The XFCE is the important part - any distribution that offers it should be roughly equivalent in power usage and speed. I use it on a P4-1.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and it boots almost exactly TWICE as fast as my friend's six-month old Vista desktop. I'm not sure what processor/ram combo he has, but a six-month old desktop from Lenovo should be able to easily beat my ancient computer.
Three things I like about this configuration:
1-It uses next to nothing in resources. 2-It's easy to setup. For example, I haven't looked at shutting down unnecessary services, etc. I could probably get a pretty good speed boost if I did. 3-XFCE's user interface is similar enough to KDE/Windows that I don't notice the difference. Some window managers behave so differently, it is very jarring to try and use them.
Why does it take the Wii a good 30 seconds to start playing a game from the time you push the power button? (I'm including in here the time it takes to acknowledge the safety warning and click through the Wii menu.) I'm sure that the 360 and PS3 are just as bad.
And (probably unique to the Wii), why do I have to see one or two more safety warnings every time the game loads?
And (definitely not unique to the Wii), why do I have to watch multiple studio logos before I even get to the start screen. The record that I found, was one game that had EIGHT studio ads!!
But, how about DVD players. My player takes somewhere in the 20 second range to load a disc and then I have usually a few (usually) skippable ads followed by 10-15 seconds of unskippable menu animations.
I'm still holding out on Blu-Ray because one recent review of a new Sony player was talking about how fast it was - 1 minute to start up - 1 minute to load the disc. That's two full minutes before even the ads start to play!
I kinda miss the 80's, when you stuck your VHS tape in and the movie started right away. Any ads? Then just rewind back only to the start of the movie and you'll never see them again. You took Super Mario Bros and put it in your Nintendo. In under five seconds, you're asked if you wanted to play with one or two people. After you make that choice, within a second you're playing the game.
If you've ever seen the original BioShock teaser trailer, it was made before the game was, and much of the art/design was unique to it. The final game is significantly different than that teaser.
The Samba guys should be happy considering that M$ is sending their best minds to help them achieve compatibility. How about if we do it the other way - send the Samba guys to Windows-world to show them how it should be done?
It might not be so positive for the rape victim. If she can't remember being raped, then how the hell did she get pregnant? Where did those bruises come from? And why does she now have HIV?
Also, why do people from the district attorney's office keep coming by and asking her to testify? Testify to what?
...but come on. I'm hearing the following complaints:
-"I can't hook up my DV camera." If you're going to be doing video editing, why aren't you using the MacBook Pro already? Or even better, a desktop? I just can't see doing any serious video work on a mid-range laptop. And if you want to give me the "I want to edit video on the road" bit, well then I ask you how long is that battery going to last working with big video files?
-"I can't hook up my external drives." Okay this one is a bit more serious, but then again, every external drive I have ever bought has been either USB or USB with Firewire. The number of pure Firewire drives out there has to be pretty small. But even so, a new USB backup drive won't set you back more than $150 or so.
-"I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target disk on a regular basis, if ever.
It sounds to me like Apple got rid of a feature that most of the target MacBook audience wasn't even using anyway. When I buy one of the new ones, I'll appreciate not having to pay extra for a feature I'll never use.
If I recall correctly, it was six months after the release of Flash 9 for Windows when Linux got it, but there wasn't even a Flash 8 for Linux. Linux users had actually been waiting for a new release since the release of Flash 7.
wpa2 with a shared key is only crackable with a brute force attack. Assuming that an alphanumeric character is used for each character of the attack, then for a key of length 8 (the minimum) the attack takes 26+26+10+10=72^8 (lowercase+uppercase+numbers+shifted num keys) time which is 7x10^14. A factor of 100 isn't a big deal - it reduces it to 7x10^12.
Even worse, if the key is longer than the minimum, say 14 digits, then the number of brute force keys are 1x10^26 and improving that to 1x10^24 isn't going to make much of a difference at all.
So why will Sprint "lose its advantage" if it doesn't ramp up quickly? Seriously, is ATT or Comcast on the verge of offering some great new service that's going to make WiMax obsolete? Is there some competitor to Sprint that is going to build out first?
I would love it if either of those possibilities were true, but the truth is that these companies are exceedingly conservative and slow to upgrade. Sprint could take the next decade doing a nationwide roll-out and probably not lose too much market share.
