I don't know what's the going definition of "monster" these days, but I do think getting three years worth of salary in a month and a buttload of free advertising on top is a pretty big success.
No, it's not insta-ticket to the billionnaire club but nobody ever made it out to be either.
Freeware/homebrew games? Sure, Sony could do that, but then the actual console would cost up to twice what it does now to be able to make a profit. Then nobody would buy it, and it would flop badly.
You've got to be kidding me. If you seriously believe that enough people would buy a fucking PS3 just for homebrew games to actually make a noticeable dent in licensed game sales, I have a bridge to sell you. Quite a few bridges, really. All in mint condition!
and you've got $30,000 per person per year - which is not very good money.
No, it's not "very good money", but it's not a very bad money either. All in all, it's pretty damn close to what most people get, "very average money" and enough to live quite comfortably on - that's absolutely nothing to sniff at for ONE sale.
Especially considering these people are most likely getting it from doing what they love, instead of toiling their lives away for some faceless megacorporation like the other 50% of the population who also earn $30k-or-less-a-year.
The KDE devs did try to get Akonadi recognized as a standard so resources (like an address book) would be recognized in Gnome applications as well. FreeDesktop.org did not accept it as a standard.
No, they didn't. There isn't such a proposal anywhere on the XDG lists.
Based on that thread, it looks like they talked about it themselves and then decided it won't be accepted without even actually trying, or that there would be too much hassle.
Just ONE false positive is enough to turn it from "yeah, well, fine" into "pure evil", and there WILL be false positives. There's a reason vigilantism is illegal, this is no different.
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
apt-get install -f
Yes, it's usually fixable. But it shouldn't break in the first place. And -f isn't always enough, it's still fixable by hand in those cases, but end-users can't do that.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Not sure if troll..?
It's not a troll. It's perfectly valid extrapolation of your argument. You claim it should be Debian because you use Debian. Well, vast majority of their potential customers don't use Debian on their desktop, they use Windows. Therefore, if the mobile platform should be influenced by users' desktop of choice, it should be windows.
1) You lose easy access to the largest repository on Earth (Debian's). And Debian has a dedicated ARMel distribution. This is _massive_
There's a kernel of truth in this one, but it's unlikely they would be directly usable because of library version differences, and even if they were, vast majority of the applications there are horribly suited for mobile devices.
2) When I still used RPM-based distros, I could make the package DB go boom by just installing/uninstalling stuff
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
3) I know how to package DEBs. Not true for RPM.
I know how to package RPM's. They're pretty damn simple, DEBs on the other hand require some arcane magic.
4) The decission was made behind closed doors.
Yes, pretty much just like every other company's every decision.
5) I use Debian for laptops, desktops, servers, I would prefer to use Debian-esque on my mobile.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Today, a decade and a half later, we have cell phones that are many hundreds of times faster than those Pentium and Pentium II systems
Citation needed. Top-end cell phones have CPU's with clock speeds about four times that of the P2 you mentioned, and I'm pretty damn sure ARM is not 50 times more effective clock-for-clock than P2.
Firefox's problem is not it's JavaScript speed, it's the fact that the whole browser is slow as HELL and unstable when you use a couple of addons.
What makes you think those are separate issues? Yes, it's true some addons can cause huge slowdowns, but what do you think most addons are written in? Yep, that's right, JavaScript - making it faster will help with them as well.
What we really need in the consumer market are good value for money 1920x1080 pixel displays for laptops in the 12"-16" range.
This. It seems that the resolutions on laptop displays not only have not improved recently, they've been getting steadily worse over the past few years - SXGA+ and WSXGA+ used to be common, and even UXGA and WUXGA displays were not that unusual, but nowadays it seems almost everyone is almost exclusively pitching horrifying WXGA panels with some WSXGA offerings and only a few having 1080p (which is still less resolution than WUXGA).
I suppose this is the price we pay for the commodization of laptops. They've only marketed at the half-blind.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before
While that may be true for "idiot roommate", there's no reason why it should be for evil geniuses. Nature favors less-lethal diseases, a pathogen that kills off all it's hosts or kills too fast to spread effectively is an evolutionary dead-end and obviously there are huge selection pressures against such behavior.
