The best answer I've seen is basically that *BSD is a much more cohesive experience, with a smaller number of contributors and a project that is under tighter control. This has some real downsides - progress is slower in some areas - but things also feel more unified, like they came from one source rather than many.
Mind you, a good Linux distribution will do its best to give you that same impression, and there are always going to be programs that don't look or act quite like anything else on the system, but the core components had a more cohesive feel to me.
Sort of... Lack of plug-ins (mostly Flash) gimps things a lot. Even if you ignore Flash-navigated websites and the like, even something as simple and common as an embedded YouTube video or Jukebox applet won't work, and those are *very* popular with the kind of crowd you're talking about. Additionally, don't forget Flash games - the iPad will have tons of games, most cheap or free, but to a lot of people browser-based Flash games are a big deal, and spending a bunch of money on a web-browsing device that can't play this is pointless.
Can you email?
Well, you can *read* emails easily enough. You can even send short responses. I suppose if you had an external keyboard that could connect, or if you spent a while poking the screen, you could even send longer messages. With sufficiently excessive effort, you can probably send photos and such too... not photos you took with the device (like on a phone) or photos you hacked upon in Photoshop (unless you transferred them from a PC for some reason), but you could do it.
You're also forgetting IM and video chat. Sure, the iPad will have Skype, but without a camera you lose a lot of the experience, and without either real multitasking or a good keyboard, doing things like sending a funny link to your friends gets a lot harder.
There's certainly a niche for this device, but I rather doubt it's a very deep niche when the price is so high. We'll see in a year or three anyhow, after a couple revisions and a drop in price.
It may or may not help destroy Flash (until IE gets HTML5 support, I doubt that Flash will ever lose its grip), but until it does, it will be a partially crippled web browsing device. Why the heck would I pay so much money for something like that?
Just because I want flash to die doesn't mean it's logical to go buy an expensive piece of hardware that, due to its lack of flash, is less useful for web browsing than a cheaper netbook! Death of Flash vs. anti-Apple is a severely false dichotomy.
For the next version of Exchange supports the full OWA on all modern browsers (and IE6 for good measure). Pretty sure it doesn't actually work with Firefox 1.0, although I haven't tried.
It's not so much that IE6 sucks as that it's outdated. At release, IE6 was a perfectly reasonable choice of browser. It might not have been a *good* browser, but there wasn't much choice, and in particular there were no exceptional alternatives, especially for free, so it was a reasonable one.
The problem is the aforementioned release is nearly a decade ago. If anybody were still using the Gecko/Mozilla codebase from back then (I don't think it was even open sourced yet, though I might be wrong there) you can bet that Google would be popping up a warning for them too (actually, they might anyhow). Similarly for anybody using KHTML (rendering engine in Konqueror and basis for WebKit) from that far back. It's just bloody obsolete, and now that there are far more capable alternatives, IE - especially IE6 - can no longer set its own standards for web content. The effort to make things work with its non-standard behavior just isn't justifiable anymore, any more than it is for any other vastly outdated rendering engine.
Not sure if the project is still alive or not, but might the DesktopBSD bits be useful here? FreeBSD with a pre-installed/configured X server and KDE. I tried it once, and rather liked it, but it's kernel was a full version behind the actual FreeBSD codebase (6.something when FreeBSD was at 7.2 or somesuch). There was a beta version using 7.x that I never got around to trying, and this was all several years ago, but at the time it was a pretty nice setup, and according to their site you could simply install their userland components on top of a base FreeBSD system if you wanted to, and get what was essentially the result of using their nice graphical installer.
How would this work with Linux? The reason it works with *BSD is that the BSD license doesn't exclude linking with anything. You can, quite legally, compile a bunch of random.o files that showed up on your doorstep on a CD-ROM into either kernel. However, even if they came with a license that says "Copyright 2010 Somebody Or'Other. You're allowed to do anything you want with these files and give them to anybody, but I'll never give you the source!" you couldn't legally redistribute your compiled Linux kernel; because the kernel is now linked against non-GPL code, making copies of it would constitute copyright infringement.
On the other hand, with BSD you can quite legally redistribute the resulting kernel binary. Nothing in the BSD license prohibits redistribution due to any linked code, or the lack of source availability, or much of anything else (falsely claiming you wrote the code violates the BSD license, but not much else does). Now, the FreeBSD developers don't *want* to compile bits that are under a more restrictive license into their pure kernel, but just as with Linux, you can compile a loadable kernel module. Unlike with Linux, they can legally redistribute said kernel module, so they do. It may not be part of the core install, but it's on the CD.
Windows is already the predominant gaming OS for PCs; those who get a Mac or Linux implicitly acknowledge from the beginning that very few games are released for their platform and a lot of Windows games won't ever really work, or get ported. As for the WDDM requirement (NT6 or higher), while it's true that there are still a lot of outdated Windows systems out there, Win7 adoption is picking up speed. By the time this capability is available, there will be a lot more DX11-capable boxes than there are now, and I'd argue that even now it's a worthwhile target.
