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Comment Re:Fractint (Score 1) 131

Is there anything better than Fractint now? I too played with it for ages on a clunky old IBM PC with clicky keyboard and Windows 2 (although Fractint ran in DOS though, I think, and necessitated misc tweaking with graphics drivers to make it work, you kids don't know how lucky you are...)

You have the open-source "xaos" http://xaos.sf.net/ for a fast interactive fractal exploring and "Fraqtive", http://fraqtive.mimec.org/ for a beautiful view generator. Also, there are new versions of fractint, but the UI is really outdated. Wikipedia has a list with a few more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software

Intel

Microsoft Lifts XP Mode Hardware Requirement 205

An anonymous reader writes "This week, Microsoft published a patch that allows Windows XP Mode to run on PCs without hardware-assisted virtualization. Which begs the question: Why the bizarro requirement in the first place? Was it an honest attempt to deliver an 'optimal' user experience? Or simply a concession to the company's jilted lover, Intel Corporation — 'a kind of apology for royally screwing up with the whole Windows Vista “too fat to fit” debacle,' as the blog post puts it."

Comment Re:Turbo Boost technology? (Score 5, Informative) 196

Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?

Sadly, this technology was called "Intel Dynamic Acceleration" (IDA) in Core-2 CPU's, but nobody noticed it. So, Intel tried with "Dual Dynamic Acceleration" (DDA), but again, nobody noticed. At last, renamed it to "Turbo Boost" and now everybody thinks it's something new.

So, after three attempts, it seems that the current name is the best.

Comment Re:/tmp and /var/tmp (Score 3, Interesting) 303

-- but they failed to point out that Solaris also has a /tmp, and that, by default /tmp is actually partially backed by RAM, which is extremely convenient and useful from time to time, when you want a little piece of lightning-fast filesystem space, or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test.

In any new Linux distribution, /dev/shm is also backed by ram, so you can do:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 1.12253 s, 478 MB/s


$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/foo bs=1024k count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 0.754747 s, 711 MB/s

Obviously, I had to copy four times the data to reach the slowness of Solaris :-)

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare" 529

Theovon writes, "It's only been two days since the announcement of the official release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and the fallout has been very interesting to watch. By and large, fresh installs of Edgy tend to go well. Many people report improved performance over Dapper, improved stability, better device support, etc. A good showing. But what I find really interesting is the debacle that it has been for people who wanted to do an 'upgrade' from Dapper (6.06). Installing OS upgrades has historically been fraught with problems, but previous Ubuntu releases, many other Linux distros, and MacOS X have done surprisingly well in the recent past. But not Edgy." Read on for the rest of Theovon's detailed report.

Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0 606

grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."

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