Well, folks like Linus Torvalds sum up exactly what I've thought of Gnome for a while:
Where dialogs used to give a variety of options, now the standard is essentially:
"Do you want to foo? [OK] [CANCEL]"
This is a classic case of why I hate Gnome. It's too dumbed down, to the point where Windows is superior with it's "[Yes] [No] [Cancel]" or with KDE's de-facto standard of providing more verbose contextual options.
I used to be a bit of a Gnome fan and hated KDE with a passion. Now KDE has grown so much and Gnome has taken so many steps backwards that I *heart* KDE and hate Gnome with a passion. I keep both installed and with each release I upgrade Gnome and give it another chance, only to go right back to KDE for my primary desktop. It's also worth noting that the Gnome desktop's default look is not really a corporate look, but downright drab, to the point where it's hurtful to the eyes. KDE may be more colorful, but, at least on SuSE, it's done in such a way that it doesn't look garish like Windows' default Luna theme does. Yes, Plastik is kinda-sorta similar to Windows' window decorations, but the widgets Plastik provides are far more functional.
Europeans get a manual with Windows? Even the OEM version?
What is called a "manual" here is really just a glitzy brochure with no real, usable information. There hasn't been a cursory Windows manual since Windows 95 - and not a REAL manual since Windows 3.1 or 3.0. And that's if you bought the RETAIL version. Here, OEM customers get NOTHING unless the OEM was kind enough to author their own manual.
IIRC, courts have decided that enforcing price controls by forcing hardware to be sold with the OEM edition is not valid, so you can indeed sell OEM software without hardware. Just be damn sure what you are selling is actually legal and includes the COA (which with OEM pretty much means that annoying holographic sticker)
re: How is it an infringement of copyright when he doesn't even make a copy?
It's not. It's an example of Microsoft's buying off the courts, and their seeking to eliminate right of first sale. That specific case is one reason I started migrating my company to Linux last year. For workstations, if a box does not HAVE to run Adobe Creative Suite, Visual Studio, or Quickbooks, it has Linux on it instead. Servers? Exchange is being punted next, at that point we'll have no real need to keep the domain server on Windows and will be using Samba for authenticating what Windows workstations remain.
What we're doing costs Microsoft only 15 seats or so of recurring sales in the future, but I'm hardly the only one fed up with Microsoft's shift toward being outright hostile to customers, plus we recommend systems to other companies. We offer OSS alternatives such as OOo.org for customers who are unlikely to encounter OOo's major performance bugs, and Linux as alternatives for those who don't need Windows. Most still opt for Windows (many run Quickbooks or other apps such as medical practice management suites available ONLY for Windows), however very few go for Microsoft Office.:)
I've got to admit, I've never really understood why DVD produced such a massive shake-up. The video and audio quality is no better than LaserDisc, which was around for years and years prior to DVD. DVDs at first were perhaps a bit less expensive than LDs, but it wasn't a huge difference. People will point to the convenience of the smaller format. . . That's true, but I have a hard time seeing how that explains the massive, rapid success of DVD relative to LD. There weren't any portable DVD players in the beginning, so size shouldn't have mattered that much.
Size and capacity.
How often do you have to turn over or swap laser discs during a movie? For most films, at least once.
How often for DVDs? Unless you're watching a 5-hour-long single-layer Indian movie, exactly never.
How many portable LD players are there? Exactly zero. Even if marketed as portable, it isn't.
How many portable DVD players are there? Many, ranging from high-end videophile units down to K-Mart Blue-Light specials.
How many LD drives for PCs/Macs/etc are available? Zero?
How many for PCs/Macs/etc? Scores, if not hundreds, you say?
There is good reason DVD succeeded where LD kind of floundered since the '70s.
While I am also a Firefox fan and use it despite Konqueror's being very nice and passing the Acid2 test, it should be pointed out that Firefox does NOT pass the Acid2 test. At least, Firefox/1.5.0.1 does not. The dev tree might, but who counts that? One may as well claim that Looking Glass is the best operating environment ever - but since it's vaporware/unreleased it would be a false statement.
Sure, Firefox breaks less than IE does when loading the Acid2 test, however by a strict measurement, only one (two) browsers to date pass Acid2:
KHTML (Safari/Konqueror)
If you want to count dev trees/beta releases, then you've got:
Opera Firefox
Also, I think it's great that the Opera folks are almost mocking Microsoft, and challenging them to pass Acid2. Aside from KHTML which is there, and MSIE which TOTALLY pukes on it, Every other browser is almost rendering Acid2 to be recognizable as a smiley face. At least everyone else is attempting to handle proper CSS and bad CSS correctly, e.g, render compliant CSS, and downgrade gracefully on broken CSS.
