Ah! That robot is scary! Why does it have to look like two skinny guys in skintight pants have their torsos stuck in the chassis? If there are two guys in there, why are they making that awful two-stroke engine sound?
dude....girls are way more willing to compromise on a guy's looks than guys are on a girl's. A guy with money gets girls, and a girl with looks gets guys. We're the ones who might need convincing that fun beats pretty.
Your trust in markets may be misplaced. What if it were food, instead of oil, and there were only a hundred people, instead of 6 billion? If they're currently living on a limited supply of food, they'd better find a new one before it runs out.
You can't assume that somebody in the world will solve the problem of delivering energy cheaply without oil. Maybe we'll have the technology for a sustainable (that is, non-polluting and non-dependent on non-renewable resources) economy within the next 30 years, maybe not. We'd better make that sweet, sweet oil last as long as we can, because if we can't figure out some way to get along without it before it runs out, we're going to have to live much less comfortable lives.
You're right, the price will increase before it literally "runs out." But cheap energy is good for our quality of life, and if the price of energy increases, that's already a bad thing.
If they can deliver on the claim of a five-fold improvement in energy density over Lithium-ion batteries, they will find a market. It's more convenient to plug in your laptop to recharge it, but for military applications, it would be great if a little fuel cell could power a gadget for five times longer than the current battery.
The cost of Windows is hidden nicely when it's bundled with the computer. My MS Office and Windows XP were both bundled with my laptop, the result being that I can't remember how expensive they were. The proportion of computer users with the wherewithal to upgrade the OS is pretty small, so most of them forget that it's not just 'part' of the computer.
This one program makes Windows much, much, better, if you're a power-user. Linux does not have anything to compete with it. tcl/tk might work, but that's swatting a fly with a shotgun. I just want a VERY convenient way to record, script and play back keystrokes (and possibly mouse actions). Is that so much to ask?
Command lines aren't inherently harder, just harder to figure out if you're unfamiliar with what you're doing. If you can google for help, it's probably better to look for a command-line solution, because it's much easier to write a tutorial for a command-line procedure than for a gui procedure.
Also, you don't have to use a command line to chmod files. If you're using KDE, set up a menu item that runs "kdesu konqueror" to get a superuser-enabled instance of konqueror running, then use chmod through the gui. You might find that it's faster to use the command line, but there's a gui if you want one.
I'm a Windows user who made the switch to Linux last month. I've used most of the programs bundled with KDE, and also GIMP, Gnumeric and Abiword. My first instinct is always ctrl-C/V, and this has worked in every program so far, with the exception of console emulators. In xterm I both-click, and in Konsole I use shift-insert.
I'm pretty happy with my laptop keyboard. It's a Dell. Fault them where you will, but the keyboard is fine: the block-of-six that usually resides above the cursor keys is duplicated above my backspace key, and the cursor keys are tucked nicely under the Enter and Shift keys. The Backspace key is nice and big (my number one objection to the mac laptop keyboards that I've seen) and the spacebar is big enough. And Ctrl is in the bottom left, where it belongs. After making the world's best keyboards for N years, how could IBM displace Ctrl on their thinkpads? It's a sin.
The city isn't just trying to protect pedestrians by forbidding them to endanger themselves, it's also trying to protect itself and the cars on the road. If a pedestrian steps out at the wrong time and a bus swerves to avoid hitting him, there's likely to be a good deal of property damage (the bus may hit parked cars) and all the passengers on the bus will lose time if the bus can't continue to operate.
Maybe you're too smart to get hit, but the city should be acting to prevent the absentminded and the stupid from disrupting its daily operation.
No doubt Microsoft would be reluctant to employ a sudo type approach because of "Not Invented Here".
I'm not familiar with that aspect of the Microsoft strategy. Aren't they *always* being accused of stealing other platforms' features? Big bad copycat, that's how people seem to view them.
Can this machine be used to reduce techno-waste? My guess is that it can't; the main problem with techno-waste is heavy metals, and they'd wind up either in the ash or the smoke.
Re:Ban all Microsoft Users from the Internet...
on
DNS Root Servers Attacked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Giving users "sudo" instead of "su" will help quite a lot, but you're right. It's tough to find a happy medium between too much notification (Vista) and not enough (XP).
I think the better solution is to get noobs to be better educated on how to avoid spyware and viruses, etc in the first place.
Yeah, but Windows was so un-secured and so prone to attack that even semi-competent users can wreck there systems. I doubt that Microsoft consists of such utter dullards that Vista will be *easier* to crack than XP, but even if it's a good deal harder, it will still be broken enough for spyware to get out and for botnets to persist.
