Ditto. I'm using FreeBSD 5.1 and XFree86 4.3. I have the same experience. X is smooth and responsive.
But XP does seem a bit more responsive though. Not a whole lot, but a bit. So I did some checking to see why. Run a CPU meter in XP and in XFree86. The Windows GUI certainly appears to be the highest priority in XP. Move the mouse and CPU usage jumps. Drag a window and sometimes I can hear WinAmp stutter under the increased load. Now bring up XP and XFree86 from a cold start. XP appears to be up and running faster, but notice that hourglass cursor. It's making you think it's up and running when it's still loading. I ran a test once, from bootup to the display of Slashdot in a browser. FreeBSD + KDE + Konqueror was faster than Win2K + IExplorer.
There should be no reason for this, since the win32 API doesn't have a tenth of the feature set of the X11 API. But there it is. XFree86 scales up, while win32 demands faster and faster processors every year.
That's not the failure of the open source model - that is its strength.
Let me state a different but related failure: "The failure of open source is the preponderance of slashdot readers who never get past the first few posts on a topic".
People think XFree86 is a slug because they read slashdot. So they go off to write their own replacement. 25% of the way through, they realize that every myth they knew about XFree86 was wrong, so they abandon the project. Thus the proliferation of half finished X replacements.
Phhhhft! Linus got charged by an angry penguin, and had to run for his life, but he still works on Linux. I mean, having some rabid penguin chase you around a zoo is much more traumatic that getting bit by a dragonfly.
A second cable line directly competes with the first. The mere threat of it is enough to prevent the first from overcharging its customers. It's certainly worth it for them to lease out their line at a reasonable rate to the second company.
As long as the possibility exists that second lines could be installed, the owners of the existing lines will behave reasonably. The only reason this isn't happening today is that local governments aren't allowing the possibility of additional lines.
Don't you think it'd be a bit of a problem if there were eight cable companies in your area and eight cable lines running to every house?
What makes you think that would happen? Here's the more likely scenario:
"Dear FirstCableCo, your fees for using your cable are way too high. We have decided to install our own fiber optic network paralleling yours. We figure our investment will show a return in about six years."
"Dear SecondCableCo. You bastards! You know darned well that if you have fiber all of our customers will switch over! Grrr, I hate this new free market society. This competition thing is so damned annoying. Fine, we'll give you a discount to use our lines..."
Don't think it would happen that way? Check out your history. It happened with railroads despite the fact that they were all local and regional monopolies, and before the government got involved.
The cost of MRI installations is one reason why Ultrasound is taking off in a big way. Your clinic down the street can't afford a $5,000,000 MRI, but it can afford a $30,000 ultrasound. Additionally, US is portable and doesn't cause acrophobia.
I'm a bit confused as to why this was modded down. I answered the question that was put forth. To quote "What is more dangerous to the public, a psycho with a homemade mortar or a psycho with a semi-automatic handgun."
The answer seems obvious to me. The mortor in the story isn't going to be dangerous to large amounts of people, but a real mortor with real shells is going to cause a shitload of damage. Which is why armies are equipped with more mortors that semiautomatic handguns.
My mom is the same way. I tell her and I tell her but she does not listen. I tell her that spam is illegal but she does not listen. I tell her to never unsubscribe to spam, explaining exactly why, but she doesn't care. I can see her eyes glaze over as I speak. I am, in her own words, her "personal computer instruction manual", but she won't listen. It's so aggravating I want to scream.
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
A clue for the clueless: nothing will ever eradicate spam. Murder has been outlawed for approximately 5000 years. We still have murder. Law can codify acceptable behavior, but it can never eliminate unacceptable behavior.
I was visiting my friend last week and he was telling me his kid was required to submit homeowork in MSOffice XP format, either WordXP or PowerPointXP. 2000 or '97 was forbidden. He has his own 800MHz computer but still has to use his father's to do his homework.
One of his teachers can't even see his student's homework on his own computer, but there's nothing he can do about it.
Ditto. I remember finding perl scripts and not being able to run them because I couldn't upgrade the existing perl without breaking the OS. Getting perl out of the FreeBSD base system was a Good Thing(tm).
Does anyone in the Linux community remember the anguish over the switch from bash-1.x to bash-2.x? I can't imagine them wanting to go through that all over again, but if core OS scripts are written in python, they will.
Yes, it's hard to write portable code. It's damned near impossible when GNU keeps changing the libc API between minor releases. But when you have a portable standard, it's foolish to ignore it. There's no reason to write bash-only scripts when there's a POSIX shell standard to write to. There's no reason to write GNU make files when there's a perfectly reasonable and standard make format. Examples abound.
