An even better thing to do would be to standardize one API that the Linux kernel uses and give that to manufacturers so they can support all Linuxes, rather than masquerading as Windows.
We already do that, Linux implements ACPI. However Windows doesn't. So motherboard makers theoretically would have to accommodate the Windows oddities *and* support the standard (which wouldn't work in Windows). Fun huh ? How many are prepared to support the extra cost ?
Or of course the kernel developers can make do with the broken implementation of ACPI that are seen in the wild and that do work with Windows. In practice it's the only way to make sure the system will work on a random x86 type of machine.
Putting the obvious Microsoft fears aside, can we not give credit where credit is due?
Microsoft have taken a huge step into open source here and they deserve to be nurtured and supported by a willing community so that we can all make the most of it.
When your neighbour who has thrown rocks in all your windows, cut down your trees, slashed your tyres and poisoned your cat suddenly acts friendly and invites you to have dinner, what's your first move ? To show support and willingness or to go in your garage to decide which of the tyre iron or the baseball bat you're going to bring ?
And also, use an app that supports paragraphs. They'll do wonders for your TPS reports (security analysts might not tell you that but it's still important).
Ok, sure you can't even be sure unless you have the microcode running your hardware. But for 99.999% of people, the source is good enough.
Even then you can't be sure, because the hole could be built into the hardware. The best you can really do is get a stack of identical processors and chip sets and destructively slice all but one of them up and run them through an electron microscope to verify the circuits -
Of course that's assuming you have the code for the microscope controller... After all it's only showing stuff on a screen... Who knows if it's real ?
I've seen cases where a car's hubcaps were blurred, presumably because the face-search-and-blur algorithm hit it. Here is one example (for street view of 116 Manhattan Ave, Jersey City, NJ, in case the link isn't right).
That's just because of all those cases of NJ hubcap thieves using Google street view to plan their larcenies. Those vile criminals !
That's ok, the server will just run on Linux. Joke aside, it's easy to multiply the number of servers, and the capacity of the systems will grow.
On the other hand, is it useful to access an online desktop from a handheld unit ? If one considers that iPhone or HTC type of terminals are setting the trend, can you actually do something with a "desktop" system from one of those things ? Or is a eeePC the minimum you're expected to be using ? Presumably you're supposed to use some kind of embedded system, since you don't have a desktop system any more...
About the size of what house? And no, a quarter is not recognised everywhere. An example: http://www.ericstrains.com/n-scale/images/n-scale_size.jpg I have no idea what that coin is, so I do not know what the size of that train is (or it could be an enournously large coin, and the train is normal scale)
Quite, I believe that image was lifted from Google Earth, somewhere in northern Canada where a giant coin was built for unknown reasons (possibly to lure aliens).
Interesting that the new laptops seem to work better with Linux than with XP. Of course whether they actually do work with Vista is debatable...
My current laptop came with Vista as well. I kept it on a shrunken partition for a while so I could poke at it for a while to see what it was like. The best bit was when it went (through one of the security alert thingies) "are you the one who tried to format the SD card in the card slot ?" So I clicked Yes. And the reply "You are not allowed to write to the card slot for you are not worthy" (or something). So I nuked the partition with mkfs.ext3 and good riddance. Works fine now with a KDE desktop.
It (used to) run just fine. Can't say how it runs nowadays but I ran it on a R3000 without problems a few years back. Of course you didn't get to use the x86 blobs such as Flash, some proprietary apps and such.
It also ran a couple of the BSDs if I recall correctly.
So there's no reason it shouldn't work any more.
And regarding the specs of the laptop, I used to have (well I still have it but don't use it because of the dead battery) a PII 400MHz machine that came with 128Megs of memory (Sony PictureBook) and it ran fine for some time (2000 to 2003 I'd say) running KDE. I eventually added a little RAM but as it came originally it worked quite well. I ran StarOffice (or was it OOo already ?) on Mandrake and never had any trouble with it. It was a great little machine despite it's 1 hour of battery life and weird screen size (1024x480).
Rumor != News. Steve Jobs is pretty much the heart & sole of Apple.
So what you're saying is that he should step on it ?
This doesn't make much sense to me... But that's ok, I'm a consultant, things don't have to make sense to me (nor do I have to make sense, so it all balances out in the end).
Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone.