Also, there's the occasional "aww fuck, did I really just execute that file?" (I've done it once and I'm pretty knowledgeable; I'm sure even fairly well-educated noobs will fall for something eventually) that will also fuck up a system. And while that doesn't mean you lose all your data (utterly malicious viruses are rare, too unprofitable to be worth the time) it could very well mean a rootkit that's impossible to dislodge without going nuclear.
The real and lasting solution is to make reformatting and reinstalling everything a task for an average user in a couple of hours (preferably with little enough attention that the user can watch a movie at the same time), instead of a task for a geek overnight, IF he can find all the CDs that the programs came on. At least when automatic detection and configuration work properly, GNU/Linux has reached this target (which is ironic, because reformatting is not needed often on a Linux machine, due to better security practices and of course obscurity) with APT and remote package repositories. But proprietary software has to protect itself, so there would need to be measures in place to prevent unauthorized users from downloading the material. A simple solution, though not perfect, would be to store small licenses in a privileged folder on the user's hard drive, so that he need only migrate this license folder (and his documents and configuration preference files) to the new installation.
That would be a good solution, but of course the license folder would be a popular target for attack. Plant something there that instructs the machine to download malware (that would pose as MS Office, or whatever) up reinstallation, and the system is back in the botnets.
There was a good article recently about the true purpose of DRM: not to prevent piracy (obviously it ain't doing jack there) but to minimize users' rights so that they can be sold back again. The goal is to let the content owners practice a little bit of good old fashioned double dipping.
You probably saw it. I don't know, it seemed pretty convincing at the time, but now I'm thinking that the ROI must still be pretty crappy. How many users are actually going to buy the PSP version of a movie *and* the DVD version?
Does this claim look foolish to anyone? Sure, this is smaller than the Nokia "brick" phones we used to carry around in the late 90s. I'm not living in any kind of wealthy community, and practically all the cell phones flip open. They're significantly smaller than the device pictured in the article
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Ah! That robot is scary! Why does it have to look like two skinny guys in skintight pants have their torsos stuck in the chassis? If there are two guys in there, why are they making that awful two-stroke engine sound?
dude....girls are way more willing to compromise on a guy's looks than guys are on a girl's. A guy with money gets girls, and a girl with looks gets guys. We're the ones who might need convincing that fun beats pretty.
I got "More RAM == Beer!"
Your trust in markets may be misplaced. What if it were food, instead of oil, and there were only a hundred people, instead of 6 billion? If they're currently living on a limited supply of food, they'd better find a new one before it runs out.
You can't assume that somebody in the world will solve the problem of delivering energy cheaply without oil. Maybe we'll have the technology for a sustainable (that is, non-polluting and non-dependent on non-renewable resources) economy within the next 30 years, maybe not. We'd better make that sweet, sweet oil last as long as we can, because if we can't figure out some way to get along without it before it runs out, we're going to have to live much less comfortable lives.
You're right, the price will increase before it literally "runs out." But cheap energy is good for our quality of life, and if the price of energy increases, that's already a bad thing.
First "some European" moves toward Linux, and now there's going to be a vault for "Doomsday Seeds?"
If they can deliver on the claim of a five-fold improvement in energy density over Lithium-ion batteries, they will find a market. It's more convenient to plug in your laptop to recharge it, but for military applications, it would be great if a little fuel cell could power a gadget for five times longer than the current battery.
"20'th" century?
"the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk which flew for the first time that year had 12hp" The author seems to think Kitty Hawk is the name of their plane.
And this is in just the first two sentences.
The cost of Windows is hidden nicely when it's bundled with the computer. My MS Office and Windows XP were both bundled with my laptop, the result being that I can't remember how expensive they were. The proportion of computer users with the wherewithal to upgrade the OS is pretty small, so most of them forget that it's not just 'part' of the computer.
An hour? Maybe two? For something that millions of people will use dozens of times per day, that doesn't really sound like enough.
AutoHotkey.
This one program makes Windows much, much, better, if you're a power-user. Linux does not have anything to compete with it. tcl/tk might work, but that's swatting a fly with a shotgun. I just want a VERY convenient way to record, script and play back keystrokes (and possibly mouse actions). Is that so much to ask?
A computer won't get you laid.
Command lines aren't inherently harder, just harder to figure out if you're unfamiliar with what you're doing. If you can google for help, it's probably better to look for a command-line solution, because it's much easier to write a tutorial for a command-line procedure than for a gui procedure.
Also, you don't have to use a command line to chmod files. If you're using KDE, set up a menu item that runs "kdesu konqueror" to get a superuser-enabled instance of konqueror running, then use chmod through the gui. You might find that it's faster to use the command line, but there's a gui if you want one.
