If you are so smart, tell me how to put a cheap 2GHz PC in a 15x10x8cm controller compartment of a robot I'm making. And power it from a 13.8V gel-lead-acid battery that needs every bit of spare power for the main motor. The specification says nothing about having a needless, integrated air heater in the controller, but any CPU that draws more than 200mA and requires more than one voltage with DC-DC convertion efficiency less than 90% is way too much.
And there are defnitely more things that really need accuracy. Basically every kind of system that interfaces with hardware on a raw I/O level, with control implemented in software. Hell, a dumb high-speed rotary-to-linear transducer with a motor needs extremely precise software control.
Looks like you need to get a broader view of things before stating completely unfounded statements in the public.
Well, maybe instead of doing retarded, primitive generalizations and assumptions about the OP, trying to make the wisest man on the Earth out of yourself and being a rude asshole in the end (yes, I'm referring to #22827572 too), try communicating your thoughts in a more civilized and useful way? I'd expect someone so down-to-earth, wise and mature to know better how to argue in a polite manner. Using ad hominem "arguments" from the first sentence onwards could be a sign of everything but maturity and credibility. Oh, and if I were you, I'd be wary of not sounding like a "unique snowflake" myself, as you do. What makes you so exceptional and authoritative to issue one bold blanket statement after another about education, universities, young people and doing a living? All I see are some insults. Or am I wrong?
Oh, and I don't see how he expects everything on a platter - did he say somewhere "no, I'm not going to work at all" or "I want them to pay for everythin and be happy they did some good and expect nothing back" or something like that? Not that I see. I'd even go as far as saying, that asking questions is an absolute opposite of expecting everything on a platter. So where's the problem?
Actually, biological muscles aren't healing beyond minor damage either. Damaged areas are patched with connective tissue, so the damage doesn't spread and affect the muscle as a whole in a significant way, but the fibers affected will remain a bit weaker.
AFAIR it is only available for ext2 as of now - not as a global kernel option or something like that. That's a good starting point, but not very useful for me right now.
I'm using regular ramdisks initalized with data on bootup, composited with temporary, empty disk partitions using unionfs and synchronized back to their real partitions on powerdown, so that I have an extremely fast read time for most things contained on such a disk and conventional write-reread times. However, the problem is that for the upper layers of the kernel, those ramdisks are not RAM at all, just some other block device around - and when it comes to loading executables and libraries, they are copied, well, from memory to memory. What's missing is some way to tell the damn thing to use the data pages that already are there and issue a copy-on-write only when required. If this mechanism can do that - well, I'll be in as soon as they make it a little bit more fault-tolerant.
Rarely, but when you need it - well, you really NEED it. Sometimes the only way to escape a high-speed collision or a very bad skid is to accelerate, not to brake, and you certainly wouldn't want yor car to be at its maximum power already.
There's something wrong with 2.x if it can *alone* make my system (Core Duo 1.83, 3GB DDR2) really sluggish, even though it is normally running KDE, VMWare Server with Windows Server 2003 inside and several applications on both OSes quite effortlessly. It's not normal for a damn office suite to be more resource-demanding than an operating system, is it?
Somehow I get this weird feeling that this is exactly the point of this thing being there at all. And, honestly, I can imagine a missle maiming someone inside the target vehicle just as happily as this contraption and I don't think a soldier will give a crap wether his leg was torn off by decompression of high-pressue gas or burnt off by a focused beam of photons. Either way it's a leg off. Actually, the latter is a bit better, because it gives a higher chance of surviving a not-quite-direct hit - the laser burns only the 50.8-cm area it hits, an explosion will generate an extreme pressure inside the whole vehicle, ripping the crew apart anyway.
you can download a perfectly well working cracked ISO of Windows as fast as an ISO of your favourite distribution and the fact that these won't ever show you any activation or advantage check bullcrap That's what I hate about people like you. You think you're too good to be bothered by all this "license", "copyright" and "respect for others' work (regardless of its objective quality)" stuff. Because no one cares, right? Wrong. Want to crack your Windows CD, then? Well, hold it in your teeth and bite into it as hard as you can until you hear a loud "CRACK!". Congratulations, it's cracked. Now go away. Shooo.
