And it's still going to be a lot of fuel, burned somewhere else to make this car's electricity. We need nukes, since the wind and solar things will never put a dent in a massive shift to cars like this.
Logistically, solar and wind are perfect for an application like an electric car since the energy can be stored in the car's batteries. The biggest drawback to solar and wind is that they're not "always on", but the car can be charged during times where solar and wind are at peak output and hold that energy for later use. I'm not ragging on nuclear (I think it's great and we should be trading coal for nuclear, in the very short term), but I think you're being a little naive by thinking that wind and solar can't generate electricity at utility scale. They're already doing it in many places. You don't want to be the guy who says something will "never" happen, only to be proved wrong.
Doom3 and UT2004 played on general purpose computers that were not optimized for gaming, no matter what the specs are. Those games needed a lot of brute force computing to overcome the limitations of the generalist PC design.
I don't agree with this perspective about PCs. Both consoles and PCs are effectively of the same overarching design: a general purpose CPU, a GPU, some general purpose memory, and some graphics memory. In fact, consoles are generally less capable machines than PCs because they do lots of things to reduce the component costs like stripping out branch prediction from the CPU cores, sharing memory between systems all over the place, etc. The reason that console games appear to be "optimized" is because they're uniform. A developer knows exactly what hardware specs he/she will be writing code for and can therefore maximize a game's performance to that spec. For example, if you know you have exactly 16 MB of texture memory, you can make your textures fit exactly in that foot print and not have to worry about managing it by moving it between other types of memory. PC developers have to do a great deal of work to make a game scale to the wide range of hardware that's out there. Unfortunately, this idealized steps on the scale are never perfect because systems are so dissimilar. While most modern PC games try to auto-detect your specs and use that info to scale the game detail to a certain level, it's never quite perfect and the discerning end user will spend some time tweaking settings until he/she is satisfied. The developers aren't relying on a PC's "brute force", as you describe it. Instead, they're trying their best to accommodate its versatility.
How hard could it POSSIBLY BE to have MMS support available on day 1? Only every other phone on their network supports it.
I'd say that it's most likely the fact that AT&T is trying to find a new and unusual way to gouge people by altering their MMS price plants. They're probably just taking some extra time to optimize their rape-to-profit ratio.
I'm sure it cost apple a considerable amount to develop and have a manufacturing line for the second version of the iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that the vast bulk of iPhones sold will be the 16gb model. Therefore, they have to amortize the development costs over a smaller market for the larger memory size. It's not really about the cost of the memory, it's about the additional R&D and the cost of having a second assembly line.
I suppose that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that there's only one assembly line, and some PCBs come off it with a second flash chip soldered on, while others come off with bare contacts and it costs next to nothing to do one over the other beyond the cost of the chip.
Just because they were generous when the 3G came out, does not obligate them to do so again.
It wasn't really that they were "generous" about the 3G. It was more that the original iPhone wasn't subsidized at all. Basically, they were giving a subsidy to people who had never really received one previously. Either way, this complaint is stupid. Every other US carrier and phone manufacturer has these exact same terms. Can someone explain to me why it is that when it's Apple + AT&T, it becomes an unbearable outrage?
It isn't magic (like standard rollover logic in keyboards), it's behavioral modification.
Most of the common human/computer interfaces require significant behavioral modification, so I'm not sure why you seem to highlight this particular one negatively. Typing on any keyboard is an unnatural process and requires some type of formal training to become effective at it. My high school required a semester course in typing, and by the end of that, the top few people in the class could touch type about 45 wpm, which would be considered quite crappy by anyone who uses a computer every day for his/her job. Even if the training is just a copy of Mario Teaches Typing, it still requires a great deal of effort for most people to become proficient at it. Formal training is, by definition, behavior modification. While there are increasingly more natural interfaces becoming available (speech recognition, mind melding, whatever), typing is still the gold standard and has been for the last 100 years. The fact that every cell phone manufacturer's goal these days is to build a good QWERTY keyboard into their device should be a strong indicator that typing is still going to be the gold standard for decades. Believe me, I would love to get away from having to tap away on a curiously-arranged array of buttons as much as the next guy, but if there is some technique that will make it less annoying, I'll go for it even if it requires a little bit of "behavior modification".
