You have an interesting point. I wish a commercial product would pop up that actually supports most open source operating systems. Some linux users and a few BSD users refuse to use anything not under their favorite license. I think a little diversity could really allow a product to get market share. I personally use Windows, Mac OSX, MidnightBSD and Solaris at home. It would be nice to have one word processor for all of them. (no, i don't like open office) For me, the problem with open office is the user interface and lack of decent Mac support. I don't want to run it in X11 and I shouldn't have to go to a third party to get a native ui either. The other problem is the functionality dependance on Java. Some platforms you simply can't run java on. (like anyone using almost any risc chip with an open source OS)
Have you seen what MS charges college students? You only get a discount on XP Pro last I checked, and its still 99 dollars. With the special Microsoft licensing deal at my last uni, I could get it for 89.. wow the savings.
Apparently you make enough that 99 dollars isn't much money. To some people, thats a fifth of their rent or half their weekly paycheck before taxes! If Microsoft shut them out, they would be forced to use an alternative OS. Microsoft doesn't want to lose poor people. I got into computing in my teens while I lived in a trailer park. I can tell you that everyone with a computer ran windows 3.1 or 95 in there. (well except me and a friend who pirated NT4) I was a freak when i tried redhat 5. Aside from the obvious hatred of trailer parks I now have, I don't see these people affording anything or wanting to switch off windows.
Now eventually they'd probably get a license to Windows one way or another. As for the restore disc, my mother's HP didn't come with one. I had no way to reinstall Windows ME on her system when she got a virus. (arguably windows me is a virus too) She makes 30,000 a year and has major credit card debt. No windows license for her. My plan to get her legal is to wait till her system dies and then help her get a new lowend dell. I can't build a pc with a windows license for 300 dollars very easily including a monitor.
On a side note, Macs don't cost thousands of dollars. My iBook was $950 and Mac Minis are under 1000. Its not like you have to buy an apple display. They have great refurb deals too.
btw doesn't geek squad charge a lot for windows installs? That would probably make it closer to $200. At that point wait for dell to have a sale...
(yes dell sucks, but they are cheap and you get a free fireplace with each new laptop)
I had to call apple at lot less than dell at my previous job. I agree apple laptops aren't perfect, but i've got 3 at home and only one has had any problem. The lcd was bad when it shipped (first iBook). Apple replaced it and shipped it back in 2 days. Both G4s work fine.
As for performance, my wife's PowerMac G4 Dual 867mhz compares in frame rate on WoW and ET with my Dual Xeon 2.0ghz dell. Both had an upgraded video card (9600xt 128mb agp in dell, 9800 agp4x 128mb in mac). For many tasks the systems are comparable. My dell kicks ass when there's a long integer computation loop or something. Now if I run freebsd or linux on my dell, it does seem noticably faster. I'd say apple's advantage is OSX's speed (minus poor disk IO). Even my iBook can run Calculator well.:)
There is a difference in vendor quality with an apple. As far as I know, no one has video of an iBook blowing up like that dell laptop in japan. Thinkpads, dells and gateways have always had problems with hard drives failing. With thinkpads, it was because heat from the cpu was blown at the hard drives. (IBM versions at least) Every vendor has a problem just like anything in life. You just have to find the vendor with the least problems or at least ones you can live with. Buying an apple is a better investment than a dell. Buying a thinkpad might be equivalent although i've never seen a lenovo model. In any event, you need to pay more than the 500 dollars dell starts their flaming laptops at. MacBooks are comparable to other vendors. I do miss the radeon cards from the iBooks though.
As for speed, if you are running native apps an intel mac is much faster than a PowerPC model. However, rosetta is VERY slow and I found Dreamweaver and Illustrator unusable on a dual core mac mini for example.
I agree with everything that you said. I don't even understand why SDTVs are still sold. Prices won't come down until conventional televisions are off the market. Then when no one will buy a tv, they must lower the prices.
As for LCD televisions, I'd personally rather have one. They take up little space and many use less energy than a CRT. If the prices would come down a bit more, I might actually save money running an LCD over a CRT.