What MSIE renders could just as well be accomplished by splashing paint on a sheet of canvas. With the way Microsoft is handling things, I wonder why they don't just ignore CSS altogether and turn their browser into a random pixel renderer?
Get with the program, Microsoft. You have the greatest market share so it is in your best interest for maintaining your share to act responsibly. I hope the mass reaction to MSIE 7.0 is for major sites to either block the browser, or to use CSS which causes MSIE to totally break, and for those sites to recommend all browsers which are not MSIE as alternatives.
Microsoft has held the web back long enough with their refusal to implement proper PNG rendering - their holding back the web has to stop now.
Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether."
How much did it cost Sony for that marketing analysis? They were stupid to even consider this "protection" algorithm in the first place. Why alienate PAYING customers when professional content pirates will not be deterred in the least? All you will end up doing is locking yourselves out of the majority of the market of existing HDTV owners, and locking yourself out of the market of people who rip legally-purchased media to iPod and PocketPC devices.
Once OS/X for x86 hits the shelves installing it on Wintel boxes is no longer going to be a piracy issue, just Jobs' trying to keep a stranglehold on the hardware market.
Why do you think you need a license? Copyright law doesn't impose ANY restrictions on what you do with something you've downloaded. It only stops you from making copies.
You got that ALMOST right. Let's correct it:
Why do you think you need a license? Copyright law doesn't impose ANY restrictions on what you do with something you've downloaded. It only stops you from making and distributing copies which are not in accordance with the Fair Use clause.
There. Much better. Methinks you work for the MPAA or RIAA.
. . . wait for it. . . DMCA to be misused by Apple in 3, 2, 1
You have now been sued by Apple in their nightly bid to take over the world. Troz!!
Seriously though, I wonder if Apple would consider taking action? They've already taken action against folks who run OS/X on Wintel boxes. If I were to run OS/X I'd want to run it on a whitebox PC, not an Applefied proprietary box that I can't select better hardware for.
Disputing a charge because a company delivered a defective product and refuses to make good on it? I'd say he's well within his right to demand a chargeback, especially on a big-ticket item.
Know that there ARE whitebox laptop manufacturers out there boasting a failure rate of under 2% and also offer ZERO-visibly-defective pixel policies.
Having been forced to work with Oracle before they had a usable GUI (It can be argued they still don't) theen MySQL Server, I learned to appreciate a database GUI. I've grown to *HEART* mysqlcc, and more recently mysql-administrator, mysql-query-browser, AND phpMyAdmin. Wake me up when the same are available for PostgreSQL AND they are bundled with major distributions like the MySQL tools are. Oh, and they need to WORK, too.
2. Familiarity
When I switched BACK to Windows without having touched Linux for 5+ years, the apps we initially standardized on use MySQL as the back end, many of them exclusively so. MySQL seems to be more ubiquitous in the OSS world, despite its license being less-free than PostgreSQL
3. Time
Who has the time to investigate or extend PostgreSQL, and why bother when there is MySQL? I've read up a little on PostgreSQL and I like its feature set better than MySQL, but I'd have to spend time learning about administering, backing up, restoring, configuring, and tuning it properly. I've already put that time into MySQL and right now I need to learn the ins and outs of asterisk on top of my usual workload. MySQL is running just fine, why switch now? When we develop an app for distribution which would not meet MySQL's requirements (e.g, requiring us to GPL the product), THEN I will put time into learning PostgreSQL.
Eh, what are you complaining aboot? (sorry, couldn't resist)
I, for one, refuse to believe your propoganda. Hell, as a South-Shore-residing Masshole, I refuse to believe that indoor plumbing exists west of I-495, and certainly not Internet access.:D
This is nothing new. Every president for the last 100 years or so has been disregarding the Constitution, as has Congress. Why should the judicial branch be any different?
By that logic, why did you ever leave Mommy and Daddy to go out on your own (or have you yet)? This is intended to be funny and drive across the point, BTW, and not an attack.
Why go to a bar, or to a movie? It's not even remotely useful to do either since they do not provide a living.
Ever go skiing? Why go up a mountain just to take a huge risk balancing on narrow pieces of fibreglass while sliding down the side of a mountain at 60-90mph, when at any moment you might just fall and end up crashing into a tree and dying?
Why bother doing ANYTHING?
It's human nature. Why not explore? I would LOVE to see the gas giants up close - especially Jupiter and Saturn. I would love visit the Horsehead nebulae up close. I would love to visit the vicinity of a black hole just to find out whether it is actually visible or not. I would love to visit a brown dwarf to see just what happens while a star "dies."
Wouldn't it be fascinating? For no other reason than to SEE it. In person. Wonder in amazment at the universe.
