I'm sick of having to write: a) hacks to make css layouts work on IE b) use javascript dropdowns (not my idea to use dropdowns btw) instead of the great CSS hover elements
Whats better, spending a few each seconds each day looking over the list of emails spam assasin filtered into a spam folder, or missing out on hillarious gags like this: http://www.zug.com/pranks/penis/
>>If you need a stable desktop that you can transition smoothly, Ubuntu is for you.
What other desktop oriented distributions have you tried? -- I tried Mandrake, Ark, Mepis, Xandros, Lycoris, SuSE, Fedora, Libranet and about 3-4 or so others and I have to say while I would rank Ubuntu higher than Fedora as a distribution that "just works", I would rank it lower than all the ones mentioned above.
As for it being easy to add or change anything, deb offers no real advantages to rpm ever since apt4rpm and there are more than a few debian based distributions I prefer to Ubuntu, like Mepis, Libranet or Xandros.
My favorite at the moment is ArkLinux - it is several light years ahead of Ubuntu if you're looking for something that "just works".
I tried it, it's not bleeding edge like gentoo or sourcemage, its not easy to configure like mandrake, its not stable like debian, its not easy to install like ark, its not mainstream like suse or fedora, its not barebone like arch/lfs or slack, its not windows like like lycoris or xandros, its not your top bootable solution like knoppix and its not portable like netbsd (ok, so netbsd isnt linux, but still).
It seems its pretty much a vanilla gnome with a different background and a stripped down debian installer. What does it do better than any other distribution?
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi as well as OpenMosix
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi.
Errr, you get a 3 year manufacturer's warranty with BenQ, and they have a far superior dead pixel policy than most competitors (if there's a dead pixel anywhere near the middle, they'll replace).
Mine came with 0 dead or stuck pixels and I've read upward of 100 customer reviews where not a single customer had even a single dead pixel or stuck pixel.
Sure you can get the warranty extended to 5 years, but I think 3 is more than enough, Samsung give you 1 year by comparison!
Hey, and the BenQ FP937S+ which is cheaper than DVI lacking Samsung 915N (atleast here) has DVI. Seems this roundup could have easily recommended this 19" if their heads werent so far up their asses. 3 Samsungs, 2 Viewsonics, and not a single Benq, shish!
I chose the BenQ FP937s+ as its by far the most impressive at its price. You'll notice no BenQ monitors are mentioned in the roundup, dispite them producing some of the best displays for the price.
Yes, good idea. But survey starts at 20 years. Which leads me to believe its a survey that will be used in DRM application, not media reliability.
For me, I think 5 years is fine for a media to last, as long as I can take the data and transfer it to another media. Naturally, with TC and DRM that will not be the case and *thats* the problem.
128kbps WMA (which blind listening tests reveal is for the most part worse than 128kbps OGG) is clearly inferior to CD quality.
As soon as you get in the ~$300 budget for headphones, you will hear just how poor 128kbps and even 160kbps wma/ogg sound. You actually hear sound artifacts, its not even a matter of lost detail!
Now, its really bad for 128kbps and very noticeable for 160kbps and they market 64kbps as cd quality!? -- pisses me off!
3) It's not 'bloat' (whatever that is), it's just using the hardware and X-server abilities to their full. By shifting much of the rendering to the graphics card, you could actually lower CPU usage. I'm sure a thousand openbox/console/ion/ratpoison users are waiting to post "I don't need this". To which I say "well go back to your teletype then".
I disagree on CPU usage. While I applaud this technology, both cpu and gpu usage will be higher as there is a constant high cpu usage to generate 3d, even if windows are not being moved, while stationary windows take almost no CPU on 2d.
I do see the advantage of 3d though. It certainly allows flexibility and I'm looking forward to being able to actualy shrink windows (without resizing), or being able to see through them. It will certainly also remove the limitations of 2d and I'm sure most will still be backward compatible with 2d so programmers wont be forced to rewrite their software. So there's hardly anything negative can come from this, so good stuff.
As for productivity, I dont see it having any positive or negative impact (well, maybe the first month will just be looking at the eye candy, but thats to be expected with any good looking product). Other than that, here are some thoughts on OS productivity or atleast how I see it: http://linux.slashdot.org/~Hackeron/journal/101301.
What I wonder though is how this 3d desktop would perform on 1880x1440 (typical max 21" resolution) with something modest like a geforce4 mx440. Resolution really kills 3d performance and I havent seen 3d desktop presentations on anything higher than 800x600 so far.