I wouldn't assume the supreme court wants to make it easier to beat down stupid patents. Remember who did the last appointments to the supreme court? Patents help monopolies. The best we can hope for is a very narrow verdict so no more harm is done.
No, just apple patches. There are bugs in the 10.4.x patches between versions. Check out the apple osx server mailing list sometime. You'll see what i'm talking about. I suppolse you could even read the changelog in the apple support area. It depends what features you tend to use if you experience problems. In my case, I ran a file server with afp and samba support enabled. I had some weird cases where permissions on share points would change. Occasionally services would fail and not restart. 10.4.6 did seem pretty stable compared to 10.4.2-10.4.5 though.
Part of the problem was the dns name of the server was changed on me. My boss told the dns admins to change the hostname which screwed up the kerberos realm stuff. I had to delete all users, reset it and then add them again to get it working just right. That particular issue was not apple's fault, but they could make it easier to change the name. The command line utility did not fix the kerberos realm. The xserve was purchased last september and I was new to OSX server administration when i took over then. I did have other experience.
I'm sure part of it was me and my ignorant boss. There is a dark side to Mac administration though. I think I'd personally pick Windows, freebsd or linux for a file server in the future. (freebsd has bad samba throughput)
Yes, apple's updates can be a real pain. My iBook G4 800mhz had an openfirmware update early on. After that point the fans never run unless i boot into a hardware test. THey increased the temperature before the fans kick in so my iBOok freezes if i try to run a game or intensive app. Another fun factor in iBook ownership is upgrading the hard drive. 50 screws. You literally have to take everthing but the display off to swap out the hard drive. With a dell its 1 screw on most models.
With apple updates to the OS or essential software its always good to wait 24 hours before patching. They usually catch severe problems and offer an update during that time. If you think client patches are bad, try OSX server.
Yes, I've had a lot of problems with T-Mobile as well. A few minor billing issues and many problems with dropped calls. Contacting customer service is useless. I found it difficult to believe it was my phone as my wife's phone did the same thing. Each phone is a different brand. Then I was told it was my area. The same problem happens to me on the other side of the state. In both cases college towns (ann arbor mi and kalamazoo mi). I guess the next question is who doesn't suck? I've talked to people with centenial and they are out. I wont' use cingular since AT&T owns them. (bad dsl and landline issues) Verizon has dicked me over with VOIP so I'm not about to use them again. How's sprint?
Good idea, but it won't help much. Linus did it with Linux and I still here people say "LieNIX" instead of "Linux". I had difficulty pronoucing his name when I got the first edition of CSS: Design for the Web. (great book) Around my friends i just started calling it the Bert and Ernie book. Looking back its not the nicest reference, but it sure did reflect how i felt about the backwards z-index numbering in opera 4. I stopped supporting opera explicitly then and to this day never use it.
You are absolutely correct. I bought my wife WoW the day it came out. It included a 10 day free trial for me. We both started at the same time. I couldn't find another copy to buy for 3 months. Her first character was already level 28 or something by the time I got the game. (i was level 9)
She started a new character with me. Since my first love is FPS games, it always ends up with her 20 or more levels ahead of me by the time I play Wow again. I only spend 5-10 hours a month playing WoW and 20-30 playing Enemy Territory. I can never keep up with her and I often need to play WoW to talk to her.:)
Another problem with the industry is that most people don't play games very long. Most of my friends don't stick with a game long enough to get more than one or two plays in with them online. Its costly keeping up. One minute battlefield 2 is hot and the next they are playing guildwars. I can't keep up anymore. I miss playing Doom or AOE2 for 5 hours with friends, etc. I've got literally hundreds of games collecting dust because no one else has them or wants to play them anymore.
I have trouble believing that bbcode or any other method is full proof. It depends what you translate the bbcode into in your app. You may still introduce an issue. Perhaps user agents should allow you to disable features on pages using headers, etc. I could explicitly mark a page as not including javascript, etc. Obviously this wouldn't be full proof either, but it would certainly help. If the browser isn't expecting javascript or embedded objects then it can safely ignore them. Maybe we should start signing pages so that they don't display without a checksum, etc. The browser would need to wait for the whole page though.
