I've been using Kubuntu Karmic since the beta, and it's been working fine for me. I've had precisely two problems: Slightly flaky sound (fixed by installing PulseAudio and using that as the default over whatever KDE defaults to), and the kernel bitching a bunch at me about having ECC disabled in BIOS (fixed by blacklisting the ECC modules in/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf).
ext4 is fully mature--it's no more "bleeding edge" than the 2.6.28 kernel used in 9.04--but you can choose ext3 if you want, and if you're upgrading it won't in-place upgrade you to ext4. Grub2 was an interesting choice, though if you're updating from an older Ubuntu version, again it won't upgrade that for you. Grub2 works fine for me; it's just a bunch slower than legacy GRUB.
You know, pull-down menus are pretty confusing to first-time users, too. Most people are smart enough to get the hang of them after a few hours, and don't even think about them after a few months.
This depends on how well the menus are designed, too. One quirk that's bugged me about Firefox for a long time: In *nix systems, the preferences window is called Preferences and is located in the Edit menu. In Windows, it's called Options and is located in the Tools menu. I know they're trying to emulate the paradigm that other programs for [Windows/GNOME/KDE] will also use, but that d'oh moment, when I'm telling my (Windows-using) grandpa how to change his home page and I tell him to find Preferences under Edit, is pretty annoying.
This sounds like another good reason to switch to BSD. Strike two linux!
(FWIW strike one is linux's sound architecture)
I think more than a few people would be willing to use BSD, if the driver situation weren't so bad for it. It's worse than the situation Linux is in, and Linux has some severe driver problems as well (just look at ATI video cards).
"Do", not "due". And I got the right to say the first time we had brownouts in my area, and other people's energy wasting affected me. Not only do you waste an extra 40-100W per computer, but during summer, your ACs work harder too, cooling down that extra heat energy.
Interestingly, my desktop (which runs both SETI and rosetta) still keeps my CPU throttled down to 1 GHz from its listed clock speed of 2.2 GHz, due to the miracle of Cool'n'Quiet. I've never bothered to check what my desktop's power load is, either while running BOINC or while not running it, but I imagine the difference is fairly negligible if my CPU thinks it's not even busy enough to click up from 1 GHz.
Sure they can be, if your freedom is absolute, you're free to treat others like property.
By extension, others would be free to treat you like property, which would impinge on that absoluteness of freedom you're talking about.
"I shouldn't even need to explain the difference here." translates to "I can't provide a good argument so I'll just say it should be obvious". You're just trolling.
Interesting. It's illuminating to note how much you believe in your own sig line. By the way, how is it trolling to note a fundamental difference between voluntary contracts and murder? These two things are completely, totally, and utterly incomparable. One removes a person's fundamental rights (life); the other is an agreement between two parties.
They're not actually slaves and the agreements you're entering into. It's true I know nothing first hand about the BDSM community but you appear to know even less. If A agrees to be B's slave, B can still be arrested and charged if B mutilates or murders A even with A's consent.
Well, yes, but murder was a different example you gave. We were talking about slavery. Granted, if the slave gave his consent to be a slave, it isn't really slavery (that's the "involuntary" part of involuntary servitude). But you made that error as well. So I'm not sure what your point here is, beyond "killing people is bad, and enslaving them is equally bad".
if everyone is free, surely you should be free to sell your children into prostitution?
Children are not property, and cannot be bought and sold.
Surely you should be free to murder someone if you feel like it, right?
I shouldn't even need to explain the difference here. Surely you are capable of determining the difference between voluntarily entering into a contract, and murder. How you got modded "insightful" with harebrained, ridiculous examples like this is beyond me.
If people were permitted to become slaves, this would have an impact on society, not just those involved in the contract.
People can become slaves. I take it you don't know much about the BDSM community, do you?
How many people here have in the last couple of years actually tried to type on a Model M?
I have, for one. It's the keyboard attached to my desktop at home. I've noticed that I make fewer mistakes on the Model M than I do on the generic Dell keyboards at my university, and especially compared to my laptop's keyboard. The "click" isn't just random noise; that's aural and tactile response that you have successfully completed a keypress. With most other keyboards, I have to guess, and although I'm usually right, I am not always. I suppose the Model Ms aren't exactly for everyone, but they're perfect for me.
