We have here some Sun Fire V440s which top list of the problem-free servers. Those are SPARC IV chips and they work and run fine since the
Oldest Sun server we had IIRC was ~12yo and it was recycle simply because per chance it was noticed that (1) Sun stopped support for the server few years ago (that was me who noticed that) and (2) several business critical apps still ran on the server. (Can't tell you the model number because nobody from IT could recall it.) At least in the past, one has expected 10 years of support for hardware and OS from the commercial UNIX vendors.
Yeah, lack of new major versions is understandable, but still for my employer would be a major PITA. But luckily we have started move to x64/Solaris 10 (servers made by HP no less!) right now, and the news would only hasten the transition. I doubt Oracle would see any H/W sales from us (and our customers) anymore: as much as I dislike the HP, over past few years their Services proved to be very cooperative: idea of running Solaris on HP x64 hardware (instead of previous HP-UX on Itanic) came from them and they do provide support for both H/W and OS.
that's an Ubuntu problem, not a "Linux" problem. There are Linux distros that are accessibility-friendly. Pure, raw, actual Linux doesn't really have a gui anyway.
But I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be the most accessible of the Linux distributions!
:)
Actually, I think those are bad genes, inherited from X Window System. In past I have tried to use bare X + WM without mouse. Pretty soon I have found that it is not possible at all: X requires mouse, most X applications simply do not have any keyboard shortcuts (e.g. editres or xedit). So I found a spare one. Only to find 15 minutes later that X requires 3-button mouse. And I had only spare 2-button mice.
The thing is that most distros, Ubuntu included, target the group of users to whom it is actually keyboard which is optional. Windows historically targeted gov'ts and thus had to provide the full (keyboard) accessibility out of box: yes, there are people who have disruption of motor skills and can't use mice.
Anyway, I mostly work in shell anyway, I'm over the toying with Ubuntu, and back in the Aptosid.
It appears that Ctrl-Alt-D was the shortcut I was missing. In Windows 7 I too do not know how to get to the desktop with keyboard shortcuts (in Win XP IIRC it was Win, Esc, Tab; hm something similar works in W7 too), but raw window of Explorer is sufficient (where from you can navigate e.g. to computer management).
Otherwise, Linux, or X Window System, is probably the most keyboard unfriendly environment I have ever encountered. KDE 3.x in my past experience was OK (they mimic Windows a lot, also in keyboard shortcut aspects; no experience with KDE4), but GNOME based systems not once have failed me in keyboard department in past (my departure from GNOME (1.4) was largely due to removal of keyboard shortcuts altogether in GNOME 2.0; IceWM FTW!).
Windows is actually mostly OK w/o mouse. Most MSFT applications are quite keyboard friendly. Ditto Mac OS X. The OSs give impression that they were at least somehow tested for the occasional mouse failure. (Safari with keyboard only is very functional.)
Can't say the same for the modern Linuxes, Ubuntu 11.04 in particular (IIRC previous versions, based on GNOME 2.x are not better). Recently my trackball dyed and I had to get around with only keyboard. It was abysmal. Essentially, it went like Alt-F2, xterm, sync, etc, shutdown -h how. From GUI, trying to eject the USB drive properly without the mouse to me proved to be impossible.
Oh, yeah, FireFox on MacOS. Never managed to make it working to my liking. And on laptops, with sleeps/etc there are some non-obvious bugs which make FireFox spinning at ~20-50% CPU load for no apparent reason. With some regrets had to move to Safari. (Chrome is simply not my cup of tea and to me not much different from Safari.)
As previous posters have said that is not not true.
Or specifically... Well, it appears you are a one of the few victims of a bug in later 2.x, earlier 3.x versions of Fx which was preventing proper auto-updates after user once has postponed update (or something along the line). It would still work with explicit "check for updates", but before you get next major version, you have to update to the latest point version. Only timer for automatic prompt to update was broken. IIRC was fixed in 3.5.
Like 2 weeks was enough to cause the massive problems Sony had. Hah.
Large layoffs in large companies are rarely a big secret. Meaning that people likely new months in advance. Now imaging what would you do if you knew that your department is going to get an axe? Would you be doing your normal job? - or drinking coffee and looking for a new job already?
