If you're worried about trivial the amounts of radiation found on scottish moors you also might want to consider abstaining from eating any animals grazing on plants growing on granite bedrock and any fish caught in the north sea. Also you should avoid going within a few miles of any unfiltered coal fired power station as the dust it generates can be highly radioactive depending on where the coal came from. But then paranoia isn't best friends with rationality is it?
Slackware will run any SysV style script you put in too. What do you think the "rc.sysvinit" startup script is for? As for BSD being cumbersome , umm how exactly? Everything runs in series in the init files. Couldn't be simpler. If you want to stop something running you just comment it out. If you want to stop something running in a SysV init you have to find the its startup file amongst all the other similarly named files and links pointing everywhere in the rcX.d dirs then rename it, more it to a different dir or edit it manually and shove an "exit" in it. What a pain in the arse. Give me BSD style init anyday.
About as cool as the sun. Thats just what you'd need , loads of phone calls from people who "just want to ring for a laugh" or people who click accidentaly or people who phone up to tell you your page sucks whereas if they had to actually dial the number they might not bother. Still , it'll probably happen. Every crap idea ends up in browsers eventually.
The Internet Protocol was originally designed for non realtime applications. In the last few decades it has been shoehorned into various realtime applications , IP telephony being one, online games being another. And it sort of works. But not very well without a HELL of a lot of high end hardware to help it along. Some things are best left to propriatary protocols , they do one thing and they do it well. Speech is one of these things that would be better served with one of these (and in fact a lot are used). I simply don't understand this headlong rush into using IP for everything , its a general purpose protocol for sure but this means its a jack of all trades master of none. Isn't it time that companies who should know what they are doing ignore all the hype and bandwagons with fairly flat tyres from the startups desperate to flog VOIP to stay afloat and use their expertese to design something for the 21st century , not use an overworked protocol from the 1970s?
Well , when I said I haven't had any problems with it I meant once I'd got it set up. To be honest I'm still using v3 since v4 just Will Not Work properly with my Matrox G200 graphics card. No idea why. I guess if I did heavy duty openGL stuff I'd be a bit pissed off but since I only use it for xterms and browsers its not a bit deal.
Yes , and I also meant "technical" not "techinal". Its called a typo. Stop being so anal.
Great , another config file format to learn.
on
Mandrakelinux Goes X.org
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I've never used X.org but I've used XFree86 for almost 10 years now and have not had any issues with it. What is the advantage of X.org? Are there good techincal reasons or is it just politics (of which frankly theres far too much off in OSS these days IMO)?
Given that analogue TV sets/monitors can effectively do a virtually infinite range of colours how exactly is this an advancement? But then again , lots of things in the digital domain pretend to be great when they first come out but are actually a step backwards compared to the analogue alternative (eg 14 bit CD players vs Vinyl, MP3 vs CD, DAB vs FM) and people swallow it hook & line...
I'd be the first person to admit that IDEs are useful. But not having one should only make coding a bit harder , not impossible! If you can't code a program just from command line tools then theres something seriously lacking in your abilities as a coder. I've written Xlib programs in C using just vi and the command line cc compiler and I don't rate myself as a guru. If I can do it any half decent coder should be able to.
From the article: "hat the programmer wants, she must"
"She" wants? Oh god gimme a break. Why can't these PC 60s hippies just get it into their head that most programmers are male and this spurious use of the female personal pronoun (in the hope of what, securing some sort of equal rights in IT?) is really bloody annoying. If someone was writing about midwives or nurses would they use "he" all the time? No. Such Mr Bearby Right-on Relic, how about you drop the politicall correct rhetoric and just concentrate on your work??
I remember adding modules onto the Tcl interpreter back in 1994. This is hardly cutting edge stuff. Ok , it didn't change the actual syntax of the language , it just added new commands but its the same sort of thing in terms of functionality since you could have those new commands do anything you wanted. I do wish people would stop pretending to be futuroloists when they're apparently not even aware of the recent past.
"but having a single app (single download, single install, single version tracking) that does web + mail + calendar + html editor + irc on every existing platform is required."
Drivel. Its only required if you're some sheep who thinks the monolithic way a-la MS Office is the only way to go.