Yeah, 2 whole megabytes may be too much. Remember there are *vastly* more small/dumb computing devices out there than the big-old desktop PC. So, maybe he's programming on a phone platform or some such and making a sincere effort to make something different.
Except we know he's not programming for something other than a "big-old desktop PC" because the title of the post is "Lightweight C++ Library for SVG On Windows?" Even for the crappiest/oldest Windows systems still in use, 2 MB is comically small. I I actually thought that spec was some sort of typo, but I guess not!
Both vi and emacs can handle files with 10k lines easily. Chances are they both can handle much longer files before swapping then any IDE.
I think the point the parent was trying to make is that it's a huge pain in the ass to write a large app using a simple text editor vs. a full-blown IDE, not that there are hard limits on how many lines of code they can handle (which I would imagine that ANY type of coding environment should be more than capable of handling far more lines of code than anyone would ever sanely have open at a given time. It's just text, folks! Imagine what a couple gigs of text looks like and that's roughly how long it'll take until you start "swapping"). There are plenty of things that Emacs and Vi[m] can do that true IDEs do like syntax highlighting, bracket matching, etc. In fact, my roommate wrote his own.vimrc that's like 300 lines long and has all sorts of ridiculous stuff in it that I didn't even know was possible. However, what they don't do is integrate with the compiler and the debugger well. Sure, you can run gcc or make or whatever from inside Vi by using the ! command, but once you've attempted to compile and eventually muck something up, it's then up to you to read the compiler output and navigate manually to the problem area. This may be fine if you have one problem, but if you have several, this process becomes burdensome. What it amounts to is a lot of extra typing, and no clear advantage over a full IDE. The classic terminal editors definitely have their uses, though. If you're on any sort of *nix system that you haven't had the pleasure of configuring yourself, Vi is almost certainly on there and ready to go. If you want, you can easily just pop in your own.vimrc and it'll work just as you'd like it. Also, if you're stuck doing work remotely over SSH (which I've done my fair share of) having a full-featured text editor at your disposal is quite refreshing.
I'd have to agree that both Eclipse and NetBeans have sort of a "heavy" feel to them, and it's probably at least in part due to the fact that they're written in Java (and by this, I mean the actual IDE is a Java app, not that it's an IDE for writing in Java). Despite this, I've started to appreciate a lot of the features NetBeans has for Java development. I'm not sure if they all carry over to other languages through plug-ins and whatnot, but for Java, it really goes the extra mile. Good code completion, in-line lookup of Javadocs, safely renaming all instances of an object in a given scope, and a highly useful and simple-to-use GUI toolkit prompted me to make the switch. I was previously using JCreator, which is another free Java IDE that's much more lightweight and I still use it sometimes if I'm dealing with a single-file project so that I don't have to deal with throwing stuff into my workspace, creating a new project, etc. in NetBeans. I still haven't gotten around to giving Eclipse a try, but I hear it's comparable in quality.
Psystar had the advantage of massive word-of-mouth and R&D done for them by the hackintosh enthusiasts. Were it not for the legal trouble, I would assume that (barring specific incompetence) they could have carried on for a fair while.
I agree that they had major name recognition, but that recognition equated to them being labeled "the guys who are pissing off Apple by making clones" and not "the guys who are making awesome, cheap Mac clones that I want to buy". The members of the/. community that enjoy Macs do so because of the technical merits (UNIX underpinnings, efficient GUI, etc. [don't flame me]). The rest of the world likes Macs because they're "cool" and they don't necessarily define that "coolness" explicitly. So, if a/.er wants the technical advantages of having a Mac without the price, they go for a hackintosh. The problem there is that a/.er is probably just going to build that hackintosh him/herself rather than pay Psystar for one. Not only is it cheaper, but you get to learn something in the process. The rest of the world would see a Mac clone and say "that's not a Mac! It's not cool!" and move along.
When I hear "normal" people complain about Macs, what I hear consistently is "I wish Apple would make a cheaper Mac", not "I wish some other company would step in and compete with Apple to drive down the price." What I'm trying to say is that the market for pre-built hackintoshes is tiny. Of all the people I know, both technical and nontechnical, I can't imagine any of them buying one.