No, more like, Sony found out they were incompetent and was firing them for that. Too little too late, obviously.
Such companies are run by accountants. To them security is a buzzword without any particular meaning. After a successful lawsuit it might get a real $$$ number and then they would start paying attention to it. But not a moment sooner.
Also, RTFA mentions that according to lawsuit, Sony hasn't failed to properly secure their development servers - it was only the servers holding the customer information which were neglected.
Paint me surprised: MS can C++??? Last time I checked they had no C++ anymore. I think by C++ they actually mean the silly managed(?) thing they try to pass as C++ instead. Meaning that it is at least half way already implemented in C#.
So, if memory management is issue today, something is wrong...
Developers.
Most CS courses went with GC-capable languages. Plus side: students can concentrate on algorithms and are shielded from even trivial details of computer architecture. Minus side: programming is all about resource management (resource being: CPU, memory block, file or even programs themselves) and new slew of developers are struggling with anything scaled from lab assignment to the real world magnitudes.
Recently seen anguish of a developer who tried to open 100K files. And it didn't worked. And his perfect Java program failed and in process of doing so had corrupted some of the (precious) files already open. But he isn't guilty - really - it is poor design of OS or suckage of admins who put the limit in place.
Memory management (or generally resource management) isn't the issue. It is that head of most developers nowadays are filled with long lists of useful libraries instead. People are slowly forgetting how stuff is working - and why it is working that way - they are more into linking some other code which already does it for them. Even if using the library encumbers more than helps. But I think we already had seen that trend occuring in CS before.
But there is a hidden bonus to watching the prequel Star Wars: one would definitely enjoy the reviews which are by far more interesting than the prequels themselves.
I tracked KDE 4 versions, starting with 4.0 and up to 4.3, via VirtualBox'ed Aptosid (at the time called Sidux) installation, and never had seen such problems. There were early problems upgrading KDE3 to KDE4, and in KDE 4.0/4.1/4.2 many vital pieces were missing - but otherwise, I have never seen the "crash every 10m" behavior you mention.
1. Asian women look younger to us westerners.
2. All men are obviously obsessed with young girls.
3. All women are obviously obsessed with looking like young girls.
Shortly: youth is the only thing which never gets out of fashion.
Regarding molestation... This actually interesting question. But it should be rephrased: why it is only that kind of stuff gets imported into the West?? Why it is nearly impossible to find a decent romance or ero manga here?? They are actually in Japan are more numerous compared to the hentai.
Ironically, most of the time I drop into the shell on my Windows box is when I get annoyed by all the stuff which gets in a way of doing work.
File Manager of Windows 3.1/3.11 was quite useful. And fast. Original Win95's Explorer half so useful but still OK, since keyboard support was OK. But Win2k/XP made a step back by essentially breaking the keyboard shortcuts, by introducing bunch of useless sidebars. Win7 made the Explorer essentially a nice frontend for the Picasa and Mercurial - I personally can't use the new Explorer for anything else - it is simply way too unpredictable in both behavior and performance.
I think you are little bit overreacting and exaggerating. Those are comics. Work of fantasy. I have seen much much much more *photographic* repugnant stuff rotating constantly on internet.
And I have seen some yaoi, which to me was absolutely boring stuff (I'm in general not a manga person). But I'm no religious person/no moralist, I'm not gonna dictate what other can/cannot read or like. If they like it, let them be.
I've actually read more than one forum post where someone dismissed an entire application because a change to one keyboard shortcut made a program "completely unusable." It's okay to be a little pedantic, but there's a point where it crosses the line to ridiculousness.
Depends. If that application was a media player and it was the Spacebar which stopped working as a Play/Pause button, then I too would dismiss it completely. Likewise if that application was a file manager and double click stopped launching selected file. Or graphics editor - and Ctrl-+/- stopped zooming.
Seeing how Ubuntu/GNOME frivolously break settled workflows for no good reason doesn't inspire and yes a simple shortcut might become that last drop.
The problem is not the CPU support, is support for the motherboard...
But the MB manufs won't move until chipset CPU/manufacturers also support the type BIOS.