We're human. We explore. We have curiousity. Of COURSE we want to get off this "rock" - does there have to be any reason other than "it's out there, and I have never been there." - to paraphrase from The Truman Show - "Because I never have! That's why people go places, isn't it?"
Does there HAVE to be a tangible result?
of course, I'd love to see an end to political strife, starvation, etc. first before spending money on space exploration, but again, it's all human nature and it's human nature to bicker and those issues will never be solved, so why not spend money on exploration?
Many here think of an application (OOo Writer, M$ Word, Solitaire, Halo) opening 10% more quickly, or possibly a 10% faster framerate, and they Just. Don't. Get. It.
Why? Not because they're stupid; they just have not been exposed to large computing jobs in the business world yet, or they're isolated from the ramifications of scheduling.
When you have larger jobs which take anywhere from hours to days, weeks, or even months of processing time to complete, that 10% increase in performance is huge. In fact, a 2% increase can be huge because on really large jobs 2% can mean days shaved off of a job's completion time. 10% is a HUGE time savings and well worth the effort expended.
A 10% CPU speed gain would give you 2.7Ghz performance on a 2.4Ghz CPU. Unless you are running a big number crunching cluster then this isn't going to mean a great deal. If you are running a big maths app then the chances are you are compiling your own code from source with all the optimisations you could get anyway.
No, You have it backwards. A 10% performance gain from CPU optimizations compiled in will net you near-2.4Ghz performance on a 2.4Ghz processor. It will never give you 2.7Ghz peformance on a 2.4 Ghz processor.
If your binaries are compiled without MMX, SSE, SSE2, SMP/SMT, etc. then you're missing out on the multimedia-optimized calls, and your applications are unware of more advanced thread scheduling. Therefore, your applications will not be taking full advantage of your processor, effectively giving you the performance of a (since we're using the 10% number) 2.0Ghz box.
Non-optimized binaries don't give you the full performance of your processor.
It's like using a stock restrictive exhaust on a high-performance V8 engine. In stock form with the restrictive optimized-for-noise-level-and-profit exhaust system, you're getting a lower CFM than say, a Corsa or Flowmaster exhaust, where the system is optimized for high flow and velocity with efficient noise reduction used to balance the difference between legal sound levels and performance, regardless of cost. One of my cars has the stock exhaust because I like quiet systems, but my other has a stainless steel flowmaster exhaust because it's old enough to be exempt (in my state) from noise and emission laws - performance is the ONLY goal of that car. (yes, I have a clean record BTW).
Binaries shipped with most distributions are intended to be "safe" (stable) on ANY system it's installed on. They cannot know in advanced if you're installing on a Celery, an early Athlon or Duron, a Pentium III, Pentium 4, or Athlon X2 or Opteron. They compile them to be stable and functional on all of the processors, and sometimes forego taking advantage of more efficient, special-purpose instructions bleeding-edge systems can provide.
If for example, the GP is in the movie special effects business and his bread and butter is rendering 3D jobs or ripping MPEG2 files, a 10% increase in performance can save days or even weeks on a final rendering job, especially in a clustered environment.
We've done some small 3D animations (I'm not in the movie industry BTW although one of my clients is - yes, the fools who did chmod 777 / on OS/X because they HATE security - and they wondered why the periodically got hacked and pwned on such a "secure" operating system ) and on a non-SMP, non-cluster-aware (circa 2002) application the rendering took 14 DAYS to complete - for a complex 15 second animation. Multiply that by an order of magnitude (or two magnitudes - in comparison most movie scenes are FAR more complex than what we rendered) for the complexity you'd spend a HELL of a lot more time to render the scene.
Okay, say on an SMP-ware app, on modern hardware, that 100x more complex scene on new hardware still takes 15 days to complete, and you have many more scenes to render. Let's also say that you cluster it and effectively quadruple the processing power - with clustering management overhead you don't get quite 4x the performance - so let's say that the job is brought down to 5 days to render. Now let's say that the scene just grew in length because the director changed his mind. Add in two days to adjust the model and play through the wireframe or solid-shaded scenes, but your deadline is still next ten days away. From experience you know that the scene will likely take 11 days to render and compile to a format you can deliver. You're going to miss your contractual deadline, and because your lawyer didn't include clauses that say you cannot be held responsible if the director changes the job, you eat the cost of the entire job. You still need to pay the 3D artists, your IT folks, legal, marketing, your electric bill, and so forth.
That 10% performance increase would have enabled you to deliver it within your contractual deadline and would have netted a couple hundred grand, but now net loss to you is nearing six figures between other jobs you had to turn down to complete this one plus all the business costs of completing the job you still are contractually bound to deliver, but now cannot collect payment for. You could try to sue the production company for changing the job on you, but guess what? It wasn't Disney you contracted with, it was a production company created for the sole purpose of producing this movie, and it was dissolved as soon as the final movie was handed off to Disney. You now spent money on lawyers to chase a company which no longer exists, and not only did you do the job for free, you have to pay legal yet more money.
