MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.
But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM. The answer to this depends on where I am. Currently I am at work so I find this feature bloody useful as I use office alot and open a large number of different documents to view the contents or make small edits. When I am at home I would find this more annoying though as I spend less time opening Office documents.
When was the last time you used OOo? Since 2.0, it's not that slow. It's slow in initial loading, but that's because OOo loads the whole suite when starting any of its components, so comparing load time of OOo Writer vs. Word, for example, is not an apples-to-oranges comparison. I use 2.0 and I find it slower than Word. I did not know that when I loaded OOo writer it also loaded all the rest of the suite but why waste time doing that at all? Normally I open office by clicking on a document which I want to open, in which case I do not want it to waste time with alot of features that are not relevant to the document type I have just opened.
I would bet that this is why it is always accused of being slower thet MS Word and this is one of the reasons I would have a hard time convincing anyone else to use Open Office over the MS version. Trying to explain that it was not a fair comparison would not really wash with alot of people (myself included) as they were not likely to understand why it worked the way it did and what was gained from doing it the way it does from a useability point of view.
've never understood paying that kind of cash for a video card. At least not for gaming. What are you paying for, theoretical performance increases for games that won't exist before your next upgrade? $150 will get you an nvidia card that will handle any game on the market at top settings. For you that would be £75. The last card I bought was a 6800 GTX when it first came out. Since it is now 3 or 4 years old and I can still run alot of games at the maximum resolution of my monitor I think it was good investment.
Note though that I say maximum resolution of my monitor (1280 * 1024). Since this now also needs replacing (it's a CRT) my next card I want to run at 1920*1280 at least so it will look good on the 24" widescreen monitor I have an eye on. I also expect 50-60 fps at this resolution.
Also note that this is me exercising some restraint. If I was not exercising restraint I would buy 2 24" monitors as I used to run a dual monitor setup a few years ago and found I was more productive (I am a software developer).
why use cruise missles when 'smart bombs' are sufficient? If using a bomb the B52 has to fly over your target in order to drop it. With a cruise you can immediately launch and let the missile fly there. The missile is much faster than a fully loaded bomber.
Give me one good reason why Vista *shouldnt* be their top priority. How about the lack of uptake? Nobody is buying Vista. Where I work we provide a web based solution to various large and small corporate clients. None of them are on Vista yet.
First point is actually to whatever moron modded this as a Troll. Why? Just because he asked a valid question that you do not want to answer does not make it a troll. If you can post something then piss off somewhere else which doesnt have a comments area, it just lets you rate news on how interesting it is to your narrow point of view.
My second point was to say that I will be very happy if ATI actually follow through with this. I used to buy ATI cards as they are usually slightly cheaper than NVidia's similar offerings. Then I got annoyed with the state of ATI support under linux and started looking at the NV cards.
When I discovered they tried to keep as much of the code in the driver constant between Linux and Windows I switched as this made sense and meant you got similar performance under both OS's. If a decent open source driver appears for ATI (As I am sure it will) then my next purchase will be a top of the range £300+ ATI card.
Cruise missiles are either in the hold if being transported as cargo, or in this case slung under the wing on pylons ready for launching at some poor schmuck.
We used to have B52's permanently flying above Iraq with a selection of cruise missiles armed and ready (but non-nuclear tipped) so that a commander on the ground can ask for a particular buidling to disappear and it will do so very quickly. The order is imediately relayed to a controller who programs the missile with the co-ordinates and then launches. Since the B52 was already in the air above the target zone with a number of these things on board the time from request to detonation is alot shorter than if they were launched from a ship in the Gulf.
The big difference in this case is that these were nuclear tipped so would have made a much bigger bang.
The big question to my mind though is how this happened by accident? Was this a training flight where there was never any intention of launching or was the plane about to go on a sortie but some mistake on the ground meant they got given the wrong payload and the plane was in the air before this was realised.
I suppose the other option is that it was reaction to a nuclear armed bomber taking off from Russia at the same time (They have resumed these flights again recently) and the pentagon not wanting to take any chances / make a point. Although if this is the case I would rather not think about it.
And an awful lot of physics was worked out from chemistry. And most of the new stuff in biology is chemistry. If you can touch it, it is chemistry - if you drop it, it is physics... Actually it's the other way round, Chemistry and Biology are just Physics in disguise.
GPL would prevent competitors from using the AMD-developed driver technology without sharing back their own improvements. Not necessarily. It is perfectly possible to read someone else's code then use it to inspire your own development without actually copying it line for line. You can use their code as a roadmap to a solution without openly copying it line for line.
