Absent some furious backpedaling, my next purchase WON'T be anything from ASUS. By all means market Windows positively but MS can do their own trash talking. I'm going to take this to mean they mean to go in an explicitly Linux unfriendly direction to get back scratches from MS.
The cause is mainly that graphics are getting better and better, which means more and more artists are required to make a game. Polyphony Digital, makers of the Gran Turismo series have said a single artist takes 6 months to make a car model for GT5 (for PS3), whereas the same artist took a month doing so for GT3 and GT4 (for PS2), and just a day in GT and GT2 (for PS1).
This has lead to a lot of bankruptcies and consolidation in the gaming industry, with publishers like EA growing a lot. However, we're now at the point that even these big fish are losing money, with EA full of red ink ever since the current generation of consoles started. Take 2 has been posting losses even with its GTA4 multi-million-units cash cow (which has allegedly cost around $100 million to develop. Just open up google finance and check out these companies earnings, they're consistently dismal in the last few quarters/years.
There won't be any "toning down" of graphical improvements. At the very least, games will be held to current graphical standards. The expectations have already been set. What is needed here is better tools. The single artist needs to be able to once again create that car model in a day. Raw graphics capability has grown without a matching increase in the competency of game engines and authoring tools. So there is big money for whoever can figure out how to start addressing that.
Now, based on the number of requests for help I get after people learn that I "know computers", I submit that Windows machines aren't really ready to go out of the box in a surprising number of cases.
Lenovos are good case in point. There is a lot of bloat around wireless and corporate supplied updates. On some we've bought, the machines acted like wedged up little grindy bricks right at powerup. It was so bad that it made decent machines look really really slow. And there was a LOT of it. Removing that crap for someone who bought one privately in Add/Remove Programs took over half an hour.
Creating a new XP image for them from scratch woke them right up. (1.6Ghz Core Duos with a gig of ram)
I'm going to have to agree with those who say Kohut just doesn't get it. A netbook with a bigger screen, bigger keyboard, and more storage is called a "laptop". I think what is going on here is that deep down Kohut realizes that but hopes to redefine "netbook" to be closer to something he already sells. Thankfully, netbook vendors who don't already sell laptops are coming on line.
The "hard-core" is redundant if using the faux-PC term "trekker" in place of "trekkie". I am forced to use politically correct terminology for no end of disabled, economic, and ethnic conditions. I draw the line at Trek fans that take themselves too seriously.
It isn't anywhere near as seductive. You have a lot of mobile phone and PDA apps which aren't super compelling especially if they aren't on a smartphone and replacing them isn't as daunting. Ok so now the ARM machine runs "Windows". "I'll just install this copy of FooApp I snuck home from work. " click! click! click! "Why won't it work?!?!" If anything, throwing WinCE on a thing that looks like a little laptop will do nothing more than confuse the issue.
Also, the ARM machines are going for a price point the Dells, Toshibas, and for that matter Microsofts of the world are deathly afraid of. Why add an extra few bucks to a low margin machine just to run WinCE Solitaire?
The other thing happening is that the specs and price on "netbooks" keep going up and with mechanical drives in place of solid state ones. So what we do indeed wind up with bargain laptops with insufferably small screens and keyboards. These things only make sense when they are tough as nails, almost disposably cheap, and focused on tasks that small machines do well. If what I'm going to wind up with is just another flaky bargain laptop with a tiny screen and keyboard then I'll just pay 50 to 100 more for bigger UI devices.
I'm much more exciting about the upcoming ARM devices that start under $300 and are gunning for the under $200 pricepoint. That combination of price, size, toughness, and unbeholdeness to the Win32 ecosystem will allow for truly new devices and categories. I want to see these things in blister packs at Wal-Mart for $100.
