to idle at 57 C, now idles at 33 C (case temp is 31 C, so it's generating very little heat and by extension using very little power, especially compared to what it used to do).
Well Debian's current version isn't exactly ancient (I'm talking about the current version if you apt-get unstable, not the currently released stable version, which is 6-12 months behind due to rigorous testing).
But in any case, getting the tulip driver to work wasn't a problem. But a newbie installing Linux has likely never heard of a tulip driver, and is unlikely to leap to the conclusion that his LinkSys network card needs it. Auto-detecting it would be nice, or at least having the install say "you probably need either the tulip or the 8139".
As for X, i tried the new "XFree86 -configure" method, but it hung my computer (couldn't switch virtual consoles even; had to ssh in to kill it). So I ended up manually configuring with xf86config. The new config might be nice if it works, but I haven't had a chance to see it in action...
Sure, wind power is non-polluting from a chemical standpoint, but it certainly disrupts the environment significantly. Producing any decent amount of power takes a lot of windmills. California's been experimenting with it a bit, and if you drive along I-10 in the desert east of L.A., you'll see acres and acres covered with windmills every 10 feet or so. Certainly ugly, and probably has an impact on the native wildlife as well. Now multiply that by 100x or so to get enough windmills to actually power California, and you'll have most of the state covered in ugly white towers...
At least with Debian, the precompiled kernel doesn't automatically have CD burning properly set up. You have to load the required modules and pass them the proper arguments, as I described in my previous post (and yes, I got the requisite steps from the CD-Writing-HOWTO). In Windows, it detects the hardware and sets it up for you.
I suppose that'd work too. The reason I did it the way I did is that's how the HOWTO I read recommended. That and Debian has a nice modconf utility for setting up modules and their parameters, while for lilo I'd have to figure out how to edit it properly myself.
And Windows works the same, it just doesn't tell you about it.
/dev/hdc):
/dev/cdrom symlink to point to /dev/scd0 instead of /dev/hdc
Well that's the point -- it figures out how to get it working, and does so. It'd be nice if Linux did something like that. To get my cd burner working in Linux, I had to read through the relevant HOWTO, and do the following (my cd-r drive is on
unload the ide-cd module
reload the ide-cd module with "ignore=hdc"
load the ide-scsi module
change the
Not too difficult once you figure out what to do (especially if you use modconf on Debian so your modules and module parameters automatically get saved for the next boot), but not exactly newbie-friendly either.
I know what hardware I have in my computer. But Linux often either labels it strangely, or labels it completely wrongly because of its bizarre way of operating. For example, I have not a single piece of SCSI hardware in my system. Yet for my IDE CD burner to work, I have to load the ide-scsi module, because apparently CD burning in Linux has only been implemented for SCSI burners, so the only way to get IDE burners to work is to emulate them as SCSI burners. Not intuitive.
Not to mention the millions of chipset names. In Windows, you choose the name of your card, and it figures out the chipset (that's in the worst case; usually it just auto-detects it in the first place). In Linux, you have to figure out who made the chipset on your card, which often isn't labeled on the box or in the manual, so requires some guessing or googling. An easy-to-find example is the emu10k1 for Soundblaster Live cards (this is actually documented by Creative); a harder-to-find example is the tulip driver for LinkSys network cards (most of the $10 LinkSys cards don't come with a manual, and the box doesn't mention what chipset they use). And so on for ever.
The Debian way of solving this is by default to build almost everything in the kernel as a module. That way if you discover you need some functionality, you don't have to recompile the kernel; just load the required module. It makes kernel compiling take a bit longer (~20 mins on my Athlon 1.33 GHz), but it's worth it IMHO for never having to recompile it again (until the next kernel upgrade anyway).
Devs used to care about a good storyline
Yeah, you know Doom and Duke Nukem 3d were widely renowned for their storylines...
