... let me see , what have the KDE team done so far. Err , copy the windows look and feel , and.... umm , no thats it. So what will KDE 4 be? A knock-off of XP with a few Vista features they've found out about thrown in for good measure?
Sorry , I'm not trolling but KDE really is just a windows clone even down to the style of the main menu. It has zero originality so why should anyone expect this to change with 4? Other window managers have come up with new and interesting ways of doing things so why the hell does everyone fawn over KDE? Even though Gnome is kind of a windows-a-like its at least different enough to stand on its own merit and not just be a hand-me-down in spirit from Redmond.
A landline phone uses less electricity (so costs less to run) A landline phone has a guaranteed quality of service A landline phone is very cheap to buy. A landline phone is very resistant to bad lines (useful if you're well out in the country) A landline phone can have free calls depending on package
An IP phone has cheap/free calls depending on the package/software. Ummm , any other pros for IP phones.... nope. Can't think of any. Here are some cons:
An IP phone uses more power. An IP phone can be hacked. An IP phone relies on a good connection - too many dropped packets and the voice sounds unintelligable. An IP phone is more complex and hence theres more to go wrong. An IP phone doesn't have guaranteed QOS nor does it have a guaranteed working emergency number.
So geek boy with your business poser phone , those are my pros and cons , lets hear yours. If you have any and you're not just blowing smoke out your rear.
Get a normal land line wired phone without any bells & whistles and it'll consume zero watts until you take it off the hook. IP phones are just for geeks and serve no useful purpose over normal phones other than for just showing off to other geeky friends.
"Most people seem to think he is guilty but is he?"
Most people are no better than the tabloids. They make up their minds in a nanosecond that someone is guilty based on heresay and 3rd hand reports of "evidence" then get all self righteous about it. Just because the average IQ on slashdot is above the mean doesn't mean that human nature on here is any different to anywhere else.
Still , when did lack of information stop anyone on slashdot from pronouncing on The Truth.
Why would a company be so dumb as to spin off the most important part of its product (lets face it, hardware is commodity these days) and THEN sell it off to a competitor and THEN pay royalties??! The mind boggles. Perhaps I'm a cynic but I can't help thinking that some pen pushing accountant behind the scenes thought the windfall would look good in the end of year books and with the usual short termism of such people never considered the long term repercussions. Who knows , perhaps I'm wrong , but last time I looked Apple, Sun, IBM etc hadn't given away OS/X, SOlaris, AIX to some company then paid for the priviledge to use them! The article mentions the possibility of them using Windows Mobile! A palmtop OS which has really been a success. Not. Have the inmates taken over the asylum down at Palm?
"I cannot count how often I see error messages or assert failures with GNOME applications "
Amen to that. I'm guessing you were just too far down the posting tree for the OSS fanboys to find you and mod you a troll. I'm tired of stuff Just Not Working in these supposedly "next generation" (yeah right) desktop "enviroments" and most of the apps can't even be bothered to put up a window when they're about to fail, just dump some obtuse error message to the console then exit. Oh yeah , linux is really ready for Joe Public.
"As a consultant, I get to stick my nose in a lot of development shops,"
Most "consultants" I've worked with seem to just patronisingly state the bloody obvious, come up with some 2nd rate design, write some unmaintanable code , then piss off and take their wheelbarrow full of money they've been paid for the "job" with them.
Can someone explain these to me since I'm confused. The article states:
"This example shows that I can treat a function just as I treat any other variable. C developers think of this concept as a function pointer, but JavaScript's notion of higher-order functions is much more powerful... [snip] Using a function as a function argument, or returning a function as a value, elevates this abstraction into the realm of higher-order functions. "
Whats so new and powerful about this? Using the C example you can easily return function pointers as arguments from functions and pass them too functions as well. So why is javascripts method so much more powerful that C's? Using a standard C compiler you could also pass to the same piece of code function pointers to functions with variable arguments(though I suspect a C++ compiler might complain about this).
People who've had artificial lenses replace their own (because of cataracts or some other ailment) apparently can see the near ultraviolet which is said to be blueish-white. The reason for this is because the lens blocks these wavelengths but the cones are sensitive to them. Perhaps the wavelengths are blocked because they could be harmful to the retina or perhaps its just one of those biological quirks.
