I have an old Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook P1032 from ebay. It's 9 inches wide, comes with a touch screen, and happily runs Linux. It's a bit low on memory (128MB), but it comes with 8 hours runtime using an extened battery, and is great for watching movies on planes. Or coding, whichever you prefer. Sub-notes are neat, but certainly not new. Vapourware comes and goes, while Sony and F-S quietly keep producing them.
Oh please. Has science spending been cut to fund faith schools? No. Maybe you have a problem with religion (I might also), but this is a different discussion. The British government tried to bail out Rover. It was a valiant attempt to keep a few more workers working and off benefit. It didn't work, there's a short term pinch. It happens. Oh, and I work on an EPSRC funded project, so yes, I do care.
I'm a physicist so LaTeX is the only sensible way to write reports/papers, but it's starting to look a little long in the tooth and could do with a scrub.
Have the LaTeX3 project produced anything? I get the (perhaps completely wrong) impression that the project has sunk into navel-gazing, in a search for the perfect solution. I'd be happy with the next iteration, if it comes out soonish. Release early, release often?
These are resonant devices right? Extremely tiny ones. One decent pulse of RF at the right frequency makes lots of toast-dust. It might smell a bit funny, but they won't be resonant any more.
It's true that regular flu kills far more people each year that Avian flu. But for a rather shocking number, look at how many people have caught Avian flu and died from it - around 60% according to wikipedia. It's currently quite hard to catch Avian flu, you really need to be handling the birds. The real risk comes if that changes, and the virus mutates to allow efficient human-human transfer. Then we could have the contagiousness of normal flu with the kill rate of Avian flu - that's scary.
Linking to wikipedia doesn't make you smart. I think we all know what a mean is, it's just that some of us realize how meaningless it can be (pun intended).
Whoa, slow down excitable-designer-person. This too fresh and clean idea is a phone, with buttons for pressing and a screen for watching. It's been done before.
I guess that's a fair point. I've never used it as a security feature, I (blindly) trust the portage tree. It's the.tgz's from some obscure corner of the web that I sorry about more.
The sandbox part of the Gentoo build process is more interesting, thinking about the problem. If you use separate ebuild stages, rather than emerge, you can check the sandbox directory tree to see what has been built and what will be copied across to your main system.
Try Gentoo. Apart from fanboy overtweakers, it provides just the kind of installation control you're asking for, via emerge. Emerge builds the new app in a sandbox, then transfers it to your running system. You then run etc-update to update your config files. If the install wants to modify files in 'protected' directories (/etc,/etc/init.d, etc.), it will ask you before making the changes. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass (327 files to update...), but at least you get to see what's going on.
'cos nobody could ever call the IEEE a bunch of money grabbing bast...
Access to their electronic journals (back issues) certainly turns a profit. As a fully paid up member, I was given access to...zero journals. I left that subscription to lapse.
I read it and thought how childish MS can be. I've no idea what the OO stands for, but I can think of a related open software package it might be designed to frustrate...
Okay, bare with me, I'm thinking about this. My bicycle has a MTBF which isn't related to its lifetime - it breaks and I repair it, until at some point it breaks really badly and I replace it. But if my hard drive dies, it's dead, end of story - in other words I only care about the first failure. The 'infant mortality' stage makes sense, but let's assume that is covered by the guarantee (I know, my data's gone, but I'm bound to have backups;-) Once we've reached the 'low failure rate' stage, isn't the mean time-to-first-failure related to the MTBF?
For something that isn't repairable, surely they are related? Lifetime = alpha * MTBF, where alpha is some number less than one? Or are you thinking that the curve is rather broad?
There's a place for everything, and I'm not convinced that simulations are the place for it.
Um, one of the earliest OO languages was Simula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula). The clue is in the name, it was designed for simulation. I can write code that's near impossible to debug in any language, and OO code is no exception. Writing OO code does take a bit of practice. But well written OO code can be a real pleasure to use, very easy to read, maintain and extend.
Is Google Earth really so much better than a bit of local knowledge? You know, like grew up in the area, lived there all your life, know every backstreet, have friends you can hide with, etc. Remember, the Iraqis live there, we're the invaders.
There seem to be lots of folks out there claiming Linux has killed Solaris. But if you talk to any admin managing machines with lots of users, shifting heavy data, they love Solaris. Better throughput, better reliability. And they keep buying Sun (even if Solaris is free). What was that quote Steve Jobs was using - if you're serious about software you have to develop your own hardware?
I studied physics at Warwick, 92-95. We used to have one small lab of Windows machines, 1 small lab of vt220 terminals, one large lab of X-terminals and two large labs of Suns. Virtually everything was Unix back then. How things change.
