If you were to read the articles on Wikipedia and around the web in general regarding cold fusion, somoluminescence, and other "cold" fusion reactions you would come away with two very wrong impressions. First would be that these technologies are very close to fruition and second that they are the holy grail of energy production and the answer to all of our problems. You would think that the fusion reactions are not dangerous, do not pollute, and the fuels involved are of infinite supply. The reality is that the only reproducable, controlled, fusion reactions mankind has managed to generate in a reproducable manner consume much more power than they generate, and are many, many years before becoming a source of power. Regarding fusion by-products, the fact is that most fusion reactions produce deadly forms of radiation, weather "cold" or "hot", and the fuels required for a-neutronic reactions are not in infinite supply.
Granted that the idea of "Mr. Fusion" powering our automobiles on flat beer with helium, water vapour, and heat as it's only waste is captivating. Having a near infinite supply of energy would solve many of our and the world's problems (and I'm sure cause many of it's own as well).
We should not lose sight that there are real, proven sources of energy that are renewable, cleaner and longer term than fossil fuels, that also require our investment of research, money, time, and education. Although they are not a "Magic Bullet" like Cold or Bubble fusion, they are the reality we should be focused on.
Our resposibilities to each other
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
I started using Linux in 1993 when the SLS distribution fit onto 8 5.1/4"HD floppy disks that you wrote with RAWRITE. Even then there was an X server, vi, TCP/IP support, and most importantly XEYES, and even back then I was amazed such a thing could be built for free.
I took a few years off and started using it again with Slackware V9. This time I was dumbfounded. How in the world was this possible?? DVD player, Office software, various excellent servers, development IDEs, everything and still XEYES! How could this rise from a group of volunteers? This is something to be proud of. It's proof that human nature isn't totally self serving.
Now I read this. These comments. I can tell you that these aren't the attitudes that built Linux, but maybe they're what it created.
There seems to be two extremes and nothing else. On behalf of OSS developers I read "We don't owe anybody anything unless we get paid." On behalf of users I read "If you publish something then you're dedicated to support it or suffer painful death".
I'll be honest. These are legitimate viewpoints. Both of them. The first is an attitude you see in undisciplined children. 'I'll do what I want and owe nobody else anything. Damn the consequences. My world revolves around me.' The second is slightly more enlightened, such as 'Linux is awesome. I expect a quality free OS to replace Windows and developers to dedicate themselves to it. Myself, I'm not technical and too busy to contriubte."
There is no middle ground here. Luckily there is middle ground in reality otherwise this wouldn't still be working. It would be a shame if this rift got bigger driving Linux to a halt.
There is a middle ground, and I think that most of us live there. We don't expect perfection, we don't dedicate our lives to coding and patching, we experiment and try to get things to work, we enjoy seeing something we worked hard on used by other people and become important.
I remember the earliest Kansas City Linux Users Group (the first I found) postings from "users" were incredibly technical. Getting X windows to work involved terribly difficult calculations based on your monitor and graphics card's refresh rates. It took dedication and time to get a system running but what an accomplishment when you saw those xeyes (but that was about all you could run)
Now Linux is attracting less technical users. People that see the computer as a tool, as a means to an end, not an important toy. People that DONT want to compile a kernel and don't want to know how to. And people that want things to simply work, as they believe things do in windows.
More developers than ever are contributing at various levels of dedication and skill. Some publish a 1-time app that they wrote and have no desire to support and some are driven by providing something to the community that's needed and appreciated and are committed to supporting it.
And it takes both groups to make this work. Looking at your users as undeserving pests that provide nothing and should be grateful for what they get is wrong. But users should realise that they really don't DESERVE anything and SHOULD be grateful for what they get.
Users can't look at developers as software machines whos lives are dedicated solely to their application and should provide high quality support rapidly. But developers should realise that for this to function and grow that they need to support their application and try to understand what their users expect (and if they cant or don't want to fulfil those expectations then communicate it)
There's two ways to go. Developers can say "screw it, I'm not working on that app until my inbox is full of thank yous.", users can say "I'll keep flame-mailing this guy until he gets so pissed off that he helps me" (Good logic there)
Or we can step back, put our expectations back into p
Here are two examples with empirical data to support them. Either the T41 is an extremely exceptional machine (It is nice, but I wouldn't go that far) or VMWare runs on both operating systems with what could be called "acceptable" results.
To get more accurate information you would have to look for (or perform) some well designed and run benchmarks. Determine which is your prefered Operating System. Also, find out if there are any functional limitations to VMWare on either of these platforms.