By the way, those people who think HIV was created in a government lab seriously underestimate how cleverly made HIV is. It's way beyond our best evil geniuses.
Building something like HIV from scratch is way beyond us, but taking something like it that already has the important clever parts and adding something nature doesn't think is clever - too much deadliness, may not be.
Homeopathy is a catch-all phrase which essentially boils down to "Remedies which have been passed down by word-of-mouth but have not been subjected to modern testing".
No, it isn't. The term you're looking for is "folk" or "traditional" medicine. Homeopathy is a very well defined term for a specific brand of quackery, and while some people may (ab)use it in the way you mean, it's a very ambiguous term at best, and mixing the two makes a huge disservice for both traditional medicine and modern medicine.
I just recently salvaged a cd-wallet from my car after it was vandalized, many of these disks have been in there for about ten years, in rather extreme environment - the temperature in that car gets up to about +70C in direct sunlight during summer, and has occasionally dropped down to -30C in winter, and I'm sure the moisture levels vary just as dramatically.
Most of them seem to work just fine, cdparanoia doesn't even report any error correction coming into play - and when they do fail, it seems to be because of scratches, not spontaneous degradation. These aren't particularly high quality media either, most of them are cheapest junk I could buy - why waste money on the best when it's just car audio collection in conditions that (or so I thought) will kill even the best media in few years at most?
Mars atmosphere is 1% of Earths atmosphere. This makes fixed wing airplanes that use lift useless. Ornithopers don't use lift and mathematically it should work if the basics get worked out.
Ornithopters most certainly do use lift, and the thrust component of them also depends on atmospheric density just like on normal planes. How the hell do you think they work? By magic? Antigravity?
Conventional aircraft are perfectly capable of flying on Mars, they just need a large wingspan and must fly very fast, which is somewhat counterproductive on an exploratory vessel that presumably needs some time to study things rather than zipping by at bajillion MPH, so flapping wing designs are a bit better due to the lift generated not being related to horizontal speed, but by no means the only ones possible.
Indeed, losing either of those two probably wouldn't cause any issues - but you also lose vacuum boosters for power brakes and that is a problem, especially if the driver doesn't know it will happen.
Not really. There aren't any settlements on southern hemisphere that are anywhere as near to the pole as there are in the north, and that quite obviously limits the show a lot.
Southern tip of Tasmania is 44 degrees south. Most of Europe and almost entire Canada is closer to the north pole than that is to south! We have _cities_ 70 degrees north, you'd have to live on Antarctica to match that on the south pole.
So "pandemic" doesn't just mean something contagious that's occurring worldwide, otherwise the common cold would have been classified as pandemic throughout recorded history.
Right. It just means something contagious that is spreading widely (doesn't have to be worldwide, just a very large area).
Things like common cold* are not classified as pandemic, because they've already stabilized. It's already present in the whole world, and not spreading into new populations any more. If cold cases would suddenly start to skyrocket, then maybe... or if cold was eradicated from large areas and did a comeback.
*) Common cold might not count as a pandemic even if it did meet the spreading criteria, since it doesn't have a single causative agent - it's just an umbrella term for a wide variety of mild respiratory tract infections.
I'm aware of the costly roaming fees, hell we see a few newspaper articles every year where some poor soul is hit by ginormous bills when their phone/laptop/whatever decides to connect to Russian network from a ski resort near the border.
But the parent was claiming extortionate data rates with no mention of any special circumstances, implying they're extremely expensive even within your country of residence.
I don't know which part of EU you're in, but at least here in Finland, unlimited data costs 10/month for 384kbps and 14 for max speed, not exactly free but I wouldn't call it "very" costly, much less a fortune.
Any comment criticising Linux is bound to be controversial here and I really don't have the energy to respond to everyone who has called me a Microsoft shill.
