This is an excellent example of why Linux is not being adopted by the masses.
Linux has the best hardware support for mass market machines of any non windows OS. And frankly, it has better out of the box support than windows.
The problem is not any more solvable than it already is, in other words, it isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one - MS can get away with developing almost no drivers because market pressure ensures that the drivers get written by hardware vendors.
Funny, how silent the Linux kiddies become when substantive discussion is afoot.
Silence is common amongst all fanboys when real problems are cited. But this is a troll. The problem is not substantially solvable.
The real question I have is, what are the advantages, in this case, of moving to Linux. Linux has become as strong as it has by being dedicated to practical solutions, not ideological ones. The best one I can see is that the licences for Windows are signifigantly higher than the $5 they are charging their customers. In that case a slight increase cost of hardware is acceptable.
Lucent modems are reasonably cheap, and the chipset has drivers (shipped with Linspire, back when it was Lindows). Also, Lucent is one of the better performing Winmodems (although my experience here is with the windows driver, so your milage may vary). If slight increases in hardware cost are acceptable, the Lucent driver is stable under Linux, and ships in serveral major distributions.
The replacement has to be roughly as performant as BK, if possible (so far, not so much), offer the distributed SCM model (several available tools) and hopefully have a stable release (less so).
Michael Bay is a slick technician, but not the right age for fandom. A Transformers movie isn't really a place for an auteur to provide vision, so it comes down to a good script and a willingness for everyone involved to have a good time.
yellowTab has a story under which they have gained access to BeOS code (legally) prior to the Palm deal. Zeta = BeOS + yellowTab code + some Haiku code
Probably because this patent is meant to do stuff like figure out information about people who aren't Amazon users.
For example, you buy an anniversary gift same time every year, Amazon figures out that you're wife is such and such and age, in such and such a demographic and your anniversarry is at such and such a time, and she likes pink.
Next year Amazon reminds you that you have an anniversarry coming up, and that this pink dress in your wifes size is on sale. And you'd get it cheaper to preorder now.
See? You don't have to manually enter any data, Amazon does the work. It'll figure out when you have children, how old they are, what gender they are, and could concievably start suggesting gifts to buy for your kid's best friend's birthday . . . all without you doing anything that what you are already doing.
Is there an "official" body for sectioning off the moon? How does all that work?
Sure, any country with enough balls and explosives can stick a flag there, but, unlike terrestrial land, I doubt that other countries take that as a solid stake of ownership.
If there isn't an official body, what happens when, say, Japan decides to plant themselves in some choice piece of real estate, like the lunar equator, or wherever in lunar geography is best for launching rockets for Earth? That's a pretty easy to imagine situation, and it would put the Japanese (or the Russians, or the US, or whoever) in a pretty solid dominating position.
If the current trend of trailer being slightly better than the movie, and the movie being slightly better than it's predecessor continues, then we might have a movie that I would rent.
Nothing wrong with crap at the Cannes of course - they don't get to see your film first. It'll just get panned.
Did you miss the part where he said "not distracted".
Here is a game you can play. Find and empty white room, with a single empty desk and an uncomfortable chair. Take your laptop, and try to get some work done there.
Your brain will look for anything to ramp up the level of stimulus. And that doesn't mean your work. It means stuff like feeling compelled to spend three hours customizing the font and colors on your laptop screen. Or checking your email every thirty seconds.
Is it a crime to, say, play music while you work? This guy is just looking for the equivalent. Happy employees are better employees.
The XAA sucks sweaty donkey ballsack. KAA (or it's successor) needs to be firmly in place, with solid proof that it works (software implementation) before vendors are going to write drivers for it.
Getting the vendors to open up specs, or to write OSS drivers themselves is just gonna get you blue in the face, and besides, it is pretty orthogonal to actual technological growth.
Only programmers can do this work, any consumer or advocate can push to have specs opened up. How many GPU manufacturors have you contact this week?
The niche for Centos and Whitebox is pretty small, but real. It's not enough to have a good support contract, there is also the faith that a good support contract is most profitable if you ship a product that rarely has failure.
If what you need is not nine nines of availability, but maybe seven and a half, Whitebox is for you. Can't afford a support contract, but want an enterprise proven stable OS? Then Whitebox and Centos are currently as close as you come.
Until OpenSolaris comes out.
Re:Arbitrary resolution and refresh rate
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
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· Score: 1
I'll answer this, just FYI, though you probably won't actually see it.
