The bottleneck in the PS2 architecture is quite easy to point out: it has no GPU, only a very primitive "Graphic Synthesizer", which simply accellerates some raster ops on a framebuffer. Even then it STILL manages to hold nearly even with the XBox, even with half the RAM and a slower CPU (though with a 128 bit bus that could have made up for it).
I have no doubt that Sony has greatly overhyped the PS3, and that the two consoles are quite close in real world performance. However, Sony has certainly removed the old bottleneck.
And starting at 1080p is certainly a draw for me. 'course, I'm going to have to run it through my monitor for a while instead of my TV.. of course if there's no VGA out, then I guess I'll have to invest in a scan converter as well.
> as Debian derivatives go, Knoppix and its "children" (Kanotix, etc) are much better. Better HW recognition, better multimedia support, better package management (straight from Sid) etc.
Knoppix I think is something of a bait-and-switch. If you install Knoppix as Knoppix, you'll find that none of your core packages are compatible anymore, there are no Knoppix-specific repositories that will support you, and at some point, Sid will go out of sync and you'll be stuck. If you install it as vanilla Debian, you have debian, not Knoppix.
Ubuntu actually supports its own packages, and it also supports AMD64 as a first-tier distribution. These were the factors that led me to Ubuntu. The only real gripe I have is the lag with new packages I've needed or wanted (ghc 6.4, needed; postgresql 8, wanted; firefox 1.03, wanted) that Ubuntu has been slow to supply. I'd call these pretty minor things however, which will probably be addressed when breezy next updates from sid.
As of this morning, breezy still appears to be totally broken for KDE users. Previously there were some problems with DBUS versions, which may still be in effect, but I haven't seen them crop up recently, because I'm struggling with a new problem: aptitude seems inclined to want to remove all of KDE because of a couple unmet dependencies. Namely some silly stuff, like depending on an exact version of Kate for example, with an upgrade to Kate causing the parent package to break and want to take KDE with it. One needs to pin packages, which then tends to have the opposite effect of locking down everything that depends on it. It's apt's special version of RPM hell. That's life on the edge, and it's easy to fall off and lose a lot of packages if you don't look closely at what you're doing.
Given that I also want side-by-side 32 bit support on my amd64 distro, and that Ubuntu's 32-bit support amounts to running a chroot, I'm looking pretty hard at Fedora. I don't think Ubuntu's a bad distribution at all, in fact its amd64 support is first-rate, but I just don't care as much for the chroot solution. I still recommend Ubuntu for a desktop Linux; one should just be aware that Ubuntu's Unstable (currently breezy) is more like Debian's Experimental at start and only slowly converges to the relative stability of Sid, until release (currently hoary) at which time it becomes stable as Debian Stable. Stick to Hoary unless you like occasional mass-breakage.
While I'm a big fan of backwards compatibility I've never understood this "make-or-break" attitude. Is step 1 on the installation instructions for a new console "Smash previous hardware to bits with hammer."??
You mean you're not aware of Sony's new DRM scheme?
I believe this is what they call a "false dichotomy". Nowhere is one forced to choose between proper spelling and grammar and the content of the article. I prefer to buy a fridge that keeps my food cold AND doesn't have scratches and dents, thanks.
Ideas are not single-sourced: if you can't present an idea with any care toward communicating it effectively and correctly, I'll prefer to go somewhere else.
You'd think people who program for a living would know a thing or two about composition, considering that compilers are even less forgiving about spelling and their particular grammar.
Re:There should be a way to mod posters of stories
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 1
> they need to move to the K5 Engine. there people vote for a story to make the front page.
This has of course resulted in a cultural renaissance for K5...
There are other "story rating" systems that are perfectly democratic, and could be better than a straight out single popularity contest. Stuff like "friend recommendations" rating higher than "general recommendations", for example. But this is slashdot we're talking about... do you really think they're going to do a damn thing?