The BSD community is just following in the Linux footsteps on this one. I've said this before, and I'll say it again... DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are distros, nothing more.
I've been working on a new BSD variant called MidnightBSD based on FreeBSD 6 but its a real fork. The idea is to add a graphical environment that is not KDE or gnome. I did seriously consider gnome, but their lack of interest in supporting non linux systems scared me off. I've read about the crap that the freebsd gnome project has put up with. Plus I figured it would just end up being another linuxish ripoff.
The real problem with developing something new is that so many people are almost religious about their window managers and if they like full fledged desktop environments. Another problem is development. In order to have a unique system you must write a gui toolkit yourself or use a more obscure one. If I were to write a window manager in gtk for instance, I'd get flack for duplicating effort when sawfish, xfce and metacity exists. The other issue is licensing. These new bsd distros have used GPL because its easier fot them. There aren't many bsd licensed toolkits to build from or even LGPL that are worth anything. I don't care if part of the system is under gpl, but I think die hard bsd fans will. In the end, I decided that I'll be targeting a very specific audience as its a BSD with a freakish gui.
I decided to use GNUstep with WindowMaker to start the project and then see where it takes me. I definetely want to replace the window manager with something that is more usable though. Usability is something few of us open source developers care about. I did the mom test though and she actually could use window maker better than KDE. She said there was less "clutter". She's a windows user.
I'm hoping to get some help developing a new window manager and applications on top of gnustep. From a licensing perspective its weird, but its also a bit like NEXTSTEP which can't be bad.
I'm keeping freebsd ports though. I'll have to write a gui frontend for them and start my own ports collection long term.
Hot and bothered is right. If you look at the specs, this thing uses more power and most likely gets hotter than its predecessors. I'm starting to care about power consumption with processors, and it seems only reasonable that be applied to other devices like drives and video cards as well. The largest hard drive in my home is 160gb right now. I could use a 700GB disk, but I'd rather have a drive that uses less power at say 300GB.
That is true, but the definition of an operating system is not as clear cut as it used to be. People demand more functionality from modern operating systems. Its not just a kernel and a few tools anymore. End users want their computers to play music and games. They want eye candy, instant messaging, word processing, internet capability, etc.
Then there's algorithm changes. Sometimes faster algorithms require a larger working set and therefore use more memory. Look at the changelog for the linux kernel or check out some of the discussions on the BSD mailing lists. I saw a thread debating if FreeBSD should increase the stack size to accomodate Gnome a year or so back. Someone pointed out that linux and solaris both have larger stacks. Caches used are much larger now as we try to feed data to our 3ghz+ cpus.
The real problem is that programmers entering college in the past 10 years have been told that memory is cheap and new cpus will be around to fix any of their problems in 18 months. No one seems to care about a small memory footprint or speed anymore. Programmers are also taught that optimizing code isn't worth it because it introduces bugs and increases debugging time. Most of us hate debugging and rely on IDEs to do it for us. Then you add virtual machines like the java vm and.NET runtime and you see the movement away from performance over simplicity. Microsoft and VMWare are pusing virtualization like crazy. That movement may bring back performance concerns since people will want WIndows and Linux to run fast in virtual machines. It will only be a short term effect though.
Reading this thread I saw several posts about using assembly to speed up computations. Did you realize that we are told never to use assembly because gcc can do it better than we can? That was reinforced in every class at my university, even the sparc assembly course. I compared the output from a c program and something i wrote and my code was concise and faster in assembly. Most students didn't even try it though as the professor told them "the answer". Sometimes complexity is worth it.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to properly cool my computers. It seems like everytime I buy a new pc, its got problems. (regardless if i build or buy oem)
I can get most cpus to run at 35 degrees celcius using artec silver and a decent heat sync/fan combo. The problem is usually with hard drives or video cards.
