Let's make one thing extremely clear here - when a company markets something called "internet access" and a consumer purchases said service, there is a certain expectation of service. If you are limited to outgoing connections to web addresses, then you don't have an "internet connection" , you have a "web browsing connection".
Yes. I had an ISP once that did that. I was in an apartment building that contracted to get a good deal on Internet service for the building (it wound up not being a good deal, because the landlord apparently got confused about the price he was quoted, told us the artificially low price, we gave the thumbs-up, then he realized his mistake and was screwed, but we still had to pay three times what we had agreed to initially) and they put the whole building behind NAT with one IP address. What you said is almost the exact same line that I gave to the landlord and to the ISP. Needless to say, they weren't interested in listening.
The primary moral of my story, at least, is that if you care about your Internet service don't let someone that doesn't know a thing about computers order it on your behalf. I was talking to the guy and he said that he was hooking up web-enabled security cameras in his house, and he actually set up multiple accounts with Insight (the local cable company), all with dynamic IP addresses, to try to accomplish this. What's sad is that he apparently talked to Insight and this is what they told him he should do. Whatever lets them sell more connections, though I'm kind of surprised they didn't offer him a more expensive rate with static IPs for the cameras.
What's the point of packaging an album in one file when its content clearly exists in discrete songs?
As "cohesive" as the album may be, its songs are certainly discrete, as proven by their live performances, by the performance of the songs by other artists and by the existence of the different take on "Morning Bell" that appears on Amnesiac. In fact it's very difficult to produce a work of the length of the typical pop album without clear divisions. This doesn't mean that the album can't be appreciated as a larger whole; writers of symphonies, operas and song cycles use clear divisions in their works and often see the movements/arias/songs appreciated both individually and as part of the whole. The only musical form I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't have this type of division is the fugue, which can be broken into components for analysis but is extremely musically continuous.
Anyway, if you release a 40-meg file lots of people on slow or unreliable Internet connections won't download it (this becomes increasingly less true as more people get better connections), and in not too long someone will just split up the tracks at the obvious song boundaries and offer them up individually on P2P. More people, I'd wager, would download the second version and you'd be right back where you started.
Since recorded popular music has been around its albums have been much more similar to song cycles than symphonies. Even albums like Kid A, which are pretty cohesive. A lot of song cycles are pretty cohesive, too, thematically and musically. And performers have cherry-picked songs from them for performances for ages. They've done this because they didn't necessarily want to devote their whole recital to, say, Schubert. In pop music the performer and composer are one entity and the listener now has the freedom to cherry pick songs. And the performer-composer should quit bitching about it and make music. If the artist wants it to be listened to like a symphony he's got bigger and older problems than iPods. People often listen to (whole) albums while driving, chatting on the phone or doing chores; in short, while doing anything but concentrating on the music. It's a problem older even than recorded music, as even though an audience at a classical-style concert might look formal and focused on the occasion half of them are asleep by the second movement and devote most of their brain cells to figuring out when to clap and how to appear respectable in polite company.
How have artists tried to address these problems? The composer of some super-hard clarinet work whose name eludes me has tried to allow only the most serious of players to get a hold of his scores. Conductors have turned to the audience and yelled at crying babies. It hasn't solved the problem. Nothing short of mind control can solve the problem. This can be "discouraging to an artist"? TOUGH COOKIES!
A few years back I remember some member of Radiohead commenting on how he hated CDs and really preferred LPs. So maybe they are holding out hope that all this digital stuff will pass and people will go back to LPs eventually. Right. I can't say I'd mind that as a music listener either. I wouldn't lose much but the ability to listen in the car, and I usually don't do that anyway, because I can't concentrate on the music when I'm trying to dodge those pesky pedestrians and fire hydrants...
At any rate, when I read that quote about preferring LPs I listened to my Kid A CD again and IIRC the side break is between Treefingers and Optimistic. That was quite a while ago, and I don't memorize this type of thing.
I wouldn't want to be on iTunes/Napster/etc. either, because of the DRM, if I could ever get my act together and finish any of the songs I've been working on over the last decade. I'm not sure if Radiohead's reasons are the same, though. I haven't really heard them say much about their concept of the relationship between performer and audience, so for all I know they might be looking to avoid liability in iPod-related pedestrian collision lawsuits.
