I still find KDE 4.x, at least as packaged with Fedora, too unstable for everyday use. Simple operations like opening a file explorer can be enough to crash it. Every time it starts it re-detects my sound card and asks if I would like it to forget about my "old" one (the same card it's just detected).
What version of Fedora are you using? I have been using KDE on Fedora for well over 5 years and I rarely have issues and if I do they are easily resolvable. I actually use Fedora (now version 19) on the laptop I use when I am consulting and I don't dual boot. As for opening a file explorer (I assume you are using Dolphin) crashing the system I have never seen that happen and I use Fedora on a daily basis. If you are talking about KDE 4.0 well that was the only version that forced me to use Gnome for a few months however that was years ago.
The sad fact is that the newest version of KDE is a the perfect DE for anyone wanting to switch from Windows (XP, Vista, 7) to Linux
What is so sad since that comes across as bit "Trollish", however I do agree with the rest of your comment.
Basically I have been using Fedora for over 5 years now and have recently upgraded both of my machines to Fedora 19. There is one part of the installation process that gives you the option of installing Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Sugar and a few other window setups by just ticking a box which is almost a no brainer. Prior to that you could always choose KDE if you want to although you need to look a bit harder.
As for KDE I have found that desktop to be very intuitive and a delight to use and even my wife who has no technical background finds it easy to use. I was setting up a friends laptop last week (he wanted LibreOffice) and found the Windows 8 interface the most annoying thing I have ever had the misfortune to use and I have used GUI devices for over 30 years. I actually found some of the so called features such as "hot" corners/sides were things that I had seen and used over 4 years ago on KDE.
It's still that way with sound cards, wifi cards, and even graphic adapters, and even -- gasp!!! -- some monitor brightness controls on the various laptops I've tried to use over the years, and the secure boot stuff just confuses me. I haven't been able to get a boot cd to even boot on this stupid UFI or whatever 2013 laptop of mine;-(
I have a 5 and 3 year old laptops and both work very well running Fedora 19. Basically it took me about five and a half easy hours to download, create a boot-able USB key, install the OS on both laptops, do an update and pull in some applications that I normally use. At no time was my user (includes wife and sons) data compromised although I do backups to be safe. While I would not really recommend Fedora for the novice it is incredibly simple to install even if you don't know much about installing an OS.
If you have a 2013 machine and you are having the problems you describe (I have not had those problems for well over four years and even then they were resolvable) you really should do the following, firstly use Google (or any search engine) to find out how to resolve the problem(s) and if that does not work or it is too difficult for you just stick to a Microsoft OS, after-all in most countries it comes already pre installed.
I am sometimes asked "Can Linux be made to look like Windows?" my answer would be "It can be made too, but why would you".
How long before it shows up in major distributions such as Linux Mint?
Don't know, but Fedora 18 has 3.9.6-200.fc18.x86_64 and that was a week ago. A quick check of the updates indicates that the 3.9.6 kernel is still the latest. As far as getting the 3.10 kernel goes I would say within a week or two, however it really depends on your distribution and how up to date the maintainers like to keep the repositories.
If you are the repository maintainer for a customer that is using say Redhat Linux (you would be crazy to install a non supported Linux distribution on a production or even development machine) you may have a two to six month delay offset on updates and that is assuming that the customer or company allows 6 monthly updates. In my experience many companies don't like to do any updating once their systems are up and running and it is allot of work on the IT managers side to even get critical patches applied and without the appropriate sign-off's and agreed outages (normally 10 minutes) nothing gets done.
Wow you have a home theater that you only use for the "occasional good flick"?
I am fairly sure he means a decent sized HDTV a BD player and a good 5.1 or 7.1 sound system all which can be purchased for less than $1000.00 although you could go to extremes and spend many times that. Before the comments of I am a poor "insert excuse here" my reply would be "and you can afford a family movie ticket and in many cases dinner".
Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP
Not going to argue about the first sentence since that is a personal thing and I respect you for it. However Fedora 10 (Dec 2009), you do realise that Fedora 18 is the latest although fedora 19 is going to be out in about a week. No matter what distribution you like be it Fedora or Debian based the basics have not changed although it is up to the individual to decide on what GUI they are comfortable with be it KDE, Gnome, xfce etc. While i am not a Linux developer I am a Professional IT Engineer and I can work quite comfortably and efficiently in a Microsoft environment using Fedora although any Linux distribution would do.
I want something that just works, out of the box, without a silly learning curve, without having to use google as a user manual just to do basic stuff that takes one or two clicks on Windows.
That is rather a strange thing to say being a Linux Developer, what "silly learning curve" are you talking about? I don't have any MS Windows PC's in my household and all my family can use my machines with their preferred applications without having to use Google to look up manuals and they are not technical as I am. Personally I use the "man' command and lastly I use Google however that is mostly in regard to applications and like it or not you would have to do the same thing in MS Windows. As for one or two clicks in MS Windows pretty much every thing I use requires one or two clicks and do use quite a few applications and that has been the same since the early 1980's when using X11 window menus.
In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience
Yes that is nice of some however if a company want to keep additions and modifications to BSD licensed software a secret then it is their right as defined by the BSD License . Basically a take it and do anything you want with it although the license does require you to keep the license with the code. On the other hand the GPL (particularly GPL v3) license does not mind if you take the code and modify it however you are required under the terms of the GPL to provide the source of any modifications you make if the software is distributed outside of the company.
i think people are willing to pay more premium prices. the problem is the store front has poor visibility.
On my android phone I touch the "Play Store" icon then select "Games". You can even search by "Categories", Name and Price if you wish. Of course it is much easier to search for "Top Free" (I am pretty sure this is what most people pick) or if you feel like spending money "Top New Paid". You can't get much simpler then that.
It's a no brainer, and why the console market is the same old stale recycled garbage, and the mobile market has some of the most original game ideas seen in decades.
With the exception of Angry Birds (great for killing time on public transport) what smart phone games have original ideas? Most smart phone games are IMHO a copy of what the old Nintendo games used to be back in the 1990's although that is not to say they aren't fun especially if they are what I would call "soft" arcade games, however the more dedicated gamers (PC or console) prefer games that have better quality graphics, gameplay and control which smart phone don't have.
BTW I do agree that many games on the console and PC market appear to be recycled garbage but to the software developers if release one sells well and release two sells just as well if not better then expect version three etc until sales drop off. That is business for you. Also while I am at it how many releases of Angry birds have come out lately? Is there much of a difference here?
There are very talented people that can hide things in only a few lines of code. See http://ioccc.org/ for some examples that will make your skin crawl.
True, but any programmer that works in a Professional way should document their code so that it is maintainable. Those programmers that think that their code should be hard to read because that is a good way of keeping their job eventually come down to earth with a thud when their manager tells them that "The door is over there, please watch your fingers on the way out". Usually hard to read code is thrown out and a fresh start is made since it sometimes is so much quicker to do this especially if the System Designer (not the programmer) has documented the concept properly. On a more serious note companies that don't have well documented overview design and code are asking for trouble down the time line.
"Exact binaries" is not the point of having the source code.
With a Linux distribution you have repositories which have checksums on their binaries, however the lead up article states this "severely limiting the whole point of running free software". nice statement but is this not a bit "trollish" since you can really say the same about all vendors who produce binaries. At least with Open Source you can look at the the code or get someone to do it for you however at some stage it still comes down to trust.
With regard to the "Other OS" on the "Fat" PS3's. You did not have to update the firmware that removed the "Other OS" feature however you were bared from PSN and some newer games may insist on a firmware update before you could play them which sort of gently "nudged" you into updating. Let's be reasonable, the "Other OS" feature was cool for those who wanted to install a Linux distribution on their PS3 however you really were better installing a Linux distribution on your PC instead since Linux on the PS3 was really a "proof of concept" anyway.
Shit, I'm still angry about the rootkit thing
Oh the old "root kit" fiasco rears it's ugly head again. It was Sony BMG (Sony was in the process of acquiring BMG when the shit hit the fan) not the management of Sony that implemented that. Yes you can be shitty at Sony but spare a thought for the Microsoft OS that allowed that stupidity to happen. This is one of the main reasons why my OS runs a Linux distribution.
