That's true. I have been experimenting a bit with setting up a Hackintosh, and it really lives up to its name: hacks after hacks. A complete nightmare, and even if you get it working, you wind up with an unstable system. Hunting third party drivers for Windows, or the little tweaks you need in Linux, start to look like child's play after that.
If you happen to find compatible hardware, setting up a Hackintosh can be a fun thing to screw around with for one weekend, but other than that, it doesn't provide much value, and is not a realistic shortcut for "a cheap Mac".
BTW the new Mac Mini comes with fixed onboard RAM. I wish I could see a more detailed teardown soon, would like to see how hard it is to replace the HDD.
The options are only "I'm safe" and "I'm not in the area". Other people can't now distinguish between the situations that you are not safe or that you have just not got around to click a button.
Linus has found a certain style that appears to work for him and the team closest to him so I won't say it's wrong, but if his style were different would he have attracted different people to that inner circle, and would those people have been more effective or less? Can't say.
It's not only about effectiveness but about treating other people with respect.
"One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."
Excuses, excuses. One can easily be heard and still be professional if he wants to. Linux alone is so cool and influential that the leader of the project will certainly get noticed even without peppering everything with insults and cursing.
cpubenchmark.net is these days quite useful tool for comparison. You get a rough number, which isn't applicable to all use scenarios, but is still worlds better than clock rate.
I doesn't matter anyway. The vast majority of users (almost 100%) won't read the source or make modifications. From a purely marketing perspective, "open source" is a word like "locally-grown" to add a nice and cozy grassroots feeling to the product.
More specifically, it is governed by the Continuum feature, which means that when you go mobile (for example detach the screen unit from a hybrid device's base), it will switch to Modern UI. The apps that you have open are arranged nicely depending on the use case.
But I bet you'd see some interesting differences if you compare the time between when an open-source vulnerability is reported and when it is fixed to the same interval for a commercial, closed source alternative, you'd see that known vulnerabilities exist for a much shorter time in a well-supported open source product.
Take a look at bug trackers of OSS projects sometimes. They are full of known bugs which have been waiting for fix for months or years. Around the time when Heartbleed was discovered, there was another bug reported 4 years ago and no one had taken the responsibility to fix it. It even had a CVE record.
For security it is not enough that anyone can read the source code. In practice people rarely have the time or patience to churn through projects that can be 10k or 100k lines of code, just looking for dragons for fun. If we really want to get this right, there must be professional, thorough, provable and documented code audits.
... their software will look like a 2000 era flash app made by a 13 year old, be even slower than that and receive absolutely no updates; if there is even a minor problem with the standard, you will have to buy a new adapter to get the fix.
The background of that app is a grey gradient with lots of uneven banding. Over that there is text drawn with white MS Sans Serif font. When you change Windows DPI setting, the text becomes larger, but also horribly aliased and can't fit the window anymore. There is a button to check for updates, but you have never seen it find one. "Check update..." "No update found !" When you restore the app from system tray you can see how it slowly paints its GUI. Then when you exit the app, it pops up a message box with the text "Error: NULL".
The point is that you *can* read the source code. *Anyone* has that ability, or can learn to do so. Many people do so.
Almost no one but the actual developers of the project read the source code. Software projects are so large these days that people seldom wade through the multiple thousands lines of code just for fun.
Here's an experiment people here can do: download the source code of some small project and read it thoroughly. Just try what it feels like. Understanding how the program actually works can take surprisingly big amount of time.
This is also the reason why I cringe when the backend of Linux distros is often woven together with shell scripts. You have to be super careful to write code with proper input validation, and all the related tools must retain their interfaces or you get weird "Invalid argument" type of breakage. Then there are things like Shellshock which immediately made the dhclient script vulnerable. It's all just too dangerous. And I didn't even begin to talk about the slow parsing of scripts and the forking overhead of every little process the script calls.
You mean The Pirate Bay? They have just outsourced the trackers, that's all. Or if you meant Magnet links, if you read through them, you can see that they contain a bunch of tracker addresses too.
On the other hand, the cheapness of cloud bandwidth has eliminated all the legal utility of bit torrent for me. "Large" legal collections of things tend to be available for straight download nowadays.
Cloud distribution is probably also much more efficient.
Don't get me wrong, I think BitTorrent is very cool technological achievement. But transferring data between semi-random hosts around the globe and opening hundreds of TCP connections per computer while doing it, is like the ultimate way to clog the pipes.
I don't see how lowering the resolution would free CPU time. Wouldn't the CPU still do the same object calculations at the same positions, and the rasterization be left completely to the GPU?
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. I have been experimenting a bit with setting up a Hackintosh, and it really lives up to its name: hacks after hacks. A complete nightmare, and even if you get it working, you wind up with an unstable system. Hunting third party drivers for Windows, or the little tweaks you need in Linux, start to look like child's play after that.
If you happen to find compatible hardware, setting up a Hackintosh can be a fun thing to screw around with for one weekend, but other than that, it doesn't provide much value, and is not a realistic shortcut for "a cheap Mac".
