Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:My experience this past month with Linux (Score 1) 727

Out of interest, how well does OSX work on that laptop?

My guess is the experience will be even worse than with Linux.

The lesson here is that if you want a Linux or OSX laptop, you buy one that's known to run the OS of choice. In OSX's case, you go to an Apple shop. In Linux's case, you go to a Linux laptop shop like Dell or System 76 or a bunch of others.

It doesn't require an engineering degree you see, just a little nouse with purchases.

I'm curious which model you actually have: the UX41A does not exist as far as I can tell. Unbuntu 14.04 works perfectly on the UX21.

Comment Re:Nobody else seems to want it (Score 1) 727

if DOS needed them, then you would expect them to be provided with the hardware, you would install them, and then your applications would use them through the OS API.

Er have you ever used DOS. It provided almost no API at all. And the ones it did no one used. It certainly didn't provide any graphics. The BIOS provided a spectacularly slow interface to the VGA card.

The fact that you had to configure games specifically for your hardware means they were not "DOS drivers" but "game drivers".

No not really. The DOS model was it did fuck-all so if you wanted to use any hardware beyond the small range that was directly supported by the dos APIs and the BIOS then you had to provide all the drivers yourself.

Basically DOS did an OK job at files. And text out to the console. Everything else, graphics, sound, a mouse, joysticks, printers, scanners and so on was provided by drivers in the application program.

The only reason VGA worked uniformly is a whole bunch of manufacturers reverse engineered the VGA register map so that the specially written VGA drivers for dos stuff would work with their clone cards.

Comment Re:Nobody else seems to want it (Score 5, Interesting) 727

This means that you have to have code review from the Linux kernel team. And you have to divulge any amateur or buggy code embodied in the source. Which may compromise the imaginary advantage your marketdroids think they have on other platforms.

God yes this. 1000 times this.

One particular example I remember well was TV capture cards in the early/mid 2000s.

Basically the chipset was the Brooktree BT878, which was actually pretty good though remarably cheap. I ended up with a few capture cards what people gave to me because "they didn't work".

That meant they didn't work on Windows. Every manufacturer wrote their own buggy, unstable, system crashy drivers and put effort into some god-awful shiny TV program which made heavy use of gradients and nonstandard TV controls.

On Linux, they all. just. worked. There was one BT878 driver that was well written and well debugged and "shitty" capture cards that "didn't work" gave years of stable, flawless performance.

The same thing cycled around with webcams. It was a wild-west of chipsets. They'd all work after a fashion on Windows. On Linux, they either worked perfectly or not at all due to lack of drivers. The ones that did work were invariable more stable and more featureful because the driver would be written to expose the full functionality of the chipset.

These days the situation is better on all platforms since the standards people have realised that having standard driver interface makes for a much better experience. xHCI means that any random USB chipset works. Same for bluetooth now too. UVC means any camer works and so on and so forth. It's like magic. You can buy a cheap-ass piece of crap from any random vendor and it will just work, no drivers, no hassle on Windows, Linux and OSX.

The thing is vendors are almost uniformly bad at writing drivers. On Linux this means they don't bother. On Windows the drivers are a pile of crap. Having centrally maintained drivers is in fact a large improvement on BOTH operating systems.

Comment Re:Shame (Score 2) 102

How is that deprecated auto_ptr working out for you?

Er huh? Old code using it still works does it not? Now you get a warning if you use it. I imagine you will have something approaching infinite time to remove it after you upgrade your compiler.

So it's fine. No problem in fact. I'm not sure what your point is?

The lambda syntax is hideous. Hell even Javascript makes it easy to declare anonymous functions!

Hideous is in the eye of the beholder, but hard to create anonymous functions in C++, it is not.

[&](auto x){ do something with x};

If you think that's hard, you should seriously consider another career.

An honest person wouldn't be afraid to admit that.

Where has he been dishonest? He's always admitted C++ has flaws. An HONEST person wouldn't cast false accusations.

Comment Re:They can produce tritium at fission plants (Score 1) 305

Not really. The critical mass for U235 is 50 kg or so, while for PU240 it's about 40 kg.

As the other poster pointed out, it's Pu 239 with a critical mass of 10Kg. The Fat Man pit weighed only 6Kg however. You can enhance criticality by compressing the pit (the implosion stage) and reflecting the neutrons back, to increase the per-neutron fission yield.

Comment Re:what are you smoking? (Score 3, Informative) 129

Yeah but there's the memory penalty, and the conflicting CPU schedulers.

If you have 20VMs basically running the same code, then all of the code segments are going to be the same. So, people are doing memory deduplication. Of course that's inefficient, so I expect people are looking at paravirtualising that too.