>>What more is there to know about it? It is dog slow
I've had an 866mhz transmeta (oqo has 1ghz), its lightening fast (read instant) with ion, konqueror, mplayer,gimp(desktop2),kmldonkey, kernel-compile, mutt and several kwrites running at the same time (ftp://81.86.159.146/latest.png). It performed alright on Windows as well, but I did have hard lockups when using photoshop (not the case with linux+gimp).
Lets not forget the 15 hours battery life was a big plus also (from NiMH, not LiION!).
>>has a crappy screen and costs a lot more than a comparable laptop.
Comparable laptop, lol - thats rich. And my AMD 2500+ desktop costs even less than a compareable laptop and by compareable I ofcourse mean x86 like you.
>>The keyboard works ok, the battery life sucks
Optional extended battery lasts twice as long, which on low typical usage (internet/word processing/presentation viewing) should easily last upward of 5 hours.
>>and it won't play unreal.
Well, I played Soldier of Fortune and Warcraft3 on my 866mhz crusoe and it worked more than fast enough (SOF native linux version, warcraft3 through winex). Didnt really expect it to play anything better, and no reason it should - its still 3d accelerated which is amazing at its size.
>>How the hell do you think software is going to be installed? Never had a laptop without a CD-ROM I guess, because in that case you either have to mount ISO images locally or share a CD-rom over the network. How the hell else would you install software?
Well, you tell me. Provided you get this as a desktop replacement, which is an official option of this device, what is the preferred method to get stuff on it?
>> It will probably run linux. What more do you want from a review?
Did I ask for linux support? -- How about "updating" to windows 2000 for a performance boost? -- does it boot from wireless? does it have a bios that can boot from usb cdrom or usb floppy?
How does the built in wireless perform? - Driver issues? - Battery effect?
What about reliability, durability? how does it perform in the field? what happens during casual misuse? -- I already mentioned all this, didnt you read?
Thanks, but unfortunately, the review fails to cover reliability, durability, portability, usability, or updating the OS or even software installation.
It fails to cover any more than the specifications in all the press releases and ironically, gaming. Would be nice to see a review from someone who used the thing for atleast a week or so and can comment on its performance in the field.
A while ago, all IBM drives sold in the UK were either broken out of box, or would break within a few months because of a manufacturing failure. (I had a replacement sent 3 times before giving up)
The line was called back, but only after several tens of thousands were sent out to retailers.
Shows some bad QA from IBM, so I avoid their drives (well, except their SCSI drives).
Personally, I now just buy the most silent drives available. I noticed the speed difference between the jetplane sounding maxtor and virtually dead silent seagate is a few MB/sec and seek is about the same. However the Seagate is cooler, and silent - works for me!
As for Western Digital, I have a 20Gb drive I got about 6 years ago that still works great, thats quite impressive. But I now avoid their drives for their sheer volume which is unbearable in a bedroom at night.
How many times. This is not a Microsoft bashing! Why the hell is it when microsoft is mentioned, every microsoft supporter assumes its being bashed!?
It is linux bashing however, plain and simple. This feature is first of all presented as a bug and as a kernel bug no less. It is also compared to one of the only systems that protect you from this feature by default to isolate Linux as this unsecure beast.
All I'm doing is removing this ridiculous isolation by comparing it to the competition that just happens to include OSx, Windows, Beos, Unix-varients, PalmOS, and any other operating system out there, what the hell is wrong with that!?
And the point I'm trying to make is we'll see this story in all Windows magazines tomorrow and in all "studies" in the future comparing Linux and Windows when really its a non issue.
Its not Microsoft's fault, but since OpenBSD was mentioned, why not mention Windows as well?
It just seems like look, Linux is unsecure while OpenBSD isnt so its worth noting that if that is the definition of security, then windows, dos, unix, freebsd, mac, beos and pretty much every operating system with the default configuration is affected by this problem (except for some server distributions and server oriented operating systems like openbsd).
Maybe future releases will fall for this FUD and add un-needed overhead to their desktop release, but that would be even worse.
I guess it depends on your definition of stability. If we're talking about a server, to me uptime == stability. Certainly not the case for a desktop machine, but for a webserver, the availability of the website is whats important.
Also, a quick reboot is fine, but I couldnt access the site for 5 hours (not sure how much longer it was down though), and a patch that breaks the system is also what I consider a lack of stability.
PS, I do agree with you about uptime not being everything, but unfortunately netcraft doesnt check site availability.
Slashdot Mirror
Why Firefox?
CSS SUPPORT!