That 100% bonus would be more than offset by the lost.
Straw man? Perhaps, but it has happened, and that's often how it works. A 10% performance increase is HUGE. You can bet that if I were running a rendering farm, it would be compiled from source and all stable optimizations would be enabled.
re: Still, we are talking about their games, and I am sure they are happy about this. All the talk will move games off the shelves and Rockstar will make money. What do they care?
That reminds me of Dogma, where before the movie premiered, Kevin Smith attended some anti-Dogma rallies and even managed to get on television to publicly protest the movie. Why? Because he knew the protests would serve only to make more people aware of the movie and go see it - that, and he's a bit of a smartass and knew that Clerks and Mallrats fans would go see it regardless and the DVD would sell well.
What Rockstar should do is offer free T-shirts protesting the "boycott" to anyone in that county who can provide a proof-of-purchase of the game, and let their own customers promote the game, and when the school attempts to ban those T-shirts, offer to protect students' first amandment rights (after all, the T-shirts would be protesting the boycott, and not pure corporate advertisting, and since it's political expression, it would meet the guidelines for protection under the first-amendment). This could generate more significant "free" PR for your products!:)
Hey Rockstar - take my idea, and I promise not to sue. All I ask in return for use of my idea is a couple of games from your back catalogue!:)
Ack! Brain fart! It was clear from the context when I said apache above, I was referring to asterisk. Someone asked me how to configure something in apache as I was typing that post last night. Heh!
This is why I use SuSE. A quicker time to get a machine up and running, plus I compile the kernel to enable all modules for all hardware we have or will have within the lifetime of a release, and when it's time to upgrade hardware what does the job consist of?
1. Install new motherboard 2. Boot from a live CD 3. chroot/mnt/newhdd 4. mkinitrd 5. (in some cases) xorgconf or sax2
I'm partial to KDE distributions. I use KDE, Mandriva, and kubuntu. My preferred distribution is SuSE because although it's more bleeding edge, it's still very stable and users who are novices are very comfortable with KDE on SuSE. Also, updates are extremely easy on SuSE. What happens then? That's right, boot to Linux and start working right away, although now that we're going with dual core processors and will soon be using dual core Athlons and Opterons instead of the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, I might have to recompile the kernel. Not a big deal, just one more kernel to add to grub and step 6 will be to change the default kernel selection for grub. Disk space? Storage is now one of THE cheapest components in a system - this isn't the early-to-mid-90s when a hard drive will easily exceed any two or three other components of a computer system added together. Nowadays I can build a server PC with a 900GB RAID-5 array (HARDWARE RAID) for what I paid for my first 32-bit computer (an 8MB 80386DX/33 80MB single HDD, overclocked to a whole 40Mhz) or for what I paid for the components for my first 486DX.
Less time fussing with a system. Quicker time to get a machine running. Upgrades to KDE, etc. require only an hour or two to download and not many hours compiling all the applications we use.
Servers? If an email server, apache web server, etc. is running just fine and we don't need to patch for a new vulnerability, it stays put. Less downtime, more productivity.
I like the idea of Gentoo but you just nailed its main drawback right on the head. Sure, it'll run slightly slower (in theory) than a Gentoo installation, but that will only matter on 3D rendering or MPeG ripping jobs, of which we do only a couple here and there.
If I were doing something which required a very optimized rendering farm or other form of clustering where performance was crical and shaving off a couple of percentage points in performance could result in saving days on a job, I'd definitely go the Gentoo route and totally strip down the kernel. For general purposes, those lost performance points are well worth the convenience it buys.
1. Announce product with neat ideas 2. IPO 3. Have nothing to show but drawings and a slick slide presentation 4. PROFIT!
Seriously now - I go for watches with lot of functionality -- usually flight computers. I had a Seiko flight computer, got sick of it because it was so clunky and gave it away, then I got a Citizen flight computer, slightly less clunky, but gave it to my brother. I am about to buy a Pulsar flight computer, but will probably get sick of THAT, too. They just don't make good watches in a small package. . .