And on the conceptual level, it seems that today's listener's ability to control nearly every aspect of the listening experience turns the relationship between performer and audience (originally founded in classical concerts, which might have loosely based on the church settings from which "serious" music performances started in the middle ages... I'm just guessing at some of that, my music history courses didn't focus on cool shit like composer-performer-audience relationships but rather on boring stuff like composers and their works...) on its head. Some artists might not be comfortable with that. But the freedoms that the listener has gained through technology, such as those of venue and tracklisting are pretty superficial in my opinion, at least to the performer. The audience has always been free of mind to (mis)understand the work, to rearrange the performance mentally, to be distracted or asleep, to walk out during the show, to be cynical and not step into the world of the work. Audiences and critics have excercised these freedoms for centuries and often pissed off composers and performers in so doing, so these kids with their fancy iPods shouldn't be anything new. But that's just my opinion:).
I can't confirm or disconfirm it, but I do think it strange that watching the static is required to fix the TV; wouldn't it be easier on the eyes to walk away and do something else while the static was playing?
Haha, that's the same problem my brother has on his Windows box. Which is why ESR's comments sound so... quaint to me. Not only can Free Software already work with iPods (according to the people in this discussion and others), Linux has already become Windows for lots of people, a system that people use to consume closed resources with closed programs and closed drivers. Of course, if you're going to use Linux like Windows you're going to have to give up some of the benefits of Linux, like the ability to run at 64 bits.
I wish I had a 64-bit computer to run 64-bit Linux on. I wouldn't have been tempted to install Flash player or Real player or any of that. It's pretty much all ads and crap on those channels anyway.
This is all a bunch of Linux World Domination shit. Who cares about Linux World Domination? The big differences between running Linux and Windows come from the facts that that Linux is a minority OS, that it's F/OSS and that it's not commercial. There are some benefits and drawbacks to each of these. With Windows compatibility layers, closed-source drivers/software, and commercial drivers/software Linux lets you at least partially switch sides on some of these issues these days. But once you're running majority software you're back in the target of malware. Once you run closed-source software you're tied to a company and platform. And once you're running commercial software you're back in the eye of the marketing machine (so things will happen like you try to play a CD and the first screen you get is ads, WMP-style... at least the way WMP was on my last Windows installation... this attitude was one of the things that offended me most about Windows). If that's what you want, run Windows, IE, WMP, iTunes; that's what I tell all my friends.
"It's UNIX and open standards that we ought to be promoting."
Forget Unix. Just open and free standards. If we have open and free standards then we can make things different or better than Unix if we want to.
And also, clarity about what is an open and free standard. MP3 is not, because you need a patent license to encode it. DVDs are not, because of their lame attempt at encryption (the Content Scrambling System) and the questionable legal status of decrypting it (DeCSS). And "goofy binary formats" aren't necessarily non-open; a "binary" standard can be just as open as any other, as long as it's documented and unencumbered. ELF is an open binary standard (I think SCO claimed otherwise, but what do they know?); Ogg-Vorbis/Theora, Standard MIDI files, raw PCM data and even tarballs also would be considered binary data and I'm pretty sure those are all open, too.
"Strip down to your skivvies and wander off into the woods for a couple of weeks. See how you do by refusing to work more than 40 hours."
Well, sure, if you try to set hours for yourself you might not do so well. But as has been pointed out earlier in this discussion, and as I've heard elsewhere, the hunter-gatherers "worked" something around 20 hours per week. So if you know what you're doing you might not do so badly. We have to work more total hours on the whole because we have to not only work to feed ourselves but to prop up all the machinery of society or the crazy-expensive shit we do for leisure or whatever. Insert crackpot analysis here.
It seems to me that we may only really be "wired" to work, say, 20 hours per week on a sustained basis. And in order to work more than that without stressing out we have to organize our time and at least give ourselves some guaranteed leisure time to look forward to.
That is kind of odd... at my job I have to swap hardware in and out of Windows boxes all the time. Typically Windows just starts up in a VGA mode if you're using a different card than the last one you booted with. It does suck that I have to reinstall the driver even if I am using a card covered by the same driver as the previous one, but I've never had it fail to get to a mode where I could do the push-button driver install.
The way X works on my computer at home I'm pretty sure it would refuse to start X without a card covered by the same driver installed, but it's very likely that Ubuntu makes some attempt to detect what card you're using. Which is nice.
As I see it this system could be one of two things: an additional line of defense or a replacement for an existing line of defense. If it's an extra line of defense it adds more work, especially if it has lots of false positives. If it's replacing a line of defense it had better have fewer false negatives than what it replaced, otherwise it would make the system less secure overall. This would be true of just about any new security technology. You just tried to argue first that this system might be used to save people time by allowing them to bypass a level of security and next that it would just be another extra layer. It can't be both ways.