The actual idea of installing a game from the game media (ie. BD or DVD) may sound like a good idea to some however when you think about it is not that great since you actually have to fully install the game which could be anywhere between a few GB to 40 or more GB and most BD based games are in the order of many GB, so assuming 10GB to 20GB for example you would probably be able to install between 40 and 15 games (500GB disk allowing a few GB for the OS) before you would have to delete one to make way for another. PC gamers get around this by installing larger disks although I am quote sure the XBox1 will allow you to do this to but at a much greater price (sort of like the Xbox360 now)
One thing the buyer of the XBox1 will have to do on purchase is to connect to the Internet to implement the changes then you can stay offline ( see here ).
By switching to SSD's on a data intensive web application, I got 20 times speed improvement - from 20 hits per second to 400.
I trust SSDs more than physical spindles any day.
When designing storage for any Business or Enterprise the disks (solid state or spinning) should always be in some sort of RAID configuration that supports disk redundancy. Failure to do this could result in loss of data when the disk eventually fails and it will. I am often asked "How long" and my answer is "How long is a peace of string".
At the moment SSD's are excellent when you need high I/O from a few disks up to say a few TB however if you look at enterprise storage solutions of 10's or even 1000's of TBytes you are still looking at spinning media with large cache front ends (BTW I am talking about $20k up to many millions of dollars storage area networks). Of course for smaller scale computing SSD's are excellent for high performance but unless you don't really care about your data you still need disk redundancy or I hope your backup and recovery services are excellent, keeping in mind that an outage may cost a considerable amount of money for every hour or even minute you are down.
It must be noted that when designing any computing system you really need to consider performance expectations as well as backup and recovery requirements. The choice of using SSD's, spinning media or even SAN's is normally made after Business or Enterprise expectations are made clear.
I'm not surprised that it took HP so long to figure out
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
on the whole O/S.
After all, it has a dollar sign in it and they're not particularly astute with cash lately.
Or if you are a Unix System Admin you could type "shutdown". Of course like most commands in Unix/Linux there are options but that command alone will definitely shut the system down. Now I hope you had permission to actually run that command:)
Neither James Watt or André-Marie Ampère were English.
Ok James Watt was born in 1736 in Greenock, Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish.
André-Marie Ampère was born in France so we will call him "French".
You forgot "James Prescott Joule" who was born in Lancashire, England so we have to call him "English".
This resulted in cold aisle supply temperature exceeding 80F and relative humidity exceeding 95%. The Open Compute servers that are deployed within the data center reacted to these extreme changes. Numerous servers were rebooted and few were automatically shut down due to power supply unit failure.
WTF 80 deg F (approx 27 deg C) is quite warm in a Data-centre especially in a "cold aisle" and 95% humidity is criminal.
Facebook learned from the mistakes, and now designs its servers with a seal around their power supply, or as Parikh calls it, "a rubber raincoat."
When designing a Data-centre you have to plan for a certain temperature range that the equipment you have inside operates optimally. In addition you have to keep the humidity within manufacture recommended limits since too low results in static electricity and too high well you could get condensation on the electrical equipment. Rubber seals may protect power supplies although I don't think this will completely protect them, but what about the rest of the equipment such as the electronics, connectors and what about backup systems which are very susceptible to temperature and humidity just to name a few.
My score for this design is zero out of ten and ten out of ten for LOL, welcome to cloud computing:)
I also will not be buying one, however I am not sure about the issue with backwards compatibility. Could you play a NES game on SNES? genisis game on saturn? a good portion of my gaming life has not been backwards compatible and im ok with that.
You are correct with regard to earlier popular console and handhelds however you can get the ROM files (ok this borders on piracy) and play them via an emulator on your PC (MS Windows or even Linux) that is if you really want to play "retro" games. Speaking of "retro" games do you know that you can still play the original PS1 disks on the the PS1 (obviously), PS2 and PS3. Of course playing a PS1 game on a PS3 to a 55 inch TV can be fairly hard on the eyes although there are a few which are not that bad as far as graphics go.