Its not worth it. She'll gain 20 pounds, lose her job, and end up blowing her 19 year old guild leader when she takes a trip to go "see her parents" so she can get some extra dkp.
In my book, gaining 20 pounds results in a 50 DKP MINUS!
The program that isn't packaged for his Linux distro might as well not exist for the non-technical end user.
The Windows user doesn't need a central repository.
But if he wants to shop the software mega-mall, he has dozens, if not hundreds, of choices - and it is not remotely as difficult as the geek pretends.
You seem to be presenting a counter-intuitive argument. It sounds like you're saying that the average Windows user is far less technical than the average Linux user (which is probably true). But then you go on to say that these less-technical people should be provided a more difficult solution to installing software, rather than an easier one. App stores/repositories/whatever you want to call them simplify the process of acquiring software. Why would you want the opposite for non-technical users? A company with this philosophy isn't going to do very well. Just look at the record labels and their resistance to making music distribution easier. If you haven't heard, they're not doing so hot these days.
Indeed, I like the Sparkle solution, as well. I'm actually working on integrating into a Mac app I'm writing. As sort of a side note, I've found it interesting that the experience of downloading and installing arbitrary Mac software off the internet is a lot more consistent than that of Windows software. i.e. Almost everything is distributed in.dmg format, installs via dropping into the Applications folder, implements Sparkle, etc. I'm not sure what sort of psychological stranglehold His Steveness has managed to gain over the Mac devs out there, but they seem to keep it on the straight-and-narrow. There is a lot to be gained from having a consistent user experience, even in cases where it may not be 100% optimal.
One more thing I forgot to add: software updates. Right now, most products have their own method of updating. You might be prompted for a new version and have the option to download it in-place. You may be redirected to a web site where you can download it form. You may have to explicitly tell the product to check for an update. Or, if you're exceptionally unlucky, the product may not have any soft of update mechanism in place, in which case it's up to you to keep on top of it. In a world where almost no software is shipped as "complete" anymore, updating is critical.
The problem with this idea, is that PC users already have an App Store... It's called the Internet. Or Walmart.
Seriously, there's no incentive to use their Java App Store on an open system (home computer) which is very much unlike with the iPhone, where you have to use it in order to get apps.
The idea of an "App Store" is appealing, even when you're not forced into using it. It simplifies the acquisition of software by giving every product an identical and simple way of buying and installing it. This, of course, has existed for forever in the F/OSS world in the form of package managers/repositories, but this doesn't really exist on Windows, which (*gasp*) is still what the vast majority of people use.
Right now, if you want software for your Windows box, you can go to the store and buy a CD/DVD, pop it in, click through an annoying wizard and you're done. OR you go the internet route, which can get unnecessarily complex for the average user. This involves finding the software (if you're lucky, google will point you a primary or trustworthy source), paying for it(which usually involves creating an account for every product you buy since they're all from different vendors), downloading it, decompressing it (which can involve dealing with any of the existing compression schemes, which you may or may not have software to decompress), installing it (if you're lucky, it may just be an executable and your life will be easy), and possibly authenticating it (which requires annoying hoops to jump through as well as providing personal information).
While I'm not a fan of one company having a monopoly over software distribution, it can definitely simplify the process. You're able to find everything from a trusted source. You only have to make one account. You can then install anything you want with one click, iTunes style. This isn't something that's meant just for your grandma, either. I'd love to save the headache of sifting through all the crap to get something new up and running. It worked for Apple, it worked for Valve, and it's certainly possible that it'll work for Sun.
I used to work for a major home improvement warehouse chain as the vault supervisor. We had NCR self-checkout machines at my store that I was responsible for maintaining. The inside of this ATM looks nearly identical to the self-checkout machines (I can sort of make out the NCR logo at the top of the monitor). Unsurprisingly, there's nothing special about this machine. The gray boxes with the green handles have bills in them, possibly different denominations in each box. The top rack of the lower cabinet just below the keypad is a rack with coins. Behind the boxes are belts that grab the bills and pull them to the dispenser. The boxes and the rack are both locked in place with a keyed lock, that's not of the highest quality. The outer cabinet is locked with another keyed lock that uses a different key from the rack and the boxes. When bills are dispensed, IR sensors are tripped as the bills pass through the slot to ensure that they actually made it out and didn't get stuck along the way. Although these machines break down more often than I would've preferred, I've never seen them fail to dispense money without the software throwing an error. The couple times that a customer claimed a dispense failure, but no error was thrown, we checked the video surveillance and it turned out they either didn't realize they already grabbed the money or they were trying to pull a fast one.