The problem is the refresh rate of your Video Card. Since X.org has little in the way of card specs, the result is that we have to do stuff like ask the BIOS what modes it can set the card to. The BIOS rarely has all the resolutions and refresh rates that the card can handle, but since we don't know which registers to twiddle and bits to flip, we have to ask the BIOS to do all the work. We simply cannot make the card do any other resolutions in this case, no ifs ands or buts.
Umm, I haven't read Olivier's interview yet, but as a minor Xfce developer I can say that the project does the opposite of ignore fd.o. In fact, during the 4.0 development process, Xfce was ahead of Gnome in it's implementation. There was even some talk of thinking of Xfce as a reference implementation of a desktop built to fully utilize the standard.
fd.o is gaining momentum. I think the problem with fd.o is that it's low barrier to entry means that people want to standardize _everything_ almost to the point that no innovation can occur.
But XDND? The icon's spec? The MIME spec? Xsettings?.desktop files? All pretty major fd.o accomplishments, all implemented by the 4 major OS Desktop Environments (KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Rox). In fact, the MIME spec is pretty facinating in that it's a case of an extremely minor player in the OS desktop, Rox, was doing one thing better than anyone else, and saw pretty quick adoption on all sides essentially just by presenting what they were already doing as a proposed standard.
Sitting here on the Linux side of the fence, and as a part time Open Source developer, I can tell you the things I admire about Windows, both as a platform for development and as a workstation or server. Specifically, the painstakingly preserved backwards compatibility, and the pervasive integration of system are the envy of anyone who has had to use or develop for a wide range of Linux distributions.
What I don't see is the other side - specifically, what does Microsoft see in Linux? What does Linux offer that Windows does not, and what does Linux offer that Windows doesn't do as well, from a Microsoft point of view? Just as important, where is Microsoft headed to close those gaps?
While I would love to be one of the many leaping into the air, clicking their heels together, and saying "there is no bitch like Fiorina" I have begun to suspect that, in fact, there might be.
Who will replace her? Fiorina may have turned HP into Compaq, but they are still profitable, and under Fiorina's reign would be for some time. If she's been ousted, I somehow doubt she would be replaced by a innovative leader who would return the spirit of creation to the company. I fear it's more like "If we don't bother making even affordable shitty products we can cut this pie a little larger, and squeeze a little more blood from this stone".
I suspect that either this or RAV was for the definitions. This is the second AV company MS has picked up in the last 6 months, and integrating those codebases is awfully silly.
Unless MS wasn't to market their code to the Unix server market which seems unlikely, this is probably just a case of MS using it's money to squirt out a reasonable product in the least amount of time.
Virus definions and AV engines are pretty orthogonal, so MS can just buy two competeing companies and integrate their strengths. Voila, instant solid market presense.
This is great news. Slack is the most important of the one man distros, and it's always a worry that something might make Pat (and Slack, by extension) topple and fall.
But this doesn't seem to be a real worry. Pat's dropped Gnome out of the core distro, which is really better for everyone - Gnome eats up huge amounts of Pat's energy, and Slack has been an Xless or KDE centric distro for a while now. Dropline Gnome is pretty sweet, so even after Gnome was included in Slack, most users I know used Dropline anyway.
Pat's made it clear that he has made plans for Slack to continue in his absence should anything happen to him, so no need to migrate my desktop just yet, and in light of Pat's recent illness the Slack community has really backed him up - and I also like seeing the third party packagers for Slack get included in the distro. It's nice seeing the Slack community gel over the recent trauma.
All in all, Slack seems as healthy as ever, even if of late, Pat hasn't been
Well, there is some question about that. My impression has always been that the forces of MS programmers were focused on OS/2 the most profitable enterprise in their relationship with IBM, a relationship that had been key to all of MS's previous successes.
If a some talent coder working his butt off for something he found interesting hadn't come along, things would be different, how different we can argue.
I find the "Someone else would have" arguments irritating - what if Linus hadn't hacked out Linux. Would someone else have written a Unix like OS. Duh, the BSD's were already around, Minix was prevelant, and the GNU project was already on their way to writing a kernel. Does that mean the world would have been the same? Duh again
There is not FUD. Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt? He didn't say a damn thing against Linux, and even argues that the business model which pushed IBM to invest in Linux (and which was partially caused by Linux) would still exist. They'd just open up OS/2 instead of porting OS/2 code (and AIX code, since those code bases have intermingled) to Linux.