Backwards compatibility can be a good thing if you don't have enough launch titles for your new console (eg PS2 and PS3) however over time (one to two years) backwards compatibility becomes less of a selling point.
How do I setup an NFS mount point under Linux without editing/etc/fstab by hand?
What you have said is totality meaningless unless the following is true:
If you want to use NFS to manually or automatically mount a file-system you need super user privilege to do this. If you as the person requiring an NFS mount has not arranged to have a remote file-system made available with the correct permissions (ie "trust") to the particular machine they are managing then they will not be able to mount the remote file-system. Editing/etc/fstab is the least of your problem and one way or an other the file must be changed since this file controls what file-systems (remote or local) are mounted.
BTW even user MS Windows you still need permission from the server machine and must authenticate accordingly to mount a share.
Why should ReactOS receive more support from the OSS community, after all in the majority of cases when you buy a new PC or even purchase a second hand one you actually get Microsoft Windows already pre-installed. i can understand if you wish to upgrade say MS Windows 2000, XP or even 7 but for the majority of people out there why would they bother, after all if they can't be bothered installing a Linux distribution then why would they install a MS Widows look alike for what they most likely consider is basically the same OS.
Linux is fine for servers, portable devices, and embedded systems, but trying to stick it on the desktop is a foolish dream that has failed for over 10 years
Hmm. not sure if you are trolling but I have been using Linux as my principle desktop for over 5 years and as a professional engineer I can easily work within a Microsoft centric environment. Some of the main reasons why MS Windows dominates over Linux on the Desktop is policy making Management in the majority of cases don't know there are alternatives or the company is effectively locked into using MS Windows. For the home user most people use MS Windows because they already have it installed on their PC (The Microsoft Tax) and don't really know or care about installing a Linux distribution since it may damage their brain cells:). Of course if the home user is a "Gamer" then in the majority of cases they want to play "Games for Widows" which even though some games can be run under packages such as WINE most gamers will not make the switch.
Since the one of the main talking point about android is the ability to side install apps
That is always a problem with any OS which includes Microsoft Windows although most malware and viruses target that OS. Still to be fair in the majority of cases it is the unaware user that is at fault. Of course the unaware user is going to be the one to complain when in reality it really is their fault for not even taking the time to read up on basic computer etiquette and security awareness.
Of course how can you be sure any app you install is genuine? Unless you write, compile and install it yourself and even that isn't 100% trustworthy
You are dead right if the developer (private or commercial) is not very good at programming then the application they write is going to have problems and in a worst case scenario you as the users of said application could stuff up your data. The problem all users face no matter what the OS is, at some stage they are going to have to trust their vendor or they may as well wrap themselves in animal skins, light up a branch and retire to their cave.
So define ignorance when the professional have a hard time and the average person isn't smart enough to know what compiling is let alone do it.
Well it's not difficult to type "make" as a normal user then test and when fully satisfied that the application works properly type "make install" as the system admin. But this means using the "command line" or a developer GUI which basically allows the developer to develop and maintain the application. However the average person does not know what the "command line" or even what a development GUI is or if they do think their brains will explode if they attempt it:)
Even if they did I would be interested in how they are going to backup their data and somewhere down the time track run a disaster recovery scenario. Oh I would love that contract.:)
I have a HP dv7 (2.5 years old with 8GB RAM) running Fedora 18 with the latest updates as per a week ago and my Firefox is version 20. The demo definitely does run under Firefox although I did have to do two refreshes before the demo started.
I ran the performance test and I got about 17 frames a second in full screen mode which is not that good but it is still viewable although a bit jerky at time. I did like the refection on the tiles in the church and the water effects although I have seen similar and better in other games of this type. The thing that has me worried when viewing my performance monitor is that the CPU temperature showed about 95 deg C which considering that boiling water is 100 deg C means that I will be sending my dv7 in for repair before my warranty runs out.
Still for something like this to run on a browser under Linux IMHO is quite good and may level the playing field between desktop OS's since basically if you are a PC gamer you have to run your "Games for Windows" under a Microsoft OS (I do know about WINE but IMHO it is a kludge for a kludge anyway). Still I actually prefer console gaming to PC gaming and no amount of arguments can convince me otherwise.
