This is not intuitive at all. I was used to the previous firefox/gimp open file dialog which showed the area where you're supposed to type in the path to the filename (auto-complete included). UI's on countless interfaces have been doing this for years. The moment you take out that field where you're supposed to type the user no longer thinks that I can type anything so it didn't dawn on me and many other users (Probably linus included) that this was still possible.
I take the best from all window managers and desktops. I use gnome-terminal for my shell (I like it better than loading the bloated kbuildsycoca stuff from KDE's konsole) and it's just as easy to configure as konsole. When I need to use a file explorer gui with large thumbnails or for moving lots of different files around I use konqueror from KDE. As a base WM I use fluxbox because I can't live without tabs and being able to create tabbed windows. It's fast, easy, and as "elegant as vim/gvim" once you learn how to use it.
What allows me to easily have the most bleeding edge versions installed on my system without thinking about dependencies? Gentoo.
I had to use GCC to return actual errors in my code because the only thing MSVC++ compiler would tell me is Internal Compiler Error (ICE) over and over again. Seriously, M$ cannot get a compiler right, it cannot get a text file right (why use ^M\n instead of just \n?..a source of many headaches), and yet they claim to innovate technology which has been available for 5+years on other systems/os's. People eat their crap up left and right and you just increase M$ end objective M$$$$$ for terrible software.
No I'm saying that it will not be as unreliably as the xbox at doing what it is supposed to do, play video games, and play them well. A system crash in the first lap of gotham racing on 360 would be the equivalent of a kernel panic on boot. While this happens it is very rare and usually because of experimental CVS drivers, unsupported hardware, third party drivers, or a bad setup.
Fortunately I compile my own kernels and I know what I'm doing. If you're going to use linux you need to know a little about what you're doing (usually). An xbox is an appliance like a microwave, refrigerator, toaster, macosx, or winxp. It should be simple enough for kids to use and for others to just use without having to think about its internal components, heating, cooling, why its crashing etc.
So half a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of new Xbox 360 owners are having problems. Why does Slashdot have to state "Xbox 360 Very Unstable"? I've had bad installs of Linux too. Would we see the headline on Slashdot "Linux Very Unstable" too?
Uhh..do you know what is under the hood of the xbox360, what makes it tick, can you search google and find the answer to your problem immediately and apply a patch? A bad linux installation is *100%* your fault because you
1) are a moron who can't follow directions 2) have hardware problems unrelated to linux 3) don't know what you are talking about.
Have you ever subscrubed to LKML? Do you know how much testing goes into a certain patch or the kernel before it is released as stable? A new minor minor kernel is released every ~2 weeks. Will linux catch on fire and kill you slowly due to smoke inhalation? Don't even try to compare that trashy xbox hardware to the linux OS.
I couldn't agree more. People are angered by locked in formats. They want to be able to properly share documents no matter what the underlying architecture.
It seems that everyone is sleeping with everyone nowadays. Microsoft creates a shitty OS full of bugs. Then virus writers load it with worms, rootkits, and other malware over time. Then all these security companies get into the business of cleaning up after M$'s crap. As long as M$ keeps creating crap these guys are in business. You can think of anti-virus companies as digital refuse workers for M$. if there is no trash to take out, then these guys don't have a job.
So now Sony and F4I create a rootkit that will stick itself onto your system like a parasite (does this happen if the user is not running as admin? Can the rootkit work then in regular user mode?). As this excellent article pointed out, M$ would love to be in bed with Sony as the OS/digital content distributor of choice. Currently this happens to be Apple and M$ would love to grab a hefty share of the profits. They don't care about the majority of home users. If you aren't running a production system and paying them oodles of cash, they won't give you the time of the day. Why should they care about your security when most users don't care about their security. In all honesty your average joe doesn't know what a rootkit is (the CEO was right about that), he doesn't care, as long as his computer "isn't running slowly" and popups aren't flooding his desktop. In the end he doles out the job of fixing his computer to some neighborhood geek or tech support dude.
Well I for one have had enough of this crap. I refuse to fix your computer if its broken! If you want me to fix it, I'm going to install an open source system created by users for users.
Sure virus writers can start attacking there also, but as long as I know what's going on under the hood I can protect myself better. The average Joe can take advantage of this protection because if it's good for me it's good for him. I'm staking my reputation on the code i've written, there's a sense of pride in it. I'm not just in it for the money.