Have you tried running Matlab on the Linux boxes? You probably already have it licensed. I ran Octave for a while, but it's just different enough from Matlab to be really awkward, especially when sharing scripts. I run Matlab from my Gentoo box with no problems (if it installs under Gentoo, I'm assuming it'll install under just about any distro;-)
One massive benefit of running Linux for me is that I can prepare code on my desktop, then recompile the same code on a larger central machine for longer simulation runs (days). We've just bought a proprietary simulation package that runs Windows only, and it keeps tying up desktop machines while our central cluster sit idle. Stupid, dumb Windows.
Good luck with your IT guys - if you're lucky you might find someone who wants to do it but hasn't been able to justify the time.
We used to be much more unix-centric, but there is now a very heavy windows bias. The admin staff (as in beancounters, not root) have too much control over computer policy. They assume that all we need to run is MS office and a access a couple of university databases of student IDs and cost codes. They don't understand why some of us want to run strange packages they've never heard of. It's getting harder to run Linux/Solaris/whatever. There is currently no official access to university email without Windows (although there are hacks to make it work). Remote administration of Windows machines is being introduced.
It's sad. Unix admins cost more. Universities don't have much cash/don't pay well. Cheap admins don't understand/want unix. We get more Windows.
Don't try three or four distros unless you have time to kill. They all work, and all do virtually the same thing - pick one. Use what somebody helpful nearby uses - the person you'll go to when you get stuck. If you really like Linux, you might try another distro in a few months time, but out of curiosity rather than need (that's what I did).
I think the question is interesting. You give us some examples of what you want to use your computer for. Any distro can easily do all of them, but I didn't find that obvious until I'd been using and reading about Linux for a while. There is less difference between distros than a lot of discussions (e.g. here on/.) would lead you to beleive.
The opencascade library is now open source. It's the 3D library, so it has no GUI, but the whole core is there. It just need someone to work a little Qt/GTK magic:
http://www.opencascade.org/
This is especially true when viewed from a global perspective.
That's an interesting point. In the second half of the last century, the US has invested passively in science, and done very well from it. A lot of scientist have moved to the US, attracted by a big research budget. I've thought about it. But as political interference increases, we'll start moving somewhere else instead - the science goes on. But what will be the effect for the United States?
Slashdot Mirror
I have an old Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook P1032 from ebay. It's 9 inches wide, comes with a touch screen, and happily runs Linux. It's a bit low on memory (128MB), but it comes with 8 hours runtime using an extened battery, and is great for watching movies on planes. Or coding, whichever you prefer. Sub-notes are neat, but certainly not new. Vapourware comes and goes, while Sony and F-S quietly keep producing them.
2 _FPCM02053_PC_Notebook/display_~full_specs
http://www0.epinions.com/pr-Fujitsu_LifeBook_P103
as a jelly fish and a porn star
You saw that one too? What did you think of the plot?
Oh please. Has science spending been cut to fund faith schools? No. Maybe you have a problem with religion (I might also), but this is a different discussion. The British government tried to bail out Rover. It was a valiant attempt to keep a few more workers working and off benefit. It didn't work, there's a short term pinch. It happens. Oh, and I work on an EPSRC funded project, so yes, I do care.
I'm a physicist so LaTeX is the only sensible way to write reports/papers, but it's starting to look a little long in the tooth and could do with a scrub.
Have the LaTeX3 project produced anything? I get the (perhaps completely wrong) impression that the project has sunk into navel-gazing, in a search for the perfect solution. I'd be happy with the next iteration, if it comes out soonish. Release early, release often?
These are resonant devices right? Extremely tiny ones. One decent pulse of RF at the right frequency makes lots of toast-dust. It might smell a bit funny, but they won't be resonant any more.
It's true that regular flu kills far more people each year that Avian flu. But for a rather shocking number, look at how many people have caught Avian flu and died from it - around 60% according to wikipedia. It's currently quite hard to catch Avian flu, you really need to be handling the birds. The real risk comes if that changes, and the virus mutates to allow efficient human-human transfer. Then we could have the contagiousness of normal flu with the kill rate of Avian flu - that's scary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1
Linking to wikipedia doesn't make you smart. I think we all know what a mean is, it's just that some of us realize how meaningless it can be (pun intended).
Whoa, slow down excitable-designer-person. This too fresh and clean idea is a phone, with buttons for pressing and a screen for watching. It's been done before.
I guess that's a fair point. I've never used it as a security feature, I (blindly) trust the portage tree. It's the .tgz's from some obscure corner of the web that I sorry about more.
The sandbox part of the Gentoo build process is more interesting, thinking about the problem. If you use separate ebuild stages, rather than emerge, you can check the sandbox directory tree to see what has been built and what will be copied across to your main system.
