'Cause no *nix nor Mac OSX will ever threaten Window's hegemony over the x86 desktop market (and last I checked that's the dominant market - as in 90% of home computers). People will continue to use Windows because it's what they're used to. Even if they try Linux, they don't really have the attention span to harness it's power by learning how to pipe etc.
As for a server platform, I have to plead ignorance as I have no clue what OS X's strengths/weakness's are in terms of stability and security. I don't really see how it could threaten Sun Unix however.
Linux still hasn't proven itself on the performance front. Even after several months, the Linux NVIDIA drivers are noticably lower in performance than their Windows counterparts.
Well from what I saw the difference beteen Windows vs. Linux was pronounced at low resolutions but the difference at high resolutions gets less and less as the resolutions get higher, until it's hardly even noticeable. This was based on Quake3A benchmarks.
No doubt MS would enjoy that. They'd probably also throw me in jail for installing my (legal) copy of win98 onto a friend's computer, even though he bought the computer with a copy on it, got no "system" disks for it, and is, in my opinion, licensed to install a copy when something goes wrong with the original installation (as it did).
God I'm a little sick of the grotesque exagerration of/. MS detractors. MS is a company that makes some good and bad (ok mostly bad) software. But they're not gonna beat down your door for owning illegal software, at least not that I've heard of. Some of the responses to this article are so asinine and ridiculous it's not funny.
I don't mean to be picking on you but I had to say something.
Re:Suspicious...but interested--An idea!
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
Yeah but a hovercraft wouldn't add a 3rd dimension really, you're not flying, you're hovering over the ground. Now actual flying cars would be a disaster, seeing as how most people can't even drive regular cars.
Well unless this is the world's largest and greatest prank, it can't be something as simple as a scooter, seeing as people with real credibility like Steve Jobs, and others with significantly less credibility, like Jeff Bezos, are touting that it is as important an invention as the PC.
Also, according to the acticle, the model will sell for under $2000, which makes it much less expensive then a car. Remember too that it was tested inside a room (I believe) which decreases the chance that it's any kind of helicopter.
Re:Suspicious...but interested--An idea!
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
From the MSNBC article:
One editor who saw the proposal went as far as to speculate -- jokingly (perhaps) -- that IT was a type of personal hovering craft.
Coooooooooooooooooooooooooool. If that's what it is then that is pretty damn neat!
I think it's a motor vehicle of some sort:
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
Consider the Salon article:
According to the inventor of "Ginger," Dean Kamen, his device will be an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
Also from the MSNBC Article:
The "core technology and its implementations" will, according to Kamen, "have a big, broad impact not only on social institutions but some billion-dollar old-line companies." And the invention will "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide. It will be an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
Anything that revolutionary would have to be transportation of some kind. The "billion dollar" companies are car and oil companys (and possibly power companies".
In quantum terms, while the boss in the lab observing the programmers, they are in particle state, doing one thing at a time. But when the boss is out of the room, no longer able to observe them, they change to a wave state, and can be said to be doing everything at once. The boss returns, and they collapse back into particle state. Therefore, to increase productivity, the boss should stay out of the lab.
I'm not really sure I get the "wave state". Is that in contrast to being units, they become one big heterogeneous wave, with all their particles mixed together?
Maybe it's that I just don't really know anything about "quatum wave properties", I took Chemistry for my science sequence in college, I took Physics in high school (which was some time ago). Never really got into anything cool like this in my studies, (although my Calculus professor did explain the chaos theory, which was cool).
I'm trying to read about Quantum and I keep getting an Apache error message about unauthorized access.
If someone has a dumbed-down explanation of Quantum computing that would be nice, 'cause I still have no idea what they are. It seems like they're trying to represent bits at the molecular level, but why that's better is beyond me.
There are enough little 13 year old D00dz in chatrooms across the internet embarassing me as an American by claiming that America is a better county because it can nuke other countries, we don't need them on/. too. Not that you're a d00d.:^)
Just because we intervened in a war doesn't give us the right to act however we want, wherever we want. I get really sick of action movies portraying Americans as tough macho guys, behaving rudely towards anyone from a foreign country, and then defending themselves based on some other American (obviously not them) who fought and died in a war because it was simply the right thing to do.
Appartently Linux-nazis think X-Bill and Ktetris (or whatever) is funner or more intellectually stimulating than Alpha Centauri or Quake. They need actually start playing some of these games that they mention.
I had Artic Fox for my 8086. It was written by Dynamix and came in a box that looked more like a vinyl record than a modern computer game.
I played it alot, if I remember correctly you could drop mines off the back of your tank and bury into the snow. The day I blew up that headquarters thingie I put it on the shelf and never played it again.