But there's another aspect of building systems, and that's building for the future. You have to remember that parts like DIMMs don't exist in a vacuum. DDR2 and DDR3 are electrically incompatible, and so when you buy a motherboard, you have to make a decision then about what kind of RAM you want. You want to upgrade your RAM to the next standard, you also have to pay money for a new motherboard, and possibly a new CPU as well. Depending on how good the new standard is compared to the old, and how well-supported (or not) the old standard will be once it's superseded, buying a plane with jet engine hookups may well be worth the added cost.
Take PCI-Express, for example. PCIe pretty much took the graphics card world by storm in a relatively short period of time. When I was building my present computer two and a half years ago, PCIe was still a fairly whiz-bang standard. Had I followed the "take the older, cheaper, good-enough" hardware route and stuck with an AGP board, I would have no options today for a new graphics card.
Of course, the counterexample is DDR and DDR2. I made the choice when I built my computer to stick with DDR. Partially because Socket AM2 wasn't out at the time, and partially because the latencies kept DDR2's performance right on-par with DDR, sometimes even slightly worse. Even though today, DDR2 does have better performance, DDR memory is still readily available in whatever increments you want it, and still dirt cheap too. And its performance is still plenty good.
I guess the moral is, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all approach to these kinds of cost/performance/upgradability tradeoffs. Is DDR3 expensive now? Yep. Is it worth the cost? To some people, it might be.
Every school is different, and engineering schools are no exception. I'm a junior CS major at a fairly well-regarded (top 100) engineering school, and they give us plenty of humanities and social science electives in the BS program, plus four free electives that you can do really whatever you want with. Not every CS program breaks your balls.
The Energizer Bunny certainly comes to mind. They could make a nice "solute to the Mars rovers", showing scenic images from the mission against booming orchestral music.
A properly written web site should never need to do a browser check.
My site implements a (sort of) browser check, but only through.htaccess. Any browser that supports application/xhtml+xml gets that MIME type for my pages, and any browser that doesn't support it gets text/html. There are indeed legitimate uses to checking browsers, or at the very least browser capabilities. This is the underlying idea behind a legitimate use of XSLT, too. It's not bad web design to create different versions of a site for different browsers; it's merely bad design to either not deliver or cripple a web site based on what browser is being used.
Yeah, having an OS that works with a minimum of goofing about really sucks.
Don't get me wrong, from time to time, I get the "learn something new" bug too. But normally, I just want my OS to work, and get annoyed when it doesn't. I know how to fix it if it dies, but that doesn't mean I like doing it all the time. I know what a configuration file is, how to edit them, how to compile and install programs...but I don't want to do that all the time. I don't want to use the trusty trio of./configure, make, make install only to discover that some obscure dependency isn't met. I like aptitude and how it manages packages without me having to worry about all the piddling shit. It's simply easier, and it affords me more time to do other things that I enjoy. As many have already pointed out, your arrogant attitude turns people off of Linux. Frankly, your arrogant attitude also makes you look like a giant ass as well. There are more important things to worry about than how "nerdy" something is; it's as ridiculous as worrying about how "cool" your car is, when the function of a car is to transport you from one point to another. However, it's your choice.
Don't bother; if you overclock it like mad, you run into all sorts of problems, and if you don't, you run into the fact that, at stock clocks, it rather sucks. Save yourself the trouble and get an Opteron, if you insist on overclocking, or if you don't, an Athlon 64 X2.
In short, when 2k came out, P4 was almost there and PIII Coppermine was ubiquitous. A Pentium II would no more be "high end" then than a Willamette P4 at 1.5 GHz would be "high end" today, loosely. Though you are correct: Win2k does run well on hardware like that.
Actually, the Pentium M (7xx series) CPU, which is actually a fairly nice CPU, was designed in Israel. The Pentium 4 (5xx and 6xx; the 8xx Pentium D is 2 Prescotts glued together), including the dismal Willamette, fairly good Northwood, and absolutely awful Prescott, was designed (if I recall correctly) in Oregon.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No. And on the other hand, no.
I've been using Kubuntu Karmic since the beta, and it's been working fine for me. I've had precisely two problems: Slightly flaky sound (fixed by installing PulseAudio and using that as the default over whatever KDE defaults to), and the kernel bitching a bunch at me about having ECC disabled in BIOS (fixed by blacklisting the ECC modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf).
ext4 is fully mature--it's no more "bleeding edge" than the 2.6.28 kernel used in 9.04--but you can choose ext3 if you want, and if you're upgrading it won't in-place upgrade you to ext4. Grub2 was an interesting choice, though if you're updating from an older Ubuntu version, again it won't upgrade that for you. Grub2 works fine for me; it's just a bunch slower than legacy GRUB.
