first it job, straight out of uni, quit after 9 months. but instead of getting a similar job elsewhere (indeed anywhere in the world!) i moved back up north and spent the next few years drinking with my mates and ending up in a shitty dead end town with no money and no hope of escape. i did escape eventually but i wish my dissolusionment hadnt taken me away from it jobs completely! my advice: try try again
1. prog calls malloc (or equivalent) 2. os hands memory to prog 3. prog tries to read or write out of the range it was given 4. BANG!
seems a bit bloody simple to me.
unless it's something to do with the bios/hardware just dumbly doing what it's asked by the code. which is just as stupid as a prog requesting a handle to the File System and magically getting read/write access to every file everywhere instead of just it's local folder and "c:/my documents"
while I'm reading TFA could someone explain why branch "prediction" is such a big sticking point in CPU architecture... surely a processor has the compiled code and a bunch of data, it doesn't need to predict anything because it's all laid out. and by that i mean "for... if... break;" processor shouldn't be surprised when it gets to that nested if and reaches the break and has to jump out of the loop cos it's clearly there in the code to start with, it's not like it just magically showed up, is it.
2.8g p4
512mb ram (win98se)
one 40gig matrox HD
one DVD reader CD writer combo
onboard graphics*
one cpu fan
one 120mm case fan, with a resistor inline to drop it
PSU butchered so it is in the path of aforementioned 120mm fan
the psu was a very cheap one that came with a £10 case but appears to be handling things fine, sans GFX card.
i'd love a fanless power supply when i upgrade again but like silentpcreview says i doubt i'll need a 500W one, at the mo you cant hear the computer when you, say, play an mp3 or watch a DVD on it
(*the mobo didnt like my geForce)
>the fact that it is only monochrome will keep me from
>trying the experiment any time soon
i take issue with this, the pda i use has a 16 grade monochrome screen. good design means that the UI has a good balance of contrast to keep it legible. what exactly precisely is "color" an "absolute requirement" for when you are organising/emailing/word processing/bloggind or slashdotting? non IMO. google needs no color, as does pretty much every website i use. it's just decoration. this display tech isnt good enough yet for real time rendering of movies so that goes out of the window. sure once we're a few years down the line and eink-ebooks become a reality then graphic novels (comics) and glossy magazines would probably very much like color but hey, >90% of current dead tree newspaper pages have been grayscale for ever and i expect there arent great swathes of people *not* buying them because the graphics are crap.
the trick will be to wait until the planet is DRM saturated and then release the nifty programs and plug in chips that cracks it all. all of which will have been in top secret development in the mean time so that the exploits that are found arent published (and therefore fixed) until it's much too late.
seriously, why cant someone just put out a laptop with a keyboard that resembles the desktop one i'm used to instead of randomly rearranging the keys, i can live without the numpad but i really cant deal with spending ten minutes hunting around to find the delete key and having to hold down another function key while i'm at it.
add a widescreen lcd to complement the shape and suddenly it's good to watch dvds on too, yay!
seriously, though, there is no reason whatsoever for laptop keyboards to be so damn freaky, especially considering that they're all laid out differently. the only reason they do it like that is because they always have
re: top 40 radio (and indeed, films) : i'm the sort of person who hunts around the net and real life shops and buys things that i've never seen/heard/new about before. at glastonbury festival last year 90% of the bands i went to see perform i'd never heard of. amazingly somone once described this behaviour as "brave" !
re: "big 3 tv" : i watch about 5 hours of tv a week : my two tv shows "lost" and "house" and the rest is news.
re: media/news : i watch news, read news on the net and occasionally purchase a newspaper. but then i make up my own mind, as opposed to blind dumbly believing it's all gospel. i may hand over cash to murdoch day in/day out but i dont see him as some kind of preacher-of-the-truth. i get rather annoyed at the coverage/lack of too. e.g. on one news show last night a segment on Mugawbes reigeme and policies was followed by a story about some skinny bird who, apparently, did some coke at the weekend. WTF?
you have a bunch of valid points but personally my problem is that i DONT want a carbon copy of windows i'd very much like to use linux as a server at least but it's just a pain to set up, i've tried several distros over the years and configuring one to just boot up with apache and sit on my network with my windows boxes HAS been tantamount to rocket science. now it has been a couple of years since i've had a go (i did eventually get a dyndns suse based web server up at one point) so it may no longer be the case but i'd like
1. install linux os, boot into GUI
2. install apache
3. run apache config program, tick checkbox that says "start on boot (inc non GUI boots)
4. run os network config, press button to install "windows compatible file sharing" (samba etc.)
