Bullet Proof Banana Hammocks Made Out of Bananas.
On a serious note, a lot of 'projects' seem to come out like this one, but very few ever seem to make it to commercial scale and distribution, let alone success and continued survival. "Alternative" tech never seems to sell, quite possibly because it's 'alternative', and the big boys have enough cash to make most things go away that would cut into their profits, like that pesky cold fusion.
Speaking of pretentious...
If GNU/Linux is a "jail", and you have to "get out of jail" by only using non-free software...then perhaps I'll just use Linux Linux. Linux is just a kernel, and GNU tends to be nearly the worst toolchain/base tools on any OS. BSD base tools are at least clean, efficient, and actually follow the unix pholosophy, instead of building a private copy of "sort" into every command.
The "Libre" version of the kernel has gone so far (at least last year, when it was on lwn) as to 'forbid' you from running any kind of non-GPL drier or blob.
The LK itself wasn't even initially GPL, for a few versions. Linux, and other software, is available because people were free to choose to be able to do it and pursue it, not because the GNU foundation exists and heavily advertises its own worth. GNU also tends to 'frown' upon non-GPL, but otherwise 'more liberal' open source software because it allows more choice, and hence 'evil proprietary software can choose it too! bad! shame!' (I can imagine Stallman saying that out loud, that verbatim...I really can).
"I'm just doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, it won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
^ GNU would have a lot more credibility, if Hurd was an operating system people knew about as well as NetBSD...or even the L4/Fiasco Microkernel.
It's been in Development Hell since 1986. Their initial option was to use a 4.4BSD kernel (circa 1987) and rework it, but they weren't getting extensive bend-over-backwards do-it-for-us support from the Berkley guys, so wanted 'Mach' instead...waited 3 years for them to change the license for them...
The common factor about the "rejections" on the "Free Linux" thing, like for Debian, is that all a distribution has to do is offer the "option" to install non-free, even if it's disintegrated with the project, not 'easily available' in the software, or easily linked from websites or main pages, but that it's merely not-impossible to search for it on the internet, find it, and install it. Woo. "FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all include instructions for obtaining nonfree programs in their ports system."
If you can't trust *administrators* to make their own logical choices, even if 99% of their software is free, then you shouldn't be promoting Linux.
The GNU philosophy is, and always has been, a 'walled garden' of supposed luxury and extravagance that tends to fall short and piss people off because they're just taking choices, options, and 'stuff' away from you.
The lovely thing is, it appears to predate the Apple notion of that by at least two decades.
But it's very classic Soviet style/Stalinist, to talk about "the freedom of the people", while ordering them by threat of death not to think of anything on the non-approved list.
I'm always going to run proprietary stuff, because I like my video card to operate, I like OpenCL, I like video playback. The 'license restrictions' per-distro, tends to mean at least one of those is not available via 'normal' means.
And as various Linux foundations and organizations have done, encouraging developers, and "scary proprietary people" to release their program/utility/game/driver source code under a free license, eventually, is easier by making them -like- Linux, instead of feel threatened by it.
If it's turned into religious dogma (which Stallman seems rather proud of), then you're going to have at least two diametrically opposed camps who will never get along, and will essentially try to "kill" each other over time.
I've always found it amusing that the "linux" community seems to think itself much superior to and isolated from their *BSD second-cousins, but what people should perhaps be more worried about, are all of the greedy corporations, and corporate takeovers, that threaten decently sane and objective policy making. Fedora at least got 'spun off' from Redhat, and they for the most part, haven't been trying to burn anything down. You can't say that for Canonical, Mandriva's group, or (unfortunately, now) Novell. Probably not either for the others that I can't think of off-hand this early in the morning.
That kind of corporate meddling has got an entire toolkit/desktop environment (GTK+GNOME) making drastic, bizarre usability decisions, mostly based on one company's money.
All of these GNU-activist people seem to be worried about 'proprietary software', when 'proprietary money used to drive primary development focus on free projects' tends to be more stagnating and crippling, if it's causing real bugs, feature requests, existing projects, and roadmaps, to get ignored because they're not getting paid 'extra' for it.
