Just out of interest I was looking up the specifications for Deep Junior - that is, the specs of the machine that played Kasparov.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything, nothing on the game sites, nothing through google. I found out that it is created to run on a multi-processor machine, and that it probably is running on two processors.
But come to think of it, this is one area where Linux is *much* nicer from an end-user perspective.
This constant would be nice to end users....That part is correct. Most end users however do not "perfect their system". They change OS whenever they change computers, and they won't transfer any of their settings.
Actually, the X desktop can be tweaked to suit a person so much, nobody else will be able to use it. So that friendly neighbour will soon throw in the towel if he decides to help you with the problem.
The first thing that you will have to do to get linux in the market is to unify the different interfaces. When you can do things in a more or less standardised and logical way users will more easily flock to it. Making it more like Windows is probably the only way to accomplish this. [ctrl][s] for saving, a start menu, the [_][o][x] buttons on the top-right of your windows....
Luckily Linux is getting there slowly, and with the better kernel underneath it might stand a small chance to be accepted by end users.
Warper
Oh, no, to switch resulutions just edit your x configuration file and then press [ctrl][alt][-]. Then guess to which resolution your window manager has changed.
What do you mean, a 'little' slower? A 'normal' 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus is very slow. A 1000 MBit network card already manages to fill that bus completely. The maximum PCI speed (64 bit / 66 MHz) is 4 times that. Still, only the speed of 3 gigabit network cards:(.
Still it would be way faster than a hard disk drive. And it would off-load quite a lot of hdd activity needed for handling the swap file. Not to mention seek times. Obviously you wouldn't want to address the memory directly - even a big cache wouldn't hide the awfull performance.
Memory is cheap and you would not need fast memory. You could also use it for disk cache, though that might really saturate the PCI bus (2 transfers minimum!!!).
All in all, I would welcome such a PCI card. Obviously the 32 / 33 PCI bus is walking on it's last legs though.
Maarten
Re:A simple answer to the question:
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
XML itself is indeed a simple vehicle for storing data (the data itself can be quite complex, since you can put in anything you like). Obviously XML will not replace an RDBMS for storing and looking up data, and it does not need to.
Though XML itself may look easy, I can asure you that the technical incompetent won't like the standards written around XML a bit. Schema's and XSLT take a while to get used to.
Furthermore, you do not have to write an application to parse XML at all. It has been done already. You will be presented with the DOM or with SAX. With the DOM you get a pre-parsed tree structure and with SAX you will be called back if it has found your data. 95% of the people in these discussions will know this.
The only conclusion I can draw from your writing is that you are as deep in XML as the writer of the original article: not at all. You see XML as just a text-file with some data in it. Other/. articles have already explained why this isn't so.
Warper
can anybody rewrite _all_ the linux configuration files to xml please? before lunch?
I can surely relate to this. There is no way that you can be a real systems engeneer withouth the low level (in software design terms) experience gathered on previous assignments. Obviously this is not enough, you must be able to think cohenently about problems. Some intelligence is actually required.
On the other hand, too much experience in coding or hardware may be prohibitive for doing a good job. My own boss, who is unhappily growing towards management himself, still looks too much to the nitty gritty element of the job. On the other hand, in the computer security business you MUST think in terms of technique first.
Luckily enough he is smart enough to let the team make some decissions on their own, or at least ask them about their opinion. With a software engeneer and UI builder, a good C++ programmer, a guy who's really into the standards and a genuine different thinkin' geek and java programmer (me) we are pretty well balanced:^)
I've got a Siemens mobile phone (Siemens C35i) that requires you to choose a time period at the end. It doesn't say what it is for, but retention time is the only option I can think of.
It sure does deliver the message right away, and the time periods seem to be right for it too.
So I cannot send an SMS without putting in a time limit. Note that this is anoying too since it requires me to press a button every time.
Ok, but that's taking a bit strange way to handle your photo's. Low compression can save you lots of space and will not significantly hit the quality of your pictures.
Obviously there are lots of usages for 1 TB drives and even for 100 TB drives. Take my ISP's news server. It's largish at 2.5 TB for binaries and 600 GB for text. And they had to ban the VCD's and DIVx newsgroups due to storage capacity.
