The main bonus of Debian has always seemed to me to apt.
I have OSX. I have apt. I just installed fink, and got apt with it. I installed Apple's X11 and I run GNOME in full-screen mode. I like the way it runs with Aqua. The desktop is the same in both. I use LyX a lot, but don't like the Aqua QT version so I use the X11 version with GNOME it works better, but when I click "View DVI" it switches back to Aqua and opens TeXShop because I like that program.
I love that kind of interoperability. I get the best of both worlds. I can apt-get install stuff, and still get nice OSX software running alongside it.
If I did want debian on my powerbook I would install Ubuntu. I has a great install process, has a clean desktop even my parents could use, and runs well. But I wouldn't give up my Airport Extreme card for it.
> (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
It wasn't Ottomatic, but I remember that game, it was rather good.
> (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
>(forgot the name) line-art 3D space-age-ish tank game that performed really, really well even on older machines. Collected flags, biased your tank(which was red) in terms of ammo/speed/armour, etc. Came in a really weird box.
That was Spectre, about the first game I ever really really played. Endlessly. I tried all the combinations and played it a vast amount. They also had Spectre VR with improved graphics, but it crashed by 6100/60.
Glider was great, and I spent far too long making my own houses. Glider Pro runs under OSX and is now free.
It seems to me that the liquid-cooling system is little more than a fancy heatpipe. These have been around a while in PC systems on heatsinks. I had a coolermaster with one, a silentpipe. The idea being that a slowfan with the two copper liquid-filled pipes could move more heat to the top of the sink and away, than a quick fan. I think it worked. Never cared that much any way. It cost about 30 only, not a lot of song-and-dance, except to be able to say, wow, liquid cooling. Could be the same here.
Of course, the PSU was the noisy thing, so I couldn't tell the difference in CPU fan noise anyway.
I am fairly sure that similar technology already exists...
I had to spend a year in the Combined Cadet Force while at school and the largeer radio's they used had throat mikes that enabled subvocal, or at least very quiet speech.
This is something that I think ought to be integrated into cell phone technology. Include bluetooth to remove any unsightly wires and tuck the rest in behind your tie/collar/whatever... Small dermal pads on your throat could be made nearly invisible...
No more yelling in public... in fact, if you made a small bluetooth earpiece too then the phone doesn't even have to make any noise... a completly silent conversation. What a revolution.
Today, we announce the creation of Gentoo Games, Inc., a gaming technology company created to deliver innovative Linux-based game technologies to the public. To kick off this new initiative, we are also announcing a full version of the very popular (Linux exclusive) America's Army military combat simulation on a self-booting Gentoo GameCD. Thanks to hosting services provided by Super Computer, Inc., the America's Army GameCD can be downloaded here. This CD includes the full version of the America's Army game and requires an NVIDIA or recent ATI (Radeon 8500 or higher) graphics card. Enjoy!
There is also a UT2K3 version...
Hardware is autodetected... and so just works... It boots straight into X. There is no configuration needed. You don't even need to install the game. Great for a LAN party as every computer that is reasonably new should boot straight into a networkable game...
If you want something totally concurrent with the PC world then Gentoo linux is the way to go. Nearly all packages will work with PPC because they are self compiled. As long as you know a little about linux and have used it before, or are willing to learn Gentoo can be installed. They have the best documentation I have yet found, and the most friendly forums.
YellowDog is a port of RedHat, pretty much. The advantage is that they only produce a PPC distro and are very good at it. They have navy contracts with PPC products and actually sell PPC hardware. One of the very few companies who do aside from Apple. YellowDog is good if you want the ease of use that a modern distro should provide.
OpenOffice should run fine. It will also run with OSX using apple's X11, but not natively under Aqua.
KOffice and the Gnome office will also work out-of-the-box.
The cost is not just money spent on Antiviral products. These are available for free but most companies would rather pay a little extra and get support for the product. All software causes problems of one kind or another, might as well pay upfront for the solution.