On a lighter note where are all the NPC's and there has to be a dragon somewhere or at least some Orc's (maybe they were doing their washing):)
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I still find KDE 4.x, at least as packaged with Fedora, too unstable for everyday use. Simple operations like opening a file explorer can be enough to crash it. Every time it starts it re-detects my sound card and asks if I would like it to forget about my "old" one (the same card it's just detected).
What version of Fedora are you using? I have been using KDE on Fedora for well over 5 years and I rarely have issues and if I do they are easily resolvable. I actually use Fedora (now version 19) on the laptop I use when I am consulting and I don't dual boot. As for opening a file explorer (I assume you are using Dolphin) crashing the system I have never seen that happen and I use Fedora on a daily basis. If you are talking about KDE 4.0 well that was the only version that forced me to use Gnome for a few months however that was years ago.
The sad fact is that the newest version of KDE is a the perfect DE for anyone wanting to switch from Windows (XP, Vista, 7) to Linux
What is so sad since that comes across as bit "Trollish", however I do agree with the rest of your comment.
Basically I have been using Fedora for over 5 years now and have recently upgraded both of my machines to Fedora 19. There is one part of the installation process that gives you the option of installing Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Sugar and a few other window setups by just ticking a box which is almost a no brainer. Prior to that you could always choose KDE if you want to although you need to look a bit harder.
As for KDE I have found that desktop to be very intuitive and a delight to use and even my wife who has no technical background finds it easy to use. I was setting up a friends laptop last week (he wanted LibreOffice) and found the Windows 8 interface the most annoying thing I have ever had the misfortune to use and I have used GUI devices for over 30 years. I actually found some of the so called features such as "hot" corners/sides were things that I had seen and used over 4 years ago on KDE.
It's still that way with sound cards, wifi cards, and even graphic adapters, and even -- gasp!!! -- some monitor brightness controls on the various laptops I've tried to use over the years, and the secure boot stuff just confuses me. I haven't been able to get a boot cd to even boot on this stupid UFI or whatever 2013 laptop of mine ;-(
I have a 5 and 3 year old laptops and both work very well running Fedora 19. Basically it took me about five and a half easy hours to download, create a boot-able USB key, install the OS on both laptops, do an update and pull in some applications that I normally use. At no time was my user (includes wife and sons) data compromised although I do backups to be safe. While I would not really recommend Fedora for the novice it is incredibly simple to install even if you don't know much about installing an OS.
If you have a 2013 machine and you are having the problems you describe (I have not had those problems for well over four years and even then they were resolvable) you really should do the following, firstly use Google (or any search engine) to find out how to resolve the problem(s) and if that does not work or it is too difficult for you just stick to a Microsoft OS, after-all in most countries it comes already pre installed.
I am sometimes asked "Can Linux be made to look like Windows?" my answer would be "It can be made too, but why would you".
How long before it shows up in major distributions such as Linux Mint?
Don't know, but Fedora 18 has 3.9.6-200.fc18.x86_64 and that was a week ago. A quick check of the updates indicates that the 3.9.6 kernel is still the latest. As far as getting the 3.10 kernel goes I would say within a week or two, however it really depends on your distribution and how up to date the maintainers like to keep the repositories.
If you are the repository maintainer for a customer that is using say Redhat Linux (you would be crazy to install a non supported Linux distribution on a production or even development machine) you may have a two to six month delay offset on updates and that is assuming that the customer or company allows 6 monthly updates. In my experience many companies don't like to do any updating once their systems are up and running and it is allot of work on the IT managers side to even get critical patches applied and without the appropriate sign-off's and agreed outages (normally 10 minutes) nothing gets done.
Wow you have a home theater that you only use for the "occasional good flick"?
I am fairly sure he means a decent sized HDTV a BD player and a good 5.1 or 7.1 sound system all which can be purchased for less than $1000.00 although you could go to extremes and spend many times that. Before the comments of I am a poor "insert excuse here" my reply would be "and you can afford a family movie ticket and in many cases dinner".
Yeah a laser pointer would be really unacceptable.
