It's the Intel implementation of the ARM architecture, originally produced by Acorn Computers, and used in a lot of first-generation PDAs. The XScale clocks faster, but there are persistent rumours that it runs slower per MHz than the StrongARM. Anyone have any hard info on this?
Re:self cleaning windows
on
Lotus Nanotech
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· Score: 2, Informative
Until the coating half wears off and then you have to wash the entire skyscaper with tetrachlorowhatever to get the residue off. Products like this for glass already exist. Tried them on my car. Once.
> I remember reading somewhere about sweden switching from driving on the left to the right side... From what I heard the switchover was pretty painless.
That's true (well, it was somewhere in Scandanavia), but I've driven across Sweden, and there are not a lot of roads big enough for two cars, and even less people. The UK is unlikely ever to change, because 60 million people have cars with steering wheels on the wrong side, and just changing the signposts and the motorway intersections would cost a prohibitive amount. By analogy, hanging OS is easy if you have no data and no users...
...because, although it is installed, we don't use it at present, so fixing it didn't seem like a priority. Also, the Cobalt patch was incompatible with our recompiled Apache setup, and Cobalt still hadn't released the source code last time I looked. (I'm sure this isn't right wrt open source licencing, but what are we going to do, sue?) So, if you probed our machine, we are in the 'security risk' list, but I don't think we should be.
> the Japanese government is considering abandoning Microsft Windows
I struggle with the idea of a whole country, or even a whole administration, changing OS at midnight one Saturday. Surely this sort of thing is going to happen one department at a time, and, probably, one office at a time in a lot of cases. Most government departments have a significant amount of bespoke software that would need tweaking, if not rewriting. Even if the decision was taken on a nationwide basis, I would expect the changeover to take at least the lifetime of the average corporate PC, ie 2-4 years.
While Linux might be wonderful for a lot of purposes, I can't see all the government graphic designers being thrilled with the current choice of Linux frame-based DTP packages, for example. So you are going to have Windows (and, probably) Mac ghettos for a long long time.
And I think we can assume that the security people at least would like to be able to run all the programs the people they are spying on can run...
In the UK I think it's April 4th, or maybe 5th, and, apparently, it's nine months before Xmas, ie the conception of Christ, which was a big festival at some point in church history.
I always hate the bit in the movies when the bad guy gets what's coming to him. Why don't we organise a whip-round to show Ole Bill that there are no hard feelings, and maybe he wll be so touched that he will go open source and let us run VB?
Which is exactly what France Télécom did to introduce the Minitel. They gave away the terminals and charged for the services. The Internet in France still hasn't managed to do better in terms of market penetration.
Because otherwise economic forces would encourage people with marketable names to have a disproportionate number of children, making phone books of the future more difficult to hash efficiently.
Although, in terms of browser compliance, IE is not much worse than the alternatives, commercial and open source, and significantly better in some cases. See, for example, the decidedly odd way that Netscape/Mozilla handle table widths, and compliance with CSS standards.
So just to get this straight, next time I want to sort some data from a text file and output it, instead of using Perl, I should carve the algorithm into a block of silicon with a chisel instead? Good abstraction is good, because it lets people ship reliable products quickly. Bad abstraction is bad, but not as bad as bad C programming with pointers. And the 'knowing how it works' argument for low-level is generally spurious, because of emergent complexity: even if you know what every line of code in the Linux kernel does, predicting how a network of 100 LInux boxes will perform when running a particular mix of applications, for example, is impossible in practice.
> Nobody seems to complain as much about reinventing the wheel, when the wheel is free, no matter how useless it is.
Hmm, FAQ says not to say 'me too'... But AntipodesTroll is right, aren't we kidding ourselves a bit here? A lot of open source software is basically reverse engineering (albeit often at a fairly high level) of a successful commercial idea that has been developed with corporate money. Open Office may be open, but the development path is largely defined indirectly by MS. Ghostscript is great precisely because, in terms of functionality, it does exactly the same job as a proprietary PS interpreter. And isn't Linux, and, even more so, BSD, essentially a clone of a successful non-MS OS?
Open source coding may be original, slick, efficient, cool, portable or whatever, but how many of the user-level applications do something genuinely new, how many think outside the (essentially MS but a bit Berkeley-defined) box? Looking around my system, the only candidates that spring to mind are Emacs and Apache:-)
Sure you can, it's a free world, it's just that some of us are waiting for a 400MHz XScale RISC OS machine to replace the existing 206MHz StrongARM models. If the new one is going to be slower, I'll stop saving my beer money...
