and while ogg may be a technically superior format, the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's. It's just not going to happen.
No, they're not going to convert their mp3 collection. But if they're like me, they may start ripping new cds using ogg instead of mp3. Personally, I find the difference in sound quality between the two formats to be very noticable, especially with classical music rips (to the extent that before oggs came along I refused to rip any classical cds to mp3 because they sounded so crap, and only had a rock mp3 collection) And ripping a CD is so fast these days that it's not really much of an effort to re-rip your old mp3s (something which I'm gradually doing).
Anyway, the point is - what does it matter what the rest of the world does? This article is talking about searching/manipulating your own collection. For some of us, and especially the subset of geeks who read slashdot, vorbis tools would be very useful.
You missed this from the FAQ: Q: How will you know that I'm watching the adverts?
A: A Monthly update is automatically sent to Metronomy, confirming the number of ads shown to each household.
(and there's more stuff stating fairly clearly that you need to use at least 30 hrs a month, etc - presumably the written agreement stipulates this quite clearly. So don't think they won't be checking or that you can get around this just by saying "but your software doesn't work under Linux":)
You'd have to boot your PC into Windows for at least 30hrs / month, or one hour per day, when you were sleeping or at work for it to be OK. Considering you can get computers to boot and shutdown automatically this wouldn't be too hard to manage. But it's still not that great a deal anyway - the monitor is only a 15" CRT, there's no CD burner and it only comes with on-board graphics, so you'd still have to pay a fair bit extra for a usable system.
Digital cameras within the price range are similar to "compact cameras", and typically have limited modes and manual settings. Anyone can use a point-and-shoot camera, but a person who is interested in learning photography as a serious hobby will need something with more settings.
This used to be true, but with recent cameras (eg the Canon Powershot A70/A80) it's no longer the case. With the exception that you have to use the LCD display on the back as a viewfinder, you generally get aperture/shutter-priority as well as full manual controls, manual focus and shutter speeds from around 15 secs to > 1/1000 sec. Plus, when half pressing the shutter, you actually get a full preview of what the photo will look like, including exposure settings. You can even get information about what area the AF is using to focus on and histogram displays.
The other beauty of film is that you can always buy a film scanner and get digital files that are of much better quality than a digital camera of the same price.
Hmmm... Two quick points: (a) Scanning in even twenty negatives with a film scanner is such a long and painful process that I never want to do it again, and (b) Scanning negatives of 100 ASA film has never given me good resolution in terms of detail. Certainly not greater than a 3 megapixel digital camera pic. Maybe if you were using 64 ASA slide film, you'd get better results, but only then.
I'm currently ditching my (beautiful) Nikon FE-2 SLR for a digital camera - talk all you want to about how nice it is to have the "constraints" of film, but for me those constraints are exactly that: constraints.
Digital is lighter, cheaper and - best of all - you can see when you've cocked up.
-O3 probably won't help your performance in the first place, and will likely degrade it.
Yes, you're right: -O3 is simply -O2 with -finline-functions and -frename-registers, neither of which are likely to make much difference and -finline-functions could actually slow things down.
There's a fantastic freshmeat editorial from a year or two ago on all this here
I started out on SuSE LiveEval, I wanted to use AIM. Linux AIM didn't work right, gAIM wouldn't compile since I didn't have GCC, and GCC Binaries were 144 megs large.
Well, it doesn't sound as if you ever tried to give Linux a go - two hours mucking about with a bootable CD distro won't tell you anything about Linux.
If you really want to try Linux, make a 5 Gig partition and install a proper distro onto that - Redhat or Mandrake would probably be the most friendly to a newbie. Play around with it for a week or two, and then see what you think...
Re: ... regards a brand new VM subsystem as "stabl
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 1
You do this at the cost of valuable desktop real estate.
Um, no. Tabbed browsing *saves* desktop real estate. Think about it.
