The long predicted death of PCs and the rise of compelling PDA/phones (like the iPhone) is finally here. While I won't speak to the phone bit, I will say that I've been working with thin clients from Wyse, HP, Igel and Sun for years now. They are like vt220s, but better!
Behold the all-conquering almighty VT420! Oh, wait...
Maybe, what they are thinking is this way, only a few malware apps will be able to run at a time, since that is what a windows box is for right?
Rest assured that this feature will not be impeded in any way. Malware can attach itself to any running daemons in any of the traditional ways. These daemons are not constrained in the same way as applications that users might actually want to run.
How is it kicking any customer in the nuts to say "there's a stripped down version available only to OEMs who want to make a highly discounted product for third world deployment."? It's not even offered to the "loyal customers" you say we spite.
So why not offer this to your "loyal customers" in the rich world also?
Perhaps it's good enough for some of them, so they could buy the right-sized offering, rather than being forced to overbuy. My mother and her sister (both aged 80+), for instance, rarely run more than two applications (email & browser) at a time. The only other application they use on their PCs is solitaire (and the browser & email are probably closed).
... because you never get 100.00000000% agreement.
Except in places like Albania (under Enver Hoxha) and North Korea (under "eternal president" Kim Il Sung and his stand-in Kim Jong Il), where elections could come darn close to 100% for one candidate.
Then again, if polls of scientists reached that level of unanimity on any non-vacuous projection of future climate, I'd trust their conclusion, since science is neither Stalinist nor coercive. The existing degree of consensus on the IPCC projections is high enough that I'm very concerned - not about scientific integrity, but about what we've been doing to the climate.
Most patent holders won't go after DIY types who violate for personal use, but that's not because they have no legal ability to do so.
Actually, it IS because they have no legal recourse against DIY use of patented inventions. Patents only grant monopolies over commercial exploitation of an invention. You are explicitly allowed to employ the disclosed inventions for your personal use, or for educational purposes. You're just not allowed to sell or give it to others.
I bought Caldera OpenLinux in 1997.
It was actually fairly decent, with a much better installer than other distros and GUI system management tools. In these features, it presaged what many other distros have done since then. If they had kept working at it, it might have been a real contender...
Of course, Caldera morphed hideously into SCOg after 2000, lashing out at the Linux community, abandoning technology for litigation, and creating their own private pit of Hades to which they are now consigned.
The root of that word is not ignorant person but "Negro", referring to the race of people with Black Ancestry. Negro itself comes from the Latin word 'niger' - which means 'black'. The usage of the word to mean ignorant person is but the start of the racist connotations it has acquired in the US.
WRONG. Here's a summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggardly for you. You might be particularly amused by the item on the Economist magazine. The "racist connotations" to which you refer are nonexistent, except perhaps for a few (mostly Americans, apparently) whose grasp of English is as poor as yours.
HP also "gets it" on providing decent printer drivers for Linux (maybe RMS had a quiet word with someone). Their HPLIP package immediately found my network HP7410 all-in-one, and set up access to its printer, scanner and fax. It plays nicely with CUPS, each function works with all relevant applications, and it has a nice device manager interface.
Oh, and the Linux drivers don't even try to call home like HP's drivers for Windows. There's no need, as HPLIP is open source and available from the repositories of probably every Linux distribution.
I've moved on request by my employer, and in changing jobs. Each time, I asked if there was relocation support, as this can be expensive. Always, the answer was yes, including temporary housing, packing/shipping/unpacking furniture, special handling for family pets, etc.
Our family pet is a horse - a frisky 600kg Irish Hunter. There were dropped jaws at certain costs resulting from this (specialized truck, temporary stables, etc.), but they paid up.
I'm on Linux, and as a test, I just watched some [boring] live video on CNN:
1. CNN did not try to install a P2P application on my PC
2. I was not offered any EULA
3. My upstream data traffic did not change
Obviously, CNN hates Linux. Good news!
I can't see where anyone in this thread has said otherwise, nor am I aware of any attempts to redefine "Giga" as an SI prefix to mean anything else.
