What I "lose" in javascript performance, I think I more than make up for in not wasting any cpu cycles on anti-virus crud.
I'm not at all sure how relevant these synthetic tests are. I use Ubuntu 8.10 on a 2 year old laptop and it honestly feels snappier now than it did when it was running XP. Maybe some things are slower and some things are faster. Beats me, as I'm too busy actually using it for real work to be bothered benchmarking it. But on the whole, it certainly "feels faster" now.
Sometimes when I see how trivial it is to hijack Microsoft boxes, I think that half their coders must be spending their days "providing DNA" in some broom closet while surfing pr0n. For fuck sake, Microsoft has fairly unlimited resources. If they really WANTED to clean up their security act, they could.
In my 15+ years using Linux, various BSDs, and other open source software, I can't recall even once where someone asked me to "prove" that my tools were secure.
I just tried it with my windows mobile 6.1 phone (Samsung Blackjack II) and followed the instructions to the letter. No joy. It was good for about 20 minutes of aggravation though. Maybe Google can harness that angst for their next datacenter project. grrrr...
But seriously, I installed Ubuntu last night. I've been a diehard RHEL/CentOS user for years. It just plain worked out of the box for me on a relatively new laptop. It found the Wifi,sound, my bluetooth mouse, asked me if I wanted the "non free" binary accelerated Radeon X1600 video driver, etc. Pretty slick.
I realize that I'm not a typical clueless windows user, but I think this is downright easy to migrate to for a Windows user, especially when Firefox 3.x and Openoffice are bundled along with it. That's enough to satisfy a huge swath of userbase and it's completely free. The entire install only took about 10 minutes too.
It's modded funny, but it is accurate. If you don't like Google's policy and they won't change it....vote with your feet. I actually uninstalled google earth because of this.
While strides have been made in HIV treatment, it's still a death sentence. Doctors can keep the patient alive longer, but they can't prevent the inevitable.
With so many people in the developing world suffering from HIV, it would be nice to see something like this fast tracked. I am sure that some of those folks, now intimately familiar with their own mortality, would be eager to participate knowing that they could potentially help other people.
I spend a great deal of time in China. The real crux of the problem is that there is a WIDE gulf between the law and enforcement of the law (unless it involves anti-government behavior...then the gulf narrows quickly).
I can easily go to any one of hundreds of locations that I know of (and I'm a damn foreigner) in Beijing and buy openly pirated movies and software. Sure, it is illegal to sell that stuff per the law books, but the government just doesn't care. And when they make some noise about caring, it's VERY temporary, the press gets their story and photos, and then it's back to business as usual.
Government officials are profiting directly from winking at this illicit trade so there's little incentive for those lower on the totem poles to rock the boat. It's not uncommon for the owner of one of these illicit DVD/CD fabs to bring in the relative of some party official in as a "silent partner" to keep the heat off. Welcome to China. Now be quiet and enjoy your 10RMB DVD (complete with fancy packaging and liner notes) that can be had in most subway stations and street corners in Beijing...er...roughly 7% of the price I'd pay at my local Best Buy for the same title in similar packaging.....
I dunno. But perhaps AMD "ran the numbers" and decided that it wasn't competitive in the embedded marketplace. As the smaller of the two CPU rivals, it needs to be careful about which battles it chooses to fight and can't dip a toe into every niche market. The Athlon Neo looks like an interesting product, but it seems a little too power hungry for the tiny netbook market and definitely not for embedded devices other than perhaps set top boxes. Time will tell.
In these economic times people don't seem to care so much about "silly" things like privacy and security when they're scrapping for a job. In a better economy, I think people would be more inclined to make a big fuss. Sad.
In the face of credible and supported competition that's FREE, it becomes hard to justify to PHB's that they'll need to spend a few grand per server on licenses (plus hopping on the license upgrade merry-go-round every couple of years) to do the same work.
On the desktop side, it's the same deal. Trying to shoehorn in a few hundred bucks of worthless software licenses onto devices that are going to be priced in the low to mid hundreds is going to be a non-starter for the companies that want to sell the devices. Enter Linux.
then I'm sure anything is possible if enough resources are thrown at the problem. For everyone else, I'm sure a single wipe is just fine.
Besides, if the man (Tm) really wants to know what you're up to, there are MANY other ways of getting at your secrets than trying to analyze your hard drive.
Call me when there's a fembot that will bring pizza and beer (and er....other services) without being summoned to do so. Then I'll be all set to retire and contemplate truly meaningful things like how to more effectively eliminate lint and sweater pills. Oh, and mister designer...don't forget the MUTE button.
I don't know about *your* mom, but my 65-ish year old parents Adapted from Windows 2000 to CentOS 5.2 (the desktop version) + OpenOffice 3 in about a day. I just needed about 20-30 minutes of time to show them the little differences in using their new GUI.
