"If she is going to go and complain to Ballmer, she probably knew a bit about vista anyways, and i don't understand the kind of parent who goes out and drops 150 on software because of some little feature."
A lot of people just have blind trust in MS. It has to do with their advertising budget, and the fact that they are not involved much in IT. For a lot of people, $150 is not much money, but when they pay it to a supposedly reputable company, they expect things to work.
I think GP was making the point that 13 year old girls are not usually the ones handing over the money for computers, and hence 'value' (i.e. how good something rates after a cost/benefit analysis) is not the right word. 'Appeal' would be better.
The person making the final purchasing decision (the parent) cares that they have the right tool for the job and that all costs (including maintenance) are minimal.
"It comes down to tuning for the target environment. A car is not a boat. A plane is not a car. Shoes are not wheels. Targeting two has predictable results: Everyone is let down."
Me too on Ubuntu, for several months now. For most things, it just works.
I remember reading somewhere that satisfaction peaks with new things around the 30 day mark, and then the honeymoon wears off. I've done that with linux at least 3 or 4 times by now, learning dvorak, and having to switch back again. But I'm past that this time.
Ubuntu isn't perfect, but it does the job and it is improving rapidly. On both my computers, XP is gone and I've gotten all the hardware working. Some of it was a pain, but it can be a pain getting hardware working with MS too. The pdf reader (evince) sometimes needs switching to xpdf or KPDF or Adobe Reader for large documents, but all that requires is opening up synaptic and typing in pdf, tick, apply, done. Usually the best applications have a little ubuntu symbol next to them anyway.
The non-automatic linking of email hyperlinks with thunderbird is a bit annoying, but not a showstopper. I assume it will be fixed within the next release, or release after. After a kernal update, I need to re-install legacy sound card drivers and revert to the old xorg.conf. It's not hard. And because I installed it on another partition, it will also break the menu.lst file. I know how to fix it.
If I play a game, I'm not sure how to alt-tab like I used to, to get out of it. Not a huge deal.
All of these are either minor quibbles, or something a smart kid can figure out with the aid of a search engine. This is not the linux of your full time CS major friend in college who can only be bothered teaching you how to type "man grep".
And it's not like the world of XP is perfect either. Constant spyware annoyances, the same damn trojan coming up again and again no matter which anti-malware system hogging POS you install, watching random crap phoning home with a packet sniffer... if all I have to suffer is to have to change a config file every now and then, so be it.
No signing your life away with an EULA. No having to roll the dice with the legal/ethical/malware issues of pirated software. No eternal $$$ upgrade cycle.
The news of doubling market share does not surprise me in the slightest. It has that feeling of other things you know are special and are going to shake things up. Like the jesus versus santa southpark mov file you showed your friends back in college. Or winamp. Or doom. Or quake. Or win95 back in the day.
Re:A precedent for private space exploration
on
The New Moon Race
·
· Score: 1
"Now its just time to buck up and do it. Do it with open source. Now that's a picture I wouldn't mind seeing plastered all over the Associated Press, a picture of a lunar robot with a huge-ass penguin logo on it."
Why the Penguin? Why not use the BSD Demon logo? It would go particularly well with a mission to the Moons of Mars.
I suppose it's a good lesson that you should be kind to your kids, because you can't pay someone to give a shit about you, and ultimately the only people that will care about you at that age are family. They are the ones who will decide if it's nursing home time for you, and whether they care about how much mold is growing on the food at that particular nursing home.
Another lesson is that no one lives forever, millions of things conspire against it and the body was just not designed for it. It was designed to reproduce, live long enough to reproduce most of the time and safeguard some future generations if necessary. The nearest thing to immortality is your own children. Age gracefully.
If I was in that situation, I'd end it. If you have a computer with some bad and hardwired RAM, maybe the kids can still use it for games provided it doesn't crash too often. After it crashes too frequently to be of use, it needs to be tossed. Of course, that's a personal decision, and something that has to be made before the point of no return if it's your brain that is going haywire.
"After all it is against human rights, against democracy and against just about everything else we stand for."
What does the US stand for, exactly? From where I'm sitting it seems to stand mainly for whatever someone with a wad of cash, a printing press or a television network wants it to stand for.
"lowering the amount of power needed for the average home PC to operate."