. . . Which brings us to what amounts to a Linux watch. Neat idea, and I'd love to have the kind of functionality Leela (Futurama!) seems to have on her wrist thingy, but the thing would be SO annoying to wear. Why don't they just put together a Linux PDA, PocketPC-sized with USB Host, SD, and CF support, and go with a larger screen and biometric scanner? That way, it could be slightly larger, not so annoying, money would go into functionality, capacity, faster CPU, or more power capacity (longer runtime!) rather than figuring out how to get it to stay on someone's wrist? This is the kind of "watch" I'd get fed up with after just one day, no matter how much functionality they can cram into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, folks like Linus Torvalds sum up exactly what I've thought of Gnome for a while:
Where dialogs used to give a variety of options, now the standard is essentially:
"Do you want to foo? [OK] [CANCEL]"
This is a classic case of why I hate Gnome. It's too dumbed down, to the point where Windows is superior with it's "[Yes] [No] [Cancel]" or with KDE's de-facto standard of providing more verbose contextual options.
I used to be a bit of a Gnome fan and hated KDE with a passion. Now KDE has grown so much and Gnome has taken so many steps backwards that I *heart* KDE and hate Gnome with a passion. I keep both installed and with each release I upgrade Gnome and give it another chance, only to go right back to KDE for my primary desktop. It's also worth noting that the Gnome desktop's default look is not really a corporate look, but downright drab, to the point where it's hurtful to the eyes. KDE may be more colorful, but, at least on SuSE, it's done in such a way that it doesn't look garish like Windows' default Luna theme does. Yes, Plastik is kinda-sorta similar to Windows' window decorations, but the widgets Plastik provides are far more functional.
Europeans get a manual with Windows? Even the OEM version?
What is called a "manual" here is really just a glitzy brochure with no real, usable information. There hasn't been a cursory Windows manual since Windows 95 - and not a REAL manual since Windows 3.1 or 3.0. And that's if you bought the RETAIL version. Here, OEM customers get NOTHING unless the OEM was kind enough to author their own manual.
IIRC, courts have decided that enforcing price controls by forcing hardware to be sold with the OEM edition is not valid, so you can indeed sell OEM software without hardware. Just be damn sure what you are selling is actually legal and includes the COA (which with OEM pretty much means that annoying holographic sticker)
So does my uncle's brother-in-law's cousin's sister's best friend's husband. Know what that makes us?
;)
Absolutely nothing.
</Obvious Spaceballs ripoff>
re: How is it an infringement of copyright when he doesn't even make a copy?
:)
It's not. It's an example of Microsoft's buying off the courts, and their seeking to eliminate right of first sale. That specific case is one reason I started migrating my company to Linux last year. For workstations, if a box does not HAVE to run Adobe Creative Suite, Visual Studio, or Quickbooks, it has Linux on it instead. Servers? Exchange is being punted next, at that point we'll have no real need to keep the domain server on Windows and will be using Samba for authenticating what Windows workstations remain.
What we're doing costs Microsoft only 15 seats or so of recurring sales in the future, but I'm hardly the only one fed up with Microsoft's shift toward being outright hostile to customers, plus we recommend systems to other companies. We offer OSS alternatives such as OOo.org for customers who are unlikely to encounter OOo's major performance bugs, and Linux as alternatives for those who don't need Windows. Most still opt for Windows (many run Quickbooks or other apps such as medical practice management suites available ONLY for Windows), however very few go for Microsoft Office.
Sorry for the me-too post but here goes:
Thank you for the tip!
Size and capacity.
How often do you have to turn over or swap laser discs during a movie? For most films, at least once.
How often for DVDs? Unless you're watching a 5-hour-long single-layer Indian movie, exactly never.
How many portable LD players are there? Exactly zero. Even if marketed as portable, it isn't.
How many portable DVD players are there? Many, ranging from high-end videophile units down to K-Mart Blue-Light specials.
How many LD drives for PCs/Macs/etc are available? Zero?
How many for PCs/Macs/etc? Scores, if not hundreds, you say?
There is good reason DVD succeeded where LD kind of floundered since the '70s.
While I am also a Firefox fan and use it despite Konqueror's being very nice and passing the Acid2 test, it should be pointed out that Firefox does NOT pass the Acid2 test. At least, Firefox/1.5.0.1 does not. The dev tree might, but who counts that? One may as well claim that Looking Glass is the best operating environment ever - but since it's vaporware/unreleased it would be a false statement.
Sure, Firefox breaks less than IE does when loading the Acid2 test, however by a strict measurement, only one (two) browsers to date pass Acid2:
KHTML (Safari/Konqueror)
If you want to count dev trees/beta releases, then you've got:
Opera
Firefox
Also, I think it's great that the Opera folks are almost mocking Microsoft, and challenging them to pass Acid2. Aside from KHTML which is there, and MSIE which TOTALLY pukes on it, Every other browser is almost rendering Acid2 to be recognizable as a smiley face. At least everyone else is attempting to handle proper CSS and bad CSS correctly, e.g, render compliant CSS, and downgrade gracefully on broken CSS.
What MSIE renders could just as well be accomplished by splashing paint on a sheet of canvas. With the way Microsoft is handling things, I wonder why they don't just ignore CSS altogether and turn their browser into a random pixel renderer?