"That is far most important than all your little my-browser-is-smaller-than-yours pissing contest"
NO it isn't. Its a damn site more relevant than a mine-can-do-more-than-yours chest beating contest.
"mozilla suite extended to include a blogger, an im client, a pim synchronisation tool or a p2p client"
Oh yes , and bloggers are so useful... well to egotistical teenagers and 20somethings who kid themselves that they're miserable lives or ideas are of the slightest interest to anyone. But hey , yeah a blogger why not. And why not a word pro to compose all those blogs and hey , maybe a spreadsheet and a presentation manager?
"the mozilla.org resources into fullfilling your personal needs"
Oh dear, you called people "resources". You're a just another standard issue manager-in-waiting cog in the machine spouting supposedly trendy buzzwords arn't you.
"Mozilla is the single most important application in that field."
Yeah whatever , keep kidding yourself, maybe someone will believe you one day.
I've not seen someone use them for art before but they can be used for illicit communications. Heres a program that allows people to use ping packets to chat to each other: icmptalk.c
I think you missed his point. The fact that you work in the computer industry means you're probably more predisposed to be "into" this sort of stuff whereas someone else your age who worked in a completely different industry may never have been into it in the first place and now cares even less and non-IT people make up the vast majority of population. Even even with those in IT such as myself (35 yrs old , unix C++ programmer) find that as we get old er we care less. When I was 25 I was into all the gadgets and read all the gadget mags. Now I really don't care anymore. I do my job , go home and then forget all about techy stuff. Sorry mate , but thats the way it is , you're an exception to the rule.
Ultimately a hybrid is simply a car with a small petrol engine. Since all the energy comes from the engine whether it gets converted into electricity and stored in the batteries first or goes straight to the whells your max efficiency will only ever be related to the efficieny of the engine itself. No doubt being able to use regenerative braking and have the engine run at its optimal speed will add maybe 10mpg (I'm guessing) but at the end of the day the ultimate efficiency of that engine is what limits the car. The electric motor is no magic bullet I'm afraid. For that you need true battery power with the electricy being generated somewhere else first.
The problem with car diesel engines (speaking as a brit who's driven a few) is that yes they have good mpg but they also generally have lousy performance compared to a petrol engine of the same capacity. Also diesel exhuast despite filters and catalyst its still pretty noxious and even new diesel cars can be seen disappearing off in a cloud of black smoke if revved hard. Plus they sound awful on idle. Obviously these points don't bother many people in europe since diesel cars are big here but they're not the perfect transport solution.
I've done some test programs with SCTP on linux and as far as I can see it is indeed a straight functional replacement for TCP at the sockets level. Whether its as robust or reliable is something I can't answer but it can do 1 -> many connections which TCP can't (and which is its whole point) and the usual 1 -> 1 and converting a TCP app written in C/C++ to SCTP is a simple case of changing a single argument to the socket() call. I suspect however that it'll be a case of better the devil you know since SCTP is new and untested (AFAIK) in anger and no doubt it will be found to have its own set of issues. Besides , TCP is so widespread I can't see it being replaced anytime soon.
Well unless someones written a windows virus that can run on a unix box then I doubt IE under WINE will be much of a threat. Sure it might mess up his wine virtual windows configuration but that'll be about it.
As the millions of pirate DVDs and Video CDs in the far east and the number of low quality MP3s around demonstrate , most people don't give a rats arse about high quality. As long as its more or less watchable and/or listenable then they're happy. Hence it would be quite feasable for a pirate to rip a digital recoding to analogue then re-record in unprotected digital and distribute. This is something the media companies (and you it seems) simply fail to understand.
This could create real life horror!
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 1
Imagine it. You're innocently standing somewhere at night when you hear a disembodied voice that no one else around you can hear. Then all the cats and dogs start howling and bats start flying round in circles because they're all confused by the ultrasound. I wonder if Stephen King is an investor in this system??
Re:neither one
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The sound could well appear back where it was originally played (though I have my doubts since its impossible to measure all effects of the sound everywhere) to a person standing there but other people standing nearby will still hear sound but it'll just be a jumble of noise. So thats hardly directed sound is it?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're worried about trivial the amounts of radiation found on scottish moors you also might want to consider abstaining from eating any animals grazing on plants growing on granite bedrock and any fish caught in the north sea. Also you should avoid going within a few miles of any unfiltered coal fired power station as the dust it generates can be highly radioactive depending on where the coal came from. But then paranoia isn't best friends with rationality is it?
