You are completely brainwashed by Apple's marketing -- amazing.
I don't care if others use Apple products. I don't understand why you think I perceive Apple as a "Threat" to me... what I'm trying to make clear is that I don't want to be a part of the Apple Culture regardless of how their products perform. Just like I wouldn't buy an overpriced sweatshirt with a huge GAP on the front, I wouldn't buy an overpriced computer with a huge Apple logo on its face. If you want to buy an Apple product, I say go for it. Put on your Gap shirt, your Abercrombie jeans, your Nike Air Jordan's, get in your Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer, drive to the Apple store and buy everything in sight. Surrender to the power of the logo.
I doubt that. Maybe I'd be the only person to say it on/., but not the only person to say it anywhere. Apple brands the shit out of all of their stuff and it is so unbelievably tacky and tasteless that I would never buy an Apple product despite any evidence of superiority or advantage in price.
Apple hardware is more expensive than its competitors and it doesn't offer any distinct advantages. Apple sells the brand and the image, not the product. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that -- Nike and The Gap do it too -- but you can't expect a freethinker to buy into some corporate marketing campaign.
Yuppies buy for status, not for practicality. Apple products buy status and image above all else.
I forgot to mention that I even tested with pre-release hardware samples from Intel and I STILL had no problem with sound or anything else. It even worked in FreeBSD!
This totally sucks that he's blaming his hardware problems on GNU/Linux. Isn't it odd that the support people didn't know about his problem, and the community hadn't heard of it either? When's the last time you had a low-level hardware problem like this and both pro support and the community hadn't heard of it thousands of times already? Or at least couldn't figure it out? This article is bullshit.
I've tested more than a dozen GNU/Linux distros in the past year, and two versions or more of those dozen in that time and on a wide variety of hardware... only with two distros, both with pre-2.4.19 kernels (Mandrake 9.0 and Lycoris 1.1), did I experience any problem with onboard sound. I tested Knoppix 3.2 on every Intel motherboard since and including the D845GBVL and sound worked on all of them (mostly it was the same AD chip). I wish he'd have said what distro he used rather than publish this nonsense.
Ironic that this story should show up two slots above the story on questionable Internet journalism. Y'know I wish my last two articles had been picked up by Slashdot, but I'm not going to start peddling bullshit in order to make the front page. But then again, I don't have a deadline to make and I don't have to publish every week. I guess the more you get paid as an Internet journalist, the less you're worth?
You are not using the term "FUD" in the proper context. If you think someone is wrong, their viewpoint or experience is not FUD. FUD means Fear Uncertainty and Doubt and implies that someone is being dishonest in regards to a subject that has an element of mystery or nebulousness about it.
Going from 2.4 to 2.6 worked great on Debian and Gentoo, but they automatically download the proper extras for you whereas RedHat only distributes single RPMs for everything. I see where my mistakes were, but the problem lies with RedHat and the way they distribute software. RH9 is really not meant to be upgraded; it is designed to be replaced by RHEL.
I know -- I'm in the process of redesigning it. I did it all in Flash back when I thought Flash was cool... now that I know it's awful, I have to rewrite everything.
Totally disagree. The terrorists in Al-Qaida and the Palestinian groups have made it widely known that they hate the Jewish people. Most of their terrorist acts these days are because of American support of Isreal. Bin Laden's biggest motivator was that the dirty white American christians were in his precious holy land. They're intolerant, racist, anti-semitic bastards.
Popular opinion seems to be that the primary cause for this ignorance and violence is lack of proper education and lack of gainful employment. Since the poor people have nothing to do and can only learn from fundamentalist Muslim "clerics," they become terrorists. You don't see any rich kids blowing themselves up to kill innocents that they have never met yet hate passionately.
Anyway, back to oil. Not every middle-eastern nation has oil to sell (or even use). The US has a large amount of undrilled oil but it's hard to get to and too expensive to drill right now, for the most part. One of my best friends owns oil rights to some property in Wellsville NY and used to spend every day out in the oil fields. It's dirty, rigorous work, and although you can make money drilling oil you can't make money paying someone else to drill it for you. In Iraq and Saudi-Arabia the oil is easy to get to and close to the surface; in NY and PA, the oil is far down and underneath a lot of bedrock. Then there are environmental regulations and laws and taxes and special equipment costs for the deep drilling, etc.
Oddly, most of the laborers in Qatar (another oil-rich country) are foreigners from neighboring poor countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan where there is no money, no oil, no work and no hope. Even the people of Qatar tend to discriminate against "local foreigners" (see National Geographic from 2003... er... last spring? It has an arabian guy on the cover). The culture of the middle east is simply an intolerant one.