Look at it this way: How many iPhone users are there? Lots, sure... but a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Windows users. Now consider how many simple, often pointless, and usually cheap or free games exist for the iPhone. With even crappy Intel Integrated graphics offering (slow) DX11, there's plenty of market for this kind of thing in the next few years.
The bridge in question floats (one of the 2 longest floating bridges in the country I believe, certainly one of the first of any significant length) so it's unlikely to "fall into the water" per se. There's a pretty good chance that an earthquake could make it unusable in some other way though. Heck, opening the bridge to let a boat (a section of it swings open like a door, since a raised drawbridge would be impractical) through seems to knock the thing out of comission for repairs once or twice a year.
It is definitely a major route though; not just for Microsoft employees, but for anybody seeking to get from the east side (Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland) to the northern half of Seattle. There is another floating bridge a ways south, and you can go around the northern end of the lake if you don't mind a half-hour detour, but at rush hour all the routes are packed. When one of the bridges gets closed it gets *really* bad. It is very much in the best interest of Microsoft (or anybody else living/working in the area) to get an improved bridge in place ASAP.
Heavy water is often used in reactor cooling/moderation. For that matter, light water in the presence of neutron emitters (such as a fission reaction) will slowly become heavy water. In any case, sometimes the deuterium or tritium ions split from their oxygen atoms, especially under the energetic conditions within a reactor. Unless they quickly re-bond (either with oxygen or other hydrogen ions) you now have monatomic hydrogen in your water stream. That stuff is damn near impossible to contain - one of the reasons hydrogen as a fuel source for cars has never really taken off; it either has to be kept super cold or it escapes slowly through almost any valve or seal - and so you get tritium (monatomic, possibly also molecular) slowly leaking out. It's lighter than air, but in a small space it may accumulate for a while before something happens, like a maintenance shaft being opened, that wafts it out into the open. Viola, a "tritium leak"!
My personal favorite example is Hyperterminal. It's not even distributed with Windows anymore - who needs a utility to monitor an archaic port that most hardware no longer even includes? - but when I needed to test that a USB-to-COM adapter was working (on Win7, with a driver written for XP), I grabbed a old copy of Hyperterminal (one exe + one dll) that was originally from a Windows 95 system. Everything worked. The only thing I can think of that might have caused a problem would be if the Win7 install was x64, in which case the (32-bit) XP driver wouldn't have loaded... but that's what virtualization is for.
It actually sounds like the problem that this article discusses is very much the one that has plagued WinMo devices (and will until 7, when the device specs are far more stringent). Basically, while you can download any exe you want, and it will execute (assuming any necessary dlls are packaged with it, etc.) but there's no guarantee that the program will run correctly on your hardware. Do you have a touchscreen? Do you have the right hardware buttons? Do you have... you get the idea. Apparently, this is becoming a problem for Android too.
No offense, but if you got a restraining order for that, you either did something far in excess of what you posted above, or you need to acquire the services who completed at least their second year of law school. It's not as though the school can arbitrarily hand those out... it's (presumably) public property, so they can't even use trespass laws. Either way, you screwed up pretty royally, managing to get yourself forbidden from the school your daughter attends.
This is not to say that I disagree with the general gist of your post, but the extremism of the last part kind of overshadows the whole message. Either include enough detail to show that something actually happened which was both illegal and not your fault, or leave off the bit about the restraining order.
While this may be true today, desktop Linux is gaining traction, and especially is gaining mindshare. The more people who know of it, and are willing to try it out, the more features like this are going to matter. When somebody tries Linux, if they notice that it's really snappy loading a program, that is going to positively influence their opinion of the OS and hopefully they'll spread that positive opinion. This is exactly the kind of positive feedback loop Linux needs for gaining desktop acceptance, even if it requires writing code that is of limited use in the current install space.
Conversely, if it seems to take a lot longer to do something - especially something Windows does quickly - potential Linux converts are less likely to recommend Linux to others. Random example: Firefox takes bloody ages to load on my school's Linux lab machines (5 seconds would be fast; I've seen 15). It's probably a misconfiguration on the part of the support staff; the computers are plenty fast enough. However, the first impression of *everybody* on using them is "Why is loading the web so damn slow?!?" and many aren't going to have previously seen Linux anywhere else. That's not the kind of first impression we want to give.
Neat, and thanks. I'll look into getting it on my Linux box. This is one of those little features that make so much difference in user experience; the less time you have to look at a busy mouse cursor while loading things, the easier it is to convince people to use the software.
Wow... you sound like you've actually played the game, but have some extremely odd notions about it.
