Since you have to reboot, this implies that you have physical access. Ok, great... but they could still have locked the boot sector and BIOS boot order, encrypted individual files (EFS) or the whole volume (BitLocker), or restricted access in other ways (standard users can't actually write anywhere on my C drive, although not for paranoid security reasons).
That said, short of something like BitLocker, if you have physical access it's generally game over anyhow.
Don't forget that EVE also has the whole "PVP is consensual, you consent to it when you launch your ship" thing. You actually can teleport your character to some degree (jump clones) but moving anything material from place to place requires flying it... potentially through all sorts of people who'd be just as happy to take it by blowing big enough holes in your hull that it just pops out. In highsec I suppose this doesn't matter much (so it really is about the economic aspects, which EVE has lots of) but very few of the reasons I like to play EVE exist in highsec.
"Broadband" in the US is generally defined as "better than 200kbps" and no, I haven't misplaced a 0 in there. Dual ISDN counts as broadband. Crappy 768kbps DSL counts as broadband. you get the picture.
On a connection like that - and they are very, very common - downloading even a smallish DVD image (like the 32-bit Win7.iso) will take much of a day.
"Backstabbing" IBM over OS/2 is a slightly excesive claim. IBM drove that project into the ground, insisting on too much control and changing requirements so much that it was falling far behind schedule. Thus, Microsoft started a new project called OS/2 NT, which would have been an intermediate OS (among other things, it included compatibility with OS/2 applications in the first few releases). IBM never stopped driving OS/2 into a hole, and then MS implemented their new Win32 API (first seen in NT; at this time, OS/2 was still 16-bit only due to IBM's insitence that it run on 286) in a consumer OS (Win95). Win32 took off, MS took what they had and ran with it, releasing NT 4 (not firmly under the Windows brand), and telling IBM where they could stick their absurd requirements.
Actually, I'm curious why they have their own implementation anyhow. From their site, it sounds like they're doing much the same thing as Mono, but are maybe a bit further behind. Mono is already open source, so... why?!?
Making a non-portable Java app is trivial; all you need is to use a native library that isn't available on every platform. Interestingly enough, this (not MS-specific extensions) is also the primary reason that not all CIL apps are portable between.NET and Mono. The vast majority of pure managed code applications are quite portable, although it si true that Mono is still behind.NET in terms of implemented API.
Each one extracts CO2 several orders of magnitude slower? I mean, think about the mass of a gas like CO2. Now envision a ton of the stuff. One of these machines would extract that much every single day. This is a pretty impressive achievement.
The fact that jailbreaking is non-trivial and that there is still anything which requires it is proof that no, you can't. You can write applications against a published SDK running on a specific operating system, but you can't affect the underlying system in any meaningful way without jailbreaking. You can run any code you like on your phone - except a program to patch out the inhibition against *actually* running any code you want (OK, there are lots of other things you can't do, but that's the point). I'm sure the 3G S will be jailbroken soon enough, but until then you're still limited to the development tools and toys that Apple lets you play with.
Energy is measured in Joules. This applies to everything from power utilities (3.6 MJ == 1 KW H) to cars (32 MJ per litre of 87 Octane gasoline). Any decent physics class or book should explain this - it really is just math, which makes your subject somewhat ironic.
Apparently, electrical energy accounts for 1/8 of the global energy consumption. Thus, an energy source that produces exactly as much energy as our total consumption would produce 8 times as much eneergy as our electrical consumption, and a source that produced 40 times our electrical consumption would produce 5 times our total energy consumption.
Sure, and Alt-Shift-Tab lets you cycle through programs in the order of least-recently-used to most-recently-used, while Ctrl-Shift-Tab does the same thing with IE8 tabs. Firefox still doesn't offer what I want. The tabs I'm switching between may not be adjacent (and in case you hadn't guessed, I dislike using the mouse to switch or drag tabs), and even if they are, having one key chord for the direction I'm most likely by far to be going (back to previously used tab) makes a lot more sense.
Iroincally enough, IE8 is faster at it than Firefox 3.0, too. One of the first things I noticed when the IE8 public RC (never mind the actual release) came out. Kinda sad...