You're unaware that GB means 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes? In all cases, the giga- or G prefix means 10^9, while the gibi- or Gi prefix should be used for 2^30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
(If you mean as in Gigabyte, then that's a completely different issue, since byte is not an SI unit. Unfortunately we are fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition, simply to make it the same as the usage for SI units.)
It's not a different issue, according to NIST, IEC, NBS, IUPAC, and others. The issue has nothing to do with whether the unit being prefixed is SI or not, and everything to do with avoiding ambiguity (what about giga-dollars, for instance). Actually, the instance of megabytes and so forth is explicitly and clearly covered by the standards authorities. From the abovementioned wiki page:
"Under this recommendation, the SI prefixes should only be used in the decimal sense: kilobyte and megabyte denote one thousand bytes and one million bytes respectively, while kibibyte and mebibyte denote 1,024 bytes and 1,048,576 bytes respectively. This recommendation has since been adopted by some other leading national and international standards, which now state that the prefixes k, M and G should always refer to powers of ten, even in the context of information technology." You can look up the SI definitions in French and English at http://www1.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8.pdf or if you're willing to pay, you can get IEEE 260.1-2004 which standardized kibi- gibi- and so forth. The "for idiots" summary is available from NIST http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
So disk drive manufacturers and others using GB to mean 10^9 bytes are actually correct. Those howling that it should mean 2^30 bytes are actually wrong. In every case.
In English, giga is pronounced with a hard-g (as in "giggling girls give gifts"). Check the Oxford English dictionary, or any other English dictionary if you don't believe me. There was an attempt by the US NBS to redefine it to use a soft-g (as in "giant giraffe giblet gin"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga#Pronunciation Thankfully, this hijacking attempt to a new and wrong pronunciation has been quite unsuccessful - I have worked with a great many American scientists and engineers over decades, and every one of them uses the correct hard-g pronunciation (so do the newsreaders on US TV, even). I work in R&D at a fairly large US-centric multinational, and I have yet to hear anyone pronounce giga as "jigga", not even MBA-handicapped marketing types. And it's really hard to imagine an executive saying "jiggabuck" instead of gigabuck - the audience would crack up completely...
If you want to pronounce giga with a soft-g, then please use French...
And it's 10^9 watts, not 2^20.
Indeed it is. Giga means 10^9 numerically, by definition. Alas, we are still fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences.
... she was working 80 hour days with children's theater.
Your friend should study a little more science: she's obviously measuring time the wrong way. And if she's not, then a physicist should look into it immediately!
An annual fee of ã20 is significantly less than I spend on music/DVDs as it stands, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.
In addition to the points that others have made (unfair tax on non-downloaders, not clear that it gives right to download, etc.), there is another issue.
If the industry revenue becomes a fixed tax, independent of their costs or efforts in developing musical quality/talent (bear with me here), then their business incentives become even more twisted. In effect, their aggregate income would be largely fixed, and they could control only their individual costs.
One inevitible result would be a great reduction in the quality of output, in order to minimize costs and maximize profits. It may seem almost impossible to reduce the quality of mass music much further, but I am sure it is the kind of surreal challenge which the Music majors would meet.
Another consequence would be the in-fighting between the major labels concerning the division of the spoils. The machinations leading up to each annual agreement might deliver more entertainment (in a pathetic or ironic sense) than the entire musical output of the year. Each would demand the lion's share, and attempt to game the system appropriately. Such attempts might include proliferation of labels, increased output of even cheaper trashy tracks (i.e. output might even go up, but with worse music), shill downloaders to boost "popularity", and so forth. Of course, there's a near certainty that any long term agreement would be challenged legally, and any attempts by non-majors to get a share of the spoils would be vehemently resisted.
If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).
And what about those who don't download or upload such copyrighted material without permission? We should NOT have to pay this extra fee/tax/whatever. The music/movie/games businesses have no right to dip into my pocket. If I buy something from them (it happens, occasionally), then I'll pay for it. However, I doubt if my annual spend on CDs and DVDs nowadays exceeds their proposed monthly fee.
Yeah, but then I'd be living in Finland. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Why not? Don't you like (i) high taxes, (ii) long cold winters, (iii) wierd languages?