Also note that reading the code may give a valuable insight into the hardware it is meant to support and how to either base your future products on that hardware, or possibly design your future products such that code optimised for you competitors products will run well on your hardware but code optimised for your products will only run well on your products. Since both Nvidia and ATI have "friendly" games developers who already favour one company or the other this could give a substantial advantage.
Remember a few years ago when many games had the runs best on nvidia logo as soon as you launched them. I also seem to remember some strange shenanigans with regard to 3Dmark optimising their benchmarks to favour one card at around the same time although I cant remember which. I am also fairly sure that ATI are not above befriending a few games companies with free samples in order to make sure their games run slightly better on ATI hardware.
The fact is that the 3D card market is driven by people buying the latest tech to get the highest framerate in the latest hot title. Making sure that killer app ran slightly better on your product could translate into alot of extra sales for that company.
There is also the possibility that both teams of hardware designer have been reverse engineering competitors products and doing all these things for years, but open sourcing the drivers (and hence exact hardware specs) would reveal this to their customers. I know in the past John Carmack took issue with Nvidia for releasing a less advanced card with a higher model number but then tweaking the driver so that the new card appeared to be more advanced.
The fact is that we live in a capitalist system which encourages these sorts of tricks if you can get away with them. Microsoft has been walking a fine line of anti-competitive practices for years but have always managed to get away with it. I know they have been fined and had various punishments leveled at them but they have never made a loss to my knowledge and they still maintain a position of dominance in the application market by leveraging the fact that they produce the defacto OS that most people use. I just think that other companies also engage in similar practices but people make less of a fuss since they are not the pariah the MS have become.
In fact, common sense tells me that if I steal something, I have acquired it without expending my own resources, which seems a net benefit to me. Which piece of 'common sense' tells me that I shouldn't steal? Answer: The bit of common sense that say what you do to me I will doo back. If you steal something from me I might just take EVERYTHING from you.
Since when do Dell's terms and conditions pass for law? Remember "by opening this package you consent to our terms and conditions?" They don't. But neither does your opinion. I was actually hoping someone qualified could post a link detailing why the terms are invalid or quote a relevant piece of legal precedent either way. I know a great many compaies have unenforcable terms and conditions or disclaimers so was curious if this is or not?
If they were really concerned about the deficit, they would be spending a lot of that money on cleaners for coal plants, bigger nuclear plants, equipment for cleaning up their pollution. But they are not spending 1 penny on it. They are certainly spending money on improving their nuclear reactor technology as they are one of the few countries looking at investing in Pebble Bed Nuclear reactors. Check out this page and the section on china:
Why bother spending money on improving coal efficiency if you plan on phasing it out entirely? This would make them the world leaders in advanced, safe nuclear power generation.
Nobody is forcing people to work there, if the company wants to require employees be tagged with RFID there shouldn't be a problem with that because the potential employee has a choice. Only someone who has never had any trouble finding work would have an attitude like yours. For those of us who have been unemployed and desperate we understand that there are times you will accept any conditions if they come with a paycheck that will feed your family. The choice you mention is only applicable to those who can easily find alternative work, not everyone fits into that category.
Also note that once a few companies started down this route many more may have followed, in which case a time could arise in a few years where all low skill jobs required this sort of invasion of privacy. Maybe making it illegal early was the best way to prevent this sort of culture from arising.
How do you feel about game consoles and the companies that sell them?
Game consoles are sold on a similar business model. The price you pay for a game console in the shops is far below what it cost to manufacture. The company making the console then make that money up by adding a slice to the cost of each game. All consoles nowadays have a way of making sure that all games produces have to be licenced by the console manufacturer, usually this is in the form of a specialist storage medium (ie - proprietary cartridge design or disc format).
That is why MS went to such efforts to lock down the Xbox. Since it was effectively a subsidised PC they did want people to buy them and then not buy any Xbox games (ie - trash the OS and install linux / windows xp / whatever else).
I used the Xbox as an example but all consoles on the market operate on a similar business model as otherwise there launch costs would be alot higher.
In the UK people have been arrested for making bombs before they set them off! Thats because over here we do not have a consitution. So what we have instead are a whole gamut of laws which effectively make almost everything illegal, then we give the police force the responsibility to choose when they apply them and the Jury the reponsibilty of who they find guilty.
The jury is the ultimate check and balance ot whether a law is sane as they have a two fold responsibity:
1) Decide on guilt or innocence. 2) Decide whether the Law is just.