Well you saved me a post. I've been saying this for a while. I mean, why do we need a computer to count? Seems a little like overkill, and an unnecessary risk.
I think the perfect solution would be a machine that prints out a hardcopy of your vote and the time. I do believe in physical records, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater however!
Re:I don't trust it & never will
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 1
Ok... excellent point and post.
My idea was a voting machine that printed a hard copy printout of everytime someone voted, who they voted for, and at what time the vote was made. The printouts would be stored only as records, the machine would still tally votes, the hard copies would exist as a measure of checking the vote. The clock would be independent of the computer system (probably just an ordinary punch clock), so it would be near impossible to tamper with the count through electronic means.
It's a hard situation, and noone ever said elections are easy.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. Luckily I went to town hall and made sure they registered me. They called my district booth and told them to put me on the list.
Although they were using M$Access to keep track of who registered, I wonder if that had anything to do with it?
Being the first person to achievesubterranean supersonic travel: priceless.
I think you mean subspatial supersonic travel? Either way it's still wrong, cause everyone knows that Chuch Yeager holds that record. Maybe you mean nonvehicular supersonic travel? I think that's already done before. I think she just wants to set a record for the highest jump ever.
Or maybe she's planning to jump into a cave?
Surprising amount of scientific ignorance here...
on
Sub-Orbital Skydiving
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· Score: 1
Whether she falls from 100,000 feet or 10,000 feet and her chute fails to open she'll hit the earth probably at the same speed (approx. 200 mph, that is, terminal velocity). How long it takes her to slow down from mach 1.5 (speaking of scientific ignorance, I forget if mach is faster or slower at high altitudes) down to terminal velocity, I do not know.
I'm also not sure how she'll survive the transition from the two atmosphere gradiants, she'll drop a considerable amount of speed rather quickly. That must be like hitting the ocean at full freefall, at that speed. My thoughts are that you could easily snap your neck if you enter the lower gradiant at the wrong angle.
I'm not sure whose crazier, her, or that guy who's traveling into space on a home-made rocket (I forget the URL to his site). Well, we all have to go sometime I suppose. Was it Neil Young who sang "better to burn out than to fade away."? I'm not sure.
Bill Gates himself sent it! I saw him put it in his gold-plaited mailbox and send it! I'm surprised he was able to send it, as he was being gored by the Loch Ness monster, from whom he stole the Hitler diaries. It's also surprising that a letter was able to magically turn into email. Alright back to the alien autopsy I'm performing...
I've actually gone back and played a lot of old games I used to like and found a lot of them to be quite monotonous and boring. Even my beloved Castlevania III, which for years I had touted as being the absolute pinnacle of game design and closest thing to God imaginable, turned out to be a so-so experience after playing it ten years later.
It's just that you're all remembering fondly what was most interesting and exciting to you at that particular time period. When I discovered a vintage 25 Ms. Pacman arcade at an equally vintage Pizza Hut near my house, it zapped me right back to 1983. *sigh* Those were good years.
But as a game, Ms. Pacman isn't exactly that dynamic or anything, or really exciting. When it was released it was new, and different, and it was a simpler time in your life. But that's it, it's the past and it's gone. The only thing real is the present.
Actually there are alot of good games out there right now, that after playing them would make it hard to go back.
This is not to say that all old games are crap. I'm just saying that the reason a lot of people like them is for nostalgia, not because they're actually good games. And what I'm reading on this subject is "games were better back then". Well, not really, you just forgot about the ones that sucked.
Incidently, ever see what happens when you score too high in Ms. Pacman and it crashes? It's pretty cool.
No, it's not caffeine that's a laxative. Coffee has other chemicals in it that make it a diaretic (sp?). Caffeine by itself does nothing for your digestive tract.
That's why I like a cup of decaf after dinner. Not that it "expels" (ewwwww...), but it really settles your stomach.
"I don't know what planet you've been on, but here on planet Earth, while there are thousands of highly successful women, the vast majority of programmers, heads of corporations and leaders are men. And not because men are somehow biologically superior--but because from birth, women are told they cannot."
That's what I do not buy. That stuff with his wife, who the hell knows? It's probably true I suppose. And that's a shame, she seems like an extremely intelligent woman. But the above assertion is horsespittle and you know it. Not the women are biologically inferior one, but the "women are in the right to blame men for the lack of female programmers" one.
BTW I don't count what someone writes in a dopey Slashdot post as "hard factual evidence". Maybe you do, which is fine and well I guess. If so I'll be posting my theories on the JFK assassination on Usenet later, be sure to take notes! It's "hard factual evidence" afterall.