The extra costs come from lost time. Some that is very hard to measure. 400 person companies will not have a large helpdesk or IT staff. They are caught in a situation where a large staff is not needed normally, but the existing staff is too small to handle a big problem. So when a large problem does arrise the few staff are overworked and it takes a long time to fix, hence the lost money.
Large companies have large support staffs, smaller companies can be fixed relatively rapidly. Those caught in the middle get screwed.
Firing staff for opening.exe messages will not help. Most workers will have no idea how there computer works. You might as well fire them for not being able to tune the breakroom TV. A better policy of blocking mail and scanning it would help. But that takes a skilled IT dept, who will be better payed at a larger company.
Gentoo is source based. Ie. you compile everything from source. That isn't strickly true for the install, a lot of larger packages can be got pre-compiled for specific chips, but generally everything is installed with *your* settings for *your* computer.
It takes a while, but you have nothing installed that you don't want.
I used it on x86 because, In MY opinion, its the best system. SuSE comes close, but gets into too much of a confused mess.
I also found gentoo easier to install than debian. They have a very good docs section, and one of the better forums around. Very helpful and friendly people. They seem to enjoy helping new people to get the best from their computers. Actually makes gentoo a pleasure to use.
YellowDog is a PPC only red hat clone. The only support PPC so are totally dedicated to making everything run well. I think their distro is excellent, and very easy to use. A good newbie install.
SuSE support stopped a while ago. RedHat never started. Mandrake might still be around. I'm not a mandrake person. Debian isn't for me.
Hope thats enough, all thoughts are my own, don't flame me for them. Use whatever you want.
In fact install every distro you can get. You will olny learn more. Choose one you like and stick to it.
Interoperabilty needs help from both sides. Both involved parties must decide on a standard then write software to adhere to it. eg. all mp3 players play the same mp3s. One mp3 can play on all players because of the standard.
In order to sell an mp3 player it either has to have better features that the standard implements or have more human=friendly features eg. its smaller, better looking etc.
Here microsoft coes out with a system. Then the OSS teams try to reverse engineer it and create a compatable system. Then microsoft changes it.
Therein lies the problem. Microsoft is not trying to interoperate. OSS is trying to be compatible. They are always following, and not creating. Mainly because they don't have a market base to force products onto to get a lead.
OSS needs a killer-app style product/system/something to get the lead, so that microsoft will have to try to be compatible.
True interoperability cannot happen without support from bothsides. OSS just needs to make microsoft want to help. Easier said than done.
Apple's cool comes from its superb hardware lineup. Nobody would choose any other laptop given the choice of an Apple powerbook and an equal PC one. The same holds for every other item they produce. The G5s look stunning and are too quiet to tell if they are on.
Everybody who sees an iPod wants one, and they work fine with Windows.
Microsoft con't itself up its credibility by showing Windows, it has to be in a cool computer, they need to team up with a Hardware manufacturer. Alienware do nice cases...
Apple's OS might be great but how often do you really see what its doing on TV. Just a snap of a guy with a computer (albeit a tiny, thin laptop with a glowing apple on it), or a loading bar while the MacOS takes down Alien hardware through a non existant interface.;)
This missed the point a little for me. I have used many different distros on both ppc and x86 and learnt the most regardless of distro whenever something went wrong.
Before you ask I have installed LFS and currently use gentoo.
But here is the point change. I don't use gentoo as an educational distro. I use gentoo as the closest i have got to linux on the dekstop. I create my distro using gentoo. I don't want it complicated, but i do want it to work. Portage does that for me.
I understand the view that it ought to be a learning experience but i also want a stable computer to work on. I can't afford to have something broken. I run the stable tree. I just want emerge to work.
If I want to learn something i actively learn it. I look at the config files and mess around. And if it breaks i fix it.
Here in the UK we don't quite get real guns but this is bad enough...
At school there was a bbgun craze. Needless to say a friend got a high-strength gas power desert eagle.