T2, in and of itself, doesn't take that long. With a knowledgeable friend and/or careful planning, you could do it before finishing a three-week trial if they didn't limit those ships to non-trial accounts. You can certainly do it in a month or so. Sure, an Interceptor or Assault Frigate is no Black Ops battleship or Command battlecruiser, but it's Tech 2 and perfectly usable in PvP. Of course, well within the trial period (I've done it), you can have a powerful T2-fitted Rifter or similar. Sure, it's T1, and it's a frigate... but hell, with the right fittings you can kill interceptors (despite them being T2) in such a ship. That said, a tech 1 hull with tech 1 fittings can still be perfectly valid as a PvP ship, for roaming gangs or gate camping or scouting a convoy or any number of other things. If you want, that's a valid approach right up through battlecruisers and battleships; the largest non-capital military ships, and you can get to battlecruisers in about a month if you really push it.
For large ships, T2 does indeed take longer. A Vagabond (T2 cruiser) - one of the best PvP ships for solo or small gang warfare, due to its incredible speed, decent durability, and decent firepower - will take at least two months to train for (longer if you want all the support skills that such a ship's pilot ought to have, but not *much* longer). Of course, that's not really a *large* ship, although a well-fitted one can kill most battlescruisers. Command ships are at least a few months more, and at a guess I'd estimate 8 months for a T2 battleship. Of course, it's not like you can't do anything until you get there. Fly a T1 frigate until you can fly a cruiser or T2 frigate. Fly cruiser or T2 frigate until you can fly T2 cruiser (Vagabond or similar). Almost any combat ship can be valuable in PvP, and even relatively new characters can have the skills to succeed in solo PvP if they get a pointer in the right direction.
The times above are assuming you train straight for that ship's skills; after over 2 years of EVE I still can't fly Black Ops because honestly I don't give a damn. They're awesome ships, and fill a very valuable tactical role... and yet their hulls alone cost several times what I spend on a fully fitted fleet battleship or even T2 battlecruiser. Most of my PvP is in a T1 battlecruiser, because frankly the Hurricane is fantastic PvP ship; it's got DPS comparable to a battleship, can tank well enough, is fast, and full fittings, rigs, and insurance for one costs like 70M tops (of which you'll get 30-odd million back from the insurance if you die). I use a fully T2 fit (rigs aside), and the skills necessary for my exact fit would probably take about 7 months or so to train from a new character. Within three months though, you could be perhaps 90% as effective; it's not actually that important to have a T2 MWD, or even T2 guns.
In any case, the suggestion that you can't PvP for a freaking year is *complete* bullshit. It's not typically practical to try PvP in your first week, but I have a friend who tried the game and was brining his cruiser on roaming gangs with me before his two-week trial ended (you can get three-week trials now, and early characters now receive a bonus to skill training speed to get them started even faster). Hell, I don't even suggest rushing T2; cost for cost, T2 hulls aren't close to worth it. T1 is easier to train and typically the hull costs literally 1/10 as much, for a ship that is well over half as effective.
Absent is definitely worse. Consider the Nokia N800/810/900; touchscreen-based devices (for the 8x0, at least, it's resistive sensing; no multi-touch, though stylus works) with working Flash. Yes, playing Flash games can be hard (some don't require anything other than clicking, but some require keyboard input too which is tricky on a phone-sized device, especially the N800 which lacks a hardware keyboard). On the other hand, long before Pandora had specialized apps for things like the iPhone, I could load http://pandora.com/ in the N800's web browser, and (after a minute of so of loading; Flash 9 on a 400MHz ARM is not fast) it worked fine. You know what's really funny? The Pandora applet actually *does* use hover... and yet it was 100% usable with a touchscreen. Nothing *required* hover support... and you actually could hover anyhow, by tapping on a non-active part of the applet and dragging onto the sensitive region.
The only Flash applets I've seen that specifically require hover to do things that you can't achieve with a click (because it does something entirely different) are advertisements. The NXX0 has AdBlock Plus for MicroB (or Mobile Firefox, with the normal ABP) and suddenly it's not even relevant (plus your pages load fast and you don't waste screen real-estate on ads). Meanwhile, Youtube (including embedded videos in other pages) works. Hulu works. Those book-reading websites that use Flash to prevent copy-paste work. Your random flash-navigated website probably works. Accounting for the limitations of the display and keyboard, many games work.
Yes, I'll gladly trade some things being broken for a large chunk of web content simply being absent.
Odd... your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I find that SuperFetch, *especially* on a laptop, is essential to speeding things up specifically because I don't have to wait for the data to be read off the disk before I can run a program. Startup doesn't seem any slower to me (I'll grant you that I haven't timed it) and unlike XP (no SuperFetch), either Vista or Win7 (both with SF enabled) is usable immediately after logging in. Sure it's slower while background stuff loads, but it's not like the computer is nearly frozen for a while, the way XP used to do. Once bootup is past, SuperFetch becomes essential to remove the bottleneck of that really slow laptop hard drive when I try to run something.
Actually, even XP had a disk cashe (like all the other OSes you mention, it was post-caching - storing data in case you need it again soon, rather than pre-caching things that you are probably about to use). However, as I understand it, the disk cache in XP was relatively small, and XP was (at release) used extensively on machines that really didn't have the kind of RAM it wanted. Therefore, it implemented an extremely aggressive paging algorithm, constantly writing memory pages to disk but not recovering them until it absolutely had to (even if there was un-allocated RAM). Not only did this increase I/O, but it meant that switching out of one long-running application (which has been allocating and freeing memory for so long that *everything* else got paged out) takes ages.