As for this particular system, I don't see how it could replace any of the baggage-scanning equipment that we currently have, so it would likely be an additional line of defense. Currently at US airports security consists of parallel pipelines; it looks like this test would take longer than any other stage in one of the pipelines (at airports I've been to recently the limiting stage is either people taking off their shoes and emptying their pockets, or if there is enough space to effectively parallelize that stage it's getting the stuff through the scanning machine), so in order to keep people flowing through at today's rate you'd need more than one of these new machines for each existing bag-scanning machine. This would take up a lot of space. This also means it could be the cause of slowdowns if some of the machines were out of order. Furthermore even if they hit their goal of 4% false positives that's still one in every 25 passengers; that part doesn't slow down the main line much as long as they can get people efficiently out of the way, but it could be a big delay for the people that are flagged, which adds significantly to the overall average wait time. If I understand this correctly it might flag the same people as false positives repeatedly, which would be effectively like being put on a watch list that you couldn't possibly challenge. Which sucks, as does the fact that it would put more stress on people that are already nervous or upset.
Interestingly, a calculation in another thread gave a figure of over 6,000 false positives per day at a 30M passenger-per-year airport with an 8% false-positive rate. If they got it down to their goal of 4% that's over 3,000 people that might have to go in for additional questioning/searching. It seems like a lot, but it only comes down to just over two per minute. If it's reasonably parallelized (security already is at the big airports I've been through) they should be able to get people through additional at that rate with no problem.
So the demand isn't there but you wouldn't blame the technology? What else could be to blame? You don't blame the market when a product fails, you blame the product for being wrong for the market. It doesn't matter if "media center" PCs are technological marvels (they're not), if they're not well-suited to the task at hand they'll just get in the way of users that want a truly intuitive experience. That would make them bad technology.
Remember the article that was posted here earlier comparing the virtues of an ancient Apple Newton and a brand-new, slightly larger gadget that runs full WinXP? Sure, WinXP gives you a lot more possibilities than the Newton's OS, but for most of the things you actually want to do with a PDA the software written strictly for the purpose lets you be much more efficient. The "standard" media components like DVD/VHS players and television sets give people an intuitive, focused and reliable interface. They may be less fancy, but they're still better technology for most media-consuming people.
I know what you mean. I looked down at my keyboard and saw a dusty button that said "insert", but it just put me in Replace mode, which makes no sense at all!
Eventually I got so fed up I erased the whole OS and installed Plan 9, but their editors are even more trippy...
If you want to know if hardware acceleration is working pop open an xterm and issue "glxinfo | grep direct". The result should be self-explanatory (though the process to arrive at it is far from!).
I use Gentoo and FreeBSD, and IIRC Gentoo's documents on 3d w/ATI and 3d w/nVidia are pretty straightforward even if you're not running Gentoo; you'll just have to filter out all that "emerge" silliness. Gentoo's docs for desktop- and X-related stuff have helped me through a few issues on FreeBSD as well (the FreeBSD handbook is mostly useful for the FreeBSD-specific stuff).
Parent has received many responses about the role of OS and libraries replacing drivers. In a sense the whole architecture of the computer, hardware-wise, that allows instructions to be sequentially read from memory and executed, is part of that "driver" scheme. Computers aren't built to give GPUs this capability.
A big part of what drivers do is translate from some kind of API into the instructions that are sent to the hardware, and make sure that those instructions are such that the desired result is found efficeintly, so in that sense compilers and assemblers are a big part of the CPU's driver. This part of the CPU's "driver" runs on the CPU, sometimes even at real time (considering JIT compilation, for example).
For a GPU this driver function is executed on the CPU and not the GPU. Modern GPUs are almost certainly capable of all the calculations and logic necessary to generate their own code, but that doesn't mean that they'd be good at it. GPUs are extremely parallel and very good at certain types of computation but not so good at branching. A graphics driver has to make lots of decisions about how to optimize the code, and a GPU would handle all that conditional stuff as effectively as a CPU.
Lastly there are questions of convenience. Development tools, compilers and libraries for GPUs aren't as mature as they are for CPUs.
So seeing an old car in a rich neighborhood constitutes probable cause these days? Or does that requirement for searches not apply to cars?
I've heard that there's some kind of loophole in probable-cause requirements that allow, among other things, police to set up checkpoints where they sit by the side of the road looking into people's cars to see if they're wearing seat belts. I asked my dad (who is a lawyer) about this and he said that for some reason they didn't need to prove probable cause to see if you were wearing the seat belt. I personally think it's absurd, but I don't know everything...
And as well the Supreme Court would probably strike down a flat ban on embryonic stem-cell research. But anyway, I think it's better for the anti-embryonic stem-cell funding politicians that it's not banned. The fact that private corporations and states fund embryonic stem-cell research calms the pro-funding majority (I heard on the news that recent polls show upwards of 60% of Americans oppose Bush's funding ban), preventing it from becoming an issue that could seriously turn people against an anti-funding politician. It also riles up the anti-funding people. People tend to shout much louder when the status-quo is not in their favor. Hence, huge anti-war rallies but not many pro-war rallies when we're at war, huge anti-abortion protests but not many pro-abortion protests when abortion is legal, etc.