5. find linux box onto network, find my new httpd shared directory, drag and drop website files
6. done
but instead i had to undergo aforementioned weeks of google groups and editing obscure config files in obscure places JUST TO SET THE IP ADDRESS OF THE MACHINE. that's right i had to set the ip address, gateway, domain/workgroup, computer name, etc. in about 8 programs and config files. are you seriously telling me that that's "just the way we like it"? that the magic bullet against the windows-registry is to have every single program that uses a network card to have to be told precisely how?
again, it may have been that particular flavour of suse, in which case please feel free to reccomend a distro that doesnt involve such trials and tribulations, i really do want to know, i really really do want a linux server, i'd love to be able to plaster linux all over my CV alongside my MS based qualifications, really!
this isnt intended as flamebait, i'm just venting much built up personal linux frustration...
>if this is what you want *then cook up your own distro*.
i'm sick of this response every time someone has a personal pick at a particular linux point. "if you dont like it build/compile/make/construct/market your own version" and the classic "if you find an error/bug/problem/driver issue/incompatibility with a particular piece of software then why the f**K dont you just install gnu,gcc,awk,python,make,lisp,gawk and once you've spent two weeks getting them built/made/compatible with each other with zero documentation apart from google groups and arsey RTFM replies when there is no FM to any newbie tech question, learn C,C++ and ASM and fix it yourself FFS and stop complaining"
either that or sneering windows/n00b/linspire related comments. heard of user feedback? imagine if amazon had the opposite of one click ordering where you had to jump through a load of hoops (your details, your payment details, your delivery details, a user survey, terms and conditions, where did you hear about us) for every product in your shopping cart and refused to change it out of some dumb programmers pride (i made it therefore it's right and you are wrong), would there user base be quite so massive?
and you all wander why this year is *never* the year of the linux desktop!
>If you need antivirus software, your problem is not viruses -- it is that you don't have any control over what programs are getting to run on your computer. Get that control, and you don't need antivirus software.
seconded. for a few years my main PC at home has been a 98SE box with IE and OE physically removed from the system. and being judicious enough not to open attatchments or download flash games and other assorted crap i've never had a malware problem. i do have AV software but i sandboxxed it (it's in a folder on a partition somewhere) and so can scan the occasional exe if i wish without the nastyness of norton-taking-over-your-system
other posters seem to be quick to jump on the FUD bandwagon re: this one but having read the first ocuple of pages i can summarise it thus:
you walk into a shop
you scan the barcode (or possibly even the product directly)
you send the picture
the computer finds out what the product is, and sends you back info. this could indeed be the new specially-for-you discount on amazon.com but it could also be an auto-froogle or even just send you a rating based on user reviews
you digest the info and either buy the item or find another and repeat
is STILL not supported despite the fact that a lot of the existing code emulates it anyway (-moz-inline-box). this is the most important bug fix IMO as it will mean that web designers can get on with cross browser designing. as opposed to bells and whistles (ooh favicons bug fixed! gee wizz!)
really... cars usually are a box shape with a wheel at each corner. they contain seats and some basic controls for making it move. you apply motion lotion and, well, go. from a to b. my car does this job just fine, but it does have the added extra of a knackered old stereo so i can listen to radio 4, handy!
now, try buying a new "car" nowadays that doesnt have bluetooth/phone integration, sat nav, dvd player, a supercomputer, heated steering wheel, coffee maker, vibrating seats, banana plantation etc. it's getting increasingly difficult to get a bog standard car that does the car job well and concentrates on being a car first and a replacement for having a house second.
sadly this will soon be true of everything. my car is 10 years old and though it does require some tlc to get past it's annual MOT it does it's job fine. car makers are so desperate to get the likes of me to needlessly buy a new vehicle that they lob all this crap at me.
so i expect the same is true of these mice, i've got a knackered old optical mouse. with a wired connection. being optical it has gone for years without getting so full of crap it wont work, forcing me to buy a new one, the cable seems to have resisted the effects of fatigue too. when it dies i'll probably go out and buy a new one exactly the same. if they exist any more (two buttons + scroll wheel) that is
so, questions: is it possible to buy flat screen 15" monitors WITHOUT integrated speakers and/or a usb hub? how about a toaster or microwave WITHOUT a digital display, fifteen buttons and endless programs and modes? a washing machine with just one button ("on")? or my favourite: a mobile phone that doesnt have color screen, games, bluetooth, web browser, camera and mp3 player? FFS my phone is a PHONE, i do often use it for the extravagant act of texting instead of phoning, but it does it's job well, holds charge for a week, gets as good a signal on a boat as in the city and has buttons that even my stubby thumb can operate.
