It sucks? That's the same aspect ratio and resolution as the 17" Powerbook from apple.. you know, the fancy widescreen one that everyone says is the coolest thing on earth.
Er, that resolution sucks on the Apple too. As I said, I'm looking at a 1600x1200 15" LCD right now and it's great. That's why I don't own a Powerbook (well, that and the price:).
It would be reasonable to assume that you want them to have 1600x1200 at 17".. but that would be at your typical aspect ratio... so instead of 1600 across, this is 1440
I'm not saying I want 1600x1200 in a 17" screen. I want the same DPI on screen. That would mean this 17" wide screen should be at least 1920x1200 (WUXGA).
1440x900 WTF? Toshiba has a huge flop on their hands.
Although I haven't seen it (page is dead), it sounds bulkly (10 lbs?!). But the absolute kicker is that resolution. A 17" (!) screen that only does 1440x900?! Oh man that sucks.
My 15" Dell is running at 1600x1200 right now (and looks wonderful). Ah, love that UXGA. Toshiba made a huge mistake.
So rather than translating to something unorganized like English, you would use Real Character which breaks down the concepts into logical groupings.
So really it's just a more structured language that would hopefully be easier to learn than a complex native language. Interesting. There are tons of other languages like that too, this one is interesting because of the cool looking script though.
I think you're on the right track but what's so different about this language versus any other language? You still need a translation table from your native language to this universal language.
I could just as easily say "English is the universal language". So the concept of "good" in German translates to the symbol "good" in my new universal language.
Some languages have concepts that can't be easily explained in another language. What would make Real Character any easier to translate to and from? It has a limited vocabulary just like any other language. Or does it?
I don't get it. Maybe I should go read up on Real Character, but it just sounded like a different way to write english.
I mean, the english language was broken down and made into a script of symbols to words. Like Chinese and other complicated languages except more ordered... I assume.
What's the deal? That doesn't sound universal or even particularly interesting. I mean, they had to "hack" the language to get things like "fax" and other modern concepts into it.
Maybe I'm just missing something (a healthly brain?):)
Since Knoppix boots right off the CD and doesn't touch your system then I feel that's the best way to get newbies interested. That way there is no commitment to just try Linux.
Most of the time it requires zero work to get them running Linux. After that they can decide if they want to really install Linux.
Even though I don't use it, KDE 3.1 usually produces a very favorable impression of Linux because it looks slick.
Eh? Depends on what you do with your computer. RedHat 5?! You're talking massive changes since then.
What did I do next? Not much else to do. None of my apps (read : games) were available at the time for Linux.
All you do with your computer is play games?? Hmmm. True, maybe Linux isn't for you. Although I'm a hardcore Quake3 player so that's my favorite game and it just happens to run great in Linux. I play some Tribes2 and UT2003 in Linux also.
I was unable to find replacements for any of my tools (read : an XTree clone such as ZTree, Office, Visual Studio, Drive Image, etc.)
Xtree? Try "ytree" in Linux. Personally I'd rather use a GUI file explorer or the console though (Konqueror, Nautilus, ROX, etc.).
Office? OpenOffice, Koffice, the GNOME office stuff... What applications do you use? There are many, many word processors besides the "office" suite versions. Same holds for the other applications.
Visual Studio? I do a lot of VS development and agree there is nothing as good for Linux, but there are tools if you're into that kind of thing. Kdevelop, wxPython (VB-like), Eclipse, NetBeans, and many others. There are craploads of development tools on Linux.
Drive Image??? How much time per day do you spend in that app?? There are a ton of backup applications for Linux. I can't comment on any of them because I don't back up as much as I should. Kbackup and others are easy to use.
I mean what really do you spend your time doing on the computer?
Need to web surf? MozillaFirebird, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx, Nautilus, etc.
E-Mail? Mozilla, Balsa, Kmail, mutt, pine, and all the others I'm forgetting about.
Other popular and useful apps: The Gimp VMware
I could just go on and on. It really doesn't sound like you gave Linux a fair shot. Plus that was 5 years ago, that's an eternity in computer terms.
Burn the Knoppix ISO and you won't even need to do anything to your computer to run a newer Linux. It boots fully off the CD and contains a ton of applications. It will kinda chug because it has to read from the CD so much, but it works good enough and doesn't touch your current system.
Just look at the number of comments on this thread. Nobody cares.