The up-side of this is that the main running program still looks pretty fast, even on a low-memory computer. That was the goal for XP. Unfortunately, it also makes XP hopelessly bad at managing systems with the kindof RAM you see today - it will still super-aggressively swap out memory pages for inactive applications, even if it could leave stuff in main memory and just re-use a portion of the RAM. Once that RAM is freed - perhaps because the program is closed - it lacks the sense to fill it up again with cached data that you might want soon (quite possibly including chunks of the pagefile holding data for one of the background processes the user is just about to click on and would rather see activate without 4 seconds of delay to pull paged memory in again).
That said, your point stands. XP's memory management is terrible for modern systems, and aside from the difference between pre- and post-caching, all other major OSes are "memory hogs" in this manner too. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
One of the main tricks, which you're completely glossing over, is the algorithm that determines what files are likely to be wanted/needed at any particular time of day. Sure, lsof will give you the raw data on what's open when, but making something useful out of that it a touch trickier than you suggest.
Additionally - and forgive my lack of Linux kernel expertise; I never thought to check this - is there a limit on the size of the filesystem cache? If it's less than a couple gigabytes, you're not going to be able to pre-load some of the files that most need it. If it is that large, presumably the ability to re-allocate it to a user-space program near instantly is also present, but that would be my next question. Finally, is the cache FiFo? If so, you've got a problem - unless your users are literally as regular as clockwork, they aren't going to want program X, and nothing but program X, at exactly time Y every day. Therefore, to ensure it's pre-loaded for them, you have to cache it in advance. However, if there's a lot of filesystem access - even small everyday stuff, like browsing the web or looking through a photo collection - the constant disk I/O will shove a lot of your pre-cached data out of the buffer.
Superfetch doesn't *sound* terribly impressive, but more thought went into it than you might realize.I'm certainly not saying it can't be duplicated on Linux, but there's obviously a reason it hasn't been, and it's obviously not because the feature is useless. I'm not sure how relevant it is to servers, but from a user perspective, the difference between five seconds and under one second to open a particularly large program is extremely noticeable. Given enough RAM (4GB on my system, of which Superfetch typically is using upwards of 3) you can easily achieve speedups like that.
Why use server cycles for an effectively static page? That site is probably going to see a lot of load, running even a simple PHP (or ASP.NET, it being MS) web application seems like a lot more overhead than some static HTML page with an embedded script that uses the client to do the work.
Terribly low though VGA is by modern standards, it's actually plenty for getting around on a limited day-to-day basis. It's certainly enough to avoid walking into a chair, or off the edge of a sidewalk, or into oncoming traffic. It would be possible to recognize people, at least up close, without needing to touch their face or pick out their voice. You wouldn't be able to read a book or something without very strong magnification, but you could probably make out street signs and bus numbers. Color-code your keys and you'd be able to lock and unlock your door, open your mailbox, etc. You'd be able to identify paper money, assuming nobody tries to slip you a counterfeit. You could probably even do basic cooking (use of a microwave, at least) and use everyday devices like cell phones or even computers (get the screen to fill your field of view, and it'd be just like I had back in the early 90s). Movies would be grainy as heck but better than no video at all.
I know people who would do just about anything for this kind of capability today.
I agree with you, but Slashdot apparently rejects any article submission with a URL that was used in another rejected article. Since people are constantly producing absolute crap article submissions - things even the editors won't post, no matter how interesting or on-topic the material is - it often becomes necessary to find an alternate link to the material you want to submit. Frankly, annoying though URL shorteners are, they're better than links to ad-riddled pages that spread their copy-pasted content out over a dozen click-throughs, add no original content, have no link back to the source, and are hosted on underpowered servers that can't take the surge of traffic.
That said, for all I know, this article points to such sites. It's not like I actually checked the links...
Lacking more info, I'm going to venture a guess that yes, the 5300 the GP mentions is the Intel Pro Wireless 5300 chipset (802.11abgn, and generally pretty darn good). The Linux drivers for it are open-source, but that doesn't necessarily mean bug-free or that all features are available. It does mean you could try to get it working yourself if you want, though. I have one such chipset myself, and while I've never tried to make it act as an AP, it would be neat to be able to do so.
On a side note, are there any easy Linux tools to make a WLAC card act as an AP and a client simultaneously (as SoftAP apparently does)? That would be very nice - I've only got *one* WLAN card in the laptop and it would be fantastic to be able to use it as simultaneously a client and a repeater that others could access (I promise I wouldn't even redirect them all to 64.111.96.38).
I'm trying to figure out how he didn't see the Enhanced Security warning screen... you know, the one that pops up the first time you start IE (and subsequently, if you don't turn off the warning) and tells you various things (including that downloading is restricted and security settings are very high). It also tells you how to turn off this feature, if you want to...
