I remember when I got suckered into buying 2 voodoo cards placed into my PC in SLI mode.
the demo disc that came with it showed off -: DAZZLING:- effects...
and _NONE_ of the fucking games I owned or subsequently bought got any significant benefit from it...
hmmmmm...
No wonder people are buying consoles - they are tired of being milked!
"...the virus writers don't even consider the tiny Mac base worth harassing."
Not any morrrrre maaaaaaaaannn.
Thanks to Mr. Jobs idiotic decision to convert the hardware to Intel CPU's AND enabling easy booting of Windows on Mac's using the new Bootcamp saoftware.
Stupidist decision Apple ever made. It will destroy the company.
I predict that these two things, changing to Intel CPU's & facilitating the running of Windows on Mac's, will prove to be a catastrophic mistake for Apple.
Windows has a broader range of applications available & so as Mac users sample this new universe they will end up spending more & more time there.
Eventualy the penny drops that they may as well use low cost commmodidty Wintel HW instead of expensive proprietary Apple HW to do the same thing...
As an Apple Powermac owner I can attest that there are some great apps written only for Mac's but compared to the vast library of Windows apps... well... I can't see it as a fair contest.
After 'upgrading' our very nice (& expensive) non PowerPC based Mac's to very nice (& expensive) PowerPC based Mac's not so long ago we are not interested in once again 'upgrading' our very nice (& expensive) PowerPC based Mac's to very nice (& expensive) Intel based Mac's to suit Apple.
Instead we have simply given up & just switched to low cost commodity Wintel HW.
I think over time, a lot of others will do this also. In our household the announcement that Apple had capitulated to Wintel mean't to us that a desktop OS had now been reduced to Monopoly$oft or OSS (primarily Linux).
"My main purpose was to illustrate the fact that a computer dosen't need to be 1+Ghz to be what some people consider to be useful..."
I agree 100% with this. For the first time ever our houshold is actually 'downgrading' our beast PC's as the come due for replacement with 'low end' laptops because a) they are so cheap now & b) they are already plenty powerful enough.
Our focus has changed to finding & using software that makes best use of this hardware instead of slavishly throwing hardware at the latest bloat-ware de jour.
"why would you want to give away the memory saving advantages of shared libraries? Multiple applications can use the same shared library copy that is loaded into RAM"
Once again this is theory, it's the poor implementation that I have a beef with & what the majority of users experience major hassles with.
M$ were forced to deal with it in their OS by protecting system.dll's - even going to the extreme of copying back any.dll's that had changed after each reboot.
Mac OS X uses fat binaries & protected system files.
Linux has incredible dependency problems caused by the combination of installing multiple desktops, multiple window managers, multiple libraries etc all placed in different places in different distros with symlinks splattered all over the place at the whim of different ditro authors.
None of the attempts at package management currently deal with this as effectively as the authors would have us believe.
Many Linux advocates often state "oh just grab the source & bulid your app package yourself, no problem" - yeah sure, this is a cruel joke on the average user who quickly gives up drowning in error messages spewing down their screens from the compiler.
In another post I noted that I had the least frustration with a.tgz based Slackware system, but hey maybe that's just me.
Don't get me wrong, I see great potential for Linux & I love the concept of OSS but lets call a spade a spade & start being honest about what needs fixing ok?
"At the moment you can download a tiny application that can contain a huge amount of functionality as it's standing on the shoulders of giants (the available libraries) rather than re-inventing the wheel."
That's the theory... the practical outcome (for most folks) is very different however.
"...A great deal of this is caused by programmer never reinventing wheels in OSS. This means that every program has dependancies for a half dozen third party programs and libraries instead of incorporating just the functionality they need for their app. Those half dozen programs and libraries have followed the same bloat yielding philosophy and have their own dependancies; those in turn have their own dependancies and so on."
I agree 100% with this. Dependency hell is alive & well in Linux.
Linux advocates should acknowledge it & DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Currently it is glossed over, this is just as bad as wintel fanboys & trolls.
Advocates of Linux stress choice but the end user experience is somewhat different to the rosy picture given by hobbyists & otherwise technical advocates.
The fact that there are so many specialist distros such as DSL & Puppy is ample evidence that it is beyond the capacity of 'Joe Sixpack' users to successfuly configure a Linux system by adding or removing packages & recompilng the kernel to suit their particular hardware thereby reducing bloat.
Dependency management & Package management in general in Linux badly needs looking at, its easily broken & requires too much technical knowledge to fix.
I don't care which is your favourite.rpm,.deb etc - I've tried them all. As a non expert user i actually had the least amount of trouble tinkering with a.tgz based Slackware 9 system, but even there, my configurability was limited to minor package alterations, any thing beyond that quickly broke the system.
* The folks at Gobo Linux have made what I regard as the sensible decision to emulate the 'Fat Binary' concept of Mac OSX. A far less troublesome way to handle the issue of dependencies.
Loking at the source code reveals a shambles of poor cpu & ram management - Gnome 2.14 goes a long way to fixing this thankfully.
There are almost 500 known distributions of Linux now, most reimplementing previous was, sometimes to the betterment of Linux but often just out of vanity or personal preference.