You know, pull-down menus are pretty confusing to first-time users, too. Most people are smart enough to get the hang of them after a few hours, and don't even think about them after a few months.
This depends on how well the menus are designed, too. One quirk that's bugged me about Firefox for a long time: In *nix systems, the preferences window is called Preferences and is located in the Edit menu. In Windows, it's called Options and is located in the Tools menu. I know they're trying to emulate the paradigm that other programs for [Windows/GNOME/KDE] will also use, but that d'oh moment, when I'm telling my (Windows-using) grandpa how to change his home page and I tell him to find Preferences under Edit, is pretty annoying.
This sounds like another good reason to switch to BSD. Strike two linux!
(FWIW strike one is linux's sound architecture)
I think more than a few people would be willing to use BSD, if the driver situation weren't so bad for it. It's worse than the situation Linux is in, and Linux has some severe driver problems as well (just look at ATI video cards).
Ya know.. When we decide to rid ourselves of 1/3 of our useless population.. these bastards should be first on the ship.
You forget. We're the descendants of the useless 1/3.
could an AM2+ processor be used in an AM3 motherboard?
Nope. The AM2+s lack the DDR3 memory controller.
That is a bacteriophage, which is neither a cold nor a flu virus.
"Do", not "due". And I got the right to say the first time we had brownouts in my area, and other people's energy wasting affected me. Not only do you waste an extra 40-100W per computer, but during summer, your ACs work harder too, cooling down that extra heat energy.
Interestingly, my desktop (which runs both SETI and rosetta) still keeps my CPU throttled down to 1 GHz from its listed clock speed of 2.2 GHz, due to the miracle of Cool'n'Quiet. I've never bothered to check what my desktop's power load is, either while running BOINC or while not running it, but I imagine the difference is fairly negligible if my CPU thinks it's not even busy enough to click up from 1 GHz.
Sure they can be, if your freedom is absolute, you're free to treat others like property.
By extension, others would be free to treat you like property, which would impinge on that absoluteness of freedom you're talking about.
"I shouldn't even need to explain the difference here." translates to "I can't provide a good argument so I'll just say it should be obvious". You're just trolling.
Interesting. It's illuminating to note how much you believe in your own sig line. By the way, how is it trolling to note a fundamental difference between voluntary contracts and murder? These two things are completely, totally, and utterly incomparable. One removes a person's fundamental rights (life); the other is an agreement between two parties.
They're not actually slaves and the agreements you're entering into. It's true I know nothing first hand about the BDSM community but you appear to know even less. If A agrees to be B's slave, B can still be arrested and charged if B mutilates or murders A even with A's consent.
Well, yes, but murder was a different example you gave. We were talking about slavery. Granted, if the slave gave his consent to be a slave, it isn't really slavery (that's the "involuntary" part of involuntary servitude). But you made that error as well. So I'm not sure what your point here is, beyond "killing people is bad, and enslaving them is equally bad".
if everyone is free, surely you should be free to sell your children into prostitution?
Children are not property, and cannot be bought and sold.
Surely you should be free to murder someone if you feel like it, right?
I shouldn't even need to explain the difference here. Surely you are capable of determining the difference between voluntarily entering into a contract, and murder. How you got modded "insightful" with harebrained, ridiculous examples like this is beyond me.
If people were permitted to become slaves, this would have an impact on society, not just those involved in the contract.
People can become slaves. I take it you don't know much about the BDSM community, do you?
How many people here have in the last couple of years actually tried to type on a Model M?
I have, for one. It's the keyboard attached to my desktop at home. I've noticed that I make fewer mistakes on the Model M than I do on the generic Dell keyboards at my university, and especially compared to my laptop's keyboard. The "click" isn't just random noise; that's aural and tactile response that you have successfully completed a keypress. With most other keyboards, I have to guess, and although I'm usually right, I am not always. I suppose the Model Ms aren't exactly for everyone, but they're perfect for me.