In some countries doing that could land you in jail and/or paying a hefty fine. See here.
Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP
Not going to argue about the first sentence since that is a personal thing and I respect you for it. However Fedora 10 (Dec 2009), you do realise that Fedora 18 is the latest although fedora 19 is going to be out in about a week. No matter what distribution you like be it Fedora or Debian based the basics have not changed although it is up to the individual to decide on what GUI they are comfortable with be it KDE, Gnome, xfce etc. While i am not a Linux developer I am a Professional IT Engineer and I can work quite comfortably and efficiently in a Microsoft environment using Fedora although any Linux distribution would do.
I want something that just works, out of the box, without a silly learning curve, without having to use google as a user manual just to do basic stuff that takes one or two clicks on Windows.
That is rather a strange thing to say being a Linux Developer, what "silly learning curve" are you talking about? I don't have any MS Windows PC's in my household and all my family can use my machines with their preferred applications without having to use Google to look up manuals and they are not technical as I am. Personally I use the "man' command and lastly I use Google however that is mostly in regard to applications and like it or not you would have to do the same thing in MS Windows. As for one or two clicks in MS Windows pretty much every thing I use requires one or two clicks and do use quite a few applications and that has been the same since the early 1980's when using X11 window menus.
In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience
Yes that is nice of some however if a company want to keep additions and modifications to BSD licensed software a secret then it is their right as defined by the BSD License . Basically a take it and do anything you want with it although the license does require you to keep the license with the code. On the other hand the GPL (particularly GPL v3) license does not mind if you take the code and modify it however you are required under the terms of the GPL to provide the source of any modifications you make if the software is distributed outside of the company.
i think people are willing to pay more premium prices. the problem is the store front has poor visibility.
On my android phone I touch the "Play Store" icon then select "Games". You can even search by "Categories", Name and Price if you wish. Of course it is much easier to search for "Top Free" (I am pretty sure this is what most people pick) or if you feel like spending money "Top New Paid". You can't get much simpler then that.
It's a no brainer, and why the console market is the same old stale recycled garbage, and the mobile market has some of the most original game ideas seen in decades.
With the exception of Angry Birds (great for killing time on public transport) what smart phone games have original ideas? Most smart phone games are IMHO a copy of what the old Nintendo games used to be back in the 1990's although that is not to say they aren't fun especially if they are what I would call "soft" arcade games, however the more dedicated gamers (PC or console) prefer games that have better quality graphics, gameplay and control which smart phone don't have.
BTW I do agree that many games on the console and PC market appear to be recycled garbage but to the software developers if release one sells well and release two sells just as well if not better then expect version three etc until sales drop off. That is business for you. Also while I am at it how many releases of Angry birds have come out lately? Is there much of a difference here?
There are very talented people that can hide things in only a few lines of code. See http://ioccc.org/ for some examples that will make your skin crawl.
True, but any programmer that works in a Professional way should document their code so that it is maintainable. Those programmers that think that their code should be hard to read because that is a good way of keeping their job eventually come down to earth with a thud when their manager tells them that "The door is over there, please watch your fingers on the way out". Usually hard to read code is thrown out and a fresh start is made since it sometimes is so much quicker to do this especially if the System Designer (not the programmer) has documented the concept properly. On a more serious note companies that don't have well documented overview design and code are asking for trouble down the time line.
"Exact binaries" is not the point of having the source code.
With a Linux distribution you have repositories which have checksums on their binaries, however the lead up article states this "severely limiting the whole point of running free software". nice statement but is this not a bit "trollish" since you can really say the same about all vendors who produce binaries. At least with Open Source you can look at the the code or get someone to do it for you however at some stage it still comes down to trust.
The more I see console maker assholery, the more I like using my actual computer for gaming.
If you think the PC running a Microsoft OS is immune I have a sightly used Harbour Bridge that I can sell you :)
Shit, I'm still angry about the rootkit thing
Oh the old "root kit" fiasco rears it's ugly head again. It was Sony BMG (Sony was in the process of acquiring BMG when the shit hit the fan) not the management of Sony that implemented that. Yes you can be shitty at Sony but spare a thought for the Microsoft OS that allowed that stupidity to happen. This is one of the main reasons why my OS runs a Linux distribution.