Mobile phone theft was such a problem that the police here in the UK were spending loads of effort trying to stop schoolkids being attacked for the mobile telephones they carried, and finally the manufacturers were forced to find a way of deactivating stolen phones, which finally meant that the problem lessened.
That's interesting - here in Australia I've never heard of such problems. (Of course there are thefts of mobile phones, but at about the same rates as wallets, credit cards, etc)
But about the iPod, I'd be replacing a $40 CD player with a $450 iPod, and that's just one more thing to think about before buying it. Also, the 6-hour battery life, the $50 battery replacement cost, the expense of external battery packs, plus them not being available in the UK, plus the possibility of problems getting it to work with linux, plus the inconvenience of getting firewire to work, plus the cost of buying a special AC adapter for each of the locations I'd frequently want to charge it... It just seems like every iPod accessory costs 50 dollars or more, where the equivalent accessory for a CD player would cost ten dollars.
I understand your argument about the cost, but a PDA is much smaller and more portable than a CD player! You can't stick a CD player in your pocket and walk around with it, but that's exactly what I do with my Palm. Plus a 256Mb SD card holds more than four hours of music: much better than a CD!
(For that matter, you could always by a Palm rather than an iPod - the battery life's no better but they come with a universal travel adaptor with attachments for all countries (very cute) and work better under linux than they do under Windows or Mac OS... and the Tungsten E (which is what I have) is much cheaper, too:)
Ogg is nice.. but all teh ogg heads out there knew damn well before they went and encoded anything out there that ogg was the black sheep of portables. There is not a lot of ogg support out there. Sorry. You knew that when you started.
I pointed this out much earlier in this article, but the only two music formats I've seen supported on the Palm Tungstens are mp3 and ogg (and Real's format if you're prepared to use their player) I've never seen WMA, AAC or anything else supported (although this is only looking at the most popular software).
I've often thought about encoding music in ogg, but have reasoned like you did that there wouldn't be any hardware support. Now that my Palm is my player, I really can find a use for ogg:)
(~400 CDs at high quality - over 2 weeks of music)
Planning on driving somewhere for two weeks straight, are we?
Let's see... that's 14 * 24 hours = 336 hours... Assuming a speed of 100 km/h, that's 33,600 kms without hearing the same song again, which is equivalent to driving nearly all the way around the earth at the equator (assuming you could drive on water...) Sure, I can see why you'd want that much music - I go on 33,600 km drives all the time:)
Hell, I doubt I've even got 50 music CDs - if you've got 400 you must be prepared to listen to a lot of crap!:)
That's one of my concerns about buying an iPod: do you really want to be walking around with something that fits neatly in a thief's pocket, and is worth #400 (slashdot currency symbols be damned)
Ever thought about how much a fancy new mobile phone is worth if you had to buy it outright? Probably at least as much as an iPod is the answer... and plenty of people carry those phones around in their pockets!
(Not to mention how much your credit card is worth - which is even smaller and lighter:)
The reason why WMA would be more useful is because more people use WMA.
Hmmm... funny, then, that the two popular mp3 players for Palm OS 5 (AeroPlayer and Pocket-tunes) both support Ogg files, but do not support WMA! Either there's licensing issues here, or nobody actually uses WMA (does anyone?? I've never known anyone who did, and a lot of my friends have large mp3 collections...)
For me, bibliographic software. Huge deal breaker for academic writers.
You do realise that Endnote 7 works with OOo (or at least, RTF) documents, don't you? Not as well as it does with Word documents, but as simple as using LyX. Of course, if you know about LyX and think the biliographic functions are superior, why on earth would you want to use OOo at all??
I agree though - there's nothing stopping OOo from having a bibtex library import function: bibtex is a simple format to parse. I guess the problem is that anyone who uses bibliographic databases and is computer-literate enough to know how to program is unlikely to ever use OOo anyway. (A few years ago I started writing a perl script to parse an OOo document for citation codes, parse a bibtex library for entries and rewrite the document with the correct citation format and a bibliography at the back. It's all pretty simple stuff to do. But I stopped halfway through when I realised I had better things to do with my time since I was never going to use OOo to write scientific papers anyway...)
