A Pentium? Are you serious? The PPE in the Cell is essentially IBM's "G5" PowerPC 970 core, complete with Altivec/VMX. That's no slouch. It'll run "software not specifically written for the Cell" just fine. The SPE's are the really interesting parts though.
And you might want to get the PS/3 as a cheap Cell development platform, it depends on what Sony or IBM do with the Cell. If the only other options are big blade servers from IBM, then $600 for a development machine running Linux would be quite acceptable. Especially if they don't make the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 Linux kit i.e locking it down to the point of near uselessness. I'd still prefer it if someone made a Cell ATX mobo, or something. But I guess the advantage with the PS/3 will be the lower prices due to mass production. Just look at the prices for a non-Apple PowerPC mobo, or any other processor.
Are they really that absurd? IIRC, a recent long-term study found that people tended to develop brain tumours on the same side of their head that they used their mobile/cell phone on. And I don't care about what we *currently* know about RF radiation and how it *shouldn't* cause tumours. We still might discover that there is a cause, or maybe not. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that the phones cause brain tumours. I'm sure a lot of that is driven by the media and their desire to sell more ads (what they're really selling). But until someone can show that e.g it's a statistical coincidence, then the fear will remain. I don't want to run the risk of developing a life-threatening tumour just to use a phone.
How is that any different to the wired "hands free" earpiece + mic sets that have been around 5+ years? What I'm interested in is the reduced exposure to RF radiation. Put the mobile/cell phone on the desk, on the passenger seat, in your bag/purse, or even just held in your hand (away from your head) and talk with one of these headsets. Although, BlueTooth is still RF. How much power does BlueTooth put out compared to GSM or CDMA?
That was the original cliche phrase, which over time has evolved for whatever reason to omit the "not" part.
Maybe in America it did. But in the rest of the world it didn't, and you sound like a bloody fool saying "could care less". But hey, if you want to sound like the rest of the uneducated hicks, go right ahead. I have no problem with Americans sounding stupid:)
I do use IMAP, and Mail.app talks to it just fine. The problem arises when I'm using Mail.app to read email from two boxes at once, both operating out of a network-based home folder. The app has some cache/index files that don't play well in a sharing environment.
If that's the case, then it's an application issue. No new network filesystem is going to magically fix bad assumptions made in an application. Go complain to Apple or whoever it is that makes Mail.app.
Re:My main problems with OpenOffice (on any OS)
on
Office Delayed, Too
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· Score: 1
I don't know about Sun being responsible for the mess, I think that'd be more StarDivision's fault. StarOffice goes back at least 10 years. As for portability, my understanding is that StarOffice/OpenOffice has its own CORBA/COM-like component system. Most of SO/OO is written in fairly reasonable C++, but critical parts of this component system requires assembly language to be written. And it not only has to be done for every processor/ISA, but for every operating system as well. That is, every combination of processor and OS.
Hopefully the adoption of ODF will mean we don't have to use the monstrosity of OO, but can use lightweight alternatives like Abiword and KOffice.
Kevin Rudd is another potential leader who would make a better choice than Beazley. Until the ALP shapes up, there's always the Greens and Democrats, who are slowly playing a bigger role in Australian politics. Hell, even Family first is looking better than Labor!
Where is it written that it will be illegal for anyone outside of the third world to get one of these laptops? I can see them being donated to a few developers around the world, as happens with quite a bit of hardware. They might even end up running it like that wind-up radio from several years ago: sell them in the first-world and use the money to subsidize the ones sold/given to the third-world.
The interesting thing about Al Qaeda is that one of the top US military chiefs (Casey?) said almost as much at a congressional hearing. He equated Al Qaeda to a franchise. I'd go even further and say it's almost like a generic term now. You have all these groups popping up around the world like Spartacus, each claiming to be "Al Qaeda". Which suits the goals of many polititians just fine. Whenever something blows up, just blame Al Qaeda! It's the name everyone knows and trusts for terrorist attacks;)
All good points, but most of your points can be addressed with F/OSS. I'm not claiming every problem/issue can be addressed with Free and Open Source software. But here are some suggestions.
Accessability. You know that there are many groups around the world that recycle old PC's, load them up them up with Linux and other F/OSS, and donate them to underpriviledged people. This could work in a university/college situation.
