Ok, my personal positions is that Ars has a point. I love some of their writers and visit them pretty much daily. I want to support them, but I do not have the cash to buy a subscription which would be the proper thing to do. I also really hate ads around my articles. Which leads me to the question: will a simple wget cronjob (i.e. wget -r -l 2 -o/dev/null -O/dev/null -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100214 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.8' www.arstechnica.com) result in them getting paid for a few page views?
Input on how to make this work would be most welcome.
I see what you did there. Very clever. How is that working out for you?...Dr. Phil?! Is that you?
OK, Smartguy. Please explain the difference in logical content between these three conversations:
"Nobody voted for Nader."
"I did."
Translation: Nader received a negligible quantity of votes. Your vote was one of the negligible few.
"There was no demand for this product."
"I bought one."
Translation: There was so little demand for this product that it was not viable. There were so few of you who purchased this product that it was not profitable.
"P is an empty set."
"I am a member of P."
Translation: P is an empty set. You are an element of P. You are NULL.
Oh, I think that we do want petulant, perky, happy, sad, etc. robots. Things like the Pleo and other pet or baby type robotic toys have limited "AI" to simulate the behaviors that we associate with real animals and babys. I see this as a separation of purposes. For practical purposes, i.e. exploring Mars, vacuuming dust and fur, detecting mines, etc. we want robots that work reliably, predictably and efficiently. For companionship purposes; i.e. pet simulators, companion simulators, therapist simulators, etc., we want believable, "feelable" emotions.
While dogs can be trained and used for search and rescue; huge amounts of time and energy go into molding and directing the dogs' emotions. They have to be rewarded for desired behavior, kept happy, etc. Search-bots, on the other hand, once created and trained need little further effort until needed. And, the training data can be replicated directly, without having to re-train every search bot.
On the other hand, interacting with an emotionless device is just that. Interacting with a pet, child, etc. is rewarding strictly because of the emotional content of the interaction. Just think about the people who dress their Roombas. They are, wierdly, simulating some of the aspects of emotional intelligence that the device natively lacks. Now, that is primarily in their head; but, it shows the desire for companion bots. Ideally, a perfect Pleo would react well enough for these people to feel content with it and let their vacuum clean without perturbation.
I do believe that there are two unique domains for bots that are separable. In humans, we have to force ourselves to do both without really excelling at either. Think of how many self-help books there are on training ones memory, improving mental math skills, increasing strength, and so on. These exist because we do not natively excel at things like calculating, storing data, or performing mechanical work. And how many books are there intended to help us relate to the opposite sex, relate to our children, bosses, pets, customers and the like. We, even the females among us, need help dealing with emotions.
AI and robotics allows us to create devices that excel at either of the problem domains without requiring excellence in the other. While emotional AI does not have the immediate value that functional AI does; it is progressing. After all, consider that modern Psychology is much more closely related to the Philosophy of the early 1900's than it is to the engineering of the early 1900's. While functional sciences have progressed vastly in the past century; emotional "sciences" have made very limited progress. Since the understanding of the emotion domain is vastly less than the understanding of the functional domain, the emotional AI is similarly stunted. Hopefully, more hard science research into emotion will lead to progress in this area.
I have no argument with your post at all; I just want to assert my belief that people should be free to offer bounties. Not to demand that they be accepted; but to offer. After all, there just might be a dev who wanted to play with CUDA on double precision hardware but did not want to shell out what nVidia was asking. The bounty might just cover the cost of the fun new toy; without having to put anything on a credit card. Freedom to offer or not; to accept offers or not; without anycoercion or harrassment strikes me as a good thing. A demand couched as an offer is not.
I gotta agree, both with ShieldW0lf and with the opposite point of view. I agree that this consumer society we have here in the US really sucks. It seems that we have gotten off the treadmill of working all day to hunt/gather/farm food all the way to working all day to pay off debt and accrue more getting the latest shit at some chain store.