Slashdot Mirror
The best answer I've seen is basically that *BSD is a much more cohesive experience, with a smaller number of contributors and a project that is under tighter control. This has some real downsides - progress is slower in some areas - but things also feel more unified, like they came from one source rather than many.
Mind you, a good Linux distribution will do its best to give you that same impression, and there are always going to be programs that don't look or act quite like anything else on the system, but the core components had a more cohesive feel to me.
Can you browse the web?
Sort of... Lack of plug-ins (mostly Flash) gimps things a lot. Even if you ignore Flash-navigated websites and the like, even something as simple and common as an embedded YouTube video or Jukebox applet won't work, and those are *very* popular with the kind of crowd you're talking about. Additionally, don't forget Flash games - the iPad will have tons of games, most cheap or free, but to a lot of people browser-based Flash games are a big deal, and spending a bunch of money on a web-browsing device that can't play this is pointless.
Can you email?
Well, you can *read* emails easily enough. You can even send short responses. I suppose if you had an external keyboard that could connect, or if you spent a while poking the screen, you could even send longer messages. With sufficiently excessive effort, you can probably send photos and such too... not photos you took with the device (like on a phone) or photos you hacked upon in Photoshop (unless you transferred them from a PC for some reason), but you could do it.
You're also forgetting IM and video chat. Sure, the iPad will have Skype, but without a camera you lose a lot of the experience, and without either real multitasking or a good keyboard, doing things like sending a funny link to your friends gets a lot harder.
There's certainly a niche for this device, but I rather doubt it's a very deep niche when the price is so high. We'll see in a year or three anyhow, after a couple revisions and a drop in price.
It may or may not help destroy Flash (until IE gets HTML5 support, I doubt that Flash will ever lose its grip), but until it does, it will be a partially crippled web browsing device. Why the heck would I pay so much money for something like that?
Just because I want flash to die doesn't mean it's logical to go buy an expensive piece of hardware that, due to its lack of flash, is less useful for web browsing than a cheaper netbook! Death of Flash vs. anti-Apple is a severely false dichotomy.
For the next version of Exchange supports the full OWA on all modern browsers (and IE6 for good measure). Pretty sure it doesn't actually work with Firefox 1.0, although I haven't tried.
It's not so much that IE6 sucks as that it's outdated. At release, IE6 was a perfectly reasonable choice of browser. It might not have been a *good* browser, but there wasn't much choice, and in particular there were no exceptional alternatives, especially for free, so it was a reasonable one.
The problem is the aforementioned release is nearly a decade ago. If anybody were still using the Gecko/Mozilla codebase from back then (I don't think it was even open sourced yet, though I might be wrong there) you can bet that Google would be popping up a warning for them too (actually, they might anyhow). Similarly for anybody using KHTML (rendering engine in Konqueror and basis for WebKit) from that far back. It's just bloody obsolete, and now that there are far more capable alternatives, IE - especially IE6 - can no longer set its own standards for web content. The effort to make things work with its non-standard behavior just isn't justifiable anymore, any more than it is for any other vastly outdated rendering engine.
Not sure if the project is still alive or not, but might the DesktopBSD bits be useful here? FreeBSD with a pre-installed/configured X server and KDE. I tried it once, and rather liked it, but it's kernel was a full version behind the actual FreeBSD codebase (6.something when FreeBSD was at 7.2 or somesuch). There was a beta version using 7.x that I never got around to trying, and this was all several years ago, but at the time it was a pretty nice setup, and according to their site you could simply install their userland components on top of a base FreeBSD system if you wanted to, and get what was essentially the result of using their nice graphical installer.
How would this work with Linux? The reason it works with *BSD is that the BSD license doesn't exclude linking with anything. You can, quite legally, compile a bunch of random .o files that showed up on your doorstep on a CD-ROM into either kernel. However, even if they came with a license that says "Copyright 2010 Somebody Or'Other. You're allowed to do anything you want with these files and give them to anybody, but I'll never give you the source!" you couldn't legally redistribute your compiled Linux kernel; because the kernel is now linked against non-GPL code, making copies of it would constitute copyright infringement.
On the other hand, with BSD you can quite legally redistribute the resulting kernel binary. Nothing in the BSD license prohibits redistribution due to any linked code, or the lack of source availability, or much of anything else (falsely claiming you wrote the code violates the BSD license, but not much else does). Now, the FreeBSD developers don't *want* to compile bits that are under a more restrictive license into their pure kernel, but just as with Linux, you can compile a loadable kernel module. Unlike with Linux, they can legally redistribute said kernel module, so they do. It may not be part of the core install, but it's on the CD.
Windows is already the predominant gaming OS for PCs; those who get a Mac or Linux implicitly acknowledge from the beginning that very few games are released for their platform and a lot of Windows games won't ever really work, or get ported. As for the WDDM requirement (NT6 or higher), while it's true that there are still a lot of outdated Windows systems out there, Win7 adoption is picking up speed. By the time this capability is available, there will be a lot more DX11-capable boxes than there are now, and I'd argue that even now it's a worthwhile target.