That would be Google, I think - unintrusive ads that, however hard to believe that would be, are often sensible and even useful. Yes, I've used them a few times and found a few products and services I was trying to get much faster than I would have found them myself. I guess the Google Ads' context system would do wonders on Wikipedia - there's everything required to maintain the context of the article and present meaningful, relevant ads. And keep the Wikipedia up and running.
I've got a middle-sized website myself (several thousand users, about 15k views a day, increasing) which is up since 10 years almost completely without ads, save for a tiny Google Ads banner no one notices and a hosting company's banner in exchange for an additional file server - the main hosting is and always was paid with raised money. However, as the site grows, the cost increases every year. In a few years, it will probably get higher than the donations we get and I will have to find some other method of funding the hosting. So the problem definitely is there and it's significant even for small to medium websites.
I don't know where did this notion of/. front page space being a scarce resource come from, but I really don't think that NOT submitting some stories will cause a spontaneous apperarance of "valuable" (however you define that in the scope of your own interests) news in the submission system. Or will it?
IF you can't code, you'd better not take up the coding tasks - but there are tasks that require other skills, too. Of particular use is documentation writing, something that OSS programmers often dismiss as unimportant and boring or just because they don't have the "feel" for writing decent manuals. If you can express complicated ideas in a simple way, explain them clearly and make sense out of contorted processes in general, try your skills in this area, it certainly will help some user as much as a new feature in his favourite application.
They've got caffeinated soap, shampoo, shower gel and whatnot for sale - and now, they can advertise them as cancer-preventing in addition to jolt-giving!
BTW, does anybody here have any experience with those caffeinated soaps and shampoos and can confirm their effectiveness? Just curious, they look quite plausible, but it's always good to know a first-hand opinion.
They've been the first (only?) company to construct their logo with individual atoms - and that was in 1990. Looks like they don't give up researching the basics, despite turning more and more into a consulting/support company, not the big iron provider they've always been.
You probably would, if you liked it, if not for any other reason. For most use cases, wether The Right Tool for The Job(tm) is Linux, BSD, Solaris or just about anything else should be determined by asking the people due to be in charge what they feel most comfortable with. And that's it. If you don't expect to push the system to its limits in a very specific way, fear a particular kind of attack vectors or require in-kernel support for this or that newfangled widget, be it hardware or software, and don't consider some platform a burden in the case of staff turnover, the most sensible choice is really what the staff would like to work with.
Actually, in most other cases it's even easier, because there often is an industry standard - e.g. half (warning: that's an educated guess, that is, a number pulled out of my, er, back pocket, representing something close to reality in a simplified, but suitable way) of the banks and other financial institutions tend to use Solaris a lot (the other half using IBM stuff) just because a tried way of doing things for them and there's no point in changing that.
And if you want an OS for personal use, feel free to choose on any basis you like, from the license to the number of lines of code to the project founder's hair color - just be careful not to become a brainwashed zealot...
And how do you, exactly, express a complex, hierarchical configuration (as is often needed for real servers, not your typical home *NIX box serving your e-mail) in an unambigious, standard, predictable, system-independent way using ini files? Sooner or later, you will end up with an unloved, messy bastard child of ini and something XML-esque in its nature, if not looks. And it'll be even worse than a well-known evil you can deal with easily.
Sure, more often than not, XML is an overkill, but sometimes there's no better way in the long run. Really, any extreme point of view is bad, pro- or anti-XML alike. So, know your enemy and be prepared to admit his strengths, for he has them regardless of what you think.
That's interesting - I've been doing some modeling in Blender on a SiS 661 with the free driver (that is, no DRI at all). The "preview" window was next to useless, but the workspace itself was pretty fast. I was able to model some relatively simple objects and animations without any problems, on a Celeron M 1,5GHz. I've even tried playing with some more complicated scenes downloaded from blender.org examples and tutorials and everything was still fine, if not extra-smooth.