That being said; I'm not ready to go off and play Thoreau just yet. So, money is, to some degree necessary. I hate having to do things that I believe are unethical or just plain stupid for an employer; and, I've really lost my ability to do so. So, I make less money that I probably could if I were no so damn picky.
However, being compensated for doing something useful and productive that I would not do for fun in my free time does not seem like a bribe. For example, a friend of mine with lots more money that I have needs his deck painted. He would rather spend his time working on his new kit plane; so, he offered me some cash to do it for him. This seems like a good, fair deal for both of us. He gets things done without interrupting his fun and I get some spare cash.
There is nothing unethical about the deal, nothing about it compromises my standards; and, I could easily have said no. The developers in this case did say no; but, if they had said yes, it would have been completely above board. They were not implicitly coerced, which is the normal situation for employment... Do what we say or lose your job, medical care, etc.
The problem, if any, was that the one making the offer of a bug bounty expected that it would be taken. Thus he was very upset when his expectatins were not met. That is the joy and frustration of community projects. People often work and help for nothing; but, they also often refuse to help even for compensation. That are free to do as they choose in a free software environment.
As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams?
No; as opposed to projects with no or little revenue streams.
In fact, above some threshold, software quality seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of money available for developing the software.
I wonder if the ratio is to the number of management/marketing types to number of actual developers that causes this quality drop? I remember reading on kerneltrap.org that an insanely large number of individual contributers had shown up in Linus' git reports. Something like ~3500-4000 individuals. Other than Linus and the various subsystem maintainers, I am not aware of any marketing types or PHBs involved.
Any guesses as to what the dollar or PHB count threshold actually is? When does success become toxic, on average?
As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams? I have no real knowledge of the how much revenue the Apache Foundation has gotten over the years; but, if you compared the quantity and quality of their code with that of MS or Oracle, I'd bet that Apache does a lot more for the dollar.
I agree. The only times I've seen drives die is when there have been utility, UPS or PSU problems. In fact, I just switched to all solid state on a key server because the client is in a rural area where the power can go off for 1-3 hours half a dozen times a year. And, they have been unable to get funding for a generator; so, after the last UPS fried itself and the server's drives and PSU, I switched to flash. The added bonus is that the power draw and heat dissipation are lower which means the server stays up longer anyway.
Offer a flat rate up to a set cap measured in Gb/month, with overages priced at a different rate. People would then pay for their excesses, allowing the ISP to spend more on adding capacity.
End-users like this arrangement for cellphone service. They would understand and appreciate such a thing coming to their Internet service What kind of crack are you smoking? One of the most hated aspects of cell plans is the insanely convoluted usage caps. If that ever came to ISPs, you'd see private WiFi connection sharing explode. I really have difficulty thinking that there really are consumers that WANT to watch their bandwidth usage.
Try telling my wife that she should stop watching that streaming Rockford re-run when she is awake at 3:00 AM with PMS because we are near our bandwidth limit....
Well, speaking as the husband of a print designer, I can concur. She kept up with the upgrade treadmill
until CS1. Since then, she has tried the trial versions but has found no compelling reason to upgrade.
And, yes, she does do glossy magazine, and sign work.
Some people may suggest abandoning your keyboard and going outside to observe this "sun". I recommend that you visit
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/latest.html instead. Much less effort required.:)
I agree with that. I haven't used any MS software, any Adobe software, or any eggs from caged chickens in several years. I've also gotten a friend to switch one of his systems from WinXP to Kubuntu instead of buying a legit license for it. (It came from a relative with a cracked version of XP.) I've stopped buying potted plants and started just saving and planting seeds to save all that diesel spent shipping little seedlings around. I have no idea if it makes any difference to MS, Adobe, Raley's, WalMart, etc. but it does make a difference to me.