I had a problem trying to get RH9 to work on an Athlon64 system a few months ago. I downloaded the vanilla 2.6 kernel as I've done with other distros, followed the directions and did everything I was supposed to, and then it wouldn't compile, needed special extensions to work with RH... then X was screwed for some reason. In general RH9 is just not made for the 2.6 kernel. I didn't try the 2.4 vanilla kernel because I didn't think it would add the functionality I needed.
What I have a problem with is when you try to install a Vanilla kernel on a RedHat system, it still goes berserk. Commercial GNU/Linux vendors have found new and unusual ways to make their software proprietary. It's just a different kind of vendor lock-in, because if you've got RedHat you're stuck with RedHat Inc. for patches and updates.
What a pleasant fantasy you have, where somehow oil will be more precious and expensive than electricity. There will be an electricity crisis long before there will be another oil crisis... just wait for the summer when the rolling blackouts come back to make up for shortages. Only next time it happens, it might not be isolated to California. Complicate the matter by making cars completely electric and you won't be able to afford to post on Slashdot anymore because you can't afford the electricity.
Wonderful. Then there will be even more poor, hopeless people in the middle east to turn to fundamentalist wackos who instruct them in the ways of killing people who don't look and act like them...
It almost seems like a better solution to keep buying oil just so the billion or so western asians don't go broke and starve themselves into more terrorism and ignorance.
Not like there's much else you can do with rocky, sandy wasteland.
The system doesn't work fine if it isn't working for everyone. School is not the wild and learning is not an exercise in Darwinian theory.
Fine motor skills are a learned trait, not an inherited one. The best artists I know -- professional artists -- all say that anyone can draw as well as they do if they were only to practice and use all of their tools properly. You can learn to adjust your handwriting just as easily as you can learn to write with your non-dominant hand. Why don't you "suck it up," quit whining about how life is unfair and adjust your habits so that you're happier about your life.
You still don't get it. What if Microsoft gave the (DRM-protected) music away for free in order to sell their WMA-based (or something newer) player? Couple that with a big media blitz to sell the Microsoft players and then it would be goodbye, iPod.
The only players that would survive would be those that support many different formats: WMA, the iTMS format whatever it is, OGG, WAV, MP3 and whatever else. Some players like the iRiver H120 can already do that (well, mostly as far as I can tell from their site).
Where have you been for the past five years? Or is the famous Steve Jobs Apple Distortion Field in effect?
Microsoft has a long history of losing money on a product simply to attempt market domination. In fact the only products they have that don't lose money are Windows and Office.
The X-Box loses hundreds of millions of dollars per year, yet Microsoft carries on and is even developing a second generation. Why do you suppose this is?
Now given this information, who do you think would win if it were Microsoft vs. Apple in a tight market?
Save the screens for the CCFL lamps that illuminate them. That way when you have to replace such a tube when it wears out or breaks in your working replacement device, you will have a means of repairing it.
CCFL (cold cathod fluorescent lamps) have a life of anywhere between 15,000 and 50,000 hours and most will lose half of their brightness after roughly half of its lifespan. They're also made of thin glass and are easily broken. If you break a CCFL tube you will probably not be able to buy a replacement and even though the tube only costs a few dollars you will have to replace the entire LCD screen at a cost of hundreds of dollars (in a laptop system).
The "honor system" doesn't apply here, because no one has agreed to pay sales tax on out of state purchases. If we had agreed as a nation or as individual states to report our online purchases, we would be on the honor system.
If we refuse to comply with unreasonable demands for money from the state, we are not on the "honor system" as far as our obligations are concerned.
We should have taken a lesson from Star Trek. They're constantly reversing the polarity of things to solve problems.
This is a good answer to the phenomenon in Italy though. If you actually suddenly reversed the polarity on an AC device that would certainly blow it up if it were under load. DC devices can be more forgiving sometimes -- usually you just fry the transformer.
