What is it with all the netbook weirdness.

I have an Eee 900 20G. Basically it is a small, cheap, very light, well built machine with a moderate battery life. It can combine those properties because it was very low spec compared to its contemporaries. Other than that, it is just a laptop. There are no restriction or lack of featuers. It is just a laptop.

I happen to like it because I don't require a fast machine or a large screen. Therefore it is better than almost all other laptops (for me) because it nails the specs I do care about.

When I am at home, I plug it in to an external monitor and DVD drive and it works well as my home (entertainment) computer.

I can't believe I am the only person in the world who does not need a fast machine. I have particular trouble believing it because they sold so very well.

I can see that the netbook markey it "dieing" mainly because the speed, size, weight and cost has gone up, making them merge with the normal laptop segment. There's therefore nothing to distinguish them from normal laptops. But when they were small, cheap and light they sold well.

The great thing about generic PCs is that they span niches from Vortex86, PC/104, through to laptops (with any practical range of speed, weight, battery life, cost size), luggables, desktops (from tiny Via /atom to quad socket behemoths) through to servers in as many shapes and sizes.

Why does this particular combination of weight, speed, size and cost seem to cause so much consternation?

They do not have a high gain antenna, despite the claims. They have a high efficicncy omnidirectional antenna. There is big difference. In the world of antennae, high gain *MEANS* directional.

A high gain antenna is good for a point to point link and useless for an area access point. Some access points have moderate gain "omnis" which emit 360 degrees in plane and maybe 20 out of plane. These are not good for multi storey houses.

Frankly, I think the value statement of "It is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man" is too lenient on the use of power. Its better to let any number of the guilty go free, than to convict one innocent man.

You appear not to understand probability.

Assuming it is impossible to construct a flawless justice system, the only way to ensure that no innocent person is ever convicted is to never convict anyone.

That is not desirable.

Some things are like questioning the existence of gravity. It is not fully understood, but its existence somewhat hard to deny. Nonetheless, I strongly encourage you try.

"They confuse correlation with causation"

I find it amazing that some random slashdotter thinks he is smarter than that a very large number of scientists, even though he (a safe assumption) has no formal training in the area of interest.

Correlation implies one of:
- A causes B
- B causes A
- some other C causes both A and B
- Chance

Given what we know about the spectra of carbon dioxide and greenhouse effects (see eg Venus), and a number of other things, which of the choices (if any) do you think is more likely?

Yes. Just imagine if Newton was convinced that through alchemy he could turn base metals in to gold. Imagine he wasted a significant chunk of his life convinced he could do something we now know to be impossible (in the way he imagined it).

Imagine if Einstein was convinced quantum mechanics was a crock ("God does not play with dice") and spent lots of time trying to debunk it. Imagine if Enistein was convinced that the universe was not expanding and tried to spend a lot of time proving it.

Etc...

One of the tricks is low density parity check codes (LDPCC) which are the best currently known error correcting codes. They're decoded with a wonderfully elegant decoding algorithm which is embarresingly parallel so it works very well in hardware.

In fact, you can pretty much implement the belief network in hardware directly.

The codes are also used in 10G Ethernet, too.

Funny thing is that they date from the 60's, but were impractical because of the amount of computation required to decode them. The decoding algorithm was then rediscovered for inference on Bayes nets.

If you lick this sort of thing, it is worth reading Mackay's book on inference which is free online. I have no affiliation to Mackay, btw.

I have an eee 900 (one of the earlier ones if you remember). It has an ethernet port which I use moderately frequently. The thickness of the eee is one of the causes of its robustness: it has a *HUGE* hinge on the screen which will never break, unlike so many other laptops. That makes the case deep enough to fit in an ethernet port comfortably without affecting the structural integrity of the machine.

Stuck of FVWM? STUCK??? FVWM has excellent support for multiple monitors. You just need to know how.

Firstly, FVWM has extended the stnadard X11 position/size spec (width*height+left+right) with an additional marker to indicate the particular screen. Eg: wxh+l+r@X, where X is g for the global screen, p for the primary and so on.

If you want to bind keys to shuffle windows around over multiple monitors you can do something like:

Key F1 A C AnimatedMove 0 0

eg if F1 is presses in Any region with the Control modifier, move the current window to 0,0.

There's als MoveToScreen which can be used to move windows to another screen, etc.

There's settings for resistance for dragging the windows over the edge of screens, preventing overlap over the edge of the screen and so on.

Seriously, they "man fvwm" from an xterm and search for Xinerama. There are hundreds of options.

Finally, if all else fails, and you wish to do some really strange maniuplations, then you can write an FVWM module in a variety of languages to suit your taste.

If you look at the filesystem benchmarks, JFS is often not the fastest, but scores best in term of CPU usage. I've found that on a netbook which has a very fast disk (ie flash) and not much CPU, JFS is actually the best option. YMMV of course, and I came to this conclusion before ext4 was released, and I haven't trried the pre-release ones like btrfs.

I agree with you about the monstrosoties. The kernel is full of classes and virtual functions. C++ provides exactly those features without the syntactic overhead and assosciated bugs. Because they are a built in feature, everyone does them the same way. Not only that but it uses less memory (kinder on the cache) because it stores only one copy of each vtable. It also provides *exactly* the same features as C for when they are really needed.

But people keep complaining about the "complexity" of C++ while happily implementing 3/4 of the C++ compiler by hand in C every time they want to do something simple like instantiate a class. Not only that but they come up with a vaeiety of strange and perverse arguments as to why C is better. See the infamous LKML C++ threads for some fine examples of straw men, ad homenm and general wrong headedness.

As for user mode graphics, for many years, X11 provided pretty much pure user mode graphics. The faster 3D accelerated ones tend to be more tied to the kernel.

For those of you unaware, HM had essentially complete loss of long term memory, but a normal short term/working memory and, curiously the ability to commit long term learning to his motor memory. So, he could learn new motor skills (an example would be juggling, but I do not know if HM learned that particular task), but not high-level memories.

If you're interested in more, then try reading the excellent book: "The man who mistook his wife for his hat".

Myopic zombies?

Sure, some people seemed rather busy equating Obama with the second coming and all. Plenty of people however realised that he would be much like many other presidents and do all the evil things one generally expects of a politician.

But myopic zombies? He's still a better alternative than the republicans.