Qt is largely a Nokia effort, but, they have to worry about their product bottom line, so it's in their best interest to make things as best, and as pleasing as possible to all end users and developers.
Corps like Canonical sell services, and derived packages. They don't have to care about what people want in a UI (and frankly have said they don't give a shit, in so many words), or performance, or usability, or general practical sanity, but they might care about what's easiest and most consistent to "develop" for, even if they end up making it only usable by psychic armless children from Belarus. People will still buy it because of the 'brand' name. I wonder where I've heard that story before...
Meh...we'd all be better served if (software) engineers would reasonably (when productive/valid/sane to) stick to engineering, instead of politics, philosophy, or quasi-religion.
Guys ranting a political agenda while trying to push their 'special' software at you, was barely tenable in the 1980s, and it's very simply counterproductive and offputting in the 2010s; much for the same reasons less and less people are willing to put up some faceless third party saying that they're going to be punished if they don't slaughter a cow to appease the sky this weekend (or anything else that absurdist and irrelevant).
"I don't need to use the phone, so I am looking for an unlocked phone"
Well, there's your problem right there.
Also, the android SDK has emulators for all of their phone API levels. If you're planning to get a phone, "but not a phone", it would obviously be cheaper to use that, especially if you aren't planning to use any sort of advanced features (like for 'flash'). You could then just ask someone you know to test things on their phone to make sure it looks like what you see on the SDK.
Otherwise, if you're looking for a phone...that can make phone calls, I hear that Android and iPhone are actually pretty bad at it!
TFA uses http://jsbenchmark.celtickane.com/Run.aspx which is a joke.
A useful benchmark is Futuremark's Peacekeeper, really, since it tests a wide variety of common tasks. On my machine, Chrome's the fastest at raw JS, but (by far) slowest at rendering...besides Firefox, which is actually slowest at -every- benchmark -every- time (by a typical margin of 5-10x or more; 4 RC is even slower than everything else on its own benchmarks like Kraken).
Even Opera (with no hardware acceleration at all) beats Chrome at complex graphics and rendering on canvas. Chrome is also the only accelerated browser to get incorrect rendering/redraw on many of the various Canvas acceleration tests/demos.
IE9 is the fastest at rendering complex stuff, while still keeping up with the pack on regular JS, which I dare say is a useful area to be #1 in.
If the browser compiles all of your JS really fast, but then takes a lot of extra time to actually display it, you're still bottlenecking as if you had an incredibly slow JS engine, just at a different part in the average case.
If you do HPC in your web browser via JS, Chrome is definitely the way to go, though.
Yes.
They let you select the classic Slashdot style before, instead of the awful and slow abomination that replaced it...if they're getting rid of both for this pile of crap,with no way to select the classic classic, personally, I'll be finding some other way to get vaguely sane/interesting news.
It's depressing to know that most 'web designers', at least those of the '2.0' variety, have absolutely zero sense for aesthetics or usability.
It's an area where Firefox was never meant to be optimized. Mozilla Suite 1.7 and 1.8 at least worked fine (as did Seamonkey 1.x). The difference is that Firefox has XUL for its entire UI, and a purely single threaded javascript engine. There've been bug reports about it since before Firefox 1.0, and they've all been closed with "it's by design". Other modern browsers don't have much issue with this because A( they don't put the UI in the javascript engine, B( Chrome and Opera work by one process/VM per tab respectively, they work independently of each other.
10.62 is 'old'? It's less than a week old. Probably your 'not the most recent' build of 10.70 is older than that.
And comparing to the results up top are meaningless. Different hardware, different OS, different software config.
On my config(3ghz C2Q, 4gb ram, XP x64), I'm seeing:
FF nightly: 12630.2ms +/- 2.8%
Opera 10.62: 11888.4ms +/- 0.6%
Chrome dev: 14925.4ms +/- 0.5%
And like other comments are pointing out, Opera and Chrome remain responsive throughout the testing, FF might as well have locked up.
Firefox has done this since the beginning, which was one of the main differences to Mozilla Suite. Any sufficient load (which in single core processors was quite minimal) would lock up the browser, refuse to let the UI do anything, since it uses the same single-threaded Javascript engine thanks to XUL.