Get with the program, Microsoft. You have the greatest market share so it is in your best interest for maintaining your share to act responsibly. I hope the mass reaction to MSIE 7.0 is for major sites to either block the browser, or to use CSS which causes MSIE to totally break, and for those sites to recommend all browsers which are not MSIE as alternatives.
Microsoft has held the web back long enough with their refusal to implement proper PNG rendering - their holding back the web has to stop now.
Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether."
How much did it cost Sony for that marketing analysis? They were stupid to even consider this "protection" algorithm in the first place. Why alienate PAYING customers when professional content pirates will not be deterred in the least? All you will end up doing is locking yourselves out of the majority of the market of existing HDTV owners, and locking yourself out of the market of people who rip legally-purchased media to iPod and PocketPC devices.
Why not? They can add our own uniqueness to their own! :D
Once OS/X for x86 hits the shelves installing it on Wintel boxes is no longer going to be a piracy issue, just Jobs' trying to keep a stranglehold on the hardware market.
Why do you think you need a license? Copyright law doesn't impose ANY restrictions on what you do with something you've downloaded. It only stops you from making copies.
You got that ALMOST right. Let's correct it:
Why do you think you need a license? Copyright law doesn't impose ANY restrictions on what you do with something you've downloaded. It only stops you from making and distributing copies which are not in accordance with the Fair Use clause.
There. Much better. Methinks you work for the MPAA or RIAA.
. . . wait for it. . . DMCA to be misused by Apple in 3, 2, 1
You have now been sued by Apple in their nightly bid to take over the world. Troz!!
Seriously though, I wonder if Apple would consider taking action? They've already taken action against folks who run OS/X on Wintel boxes. If I were to run OS/X I'd want to run it on a whitebox PC, not an Applefied proprietary box that I can't select better hardware for.
What are you calling fraud?
Disputing a charge because a company delivered a defective product and refuses to make good on it? I'd say he's well within his right to demand a chargeback, especially on a big-ticket item.
Know that there ARE whitebox laptop manufacturers out there boasting a failure rate of under 2% and also offer ZERO-visibly-defective pixel policies.
1. Lack of administration tools
Having been forced to work with Oracle before they had a usable GUI (It can be argued they still don't) theen MySQL Server, I learned to appreciate a database GUI. I've grown to *HEART* mysqlcc, and more recently mysql-administrator, mysql-query-browser, AND phpMyAdmin. Wake me up when the same are available for PostgreSQL AND they are bundled with major distributions like the MySQL tools are. Oh, and they need to WORK, too.
2. Familiarity
When I switched BACK to Windows without having touched Linux for 5+ years, the apps we initially standardized on use MySQL as the back end, many of them exclusively so. MySQL seems to be more ubiquitous in the OSS world, despite its license being less-free than PostgreSQL
3. Time
Who has the time to investigate or extend PostgreSQL, and why bother when there is MySQL? I've read up a little on PostgreSQL and I like its feature set better than MySQL, but I'd have to spend time learning about administering, backing up, restoring, configuring, and tuning it properly. I've already put that time into MySQL and right now I need to learn the ins and outs of asterisk on top of my usual workload. MySQL is running just fine, why switch now? When we develop an app for distribution which would not meet MySQL's requirements (e.g, requiring us to GPL the product), THEN I will put time into learning PostgreSQL.
Eh, what are you complaining aboot? (sorry, couldn't resist)
:D
I, for one, refuse to believe your propoganda. Hell, as a South-Shore-residing Masshole, I refuse to believe that indoor plumbing exists west of I-495, and certainly not Internet access.
This is nothing new. Every president for the last 100 years or so has been disregarding the Constitution, as has Congress. Why should the judicial branch be any different?
By that logic, why did you ever leave Mommy and Daddy to go out on your own (or have you yet)? This is intended to be funny and drive across the point, BTW, and not an attack.
Why go to a bar, or to a movie? It's not even remotely useful to do either since they do not provide a living.
Ever go skiing? Why go up a mountain just to take a huge risk balancing on narrow pieces of fibreglass while sliding down the side of a mountain at 60-90mph, when at any moment you might just fall and end up crashing into a tree and dying?
Why bother doing ANYTHING?
It's human nature. Why not explore? I would LOVE to see the gas giants up close - especially Jupiter and Saturn. I would love visit the Horsehead nebulae up close. I would love to visit the vicinity of a black hole just to find out whether it is actually visible or not. I would love to visit a brown dwarf to see just what happens while a star "dies."
Wouldn't it be fascinating? For no other reason than to SEE it. In person. Wonder in amazment at the universe.