Slackware will run any SysV style script you put in too. What do you think the "rc.sysvinit" startup script is for? As for BSD being cumbersome , umm how exactly? Everything runs in series in the init files. Couldn't be simpler. If you want to stop something running you just comment it out. If you want to stop something running in a SysV init you have to find the its startup file amongst all the other similarly named files and links pointing everywhere in the rcX.d dirs then rename it, more it to a different dir or edit it manually and shove an "exit" in it. What a pain in the arse. Give me BSD style init anyday.
"Big Rich White CEO "
So would it be ok if he was skinny , poor and black??
I'n not saying it can't be done , I'm just saying why use IP when there are far more appropriate technologies to use for realtime voice calls.
"how cool will it be to have links "
About as cool as the sun. Thats just what you'd need , loads of phone calls from people who "just want to ring for a laugh" or people who click accidentaly or people who phone up to tell you your page sucks whereas if they had to actually dial the number they might not bother. Still , it'll probably happen. Every crap idea ends up in browsers eventually.
The Internet Protocol was originally designed for non realtime applications. In the last few decades it has been shoehorned into various realtime applications , IP telephony being one, online games being another. And it sort of works. But not very well without a HELL of a lot of high end hardware to help it along. Some things are best left to propriatary protocols , they do one thing and they do it well. Speech is one of these things that would be better served with one of these (and in fact a lot are used). I simply don't understand this headlong rush into using IP for everything , its a general purpose protocol for sure but this means its a jack of all trades master of none. Isn't it time that companies who should know what they are doing ignore all the hype and bandwagons with fairly flat tyres from the startups desperate to flog VOIP to stay afloat and use their expertese to design something for the 21st century , not use an overworked protocol from the 1970s?
:)
Well , when I said I haven't had any problems with it I meant once I'd got it set up. To be honest I'm still using v3 since v4 just Will Not Work properly with my Matrox G200 graphics card. No idea why. I guess if I did heavy duty openGL stuff I'd be a bit pissed off but since I only use it for xterms and browsers its not a bit deal.
Yes , and I also meant "technical" not "techinal". Its called a typo. Stop being so anal.
I've never used X.org but I've used XFree86 for almost 10 years now and have not had any issues with it. What is the advantage of X.org? Are there good techincal reasons or is it just politics (of which frankly theres far too much off in OSS these days IMO)?
Given that analogue TV sets/monitors can effectively do a virtually infinite range of colours how exactly is this an advancement? But then again , lots of things in the digital domain pretend to be great when they first come out but are actually a step backwards compared to the analogue alternative (eg 14 bit CD players vs Vinyl, MP3 vs CD, DAB vs FM) and people swallow it hook & line...
I'd be the first person to admit that IDEs are useful. But not having one should only make coding a bit harder , not impossible! If you can't code a program just from command line tools then theres something seriously lacking in your abilities as a coder. I've written Xlib programs in C using just vi and the command line cc compiler and I don't rate myself as a guru. If I can do it any half decent coder should be able to.
From the article: "hat the programmer wants, she must"
"She" wants? Oh god gimme a break. Why can't these PC 60s hippies just get it into their head that most programmers are male and this spurious use of the female personal pronoun (in the hope of what, securing some sort of equal rights in IT?) is really bloody annoying. If someone was writing about midwives or nurses would they use "he" all the time? No. Such Mr Bearby Right-on Relic, how about you drop the politicall correct rhetoric and just concentrate on your work??
Yeah i'll get modded as a troll , whatever.
I remember adding modules onto the Tcl interpreter back in 1994. This is hardly cutting edge stuff. Ok , it didn't change the actual syntax of the language , it just added new commands but its the same sort of thing in terms of functionality since you could have those new commands do anything you wanted. I do wish people would stop pretending to be futuroloists when they're apparently not even aware of the recent past.
"but having a single app (single download, single install, single version tracking) that does web + mail + calendar + html editor + irc on every existing platform is required."
... well to egotistical teenagers and 20somethings who kid themselves that they're miserable lives or ideas are of the slightest interest to anyone. But hey , yeah a blogger why not. And why not a word pro to compose all those blogs and hey , maybe a spreadsheet and a presentation manager?