I don't think it's an intentional strategy; I think the President is simply playing to his base. But I also think that if a research ban rather than a funding ban was the status quo that Americans would be more likely to assign the matter higher importance, which would be bad news for politicians in the minority.
How much testing and review do extensions really go through? Does anyone know much about the process, whether it would be conceivable to get a malware extension temporarily approved? Furthermore, I'd think it would be easy, once your extension was already on mozilla.org, to slip malware into the source, release a new version, and wreak some havoc for a few days until you got kicked off.
"Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem."
A bug, 'eh? I don't pay attention to this stuff religiously, but I'm pretty sure Google ads display in iframes. And I'm pretty sure they removed the border from their ads recently. So do Google ads display with a border around them?
If so, I'm not exactly calling it a foul conspiracy; if it was user-controlled opt-in behavior it would be good for users IMO regardless of motivation. If it's not user-controlled or opt-in, on the other hand, then it's probably breaking the standard (I haven't read the various specs regarding the display of iframes) and that's not good. And I'm guessing it's the latter.
The point of your parent comment is that OS X uses nothing from the Linux or BSD *kernels*. It uses some BSD userspace code.
The kernel is the lowest-level part of an operating system, which provides abstractions between programs that users see and the hardware. Some of the most important of these abstractions are virtualization of limited physical resources such as CPU and memory, so that programs don't have to worry about sharing them. Userspace programs that are generally considered part of the OS include standard libraries, command shells and basic utilities.
Debian/BeOS and Debian/Plan9 would work just fine. You'd just have to accept that you were using an operating system that's not Unix, and not Not Unix either.
Creating a distribution of BeOS or Plan9 with the Debian mindset and many similar tools is certainly possible. However, in order to provide the true experience of either OS you'd need a dedicated team willing to write native programs in the style of those OSes and make sure that improvements made to the Debian/GNU Linux versions were reflected in their separate programs. The same thing is true of Debian/Win32 (except that they can't actually distribute Windows; perhaps Debian/ReactOS). Completely possible, but it's a lot more work than just porting things.
I don't know about sucking donkey cock. My old-ish laptop has some random GPU whose X drivers have major stability issues. So I use the vesa drivers and I've never found myself desiring more performance when switching desktops in X or shuffling windows around. A P3 with sufficient memory (the laptop has 192MB) is plenty capable of handling the load.
I also have a P3 desktop box with just 64MB RAM that's currently running Plan 9, but used to run FreeBSD with the nVidia binary drivers. In that case the drivers made a big difference for every-day window management because I was running at a high resolution without much RAM. Of course, running at low resolution isn't that much of a hindrance thanks to xft (and the fact that programs old enough not to support xft generally work much better at low resolutions than high). I notice much less of a difference between my 1600x1200 desktop screen and my 800x600 laptop screen than you would think.
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Yeah, I couldn't believe TFAuthor wrote that. I fired up my Plan 9 box just to make sure it wasn't true.
The vi thing I found a long time ago; at first I thought it was to prevent anyone from porting vi to their system but since realized that it was just a result of the naming convention for their development tools.
WMII has a similar feature. I tried WMII for a few days and that was one of the only things I liked about it... does this thing work well if you're not using KDE? I'm looking for a replacement for my current "run dialog" (http://www.fvwmwiki.org/Tips/RxvtRunDialog), which at least has tab-completion.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, striving for backwards-compatibility can harm an operating system much more than help it.
Windows, for example, is an operating system targeted at end-users, runners of programs. Microsoft has thus focused heavily on binary backwards-compatibility, allowing it to get in the way of imposing good security defaults. Had Microsoft put their foot down and told vendors to write their programs properly for NT they could have had a non-admin user be default in Win2k/XP. Alas. Macs and Unixes tend to break binary compatibility every time their creators sneeze...
Unix, however, is an operating system (well, many operating systems) targeted at programmers. Its developers have been in my opinion too focused on keeping source-compatibility with old Unix programs. Thus still today on Unix we emulate VT100s for a significant portion of our work and have interfaces (both programming- and user-) that are the result of design decisions made in the 70s, decisions that would be made differently if made today, and would result in a cleaner, better system.
This topic is about whether you should write single-threaded or multi-threaded programs for the highest performance. If for your application there is a cost of one over the other that grows faster than linearly as the number of users scales upwards, that cost would soon eclipse the difference in performance due to implementation language, which is probably a percentage speedup that holds pretty constant as number of users grows.