We're human. We explore. We have curiousity. Of COURSE we want to get off this "rock" - does there have to be any reason other than "it's out there, and I have never been there." - to paraphrase from The Truman Show - "Because I never have! That's why people go places, isn't it?"
Does there HAVE to be a tangible result?
of course, I'd love to see an end to political strife, starvation, etc. first before spending money on space exploration, but again, it's all human nature and it's human nature to bicker and those issues will never be solved, so why not spend money on exploration?
That's the problem.
Many here think of an application (OOo Writer, M$ Word, Solitaire, Halo) opening 10% more quickly, or possibly a 10% faster framerate, and they Just. Don't. Get. It.
Why? Not because they're stupid; they just have not been exposed to large computing jobs in the business world yet, or they're isolated from the ramifications of scheduling.
When you have larger jobs which take anywhere from hours to days, weeks, or even months of processing time to complete, that 10% increase in performance is huge. In fact, a 2% increase can be huge because on really large jobs 2% can mean days shaved off of a job's completion time. 10% is a HUGE time savings and well worth the effort expended.
No, You have it backwards. A 10% performance gain from CPU optimizations compiled in will net you near-2.4Ghz performance on a 2.4Ghz processor. It will never give you 2.7Ghz peformance on a 2.4 Ghz processor.
If your binaries are compiled without MMX, SSE, SSE2, SMP/SMT, etc. then you're missing out on the multimedia-optimized calls, and your applications are unware of more advanced thread scheduling. Therefore, your applications will not be taking full advantage of your processor, effectively giving you the performance of a (since we're using the 10% number) 2.0Ghz box.
Non-optimized binaries don't give you the full performance of your processor.
It's like using a stock restrictive exhaust on a high-performance V8 engine. In stock form with the restrictive optimized-for-noise-level-and-profit exhaust system, you're getting a lower CFM than say, a Corsa or Flowmaster exhaust, where the system is optimized for high flow and velocity with efficient noise reduction used to balance the difference between legal sound levels and performance, regardless of cost. One of my cars has the stock exhaust because I like quiet systems, but my other has a stainless steel flowmaster exhaust because it's old enough to be exempt (in my state) from noise and emission laws - performance is the ONLY goal of that car. (yes, I have a clean record BTW).
Binaries shipped with most distributions are intended to be "safe" (stable) on ANY system it's installed on. They cannot know in advanced if you're installing on a Celery, an early Athlon or Duron, a Pentium III, Pentium 4, or Athlon X2 or Opteron. They compile them to be stable and functional on all of the processors, and sometimes forego taking advantage of more efficient, special-purpose instructions bleeding-edge systems can provide.
10% could very well be worth a 100% bonus in pay.
If for example, the GP is in the movie special effects business and his bread and butter is rendering 3D jobs or ripping MPEG2 files, a 10% increase in performance can save days or even weeks on a final rendering job, especially in a clustered environment.
We've done some small 3D animations (I'm not in the movie industry BTW although one of my clients is - yes, the fools who did chmod 777 / on OS/X because they HATE security - and they wondered why the periodically got hacked and pwned on such a "secure" operating system ) and on a non-SMP, non-cluster-aware (circa 2002) application the rendering took 14 DAYS to complete - for a complex 15 second animation. Multiply that by an order of magnitude (or two magnitudes - in comparison most movie scenes are FAR more complex than what we rendered) for the complexity you'd spend a HELL of a lot more time to render the scene.
Okay, say on an SMP-ware app, on modern hardware, that 100x more complex scene on new hardware still takes 15 days to complete, and you have many more scenes to render. Let's also say that you cluster it and effectively quadruple the processing power - with clustering management overhead you don't get quite 4x the performance - so let's say that the job is brought down to 5 days to render. Now let's say that the scene just grew in length because the director changed his mind. Add in two days to adjust the model and play through the wireframe or solid-shaded scenes, but your deadline is still next ten days away. From experience you know that the scene will likely take 11 days to render and compile to a format you can deliver. You're going to miss your contractual deadline, and because your lawyer didn't include clauses that say you cannot be held responsible if the director changes the job, you eat the cost of the entire job. You still need to pay the 3D artists, your IT folks, legal, marketing, your electric bill, and so forth.
That 10% performance increase would have enabled you to deliver it within your contractual deadline and would have netted a couple hundred grand, but now net loss to you is nearing six figures between other jobs you had to turn down to complete this one plus all the business costs of completing the job you still are contractually bound to deliver, but now cannot collect payment for. You could try to sue the production company for changing the job on you, but guess what? It wasn't Disney you contracted with, it was a production company created for the sole purpose of producing this movie, and it was dissolved as soon as the final movie was handed off to Disney. You now spent money on lawyers to chase a company which no longer exists, and not only did you do the job for free, you have to pay legal yet more money.