The Internet killed amateur radio, it's that simple. You can more easily (no skill needed) talk to more people than were ever on the radio.
Yes, I'm a ham (extra for more than 10 years) and I think the no-code technician license should give you full privileges (same as extra). In other words, I think there should only be one ham license class. That might save the hobby.
And shut up all you old whiners about the degradation from n00bs, you'll be dead soon anyway. The quality of the operators won't matter one lick when there's no one on the air anyway.
As soon as your JavaCard is going to be universal (and serve multiple purposes with varying degree of security) it has to return a "score" (rather than a yes/no decision).
Eh? I understand the part about being able to use a score to slowly converge on a working template, but that's not the way any smartcard I've seen works.
I've never worked with a card that returned a score. The biometric template is instead used like a PIN, it either unlocks the card or not and the card determines that. When the card is unlocked it then authenticates in a traditional manner (usually a standard public key, RSA or whatever). In other words, the biometric template unlocks the private key. Note that no private data is ever read off the card, everything is done on-card.
When you're talking smartcards, it's not the client application that determines the security level. Normally it's the card that determines if you've passed all the security criteria. Hence smart card.
The US government is not a corporation, it's a public entity. By the people, for the people?
Traditionally much of what the government does is public information. Lots of research and other items are freely available to US citizens, including some military information.
The Internet was originally a public funded government project.
If you're a US citizen then that's your tax money going to Microsoft. Would you rather it go there or go to an open-source project that actually benefits the public at large? It's public money why shouldn't it directly benefit the public?
Er, hate to reply to my own message but I hit the damn submit button...
I believe that if it's at all possible, government money should be used to benefit the general population. Funding open-source projects is a good way to get the job done and benefit the tax payers as well. This project would've been perfect for that.
Instead the money just goes to fund the richest corporation in the world.
Seriously, did Redhat or any of the other big Linux players bid on this contract (IBM?)?
If not, then shame on them. Maybe they didn't know the deal was going down, but often these RFP's are public information.
That money would have gone a long, long ways towards making Linux the best OS out there. It's almost there now and just about any current distro would work fine, but that money could've been used to quickly fix any minor problems still plaguing Linux (eg. get rid of all text based config tools). As others have mentioned, they could've hired on the best Linux developers available to make everything 100% perfect. I don't think that little extra development would've taken any extra time out of their current schedule and would create jobs for many people along with increasing security, decreasing M$'s monopoly, and bettering open-source as a whole.
Treating software as a job specific tool is often very useful. 'wc' is an excellent program for counting text, not so hot at anything else - and why would it need to be.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of what I said. I probably should not have mentioned software. 'wc' is in fact a narrow tool just like any specific piece of software. A general computer or programming language can do much, much more than a specific tool and is in fact a "super" tool that can do anything (within this context of general computing).
No, it would not be fair to compare intel compilers to gcc compilers.
Why would you say that?
The various back-ends for GCC are often implemented by completely different people. GCC on PPC can not even be considered the same compiler as GCC on X86. Apple & IBM have tweaked GCC for PPC just as much as Intel as tweaked ICC for X86.
Just because it's called "GCC" doesn't mean it's the same compiler, the code generators are completely different because the hardware is completely different.
I'm sick and tired of people saying this crap about "use the right tool for the right job". It's like a geek mantra or something. I'm a geek but I don't subscribe to this theory that a computer or software or a programming language is a regular tool to be confused with a hammer or something.
Computers, software, and programming languages are tools, I'll give you that. But they are not single purpose tools like a hammer or screwdriver. A computer can do a multitude of tasks. It's malleable and can do just about anything. Since programming languages drive the computer they also fall into the same category. No matter what computer or what programming language, you have a all powerful system (well, as far as any electronic piece of equipment can be).
Picking the "right tool for the right job" when you're talking computers isn't like deciding whether to use a pair of pliers or axe to cut down a tree. It's like having a box of super tools and each one can do just about anything. Which one do you pick? Well, that answer isn't so easy when just about any of them can do the same tasks just maybe in a different fashion.
I also believe because of the flexibility of computers and specifically programming languages that it is in fact possible to create a more perfect language than anything currently existing. There is no perfect programming language, but there could be.
Sorry if that came out confusing. This only just now hit me. I'll have to organise my thoughts as I think about this some more.