Do not get me wrong, but if that Coreboot want to replace the BIOS of a motherboard then it should necessarily be 100% compatible, nothing less. How can they say that for example the Coreboot is compatible with the Asus A8N-E, when only one SATA port works and PCI-E 16X do not work?
Yes, you have missed something. Check the server motherboard compatibility list. It is much much more "up-to-date." Apparently people who are struggling most with the carp of proprietary BIOSs are the admins of data centers and server farms. Thus the developer's bias. Me, desktop user, is not on their roadmap.
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
I have seen lots and lots of $.99 games which were worth more than that. And I have seen really really few $60 games which were worth the $60. And they were worth the $60 not because they had loads of content, but because I really enjoyed playing them.
And that's the core of the pricing problem IMO: pumping more content into a basically $10-20 game doesn't make it a $60 game. The wasted $40-50 bucks are just that: wasted.
I wish the game developers went back to basics and started making simpler games appealing to the gaming essentials. I personally miss a shooter which is really a shooter and not also a racing/diving/flying/swimming simulator at the same time.
Sadly the only way some of that testing gets to happen is to have people use it.
Though that has not worked either - in the best traditions of Linux audio subsystem, most queries I have seen on PA mail lists were answered with "fix your config" type of replies. For documentation see... well ask on the same forums. And btw, PA documentation is still in shambles - nobody bothered to make it useful or complete.
PA is layer which (as per RFC1925, 6a) simply added another layer to the existing mess - multiplying it by a bit - without actually adding any major features. They should throw away both PA and ALSA, and use OSS instead. That one works. (And btw the latter sounds better too: ALSA has some sort of jitter/whatever, making sound to lose in clarity.)
AdBlock and NoScript deals with the AJAX problem nicely. With SPDY the extensions are (and the browser as a whole) out of the loop, since it is server who decides what to send to client. The client can only silently ignore the junk sent by server.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the stylish's script.
We have here some Sun Fire V440s which top list of the problem-free servers. Those are SPARC IV chips and they work and run fine since the
Oldest Sun server we had IIRC was ~12yo and it was recycle simply because per chance it was noticed that (1) Sun stopped support for the server few years ago (that was me who noticed that) and (2) several business critical apps still ran on the server. (Can't tell you the model number because nobody from IT could recall it.) At least in the past, one has expected 10 years of support for hardware and OS from the commercial UNIX vendors.
Yeah, lack of new major versions is understandable, but still for my employer would be a major PITA. But luckily we have started move to x64/Solaris 10 (servers made by HP no less!) right now, and the news would only hasten the transition. I doubt Oracle would see any H/W sales from us (and our customers) anymore: as much as I dislike the HP, over past few years their Services proved to be very cooperative: idea of running Solaris on HP x64 hardware (instead of previous HP-UX on Itanic) came from them and they do provide support for both H/W and OS.
But I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be the most accessible of the Linux distributions!
Actually, I think those are bad genes, inherited from X Window System. In past I have tried to use bare X + WM without mouse. Pretty soon I have found that it is not possible at all: X requires mouse, most X applications simply do not have any keyboard shortcuts (e.g. editres or xedit). So I found a spare one. Only to find 15 minutes later that X requires 3-button mouse. And I had only spare 2-button mice.
The thing is that most distros, Ubuntu included, target the group of users to whom it is actually keyboard which is optional. Windows historically targeted gov'ts and thus had to provide the full (keyboard) accessibility out of box: yes, there are people who have disruption of motor skills and can't use mice.
Anyway, I mostly work in shell anyway, I'm over the toying with Ubuntu, and back in the Aptosid.
There are Linux distros that are accessibility-friendly.
For example?
I have yet to see a single GUI-based distro boasting that it is keyboard friendly out of box.
It appears that Ctrl-Alt-D was the shortcut I was missing. In Windows 7 I too do not know how to get to the desktop with keyboard shortcuts (in Win XP IIRC it was Win, Esc, Tab; hm something similar works in W7 too), but raw window of Explorer is sufficient (where from you can navigate e.g. to computer management).
