At some point I suppose you decided that it was pointless to spend all your time spewing FUD about "Windoze XP" and you've now decided to switch gears to FUDing Vista instead.
No, XP still sucks. As a PVR it has poor uptime and should not be connected to the internet. Just the same, the author should know that XP is more stable than Vista and there's more software and hardware available for XP to make a PVR than there is for Vista.
Someone who really knows what they are doing has MythTV working. You can connect that to the internet and that's what has the MAFIAA scared. The future is free.
All those new laptops being sold, they're all to "hardest core fanboys", are they? No, I'm not talking about the fraction of a per cent who want XP again, I'm talking about the 99.9x% of users who have it. Hard core fanboys, are they?
Count them for me, before the vendors go out of business. Other restrictive devices have failed in the past. M$ has made the mistake of making their whole OS into a restrictive device and people are not buying it.
In another move that was sure to infuriate many geeks, the 70 year old presidential hopeful also said that he would ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to serve on his cabinet to deal with technology issues if elected. He did not however say what position Ballmer might be hired in, but did joke that he might consider him for a diplomatic position, such as ambassador to China.
Is clicking "Check for updates" and "Install updates" too difficult for the "average GNU/Linux person"?
Sure it is, if the damn SATA drive does not work. The average GNU/Linux person would never get to the screen where they could press that button. From previous broken "updates" the button is a crap shot anyway.
No, I've never used Vista and I hope never to have to. Vista is so broken that it is not installed on any public machines and reasonable places of work have banned it. Only the hardest core fanboys have Vista and keeps it.
This article is looking more and more like an attempt to advertise and sell Vista. No one else is buying it, so M$ has decided to try to push it on Slashdot users. Ha, fat chance. Anyone familiar with AV in the Windoze world has their pet third party applications that work under XP. People who know enough to make MythTV work will be far happier with it than any DRM crippled pile from M$.
MythTV is growing into much more than a PVR and it scares M$ the MAFIAA silly. It's getting video conferencing, games, email and browsing - which all look great on HD TV's. You can plug Amarok onto it and have a really cool video/music juke box. It can store and share all your pictures and media with the world. This is what M$ would like their media center to do and how they intend to stay relevant in the home market while their core products quickly become second rate commodities most people take for granted and can get online at no cost. The Zune squirt is a good indicator of how well their ambitions will work out and a good advertisement for free software. Sooner or later, people are going to demand these things without obnoxious restrictions and the MAFIAA's nasty little "IP" laws are going to go into the trash. The legal and technical barriers M$/MAFIAA erected have no more shut down MythTV than Vista has satisfied customer demands. Free software is doing more to enable HD content than M$ ever will.
a lot of GNU/Linux people either are stuck dealing with Windows in their day jobs
If the author of the article was really familiar with Windoze, he would have known to use XP and third party applications for his media center. If not, he would never have made Vista work. There's a lot about this article that does not add up and I smell a switcher attack.
The more I think about it, the more the article looks like an ad for Vista. One of many M$ PR drones posting as AC insultingly froths:
All you're doing is slagging off the author and not addressing some of his very reasonable points.
I did not see many reasonable points in Vista's favor. Mostly the author dips to M$ talking points about "correctness" "experience" and other nebulous observations. There was no number of click count for common tasks, mention of digital restrictions or other ease of use issues that people really care about.
Why, exactly would someone spend hours setting up (or failing to set up) MythTV when Vista can do everything MythTV can?
Here the author almost got things right. Vista gave him more hardware trouble than MythTV did. Getting Vista to work at all is difficult for all but the most hardened fanboys who know all the details of driver downloading, register hacking, etc. That he used Vista at all is fishy, because most AV people will tell you to sick with XP and excellent third party software available on that platform. HD is almost certain to tip the balance further in Myth's favor because it too has been working for a while and you can still get hardware that is not limited by broadcast flags. Try that on anything from M$.
Yet again, Microsoft have produced a superior product which people actually WANT, and can USE.
People don't want DRM and the very purpose of digital restrictions is to keep people from doing what they want, even if the shit worked out of the box.
Windows XP for my special needs and Ubuntu for the basic stuff seems to get the job done for me without spending money.