What's your point? Both are presented as general-purpose desktop operating systems (Slackware has some proponents who will try and claim that status for it too, but most of them wouldn't get very far). At the very least, try it on another "user-friendly" desktop-oriented distro.
Of course, they're also benchmarking on a 2-month-old build of Ubuntu (designed for the capabilities of modern hardware, and the features of a modern OS) vs. on a 92-month-old build of Windows. When XP came out, it said that its minimum requirements were 128MB of RAM (on which it runs little better than Vista on 512MB) and people thought that was a lot! This is a ridiculous comparison.
He already made it worthless. He summed the working set of all the Chrome processes, ignoring shared portions (which is rather stupid, as the browser itself will tell you how big those are). This vastly overestimates Chrome's memory usage.
As for the IE thing, use the Start command (which invokes the file associations/URI handler for its parameter). For example, the command "start http://google.com/" will open the Google page in a new tab (assuming IE is the handler for http: URIs and you have IE configured to open pages from other processes in new tabs). This is easy to automate. (For the curious, start is the Windows builtin command invoked by the Run dialog, or whenever you double-click a file).
10 is nothing. Running down the Slashdot RSS feed I may well open over 15 tabs, and from each of those I might open another tab or two (yes, I RTFAs). Chrome and IE8 handle this quite well. Opera and Konqueror are OK. Firefox bogs down for a long time, and I don't know about Safari. Hardware is Core 2 Duo, 1.83 GHz and 2GB of RAM, clean Vista x86 install.
I stopped using Firefox for reading Slashdot specifically because it was so bad at this (didn't help that its RSS interface is pretty bad, too).
He was probably referring to things like the plugins that make Firefox's tabbed browsing not suck. It's a sad state of affairs when the browser that introduced tabs to the masses (not the first, but the first with more than about 5% market share) now has one of the worst tabbed interfaces by default. No tab groupings, no jumping back-and-forth using Ctrl-Tab (it cycles through the whole list instead), etc.
In all fairness, a lot of BSD documentation with regard to drivers still ends with something like "... then recompile your kernel and reboot."
Also, XP (despite being 8 years old, it's still what a lot of people think when you say "Windows") will need to reboot after many driver changes. Vista and above are much better behaved in this regard, allowing installation/update/removal of most audio, video, input, and peripheral drivers without rebooting.
So maybe this isn't a good time to mention that you can upgrade video drivers in Vista (and above), or recover from a video display crash, without even closing and reopening your windows, never mind the applications behind them?
That said, I don't know how to force WIndows to load or unload a kernel module (.sys file, typically) via command line. It's probably possible, but Linux certainly does make it easy.
One interesting change here that Win7 has done is that there are now two default sound devices (for both recording and playback): the usual "Default" and the "Communications" device. These certainly can be the same, but they also allow things like making it so your media player (which would use the Default) goes out your main speakers, while your VoIP goes to a headset. Still, this requires A) the two defaults be configured, B) communication applicaitons identify themselves as such, and C) the audio drivers recognize different outputs (most Windows drivers treat analog headphones and analog speakers as the same device, and don't let you choose which to use - plugging in headphones turns off the speakers, and that's it). If you already have C, have bothered to do B, and your users are capable of A, then it seems that simply having something like Skype's sound configuration (where you can select the device to use for each of several different sound uses) makes a lot of sense. Try to keep the defaults reasonable, of course, but don't *force* us to use them.
An alternative is to have the audio system do per-application control of the Default. This is probably actually feasible, since Vista and up already support per-application volume control. It would simply be a matter of telling each application, when it wants the open the default audio device, to use a user-specified "default" for that application.
Thank you. That is a better explanation of the exact problem than I gave, as it explains better why it is so difficult / takes so much time to find a region suitable for erase/overwrite (and why TRIM helps the drive so much).
Disclaimer: I am not a SSD firmware author, although I've spoken to a few.*
As best I can understand it, the problem is that writes are scattered across the physical media by wear-leveling firmware on the disk. In order to do this, the firmware must have a "free list" of sorts that allows it to find an un-worn area for the next write. Of course, this unworn area also needs to not currently be storing any relevant data.