It used to be 'real fun' to have to hunt down which tab was secretly using 100% of the CPU to do nothing because of javascript, especially when the UI was nearly unresponsive as a result.
From TFA: "Philippine Daily Inquirer"
"The Inquirer is withholding the identities of the parties involved so as not to intrude on their privacy."
Where the hell is THEIR original citation? Usually various international case information is picked up by various law services (far as I know). Searching for most of the relevant terms of this article (like the presiding judge) in combination with other relevant terms of the article, only produce this, and things linking to it (mostly in the Philippines, of course).
Given the lack of reference here, there also appears to be no actual evidence that the OSG was citing wikipedia, aside from the ex-wife's brief.
But, given that I'm not a lawyer...I just prefer Associated Press, or failing that, a meaningful chain to follow in national/international news reports.
Here, we have absolutely nothing to go on, but a single foreign newspaper publishing something on their website. I'm sure anyone who COULD figure out where the hell this came from would get free mod points, but...it looks half-baked to me.
Nevermind elsewhere on the site, stories written by "DJ Yap" (I'm sorry, but even if someone's name was changed, newspapers would hire them and publish it why?): http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/metro/view/20100830-289493/House-painter-gets-14-years-for-drug-possession
They're called statutory damages for a reason. It's precalculated by a statute (hence the name) or a law. Given that the lawyer's fees were so low...likely Blizzard wasn't considering asking for so much (especially given likely inability to repay such an amount), but was given little to no say in it, given that it was a DEFAULT judgement (defendant never responded despite being served/summoned), and hence not argued "in trial".
It was a lengthy, boring series of motions that was never once contested.
The difference here seems to be that they were explicitly soliciting money for in-game stuff, rather than accepting donations purely to offset hosting costs. (Eg, most private servers aren't going to be needing 3 million dollars just to host it.)
Some of the language that Activision/Blizzard uses in the briefs are unnerving (such as 'unauthorized client' and 'you must be connected to blizz servers onlien to patch, not use blizz-provided offline patcher files').
If you also RTFA, it was a default judgment, meaning scapegaming was served, and chose not to respond at any point during the whole proceedings.
This isn't the kind of thing you expect from Slashdot, or Slashdot submitters/readers.
It's a PR stunt, but it's filed under 'science'.
It's also linking to a third party blog, 11 days after it was news.
Press release containing contact info: http://media.gm.com/content/media/gb/en/news/news_detail.brand_chevrolet.html/content/Pages/news/gb/en/2010/CHEVROLET/07_15_perfect_hand_shake
Original (as far as I know) blog entry mentioning it: http://jalopnik.com/5588201/this-is-the-formula-for-the-perfect-handshake
Contact email on the press release is chevrolet@mischiefpr.com.
If a Slashdot contributor gets taken for a line with that one, and editorial staff allows it through as a Science (not Idle) story, while nobody bothers to do even the slightest amount of digging, it might be high time to revise standards and practices, since Slashdot is starting to descend to a less-timely, less-informed, more gullible version of reddit.
I remember when Slashdot was THE place for techie/geeky news, and the comments were considerably more often than not insightful. Nowadays, people seem happier to quibble over minor semantics in an article while missing the big picture. I'm not trying to put Slashdot, one of my favorite sites, down but I'd rather it retain or improve level of quality, not slip toward the same plateau as Slashdot Parody Sites[tm].
If you're going to accept PR advertisements, at least put them in the ad box in the corner and accept payment, so people can opt out.
That sounds an awful lot like the space combat system in Star Wars Galaxies. In fact...it sounds identical. You can take shuttles around, but it's considerably cheaper to use your own starship, fly it around via hyperspace, and land at a planet.
And you can have 'epic space battles', and 'space combat levels' are independant compared to your 'ground combat levels'. *sniff* I was on the edge of qualifying for experimental light cruiser, too.
It seems like this was already done in 1989 to ~25 millisecond accuracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Algorithm
So all they're doing here is attempting to refine it to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization before tryinig to come up with something better.
We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