At least we've got decent internet access. I've had 100/10 fiber to the house for a couple of years now. No usage caps, no blocked ports, no hassle. And I live in the countryside outside Kuopio, 300km north of Helsinki. (Service is DNA Mediakoti, which includes IP TV as well as internet).
If the keys are burned in, are they then supplied to the various law enforcement agencies to make things easier on them?
No need. A list of all possible encryption keys can be generated easily, and they've been told how to do this. They just need to try them sequentially...
The confusion is quite ridiculous. I mean really, when the fscking salespeople need to look up tables to determine which windows versions include which features, you can tell someone somewhere in marketing has screwed the pooch badly.
Don't ever try to discuss Labview licenses with National Instruments... Even their sales reps can't figure out what kind of licenses we need in many cases. This debacle recurs every year in different ways (we're a significant customer for them, since we sell a lot of stuff with embedded Labview).
I have fiber to the house with 100/10 service available.
What do you do with all that bandwidth? I'm just curious.
100Mbit/sec is about 850GByte per day - obviously we don't saturate this 24/7, but the higher speed means things get completed sooner. With this convenience you tend to do even more online than before. To take one example, every few months, I upload about 500MB or do of digital photos to a print house. This took hours when we had 2.0/0.5 Mbit cable service; now it's just a few minutes. Downloading an ISO, or running updates on our linux systems also takes just minutes.
Also, consider that we have kids spending time on the net as well - sometimes the bandwidth is fully used. Luckily, there are no caps on usage here...
Poster: Can I be moderated as "interesting" please?
Slashdot: No. Sod off.
Poster: Look, I hate Microsoft as much as anyone!
Slashdot: If you want to be interesting, you'll have to really hate Microsoft.
Poster: I do!
Slashdot: Oh yeah? How much?
Poster: A lot!
Slashdot: OK, you're +5 interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
The long predicted death of PCs and the rise of compelling PDA/phones (like the iPhone) is finally here. While I won't speak to the phone bit, I will say that I've been working with thin clients from Wyse, HP, Igel and Sun for years now. They are like vt220s, but better!
Behold the all-conquering almighty VT420! Oh, wait...
Maybe, what they are thinking is this way, only a few malware apps will be able to run at a time, since that is what a windows box is for right?
Rest assured that this feature will not be impeded in any way. Malware can attach itself to any running daemons in any of the traditional ways. These daemons are not constrained in the same way as applications that users might actually want to run.
I have a desktop system. I don't print.
So you essentially have a heavyweight non-mobile netbook?
How is it kicking any customer in the nuts to say "there's a stripped down version available only to OEMs who want to make a highly discounted product for third world deployment."? It's not even offered to the "loyal customers" you say we spite.
So why not offer this to your "loyal customers" in the rich world also?
Perhaps it's good enough for some of them, so they could buy the right-sized offering, rather than being forced to overbuy. My mother and her sister (both aged 80+), for instance, rarely run more than two applications (email & browser) at a time. The only other application they use on their PCs is solitaire (and the browser & email are probably closed).
Except in places like Albania (under Enver Hoxha) and North Korea (under "eternal president" Kim Il Sung and his stand-in Kim Jong Il), where elections could come darn close to 100% for one candidate.
Then again, if polls of scientists reached that level of unanimity on any non-vacuous projection of future climate, I'd trust their conclusion, since science is neither Stalinist nor coercive. The existing degree of consensus on the IPCC projections is high enough that I'm very concerned - not about scientific integrity, but about what we've been doing to the climate.
Hah! I'll call mine "zebra-striped hats"...
Most patent holders won't go after DIY types who violate for personal use, but that's not because they have no legal ability to do so.
Actually, it IS because they have no legal recourse against DIY use of patented inventions. Patents only grant monopolies over commercial exploitation of an invention. You are explicitly allowed to employ the disclosed inventions for your personal use, or for educational purposes. You're just not allowed to sell or give it to others.
I bought Caldera OpenLinux in 1997.
It was actually fairly decent, with a much better installer than other distros and GUI system management tools. In these features, it presaged what many other distros have done since then. If they had kept working at it, it might have been a real contender...
Of course, Caldera morphed hideously into SCOg after 2000, lashing out at the Linux community, abandoning technology for litigation, and creating their own private pit of Hades to which they are now consigned.