The Cell is an asynchronous SMP and the SunT1 is a synchronous SMP machine. The Cell processor has one master CPU with multiple "DSP" chips or cores. The SunT1 has multiple CPU cores.
If the companies are going to make it difficult for developers to fix problems with their drivers then we developers should not be obligated to make their life easier either! Let them provide userland binary drivers (e.g. like nvidia and ati) outside of the kernel. This seems to have worked fine. The only thing that doesn't work is that their drivers are broken. Who's fault is that..the kernel's?
Just think about what could be done without the monetary restrictions, or even if they could be significantly reduced. If the US had instead used for scientific research the $200 billion they wasted on Iraq, who knows how far ahead of the world they could be. Investing that much money in something constructive, like scientific research, would reap tremendous benefits. Even half of that dollar figure could fund a lot of cutting-edge research.
Now, I don't want to change the subject, but waging war (when there is no threat that anything will happen to your own country) is a great way to inject growth into the economy. War destroys and then corporations have an incentive to get government grants (our tax dollars) to help rebuild another country's economy and everything we destroyed. Slowly but surely (like the Borg) the US will assimilate Iraqi culture like we do with everything else. In the process, more Iraqi's will lose their "traditional" values and practices, and a entire younger generations of Iraqi's will become another mindless consumer-oriented MTV generation. We will move our Walmarts, Home Depots, McDonalds, and Starbucks as well as big government contractors into Iraq (if these companies are not over there already). It's all about US hegemony. Let's force our way of life onto them. If you don't like it you can stagnate and die.
I know for a fact that many scientists slightly modify their results to make them look better all the time. Now, they probably don't blatantly fabricate data like this guy, but they sometimes tweak a number here or there so on initial deposition for publication every thing looks good to the reviewers (closes holes in their findings). This gives the researcher time to fix problems in their work while knowing that it will be published in the future with minor modifications.
What incentive would a researcher have to fix minor problems if he/she knew that their findings would not be published anyways? They either try another journal or go onto another experiment. Why waste time, when time is grant money that is running out?
After going through all the graphs and making up my own decision as to what seems like the best price/performance ratio CPU, the authors determine that they can't determine anything!!
Final Thoughts: No Definitive Winner
However their results seem to indicate that either the P4 630 or the Athlon64 3000+ offer the best performance at this point in time in the CPU market. I actually suspected this since higher model CPU's are way overpriced. So since the choice comes down to the P4 630 vs. the Athlon64 3000+, the only question remaining is, which one uses more power when idle and at 100% load? In any case the winner seems to be the AMD since even if the P4 has EMT64, I've heard it's a rather poor implementation of x86_64.
Having said that it's conceivable that a version of the Open Source Linux port could be converted back to Windows. But it would not be the official Xara version (it couldn't use the Xara name), it wouldn't include any customer support or any of the licensed components we can include. So we hope it doesn't happen, because that would jeopardise our ability to continue. Put simply, if we can't earn money from the product somehow, we can't employ full time engineers working on the Open Source product, and that helps no one.
It's not inconceivable. It will happen, maybe even under cygwin, but it will. Windows users will start to get mad since they have to continue to pay (and no they won't switch to linux). Sure the OSS version would not include some of the proprietary plugins, but if the user really wants or needs those then he/she would be happy to pay for them by purchasing the retail version. With an OSS version ported to Windows, all that Xara could do is just sell their support and expertise. But with so many online forums, chats, and help pages would their support even be necessary?
It seems to me that Xara is really shooting themselves in the foot.
And on Linux that means it has to be Open Source in order to stand any chance of success
I also think this is not true. I think they should have done the exact opposite. That is port it to linux and macosx, keep it closed source, and sell their product at their current low price on all platforms. Not only would this help them, but it would give support to Xorg/Xfree + whatever window manager/desktop + linux kernel as a feasible graphics platform with a commercial backing. If they are scared about being bought out (are they even a publicly traded company?) then open source the linux / macosx codebase in the event that it seems imminent that they will be bought out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not intuitive at all. I was used to the previous firefox/gimp open file dialog which showed the area where you're supposed to type in the path to the filename (auto-complete included). UI's on countless interfaces have been doing this for years. The moment you take out that field where you're supposed to type the user no longer thinks that I can type anything so it didn't dawn on me and many other users (Probably linus included) that this was still possible.
..they might actually get a clue.