Look at it this way: How many iPhone users are there? Lots, sure... but a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Windows users. Now consider how many simple, often pointless, and usually cheap or free games exist for the iPhone. With even crappy Intel Integrated graphics offering (slow) DX11, there's plenty of market for this kind of thing in the next few years.
The bridge in question floats (one of the 2 longest floating bridges in the country I believe, certainly one of the first of any significant length) so it's unlikely to "fall into the water" per se. There's a pretty good chance that an earthquake could make it unusable in some other way though. Heck, opening the bridge to let a boat (a section of it swings open like a door, since a raised drawbridge would be impractical) through seems to knock the thing out of comission for repairs once or twice a year.
It is definitely a major route though; not just for Microsoft employees, but for anybody seeking to get from the east side (Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland) to the northern half of Seattle. There is another floating bridge a ways south, and you can go around the northern end of the lake if you don't mind a half-hour detour, but at rush hour all the routes are packed. When one of the bridges gets closed it gets *really* bad. It is very much in the best interest of Microsoft (or anybody else living/working in the area) to get an improved bridge in place ASAP.
Heavy water is often used in reactor cooling/moderation. For that matter, light water in the presence of neutron emitters (such as a fission reaction) will slowly become heavy water. In any case, sometimes the deuterium or tritium ions split from their oxygen atoms, especially under the energetic conditions within a reactor. Unless they quickly re-bond (either with oxygen or other hydrogen ions) you now have monatomic hydrogen in your water stream. That stuff is damn near impossible to contain - one of the reasons hydrogen as a fuel source for cars has never really taken off; it either has to be kept super cold or it escapes slowly through almost any valve or seal - and so you get tritium (monatomic, possibly also molecular) slowly leaking out. It's lighter than air, but in a small space it may accumulate for a while before something happens, like a maintenance shaft being opened, that wafts it out into the open. Viola, a "tritium leak"!
My personal favorite example is Hyperterminal. It's not even distributed with Windows anymore - who needs a utility to monitor an archaic port that most hardware no longer even includes? - but when I needed to test that a USB-to-COM adapter was working (on Win7, with a driver written for XP), I grabbed a old copy of Hyperterminal (one exe + one dll) that was originally from a Windows 95 system. Everything worked. The only thing I can think of that might have caused a problem would be if the Win7 install was x64, in which case the (32-bit) XP driver wouldn't have loaded... but that's what virtualization is for.
It actually sounds like the problem that this article discusses is very much the one that has plagued WinMo devices (and will until 7, when the device specs are far more stringent). Basically, while you can download any exe you want, and it will execute (assuming any necessary dlls are packaged with it, etc.) but there's no guarantee that the program will run correctly on your hardware. Do you have a touchscreen? Do you have the right hardware buttons? Do you have ... you get the idea. Apparently, this is becoming a problem for Android too.
No offense, but if you got a restraining order for that, you either did something far in excess of what you posted above, or you need to acquire the services who completed at least their second year of law school. It's not as though the school can arbitrarily hand those out... it's (presumably) public property, so they can't even use trespass laws. Either way, you screwed up pretty royally, managing to get yourself forbidden from the school your daughter attends.
This is not to say that I disagree with the general gist of your post, but the extremism of the last part kind of overshadows the whole message. Either include enough detail to show that something actually happened which was both illegal and not your fault, or leave off the bit about the restraining order.
While this may be true today, desktop Linux is gaining traction, and especially is gaining mindshare. The more people who know of it, and are willing to try it out, the more features like this are going to matter. When somebody tries Linux, if they notice that it's really snappy loading a program, that is going to positively influence their opinion of the OS and hopefully they'll spread that positive opinion. This is exactly the kind of positive feedback loop Linux needs for gaining desktop acceptance, even if it requires writing code that is of limited use in the current install space.
Conversely, if it seems to take a lot longer to do something - especially something Windows does quickly - potential Linux converts are less likely to recommend Linux to others. Random example: Firefox takes bloody ages to load on my school's Linux lab machines (5 seconds would be fast; I've seen 15). It's probably a misconfiguration on the part of the support staff; the computers are plenty fast enough. However, the first impression of *everybody* on using them is "Why is loading the web so damn slow?!?" and many aren't going to have previously seen Linux anywhere else. That's not the kind of first impression we want to give.
Neat, and thanks. I'll look into getting it on my Linux box. This is one of those little features that make so much difference in user experience; the less time you have to look at a busy mouse cursor while loading things, the easier it is to convince people to use the software.
Wow... you sound like you've actually played the game, but have some extremely odd notions about it.