It's not unreasonable. OS/2 already has a strong presense in enterprise workstations, and that's a strong consulting market. A stronger OS/2 very possibly might have kept IBM (and only IBM mind you) out of the Linux game.
Stop yelling just because someone said something you didn't understand.
Supplanting Google isn't even hard, relatively speaking. Just be better - total cost of migrating from Google to another search engine approaches nill.
The question, of course, is can MS supplant Google? I doubt it. The reasons:
* Microsoft can't pull a MS Works or similar trick - namely they can't undersell on a poorer product until it hits market saturation
* They can't use proprietary API's or file formats for lock in
* They can't bundle it with their OS
* They can bundle it with their other web services, but when Google trashed Yahoo! many moons ago, it was made clear that superior search engine beats stack of web services.
* MS has no skill making a successful web service. Hotmail and MSNBC are strategic grabs of other services or content (anyone have a counterexample?).
* MS does not seem to have a corporate philosophy that would easily lend itself to Google type ads, which are the only search engine ads I have ever been lulled by. How will MS make a profit?
Of course one has to wonder why they entered the search engine market anyway. I suspect it is simply because it's cool, and much though you may loath them you've got to get MS that. They go where it's cool, even if it's not profitable all the time - they can afford it. Of course, once they are king of a market, they are ruthless about squeezing the rock for all it's water . . .
You know, I suspect you are a troll, but I'm not getting it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but really, what are you taking a stab at?
Okay, maybe I see your point about the memory managemenet, assuming that your one line comment refers to Linux's tendency to overcommit on memory. But are you really saying that?
As a troll, your composition is muddled, and inconsistent. If this is in fact a parody the current America administration, could you give us some additional hints? Some context? A picture of Bush with the One Ring?
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This is an excellent example of why Linux is not being adopted by the masses.
Linux has the best hardware support for mass market machines of any non windows OS. And frankly, it has better out of the box support than windows.
The problem is not any more solvable than it already is, in other words, it isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one - MS can get away with developing almost no drivers because market pressure ensures that the drivers get written by hardware vendors.
Funny, how silent the Linux kiddies become when substantive discussion is afoot.
Silence is common amongst all fanboys when real problems are cited. But this is a troll. The problem is not substantially solvable.
The real question I have is, what are the advantages, in this case, of moving to Linux. Linux has become as strong as it has by being dedicated to practical solutions, not ideological ones. The best one I can see is that the licences for Windows are signifigantly higher than the $5 they are charging their customers. In that case a slight increase cost of hardware is acceptable.
Lucent modems are reasonably cheap, and the chipset has drivers (shipped with Linspire, back when it was Lindows). Also, Lucent is one of the better performing Winmodems (although my experience here is with the windows driver, so your milage may vary). If slight increases in hardware cost are acceptable, the Lucent driver is stable under Linux, and ships in serveral major distributions.
The replacement has to be roughly as performant as BK, if possible (so far, not so much), offer the distributed SCM model (several available tools) and hopefully have a stable release (less so).
http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html
This is an explanation by the SVN team to the world why they themselves would never use SVN to manage the linux kernel.
I'm opposed to this.
I would like to be free to whack the USPTO upside the head, without IP encumbrance.
Michael Bay is a slick technician, but not the right age for fandom. A Transformers movie isn't really a place for an auteur to provide vision, so it comes down to a good script and a willingness for everyone involved to have a good time.
I give it a 50-50 chance
yellowTab has a story under which they have gained access to BeOS code (legally) prior to the Palm deal. Zeta = BeOS + yellowTab code + some Haiku code
IIRC the use of the term "Swap" is incorrect in the Linux world too. Linux sends pages to virtual memory, not swapping out whole apps.
In fact, is there any major OS that still swaps?
Anybody got a handy chaos theorist? Anybody? Seriously, I need a chaos theorist, oily hair, glasses, fuzzy math skills, preferably debauched.
Alternatively do any of you know anything about UNIX systems?
Probably because this patent is meant to do stuff like figure out information about people who aren't Amazon users.
For example, you buy an anniversary gift same time every year, Amazon figures out that you're wife is such and such and age, in such and such a demographic and your anniversarry is at such and such a time, and she likes pink.
Next year Amazon reminds you that you have an anniversarry coming up, and that this pink dress in your wifes size is on sale. And you'd get it cheaper to preorder now.