I have read in these replies about a number of limitations with VMWare running on both Linux and windows. Some I can confirm like having to run services for network support on windows (Is this really that bad?) and others I cannot such as not being able to use the high definiton VMWare graphics driver on Linux.
I have run VMWare on both operating systems for a while and although I consider it to be fully functional in both environments these are the things that I found to be worthy of mention:
VMWare on Linux Negatives: 1) To get the vmware-tools fully installed with the highres graphics and fast network support you must have the kernel source for your exact kernel. I know this will get me flamed but there are real people running distros that do not have the kernel source and do not know how to compile one. 2) There is no GUI tool to configure the virtual networks. This can be complicated, involving port forwarding for NAT networks, configuration of DHCP properties, assigning free IP addresses, etc. These are things that an experienced UNIX admin who is familiar with networking could do but many people will have trouble even with the provided documentation. 3) I experienced problems with the VMNET module on Slackware not being able to do anything but bridged networking. (I'm sure was a stupid thing but stumped me)
Negatives with Windows: 1) Umm. I'm sure there are some but I didn't notice anything worthy of mention. There is the fact that the network services have to run as services, but I don't consider this really a negative.
I think the most important factor to your decision is this: Linux support of your laptop's hardware. This is going to sound like I'm trying to scare you out of Linux on a Laptop but this is a purchase that deserves the level of consideration I will describe.
Find out as much information as you can about the available Linux support of the brand of laptop you are considering. Consider the brand of the laptop and the vendor and model of it's components. I know that there are several laptop oriented modules ("drivers") available to compile in the kernel. I remember power saving, CPU frequency management, battery management, and more. But laptops often have many vendor specific hardware devices and system management software and something may not be supported.
You should research what hardware features are important to you and if they are supported in Linux. Also find out what system management sofware the vendor provides and see if there are equivalents in Linux. An example of management software would be a program that allows you to control energy consumption when plugged in vs when running on battery.
Make sure the manufacturer of the various laptop devices have "drivers" for linux. Check things like the Ethernet card (even if it's builtin), modem, infrared (if you use), sound device, video device, USB device, 1394 device, and card readers. If you do find a problem remember that many of these devices can be replaced with a PCMCIA device that does the same job.
You want to check things that you'd think should not be a problem like the CD/DVD reader/burner. If linux has a problem with making the CD hardware work the you are in trouble. It is probably unlikely that the vendor has an alternative brand of reader that can be used. And do you want to lug around an external USB drive?
Don't get distracted by the unimportan
For work I had an IBM T41 laptop with 2GB ram. It ran XP.
On it I ran 2 virtual machines, one with a full blown oracle installation on Linux running a 10GB database. The second VM was running W2K with apache/tomcat/jboss. I used this machine to teach loadtesting classes with this as the web/database server taking the load and it performed spectacularly.
At home I moved off of XP because I got tired of having to call Microsoft for reactivation keys and started running Linux. When I NEED XP I use VMware and also use it to check out new distros.
In both situations I felt as if VMWare were hardly running and also sheilded my main OS from dying when things like Oracle got really busy. I had the option of running Oracle on my main OS but just found it much more conveniant to run in the VM. The T41 was no dog when it came to performance but I was very surprised how well it handled 3 OSes.
The most important thing with VMWare is RAM. 2GB was fine. At home I have 4 and that's nice. People ask "WHY do you need 4GB?!" and I try to explain VMWare and the many wonderous benefits of it but usually wind up with a response of "Why don't you just use Lilo or Grub?".
I'd also suggest looking at a DLP projector.
I purchased an Optoma 739 for $1000 a year ago April and I consider it the best electronics purchase I have ever made. It has been on 24 hours a day since as I work from home and I use it as my computer monitor and television (using a HDTV cable box as the tuner).
This model is bright enough to use in a room with two lit floorlamps, is extremely quiet, bulb life is very long (it hasn't burnt out yet!), and the bulbs are relatively cheap.
People come over to watch movies or play games and drool and I paid far less than any comparable plasma or flat screen TV.
There are three major concerns regarding a projector. One is the "rainbow effect" from single chip DLP models, next is the cost of high resolution models, and third is bulb cost.