Their first comment? "Wow, this is pretty fast. Now we don't have to spend a grand on a new computer. Thanks!" (on a fairly old 2ghz P4 box with 512mb RAM and Matrox...remember them?...video card)
I live in China for several months a year and this is not even close to accurate. EVERYONE knows (and more importantaly/sadly ACCEPTS) the widespread corruption in China. Attempts at "stamping it out" are token attempts, at best. It is widespread and pervasive. At the end of the day, the CCP is about self preservation. Making any serious effort at killing off corruption cuts too close to the bone.
Yes, Chinese are proud of their country, but better than half would bolt for the door if they were given the opportunity to go to Europe or the US.
Child of Chinese government lackey studying abroad fails to see the utility of reporting censorship while living large on the spoils of corruption. Big surprise....
I can confirm that the English version is available in Beijing while the Chinese version isn't.
And yes, you're right that most of the clods here just don't care that their news is fondled en route to their tv/monitor/radio/etc. In that sense, the cretins with guns have won.
"But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
What's the point of adding that statement? So it's OK to steal from someone who is "rich" or who has a shrewd accountant?
I don't like Microsoft any more than the next guy, but winking at large scale theft of their product because they somehow "deserve it" is just plain wrong.
Some of the incarnations might be ugly, but the building blocks for "making it pretty" are there. A big Achilles heel is the graphics situation. Even with REALLY fast video cards, my Linux desktop seems to lag Windows in terms of having fast graphics. Without that, it's hard to ratchet up the eye candy for people that care about that sort of thing (and I'm not really one of those).
I have had the occasion to visit MII in China. They can already get a screenshot of what any iCafe user is doing in real time. I saw it with my own eyes. Combine that with their requirement that iCafe users need to show their ID card when they rent a computer and there is effectively zero privacy. These were windows PC's so I'm not sure why the hurry to switch to Linux. It probably has less to do with the actual operating system and more to do with the vendor who is supporting the switchover backhanding some government lackey a Benz or three. Welcome to China.
It really depends on what the larger distros choose to stick with as their default. To be honest, I'd still be using ext2 if Redhat hadn't made ext3 the default. While I'm sure that some applications depend on wringing that last few % of performance out of the spindles, it just doesn't matter THAT much for most applications.
Slashdot Mirror
What I "lose" in javascript performance, I think I more than make up for in not wasting any cpu cycles on anti-virus crud.
I'm not at all sure how relevant these synthetic tests are. I use Ubuntu 8.10 on a 2 year old laptop and it honestly feels snappier now than it did when it was running XP. Maybe some things are slower and some things are faster. Beats me, as I'm too busy actually using it for real work to be bothered benchmarking it. But on the whole, it certainly "feels faster" now.
Best,
Sometimes when I see how trivial it is to hijack Microsoft boxes, I think that half their coders must be spending their days "providing DNA" in some broom closet while surfing pr0n. For fuck sake, Microsoft has fairly unlimited resources. If they really WANTED to clean up their security act, they could.
In my 15+ years using Linux, various BSDs, and other open source software, I can't recall even once where someone asked me to "prove" that my tools were secure.
I just tried it with my windows mobile 6.1 phone (Samsung Blackjack II) and followed the instructions to the letter. No joy. It was good for about 20 minutes of aggravation though. Maybe Google can harness that angst for their next datacenter project. grrrr...
:)
But seriously, I installed Ubuntu last night. I've been a diehard RHEL/CentOS user for years. It just plain worked out of the box for me on a relatively new laptop. It found the Wifi,sound, my bluetooth mouse, asked me if I wanted the "non free" binary accelerated Radeon X1600 video driver, etc. Pretty slick.
I realize that I'm not a typical clueless windows user, but I think this is downright easy to migrate to for a Windows user, especially when Firefox 3.x and Openoffice are bundled along with it. That's enough to satisfy a huge swath of userbase and it's completely free. The entire install only took about 10 minutes too.
Kudos to the Ubuntu team.
I can already see the craigslist ads..."Wanted: Computer geek to come snake out my RAM."
It's modded funny, but it is accurate. If you don't like Google's policy and they won't change it....vote with your feet. I actually uninstalled google earth because of this.
As long as my wife doesn't use it to track my girlfriend. Then I'd be really f00ked.
While strides have been made in HIV treatment, it's still a death sentence. Doctors can keep the patient alive longer, but they can't prevent the inevitable.
With so many people in the developing world suffering from HIV, it would be nice to see something like this fast tracked. I am sure that some of those folks, now intimately familiar with their own mortality, would be eager to participate knowing that they could potentially help other people.
I guess it's back to using an E-meter or flipping a coin to see who is telling the truth. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter
I spend a great deal of time in China. The real crux of the problem is that there is a WIDE gulf between the law and enforcement of the law (unless it involves anti-government behavior...then the gulf narrows quickly).
I can easily go to any one of hundreds of locations that I know of (and I'm a damn foreigner) in Beijing and buy openly pirated movies and software. Sure, it is illegal to sell that stuff per the law books, but the government just doesn't care. And when they make some noise about caring, it's VERY temporary, the press gets their story and photos, and then it's back to business as usual.