Drivel. Its only required if you're some sheep who thinks the monolithic way a-la MS Office is the only way to go.
"That is far most important than all your little my-browser-is-smaller-than-yours pissing contest"
NO it isn't. Its a damn site more relevant than a mine-can-do-more-than-yours chest beating contest.
"mozilla suite extended to include a blogger, an im client, a pim synchronisation tool or a p2p client"
Oh yes , and bloggers are so useful
"the mozilla.org resources into fullfilling your personal needs"
Oh dear, you called people "resources". You're a just another standard issue manager-in-waiting cog in the machine spouting supposedly trendy buzzwords arn't you.
"Mozilla is the single most important application in that field."
Yeah whatever , keep kidding yourself, maybe someone will believe you one day.
I've not seen someone use them for art before but they can be used for illicit communications. Heres a program that allows people to use ping packets to chat to each other: icmptalk.c
I think you missed his point. The fact that you work in the computer industry means you're probably more predisposed to be "into" this sort of stuff whereas someone else your age who worked in a completely different industry may never have been into it in the first place and now cares even less and non-IT people make up the vast majority of population. Even even with those in IT such as myself (35 yrs old , unix C++ programmer) find that as we get old er we care less. When I was 25 I was into all the gadgets and read all the gadget mags. Now I really don't care anymore. I do my job , go home and then forget all about techy stuff. Sorry mate , but thats the way it is , you're an exception to the rule.
Thats hardly a fair comparison. Put a turbo on that petrol car THEN compare them.
Ultimately a hybrid is simply a car with a small petrol engine. Since all the energy comes from the engine whether it gets converted into electricity and stored in the batteries first or goes straight to the whells your max efficiency will only ever be related to the efficieny of the engine itself. No doubt being able to use regenerative braking and have the engine run at its optimal speed will add maybe 10mpg (I'm guessing) but at the end of the day the ultimate efficiency of that engine is what limits the car. The electric motor is no magic bullet I'm afraid. For that you need true battery power with the electricy being generated somewhere else first.
The problem with car diesel engines (speaking as a brit who's driven a few) is that yes they have good mpg but they also generally have lousy performance compared to a petrol engine of the same capacity. Also diesel exhuast despite filters and catalyst its still pretty noxious and even new diesel cars can be seen disappearing off in a cloud of black smoke if revved hard. Plus they sound awful on idle. Obviously these points don't bother many people in europe since diesel cars are big here but they're not the perfect transport solution.
I've done some test programs with SCTP on linux and as far as I can see it is indeed a straight functional replacement for TCP at the sockets level. Whether its as robust or reliable is something I can't answer but it can do 1 -> many connections which TCP can't (and which is its whole point) and the usual 1 -> 1 and converting a TCP app written in C/C++ to SCTP is a simple case of changing a single argument to the socket() call. I suspect however that it'll be a case of better the devil you know since SCTP is new and untested (AFAIK) in anger and no doubt it will be found to have its own set of issues. Besides , TCP is so widespread I can't see it being replaced anytime soon.
"solution coded in Java should be about as fast as a C++ solution"
.. in maybe 2020 when Sun have finally got their JVM and JIT on a par with precompiled binary code.
Quite possibly
Well unless someones written a windows virus that can run on a unix box then I doubt IE under WINE will be much of a threat. Sure it might mess up his wine virtual windows configuration but that'll be about it.
As the millions of pirate DVDs and Video CDs in the far east and the number of low quality MP3s around demonstrate , most people don't give a rats arse about high quality. As long as its more or less watchable and/or listenable then they're happy. Hence it would be quite feasable for a pirate to rip a digital recoding to analogue then re-record in unprotected digital and distribute.
This is something the media companies (and you it seems) simply fail to understand.
Imagine it. You're innocently standing somewhere at night when you hear a disembodied voice that no one else around you can hear. Then all the cats and dogs start howling and bats start flying round in circles because they're all confused by the ultrasound. I wonder if Stephen King is an investor in this system??
The sound could well appear back where it was originally played (though I have my doubts since its impossible to measure all effects of the sound everywhere) to a person standing there but other people standing nearby will still hear sound but it'll just be a jumble of noise. So thats hardly directed sound is it?