I've got two pcs currently. One often overheats causing data loss. I'm using raid 1 (mirroring) so there is considerable heat generated and both drives often access concurrently. The system is my home file server and router so its quite important that it stays up and reliable. Idle temerature yesterday was 105 degrees F while the apartment got up near 90 (broken air conditioning). The cpu and ambient case temperature were identical. This machine isn't a workhorse by any means. Its an AMD Sempron 2300+ with a Geforce 5200 (fanless), 3 hard drives (2 in raid 1 wd sata 150 disks, 1 seagate 80gb ide), and a dvd rom drive. I've got an antec case with a 375 watt power supply. There is an 80 and 120 fan inside plus the cpu fan and of course the power supply. I can get the back of the case very cool, but never seem to get the drives to stay cool. If I place a fan in the front, it doesn't seem to help at all. (the fans are in the back, pulling air out) In the past, I've had bad luck with hard drive coolers. Usually the fans on them would not help and the added crap around the drive made it worse. I've thought about water cooling plus some fans but I don't want to put that much into a sempron. (still hoping the wife will let me get an athlon64 or pentium D)
Yes, but DVD caught on because people could watch movies on their computers. College students bought them like crazy. Then the person bought one disc to try it and no more vhs.:)
In this case, the new drives include tons of DRM. I think that will be the downfall because people will expect the freedoms they've seen with DVD. When you have to buy a new computer monitor and you can't make a copy for your buddy... well lets just say it won't do as well.
I'm still worried about buying an HDTV that will actually work. I bet HDMI will be replaced with something else before i can afford one. I just want some damn standards. I feel safer buying a 32bit processor right now than purchasing a new tv. I know 32bit software will be around for a few more years.
I'd jump at the opportunity to download movies on the internet. I buy tv shows on iTunes all the time. I care about convenience over video quality. iTunes has drm restrictions too but at least i can watch the files on both my iBook and dell workstation.
Like others have mentioned, I'm more interested in larger backup storage. In my case, for my iTunes library and source code.
And? Blogging lowers my stress levels. I get to talk about how shitty my day was and a few people close to me may read it and then we'll have a dialog. If not, i put it somewhere and i can let it go. Not just teens blog. I'm in my late 20s. My mother has a blog too.
Frankly i have less of a problem with blogging than the governments privacy violations with the telephone network. I choose to blog, I didn't choose to let them listen to my calls or view the list of people I called.
Blogging isn't a breakdown in society, its just a new way to communicate information to people you know. (and don't know)
It depends on the person I suppose. I personally like MySQL better than postgresql as I find it easier to administer. (less crap on the file system, etc) I will look again. Perhaps postgresql has better jdbc support now than the last time I looked.
I'm glad to see oracle releasing open source products.
I don't think its Microsoft's responsibility to keep the driver api identical for a new release of windows. Many of us complain about Microsoft's lack of security including drivers. It might have been more difficult for Sony DRM or many rootkits to work if the driver model were more secure and more drivers could run in userland. Microsoft has made steps to do this which causes incompatibilities.
Its ok for linux developers to drastically change a minor kernel release 2.6.x but not ok for microsoft to change on a major release? That doesn't make sense. In my view, the linux people are wrong. A kernel module written for 2.6.0 should work in 2.6.16 without any changes. 2.8.x can include incompatible changes.
I think people forget this is a beta. Microsoft will change the system several times before release. They usually throw drivers in at the last minute after third party vendors have had time to develop and verify them on a near complete release. It makes sense to do that.
What I want to know about vista are things like usability improvements, reasons I might want to upgrade without the Microsoft spin, etc. Will my software run? Early reports indicated that vista will break a lot of apps.
You might be right. Then again, maybe someone found a serious flaw with the latest DRM crap and they are trying to save face. It seems to me they've always wanted to restrict me. Why stop at the finish line?