These same extended version will be shown separately, so that you don't have to see them at the same time. I personally was thinking about the marathon session, but my brains got the better of me and said "hey fool you'll sleep through the l33t showing of r0tK if you do that!"
But in many cases it's really easier to approve "Linux in general" and later specify that sometime it can be BSD
Except we're talking about governments here, not businesses. They might pass a law requiring Linux+KDE+OpenOffice, which would in effect make FreeBSD, GNOME and AbiWord illegal.
Don't lobby for Linux. Besides being a FreeBSD user hating to see EU nations ban everything but Linux, it also doesn't do anything to correct the pervasion monoculture in governments. While 100% use of Linux is better than 100% use of Windows, 100% use of anything is still bad.
So lobby for Open Source instead. Lobby for Open Standards. Those will also be much easier to get acceptance.
The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat
Aluminum cases are light, generally aesthetic, but have absolutely no benefit for cooling. I actually prefer steel cases because they're stronger. If your case ever gets hot enough that aluminum versus steel would ever make a difference, you're system is already slagged.
At work all of our workstations in the lab have a menu item to swap CapsLock/Ctrl. Observing people, I see three groups. One always uses the default of Ctrl in the lower left. One always swaps it. And the last group always uses whatever is there.
Frankly, I think it all depends on what you are used to, what what programs you use. If you an Emacs person, then moving that Ctrl to the left of A makes a whole bunch of sense.
Hmmm, anyone out there lobbying to move Alt to the left of Z?
Actually that's not necessarily the case. I find that my FreeBSD setups boot a bit slower than my Linux setups. Of course, my Linux setups tend to be Slackware, and not kitchen sink distros like SuSE or Mandrake...
Different architecture I guess. The USB drivers are kernel modules under FreeBSD as well. But they will get used as needed, without having to do an explicit kldload (insmod/modprobe).
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto. I'm using FreeBSD 5.1 and XFree86 4.3. I have the same experience. X is smooth and responsive.
But XP does seem a bit more responsive though. Not a whole lot, but a bit. So I did some checking to see why. Run a CPU meter in XP and in XFree86. The Windows GUI certainly appears to be the highest priority in XP. Move the mouse and CPU usage jumps. Drag a window and sometimes I can hear WinAmp stutter under the increased load. Now bring up XP and XFree86 from a cold start. XP appears to be up and running faster, but notice that hourglass cursor. It's making you think it's up and running when it's still loading. I ran a test once, from bootup to the display of Slashdot in a browser. FreeBSD + KDE + Konqueror was faster than Win2K + IExplorer.
There should be no reason for this, since the win32 API doesn't have a tenth of the feature set of the X11 API. But there it is. XFree86 scales up, while win32 demands faster and faster processors every year.
That's not the failure of the open source model - that is its strength.
Let me state a different but related failure: "The failure of open source is the preponderance of slashdot readers who never get past the first few posts on a topic".
People think XFree86 is a slug because they read slashdot. So they go off to write their own replacement. 25% of the way through, they realize that every myth they knew about XFree86 was wrong, so they abandon the project. Thus the proliferation of half finished X replacements.
Phhhhft! Linus got charged by an angry penguin, and had to run for his life, but he still works on Linux. I mean, having some rabid penguin chase you around a zoo is much more traumatic that getting bit by a dragonfly.
A second cable line directly competes with the first. The mere threat of it is enough to prevent the first from overcharging its customers. It's certainly worth it for them to lease out their line at a reasonable rate to the second company.
As long as the possibility exists that second lines could be installed, the owners of the existing lines will behave reasonably. The only reason this isn't happening today is that local governments aren't allowing the possibility of additional lines.
Don't you think it'd be a bit of a problem if there were eight cable companies in your area and eight cable lines running to every house?
What makes you think that would happen? Here's the more likely scenario:
"Dear FirstCableCo, your fees for using your cable are way too high. We have decided to install our own fiber optic network paralleling yours. We figure our investment will show a return in about six years."
"Dear SecondCableCo. You bastards! You know darned well that if you have fiber all of our customers will switch over! Grrr, I hate this new free market society. This competition thing is so damned annoying. Fine, we'll give you a discount to use our lines..."
Don't think it would happen that way? Check out your history. It happened with railroads despite the fact that they were all local and regional monopolies, and before the government got involved.