I ran some java AWT based installers over ssh on machines that only boot to consoles. It is very possible to serve graphical apps from machines that cannot themselves display them. The parent isn't as trollistic as you seem to think. The technique is actually useful.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
From the point of view of a user, that isn't a bad thing. It is an assurance of good behavior. If you know something you are going to do will seriously annoy your customers then you should think three times at least about it. And it wasn't just that Sun bought MySQL and it was "fork, fork, fork". It was Sun bought MySQL and the core devs jumped ship. If the code was all that important than there should have been concern for those devs as they are the ones who know it best. And many projects that have "forked" have in reality had the core devs pushed out for one reason or another and the community simply follows the devs.
It seems to me that you want to relegate goodwill and trust to low or no importance. For users of FOSS code, it is almost everything.
Wait, what? Modern piracy of SNES and NES games didn't hurt their sales at all. Copy protection in those days was the fact that you couldn't make a copy of a cartridge (disk systems excluded). You made your money, and things worked. NES piracy was rampant by the time the N64 was ready, and they still didn't care enough to make a serious attempt to copy protect those cartridges.
That may have been true but Ninty sure doesn't like it now. They make a few nickels selling old NES, SNES, and (I think) Genesis titles through the Wii Shop Channel. They run on DRMed emulators that are already installed on the console. But homebrew smartasses have ported SNES9X and other emulators to run on softmodded Wiis.
Many school districts and libraries get Federal E-Rate dollars to help pay for networking infrastructure. One of the stipulations for getting these funds is that net access be filtered. That alone will get filtering imposed and that is before the board and Little Johnnie's parents ask about porn.
It is a matter of how responsive the filter admins are to overblocks. Many want simply to drop in a product that will solve their "inappropriate site" problem for them.
That is not what I'm saying. All of the successful theories I mentioned were not simple to discover or derive but they all
a) unify previously disassociated facts b) make practical to study predictions c) are parsimonious which isn't the same as simple at all
String theory only accomplishes a) at the expense of b) and c). What I was saying is that theories that have been successful unifying ideas, making predictions, and even leading to technology have all had a quality of parsimonious elegance to them. String theory only unifies ideas at the expense of being impractical to study by observation and by doing unspeakable things to Mr. Occam. It has had over 35 years and only now will the new Collider be able to falsify some of them. Most theories don't go that long without being subject to some and preferably many forms of falsification.
And I was not suggesting that string theory should not be studied. I AM suggesting that other approaches like Quantum Loop Gravity and others shouldn't be starved in it's almost exclusive favor.
1] Not being testable with current technology is not the same as not making any testable predictions. Technology advances, after all, and there are predictions that were made by Einstein that are still being tested today.
Yes it is true that certain implications of Einstein's theories have only become testable recently. But it is also true that others were testable even with turn of the 20th century technology. As I recall, an expedition was mounted to South Africa to test the prediction that the eclipse happening there would make it possible to actually measure a particular kind of gravitational lensing by the Sun. That the measured lensing agreed strongly with the theory was a strong confirmation. Einstein's theories also explained a precession in Mercury's orbit that Newton could not and explained the lesser degrees of it in the other inner planet orbits. By the early Seventies, it was even possible to directly measure time dilation with synchronized atomic clocks one moving in a jet liner and the other left on the ground.
In thirty five years, I would almost surely think that SOME aspects/predictions would have been practical to test.
String theories have been around for thirty five years and the LHC will only be able to test a subset of possible string theories leaving a great many safe from falsification by it.
Yes there are tests but the tests won't be definitive. One of the problems with string theories is that there are a multitude of them and they very very mutable. The collider will only rule out (likely) or confirm (doubtful) a subset of the possible string theories. However, the remainder of the string theories will be safe from falsifiable experimentation. What is needed but lacking is way to winnow out candidate string theories that a) describe our/the universe, b) solve current quandaries of physics like why certain physical constants have the values that they do, c) make predictions which are practical to confirm, d) are parsimonious as string theories are notorious for introducing several new constants and constructs for every one they explain.
Now I may not be a PhD but I am a taxpayer who is happy to see some of his taxes go to funding basic scientific research. And I agree with those who say that the current fashionability of string theories preclude other approaches from being funded and that string theories are getting a free pass on standards of prediction, observation, and experiment that other branches of science are held to.