The AV people I know say things like, "I'm never going to Vista," so the use and advocacy of Vista smells. I'm surprised he was able to make Vista work at all, a task that's defeated the local M$ Ambassadors here at LSU and all they wanted was a desktop. Once you get around the driver issues you run straight into digital restrictions like disabled SPDIF outputs for "premium" content which make Vista unusable for hard core AV fans. Perhaps ignoring HD was more a kindness to Vista than it was to MythTV which is reported to work despite legal restrictions and other created evil.
Finally all of the M$ keywords and phrases make this "Sprak" guy sound like a M$ PR drone. "Microsoft-hater", nebulous talk about "correctness" "experience" to claim M$ has a better interface, all of this stinks out loud.
Fake "objectivity" is what I've come to expect from the M$ PR people. The more you "get the facts" from them the more wrong you are.
I'm surprised he was able to make Vista work at all. The solutions to Windoze driver problems are not something the average GNU/Linux person would know.
This and several M$ key phrases make me suspect the author and think MythTV is better than he describes.
The author, who you call a "zealot" says this about himself:
I'll be honest about my bias, I've been involved with Linux for about 14 years and love it! I held an officer position at a US LUG and have made my Linux machine my main home system (with a little OS X on my G5 for diversity). In addition, as are some Linux users, I'm usually a Microsoft-hater but am forced to use Windows and associated bloatware at work so I try to see the best in it- sigh.
This sounds, to me, like half the astroturf here on Slashdot. No self respecting free software advocate would call themselves a "Microsoft-hater" or a "zealot". These are terms M$ has made up to defend their non free software, digital restrictions, licensing and other obnoxious practices. Anyone who values freedom is labled this way by non free software companies. Dislike of these practices does not make a person blind. His objectivity is suspect to say the least.
You say:
Then he proceeds to say since mythtv cant do HDTV and Media center can, he is going to hold off on HDTV. WTF that alone makes MythTV totally useless for a huge number of techies.
You might mention the reason for that:
I've temporarily held off on HDTV tuners as I'm on special assignment in Europe, with no access to signal.
Oh, huge minus there. There are cards that work.
You might also mention that most free software minuses are legally created fictions. It's still against the law to distribute a full free media system in the US. Your company risks a raid if they do so much as tell you where to get things, so it's a good thing Mark Shuttleworth is from South Africa.
All and all, I'm not sure if this message from new member "Sprak" is what it says it is or if it's just another PR ass wiper from the Redmond lie machine. Besides "Microsoft-hater" he uses a lot of other M$ keywords, "[M$] do hire some smart and talented people", "Vista install was pretty painless with some nice eyecandy and a generally more "serious" look than XP", "there is a feeling of connectedness in the software" and so on and so forth. You can spot these things from a mile away. They all sound the same because they all come with the same marching orders and talking points. Only someone intimately familiar with Windoze workarounds can make Vista work the way he did or would have the M$ brainwash language so ingrained into their thoughts. Such a person would not have time know free software, much less be a LUG officer.
It's always been this way with M$. You change versions, you lose work. Office 2007 is just a bigger problem not a different problem. It's good to see it being rejected.
It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.
It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.
Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.
they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
No, they use it because the journals demand it. I'm glad that's changing. Word is crazy, quirky and wastes the users time. It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life. You should know that from all the problems your wife has at times like this when there's no Mac version available.
For collaboration, subversion works great. If it has not already been worked into Open Office and others, it won't take much to do it. All of this is old hat for people who have been combining work from hundreds of people to make free software. The collaboration tools M$ introduced a couple of years ago are late and second rate as usual.
I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.
RzUpAnmsCwrds, you already have my nickel because you are a paid M$ PR hack. As is par for the course, M$ had dumped the new Office at LSU, so a part of my "tech fee" has purchased it.
No, I'm not elitists to say that Word is only the best tool for the job when someone else demands it. By choice, people used alternatives like Word Perfect which you seem to have forgotten about. Word only gained it's share because M$ dumped it and buttered up some "decision makers" in big dumb companies. PhDs and other people brave enough to look beyond the start menu knows Word's just another way for M$ to make money through format lock in and "network effect."
There are several good alternatives to the new Office but no good reason to buy into it. There's Kword, Open Office, Abiword, Star Office and Word Perfect. With LyX, you can do GUI Tex if you want. If you are really stuck on Office, Open Office is a good fit. The only reason to move to the new Office is that you want M$ at any cost.
Yes and I know second rate when I see it. Windoze is hopelessly outclassed by any GNU/Linux distribution. It's important for people who know computing to recommend what's best.