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You have an interesting point. I wish a commercial product would pop up that actually supports most open source operating systems. Some linux users and a few BSD users refuse to use anything not under their favorite license. I think a little diversity could really allow a product to get market share. I personally use Windows, Mac OSX, MidnightBSD and Solaris at home. It would be nice to have one word processor for all of them. (no, i don't like open office) For me, the problem with open office is the user interface and lack of decent Mac support. I don't want to run it in X11 and I shouldn't have to go to a third party to get a native ui either. The other problem is the functionality dependance on Java. Some platforms you simply can't run java on. (like anyone using almost any risc chip with an open source OS)
Have you seen what MS charges college students? You only get a discount on XP Pro last I checked, and its still 99 dollars. With the special Microsoft licensing deal at my last uni, I could get it for 89.. wow the savings.
Apparently you make enough that 99 dollars isn't much money. To some people, thats a fifth of their rent or half their weekly paycheck before taxes! If Microsoft shut them out, they would be forced to use an alternative OS. Microsoft doesn't want to lose poor people. I got into computing in my teens while I lived in a trailer park. I can tell you that everyone with a computer ran windows 3.1 or 95 in there. (well except me and a friend who pirated NT4) I was a freak when i tried redhat 5. Aside from the obvious hatred of trailer parks I now have, I don't see these people affording anything or wanting to switch off windows.
Now eventually they'd probably get a license to Windows one way or another. As for the restore disc, my mother's HP didn't come with one. I had no way to reinstall Windows ME on her system when she got a virus. (arguably windows me is a virus too) She makes 30,000 a year and has major credit card debt. No windows license for her. My plan to get her legal is to wait till her system dies and then help her get a new lowend dell. I can't build a pc with a windows license for 300 dollars very easily including a monitor.
On a side note, Macs don't cost thousands of dollars. My iBook was $950 and Mac Minis are under 1000. Its not like you have to buy an apple display. They have great refurb deals too.
btw doesn't geek squad charge a lot for windows installs? That would probably make it closer to $200. At that point wait for dell to have a sale...
(yes dell sucks, but they are cheap and you get a free fireplace with each new laptop)
True but i have a first gen g4 ibook and its working great. It all depends.. this was based on the powerbooks before it.
I had to call apple at lot less than dell at my previous job. I agree apple laptops aren't perfect, but i've got 3 at home and only one has had any problem. The lcd was bad when it shipped (first iBook). Apple replaced it and shipped it back in 2 days. Both G4s work fine.
:)
As for performance, my wife's PowerMac G4 Dual 867mhz compares in frame rate on WoW and ET with my Dual Xeon 2.0ghz dell. Both had an upgraded video card (9600xt 128mb agp in dell, 9800 agp4x 128mb in mac). For many tasks the systems are comparable. My dell kicks ass when there's a long integer computation loop or something. Now if I run freebsd or linux on my dell, it does seem noticably faster. I'd say apple's advantage is OSX's speed (minus poor disk IO). Even my iBook can run Calculator well.
There is a difference in vendor quality with an apple. As far as I know, no one has video of an iBook blowing up like that dell laptop in japan. Thinkpads, dells and gateways have always had problems with hard drives failing. With thinkpads, it was because heat from the cpu was blown at the hard drives. (IBM versions at least) Every vendor has a problem just like anything in life. You just have to find the vendor with the least problems or at least ones you can live with. Buying an apple is a better investment than a dell. Buying a thinkpad might be equivalent although i've never seen a lenovo model. In any event, you need to pay more than the 500 dollars dell starts their flaming laptops at. MacBooks are comparable to other vendors. I do miss the radeon cards from the iBooks though.
As for speed, if you are running native apps an intel mac is much faster than a PowerPC model. However, rosetta is VERY slow and I found Dreamweaver and Illustrator unusable on a dual core mac mini for example.
I agree with everything that you said. I don't even understand why SDTVs are still sold. Prices won't come down until conventional televisions are off the market. Then when no one will buy a tv, they must lower the prices.
As for LCD televisions, I'd personally rather have one. They take up little space and many use less energy than a CRT. If the prices would come down a bit more, I might actually save money running an LCD over a CRT.