Try Gentoo. Apart from fanboy overtweakers, it provides just the kind of installation control you're asking for, via emerge. Emerge builds the new app in a sandbox, then transfers it to your running system. You then run etc-update to update your config files. If the install wants to modify files in 'protected' directories (/etc, /etc/init.d, etc.), it will ask you before making the changes. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass (327 files to update...), but at least you get to see what's going on.
'cos nobody could ever call the IEEE a bunch of money grabbing bast...
Access to their electronic journals (back issues) certainly turns a profit. As a fully paid up member, I was given access to...zero journals. I left that subscription to lapse.
That's innovative.
I read it and thought how childish MS can be. I've no idea what the OO stands for, but I can think of a related open software package it might be designed to frustrate...
Another thank you. That's clarified everything.
Okay, bare with me, I'm thinking about this. My bicycle has a MTBF which isn't related to its lifetime - it breaks and I repair it, until at some point it breaks really badly and I replace it. But if my hard drive dies, it's dead, end of story - in other words I only care about the first failure. The 'infant mortality' stage makes sense, but let's assume that is covered by the guarantee (I know, my data's gone, but I'm bound to have backups ;-) Once we've reached the 'low failure rate' stage, isn't the mean time-to-first-failure related to the MTBF?
For something that isn't repairable, surely they are related? Lifetime = alpha * MTBF, where alpha is some number less than one? Or are you thinking that the curve is rather broad?
There's a place for everything, and I'm not convinced that simulations are the place for it.
Um, one of the earliest OO languages was Simula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula). The clue is in the name, it was designed for simulation. I can write code that's near impossible to debug in any language, and OO code is no exception. Writing OO code does take a bit of practice. But well written OO code can be a real pleasure to use, very easy to read, maintain and extend.
Is Google Earth really so much better than a bit of local knowledge? You know, like grew up in the area, lived there all your life, know every backstreet, have friends you can hide with, etc. Remember, the Iraqis live there, we're the invaders.
There seem to be lots of folks out there claiming Linux has killed Solaris. But if you talk to any admin managing machines with lots of users, shifting heavy data, they love Solaris. Better throughput, better reliability. And they keep buying Sun (even if Solaris is free). What was that quote Steve Jobs was using - if you're serious about software you have to develop your own hardware?
Hey Jeb,
;-)
I studied physics at Warwick, 92-95. We used to have one small lab of Windows machines, 1 small lab of vt220 terminals, one large lab of X-terminals and two large labs of Suns. Virtually everything was Unix back then. How things change.
Have you tried running Matlab on the Linux boxes? You probably already have it licensed. I ran Octave for a while, but it's just different enough from Matlab to be really awkward, especially when sharing scripts. I run Matlab from my Gentoo box with no problems (if it installs under Gentoo, I'm assuming it'll install under just about any distro
One massive benefit of running Linux for me is that I can prepare code on my desktop, then recompile the same code on a larger central machine for longer simulation runs (days). We've just bought a proprietary simulation package that runs Windows only, and it keeps tying up desktop machines while our central cluster sit idle. Stupid, dumb Windows.
Good luck with your IT guys - if you're lucky you might find someone who wants to do it but hasn't been able to justify the time.
We used to be much more unix-centric, but there is now a very heavy windows bias. The admin staff (as in beancounters, not root) have too much control over computer policy. They assume that all we need to run is MS office and a access a couple of university databases of student IDs and cost codes. They don't understand why some of us want to run strange packages they've never heard of. It's getting harder to run Linux/Solaris/whatever. There is currently no official access to university email without Windows (although there are hacks to make it work). Remote administration of Windows machines is being introduced. It's sad. Unix admins cost more. Universities don't have much cash/don't pay well. Cheap admins don't understand/want unix. We get more Windows.
Don't try three or four distros unless you have time to kill. They all work, and all do virtually the same thing - pick one. Use what somebody helpful nearby uses - the person you'll go to when you get stuck. If you really like Linux, you might try another distro in a few months time, but out of curiosity rather than need (that's what I did).
/.) would lead you to beleive.
I think the question is interesting. You give us some examples of what you want to use your computer for. Any distro can easily do all of them, but I didn't find that obvious until I'd been using and reading about Linux for a while. There is less difference between distros than a lot of discussions (e.g. here on
Try one and have fun.
The opencascade library is now open source. It's the 3D library, so it has no GUI, but the whole core is there. It just need someone to work a little Qt/GTK magic: http://www.opencascade.org/
This is especially true when viewed from a global perspective.
That's an interesting point. In the second half of the last century, the US has invested passively in science, and done very well from it. A lot of scientist have moved to the US, attracted by a big research budget. I've thought about it. But as political interference increases, we'll start moving somewhere else instead - the science goes on. But what will be the effect for the United States?
Bullshit surveys saying all's well and the customers love it - now we know Novell have been bought out by the Redmond beast.