While he watched a friend racing around on GTA one day he accidentally shot the screen of his large, expensive Dell laptop. It still worked though, except for large blackbars coming in from the closer two sides of the screen to the point of impact. He, and his parents who had just bought it, were less that impressed with him. That the screen worked at all impressed me.
Another friend decided to demonstrate the abilities of a hard drive to withstand g-forces of a certain strength. He removed the drive and dropped it on his desk from a height of about two inches. When he plugged it in agin it failed the boot up test. It needed to be replaced. It might be worth pointing out this wasn't a new drive. It had three years worth of school work and notes on it, mostly unbacked up.
I also superglued ram into a computer once because the clips wouldn't hold it in. I fried the motherboard at the same time, so I don't know if the ram worked or not. It was new ram too... well off ebay, so that could be it. So i lost ram, the mobo, and infact the whole computer: it was an apple, but an old one, so it didn't really matter, it wasn't working that well anyway. The fans had problems, they whined like mshing gears on a car on startup.
Any filesharing servers that were on our networks protected them selves with heavy logging. The computing department became surprisingly lenient when faced with evidence that the largest downloaders were on their staff.
Of course our esteemed leader was less than competent, not even know which official servers were running.
Foxes guarding hen houses is not such a bad idea. They will protect them for their own and they will know best how to. Not only that but i imagine that they are heavy net users and will throttle filesharing during normal hours for their benefit as well as other users.
The best person to see if a system is vulnerable is a good cracker... employ them instead of fighting them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you need to put in a minus sign or two...
-240 Celsius = 35 Kelvin
0K = absolute 0 = -273 C or thereabouts.
0C = 273 K
240C = 240 + 273...
Alex
The main bonus of Debian has always seemed to me to apt.
I have OSX. I have apt. I just installed fink, and got apt with it. I installed Apple's X11 and I run GNOME in full-screen mode. I like the way it runs with Aqua. The desktop is the same in both. I use LyX a lot, but don't like the Aqua QT version so I use the X11 version with GNOME it works better, but when I click "View DVI" it switches back to Aqua and opens TeXShop because I like that program.
I love that kind of interoperability. I get the best of both worlds. I can apt-get install stuff, and still get nice OSX software running alongside it.
If I did want debian on my powerbook I would install Ubuntu. I has a great install process, has a clean desktop even my parents could use, and runs well. But I wouldn't give up my Airport Extreme card for it.
> (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
It wasn't Ottomatic, but I remember that game, it was rather good.
> (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
>(forgot the name) line-art 3D space-age-ish tank game that performed really, really well even on older machines. Collected flags, biased your tank(which was red) in terms of ammo/speed/armour, etc. Came in a really weird box.
That was Spectre, about the first game I ever really really played. Endlessly. I tried all the combinations and played it a vast amount. They also had Spectre VR with improved graphics, but it crashed by 6100/60.
Glider was great, and I spent far too long making my own houses. Glider Pro runs under OSX and is now free.
It seems to me that the liquid-cooling system is little more than a fancy heatpipe. These have been around a while in PC systems on heatsinks. I had a coolermaster with one, a silentpipe. The idea being that a slowfan with the two copper liquid-filled pipes could move more heat to the top of the sink and away, than a quick fan. I think it worked. Never cared that much any way. It cost about 30 only, not a lot of song-and-dance, except to be able to say, wow, liquid cooling. Could be the same here.
Of course, the PSU was the noisy thing, so I couldn't tell the difference in CPU fan noise anyway.
Just a thought.
Already liquid cooled, and in a cool aluminium case, enough case fans for a hovercraft. What is left to do?
I thought Apple shipped 800,000 iPods last quarter, so an increase to 1,000,000 would be helped by the 1,050,000 drives from Toshiba each month.
I am fairly sure that similar technology already exists...
I had to spend a year in the Combined Cadet Force while at school and the largeer radio's they used had throat mikes that enabled subvocal, or at least very quiet speech.