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Let's make one thing extremely clear here - when a company markets something called "internet access" and a consumer purchases said service, there is a certain expectation of service. If you are limited to outgoing connections to web addresses, then you don't have an "internet connection" , you have a "web browsing connection".
Yes. I had an ISP once that did that. I was in an apartment building that contracted to get a good deal on Internet service for the building (it wound up not being a good deal, because the landlord apparently got confused about the price he was quoted, told us the artificially low price, we gave the thumbs-up, then he realized his mistake and was screwed, but we still had to pay three times what we had agreed to initially) and they put the whole building behind NAT with one IP address. What you said is almost the exact same line that I gave to the landlord and to the ISP. Needless to say, they weren't interested in listening.
The primary moral of my story, at least, is that if you care about your Internet service don't let someone that doesn't know a thing about computers order it on your behalf. I was talking to the guy and he said that he was hooking up web-enabled security cameras in his house, and he actually set up multiple accounts with Insight (the local cable company), all with dynamic IP addresses, to try to accomplish this. What's sad is that he apparently talked to Insight and this is what they told him he should do. Whatever lets them sell more connections, though I'm kind of surprised they didn't offer him a more expensive rate with static IPs for the cameras.
What's the point of packaging an album in one file when its content clearly exists in discrete songs?
As "cohesive" as the album may be, its songs are certainly discrete, as proven by their live performances, by the performance of the songs by other artists and by the existence of the different take on "Morning Bell" that appears on Amnesiac. In fact it's very difficult to produce a work of the length of the typical pop album without clear divisions. This doesn't mean that the album can't be appreciated as a larger whole; writers of symphonies, operas and song cycles use clear divisions in their works and often see the movements/arias/songs appreciated both individually and as part of the whole. The only musical form I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't have this type of division is the fugue, which can be broken into components for analysis but is extremely musically continuous.
Anyway, if you release a 40-meg file lots of people on slow or unreliable Internet connections won't download it (this becomes increasingly less true as more people get better connections), and in not too long someone will just split up the tracks at the obvious song boundaries and offer them up individually on P2P. More people, I'd wager, would download the second version and you'd be right back where you started.
Since recorded popular music has been around its albums have been much more similar to song cycles than symphonies. Even albums like Kid A, which are pretty cohesive. A lot of song cycles are pretty cohesive, too, thematically and musically. And performers have cherry-picked songs from them for performances for ages. They've done this because they didn't necessarily want to devote their whole recital to, say, Schubert. In pop music the performer and composer are one entity and the listener now has the freedom to cherry pick songs. And the performer-composer should quit bitching about it and make music. If the artist wants it to be listened to like a symphony he's got bigger and older problems than iPods. People often listen to (whole) albums while driving, chatting on the phone or doing chores; in short, while doing anything but concentrating on the music. It's a problem older even than recorded music, as even though an audience at a classical-style concert might look formal and focused on the occasion half of them are asleep by the second movement and devote most of their brain cells to figuring out when to clap and how to appear respectable in polite company.
How have artists tried to address these problems? The composer of some super-hard clarinet work whose name eludes me has tried to allow only the most serious of players to get a hold of his scores. Conductors have turned to the audience and yelled at crying babies. It hasn't solved the problem. Nothing short of mind control can solve the problem. This can be "discouraging to an artist"? TOUGH COOKIES!
A few years back I remember some member of Radiohead commenting on how he hated CDs and really preferred LPs. So maybe they are holding out hope that all this digital stuff will pass and people will go back to LPs eventually. Right. I can't say I'd mind that as a music listener either. I wouldn't lose much but the ability to listen in the car, and I usually don't do that anyway, because I can't concentrate on the music when I'm trying to dodge those pesky pedestrians and fire hydrants...
:).
At any rate, when I read that quote about preferring LPs I listened to my Kid A CD again and IIRC the side break is between Treefingers and Optimistic. That was quite a while ago, and I don't memorize this type of thing.
I wouldn't want to be on iTunes/Napster/etc. either, because of the DRM, if I could ever get my act together and finish any of the songs I've been working on over the last decade. I'm not sure if Radiohead's reasons are the same, though. I haven't really heard them say much about their concept of the relationship between performer and audience, so for all I know they might be looking to avoid liability in iPod-related pedestrian collision lawsuits.