From a sample size of one (me) I disagree with your claim. I consider myself to be heavily biased towards Linux, and towards KDE and Ubuntu specifically. However, I am well aware of the long history of Unix; and, though I have no earthly reason to need one, I "window-shop" for old Unix boxes from Sun or IBM as they would be a really cool toy to have and learn on.
I also read about interesting developments happening in other OSs like Dragonfly BSD and OpenSolaris. While I have not been motivated to setup a BSD box in a few years; I am much more likely to install a flavor of BSD or Solaris voluntarily than I am to setup Windows Vista or OS X.
I guess that makes me a free software fanboy, then. Oh, well.
One of the great things about Linux/Unix is that it is really easy to write quick, simple scripts to accomplish little tasks as they occur. Whether written for SH/BASH/etc., for PHP, Python, Perl or what have you, a few lines of code can provide a time or labor saving solution to a sysadmin or skilled end-user. This is one of the things that has encouraged me to convert more and more machines from Windows Server to Linux. These scripts, however, are almost impossible to easily and quickly write in a way that leverages multiple cores. Some interpreters do not support multi-threading and others have funky threading implementations that do not seem to be of much use aside from handling asynchronous IO.
Though I studied programming years ago (late '80s and early '90s), I am far from a skilled programmer. I do, however, have enough of a grasp of the subject to be able to create purpose-specific scripts to make my life as an admin easier or to solve situationally unique problems. Since they often are used to automate repetitive tasks, they tend to have a good degree of parallelism by nature.
I have spent significant time Googling and reading online docs; and, I have not found a reasonably performant threading implementation that even remotely maintains the ease of coding that non-threaded scripts have. While I know that most of this discussion is focused on the software created by developers for distribution; I have a suspicion that having a multitasking script interpreter that is as easy for admins to use as what we have now would greatly improve server performance.
After all, if there are a few poky script interpreters hogging a few cores, even the best optimized daemons will not be able to work to their potential.
I've got a messed up knee; and, I wear a brace to do any serious hiking or similar activity. Since I've already got the damn itch, sweaty, annoying thing on; it might as well serve two functions instead of just one. Power and joint stabilization seem like a nice deal for those who need the stabilization in the first place.
For those whose knees are fine, however, it seems likely that the discomfort of any brace will outweigh the minimal juice provided. Carrying a supply of spare NiMH or other rechargeable batteries in your backpack or camera bag is not a great burden for an equivalent amount of juice. If you compare the weight of the food and water needed for a day of hiking compared to the weight of the batteries needed to run a GPS, camera and cell phone, the juice is negligible.
I'm using a Gateway E4200 from circa 1999. I've gone through 3 mobos, using a MSI Neo3 something now, have gone from a PII to a P4 to a Pentium D with a Core2Duo on a UPS truck somewhere on the way to my house now. I've gone from a 6GB IDE drive to SATA RAID 1 + IDE drives. Changed from integrated to PCI to AGP to PCIe graphics. Changed PSUs (this required judicious use of the Sawzall). Replaced the floppy with a flash reader, even painted the case to more attractively blend with my (wife's) decor. Oh, and, I've gone from Win2K to XP to Longhorn Beta to Ubuntu 6.06-->6.10-->7.04-->7.10. All without buying anything that wasn't exactly what I wanted and nothing more. Could an Apple product be so flexible?
Just bought a Jetway ITX board with a C3, very nice little board, works perfect for a Terminal Services client. And fits in a PoS old ATX case that was laying around for a simple prototype unit.
I appreciate that AMD realizes that there is already a market for ITX and muATX systems; and, that this will allow case, cooling and mobo manufacturers to offer more choices with less design and inventory cost. Though I prefer ATX with lots of PCI slots for most uses, having a very compact form factor that allow the use of purpose designed enclosures with standard x86(64) hardware is very nice. It makes creating things like vehicle PCs, remote monitoring systems, etc. reasonable for the DIY crowd.