And this will continue to change. People are becoming aware of resource scarcity, and want to insure themselves from rising prices. Witness the rise of cheap power meters such as the Kill-A-Watt. These took years to move over to 240V simply because they couldn't keep up with the demand for 110V items.
Something like a WRAP uses 5 Watts. Use it as a firewall/router/ADSL modem/traffic shaper, and it's going to be a cheaper and smaller solution than the typical 20+ Watt modem/router box.
Even CRTs have dropped in power usage compared to what they used to.
We are rapidly approaching the day when our computers will be fast enough for most tasks, the hard drive will be solid state, the system will be passively cooled and made from reliable parts that will last for decades, drawing minimal power. Any media that won't fit on the solid state hard drive can be stored on the spinning kind and plugged in as needed via USB/eSATA/firewire.
Intel probably doesn't want us to have these systems. AMD may or may not. Via certainly does, and you can bet that for pretty much everyone in the first world there is a market for several of these type of systems at a $300 price point or so. That may be a reduction in profitability for Intel, but it will be a massive new market for others, and getting easier to enter all the time.
"I'm sick of all the "money is a scam" articles on the internet recently."
Real free speech is a bitch, eh? It must have been so nice back before the 1990s when all anyone easily read was the same propaganda from Time/Newsweek, discussing hard-hitting political issues like Bill Clinton's hairstyle.
"3) Increasingly huge portions of the economy are diverted to gold production during times of economic growth because that, rather than e.g. cancer cures, have the highest return."
As opposed to now?
The money is always in treating the symptoms, never in cures. And if you own a treatment, it also works out very well if you subsidize the cause.
"Does the Internet have a mind on its own already?"
Preliminary reports suggest that the emergent mind of the internet has an insatiable appetite for porn.
Other background information: The world wide web was proposed by Tim Berners Lee in 1989, the first web software created in 1990. That would make the mind of the web... approximately 17 years old.
Hmm, ok. If I want to know the Frankfurt School's politically motivated take on science, I'll read Gould. He did a stellar job of ignoring current research in favor of attacking century old experiments.
I've got a better idea - branch the kernel and call it PostgreBSD. That is of course unless you want it to have all the speed and functionality of Windows 3.1.
"Yet, our wasteful energy consumption is a very very serious problem and as oil climbs over $100 per barrel and we look at more energy shortages due to constraints in Natural Gas supplies and Oil supplies it is really going to hit home. Hopefully people will come to wish they hadn't wasted it. But it will be too late then."
Unfortunately, there are a confluence of factors that lead to this wastefulness.
One is that the cost of a finite but large resource (in the sense that it will last multiple generations even when use is widespread) is near to the cost of extracting it (in the short term).
Another is that people in general desire power, and power stems from making people dependent on you. If you have someone over a barrel (pardon the pun), you have more power than if you don't. The rulers of a country where the average person has all his daily needs provided for on his own property or within his community is relatively powerless, especially when that person has arms to resist. Energy dependence is one of those ways in which control is enforced. If you need to pay money for energy, that money can be taxed and those taxes can support the power structure.
Yet another is short term thinking. In a lot of ways, short term thinking is encouraged over long term thinking. A part of that is a usury that is so endemic that we are accustomed to thinking that everything must increase in cost somewhere between 3% and 20% per year. If an investment doesn't have a similar ROI, it won't get done. You'd never get something like a cathedral built these days, for that very reason.
Usury has existed for thousands of years because it is a great way of enriching one person at the expense of someone else. But really, this harks back to the previous point - power requires dependence, and entrenched power will engineer further dependence. It's not in the immediate interest of those in power to be in control of a populace capable of the thinking required to insulate their house. Or for that matter, the motivation and the capability to think in terms of centuries and plan for the needs of their own progeny.
The antidote to all of this is a rise in cost caused by actual scarcity, enforcing frugality. You don't see jewelers throwing away scrap gold and silver. You don't see starving peasants in the midst of famine cooking up a feast with their very last stores of grain.
"This is a foot in the door; the gateway drug so-to-speak."
Absolutely. Once you've addicted the masses to a linux like Ubuntu, if anything bad should happen to Ubuntu (e.g. malware) it would be easy to switch because it's FOSS. The whole free support infrastructure changes. Instead of your geeky nephew knowing to type Meta R cmd, regedit etc... or go into windows settings etc, he'll know to bring u a terminal, apt-get whatever.