This is something that I think ought to be integrated into cell phone technology. Include bluetooth to remove any unsightly wires and tuck the rest in behind your tie/collar/whatever...
Small dermal pads on your throat could be made nearly invisible...
No more yelling in public... in fact, if you made a small bluetooth earpiece too then the phone doesn't even have to make any noise... a completly silent conversation. What a revolution.
GentooGames
http://www.gentoogames.com
From gentoo.org:
Today, we announce the creation of Gentoo Games, Inc., a gaming technology company created to deliver innovative Linux-based game technologies to the public. To kick off this new initiative, we are also announcing a full version of the very popular (Linux exclusive) America's Army military combat simulation on a self-booting Gentoo GameCD. Thanks to hosting services provided by Super Computer, Inc., the America's Army GameCD can be downloaded here. This CD includes the full version of the America's Army game and requires an NVIDIA or recent ATI (Radeon 8500 or higher) graphics card. Enjoy!
There is also a UT2K3 version...
Hardware is autodetected... and so just works... It boots straight into X. There is no configuration needed. You don't even need to install the game. Great for a LAN party as every computer that is reasonably new should boot straight into a networkable game...
If you want something totally concurrent with the PC world then Gentoo linux is the way to go. Nearly all packages will work with PPC because they are self compiled. As long as you know a little about linux and have used it before, or are willing to learn Gentoo can be installed. They have the best documentation I have yet found, and the most friendly forums.
YellowDog is a port of RedHat, pretty much. The advantage is that they only produce a PPC distro and are very good at it. They have navy contracts with PPC products and actually sell PPC hardware. One of the very few companies who do aside from Apple. YellowDog is good if you want the ease of use that a modern distro should provide.
OpenOffice should run fine. It will also run with OSX using apple's X11, but not natively under Aqua.
KOffice and the Gnome office will also work out-of-the-box.
The cost is not just money spent on Antiviral products. These are available for free but most companies would rather pay a little extra and get support for the product. All software causes problems of one kind or another, might as well pay upfront for the solution.
.exe messages will not help. Most workers will have no idea how there computer works. You might as well fire them for not being able to tune the breakroom TV. A better policy of blocking mail and scanning it would help. But that takes a skilled IT dept, who will be better payed at a larger company.
The extra costs come from lost time. Some that is very hard to measure. 400 person companies will not have a large helpdesk or IT staff. They are caught in a situation where a large staff is not needed normally, but the existing staff is too small to handle a big problem. So when a large problem does arrise the few staff are overworked and it takes a long time to fix, hence the lost money.
Large companies have large support staffs, smaller companies can be fixed relatively rapidly. Those caught in the middle get screwed.
Firing staff for opening
Gentoo is source based. Ie. you compile everything from source. That isn't strickly true for the install, a lot of larger packages can be got pre-compiled for specific chips, but generally everything is installed with *your* settings for *your* computer.
It takes a while, but you have nothing installed that you don't want.
I used it on x86 because, In MY opinion, its the best system. SuSE comes close, but gets into too much of a confused mess.
I also found gentoo easier to install than debian. They have a very good docs section, and one of the better forums around. Very helpful and friendly people. They seem to enjoy helping new people to get the best from their computers. Actually makes gentoo a pleasure to use.
YellowDog is a PPC only red hat clone. The only support PPC so are totally dedicated to making everything run well. I think their distro is excellent, and very easy to use. A good newbie install.
SuSE support stopped a while ago.
RedHat never started.
Mandrake might still be around. I'm not a mandrake person.
Debian isn't for me.
Hope thats enough, all thoughts are my own, don't flame me for them. Use whatever you want.
In fact install every distro you can get. You will olny learn more. Choose one you like and stick to it.
http://www.ussubmarines.com
The price is a little higher, but then sos the spec.
A full blown luxury motoryatch that happens to be submersible to 300 feet.
I want one.
Use a tool designed for the job.
:
An Xbox for gaming. 130
A cheap desktop for everything else 500
internet/email/netty thing, IM doesn't need power.
