The article is full of sensationalism like "serious bug", "major regression" to promote Phoronix and its "wonderful test suite". If you read it closely, you'll see they have seen a 10% increase in power consumption on just one of their test laptops that depends on BIOS settings. That particular laptop has a bug in its BIOS where it claims it wants to manage configuration of a particular piece of hardware, and new kernels obey that request. You can even tell the kernel to disregard BIOS and force power settings anyway.
For me, improving power efficiency everywhere but that particular laptop is a major win. If you feel nice, you can even detect this particular buggy BIOS and ignore its request. But then, even after throrough fiddling, Phoronix guys weren't able to improve power usage by more than 15% even on this laptop, so it's not a big issue anyway.
I don't see them removing existing bills, though. This is the standard operating procedure: an unpopular law goes in, then after the election everyone mysteriously "forgets" about it.
You mean, the entire Debian is too little for you?
Some GUI programs are unusable due to assumption that the vertical resolution is much bigger than 480, and some fail badly due to quirks of Hildon widgets, but in general, you can do everything you would be able to do on a Pentium III 256MB ram 32GB disk laptop. No graphic accelerator since it has OpenGLES while most 3D games/etc expect OpenGL, but that's mostly due to bad proprietary display drivers. In the future, even that won't be a problem even if no sane drivers pop up, since SDL 1.3 and Wayland have GLES backends.
Another annoying issue against N900 is the set of default keymappings. I wonder WTF Nokia was thinking, not assigning basics like PgUp, PgDn, Esc, [, ], <, >, etc, while leaving most shifted and Fn-ed combinations unbound. Fortunately, unlike closed systems, this is trivial to fix.
I found I no longer have any use for a laptop. Laptop keyboards and monitors are unfit for prolonged work, and when on the go, it is better to have a portable rather than merely luggable device that is almost as powerful.
I admit, most of my work involves command line, text editor or at most a browser, but I'd say more RAM and a slightly bigger screen would make laptops obsolete for most other tasks as well. Just please, never, ever, force a touchscreen UI when not needed, like most of Nokia's software does. The device has a keyboard for a reason.
Quite a bit of Windows software is compiled using Intel's compilers, and they are intentionally made to sabotage performance on AMD chips. When looking at CPUID, instead of checking the features they want, they look for that _and_ the CPU being "GenuineIntel", and if not, the code chooses the worst possible implementation. This includes some major scientific math libraries and a part of popular benchmarks.
I mentioned this particular example, but it is but one of many. Systemic oppression of workers under communism is less talked of in the West, so let's take a look at the other side of "worker-peasant" for something that is better publicised. Murdering by starvation one fourth of peasants in the state of Ukraine is such a stellar example of a benevolent party fighting for the good of common people against those evil capitalists...
For non-soviet examples, look at the Cultural Revolution, the rule of Red Khmers or what is still going on in North Korea.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917. You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
There were around 100 or so implementations of communism. If every single of them was "not the TRUE communism", perhaps there's something wrong with the ideology?
Have you tried compiling cross-compiling projects that use autotools compared to those with hand-written makefiles? There's a world of difference in favour of the former. Unless there are some utterly broken m4 macros mispasted by retarded monkeys (which, I admit, happen way too often), it just works.
Hand-written makefiles on the other hand support only systems they were explicitely ported to, with inevitable bit rot setting in, and if cross compilation happens to work, it's only for a certain pair of host and target arch, usually only with a single compiler version as well.
For SIGBUS errors, they tend to be trivial to fix. These are consistent errors in the same place, just fire up gdb and you get the culprit instantly. In the worst case, with a pointer passed around with a long way between it is created and used, you can add a few assertions for alignment on the way.
At least as C++ goes, clang is a bad joke. It mostly works on C and ObjC, but then, it takes a week for a high school student with no former knowledge of grammar parsers to write a C compiler (ok, with hardly any optimizations...).
That's the front end, but with clang back end being behind gcc as well on x86, I wouldn't hold my breath.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917.
If you, unlike me, were lucky enough to not live in a communist country and didn't have half of the family murdered for, say, having a title "senior worker"[1], please read Animal Farm or 1984, these are pretty accurate descriptions.
[1]. An uncle of my grandfather, an uneducated factory worker, was promoted to "senior worker" which was for people with no formal training but with work experience who proven they have a clue how to do their job. That was enough to be labelled "an agent of the bourgeoisie" and be taken away by the DHS^H^H^H UB never to be seen again.
Wait, what? You _want_ intrusive DRM and think this is a "good" thing?
Steam, Battle.net -- no deal. Local DRM like SecuROM rootkit is at least easily avoidable thanks to cracks. And no, I will never allow a rootkit to be installed on a system that's run natively, even on a throw-away partition.
These days, it's groups like Razor and Skidrow whom you can trust...
The numbers you linked are off by several orders of magnitude. They include only direct deaths during mining, transport and burning. Pollution is not included.