See? You don't have to manually enter any data, Amazon does the work. It'll figure out when you have children, how old they are, what gender they are, and could concievably start suggesting gifts to buy for your kid's best friend's birthday . . . all without you doing anything that what you are already doing.
Is there an "official" body for sectioning off the moon? How does all that work?
Sure, any country with enough balls and explosives can stick a flag there, but, unlike terrestrial land, I doubt that other countries take that as a solid stake of ownership.
If there isn't an official body, what happens when, say, Japan decides to plant themselves in some choice piece of real estate, like the lunar equator, or wherever in lunar geography is best for launching rockets for Earth? That's a pretty easy to imagine situation, and it would put the Japanese (or the Russians, or the US, or whoever) in a pretty solid dominating position.
This not been thought of before?
If the current trend of trailer being slightly better than the movie, and the movie being slightly better than it's predecessor continues, then we might have a movie that I would rent.
Nothing wrong with crap at the Cannes of course - they don't get to see your film first. It'll just get panned.
Did you miss the part where he said "not distracted".
Here is a game you can play. Find and empty white room, with a single empty desk and an uncomfortable chair. Take your laptop, and try to get some work done there.
Your brain will look for anything to ramp up the level of stimulus. And that doesn't mean your work. It means stuff like feeling compelled to spend three hours customizing the font and colors on your laptop screen. Or checking your email every thirty seconds.
Is it a crime to, say, play music while you work? This guy is just looking for the equivalent. Happy employees are better employees.
Oh - wait a sec. Do you work for EA?
No clevage? Then what's the point?
No.
The XAA sucks sweaty donkey ballsack. KAA (or it's successor) needs to be firmly in place, with solid proof that it works (software implementation) before vendors are going to write drivers for it.
Getting the vendors to open up specs, or to write OSS drivers themselves is just gonna get you blue in the face, and besides, it is pretty orthogonal to actual technological growth.
Only programmers can do this work, any consumer or advocate can push to have specs opened up. How many GPU manufacturors have you contact this week?
The niche for Centos and Whitebox is pretty small, but real. It's not enough to have a good support contract, there is also the faith that a good support contract is most profitable if you ship a product that rarely has failure. If what you need is not nine nines of availability, but maybe seven and a half, Whitebox is for you. Can't afford a support contract, but want an enterprise proven stable OS? Then Whitebox and Centos are currently as close as you come. Until OpenSolaris comes out.
I'll answer this, just FYI, though you probably won't actually see it.
The problem is the refresh rate of your Video Card. Since X.org has little in the way of card specs, the result is that we have to do stuff like ask the BIOS what modes it can set the card to. The BIOS rarely has all the resolutions and refresh rates that the card can handle, but since we don't know which registers to twiddle and bits to flip, we have to ask the BIOS to do all the work. We simply cannot make the card do any other resolutions in this case, no ifs ands or buts.
Umm, I haven't read Olivier's interview yet, but as a minor Xfce developer I can say that the project does the opposite of ignore fd.o. In fact, during the 4.0 development process, Xfce was ahead of Gnome in it's implementation. There was even some talk of thinking of Xfce as a reference implementation of a desktop built to fully utilize the standard.
.desktop files? All pretty major fd.o accomplishments, all implemented by the 4 major OS Desktop Environments (KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Rox). In fact, the MIME spec is pretty facinating in that it's a case of an extremely minor player in the OS desktop, Rox, was doing one thing better than anyone else, and saw pretty quick adoption on all sides essentially just by presenting what they were already doing as a proposed standard.
fd.o is gaining momentum. I think the problem with fd.o is that it's low barrier to entry means that people want to standardize _everything_ almost to the point that no innovation can occur.
But XDND? The icon's spec? The MIME spec? Xsettings?
Sitting here on the Linux side of the fence, and as a part time Open Source developer, I can tell you the things I admire about Windows, both as a platform for development and as a workstation or server. Specifically, the painstakingly preserved backwards compatibility, and the pervasive integration of system are the envy of anyone who has had to use or develop for a wide range of Linux distributions.
What I don't see is the other side - specifically, what does Microsoft see in Linux? What does Linux offer that Windows does not, and what does Linux offer that Windows doesn't do as well, from a Microsoft point of view? Just as important, where is Microsoft headed to close those gaps?