This is repeated like a broken record on Slashdot...men are responsible for all of women's problems, including them not wanting to go into this industry. Honestly, I think it's bullshit.
Everybody's been told they couldn't do so and so their whole life, some people succeed despite it (and some women have proved themselves and succeeded), and some people let themselves be defeated by it. A lot of people I know, male and female, have had parents dismiss their efforts at something, for one.
Now the on-job descrimination thing, well that could be a different story. A lot of people in this county use that as an excuse, although some are actually victims of it. Still get over yourself and succeed and stop whining 'cause my ears are starting to hurt...
Slashdot Mirror
'Cause no *nix nor Mac OSX will ever threaten Window's hegemony over the x86 desktop market (and last I checked that's the dominant market - as in 90% of home computers). People will continue to use Windows because it's what they're used to. Even if they try Linux, they don't really have the attention span to harness it's power by learning how to pipe etc.
As for a server platform, I have to plead ignorance as I have no clue what OS X's strengths/weakness's are in terms of stability and security. I don't really see how it could threaten Sun Unix however.
Well from what I saw the difference beteen Windows vs. Linux was pronounced at low resolutions but the difference at high resolutions gets less and less as the resolutions get higher, until it's hardly even noticeable. This was based on Quake3A benchmarks.
God I'm a little sick of the grotesque exagerration of /. MS detractors. MS is a company that makes some good and bad (ok mostly bad) software. But they're not gonna beat down your door for owning illegal software, at least not that I've heard of. Some of the responses to this article are so asinine and ridiculous it's not funny.
I don't mean to be picking on you but I had to say something.
Well unless this is the world's largest and greatest prank, it can't be something as simple as a scooter, seeing as people with real credibility like Steve Jobs, and others with significantly less credibility, like Jeff Bezos, are touting that it is as important an invention as the PC.
Also, according to the acticle, the model will sell for under $2000, which makes it much less expensive then a car. Remember too that it was tested inside a room (I believe) which decreases the chance that it's any kind of helicopter.
One editor who saw the proposal went as far as to speculate -- jokingly (perhaps) -- that IT was a type of personal hovering craft.
Coooooooooooooooooooooooooool. If that's what it is then that is pretty damn neat!
According to the inventor of "Ginger," Dean Kamen, his device will be an alternative to products that "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
Also from the MSNBC Article:
The "core technology and its implementations" will, according to Kamen, "have a big, broad impact not only on social institutions but some billion-dollar old-line companies." And the invention will "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide. It will be an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
Anything that revolutionary would have to be transportation of some kind. The "billion dollar" companies are car and oil companys (and possibly power companies".
I'm not really sure I get the "wave state". Is that in contrast to being units, they become one big heterogeneous wave, with all their particles mixed together?
Maybe it's that I just don't really know anything about "quatum wave properties", I took Chemistry for my science sequence in college, I took Physics in high school (which was some time ago). Never really got into anything cool like this in my studies, (although my Calculus professor did explain the chaos theory, which was cool).
I'm trying to read about Quantum and I keep getting an Apache error message about unauthorized access.
If someone has a dumbed-down explanation of Quantum computing that would be nice, 'cause I still have no idea what they are. It seems like they're trying to represent bits at the molecular level, but why that's better is beyond me.
There are enough little 13 year old D00dz in chatrooms across the internet embarassing me as an American by claiming that America is a better county because it can nuke other countries, we don't need them on /. too. Not that you're a d00d. :^)
Just because we intervened in a war doesn't give us the right to act however we want, wherever we want. I get really sick of action movies portraying Americans as tough macho guys, behaving rudely towards anyone from a foreign country, and then defending themselves based on some other American (obviously not them) who fought and died in a war because it was simply the right thing to do.
Appartently Linux-nazis think X-Bill and Ktetris (or whatever) is funner or more intellectually stimulating than Alpha Centauri or Quake. They need actually start playing some of these games that they mention.
I had Artic Fox for my 8086. It was written by Dynamix and came in a box that looked more like a vinyl record than a modern computer game.
I played it alot, if I remember correctly you could drop mines off the back of your tank and bury into the snow. The day I blew up that headquarters thingie I put it on the shelf and never played it again.
It was a fun game though.
Well you saved me a post. I've been saying this for a while. I mean, why do we need a computer to count? Seems a little like overkill, and an unnecessary risk.
I think the perfect solution would be a machine that prints out a hardcopy of your vote and the time. I do believe in physical records, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater however!
My idea was a voting machine that printed a hard copy printout of everytime someone voted, who they voted for, and at what time the vote was made. The printouts would be stored only as records, the machine would still tally votes, the hard copies would exist as a measure of checking the vote. The clock would be independent of the computer system (probably just an ordinary punch clock), so it would be near impossible to tamper with the count through electronic means.