Now, consider a SSD in use. Initially, the whole disk is free, and writes can go anywhere at all. They do, too - you end up with meaningful (at some point) data covering the entirety of the physical memory cells pretty quickly (consider things like logfiles, pagefiles, hibernation data, temporary data, and so forth). Obviously, most of that data doesn't mean anything anymore - to the filesystem, only perhaps 20% of the SSD is actually used, after 6 months. However, the SSD's firmware things that every single part has now been used.
Obviously, the firmware needs to be able to detect when data on disk gets obsoleted, and can safely be deleted. The problems with this are that this leads to *very* complicated translation tables - logical disk blocks end up having no relation at all to physical ones, and the SSD needs to track those mappings. The other problem is that these tables get *huge* - a typical home system might have between 100K and 1M files on it after a few months of usage, but probably generates and deletes many thousands per day (consider web site cookies, for example - each time they get updated, the wear leveling will write that data to a new portion of the physical storage).
Maintaining the tables themselves is possible, and when a logical block gets overwritten to a new physical location, the old location can be freed. The problem is that this freeing comes at the same time that the SSD needs to find a new location to write to, and the only knowledge it has about physical blocks which can safely be overwritten is ones where the logical block has been overwritten already (to a different physical location). Obviously, the lookup into the table of active blocks has to be indexed by logical block, which may make it difficult to locate the oldest "free" physical blocks. This could lead to searches that, even with near-instant IO, result in noticeable slowdowns.
Enter the TRIM command, whereby an OS can tell the SSD that a given range of logical blocks (which haven't been overwritten yet) are now able to be recycled. This command allows the SSD to identify physical blocks which can safely be overwritten, and place them in its physical write queue, before the next write command comes down from the disk controller. It's unlikely to be a magic bullet, but should improve things substantially.
* As stated above, I don't personally write this stuff, so I may be mis-remembering or mis-interpreting. If anybody can explain it better, please do.
Does 3.5 actually *have* private browsing? The equivalent of IE8's InPrivate mode, or Chrome's Incognito? If so, good for them - Google and Microsoft released those features near-simultaneously, and it's about time they made it into the world's second-most-popular browser (ignoring version numbers).
Firefox 3.0 takes bloody AGES to start up on the Linux boxes at my school (GNOME, Fedora 9). It's probably a misconfiguration thing - it's faster on my KDE4 system (although still slower than Konqueror) - but even on Windows it's still substantially slower to start than IE8. I suppose I should try 3.5 and see if they've improved there, though.
*IF* that were the only difference, we would be seeing these kinds of articles about Windows Mobile games too (actually I suppose we wouldn't, seeing as this is Slashdot, but bear with me). The framework to develop games for those platforms (XNA + Visual C# Express Edition) is literally free, assuming you have Windows (most of the world does). True, WinMo platforms are less unified than the iPhone, but there's still a huge market out there for any given device, and the barrier to entry is VERY low.
Now, perhaps the iPhone's hardware makes enough of a difference - most WinMo phones have lower specs, and lack things like the tilt sensor (of course, most of them also have buttons...) - but I think the evidence is fairly clear that gaming on phones, even if it eventually takes off, is not currently a terribly large market.
Novell was awarded a fairly large compensation by the court, right? My guess is that, in order to extract that much money from SCO, they'll need to take just about every piece of property that SCO owns... and given that they are both in the *nix software business, getting the rights to SCO's Unix flavors would seem an obvious move.
Hmm... my only printer is local, but it was found easily.
Dolphin is not my preferred application. Two recommended options: either change the default file browsing application in the KDE configuration, or just put a link to Konqueror (in Filemanager mode) on your desktop or pinned to the K menu or similar.
Middle-click opens links in a new tab for me, the way it has done for years. I'm pretty sure this is optional. What I really like is that I can now tell Konqueror to *close* a tab when I middle-click on it (in the tab bar) which is the behavior of all other browsers, and which I find intuitive and convenient.
For me, the new features more than outweigh the occasionally incompletely ported application. If you don't mind the disk space, you can keep the KDE3 apps and libraries around if you really want to, but frankly my experience is that KDE4.2 is frankly just superior to 3.5 now. If you don't feel that way, that's fine, the choice is yours. Personally, I love it.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you have to reboot, this implies that you have physical access. Ok, great... but they could still have locked the boot sector and BIOS boot order, encrypted individual files (EFS) or the whole volume (BitLocker), or restricted access in other ways (standard users can't actually write anywhere on my C drive, although not for paranoid security reasons).