T2, in and of itself, doesn't take that long. With a knowledgeable friend and/or careful planning, you could do it before finishing a three-week trial if they didn't limit those ships to non-trial accounts. You can certainly do it in a month or so. Sure, an Interceptor or Assault Frigate is no Black Ops battleship or Command battlecruiser, but it's Tech 2 and perfectly usable in PvP. Of course, well within the trial period (I've done it), you can have a powerful T2-fitted Rifter or similar. Sure, it's T1, and it's a frigate... but hell, with the right fittings you can kill interceptors (despite them being T2) in such a ship. That said, a tech 1 hull with tech 1 fittings can still be perfectly valid as a PvP ship, for roaming gangs or gate camping or scouting a convoy or any number of other things. If you want, that's a valid approach right up through battlecruisers and battleships; the largest non-capital military ships, and you can get to battlecruisers in about a month if you really push it.
For large ships, T2 does indeed take longer. A Vagabond (T2 cruiser) - one of the best PvP ships for solo or small gang warfare, due to its incredible speed, decent durability, and decent firepower - will take at least two months to train for (longer if you want all the support skills that such a ship's pilot ought to have, but not *much* longer). Of course, that's not really a *large* ship, although a well-fitted one can kill most battlescruisers. Command ships are at least a few months more, and at a guess I'd estimate 8 months for a T2 battleship. Of course, it's not like you can't do anything until you get there. Fly a T1 frigate until you can fly a cruiser or T2 frigate. Fly cruiser or T2 frigate until you can fly T2 cruiser (Vagabond or similar). Almost any combat ship can be valuable in PvP, and even relatively new characters can have the skills to succeed in solo PvP if they get a pointer in the right direction.
The times above are assuming you train straight for that ship's skills; after over 2 years of EVE I still can't fly Black Ops because honestly I don't give a damn. They're awesome ships, and fill a very valuable tactical role... and yet their hulls alone cost several times what I spend on a fully fitted fleet battleship or even T2 battlecruiser. Most of my PvP is in a T1 battlecruiser, because frankly the Hurricane is fantastic PvP ship; it's got DPS comparable to a battleship, can tank well enough, is fast, and full fittings, rigs, and insurance for one costs like 70M tops (of which you'll get 30-odd million back from the insurance if you die). I use a fully T2 fit (rigs aside), and the skills necessary for my exact fit would probably take about 7 months or so to train from a new character. Within three months though, you could be perhaps 90% as effective; it's not actually that important to have a T2 MWD, or even T2 guns.
In any case, the suggestion that you can't PvP for a freaking year is *complete* bullshit. It's not typically practical to try PvP in your first week, but I have a friend who tried the game and was brining his cruiser on roaming gangs with me before his two-week trial ended (you can get three-week trials now, and early characters now receive a bonus to skill training speed to get them started even faster). Hell, I don't even suggest rushing T2; cost for cost, T2 hulls aren't close to worth it. T1 is easier to train and typically the hull costs literally 1/10 as much, for a ship that is well over half as effective.
Absent is definitely worse. Consider the Nokia N800/810/900; touchscreen-based devices (for the 8x0, at least, it's resistive sensing; no multi-touch, though stylus works) with working Flash. Yes, playing Flash games can be hard (some don't require anything other than clicking, but some require keyboard input too which is tricky on a phone-sized device, especially the N800 which lacks a hardware keyboard). On the other hand, long before Pandora had specialized apps for things like the iPhone, I could load http://pandora.com/ in the N800's web browser, and (after a minute of so of loading; Flash 9 on a 400MHz ARM is not fast) it worked fine. You know what's really funny? The Pandora applet actually *does* use hover... and yet it was 100% usable with a touchscreen. Nothing *required* hover support... and you actually could hover anyhow, by tapping on a non-active part of the applet and dragging onto the sensitive region.
The only Flash applets I've seen that specifically require hover to do things that you can't achieve with a click (because it does something entirely different) are advertisements. The NXX0 has AdBlock Plus for MicroB (or Mobile Firefox, with the normal ABP) and suddenly it's not even relevant (plus your pages load fast and you don't waste screen real-estate on ads). Meanwhile, Youtube (including embedded videos in other pages) works. Hulu works. Those book-reading websites that use Flash to prevent copy-paste work. Your random flash-navigated website probably works. Accounting for the limitations of the display and keyboard, many games work.
Yes, I'll gladly trade some things being broken for a large chunk of web content simply being absent.
Odd... your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I find that SuperFetch, *especially* on a laptop, is essential to speeding things up specifically because I don't have to wait for the data to be read off the disk before I can run a program. Startup doesn't seem any slower to me (I'll grant you that I haven't timed it) and unlike XP (no SuperFetch), either Vista or Win7 (both with SF enabled) is usable immediately after logging in. Sure it's slower while background stuff loads, but it's not like the computer is nearly frozen for a while, the way XP used to do. Once bootup is past, SuperFetch becomes essential to remove the bottleneck of that really slow laptop hard drive when I try to run something.
Actually, even XP had a disk cashe (like all the other OSes you mention, it was post-caching - storing data in case you need it again soon, rather than pre-caching things that you are probably about to use). However, as I understand it, the disk cache in XP was relatively small, and XP was (at release) used extensively on machines that really didn't have the kind of RAM it wanted. Therefore, it implemented an extremely aggressive paging algorithm, constantly writing memory pages to disk but not recovering them until it absolutely had to (even if there was un-allocated RAM). Not only did this increase I/O, but it meant that switching out of one long-running application (which has been allocating and freeing memory for so long that *everything* else got paged out) takes ages.