> but one is apparently reserved in the PS/3 Cell for system use so that leaves 7 remaining for general purpose use
According to Anand's review, they're allowing for one of the SPE's to be defective, in order to increase yields, and disabling one of them in all of them regardless, so that the hardware is identical.
This is a pretty common practice in the industry, and the resulting chips are still plenty usable. Otherwise the PS3 would have real price and possibly even volume problems.
Speaking of volume, that's probably why they're not launching it this year: they don't want a repeat of the shortage fiasco of the PS2.
> What the Linux community needs right now is a good leader.
There's this guy from Finland who does a lot of coding on Linux. Tends to be kind of brusque dismissive when he does have opinions, but he doesn't stand on a soapbox all the time, and is otherwise is really down to earth and approachable. Gets a lot done for the community.
> Dvorak is not really a crackpot leftover. He's apparently become an authoritarian, which is quite a bad thing. Originally he came up with an efficient solution to a problem created in an arbitrary manner, and he saw it fade into obscurity.
He didn't compose the New World Symphony either. That might be your first clue that there's more than one guy with that name. Pick up a Czech phonebook sometime, you might be surprised.
Your co-worker threw dictionary definitions at me. Real fabulous communication skills. I was merely skeptical before -- now I'm prejudiced. Good luck and godspeed.
> So the Gentoo and Debian developers aren't part of the community? I think they'd take issue with that assertion.
Hey mister category theory, if I started a distribution that had a thousand users, and I was one of them, but only I had commit access, would it still be a community distribution?
I know they'd take exception to it, as would probably every single linux distributor. Even SuSE could probably claim being "community based" for simply including third party packages. I'm simply asking for an explanation of "community based", which has otherwise become an empty buzzword.
> Many people don't know that "decimated" means to kill 1/10 of the opposition.
Not the "opposition", actually. Decimation was punishment for a misbehaving Roman cohort or sometimes an entire legion. Every 10th man, chosen by lots, would be clubbed to death by his fellow soldiers.
Not a common practice, but it came into fashion with some of the more ruthless generals during times of unrest among the legions.
> Yet there was no RPM based solutions managed by the community itself.
I can't think of any distribution "managed by the community itself". Redhat controls Fedora, the Gentoo devs are the gatekeepers for the portage tree, and Debian has a lengthy sponsorship process for DD's. I expect the configuration management of packages, such as synchronizing upgrades when a core dependency changes incompatibly, to be handled by experts, not foisted off on "the community".
What exactly do you mean by "managed by the community"?
If you would like readers to think Slackware isn't some crusty fossil, it might help to not link to the old outdated version of the slackbook to the phrase "not outdated version". People might get the idea that that's the "not outdated version". Or something.
When the trackback show that the buzz no longer has mindshare in the osphereosphere... gimme a few more minutes, I might be able to tart that up with even more hipster jargon. not that I really want to...
You posted this to slashdot, which of course will get you roundly flamed... me among those flaming you. Mad propz to me for puttin DOWN some punk on da DOT, shizzle! *sigh*... I need to delete my account again if I continue to post such stupidity (I had a low UID once, though still more than an order of magnitude off yours).
Artistic integrity is great, but HTML's a pretty funny medium to attempt to assert it in. Even without deliberate modification, most user-agents do their perverse damndest to make sites look bad. I looked at your blog, looks like we're in agreement... let's hope the rest of slashdot stops piling on now. Seems doubtful though.
Hey at least you aren't charging $50 for people to download your opinions about greasemonkey (*rolling eyes*)
> That said, I am going to use this guide to disable Greasemonkey.
And I'll continue to do what I always do, which is to not visit your site. And to rewrite the HTML and add javascript with proxomitron for the rest. Disable that.
> The strange thing about this is that the trademarks that they use (Linux Business News) etc. belong to Linus Torvalds. Effectively this means he is endorsing these magazines.
Not a chance. Linus is simply refusing to exert control over use of the trademark in publications, and he's probably already lost protection over that usage now. But while Kleenex cannot enforce usage of its brand name when used as a generic word, just try to start a company named Kleenex.