And, let's think, what is more dangerous: pollution that makes it hard to see, gives people asthma, causes old people to suffocate, makes trees lose all leaves, and so on, or pollution that is locked in steel barrels sealed in tons of concrete under a mountain?
Then what about this image(warning: EXTREMELY gory)?
Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself
on
Jack Kevorkian Dead at 83
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
He wasn't rendered helpless by his illness -- until his last visit to the hospital shortly before his death. And if this bout of illness would be staved off, he'd have a few more years of mostly fully able life. Most of us have some illness a good part of their lives -- be that bad blood pressure, diabetes, allergy or whatever else. He did succumb to his kidney problems, but was more able at the age of 83 than most of you will be.
On the other hand, those who are rendered helpless -- trapped in a body that no longer works -- do suffer for no good reason. When you can't move on your own, have to fed and have your poo cleaned by others, and most importantly, have no hope of it ever getting better -- you're effectively in the most cruel jail.
Any sane user of Firefox has AdBlock installed, which drives down usage measured by advertising and tracking companies by a lot. Thus, from all the datasets mentioned at that page, Wikimedia stats are the only ones I'd bother with.
We're talking about Firefox 3.5, not IE 6. You lose basically some javascript performance -- which hardly ever matters, and a few other very minor details.
As you say, "almost 2 years old". So how often do you expect people to roll out major upgrades to something that works well? There is a world of difference between changing the browser on your home box and on aunt Lucy's one as well and having some extension cease to work and buttons being moved to other places and major testing of all software in a large organization to see if they still work after that change. The only way to make this manageable is to do major upgrades every X years or when there's actual need to do so; otherwise you'd have to either skip testing or have a big part of your employees and customers' time spent on unproductive upgrades for the sake of upgrading.
Uhm, there is a vital thing about autoupdates: they should never, ever make gratuitous changes. Fix security bugs, data loss ones, major annoyances, perhaps minor typos that can't bring regressions. Bringing in a whole major release means your software is not stable.
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And if you do all this kind of work, how much time is left for learning and interests?
The article is full of sensationalism like "serious bug", "major regression" to promote Phoronix and its "wonderful test suite". If you read it closely, you'll see they have seen a 10% increase in power consumption on just one of their test laptops that depends on BIOS settings. That particular laptop has a bug in its BIOS where it claims it wants to manage configuration of a particular piece of hardware, and new kernels obey that request. You can even tell the kernel to disregard BIOS and force power settings anyway.
For me, improving power efficiency everywhere but that particular laptop is a major win. If you feel nice, you can even detect this particular buggy BIOS and ignore its request. But then, even after throrough fiddling, Phoronix guys weren't able to improve power usage by more than 15% even on this laptop, so it's not a big issue anyway.
I don't see them removing existing bills, though. This is the standard operating procedure: an unpopular law goes in, then after the election everyone mysteriously "forgets" about it.
Fair advertising would label that as 6kbps with 56Mbps/1Mbps burst (if the link is 56Mb up 1MB down, 2GB monthly cap).
You mean, the entire Debian is too little for you?
Some GUI programs are unusable due to assumption that the vertical resolution is much bigger than 480, and some fail badly due to quirks of Hildon widgets, but in general, you can do everything you would be able to do on a Pentium III 256MB ram 32GB disk laptop. No graphic accelerator since it has OpenGLES while most 3D games/etc expect OpenGL, but that's mostly due to bad proprietary display drivers. In the future, even that won't be a problem even if no sane drivers pop up, since SDL 1.3 and Wayland have GLES backends.
Another annoying issue against N900 is the set of default keymappings. I wonder WTF Nokia was thinking, not assigning basics like PgUp, PgDn, Esc, [, ], <, >, etc, while leaving most shifted and Fn-ed combinations unbound. Fortunately, unlike closed systems, this is trivial to fix.
I found I no longer have any use for a laptop. Laptop keyboards and monitors are unfit for prolonged work, and when on the go, it is better to have a portable rather than merely luggable device that is almost as powerful.
I admit, most of my work involves command line, text editor or at most a browser, but I'd say more RAM and a slightly bigger screen would make laptops obsolete for most other tasks as well. Just please, never, ever, force a touchscreen UI when not needed, like most of Nokia's software does. The device has a keyboard for a reason.
That's bland. Needs salt.
Quite a bit of Windows software is compiled using Intel's compilers, and they are intentionally made to sabotage performance on AMD chips. When looking at CPUID, instead of checking the features they want, they look for that _and_ the CPU being "GenuineIntel", and if not, the code chooses the worst possible implementation. This includes some major scientific math libraries and a part of popular benchmarks.
1984 was about comminism, Animal Farmn was about facism (the other end of the spectrum).
Napoleon = Joseph Stalin
Snowball = Lev Trotsky
Squealer = Viatcheslav Molotov
Animal Farm is based on the history of soviet Russia, and on relations between the Party and the masses.