One person, modded troll, called you a shill. Clearly, that's everyone. Or maybe it's just an easy way of waving away all the others without answering the perfectly valid questions they asked?
Critizicing Linux is reasonably likely to raise some controversy around these parts, but that's not what caused the outrage. Stating dubious opinions like "Linux hasn't changed at all in fifteen years" and "installing applications requires in-depth knowledge" as facts without reasoning them at all is what does that. If you want to criticize, then do so by all means, but your post was NOT criticism, that implies analysis and evaluation.
You're being really disingenious here. What you are doing is NOT just editing a text file, and you know it. It's editing a text file OWNED BY ANOTHER USER, AND modifying advanced system configuration without using the provided settings tools. Something you would do in windows with regedit.
So, just how "easily" do these things work in Windows 7? Let's see:
1) Editing a text file owned by another user. Open it in notepad, edit, try to save. What happens? It just silently shifts to "save as" dialog instead of saving, NO UAC dialog for privilege elevation, it won't even tell you it can't save the original file, much less why not. Gee, really intuitive, much better than in Ubuntu!
2) Editing a registry key you don't have permissions to edit. Open regedit, navigate to the key, try to change: Oops. "Cannot edit XXX: Error writing the value's new contents.". NO UAC dialog, no telling WHY you cannot edit that. Yep, real simple.
Depends. Does running "setup.exe" and clicking "next" a bunch of times count as "fiddling"?
Perhaps not, but knowing that a "setup.exe" is even required for the computer to function properly and where to find it certainly does require above average knowledge.
2. Since "kill -9 all" would generate an error, it is that error that would be sorted and sent to/dev/null. It's therefore no surprise to me that you never spotted the problems with this command string since you would never have seen any errors.
WTF? If you're going for this sort of pedantry, you really shouldn't make this kind of dumb mistakes. |DOES NOT redirect STDERR in any shell I know of, therefore the error would be shown to the user.
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I don't know what's the going definition of "monster" these days, but I do think getting three years worth of salary in a month and a buttload of free advertising on top is a pretty big success.
No, it's not insta-ticket to the billionnaire club but nobody ever made it out to be either.
Freeware/homebrew games? Sure, Sony could do that, but then the actual console would cost up to twice what it does now to be able to make a profit. Then nobody would buy it, and it would flop badly.
You've got to be kidding me. If you seriously believe that enough people would buy a fucking PS3 just for homebrew games to actually make a noticeable dent in licensed game sales, I have a bridge to sell you. Quite a few bridges, really. All in mint condition!
The problem I see with 'what it is worth' is that I can't tell that until after I play, and I have to pay before that.
Nothing prevents you from paying again after you've played them if feel like they were worth more than what you initially gave.
and you've got $30,000 per person per year - which is not very good money.
No, it's not "very good money", but it's not a very bad money either. All in all, it's pretty damn close to what most people get, "very average money" and enough to live quite comfortably on - that's absolutely nothing to sniff at for ONE sale.
Especially considering these people are most likely getting it from doing what they love, instead of toiling their lives away for some faceless megacorporation like the other 50% of the population who also earn $30k-or-less-a-year.
The KDE devs did try to get Akonadi recognized as a standard so resources (like an address book) would be recognized in Gnome applications as well. FreeDesktop.org did not accept it as a standard.
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-pim&m=118583299200650&w=2
No, they didn't. There isn't such a proposal anywhere on the XDG lists.
Based on that thread, it looks like they talked about it themselves and then decided it won't be accepted without even actually trying, or that there would be too much hassle.
Just ONE false positive is enough to turn it from "yeah, well, fine" into "pure evil", and there WILL be false positives. There's a reason vigilantism is illegal, this is no different.
So how do we, as a culture, try to fix this?
The same way cultures so far out of whack with reality always do. It won't be pretty.
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
apt-get install -f
Yes, it's usually fixable. But it shouldn't break in the first place. And -f isn't always enough, it's still fixable by hand in those cases, but end-users can't do that.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Not sure if troll..?