You don't actually have to sign anything to be bound by the terms and conditions of sale.
Just paying the money constitues an acceptance of all the terms and conditions of their standard contract regardless of whether you actually read them.
It clearly states that you are bound buy them unless you can prove you negotiated a seperate agreement. I would be very surprised if this is not legally enforcable but if anyone who has a legal background can tell me why they are not I would grateful for some links to the relevant case law. If you do not have links to a relevant law or precedent please do not bother spouting some unproveable / unqualified opinion.
I only just realised when reading your post I used to help admin a network setup in a similar manner.
We set it up like this because we had collision problems due to using very old, non switching hubs and being right on the limit of how many hubs (4 in a row) and users we could have. So it made sense to drop a linux router in the middle of the network and only allow traffic through the router that actually needed to get to the other side. The only upstream connection however was on one side of the router, this was also another linux router doing NAT translation. We could have used hubs with more ports but that would have pushed us over the 100m limit between any two hubs.
This network is actually still in place as it would cost quite alot to upgrade all the hubs to proper switches and they are also awkwardly placed in terms of access. It is certainly not an ideal network but we did build it unpaid 10 years ago with no real funding.
The idea was to enable an entire council estate (American translation = Housing Project) to have a cheap shared internet connection. Please bare in mind that this was in the days when the best home connection available was an ISDN line and the alternative was modem, phoneline and paying per minute you were connected. Back then we had over 100 people sharing the ISDN line for £5 per month each. Sure during peak times it was slow, but it was better than anything else available for the cost. And as it was always on if you did want to download anything huge you could just wait until 4am.
That network is still in place as some people still use it but now they share an ADSL line instead. It is still very low bandwidth but for people on a low income who are not likely to use it heavily anyway it is perfect.
Why would the geek work for free? If your Windows blows up, you don't expect anyone to show up and fix it for free, do you? Or was that remark one of those 'if you're downloading Linux, you're downloading communism' kind of references? I think he was implying that when the computer gets to a state where all that is available is the bash shell (ie - command line), then alot of people are going to be stuck and have to pay someone to come and fix it.
Although there are geeks out there who would come round and help you fix it for free. When I was first starting out using Linux I fucked up my system more times than I can remember. On one occasion I even managed to accidentally moved the/usr directory while logged in as root:) Only I did not know what I moved so was clueless when it came to fixing it.
Thankfully I had a friend (Thanks Pete, if your reading this get in touch) who had been using it a while and would come round and help me fix it. He never charged me, so I might feel inclined to help someone else out in the same manner if the situation ever arose. That is one of the joys of a community supported OS.
I studied Space Tech for a while so while this is still a guess I like to think it a fairly educated one:
In order for something to be acceptable to NASA for use in the space program it has to be very thoroughly tested. This means you could write a software emulator that did everything required, but then it would have to run flawlessly for 10 years in order to be approved for use. You have to remember that these computers can also send commands to the satellites, so if they crash and send an erroneous command out, then that command will be actioned by the satellite.
I know this is highly unlikely, but it is not impossible so why risk it when the result of that one command could be that we lose both satellites for ever.
There is a mantra when it comes to dealing with any computer system that is running a mission critical app:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I would suggest that anyone wanting to be sysadmin, learn this. There are times when it doesn't apply but that is usually when the benefit of change out way the risks. In this case what is the benefit of upgrading the system at our end?
The BSD license does permit use in proprietery code, but does not permit the removal of the copyright notice. This is a very important point that alot of other posters to this thread, and the previous Theo thread seem to be completely ignorant of. The BSD license might permit you to use the code in a closed source project, but you have to credit the original author and leave the license intact.
Once a piece of code has been released under a BSD license, and a few people have contributed patches which are also released under a BSD license it becomes very difficult to remove the BSD license as you need everybody's permission who has contributed something.
So before you contribute to this thread, go and read both licenses, otherwise you are just spouting on about something you know nothing about.
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But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM. The answer to this depends on where I am. Currently I am at work so I find this feature bloody useful as I use office alot and open a large number of different documents to view the contents or make small edits. When I am at home I would find this more annoying though as I spend less time opening Office documents.
I would bet that this is why it is always accused of being slower thet MS Word and this is one of the reasons I would have a hard time convincing anyone else to use Open Office over the MS version. Trying to explain that it was not a fair comparison would not really wash with alot of people (myself included) as they were not likely to understand why it worked the way it did and what was gained from doing it the way it does from a useability point of view.