I wouldn't assume the supreme court wants to make it easier to beat down stupid patents. Remember who did the last appointments to the supreme court? Patents help monopolies. The best we can hope for is a very narrow verdict so no more harm is done.
No, just apple patches. There are bugs in the 10.4.x patches between versions. Check out the apple osx server mailing list sometime. You'll see what i'm talking about. I suppolse you could even read the changelog in the apple support area. It depends what features you tend to use if you experience problems. In my case, I ran a file server with afp and samba support enabled. I had some weird cases where permissions on share points would change. Occasionally services would fail and not restart. 10.4.6 did seem pretty stable compared to 10.4.2-10.4.5 though.
Part of the problem was the dns name of the server was changed on me. My boss told the dns admins to change the hostname which screwed up the kerberos realm stuff. I had to delete all users, reset it and then add them again to get it working just right. That particular issue was not apple's fault, but they could make it easier to change the name. The command line utility did not fix the kerberos realm. The xserve was purchased last september and I was new to OSX server administration when i took over then. I did have other experience.
I'm sure part of it was me and my ignorant boss. There is a dark side to Mac administration though. I think I'd personally pick Windows, freebsd or linux for a file server in the future. (freebsd has bad samba throughput)
Usually my own server et.foolishgames.net. Sometimes I hit european servers.
Yes, apple's updates can be a real pain. My iBook G4 800mhz had an openfirmware update early on. After that point the fans never run unless i boot into a hardware test. THey increased the temperature before the fans kick in so my iBOok freezes if i try to run a game or intensive app. Another fun factor in iBook ownership is upgrading the hard drive. 50 screws. You literally have to take everthing but the display off to swap out the hard drive. With a dell its 1 screw on most models.
With apple updates to the OS or essential software its always good to wait 24 hours before patching. They usually catch severe problems and offer an update during that time. If you think client patches are bad, try OSX server.
Yes, I've had a lot of problems with T-Mobile as well. A few minor billing issues and many problems with dropped calls. Contacting customer service is useless. I found it difficult to believe it was my phone as my wife's phone did the same thing. Each phone is a different brand. Then I was told it was my area. The same problem happens to me on the other side of the state. In both cases college towns (ann arbor mi and kalamazoo mi). I guess the next question is who doesn't suck? I've talked to people with centenial and they are out. I wont' use cingular since AT&T owns them. (bad dsl and landline issues) Verizon has dicked me over with VOIP so I'm not about to use them again. How's sprint?
Good idea, but it won't help much. Linus did it with Linux and I still here people say "LieNIX" instead of "Linux". I had difficulty pronoucing his name when I got the first edition of CSS: Design for the Web. (great book) Around my friends i just started calling it the Bert and Ernie book. Looking back its not the nicest reference, but it sure did reflect how i felt about the backwards z-index numbering in opera 4. I stopped supporting opera explicitly then and to this day never use it.
You are absolutely correct. I bought my wife WoW the day it came out. It included a 10 day free trial for me. We both started at the same time. I couldn't find another copy to buy for 3 months. Her first character was already level 28 or something by the time I got the game. (i was level 9)
:)
She started a new character with me. Since my first love is FPS games, it always ends up with her 20 or more levels ahead of me by the time I play Wow again. I only spend 5-10 hours a month playing WoW and 20-30 playing Enemy Territory. I can never keep up with her and I often need to play WoW to talk to her.
Another problem with the industry is that most people don't play games very long. Most of my friends don't stick with a game long enough to get more than one or two plays in with them online. Its costly keeping up. One minute battlefield 2 is hot and the next they are playing guildwars. I can't keep up anymore. I miss playing Doom or AOE2 for 5 hours with friends, etc. I've got literally hundreds of games collecting dust because no one else has them or wants to play them anymore.
I have trouble believing that bbcode or any other method is full proof. It depends what you translate the bbcode into in your app. You may still introduce an issue. Perhaps user agents should allow you to disable features on pages using headers, etc. I could explicitly mark a page as not including javascript, etc. Obviously this wouldn't be full proof either, but it would certainly help. If the browser isn't expecting javascript or embedded objects then it can safely ignore them. Maybe we should start signing pages so that they don't display without a checksum, etc. The browser would need to wait for the whole page though.