Linus is too busy getting real work done to care what some rag says.
> Saying "blah, blah, blah Godwin's Law blah blah blah" does not invalidate that view or end the useful discussion thread.
Oh, I would argue it ends the usefulness of the discussion thread. Or at least diminishes it greatly. But I'll invoke it here too -- the Nazi comparison is ludicrous. The 1984 comparisons are spot-on though, so let's run with it. I propose from now on, that we make a portamentau of Microsoft's new term: thoughttheft.
As in, "thoughttheft doubleplusungood".
But really, there's no need -- they're aiming this catchy term at school-age kids. They don't need our help in ridiculing empty slogans. Anyone remember "just say no"?
> The purpose of Federal hate crime legislation is to give the Federal government authority
If you stop right there, you're perfectly correct. I am by no means a "states-rights" fan, which is usually just a cover for bigotry, but federal hate crimes legislation is nothing more than a power grab in an attempt to federalize as many crimes as possible.
I like moves and deletes that don't take several minutes showing only "flying folders", and I like the fact that such operations don't completely abort the instant they hit a permissions error. I like having a decent command shell that isn't a slow emulated hack. I like being able to drag windows around with alt-drag and resize them with alt-rightdrag. I like virtual desktops even though I rarely ever use them. I like xkill.
I like software that doesn't suck. I don't care about threatening windows, because in my world, it's already lost -- I only use it when I have to, not because I want to. I don't complain too bitterly about it, because I can switch back pretty easily most of the time. What's this about taking over the world? I'd rather make the world nicer. Or at least mine.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottleneck in the PS2 architecture is quite easy to point out: it has no GPU, only a very primitive "Graphic Synthesizer", which simply accellerates some raster ops on a framebuffer. Even then it STILL manages to hold nearly even with the XBox, even with half the RAM and a slower CPU (though with a 128 bit bus that could have made up for it).
.. of course if there's no VGA out, then I guess I'll have to invest in a scan converter as well.
I have no doubt that Sony has greatly overhyped the PS3, and that the two consoles are quite close in real world performance. However, Sony has certainly removed the old bottleneck.
And starting at 1080p is certainly a draw for me. 'course, I'm going to have to run it through my monitor for a while instead of my TV
> as Debian derivatives go, Knoppix and its "children" (Kanotix, etc) are much better. Better HW recognition, better multimedia support, better package management (straight from Sid) etc.
Knoppix I think is something of a bait-and-switch. If you install Knoppix as Knoppix, you'll find that none of your core packages are compatible anymore, there are no Knoppix-specific repositories that will support you, and at some point, Sid will go out of sync and you'll be stuck. If you install it as vanilla Debian, you have debian, not Knoppix.
Ubuntu actually supports its own packages, and it also supports AMD64 as a first-tier distribution. These were the factors that led me to Ubuntu. The only real gripe I have is the lag with new packages I've needed or wanted (ghc 6.4, needed; postgresql 8, wanted; firefox 1.03, wanted) that Ubuntu has been slow to supply. I'd call these pretty minor things however, which will probably be addressed when breezy next updates from sid.
As of this morning, breezy still appears to be totally broken for KDE users. Previously there were some problems with DBUS versions, which may still be in effect, but I haven't seen them crop up recently, because I'm struggling with a new problem: aptitude seems inclined to want to remove all of KDE because of a couple unmet dependencies. Namely some silly stuff, like depending on an exact version of Kate for example, with an upgrade to Kate causing the parent package to break and want to take KDE with it. One needs to pin packages, which then tends to have the opposite effect of locking down everything that depends on it. It's apt's special version of RPM hell. That's life on the edge, and it's easy to fall off and lose a lot of packages if you don't look closely at what you're doing.