Note though that I say maximum resolution of my monitor (1280 * 1024). Since this now also needs replacing (it's a CRT) my next card I want to run at 1920*1280 at least so it will look good on the 24" widescreen monitor I have an eye on. I also expect 50-60 fps at this resolution.
Also note that this is me exercising some restraint. If I was not exercising restraint I would buy 2 24" monitors as I used to run a dual monitor setup a few years ago and found I was more productive (I am a software developer).
First point is actually to whatever moron modded this as a Troll. Why?
Just because he asked a valid question that you do not want to answer does not make it a troll. If you can post something then piss off somewhere else which doesnt have a comments area, it just lets you rate news on how interesting it is to your narrow point of view.
My second point was to say that I will be very happy if ATI actually follow through with this. I used to buy ATI cards as they are usually slightly cheaper than NVidia's similar offerings. Then I got annoyed with the state of ATI support under linux and started looking at the NV cards.
When I discovered they tried to keep as much of the code in the driver constant between Linux and Windows I switched as this made sense and meant you got similar performance under both OS's. If a decent open source driver appears for ATI (As I am sure it will) then my next purchase will be a top of the range £300+ ATI card.
Cruise missiles are either in the hold if being transported as cargo, or in this case slung under the wing on pylons ready for launching at some poor schmuck.
We used to have B52's permanently flying above Iraq with a selection of cruise missiles armed and ready (but non-nuclear tipped) so that a commander on the ground can ask for a particular buidling to disappear and it will do so very quickly. The order is imediately relayed to a controller who programs the missile with the co-ordinates and then launches. Since the B52 was already in the air above the target zone with a number of these things on board the time from request to detonation is alot shorter than if they were launched from a ship in the Gulf.
The big difference in this case is that these were nuclear tipped so would have made a much bigger bang.
The big question to my mind though is how this happened by accident? Was this a training flight where there was never any intention of launching or was the plane about to go on a sortie but some mistake on the ground meant they got given the wrong payload and the plane was in the air before this was realised.
I suppose the other option is that it was reaction to a nuclear armed bomber taking off from Russia at the same time (They have resumed these flights again recently) and the pentagon not wanting to take any chances / make a point. Although if this is the case I would rather not think about it.
Also note that reading the code may give a valuable insight into the hardware it is meant to support and how to either base your future products on that hardware, or possibly design your future products such that code optimised for you competitors products will run well on your hardware but code optimised for your products will only run well on your products. Since both Nvidia and ATI have "friendly" games developers who already favour one company or the other this could give a substantial advantage.
Remember a few years ago when many games had the runs best on nvidia logo as soon as you launched them. I also seem to remember some strange shenanigans with regard to 3Dmark optimising their benchmarks to favour one card at around the same time although I cant remember which. I am also fairly sure that ATI are not above befriending a few games companies with free samples in order to make sure their games run slightly better on ATI hardware.
The fact is that the 3D card market is driven by people buying the latest tech to get the highest framerate in the latest hot title. Making sure that killer app ran slightly better on your product could translate into alot of extra sales for that company.
There is also the possibility that both teams of hardware designer have been reverse engineering competitors products and doing all these things for years, but open sourcing the drivers (and hence exact hardware specs) would reveal this to their customers. I know in the past John Carmack took issue with Nvidia for releasing a less advanced card with a higher model number but then tweaking the driver so that the new card appeared to be more advanced.
The fact is that we live in a capitalist system which encourages these sorts of tricks if you can get away with them. Microsoft has been walking a fine line of anti-competitive practices for years but have always managed to get away with it. I know they have been fined and had various punishments leveled at them but they have never made a loss to my knowledge and they still maintain a position of dominance in the application market by leveraging the fact that they produce the defacto OS that most people use. I just think that other companies also engage in similar practices but people make less of a fuss since they are not the pariah the MS have become.
You all joke about this but I can quite easily believe that the US government would kill plenty of innocent people just to keep their secrets secret.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
Here are some more links:
http://world-nuclear.blogspot.com/2006/02/chinese
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/pebble.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11080908/site/newswee
Why bother spending money on improving coal efficiency if you plan on phasing it out entirely? This would make them the world leaders in advanced, safe nuclear power generation.
Also note that once a few companies started down this route many more may have followed, in which case a time could arise in a few years where all low skill jobs required this sort of invasion of privacy. Maybe making it illegal early was the best way to prevent this sort of culture from arising.
How do you feel about game consoles and the companies that sell them?