The Vietnamese government has a problem with software piracy indeed, but they're trying to do something about it by encouraging open-source software, which is a perfectly legal (and human) way of producing and releasing software...
I just think it's so poetic - what a wonderful solution to software piracy that is completely the opposite of what Microsoft wants.
The big question is: will Microsoft do an astonishing backflip and say, "Nonono... we didn't really mind you pirating our software... " Because they'd otherwise have to praise a policy of adopting open-source software:)
Part of the reason there's only One Linux version to download is that those are huge monolithic products with big self-contained libraries and functionality. They soak up a huge memory footprint because of those features of their design.
So they link in all of glibc, do they?? Is that how they manage to be so compatible??:) Seriously, the fact that they contain their own libraries is neither here nor there - they're just toolkits - what I was talking about is the capability to run the binaries on any distro. And this is exactly what they do. And the reason this works is that glibc is backwards compatible.
Plus, the reason there is only the need for one OpenOffice and one Mozilla build for 'all of Linux' is that OpenOffice and Mozilla just won't run at all in any reasonable sense (without swap thrashing and glacial UI response)
Well... I was running Firebird on a Cyrix P150+ running Win95 and 40Mb of RAM the other day. It was faster than IE...:)
But this is besides the point. You can run old linux binaries on a modern linux system, probably the only requirement is that they were compiled using v 2.0 or greater of glibc. I've already given one example; another is that Redhat 6.1 was the last distro (IIRC) to include wvdial as a package, and for a long time I simply installed the 6.1 rpm quite happily on much later distros (Redhat, Mandrake, and even Crux linux!) because I didn't have the source code.
(Of course, if you're using RPM you'll probably get dependancy warnings, but in most cases it's safe to ignore them provided you have some form of the library required. Most things on linux are made to be backwards compatible...)
(And then, things aren't forwards compatible, but that's another story...)
I'll second Crux linux as a wonderful distro:) But it is something which will scare a lot of users away, as almost all functionality you have to add in yourself.
Vector Linux looks like a "halfway house" between the bloated nature of the mainstream distros, and the minimalism of Crux. This can only be a good thing...
With linux distro's, virtually every time a new version of the distro is released, you have to either get a newly built rpm (or other similar packaging system), or recompile from the sources..
Have you ever tried running old binaries on a new system?? I have binaries that I originally compiled under Redhat 6.1 that still work under my highly updated nominally-Mandrake-9.1 system. There is, in fact, a lot of backwards compatibility - you don't need to be constantly recompiling every time you update glibc (or, indeed, Xfree86). (At least, I never do, and it hasn't hurt me yet:)
Then have a think about things like Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc... did you notice the fact that there is only one linux version available for download?? Why? Simply because the binaries work on any reasonably modern system.
Booting off the install disk, typing "recover" (I think - check the help screen) and choosing the "re-install boot loader" should do the trick.
... or you could also have used Knoppix or similar, mounted your root partition, chrooted to it and run/sbin/lilo.
Or... since it was a new PC, you could even have re-installed the system, that wouldn't have taken long...
*shrug* Of course, it shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if you were really as experienced using linux as you claim to be I can't see why it should have caused too many problems - after all, installing Windows automatically re-writes the MBR so almost anyone who dual boots has had to reinstall lilo at some time or other.
I think every distro has its problems - just think of RedHat 7.0 with its buggy GCC - and Mandrake is not without them either. What really hurts with the LG CD-ROM issue is that it's not wasting people's time or sleep, but it's actually destroying a piece of hardware.
I have exactly the same problems with test7, combined with a huge slowdown in loading applications (OpenOffice 1.1.0 takes 20 seconds to load on my AthlonXP 2000+ system - it's crazy). Actually, I don't know whether the mp3 playback issue is a scheduler problem or an ALSA problem. But it all adds up to making test7 next to useless compared to 2.4, or even 2.5.73 which was the last release I tried.