Raw xhtml in itself isn't bad.
As long as it doesn't show the bomb icon from classic. Talk about shitting your pants...
The BSD community is just following in the Linux footsteps on this one. I've said this before, and I'll say it again... DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are distros, nothing more.
I've been working on a new BSD variant called MidnightBSD based on FreeBSD 6 but its a real fork. The idea is to add a graphical environment that is not KDE or gnome. I did seriously consider gnome, but their lack of interest in supporting non linux systems scared me off. I've read about the crap that the freebsd gnome project has put up with. Plus I figured it would just end up being another linuxish ripoff.
The real problem with developing something new is that so many people are almost religious about their window managers and if they like full fledged desktop environments. Another problem is development. In order to have a unique system you must write a gui toolkit yourself or use a more obscure one. If I were to write a window manager in gtk for instance, I'd get flack for duplicating effort when sawfish, xfce and metacity exists. The other issue is licensing. These new bsd distros have used GPL because its easier fot them. There aren't many bsd licensed toolkits to build from or even LGPL that are worth anything. I don't care if part of the system is under gpl, but I think die hard bsd fans will. In the end, I decided that I'll be targeting a very specific audience as its a BSD with a freakish gui.
I decided to use GNUstep with WindowMaker to start the project and then see where it takes me. I definetely want to replace the window manager with something that is more usable though. Usability is something few of us open source developers care about. I did the mom test though and she actually could use window maker better than KDE. She said there was less "clutter". She's a windows user.
I'm hoping to get some help developing a new window manager and applications on top of gnustep. From a licensing perspective its weird, but its also a bit like NEXTSTEP which can't be bad.
I'm keeping freebsd ports though. I'll have to write a gui frontend for them and start my own ports collection long term.
Thanks, I'll look into that product.
Hot and bothered is right. If you look at the specs, this thing uses more power and most likely gets hotter than its predecessors. I'm starting to care about power consumption with processors, and it seems only reasonable that be applied to other devices like drives and video cards as well. The largest hard drive in my home is 160gb right now. I could use a 700GB disk, but I'd rather have a drive that uses less power at say 300GB.
That is true, but the definition of an operating system is not as clear cut as it used to be. People demand more functionality from modern operating systems. Its not just a kernel and a few tools anymore. End users want their computers to play music and games. They want eye candy, instant messaging, word processing, internet capability, etc.
.NET runtime and you see the movement away from performance over simplicity. Microsoft and VMWare are pusing virtualization like crazy. That movement may bring back performance concerns since people will want WIndows and Linux to run fast in virtual machines. It will only be a short term effect though.
Then there's algorithm changes. Sometimes faster algorithms require a larger working set and therefore use more memory. Look at the changelog for the linux kernel or check out some of the discussions on the BSD mailing lists. I saw a thread debating if FreeBSD should increase the stack size to accomodate Gnome a year or so back. Someone pointed out that linux and solaris both have larger stacks. Caches used are much larger now as we try to feed data to our 3ghz+ cpus.
The real problem is that programmers entering college in the past 10 years have been told that memory is cheap and new cpus will be around to fix any of their problems in 18 months. No one seems to care about a small memory footprint or speed anymore. Programmers are also taught that optimizing code isn't worth it because it introduces bugs and increases debugging time. Most of us hate debugging and rely on IDEs to do it for us. Then you add virtual machines like the java vm and
Reading this thread I saw several posts about using assembly to speed up computations. Did you realize that we are told never to use assembly because gcc can do it better than we can? That was reinforced in every class at my university, even the sparc assembly course. I compared the output from a c program and something i wrote and my code was concise and faster in assembly. Most students didn't even try it though as the professor told them "the answer". Sometimes complexity is worth it.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to properly cool my computers. It seems like everytime I buy a new pc, its got problems. (regardless if i build or buy oem)
I can get most cpus to run at 35 degrees celcius using artec silver and a decent heat sync/fan combo. The problem is usually with hard drives or video cards.