When you "help" your friends put Windoze on their computer, you are not really helping them. Send them to the local shop and make them pay for their folly. If it's a work related thing, their boss should pay for it. Windoze is only easy because so many people help M$ out every day. Keeping up with Windoze is a waste of time that only helps people who are screwing you. The less you tax yourself with Windoze, the more expensive it becomes for those who demand it.
None of this really matters because M$ is failing. Vista is a flop. No one wants it. Vendors are losing money and many are in open revolt. As the upgrade train grinds to a halt, the end of M$ is near.
"Nonsense", said the old man. If you offer a reward for something, of course you want more of it, not less. This is just the free market in action."
Next comes community outrage and jailtime for fraud. Let's hope we see some of that for all the intentional waste M$ has created in two decades of coercive monoply.
The author does get one thing right but fails to follow up on it correctly:
None of the cost-driver factors lead to reduced costs with multiple formats. They all have minimal costs when there is a a single format in use.
This is true but by this argument the lowest cost solution should be chosen and M$ has screwed themselves by creating a new non free format. Before they pushed OOXML, it could be argued that everyone had access to a M$ Word Processor. The use of a non free format created plenty of problems, but changing formats created others and people could pretend nothing was wrong. Now OOXML is used by none, so that choice maximizes the transaction costs for everyone. This should drive everone to Open Office, which costs nothing to install, works well with the old format and comes with a superior free format that all government agencies should be moving toward.
some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.
Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
Home automation technology just is not to the point yet where you can install and forget. It's constant tweaks and upgrades, failed components, trying to figure out odd configuration files, languages, and protocols to get things to work correctly and with each other.
There is big money to be saved on air conditioning in New Orleans, so this is worth your while. Venting the roof is a good low tech starting point that can use simple temperature based automation, aka the bi-metallic switch they come with. There's a house in my neighborhood with three large box fans and filters in the eaves to keep the attic cool. After that, it's worth your while to learn how to talk to your air conditioner. If you are not going to be around all day or go on vacation, it would be nice to tell the thermostat what to do - so find one that works and will take instructions from your computer. Once you have it working, it should last 20 years, which hardly makes you a slave to it.
Putting in network cable for entertainment purposes has been well defended here.
Is there anything else, though, that's read/write on pretty much all OSs?
Ask those idiots at M$ why Vista only works with FAT/NTFS and ignores better, royalty free formats. Ext2 was common when they got XP out the gate six long years ago. While you are at it, you can ask them why their format tools can only make a 32GB FAT partition and file system. Steve Jobs may have some questions to answer too, but I don't know what file systems Apple works with.
Oh, I see, M$ has a FFS2 system that does wear leveling but presents a FAT disk to the computer and they charge royalties on it. Now you know why they have not moved on. Too bad for them the new system avoids their royalties and will be saving the makers a big 40 million bucks. FTFA:
Officials expect local companies to save $40 million in licensing fees thanks to the card, in addition to profiting from sales. Taiwanese companies will not have to pay royalties to make miCards or related technology.
I hope they do the same with their music players and OGG, having been burnt so badly by Plays for Sure DRM.
Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB, you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
Why? Have your old devices stopped working? Mine have not and I've got more than enough flash cards for the forseeable future. Time marches on, sometimes things get better. My six year old CF based Cannon camera is still a champ, but it shipped with a 16MB card! 64 MB cards were just enough for a weekend, 256MB cards were nice and the 1GB card I have is strictly overkill. My newer of the same takes MMC and I knew it's limitations when I bought it. 1GB cards are enough to get as much video as the device has battery. I'm looking forward to HD video devices that will tax this new card.
The big reason to move seems to be licensing. FTFA:
Officials expect local companies to save $40 million in licensing fees thanks to the card, in addition to profiting from sales. Taiwanese companies will not have to pay royalties to make miCards or related technology.
Slam, that's a lot of money. Hopefully, they see the same logic for OGG and friends. I'd really like it if my next camera did not come with a CD full of Windoze shit and that everything worked out of the box.
... that was the line in April. In May it shifted to reports of huge Vista shipments followed by "Of corse M$ has been selling huge piles of Vista their a convicted monopolist
Yes, Microsoft is a convicted, coercive monopolist. So now, in June, the suppliers who took all of those Vista CDs are firing people. This is not a coincidence, it's a consequence. Vista is not selling and those who were forced to take it lost. "Channel stuffing" is little more than a transfer of wealth from places like Walmart, Dell, and others to M$.