Some distro's have exceptional hardware detection on a par with the commercial rivals, for example Knoppix... Some distro's have simple uncomplicated software management eg Gobo... Some have a simple BSD style undeprinning eg. Slackware... Some have very good gui managemnet tools etc etc but no one Linux combines all the myriad good ideas in one usable system. Linux appears to be a crazy 'free for for all' for programmers to indulge themselves in.
This is the greatest strength & the greatest weakness of Linux.
++ Our household & small security business experimented in switching to Linux for 12 months because we craved choice & abhored the M$ monolply like many others. After 6 months we were forced to look for something else due to fustrations of limited driver support for hardware & limited application availability. (We liked Linux overall)
We switched to Mac OSX for 12 months & really liked the system but noticed some hassles with drivers & applications.
We replace our Computers in our business annually so upon the adoption of Intel CPUs & Enabling WinXP on Mac's we decided to just replace the Mac's with inexpensive quality (Acer etc) Wintel machines (mostly laptops) & just take a very proactive approach to managing security (investing in really good firewalls etc). After all, the Mac's are fast becoming just as vulnerable now (thanks Mr. Jobs) but at greater cost of hardware.
So here we are back on the despised Windows platform bitterly awaiting the day when we can find a Linux that truly substitutes for Windows at favourable cost.
p.s. I have been trying out Linux distros since the days of multi floppy img's downloaded via 9600 bps modems back in the early nineties.
Guess it's like how people think they can drive 4wd vehicles in water with impunity (like the ad's) whereas any decent mechanic will shake his head & say 'hey, oil seals are mean't to keep oil IN, not water OUT!
Mechanical things are sometimes counter intuitive...
Yeah I know all the intellectual reasons for why this is not a big deal but you have to admit that it's ironic they spend so much time & money trying to stop shit falling offf this baby at a zillion miles a second and then some shit just ups & drops off it while it's standing still...
If I was about to be strapped into it my bowels would be loosening right about now...
Slashdot Mirror
they used to brag how they were spending a billion bucks on windows NT but look at we got for that money....
I remember when I got suckered into buying 2 voodoo cards placed into my PC in SLI mode.
:- effects...
the demo disc that came with it showed off -: DAZZLING
and _NONE_ of the fucking games I owned or subsequently bought got any significant benefit from it...
hmmmmm...
No wonder people are buying consoles - they are tired of being milked!
I use Outpost Firewall (agnitum.com).
It incorporates very good content blocking into IE as well as spyware filtering along with it's excellent Firewalling.
All you need is a decent Antivirus scanner & you're pretty much covered.
"...the virus writers don't even consider the tiny Mac base worth harassing."
Not any morrrrre maaaaaaaaannn.
Thanks to Mr. Jobs idiotic decision to convert the hardware to Intel CPU's AND enabling easy booting of Windows on Mac's using the new Bootcamp saoftware.
Stupidist decision Apple ever made. It will destroy the company.
I predict that these two things, changing to Intel CPU's & facilitating the running of Windows on Mac's, will prove to be a catastrophic mistake for Apple.
Windows has a broader range of applications available & so as Mac users sample this new universe they will end up spending more & more time there.
Eventualy the penny drops that they may as well use low cost commmodidty Wintel HW instead of expensive proprietary Apple HW to do the same thing...
As an Apple Powermac owner I can attest that there are some great apps written only for Mac's but compared to the vast library of Windows apps... well... I can't see it as a fair contest.
After 'upgrading' our very nice (& expensive) non PowerPC based Mac's to very nice (& expensive) PowerPC based Mac's not so long ago we are not interested in once again 'upgrading' our very nice (& expensive) PowerPC based Mac's to very nice (& expensive) Intel based Mac's to suit Apple.
Instead we have simply given up & just switched to low cost commodity Wintel HW.
I think over time, a lot of others will do this also.
In our household the announcement that Apple had capitulated to Wintel mean't to us that a desktop OS had now been reduced to Monopoly$oft or OSS (primarily Linux).
"...my experience is completely different from yours..."
Bearing in mind that Slashdot has a high number of techies, hobbiests & enthusiasts, that's not at all surprising.
You're not Joe six pack... I think we all get that.
"My main purpose was to illustrate the fact that a computer dosen't need to be 1+Ghz to be what some people consider to be useful..."
I agree 100% with this.
For the first time ever our houshold is actually 'downgrading' our beast PC's as the come due for replacement with 'low end' laptops because a) they are so cheap now & b) they are already plenty powerful enough.
Our focus has changed to finding & using software that makes best use of this hardware instead of slavishly throwing hardware at the latest bloat-ware de jour.
Linux is one way to possibly achieve this.
"why would you want to give away the memory saving advantages of shared libraries? Multiple applications can use the same shared library copy that is loaded into RAM"
.dll's - even going to the extreme of copying back any .dll's that had changed after each reboot.
.tgz based Slackware system, but hey maybe that's just me.
Once again this is theory, it's the poor implementation that I have a beef with & what the majority of users experience major hassles with.
M$ were forced to deal with it in their OS by protecting system
Mac OS X uses fat binaries & protected system files.