But there's another aspect of building systems, and that's building for the future. You have to remember that parts like DIMMs don't exist in a vacuum. DDR2 and DDR3 are electrically incompatible, and so when you buy a motherboard, you have to make a decision then about what kind of RAM you want. You want to upgrade your RAM to the next standard, you also have to pay money for a new motherboard, and possibly a new CPU as well. Depending on how good the new standard is compared to the old, and how well-supported (or not) the old standard will be once it's superseded, buying a plane with jet engine hookups may well be worth the added cost.
Take PCI-Express, for example. PCIe pretty much took the graphics card world by storm in a relatively short period of time. When I was building my present computer two and a half years ago, PCIe was still a fairly whiz-bang standard. Had I followed the "take the older, cheaper, good-enough" hardware route and stuck with an AGP board, I would have no options today for a new graphics card.
Of course, the counterexample is DDR and DDR2. I made the choice when I built my computer to stick with DDR. Partially because Socket AM2 wasn't out at the time, and partially because the latencies kept DDR2's performance right on-par with DDR, sometimes even slightly worse. Even though today, DDR2 does have better performance, DDR memory is still readily available in whatever increments you want it, and still dirt cheap too. And its performance is still plenty good.
I guess the moral is, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all approach to these kinds of cost/performance/upgradability tradeoffs. Is DDR3 expensive now? Yep. Is it worth the cost? To some people, it might be.
Every school is different, and engineering schools are no exception. I'm a junior CS major at a fairly well-regarded (top 100) engineering school, and they give us plenty of humanities and social science electives in the BS program, plus four free electives that you can do really whatever you want with. Not every CS program breaks your balls.
But if you want an MS...
In what would a Mars Rover be soluble, exactly?
If the wing is bent, would that not change the wing's chord line, thus the angle of attack, and thus the lift?
Yeah, having an OS that works with a minimum of goofing about really sucks.
./configure, make, make install only to discover that some obscure dependency isn't met. I like aptitude and how it manages packages without me having to worry about all the piddling shit. It's simply easier, and it affords me more time to do other things that I enjoy. As many have already pointed out, your arrogant attitude turns people off of Linux. Frankly, your arrogant attitude also makes you look like a giant ass as well. There are more important things to worry about than how "nerdy" something is; it's as ridiculous as worrying about how "cool" your car is, when the function of a car is to transport you from one point to another. However, it's your choice.
Don't get me wrong, from time to time, I get the "learn something new" bug too. But normally, I just want my OS to work, and get annoyed when it doesn't. I know how to fix it if it dies, but that doesn't mean I like doing it all the time. I know what a configuration file is, how to edit them, how to compile and install programs...but I don't want to do that all the time. I don't want to use the trusty trio of
Lets cut this crap out that funding of the schools is the problem it isn't even the problem at all.
I hope you're not the one teaching kids English.
It's apparently illegal even to be seen carrying a bible in school.
Er. It seems you have been woefully misinformed.
You and your shirt could really benefit from this new invention that I hear is also in beta testing. It's called a "comma".
Don't bother; if you overclock it like mad, you run into all sorts of problems, and if you don't, you run into the fact that, at stock clocks, it rather sucks. Save yourself the trouble and get an Opteron, if you insist on overclocking, or if you don't, an Athlon 64 X2.
Kids are too busy taking pornographic pictures of themselves and having sex with teachers.
Only the lucky ones.
[Windows 2000] is part of the Microsoft Windows NT line of operating systems and was released on February 17, 2000.
The original Pentium 4, codenamed "Willamette", ran at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz and was released in November 2000 on the Socket 423 platform.
The Pentium III is an x86 (more precisely, an i686) architecture microprocessor by Intel, introduced on February 26, 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III
In short, when 2k came out, P4 was almost there and PIII Coppermine was ubiquitous. A Pentium II would no more be "high end" then than a Willamette P4 at 1.5 GHz would be "high end" today, loosely. Though you are correct: Win2k does run well on hardware like that.
Actually, the Pentium M (7xx series) CPU, which is actually a fairly nice CPU, was designed in Israel. The Pentium 4 (5xx and 6xx; the 8xx Pentium D is 2 Prescotts glued together), including the dismal Willamette, fairly good Northwood, and absolutely awful Prescott, was designed (if I recall correctly) in Oregon.
No, he has a point. AMD does not make and has never made an X2 3200+. The absolute bottom of the barrel is a 3800+.