Incidentally, a hallmark of all other good theories in physics to date is that all can be represented by fairly simple systems of equations which an Asimov, a Sagan, or for that matter a good HS science teacher can explain to an interested (and research funding...) public. Be they Newtons Law's, Special and General Relativity, or Maxwell's Equations, good theories tend to have a parsimonious tightness to them that practically shout out what experiments one should do next. Now I realize that in the end, that the universe need not conform to such beautiful systems but the fact that to date that it has and string theories most certainly are not give me pause.
The FA at least holds out some hope for winnowing out more implausible string theories (and no the idea that all string theories describe a possible universe cuts zero ice until someone finds a way to observe/test that) at least and maybe showing the way to an actual viable theory that is more than pretty math.
I'd love to know the internal machinations that went on here, but I suspect that someone took the opportunity of the fall of the forint and the foreign currency debt problem (an enormous problem) to push an open source agenda. Whether this will hold up, or whether MS will make a counter offer allowing the Hungarian government to pay cheaply in forints remains to be seen.
That at least is a MS getting a taste of it's own medicine. I rather like the idea of improving FOSS further and forcing MS to take that medicine as frequently as possible.
Remember folks, a threat has to be credible to be taken seriously and it seems that MS is getting it more and more these days. Let's keep it up.
Remember also Procurement Departments that even though MS is smiling and making reassuring noises now, they WILL try for bigger cash later when they think a change of administration or circumstance will allow them to beat it out of you. Threaten FOSS migrations again....and again...and again.... As I say, a taste of their own medicine.
WinCE won't have the attraction of WinXP. WinCE won't run J. Random Intel Win32 App. So you can license a bunch of mobile phone apps and WinCE or just skin a Linux install.
It looks to me like these people are doing actual work to justify their conclusions. Now you can dispute their methods and conclusions but what they are up to isn't faith in a religious sense. Sticking lots of exclamation points on astounding ignorance doesn't rescue it from that state.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out:
http://www.asus.co.uk/eeepc/1008HA/features.html
Absent some furious backpedaling, my next purchase WON'T be anything from ASUS. By all means market Windows positively but MS can do their own trash talking. I'm going to take this to mean they mean to go in an explicitly Linux unfriendly direction to get back scratches from MS.
Do "custom updates" then tick the box that says ignore this update.
There won't be any "toning down" of graphical improvements. At the very least, games will be held to current graphical standards. The expectations have already been set. What is needed here is better tools. The single artist needs to be able to once again create that car model in a day. Raw graphics capability has grown without a matching increase in the competency of game engines and authoring tools. So there is big money for whoever can figure out how to start addressing that.
Now, based on the number of requests for help I get after people learn that I "know computers", I submit that Windows machines aren't really ready to go out of the box in a surprising number of cases.
Lenovos are good case in point. There is a lot of bloat around wireless and corporate supplied updates. On some we've bought, the machines acted like wedged up little grindy bricks right at powerup. It was so bad that it made decent machines look really really slow. And there was a LOT of it. Removing that crap for someone who bought one privately in Add/Remove Programs took over half an hour.
Creating a new XP image for them from scratch woke them right up. (1.6Ghz Core Duos with a gig of ram)
I'm going to have to agree with those who say Kohut just doesn't get it. A netbook with a bigger screen, bigger keyboard, and more storage is called a "laptop". I think what is going on here is that deep down Kohut realizes that but hopes to redefine "netbook" to be closer to something he already sells. Thankfully, netbook vendors who don't already sell laptops are coming on line.
The "hard-core" is redundant if using the faux-PC term "trekker" in place of "trekkie". I am forced to use politically correct terminology for no end of disabled, economic, and ethnic conditions. I draw the line at Trek fans that take themselves too seriously.
*Whooooooosh!*
"...The automation capabilities of VBA MAKE the financial industry work...."
Well that explains a lot.
That's gotta hurt!