The PC104 and other embedded architectures and form factors are great, but, the require cross compilation, vertical market components with non-affordable prices at individual unit volumes, etc. Being able to run Puppy or Debian or Windows 2000 without much hassle on a tiny system is a great freedom for special purpose PCs.
I have 14 boxes running Ubuntu Server 7.04 and none of them have had any issues in the past 6 or so months. They have been vastly more stable than the 3 Windows Server 2003 boxes.
I've also been toying with the idea of building or buying a large supplemental power supply. In my case, I have a Compact Flash GPS that I use with a handheld while driving and hiking. In the car, power is not a problem; but, on hikes, I can only use the GPS for the duration of the handheld's battery life. With the GPs drawing juice and the screen brightness turned all the way up for visibility in full sun; this is not near the duration of a long trek.
Since I really do not fancy the idea of carrying a Lead-Acid battery in a backpack for hours, NiMH or Li-Ion looks appealling. But, designing a suitable package which allows for easy charging and quick connection to the handheld is not something I have gotten up the motivation to do. Anyone know of a pre-existing design or package for this purpose?
Absolutely. I have a friend, a retired executive from the telecom world. He is relatively savvy, but, he is not a geek and, though he has installed various flavors of Windows for himself and his friends, he usually would prefer to do other things with his time. He knows that I have been using Ubuntu since Dapper pre-release and is interested. We had talked about setting up his desktop with Ubuntu in the fall after fishing and gardening season is over. Now that Dell is selling them preinstalled, I would bet that he will pick up one of the less expensive Dimensions that come preinstalled before then.
Having the bundle available takes the need to do the time consuming acts of downloading, burning, running the installer and tweaking the installation. My impression is that an unfortunately huge segment of the American population would rather call an 800 number and hand over their card than do any work on their own. The fact that Dell is willing to cater to the "more money than sense" crowd is great for Linux.
I just hope that there is sufficient support available for those who are too lazy to google for an answer and instead instinctively call tehc support. If their experience is at least on par with the XP support they recieve, I bet they'll be pretty happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, my personal positions is that Ars has a point. I love some of their writers and visit them pretty much daily. I want to support them, but I do not have the cash to buy a subscription which would be the proper thing to do. I also really hate ads around my articles. Which leads me to the question: will a simple wget cronjob (i.e. wget -r -l 2 -o /dev/null -O /dev/null -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100214 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.8' www.arstechnica.com) result in them getting paid for a few page views?
Input on how to make this work would be most welcome.
I see what you did there. Very clever. How is that working out for you? ...Dr. Phil?! Is that you?
OK, Smartguy. Please explain the difference in logical content between these three conversations:
"Nobody voted for Nader." "I did."
Translation: Nader received a negligible quantity of votes. Your vote was one of the negligible few.
"There was no demand for this product." "I bought one."
Translation: There was so little demand for this product that it was not viable. There were so few of you who purchased this product that it was not profitable.
"P is an empty set." "I am a member of P."
Translation: P is an empty set. You are an element of P. You are NULL.
Oh, I think that we do want petulant, perky, happy, sad, etc. robots. Things like the Pleo and other pet or baby type robotic toys have limited "AI" to simulate the behaviors that we associate with real animals and babys. I see this as a separation of purposes. For practical purposes, i.e. exploring Mars, vacuuming dust and fur, detecting mines, etc. we want robots that work reliably, predictably and efficiently. For companionship purposes; i.e. pet simulators, companion simulators, therapist simulators, etc., we want believable, "feelable" emotions.
While dogs can be trained and used for search and rescue; huge amounts of time and energy go into molding and directing the dogs' emotions. They have to be rewarded for desired behavior, kept happy, etc. Search-bots, on the other hand, once created and trained need little further effort until needed. And, the training data can be replicated directly, without having to re-train every search bot.