I'm not a programmer, or I _would_ help. I'm an engineer. I need to use the product, not talk about it or write it. Put up or shut up. While you're at it, fix that bloat problem - thin is in.
Well, then, good for you. So don't use OOo - nobody's forcing you to. No reason to start thinking it's all one big insult directed at you...
Personally, I find OOo very useful and I'm extremely happy that it exists.
Same experience here - been using ReiserFS on both my / and/home partitions for over two years, with several power failures and crashes... and ReiserFS has never even blinked. No problems at all.
I was using it more to make a point about how much better the scheduler is with the Con's patches.
Fair enough - I'm not disputing that the scheduler is not vastly improved, only that you didn't need those improvements to successfully compile stuff in the background... The other examples you've given make more sense.
I was just ranting about how useful nice is, and yet how little use seems to be made of it...
With mozilla compiling in the background and vanilla test4, it's very hard to position my mouse pointer accurately on the screen while Mozilla is parsing a new page.
Hmmm... this is what "nice" is for. In my.bashrc I have the alias:
alias make='nice -n 19 make'
And I can happily compile mozilla (or anything else) while doing whatever else I like (short of playing action games, since there will be occasional tiny lags, and if you're using 100% CPU all the time there's not much point compiling in the background, anyway) - for "normal" tasks such as programming, word processing and graphics manipulation you'll never notice any difference.
Likewise I encode divx files at nice -n 19. It never ceases to amaze me how many long time users don't realise you can run tasks at lower priorities...
The patch you're talking about sounds impressive, but I can't really see why you'd need it for background compile jobs. And while I have a nice AthlonXP system now, until recently I was doing exactly the same things on a 500 MHz celeron and never had any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
and while ogg may be a technically superior format, the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's. It's just not going to happen.
No, they're not going to convert their mp3 collection. But if they're like me, they may start ripping new cds using ogg instead of mp3. Personally, I find the difference in sound quality between the two formats to be very noticable, especially with classical music rips (to the extent that before oggs came along I refused to rip any classical cds to mp3 because they sounded so crap, and only had a rock mp3 collection) And ripping a CD is so fast these days that it's not really much of an effort to re-rip your old mp3s (something which I'm gradually doing).
Anyway, the point is - what does it matter what the rest of the world does? This article is talking about searching/manipulating your own collection. For some of us, and especially the subset of geeks who read slashdot, vorbis tools would be very useful.
You missed this from the FAQ:
:)
Q: How will you know that I'm watching the adverts?
A: A Monthly update is automatically sent to Metronomy, confirming the number of ads shown to each household.
(and there's more stuff stating fairly clearly that you need to use at least 30 hrs a month, etc - presumably the written agreement stipulates this quite clearly. So don't think they won't be checking or that you can get around this just by saying "but your software doesn't work under Linux"
You'd have to boot your PC into Windows for at least 30hrs / month, or one hour per day, when you were sleeping or at work for it to be OK. Considering you can get computers to boot and shutdown automatically this wouldn't be too hard to manage. But it's still not that great a deal anyway - the monitor is only a 15" CRT, there's no CD burner and it only comes with on-board graphics, so you'd still have to pay a fair bit extra for a usable system.
Digital cameras within the price range are similar to "compact cameras", and typically have limited modes and manual settings. Anyone can use a point-and-shoot camera, but a person who is interested in learning photography as a serious hobby will need something with more settings.
This used to be true, but with recent cameras (eg the Canon Powershot A70/A80) it's no longer the case. With the exception that you have to use the LCD display on the back as a viewfinder, you generally get aperture/shutter-priority as well as full manual controls, manual focus and shutter speeds from around 15 secs to > 1/1000 sec. Plus, when half pressing the shutter, you actually get a full preview of what the photo will look like, including exposure settings. You can even get information about what area the AF is using to focus on and histogram displays.