I take the best from all window managers and desktops. I use gnome-terminal for my shell (I like it better than loading the bloated kbuildsycoca stuff from KDE's konsole) and it's just as easy to configure as konsole. When I need to use a file explorer gui with large thumbnails or for moving lots of different files around I use konqueror from KDE. As a base WM I use fluxbox because I can't live without tabs and being able to create tabbed windows. It's fast, easy, and as "elegant as vim/gvim" once you learn how to use it.
What allows me to easily have the most bleeding edge versions installed on my system without thinking about dependencies? Gentoo.
Does anyone know how much Yahoo paid for del.icio.us?
in third world countries use water.
I emailed this company and if you don't have at least 0.5" diameter copper water pipes running through your house the water heater will not work.
I had to use GCC to return actual errors in my code because the only thing MSVC++ compiler would tell me is Internal Compiler Error (ICE) over and over again. Seriously, M$ cannot get a compiler right, it cannot get a text file right (why use ^M\n instead of just \n? ..a source of many headaches), and yet they claim to innovate technology which has been available for 5+years on other systems/os's. People eat their crap up left and right and you just increase M$ end objective M$$$$$ for terrible software.
No I'm saying that it will not be as unreliably as the xbox at doing what it is supposed to do, play video games, and play them well. A system crash in the first lap of gotham racing on 360 would be the equivalent of a kernel panic on boot. While this happens it is very rare and usually because of experimental CVS drivers, unsupported hardware, third party drivers, or a bad setup. Fortunately I compile my own kernels and I know what I'm doing. If you're going to use linux you need to know a little about what you're doing (usually). An xbox is an appliance like a microwave, refrigerator, toaster, macosx, or winxp. It should be simple enough for kids to use and for others to just use without having to think about its internal components, heating, cooling, why its crashing etc.
So half a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of new Xbox 360 owners are having problems. Why does Slashdot have to state "Xbox 360 Very Unstable"? I've had bad installs of Linux too. Would we see the headline on Slashdot "Linux Very Unstable" too?
Uhh..do you know what is under the hood of the xbox360, what makes it tick, can you search google and find the answer to your problem immediately and apply a patch? A bad linux installation is *100%* your fault because you
1) are a moron who can't follow directions
2) have hardware problems unrelated to linux
3) don't know what you are talking about.
Have you ever subscrubed to LKML? Do you know how much testing goes into a certain patch or the kernel before it is released as stable? A new minor minor kernel is released every ~2 weeks. Will linux catch on fire and kill you slowly due to smoke inhalation? Don't even try to compare that trashy xbox hardware to the linux OS.
I couldn't agree more. People are angered by locked in formats. They want to be able to properly share documents no matter what the underlying architecture.
It seems that everyone is sleeping with everyone nowadays. Microsoft creates a shitty OS full of bugs. Then virus writers load it with worms, rootkits, and other malware over time. Then all these security companies get into the business of cleaning up after M$'s crap. As long as M$ keeps creating crap these guys are in business. You can think of anti-virus companies as digital refuse workers for M$. if there is no trash to take out, then these guys don't have a job.
So now Sony and F4I create a rootkit that will stick itself onto your system like a parasite (does this happen if the user is not running as admin? Can the rootkit work then in regular user mode?). As this excellent article pointed out, M$ would love to be in bed with Sony as the OS/digital content distributor of choice. Currently this happens to be Apple and M$ would love to grab a hefty share of the profits. They don't care about the majority of home users. If you aren't running a production system and paying them oodles of cash, they won't give you the time of the day. Why should they care about your security when most users don't care about their security. In all honesty your average joe doesn't know what a rootkit is (the CEO was right about that), he doesn't care, as long as his computer "isn't running slowly" and popups aren't flooding his desktop. In the end he doles out the job of fixing his computer to some neighborhood geek or tech support dude.
Well I for one have had enough of this crap. I refuse to fix your computer if its broken! If you want me to fix it, I'm going to install an open source system created by users for users.
Sure virus writers can start attacking there also, but as long as I know what's going on under the hood I can protect myself better. The average Joe can take advantage of this protection because if it's good for me it's good for him. I'm staking my reputation on the code i've written, there's a sense of pride in it. I'm not just in it for the money.
Mega blokes wins supreme court battle... ..those bloody blokes!
Too seckzy for me and my business. No one would get any work done!
who has tin foil anyways? You mean aluminum foil?