For my most people storing their text documents and digital pictures the current state of the art is overkill, but I can think of a hundred reasons for such storage capabilities easily (pay me and I will do it:).
All my MSX games easily fit in a few MB's but I had years of fun with them btw.
Maarten
First of all it is not "reproducsble" but "reprecucible". Furthermore, the browser/client TCP/IP stack should start up without the "syn" packet right away. Therefore it cannot know what kind of web-server the server side is running.
I must say that I have never seen one of these strange requests myself. I cannot believe this has ever been the case, or ever will be the case. Furthermore, imho Microsoft is quite nice about following HTTP standards. They have been more standardised than Netscape browsers until the 4.7 versions were replaced by - eh - mozilla 1.0 effectively:).
This is a good thing too. My firewall would not allow such strange going on's in the TCP/IP connections probably (dunno, my NAT router will probably not even set up a connection without a syn package. HMMM. Maybe I should try this:).
Maarten
It may be that they were not intended for that purpose, but it is certainly used that way. People want to view web pages in a way that is pleasing to the eye.
Unfortunately the new CSS and (x)HTML standards have their drawbacks. It will remain difficult to let a web-page be viewable in an enjoyable way on any device. The support that has been build in the latest standards (e.g. accessability and device support) is not taken up widely, see the 'print this page' links on many web pages).
As long as dynamic html remains error prone and difficult for positioning you will continue to see supplementing technologies like flash/mpeg.
As for the last remark, a lot of people (with microsoft browsers) do see the internet as a very large electronic magazine. The time of HTML purists has long been over (unfortunately I am one). Get with this century!
*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters
This was my first problem with RedHat too. Installing the OS was no problem, but how to play my MP3's? There is only so much work I can do without music. And all the songs are on an NTFS partition. OK, so it is unstable. As long as it doesn't crash my kernel, leave it in read only mode! Note that Mandrake has NTFS support in its latest incarnation.
I didn't catch that DMA off, thanks for that. One problem that most users will find is that normal IDE cd drives are detected as/dev/hdc instead of the scsi variant. This makes copying of cd's a lot more difficult for the average user.
Setting up the nvidia drivers wasn't that difficult though. 2 RPM commands and I was there. Thank god for forums though, without some posts on the nvidia forums this would have been much more difficult.
Warper
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of interest I was looking up the specifications for Deep Junior - that is, the specs of the machine that played Kasparov.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything, nothing on the game sites, nothing through google. I found out that it is created to run on a multi-processor machine, and that it probably is running on two processors.
Does any slashdotter know?
Cheers,
Warper
But come to think of it, this is one area where Linux is *much* nicer from an end-user perspective.
This constant would be nice to end users....That part is correct. Most end users however do not "perfect their system". They change OS whenever they change computers, and they won't transfer any of their settings.
Actually, the X desktop can be tweaked to suit a person so much, nobody else will be able to use it. So that friendly neighbour will soon throw in the towel if he decides to help you with the problem.
The first thing that you will have to do to get linux in the market is to unify the different interfaces. When you can do things in a more or less standardised and logical way users will more easily flock to it. Making it more like Windows is probably the only way to accomplish this. [ctrl][s] for saving, a start menu, the [_][o][x] buttons on the top-right of your windows....
Luckily Linux is getting there slowly, and with the better kernel underneath it might stand a small chance to be accepted by end users.
WarperOh, no, to switch resulutions just edit your x configuration file and then press [ctrl][alt][-]. Then guess to which resolution your window manager has changed.
Still making money? What are you talking about???
WarperWhat do you mean, a 'little' slower? A 'normal' 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus is very slow. A 1000 MBit network card already manages to fill that bus completely. The maximum PCI speed (64 bit / 66 MHz) is 4 times that. Still, only the speed of 3 gigabit network cards :(.
Still it would be way faster than a hard disk drive. And it would off-load quite a lot of hdd activity needed for handling the swap file. Not to mention seek times. Obviously you wouldn't want to address the memory directly - even a big cache wouldn't hide the awfull performance.