The actual idea of installing a game from the game media (ie. BD or DVD) may sound like a good idea to some however when you think about it is not that great since you actually have to fully install the game which could be anywhere between a few GB to 40 or more GB and most BD based games are in the order of many GB, so assuming 10GB to 20GB for example you would probably be able to install between 40 and 15 games (500GB disk allowing a few GB for the OS) before you would have to delete one to make way for another. PC gamers get around this by installing larger disks although I am quote sure the XBox1 will allow you to do this to but at a much greater price (sort of like the Xbox360 now)
One thing the buyer of the XBox1 will have to do on purchase is to connect to the Internet to implement the changes then you can stay offline ( see here ).
By switching to SSD's on a data intensive web application, I got 20 times speed improvement - from 20 hits per second to 400. I trust SSDs more than physical spindles any day.
When designing storage for any Business or Enterprise the disks (solid state or spinning) should always be in some sort of RAID configuration that supports disk redundancy. Failure to do this could result in loss of data when the disk eventually fails and it will. I am often asked "How long" and my answer is "How long is a peace of string".
At the moment SSD's are excellent when you need high I/O from a few disks up to say a few TB however if you look at enterprise storage solutions of 10's or even 1000's of TBytes you are still looking at spinning media with large cache front ends (BTW I am talking about $20k up to many millions of dollars storage area networks). Of course for smaller scale computing SSD's are excellent for high performance but unless you don't really care about your data you still need disk redundancy or I hope your backup and recovery services are excellent, keeping in mind that an outage may cost a considerable amount of money for every hour or even minute you are down.
It must be noted that when designing any computing system you really need to consider performance expectations as well as backup and recovery requirements. The choice of using SSD's, spinning media or even SAN's is normally made after Business or Enterprise expectations are made clear.
I'm not surprised that it took HP so long to figure out
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
on the whole O/S.
After all, it has a dollar sign in it and they're not particularly astute with cash lately.
Or if you are a Unix System Admin you could type "shutdown". Of course like most commands in Unix/Linux there are options but that command alone will definitely shut the system down. Now I hope you had permission to actually run that command :)
Neither James Watt or André-Marie Ampère were English.
Ok James Watt was born in 1736 in Greenock, Scotland which like it or not is physically joined to England however for the sake of political correctness we will call him Scottish.
André-Marie Ampère was born in France so we will call him "French".
You forgot "James Prescott Joule" who was born in Lancashire, England so we have to call him "English".
Welcome to Oregon, it rains a lot.
From the Article
This resulted in cold aisle supply temperature exceeding 80F and relative humidity exceeding 95%. The Open Compute servers that are deployed within the data center reacted to these extreme changes. Numerous servers were rebooted and few were automatically shut down due to power supply unit failure.
WTF 80 deg F (approx 27 deg C) is quite warm in a Data-centre especially in a "cold aisle" and 95% humidity is criminal.
Facebook learned from the mistakes, and now designs its servers with a seal around their power supply, or as Parikh calls it, "a rubber raincoat."
When designing a Data-centre you have to plan for a certain temperature range that the equipment you have inside operates optimally. In addition you have to keep the humidity within manufacture recommended limits since too low results in static electricity and too high well you could get condensation on the electrical equipment. Rubber seals may protect power supplies although I don't think this will completely protect them, but what about the rest of the equipment such as the electronics, connectors and what about backup systems which are very susceptible to temperature and humidity just to name a few.
:)
My score for this design is zero out of ten and ten out of ten for LOL, welcome to cloud computing
I also will not be buying one, however I am not sure about the issue with backwards compatibility. Could you play a NES game on SNES? genisis game on saturn? a good portion of my gaming life has not been backwards compatible and im ok with that.
You are correct with regard to earlier popular console and handhelds however you can get the ROM files (ok this borders on piracy) and play them via an emulator on your PC (MS Windows or even Linux) that is if you really want to play "retro" games. Speaking of "retro" games do you know that you can still play the original PS1 disks on the the PS1 (obviously), PS2 and PS3. Of course playing a PS1 game on a PS3 to a 55 inch TV can be fairly hard on the eyes although there are a few which are not that bad as far as graphics go.