Also if you make the source REALLY bright then apparently human vision can extend a very short distance into the near infrared as a very bright near infrared source will excite the rods or cones (not sure which it is) a tiny amount.
What surprises me is that no one has written an open source 3D graphical MUD (which is all MMORGS are) from scratch yet. I realise its difficult but when has something being difficult stopped many projects before?
"Finally the most important feature of data integrity os check summing and everything on ZFS is checksummed meaning zero data corruption."
Umm , last time I looked checksumming merely told you if there WAS data corruption , it doesn't prevent it. Does ZFS has some other method to prevent data corruption (eg for a gone bad sector etc) or does it just flag a file as corrupted and leave it up to you what to do next?
Putin might (or might not) be a dictator, but the sort of people who could take his place if he was deposed doesn't bear thinking about. Theres a whole nest of former and current FSB/KGB mixed up with BIG organised crime bosses behind the scenes. Russia is a political mess right now and I'm not sure theres a solution.
UDP is connectionless so you can send a packet and get a valid reply in a microsecond or a year depending purely on how long the app is willing to wait. So how long with the NAT router wait before is prevents a UDP reply packet crossing the barrier back to the sending app?
Because he seems pretty darn techno savvy in his books. I can't believe he makes it all up and it just happens to be derived from technology that already exists by pure coincidence. I'm sure he's a lot more clued up than he lets on.
Fine , ban these virtual images of child porn. Presumably all the carved cherubs and statues in fountains of pissing children will have to go too , not to mention numerous works of art. No? Oh and why's that then Mr Reid? Oh , of course , its called double standards, something politicians are past masters at.
For someone who's supposedly an influential Sci-fi author you'd have expected the guy to have a vague clue about how the technology of the day worked. I'm not sure I believe him to be honest.
I wouldnt bet on that. The gap between what can be stored on a given area of magnetic/optical disks compared to some type of solid state memory is actually getting larger , not smaller.
Theres a good article in Sci Am this month
on
New Mars Discoveries
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Scientific American is running an article about how it now looks almost certain that there were large standing bodies of water on Mars in its early history. However it goes on to say that this probably only lasted for a billion years or so before the water froze/evaporated and mars slowly turned into the dusty desert we know today.
My own belief is that Mars slowly lost its atmosphere due to its low gravity and poor magnetic field and as the air pressure went down it was easier and easier for water to evaporate until at some point the pressure got to the point where the boiling point of water had dropped to below the ambient temperature of the planet and that was the end of the lakes/seas if there were any still around by then. Once in the atmosphere the water was dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, the H2 escaped and the O2 reacted with whatever was around producing the rusty landscape we see today.
1 and 3 are possible but I suspect 2 is unlikely , since to shoot out a rock large enough to cause the craters of the size discussed here would not only required far more energy than any volcano could ever produce but if somehow it did it would almost certainly completely destroy the volcano in the process. Its one thing to fire off rocks a few tens of metres in diameter , quite another to fire off mile wide lumps at sub orbital speeds.
"that video failure does not necessarily take down a whole server."
No it doesn't , but if you're running windows virtualised then the odds are you're using the console and if you can't use the console because some virus has crashed the display then that possibly defeats the purpose of having the machine in the first place especially if it happens to be your workstation.
"assuming that you are talking about crashing the X server, no, because you can just restart X without affecting the rest of the server."
Sorry , it doesn't always work like that. I've had X servers totally lock up video cards which stay locked even once the X server process has been killed and no amount of X restarts solved it. The only thing that worked was shutting down then switching the machine off then on again. Now this may be limited to certain graphics cards (Matrox in my case) but the fact it happens at all should be a warning.
Slashdot Mirror
... let me see , what have the KDE team done so far. Err , copy the windows look and feel , and .... umm , no thats it. So what will KDE 4 be? A knock-off of XP with a few Vista features they've found out about thrown in for good measure?