I'm sick of having to write:
a) hacks to make css layouts work on IE
b) use javascript dropdowns (not my idea to use dropdowns btw) instead of the great CSS hover elements
Whats better, spending a few each seconds each day looking over the list of emails spam assasin filtered into a spam folder, or missing out on hillarious gags like this: http://www.zug.com/pranks/penis/
:)
The choice is obvious
>>If you need a stable desktop that you can transition smoothly, Ubuntu is for you.
What other desktop oriented distributions have you tried? -- I tried Mandrake, Ark, Mepis, Xandros, Lycoris, SuSE, Fedora, Libranet and about 3-4 or so others and I have to say while I would rank Ubuntu higher than Fedora as a distribution that "just works", I would rank it lower than all the ones mentioned above.
As for it being easy to add or change anything, deb offers no real advantages to rpm ever since apt4rpm and there are more than a few debian based distributions I prefer to Ubuntu, like Mepis, Libranet or Xandros.
My favorite at the moment is ArkLinux - it is several light years ahead of Ubuntu if you're looking for something that "just works".
I tried it, it's not bleeding edge like gentoo or sourcemage, its not easy to configure like mandrake, its not stable like debian, its not easy to install like ark, its not mainstream like suse or fedora, its not barebone like arch/lfs or slack, its not windows like like lycoris or xandros, its not your top bootable solution like knoppix and its not portable like netbsd (ok, so netbsd isnt linux, but still).
It seems its pretty much a vanilla gnome with a different background and a stripped down debian installer. What does it do better than any other distribution?
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi as well as OpenMosix
crap, got attached to the wrong story.
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi.
Errr, you get a 3 year manufacturer's warranty with BenQ, and they have a far superior dead pixel policy than most competitors (if there's a dead pixel anywhere near the middle, they'll replace).
Mine came with 0 dead or stuck pixels and I've read upward of 100 customer reviews where not a single customer had even a single dead pixel or stuck pixel.
Sure you can get the warranty extended to 5 years, but I think 3 is more than enough, Samsung give you 1 year by comparison!
Hey, and the BenQ FP937S+ which is cheaper than DVI lacking Samsung 915N (atleast here) has DVI. Seems this roundup could have easily recommended this 19" if their heads werent so far up their asses. 3 Samsungs, 2 Viewsonics, and not a single Benq, shish!
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050215/ lcd-01.html
I chose the BenQ FP937s+ as its by far the most impressive at its price. You'll notice no BenQ monitors are mentioned in the roundup, dispite them producing some of the best displays for the price.
... why doesnt it?
Gee, it was about 18 months since I had a crash, strangely thats around the same time I switched to Linux full time. Coincidence?
Yes, good idea. But survey starts at 20 years. Which leads me to believe its a survey that will be used in DRM application, not media reliability.
For me, I think 5 years is fine for a media to last, as long as I can take the data and transfer it to another media. Naturally, with TC and DRM that will not be the case and *thats* the problem.
128kbps WMA (which blind listening tests reveal is for the most part worse than 128kbps OGG) is clearly inferior to CD quality.
As soon as you get in the ~$300 budget for headphones, you will hear just how poor 128kbps and even 160kbps wma/ogg sound. You actually hear sound artifacts, its not even a matter of lost detail!
Now, its really bad for 128kbps and very noticeable for 160kbps and they market 64kbps as cd quality!? -- pisses me off!
I do see the advantage of 3d though. It certainly allows flexibility and I'm looking forward to being able to actualy shrink windows (without resizing), or being able to see through them. It will certainly also remove the limitations of 2d and I'm sure most will still be backward compatible with 2d so programmers wont be forced to rewrite their software. So there's hardly anything negative can come from this, so good stuff.
As for productivity, I dont see it having any positive or negative impact (well, maybe the first month will just be looking at the eye candy, but thats to be expected with any good looking product). Other than that, here are some thoughts on OS productivity or atleast how I see it: http://linux.slashdot.org/~Hackeron/journal/10130
What I wonder though is how this 3d desktop would perform on 1880x1440 (typical max 21" resolution) with something modest like a geforce4 mx440. Resolution really kills 3d performance and I havent seen 3d desktop presentations on anything higher than 800x600 so far.
s/shure/sure - shure is an audio equipment company.
s ub1.
Sorry for seeming like an asshole, I'm just sensitive to that word as I recently bought some kick ass canalphones by them: http://shure.com/personaltech/default.asp?id=main
>>What more is there to know about it? It is dog slow
,gimp(desktop2) ,kmldonkey, kernel-compile, mutt and several kwrites running at the same time (ftp://81.86.159.146/latest.png). It performed alright on Windows as well, but I did have hard lockups when using photoshop (not the case with linux+gimp).