Backwards compatibility can be a good thing if you don't have enough launch titles for your new console (eg PS2 and PS3) however over time (one to two years) backwards compatibility becomes less of a selling point.
How do I setup an NFS mount point under Linux without editing /etc/fstab by hand?
What you have said is totality meaningless unless the following is true:
/etc/fstab is the least of your problem and one way or an other the file must be changed since this file controls what file-systems (remote or local) are mounted.
If you want to use NFS to manually or automatically mount a file-system you need super user privilege to do this. If you as the person requiring an NFS mount has not arranged to have a remote file-system made available with the correct permissions (ie "trust") to the particular machine they are managing then they will not be able to mount the remote file-system. Editing
BTW even user MS Windows you still need permission from the server machine and must authenticate accordingly to mount a share.
Linux is fine for servers, portable devices, and embedded systems, but trying to stick it on the desktop is a foolish dream that has failed for over 10 years
Hmm. not sure if you are trolling but I have been using Linux as my principle desktop for over 5 years and as a professional engineer I can easily work within a Microsoft centric environment. Some of the main reasons why MS Windows dominates over Linux on the Desktop is policy making Management in the majority of cases don't know there are alternatives or the company is effectively locked into using MS Windows. For the home user most people use MS Windows because they already have it installed on their PC (The Microsoft Tax) and don't really know or care about installing a Linux distribution since it may damage their brain cells :). Of course if the home user is a "Gamer" then in the majority of cases they want to play "Games for Widows" which even though some games can be run under packages such as WINE most gamers will not make the switch.
Since the one of the main talking point about android is the ability to side install apps
That is always a problem with any OS which includes Microsoft Windows although most malware and viruses target that OS. Still to be fair in the majority of cases it is the unaware user that is at fault. Of course the unaware user is going to be the one to complain when in reality it really is their fault for not even taking the time to read up on basic computer etiquette and security awareness.
Of course how can you be sure any app you install is genuine? Unless you write, compile and install it yourself and even that isn't 100% trustworthy
You are dead right if the developer (private or commercial) is not very good at programming then the application they write is going to have problems and in a worst case scenario you as the users of said application could stuff up your data. The problem all users face no matter what the OS is, at some stage they are going to have to trust their vendor or they may as well wrap themselves in animal skins, light up a branch and retire to their cave.
So define ignorance when the professional have a hard time and the average person isn't smart enough to know what compiling is let alone do it.
Well it's not difficult to type "make" as a normal user then test and when fully satisfied that the application works properly type "make install" as the system admin. But this means using the "command line" or a developer GUI which basically allows the developer to develop and maintain the application. However the average person does not know what the "command line" or even what a development GUI is or if they do think their brains will explode if they attempt it :)
I doubt they have the storage capacity.
Even if they did I would be interested in how they are going to backup their data and somewhere down the time track run a disaster recovery scenario. Oh I would love that contract. :)
I have a HP dv7 (2.5 years old with 8GB RAM) running Fedora 18 with the latest updates as per a week ago and my Firefox is version 20. The demo definitely does run under Firefox although I did have to do two refreshes before the demo started.
:)
I ran the performance test and I got about 17 frames a second in full screen mode which is not that good but it is still viewable although a bit jerky at time. I did like the refection on the tiles in the church and the water effects although I have seen similar and better in other games of this type. The thing that has me worried when viewing my performance monitor is that the CPU temperature showed about 95 deg C which considering that boiling water is 100 deg C means that I will be sending my dv7 in for repair before my warranty runs out.
Still for something like this to run on a browser under Linux IMHO is quite good and may level the playing field between desktop OS's since basically if you are a PC gamer you have to run your "Games for Windows" under a Microsoft OS (I do know about WINE but IMHO it is a kludge for a kludge anyway). Still I actually prefer console gaming to PC gaming and no amount of arguments can convince me otherwise.
On a lighter note where are all the NPC's and there has to be a dragon somewhere or at least some Orc's (maybe they were doing their washing)