Arstechnica you say? -- isnt it ironic their site was down for atleast 5 hours about a week back?
Also, look at their uptimes on netcraft. There average uptime plummeted to about half since they switched to windows. Sure its still "good enough", but how can you possibly say 2003 is more stable that linux? - especially substantially more stable?
err, H.323 works quite well over 56k to talk to russia with video. Under those horrible conditions, its about as functional as a phone replacement atleast.
SIP is better, but doesnt seem to scale down nearly as well as H.323 scales up.
I personally tried both and gnome-meeting is just as functional, it also supports IP to phone and video, with the added bonus of netmeeting compatibility and not using a central server to transport the data (allows offices to block with firewall and naturally harder to intercept).
As soon as a more modern CPU comes out that: 1) Runs on battery power for >15 hours 2) Doesnt require active cooling 3) Doesnt eat more than 3 watts or produce more than 3 watt heat 4) Small enough to allow easy clustering.
You'll see me upgrading instantly:)
The only CPU that does this is the Transmeta Crusoe and their newer Efficeon. You can easily get a fanless cluster that gives you 16Gflops of power with 1gbps onboard lans (multiplied by 20 or so nodes) taking 150W *peak* (wow!) and only the size of a typical mid tower! -- how incredible is that?
So what if their 866mhz CPU's produces about 400mhz real power? With konqueror and other well written software, it feels no slower than the 3200+ Athlon XP, giving me a great 10" wide screen, extremely light unit and up to 18 hours battery life!
So really, if you believe in clustering and/or embedded systems, you'll understand the need for software to run well on slower CPUs (look how well opera is doing on PDAs). Sure with modern CPUs assembly and other very low level languages are not often used, but this just goes to prove C++ coupled with QT can produce very efficient software.
So apart from those fundemental points, surely you've seen many businesses and schools still running on old 100-300mhz machines that simply dont see a need to upgrade. Mozilla/Firefox are definitely out of the question for them.
Re:Who has firefox affectd my use of Mozilla?
on
Planning For Mozilla 2.0
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Nice screenshot of konqueror in action on my lappie: http://81.86.159.146/hackeron/index.php/Image:Late st.png
(yes, thats another konqueror on the bottom frame, and yes thats Tara Reid in mplayer and yes thats the ion window manager)
Whats impressive is on that very productive configuration, things feel *faster* than firefox+KDE on a 3200+ AMD box.
Firefox is light? -- still painfully slow on an 866mhz crusoe laptop (the ones with >15 hours battery life). Used to use opera on it, but since Konqueror 3.3.0, I've never looked back.
Since 3.3.0, Konqueror is rock stable (unlike 3.2.4) and it now easily views absolutely every site I visit flawlessly. Its also snappy and responsive on machines as slow as 200mhz with 20 tabs open. - So I dont much care for either firefox or mozilla thank you very much.
PS: for the record, I've converted many firefox users to konqueror;)
Thanks for that. I also noticed the results to be somewhat fishy. When I ran my own tests, I came to another interesting point besides the interesting points you've made.
MPEG4 codecs use previous frames as part of the image for the next frames. So if you look at a single frame for the comparison, you could be missing the switch over where several frames back are no longer used or you might not even hit the right frame at all since frames are easily skipped, therefore the image will have less detail, when really its far more in real life.
So a combination of PSNR and a short 5 second clips of fast motion, low motion, anime and black and white is how I would run a more or less fair test. Not to mention different bitrates should be tested.
Yes, without figures its an opinion, but there's nothing to prove it true or untrue.
Lets stick to the facts then. Its a popular codec used by default in mencoder and various other popular encoding software, its under development with releases, the upstream are helpful and very alive, it supports various file formats, not just mpeg4, so its also the most full featured codec.
All this considered, why wasnt it in the doom9 comparison? -- could it be for the same reasons vorbis wasnt in microsoft's audio codec comparisons?
What about libavcodec (mencoder's default)? I ran some xvid vs lavc myself and found lavc to be of better quality vs size. Isnt it ironic the best codec isnt even in the comparison?