Given that I also want side-by-side 32 bit support on my amd64 distro, and that Ubuntu's 32-bit support amounts to running a chroot, I'm looking pretty hard at Fedora. I don't think Ubuntu's a bad distribution at all, in fact its amd64 support is first-rate, but I just don't care as much for the chroot solution. I still recommend Ubuntu for a desktop Linux; one should just be aware that Ubuntu's Unstable (currently breezy) is more like Debian's Experimental at start and only slowly converges to the relative stability of Sid, until release (currently hoary) at which time it becomes stable as Debian Stable. Stick to Hoary unless you like occasional mass-breakage.
While I'm a big fan of backwards compatibility I've never understood this "make-or-break" attitude. Is step 1 on the installation instructions for a new console "Smash previous hardware to bits with hammer."??
You mean you're not aware of Sony's new DRM scheme?
I believe this is what they call a "false dichotomy". Nowhere is one forced to choose between proper spelling and grammar and the content of the article. I prefer to buy a fridge that keeps my food cold AND doesn't have scratches and dents, thanks.
Ideas are not single-sourced: if you can't present an idea with any care toward communicating it effectively and correctly, I'll prefer to go somewhere else.
You'd think people who program for a living would know a thing or two about composition, considering that compilers are even less forgiving about spelling and their particular grammar.
> they need to move to the K5 Engine. there people vote for a story to make the front page.
...
... do you really think they're going to do a damn thing?
This has of course resulted in a cultural renaissance for K5
There are other "story rating" systems that are perfectly democratic, and could be better than a straight out single popularity contest. Stuff like "friend recommendations" rating higher than "general recommendations", for example. But this is slashdot we're talking about
> but one is apparently reserved in the PS/3 Cell for system use so that leaves 7 remaining for general purpose use
According to Anand's review, they're allowing for one of the SPE's to be defective, in order to increase yields, and disabling one of them in all of them regardless, so that the hardware is identical.
This is a pretty common practice in the industry, and the resulting chips are still plenty usable. Otherwise the PS3 would have real price and possibly even volume problems.
Speaking of volume, that's probably why they're not launching it this year: they don't want a repeat of the shortage fiasco of the PS2.
> What the Linux community needs right now is a good leader.
There's this guy from Finland who does a lot of coding on Linux. Tends to be kind of brusque dismissive when he does have opinions, but he doesn't stand on a soapbox all the time, and is otherwise is really down to earth and approachable. Gets a lot done for the community.
Can't remember his name though. He might be good.
> Dvorak is not really a crackpot leftover. He's apparently become an authoritarian, which is quite a bad thing. Originally he came up with an efficient solution to a problem created in an arbitrary manner, and he saw it fade into obscurity.
He didn't compose the New World Symphony either. That might be your first clue that there's more than one guy with that name. Pick up a Czech phonebook sometime, you might be surprised.
> See other comments in this thread.
Your co-worker threw dictionary definitions at me. Real fabulous communication skills. I was merely skeptical before -- now I'm prejudiced. Good luck and godspeed.
Astronauts.
> So the Gentoo and Debian developers aren't part of the community? I think they'd take issue with that assertion.
Hey mister category theory, if I started a distribution that had a thousand users, and I was one of them, but only I had commit access, would it still be a community distribution?
I know they'd take exception to it, as would probably every single linux distributor. Even SuSE could probably claim being "community based" for simply including third party packages. I'm simply asking for an explanation of "community based", which has otherwise become an empty buzzword.
> Many people don't know that "decimated" means to kill 1/10 of the opposition.
Not the "opposition", actually. Decimation was punishment for a misbehaving Roman cohort or sometimes an entire legion. Every 10th man, chosen by lots, would be clubbed to death by his fellow soldiers.
Not a common practice, but it came into fashion with some of the more ruthless generals during times of unrest among the legions.
> Yet there was no RPM based solutions managed by the community itself.
I can't think of any distribution "managed by the community itself". Redhat controls Fedora, the Gentoo devs are the gatekeepers for the portage tree, and Debian has a lengthy sponsorship process for DD's. I expect the configuration management of packages, such as synchronizing upgrades when a core dependency changes incompatibly, to be handled by experts, not foisted off on "the community".
What exactly do you mean by "managed by the community"?