That 100% bonus would be more than offset by the lost.
Straw man? Perhaps, but it has happened, and that's often how it works. A 10% performance increase is HUGE. You can bet that if I were running a rendering farm, it would be compiled from source and all stable optimizations would be enabled.
re: Still, we are talking about their games, and I am sure they are happy about this. All the talk will move games off the shelves and Rockstar will make money. What do they care?
:)
:)
That reminds me of Dogma, where before the movie premiered, Kevin Smith attended some anti-Dogma rallies and even managed to get on television to publicly protest the movie. Why? Because he knew the protests would serve only to make more people aware of the movie and go see it - that, and he's a bit of a smartass and knew that Clerks and Mallrats fans would go see it regardless and the DVD would sell well.
What Rockstar should do is offer free T-shirts protesting the "boycott" to anyone in that county who can provide a proof-of-purchase of the game, and let their own customers promote the game, and when the school attempts to ban those T-shirts, offer to protect students' first amandment rights (after all, the T-shirts would be protesting the boycott, and not pure corporate advertisting, and since it's political expression, it would meet the guidelines for protection under the first-amendment). This could generate more significant "free" PR for your products!
Hey Rockstar - take my idea, and I promise not to sue. All I ask in return for use of my idea is a couple of games from your back catalogue!
Ack! Brain fart! It was clear from the context when I said apache above, I was referring to asterisk. Someone asked me how to configure something in apache as I was typing that post last night. Heh!
If I didn't use up my mod points already. . .
/mnt/newhdd
This is why I use SuSE. A quicker time to get a machine up and running, plus I compile the kernel to enable all modules for all hardware we have or will have within the lifetime of a release, and when it's time to upgrade hardware what does the job consist of?
1. Install new motherboard
2. Boot from a live CD
3. chroot
4. mkinitrd
5. (in some cases) xorgconf or sax2
I'm partial to KDE distributions. I use KDE, Mandriva, and kubuntu. My preferred distribution is SuSE because although it's more bleeding edge, it's still very stable and users who are novices are very comfortable with KDE on SuSE. Also, updates are extremely easy on SuSE.
What happens then? That's right, boot to Linux and start working right away, although now that we're going with dual core processors and will soon be using dual core Athlons and Opterons instead of the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, I might have to recompile the kernel. Not a big deal, just one more kernel to add to grub and step 6 will be to change the default kernel selection for grub. Disk space? Storage is now one of THE cheapest components in a system - this isn't the early-to-mid-90s when a hard drive will easily exceed any two or three other components of a computer system added together. Nowadays I can build a server PC with a 900GB RAID-5 array (HARDWARE RAID) for what I paid for my first 32-bit computer (an 8MB 80386DX/33 80MB single HDD, overclocked to a whole 40Mhz) or for what I paid for the components for my first 486DX.
Less time fussing with a system. Quicker time to get a machine running. Upgrades to KDE, etc. require only an hour or two to download and not many hours compiling all the applications we use.
Servers? If an email server, apache web server, etc. is running just fine and we don't need to patch for a new vulnerability, it stays put. Less downtime, more productivity.
I like the idea of Gentoo but you just nailed its main drawback right on the head. Sure, it'll run slightly slower (in theory) than a Gentoo installation, but that will only matter on 3D rendering or MPeG ripping jobs, of which we do only a couple here and there.
If I were doing something which required a very optimized rendering farm or other form of clustering where performance was crical and shaving off a couple of percentage points in performance could result in saving days on a job, I'd definitely go the Gentoo route and totally strip down the kernel. For general purposes, those lost performance points are well worth the convenience it buys.
Is this the dot-com bubble all over again?
1. Announce product with neat ideas
2. IPO
3. Have nothing to show but drawings and a slick slide presentation
4. PROFIT!
Seriously now - I go for watches with lot of functionality -- usually flight computers. I had a Seiko flight computer, got sick of it because it was so clunky and gave it away, then I got a Citizen flight computer, slightly less clunky, but gave it to my brother. I am about to buy a Pulsar flight computer, but will probably get sick of THAT, too. They just don't make good watches in a small package. . .
. . . Which brings us to what amounts to a Linux watch. Neat idea, and I'd love to have the kind of functionality Leela (Futurama!) seems to have on her wrist thingy, but the thing would be SO annoying to wear. Why don't they just put together a Linux PDA, PocketPC-sized with USB Host, SD, and CF support, and go with a larger screen and biometric scanner? That way, it could be slightly larger, not so annoying, money would go into functionality, capacity, faster CPU, or more power capacity (longer runtime!) rather than figuring out how to get it to stay on someone's wrist? This is the kind of "watch" I'd get fed up with after just one day, no matter how much functionality they can cram into it.