it too is several years old and yes i could easily buy a new car, phone and logitech mouse but... why?
yes but "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder. i have no desire to look at sparkley shiney things and personally can see little visual advantage in emerald (for example) over green stained-glass. my wedding ring will probably be jet black. though i'd need to work out what rock i want to get it carved out of. heh. probably not coal, though, unless i cant afford anything more durable!
>The starter package for the 360 is just a complete joke.
You're assuming that everyone who will buy a 360 is an online gaming uber geek. MS may well want to target the sleek model at normal human beings who could be persuaded to get due to it having a lot MORE features than your average DVD player.
i suppose you also think that two slice toasters are "dumb" when there are four sliced bsd powered models available.
if you RTFA all it says is that the HD might not be there sometimes. if theres a mini 360 equivalent to the psone or pstwo then this could be the reason... thus all those people who dont want a massive washing machine sized game console can have the sleek sexy chrome 360 with all the gamer-geek bollox removed. which sounds like a marketing ploy to target the non already consoled sections of the populous who dont care about chipsets, megabytes, gigabytes and bandwidth, who want to use it like they use their existing DVD player. just one that also happens to have games.
get a psion revo from ebay, very cheap and the plus model has:
a keyboard! small enough to be small, big enough to type on. handy on the train/bus/bench and no messing with character recognition
nicely laid out calendar with appointments and alarms
word processor which auto converts to/from ms word docs on the pc
spreadsheet that does the same with excel
but the best part is:
black and white screen
no backlight (= good battery life)
no bluetooth
no wifi
no camera
not a phone
i've had mine for about three months and have taken to writing a short scifi novel on the train to/from work. it fits perfectly alongside my cup of tea on the little seat-back-shelfs
Slashdot Mirror
first it job, straight out of uni, quit after 9 months. but instead of getting a similar job elsewhere (indeed anywhere in the world!) i moved back up north and spent the next few years drinking with my mates and ending up in a shitty dead end town with no money and no hope of escape. i did escape eventually but i wish my dissolusionment hadnt taken me away from it jobs completely! my advice: try try again
um, surely all os's should do this:
1. prog calls malloc (or equivalent)
2. os hands memory to prog
3. prog tries to read or write out of the range it was given
4. BANG!
seems a bit bloody simple to me.
unless it's something to do with the bios/hardware just dumbly doing what it's asked by the code. which is just as stupid as a prog requesting a handle to the File System and magically getting read/write access to every file everywhere instead of just it's local folder and "c:/my documents"
mechanical can openers are a rarity in the states then? blimey (limey).
while I'm reading TFA could someone explain why branch "prediction" is such a big sticking point in CPU architecture... surely a processor has the compiled code and a bunch of data, it doesn't need to predict anything because it's all laid out. and by that i mean "for... if... break;" processor shouldn't be surprised when it gets to that nested if and reaches the break and has to jump out of the loop cos it's clearly there in the code to start with, it's not like it just magically showed up, is it.
MS is using open to mean "free as in beer" (for the time being)
OO.o is using open to mean "free as in speech"
umm, i assume that linux didnt exist before 1999 then, what with the general lack of >500mhz cpus...
whereas my pc falls BELOW their lowest:
2.8g p4
512mb ram (win98se)
one 40gig matrox HD
one DVD reader CD writer combo
onboard graphics*
one cpu fan
one 120mm case fan, with a resistor inline to drop it
PSU butchered so it is in the path of aforementioned 120mm fan
the psu was a very cheap one that came with a £10 case but appears to be handling things fine, sans GFX card.
i'd love a fanless power supply when i upgrade again but like silentpcreview says i doubt i'll need a 500W one, at the mo you cant hear the computer when you, say, play an mp3 or watch a DVD on it
(*the mobo didnt like my geForce)
>the fact that it is only monochrome will keep me from
>trying the experiment any time soon
i take issue with this, the pda i use has a 16 grade monochrome screen. good design means that the UI has a good balance of contrast to keep it legible. what exactly precisely is "color" an "absolute requirement" for when you are organising/emailing/word processing/bloggind or slashdotting? non IMO. google needs no color, as does pretty much every website i use. it's just decoration. this display tech isnt good enough yet for real time rendering of movies so that goes out of the window. sure once we're a few years down the line and eink-ebooks become a reality then graphic novels (comics) and glossy magazines would probably very much like color but hey, >90% of current dead tree newspaper pages have been grayscale for ever and i expect there arent great swathes of people *not* buying them because the graphics are crap.
