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AMD64 performance
Having finally an AMD64 system in my hands, I’m positively surprised by its performance. When I switched from a Duron 650 MHz to a Celeron 2.6 GHz a few years ago, the performance increased much less than I expected. This applied to Sempron 2400+ (~1.6 GHz?, Socket A) as well, it ran only slightly faster than the […]
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OS reinstallation after 10 years
IIRC, I’ve been running Debian GNU/Linux on my primary workstation since summer 1995. All that time (almost 11 years!) the operating system ran without any single reinstallation, starting with the Debian 0.93R5 version and ending with mixed sarge-etch (post-3.1). I only performed upgrades, I’ve never reinstalled the system from scratch. None of the upgrades required […]
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The Community Patent Consultation
I’ve noticed that European Commission starts a new round of the Community Patent project that can lead to legalization of software patents in the European Union. E.U. citizens and companies have opportunity to fill-in a Commission questionnaire on the issue till the end of March. If you are concerned about the European patent system and/or […]
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From Ekiga to Twinkle
I’ve been using Ekiga (formerly Gnomemeeting) for several years. Among free software phones it was exceptionally stable and well usable since about its 1.0 version. But it supported only the H.323 protocol which became a big problem during the time. H.323 is usually not supported by VoIP providers, it is poorly supported by the Asterisk […]
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Linux printing sucks
There were old good times when one could install magicfilter on his GNU/Linux system and send a file to a printer and the printer printed the file as expected. Since I started to use CUPS a few years ago it’s no longer true. Whenever I send some PostScript or PDF file to my printer, I’m […]
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Grain in scanned images
There has been an interesting discussion on comp.periphs.scanners recently about scanners, film grain, noise and aliasing. I wondered why my 2400dpi scanner produces very grainy scans in comparison with prints (and the scanned images are of much worse quality than pictures from my 2Mpix camera because of the grain) and why the grain is more […]
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Software Patent Game
Not having millions of dollars/euros on your account? Not backed up by dozens of lawyers? Not having guts to kill inovation and to blackmail your competitors? Never mind, you can still play the Software Patent Game!
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From Konqueror to Firefox
Several latest versions of Konqueror use to crash, usually about once or twice a week. This is not something I’m able to fix easily and as I got sufficiently annoyed (including some missing features such as inability to block popups or to show page source in a sane way) I decided to move to another […]
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Stepping down with GUI toolkits
I write a small application which works with Festival speech synthesis system. As Festival modules I use are written in Scheme, I started to write the application in Common Lisp and McCLIM. But I had to step back from this decision soon. McCLIM is an excellent GUI toolkit, but it lacks support for Czech, which […]
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Tramping in Emacs
Why to use separate terminal applications for remote connections when one can use Emacs? Why to run remote Emacs of different version, in different configuration, with echo delays, without your customizations, etc.? Why to pollute your desktop with another window and why to switch between it and Emacs all the time? Why to run multiple […]