If he was wrong, much better of him to just say so without qualifications.
The truth is rarely what gets written in the papers, whether it's papered over or just omitted. No one doing a back-room deal is going to either admit it or publicize it, but loads of back-room deals still happen. That by definition is a conspiracy - an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
The quest to understand what's actually going on in the world requires taking facts, drawing inferences and discussion. Just because some journalist doesn't like it should not stop the general public from trying to get a better understanding of the world than they would through picking up a random glossy magazine or newspaper. If an otherwise intelligent person appears to be taken in by a poor argument, people are right to be suspicious.
"My main point in this thread is that people who are already in the FOSS community will occasionally use Macs, and I just personally find that odd."
It stranges me out too. I suspect that the reason is that those people are fans of good design. Their fandom of good design outweighs their love of FOSS. And there are a lot of such people who are soon parted from their money.
Apparently there were also a number of American Indians who readily accepted nice warm blankets from the US Army. It was probably just too much time and frustration for them to make their own, inferior blankets. It was a busy world back then, and time was money, after all.
It may do that, or it may not, much like speed for commercial travel has hit the point of diminishing returns. Processor speed has been remarkably similar - you get the overstep that results in products like the Concorde and Williamette P4 - moderately faster, much more expensive. Then you get a move to more efficiency while maintaining similar performance. Of course, that depends on what the physics is. If increasing flight time by 25% shaved 90% of the fuel cost, jets may have gone down that path.
"Damn it, I want my fast, multi-core, and CHEAP processors already;-)"
For what you use it most, you really want something as fast that consumes about 10W or less at the plug. Better for you, the environment, your electricity bill, and your peace of mind when in 5 years time some component is destroyed from heat because you weren't there when a fan died.
It's only a matter of time before someone like Via builds it anyway. And the CEO of Intel who builds it can look like a god for about 5 years until the market saturates, at which point he should have sold his stock.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"If she is going to go and complain to Ballmer, she probably knew a bit about vista anyways, and i don't understand the kind of parent who goes out and drops 150 on software because of some little feature."
A lot of people just have blind trust in MS. It has to do with their advertising budget, and the fact that they are not involved much in IT. For a lot of people, $150 is not much money, but when they pay it to a supposedly reputable company, they expect things to work.
You make some good points.
I think GP was making the point that 13 year old girls are not usually the ones handing over the money for computers, and hence 'value' (i.e. how good something rates after a cost/benefit analysis) is not the right word. 'Appeal' would be better.
The person making the final purchasing decision (the parent) cares that they have the right tool for the job and that all costs (including maintenance) are minimal.
"It comes down to tuning for the target environment. A car is not a boat. A plane is not a car. Shoes are not wheels. Targeting two has predictable results: Everyone is let down."
Maybe it was designed by committee?
Me too on Ubuntu, for several months now. For most things, it just works.
I remember reading somewhere that satisfaction peaks with new things around the 30 day mark, and then the honeymoon wears off. I've done that with linux at least 3 or 4 times by now, learning dvorak, and having to switch back again. But I'm past that this time.
Ubuntu isn't perfect, but it does the job and it is improving rapidly. On both my computers, XP is gone and I've gotten all the hardware working. Some of it was a pain, but it can be a pain getting hardware working with MS too. The pdf reader (evince) sometimes needs switching to xpdf or KPDF or Adobe Reader for large documents, but all that requires is opening up synaptic and typing in pdf, tick, apply, done. Usually the best applications have a little ubuntu symbol next to them anyway.
The non-automatic linking of email hyperlinks with thunderbird is a bit annoying, but not a showstopper. I assume it will be fixed within the next release, or release after. After a kernal update, I need to re-install legacy sound card drivers and revert to the old xorg.conf. It's not hard. And because I installed it on another partition, it will also break the menu.lst file. I know how to fix it.
If I play a game, I'm not sure how to alt-tab like I used to, to get out of it. Not a huge deal.
All of these are either minor quibbles, or something a smart kid can figure out with the aid of a search engine. This is not the linux of your full time CS major friend in college who can only be bothered teaching you how to type "man grep".
And it's not like the world of XP is perfect either. Constant spyware annoyances, the same damn trojan coming up again and again no matter which anti-malware system hogging POS you install, watching random crap phoning home with a packet sniffer... if all I have to suffer is to have to change a config file every now and then, so be it.