The root of that word is not ignorant person but "Negro", referring to the race of people with Black Ancestry. Negro itself comes from the Latin word 'niger' - which means 'black'. The usage of the word to mean ignorant person is but the start of the racist connotations it has acquired in the US.
WRONG. Here's a summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggardly for you. You might be particularly amused by the item on the Economist magazine. The "racist connotations" to which you refer are nonexistent, except perhaps for a few (mostly Americans, apparently) whose grasp of English is as poor as yours.
HP also "gets it" on providing decent printer drivers for Linux (maybe RMS had a quiet word with someone). Their HPLIP package immediately found my network HP7410 all-in-one, and set up access to its printer, scanner and fax. It plays nicely with CUPS, each function works with all relevant applications, and it has a nice device manager interface.
Oh, and the Linux drivers don't even try to call home like HP's drivers for Windows. There's no need, as HPLIP is open source and available from the repositories of probably every Linux distribution.
I've moved on request by my employer, and in changing jobs. Each time, I asked if there was relocation support, as this can be expensive. Always, the answer was yes, including temporary housing, packing/shipping/unpacking furniture, special handling for family pets, etc.
Our family pet is a horse - a frisky 600kg Irish Hunter. There were dropped jaws at certain costs resulting from this (specialized truck, temporary stables, etc.), but they paid up.
I'm on Linux, and as a test, I just watched some [boring] live video on CNN:
1. CNN did not try to install a P2P application on my PC
2. I was not offered any EULA
3. My upstream data traffic did not change
Obviously, CNN hates Linux. Good news!
I can't see where anyone in this thread has said otherwise, nor am I aware of any attempts to redefine "Giga" as an SI prefix to mean anything else.
You're unaware that GB means 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes? In all cases, the giga- or G prefix means 10^9, while the gibi- or Gi prefix should be used for 2^30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
(If you mean as in Gigabyte, then that's a completely different issue, since byte is not an SI unit. Unfortunately we are fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition, simply to make it the same as the usage for SI units.)
It's not a different issue, according to NIST, IEC, NBS, IUPAC, and others. The issue has nothing to do with whether the unit being prefixed is SI or not, and everything to do with avoiding ambiguity (what about giga-dollars, for instance). Actually, the instance of megabytes and so forth is explicitly and clearly covered by the standards authorities. From the abovementioned wiki page: "Under this recommendation, the SI prefixes should only be used in the decimal sense: kilobyte and megabyte denote one thousand bytes and one million bytes respectively, while kibibyte and mebibyte denote 1,024 bytes and 1,048,576 bytes respectively. This recommendation has since been adopted by some other leading national and international standards, which now state that the prefixes k, M and G should always refer to powers of ten, even in the context of information technology." You can look up the SI definitions in French and English at http://www1.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8.pdf or if you're willing to pay, you can get IEEE 260.1-2004 which standardized kibi- gibi- and so forth. The "for idiots" summary is available from NIST http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
So disk drive manufacturers and others using GB to mean 10^9 bytes are actually correct. Those howling that it should mean 2^30 bytes are actually wrong. In every case.
The EULA is there to protect the corporation from its consumers.
Think of it as a corporate condom. It enables the corporation to screw its customers without worrying about the consequences.
Gigawatt is incorrectly pronounced jiggawatt.
Fixed that pronunciation fubar for you.
In English, giga is pronounced with a hard-g (as in "giggling girls give gifts"). Check the Oxford English dictionary, or any other English dictionary if you don't believe me. There was an attempt by the US NBS to redefine it to use a soft-g (as in "giant giraffe giblet gin"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga#Pronunciation Thankfully, this hijacking attempt to a new and wrong pronunciation has been quite unsuccessful - I have worked with a great many American scientists and engineers over decades, and every one of them uses the correct hard-g pronunciation (so do the newsreaders on US TV, even). I work in R&D at a fairly large US-centric multinational, and I have yet to hear anyone pronounce giga as "jigga", not even MBA-handicapped marketing types. And it's really hard to imagine an executive saying "jiggabuck" instead of gigabuck - the audience would crack up completely...
If you want to pronounce giga with a soft-g, then please use French...