Reminds me of those sound codec tests where vorbis wasnt present:)
Woops, mistead the 100 million for 100 billion. But in the 100 million case, you will first need to get 100 million addresses, and you cant really buy that many and otherwise they are hard to come by at such an amount.
You are not taking into account spam protection software like spam assassin and of course if you send 100,000,000 spam messages, it likely means only several billion will get several copies of the messages (there are only so many computer users).
So it will take them far less like than 15 seconds per message to say delete 20 messages at a time or if spam protection software was used, then the person has done virtually no harm except for several second delay in message fetching which is not more of a crime than using windows on the server if you think about it:)
As for pirated software, if software wasnt pirated so heavily, microsoft wouldnt exist today. Its very easy to verify this. Most commercial companies were using non-microsoft products but were forced to switch when they could not provide their services due to incompability with microsoft's pirated software. Good tactics: over price something very heavily, so people will steal it because they think considering the price it must be better. So the only people that got hurt werent hurt by the pirates, but by Microsoft. Where's the crime?
As for pirating other media like music/books, not much to say about books as anyone can see the benefits to paper not to mention printing yourself normally runs more than buying the book.
As for music, beating downloading from the comfort of your home is hard. At last the record companies started to realise this. Problem with their service is the quality is ~320kbps AAC with some tracks much lower. This is *not* cd quality and DRM re-inforced so cannot be played on my player, nor do they support my platform. As soon as they can atleast match CD sound quality (which is really not much to ask), you will see the p2p usage drop (its already starting even with their half arsed service). Until then, I'm forced to search for flac and ape (damn I hate that format) rips and I'm not willing to first of all get a machine with a cd drive (I have one of those sexy thin machines), and then pretty much throw away the CDs after copying them to the PC as I have no space for them. So stop blaming pirates already!
OGG is gaining popularity very quickly. Have a search on $YOUR_FAVORITE_P2P_NETWORK for ogg, and have a look how many people care about it.
In comparison to wma, even musepack is more widely used. Ogg is easily the second most popular codec after mp3, beating aac in popularity on the typical desktop.
Apple *needs* ogg support to satisfy those people and for the record flac as well. The Karma has flac support as well as ogg, so I know what I and pretty much anyone who cares about sound quality will be getting.
I know compiling shouldnt be needed to begin with, but I had great experience getting things working on gentoo.
Not sure about hardware support as my sblive! platinum has better support than under windows -- but I would recommend trying gentoo. A lot of work was put in to make everything just work there.
Hard to say really, the EULA is long and boring and I cant imagine anyone reading all that crap just to print something -- so stupid law.
Then again there are alternatives -- dont buy printers with no linux support, they suck anyway, and printing under linux is more than fast these days.
And for the unsupported printers, there's a cheap commercial driver called Turboprint thats worth it if you just must have the unsupported printer in question (like my Canon i850 -- crap print quality).
People like you cause websites like funroll-loops to be created.
* All distributions let you customize the kernel * Latest software at the expense of QA and stability? -- either get from upstream or use unstable third party repositories. Gentoo manage this in 1 repository with keyword masking. * Huh? -- the request should be concistent libraries with as few duplicate versions as possible. Or a dependency resolving package manager. * Based on binaries? As in a binary distribution or closed source binaries? * Well, I havent seen any distribution to have a working hal+dbus configuration out of box (some will come soon). Others have more or less hacks to give similar functionality. -- In anycase, there's no hal support in KDE at the moment anyway and hal configuration is well documented on the gentoo forums. * Hmm, what about an installer written in bash? -- I've seen quite nice ones using dialog. -- surely you mean a distribution with an installer as apposed to without one? -- for the record, there are a few installers for gentoo. * Only things that require documentation is uncommon locations for config files, for anything else you check tldp or the upstream documentation. * There are several distros that have this as a focus. Granted at the expense of a crippled init.d system. On gentoo, set parallel startup in/etc/conf.d/rc for a marginal improvement, but other than that, no matter what distribution, you need to review what services you want started to see any real improvement.
So none of your requests actually mean anything. If you want desktop polish, try ark, or lycoris, or lindows. Frankly, I dont think you will be happy with either.