From a related article referenced in the story (I'll post the excerpt because you're a stupid troll and aren't going to RTFA):
"Before I continue, I'd like to elaborate on why I chose FreeBSD as a benchmarking platform. The original reason was that it supports both the AMD64 and IA32 (i386) architectures, and the purpose of the benchmarking project was to compare performance between an Athlon 64 machine in both i386 and AMD64 modes. I also wanted to compare these two setups with a Pentium4 3.2E system to discover if Hyper-Threading or 64-bit extensions were more important to computing power. Microsoft operating systems available at the time of the project were not able to run in AMD64 mode, and even if they were, there was no 64-bit capable benchmarking software to use on a Windows platform. So the first goal was to find an OS that could use these two machines in the required modes, and the second goal was to find relevant benchmarking methods that could show the performance difference between the configurations. GNU/Linux was an option (specifically Gentoo Linux), but it wasn't mature enough at the time of testing and it didn't offer much to me in the way of benchmarking. NetBSD was also a consideration because it supports so many architectures and has been working with AMD64 longer than most other OSes. This was particularly attractive to me because I could also benchmark machines that were based on the SPARC, POWER, and MIPS architectures and compare them all. This would have worked except for the fact that NetBSD didn't have an official release for AMD64 when I was ready to test, so I'd have to have used experimental code. I also would have trouble getting the same exact code onto each machine because it changes so quickly. FreeBSD already had an AMD64 release (two, actually) and it worked terrifically for my purposes. When I started testing I was using 5.2-RELEASE, but switched to and retested with 5.2.1-RELEASE when it became available. FreeBSD was perfect because I could use the actual release (guaranteeing the same age and quality of the code for both AMD64 and i386), and the ports tree had a number of excellent benchmark tests to choose from.
The FreeBSD base system comes with OpenSSL, which offers an excellent benchmarking mode. It also includes the old Unix time command, which is essential for stopwatch tests. So, all things considered, FreeBSD was the best operating system for the project."
I guess FreeBSD can't be dead if it had a more stable and mature AMD64 port than other operating systems did.
I would like to see a benchmark with CPU stalls and utilization summarized at the end. Can't do it myself, because I am far too cheap to replace my current system (and yes, it is an MP box - dual 200Mhz PPRO - and it still does quite nicely).
If it were possible, I would have done this and measure temperatures as well... but I couldn't find a way to measure these things without interfering with the tests. It was really important to me to prevent anything from altering the test results. Of course if you have a suggestion on how I can monitor CPU stats consistently without messing with the testing, definitely turn me on to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are completely brainwashed by Apple's marketing -- amazing.
I don't care if others use Apple products. I don't understand why you think I perceive Apple as a "Threat" to me... what I'm trying to make clear is that I don't want to be a part of the Apple Culture regardless of how their products perform. Just like I wouldn't buy an overpriced sweatshirt with a huge GAP on the front, I wouldn't buy an overpriced computer with a huge Apple logo on its face. If you want to buy an Apple product, I say go for it. Put on your Gap shirt, your Abercrombie jeans, your Nike Air Jordan's, get in your Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer, drive to the Apple store and buy everything in sight. Surrender to the power of the logo.
-JemI doubt that. Maybe I'd be the only person to say it on /., but not the only person to say it anywhere. Apple brands the shit out of all of their stuff and it is so unbelievably tacky and tasteless that I would never buy an Apple product despite any evidence of superiority or advantage in price.
Apple hardware is more expensive than its competitors and it doesn't offer any distinct advantages. Apple sells the brand and the image, not the product. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that -- Nike and The Gap do it too -- but you can't expect a freethinker to buy into some corporate marketing campaign.
Yuppies buy for status, not for practicality. Apple products buy status and image above all else.
-JemFunny, I would have said pretty much the same exact thing in regards to the iPod. Except I would have added that it was designed for rich yuppies.
-JemThe iRiver H120 and H140 are iPod-killers with better looks, cheaper prices, and Ogg/Vorbis support.
-JemI forgot to mention that I even tested with pre-release hardware samples from Intel and I STILL had no problem with sound or anything else. It even worked in FreeBSD!
This totally sucks that he's blaming his hardware problems on GNU/Linux. Isn't it odd that the support people didn't know about his problem, and the community hadn't heard of it either? When's the last time you had a low-level hardware problem like this and both pro support and the community hadn't heard of it thousands of times already? Or at least couldn't figure it out? This article is bullshit.
-JemI've tested more than a dozen GNU/Linux distros in the past year, and two versions or more of those dozen in that time and on a wide variety of hardware... only with two distros, both with pre-2.4.19 kernels (Mandrake 9.0 and Lycoris 1.1), did I experience any problem with onboard sound. I tested Knoppix 3.2 on every Intel motherboard since and including the D845GBVL and sound worked on all of them (mostly it was the same AD chip). I wish he'd have said what distro he used rather than publish this nonsense.
Ironic that this story should show up two slots above the story on questionable Internet journalism. Y'know I wish my last two articles had been picked up by Slashdot, but I'm not going to start peddling bullshit in order to make the front page. But then again, I don't have a deadline to make and I don't have to publish every week. I guess the more you get paid as an Internet journalist, the less you're worth?