How is this different from the well-known watermarking attack? Doesn't the fact that most encryption systems now use the block number as a salt render this attack useless?
Intel keeps saying that it's Atom processors aren't heavy duty, but I think that's marketing spin to avoid taking the bottom out of the market for the more profit-laden processors.
I recently compared the Eee PC to my laptop. The Eee PC was able to calculate prime numbers at about 90% of the rate of my existing three-year old laptop. So, on a processor-to-processor comparison, they are about even. But the Eee PC also has three years of better hard drive, bus, and memory technology, and I expect it to fully whoop my laptop there.
Basically, I view these netbooks as having the same power as a 2-3 year old average laptop, but in a smaller form factor.
This is the same garbage that textbook publishers have foisted on college students.
At first, it was a code that let you onto a website with homework help and hints.
Then, they made it really super easy for professors to give you homework via their site (which is only accessible via the one-time code, or $20-$40). By super easy, I mean it's the same problems as in the book, but the computer grades your answers. They then email a list of grades to your professor.
They'll surely do the same thing with video games - it'll be a bonus at first, but if this catches on, then in a few years, they'll make it so that the used game is worthless.
Could someone please comment on whether it is more likely that the virus suddenly made the leap from primates to humans in the 1884-1924 range, or is it more likely that the virus slowly accumulated changes in its genetic code that allowed humans to become infected?
Could it have been that prior to this 1884-1924, that the primate version of the virus would be able to infect humans, but our immune systems were able to clear it? Or maybe that it could infect us, but its progression was so slow, that it never caused any illness?
Quickly, go yank the cable/dsl connection right out of the wall before its too late!
Come on... I'm not going to listen to mp3, but the/. summary and the article both are dangerously low on details. This effects every machine with a TCP/IP stack? IPv4 and IPv6? Leaves the machines in a permanent state of DOS? There's no prevention? No fix? And you can't even test it because it might take down "other devices between here and there"?
Pardon me, I'm off to find myself a huge grain of salt.
In contrast to the many "doom and gloom" postings about the US government's actions, it's nice to see a story where they are doing something "right" for a change.
all day battery life HSDPA (and a contract is okay) so he can surf the web anywhere bluetooth
He says he doesn't need: ability to play games great sound quality a lot of RAM or storage
It sounds like he just wants a web-enabled cell phone. Google's/T-Mobile's Android G1 should be perfect for him.
As for me, I'd like more memory, because I know I'll use it. I don't care about HSDPA, because I'm not about to enter into yet another cell phone contract. I don't care about bluetooth, because I'm not going to use an external mouse. I want pre-N wireless, because I'm going to be using it sometime in the next couple of years.
A surprising number of stories that make it to the front page have a rhetorical, leading question. In this case: "is feature-creep killing this new market already?" The question itself begs the question - is this new netbook a victim of "feature creep"? I know that anyone else who cares about logic in their arguments is bothered as much as I am. I wish that the editors would filter this sort of nonsense out before they post.
Will they really lay it all out for the customer:
"We want to spy on you. Is that cool?"
Or will they try and hide it in section 10.123.31 of the TOS:
"By breathing, you hereby give ATT perpetual, non-revocable permission to spy on you."
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business? Why should they allow useless products? You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
I think what many of the other posts are saying is that you should go with a GPL license and then hope that fellow academics do the right thing and give credit where due. I'd like to further suggest that you request, near the license statement, that the person cite your work. Afterall, the other posts are right, you're not going to sue if someone uses your software without proper citation, so why make it part of the license? Put at the top of each file a polite request to cite and you'll probably get more people doing so than if you bury it in the middle of a license that, honestly, most researchers won't bother to read.
You know, 5 years ago, if somebody had asked me about Javascript, I would have told them that it was a dying technology. At the time, it seemed that it was only used for pop-ups and advertisements. Back then, I had it turned off in all of my browsers. Now, we rate browsers based on their Javascript performance... amazing.
I do numerical computations for a living. I'm diagonalizing matrices all day long, all of which lives in RAM. On my dual-core machine, I'd much rather run two jobs quickly than four jobs very slowly. Of course, if I had a quad-core machine, I'd feel differently.