The up-side of this is that the main running program still looks pretty fast, even on a low-memory computer. That was the goal for XP. Unfortunately, it also makes XP hopelessly bad at managing systems with the kindof RAM you see today - it will still super-aggressively swap out memory pages for inactive applications, even if it could leave stuff in main memory and just re-use a portion of the RAM. Once that RAM is freed - perhaps because the program is closed - it lacks the sense to fill it up again with cached data that you might want soon (quite possibly including chunks of the pagefile holding data for one of the background processes the user is just about to click on and would rather see activate without 4 seconds of delay to pull paged memory in again).
That said, your point stands. XP's memory management is terrible for modern systems, and aside from the difference between pre- and post-caching, all other major OSes are "memory hogs" in this manner too. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
One of the main tricks, which you're completely glossing over, is the algorithm that determines what files are likely to be wanted/needed at any particular time of day. Sure, lsof will give you the raw data on what's open when, but making something useful out of that it a touch trickier than you suggest.
Additionally - and forgive my lack of Linux kernel expertise; I never thought to check this - is there a limit on the size of the filesystem cache? If it's less than a couple gigabytes, you're not going to be able to pre-load some of the files that most need it. If it is that large, presumably the ability to re-allocate it to a user-space program near instantly is also present, but that would be my next question. Finally, is the cache FiFo? If so, you've got a problem - unless your users are literally as regular as clockwork, they aren't going to want program X, and nothing but program X, at exactly time Y every day. Therefore, to ensure it's pre-loaded for them, you have to cache it in advance. However, if there's a lot of filesystem access - even small everyday stuff, like browsing the web or looking through a photo collection - the constant disk I/O will shove a lot of your pre-cached data out of the buffer.
Superfetch doesn't *sound* terribly impressive, but more thought went into it than you might realize.I'm certainly not saying it can't be duplicated on Linux, but there's obviously a reason it hasn't been, and it's obviously not because the feature is useless. I'm not sure how relevant it is to servers, but from a user perspective, the difference between five seconds and under one second to open a particularly large program is extremely noticeable. Given enough RAM (4GB on my system, of which Superfetch typically is using upwards of 3) you can easily achieve speedups like that.
Why use server cycles for an effectively static page? That site is probably going to see a lot of load, running even a simple PHP (or ASP.NET, it being MS) web application seems like a lot more overhead than some static HTML page with an embedded script that uses the client to do the work.
Terribly low though VGA is by modern standards, it's actually plenty for getting around on a limited day-to-day basis. It's certainly enough to avoid walking into a chair, or off the edge of a sidewalk, or into oncoming traffic. It would be possible to recognize people, at least up close, without needing to touch their face or pick out their voice. You wouldn't be able to read a book or something without very strong magnification, but you could probably make out street signs and bus numbers. Color-code your keys and you'd be able to lock and unlock your door, open your mailbox, etc. You'd be able to identify paper money, assuming nobody tries to slip you a counterfeit. You could probably even do basic cooking (use of a microwave, at least) and use everyday devices like cell phones or even computers (get the screen to fill your field of view, and it'd be just like I had back in the early 90s). Movies would be grainy as heck but better than no video at all.
I know people who would do just about anything for this kind of capability today.
I agree with you, but Slashdot apparently rejects any article submission with a URL that was used in another rejected article. Since people are constantly producing absolute crap article submissions - things even the editors won't post, no matter how interesting or on-topic the material is - it often becomes necessary to find an alternate link to the material you want to submit. Frankly, annoying though URL shorteners are, they're better than links to ad-riddled pages that spread their copy-pasted content out over a dozen click-throughs, add no original content, have no link back to the source, and are hosted on underpowered servers that can't take the surge of traffic.
That said, for all I know, this article points to such sites. It's not like I actually checked the links...
Lacking more info, I'm going to venture a guess that yes, the 5300 the GP mentions is the Intel Pro Wireless 5300 chipset (802.11abgn, and generally pretty darn good). The Linux drivers for it are open-source, but that doesn't necessarily mean bug-free or that all features are available. It does mean you could try to get it working yourself if you want, though. I have one such chipset myself, and while I've never tried to make it act as an AP, it would be neat to be able to do so.
On a side note, are there any easy Linux tools to make a WLAC card act as an AP and a client simultaneously (as SoftAP apparently does)? That would be very nice - I've only got *one* WLAN card in the laptop and it would be fantastic to be able to use it as simultaneously a client and a repeater that others could access (I promise I wouldn't even redirect them all to 64.111.96.38).
I'm trying to figure out how he didn't see the Enhanced Security warning screen... you know, the one that pops up the first time you start IE (and subsequently, if you don't turn off the warning) and tells you various things (including that downloading is restricted and security settings are very high). It also tells you how to turn off this feature, if you want to...