That said, short of something like BitLocker, if you have physical access it's generally game over anyhow.
Don't forget that EVE also has the whole "PVP is consensual, you consent to it when you launch your ship" thing. You actually can teleport your character to some degree (jump clones) but moving anything material from place to place requires flying it... potentially through all sorts of people who'd be just as happy to take it by blowing big enough holes in your hull that it just pops out. In highsec I suppose this doesn't matter much (so it really is about the economic aspects, which EVE has lots of) but very few of the reasons I like to play EVE exist in highsec.
"Broadband" in the US is generally defined as "better than 200kbps" and no, I haven't misplaced a 0 in there. Dual ISDN counts as broadband. Crappy 768kbps DSL counts as broadband. you get the picture.
On a connection like that - and they are very, very common - downloading even a smallish DVD image (like the 32-bit Win7 .iso) will take much of a day.
"Backstabbing" IBM over OS/2 is a slightly excesive claim. IBM drove that project into the ground, insisting on too much control and changing requirements so much that it was falling far behind schedule. Thus, Microsoft started a new project called OS/2 NT, which would have been an intermediate OS (among other things, it included compatibility with OS/2 applications in the first few releases). IBM never stopped driving OS/2 into a hole, and then MS implemented their new Win32 API (first seen in NT; at this time, OS/2 was still 16-bit only due to IBM's insitence that it run on 286) in a consumer OS (Win95). Win32 took off, MS took what they had and ran with it, releasing NT 4 (not firmly under the Windows brand), and telling IBM where they could stick their absurd requirements.
Actually, I'm curious why they have their own implementation anyhow. From their site, it sounds like they're doing much the same thing as Mono, but are maybe a bit further behind. Mono is already open source, so... why?!?
Making a non-portable Java app is trivial; all you need is to use a native library that isn't available on every platform. Interestingly enough, this (not MS-specific extensions) is also the primary reason that not all CIL apps are portable between .NET and Mono. The vast majority of pure managed code applications are quite portable, although it si true that Mono is still behind .NET in terms of implemented API.
Each one extracts CO2 several orders of magnitude slower? I mean, think about the mass of a gas like CO2. Now envision a ton of the stuff. One of these machines would extract that much every single day. This is a pretty impressive achievement.
The fact that jailbreaking is non-trivial and that there is still anything which requires it is proof that no, you can't. You can write applications against a published SDK running on a specific operating system, but you can't affect the underlying system in any meaningful way without jailbreaking. You can run any code you like on your phone - except a program to patch out the inhibition against *actually* running any code you want (OK, there are lots of other things you can't do, but that's the point). I'm sure the 3G S will be jailbroken soon enough, but until then you're still limited to the development tools and toys that Apple lets you play with.
That really is quite sad.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=3%2C300+square+kilometers+in+square+miles (1,274)
does not equal
http://www.bing.com/search?q=3%2C300+kilometers+in+miles (2,050)
Yeah, yeah, Google Did It First. Just wanted to see if Bing would do it too.
Energy is measured in Joules. This applies to everything from power utilities (3.6 MJ == 1 KW H) to cars (32 MJ per litre of 87 Octane gasoline). Any decent physics class or book should explain this - it really is just math, which makes your subject somewhat ironic.
Apparently, electrical energy accounts for 1/8 of the global energy consumption. Thus, an energy source that produces exactly as much energy as our total consumption would produce 8 times as much eneergy as our electrical consumption, and a source that produced 40 times our electrical consumption would produce 5 times our total energy consumption.
Sure, and Alt-Shift-Tab lets you cycle through programs in the order of least-recently-used to most-recently-used, while Ctrl-Shift-Tab does the same thing with IE8 tabs. Firefox still doesn't offer what I want. The tabs I'm switching between may not be adjacent (and in case you hadn't guessed, I dislike using the mouse to switch or drag tabs), and even if they are, having one key chord for the direction I'm most likely by far to be going (back to previously used tab) makes a lot more sense.
Iroincally enough, IE8 is faster at it than Firefox 3.0, too. One of the first things I noticed when the IE8 public RC (never mind the actual release) came out. Kinda sad...