And on the conceptual level, it seems that today's listener's ability to control nearly every aspect of the listening experience turns the relationship between performer and audience (originally founded in classical concerts, which might have loosely based on the church settings from which "serious" music performances started in the middle ages... I'm just guessing at some of that, my music history courses didn't focus on cool shit like composer-performer-audience relationships but rather on boring stuff like composers and their works...) on its head. Some artists might not be comfortable with that. But the freedoms that the listener has gained through technology, such as those of venue and tracklisting are pretty superficial in my opinion, at least to the performer. The audience has always been free of mind to (mis)understand the work, to rearrange the performance mentally, to be distracted or asleep, to walk out during the show, to be cynical and not step into the world of the work. Audiences and critics have excercised these freedoms for centuries and often pissed off composers and performers in so doing, so these kids with their fancy iPods shouldn't be anything new. But that's just my opinion
I can't confirm or disconfirm it, but I do think it strange that watching the static is required to fix the TV; wouldn't it be easier on the eyes to walk away and do something else while the static was playing?
Haha, that's the same problem my brother has on his Windows box. Which is why ESR's comments sound so... quaint to me. Not only can Free Software already work with iPods (according to the people in this discussion and others), Linux has already become Windows for lots of people, a system that people use to consume closed resources with closed programs and closed drivers. Of course, if you're going to use Linux like Windows you're going to have to give up some of the benefits of Linux, like the ability to run at 64 bits.
I wish I had a 64-bit computer to run 64-bit Linux on. I wouldn't have been tempted to install Flash player or Real player or any of that. It's pretty much all ads and crap on those channels anyway.
This is all a bunch of Linux World Domination shit. Who cares about Linux World Domination? The big differences between running Linux and Windows come from the facts that that Linux is a minority OS, that it's F/OSS and that it's not commercial. There are some benefits and drawbacks to each of these. With Windows compatibility layers, closed-source drivers/software, and commercial drivers/software Linux lets you at least partially switch sides on some of these issues these days. But once you're running majority software you're back in the target of malware. Once you run closed-source software you're tied to a company and platform. And once you're running commercial software you're back in the eye of the marketing machine (so things will happen like you try to play a CD and the first screen you get is ads, WMP-style... at least the way WMP was on my last Windows installation... this attitude was one of the things that offended me most about Windows). If that's what you want, run Windows, IE, WMP, iTunes; that's what I tell all my friends.
"It's UNIX and open standards that we ought to be promoting."
Forget Unix. Just open and free standards. If we have open and free standards then we can make things different or better than Unix if we want to.
And also, clarity about what is an open and free standard. MP3 is not, because you need a patent license to encode it. DVDs are not, because of their lame attempt at encryption (the Content Scrambling System) and the questionable legal status of decrypting it (DeCSS). And "goofy binary formats" aren't necessarily non-open; a "binary" standard can be just as open as any other, as long as it's documented and unencumbered. ELF is an open binary standard (I think SCO claimed otherwise, but what do they know?); Ogg-Vorbis/Theora, Standard MIDI files, raw PCM data and even tarballs also would be considered binary data and I'm pretty sure those are all open, too.
"Strip down to your skivvies and wander off into the woods for a couple of weeks. See how you do by refusing to work more than 40 hours."
Well, sure, if you try to set hours for yourself you might not do so well. But as has been pointed out earlier in this discussion, and as I've heard elsewhere, the hunter-gatherers "worked" something around 20 hours per week. So if you know what you're doing you might not do so badly. We have to work more total hours on the whole because we have to not only work to feed ourselves but to prop up all the machinery of society or the crazy-expensive shit we do for leisure or whatever. Insert crackpot analysis here.
It seems to me that we may only really be "wired" to work, say, 20 hours per week on a sustained basis. And in order to work more than that without stressing out we have to organize our time and at least give ourselves some guaranteed leisure time to look forward to.
That is kind of odd... at my job I have to swap hardware in and out of Windows boxes all the time. Typically Windows just starts up in a VGA mode if you're using a different card than the last one you booted with. It does suck that I have to reinstall the driver even if I am using a card covered by the same driver as the previous one, but I've never had it fail to get to a mode where I could do the push-button driver install.
The way X works on my computer at home I'm pretty sure it would refuse to start X without a card covered by the same driver installed, but it's very likely that Ubuntu makes some attempt to detect what card you're using. Which is nice.
As I see it this system could be one of two things: an additional line of defense or a replacement for an existing line of defense. If it's an extra line of defense it adds more work, especially if it has lots of false positives. If it's replacing a line of defense it had better have fewer false negatives than what it replaced, otherwise it would make the system less secure overall. This would be true of just about any new security technology. You just tried to argue first that this system might be used to save people time by allowing them to bypass a level of security and next that it would just be another extra layer. It can't be both ways.