Otherwise, Linux, or X Window System, is probably the most keyboard unfriendly environment I have ever encountered. KDE 3.x in my past experience was OK (they mimic Windows a lot, also in keyboard shortcut aspects; no experience with KDE4), but GNOME based systems not once have failed me in keyboard department in past (my departure from GNOME (1.4) was largely due to removal of keyboard shortcuts altogether in GNOME 2.0; IceWM FTW!).
Windows is actually mostly OK w/o mouse. Most MSFT applications are quite keyboard friendly. Ditto Mac OS X. The OSs give impression that they were at least somehow tested for the occasional mouse failure. (Safari with keyboard only is very functional.)
Can't say the same for the modern Linuxes, Ubuntu 11.04 in particular (IIRC previous versions, based on GNOME 2.x are not better). Recently my trackball dyed and I had to get around with only keyboard. It was abysmal. Essentially, it went like Alt-F2, xterm, sync, etc, shutdown -h how. From GUI, trying to eject the USB drive properly without the mouse to me proved to be impossible.
Oh, yeah, FireFox on MacOS. Never managed to make it working to my liking. And on laptops, with sleeps/etc there are some non-obvious bugs which make FireFox spinning at ~20-50% CPU load for no apparent reason. With some regrets had to move to Safari. (Chrome is simply not my cup of tea and to me not much different from Safari.)
As previous posters have said that is not not true.
Or specifically ... Well, it appears you are a one of the few victims of a bug in later 2.x, earlier 3.x versions of Fx which was preventing proper auto-updates after user once has postponed update (or something along the line). It would still work with explicit "check for updates", but before you get next major version, you have to update to the latest point version. Only timer for automatic prompt to update was broken. IIRC was fixed in 3.5.
Like 2 weeks was enough to cause the massive problems Sony had. Hah.
Large layoffs in large companies are rarely a big secret. Meaning that people likely new months in advance. Now imaging what would you do if you knew that your department is going to get an axe? Would you be doing your normal job? - or drinking coffee and looking for a new job already?
No, more like, Sony found out they were incompetent and was firing them for that. Too little too late, obviously.
Such companies are run by accountants. To them security is a buzzword without any particular meaning. After a successful lawsuit it might get a real $$$ number and then they would start paying attention to it. But not a moment sooner.
Also, RTFA mentions that according to lawsuit, Sony hasn't failed to properly secure their development servers - it was only the servers holding the customer information which were neglected.
Paint me surprised: MS can C++??? Last time I checked they had no C++ anymore. I think by C++ they actually mean the silly managed(?) thing they try to pass as C++ instead. Meaning that it is at least half way already implemented in C#.
So, if memory management is issue today, something is wrong...
Developers.
Most CS courses went with GC-capable languages. Plus side: students can concentrate on algorithms and are shielded from even trivial details of computer architecture. Minus side: programming is all about resource management (resource being: CPU, memory block, file or even programs themselves) and new slew of developers are struggling with anything scaled from lab assignment to the real world magnitudes.
Recently seen anguish of a developer who tried to open 100K files. And it didn't worked. And his perfect Java program failed and in process of doing so had corrupted some of the (precious) files already open. But he isn't guilty - really - it is poor design of OS or suckage of admins who put the limit in place.
Memory management (or generally resource management) isn't the issue. It is that head of most developers nowadays are filled with long lists of useful libraries instead. People are slowly forgetting how stuff is working - and why it is working that way - they are more into linking some other code which already does it for them. Even if using the library encumbers more than helps. But I think we already had seen that trend occuring in CS before.
Apparently, there is still some work to be done.
Chrome extensions are in this state permanently, since their inception 2 years ago.
On topic: sort'a reminds me of the Linux on Desktop. Kind of works and is there already - but "there is still some work to be done." For a decade now.
But there is a hidden bonus to watching the prequel Star Wars: one would definitely enjoy the reviews which are by far more interesting than the prequels themselves.
I tracked KDE 4 versions, starting with 4.0 and up to 4.3, via VirtualBox'ed Aptosid (at the time called Sidux) installation, and never had seen such problems. There were early problems upgrading KDE3 to KDE4, and in KDE 4.0/4.1/4.2 many vital pieces were missing - but otherwise, I have never seen the "crash every 10m" behavior you mention.