> My old Tadpole laptop sure could have used this.
I think the type of RISC processor might have something to do with the power consumption. ARM has always concentrated on frugal at the expense of fast.
That's right, and then we could optimize seek times by putting all the useful information at the near end of the strip. You can't do that with a disc. I really think we are onto something here...
Stretching a floppy disc into a long strip and wrapping it around a spindle. You must be able to store much more data than on a normal floppy. Where can I get one for my PC?
Another excuse for lazy webmasters
on
Web Page Entanglement
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· Score: 2, Informative
I am typing this in my French cybercafe, which has 10 linux terminals on a broadband connection and an ageing Minitel (1200/75 baud, 9" monochrome screen, Cornflakes packet keyboard...). Scary thing is, to find a specific (and reliable) bit of information, it is often faster to use the Minitel. One of the main reasons is that the Minitel is structured in a way that is relatively intuitive for most people.
Tracking which paths people follow is very clever, but I can't help thinking that it would be better if website designers put more effort into their navigation aids, link pages, and - gasp - maybe listened to their visitors a bit more.
The real genius of the Minitel is that it got thin client technology into millions of French homes long before anyone in France or the USA had heard of the Internet, because it is as easy to use as a telephone. The Internet has a long way to go on that score, and I don't think being able to see how everyone else gets lost is going to help in this respect.
I'm sure you're right. What I can't work out is how this ties up with the slashdot effect, ie why any site referred to falls over if no-one actually looks at the articles. Maybe everyone just clicks on the link out of malice...
If an infinite number of bloggers write an infinite number of postings, and a search engine cross-references them all, does this give us anything more than Word Salad? If the site wasn't broken I'm curious enough to try it, but I'm sceptical. Most blogs are (possibly) interesting if you know the people: otherwise, they are about as thrilling as someone else's holiday snaps. And the most used category is going to be me me me...
Also, newsy weblogs such as/. end up being cross-referenced anyway, because sooner or later someone posts a 'hey have you seen what they are saying on...' message.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Starship Command run Open Source? How about the Klingons? I think we need to know who we should be rooting for.
It's pretty good in rural France. I thought it was common knowledge that the US cellphone system was bad, but apparently not, at least in the US...
It's the Intel implementation of the ARM architecture, originally produced by Acorn Computers, and used in a lot of first-generation PDAs. The XScale clocks faster, but there are persistent rumours that it runs slower per MHz than the StrongARM. Anyone have any hard info on this?
Until the coating half wears off and then you have to wash the entire skyscaper with tetrachlorowhatever to get the residue off. Products like this for glass already exist. Tried them on my car. Once.
How many /.ers clean their shoes anyway?
> I remember reading somewhere about sweden switching from driving on the left to the right side ... From what I heard the switchover was pretty painless.
That's true (well, it was somewhere in Scandanavia), but I've driven across Sweden, and there are not a lot of roads big enough for two cars, and even less people. The UK is unlikely ever to change, because 60 million people have cars with steering wheels on the wrong side, and just changing the signposts and the motorway intersections would cost a prohibitive amount. By analogy, hanging OS is easy if you have no data and no users...
We have some logistical problems with the virtual donuts because they won't fit through the ventilation grill on the modem.
...because, although it is installed, we don't use it at present, so fixing it didn't seem like a priority. Also, the Cobalt patch was incompatible with our recompiled Apache setup, and Cobalt still hadn't released the source code last time I looked. (I'm sure this isn't right wrt open source licencing, but what are we going to do, sue?) So, if you probed our machine, we are in the 'security risk' list, but I don't think we should be.
If webmail cost money, wouldn't it discourage people from creating 5,000 addresses a day? Or provide some money to pay for the countermeasures?
> the Japanese government is considering abandoning Microsft Windows
I struggle with the idea of a whole country, or even a whole administration, changing OS at midnight one Saturday. Surely this sort of thing is going to happen one department at a time, and, probably, one office at a time in a lot of cases. Most government departments have a significant amount of bespoke software that would need tweaking, if not rewriting. Even if the decision was taken on a nationwide basis, I would expect the changeover to take at least the lifetime of the average corporate PC, ie 2-4 years.
While Linux might be wonderful for a lot of purposes, I can't see all the government graphic designers being thrilled with the current choice of Linux frame-based DTP packages, for example. So you are going to have Windows (and, probably) Mac ghettos for a long long time.