Diversity. Do non-MS users count as a group to encourage? Seriously. I tried to go back to uni a few years ago to finish my course and get a degree. But one of the reasons I left was because it had seemingly sold out to MS. I was practically attacked on an internal student forum when I complained about having to submit assignments in MS Word format. And in a database class (dealing fundamentally with SQL) the example tables for the assignments were provided in MS Access format. On a regular basis I was made to feel like an outsider, very unwelcome. Does that count as discrimination, or do I have to be black?
Tuition. How much of the student fees is going to MS and other large software companies? Computers and software are now a very important part of everyday life, and especially student life at a university/college. I'm thinking a lot of money could be saved by moving to Linux/BSD and other F/OSS, even just in the servers.
We're not talking about home PC's here, with people wanting to plug in their latest printer, scanner, webcam, or other USB gadget. In a university computer labe or library sitation the only hardware concern might be the network and graphics cards. But Realtek network cards/chips are pretty common and well supported under Linux, and graphics support under Linux/XFree86/Xorg is much better now than it used to be. An old generic card will do in most cases, for media labs (3D, etc) put in some nice nVidia cards and use the binary driver. But that's no different to Windows. So where's this great cost of which you speak?
Uh right. Care to explain then why there aren't worms spreading via Apache? Or Nokia mobile phones? Or Blackberrys. Or all sorts of other really popular software/devices?
Popularity and exposure play important roles, but not as much as other issues like ingrained behaviour, or unpatched vulnerabilities. Windows PC's may be pretty damn ubiquitous, but don't forget that they're so easy to attack!
"We have all kinds of functionality controlled by the keyboard. So, let's make people shove their left hand all the way over to one side!"
Yes, all the way over to the left... where their left hand already is. My god!
The only trouble I can imagine is with left handed players. The WASD+mouse setup works just fine for right handed players, but almost every game allows the keys/buttons to be fully customized for lefties or other purposes. I guess someone could play with the mouse in their left hand, and use the existing arrow keys with their right hand.
You're still using your experience on Earth to predict a likely occurance on the Moon. Let me explain - there's no atmosphere on the moon. The exhaust from the LEM engine (either of them) would have mostly expanded harmlessly into the vacuum of space. Very little force would have been imparted on the surroundings. We saw the flag get blown about a bit, but not much else. You certainly don't have an atmosphere to stir up and create gusts of wind in.
All good points, but what use is a scanning back with moving subjects? From what I've seen in the past, they're designed for studio use. Which means slow scans, and running a firewire cable back to a PC (laptop maybe) to save the huge files. I still prefer my 35mm camera for portability and simplicity. Point it at something, *click*. No waiting for auto focus or scanning or saving to hard disk or *slow* flash memory. Or flat batteries. I can take photos as quickly as I can wind the film. I'd rather do the slow scanning after I've had the film processed, at my own leasure. And there are still lots of medium format SLR's around. I'm looking in that direction for a few years in the future when digital has eaten more of 35mm's market.
Wasn't it reported last year that MS is totally changing the UserAgent string in IE7? Something not including the "Mozilla compatible" bit that everything has used for the last ten years. So IE 7 users will most likely be mis-identified and see the annoying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer and we don't support your commie pinko browser, hippy!" popup that all us non-IE users have been seeing for years.
I happened to find the Windos group policies, file ownership, file permissions (execute, read, write, modify etc) over Active Directory a fairly efficient way of controlling the permissions of around 1300 users with hugely varied needs over some 200 terminals across two sites.
Well it's nice to hear that corporate adminstrators are able to 'properly configure' their Windows deployments. But what about the millions of home users? You know, the ones that run as administrator (or administrator privileges) and are infected with trojans and worms. The ones that spew out spam, propagate themselves, and make the internet generally less pleasant and useful. What about all of those Windows machines?
Personally I would like to see photo contests have two separate categories. One for film cameras and one for digital with the understanding that the digital photo may have been manipulated...
That's actually a really bad way of distinguishing whether a photo has been manipulated. Digital photographs can be presented 'as is' (as much as digital can be), and film photos can still be manipulated. A lot of things can be done in the darkroom. And then there's people like myself, who have 'gone back' to film but scan the negatives or slides and manipulate them digitally. Where do I fit in?
I personally like the way DeviantART does things. Manipulated photos have their own sub-category under 'digital art', seperate from the photography category. There's certainly skill and creativity in doing proper photo manipulation and I think it deserves recognition alongside traditional photography. Some manips I've seen are more like paintings - they've been changed so much. For example, looking at recent submissions, see "Dryad" by radioactive.
With a manual as clear, conside and accessable as PHP's, who cares?
