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User: Elote

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Comments · 26

  1. Math PDFs on Is the Kindle DX Worth the Money? · · Score: 5, Informative

    It worked beautifully for the 2-3 higher mathematics PDFs I tried it with. All ot the little set theory symbols were displayed crystal clear. I don't think the screen is as readable as the PRS505's, however it's still good.

  2. Re:Antivirus is a Virus on PEBKAC Still Plagues PC Security · · Score: 1

    ClamAV is free open source and there is a port available for Windows. It's a little slow but has not on-access/resident component...It only scans what you point it to.

  3. Another collection of links to movies on Which Movie Download Site Is Best? · · Score: 1

    A quickly growing site run by one of my good friends: www.yourtvlinks.com

  4. Here's a good one: on Which Movie Download Site Is Best? · · Score: 1

    www.yourtvlinks.com

  5. Re:Keeping Score on New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, dumbass. You can't prove QM by the fact that transistors et al work as they do. QM, just like every other theory of physics is just a mathematical model and when cases are found where it does not fit our experience it must be adjusted. Newtonian mechanics was "law" for a LONG time until we could make more precise measurements. I don't even believe in this story enough to look it over, but "proof by example" is VERY DANGEROUS.

  6. Secure Hard Drive Deletion Appliance on Secure Hard Drive Deletion Appliance? · · Score: 1

    One word...MAGNETRON! juss nuke it

  7. woot! on Math Awareness Month · · Score: 1

    math makes me hard! math chicks make me harder. I think we need a math apreciator appreciation month where math chicks are all over us, yeah...

  8. Re:Completely. on Credit card signatures: Useless? · · Score: 1
    "I always make sure to be a PITA when they ask for my ID when I pay w/a CC.

    Asking for ID before completing purchases with a signed card is _strictly_ against both Visa and Mastercard policy and can get a merchant in serious trouble. If it makes you angry then report it.

    report

    here:

    forum post about it:

  9. Re:Not for everyone on Ubuntu Linux Live CD Release · · Score: 1

    As for the web community, it's not as good as you think. Sure, it's nice and friendly, and I'm a part of it (and fulltime ubuntu user on my desktop) but anything remotely complicated and you get zero replies, this is mostly because it's a very new community, and needs some time to mature, but it certainly isn't all that helpful if you have a question beyond "how do i change my desktop wallpaper?".
    Yeah, they _definately_ are not at the technical level of the gentoo guys but they do have lots of nice intermediate howtos and tips in the wikis and forums.

  10. Not for everyone on Ubuntu Linux Live CD Release · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the more advanced user thinking about trying it out...don't. I checked out array-3 of hoary a couple of days ago and quickly decided it wasn't for me.

    My mini review:
    The install is a two-phase process using text-based menus and is not difficult, however I remember thinking that the menus were layed out rather awkwardly and could have been streamlined. The second part of the install which actually performs application package installs failed mysteriously for me and gave me no option to restart it when I reran base-setup(yes, this is a pre-release cd). apt-getting the required packages manually worked fine.

    Once installed, you are presented with a very clean and polished Gnome desktop with the standard amenities including Firefox 1.0, however there was little difference between it and other Gnome installations aside from a more pleasing tan theme consistently applied to everything.

    After a few hours my athlon-xp 1600+ with 1GB ram slowed to a crawl. There were a few hundred megabytes of free memory and cpu usage was always well uner 5%, however even typing at the console was unbearably slow and loading the desktop took a couple of minutes. Never did figure that one out and killing allmost all running processes didn't help a bit. Doubt this was a kernel driver bug too, since I've run other late 2.6 based distros on this machine with no problems. This didn't occur again however...but I didn't have it installed many hours after that.

    Boot times were atrocious, maybe worse than fedora due to innumerable services being started by default...many of them which I did not recognize. I seriously doubt postfix is a necessary service for the desktop audience they're targeting.

    In summary, the desktop is great for new users, however the rest of the system leaves a lot to be desired. I would advise people to wait a while before adopting ubuntu so that they can have time to work out their issues. For now Mandrake, Suse, and the like perform better as desktop distros, and Gentoo/Slack/vanilla debian work great for the more experienced.

    The only huge win over other distros that I see at this point is ubuntu's web community, which is comparable to what you would find in the gentoo forums for helpfulness.

  11. Re:Linux is the Mircosoft of the Unix world on Sun-isms Debunked · · Score: 1

    If you had said "RedHat is the Microsoft of the Linux world" I might have agreed :-) Not because of their business practices, but because of the mediocrity of their products. Not that it's that bad, but everything about it seems to cater to know-nothing former Windows admins.

  12. Re:Welcome stranger! on Java 1.5 vs C# · · Score: 1

    I second this. There is very little that the more "modern" languages offer that can not be done nearly as easily as in C++, and you will get a huge benefit in terms of memory usage if not runtime speed.