On the other hand, interacting with an emotionless device is just that. Interacting with a pet, child, etc. is rewarding strictly because of the emotional content of the interaction. Just think about the people who dress their Roombas. They are, wierdly, simulating some of the aspects of emotional intelligence that the device natively lacks. Now, that is primarily in their head; but, it shows the desire for companion bots. Ideally, a perfect Pleo would react well enough for these people to feel content with it and let their vacuum clean without perturbation.
I do believe that there are two unique domains for bots that are separable. In humans, we have to force ourselves to do both without really excelling at either. Think of how many self-help books there are on training ones memory, improving mental math skills, increasing strength, and so on. These exist because we do not natively excel at things like calculating, storing data, or performing mechanical work. And how many books are there intended to help us relate to the opposite sex, relate to our children, bosses, pets, customers and the like. We, even the females among us, need help dealing with emotions.
AI and robotics allows us to create devices that excel at either of the problem domains without requiring excellence in the other. While emotional AI does not have the immediate value that functional AI does; it is progressing. After all, consider that modern Psychology is much more closely related to the Philosophy of the early 1900's than it is to the engineering of the early 1900's. While functional sciences have progressed vastly in the past century; emotional "sciences" have made very limited progress. Since the understanding of the emotion domain is vastly less than the understanding of the functional domain, the emotional AI is similarly stunted. Hopefully, more hard science research into emotion will lead to progress in this area.
I have no argument with your post at all; I just want to assert my belief that people should be free to offer bounties. Not to demand that they be accepted; but to offer. After all, there just might be a dev who wanted to play with CUDA on double precision hardware but did not want to shell out what nVidia was asking. The bounty might just cover the cost of the fun new toy; without having to put anything on a credit card. Freedom to offer or not; to accept offers or not; without anycoercion or harrassment strikes me as a good thing. A demand couched as an offer is not.
I gotta agree, both with ShieldW0lf and with the opposite point of view. I agree that this consumer society we have here in the US really sucks. It seems that we have gotten off the treadmill of working all day to hunt/gather/farm food all the way to working all day to pay off debt and accrue more getting the latest shit at some chain store.
That being said; I'm not ready to go off and play Thoreau just yet. So, money is, to some degree necessary. I hate having to do things that I believe are unethical or just plain stupid for an employer; and, I've really lost my ability to do so. So, I make less money that I probably could if I were no so damn picky.
However, being compensated for doing something useful and productive that I would not do for fun in my free time does not seem like a bribe. For example, a friend of mine with lots more money that I have needs his deck painted. He would rather spend his time working on his new kit plane; so, he offered me some cash to do it for him. This seems like a good, fair deal for both of us. He gets things done without interrupting his fun and I get some spare cash.
There is nothing unethical about the deal, nothing about it compromises my standards; and, I could easily have said no. The developers in this case did say no; but, if they had said yes, it would have been completely above board. They were not implicitly coerced, which is the normal situation for employment... Do what we say or lose your job, medical care, etc.
The problem, if any, was that the one making the offer of a bug bounty expected that it would be taken. Thus he was very upset when his expectatins were not met. That is the joy and frustration of community projects. People often work and help for nothing; but, they also often refuse to help even for compensation. That are free to do as they choose in a free software environment.
No; as opposed to projects with no or little revenue streams.
In fact, above some threshold, software quality seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of money available for developing the software.
I wonder if the ratio is to the number of management/marketing types to number of actual developers that causes this quality drop? I remember reading on kerneltrap.org that an insanely large number of individual contributers had shown up in Linus' git reports. Something like ~3500-4000 individuals. Other than Linus and the various subsystem maintainers, I am not aware of any marketing types or PHBs involved.
Any guesses as to what the dollar or PHB count threshold actually is? When does success become toxic, on average?
As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams? I have no real knowledge of the how much revenue the Apache Foundation has gotten over the years; but, if you compared the quantity and quality of their code with that of MS or Oracle, I'd bet that Apache does a lot more for the dollar.
http://www.flomax.com/
Well, speaking as the husband of a print designer, I can concur. She kept up with the upgrade treadmill until CS1. Since then, she has tried the trial versions but has found no compelling reason to upgrade. And, yes, she does do glossy magazine, and sign work.