I haven't looked at the PHP docs for a while now, but one Perl programmer made up a table of PHP functions that even PHP programmers find useful! That page also has a *lot* of good comparisons to Perl. It's amazing how much baggage PHP has accumulated over the years.
Ah, I stand corrected. I guess I remembered seeing Fortran mentioned somewhere when reading about PDL, and it stuck. Still, it's mostly compiled so you're limited to using its data structures. For example, you can't make a matrix of your own complex/vector/quaternion/whatever objects.
Re:Q. What is Perl 6?
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 0, Troll
Q: What's a hindu?
A: It lays iggs eh!
(Silly bit of Aus/NZ humour)
If someone else would chime in and do it better justice, but my crude understanding is that it generates some kind of extremely optimized machine code on first use and runs whatever equations you've thrown at it like silk from that point on.
My understanding is that it's written in Fortran. Which mean's it not as flexible as pure Perl code, but runs so much faster. Perl is pretty dog slow at arithmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
A Pentium? Are you serious? The PPE in the Cell is essentially IBM's "G5" PowerPC 970 core, complete with Altivec/VMX. That's no slouch. It'll run "software not specifically written for the Cell" just fine. The SPE's are the really interesting parts though.
And you might want to get the PS/3 as a cheap Cell development platform, it depends on what Sony or IBM do with the Cell. If the only other options are big blade servers from IBM, then $600 for a development machine running Linux would be quite acceptable. Especially if they don't make the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 Linux kit i.e locking it down to the point of near uselessness. I'd still prefer it if someone made a Cell ATX mobo, or something. But I guess the advantage with the PS/3 will be the lower prices due to mass production. Just look at the prices for a non-Apple PowerPC mobo, or any other processor.
Oh yeah, because all the other hardware we run Free software on costs nothing. Idiot.
Are they really that absurd? IIRC, a recent long-term study found that people tended to develop brain tumours on the same side of their head that they used their mobile/cell phone on. And I don't care about what we *currently* know about RF radiation and how it *shouldn't* cause tumours. We still might discover that there is a cause, or maybe not. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that the phones cause brain tumours. I'm sure a lot of that is driven by the media and their desire to sell more ads (what they're really selling). But until someone can show that e.g it's a statistical coincidence, then the fear will remain. I don't want to run the risk of developing a life-threatening tumour just to use a phone.
How is that any different to the wired "hands free" earpiece + mic sets that have been around 5+ years? What I'm interested in is the reduced exposure to RF radiation. Put the mobile/cell phone on the desk, on the passenger seat, in your bag/purse, or even just held in your hand (away from your head) and talk with one of these headsets. Although, BlueTooth is still RF. How much power does BlueTooth put out compared to GSM or CDMA?
Maybe in America it did. But in the rest of the world it didn't, and you sound like a bloody fool saying "could care less". But hey, if you want to sound like the rest of the uneducated hicks, go right ahead. I have no problem with Americans sounding stupid :)
If that's the case, then it's an application issue. No new network filesystem is going to magically fix bad assumptions made in an application. Go complain to Apple or whoever it is that makes Mail.app.
I don't know about Sun being responsible for the mess, I think that'd be more StarDivision's fault. StarOffice goes back at least 10 years. As for portability, my understanding is that StarOffice/OpenOffice has its own CORBA/COM-like component system. Most of SO/OO is written in fairly reasonable C++, but critical parts of this component system requires assembly language to be written. And it not only has to be done for every processor/ISA, but for every operating system as well. That is, every combination of processor and OS.
Hopefully the adoption of ODF will mean we don't have to use the monstrosity of OO, but can use lightweight alternatives like Abiword and KOffice.
Kevin Rudd is another potential leader who would make a better choice than Beazley. Until the ALP shapes up, there's always the Greens and Democrats, who are slowly playing a bigger role in Australian politics. Hell, even Family first is looking better than Labor!
Beat ya both :)
Where is it written that it will be illegal for anyone outside of the third world to get one of these laptops? I can see them being donated to a few developers around the world, as happens with quite a bit of hardware. They might even end up running it like that wind-up radio from several years ago: sell them in the first-world and use the money to subsidize the ones sold/given to the third-world.
The interesting thing about Al Qaeda is that one of the top US military chiefs (Casey?) said almost as much at a congressional hearing. He equated Al Qaeda to a franchise. I'd go even further and say it's almost like a generic term now. You have all these groups popping up around the world like Spartacus, each claiming to be "Al Qaeda". Which suits the goals of many polititians just fine. Whenever something blows up, just blame Al Qaeda! ;)
It's the name everyone knows and trusts for terrorist attacks
All good points, but most of your points can be addressed with F/OSS. I'm not claiming every problem/issue can be addressed with Free and Open Source software. But here are some suggestions.