I have a Crusoe 866mhz (3W CPU, benchmarks as 400mhz) laptop.
The laptop is small and light. Has a 10.4" letterbox size screen (1280x768), and a battery life of >15 hours (extended+modular).
I got it about 2 years ago, and am still extremely happy with it. Here's a screenshot during use: http://81.86.159.146/hackeron/index.php/Image:Late st.png
You wont get this kind of battery with faster machines, and I find my 400mhz laptop is faster than my 3200+ in day to day use as I run firefox on my desktop and gnome.
In anycase, linux is far faster than windows xp on 233mhz from personal experience, just dont run a full DE.
To me, Fail 8% of the time means 8% of boots require re-boot. I didnt see your interpretation but now that you mention it, it has happened numerous times that after reboot, my windows startup would just fail forcing me to re-install windows for no apparent reason (and there are several reports of this behaviour that can be found by google).
On a more relevent note however, since xorg 6.7, I havent had a single X crash! -- and I have 2 X-sessions and constantly go back and forth (which normally was the only time it ever crashed in the past). Not being able to run 2 X-Session on windows, there's no comparison really and I will not comment on windows's stability otherwise as the statistics speak for themselves (as well as the lack of statistics).
This will sure as hell make a nice argument for converting businesses to linux though:) -- keep 'em comming!
to tell you the truth I never measured, but its 2 batteries, so they charge fairly quickly together.
For example if I go out, use the laptop to watch a 1.5 hour movie (on lowest brightness on train), then use it for a further 5-8 hours at the office/meeting/etc, then watch another movie on the train (leaves around 30% after that), come back, plug it in, charge will already be at 90% while I change, eat, surf a bit, so I would say 2-3 hours to charge from 35% to 90%...
Modular battery is 10.4V with 3400mAh, main extended is slightly more. Laptop weighs around 1.5kg with modular battery has a 10" 1280x768 wide screen (visible in direct sunlight on full brightness).
So a pretty nice tool. Here it is at work: ftp://public:asd@81.86.159.146/latest.png - so you see, its pretty fast if I can watch a movie, chat, surf, check email, code, have a few konquerors open with many tabs, view images, etc at the same time without slowing down the movie. The window manager is ion3.
Keep in mind this 866mhz 3Watt CPU benchmarks at 400mhz P3, so if you're the kind of person who likes dual AMD64s and think a desktop requires atleast 2.8hgz, then look someplace else -- this will *not*, I repeat will *not* run windows at adequate speeds. KDE however runs just fine (3.3b2), gnome is slightly laggy. But a lighter wm is recommended.
I own the Fujitsu P2110 - 866mhz Transmeta Crusoe + 512Mb ram, and 60Gb drive (updated).
I have the extended + modular batteries, each give over 7 battery life, and I managed to squeeze over 18 hours from light to average usage (with pcmcia powered down, battery management set to performance and screen brightness on just under medium).
The laptop itself is a little slow, but seems to be perfect for reading books, watching movies/dvds and programming (with distcc). High bitrate divx play perfect, and even certain games like warcraft3 can be made playable under wine. (ATI Rage Mobility 8mb, with accelerated gatos drivers).
Also great linux support, and works pretty much out of box with everything. Sound card has hardware mixing (amazing that nforce2 and many via chips dont). There is also an optical out to plug to your hifi at no loss of quality!
Overall, highly recommended laptop that I had for around 2 years now that can be gotten dirt cheap. Slight show of tear like headphone jack has bad contact now (only if you touch the plug though, so not dramatic). Cant see me replacing it anytime soon though.
There are newer transmeta based laptops as well, and if battery and portability is your goal, they beat centrinos in every possible way (centrino requiring 2-3 times more power, bigger heavier batteries to provide similar battery life at the gain of performance).
Anyway, just my opinion, yours might differ, but over 15 hour battery life impressive by any standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Arstechnica you say? -- isnt it ironic their site was down for atleast 5 hours about a week back?
Also, look at their uptimes on netcraft. There average uptime plummeted to about half since they switched to windows. Sure its still "good enough", but how can you possibly say 2003 is more stable that linux? - especially substantially more stable?
ftp://81.86.159.146/latest.png - need I say more?
err, H.323 works quite well over 56k to talk to russia with video. Under those horrible conditions, its about as functional as a phone replacement atleast.