I've got two pcs currently. One often overheats causing data loss. I'm using raid 1 (mirroring) so there is considerable heat generated and both drives often access concurrently. The system is my home file server and router so its quite important that it stays up and reliable. Idle temerature yesterday was 105 degrees F while the apartment got up near 90 (broken air conditioning). The cpu and ambient case temperature were identical. This machine isn't a workhorse by any means. Its an AMD Sempron 2300+ with a Geforce 5200 (fanless), 3 hard drives (2 in raid 1 wd sata 150 disks, 1 seagate 80gb ide), and a dvd rom drive. I've got an antec case with a 375 watt power supply. There is an 80 and 120 fan inside plus the cpu fan and of course the power supply. I can get the back of the case very cool, but never seem to get the drives to stay cool. If I place a fan in the front, it doesn't seem to help at all. (the fans are in the back, pulling air out) In the past, I've had bad luck with hard drive coolers. Usually the fans on them would not help and the added crap around the drive made it worse. I've thought about water cooling plus some fans but I don't want to put that much into a sempron. (still hoping the wife will let me get an athlon64 or pentium D)
Yes, but DVD caught on because people could watch movies on their computers. College students bought them like crazy. Then the person bought one disc to try it and no more vhs. :)
In this case, the new drives include tons of DRM. I think that will be the downfall because people will expect the freedoms they've seen with DVD. When you have to buy a new computer monitor and you can't make a copy for your buddy... well lets just say it won't do as well.
I'm still worried about buying an HDTV that will actually work. I bet HDMI will be replaced with something else before i can afford one. I just want some damn standards. I feel safer buying a 32bit processor right now than purchasing a new tv. I know 32bit software will be around for a few more years.
I'd jump at the opportunity to download movies on the internet. I buy tv shows on iTunes all the time. I care about convenience over video quality. iTunes has drm restrictions too but at least i can watch the files on both my iBook and dell workstation.
Like others have mentioned, I'm more interested in larger backup storage. In my case, for my iTunes library and source code.
And? Blogging lowers my stress levels. I get to talk about how shitty my day was and a few people close to me may read it and then we'll have a dialog. If not, i put it somewhere and i can let it go. Not just teens blog. I'm in my late 20s. My mother has a blog too.
Frankly i have less of a problem with blogging than the governments privacy violations with the telephone network. I choose to blog, I didn't choose to let them listen to my calls or view the list of people I called.
Blogging isn't a breakdown in society, its just a new way to communicate information to people you know. (and don't know)
Until it starts getting desktop marketshare...
It depends on the person I suppose. I personally like MySQL better than postgresql as I find it easier to administer. (less crap on the file system, etc) I will look again. Perhaps postgresql has better jdbc support now than the last time I looked.
I'm glad to see oracle releasing open source products.
I don't think its Microsoft's responsibility to keep the driver api identical for a new release of windows. Many of us complain about Microsoft's lack of security including drivers. It might have been more difficult for Sony DRM or many rootkits to work if the driver model were more secure and more drivers could run in userland. Microsoft has made steps to do this which causes incompatibilities.
Its ok for linux developers to drastically change a minor kernel release 2.6.x but not ok for microsoft to change on a major release? That doesn't make sense. In my view, the linux people are wrong. A kernel module written for 2.6.0 should work in 2.6.16 without any changes. 2.8.x can include incompatible changes.
I think people forget this is a beta. Microsoft will change the system several times before release. They usually throw drivers in at the last minute after third party vendors have had time to develop and verify them on a near complete release. It makes sense to do that.
What I want to know about vista are things like usability improvements, reasons I might want to upgrade without the Microsoft spin, etc. Will my software run? Early reports indicated that vista will break a lot of apps.
You might be right. Then again, maybe someone found a serious flaw with the latest DRM crap and they are trying to save face. It seems to me they've always wanted to restrict me. Why stop at the finish line?