Government officials are profiting directly from winking at this illicit trade so there's little incentive for those lower on the totem poles to rock the boat. It's not uncommon for the owner of one of these illicit DVD/CD fabs to bring in the relative of some party official in as a "silent partner" to keep the heat off. Welcome to China. Now be quiet and enjoy your 10RMB DVD (complete with fancy packaging and liner notes) that can be had in most subway stations and street corners in Beijing...er...roughly 7% of the price I'd pay at my local Best Buy for the same title in similar packaging.....
I suspect the performance would have been a LOT better if they'd used something like the 3Ware 9690SA. 3Ware is also a LOT more Linux friendly.
Cheers,
I dunno. But perhaps AMD "ran the numbers" and decided that it wasn't competitive in the embedded marketplace. As the smaller of the two CPU rivals, it needs to be careful about which battles it chooses to fight and can't dip a toe into every niche market. The Athlon Neo looks like an interesting product, but it seems a little too power hungry for the tiny netbook market and definitely not for embedded devices other than perhaps set top boxes. Time will tell.
In these economic times people don't seem to care so much about "silly" things like privacy and security when they're scrapping for a job. In a better economy, I think people would be more inclined to make a big fuss. Sad.
In the face of credible and supported competition that's FREE, it becomes hard to justify to PHB's that they'll need to spend a few grand per server on licenses (plus hopping on the license upgrade merry-go-round every couple of years) to do the same work.
On the desktop side, it's the same deal. Trying to shoehorn in a few hundred bucks of worthless software licenses onto devices that are going to be priced in the low to mid hundreds is going to be a non-starter for the companies that want to sell the devices. Enter Linux.
Cheers,
then I'm sure anything is possible if enough resources are thrown at the problem. For everyone else, I'm sure a single wipe is just fine.
Besides, if the man (Tm) really wants to know what you're up to, there are MANY other ways of getting at your secrets than trying to analyze your hard drive.
Cheers,
Call me when there's a fembot that will bring pizza and beer (and er....other services) without being summoned to do so. Then I'll be all set to retire and contemplate truly meaningful things like how to more effectively eliminate lint and sweater pills. Oh, and mister designer...don't forget the MUTE button.
I don't know about *your* mom, but my 65-ish year old parents Adapted from Windows 2000 to CentOS 5.2 (the desktop version) + OpenOffice 3 in about a day. I just needed about 20-30 minutes of time to show them the little differences in using their new GUI.
Their first comment? "Wow, this is pretty fast. Now we don't have to spend a grand on a new computer. Thanks!" (on a fairly old 2ghz P4 box with 512mb RAM and Matrox...remember them?...video card)
There is hope.
Cheers,
This is absolute bullshit.
I live in China for several months a year and this is not even close to accurate. EVERYONE knows (and more importantaly/sadly ACCEPTS) the widespread corruption in China. Attempts at "stamping it out" are token attempts, at best. It is widespread and pervasive. At the end of the day, the CCP is about self preservation. Making any serious effort at killing off corruption cuts too close to the bone.
Yes, Chinese are proud of their country, but better than half would bolt for the door if they were given the opportunity to go to Europe or the US.
Best,
*yawn*
Child of Chinese government lackey studying abroad fails to see the utility of reporting censorship while living large on the spoils of corruption. Big surprise....
I can confirm that the English version is available in Beijing while the Chinese version isn't.
And yes, you're right that most of the clods here just don't care that their news is fondled en route to their tv/monitor/radio/etc. In that sense, the cretins with guns have won.
Best,
"But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
What's the point of adding that statement? So it's OK to steal from someone who is "rich" or who has a shrewd accountant?
I don't like Microsoft any more than the next guy, but winking at large scale theft of their product because they somehow "deserve it" is just plain wrong.
Cheers,
It's a space station!
Some of the incarnations might be ugly, but the building blocks for "making it pretty" are there. A big Achilles heel is the graphics situation. Even with REALLY fast video cards, my Linux desktop seems to lag Windows in terms of having fast graphics. Without that, it's hard to ratchet up the eye candy for people that care about that sort of thing (and I'm not really one of those).
Nice to get ext4 into "stable" though.
Cheers,
I have had the occasion to visit MII in China. They can already get a screenshot of what any iCafe user is doing in real time. I saw it with my own eyes. Combine that with their requirement that iCafe users need to show their ID card when they rent a computer and there is effectively zero privacy. These were windows PC's so I'm not sure why the hurry to switch to Linux. It probably has less to do with the actual operating system and more to do with the vendor who is supporting the switchover backhanding some government lackey a Benz or three. Welcome to China.
It really depends on what the larger distros choose to stick with as their default. To be honest, I'd still be using ext2 if Redhat hadn't made ext3 the default. While I'm sure that some applications depend on wringing that last few % of performance out of the spindles, it just doesn't matter THAT much for most applications.