I've had an 866mhz transmeta (oqo has 1ghz), its lightening fast (read instant) with ion, konqueror, mplayer
Lets not forget the 15 hours battery life was a big plus also (from NiMH, not LiION!).
>>has a crappy screen and costs a lot more than a comparable laptop.
Comparable laptop, lol - thats rich. And my AMD 2500+ desktop costs even less than a compareable laptop and by compareable I ofcourse mean x86 like you.
>>The keyboard works ok, the battery life sucks
Optional extended battery lasts twice as long, which on low typical usage (internet/word processing/presentation viewing) should easily last upward of 5 hours.
>>and it won't play unreal.
Well, I played Soldier of Fortune and Warcraft3 on my 866mhz crusoe and it worked more than fast enough (SOF native linux version, warcraft3 through winex). Didnt really expect it to play anything better, and no reason it should - its still 3d accelerated which is amazing at its size.
>>How the hell do you think software is going to be installed? Never had a laptop without a CD-ROM I guess, because in that case you either have to mount ISO images locally or share a CD-rom over the network. How the hell else would you install software?
Well, you tell me. Provided you get this as a desktop replacement, which is an official option of this device, what is the preferred method to get stuff on it?
>> It will probably run linux. What more do you want from a review?
Did I ask for linux support? -- How about "updating" to windows 2000 for a performance boost? -- does it boot from wireless? does it have a bios that can boot from usb cdrom or usb floppy?
How does the built in wireless perform? - Driver issues? - Battery effect?
What about reliability, durability? how does it perform in the field? what happens during casual misuse? -- I already mentioned all this, didnt you read?
Thanks, but unfortunately, the review fails to cover reliability, durability, portability, usability, or updating the OS or even software installation.
It fails to cover any more than the specifications in all the press releases and ironically, gaming. Would be nice to see a review from someone who used the thing for atleast a week or so and can comment on its performance in the field.
A while ago, all IBM drives sold in the UK were either broken out of box, or would break within a few months because of a manufacturing failure. (I had a replacement sent 3 times before giving up)
The line was called back, but only after several tens of thousands were sent out to retailers.
Shows some bad QA from IBM, so I avoid their drives (well, except their SCSI drives).
Personally, I now just buy the most silent drives available. I noticed the speed difference between the jetplane sounding maxtor and virtually dead silent seagate is a few MB/sec and seek is about the same. However the Seagate is cooler, and silent - works for me!
As for Western Digital, I have a 20Gb drive I got about 6 years ago that still works great, thats quite impressive. But I now avoid their drives for their sheer volume which is unbearable in a bedroom at night.
/me votes for the latter.
Time to update the education system.
How many times. This is not a Microsoft bashing! Why the hell is it when microsoft is mentioned, every microsoft supporter assumes its being bashed!?
It is linux bashing however, plain and simple. This feature is first of all presented as a bug and as a kernel bug no less. It is also compared to one of the only systems that protect you from this feature by default to isolate Linux as this unsecure beast.
All I'm doing is removing this ridiculous isolation by comparing it to the competition that just happens to include OSx, Windows, Beos, Unix-varients, PalmOS, and any other operating system out there, what the hell is wrong with that!?
Mark me offtopic, but if you want to learn how search engines really work, this is one great book.
Managing Gigabytes - Second Edition
Ian H, Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell
Morgan Kaufmann publishing
I bought it recently to help me design a database and its really one incredible book. Best technical book I've read to date.
And the point I'm trying to make is we'll see this story in all Windows magazines tomorrow and in all "studies" in the future comparing Linux and Windows when really its a non issue.
Its not Microsoft's fault, but since OpenBSD was mentioned, why not mention Windows as well?
It just seems like look, Linux is unsecure while OpenBSD isnt so its worth noting that if that is the definition of security, then windows, dos, unix, freebsd, mac, beos and pretty much every operating system with the default configuration is affected by this problem (except for some server distributions and server oriented operating systems like openbsd).
Maybe future releases will fall for this FUD and add un-needed overhead to their desktop release, but that would be even worse.
I guess it depends on your definition of stability. If we're talking about a server, to me uptime == stability. Certainly not the case for a desktop machine, but for a webserver, the availability of the website is whats important.
Also, a quick reboot is fine, but I couldnt access the site for 5 hours (not sure how much longer it was down though), and a patch that breaks the system is also what I consider a lack of stability.
PS, I do agree with you about uptime not being everything, but unfortunately netcraft doesnt check site availability.