Egad, the links are correct. Taking note of which tab opened from which link is a good thing. Just ignore my babblings...
See, this is why tabbed browsing is bad! MS is right! Bad!
Ok, I think I'm getting silly from hunger now. Byenow.
If you would like readers to think Slackware isn't some crusty fossil, it might help to not link to the old outdated version of the slackbook to the phrase "not outdated version". People might get the idea that that's the "not outdated version". Or something.
When the trackback show that the buzz no longer has mindshare in the osphereosphere ... gimme a few more minutes, I might be able to tart that up with even more hipster jargon. not that I really want to...
Do they have the resources? In their petty cash drawer, on a bad year.
Would either Microsoft's or Redhat's shareholders entertain the idea for even a microsecond as adding value to either company? Not a flippin' chance.
You posted this to slashdot, which of course will get you roundly flamed ... me among those flaming you. Mad propz to me for puttin DOWN some punk on da DOT, shizzle! *sigh* ... I need to delete my account again if I continue to post such stupidity (I had a low UID once, though still more than an order of magnitude off yours).
... let's hope the rest of slashdot stops piling on now. Seems doubtful though.
Artistic integrity is great, but HTML's a pretty funny medium to attempt to assert it in. Even without deliberate modification, most user-agents do their perverse damndest to make sites look bad. I looked at your blog, looks like we're in agreement
Hey at least you aren't charging $50 for people to download your opinions about greasemonkey (*rolling eyes*)
> That said, I am going to use this guide to disable Greasemonkey.
And I'll continue to do what I always do, which is to not visit your site. And to rewrite the HTML and add javascript with proxomitron for the rest. Disable that.
You could also consider .. I don't know who said it, so I'm going to call it ihdnaG's law (the name is "Gandhi", not "Ghandi"):
1. First they fight you
2. Then they laugh at you
3. Then they ignore you
4. Then you lose
Seems to apply to the SCO case -- most of us are somewhere between stage 2 and 3 at this point.
I think it's also fairly repellent to think Gandhi's methods of resistance somehow apply to conniving machievellian corporate machinations as well.
> The strange thing about this is that the trademarks that they use (Linux Business News) etc. belong to Linus Torvalds. Effectively this means he is endorsing these magazines.
Not a chance. Linus is simply refusing to exert control over use of the trademark in publications, and he's probably already lost protection over that usage now. But while Kleenex cannot enforce usage of its brand name when used as a generic word, just try to start a company named Kleenex.
Linus is too busy getting real work done to care what some rag says.
> Saying "blah, blah, blah Godwin's Law blah blah blah" does not invalidate that view or end the useful discussion thread.
Oh, I would argue it ends the usefulness of the discussion thread. Or at least diminishes it greatly. But I'll invoke it here too -- the Nazi comparison is ludicrous. The 1984 comparisons are spot-on though, so let's run with it. I propose from now on, that we make a portamentau of Microsoft's new term: thoughttheft.
As in, "thoughttheft doubleplusungood".
But really, there's no need -- they're aiming this catchy term at school-age kids. They don't need our help in ridiculing empty slogans. Anyone remember "just say no"?
> The purpose of Federal hate crime legislation is to give the Federal government authority
If you stop right there, you're perfectly correct. I am by no means a "states-rights" fan, which is usually just a cover for bigotry, but federal hate crimes legislation is nothing more than a power grab in an attempt to federalize as many crimes as possible.
I like moves and deletes that don't take several minutes showing only "flying folders", and I like the fact that such operations don't completely abort the instant they hit a permissions error. I like having a decent command shell that isn't a slow emulated hack. I like being able to drag windows around with alt-drag and resize them with alt-rightdrag. I like virtual desktops even though I rarely ever use them. I like xkill.
I like software that doesn't suck. I don't care about threatening windows, because in my world, it's already lost -- I only use it when I have to, not because I want to. I don't complain too bitterly about it, because I can switch back pretty easily most of the time. What's this about taking over the world? I'd rather make the world nicer. Or at least mine.