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Slashback: Newton, Wal-Mart, Eats
Honestly, where would they have unloaded that anyway? yorgasor writes "Yahoo reports that the stolen copies of Newton's Principia have been successfully recovered. The thieves are also suspected of other thefts from several Moscow and St Petersburg libraries."
They have everything. An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Lycoris joins Lindows and Mandrake in being preloaded for walmart.com: 'The new $199 Desktop/LX Certified MicroTel PCs include the Desktop/ LX operating system. Desktop/LX also includes the following incredible software features without any additional downloading:'"
Who needs a war? Krieger writes "I found this link to the definitive browser wars at HardOCP, where you get to play checkers to prove your browsers superiority. Taking the browser wars to a new high/low?"
Here's the hook, can you pass that sinker please ... JoeWalsh writes "According to this article, earlier this month RMS visited India and tried to convince them to use Free (as in freedom) Software. Then along comes Bill Gates this month, handing out free (as in beer) software, and suddenly India isn't interested in RMS's message. A choice quote: "We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own." Did RMS tell them they couldn't use GNU/Linux, or is this more Microsoft propaganda at work?"
I'm very the stolen copies of Newton's Principia have been successfully recovered. I was having trouble around here without the laws of physics.
I think India's rationale for going with Bill Gates offering over Richard Stallman's offering is fairly simple to explain: Bill's offering a finished product, no polish necessary, at no cost. RMS is saying you can have the greatest software in the world if you put your mind to it and pointing to a bunch of half-written software.
Which would you rather have? Just take a look at the statistics in the places where people can choose to pay for Windows or get Linux free to get an idea of why the opportunity is so tasty to India.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I would like to add that i see nothing here about food. move along.
Oh, please. It's a CHEAP computer in every sense. It's mean to be sold to clueless masses with no cash and no skills, not somebody looking to replace their PIII with custom everything.
It's gonna use the lowest cost stuff they can find and you know what? That's entirely appropriate. Get over it.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
OH GOD, The Humanity!
...I wish I could convince an entire country that not paying for software is just too damn expensive.
You know, /. has gotten things wrong before, but mixing up Checkers with Connect Four is a first.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
They are having some server problems so I have included portions from the article here
Via wins big Wal-Mart Linux PC order
C3-Cyrix-Centaur selling 300,000 PCM?
By Mike Magee: Tuesday 19 November 2002, 09:58
TAIWANESE SEMI firm Via has secured an order from massive shop Wal-Mart for two of its C3-Cyrix-Centaur X86 based processors. The Economic News reports that Via and Wal-Mart will create two budget machines running flavours of the Linux OS. There's also a plan for the chip company to make low cost sub $300 machines running Windows Eyecandy. The article claims that Medion is also set to clinch a deal with Via, while Legend and the Founder Group also use some of the C3 processors.
Help fight continental drift.
The PR says it compares to an 800MHz Celeron. Whether it DOES or not, I dunno.
It's not a super-powerful computer, of course, but for $199, it's certainly not a rip-off. I'd have no trouble recommending that to some people.
In a quote from the article, Bill says:
"We can save money in terms of speed of development or by being able to run on less expensive hardware."
So I guess that's why WinCE handhelds are less expensive than Palm pilots. Oh, wait, they aren't less expensive. Oh but then there is desktops. Oh wait, what about the $199 walmart PC running linux being less expensive than the Windows counterpart... Considering that Linux runs on just about anything, the "less expensive hardware" just is totally untrue. Let's see Windows XP run on a 386 with 8M ram. Nice FUD Bill.
Hiring (or promising) to hire a whole bunch of Indian programmers. Heck i would adopt windows on a couple of boxen if M$ decides to invest heavily in TI market..after all those people are not going to spend their whole lives working for MS...sooner or later they will move on, and presto! Inda has educated progammers with world class experience!
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
1024*768=786432 (total pixels)
786432*3 = 2359296 (we have 3 color per pixel)
2359296 / 1024 = 2304 kilobytes (1 byte per color-pixel) (assumed 24 bit color, 16 million...)
end result is 8 megs is more than enough for some very nice triple buffered video, and double the amount needed for double buffered.
I went to that site to play a fair game of Connect Four in the hopes of getting a final answer as to which browser is truly better than the others. Unfortunately, hoodlums have logged in with multiple browsers to throw the game by playing poorly with one browser in the hopes of defeating a defenseless opponenent!
I mean, truly, who plays checker 3 to slot 1 when the opponent has opened with a classical Harvey the Wonder Hamster attack in slots 4,5, and 6!!