The cost of MRI installations is one reason why Ultrasound is taking off in a big way. Your clinic down the street can't afford a $5,000,000 MRI, but it can afford a $30,000 ultrasound. Additionally, US is portable and doesn't cause acrophobia.
I'm a bit confused as to why this was modded down. I answered the question that was put forth. To quote "What is more dangerous to the public, a psycho with a homemade mortar or a psycho with a semi-automatic handgun."
The answer seems obvious to me. The mortor in the story isn't going to be dangerous to large amounts of people, but a real mortor with real shells is going to cause a shitload of damage. Which is why armies are equipped with more mortors that semiautomatic handguns.
The mortar is more dangerous. You can topple an entire building full of people with a good hit, but a handgun can only hold so much ammo.
Big fat hairy deal. I make my own mortor all the time with lime and sand...
My mom is the same way. I tell her and I tell her but she does not listen. I tell her that spam is illegal but she does not listen. I tell her to never unsubscribe to spam, explaining exactly why, but she doesn't care. I can see her eyes glaze over as I speak. I am, in her own words, her "personal computer instruction manual", but she won't listen. It's so aggravating I want to scream.
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
A clue for the clueless: nothing will ever eradicate spam. Murder has been outlawed for approximately 5000 years. We still have murder. Law can codify acceptable behavior, but it can never eliminate unacceptable behavior.
I was visiting my friend last week and he was telling me his kid was required to submit homeowork in MSOffice XP format, either WordXP or PowerPointXP. 2000 or '97 was forbidden. He has his own 800MHz computer but still has to use his father's to do his homework.
One of his teachers can't even see his student's homework on his own computer, but there's nothing he can do about it.
Windows will never be taken seriously as a desktop system as long as it has multiple media players...
Ditto. I remember finding perl scripts and not being able to run them because I couldn't upgrade the existing perl without breaking the OS. Getting perl out of the FreeBSD base system was a Good Thing(tm).
Does anyone in the Linux community remember the anguish over the switch from bash-1.x to bash-2.x? I can't imagine them wanting to go through that all over again, but if core OS scripts are written in python, they will.
Yes, it's hard to write portable code. It's damned near impossible when GNU keeps changing the libc API between minor releases. But when you have a portable standard, it's foolish to ignore it. There's no reason to write bash-only scripts when there's a POSIX shell standard to write to. There's no reason to write GNU make files when there's a perfectly reasonable and standard make format. Examples abound.
These same extended version will be shown separately, so that you don't have to see them at the same time. I personally was thinking about the marathon session, but my brains got the better of me and said "hey fool you'll sleep through the l33t showing of r0tK if you do that!"
But in many cases it's really easier to approve "Linux in general" and later specify that sometime it can be BSD
Except we're talking about governments here, not businesses. They might pass a law requiring Linux+KDE+OpenOffice, which would in effect make FreeBSD, GNOME and AbiWord illegal.
But most people just won't understand. At 99-1, they still think their Democrat senator voted against it.
Don't lobby for Linux. Besides being a FreeBSD user hating to see EU nations ban everything but Linux, it also doesn't do anything to correct the pervasion monoculture in governments. While 100% use of Linux is better than 100% use of Windows, 100% use of anything is still bad.
So lobby for Open Source instead. Lobby for Open Standards. Those will also be much easier to get acceptance.
he just didn't like having to mount it manually
Wouldn't just a KDE icon do the same thing? I thought hotplug was just when you need to do weird stuff when you connected a device.
The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat
Aluminum cases are light, generally aesthetic, but have absolutely no benefit for cooling. I actually prefer steel cases because they're stronger. If your case ever gets hot enough that aluminum versus steel would ever make a difference, you're system is already slagged.
Maybe I just haven't been invited into that L33t crowd - yet...
You waiting for an invitation? Hey, this isn't Linux, you don't need one! Just come on.
At work all of our workstations in the lab have a menu item to swap CapsLock/Ctrl. Observing people, I see three groups. One always uses the default of Ctrl in the lower left. One always swaps it. And the last group always uses whatever is there.
Frankly, I think it all depends on what you are used to, what what programs you use. If you an Emacs person, then moving that Ctrl to the left of A makes a whole bunch of sense.
Hmmm, anyone out there lobbying to move Alt to the left of Z?
Actually that's not necessarily the case. I find that my FreeBSD setups boot a bit slower than my Linux setups. Of course, my Linux setups tend to be Slackware, and not kitchen sink distros like SuSE or Mandrake...
Different architecture I guess. The USB drivers are kernel modules under FreeBSD as well. But they will get used as needed, without having to do an explicit kldload (insmod/modprobe).