Regarding the rainbow effect, this is caused by a cost saving method the manufacturers employ. A DLP projector works by shining light onto many little mirrors that represent pixels. These mirrors are on a semiconductor chip and don't have moving motors or mechanisms. To get full colour you need red, green, and blue lights combined at various strengths. To acheieve this you can either employ three sets of mirrors each with their own coloured light (like the old projection TVs with the three big bulbs) or a cheaper way is to use one chip and rapidly alternate the light colour with a colourwheel. The old single chip DLP models had a three or 4 segment colour wheel that spun rather slowly and if you have sensitive eyes you can actually see the flicker (or it can subconsciously effect you). Personally, I notice when monitors are set to below 75Hz and it drives me crazy, but since this projector has an 8 segment colour wheel I cannot notice the rainbow. Even if trying by moving my head back and forth rapidly I can barely see the colour separation. LCD projectors do not have this problem, but from what I've seen and read, by increasing the speed and number of wheel segments DLP projectors have essentially eliminated this.
The second drawback is resolution. Native XGA (1024x768) resolution projectors are relatively inexpensive now and are usually compatible with HDTV singnals. For a TV this is more than adequate. For a computer this can be a problem. Getting a projector with higher resolution becomes much more expensive. The projectors have the ability to fake higher resolution by "smushing" some pixels together, which I have found tolerable at 1280x1024 but the image is definately not as sharp. Maybe prices on higher res models have come down in a year, but I take the tradeoff of "low" resolution for the image size and small footprint.
Finally if you do decide to buy a projector consider bulb life and cost. I'm not joking that my proejctor has been on for a year straight and am still on the same bulb. This bulb is rated at 5000 hours in "eco" mode. Also, if it DOES need to be replaced this bulb costs around $200. I previously owned an EIKI projector which went through bulbs every 3 months, were extremely hard to find, and ran $500 each. I had a hard time convincing myself to buy another projector, but I'm glad I made the decision.
I don't mention brightness being a major consideration because most projectors now are somewhere near or over 2000 lumens which is fine for a lamp lit room (not sunlit though). Only the very small projectors for road warriors get expensive for high lumens. But do make sure the brightness is adequate for your environment and do not trust any ratings but your own eyes.
One last comment about projectors. Consider the footprint. I live in a relatively small 1 bedroom apartment in NYC. I have my projetor upside down on the top of a bookshelf and a pulldown screen on the opposite wall. With my environment, space is precious, and this takes essentially none, where a tube TV would consume a whole corner of the room and a large rear projection TV would not fit and to buy a flat panel of the same size would leave me poor.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were to read the articles on Wikipedia and around the web in general regarding cold fusion, somoluminescence, and other "cold" fusion reactions you would come away with two very wrong impressions. First would be that these technologies are very close to fruition and second that they are the holy grail of energy production and the answer to all of our problems. You would think that the fusion reactions are not dangerous, do not pollute, and the fuels involved are of infinite supply.
The reality is that the only reproducable, controlled, fusion reactions mankind has managed to generate in a reproducable manner consume much more power than they generate, and are many, many years before becoming a source of power.
Regarding fusion by-products, the fact is that most fusion reactions produce deadly forms of radiation, weather "cold" or "hot", and the fuels required for a-neutronic reactions are not in infinite supply.
Granted that the idea of "Mr. Fusion" powering our automobiles on flat beer with helium, water vapour, and heat as it's only waste is captivating. Having a near infinite supply of energy would solve many of our and the world's problems (and I'm sure cause many of it's own as well).
We should not lose sight that there are real, proven sources of energy that are renewable, cleaner and longer term than fossil fuels, that also require our investment of research, money, time, and education. Although they are not a "Magic Bullet" like Cold or Bubble fusion, they are the reality we should be focused on.
I started using Linux in 1993 when the SLS distribution fit onto 8 5.1/4"HD floppy disks that you wrote with RAWRITE. Even then there was an X server, vi, TCP/IP support, and most importantly XEYES, and even back then I was amazed such a thing could be built for free.
I took a few years off and started using it again with Slackware V9. This time I was dumbfounded. How in the world was this possible?? DVD player, Office software, various excellent servers, development IDEs, everything and still XEYES! How could this rise from a group of volunteers? This is something to be proud of. It's proof that human nature isn't totally self serving.
Now I read this. These comments. I can tell you that these aren't the attitudes that built Linux, but maybe they're what it created.
There seems to be two extremes and nothing else. On behalf of OSS developers I read "We don't owe anybody anything unless we get paid." On behalf of users I read "If you publish something then you're dedicated to support it or suffer painful death".
I'll be honest. These are legitimate viewpoints. Both of them. The first is an attitude you see in undisciplined children. 'I'll do what I want and owe nobody else anything. Damn the consequences. My world revolves around me.' The second is slightly more enlightened, such as 'Linux is awesome. I expect a quality free OS to replace Windows and developers to dedicate themselves to it. Myself, I'm not technical and too busy to contriubte."