It's a hard situation, and noone ever said elections are easy.
Although they were using M$Access to keep track of who registered, I wonder if that had anything to do with it?
Ah, interesting. Thanks for the info. I saw it somewhere online, decided it was true, but I couldn't remember where I saw it. Now I know!
Isn't that an oxymoron?
I think you mean subspatial supersonic travel? Either way it's still wrong, cause everyone knows that Chuch Yeager holds that record. Maybe you mean nonvehicular supersonic travel? I think that's already done before. I think she just wants to set a record for the highest jump ever.
Or maybe she's planning to jump into a cave?
Whether she falls from 100,000 feet or 10,000 feet and her chute fails to open she'll hit the earth probably at the same speed (approx. 200 mph, that is, terminal velocity). How long it takes her to slow down from mach 1.5 (speaking of scientific ignorance, I forget if mach is faster or slower at high altitudes) down to terminal velocity, I do not know.
I'm also not sure how she'll survive the transition from the two atmosphere gradiants, she'll drop a considerable amount of speed rather quickly. That must be like hitting the ocean at full freefall, at that speed. My thoughts are that you could easily snap your neck if you enter the lower gradiant at the wrong angle.
I'm not sure whose crazier, her, or that guy who's traveling into space on a home-made rocket (I forget the URL to his site). Well, we all have to go sometime I suppose. Was it Neil Young who sang "better to burn out than to fade away."? I'm not sure.
Bill Gates himself sent it! I saw him put it in his gold-plaited mailbox and send it! I'm surprised he was able to send it, as he was being gored by the Loch Ness monster, from whom he stole the Hitler diaries. It's also surprising that a letter was able to magically turn into email. Alright back to the alien autopsy I'm performing...
In a society based on power, and a culture based on money, what did you expect? Happiness? *laugh*
People in technology are a lot dumber than they realize sometimes.
Why the hell would you want to wear a computer?
Sorry if I messed that phrase up.
I've actually gone back and played a lot of old games I used to like and found a lot of them to be quite monotonous and boring. Even my beloved Castlevania III, which for years I had touted as being the absolute pinnacle of game design and closest thing to God imaginable, turned out to be a so-so experience after playing it ten years later.
It's just that you're all remembering fondly what was most interesting and exciting to you at that particular time period. When I discovered a vintage 25 Ms. Pacman arcade at an equally vintage Pizza Hut near my house, it zapped me right back to 1983. *sigh* Those were good years.
But as a game, Ms. Pacman isn't exactly that dynamic or anything, or really exciting. When it was released it was new, and different, and it was a simpler time in your life. But that's it, it's the past and it's gone. The only thing real is the present.
Actually there are alot of good games out there right now, that after playing them would make it hard to go back.
This is not to say that all old games are crap. I'm just saying that the reason a lot of people like them is for nostalgia, not because they're actually good games. And what I'm reading on this subject is "games were better back then". Well, not really, you just forgot about the ones that sucked.
Incidently, ever see what happens when you score too high in Ms. Pacman and it crashes? It's pretty cool.
That's why I like a cup of decaf after dinner. Not that it "expels" (ewwwww...), but it really settles your stomach.
"I don't know what planet you've been on, but here on planet Earth, while there are thousands of highly successful women, the vast majority of programmers, heads of corporations and leaders are men. And not because men are somehow biologically superior--but because from birth, women are told they cannot."
That's what I do not buy. That stuff with his wife, who the hell knows? It's probably true I suppose. And that's a shame, she seems like an extremely intelligent woman. But the above assertion is horsespittle and you know it. Not the women are biologically inferior one, but the "women are in the right to blame men for the lack of female programmers" one.
BTW I don't count what someone writes in a dopey Slashdot post as "hard factual evidence". Maybe you do, which is fine and well I guess. If so I'll be posting my theories on the JFK assassination on Usenet later, be sure to take notes! It's "hard factual evidence" afterall.
Wench.
Sorry dude, I just don't buy it.
This is repeated like a broken record on Slashdot...men are responsible for all of women's problems, including them not wanting to go into this industry. Honestly, I think it's bullshit.
Everybody's been told they couldn't do so and so their whole life, some people succeed despite it (and some women have proved themselves and succeeded), and some people let themselves be defeated by it. A lot of people I know, male and female, have had parents dismiss their efforts at something, for one.
Now the on-job descrimination thing, well that could be a different story. A lot of people in this county use that as an excuse, although some are actually victims of it. Still get over yourself and succeed and stop whining 'cause my ears are starting to hurt...