Sorry , I'm not trolling but KDE really is just a windows clone even down to the style of the main menu. It has zero originality so why should anyone expect this to change with 4? Other window managers have come up with new and interesting ways of doing things so why the hell does everyone fawn over KDE? Even though Gnome is kind of a windows-a-like its at least different enough to stand on its own merit and not just be a hand-me-down in spirit from Redmond.
"Top fuel engines produce that much power now, "
Big deal. I doubt those engines produce 2000 TONS of torque at 102 RPM which is what you need to turn power a 50,000 ton ship. Power isn't everything.
"need to survive under load for only 5 seconds at the very most"
Yeah , that'd be useful on a 2 month voyage then.
With the kind of idiots and little hitlers that seem to get hired as policemen in britain these days I'm damn glad they don't have guns.
So speaketh an insulted geek.
.... nope. Can't think of any. Here are some cons:
Well heres some facts for you geek boy:
A landline phone uses less electricity (so costs less to run)
A landline phone has a guaranteed quality of service
A landline phone is very cheap to buy.
A landline phone is very resistant to bad lines (useful if you're well out in the country)
A landline phone can have free calls depending on package
An IP phone has cheap/free calls depending on the package/software.
Ummm , any other pros for IP phones
An IP phone uses more power.
An IP phone can be hacked.
An IP phone relies on a good connection - too many dropped packets and the voice sounds unintelligable.
An IP phone is more complex and hence theres more to go wrong.
An IP phone doesn't have guaranteed QOS nor does it have a guaranteed working emergency number.
So geek boy with your business poser phone , those are my pros and cons , lets hear yours.
If you have any and you're not just blowing smoke out your rear.
>That statement is just so ridiculous it's not worth responding to.
Meaning you can't think of a response but you wanted to karma whore anyway.
Get a normal land line wired phone without any bells & whistles and it'll consume zero watts until you take it off the hook. IP phones are just for geeks and serve no useful purpose over normal phones other than for just showing off to other geeky friends.
"Most people seem to think he is guilty but is he?"
Most people are no better than the tabloids. They make up their minds in a nanosecond that someone is guilty based on heresay and 3rd hand reports of "evidence" then get all self righteous about it. Just because the average IQ on slashdot is above the mean doesn't mean that human nature on here is any different to anywhere else.
Still , when did lack of information stop anyone on slashdot from pronouncing on The Truth.
Why would a company be so dumb as to spin off the most important part of its product (lets face it, hardware is commodity these days) and THEN sell it off to a competitor and THEN pay royalties??! The mind boggles. Perhaps I'm a cynic but I can't help thinking that some pen pushing accountant behind the scenes thought the windfall would look good in the end of year books and with the usual short termism of such people never considered the long term repercussions. Who knows , perhaps I'm wrong , but last time I looked Apple, Sun, IBM etc hadn't given away OS/X, SOlaris, AIX to some company then paid for the priviledge to use them!
The article mentions the possibility of them using Windows Mobile! A palmtop OS which has really been a success. Not. Have the inmates taken over the asylum down at Palm?
"I cannot count how often I see error messages or assert failures with GNOME applications "
Amen to that. I'm guessing you were just too far down the posting tree for the OSS fanboys to find you and mod you a troll. I'm tired of stuff Just Not Working in these supposedly "next generation" (yeah right) desktop "enviroments" and most of the apps can't even be bothered to put up a window when they're about to fail, just dump some obtuse error message to the console then exit. Oh yeah , linux is really ready for Joe Public.
"As a consultant, I get to stick my nose in a lot of development shops,"
Most "consultants" I've worked with seem to just patronisingly state the bloody obvious, come up with some 2nd rate design, write some unmaintanable code , then piss off and take their wheelbarrow full of money they've been paid for the "job" with them.
Can someone explain these to me since I'm confused. The article states:
"This example shows that I can treat a function just as I treat any other variable. C developers think of this concept as a function pointer, but JavaScript's notion of higher-order functions is much more powerful...
[snip]
Using a function as a function argument, or returning a function as a value, elevates this abstraction into the realm of higher-order functions. "
Whats so new and powerful about this? Using the C example you can easily return function pointers as arguments from functions and pass them too functions as well. So why is javascripts method so much more powerful that C's? Using a standard C compiler you could also pass to the same piece of code function pointers to functions with variable arguments(though I suspect a C++ compiler might complain about this).