The other beauty of film is that you can always buy a film scanner and get digital files that are of much better quality than a digital camera of the same price.
... Two quick points: (a) Scanning in even twenty negatives with a film scanner is such a long and painful process that I never want to do it again, and (b) Scanning negatives of 100 ASA film has never given me good resolution in terms of detail. Certainly not greater than a 3 megapixel digital camera pic. Maybe if you were using 64 ASA slide film, you'd get better results, but only then.
Hmmm
I'm currently ditching my (beautiful) Nikon FE-2 SLR for a digital camera - talk all you want to about how nice it is to have the "constraints" of film, but for me those constraints are exactly that: constraints.
Digital is lighter, cheaper and - best of all - you can see when you've cocked up.
Secondly, Open Office on Linux is not even half as good or useful as OOo on Windows
What on earth are you talking about?? Or were you just trying to troll?
Care to substantiate that statement?
-O3 probably won't help your performance in the first place, and will likely degrade it.
Yes, you're right: -O3 is simply -O2 with -finline-functions and -frename-registers, neither of which are likely to make much difference and -finline-functions could actually slow things down.
There's a fantastic freshmeat editorial from a year or two ago on all this here
I started out on SuSE LiveEval, I wanted to use AIM. Linux AIM didn't work right, gAIM wouldn't compile since I didn't have GCC, and GCC Binaries were 144 megs large.
...
Well, it doesn't sound as if you ever tried to give Linux a go - two hours mucking about with a bootable CD distro won't tell you anything about Linux.
If you really want to try Linux, make a 5 Gig partition and install a proper distro onto that - Redhat or Mandrake would probably be the most friendly to a newbie. Play around with it for a week or two, and then see what you think
You do this at the cost of valuable desktop real estate.
Um, no. Tabbed browsing *saves* desktop real estate. Think about it.
Mobile phone theft was such a problem that the police here in the UK were spending loads of effort trying to stop schoolkids being attacked for the mobile telephones they carried, and finally the manufacturers were forced to find a way of deactivating stolen phones, which finally meant that the problem lessened.
... and the Tungsten E (which is what I have) is much cheaper, too:)
That's interesting - here in Australia I've never heard of such problems. (Of course there are thefts of mobile phones, but at about the same rates as wallets, credit cards, etc)
But about the iPod, I'd be replacing a $40 CD player with a $450 iPod, and that's just one more thing to think about before buying it. Also, the 6-hour battery life, the $50 battery replacement cost, the expense of external battery packs, plus them not being available in the UK, plus the possibility of problems getting it to work with linux, plus the inconvenience of getting firewire to work, plus the cost of buying a special AC adapter for each of the locations I'd frequently want to charge it... It just seems like every iPod accessory costs 50 dollars or more, where the equivalent accessory for a CD player would cost ten dollars.
I understand your argument about the cost, but a PDA is much smaller and more portable than a CD player! You can't stick a CD player in your pocket and walk around with it, but that's exactly what I do with my Palm. Plus a 256Mb SD card holds more than four hours of music: much better than a CD!
(For that matter, you could always by a Palm rather than an iPod - the battery life's no better but they come with a universal travel adaptor with attachments for all countries (very cute) and work better under linux than they do under Windows or Mac OS
Ogg is nice.. but all teh ogg heads out there knew damn well before they went and encoded anything out there that ogg was the black sheep of portables. There is not a lot of ogg support out there. Sorry. You knew that when you started.
:)
I pointed this out much earlier in this article, but the only two music formats I've seen supported on the Palm Tungstens are mp3 and ogg (and Real's format if you're prepared to use their player) I've never seen WMA, AAC or anything else supported (although this is only looking at the most popular software).