As for this particular system, I don't see how it could replace any of the baggage-scanning equipment that we currently have, so it would likely be an additional line of defense. Currently at US airports security consists of parallel pipelines; it looks like this test would take longer than any other stage in one of the pipelines (at airports I've been to recently the limiting stage is either people taking off their shoes and emptying their pockets, or if there is enough space to effectively parallelize that stage it's getting the stuff through the scanning machine), so in order to keep people flowing through at today's rate you'd need more than one of these new machines for each existing bag-scanning machine. This would take up a lot of space. This also means it could be the cause of slowdowns if some of the machines were out of order. Furthermore even if they hit their goal of 4% false positives that's still one in every 25 passengers; that part doesn't slow down the main line much as long as they can get people efficiently out of the way, but it could be a big delay for the people that are flagged, which adds significantly to the overall average wait time. If I understand this correctly it might flag the same people as false positives repeatedly, which would be effectively like being put on a watch list that you couldn't possibly challenge. Which sucks, as does the fact that it would put more stress on people that are already nervous or upset.
Interestingly, a calculation in another thread gave a figure of over 6,000 false positives per day at a 30M passenger-per-year airport with an 8% false-positive rate. If they got it down to their goal of 4% that's over 3,000 people that might have to go in for additional questioning/searching. It seems like a lot, but it only comes down to just over two per minute. If it's reasonably parallelized (security already is at the big airports I've been through) they should be able to get people through additional at that rate with no problem.
So the demand isn't there but you wouldn't blame the technology? What else could be to blame? You don't blame the market when a product fails, you blame the product for being wrong for the market. It doesn't matter if "media center" PCs are technological marvels (they're not), if they're not well-suited to the task at hand they'll just get in the way of users that want a truly intuitive experience. That would make them bad technology.
Remember the article that was posted here earlier comparing the virtues of an ancient Apple Newton and a brand-new, slightly larger gadget that runs full WinXP? Sure, WinXP gives you a lot more possibilities than the Newton's OS, but for most of the things you actually want to do with a PDA the software written strictly for the purpose lets you be much more efficient. The "standard" media components like DVD/VHS players and television sets give people an intuitive, focused and reliable interface. They may be less fancy, but they're still better technology for most media-consuming people.
I know what you mean. I looked down at my keyboard and saw a dusty button that said "insert", but it just put me in Replace mode, which makes no sense at all!
Eventually I got so fed up I erased the whole OS and installed Plan 9, but their editors are even more trippy...
If you want to know if hardware acceleration is working pop open an xterm and issue "glxinfo | grep direct". The result should be self-explanatory (though the process to arrive at it is far from!).
I use Gentoo and FreeBSD, and IIRC Gentoo's documents on 3d w/ATI and 3d w/nVidia are pretty straightforward even if you're not running Gentoo; you'll just have to filter out all that "emerge" silliness. Gentoo's docs for desktop- and X-related stuff have helped me through a few issues on FreeBSD as well (the FreeBSD handbook is mostly useful for the FreeBSD-specific stuff).
Parent has received many responses about the role of OS and libraries replacing drivers. In a sense the whole architecture of the computer, hardware-wise, that allows instructions to be sequentially read from memory and executed, is part of that "driver" scheme. Computers aren't built to give GPUs this capability.
A big part of what drivers do is translate from some kind of API into the instructions that are sent to the hardware, and make sure that those instructions are such that the desired result is found efficeintly, so in that sense compilers and assemblers are a big part of the CPU's driver. This part of the CPU's "driver" runs on the CPU, sometimes even at real time (considering JIT compilation, for example).
For a GPU this driver function is executed on the CPU and not the GPU. Modern GPUs are almost certainly capable of all the calculations and logic necessary to generate their own code, but that doesn't mean that they'd be good at it. GPUs are extremely parallel and very good at certain types of computation but not so good at branching. A graphics driver has to make lots of decisions about how to optimize the code, and a GPU would handle all that conditional stuff as effectively as a CPU.
Lastly there are questions of convenience. Development tools, compilers and libraries for GPUs aren't as mature as they are for CPUs.
So seeing an old car in a rich neighborhood constitutes probable cause these days? Or does that requirement for searches not apply to cars?
I've heard that there's some kind of loophole in probable-cause requirements that allow, among other things, police to set up checkpoints where they sit by the side of the road looking into people's cars to see if they're wearing seat belts. I asked my dad (who is a lawyer) about this and he said that for some reason they didn't need to prove probable cause to see if you were wearing the seat belt. I personally think it's absurd, but I don't know everything...
And as well the Supreme Court would probably strike down a flat ban on embryonic stem-cell research. But anyway, I think it's better for the anti-embryonic stem-cell funding politicians that it's not banned. The fact that private corporations and states fund embryonic stem-cell research calms the pro-funding majority (I heard on the news that recent polls show upwards of 60% of Americans oppose Bush's funding ban), preventing it from becoming an issue that could seriously turn people against an anti-funding politician. It also riles up the anti-funding people. People tend to shout much louder when the status-quo is not in their favor. Hence, huge anti-war rallies but not many pro-war rallies when we're at war, huge anti-abortion protests but not many pro-abortion protests when abortion is legal, etc.