There is no middle ground here. Luckily there is middle ground in reality otherwise this wouldn't still be working. It would be a shame if this rift got bigger driving Linux to a halt.
There is a middle ground, and I think that most of us live there. We don't expect perfection, we don't dedicate our lives to coding and patching, we experiment and try to get things to work, we enjoy seeing something we worked hard on used by other people and become important.
I remember the earliest Kansas City Linux Users Group (the first I found) postings from "users" were incredibly technical. Getting X windows to work involved terribly difficult calculations based on your monitor and graphics card's refresh rates. It took dedication and time to get a system running but what an accomplishment when you saw those xeyes (but that was about all you could run)
Now Linux is attracting less technical users. People that see the computer as a tool, as a means to an end, not an important toy. People that DONT want to compile a kernel and don't want to know how to. And people that want things to simply work, as they believe things do in windows.
More developers than ever are contributing at various levels of dedication and skill. Some publish a 1-time app that they wrote and have no desire to support and some are driven by providing something to the community that's needed and appreciated and are committed to supporting it.
And it takes both groups to make this work. Looking at your users as undeserving pests that provide nothing and should be grateful for what they get is wrong. But users should realise that they really don't DESERVE anything and SHOULD be grateful for what they get.
Users can't look at developers as software machines whos lives are dedicated solely to their application and should provide high quality support rapidly. But developers should realise that for this to function and grow that they need to support their application and try to understand what their users expect (and if they cant or don't want to fulfil those expectations then communicate it)
There's two ways to go. Developers can say "screw it, I'm not working on that app until my inbox is full of thank yous.", users can say "I'll keep flame-mailing this guy until he gets so pissed off that he helps me" (Good logic there)
Or we can step back, put our expectations back into p
Here are two examples with empirical data to support them. Either the T41 is an extremely exceptional machine (It is nice, but I wouldn't go that far) or VMWare runs on both operating systems with what could be called "acceptable" results.
:
:
To get more accurate information you would have to look for (or perform) some well designed and run benchmarks. Determine which is your prefered Operating System. Also, find out if there are any functional limitations to VMWare on either of these platforms.
I have read in these replies about a number of limitations with VMWare running on both Linux and windows. Some I can confirm like having to run services for network support on windows (Is this really that bad?) and others I cannot such as not being able to use the high definiton VMWare graphics driver on Linux.
I have run VMWare on both operating systems for a while and although I consider it to be fully functional in both environments these are the things that I found to be worthy of mention:
VMWare on Linux Negatives
1) To get the vmware-tools fully installed with the highres graphics and fast network support you must have the kernel source for your exact kernel. I know this will get me flamed but there are real people running distros that do not have the kernel source and do not know how to compile one.
2) There is no GUI tool to configure the virtual networks. This can be complicated, involving port forwarding for NAT networks, configuration of DHCP properties, assigning free IP addresses, etc. These are things that an experienced UNIX admin who is familiar with networking could do but many people will have trouble even with the provided documentation.
3) I experienced problems with the VMNET module on Slackware not being able to do anything but bridged networking. (I'm sure was a stupid thing but stumped me)
Negatives with Windows
1) Umm. I'm sure there are some but I didn't notice anything worthy of mention. There is the fact that the network services have to run as services, but I don't consider this really a negative.
I think the most important factor to your decision is this: Linux support of your laptop's hardware. This is going to sound like I'm trying to scare you out of Linux on a Laptop but this is a purchase that deserves the level of consideration I will describe.
Find out as much information as you can about the available Linux support of the brand of laptop you are considering. Consider the brand of the laptop and the vendor and model of it's components. I know that there are several laptop oriented modules ("drivers") available to compile in the kernel. I remember power saving, CPU frequency management, battery management, and more. But laptops often have many vendor specific hardware devices and system management software and something may not be supported.
You should research what hardware features are important to you and if they are supported in Linux. Also find out what system management sofware the vendor provides and see if there are equivalents in Linux. An example of management software would be a program that allows you to control energy consumption when plugged in vs when running on battery.
Make sure the manufacturer of the various laptop devices have "drivers" for linux. Check things like the Ethernet card (even if it's builtin), modem, infrared (if you use), sound device, video device, USB device, 1394 device, and card readers. If you do find a problem remember that many of these devices can be replaced with a PCMCIA device that does the same job.