It isn't anywhere near as seductive. You have a lot of mobile phone and PDA apps which aren't super compelling especially if they aren't on a smartphone and replacing them isn't as daunting. Ok so now the ARM machine runs "Windows". "I'll just install this copy of FooApp I snuck home from work. " click! click! click! "Why won't it work?!?!" If anything, throwing WinCE on a thing that looks like a little laptop will do nothing more than confuse the issue.
Also, the ARM machines are going for a price point the Dells, Toshibas, and for that matter Microsofts of the world are deathly afraid of. Why add an extra few bucks to a low margin machine just to run WinCE Solitaire?
The other thing happening is that the specs and price on "netbooks" keep going up and with mechanical drives in place of solid state ones. So what we do indeed wind up with bargain laptops with insufferably small screens and keyboards. These things only make sense when they are tough as nails, almost disposably cheap, and focused on tasks that small machines do well. If what I'm going to wind up with is just another flaky bargain laptop with a tiny screen and keyboard then I'll just pay 50 to 100 more for bigger UI devices.
I'm much more exciting about the upcoming ARM devices that start under $300 and are gunning for the under $200 pricepoint. That combination of price, size, toughness, and unbeholdeness to the Win32 ecosystem will allow for truly new devices and categories. I want to see these things in blister packs at Wal-Mart for $100.
How terribly unfashionable. It's Ahab The Bomb Throwing Ay-Rab we're supposed to be afraid of now. Commie witch hunts are soooo 20th Century.
You're just this penny-stealing, wannabe-criminal man.
I ran some java AWT based installers over ssh on machines that only boot to consoles. It is very possible to serve graphical apps from machines that cannot themselves display them. The parent isn't as trollistic as you seem to think. The technique is actually useful.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
From the point of view of a user, that isn't a bad thing. It is an assurance of good behavior. If you know something you are going to do will seriously annoy your customers then you should think three times at least about it. And it wasn't just that Sun bought MySQL and it was "fork, fork, fork". It was Sun bought MySQL and the core devs jumped ship. If the code was all that important than there should have been concern for those devs as they are the ones who know it best. And many projects that have "forked" have in reality had the core devs pushed out for one reason or another and the community simply follows the devs.
It seems to me that you want to relegate goodwill and trust to low or no importance. For users of FOSS code, it is almost everything.
Wait, what? Modern piracy of SNES and NES games didn't hurt their sales at all. Copy protection in those days was the fact that you couldn't make a copy of a cartridge (disk systems excluded). You made your money, and things worked. NES piracy was rampant by the time the N64 was ready, and they still didn't care enough to make a serious attempt to copy protect those cartridges.
That may have been true but Ninty sure doesn't like it now. They make a few nickels selling old NES, SNES, and (I think) Genesis titles through the Wii Shop Channel. They run on DRMed emulators that are already installed on the console. But homebrew smartasses have ported SNES9X and other emulators to run on softmodded Wiis.
Many school districts and libraries get Federal E-Rate dollars to help pay for networking infrastructure. One of the stipulations for getting these funds is that net access be filtered. That alone will get filtering imposed and that is before the board and Little Johnnie's parents ask about porn.
It is a matter of how responsive the filter admins are to overblocks. Many want simply to drop in a product that will solve their "inappropriate site" problem for them.
That is not what I'm saying. All of the successful theories I mentioned were not simple to discover or derive but they all
a) unify previously disassociated facts
b) make practical to study predictions
c) are parsimonious which isn't the same as simple at all
String theory only accomplishes a) at the expense of b) and c). What I was saying is that theories that have been successful unifying ideas, making predictions, and even leading to technology have all had a quality of parsimonious elegance to them. String theory only unifies ideas at the expense of being impractical to study by observation and by doing unspeakable things to Mr. Occam. It has had over 35 years and only now will the new Collider be able to falsify some of them. Most theories don't go that long without being subject to some and preferably many forms of falsification.
And I was not suggesting that string theory should not be studied. I AM suggesting that other approaches like Quantum Loop Gravity and others shouldn't be starved in it's almost exclusive favor.