I'm not sure he really gives a fuck, to be honest. When you're a billionaire ex-CEO of one of the world's largest and most successful companies, whose time is increasingly devoted to running a charity foundation to distribute AIDS drugs and whatnot, I really doubt your top concern is astroturfing Slashdot.... It's depressing in and of itself that someone can be as mouth-foamy as you are about some fscking software.
M$ spends about a billion dollars a month on marketing. I spend a few minutes a day.
Bill Gates' supposed charity is his bid to 0wn medicine and education. Big drug companies like his "IP" ideas and the crappy laws he got passed but they won't like what he does to them and medicine. Those same "IP" laws have doomed millions to die without otherwise cheap medicine. Everything he does comes with strings attached, such as pledging to use M$ software, respect their patents and other nonsense that has nothing to do with medicine or education. For every dollar spent, the typically "leverages" nine in public spending but demands complete control of the results. Worse, he's used foundation funds to purchase independent newspapers that have looked into his misdeeds.
Circuit city and Dell are in the retail sector, and that article doesn't say who at Motorola is getting canned.
Yeah, but CC and Dell and CompUSA and anyone else selling hardware has been squeezed by M$ and burnt by poor sales. That they are firing people means they expect worse. After six years of waiting, Vista is a flop. People are really sick of the upgrade train and it's hurt the whole industry's reputation. Time for honest computing.
How does Motorola get into this mix? Well the neat-o things about their new phones are all features that depend on M$ desktops to work and other rape you deals. M$'s move into digital music is just as as big a disaster as Vista is. Plays for Sure failed and then got stabbed in the back, so those who took the trouble to install drivers and wade through the WMP nightmare got screwed. How many $250+ phones are you going to sell that way? The M$/RIAA/MPAA cluster fuck here is amazingly bad.
After six years of waiting, Vista blows so it's hard times for those pushing the retail upgrade train. It may be possible to remove the M$ tumors, but they are so far spread over the tech industry that it's going to hurt before it gets better. The fine summary forgot to add CompUSA to the list of those harmed by the collapse of non free. Time for another gig.
80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.
There has to be a typo hiding in there, but the whole thing is an empty set. It's hard to believe they can make 80 cores with 100E6 transistors when it take 261E6 transistors to make two. Each core would have less than a million transistors in the 80 core model. You have to go all the way back to the 486 to see that kind of count from Intel. It's possible because the cores are not x86, there's no "ability to use memory" and... it's vapor ware. For the practical significance, they might as well have photographed a box of Pentiums and called it useful because Open Mosix does auto clustering and there are live CD versions. You've got a better chance of computing something with the box of Pentiums.
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At some point I suppose you decided that it was pointless to spend all your time spewing FUD about "Windoze XP" and you've now decided to switch gears to FUDing Vista instead.
No, XP still sucks. As a PVR it has poor uptime and should not be connected to the internet. Just the same, the author should know that XP is more stable than Vista and there's more software and hardware available for XP to make a PVR than there is for Vista.
Someone who really knows what they are doing has MythTV working. You can connect that to the internet and that's what has the MAFIAA scared. The future is free.
All those new laptops being sold, they're all to "hardest core fanboys", are they? No, I'm not talking about the fraction of a per cent who want XP again, I'm talking about the 99.9x% of users who have it. Hard core fanboys, are they?
Count them for me, before the vendors go out of business. Other restrictive devices have failed in the past. M$ has made the mistake of making their whole OS into a restrictive device and people are not buying it.
What an ass:
I suppose things can get worse.
Is clicking "Check for updates" and "Install updates" too difficult for the "average GNU/Linux person"?
Sure it is, if the damn SATA drive does not work. The average GNU/Linux person would never get to the screen where they could press that button. From previous broken "updates" the button is a crap shot anyway.
No, I've never used Vista and I hope never to have to. Vista is so broken that it is not installed on any public machines and reasonable places of work have banned it. Only the hardest core fanboys have Vista and keeps it.
This article is looking more and more like an attempt to advertise and sell Vista. No one else is buying it, so M$ has decided to try to push it on Slashdot users. Ha, fat chance. Anyone familiar with AV in the Windoze world has their pet third party applications that work under XP. People who know enough to make MythTV work will be far happier with it than any DRM crippled pile from M$.