Nah, we know that the olympics and the olympic committee are all a bunch of nice guys and not are all in it for the money. It's all done in the spirit of sports and fraternity and cooperation.
Presumably they just had to recoup the cost of the access points. Those things are expensive you know.
Now why should there be a driver for a card reader (I presume it's one of the ubiquitous SD/memory stick readers) ? They always seem to be on the USB bus internally and should be plain mass storage devices. Stupid Windows requiring drivers for everything... They probably want drivers for speakers nowadays.
Especially since the pound currency sign is part of the Latin 1 aka ISO-8859-1 character set that/. claims to use (in position 163 or 0xA3). No Unicode required.
This sounds like a lot of bollock cheap crap talk to me. So; electric cars are going to save the future because no one needs to use gas to power their cars. Cool. So what device is providing the power to fuel those electric cars?
Robocar : We are now aploaching highway, please to pedal faster User : puff puff, I should have bought a fresh set of batteries
Thanks to an ongoing education project, you can see the kinetic crater left by the first batch of conspiracy theorists there. There should be another batch sent around 2011 I think.
On the other hand you can see the cheese has clearly melted where the lander thrust has hit. And the mounse infestation is consistent with current theories on moon composition.
Power losses can cause data loss? Gee, you mean that my system that relies on electricity for everything it does can be adversely effected by power outages even if I take precautions?
Bah, I'll just tell Igor to go whip the children who pedal on the generator downstairs more often. Big deal.
To fight this patent would cost us about a half-million dollars plus the time spent in court. We can pay them about 100,000/year and keep our business alive. Guess which option a sane businessman would choose?
Slashdot Mirror
An even better thing to do would be to standardize one API that the Linux kernel uses and give that to manufacturers so they can support all Linuxes, rather than masquerading as Windows.
We already do that, Linux implements ACPI. However Windows doesn't.
So motherboard makers theoretically would have to accommodate the Windows oddities *and* support the standard (which wouldn't work in Windows). Fun huh ? How many are prepared to support the extra cost ?
Or of course the kernel developers can make do with the broken implementation of ACPI that are seen in the wild and that do work with Windows. In practice it's the only way to make sure the system will work on a random x86 type of machine.
Putting the obvious Microsoft fears aside, can we not give credit where credit is due?
Microsoft have taken a huge step into open source here and they deserve to be nurtured and supported by a willing community so that we can all make the most of it.
When your neighbour who has thrown rocks in all your windows, cut down your trees, slashed your tyres and poisoned your cat suddenly acts friendly and invites you to have dinner, what's your first move ?
To show support and willingness or to go in your garage to decide which of the tyre iron or the baseball bat you're going to bring ?
And also, use an app that supports paragraphs. They'll do wonders for your TPS reports (security analysts might not tell you that but it's still important).
Even then you can't be sure, because the hole could be built into the hardware. The best you can really do is get a stack of identical processors and chip sets and destructively slice all but one of them up and run them through an electron microscope to verify the circuits -
Of course that's assuming you have the code for the microscope controller... After all it's only showing stuff on a screen... Who knows if it's real ?
The article says that they built up a library using photos of faces downloaded from the internet. So that completely defeats the whole point.
They should just use the face of Bob and earn more slack in the process.
I've seen cases where a car's hubcaps were blurred, presumably because the face-search-and-blur algorithm hit it. Here is one example (for street view of 116 Manhattan Ave, Jersey City, NJ, in case the link isn't right).
That's just because of all those cases of NJ hubcap thieves using Google street view to plan their larcenies. Those vile criminals !
That's ok, the server will just run on Linux. Joke aside, it's easy to multiply the number of servers, and the capacity of the systems will grow.
On the other hand, is it useful to access an online desktop from a handheld unit ? If one considers that iPhone or HTC type of terminals are setting the trend, can you actually do something with a "desktop" system from one of those things ? Or is a eeePC the minimum you're expected to be using ? Presumably you're supposed to use some kind of embedded system, since you don't have a desktop system any more...
Not yet convinced.
About the size of what house? And no, a quarter is not recognised everywhere. An example:
http://www.ericstrains.com/n-scale/images/n-scale_size.jpg
I have no idea what that coin is, so I do not know what the size of that train is (or it could be an enournously large coin, and the train is normal scale)
Quite, I believe that image was lifted from Google Earth, somewhere in northern Canada where a giant coin was built for unknown reasons (possibly to lure aliens).