It's not a troll. It's perfectly valid extrapolation of your argument. You claim it should be Debian because you use Debian. Well, vast majority of their potential customers don't use Debian on their desktop, they use Windows. Therefore, if the mobile platform should be influenced by users' desktop of choice, it should be windows.
1) You lose easy access to the largest repository on Earth (Debian's). And Debian has a dedicated ARMel distribution. This is _massive_
There's a kernel of truth in this one, but it's unlikely they would be directly usable because of library version differences, and even if they were, vast majority of the applications there are horribly suited for mobile devices.
2) When I still used RPM-based distros, I could make the package DB go boom by just installing/uninstalling stuff
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
3) I know how to package DEBs. Not true for RPM.
I know how to package RPM's. They're pretty damn simple, DEBs on the other hand require some arcane magic.
4) The decission was made behind closed doors.
Yes, pretty much just like every other company's every decision.
5) I use Debian for laptops, desktops, servers, I would prefer to use Debian-esque on my mobile.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Today, a decade and a half later, we have cell phones that are many hundreds of times faster than those Pentium and Pentium II systems
Citation needed. Top-end cell phones have CPU's with clock speeds about four times that of the P2 you mentioned, and I'm pretty damn sure ARM is not 50 times more effective clock-for-clock than P2.
Firefox's problem is not it's JavaScript speed, it's the fact that the whole browser is slow as HELL and unstable when you use a couple of addons.
What makes you think those are separate issues? Yes, it's true some addons can cause huge slowdowns, but what do you think most addons are written in? Yep, that's right, JavaScript - making it faster will help with them as well.
What we really need in the consumer market are good value for money 1920x1080 pixel displays for laptops in the 12"-16" range.
This. It seems that the resolutions on laptop displays not only have not improved recently, they've been getting steadily worse over the past few years - SXGA+ and WSXGA+ used to be common, and even UXGA and WUXGA displays were not that unusual, but nowadays it seems almost everyone is almost exclusively pitching horrifying WXGA panels with some WSXGA offerings and only a few having 1080p (which is still less resolution than WUXGA).
I suppose this is the price we pay for the commodization of laptops. They've only marketed at the half-blind.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before
While that may be true for "idiot roommate", there's no reason why it should be for evil geniuses. Nature favors less-lethal diseases, a pathogen that kills off all it's hosts or kills too fast to spread effectively is an evolutionary dead-end and obviously there are huge selection pressures against such behavior.
By the way, those people who think HIV was created in a government lab seriously underestimate how cleverly made HIV is. It's way beyond our best evil geniuses.
Building something like HIV from scratch is way beyond us, but taking something like it that already has the important clever parts and adding something nature doesn't think is clever - too much deadliness, may not be.
Homeopathy is a catch-all phrase which essentially boils down to "Remedies which have been passed down by word-of-mouth but have not been subjected to modern testing".
No, it isn't. The term you're looking for is "folk" or "traditional" medicine. Homeopathy is a very well defined term for a specific brand of quackery, and while some people may (ab)use it in the way you mean, it's a very ambiguous term at best, and mixing the two makes a huge disservice for both traditional medicine and modern medicine.
I just recently salvaged a cd-wallet from my car after it was vandalized, many of these disks have been in there for about ten years, in rather extreme environment - the temperature in that car gets up to about +70C in direct sunlight during summer, and has occasionally dropped down to -30C in winter, and I'm sure the moisture levels vary just as dramatically.
Most of them seem to work just fine, cdparanoia doesn't even report any error correction coming into play - and when they do fail, it seems to be because of scratches, not spontaneous degradation. These aren't particularly high quality media either, most of them are cheapest junk I could buy - why waste money on the best when it's just car audio collection in conditions that (or so I thought) will kill even the best media in few years at most?
Mars atmosphere is 1% of Earths atmosphere. This makes fixed wing airplanes that use lift useless. Ornithopers don't use lift and mathematically it should work if the basics get worked out.
Ornithopters most certainly do use lift, and the thrust component of them also depends on atmospheric density just like on normal planes. How the hell do you think they work? By magic? Antigravity?