No signing your life away with an EULA. No having to roll the dice with the legal/ethical/malware issues of pirated software. No eternal $$$ upgrade cycle.
The news of doubling market share does not surprise me in the slightest. It has that feeling of other things you know are special and are going to shake things up. Like the jesus versus santa southpark mov file you showed your friends back in college. Or winamp. Or doom. Or quake. Or win95 back in the day.
In keeping with his joke, there are actually now 81 users of linux. I guess that must make me about #72 or so.
"You can be sure they are aware of it and are closing that window as fast as they can."
New operating systems aren't created or rectified overnight. That window is actually a door. That little speck of dust in the distance is the horse.
"The mac mafia can blow me"
Don't encourage them.
"Now its just time to buck up and do it. Do it with open source. Now that's a picture I wouldn't mind seeing plastered all over the Associated Press, a picture of a lunar robot with a huge-ass penguin logo on it."
Why the Penguin? Why not use the BSD Demon logo? It would go particularly well with a mission to the Moons of Mars.
I suppose it's a good lesson that you should be kind to your kids, because you can't pay someone to give a shit about you, and ultimately the only people that will care about you at that age are family. They are the ones who will decide if it's nursing home time for you, and whether they care about how much mold is growing on the food at that particular nursing home.
Another lesson is that no one lives forever, millions of things conspire against it and the body was just not designed for it. It was designed to reproduce, live long enough to reproduce most of the time and safeguard some future generations if necessary. The nearest thing to immortality is your own children. Age gracefully.
If I was in that situation, I'd end it. If you have a computer with some bad and hardwired RAM, maybe the kids can still use it for games provided it doesn't crash too often. After it crashes too frequently to be of use, it needs to be tossed. Of course, that's a personal decision, and something that has to be made before the point of no return if it's your brain that is going haywire.
"After all it is against human rights, against democracy and against just about everything else we stand for."
What does the US stand for, exactly? From where I'm sitting it seems to stand mainly for whatever someone with a wad of cash, a printing press or a television network wants it to stand for.
Are the black belts in something practical, or are they of the non-contact dance class MacDojo genre?
"lowering the amount of power needed for the average home PC to operate."
And this will continue to change. People are becoming aware of resource scarcity, and want to insure themselves from rising prices. Witness the rise of cheap power meters such as the Kill-A-Watt. These took years to move over to 240V simply because they couldn't keep up with the demand for 110V items.
Something like a WRAP uses 5 Watts. Use it as a firewall/router/ADSL modem/traffic shaper, and it's going to be a cheaper and smaller solution than the typical 20+ Watt modem/router box.
Even CRTs have dropped in power usage compared to what they used to.
We are rapidly approaching the day when our computers will be fast enough for most tasks, the hard drive will be solid state, the system will be passively cooled and made from reliable parts that will last for decades, drawing minimal power. Any media that won't fit on the solid state hard drive can be stored on the spinning kind and plugged in as needed via USB/eSATA/firewire.
Intel probably doesn't want us to have these systems. AMD may or may not. Via certainly does, and you can bet that for pretty much everyone in the first world there is a market for several of these type of systems at a $300 price point or so. That may be a reduction in profitability for Intel, but it will be a massive new market for others, and getting easier to enter all the time.
"I'm sick of all the "money is a scam" articles on the internet recently."
Real free speech is a bitch, eh? It must have been so nice back before the 1990s when all anyone easily read was the same propaganda from Time/Newsweek, discussing hard-hitting political issues like Bill Clinton's hairstyle.
"3) Increasingly huge portions of the economy are diverted to gold production during times of economic growth because that, rather than e.g. cancer cures, have the highest return."
As opposed to now?
The money is always in treating the symptoms, never in cures. And if you own a treatment, it also works out very well if you subsidize the cause.
"Does the Internet have a mind on its own already?"
Preliminary reports suggest that the emergent mind of the internet has an insatiable appetite for porn.
Other background information: The world wide web was proposed by Tim Berners Lee in 1989, the first web software created in 1990. That would make the mind of the web... approximately 17 years old.
I wonder...
Hmm, ok. If I want to know the Frankfurt School's politically motivated take on science, I'll read Gould. He did a stellar job of ignoring current research in favor of attacking century old experiments.
For the facts, give me Herrnstein and Murray.