ATI cards in the past would sort of work if they weren't seated correctly.
In the past, it also used to be the case that ATi were the primary board manufacturers, but now that responsibility been relegated to 3rd parties like Gigabyte or XFX. A quick Newegg search for 4770s shows that there are currently zero boards sold by ATi, though suspiciously all the 4770 boards look exactly the same. Sometimes when a new board comes out, both ATi and nVidia will manufacture the boards themselves and then just have the 3rd party manufacturers slap their stickers on them before they go to the store. I'm currently running a 1st run nVidia 8800 GT that was shipped this way.
Hey, is it any surprise campus security are afraid of Command Line Interface Terrorism?
Command Line Interface Terrorism (CLIT) is not widely understood by local law enforcement agencies. People fear CLIT because they do not understand it.
The book, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics [amazon.com] discussses the fact that only a very small percentage of citizens understand democratic principles. (Get the book from the library. Don't pay Amazon $66.95 for a paperback.)
This is an excellent book. My political science 101 teacher chose it as the main text for the course. It's one of the few times I really enjoyed required reading in college. Unfortunately, I doubt much of the class actually read the book. I highly recommend it, even if you know a bit about the U.S. system of government already. It goes into great depth about how certain checks and balances were intentionally "sabotaged" from the very beginning to avoid problems that arise whenever a true democracy exists.
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And it's still going to be a lot of fuel, burned somewhere else to make this car's electricity. We need nukes, since the wind and solar things will never put a dent in a massive shift to cars like this.
Logistically, solar and wind are perfect for an application like an electric car since the energy can be stored in the car's batteries. The biggest drawback to solar and wind is that they're not "always on", but the car can be charged during times where solar and wind are at peak output and hold that energy for later use. I'm not ragging on nuclear (I think it's great and we should be trading coal for nuclear, in the very short term), but I think you're being a little naive by thinking that wind and solar can't generate electricity at utility scale. They're already doing it in many places. You don't want to be the guy who says something will "never" happen, only to be proved wrong.
Similarly, you can do integer division or multiplication by 2 as a bit shift, since a bit shift is a far less costly operation:
SHR EAX,1
instead of
DIV EAX,2
Doom3 and UT2004 played on general purpose computers that were not optimized for gaming, no matter what the specs are. Those games needed a lot of brute force computing to overcome the limitations of the generalist PC design.
I don't agree with this perspective about PCs. Both consoles and PCs are effectively of the same overarching design: a general purpose CPU, a GPU, some general purpose memory, and some graphics memory. In fact, consoles are generally less capable machines than PCs because they do lots of things to reduce the component costs like stripping out branch prediction from the CPU cores, sharing memory between systems all over the place, etc. The reason that console games appear to be "optimized" is because they're uniform. A developer knows exactly what hardware specs he/she will be writing code for and can therefore maximize a game's performance to that spec. For example, if you know you have exactly 16 MB of texture memory, you can make your textures fit exactly in that foot print and not have to worry about managing it by moving it between other types of memory. PC developers have to do a great deal of work to make a game scale to the wide range of hardware that's out there. Unfortunately, this idealized steps on the scale are never perfect because systems are so dissimilar. While most modern PC games try to auto-detect your specs and use that info to scale the game detail to a certain level, it's never quite perfect and the discerning end user will spend some time tweaking settings until he/she is satisfied. The developers aren't relying on a PC's "brute force", as you describe it. Instead, they're trying their best to accommodate its versatility.
How hard could it POSSIBLY BE to have MMS support available on day 1? Only every other phone on their network supports it.
I'd say that it's most likely the fact that AT&T is trying to find a new and unusual way to gouge people by altering their MMS price plants. They're probably just taking some extra time to optimize their rape-to-profit ratio.
I'm sure it cost apple a considerable amount to develop and have a manufacturing line for the second version of the iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that the vast bulk of iPhones sold will be the 16gb model. Therefore, they have to amortize the development costs over a smaller market for the larger memory size. It's not really about the cost of the memory, it's about the additional R&D and the cost of having a second assembly line.