the trick will be to wait until the planet is DRM saturated and then release the nifty programs and plug in chips that cracks it all. all of which will have been in top secret development in the mean time so that the exploits that are found arent published (and therefore fixed) until it's much too late.
seriously, why cant someone just put out a laptop with a keyboard that resembles the desktop one i'm used to instead of randomly rearranging the keys, i can live without the numpad but i really cant deal with spending ten minutes hunting around to find the delete key and having to hold down another function key while i'm at it.
add a widescreen lcd to complement the shape and suddenly it's good to watch dvds on too, yay!
seriously, though, there is no reason whatsoever for laptop keyboards to be so damn freaky, especially considering that they're all laid out differently. the only reason they do it like that is because they always have
re: top 40 radio (and indeed, films) : i'm the sort of person who hunts around the net and real life shops and buys things that i've never seen/heard/new about before. at glastonbury festival last year 90% of the bands i went to see perform i'd never heard of. amazingly somone once described this behaviour as "brave" !
re: "big 3 tv" : i watch about 5 hours of tv a week : my two tv shows "lost" and "house" and the rest is news.
re: media/news : i watch news, read news on the net and occasionally purchase a newspaper. but then i make up my own mind, as opposed to blind dumbly believing it's all gospel. i may hand over cash to murdoch day in/day out but i dont see him as some kind of preacher-of-the-truth. i get rather annoyed at the coverage/lack of too. e.g. on one news show last night a segment on Mugawbes reigeme and policies was followed by a story about some skinny bird who, apparently, did some coke at the weekend. WTF?
>(I wish I could remove IE itself) www.litepc.com
you have a bunch of valid points but personally my problem is that i DONT want a carbon copy of windows i'd very much like to use linux as a server at least but it's just a pain to set up, i've tried several distros over the years and configuring one to just boot up with apache and sit on my network with my windows boxes HAS been tantamount to rocket science. now it has been a couple of years since i've had a go (i did eventually get a dyndns suse based web server up at one point) so it may no longer be the case but i'd like
1. install linux os, boot into GUI
2. install apache
3. run apache config program, tick checkbox that says "start on boot (inc non GUI boots)
4. run os network config, press button to install "windows compatible file sharing" (samba etc.)
5. find linux box onto network, find my new httpd shared directory, drag and drop website files
6. done
but instead i had to undergo aforementioned weeks of google groups and editing obscure config files in obscure places JUST TO SET THE IP ADDRESS OF THE MACHINE. that's right i had to set the ip address, gateway, domain/workgroup, computer name, etc. in about 8 programs and config files. are you seriously telling me that that's "just the way we like it"? that the magic bullet against the windows-registry is to have every single program that uses a network card to have to be told precisely how?
again, it may have been that particular flavour of suse, in which case please feel free to reccomend a distro that doesnt involve such trials and tribulations, i really do want to know, i really really do want a linux server, i'd love to be able to plaster linux all over my CV alongside my MS based qualifications, really!
this isnt intended as flamebait, i'm just venting much built up personal linux frustration...
>if this is what you want *then cook up your own distro*.
i'm sick of this response every time someone has a personal pick at a particular linux point. "if you dont like it build/compile/make/construct/market your own version" and the classic "if you find an error/bug/problem/driver issue/incompatibility with a particular piece of software then why the f**K dont you just install gnu,gcc,awk,python,make,lisp,gawk and once you've spent two weeks getting them built/made/compatible with each other with zero documentation apart from google groups and arsey RTFM replies when there is no FM to any newbie tech question, learn C,C++ and ASM and fix it yourself FFS and stop complaining"
either that or sneering windows/n00b/linspire related comments. heard of user feedback? imagine if amazon had the opposite of one click ordering where you had to jump through a load of hoops (your details, your payment details, your delivery details, a user survey, terms and conditions, where did you hear about us) for every product in your shopping cart and refused to change it out of some dumb programmers pride (i made it therefore it's right and you are wrong), would there user base be quite so massive?
and you all wander why this year is *never* the year of the linux desktop!