Silly. An "innstead" is a modest tavern with cheap rooms and simple food. That's not a typo, it's an oblique reference.
I'm a Windows user who made the switch to Linux last month. I've used most of the programs bundled with KDE, and also GIMP, Gnumeric and Abiword. My first instinct is always ctrl-C/V, and this has worked in every program so far, with the exception of console emulators. In xterm I both-click, and in Konsole I use shift-insert. I'm pretty happy with my laptop keyboard. It's a Dell. Fault them where you will, but the keyboard is fine: the block-of-six that usually resides above the cursor keys is duplicated above my backspace key, and the cursor keys are tucked nicely under the Enter and Shift keys. The Backspace key is nice and big (my number one objection to the mac laptop keyboards that I've seen) and the spacebar is big enough. And Ctrl is in the bottom left, where it belongs. After making the world's best keyboards for N years, how could IBM displace Ctrl on their thinkpads? It's a sin.
The city isn't just trying to protect pedestrians by forbidding them to endanger themselves, it's also trying to protect itself and the cars on the road. If a pedestrian steps out at the wrong time and a bus swerves to avoid hitting him, there's likely to be a good deal of property damage (the bus may hit parked cars) and all the passengers on the bus will lose time if the bus can't continue to operate.
Maybe you're too smart to get hit, but the city should be acting to prevent the absentminded and the stupid from disrupting its daily operation.
No doubt Microsoft would be reluctant to employ a sudo type approach because of "Not Invented Here".
I'm not familiar with that aspect of the Microsoft strategy. Aren't they *always* being accused of stealing other platforms' features? Big bad copycat, that's how people seem to view them.
This may be true, but Tetris has its own benefits. The study is unfairly biased against Tetris.
Can this machine be used to reduce techno-waste? My guess is that it can't; the main problem with techno-waste is heavy metals, and they'd wind up either in the ash or the smoke.
No, the ethanol is derived from the trash itself (from the organic bits). The input is diesel fuel, not ethanol.
This seems to be a VERY clonable technology.
Giving users "sudo" instead of "su" will help quite a lot, but you're right. It's tough to find a happy medium between too much notification (Vista) and not enough (XP).
MacroHard
If that makes me think of a penis, do I necessarily have a dirty mind?
I think the better solution is to get noobs to be better educated on how to avoid spyware and viruses, etc in the first place.
Yeah, but Windows was so un-secured and so prone to attack that even semi-competent users can wreck there systems. I doubt that Microsoft consists of such utter dullards that Vista will be *easier* to crack than XP, but even if it's a good deal harder, it will still be broken enough for spyware to get out and for botnets to persist.
Also, there's the occasional "aww fuck, did I really just execute that file?" (I've done it once and I'm pretty knowledgeable; I'm sure even fairly well-educated noobs will fall for something eventually) that will also fuck up a system. And while that doesn't mean you lose all your data (utterly malicious viruses are rare, too unprofitable to be worth the time) it could very well mean a rootkit that's impossible to dislodge without going nuclear.
The real and lasting solution is to make reformatting and reinstalling everything a task for an average user in a couple of hours (preferably with little enough attention that the user can watch a movie at the same time), instead of a task for a geek overnight, IF he can find all the CDs that the programs came on. At least when automatic detection and configuration work properly, GNU/Linux has reached this target (which is ironic, because reformatting is not needed often on a Linux machine, due to better security practices and of course obscurity) with APT and remote package repositories. But proprietary software has to protect itself, so there would need to be measures in place to prevent unauthorized users from downloading the material. A simple solution, though not perfect, would be to store small licenses in a privileged folder on the user's hard drive, so that he need only migrate this license folder (and his documents and configuration preference files) to the new installation.
That would be a good solution, but of course the license folder would be a popular target for attack. Plant something there that instructs the machine to download malware (that would pose as MS Office, or whatever) up reinstallation, and the system is back in the botnets.
There was a good article recently about the true purpose of DRM: not to prevent piracy (obviously it ain't doing jack there) but to minimize users' rights so that they can be sold back again. The goal is to let the content owners practice a little bit of good old fashioned double dipping.
You probably saw it. I don't know, it seemed pretty convincing at the time, but now I'm thinking that the ROI must still be pretty crappy. How many users are actually going to buy the PSP version of a movie *and* the DVD version?
"While smaller than a typical mobile phone..."
Does this claim look foolish to anyone? Sure, this is smaller than the Nokia "brick" phones we used to carry around in the late 90s. I'm not living in any kind of wealthy community, and practically all the cell phones flip open. They're significantly smaller than the device pictured in the article