Sure, it can. Sometimes. But it's the single most common "typo" I see in/. submissions. There's probably more of it than of all the other mistakes combined, "bamalance" included. And I can spot such mistakes just as easily in my native language, which is Polish, even though I don't parse it consciously for sure. Hell, I can see them even in German, a language I hate and barely know. And I'm not talking about mistakes made by non-native speakres, very common on/. - those are easily distinguished and I can "forgive" them (although it sometimes makes the intended meaning extremely difficult to understand) - what bothers me is when a native speaker makes them, whereas I do my best to write correctly just for the sake of the respect due in communication. Maybe that's something wrong with me, but I see this as something important.
But what, for the $(DEITY)'s sake, is going on with this damn "it's"!? It's the THIRD TIME in the past 24 hours and hell knows which in the past few weeks that the editors can't spot such a basic, common mistake. I'm not a native English speaker - not even a near-native - and I can see them, hunderds of slashdotters see them, they look just silly, if not discrediting, yet they are still there. Maybe the submission system should highlight every "it's" in red for the editors reviewing the stories, just in case it's a mistake, or something like that?
But it would be a lot more than enough to handle the data analysis and mapping, especially with this amount of memory. AVRs, which I'm using now, have their limits, not in the clock speed (16MHz IS a lot for controlling quite a bit of a relatively simple robot's subsystems, a few times that is enough for the whole thing) but in the memory, a whopping 4-16KB of which is build into a typical one. Just no room for any serious data processing - and chasing the robot with a laptop and an RS232 cable attached to it is no fun.
Well, not enough coffe today, my bad. Megagrams, sure. However, the phrase "thousands of kilograms" actually IS used in speech instead of "tonnes" for some ranges, something like 1000-20000 kilograms, because it allows to express a precise, yet relatively significant mass in a more natural way when this precision matters (that is, most likely below 20t) - I'd rather say "eight thousand four hundred fifty-four kilograms" than "eight and four hundred fifty-four thousandths of a tonne".
As an added benefit, you avoid the question "which one, metric or imperial?" (no, I'm not going to try to determine the airspeed of an unladen metric tonne), which might come up as the spelling difference isn't significant enough in pronunciation.
Which is a pity - it would be perfect for a SLAM-capable robot project I've got on hold since half a year because even the crappiest embedded motherboards out there are damn expensive when you want to buy just one or two of them and are a student...
It's probably for the same reason we talk about thousands of kilograms instead of "just" saying "gigagrams". The term "MIPS" is not really an abbreviation anymore, it became a proper word describing a performance unit everyone in the industry is used to.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are so smart, tell me how to put a cheap 2GHz PC in a 15x10x8cm controller compartment of a robot I'm making. And power it from a 13.8V gel-lead-acid battery that needs every bit of spare power for the main motor. The specification says nothing about having a needless, integrated air heater in the controller, but any CPU that draws more than 200mA and requires more than one voltage with DC-DC convertion efficiency less than 90% is way too much.
And there are defnitely more things that really need accuracy. Basically every kind of system that interfaces with hardware on a raw I/O level, with control implemented in software. Hell, a dumb high-speed rotary-to-linear transducer with a motor needs extremely precise software control.
Looks like you need to get a broader view of things before stating completely unfounded statements in the public.
Well, maybe instead of doing retarded, primitive generalizations and assumptions about the OP, trying to make the wisest man on the Earth out of yourself and being a rude asshole in the end (yes, I'm referring to #22827572 too), try communicating your thoughts in a more civilized and useful way? I'd expect someone so down-to-earth, wise and mature to know better how to argue in a polite manner. Using ad hominem "arguments" from the first sentence onwards could be a sign of everything but maturity and credibility. Oh, and if I were you, I'd be wary of not sounding like a "unique snowflake" myself, as you do. What makes you so exceptional and authoritative to issue one bold blanket statement after another about education, universities, young people and doing a living? All I see are some insults. Or am I wrong?
Oh, and I don't see how he expects everything on a platter - did he say somewhere "no, I'm not going to work at all" or "I want them to pay for everythin and be happy they did some good and expect nothing back" or something like that? Not that I see. I'd even go as far as saying, that asking questions is an absolute opposite of expecting everything on a platter. So where's the problem?
Actually, biological muscles aren't healing beyond minor damage either. Damaged areas are patched with connective tissue, so the damage doesn't spread and affect the muscle as a whole in a significant way, but the fibers affected will remain a bit weaker.