And it's 10^9 watts, not 2^20.
Indeed it is. Giga means 10^9 numerically, by definition. Alas, we are still fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences.
... she was working 80 hour days with children's theater.
Your friend should study a little more science: she's obviously measuring time the wrong way. And if she's not, then a physicist should look into it immediately!
An annual fee of ã20 is significantly less than I spend on music/DVDs as it stands, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.
In addition to the points that others have made (unfair tax on non-downloaders, not clear that it gives right to download, etc.), there is another issue.
If the industry revenue becomes a fixed tax, independent of their costs or efforts in developing musical quality/talent (bear with me here), then their business incentives become even more twisted. In effect, their aggregate income would be largely fixed, and they could control only their individual costs.
One inevitible result would be a great reduction in the quality of output, in order to minimize costs and maximize profits. It may seem almost impossible to reduce the quality of mass music much further, but I am sure it is the kind of surreal challenge which the Music majors would meet.
Another consequence would be the in-fighting between the major labels concerning the division of the spoils. The machinations leading up to each annual agreement might deliver more entertainment (in a pathetic or ironic sense) than the entire musical output of the year. Each would demand the lion's share, and attempt to game the system appropriately. Such attempts might include proliferation of labels, increased output of even cheaper trashy tracks (i.e. output might even go up, but with worse music), shill downloaders to boost "popularity", and so forth. Of course, there's a near certainty that any long term agreement would be challenged legally, and any attempts by non-majors to get a share of the spoils would be vehemently resisted.
If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).
And what about those who don't download or upload such copyrighted material without permission? We should NOT have to pay this extra fee/tax/whatever. The music/movie/games businesses have no right to dip into my pocket. If I buy something from them (it happens, occasionally), then I'll pay for it. However, I doubt if my annual spend on CDs and DVDs nowadays exceeds their proposed monthly fee.
Yeah, but then I'd be living in Finland. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Why not? Don't you like (i) high taxes, (ii) long cold winters, (iii) wierd languages?
At least we've got decent internet access. I've had 100/10 fiber to the house for a couple of years now. No usage caps, no blocked ports, no hassle. And I live in the countryside outside Kuopio, 300km north of Helsinki. (Service is DNA Mediakoti, which includes IP TV as well as internet).
Heh! That's almost as good as:
$man woman
man: no entry for woman
Rather depressing news for young geeks.
If the keys are burned in, are they then supplied to the various law enforcement agencies to make things easier on them?
No need. A list of all possible encryption keys can be generated easily, and they've been told how to do this. They just need to try them sequentially...
The confusion is quite ridiculous. I mean really, when the fscking salespeople need to look up tables to determine which windows versions include which features, you can tell someone somewhere in marketing has screwed the pooch badly.
Don't ever try to discuss Labview licenses with National Instruments... Even their sales reps can't figure out what kind of licenses we need in many cases. This debacle recurs every year in different ways (we're a significant customer for them, since we sell a lot of stuff with embedded Labview).
However I don't think i've seen a desktop board that could go over 8 gigabytes and most top out at four.
Maybe this was true a year ago, but not now. I recently got a PC with an Asus P5Qpro motherboard - it supports up to 16GB. http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=709&l4=0&model=2269&modelmenu=2
I have fiber to the house with 100/10 service available.
What do you do with all that bandwidth? I'm just curious.
100Mbit/sec is about 850GByte per day - obviously we don't saturate this 24/7, but the higher speed means things get completed sooner. With this convenience you tend to do even more online than before. To take one example, every few months, I upload about 500MB or do of digital photos to a print house. This took hours when we had 2.0/0.5 Mbit cable service; now it's just a few minutes. Downloading an ISO, or running updates on our linux systems also takes just minutes.
Also, consider that we have kids spending time on the net as well - sometimes the bandwidth is fully used. Luckily, there are no caps on usage here...
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy
Poster: Can I be moderated as "interesting" please?
Slashdot: No. Sod off.
Poster: Look, I hate Microsoft as much as anyone!
Slashdot: If you want to be interesting, you'll have to really hate Microsoft.
Poster: I do!
Slashdot: Oh yeah? How much?
Poster: A lot!
Slashdot: OK, you're +5 interesting.