Linux has incredible dependency problems caused by the combination of installing multiple desktops, multiple window managers, multiple libraries etc all placed in different places in different distros with symlinks splattered all over the place at the whim of different ditro authors.
None of the attempts at package management currently deal with this as effectively as the authors would have us believe.
Many Linux advocates often state "oh just grab the source & bulid your app package yourself, no problem" - yeah sure, this is a cruel joke on the average user who quickly gives up drowning in error messages spewing down their screens from the compiler.
In another post I noted that I had the least frustration with a
Don't get me wrong, I see great potential for Linux & I love the concept of OSS but lets call a spade a spade & start being honest about what needs fixing ok?
"At the moment you can download a tiny application that can contain a huge amount of functionality as it's standing on the shoulders of giants (the available libraries) rather than re-inventing the wheel."
That's the theory... the practical outcome (for most folks) is very different however.
"...A great deal of this is caused by programmer never reinventing wheels in OSS. This means that every program has dependancies for a half dozen third party programs and libraries instead of incorporating just the functionality they need for their app. Those half dozen programs and libraries have followed the same bloat yielding philosophy and have their own dependancies; those in turn have their own dependancies and so on."
I agree 100% with this.
Dependency hell is alive & well in Linux.
Linux advocates should acknowledge it & DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Currently it is glossed over, this is just as bad as wintel fanboys & trolls.
Advocates of Linux stress choice but the end user experience is somewhat different to the rosy picture given by hobbyists & otherwise technical advocates.
.rpm, .deb etc - I've tried them all. .tgz based Slackware 9 system, but even there, my configurability was limited to minor package alterations, any thing beyond that quickly broke the system.
The fact that there are so many specialist distros such as DSL & Puppy is ample evidence that it is beyond the capacity of 'Joe Sixpack' users to successfuly configure a Linux system by adding or removing packages & recompilng the kernel to suit their particular hardware thereby reducing bloat.
Dependency management & Package management in general in Linux badly needs looking at, its easily broken & requires too much technical knowledge to fix.
I don't care which is your favourite
As a non expert user i actually had the least amount of trouble tinkering with a
* The folks at Gobo Linux have made what I regard as the sensible decision to emulate the 'Fat Binary' concept of Mac OSX. A far less troublesome way to handle the issue of dependencies.
Loking at the source code reveals a shambles of poor cpu & ram management - Gnome 2.14 goes a long way to fixing this thankfully.
There are almost 500 known distributions of Linux now, most reimplementing previous was, sometimes to the betterment of Linux but often just out of vanity or personal preference.
Some distro's have exceptional hardware detection on a par with the commercial rivals, for example Knoppix... Some distro's have simple uncomplicated software management eg Gobo... Some have a simple BSD style undeprinning eg. Slackware... Some have very good gui managemnet tools etc etc but no one Linux combines all the myriad good ideas in one usable system. Linux appears to be a crazy 'free for for all' for programmers to indulge themselves in.
This is the greatest strength & the greatest weakness of Linux.
++ Our household & small security business experimented in switching to Linux for 12 months because we craved choice & abhored the M$ monolply like many others. After 6 months we were forced to look for something else due to fustrations of limited driver support for hardware & limited application availability. (We liked Linux overall)
We switched to Mac OSX for 12 months & really liked the system but noticed some hassles with drivers & applications.
We replace our Computers in our business annually so upon the adoption of Intel CPUs & Enabling WinXP on Mac's we decided to just replace the Mac's with inexpensive quality (Acer etc) Wintel machines (mostly laptops) & just take a very proactive approach to managing security (investing in really good firewalls etc). After all, the Mac's are fast becoming just as vulnerable now (thanks Mr. Jobs) but at greater cost of hardware.
So here we are back on the despised Windows platform bitterly awaiting the day when we can find a Linux that truly substitutes for Windows at favourable cost.
p.s. I have been trying out Linux distros since the days of multi floppy img's downloaded via 9600 bps modems back in the early nineties.
"..Gnome coders are taking the best of Windows and Mac OSX and putting it into Gnome..."
Good! That's what I like about Linux & Open source/Free Software!!
The ability to break free & come up with something new/better.
Honestly though you have to give credit to both KDE & Gnome for the work they are doing.
Wow interesting to know that about the sr-71!
Guess it's like how people think they can drive 4wd vehicles in water with impunity (like the ad's) whereas any decent mechanic will shake his head & say 'hey, oil seals are mean't to keep oil IN, not water OUT!
Mechanical things are sometimes counter intuitive...
Yeah I know all the intellectual reasons for why this is not a big deal but you have to admit that it's ironic they spend so much time & money trying to stop shit falling offf this baby at a zillion miles a second and then some shit just ups & drops off it while it's standing still...
If I was about to be strapped into it my bowels would be loosening right about now...
They are making a virtue out of having the print head built into the printer?
Epson do it this way which is why I DITCHED my Epson & bought a Canon with separate & replaceable print head / ink tanks.
The second question that comes to my mind is how much higher can manufactures drive nozzle density/droplet size before it becomes meaningless?
I have found quality of driver software far more important in the finished results.