Some people may suggest abandoning your keyboard and going outside to observe this "sun". I recommend that you visit http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/latest.html instead. Much less effort required. :)
I agree with that. I haven't used any MS software, any Adobe software, or any eggs from caged chickens in several years. I've also gotten a friend to switch one of his systems from WinXP to Kubuntu instead of buying a legit license for it. (It came from a relative with a cracked version of XP.) I've stopped buying potted plants and started just saving and planting seeds to save all that diesel spent shipping little seedlings around. I have no idea if it makes any difference to MS, Adobe, Raley's, WalMart, etc. but it does make a difference to me.
From a sample size of one (me) I disagree with your claim. I consider myself to be heavily biased towards Linux, and towards KDE and Ubuntu specifically. However, I am well aware of the long history of Unix; and, though I have no earthly reason to need one, I "window-shop" for old Unix boxes from Sun or IBM as they would be a really cool toy to have and learn on.
I also read about interesting developments happening in other OSs like Dragonfly BSD and OpenSolaris. While I have not been motivated to setup a BSD box in a few years; I am much more likely to install a flavor of BSD or Solaris voluntarily than I am to setup Windows Vista or OS X.
I guess that makes me a free software fanboy, then. Oh, well.
One of the great things about Linux/Unix is that it is really easy to write quick, simple scripts to accomplish little tasks as they occur. Whether written for SH/BASH/etc., for PHP, Python, Perl or what have you, a few lines of code can provide a time or labor saving solution to a sysadmin or skilled end-user. This is one of the things that has encouraged me to convert more and more machines from Windows Server to Linux. These scripts, however, are almost impossible to easily and quickly write in a way that leverages multiple cores. Some interpreters do not support multi-threading and others have funky threading implementations that do not seem to be of much use aside from handling asynchronous IO.
Though I studied programming years ago (late '80s and early '90s), I am far from a skilled programmer. I do, however, have enough of a grasp of the subject to be able to create purpose-specific scripts to make my life as an admin easier or to solve situationally unique problems. Since they often are used to automate repetitive tasks, they tend to have a good degree of parallelism by nature.
I have spent significant time Googling and reading online docs; and, I have not found a reasonably performant threading implementation that even remotely maintains the ease of coding that non-threaded scripts have. While I know that most of this discussion is focused on the software created by developers for distribution; I have a suspicion that having a multitasking script interpreter that is as easy for admins to use as what we have now would greatly improve server performance.
After all, if there are a few poky script interpreters hogging a few cores, even the best optimized daemons will not be able to work to their potential.
I've got a messed up knee; and, I wear a brace to do any serious hiking or similar activity. Since I've already got the damn itch, sweaty, annoying thing on; it might as well serve two functions instead of just one. Power and joint stabilization seem like a nice deal for those who need the stabilization in the first place.
For those whose knees are fine, however, it seems likely that the discomfort of any brace will outweigh the minimal juice provided. Carrying a supply of spare NiMH or other rechargeable batteries in your backpack or camera bag is not a great burden for an equivalent amount of juice. If you compare the weight of the food and water needed for a day of hiking compared to the weight of the batteries needed to run a GPS, camera and cell phone, the juice is negligible.
I'm using a Gateway E4200 from circa 1999. I've gone through 3 mobos, using a MSI Neo3 something now, have gone from a PII to a P4 to a Pentium D with a Core2Duo on a UPS truck somewhere on the way to my house now. I've gone from a 6GB IDE drive to SATA RAID 1 + IDE drives. Changed from integrated to PCI to AGP to PCIe graphics. Changed PSUs (this required judicious use of the Sawzall). Replaced the floppy with a flash reader, even painted the case to more attractively blend with my (wife's) decor. Oh, and, I've gone from Win2K to XP to Longhorn Beta to Ubuntu 6.06-->6.10-->7.04-->7.10. All without buying anything that wasn't exactly what I wanted and nothing more. Could an Apple product be so flexible?