"Branch the kernel and call it MyBSD"
I've got a better idea - branch the kernel and call it PostgreBSD. That is of course unless you want it to have all the speed and functionality of Windows 3.1.
"Yet, our wasteful energy consumption is a very very serious problem and as oil climbs over $100 per barrel and we look at more energy shortages due to constraints in Natural Gas supplies and Oil supplies it is really going to hit home. Hopefully people will come to wish they hadn't wasted it. But it will be too late then."
Unfortunately, there are a confluence of factors that lead to this wastefulness.
One is that the cost of a finite but large resource (in the sense that it will last multiple generations even when use is widespread) is near to the cost of extracting it (in the short term).
Another is that people in general desire power, and power stems from making people dependent on you. If you have someone over a barrel (pardon the pun), you have more power than if you don't. The rulers of a country where the average person has all his daily needs provided for on his own property or within his community is relatively powerless, especially when that person has arms to resist. Energy dependence is one of those ways in which control is enforced. If you need to pay money for energy, that money can be taxed and those taxes can support the power structure.
Yet another is short term thinking. In a lot of ways, short term thinking is encouraged over long term thinking. A part of that is a usury that is so endemic that we are accustomed to thinking that everything must increase in cost somewhere between 3% and 20% per year. If an investment doesn't have a similar ROI, it won't get done. You'd never get something like a cathedral built these days, for that very reason.
Usury has existed for thousands of years because it is a great way of enriching one person at the expense of someone else. But really, this harks back to the previous point - power requires dependence, and entrenched power will engineer further dependence. It's not in the immediate interest of those in power to be in control of a populace capable of the thinking required to insulate their house. Or for that matter, the motivation and the capability to think in terms of centuries and plan for the needs of their own progeny.
The antidote to all of this is a rise in cost caused by actual scarcity, enforcing frugality. You don't see jewelers throwing away scrap gold and silver. You don't see starving peasants in the midst of famine cooking up a feast with their very last stores of grain.
I'm guessing that he didn't really need the grade boost.
"This is a foot in the door; the gateway drug so-to-speak."
Absolutely. Once you've addicted the masses to a linux like Ubuntu, if anything bad should happen to Ubuntu (e.g. malware) it would be easy to switch because it's FOSS. The whole free support infrastructure changes. Instead of your geeky nephew knowing to type Meta R cmd, regedit etc... or go into windows settings etc, he'll know to bring u a terminal, apt-get whatever.
There, fixed that for you.
If he was wrong, much better of him to just say so without qualifications.
The truth is rarely what gets written in the papers, whether it's papered over or just omitted. No one doing a back-room deal is going to either admit it or publicize it, but loads of back-room deals still happen. That by definition is a conspiracy - an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
The quest to understand what's actually going on in the world requires taking facts, drawing inferences and discussion. Just because some journalist doesn't like it should not stop the general public from trying to get a better understanding of the world than they would through picking up a random glossy magazine or newspaper. If an otherwise intelligent person appears to be taken in by a poor argument, people are right to be suspicious.
"My main point in this thread is that people who are already in the FOSS community will occasionally use Macs, and I just personally find that odd."
It stranges me out too. I suspect that the reason is that those people are fans of good design. Their fandom of good design outweighs their love of FOSS. And there are a lot of such people who are soon parted from their money.
Apparently there were also a number of American Indians who readily accepted nice warm blankets from the US Army. It was probably just too much time and frustration for them to make their own, inferior blankets. It was a busy world back then, and time was money, after all.
It may do that, or it may not, much like speed for commercial travel has hit the point of diminishing returns. Processor speed has been remarkably similar - you get the overstep that results in products like the Concorde and Williamette P4 - moderately faster, much more expensive. Then you get a move to more efficiency while maintaining similar performance. Of course, that depends on what the physics is. If increasing flight time by 25% shaved 90% of the fuel cost, jets may have gone down that path.
"Damn it, I want my fast, multi-core, and CHEAP processors already ;-)"
:)
For what you use it most, you really want something as fast that consumes about 10W or less at the plug. Better for you, the environment, your electricity bill, and your peace of mind when in 5 years time some component is destroyed from heat because you weren't there when a fan died.
It's only a matter of time before someone like Via builds it anyway. And the CEO of Intel who builds it can look like a god for about 5 years until the market saturates, at which point he should have sold his stock.