With http://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/rfk_pt1_files/image004.jpg everybody knows what the size is.
There even are some medieval units on that ruler for the more conservative readers.
Interesting that the new laptops seem to work better with Linux than with XP. Of course whether they actually do work with Vista is debatable...
My current laptop came with Vista as well. I kept it on a shrunken partition for a while so I could poke at it for a while to see what it was like. The best bit was when it went (through one of the security alert thingies) "are you the one who tried to format the SD card in the card slot ?" So I clicked Yes. And the reply "You are not allowed to write to the card slot for you are not worthy" (or something). So I nuked the partition with mkfs.ext3 and good riddance.
Works fine now with a KDE desktop.
It (used to) run just fine. Can't say how it runs nowadays but I ran it on a R3000 without problems a few years back. Of course you didn't get to use the x86 blobs such as Flash, some proprietary apps and such.
It also ran a couple of the BSDs if I recall correctly.
So there's no reason it shouldn't work any more.
And regarding the specs of the laptop, I used to have (well I still have it but don't use it because of the dead battery) a PII 400MHz machine that came with 128Megs of memory (Sony PictureBook) and it ran fine for some time (2000 to 2003 I'd say) running KDE. I eventually added a little RAM but as it came originally it worked quite well. I ran StarOffice (or was it OOo already ?) on Mandrake and never had any trouble with it. It was a great little machine despite it's 1 hour of battery life and weird screen size (1024x480).
Rumor != News. Steve Jobs is pretty much the heart & sole of Apple.
So what you're saying is that he should step on it ?
This doesn't make much sense to me... But that's ok, I'm a consultant, things don't have to make sense to me (nor do I have to make sense, so it all balances out in the end).
Quite, I'm looking forward to the post-Jobs clamshell version of the iPod, possibly with a lovely tartan and a Hello Kitty motif. Or pompons maybe.
Anyway they'll do fine.
Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone.
Nah, we know that the olympics and the olympic committee are all a bunch of nice guys and not are all in it for the money. It's all done in the spirit of sports and fraternity and cooperation.
Presumably they just had to recoup the cost of the access points. Those things are expensive you know.
Now why should there be a driver for a card reader (I presume it's one of the ubiquitous SD/memory stick readers) ? They always seem to be on the USB bus internally and should be plain mass storage devices.
Stupid Windows requiring drivers for everything... They probably want drivers for speakers nowadays.
Especially since the pound currency sign is part of the Latin 1 aka ISO-8859-1 character set that /. claims to use (in position 163 or 0xA3). No Unicode required.
I had the privilege of attending one of his lectures back in 1998 and I can almost remember his entire speech.
Was he wearing his infamous "IP everywhere" shirt ?
This sounds like a lot of bollock cheap crap talk to me. So; electric cars are going to save the future because no one needs to use gas to power their cars. Cool. So what device is providing the power to fuel those electric cars?
Robocar : We are now aploaching highway, please to pedal faster
User : puff puff, I should have bought a fresh set of batteries
They can always buy the software from SCO then. Nobody would dare to sue them !
Well, there is the small matter of making the robocars, but I guess it's not the job of a "futurist" to do that.
That bit is indeed left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm however looking forward to the day when it will finally be illegal to drive by hand on public roads.
Is creating a copy of my DVD for my Cowon D2 piracy now ?
Legally it probably is in many places since I'm probably not even allowed to read them on my PC (Linux), but still...
Thanks to an ongoing education project, you can see the kinetic crater left by the first batch of conspiracy theorists there. There should be another batch sent around 2011 I think.
Good riddance I say.
On the other hand you can see the cheese has clearly melted where the lander thrust has hit. And the mounse infestation is consistent with current theories on moon composition.
* Burning it is out of the question.
Why ? Is it because of rule 42 ?
Oops, sorry, I've said too much already !
Power losses can cause data loss? Gee, you mean that my system that relies on electricity for everything it does can be adversely effected by power outages even if I take precautions?
Bah, I'll just tell Igor to go whip the children who pedal on the generator downstairs more often. Big deal.
And it's all green !
To fight this patent would cost us about a half-million dollars plus the time spent in court. We can pay them about 100,000/year and keep our business alive. Guess which option a sane businessman would choose?
Hiring a hitman ?