BTW the new Mac Mini comes with fixed onboard RAM. I wish I could see a more detailed teardown soon, would like to see how hard it is to replace the HDD.
since from what I have heard, modern video drivers emulate OpenGL 1/2
Where did you hear this?
OSS is not one-process-at-a time.
The options are only "I'm safe" and "I'm not in the area". Other people can't now distinguish between the situations that you are not safe or that you have just not got around to click a button.
Linus has found a certain style that appears to work for him and the team closest to him so I won't say it's wrong, but if his style were different would he have attracted different people to that inner circle, and would those people have been more effective or less? Can't say.
It's not only about effectiveness but about treating other people with respect.
"One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."
Excuses, excuses. One can easily be heard and still be professional if he wants to. Linux alone is so cool and influential that the leader of the project will certainly get noticed even without peppering everything with insults and cursing.
cpubenchmark.net is these days quite useful tool for comparison. You get a rough number, which isn't applicable to all use scenarios, but is still worlds better than clock rate.
Yes, that is true.
The mini wouldn't be a bad way to go... it's not that expensive and I can still use my 27" monitor.
Was thinking the same. The good specs and lower price make the new Mini quite attractive desktop.
I doesn't matter anyway. The vast majority of users (almost 100%) won't read the source or make modifications. From a purely marketing perspective, "open source" is a word like "locally-grown" to add a nice and cozy grassroots feeling to the product.
I believe the correct term is Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). That's the compositor. "Aero and the Win8's new one" are just themes. :)
Anyway, which apps?
More specifically, it is governed by the Continuum feature, which means that when you go mobile (for example detach the screen unit from a hybrid device's base), it will switch to Modern UI. The apps that you have open are arranged nicely depending on the use case.
But I bet you'd see some interesting differences if you compare the time between when an open-source vulnerability is reported and when it is fixed to the same interval for a commercial, closed source alternative, you'd see that known vulnerabilities exist for a much shorter time in a well-supported open source product.
Take a look at bug trackers of OSS projects sometimes. They are full of known bugs which have been waiting for fix for months or years. Around the time when Heartbleed was discovered, there was another bug reported 4 years ago and no one had taken the responsibility to fix it. It even had a CVE record.
For security it is not enough that anyone can read the source code. In practice people rarely have the time or patience to churn through projects that can be 10k or 100k lines of code, just looking for dragons for fun. If we really want to get this right, there must be professional, thorough, provable and documented code audits.
And a competent windows admin still deals with viruses on their servers.
No, they don't.
Try this mental experiment. What if the article described Microsoft using camels for Bing map service? Would it change your view?
... their software will look like a 2000 era flash app made by a 13 year old, be even slower than that and receive absolutely no updates; if there is even a minor problem with the standard, you will have to buy a new adapter to get the fix.
The background of that app is a grey gradient with lots of uneven banding. Over that there is text drawn with white MS Sans Serif font. When you change Windows DPI setting, the text becomes larger, but also horribly aliased and can't fit the window anymore. There is a button to check for updates, but you have never seen it find one. "Check update ..." "No update found !" When you restore the app from system tray you can see how it slowly paints its GUI. Then when you exit the app, it pops up a message box with the text "Error: NULL".
The point is that you *can* read the source code. *Anyone* has that ability, or can learn to do so. Many people do so.
Almost no one but the actual developers of the project read the source code. Software projects are so large these days that people seldom wade through the multiple thousands lines of code just for fun.
Here's an experiment people here can do: download the source code of some small project and read it thoroughly. Just try what it feels like. Understanding how the program actually works can take surprisingly big amount of time.
Do that experiment now.
This is also the reason why I cringe when the backend of Linux distros is often woven together with shell scripts. You have to be super careful to write code with proper input validation, and all the related tools must retain their interfaces or you get weird "Invalid argument" type of breakage. Then there are things like Shellshock which immediately made the dhclient script vulnerable. It's all just too dangerous. And I didn't even begin to talk about the slow parsing of scripts and the forking overhead of every little process the script calls.
How could the linux driver be ready before launch ?
That can be true if the hardware company is writing the Linux driver. I have seen it only happen with Intel though.
You mean The Pirate Bay? They have just outsourced the trackers, that's all. Or if you meant Magnet links, if you read through them, you can see that they contain a bunch of tracker addresses too.
On the other hand, the cheapness of cloud bandwidth has eliminated all the legal utility of bit torrent for me. "Large" legal collections of things tend to be available for straight download nowadays.
Cloud distribution is probably also much more efficient.
Don't get me wrong, I think BitTorrent is very cool technological achievement. But transferring data between semi-random hosts around the globe and opening hundreds of TCP connections per computer while doing it, is like the ultimate way to clog the pipes.
Why would a higher resolution cause more traffic between CPU and GPU?
I don't see how lowering the resolution would free CPU time. Wouldn't the CPU still do the same object calculations at the same positions, and the rasterization be left completely to the GPU?