The Cell is an asynchronous SMP and the SunT1 is a synchronous SMP machine. The Cell processor has one master CPU with multiple "DSP" chips or cores. The SunT1 has multiple CPU cores.
If the companies are going to make it difficult for developers to fix problems with their drivers then we developers should not be obligated to make their life easier either! Let them provide userland binary drivers (e.g. like nvidia and ati) outside of the kernel. This seems to have worked fine. The only thing that doesn't work is that their drivers are broken. Who's fault is that ..the kernel's?
I have often used IRC as my brain substitute. You'll always find someone there to answer your questions on just about everything.
Just think about what could be done without the monetary restrictions, or even if they could be significantly reduced. If the US had instead used for scientific research the $200 billion they wasted on Iraq, who knows how far ahead of the world they could be. Investing that much money in something constructive, like scientific research, would reap tremendous benefits. Even half of that dollar figure could fund a lot of cutting-edge research.
Now, I don't want to change the subject, but waging war (when there is no threat that anything will happen to your own country) is a great way to inject growth into the economy. War destroys and then corporations have an incentive to get government grants (our tax dollars) to help rebuild another country's economy and everything we destroyed. Slowly but surely (like the Borg) the US will assimilate Iraqi culture like we do with everything else. In the process, more Iraqi's will lose their "traditional" values and practices, and a entire younger generations of Iraqi's will become another mindless consumer-oriented MTV generation. We will move our Walmarts, Home Depots, McDonalds, and Starbucks as well as big government contractors into Iraq (if these companies are not over there already). It's all about US hegemony. Let's force our way of life onto them. If you don't like it you can stagnate and die.
I know for a fact that many scientists slightly modify their results to make them look better all the time. Now, they probably don't blatantly fabricate data like this guy, but they sometimes tweak a number here or there so on initial deposition for publication every thing looks good to the reviewers (closes holes in their findings). This gives the researcher time to fix problems in their work while knowing that it will be published in the future with minor modifications.
What incentive would a researcher have to fix minor problems if he/she knew that their findings would not be published anyways? They either try another journal or go onto another experiment. Why waste time, when time is grant money that is running out?
After going through all the graphs and making up my own decision as to what seems like the best price/performance ratio CPU, the authors determine that they can't determine anything!!
Final Thoughts: No Definitive Winner
However their results seem to indicate that either the P4 630 or the Athlon64 3000+ offer the best performance at this point in time in the CPU market. I actually suspected this since higher model CPU's are way overpriced. So since the choice comes down to the P4 630 vs. the Athlon64 3000+, the only question remaining is, which one uses more power when idle and at 100% load? In any case the winner seems to be the AMD since even if the P4 has EMT64, I've heard it's a rather poor implementation of x86_64.
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/bingofuel/pmcjlnen.htm
For those of us who don't want to pay for a game that probably won't run very well on some of our systems, when will the demo be released?
Use Fluxbox and never be bothered by pesky icons cluttering your desktop ever again
watch the video and you'll see what it does that other linux/win/mac apps do not
From the FAQ:
Having said that it's conceivable that a version of the Open Source Linux port could be converted back to Windows. But it would not be the official Xara version (it couldn't use the Xara name), it wouldn't include any customer support or any of the licensed components we can include. So we hope it doesn't happen, because that would jeopardise our ability to continue. Put simply, if we can't earn money from the product somehow, we can't employ full time engineers working on the Open Source product, and that helps no one.
It's not inconceivable. It will happen, maybe even under cygwin, but it will. Windows users will start to get mad since they have to continue to pay (and no they won't switch to linux). Sure the OSS version would not include some of the proprietary plugins, but if the user really wants or needs those then he/she would be happy to pay for them by purchasing the retail version. With an OSS version ported to Windows, all that Xara could do is just sell their support and expertise. But with so many online forums, chats, and help pages would their support even be necessary?
It seems to me that Xara is really shooting themselves in the foot.
And on Linux that means it has to be Open Source in order to stand any chance of success
I also think this is not true. I think they should have done the exact opposite. That is port it to linux and macosx, keep it closed source, and sell their product at their current low price on all platforms. Not only would this help them, but it would give support to Xorg/Xfree + whatever window manager/desktop + linux kernel as a feasible graphics platform with a commercial backing. If they are scared about being bought out (are they even a publicly traded company?) then open source the linux / macosx codebase in the event that it seems imminent that they will be bought out.