Game consoles are sold on a similar business model. The price you pay for a game console in the shops is far below what it cost to manufacture. The company making the console then make that money up by adding a slice to the cost of each game. All consoles nowadays have a way of making sure that all games produces have to be licenced by the console manufacturer, usually this is in the form of a specialist storage medium (ie - proprietary cartridge design or disc format).
That is why MS went to such efforts to lock down the Xbox. Since it was effectively a subsidised PC they did want people to buy them and then not buy any Xbox games (ie - trash the OS and install linux / windows xp / whatever else).
I used the Xbox as an example but all consoles on the market operate on a similar business model as otherwise there launch costs would be alot higher.
The jury is the ultimate check and balance ot whether a law is sane as they have a two fold responsibity:
1) Decide on guilt or innocence.
2) Decide whether the Law is just.
Here is a link to wikipedia - jump down to the bit about Jury Equity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury
You don't actually have to sign anything to be bound by the terms and conditions of sale.
l icy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~section=012
Just paying the money constitues an acceptance of all the terms and conditions of their standard contract regardless of whether you actually read them.
I could not find any links detailing the Law on this but here is a link to Dell's Terms and Conditions of Sale:
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/po
It clearly states that you are bound buy them unless you can prove you negotiated a seperate agreement. I would be very surprised if this is not legally enforcable but if anyone who has a legal background can tell me why they are not I would grateful for some links to the relevant case law. If you do not have links to a relevant law or precedent please do not bother spouting some unproveable / unqualified opinion.
* Our propellers are more advanced than the other guy's.
They are. Not for long
I only just realised when reading your post I used to help admin a network setup in a similar manner.
We set it up like this because we had collision problems due to using very old, non switching hubs and being right on the limit of how many hubs (4 in a row) and users we could have. So it made sense to drop a linux router in the middle of the network and only allow traffic through the router that actually needed to get to the other side. The only upstream connection however was on one side of the router, this was also another linux router doing NAT translation. We could have used hubs with more ports but that would have pushed us over the 100m limit between any two hubs.
This network is actually still in place as it would cost quite alot to upgrade all the hubs to proper switches and they are also awkwardly placed in terms of access. It is certainly not an ideal network but we did build it unpaid 10 years ago with no real funding.
The idea was to enable an entire council estate (American translation = Housing Project) to have a cheap shared internet connection. Please bare in mind that this was in the days when the best home connection available was an ISDN line and the alternative was modem, phoneline and paying per minute you were connected. Back then we had over 100 people sharing the ISDN line for £5 per month each. Sure during peak times it was slow, but it was better than anything else available for the cost. And as it was always on if you did want to download anything huge you could just wait until 4am.
That network is still in place as some people still use it but now they share an ADSL line instead. It is still very low bandwidth but for people on a low income who are not likely to use it heavily anyway it is perfect.
I expect they probably have, but they will still keep the old two way link going for as long as possible.
Or was that remark one of those 'if you're downloading Linux, you're downloading communism' kind of references? I think he was implying that when the computer gets to a state where all that is available is the bash shell (ie - command line), then alot of people are going to be stuck and have to pay someone to come and fix it.
Although there are geeks out there who would come round and help you fix it for free. When I was first starting out using Linux I fucked up my system more times than I can remember. On one occasion I even managed to accidentally moved the
Thankfully I had a friend (Thanks Pete, if your reading this get in touch) who had been using it a while and would come round and help me fix it. He never charged me, so I might feel inclined to help someone else out in the same manner if the situation ever arose. That is one of the joys of a community supported OS.
I studied Space Tech for a while so while this is still a guess I like to think it a fairly educated one:
In order for something to be acceptable to NASA for use in the space program it has to be very thoroughly tested. This means you could write a software emulator that did everything required, but then it would have to run flawlessly for 10 years in order to be approved for use. You have to remember that these computers can also send commands to the satellites, so if they crash and send an erroneous command out, then that command will be actioned by the satellite.
I know this is highly unlikely, but it is not impossible so why risk it when the result of that one command could be that we lose both satellites for ever.
There is a mantra when it comes to dealing with any computer system that is running a mission critical app:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I would suggest that anyone wanting to be sysadmin, learn this. There are times when it doesn't apply but that is usually when the benefit of change out way the risks. In this case what is the benefit of upgrading the system at our end?
Once a piece of code has been released under a BSD license, and a few people have contributed patches which are also released under a BSD license it becomes very difficult to remove the BSD license as you need everybody's permission who has contributed something.
So before you contribute to this thread, go and read both licenses, otherwise you are just spouting on about something you know nothing about.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.ph
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.ph