MythTV is growing into much more than a PVR and it scares M$ the MAFIAA silly. It's getting video conferencing, games, email and browsing - which all look great on HD TV's. You can plug Amarok onto it and have a really cool video/music juke box. It can store and share all your pictures and media with the world. This is what M$ would like their media center to do and how they intend to stay relevant in the home market while their core products quickly become second rate commodities most people take for granted and can get online at no cost. The Zune squirt is a good indicator of how well their ambitions will work out and a good advertisement for free software. Sooner or later, people are going to demand these things without obnoxious restrictions and the MAFIAA's nasty little "IP" laws are going to go into the trash. The legal and technical barriers M$/MAFIAA erected have no more shut down MythTV than Vista has satisfied customer demands. Free software is doing more to enable HD content than M$ ever will.
a lot of GNU/Linux people either are stuck dealing with Windows in their day jobs
If the author of the article was really familiar with Windoze, he would have known to use XP and third party applications for his media center. If not, he would never have made Vista work. There's a lot about this article that does not add up and I smell a switcher attack.
The more I think about it, the more the article looks like an ad for Vista. One of many M$ PR drones posting as AC insultingly froths:
All you're doing is slagging off the author and not addressing some of his very reasonable points.
I did not see many reasonable points in Vista's favor. Mostly the author dips to M$ talking points about "correctness" "experience" and other nebulous observations. There was no number of click count for common tasks, mention of digital restrictions or other ease of use issues that people really care about.
Why, exactly would someone spend hours setting up (or failing to set up) MythTV when Vista can do everything MythTV can?
Here the author almost got things right. Vista gave him more hardware trouble than MythTV did. Getting Vista to work at all is difficult for all but the most hardened fanboys who know all the details of driver downloading, register hacking, etc. That he used Vista at all is fishy, because most AV people will tell you to sick with XP and excellent third party software available on that platform. HD is almost certain to tip the balance further in Myth's favor because it too has been working for a while and you can still get hardware that is not limited by broadcast flags. Try that on anything from M$.
Yet again, Microsoft have produced a superior product which people actually WANT, and can USE.
People don't want DRM and the very purpose of digital restrictions is to keep people from doing what they want, even if the shit worked out of the box.
Windows XP for my special needs and Ubuntu for the basic stuff seems to get the job done for me without spending money.
The AV people I know say things like, "I'm never going to Vista," so the use and advocacy of Vista smells. I'm surprised he was able to make Vista work at all, a task that's defeated the local M$ Ambassadors here at LSU and all they wanted was a desktop. Once you get around the driver issues you run straight into digital restrictions like disabled SPDIF outputs for "premium" content which make Vista unusable for hard core AV fans. Perhaps ignoring HD was more a kindness to Vista than it was to MythTV which is reported to work despite legal restrictions and other created evil.
Finally all of the M$ keywords and phrases make this "Sprak" guy sound like a M$ PR drone. "Microsoft-hater", nebulous talk about "correctness" "experience" to claim M$ has a better interface, all of this stinks out loud.
Fake "objectivity" is what I've come to expect from the M$ PR people. The more you "get the facts" from them the more wrong you are.
I'm surprised he was able to make Vista work at all. The solutions to Windoze driver problems are not something the average GNU/Linux person would know.
This and several M$ key phrases make me suspect the author and think MythTV is better than he describes.
The author, who you call a "zealot" says this about himself:
This sounds, to me, like half the astroturf here on Slashdot. No self respecting free software advocate would call themselves a "Microsoft-hater" or a "zealot". These are terms M$ has made up to defend their non free software, digital restrictions, licensing and other obnoxious practices. Anyone who values freedom is labled this way by non free software companies. Dislike of these practices does not make a person blind. His objectivity is suspect to say the least.
You say:
Then he proceeds to say since mythtv cant do HDTV and Media center can, he is going to hold off on HDTV. WTF that alone makes MythTV totally useless for a huge number of techies.
You might mention the reason for that:
Oh, huge minus there. There are cards that work.
You might also mention that most free software minuses are legally created fictions. It's still against the law to distribute a full free media system in the US. Your company risks a raid if they do so much as tell you where to get things, so it's a good thing Mark Shuttleworth is from South Africa.