I've often thought about encoding music in ogg, but have reasoned like you did that there wouldn't be any hardware support. Now that my Palm is my player, I really can find a use for ogg
(~400 CDs at high quality - over 2 weeks of music)
... that's 14 * 24 hours = 336 hours ... Assuming a speed of 100 km/h, that's 33,600 kms without hearing the same song again, which is equivalent to driving nearly all the way around the earth at the equator (assuming you could drive on water ...) Sure, I can see why you'd want that much music - I go on 33,600 km drives all the time :)
:)
Planning on driving somewhere for two weeks straight, are we?
Let's see
Hell, I doubt I've even got 50 music CDs - if you've got 400 you must be prepared to listen to a lot of crap!
That's one of my concerns about buying an iPod: do you really want to be walking around with something that fits neatly in a thief's pocket, and is worth #400 (slashdot currency symbols be damned)
... and plenty of people carry those phones around in their pockets!
:)
Ever thought about how much a fancy new mobile phone is worth if you had to buy it outright? Probably at least as much as an iPod is the answer
(Not to mention how much your credit card is worth - which is even smaller and lighter
The reason why WMA would be more useful is because more people use WMA.
... funny, then, that the two popular mp3 players for Palm OS 5 (AeroPlayer and Pocket-tunes) both support Ogg files, but do not support WMA! Either there's licensing issues here, or nobody actually uses WMA (does anyone?? I've never known anyone who did, and a lot of my friends have large mp3 collections ...)
Hmmm
For me, bibliographic software. Huge deal breaker for academic writers.
...)
You do realise that Endnote 7 works with OOo (or at least, RTF) documents, don't you? Not as well as it does with Word documents, but as simple as using LyX. Of course, if you know about LyX and think the biliographic functions are superior, why on earth would you want to use OOo at all??
I agree though - there's nothing stopping OOo from having a bibtex library import function: bibtex is a simple format to parse. I guess the problem is that anyone who uses bibliographic databases and is computer-literate enough to know how to program is unlikely to ever use OOo anyway. (A few years ago I started writing a perl script to parse an OOo document for citation codes, parse a bibtex library for entries and rewrite the document with the correct citation format and a bibliography at the back. It's all pretty simple stuff to do. But I stopped halfway through when I realised I had better things to do with my time since I was never going to use OOo to write scientific papers anyway
The Vietnamese government has a problem with software piracy indeed, but they're trying to do something about it by encouraging open-source software, which is a perfectly legal (and human) way of producing and releasing software...
... we didn't really mind you pirating our software ... " Because they'd otherwise have to praise a policy of adopting open-source software :)
I just think it's so poetic - what a wonderful solution to software piracy that is completely the opposite of what Microsoft wants.
The big question is: will Microsoft do an astonishing backflip and say, "Nonono
Part of the reason there's only One Linux version to download is that those are huge monolithic products with big self-contained libraries and functionality. They soak up a huge memory footprint because of those features of their design.
:) Seriously, the fact that they contain their own libraries is neither here nor there - they're just toolkits - what I was talking about is the capability to run the binaries on any distro. And this is exactly what they do. And the reason this works is that glibc is backwards compatible.
... I was running Firebird on a Cyrix P150+ running Win95 and 40Mb of RAM the other day. It was faster than IE ... :)
...)
...)
So they link in all of glibc, do they?? Is that how they manage to be so compatible??
Plus, the reason there is only the need for one OpenOffice and one Mozilla build for 'all of Linux' is that OpenOffice and Mozilla just won't run at all in any reasonable sense (without swap thrashing and glacial UI response)
Well
But this is besides the point. You can run old linux binaries on a modern linux system, probably the only requirement is that they were compiled using v 2.0 or greater of glibc. I've already given one example; another is that Redhat 6.1 was the last distro (IIRC) to include wvdial as a package, and for a long time I simply installed the 6.1 rpm quite happily on much later distros (Redhat, Mandrake, and even Crux linux!) because I didn't have the source code.