Not sure what his point is.
People who've had artificial lenses replace their own (because of cataracts or some other ailment) apparently can see the near ultraviolet which is said to be blueish-white. The reason for this is because the lens blocks these wavelengths but the cones are sensitive to them. Perhaps the wavelengths are blocked because they could be harmful to the retina or perhaps its just one of those biological quirks.
Also if you make the source REALLY bright then apparently human vision can extend a very short distance into the near infrared as a very bright near infrared source will excite the rods or cones (not sure which it is) a tiny amount.
They were called MUDs.
What surprises me is that no one has written an open source 3D graphical MUD (which is all MMORGS are) from scratch yet. I realise its difficult but when has something being difficult stopped many projects before?
From the article:
"Finally the most important feature of data integrity os check summing and everything on ZFS is checksummed meaning zero data corruption."
Umm , last time I looked checksumming merely told you if there WAS data corruption , it doesn't prevent it. Does ZFS has some other method to prevent data corruption (eg for a gone bad sector etc) or does it just flag a file as corrupted and leave it up to you what to do next?
Putin might (or might not) be a dictator, but the sort of people who could take his place if he was deposed doesn't bear thinking about. Theres a whole nest of former and current FSB/KGB mixed up with BIG organised crime bosses behind the scenes. Russia is a political mess right now and I'm not sure theres a solution.
UDP is connectionless so you can send a packet and get a valid reply in a microsecond or a year depending purely on how long the app is willing to wait. So how long with the NAT router wait before is prevents a UDP reply packet crossing the barrier back to the sending app?
What exactly can the BIOS do with the hardware that the OS or boot loader can't? Err , nothing as far as I'm aware so whats the deal here?
Because he seems pretty darn techno savvy in his books. I can't believe he makes it all up and it just happens to be derived from technology that already exists by pure coincidence. I'm sure he's a lot more clued up than he lets on.
Fine , ban these virtual images of child porn. Presumably all the carved cherubs and statues in fountains of pissing children will have to go too , not to mention numerous works of art. No? Oh and why's that then Mr Reid? Oh , of course , its called double standards, something politicians are past masters at.
For someone who's supposedly an influential Sci-fi author you'd have expected the guy to have a vague clue about how the technology of the day worked. I'm not sure I believe him to be honest.
I wouldnt bet on that. The gap between what can be stored on a given area of magnetic/optical disks compared to some type of solid state memory is actually getting larger , not smaller.
Scientific American is running an article about how it now looks almost certain that there were large standing bodies of water on Mars in its early history. However it goes on to say that this probably only lasted for a billion years or so before the water froze/evaporated and mars slowly turned into the dusty desert we know today.
My own belief is that Mars slowly lost its atmosphere due to its low gravity and poor magnetic field and as the air pressure went down it was easier and easier for water to evaporate until at some point the pressure got to the point where the boiling point of water had dropped to below the ambient temperature of the planet and that was the end of the lakes/seas if there were any still around by then. Once in the atmosphere the water was dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, the H2 escaped and the O2 reacted with whatever was around producing the rusty landscape we see today.
1 and 3 are possible but I suspect 2 is unlikely , since to shoot out a rock large enough to cause the craters of the size discussed here would not only required far more energy than any volcano could ever produce but if somehow it did it would almost certainly completely destroy the volcano in the process. Its one thing to fire off rocks a few tens of metres in diameter , quite another to fire off mile wide lumps at sub orbital speeds.
"that video failure does not necessarily take down a whole server."
No it doesn't , but if you're running windows virtualised then the odds are you're using the console and if you can't use the console because some virus has crashed the display then that possibly defeats the purpose of having the machine in the first place especially if it happens to be your workstation.
"assuming that you are talking about crashing the X server, no, because you can just restart X without affecting the rest of the server."
Sorry , it doesn't always work like that. I've had X servers totally lock up video cards which stay locked even once the X server process has been killed and no amount of X restarts solved it. The only thing that worked was shutting down then switching the machine off then on again. Now this may be limited to certain graphics cards (Matrox in my case) but the fact it happens at all should be a warning.