I suppose that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that there's only one assembly line, and some PCBs come off it with a second flash chip soldered on, while others come off with bare contacts and it costs next to nothing to do one over the other beyond the cost of the chip.
Just because they were generous when the 3G came out, does not obligate them to do so again.
It wasn't really that they were "generous" about the 3G. It was more that the original iPhone wasn't subsidized at all. Basically, they were giving a subsidy to people who had never really received one previously. Either way, this complaint is stupid. Every other US carrier and phone manufacturer has these exact same terms. Can someone explain to me why it is that when it's Apple + AT&T, it becomes an unbearable outrage?
coming with Intel's new Ion graphics as default option
Ion is an nVidia product, not an Intel product. The terms "Intel graphics" and "gaming PC" should never be used together.
It isn't magic (like standard rollover logic in keyboards), it's behavioral modification.
Most of the common human/computer interfaces require significant behavioral modification, so I'm not sure why you seem to highlight this particular one negatively. Typing on any keyboard is an unnatural process and requires some type of formal training to become effective at it. My high school required a semester course in typing, and by the end of that, the top few people in the class could touch type about 45 wpm, which would be considered quite crappy by anyone who uses a computer every day for his/her job. Even if the training is just a copy of Mario Teaches Typing, it still requires a great deal of effort for most people to become proficient at it. Formal training is, by definition, behavior modification. While there are increasingly more natural interfaces becoming available (speech recognition, mind melding, whatever), typing is still the gold standard and has been for the last 100 years. The fact that every cell phone manufacturer's goal these days is to build a good QWERTY keyboard into their device should be a strong indicator that typing is still going to be the gold standard for decades. Believe me, I would love to get away from having to tap away on a curiously-arranged array of buttons as much as the next guy, but if there is some technique that will make it less annoying, I'll go for it even if it requires a little bit of "behavior modification".
Yeah, 2 whole megabytes may be too much. Remember there are *vastly* more small/dumb computing devices out there than the big-old desktop PC. So, maybe he's programming on a phone platform or some such and making a sincere effort to make something different.
Except we know he's not programming for something other than a "big-old desktop PC" because the title of the post is "Lightweight C++ Library for SVG On Windows?" Even for the crappiest/oldest Windows systems still in use, 2 MB is comically small. I I actually thought that spec was some sort of typo, but I guess not!
Both vi and emacs can handle files with 10k lines easily. Chances are they both can handle much longer files before swapping then any IDE.
I think the point the parent was trying to make is that it's a huge pain in the ass to write a large app using a simple text editor vs. a full-blown IDE, not that there are hard limits on how many lines of code they can handle (which I would imagine that ANY type of coding environment should be more than capable of handling far more lines of code than anyone would ever sanely have open at a given time. It's just text, folks! Imagine what a couple gigs of text looks like and that's roughly how long it'll take until you start "swapping"). There are plenty of things that Emacs and Vi[m] can do that true IDEs do like syntax highlighting, bracket matching, etc. In fact, my roommate wrote his own .vimrc that's like 300 lines long and has all sorts of ridiculous stuff in it that I didn't even know was possible. However, what they don't do is integrate with the compiler and the debugger well. Sure, you can run gcc or make or whatever from inside Vi by using the ! command, but once you've attempted to compile and eventually muck something up, it's then up to you to read the compiler output and navigate manually to the problem area. This may be fine if you have one problem, but if you have several, this process becomes burdensome. What it amounts to is a lot of extra typing, and no clear advantage over a full IDE. The classic terminal editors definitely have their uses, though. If you're on any sort of *nix system that you haven't had the pleasure of configuring yourself, Vi is almost certainly on there and ready to go. If you want, you can easily just pop in your own .vimrc and it'll work just as you'd like it. Also, if you're stuck doing work remotely over SSH (which I've done my fair share of) having a full-featured text editor at your disposal is quite refreshing.