    There are some serious annoyances in the language however. Passing a pointer to an nxn array is not handled easily. STL performance sucks badly. I get tired of casting pointers to char* or whatever the heck is being used at the time for every other standard function call. The syntax for certain actions is really funky...with different meanings for certain keywords in different contexts. Look at the syntax for initializer lists, inheritance, declaring abstract/pure virtual methods. Most complilers don't give very informative error messages. Standards are not implemented uniformly between compilers(look at scoping in VS 6.0 which behaves as expected in GCC).

    All of these can be fairly easily worked around. I believe what really bites C++ in the butt compared to languages such as Java is the available of standard libraries. In Java, for pretty much any task you can perform there is already a class in the standard library that will perform that task. Additionally, since all of these classes come from a single vendor, they all behave similarly, are documented similarly, and use familiar interfaces, patterns, and idioms. This is what kick my ass when writing C. Not only must you know the core language very well, you must also decypher what whoever wrote the libraries you happen to require was doing when they wrote it. The only really large and fairly consistent libraries I can think of are MFC and QT which both suck for very different reasons. With MFC you get all the performance of Java with the portability of VB, and with QT you must pay quite a lot to use it for development on Windows(not on linux though). If minor tweaks were made to the core language and better libraries were freely available noone would have any reason to migrate away from C++

  13. Not a Replacement on AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now · · Score: 1

    Word will never be replaced because it is the Emacs of the Windows world. People abuse it to do everything from designing birthday cards to writing books and designing web pages and Microsoft designed it to accomedate this. This is why it is hard to get rid of. People joke about the Emacs operating system...most people use Word in some way for everything they do instead of a more domain specific tool. The end result is a program that is usable by 12 year olds for designing their canned web pages and writing their school papers but is unwieldly for any kind of professional use.

  14. Re:I know everyone's thinking it... on Reiser4 Filesystem Released · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, of course it won't be as stable as V3 initially, but I just have a problem with them saying that it is "released". If they had said that a "release candidate" had been released or that it had been released to the mm tree(not vanilla yet) then this would have irked me a little less. Saying "it is released" implies a little more than what they meant.

  15. Re:I know everyone's thinking it... on Reiser4 Filesystem Released · · Score: 1

    Nope, this was a "research paper" for my operating systems class, never presented it to the class except for bragging on the results.

  16. I know everyone's thinking it... on Reiser4 Filesystem Released · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IT'S ABOUT FREAKING TIME!!!!!

    I did an informal comparisson of this fs against several others for one of my classes, and my results had it winning _hands down_.

    But on a more serious note, I hope this release is stable. From lurking on their mailing list, it seems that it hasn't been too long since they were in bug-squashing mode.

  17. Wonderful on New Alliance Hopes To Standardize Web Plug-Ins · · Score: 1

    Now when someone decides to write a nice "Enhanced Web Search Spyware Toolbar" plugin for IE it will work in Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror and Links too :-)
    This will drive me back to text mode.

  18. Little Mu bot's a racist! on Chatterbox Challenge Contest Underway · · Score: 1
    Excerpt from my conversation with Little Mu:

    www.willcocomputing.com/racist.bmp
    www.willcocomputing.com/racist2.bmp

    Sorry about the .bmp, the Windows box I'm on at work doesn't save to .jpg.

  19. Re:I am worried... on Longest Physics Lecture in History? · · Score: 1
    "I believe this because what happens to people during their college time effects all of society, not just the student."

    It's affects not effects asshole.

    goto university yourself.

  20. Re:Favorite Toppic on Longest Physics Lecture in History? · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    it's affect not effect asshole. goto English class

  21. Re:Yahoo! on PHP Scales As Well As Java · · Score: 1
    Nope, yahoo is not currently serving with C, but a proprietary language written in C.

    "We'll explore a case study of one company (Yahoo!) that is making the transition to PHP from a proprietary server-side page language written in C/C++."

    from your own link

  22. Slicker on Desktop Linux Sliding in Under the Radar? · · Score: 1

    If the slicker project ever gets going again then KDE will be FAR ahead of any other desktop IMHO, and become more just a ripoff of other UIs. The CVS is already quite usable, but has only 5% of the features they say that they are working on.

  23. Re:Thanks Bill on Gates: Microsoft IP Finds Its Way Into Free Software · · Score: 1

    Next time use SARCASM /SARCASM someone might actually thing you have a kernel that panics!

  24. Re:1.1 is faster; better Word import; speedy sprea on OpenOffice.org Resource Kit · · Score: 1

    Update: I too reinstalled OO RC and the speed issues went away. I was running openoffice-bin 1.1 beta2 and it like the other ebuilds of OO was painfully slow. After getting the official build it is orders of magnitude faster, thank god. No, I was not using PIO mode as suggested by someone above, hdparm reveals that I'm getting 45MB/s off disk.

  25. Re:1.1 is faster; better Word import; speedy sprea on OpenOffice.org Resource Kit · · Score: 1

    It also takes me about 6-8 seconds to load, but this is only after it has been placed in Linux's memory cache by the first load. It takes forever and a day to load off disk.