Outrageous! I see the only way this will ever be settled is through the time-honored (and FAR less unruly) game of Go Fish! Harumph, I'm taking my checkers and going home...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I'm = I am
The verb is present. The sentence is missing a predicate adjective/nominative. Not, as another Slashdot English whiz pointed out, an object. "To be" is not transitive (and thus taking an object).
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Whenever someone says something like that I hear: "We are a very poor country. We are all dunces. We can't raise our standard of living. Therefore we will eat at the crumbs and wallow in our own pity.
It's a shame people don't respect themselves more. And it's not like php requires that much more development ability then ASP does.
-Brent- An orgy of clicking and death!
That reminds me... My Girlfriend blessed Bill Gates last night. I asked her why, and she said that He was responsible for the ubiquity of the mouse wheel and therefore for the extreme dexterity of the middle finger of my right hand.Sorry, but it's a true story.
Heh, scroll on my scrigidies. Goddamn Right.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
My uncle wanted a computer as cheap as possible (as a 2nd PC in his house). I had him order a walmart PC with Mandrake. What he got was a decent PC with an AMD Athlon processor, 256MB Ram, 20GB hd and onboard video/sound, along with a PCI ethernet card and modem, all assembled. When I came over to help him set it up, I just plugged in the keyboard and mouse and monitor (which he already had). It was much easier than building him one, and it only cost $400. Then he said he wanted Win2k instead of Mandrake... well guess what. The walmart PC cam with a single CDROM that had drivers for all the hardware for every version of windows! So 40 minutes later, he had a full Athlon system. I didnt have to install any hardware or hunt down any drivers on the internet. Walmart is doing a good job with their PCs.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What a dumbass post. How will they buy them? See, there are these things called stores. Walmart has a few. In fact, Walmart has a lot. In fact, Walmart is the largest retail company in the world.
Walmart sells a wide range of products to the 'lowest comment denominator' customers. They may not have the money to buy high end but they're not dumbasses; they know if they buy a computer for $200 while Dell advertises computers for $1000, their computer is not going to be the newest and fasters and it's not going to run everything.
Leaving aside the traditional Walmart customer...
Many Linux geeks I know run multiple boxes, often on old hardware. A cheap no-frills box you can pick up with a 20 minute trip and use for a mail server, firewall, database, etc isn't a bad deal.
Granted, the graphic card has enough memory, But does the Processor have enough power? The Cyrix processor Lacks a FPU. Without FPU you're talking 1/3 the playback speed, on MMX Enhanced FPU requiring multi-media applications. That's right, this 800 MHz-1.0 GHz cyrix chip is going to run about as fast as a Celeron 333-450. Everything that doesn't need FPU integers is going to run as snappy as on a 1.0 ghz system, but video, audio, math intensive routines etc, are all goint to be hosed by the fact that they're not optimized for no-FPU cpus, and as such a FPU has to be Emulated to perform DivX playback.
Now you're probably wondering "but my Pocket PC PDA can play DivX.." Which is true, up to a point, and that point is that at extremely low resolutions, an an extremely low resolution screen, DivX playback becomes possible. and the Windows Media PocketPC edition is designed to optimize for a no-fpu environment, so, even though a DivX codec might need to emulate FPU, nothing else on the system is, so you can get by.
so forget 1024x768 resolution on the cyrix PCs for DivX playback, you'll have to full screen the movie, and decode at it's Native resolution, not at the current desktop resolution. avoiding the scaling should save enough cycles to allow clean playback. but, again, only because the DivX codec can turn off most features that enhance visual quality when playing back on a slower machine.
Also, keep in mind that your calculations are only per-frame, and that can only hold true if the video memory can dump and rewrite the data at least 30 times per second. With shared memory, you might have problems, as you need to use 70MB/s of the memory thruput Just for the video card's usage... the decoder is also goine to use an identical amount of memory thruput, plus whatever memory thruput the OS and the codec need for themselves. True, even SDRAM should have enough thruput, but theory and practice aren't the same, playback is going to take more out of these systems, and stress it harder.
Getting these cyrix $200 systems is almost like getting a 3 year old celeron box... for someone who has a three year old celeron, they might be looking at the current crop of computers with envy, but if they bought this bargain machine from wal-mart they'd be dissapointed.
I really can only recommend this machine for people so financially strapped that it's the $200 linux box, or nothing. Or people willing to use it as a $200 all-in-one firewall/router/(possibly a personal ftp/webserver), and who don't have linux compatable hardware in thier old PC. (eg: a machine that would be a nightmare to try to get linux running on)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Guess RMS didn't do his homework. MS actually got in trouble in India years ago for hiring so many Indian programmersand shipping them off to the states. India told MS their programmers are a natural resource and MS can't drain any more. So MS has built a large development facility in India. So RMS is asking India's developers to work for free, Gates is giving them paychecks.