Memory is cheap and you would not need fast memory. You could also use it for disk cache, though that might really saturate the PCI bus (2 transfers minimum!!!).
All in all, I would welcome such a PCI card. Obviously the 32 / 33 PCI bus is walking on it's last legs though.
MaartenXML itself is indeed a simple vehicle for storing data (the data itself can be quite complex, since you can put in anything you like). Obviously XML will not replace an RDBMS for storing and looking up data, and it does not need to.
/. articles have already explained why this isn't so.
Though XML itself may look easy, I can asure you that the technical incompetent won't like the standards written around XML a bit. Schema's and XSLT take a while to get used to.
Furthermore, you do not have to write an application to parse XML at all. It has been done already. You will be presented with the DOM or with SAX. With the DOM you get a pre-parsed tree structure and with SAX you will be called back if it has found your data. 95% of the people in these discussions will know this.
The only conclusion I can draw from your writing is that you are as deep in XML as the writer of the original article: not at all. You see XML as just a text-file with some data in it. Other
Warper
can anybody rewrite _all_ the linux configuration files to xml please? before lunch?
I can surely relate to this. There is no way that you can be a real systems engeneer withouth the low level (in software design terms) experience gathered on previous assignments. Obviously this is not enough, you must be able to think cohenently about problems. Some intelligence is actually required.
:^)
On the other hand, too much experience in coding or hardware may be prohibitive for doing a good job. My own boss, who is unhappily growing towards management himself, still looks too much to the nitty gritty element of the job. On the other hand, in the computer security business you MUST think in terms of technique first.
Luckily enough he is smart enough to let the team make some decissions on their own, or at least ask them about their opinion. With a software engeneer and UI builder, a good C++ programmer, a guy who's really into the standards and a genuine different thinkin' geek and java programmer (me) we are pretty well balanced
Weird.
I've got a Siemens mobile phone (Siemens C35i) that requires you to choose a time period at the end. It doesn't say what it is for, but retention time is the only option I can think of.
It sure does deliver the message right away, and the time periods seem to be right for it too.
So I cannot send an SMS without putting in a time limit. Note that this is anoying too since it requires me to press a button every time.
Maarten
Ok, but that's taking a bit strange way to handle your photo's. Low compression can save you lots of space and will not significantly hit the quality of your pictures. Obviously there are lots of usages for 1 TB drives and even for 100 TB drives. Take my ISP's news server. It's largish at 2.5 TB for binaries and 600 GB for text. And they had to ban the VCD's and DIVx newsgroups due to storage capacity. For my most people storing their text documents and digital pictures the current state of the art is overkill, but I can think of a hundred reasons for such storage capabilities easily (pay me and I will do it :).
All my MSX games easily fit in a few MB's but I had years of fun with them btw.
Maarten
First of all it is not "reproducsble" but "reprecucible". Furthermore, the browser/client TCP/IP stack should start up without the "syn" packet right away. Therefore it cannot know what kind of web-server the server side is running. I must say that I have never seen one of these strange requests myself. I cannot believe this has ever been the case, or ever will be the case. Furthermore, imho Microsoft is quite nice about following HTTP standards. They have been more standardised than Netscape browsers until the 4.7 versions were replaced by - eh - mozilla 1.0 effectively :).
This is a good thing too. My firewall would not allow such strange going on's in the TCP/IP connections probably (dunno, my NAT router will probably not even set up a connection without a syn package. HMMM. Maybe I should try this :).
Maarten
It may be that they were not intended for that purpose, but it is certainly used that way. People want to view web pages in a way that is pleasing to the eye.
Unfortunately the new CSS and (x)HTML standards have their drawbacks. It will remain difficult to let a web-page be viewable in an enjoyable way on any device. The support that has been build in the latest standards (e.g. accessability and device support) is not taken up widely, see the 'print this page' links on many web pages).
As long as dynamic html remains error prone and difficult for positioning you will continue to see supplementing technologies like flash/mpeg.
As for the last remark, a lot of people (with microsoft browsers) do see the internet as a very large electronic magazine. The time of HTML purists has long been over (unfortunately I am one). Get with this century!
Maarten