I'd have to agree that both Eclipse and NetBeans have sort of a "heavy" feel to them, and it's probably at least in part due to the fact that they're written in Java (and by this, I mean the actual IDE is a Java app, not that it's an IDE for writing in Java). Despite this, I've started to appreciate a lot of the features NetBeans has for Java development. I'm not sure if they all carry over to other languages through plug-ins and whatnot, but for Java, it really goes the extra mile. Good code completion, in-line lookup of Javadocs, safely renaming all instances of an object in a given scope, and a highly useful and simple-to-use GUI toolkit prompted me to make the switch. I was previously using JCreator, which is another free Java IDE that's much more lightweight and I still use it sometimes if I'm dealing with a single-file project so that I don't have to deal with throwing stuff into my workspace, creating a new project, etc. in NetBeans. I still haven't gotten around to giving Eclipse a try, but I hear it's comparable in quality.
Psystar had the advantage of massive word-of-mouth and R&D done for them by the hackintosh enthusiasts. Were it not for the legal trouble, I would assume that (barring specific incompetence) they could have carried on for a fair while.
I agree that they had major name recognition, but that recognition equated to them being labeled "the guys who are pissing off Apple by making clones" and not "the guys who are making awesome, cheap Mac clones that I want to buy". The members of the /. community that enjoy Macs do so because of the technical merits (UNIX underpinnings, efficient GUI, etc. [don't flame me]). The rest of the world likes Macs because they're "cool" and they don't necessarily define that "coolness" explicitly. So, if a /.er wants the technical advantages of having a Mac without the price, they go for a hackintosh. The problem there is that a /.er is probably just going to build that hackintosh him/herself rather than pay Psystar for one. Not only is it cheaper, but you get to learn something in the process. The rest of the world would see a Mac clone and say "that's not a Mac! It's not cool!" and move along.
When I hear "normal" people complain about Macs, what I hear consistently is "I wish Apple would make a cheaper Mac", not "I wish some other company would step in and compete with Apple to drive down the price." What I'm trying to say is that the market for pre-built hackintoshes is tiny. Of all the people I know, both technical and nontechnical, I can't imagine any of them buying one.
Its not worth it. She'll gain 20 pounds, lose her job, and end up blowing her 19 year old guild leader when she takes a trip to go "see her parents" so she can get some extra dkp.
In my book, gaining 20 pounds results in a 50 DKP MINUS!
Let's be honest here.
The program that isn't packaged for his Linux distro might as well not exist for the non-technical end user.
The Windows user doesn't need a central repository.
But if he wants to shop the software mega-mall, he has dozens, if not hundreds, of choices - and it is not remotely as difficult as the geek pretends.
You seem to be presenting a counter-intuitive argument. It sounds like you're saying that the average Windows user is far less technical than the average Linux user (which is probably true). But then you go on to say that these less-technical people should be provided a more difficult solution to installing software, rather than an easier one. App stores/repositories/whatever you want to call them simplify the process of acquiring software. Why would you want the opposite for non-technical users? A company with this philosophy isn't going to do very well. Just look at the record labels and their resistance to making music distribution easier. If you haven't heard, they're not doing so hot these days.
I like the Sparkle solution... Works quite well.
Indeed, I like the Sparkle solution, as well. I'm actually working on integrating into a Mac app I'm writing. As sort of a side note, I've found it interesting that the experience of downloading and installing arbitrary Mac software off the internet is a lot more consistent than that of Windows software. i.e. Almost everything is distributed in .dmg format, installs via dropping into the Applications folder, implements Sparkle, etc. I'm not sure what sort of psychological stranglehold His Steveness has managed to gain over the Mac devs out there, but they seem to keep it on the straight-and-narrow. There is a lot to be gained from having a consistent user experience, even in cases where it may not be 100% optimal.
One more thing I forgot to add: software updates. Right now, most products have their own method of updating. You might be prompted for a new version and have the option to download it in-place. You may be redirected to a web site where you can download it form. You may have to explicitly tell the product to check for an update. Or, if you're exceptionally unlucky, the product may not have any soft of update mechanism in place, in which case it's up to you to keep on top of it. In a world where almost no software is shipped as "complete" anymore, updating is critical.
The problem with this idea, is that PC users already have an App Store... It's called the Internet. Or Walmart.
Seriously, there's no incentive to use their Java App Store on an open system (home computer) which is very much unlike with the iPhone, where you have to use it in order to get apps.