SIP is better, but doesnt seem to scale down nearly as well as H.323 scales up.
I personally tried both and gnome-meeting is just as functional, it also supports IP to phone and video, with the added bonus of netmeeting compatibility and not using a central server to transport the data (allows offices to block with firewall and naturally harder to intercept).
So why on earth skype and not gnomemeeting?
5 seconds on 350mhz? -- bullshit! -- more like 10 seconds on a P3 1ghz.
As soon as a more modern CPU comes out that:
:)
1) Runs on battery power for >15 hours
2) Doesnt require active cooling
3) Doesnt eat more than 3 watts or produce more than 3 watt heat
4) Small enough to allow easy clustering.
You'll see me upgrading instantly
The only CPU that does this is the Transmeta Crusoe and their newer Efficeon. You can easily get a fanless cluster that gives you 16Gflops of power with 1gbps onboard lans (multiplied by 20 or so nodes) taking 150W *peak* (wow!) and only the size of a typical mid tower! -- how incredible is that?
So what if their 866mhz CPU's produces about 400mhz real power? With konqueror and other well written software, it feels no slower than the 3200+ Athlon XP, giving me a great 10" wide screen, extremely light unit and up to 18 hours battery life!
So really, if you believe in clustering and/or embedded systems, you'll understand the need for software to run well on slower CPUs (look how well opera is doing on PDAs). Sure with modern CPUs assembly and other very low level languages are not often used, but this just goes to prove C++ coupled with QT can produce very efficient software.
So apart from those fundemental points, surely you've seen many businesses and schools still running on old 100-300mhz machines that simply dont see a need to upgrade. Mozilla/Firefox are definitely out of the question for them.
Nice screenshot of konqueror in action on my lappie: http://81.86.159.146/hackeron/index.php/Image:Late st.png
(yes, thats another konqueror on the bottom frame, and yes thats Tara Reid in mplayer and yes thats the ion window manager)
Whats impressive is on that very productive configuration, things feel *faster* than firefox+KDE on a 3200+ AMD box.
Firefox is light? -- still painfully slow on an 866mhz crusoe laptop (the ones with >15 hours battery life). Used to use opera on it, but since Konqueror 3.3.0, I've never looked back.
;)
Since 3.3.0, Konqueror is rock stable (unlike 3.2.4) and it now easily views absolutely every site I visit flawlessly. Its also snappy and responsive on machines as slow as 200mhz with 20 tabs open. - So I dont much care for either firefox or mozilla thank you very much.
PS: for the record, I've converted many firefox users to konqueror
The file format is mpeg4, the codec is lavc-mpeg4 then?
Thanks for that. I also noticed the results to be somewhat fishy. When I ran my own tests, I came to another interesting point besides the interesting points you've made.
MPEG4 codecs use previous frames as part of the image for the next frames. So if you look at a single frame for the comparison, you could be missing the switch over where several frames back are no longer used or you might not even hit the right frame at all since frames are easily skipped, therefore the image will have less detail, when really its far more in real life.
So a combination of PSNR and a short 5 second clips of fast motion, low motion, anime and black and white is how I would run a more or less fair test. Not to mention different bitrates should be tested.
Yes, without figures its an opinion, but there's nothing to prove it true or untrue.
Lets stick to the facts then. Its a popular codec used by default in mencoder and various other popular encoding software, its under development with releases, the upstream are helpful and very alive, it supports various file formats, not just mpeg4, so its also the most full featured codec.
All this considered, why wasnt it in the doom9 comparison? -- could it be for the same reasons vorbis wasnt in microsoft's audio codec comparisons?
libavcodec (lavc) is part of the ffmpeg project: http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/
What about libavcodec (mencoder's default)? I ran some xvid vs lavc myself and found lavc to be of better quality vs size. Isnt it ironic the best codec isnt even in the comparison?
:)
Reminds me of those sound codec tests where vorbis wasnt present
Woops, mistead the 100 million for 100 billion. But in the 100 million case, you will first need to get 100 million addresses, and you cant really buy that many and otherwise they are hard to come by at such an amount.