All and all, I'm not sure if this message from new member "Sprak" is what it says it is or if it's just another PR ass wiper from the Redmond lie machine. Besides "Microsoft-hater" he uses a lot of other M$ keywords, "[M$] do hire some smart and talented people", "Vista install was pretty painless with some nice eyecandy and a generally more "serious" look than XP", "there is a feeling of connectedness in the software" and so on and so forth. You can spot these things from a mile away. They all sound the same because they all come with the same marching orders and talking points. Only someone intimately familiar with Windoze workarounds can make Vista work the way he did or would have the M$ brainwash language so ingrained into their thoughts. Such a person would not have time know free software, much less be a LUG officer.
There is a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Maybe they should research that!
Oh, you mean that thing that sucks life that Rob describes in his "Interoperability by Design" article? What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?
It's always been this way with M$. You change versions, you lose work. Office 2007 is just a bigger problem not a different problem. It's good to see it being rejected.
It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.
It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.
Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.
they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
No, they use it because the journals demand it. I'm glad that's changing. Word is crazy, quirky and wastes the users time. It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life. You should know that from all the problems your wife has at times like this when there's no Mac version available.
For collaboration, subversion works great. If it has not already been worked into Open Office and others, it won't take much to do it. All of this is old hat for people who have been combining work from hundreds of people to make free software. The collaboration tools M$ introduced a couple of years ago are late and second rate as usual.
I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.
RzUpAnmsCwrds, you already have my nickel because you are a paid M$ PR hack. As is par for the course, M$ had dumped the new Office at LSU, so a part of my "tech fee" has purchased it.
No, I'm not elitists to say that Word is only the best tool for the job when someone else demands it. By choice, people used alternatives like Word Perfect which you seem to have forgotten about. Word only gained it's share because M$ dumped it and buttered up some "decision makers" in big dumb companies. PhDs and other people brave enough to look beyond the start menu knows Word's just another way for M$ to make money through format lock in and "network effect."
There are several good alternatives to the new Office but no good reason to buy into it. There's Kword, Open Office, Abiword, Star Office and Word Perfect. With LyX, you can do GUI Tex if you want. If you are really stuck on Office, Open Office is a good fit. The only reason to move to the new Office is that you want M$ at any cost.
it's good to see that you're open minded
Yes and I know second rate when I see it. Windoze is hopelessly outclassed by any GNU/Linux distribution. It's important for people who know computing to recommend what's best.
When you "help" your friends put Windoze on their computer, you are not really helping them. Send them to the local shop and make them pay for their folly. If it's a work related thing, their boss should pay for it. Windoze is only easy because so many people help M$ out every day. Keeping up with Windoze is a waste of time that only helps people who are screwing you. The less you tax yourself with Windoze, the more expensive it becomes for those who demand it.
None of this really matters because M$ is failing. Vista is a flop. No one wants it. Vendors are losing money and many are in open revolt. As the upgrade train grinds to a halt, the end of M$ is near.
The parable has the wrong ending:
Next comes community outrage and jailtime for fraud. Let's hope we see some of that for all the intentional waste M$ has created in two decades of coercive monoply.
The author does get one thing right but fails to follow up on it correctly:
This is true but by this argument the lowest cost solution should be chosen and M$ has screwed themselves by creating a new non free format. Before they pushed OOXML, it could be argued that everyone had access to a M$ Word Processor. The use of a non free format created plenty of problems, but changing formats created others and people could pretend nothing was wrong. Now OOXML is used by none, so that choice maximizes the transaction costs for everyone. This should drive everone to Open Office, which costs nothing to install, works well with the old format and comes with a superior free format that all government agencies should be moving toward.
some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.
Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
Home automation technology just is not to the point yet where you can install and forget. It's constant tweaks and upgrades, failed components, trying to figure out odd configuration files, languages, and protocols to get things to work correctly and with each other.
There is big money to be saved on air conditioning in New Orleans, so this is worth your while. Venting the roof is a good low tech starting point that can use simple temperature based automation, aka the bi-metallic switch they come with. There's a house in my neighborhood with three large box fans and filters in the eaves to keep the attic cool. After that, it's worth your while to learn how to talk to your air conditioner. If you are not going to be around all day or go on vacation, it would be nice to tell the thermostat what to do - so find one that works and will take instructions from your computer. Once you have it working, it should last 20 years, which hardly makes you a slave to it.
Putting in network cable for entertainment purposes has been well defended here.
Is there anything else, though, that's read/write on pretty much all OSs?