Office
Web Design
Perl/Java/C/whatever
None of the above need lots of computing power.
630
Beats any 1000+ machine for work and games.
and you can do both at once... leave the compiles running and watch them while you play Splinter Cell.
Interoperabilty needs help from both sides. Both involved parties must decide on a standard then write software to adhere to it.
eg. all mp3 players play the same mp3s. One mp3 can play on all players because of the standard.
In order to sell an mp3 player it either has to have better features that the standard implements or have more human=friendly features eg. its smaller, better looking etc.
Here microsoft coes out with a system. Then the OSS teams try to reverse engineer it and create a compatable system. Then microsoft changes it.
Therein lies the problem. Microsoft is not trying to interoperate. OSS is trying to be compatible. They are always following, and not creating. Mainly because they don't have a market base to force products onto to get a lead.
OSS needs a killer-app style product/system/something to get the lead, so that microsoft will have to try to be compatible.
True interoperability cannot happen without support from bothsides. OSS just needs to make microsoft want to help. Easier said than done.
But Microsoft makes very little hardware.
;)
Apple's cool comes from its superb hardware lineup. Nobody would choose any other laptop given the choice of an Apple powerbook and an equal PC one. The same holds for every other item they produce. The G5s look stunning and are too quiet to tell if they are on.
Everybody who sees an iPod wants one, and they work fine with Windows.
Microsoft con't itself up its credibility by showing Windows, it has to be in a cool computer, they need to team up with a Hardware manufacturer. Alienware do nice cases...
Apple's OS might be great but how often do you really see what its doing on TV. Just a snap of a guy with a computer (albeit a tiny, thin laptop with a glowing apple on it), or a loading bar while the MacOS takes down Alien hardware through a non existant interface.
This missed the point a little for me. I have used many different distros on both ppc and x86 and learnt the most regardless of distro whenever something went wrong. Before you ask I have installed LFS and currently use gentoo. But here is the point change. I don't use gentoo as an educational distro. I use gentoo as the closest i have got to linux on the dekstop. I create my distro using gentoo. I don't want it complicated, but i do want it to work. Portage does that for me. I understand the view that it ought to be a learning experience but i also want a stable computer to work on. I can't afford to have something broken. I run the stable tree. I just want emerge to work. If I want to learn something i actively learn it. I look at the config files and mess around. And if it breaks i fix it.
Here in the UK we don't quite get real guns but this is bad enough... At school there was a bbgun craze. Needless to say a friend got a high-strength gas power desert eagle. While he watched a friend racing around on GTA one day he accidentally shot the screen of his large, expensive Dell laptop. It still worked though, except for large blackbars coming in from the closer two sides of the screen to the point of impact. He, and his parents who had just bought it, were less that impressed with him. That the screen worked at all impressed me. Another friend decided to demonstrate the abilities of a hard drive to withstand g-forces of a certain strength. He removed the drive and dropped it on his desk from a height of about two inches. When he plugged it in agin it failed the boot up test. It needed to be replaced. It might be worth pointing out this wasn't a new drive. It had three years worth of school work and notes on it, mostly unbacked up. I also superglued ram into a computer once because the clips wouldn't hold it in. I fried the motherboard at the same time, so I don't know if the ram worked or not. It was new ram too... well off ebay, so that could be it. So i lost ram, the mobo, and infact the whole computer: it was an apple, but an old one, so it didn't really matter, it wasn't working that well anyway. The fans had problems, they whined like mshing gears on a car on startup.
Any filesharing servers that were on our networks protected them selves with heavy logging. The computing department became surprisingly lenient when faced with evidence that the largest downloaders were on their staff. Of course our esteemed leader was less than competent, not even know which official servers were running. Foxes guarding hen houses is not such a bad idea. They will protect them for their own and they will know best how to. Not only that but i imagine that they are heavy net users and will throttle filesharing during normal hours for their benefit as well as other users. The best person to see if a system is vulnerable is a good cracker... employ them instead of fighting them.