What's your point? Both are presented as general-purpose desktop operating systems (Slackware has some proponents who will try and claim that status for it too, but most of them wouldn't get very far). At the very least, try it on another "user-friendly" desktop-oriented distro.
Of course, they're also benchmarking on a 2-month-old build of Ubuntu (designed for the capabilities of modern hardware, and the features of a modern OS) vs. on a 92-month-old build of Windows. When XP came out, it said that its minimum requirements were 128MB of RAM (on which it runs little better than Vista on 512MB) and people thought that was a lot! This is a ridiculous comparison.
He already made it worthless. He summed the working set of all the Chrome processes, ignoring shared portions (which is rather stupid, as the browser itself will tell you how big those are). This vastly overestimates Chrome's memory usage.
As for the IE thing, use the Start command (which invokes the file associations/URI handler for its parameter). For example, the command "start http://google.com/" will open the Google page in a new tab (assuming IE is the handler for http: URIs and you have IE configured to open pages from other processes in new tabs). This is easy to automate. (For the curious, start is the Windows builtin command invoked by the Run dialog, or whenever you double-click a file).
10 is nothing. Running down the Slashdot RSS feed I may well open over 15 tabs, and from each of those I might open another tab or two (yes, I RTFAs). Chrome and IE8 handle this quite well. Opera and Konqueror are OK. Firefox bogs down for a long time, and I don't know about Safari. Hardware is Core 2 Duo, 1.83 GHz and 2GB of RAM, clean Vista x86 install.
I stopped using Firefox for reading Slashdot specifically because it was so bad at this (didn't help that its RSS interface is pretty bad, too).
He was probably referring to things like the plugins that make Firefox's tabbed browsing not suck. It's a sad state of affairs when the browser that introduced tabs to the masses (not the first, but the first with more than about 5% market share) now has one of the worst tabbed interfaces by default. No tab groupings, no jumping back-and-forth using Ctrl-Tab (it cycles through the whole list instead), etc.
In all fairness, a lot of BSD documentation with regard to drivers still ends with something like "... then recompile your kernel and reboot."
Also, XP (despite being 8 years old, it's still what a lot of people think when you say "Windows") will need to reboot after many driver changes. Vista and above are much better behaved in this regard, allowing installation/update/removal of most audio, video, input, and peripheral drivers without rebooting.
So maybe this isn't a good time to mention that you can upgrade video drivers in Vista (and above), or recover from a video display crash, without even closing and reopening your windows, never mind the applications behind them?
That said, I don't know how to force WIndows to load or unload a kernel module (.sys file, typically) via command line. It's probably possible, but Linux certainly does make it easy.
One interesting change here that Win7 has done is that there are now two default sound devices (for both recording and playback): the usual "Default" and the "Communications" device. These certainly can be the same, but they also allow things like making it so your media player (which would use the Default) goes out your main speakers, while your VoIP goes to a headset. Still, this requires A) the two defaults be configured, B) communication applicaitons identify themselves as such, and C) the audio drivers recognize different outputs (most Windows drivers treat analog headphones and analog speakers as the same device, and don't let you choose which to use - plugging in headphones turns off the speakers, and that's it). If you already have C, have bothered to do B, and your users are capable of A, then it seems that simply having something like Skype's sound configuration (where you can select the device to use for each of several different sound uses) makes a lot of sense. Try to keep the defaults reasonable, of course, but don't *force* us to use them.
An alternative is to have the audio system do per-application control of the Default. This is probably actually feasible, since Vista and up already support per-application volume control. It would simply be a matter of telling each application, when it wants the open the default audio device, to use a user-specified "default" for that application.
Thank you. That is a better explanation of the exact problem than I gave, as it explains better why it is so difficult / takes so much time to find a region suitable for erase/overwrite (and why TRIM helps the drive so much).
Disclaimer: I am not a SSD firmware author, although I've spoken to a few.*
As best I can understand it, the problem is that writes are scattered across the physical media by wear-leveling firmware on the disk. In order to do this, the firmware must have a "free list" of sorts that allows it to find an un-worn area for the next write. Of course, this unworn area also needs to not currently be storing any relevant data.