1. Asian women look younger to us westerners.
2. All men are obviously obsessed with young girls.
3. All women are obviously obsessed with looking like young girls.
Shortly: youth is the only thing which never gets out of fashion.
Regarding molestation... This actually interesting question. But it should be rephrased: why it is only that kind of stuff gets imported into the West?? Why it is nearly impossible to find a decent romance or ero manga here?? They are actually in Japan are more numerous compared to the hentai.
URL bar users: Mozilla Labs Has To Go
Ironically, most of the time I drop into the shell on my Windows box is when I get annoyed by all the stuff which gets in a way of doing work.
File Manager of Windows 3.1/3.11 was quite useful. And fast. Original Win95's Explorer half so useful but still OK, since keyboard support was OK. But Win2k/XP made a step back by essentially breaking the keyboard shortcuts, by introducing bunch of useless sidebars. Win7 made the Explorer essentially a nice frontend for the Picasa and Mercurial - I personally can't use the new Explorer for anything else - it is simply way too unpredictable in both behavior and performance.
I think you are little bit overreacting and exaggerating. Those are comics. Work of fantasy. I have seen much much much more *photographic* repugnant stuff rotating constantly on internet.
And I have seen some yaoi, which to me was absolutely boring stuff (I'm in general not a manga person). But I'm no religious person/no moralist, I'm not gonna dictate what other can/cannot read or like. If they like it, let them be.
Why should they give a rats ass what the caller has to say about some gay kiddie porn ?
You have mixed up yaoi with shota. Both are predominantly targeted at the female audience.
Unity is the kind of nonsense that you end up with when you fixate on "user interface testing".
Or "Ribbon."
I've actually read more than one forum post where someone dismissed an entire application because a change to one keyboard shortcut made a program "completely unusable." It's okay to be a little pedantic, but there's a point where it crosses the line to ridiculousness.
Depends. If that application was a media player and it was the Spacebar which stopped working as a Play/Pause button, then I too would dismiss it completely. Likewise if that application was a file manager and double click stopped launching selected file. Or graphics editor - and Ctrl-+/- stopped zooming.
Seeing how Ubuntu/GNOME frivolously break settled workflows for no good reason doesn't inspire and yes a simple shortcut might become that last drop.
The problem is not the CPU support, is support for the motherboard...
But the MB manufs won't move until chipset CPU/manufacturers also support the type BIOS.
Do not get me wrong, but if that Coreboot want to replace the BIOS of a motherboard then it should necessarily be 100% compatible, nothing less. How can they say that for example the Coreboot is compatible with the Asus A8N-E, when only one SATA port works and PCI-E 16X do not work?
Yes, you have missed something. Check the server motherboard compatibility list. It is much much more "up-to-date." Apparently people who are struggling most with the carp of proprietary BIOSs are the admins of data centers and server farms. Thus the developer's bias. Me, desktop user, is not on their roadmap.
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
I have seen lots and lots of $.99 games which were worth more than that. And I have seen really really few $60 games which were worth the $60. And they were worth the $60 not because they had loads of content, but because I really enjoyed playing them.
And that's the core of the pricing problem IMO: pumping more content into a basically $10-20 game doesn't make it a $60 game. The wasted $40-50 bucks are just that: wasted.
I wish the game developers went back to basics and started making simpler games appealing to the gaming essentials. I personally miss a shooter which is really a shooter and not also a racing/diving/flying/swimming simulator at the same time.
Sadly the only way some of that testing gets to happen is to have people use it.
Though that has not worked either - in the best traditions of Linux audio subsystem, most queries I have seen on PA mail lists were answered with "fix your config" type of replies. For documentation see ... well ask on the same forums. And btw, PA documentation is still in shambles - nobody bothered to make it useful or complete.
PA is layer which (as per RFC1925, 6a) simply added another layer to the existing mess - multiplying it by a bit - without actually adding any major features. They should throw away both PA and ALSA, and use OSS instead. That one works. (And btw the latter sounds better too: ALSA has some sort of jitter/whatever, making sound to lose in clarity.)
AdBlock and NoScript deals with the AJAX problem nicely. With SPDY the extensions are (and the browser as a whole) out of the loop, since it is server who decides what to send to client. The client can only silently ignore the junk sent by server.