Quake3 is one of the very few games that can scale well. Most games fall on their face as you increase processing power due to suboptimal design issues.
Quake3 uses nearly every bit of the hardware processing power available and will just keep scaling with faster/better hardware.
In other words, Quake3 is a more raw "bare metal" benchmark than most games.
- On the Dell they disabled some Pentium optimizations.
- ???
They tweaked out the Apple with every imaginable setting but disabled all kinds of stuff on the Dell. Instead of Apple being the fastest, it's just another marketing lie.
Sorry buds, I call BS. I was finally able to get to the Apple site.
Those SPEC scores on Apple's site are WRONG. Check the SPEC results at the official SPEC website. A dual Xeon 3 Ghz machine kicks the crap out of those G5 scores.
The thing is, they used GCC. GCC sucks at the really high performance stuff on Intel. GCC has been tweaked out by Apple for the PPC. To be fair they need to use the tweaked out Intel compiler like on the SPEC website. Then you will see Apple lags behind.
Plus it depends on the Dell they got. Some are slower than others, but none are as slow as what Apple has listed.
Dual 3 Ghz Xeons 8GB DDR400 RAM (running dual or quad channel) 2x250GB 7200 HD ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (if it were me, I'd go nVidia) Sony 23" LCD flat panel Wireless LAN crap Sony DVD drive (-R/+R/-RW/+RW/CDR/CDRW) Keyboard, Case, Mouse
$6800 (I just built it at Newegg)
That's a savings of $5800 or so... So you could nearly buy 2 much faster machines for the same price.
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It sucks? That's the same aspect ratio and resolution as the 17" Powerbook from apple.. you know, the fancy widescreen one that everyone says is the coolest thing on earth.
:).
Er, that resolution sucks on the Apple too. As I said, I'm looking at a 1600x1200 15" LCD right now and it's great. That's why I don't own a Powerbook (well, that and the price
It would be reasonable to assume that you want them to have 1600x1200 at 17".. but that would be at your typical aspect ratio... so instead of 1600 across, this is 1440
I'm not saying I want 1600x1200 in a 17" screen. I want the same DPI on screen. That would mean this 17" wide screen should be at least 1920x1200 (WUXGA).
Apple weight: 5.4 pounds
Uh no, the 17" Apple weighs in at 6.8 lbs.
That definately looks better than the Toshiba, for sure. Apple-like in looks.
It weighs the same though (10 lbs?!), only has a 1.5 hour battery (WTF?!), and has the same crappy 1440x900 screen resolution.
1440x900 WTF? Toshiba has a huge flop on their hands.
Although I haven't seen it (page is dead), it sounds bulkly (10 lbs?!). But the absolute kicker is that resolution. A 17" (!) screen that only does 1440x900?! Oh man that sucks.
My 15" Dell is running at 1600x1200 right now (and looks wonderful). Ah, love that UXGA. Toshiba made a huge mistake.
Hmmm... I know where they got that idea. If you've even played the CHAOS mod for Quake2 then you'll remember the "happy grenades".
Those little bouncing bundles of joy that followed you and giggled while they blew the crap out of you.
I believe there is an UT version of the mod, but it wasn't as fun as the original. Ah, I miss the Quake2 days.
Yes, I think I get it now.
So rather than translating to something unorganized like English, you would use Real Character which breaks down the concepts into logical groupings.
So really it's just a more structured language that would hopefully be easier to learn than a complex native language. Interesting. There are tons of other languages like that too, this one is interesting because of the cool looking script though.
I think you're on the right track but what's so different about this language versus any other language? You still need a translation table from your native language to this universal language.
I could just as easily say "English is the universal language". So the concept of "good" in German translates to the symbol "good" in my new universal language.
Some languages have concepts that can't be easily explained in another language. What would make Real Character any easier to translate to and from? It has a limited vocabulary just like any other language. Or does it?
I'm still baffled.
I don't get it. Maybe I should go read up on Real Character, but it just sounded like a different way to write english.
:)
I mean, the english language was broken down and made into a script of symbols to words. Like Chinese and other complicated languages except more ordered... I assume.
What's the deal? That doesn't sound universal or even particularly interesting. I mean, they had to "hack" the language to get things like "fax" and other modern concepts into it.
Maybe I'm just missing something (a healthly brain?)
Since Knoppix boots right off the CD and doesn't touch your system then I feel that's the best way to get newbies interested. That way there is no commitment to just try Linux.