You are not taking into account spam protection software like spam assassin and of course if you send 100,000,000 spam messages, it likely means only several billion will get several copies of the messages (there are only so many computer users).
:)
So it will take them far less like than 15 seconds per message to say delete 20 messages at a time or if spam protection software was used, then the person has done virtually no harm except for several second delay in message fetching which is not more of a crime than using windows on the server if you think about it
As for pirated software, if software wasnt pirated so heavily, microsoft wouldnt exist today. Its very easy to verify this. Most commercial companies were using non-microsoft products but were forced to switch when they could not provide their services due to incompability with microsoft's pirated software. Good tactics: over price something very heavily, so people will steal it because they think considering the price it must be better. So the only people that got hurt werent hurt by the pirates, but by Microsoft. Where's the crime?
As for pirating other media like music/books, not much to say about books as anyone can see the benefits to paper not to mention printing yourself normally runs more than buying the book.
As for music, beating downloading from the comfort of your home is hard. At last the record companies started to realise this. Problem with their service is the quality is ~320kbps AAC with some tracks much lower. This is *not* cd quality and DRM re-inforced so cannot be played on my player, nor do they support my platform. As soon as they can atleast match CD sound quality (which is really not much to ask), you will see the p2p usage drop (its already starting even with their half arsed service). Until then, I'm forced to search for flac and ape (damn I hate that format) rips and I'm not willing to first of all get a machine with a cd drive (I have one of those sexy thin machines), and then pretty much throw away the CDs after copying them to the PC as I have no space for them. So stop blaming pirates already!
I would really love to see some of this objective evidence if possible. Would sure make my life easier to convert my school to linux :)
OGG is gaining popularity very quickly. Have a search on $YOUR_FAVORITE_P2P_NETWORK for ogg, and have a look how many people care about it.
In comparison to wma, even musepack is more widely used. Ogg is easily the second most popular codec after mp3, beating aac in popularity on the typical desktop.
Apple *needs* ogg support to satisfy those people and for the record flac as well. The Karma has flac support as well as ogg, so I know what I and pretty much anyone who cares about sound quality will be getting.
I know compiling shouldnt be needed to begin with, but I had great experience getting things working on gentoo.
Not sure about hardware support as my sblive! platinum has better support than under windows -- but I would recommend trying gentoo. A lot of work was put in to make everything just work there.
Hard to say really, the EULA is long and boring and I cant imagine anyone reading all that crap just to print something -- so stupid law.
Then again there are alternatives -- dont buy printers with no linux support, they suck anyway, and printing under linux is more than fast these days.
And for the unsupported printers, there's a cheap commercial driver called Turboprint thats worth it if you just must have the unsupported printer in question (like my Canon i850 -- crap print quality).
People like you cause websites like funroll-loops to be created.
/etc/conf.d/rc for a marginal improvement, but other than that, no matter what distribution, you need to review what services you want started to see any real improvement.
* All distributions let you customize the kernel
* Latest software at the expense of QA and stability? -- either get from upstream or use unstable third party repositories. Gentoo manage this in 1 repository with keyword masking.
* Huh? -- the request should be concistent libraries with as few duplicate versions as possible. Or a dependency resolving package manager.
* Based on binaries? As in a binary distribution or closed source binaries?
* Well, I havent seen any distribution to have a working hal+dbus configuration out of box (some will come soon). Others have more or less hacks to give similar functionality. -- In anycase, there's no hal support in KDE at the moment anyway and hal configuration is well documented on the gentoo forums.
* Hmm, what about an installer written in bash? -- I've seen quite nice ones using dialog. -- surely you mean a distribution with an installer as apposed to without one? -- for the record, there are a few installers for gentoo.
* Only things that require documentation is uncommon locations for config files, for anything else you check tldp or the upstream documentation.
* There are several distros that have this as a focus. Granted at the expense of a crippled init.d system. On gentoo, set parallel startup in
So none of your requests actually mean anything. If you want desktop polish, try ark, or lycoris, or lindows. Frankly, I dont think you will be happy with either.