(Of course, if you're using RPM you'll probably get dependancy warnings, but in most cases it's safe to ignore them provided you have some form of the library required. Most things on linux are made to be backwards compatible
(And then, things aren't forwards compatible, but that's another story
I'll second Crux linux as a wonderful distro :) But it is something which will scare a lot of users away, as almost all functionality you have to add in yourself.
...
Vector Linux looks like a "halfway house" between the bloated nature of the mainstream distros, and the minimalism of Crux. This can only be a good thing
With linux distro's, virtually every time a new version of the distro is released, you have to either get a newly built rpm (or other similar packaging system), or recompile from the sources ..
:)
... did you notice the fact that there is only one linux version available for download?? Why? Simply because the binaries work on any reasonably modern system.
Have you ever tried running old binaries on a new system?? I have binaries that I originally compiled under Redhat 6.1 that still work under my highly updated nominally-Mandrake-9.1 system. There is, in fact, a lot of backwards compatibility - you don't need to be constantly recompiling every time you update glibc (or, indeed, Xfree86). (At least, I never do, and it hasn't hurt me yet
Then have a think about things like Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc
... or you could also have used Knoppix or similar, mounted your root partition, chrooted to it and run /sbin/lilo.
... since it was a new PC, you could even have re-installed the system, that wouldn't have taken long ...
Or
*shrug* Of course, it shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if you were really as experienced using linux as you claim to be I can't see why it should have caused too many problems - after all, installing Windows automatically re-writes the MBR so almost anyone who dual boots has had to reinstall lilo at some time or other.
I think every distro has its problems - just think of RedHat 7.0 with its buggy GCC - and Mandrake is not without them either. What really hurts with the LG CD-ROM issue is that it's not wasting people's time or sleep, but it's actually destroying a piece of hardware.
I have exactly the same problems with test7, combined with a huge slowdown in loading applications (OpenOffice 1.1.0 takes 20 seconds to load on my AthlonXP 2000+ system - it's crazy). Actually, I don't know whether the mp3 playback issue is a scheduler problem or an ALSA problem. But it all adds up to making test7 next to useless compared to 2.4, or even 2.5.73 which was the last release I tried.
I'm not a programmer, or I _would_ help. I'm an engineer. I need to use the product, not talk about it or write it. Put up or shut up. While you're at it, fix that bloat problem - thin is in.
...
Well, then, good for you. So don't use OOo - nobody's forcing you to. No reason to start thinking it's all one big insult directed at you
Personally, I find OOo very useful and I'm extremely happy that it exists.
Same experience here - been using ReiserFS on both my / and /home partitions for over two years, with several power failures and crashes ... and ReiserFS has never even blinked. No problems at all.
I was using it more to make a point about how much better the scheduler is with the Con's patches.
... The other examples you've given make more sense.
...
Fair enough - I'm not disputing that the scheduler is not vastly improved, only that you didn't need those improvements to successfully compile stuff in the background
I was just ranting about how useful nice is, and yet how little use seems to be made of it
With mozilla compiling in the background and vanilla test4, it's very hard to position my mouse pointer accurately on the screen while Mozilla is parsing a new page.
... this is what "nice" is for. .bashrc I have the alias:
...
Hmmm
In my
alias make='nice -n 19 make'
And I can happily compile mozilla (or anything else) while doing whatever else I like (short of playing action games, since there will be occasional tiny lags, and if you're using 100% CPU all the time there's not much point compiling in the background, anyway) - for "normal" tasks such as programming, word processing and graphics manipulation you'll never notice any difference.
Likewise I encode divx files at nice -n 19. It never ceases to amaze me how many long time users don't realise you can run tasks at lower priorities
The patch you're talking about sounds impressive, but I can't really see why you'd need it for background compile jobs. And while I have a nice AthlonXP system now, until recently I was doing exactly the same things on a 500 MHz celeron and never had any problems.
Now it just refuses to boot... Something about hal.dll being corrupt.
...
..."
oh no
"Boot up my computer please, HAL."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that