Most of the time it requires zero work to get them running Linux. After that they can decide if they want to really install Linux.
Even though I don't use it, KDE 3.1 usually produces a very favorable impression of Linux because it looks slick.
Oops, for "wxPython" I meant to put "Boa".
Boa is a VB-like python based API that uses the wxWindows cross platform GUI library. AFAIK Boa works on Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Eh? Depends on what you do with your computer. RedHat 5?! You're talking massive changes since then.
What did I do next? Not much else to do. None of my apps (read : games) were available at the time for Linux.
All you do with your computer is play games?? Hmmm. True, maybe Linux isn't for you. Although I'm a hardcore Quake3 player so that's my favorite game and it just happens to run great in Linux. I play some Tribes2 and UT2003 in Linux also.
I was unable to find replacements for any of my tools (read : an XTree clone such as ZTree, Office, Visual Studio, Drive Image, etc.)
Xtree? Try "ytree" in Linux. Personally I'd rather use a GUI file explorer or the console though (Konqueror, Nautilus, ROX, etc.).
Office? OpenOffice, Koffice, the GNOME office stuff... What applications do you use? There are many, many word processors besides the "office" suite versions. Same holds for the other applications.
Visual Studio? I do a lot of VS development and agree there is nothing as good for Linux, but there are tools if you're into that kind of thing. Kdevelop, wxPython (VB-like), Eclipse, NetBeans, and many others. There are craploads of development tools on Linux.
Drive Image??? How much time per day do you spend in that app?? There are a ton of backup applications for Linux. I can't comment on any of them because I don't back up as much as I should. Kbackup and others are easy to use.
I mean what really do you spend your time doing on the computer?
Need to web surf? MozillaFirebird, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx, Nautilus, etc.
E-Mail? Mozilla, Balsa, Kmail, mutt, pine, and all the others I'm forgetting about.
Other popular and useful apps:
The Gimp
VMware
I could just go on and on. It really doesn't sound like you gave Linux a fair shot. Plus that was 5 years ago, that's an eternity in computer terms.
Burn the Knoppix ISO and you won't even need to do anything to your computer to run a newer Linux. It boots fully off the CD and contains a ton of applications. It will kinda chug because it has to read from the CD so much, but it works good enough and doesn't touch your current system.
Just look at the number of comments on this thread. Nobody cares.
The Internet killed amateur radio, it's that simple. You can more easily (no skill needed) talk to more people than were ever on the radio.
Yes, I'm a ham (extra for more than 10 years) and I think the no-code technician license should give you full privileges (same as extra). In other words, I think there should only be one ham license class. That might save the hobby.
And shut up all you old whiners about the degradation from n00bs, you'll be dead soon anyway. The quality of the operators won't matter one lick when there's no one on the air anyway.
As soon as your JavaCard is going to be universal (and serve multiple purposes with varying degree of security) it has to return a "score" (rather than a yes/no decision).
Eh? I understand the part about being able to use a score to slowly converge on a working template, but that's not the way any smartcard I've seen works.
I've never worked with a card that returned a score. The biometric template is instead used like a PIN, it either unlocks the card or not and the card determines that. When the card is unlocked it then authenticates in a traditional manner (usually a standard public key, RSA or whatever). In other words, the biometric template unlocks the private key. Note that no private data is ever read off the card, everything is done on-card.
When you're talking smartcards, it's not the client application that determines the security level. Normally it's the card that determines if you've passed all the security criteria. Hence smart card.
The US government is not a corporation, it's a public entity. By the people, for the people?
Traditionally much of what the government does is public information. Lots of research and other items are freely available to US citizens, including some military information.
The Internet was originally a public funded government project.
If you're a US citizen then that's your tax money going to Microsoft. Would you rather it go there or go to an open-source project that actually benefits the public at large? It's public money why shouldn't it directly benefit the public?
Er, hate to reply to my own message but I hit the damn submit button...
I believe that if it's at all possible, government money should be used to benefit the general population. Funding open-source projects is a good way to get the job done and benefit the tax payers as well. This project would've been perfect for that.
Instead the money just goes to fund the richest corporation in the world.
Seriously, did Redhat or any of the other big Linux players bid on this contract (IBM?)?
If not, then shame on them. Maybe they didn't know the deal was going down, but often these RFP's are public information.