We're not talking about home PC's here, with people wanting to plug in their latest printer, scanner, webcam, or other USB gadget. In a university computer labe or library sitation the only hardware concern might be the network and graphics cards. But Realtek network cards/chips are pretty common and well supported under Linux, and graphics support under Linux/XFree86/Xorg is much better now than it used to be. An old generic card will do in most cases, for media labs (3D, etc) put in some nice nVidia cards and use the binary driver. But that's no different to Windows. So where's this great cost of which you speak?
Uh right. Care to explain then why there aren't worms spreading via Apache? Or Nokia mobile phones? Or Blackberrys. Or all sorts of other really popular software/devices?
Popularity and exposure play important roles, but not as much as other issues like ingrained behaviour, or unpatched vulnerabilities. Windows PC's may be pretty damn ubiquitous, but don't forget that they're so easy to attack!
Yes, all the way over to the left... where their left hand already is. My god!
The only trouble I can imagine is with left handed players. The WASD+mouse setup works just fine for right handed players, but almost every game allows the keys/buttons to be fully customized for lefties or other purposes. I guess someone could play with the mouse in their left hand, and use the existing arrow keys with their right hand.
You're still using your experience on Earth to predict a likely occurance on the Moon. Let me explain - there's no atmosphere on the moon. The exhaust from the LEM engine (either of them) would have mostly expanded harmlessly into the vacuum of space. Very little force would have been imparted on the surroundings. We saw the flag get blown about a bit, but not much else. You certainly don't have an atmosphere to stir up and create gusts of wind in.
Note: "supervision" is already a word, and it is not the same as "super vision".
All good points, but what use is a scanning back with moving subjects? From what I've seen in the past, they're designed for studio use. Which means slow scans, and running a firewire cable back to a PC (laptop maybe) to save the huge files. I still prefer my 35mm camera for portability and simplicity. Point it at something, *click*. No waiting for auto focus or scanning or saving to hard disk or *slow* flash memory. Or flat batteries. I can take photos as quickly as I can wind the film. I'd rather do the slow scanning after I've had the film processed, at my own leasure. And there are still lots of medium format SLR's around. I'm looking in that direction for a few years in the future when digital has eaten more of 35mm's market.
Wasn't it reported last year that MS is totally changing the UserAgent string in IE7? Something not including the "Mozilla compatible" bit that everything has used for the last ten years. So IE 7 users will most likely be mis-identified and see the annoying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer and we don't support your commie pinko browser, hippy!" popup that all us non-IE users have been seeing for years.
Well it's nice to hear that corporate adminstrators are able to 'properly configure' their Windows deployments. But what about the millions of home users? You know, the ones that run as administrator (or administrator privileges) and are infected with trojans and worms. The ones that spew out spam, propagate themselves, and make the internet generally less pleasant and useful. What about all of those Windows machines?
That's actually a really bad way of distinguishing whether a photo has been manipulated. Digital photographs can be presented 'as is' (as much as digital can be), and film photos can still be manipulated. A lot of things can be done in the darkroom. And then there's people like myself, who have 'gone back' to film but scan the negatives or slides and manipulate them digitally. Where do I fit in?
I personally like the way DeviantART does things. Manipulated photos have their own sub-category under 'digital art', seperate from the photography category. There's certainly skill and creativity in doing proper photo manipulation and I think it deserves recognition alongside traditional photography. Some manips I've seen are more like paintings - they've been changed so much. For example, looking at recent submissions, see "Dryad" by radioactive.
I haven't looked at the PHP docs for a while now, but one Perl programmer made up a table of PHP functions that even PHP programmers find useful! That page also has a *lot* of good comparisons to Perl. It's amazing how much baggage PHP has accumulated over the years.
Ah, I stand corrected. I guess I remembered seeing Fortran mentioned somewhere when reading about PDL, and it stuck. Still, it's mostly compiled so you're limited to using its data structures. For example, you can't make a matrix of your own complex/vector/quaternion/whatever objects.
Q: What's a hindu?
A: It lays iggs eh!
(Silly bit of Aus/NZ humour)
My understanding is that it's written in Fortran. Which mean's it not as flexible as pure Perl code, but runs so much faster. Perl is pretty dog slow at arithmetic.