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The XFCE is the important part - any distribution that offers it should be roughly equivalent in power usage and speed. I use it on a P4-1.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and it boots almost exactly TWICE as fast as my friend's six-month old Vista desktop. I'm not sure what processor/ram combo he has, but a six-month old desktop from Lenovo should be able to easily beat my ancient computer.
Three things I like about this configuration:
1-It uses next to nothing in resources.
2-It's easy to setup. For example, I haven't looked at shutting down unnecessary services, etc. I could probably get a pretty good speed boost if I did.
3-XFCE's user interface is similar enough to KDE/Windows that I don't notice the difference. Some window managers behave so differently, it is very jarring to try and use them.
Why does it take the Wii a good 30 seconds to start playing a game from the time you push the power button? (I'm including in here the time it takes to acknowledge the safety warning and click through the Wii menu.) I'm sure that the 360 and PS3 are just as bad.
And (probably unique to the Wii), why do I have to see one or two more safety warnings every time the game loads?
And (definitely not unique to the Wii), why do I have to watch multiple studio logos before I even get to the start screen. The record that I found, was one game that had EIGHT studio ads!!
But, how about DVD players. My player takes somewhere in the 20 second range to load a disc and then I have usually a few (usually) skippable ads followed by 10-15 seconds of unskippable menu animations.
I'm still holding out on Blu-Ray because one recent review of a new Sony player was talking about how fast it was - 1 minute to start up - 1 minute to load the disc. That's two full minutes before even the ads start to play!
I kinda miss the 80's, when you stuck your VHS tape in and the movie started right away. Any ads? Then just rewind back only to the start of the movie and you'll never see them again. You took Super Mario Bros and put it in your Nintendo. In under five seconds, you're asked if you wanted to play with one or two people. After you make that choice, within a second you're playing the game.
If you've ever seen the original BioShock teaser trailer, it was made before the game was, and much of the art/design was unique to it. The final game is significantly different than that teaser.
The Samba guys should be happy considering that M$ is sending their best minds to help them achieve compatibility. How about if we do it the other way - send the Samba guys to Windows-world to show them how it should be done?
It might not be so positive for the rape victim. If she can't remember being raped, then how the hell did she get pregnant? Where did those bruises come from? And why does she now have HIV?
Also, why do people from the district attorney's office keep coming by and asking her to testify? Testify to what?
Firewire, Y! Profiles, and now iGoogle. What is the world coming to?!? ;-)
...but come on. I'm hearing the following complaints: -"I can't hook up my DV camera." If you're going to be doing video editing, why aren't you using the MacBook Pro already? Or even better, a desktop? I just can't see doing any serious video work on a mid-range laptop. And if you want to give me the "I want to edit video on the road" bit, well then I ask you how long is that battery going to last working with big video files? -"I can't hook up my external drives." Okay this one is a bit more serious, but then again, every external drive I have ever bought has been either USB or USB with Firewire. The number of pure Firewire drives out there has to be pretty small. But even so, a new USB backup drive won't set you back more than $150 or so. -"I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target disk on a regular basis, if ever. It sounds to me like Apple got rid of a feature that most of the target MacBook audience wasn't even using anyway. When I buy one of the new ones, I'll appreciate not having to pay extra for a feature I'll never use.
If I recall correctly, it was six months after the release of Flash 9 for Windows when Linux got it, but there wasn't even a Flash 8 for Linux. Linux users had actually been waiting for a new release since the release of Flash 7.
wpa2 with a shared key is only crackable with a brute force attack. Assuming that an alphanumeric character is used for each character of the attack, then for a key of length 8 (the minimum) the attack takes 26+26+10+10=72^8 (lowercase+uppercase+numbers+shifted num keys) time which is 7x10^14. A factor of 100 isn't a big deal - it reduces it to 7x10^12.
Even worse, if the key is longer than the minimum, say 14 digits, then the number of brute force keys are 1x10^26 and improving that to 1x10^24 isn't going to make much of a difference at all.
So why will Sprint "lose its advantage" if it doesn't ramp up quickly? Seriously, is ATT or Comcast on the verge of offering some great new service that's going to make WiMax obsolete? Is there some competitor to Sprint that is going to build out first? I would love it if either of those possibilities were true, but the truth is that these companies are exceedingly conservative and slow to upgrade. Sprint could take the next decade doing a nationwide roll-out and probably not lose too much market share.