1] Not being testable with current technology is not the same as not making any testable predictions. Technology advances, after all, and there are predictions that were made by Einstein that are still being tested today.
Yes it is true that certain implications of Einstein's theories have only become testable recently. But it is also true that others were testable even with turn of the 20th century technology. As I recall, an expedition was mounted to South Africa to test the prediction that the eclipse happening there would make it possible to actually measure a particular kind of gravitational lensing by the Sun. That the measured lensing agreed strongly with the theory was a strong confirmation. Einstein's theories also explained a precession in Mercury's orbit that Newton could not and explained the lesser degrees of it in the other inner planet orbits. By the early Seventies, it was even possible to directly measure time dilation with synchronized atomic clocks one moving in a jet liner and the other left on the ground.
In thirty five years, I would almost surely think that SOME aspects/predictions would have been practical to test.
String theories have been around for thirty five years and the LHC will only be able to test a subset of possible string theories leaving a great many safe from falsification by it.
Yes there are tests but the tests won't be definitive. One of the problems with string theories is that there are a multitude of them and they very very mutable. The collider will only rule out (likely) or confirm (doubtful) a subset of the possible string theories. However, the remainder of the string theories will be safe from falsifiable experimentation. What is needed but lacking is way to winnow out candidate string theories that a) describe our/the universe, b) solve current quandaries of physics like why certain physical constants have the values that they do, c) make predictions which are practical to confirm, d) are parsimonious as string theories are notorious for introducing several new constants and constructs for every one they explain.
Now I may not be a PhD but I am a taxpayer who is happy to see some of his taxes go to funding basic scientific research. And I agree with those who say that the current fashionability of string theories preclude other approaches from being funded and that string theories are getting a free pass on standards of prediction, observation, and experiment that other branches of science are held to.
Incidentally, a hallmark of all other good theories in physics to date is that all can be represented by fairly simple systems of equations which an Asimov, a Sagan, or for that matter a good HS science teacher can explain to an interested (and research funding...) public. Be they Newtons Law's, Special and General Relativity, or Maxwell's Equations, good theories tend to have a parsimonious tightness to them that practically shout out what experiments one should do next. Now I realize that in the end, that the universe need not conform to such beautiful systems but the fact that to date that it has and string theories most certainly are not give me pause.
The FA at least holds out some hope for winnowing out more implausible string theories (and no the idea that all string theories describe a possible universe cuts zero ice until someone finds a way to observe/test that) at least and maybe showing the way to an actual viable theory that is more than pretty math.
I'd love to know the internal machinations that went on here, but I suspect that someone took the opportunity of the fall of the forint and the foreign currency debt problem (an enormous problem) to push an open source agenda. Whether this will hold up, or whether MS will make a counter offer allowing the Hungarian government to pay cheaply in forints remains to be seen.
That at least is a MS getting a taste of it's own medicine. I rather like the idea of improving FOSS further and forcing MS to take that medicine as frequently as possible.
Remember folks, a threat has to be credible to be taken seriously and it seems that MS is getting it more and more these days. Let's keep it up.
Remember also Procurement Departments that even though MS is smiling and making reassuring noises now, they WILL try for bigger cash later when they think a change of administration or circumstance will allow them to beat it out of you. Threaten FOSS migrations again....and again...and again.... As I say, a taste of their own medicine.
Arms race of course as various and ever changing schemes are used to make the encryption appear to be something else.
WinCE won't have the attraction of WinXP. WinCE won't run J. Random Intel Win32 App. So you can license a bunch of mobile phone apps and WinCE or just skin a Linux install.
A fully usable GTK port has been "coming soon" to OS X for years.
Try punching "experimental evolution" into Google. That only turns up 25 million hits but here are a few to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Bacteriophage_experimental_evolution
It looks to me like these people are doing actual work to justify their conclusions. Now you can dispute their methods and conclusions but what they are up to isn't faith in a religious sense. Sticking lots of exclamation points on astounding ignorance doesn't rescue it from that state.