And I think we can assume that the security people at least would like to be able to run all the programs the people they are spying on can run...
In the UK I think it's April 4th, or maybe 5th, and, apparently, it's nine months before Xmas, ie the conception of Christ, which was a big festival at some point in church history.
I always hate the bit in the movies when the bad guy gets what's coming to him. Why don't we organise a whip-round to show Ole Bill that there are no hard feelings, and maybe he wll be so touched that he will go open source and let us run VB?
Which is exactly what France Télécom did to introduce the Minitel. They gave away the terminals and charged for the services. The Internet in France still hasn't managed to do better in terms of market penetration.
Because otherwise economic forces would encourage people with marketable names to have a disproportionate number of children, making phone books of the future more difficult to hash efficiently.
Although, in terms of browser compliance, IE is not much worse than the alternatives, commercial and open source, and significantly better in some cases. See, for example, the decidedly odd way that Netscape/Mozilla handle table widths, and compliance with CSS standards.
So just to get this straight, next time I want to sort some data from a text file and output it, instead of using Perl, I should carve the algorithm into a block of silicon with a chisel instead? Good abstraction is good, because it lets people ship reliable products quickly. Bad abstraction is bad, but not as bad as bad C programming with pointers. And the 'knowing how it works' argument for low-level is generally spurious, because of emergent complexity: even if you know what every line of code in the Linux kernel does, predicting how a network of 100 LInux boxes will perform when running a particular mix of applications, for example, is impossible in practice.
> Nobody seems to complain as much about reinventing the wheel, when the wheel is free, no matter how useless it is.
Hmm, FAQ says not to say 'me too'... But AntipodesTroll is right, aren't we kidding ourselves a bit here? A lot of open source software is basically reverse engineering (albeit often at a fairly high level) of a successful commercial idea that has been developed with corporate money. Open Office may be open, but the development path is largely defined indirectly by MS. Ghostscript is great precisely because, in terms of functionality, it does exactly the same job as a proprietary PS interpreter. And isn't Linux, and, even more so, BSD, essentially a clone of a successful non-MS OS?
Open source coding may be original, slick, efficient, cool, portable or whatever, but how many of the user-level applications do something genuinely new, how many think outside the (essentially MS but a bit Berkeley-defined) box? Looking around my system, the only candidates that spring to mind are Emacs and Apache :-)
Sure you can, it's a free world, it's just that some of us are waiting for a 400MHz XScale RISC OS machine to replace the existing 206MHz StrongARM models. If the new one is going to be slower, I'll stop saving my beer money...
Do you have a source for this theory?
> My old Tadpole laptop sure could have used this.
I think the type of RISC processor might have something to do with the power consumption. ARM has always concentrated on frugal at the expense of fast.
That's right, and then we could optimize seek times by putting all the useful information at the near end of the strip. You can't do that with a disc. I really think we are onto something here...
Stretching a floppy disc into a long strip and wrapping it around a spindle. You must be able to store much more data than on a normal floppy. Where can I get one for my PC?
I am typing this in my French cybercafe, which has 10 linux terminals on a broadband connection and an ageing Minitel (1200/75 baud, 9" monochrome screen, Cornflakes packet keyboard...). Scary thing is, to find a specific (and reliable) bit of information, it is often faster to use the Minitel. One of the main reasons is that the Minitel is structured in a way that is relatively intuitive for most people.
Tracking which paths people follow is very clever, but I can't help thinking that it would be better if website designers put more effort into their navigation aids, link pages, and - gasp - maybe listened to their visitors a bit more.
The real genius of the Minitel is that it got thin client technology into millions of French homes long before anyone in France or the USA had heard of the Internet, because it is as easy to use as a telephone. The Internet has a long way to go on that score, and I don't think being able to see how everyone else gets lost is going to help in this respect.
I'm sure you're right. What I can't work out is how this ties up with the slashdot effect, ie why any site referred to falls over if no-one actually looks at the articles. Maybe everyone just clicks on the link out of malice...
If an infinite number of bloggers write an infinite number of postings, and a search engine cross-references them all, does this give us anything more than Word Salad? If the site wasn't broken I'm curious enough to try it, but I'm sceptical. Most blogs are (possibly) interesting if you know the people: otherwise, they are about as thrilling as someone else's holiday snaps. And the most used category is going to be me me me...
Also, newsy weblogs such as /. end up being cross-referenced anyway, because sooner or later someone posts a 'hey have you seen what they are saying on...' message.