The idea of an "App Store" is appealing, even when you're not forced into using it. It simplifies the acquisition of software by giving every product an identical and simple way of buying and installing it. This, of course, has existed for forever in the F/OSS world in the form of package managers/repositories, but this doesn't really exist on Windows, which (*gasp*) is still what the vast majority of people use.
Right now, if you want software for your Windows box, you can go to the store and buy a CD/DVD, pop it in, click through an annoying wizard and you're done. OR you go the internet route, which can get unnecessarily complex for the average user. This involves finding the software (if you're lucky, google will point you a primary or trustworthy source), paying for it(which usually involves creating an account for every product you buy since they're all from different vendors), downloading it, decompressing it (which can involve dealing with any of the existing compression schemes, which you may or may not have software to decompress), installing it (if you're lucky, it may just be an executable and your life will be easy), and possibly authenticating it (which requires annoying hoops to jump through as well as providing personal information).
While I'm not a fan of one company having a monopoly over software distribution, it can definitely simplify the process. You're able to find everything from a trusted source. You only have to make one account. You can then install anything you want with one click, iTunes style. This isn't something that's meant just for your grandma, either. I'd love to save the headache of sifting through all the crap to get something new up and running. It worked for Apple, it worked for Valve, and it's certainly possible that it'll work for Sun.
I used to work for a major home improvement warehouse chain as the vault supervisor. We had NCR self-checkout machines at my store that I was responsible for maintaining. The inside of this ATM looks nearly identical to the self-checkout machines (I can sort of make out the NCR logo at the top of the monitor). Unsurprisingly, there's nothing special about this machine. The gray boxes with the green handles have bills in them, possibly different denominations in each box. The top rack of the lower cabinet just below the keypad is a rack with coins. Behind the boxes are belts that grab the bills and pull them to the dispenser. The boxes and the rack are both locked in place with a keyed lock, that's not of the highest quality. The outer cabinet is locked with another keyed lock that uses a different key from the rack and the boxes. When bills are dispensed, IR sensors are tripped as the bills pass through the slot to ensure that they actually made it out and didn't get stuck along the way. Although these machines break down more often than I would've preferred, I've never seen them fail to dispense money without the software throwing an error. The couple times that a customer claimed a dispense failure, but no error was thrown, we checked the video surveillance and it turned out they either didn't realize they already grabbed the money or they were trying to pull a fast one.
Who is Colbert? // not American // Swine Flu is worldwide.
This notation is confusing. It appears that you have a comment inside a comment inside a comment.
ATI cards in the past would sort of work if they weren't seated correctly.
In the past, it also used to be the case that ATi were the primary board manufacturers, but now that responsibility been relegated to 3rd parties like Gigabyte or XFX. A quick Newegg search for 4770s shows that there are currently zero boards sold by ATi, though suspiciously all the 4770 boards look exactly the same. Sometimes when a new board comes out, both ATi and nVidia will manufacture the boards themselves and then just have the 3rd party manufacturers slap their stickers on them before they go to the store. I'm currently running a 1st run nVidia 8800 GT that was shipped this way.
...how much were we spending before? This doesn't seem like a tremendously large number.
Hey, is it any surprise campus security are afraid of Command Line Interface Terrorism?
Command Line Interface Terrorism (CLIT) is not widely understood by local law enforcement agencies. People fear CLIT because they do not understand it.
The book, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics [amazon.com] discussses the fact that only a very small percentage of citizens understand democratic principles. (Get the book from the library. Don't pay Amazon $66.95 for a paperback.)
This is an excellent book. My political science 101 teacher chose it as the main text for the course. It's one of the few times I really enjoyed required reading in college. Unfortunately, I doubt much of the class actually read the book. I highly recommend it, even if you know a bit about the U.S. system of government already. It goes into great depth about how certain checks and balances were intentionally "sabotaged" from the very beginning to avoid problems that arise whenever a true democracy exists.
I knew it... lolcats is a grassroots movement started by the Libertarians to... uhh... get... cheezeburgers?
lolz, dis iz teh astroturfingz.
That would be "lolcat," not cat. And here [lolcatbible.com] is a page to help you.
Feh! Everyone knows that "lolcat" is just a symlink to "cat --lol".