While I would love to be one of the many leaping into the air, clicking their heels together, and saying "there is no bitch like Fiorina" I have begun to suspect that, in fact, there might be.
Who will replace her? Fiorina may have turned HP into Compaq, but they are still profitable, and under Fiorina's reign would be for some time. If she's been ousted, I somehow doubt she would be replaced by a innovative leader who would return the spirit of creation to the company. I fear it's more like "If we don't bother making even affordable shitty products we can cut this pie a little larger, and squeeze a little more blood from this stone".
I suspect that either this or RAV was for the definitions. This is the second AV company MS has picked up in the last 6 months, and integrating those codebases is awfully silly.
Unless MS wasn't to market their code to the Unix server market which seems unlikely, this is probably just a case of MS using it's money to squirt out a reasonable product in the least amount of time.
Virus definions and AV engines are pretty orthogonal, so MS can just buy two competeing companies and integrate their strengths. Voila, instant solid market presense.
This is great news. Slack is the most important of the one man distros, and it's always a worry that something might make Pat (and Slack, by extension) topple and fall.
But this doesn't seem to be a real worry. Pat's dropped Gnome out of the core distro, which is really better for everyone - Gnome eats up huge amounts of Pat's energy, and Slack has been an Xless or KDE centric distro for a while now. Dropline Gnome is pretty sweet, so even after Gnome was included in Slack, most users I know used Dropline anyway.
Pat's made it clear that he has made plans for Slack to continue in his absence should anything happen to him, so no need to migrate my desktop just yet, and in light of Pat's recent illness the Slack community has really backed him up - and I also like seeing the third party packagers for Slack get included in the distro. It's nice seeing the Slack community gel over the recent trauma.
All in all, Slack seems as healthy as ever, even if of late, Pat hasn't been
Well, there is some question about that. My impression has always been that the forces of MS programmers were focused on OS/2 the most profitable enterprise in their relationship with IBM, a relationship that had been key to all of MS's previous successes.
If a some talent coder working his butt off for something he found interesting hadn't come along, things would be different, how different we can argue.
I find the "Someone else would have" arguments irritating - what if Linus hadn't hacked out Linux. Would someone else have written a Unix like OS. Duh, the BSD's were already around, Minix was prevelant, and the GNU project was already on their way to writing a kernel. Does that mean the world would have been the same? Duh again
What the hell are you talking about?
There is not FUD. Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt? He didn't say a damn thing against Linux, and even argues that the business model which pushed IBM to invest in Linux (and which was partially caused by Linux) would still exist. They'd just open up OS/2 instead of porting OS/2 code (and AIX code, since those code bases have intermingled) to Linux.
It's not unreasonable. OS/2 already has a strong presense in enterprise workstations, and that's a strong consulting market. A stronger OS/2 very possibly might have kept IBM (and only IBM mind you) out of the Linux game.
Stop yelling just because someone said something you didn't understand.
Supplanting Google isn't even hard, relatively speaking. Just be better - total cost of migrating from Google to another search engine approaches nill.
The question, of course, is can MS supplant Google? I doubt it. The reasons:
* Microsoft can't pull a MS Works or similar trick - namely they can't undersell on a poorer product until it hits market saturation
* They can't use proprietary API's or file formats for lock in
* They can't bundle it with their OS
* They can bundle it with their other web services, but when Google trashed Yahoo! many moons ago, it was made clear that superior search engine beats stack of web services.
* MS has no skill making a successful web service. Hotmail and MSNBC are strategic grabs of other services or content (anyone have a counterexample?).
* MS does not seem to have a corporate philosophy that would easily lend itself to Google type ads, which are the only search engine ads I have ever been lulled by. How will MS make a profit?
Of course one has to wonder why they entered the search engine market anyway. I suspect it is simply because it's cool, and much though you may loath them you've got to get MS that. They go where it's cool, even if it's not profitable all the time - they can afford it. Of course, once they are king of a market, they are ruthless about squeezing the rock for all it's water . . .
You know, I suspect you are a troll, but I'm not getting it. Maybe I'm just stupid, but really, what are you taking a stab at?
Okay, maybe I see your point about the memory managemenet, assuming that your one line comment refers to Linux's tendency to overcommit on memory. But are you really saying that?
As a troll, your composition is muddled, and inconsistent. If this is in fact a parody the current America administration, could you give us some additional hints? Some context? A picture of Bush with the One Ring?
Something? Anything?