That way you'll be able to inform the VM sysrem that you're loading an immutable chunk of code and if anyone else want's to use it their free to. So it becomes an object of some sort which is shared.

And thus people will have inefficiently reinvented shared objects, and will probably index them by hash or something.

The same will happen with CPU scheduling too. The guest and host both have ideas who wants CPU when. The guests can already yield. Sooner or later they'll be able to inform the host that they want some CPU too.

And thus was reinvented the concept of a process with threads.

And sooner or later, people will start running apps straight on the VM because all these things it provides are basically enough to run a program so why bother with the host OS. Or perhaps they won't.

But either way people will find that the host OS becomes a bit tied down to a particular host (or not---and thus people reinvent portability layers) and that makes deployment hard so wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow share just the essentials of the hardware between multiple hosts to fully utilise our machines.

Except that's inefficient and there's a lot of guess work so if we allow the hosts and the host-hosts to share just a liiiiiiiitle bit of information we'll be able to make things much more efficient.

And so it continues.

Comment Re:Oh god so what? (Score 1) 193

The problem (as if there's only one!) is that the c++ committee members only have one thing in common: They hate C!

No, they all like C++, that's the one thing in common.

So you get a mix of people trying to bolt their favorite features from cobol, haskell, java, etc onto C. You know, to improve it.

You're an idiot and you've never clearly never followed the C++ standards committee process. Basically you're bitter because...

Maybe they should just stick to their failed language and leave the rest of us alone? ...you are actually a genuine failuer. By the way, branding one of the most successful computer languages of the present day and all time as a "failure" does indeed make you look ignorant and bitter.

The second problem (as if there were only two!) is that they don't update the language to reflect what people what people are doing with it,

It's a balancing act. No one likes to use nonstandard features. They then add reatures which make writing the type of code that people actually write easier. So they do add features that reflect what people are doing with it.

That means adding features that no compiler can implement (like exported templates) or feature nobody can or should use (like std::vector or cout/cin)

My god, you're taking a few missteps from 16 years ago as why the committee today is bad? Is that the best you can do seriously?

And the only reason they put exported templates in is becuase of all the users clamouring for it.

Of course they're still full of dumb ivory tower ideas like adopting cairo.

Bsaically I've come to the conclusion that anyone using the phrase "ivory tower" is an angry, bitter, twisted person. Most likely both opinionated and stupid, but angry because no one will listen to their whitterings.

Comment Re:ugh... white knights. (Score 1) 748

We wouldn't dare supress the "all men are pigs" posts made by the whack-a-doodle feminist faction

What do you mean "we"? If anything even vaguely approaching this comes up here, then people jump all over it.

Try that and you'll have the enire movement camped out on your doorstep with protest signs.

To me this sounds like a gross exaggeration. Do you have anything more concrete to back it up?

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 748

These things are not at odds:

It is not a political opinion, and it is not acceptable.

What? Fuck you sideways. I mean, I personally have no problem whatsoever with lesbigaytrangenderedetc people but I will stand up for anyone's right to do so.

I will also stand up for their right to do so. I will ALSO stand up for (and join in with) the right of other people to villify them. It cuts both ways.

Comment Re:ugh... white knights. (Score 1) 748

And yet the feminists keep shrieking that ALL men are pigs, that ALL men are rapists or rape apologists, ALL men are oppressors.

Equating the entirety of a movement to its most crazy wingnuts is really misrepresenting it.

Perhaps Adam Savage and his ilk should try meeting an actual woman once in their lives. ...? I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. What would meeting an "actual woman" do? Do you mean a woman with some specific traits? Or do you mean literally any female?

And yet, one of these selfsame delicate creatures went to prison for killing her baby by putting it in a microwave.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make except that you seem to like picking the most extreme examples of something and using them as somehow representative.

Comment Re:See: Anita Sarkeesian (Score 1) 98

Yup. there are a lot of suckers out there. The people paying into her kickstarter are the chumps.

No they're not. Or, in other words you're making up your own definition of "sucker" and "chump" which more or less equate to "people I don't like".

It's not like it's some scam kickstarter where they hope to get some widget and the person responds with the money. No, she's a person known for producing videos on sexism and is now continuing to produce videos on sexism.

They'd be suckers if they were scammed into paying for something they wanted and never got it. Instead, they get to chuck a little bit of money at someone they like to a reasonable approximation to continue doing what they like her doing.

In other words, they knew what they were paying for and have got what they were paying for. That's more or less the opposite of a sucker.

She's also been found to be a fraud

[citation needed]

Slashdot Top Deals

Old mail has arrived.

Working...