Conventional aircraft are perfectly capable of flying on Mars, they just need a large wingspan and must fly very fast, which is somewhat counterproductive on an exploratory vessel that presumably needs some time to study things rather than zipping by at bajillion MPH, so flapping wing designs are a bit better due to the lift generated not being related to horizontal speed, but by no means the only ones possible.
Indeed, losing either of those two probably wouldn't cause any issues - but you also lose vacuum boosters for power brakes and that is a problem, especially if the driver doesn't know it will happen.
Not really. There aren't any settlements on southern hemisphere that are anywhere as near to the pole as there are in the north, and that quite obviously limits the show a lot.
Southern tip of Tasmania is 44 degrees south. Most of Europe and almost entire Canada is closer to the north pole than that is to south! We have _cities_ 70 degrees north, you'd have to live on Antarctica to match that on the south pole.
So "pandemic" doesn't just mean something contagious that's occurring worldwide, otherwise the common cold would have been classified as pandemic throughout recorded history.
Right. It just means something contagious that is spreading widely (doesn't have to be worldwide, just a very large area).
Things like common cold* are not classified as pandemic, because they've already stabilized. It's already present in the whole world, and not spreading into new populations any more. If cold cases would suddenly start to skyrocket, then maybe... or if cold was eradicated from large areas and did a comeback.
*) Common cold might not count as a pandemic even if it did meet the spreading criteria, since it doesn't have a single causative agent - it's just an umbrella term for a wide variety of mild respiratory tract infections.
I'm aware of the costly roaming fees, hell we see a few newspaper articles every year where some poor soul is hit by ginormous bills when their phone/laptop/whatever decides to connect to Russian network from a ski resort near the border.
But the parent was claiming extortionate data rates with no mention of any special circumstances, implying they're extremely expensive even within your country of residence.
I don't know which part of EU you're in, but at least here in Finland, unlimited data costs 10/month for 384kbps and 14 for max speed, not exactly free but I wouldn't call it "very" costly, much less a fortune.
Any comment criticising Linux is bound to be controversial here and I really don't have the energy to respond to everyone who has called me a Microsoft shill.
One person, modded troll, called you a shill. Clearly, that's everyone. Or maybe it's just an easy way of waving away all the others without answering the perfectly valid questions they asked?
Critizicing Linux is reasonably likely to raise some controversy around these parts, but that's not what caused the outrage. Stating dubious opinions like "Linux hasn't changed at all in fifteen years" and "installing applications requires in-depth knowledge" as facts without reasoning them at all is what does that. If you want to criticize, then do so by all means, but your post was NOT criticism, that implies analysis and evaluation.
You're being really disingenious here. What you are doing is NOT just editing a text file, and you know it. It's editing a text file OWNED BY ANOTHER USER, AND modifying advanced system configuration without using the provided settings tools. Something you would do in windows with regedit.
So, just how "easily" do these things work in Windows 7? Let's see:
1) Editing a text file owned by another user. Open it in notepad, edit, try to save. What happens? It just silently shifts to "save as" dialog instead of saving, NO UAC dialog for privilege elevation, it won't even tell you it can't save the original file, much less why not. Gee, really intuitive, much better than in Ubuntu!
2) Editing a registry key you don't have permissions to edit. Open regedit, navigate to the key, try to change: Oops. "Cannot edit XXX: Error writing the value's new contents.". NO UAC dialog, no telling WHY you cannot edit that. Yep, real simple.
Depends. Does running "setup.exe" and clicking "next" a bunch of times count as "fiddling"?
Perhaps not, but knowing that a "setup.exe" is even required for the computer to function properly and where to find it certainly does require above average knowledge.
2. Since "kill -9 all" would generate an error, it is that error that would be sorted and sent to /dev/null. It's therefore no surprise to me that you never spotted the problems with this command string since you would never have seen any errors.
WTF? If you're going for this sort of pedantry, you really shouldn't make this kind of dumb mistakes. |DOES NOT redirect STDERR in any shell I know of, therefore the error would be shown to the user.