Now, consider a SSD in use. Initially, the whole disk is free, and writes can go anywhere at all. They do, too - you end up with meaningful (at some point) data covering the entirety of the physical memory cells pretty quickly (consider things like logfiles, pagefiles, hibernation data, temporary data, and so forth). Obviously, most of that data doesn't mean anything anymore - to the filesystem, only perhaps 20% of the SSD is actually used, after 6 months. However, the SSD's firmware things that every single part has now been used.
Obviously, the firmware needs to be able to detect when data on disk gets obsoleted, and can safely be deleted. The problems with this are that this leads to *very* complicated translation tables - logical disk blocks end up having no relation at all to physical ones, and the SSD needs to track those mappings. The other problem is that these tables get *huge* - a typical home system might have between 100K and 1M files on it after a few months of usage, but probably generates and deletes many thousands per day (consider web site cookies, for example - each time they get updated, the wear leveling will write that data to a new portion of the physical storage).
Maintaining the tables themselves is possible, and when a logical block gets overwritten to a new physical location, the old location can be freed. The problem is that this freeing comes at the same time that the SSD needs to find a new location to write to, and the only knowledge it has about physical blocks which can safely be overwritten is ones where the logical block has been overwritten already (to a different physical location). Obviously, the lookup into the table of active blocks has to be indexed by logical block, which may make it difficult to locate the oldest "free" physical blocks. This could lead to searches that, even with near-instant IO, result in noticeable slowdowns.
Enter the TRIM command, whereby an OS can tell the SSD that a given range of logical blocks (which haven't been overwritten yet) are now able to be recycled. This command allows the SSD to identify physical blocks which can safely be overwritten, and place them in its physical write queue, before the next write command comes down from the disk controller. It's unlikely to be a magic bullet, but should improve things substantially.
* As stated above, I don't personally write this stuff, so I may be mis-remembering or mis-interpreting. If anybody can explain it better, please do.
Does 3.5 actually *have* private browsing? The equivalent of IE8's InPrivate mode, or Chrome's Incognito? If so, good for them - Google and Microsoft released those features near-simultaneously, and it's about time they made it into the world's second-most-popular browser (ignoring version numbers).
Firefox 3.0 takes bloody AGES to start up on the Linux boxes at my school (GNOME, Fedora 9). It's probably a misconfiguration thing - it's faster on my KDE4 system (although still slower than Konqueror) - but even on Windows it's still substantially slower to start than IE8. I suppose I should try 3.5 and see if they've improved there, though.
*IF* that were the only difference, we would be seeing these kinds of articles about Windows Mobile games too (actually I suppose we wouldn't, seeing as this is Slashdot, but bear with me). The framework to develop games for those platforms (XNA + Visual C# Express Edition) is literally free, assuming you have Windows (most of the world does). True, WinMo platforms are less unified than the iPhone, but there's still a huge market out there for any given device, and the barrier to entry is VERY low.
Now, perhaps the iPhone's hardware makes enough of a difference - most WinMo phones have lower specs, and lack things like the tilt sensor (of course, most of them also have buttons...) - but I think the evidence is fairly clear that gaming on phones, even if it eventually takes off, is not currently a terribly large market.
Novell was awarded a fairly large compensation by the court, right? My guess is that, in order to extract that much money from SCO, they'll need to take just about every piece of property that SCO owns... and given that they are both in the *nix software business, getting the rights to SCO's Unix flavors would seem an obvious move.
Hmm... my only printer is local, but it was found easily.
Dolphin is not my preferred application. Two recommended options: either change the default file browsing application in the KDE configuration, or just put a link to Konqueror (in Filemanager mode) on your desktop or pinned to the K menu or similar.
Middle-click opens links in a new tab for me, the way it has done for years. I'm pretty sure this is optional. What I really like is that I can now tell Konqueror to *close* a tab when I middle-click on it (in the tab bar) which is the behavior of all other browsers, and which I find intuitive and convenient.
For me, the new features more than outweigh the occasionally incompletely ported application. If you don't mind the disk space, you can keep the KDE3 apps and libraries around if you really want to, but frankly my experience is that KDE4.2 is frankly just superior to 3.5 now. If you don't feel that way, that's fine, the choice is yours. Personally, I love it.