Yup, Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-ITX ) and Pico-ITX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-ITX )
Just bought a Jetway ITX board with a C3, very nice little board, works perfect for a Terminal Services client. And fits in a PoS old ATX case that was laying around for a simple prototype unit.
I appreciate that AMD realizes that there is already a market for ITX and muATX systems; and, that this will allow case, cooling and mobo manufacturers to offer more choices with less design and inventory cost. Though I prefer ATX with lots of PCI slots for most uses, having a very compact form factor that allow the use of purpose designed enclosures with standard x86(64) hardware is very nice. It makes creating things like vehicle PCs, remote monitoring systems, etc. reasonable for the DIY crowd.
The PC104 and other embedded architectures and form factors are great, but, the require cross compilation, vertical market components with non-affordable prices at individual unit volumes, etc. Being able to run Puppy or Debian or Windows 2000 without much hassle on a tiny system is a great freedom for special purpose PCs.
I have 14 boxes running Ubuntu Server 7.04 and none of them have had any issues in the past 6 or so months. They have been vastly more stable than the 3 Windows Server 2003 boxes.
I've got some chicken soup. Would Vista like some? It'd feel all warm and fuzzy inside...
System: Linux justin01 2.6.22-5-generic #1 SMP Sat May 19 01:01:22 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux CPU: Pentium D805 RAM: 2GB Firefox: 2.0.0.3 MD5 Benchmark took 4.246 seconds for 3000 hashes (707 hashes/second) MD4 Benchmark took 3.15 seconds for 2700 hashes (857 hashes/second) SHA1 Benchmark took 4.712 seconds for 1900 hashes (403 hashes/second) Konqueror: MD5 Benchmark took 25.447 seconds for 3000 hashes (118 hashes/second) MD4 Benchmark took 16.899 seconds for 2700 hashes (160 hashes/second) SHA1 Benchmark took 27.058 seconds for 1900 hashes (70 hashes/second)
Thanks!
I've also been toying with the idea of building or buying a large supplemental power supply. In my case, I have a Compact Flash GPS that I use with a handheld while driving and hiking. In the car, power is not a problem; but, on hikes, I can only use the GPS for the duration of the handheld's battery life. With the GPs drawing juice and the screen brightness turned all the way up for visibility in full sun; this is not near the duration of a long trek.
Since I really do not fancy the idea of carrying a Lead-Acid battery in a backpack for hours, NiMH or Li-Ion looks appealling. But, designing a suitable package which allows for easy charging and quick connection to the handheld is not something I have gotten up the motivation to do. Anyone know of a pre-existing design or package for this purpose?
Absolutely. I have a friend, a retired executive from the telecom world. He is relatively savvy, but, he is not a geek and, though he has installed various flavors of Windows for himself and his friends, he usually would prefer to do other things with his time. He knows that I have been using Ubuntu since Dapper pre-release and is interested. We had talked about setting up his desktop with Ubuntu in the fall after fishing and gardening season is over. Now that Dell is selling them preinstalled, I would bet that he will pick up one of the less expensive Dimensions that come preinstalled before then. Having the bundle available takes the need to do the time consuming acts of downloading, burning, running the installer and tweaking the installation. My impression is that an unfortunately huge segment of the American population would rather call an 800 number and hand over their card than do any work on their own. The fact that Dell is willing to cater to the "more money than sense" crowd is great for Linux. I just hope that there is sufficient support available for those who are too lazy to google for an answer and instead instinctively call tehc support. If their experience is at least on par with the XP support they recieve, I bet they'll be pretty happy.
Intel, IBM, AMD, Chartered, TSMC. Who am I missing? And, can anyone specifically rank them in terms of lag behind Intel in months/process generation?