Battery life and portability maybe?
e st.png
I have a Crusoe 866mhz (3W CPU, benchmarks as 400mhz) laptop.
The laptop is small and light. Has a 10.4" letterbox size screen (1280x768), and a battery life of >15 hours (extended+modular).
I got it about 2 years ago, and am still extremely happy with it. Here's a screenshot during use: http://81.86.159.146/hackeron/index.php/Image:Lat
You wont get this kind of battery with faster machines, and I find my 400mhz laptop is faster than my 3200+ in day to day use as I run firefox on my desktop and gnome.
In anycase, linux is far faster than windows xp on 233mhz from personal experience, just dont run a full DE.
To me, Fail 8% of the time means 8% of boots require re-boot. I didnt see your interpretation but now that you mention it, it has happened numerous times that after reboot, my windows startup would just fail forcing me to re-install windows for no apparent reason (and there are several reports of this behaviour that can be found by google).
:) -- keep 'em comming!
On a more relevent note however, since xorg 6.7, I havent had a single X crash! -- and I have 2 X-sessions and constantly go back and forth (which normally was the only time it ever crashed in the past). Not being able to run 2 X-Session on windows, there's no comparison really and I will not comment on windows's stability otherwise as the statistics speak for themselves (as well as the lack of statistics).
This will sure as hell make a nice argument for converting businesses to linux though
Movie is American Pie unseen edition, girl is Tara Reid, WHY DOES EVERYONE ASK ME THIS, lol?
So far 24 people asked me this very question, lol.
http://imdb.com/name/nm0005346/
to tell you the truth I never measured, but its 2 batteries, so they charge fairly quickly together.
For example if I go out, use the laptop to watch a 1.5 hour movie (on lowest brightness on train), then use it for a further 5-8 hours at the office/meeting/etc, then watch another movie on the train (leaves around 30% after that), come back, plug it in, charge will already be at 90% while I change, eat, surf a bit, so I would say 2-3 hours to charge from 35% to 90%...
Modular battery is 10.4V with 3400mAh, main extended is slightly more. Laptop weighs around 1.5kg with modular battery has a 10" 1280x768 wide screen (visible in direct sunlight on full brightness).
So a pretty nice tool. Here it is at work: ftp://public:asd@81.86.159.146/latest.png - so you see, its pretty fast if I can watch a movie, chat, surf, check email, code, have a few konquerors open with many tabs, view images, etc at the same time without slowing down the movie. The window manager is ion3.
Keep in mind this 866mhz 3Watt CPU benchmarks at 400mhz P3, so if you're the kind of person who likes dual AMD64s and think a desktop requires atleast 2.8hgz, then look someplace else -- this will *not*, I repeat will *not* run windows at adequate speeds. KDE however runs just fine (3.3b2), gnome is slightly laggy. But a lighter wm is recommended.
I own the Fujitsu P2110 - 866mhz Transmeta Crusoe + 512Mb ram, and 60Gb drive (updated).
I have the extended + modular batteries, each give over 7 battery life, and I managed to squeeze over 18 hours from light to average usage (with pcmcia powered down, battery management set to performance and screen brightness on just under medium).
The laptop itself is a little slow, but seems to be perfect for reading books, watching movies/dvds and programming (with distcc). High bitrate divx play perfect, and even certain games like warcraft3 can be made playable under wine. (ATI Rage Mobility 8mb, with accelerated gatos drivers).
Also great linux support, and works pretty much out of box with everything. Sound card has hardware mixing (amazing that nforce2 and many via chips dont). There is also an optical out to plug to your hifi at no loss of quality!
Overall, highly recommended laptop that I had for around 2 years now that can be gotten dirt cheap. Slight show of tear like headphone jack has bad contact now (only if you touch the plug though, so not dramatic). Cant see me replacing it anytime soon though.
There are newer transmeta based laptops as well, and if battery and portability is your goal, they beat centrinos in every possible way (centrino requiring 2-3 times more power, bigger heavier batteries to provide similar battery life at the gain of performance).
Anyway, just my opinion, yours might differ, but over 15 hour battery life impressive by any standard.