That money would have gone a long, long ways towards making Linux the best OS out there. It's almost there now and just about any current distro would work fine, but that money could've been used to quickly fix any minor problems still plaguing Linux (eg. get rid of all text based config tools). As others have mentioned, they could've hired on the best Linux developers available to make everything 100% perfect. I don't think that little extra development would've taken any extra time out of their current schedule and would create jobs for many people along with increasing security, decreasing M$'s monopoly, and bettering open-source as a whole.
As well...
Treating software as a job specific tool is often very useful. 'wc' is an excellent program for counting text, not so hot at anything else - and why would it need to be.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of what I said. I probably should not have mentioned software. 'wc' is in fact a narrow tool just like any specific piece of software. A general computer or programming language can do much, much more than a specific tool and is in fact a "super" tool that can do anything (within this context of general computing).
No, it would not be fair to compare intel compilers to gcc compilers.
Why would you say that?
The various back-ends for GCC are often implemented by completely different people. GCC on PPC can not even be considered the same compiler as GCC on X86. Apple & IBM have tweaked GCC for PPC just as much as Intel as tweaked ICC for X86.
Just because it's called "GCC" doesn't mean it's the same compiler, the code generators are completely different because the hardware is completely different.
I do care how long it takes me to encode a mpeg.
I do care how long it takes to render my 30 minute 3D animation.
I do care how long my earth simulation takes to run.
Performance matters to a lot of people and benchmarks let us know which machine is gonna get it done faster.
I'm sick and tired of people saying this crap about "use the right tool for the right job". It's like a geek mantra or something. I'm a geek but I don't subscribe to this theory that a computer or software or a programming language is a regular tool to be confused with a hammer or something.
Computers, software, and programming languages are tools, I'll give you that. But they are not single purpose tools like a hammer or screwdriver. A computer can do a multitude of tasks. It's malleable and can do just about anything. Since programming languages drive the computer they also fall into the same category. No matter what computer or what programming language, you have a all powerful system (well, as far as any electronic piece of equipment can be).
Picking the "right tool for the right job" when you're talking computers isn't like deciding whether to use a pair of pliers or axe to cut down a tree. It's like having a box of super tools and each one can do just about anything. Which one do you pick? Well, that answer isn't so easy when just about any of them can do the same tasks just maybe in a different fashion.
I also believe because of the flexibility of computers and specifically programming languages that it is in fact possible to create a more perfect language than anything currently existing. There is no perfect programming language, but there could be.
Sorry if that came out confusing. This only just now hit me. I'll have to organise my thoughts as I think about this some more.
Quake3 is one of the very few games that can scale well. Most games fall on their face as you increase processing power due to suboptimal design issues.
Quake3 uses nearly every bit of the hardware processing power available and will just keep scaling with faster/better hardware.
In other words, Quake3 is a more raw "bare metal" benchmark than most games.
Maybe, but it's not all about the compiler.
- On the Dell they had hyperthreading disabled.
- The Mac was using a memory cheat.
- On the Dell they disabled some Pentium optimizations.
- ???
They tweaked out the Apple with every imaginable setting but disabled all kinds of stuff on the Dell. Instead of Apple being the fastest, it's just another marketing lie.
And I got modded as flamebait and troll yesterday for stating the same thing.
Zealots suck.
Sorry buds, I call BS. I was finally able to get to the Apple site.
Those SPEC scores on Apple's site are WRONG. Check the SPEC results at the official SPEC website. A dual Xeon 3 Ghz machine kicks the crap out of those G5 scores.
The thing is, they used GCC. GCC sucks at the really high performance stuff on Intel. GCC has been tweaked out by Apple for the PPC. To be fair they need to use the tweaked out Intel compiler like on the SPEC website. Then you will see Apple lags behind.
Plus it depends on the Dell they got. Some are slower than others, but none are as slow as what Apple has listed.
Dual 3 Ghz Xeons
8GB DDR400 RAM (running dual or quad channel)
2x250GB 7200 HD
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (if it were me, I'd go nVidia)
Sony 23" LCD flat panel
Wireless LAN crap
Sony DVD drive (-R/+R/-RW/+RW/CDR/CDRW)
Keyboard, Case, Mouse
$6800 (I just built it at Newegg)
That's a savings of $5800 or so... So you could nearly buy 2 much faster machines for the same price.