Ask those idiots at M$ why Vista only works with FAT/NTFS and ignores better, royalty free formats. Ext2 was common when they got XP out the gate six long years ago. While you are at it, you can ask them why their format tools can only make a 32GB FAT partition and file system. Steve Jobs may have some questions to answer too, but I don't know what file systems Apple works with.
Oh, I see, M$ has a FFS2 system that does wear leveling but presents a FAT disk to the computer and they charge royalties on it. Now you know why they have not moved on. Too bad for them the new system avoids their royalties and will be saving the makers a big 40 million bucks. FTFA:
I hope they do the same with their music players and OGG, having been burnt so badly by Plays for Sure DRM.
Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB, you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
Why? Have your old devices stopped working? Mine have not and I've got more than enough flash cards for the forseeable future. Time marches on, sometimes things get better. My six year old CF based Cannon camera is still a champ, but it shipped with a 16MB card! 64 MB cards were just enough for a weekend, 256MB cards were nice and the 1GB card I have is strictly overkill. My newer of the same takes MMC and I knew it's limitations when I bought it. 1GB cards are enough to get as much video as the device has battery. I'm looking forward to HD video devices that will tax this new card.
The big reason to move seems to be licensing. FTFA:
Slam, that's a lot of money. Hopefully, they see the same logic for OGG and friends. I'd really like it if my next camera did not come with a CD full of Windoze shit and that everything worked out of the box.
An insulting AC writes:
Yes, Microsoft is a convicted, coercive monopolist. So now, in June, the suppliers who took all of those Vista CDs are firing people. This is not a coincidence, it's a consequence. Vista is not selling and those who were forced to take it lost. "Channel stuffing" is little more than a transfer of wealth from places like Walmart, Dell, and others to M$.
Yes, AC, "shit" is how M$ is pronounced.
I'm not sure he really gives a fuck, to be honest. When you're a billionaire ex-CEO of one of the world's largest and most successful companies, whose time is increasingly devoted to running a charity foundation to distribute AIDS drugs and whatnot, I really doubt your top concern is astroturfing Slashdot. ... It's depressing in and of itself that someone can be as mouth-foamy as you are about some fscking software.
M$ spends about a billion dollars a month on marketing. I spend a few minutes a day.
Bill Gates' supposed charity is his bid to 0wn medicine and education. Big drug companies like his "IP" ideas and the crappy laws he got passed but they won't like what he does to them and medicine. Those same "IP" laws have doomed millions to die without otherwise cheap medicine. Everything he does comes with strings attached, such as pledging to use M$ software, respect their patents and other nonsense that has nothing to do with medicine or education. For every dollar spent, the typically "leverages" nine in public spending but demands complete control of the results. Worse, he's used foundation funds to purchase independent newspapers that have looked into his misdeeds.
Circuit city and Dell are in the retail sector, and that article doesn't say who at Motorola is getting canned.
Yeah, but CC and Dell and CompUSA and anyone else selling hardware has been squeezed by M$ and burnt by poor sales. That they are firing people means they expect worse. After six years of waiting, Vista is a flop. People are really sick of the upgrade train and it's hurt the whole industry's reputation. Time for honest computing.
How does Motorola get into this mix? Well the neat-o things about their new phones are all features that depend on M$ desktops to work and other rape you deals. M$'s move into digital music is just as as big a disaster as Vista is. Plays for Sure failed and then got stabbed in the back, so those who took the trouble to install drivers and wade through the WMP nightmare got screwed. How many $250+ phones are you going to sell that way? The M$/RIAA/MPAA cluster fuck here is amazingly bad.
2007 is the year of Linux.
After six years of waiting, Vista blows so it's hard times for those pushing the retail upgrade train. It may be possible to remove the M$ tumors, but they are so far spread over the tech industry that it's going to hurt before it gets better. The fine summary forgot to add CompUSA to the list of those harmed by the collapse of non free. Time for another gig.
80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.
There has to be a typo hiding in there, but the whole thing is an empty set. It's hard to believe they can make 80 cores with 100E6 transistors when it take 261E6 transistors to make two. Each core would have less than a million transistors in the 80 core model. You have to go all the way back to the 486 to see that kind of count from Intel. It's possible because the cores are not x86, there's no "ability to use memory" and ... it's vapor ware. For the practical significance, they might as well have photographed a box of Pentiums and called it useful because Open Mosix does auto clustering and there are live CD versions. You've got a better chance of computing something with the box of Pentiums.
Bus space is not likely to be an issue either. It does not show up in this image of the cell processor.