See issue 14 of Make:
How is this different from the well-known watermarking attack? Doesn't the fact that most encryption systems now use the block number as a salt render this attack useless?
Intel keeps saying that it's Atom processors aren't heavy duty, but I think that's marketing spin to avoid taking the bottom out of the market for the more profit-laden processors.
I recently compared the Eee PC to my laptop. The Eee PC was able to calculate prime numbers at about 90% of the rate of my existing three-year old laptop. So, on a processor-to-processor comparison, they are about even. But the Eee PC also has three years of better hard drive, bus, and memory technology, and I expect it to fully whoop my laptop there.
Basically, I view these netbooks as having the same power as a 2-3 year old average laptop, but in a smaller form factor.
This is the same garbage that textbook publishers have foisted on college students.
At first, it was a code that let you onto a website with homework help and hints.
Then, they made it really super easy for professors to give you homework via their site (which is only accessible via the one-time code, or $20-$40). By super easy, I mean it's the same problems as in the book, but the computer grades your answers. They then email a list of grades to your professor.
They'll surely do the same thing with video games - it'll be a bonus at first, but if this catches on, then in a few years, they'll make it so that the used game is worthless.
Still no WPA. It's just embarrassing now.
Could someone please comment on whether it is more likely that the virus suddenly made the leap from primates to humans in the 1884-1924 range, or is it more likely that the virus slowly accumulated changes in its genetic code that allowed humans to become infected?
Could it have been that prior to this 1884-1924, that the primate version of the virus would be able to infect humans, but our immune systems were able to clear it? Or maybe that it could infect us, but its progression was so slow, that it never caused any illness?
Quickly, go yank the cable/dsl connection right out of the wall before its too late!
Come on... I'm not going to listen to mp3, but the /. summary and the article both are dangerously low on details. This effects every machine with a TCP/IP stack? IPv4 and IPv6? Leaves the machines in a permanent state of DOS? There's no prevention? No fix? And you can't even test it because it might take down "other devices between here and there"?
Pardon me, I'm off to find myself a huge grain of salt.
In contrast to the many "doom and gloom" postings about the US government's actions, it's nice to see a story where they are doing something "right" for a change.
So, he says he wants:
all day battery life
HSDPA (and a contract is okay) so he can surf the web anywhere
bluetooth
He says he doesn't need:
ability to play games
great sound quality
a lot of RAM or storage
It sounds like he just wants a web-enabled cell phone. Google's/T-Mobile's Android G1 should be perfect for him.
As for me, I'd like more memory, because I know I'll use it. I don't care about HSDPA, because I'm not about to enter into yet another cell phone contract. I don't care about bluetooth, because I'm not going to use an external mouse. I want pre-N wireless, because I'm going to be using it sometime in the next couple of years.
A surprising number of stories that make it to the front page have a rhetorical, leading question. In this case: "is feature-creep killing this new market already?" The question itself begs the question - is this new netbook a victim of "feature creep"? I know that anyone else who cares about logic in their arguments is bothered as much as I am. I wish that the editors would filter this sort of nonsense out before they post.
Will they really lay it all out for the customer: "We want to spy on you. Is that cool?" Or will they try and hide it in section 10.123.31 of the TOS: "By breathing, you hereby give ATT perpetual, non-revocable permission to spy on you."
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business? Why should they allow useless products? You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
I think what many of the other posts are saying is that you should go with a GPL license and then hope that fellow academics do the right thing and give credit where due. I'd like to further suggest that you request, near the license statement, that the person cite your work. Afterall, the other posts are right, you're not going to sue if someone uses your software without proper citation, so why make it part of the license? Put at the top of each file a polite request to cite and you'll probably get more people doing so than if you bury it in the middle of a license that, honestly, most researchers won't bother to read.
You know, 5 years ago, if somebody had asked me about Javascript, I would have told them that it was a dying technology. At the time, it seemed that it was only used for pop-ups and advertisements. Back then, I had it turned off in all of my browsers. Now, we rate browsers based on their Javascript performance... amazing.
I do numerical computations for a living. I'm diagonalizing matrices all day long, all of which lives in RAM. On my dual-core machine, I'd much rather run two jobs quickly than four jobs very slowly. Of course, if I had a quad-core machine, I'd feel differently.