AFAIR it is only available for ext2 as of now - not as a global kernel option or something like that. That's a good starting point, but not very useful for me right now.
As Master Yoba said, "Vista capable" it is, but enough it is not, young one!
I'm using regular ramdisks initalized with data on bootup, composited with temporary, empty disk partitions using unionfs and synchronized back to their real partitions on powerdown, so that I have an extremely fast read time for most things contained on such a disk and conventional write-reread times. However, the problem is that for the upper layers of the kernel, those ramdisks are not RAM at all, just some other block device around - and when it comes to loading executables and libraries, they are copied, well, from memory to memory. What's missing is some way to tell the damn thing to use the data pages that already are there and issue a copy-on-write only when required. If this mechanism can do that - well, I'll be in as soon as they make it a little bit more fault-tolerant.
Rarely, but when you need it - well, you really NEED it. Sometimes the only way to escape a high-speed collision or a very bad skid is to accelerate, not to brake, and you certainly wouldn't want yor car to be at its maximum power already.
There's something wrong with 2.x if it can *alone* make my system (Core Duo 1.83, 3GB DDR2) really sluggish, even though it is normally running KDE, VMWare Server with Windows Server 2003 inside and several applications on both OSes quite effortlessly. It's not normal for a damn office suite to be more resource-demanding than an operating system, is it?
Somehow I get this weird feeling that this is exactly the point of this thing being there at all. And, honestly, I can imagine a missle maiming someone inside the target vehicle just as happily as this contraption and I don't think a soldier will give a crap wether his leg was torn off by decompression of high-pressue gas or burnt off by a focused beam of photons. Either way it's a leg off. Actually, the latter is a bit better, because it gives a higher chance of surviving a not-quite-direct hit - the laser burns only the 50.8-cm area it hits, an explosion will generate an extreme pressure inside the whole vehicle, ripping the crew apart anyway.
That would be Google, I think - unintrusive ads that, however hard to believe that would be, are often sensible and even useful. Yes, I've used them a few times and found a few products and services I was trying to get much faster than I would have found them myself. I guess the Google Ads' context system would do wonders on Wikipedia - there's everything required to maintain the context of the article and present meaningful, relevant ads. And keep the Wikipedia up and running.
I've got a middle-sized website myself (several thousand users, about 15k views a day, increasing) which is up since 10 years almost completely without ads, save for a tiny Google Ads banner no one notices and a hosting company's banner in exchange for an additional file server - the main hosting is and always was paid with raised money. However, as the site grows, the cost increases every year. In a few years, it will probably get higher than the donations we get and I will have to find some other method of funding the hosting. So the problem definitely is there and it's significant even for small to medium websites.
I don't know where did this notion of /. front page space being a scarce resource come from, but I really don't think that NOT submitting some stories will cause a spontaneous apperarance of "valuable" (however you define that in the scope of your own interests) news in the submission system. Or will it?
Submit something yourself, maybe?
IF you can't code, you'd better not take up the coding tasks - but there are tasks that require other skills, too. Of particular use is documentation writing, something that OSS programmers often dismiss as unimportant and boring or just because they don't have the "feel" for writing decent manuals. If you can express complicated ideas in a simple way, explain them clearly and make sense out of contorted processes in general, try your skills in this area, it certainly will help some user as much as a new feature in his favourite application.
They've got caffeinated soap, shampoo, shower gel and whatnot for sale - and now, they can advertise them as cancer-preventing in addition to jolt-giving! BTW, does anybody here have any experience with those caffeinated soaps and shampoos and can confirm their effectiveness? Just curious, they look quite plausible, but it's always good to know a first-hand opinion.
They've been the first (only?) company to construct their logo with individual atoms - and that was in 1990. Looks like they don't give up researching the basics, despite turning more and more into a consulting/support company, not the big iron provider they've always been.
You probably would, if you liked it, if not for any other reason. For most use cases, wether The Right Tool for The Job(tm) is Linux, BSD, Solaris or just about anything else should be determined by asking the people due to be in charge what they feel most comfortable with. And that's it. If you don't expect to push the system to its limits in a very specific way, fear a particular kind of attack vectors or require in-kernel support for this or that newfangled widget, be it hardware or software, and don't consider some platform a burden in the case of staff turnover, the most sensible choice is really what the staff would like to work with.