-JemYou are not using the term "FUD" in the proper context. If you think someone is wrong, their viewpoint or experience is not FUD. FUD means Fear Uncertainty and Doubt and implies that someone is being dishonest in regards to a subject that has an element of mystery or nebulousness about it.
-JemMoving into a country is not a good reason to hate Jews. There IS no good reason for hate, period.
If it had been other Muslims moving into the country the Palestinians wouldn't have been so bothered.
-JemGoing from 2.4 to 2.6 worked great on Debian and Gentoo, but they automatically download the proper extras for you whereas RedHat only distributes single RPMs for everything. I see where my mistakes were, but the problem lies with RedHat and the way they distribute software. RH9 is really not meant to be upgraded; it is designed to be replaced by RHEL.
-JemI know -- I'm in the process of redesigning it. I did it all in Flash back when I thought Flash was cool... now that I know it's awful, I have to rewrite everything.
-JemTotally disagree. The terrorists in Al-Qaida and the Palestinian groups have made it widely known that they hate the Jewish people. Most of their terrorist acts these days are because of American support of Isreal. Bin Laden's biggest motivator was that the dirty white American christians were in his precious holy land. They're intolerant, racist, anti-semitic bastards.
Popular opinion seems to be that the primary cause for this ignorance and violence is lack of proper education and lack of gainful employment. Since the poor people have nothing to do and can only learn from fundamentalist Muslim "clerics," they become terrorists. You don't see any rich kids blowing themselves up to kill innocents that they have never met yet hate passionately.
Anyway, back to oil. Not every middle-eastern nation has oil to sell (or even use). The US has a large amount of undrilled oil but it's hard to get to and too expensive to drill right now, for the most part. One of my best friends owns oil rights to some property in Wellsville NY and used to spend every day out in the oil fields. It's dirty, rigorous work, and although you can make money drilling oil you can't make money paying someone else to drill it for you. In Iraq and Saudi-Arabia the oil is easy to get to and close to the surface; in NY and PA, the oil is far down and underneath a lot of bedrock. Then there are environmental regulations and laws and taxes and special equipment costs for the deep drilling, etc.
Oddly, most of the laborers in Qatar (another oil-rich country) are foreigners from neighboring poor countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan where there is no money, no oil, no work and no hope. Even the people of Qatar tend to discriminate against "local foreigners" (see National Geographic from 2003... er... last spring? It has an arabian guy on the cover). The culture of the middle east is simply an intolerant one.
-JemI had a problem trying to get RH9 to work on an Athlon64 system a few months ago. I downloaded the vanilla 2.6 kernel as I've done with other distros, followed the directions and did everything I was supposed to, and then it wouldn't compile, needed special extensions to work with RH... then X was screwed for some reason. In general RH9 is just not made for the 2.6 kernel. I didn't try the 2.4 vanilla kernel because I didn't think it would add the functionality I needed.
-JemWhat I have a problem with is when you try to install a Vanilla kernel on a RedHat system, it still goes berserk. Commercial GNU/Linux vendors have found new and unusual ways to make their software proprietary. It's just a different kind of vendor lock-in, because if you've got RedHat you're stuck with RedHat Inc. for patches and updates.
-JemWhat a pleasant fantasy you have, where somehow oil will be more precious and expensive than electricity. There will be an electricity crisis long before there will be another oil crisis... just wait for the summer when the rolling blackouts come back to make up for shortages. Only next time it happens, it might not be isolated to California. Complicate the matter by making cars completely electric and you won't be able to afford to post on Slashdot anymore because you can't afford the electricity.
-JemWonderful. Then there will be even more poor, hopeless people in the middle east to turn to fundamentalist wackos who instruct them in the ways of killing people who don't look and act like them...
It almost seems like a better solution to keep buying oil just so the billion or so western asians don't go broke and starve themselves into more terrorism and ignorance.
Not like there's much else you can do with rocky, sandy wasteland.
-JemThe system doesn't work fine if it isn't working for everyone. School is not the wild and learning is not an exercise in Darwinian theory.
Fine motor skills are a learned trait, not an inherited one. The best artists I know -- professional artists -- all say that anyone can draw as well as they do if they were only to practice and use all of their tools properly. You can learn to adjust your handwriting just as easily as you can learn to write with your non-dominant hand. Why don't you "suck it up," quit whining about how life is unfair and adjust your habits so that you're happier about your life.
-JemYou still don't get it. What if Microsoft gave the (DRM-protected) music away for free in order to sell their WMA-based (or something newer) player? Couple that with a big media blitz to sell the Microsoft players and then it would be goodbye, iPod.