>If you need antivirus software, your problem is not viruses -- it is that you don't have any control over what programs are getting to run on your computer. Get that control, and you don't need antivirus software.
seconded. for a few years my main PC at home has been a 98SE box with IE and OE physically removed from the system. and being judicious enough not to open attatchments or download flash games and other assorted crap i've never had a malware problem. i do have AV software but i sandboxxed it (it's in a folder on a partition somewhere) and so can scan the occasional exe if i wish without the nastyness of norton-taking-over-your-system
well if it was obvious then why doesnt my mobile phone do it already?
display:inline-block;
is STILL not supported despite the fact that a lot of the existing code emulates it anyway (-moz-inline-box). this is the most important bug fix IMO as it will mean that web designers can get on with cross browser designing. as opposed to bells and whistles (ooh favicons bug fixed! gee wizz!)
really... cars usually are a box shape with a wheel at each corner. they contain seats and some basic controls for making it move. you apply motion lotion and, well, go. from a to b. my car does this job just fine, but it does have the added extra of a knackered old stereo so i can listen to radio 4, handy!
now, try buying a new "car" nowadays that doesnt have bluetooth/phone integration, sat nav, dvd player, a supercomputer, heated steering wheel, coffee maker, vibrating seats, banana plantation etc. it's getting increasingly difficult to get a bog standard car that does the car job well and concentrates on being a car first and a replacement for having a house second.
sadly this will soon be true of everything. my car is 10 years old and though it does require some tlc to get past it's annual MOT it does it's job fine. car makers are so desperate to get the likes of me to needlessly buy a new vehicle that they lob all this crap at me.
so i expect the same is true of these mice, i've got a knackered old optical mouse. with a wired connection. being optical it has gone for years without getting so full of crap it wont work, forcing me to buy a new one, the cable seems to have resisted the effects of fatigue too. when it dies i'll probably go out and buy a new one exactly the same. if they exist any more (two buttons + scroll wheel) that is
so, questions: is it possible to buy flat screen 15" monitors WITHOUT integrated speakers and/or a usb hub? how about a toaster or microwave WITHOUT a digital display, fifteen buttons and endless programs and modes? a washing machine with just one button ("on")? or my favourite: a mobile phone that doesnt have color screen, games, bluetooth, web browser, camera and mp3 player? FFS my phone is a PHONE, i do often use it for the extravagant act of texting instead of phoning, but it does it's job well, holds charge for a week, gets as good a signal on a boat as in the city and has buttons that even my stubby thumb can operate.
it too is several years old and yes i could easily buy a new car, phone and logitech mouse but... why?
yes but "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder. i have no desire to look at sparkley shiney things and personally can see little visual advantage in emerald (for example) over green stained-glass. my wedding ring will probably be jet black. though i'd need to work out what rock i want to get it carved out of. heh. probably not coal, though, unless i cant afford anything more durable!
>The starter package for the 360 is just a complete joke.
You're assuming that everyone who will buy a 360 is an online gaming uber geek. MS may well want to target the sleek model at normal human beings who could be persuaded to get due to it having a lot MORE features than your average DVD player.
i suppose you also think that two slice toasters are "dumb" when there are four sliced bsd powered models available.
to see space all you need is a clear night, preferably away from light pollution, shouldnt cost too much
if you RTFA all it says is that the HD might not be there sometimes. if theres a mini 360 equivalent to the psone or pstwo then this could be the reason... thus all those people who dont want a massive washing machine sized game console can have the sleek sexy chrome 360 with all the gamer-geek bollox removed. which sounds like a marketing ploy to target the non already consoled sections of the populous who dont care about chipsets, megabytes, gigabytes and bandwidth, who want to use it like they use their existing DVD player. just one that also happens to have games.
get a psion revo from ebay, very cheap and the plus model has: a keyboard! small enough to be small, big enough to type on. handy on the train/bus/bench and no messing with character recognition nicely laid out calendar with appointments and alarms word processor which auto converts to/from ms word docs on the pc spreadsheet that does the same with excel but the best part is: black and white screen no backlight (= good battery life) no bluetooth no wifi no camera not a phone i've had mine for about three months and have taken to writing a short scifi novel on the train to/from work. it fits perfectly alongside my cup of tea on the little seat-back-shelfs
...who have no real idea of...a null-pointer...
i actually find that seriously quite shocking, over and above the rest