Actually, in most other cases it's even easier, because there often is an industry standard - e.g. half (warning: that's an educated guess, that is, a number pulled out of my, er, back pocket, representing something close to reality in a simplified, but suitable way) of the banks and other financial institutions tend to use Solaris a lot (the other half using IBM stuff) just because a tried way of doing things for them and there's no point in changing that.
And if you want an OS for personal use, feel free to choose on any basis you like, from the license to the number of lines of code to the project founder's hair color - just be careful not to become a brainwashed zealot...
And how do you, exactly, express a complex, hierarchical configuration (as is often needed for real servers, not your typical home *NIX box serving your e-mail) in an unambigious, standard, predictable, system-independent way using ini files? Sooner or later, you will end up with an unloved, messy bastard child of ini and something XML-esque in its nature, if not looks. And it'll be even worse than a well-known evil you can deal with easily.
Sure, more often than not, XML is an overkill, but sometimes there's no better way in the long run. Really, any extreme point of view is bad, pro- or anti-XML alike. So, know your enemy and be prepared to admit his strengths, for he has them regardless of what you think.
That's interesting - I've been doing some modeling in Blender on a SiS 661 with the free driver (that is, no DRI at all). The "preview" window was next to useless, but the workspace itself was pretty fast. I was able to model some relatively simple objects and animations without any problems, on a Celeron M 1,5GHz. I've even tried playing with some more complicated scenes downloaded from blender.org examples and tutorials and everything was still fine, if not extra-smooth.
Sure, it can. Sometimes. But it's the single most common "typo" I see in /. submissions. There's probably more of it than of all the other mistakes combined, "bamalance" included. And I can spot such mistakes just as easily in my native language, which is Polish, even though I don't parse it consciously for sure. Hell, I can see them even in German, a language I hate and barely know. And I'm not talking about mistakes made by non-native speakres, very common on /. - those are easily distinguished and I can "forgive" them (although it sometimes makes the intended meaning extremely difficult to understand) - what bothers me is when a native speaker makes them, whereas I do my best to write correctly just for the sake of the respect due in communication. Maybe that's something wrong with me, but I see this as something important.
Typo, see this - I know how to spell that word.
But what, for the $(DEITY)'s sake, is going on with this damn "it's"!? It's the THIRD TIME in the past 24 hours and hell knows which in the past few weeks that the editors can't spot such a basic, common mistake. I'm not a native English speaker - not even a near-native - and I can see them, hunderds of slashdotters see them, they look just silly, if not discrediting, yet they are still there. Maybe the submission system should highlight every "it's" in red for the editors reviewing the stories, just in case it's a mistake, or something like that?
But it would be a lot more than enough to handle the data analysis and mapping, especially with this amount of memory. AVRs, which I'm using now, have their limits, not in the clock speed (16MHz IS a lot for controlling quite a bit of a relatively simple robot's subsystems, a few times that is enough for the whole thing) but in the memory, a whopping 4-16KB of which is build into a typical one. Just no room for any serious data processing - and chasing the robot with a laptop and an RS232 cable attached to it is no fun.
Well, not enough coffe today, my bad. Megagrams, sure. However, the phrase "thousands of kilograms" actually IS used in speech instead of "tonnes" for some ranges, something like 1000-20000 kilograms, because it allows to express a precise, yet relatively significant mass in a more natural way when this precision matters (that is, most likely below 20t) - I'd rather say "eight thousand four hundred fifty-four kilograms" than "eight and four hundred fifty-four thousandths of a tonne".
As an added benefit, you avoid the question "which one, metric or imperial?" (no, I'm not going to try to determine the airspeed of an unladen metric tonne), which might come up as the spelling difference isn't significant enough in pronunciation.
Which is a pity - it would be perfect for a SLAM-capable robot project I've got on hold since half a year because even the crappiest embedded motherboards out there are damn expensive when you want to buy just one or two of them and are a student...
It's probably for the same reason we talk about thousands of kilograms instead of "just" saying "gigagrams". The term "MIPS" is not really an abbreviation anymore, it became a proper word describing a performance unit everyone in the industry is used to.