The only players that would survive would be those that support many different formats: WMA, the iTMS format whatever it is, OGG, WAV, MP3 and whatever else. Some players like the iRiver H120 can already do that (well, mostly as far as I can tell from their site).
-Jeminsanity later
Where have you been for the past five years? Or is the famous Steve Jobs Apple Distortion Field in effect?
Microsoft has a long history of losing money on a product simply to attempt market domination. In fact the only products they have that don't lose money are Windows and Office.
The X-Box loses hundreds of millions of dollars per year, yet Microsoft carries on and is even developing a second generation. Why do you suppose this is?
Now given this information, who do you think would win if it were Microsoft vs. Apple in a tight market?
-JemSave the screens for the CCFL lamps that illuminate them. That way when you have to replace such a tube when it wears out or breaks in your working replacement device, you will have a means of repairing it.
CCFL (cold cathod fluorescent lamps) have a life of anywhere between 15,000 and 50,000 hours and most will lose half of their brightness after roughly half of its lifespan. They're also made of thin glass and are easily broken. If you break a CCFL tube you will probably not be able to buy a replacement and even though the tube only costs a few dollars you will have to replace the entire LCD screen at a cost of hundreds of dollars (in a laptop system).
So yeah, keep them for parts... mainly the lamp.
-JemThe "honor system" doesn't apply here, because no one has agreed to pay sales tax on out of state purchases. If we had agreed as a nation or as individual states to report our online purchases, we would be on the honor system.
If we refuse to comply with unreasonable demands for money from the state, we are not on the "honor system" as far as our obligations are concerned.
-JemWe should have taken a lesson from Star Trek. They're constantly reversing the polarity of things to solve problems.
This is a good answer to the phenomenon in Italy though. If you actually suddenly reversed the polarity on an AC device that would certainly blow it up if it were under load. DC devices can be more forgiving sometimes -- usually you just fry the transformer.
-JemFrom a related article referenced in the story (I'll post the excerpt because you're a stupid troll and aren't going to RTFA):
"Before I continue, I'd like to elaborate on why I chose FreeBSD as a benchmarking platform. The original reason was that it supports both the AMD64 and IA32 (i386) architectures, and the purpose of the benchmarking project was to compare performance between an Athlon 64 machine in both i386 and AMD64 modes. I also wanted to compare these two setups with a Pentium4 3.2E system to discover if Hyper-Threading or 64-bit extensions were more important to computing power. Microsoft operating systems available at the time of the project were not able to run in AMD64 mode, and even if they were, there was no 64-bit capable benchmarking software to use on a Windows platform. So the first goal was to find an OS that could use these two machines in the required modes, and the second goal was to find relevant benchmarking methods that could show the performance difference between the configurations. GNU/Linux was an option (specifically Gentoo Linux), but it wasn't mature enough at the time of testing and it didn't offer much to me in the way of benchmarking. NetBSD was also a consideration because it supports so many architectures and has been working with AMD64 longer than most other OSes. This was particularly attractive to me because I could also benchmark machines that were based on the SPARC, POWER, and MIPS architectures and compare them all. This would have worked except for the fact that NetBSD didn't have an official release for AMD64 when I was ready to test, so I'd have to have used experimental code. I also would have trouble getting the same exact code onto each machine because it changes so quickly. FreeBSD already had an AMD64 release (two, actually) and it worked terrifically for my purposes. When I started testing I was using 5.2-RELEASE, but switched to and retested with 5.2.1-RELEASE when it became available. FreeBSD was perfect because I could use the actual release (guaranteeing the same age and quality of the code for both AMD64 and i386), and the ports tree had a number of excellent benchmark tests to choose from.
The FreeBSD base system comes with OpenSSL, which offers an excellent benchmarking mode. It also includes the old Unix time command, which is essential for stopwatch tests. So, all things considered, FreeBSD was the best operating system for the project."
I guess FreeBSD can't be dead if it had a more stable and mature AMD64 port than other operating systems did.
-JemDoes this mean I can play Hack & Slash again? At least this time around I don't have to worry about whether the ultra-fast 14400 line is available...
-JemI would like to see a benchmark with CPU stalls and utilization summarized at the end. Can't do it myself, because I am far too cheap to replace my current system (and yes, it is an MP box - dual 200Mhz PPRO - and it still does quite nicely).
If it were possible, I would have done this and measure temperatures as well... but I couldn't find a way to measure these things without interfering with the tests. It was really important to me to prevent anything from altering the test results. Of course if you have a suggestion on how I can monitor CPU stats consistently without messing with the testing, definitely turn me on to it.
-Jem