The default Debian install, since it's designed to handle all sorts of uses of the OS, just installs the base. Your average user wants other stuff -- X11 for example -- that it doesn't install by default. Not sure if this has changed, but when I installed Debian I had to manually install X11 by using dselect after the base install finished. And dselect is not the most user-friendly tool. It also took me a long time to get fonts to look decent (by carefully perusing the Linux Font Deuglification HOWTO), but that may be more a Linux/X problem than a Debian one. Setting up my CD burner was also a bit annoying -- I had to mess with modconf to load the ide-scsi module and pass ignore=hdc to the ide-cd module. Not too hard when reading the HOWTOs, but not something I'd want to explain to a non-computer type person how to do.
The upgrading is definitely nice though.
I can still see the benefits of software patents for truly innovative creations, but perhaps the terms should be shorter for 20 years due to the nature of the software industry; perhaps something more like 5-7 years would be more reasonable.
From reading the press release, it sounds like (someone at) Duke knows who donated the money, but are honoring his wishes to remain anonymous.
It's latin for "thus". It's placed in brackets after quoting something that sounds wrong or odd to indicate that it really is like that in the original you're quoting (otherwise you might think it's a typo or misprint on the quoter's part). Simple errors are usually fixed instead of being marked with [sic], it's used if something is just bizarre and impossible to correct (like when Dan Quayle says something completely non-sensical) or when you're quoting a published work (fixing typos when quoting a published work is okay, but fixing its grammar is generally a bad idea).
It's the only real choice for any app of significant size. Your assembly code will be unlikely to work at all on any significantly-sized app, because of the incredibly complexities of IA-64's pipelining (to improve speed, they took out all the "make sure stuff gets executed in the right order when we parallelize" hardware, so it's up to the software to take care of that now).
Bitzi stores information on files found on P2P networks, indexed by a TigerTree hash appended to a SHA1 hash. Support for it has been integrated into several Gnutella clients (ShareAza, Limewire, etc.), which have also come up with their own URL systems (gnutella:// and magnet:// are the two existing ones right now).
3dfx (you still remember them right?) had a series of ads along these lines a few years ago. They were patterned after those pharmaceutical company ads about how their technology is bettering the planet. Transcript from one:
[file footage of children running through grassy fields, etc.]
What could we do with a chip that performs a hundred billion operations per second? Why, we could bolster the world's food supply. We could use our chip to genetically engineer juicier fruits. Hardy, mineral-rich vegetables. Tastier greens. And tender, all-white-meat chickens. We could use our technology to feed the world.
But then we thought -- hey, we could use it for games!
[All the food disappears from people's plates, and the camera pans to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ricidulous.
And from another:
[File footage of doctors and old people and such]
We have in our possession a chip -- a chip that could revolutionize medicine as we know it. By performing a hundred billion operations a second, this chip could help us heal across continents. We could touch more lives, help people live longer than ever, and give us all more time to cherish the journey's truest rewards.
But then we thought -- hey, let's use it for games!
[The life-support equipment stops working and everyone dies, pan to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ridiculous.
[Doctor from the earlier file footage shots says "you know, that game's a little violent for my tastes"]
Most I'm aware are arranged vaguely like a computer's serial port connector, except that the pins are slightly further apart, and each pin is surrounded by a cylindrical plastic casing (the pin itself is recessed a bit below the end of the cylinder). This way the cylindrical plastic pieces align the connector with the socket before the metal pins actually make contact, making it nearly impossible to bend the pins (which is good when you have kids plugging and unplugging them all the time).
They'd be hard-pressed to add support for Tarkin, since it's barely even started, and not currently under active development (the Xiph coders are currently working on Theora, which is a project to integrate the VP3 codec -- which was originally closed-source and patented but has been donated to the Ogg project by the owners -- into the Ogg file format). Tarkin is still on the roadmap, but it's a long-term "what we'll do when we're done with everything else" goal with no timetable to completion.
Hijacking planes, blowing up bombs, etc. inspire terror -- people become afraid to go to public areas (in Israel especially), some people are afraid of flying planes, etc. I can't see how "e-terrorism" could possibly inspire the same sort of terror. "Oh, so the online order-tracking system is down? Not like it's the first time this week..."
If you can get 3x the storage for the same price, it might be worth using the lower-quality components (you can always replace them when they fail, since they're so cheap). Unless you need the absolute fastest performance, in which case you have to go SCSI.