I don't think it's an intentional strategy; I think the President is simply playing to his base. But I also think that if a research ban rather than a funding ban was the status quo that Americans would be more likely to assign the matter higher importance, which would be bad news for politicians in the minority.
How much testing and review do extensions really go through? Does anyone know much about the process, whether it would be conceivable to get a malware extension temporarily approved? Furthermore, I'd think it would be easy, once your extension was already on mozilla.org, to slip malware into the source, release a new version, and wreak some havoc for a few days until you got kicked off.
"Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem."
A bug, 'eh? I don't pay attention to this stuff religiously, but I'm pretty sure Google ads display in iframes. And I'm pretty sure they removed the border from their ads recently. So do Google ads display with a border around them?
If so, I'm not exactly calling it a foul conspiracy; if it was user-controlled opt-in behavior it would be good for users IMO regardless of motivation. If it's not user-controlled or opt-in, on the other hand, then it's probably breaking the standard (I haven't read the various specs regarding the display of iframes) and that's not good. And I'm guessing it's the latter.
The point of your parent comment is that OS X uses nothing from the Linux or BSD *kernels*. It uses some BSD userspace code.
The kernel is the lowest-level part of an operating system, which provides abstractions between programs that users see and the hardware. Some of the most important of these abstractions are virtualization of limited physical resources such as CPU and memory, so that programs don't have to worry about sharing them. Userspace programs that are generally considered part of the OS include standard libraries, command shells and basic utilities.
Debian/BeOS and Debian/Plan9 would work just fine. You'd just have to accept that you were using an operating system that's not Unix, and not Not Unix either.
Creating a distribution of BeOS or Plan9 with the Debian mindset and many similar tools is certainly possible. However, in order to provide the true experience of either OS you'd need a dedicated team willing to write native programs in the style of those OSes and make sure that improvements made to the Debian/GNU Linux versions were reflected in their separate programs. The same thing is true of Debian/Win32 (except that they can't actually distribute Windows; perhaps Debian/ReactOS). Completely possible, but it's a lot more work than just porting things.
I don't know about sucking donkey cock. My old-ish laptop has some random GPU whose X drivers have major stability issues. So I use the vesa drivers and I've never found myself desiring more performance when switching desktops in X or shuffling windows around. A P3 with sufficient memory (the laptop has 192MB) is plenty capable of handling the load.
I also have a P3 desktop box with just 64MB RAM that's currently running Plan 9, but used to run FreeBSD with the nVidia binary drivers. In that case the drivers made a big difference for every-day window management because I was running at a high resolution without much RAM. Of course, running at low resolution isn't that much of a hindrance thanks to xft (and the fact that programs old enough not to support xft generally work much better at low resolutions than high). I notice much less of a difference between my 1600x1200 desktop screen and my 800x600 laptop screen than you would think.
Yeah, I couldn't believe TFAuthor wrote that. I fired up my Plan 9 box just to make sure it wasn't true.
The vi thing I found a long time ago; at first I thought it was to prevent anyone from porting vi to their system but since realized that it was just a result of the naming convention for their development tools.
WMII has a similar feature. I tried WMII for a few days and that was one of the only things I liked about it... does this thing work well if you're not using KDE? I'm looking for a replacement for my current "run dialog" (http://www.fvwmwiki.org/Tips/RxvtRunDialog), which at least has tab-completion.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, striving for backwards-compatibility can harm an operating system much more than help it.
Windows, for example, is an operating system targeted at end-users, runners of programs. Microsoft has thus focused heavily on binary backwards-compatibility, allowing it to get in the way of imposing good security defaults. Had Microsoft put their foot down and told vendors to write their programs properly for NT they could have had a non-admin user be default in Win2k/XP. Alas. Macs and Unixes tend to break binary compatibility every time their creators sneeze...
Unix, however, is an operating system (well, many operating systems) targeted at programmers. Its developers have been in my opinion too focused on keeping source-compatibility with old Unix programs. Thus still today on Unix we emulate VT100s for a significant portion of our work and have interfaces (both programming- and user-) that are the result of design decisions made in the 70s, decisions that would be made differently if made today, and would result in a cleaner, better system.
This topic is about whether you should write single-threaded or multi-threaded programs for the highest performance. If for your application there is a cost of one over the other that grows faster than linearly as the number of users scales upwards, that cost would soon eclipse the difference in performance due to implementation language, which is probably a percentage speedup that holds pretty constant as number of users grows.