I mentioned this particular example, but it is but one of many. Systemic oppression of workers under communism is less talked of in the West, so let's take a look at the other side of "worker-peasant" for something that is better publicised. Murdering by starvation one fourth of peasants in the state of Ukraine is such a stellar example of a benevolent party fighting for the good of common people against those evil capitalists...
For non-soviet examples, look at the Cultural Revolution, the rule of Red Khmers or what is still going on in North Korea.
To provide some specific numbers on efficiency of ARM code:
clang trunk 28.493s
gcc 4.6 13.613s
(clang 2.9 fails to compile the code in question at all)
Pretty crushing, I'd say.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917.
You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
There were around 100 or so implementations of communism. If every single of them was "not the TRUE communism", perhaps there's something wrong with the ideology?
Have you tried compiling cross-compiling projects that use autotools compared to those with hand-written makefiles? There's a world of difference in favour of the former. Unless there are some utterly broken m4 macros mispasted by retarded monkeys (which, I admit, happen way too often), it just works.
Hand-written makefiles on the other hand support only systems they were explicitely ported to, with inevitable bit rot setting in, and if cross compilation happens to work, it's only for a certain pair of host and target arch, usually only with a single compiler version as well.
For SIGBUS errors, they tend to be trivial to fix. These are consistent errors in the same place, just fire up gdb and you get the culprit instantly. In the worst case, with a pointer passed around with a long way between it is created and used, you can add a few assertions for alignment on the way.
At least as C++ goes, clang is a bad joke. It mostly works on C and ObjC, but then, it takes a week for a high school student with no former knowledge of grammar parsers to write a C compiler (ok, with hardly any optimizations...).
That's the front end, but with clang back end being behind gcc as well on x86, I wouldn't hold my breath.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917.
If you, unlike me, were lucky enough to not live in a communist country and didn't have half of the family murdered for, say, having a title "senior worker"[1], please read Animal Farm or 1984, these are pretty accurate descriptions.
[1]. An uncle of my grandfather, an uneducated factory worker, was promoted to "senior worker" which was for people with no formal training but with work experience who proven they have a clue how to do their job. That was enough to be labelled "an agent of the bourgeoisie" and be taken away by the DHS^H^H^H UB never to be seen again.
Wait, what? You _want_ intrusive DRM and think this is a "good" thing?
Steam, Battle.net -- no deal. Local DRM like SecuROM rootkit is at least easily avoidable thanks to cracks. And no, I will never allow a rootkit to be installed on a system that's run natively, even on a throw-away partition.
These days, it's groups like Razor and Skidrow whom you can trust...
The attitude towards imaginary property isn't the biggest complaint about the French government either.
The numbers you linked are off by several orders of magnitude. They include only direct deaths during mining, transport and burning. Pollution is not included.
And, let's think, what is more dangerous: pollution that makes it hard to see, gives people asthma, causes old people to suffocate, makes trees lose all leaves, and so on, or pollution that is locked in steel barrels sealed in tons of concrete under a mountain?
No one was run over by tanks.
Then what about this image(warning: EXTREMELY gory)?
He wasn't rendered helpless by his illness -- until his last visit to the hospital shortly before his death. And if this bout of illness would be staved off, he'd have a few more years of mostly fully able life. Most of us have some illness a good part of their lives -- be that bad blood pressure, diabetes, allergy or whatever else. He did succumb to his kidney problems, but was more able at the age of 83 than most of you will be.
On the other hand, those who are rendered helpless -- trapped in a body that no longer works -- do suffer for no good reason. When you can't move on your own, have to fed and have your poo cleaned by others, and most importantly, have no hope of it ever getting better -- you're effectively in the most cruel jail.
In other words: we're waiting for one of kind souls who preordered DNF to get off his butt and upload a torrent with the demo.
Note what the blurb says: ... recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America”. Since it was MI6 guys doing the cracking, this says a lot.
Any sane user of Firefox has AdBlock installed, which drives down usage measured by advertising and tracking companies by a lot. Thus, from all the datasets mentioned at that page, Wikimedia stats are the only ones I'd bother with.
We're talking about Firefox 3.5, not IE 6. You lose basically some javascript performance -- which hardly ever matters, and a few other very minor details.
As you say, "almost 2 years old". So how often do you expect people to roll out major upgrades to something that works well? There is a world of difference between changing the browser on your home box and on aunt Lucy's one as well and having some extension cease to work and buttons being moved to other places and major testing of all software in a large organization to see if they still work after that change. The only way to make this manageable is to do major upgrades every X years or when there's actual need to do so; otherwise you'd have to either skip testing or have a big part of your employees and customers' time spent on unproductive upgrades for the sake of upgrading.
Uhm, there is a vital thing about autoupdates: they should never, ever make gratuitous changes. Fix security bugs, data loss ones, major annoyances, perhaps minor typos that can't bring regressions. Bringing in a whole major release means your software is not stable.