You want to check things that you'd think should not be a problem like the CD/DVD reader/burner. If linux has a problem with making the CD hardware work the you are in trouble. It is probably unlikely that the vendor has an alternative brand of reader that can be used. And do you want to lug around an external USB drive?
Don't get distracted by the unimportan
For work I had an IBM T41 laptop with 2GB ram. It ran XP.
On it I ran 2 virtual machines, one with a full blown oracle installation on Linux running a 10GB database. The second VM was running W2K with apache/tomcat/jboss. I used this machine to teach loadtesting classes with this as the web/database server taking the load and it performed spectacularly.
At home I moved off of XP because I got tired of having to call Microsoft for reactivation keys and started running Linux. When I NEED XP I use VMware and also use it to check out new distros.
In both situations I felt as if VMWare were hardly running and also sheilded my main OS from dying when things like Oracle got really busy. I had the option of running Oracle on my main OS but just found it much more conveniant to run in the VM. The T41 was no dog when it came to performance but I was very surprised how well it handled 3 OSes.
The most important thing with VMWare is RAM. 2GB was fine. At home I have 4 and that's nice. People ask "WHY do you need 4GB?!" and I try to explain VMWare and the many wonderous benefits of it but usually wind up with a response of "Why don't you just use Lilo or Grub?".
I'd also suggest looking at a DLP projector.
I purchased an Optoma 739 for $1000 a year ago April and I consider it the best electronics purchase I have ever made. It has been on 24 hours a day since as I work from home and I use it as my computer monitor and television (using a HDTV cable box as the tuner).
This model is bright enough to use in a room with two lit floorlamps, is extremely quiet, bulb life is very long (it hasn't burnt out yet!), and the bulbs are relatively cheap.
People come over to watch movies or play games and drool and I paid far less than any comparable plasma or flat screen TV.
There are three major concerns regarding a projector. One is the "rainbow effect" from single chip DLP models, next is the cost of high resolution models, and third is bulb cost.
Regarding the rainbow effect, this is caused by a cost saving method the manufacturers employ. A DLP projector works by shining light onto many little mirrors that represent pixels. These mirrors are on a semiconductor chip and don't have moving motors or mechanisms. To get full colour you need red, green, and blue lights combined at various strengths. To acheieve this you can either employ three sets of mirrors each with their own coloured light (like the old projection TVs with the three big bulbs) or a cheaper way is to use one chip and rapidly alternate the light colour with a colourwheel. The old single chip DLP models had a three or 4 segment colour wheel that spun rather slowly and if you have sensitive eyes you can actually see the flicker (or it can subconsciously effect you). Personally, I notice when monitors are set to below 75Hz and it drives me crazy, but since this projector has an 8 segment colour wheel I cannot notice the rainbow. Even if trying by moving my head back and forth rapidly I can barely see the colour separation. LCD projectors do not have this problem, but from what I've seen and read, by increasing the speed and number of wheel segments DLP projectors have essentially eliminated this.
The second drawback is resolution. Native XGA (1024x768) resolution projectors are relatively inexpensive now and are usually compatible with HDTV singnals. For a TV this is more than adequate. For a computer this can be a problem. Getting a projector with higher resolution becomes much more expensive. The projectors have the ability to fake higher resolution by "smushing" some pixels together, which I have found tolerable at 1280x1024 but the image is definately not as sharp. Maybe prices on higher res models have come down in a year, but I take the tradeoff of "low" resolution for the image size and small footprint.
Finally if you do decide to buy a projector consider bulb life and cost. I'm not joking that my proejctor has been on for a year straight and am still on the same bulb. This bulb is rated at 5000 hours in "eco" mode. Also, if it DOES need to be replaced this bulb costs around $200. I previously owned an EIKI projector which went through bulbs every 3 months, were extremely hard to find, and ran $500 each. I had a hard time convincing myself to buy another projector, but I'm glad I made the decision.
I don't mention brightness being a major consideration because most projectors now are somewhere near or over 2000 lumens which is fine for a lamp lit room (not sunlit though). Only the very small projectors for road warriors get expensive for high lumens. But do make sure the brightness is adequate for your environment and do not trust any ratings but your own eyes.
One last comment about projectors. Consider the footprint. I live in a relatively small 1 bedroom apartment in NYC. I have my projetor upside down on the top of a bookshelf and a pulldown screen on the opposite wall. With my environment, space is precious, and this takes essentially none, where a tube TV would consume a whole corner of the room and a large rear projection TV would not fit and to buy a flat panel of the same size would leave me poor.