Great, just another gimmic to attract the younger croud. As I walk around, I'm seeing a ton of teenagers with no more reason for a phone than to "stay in touch with all their friends". It's more like be bothered consitantly and cause headaches for everyone else because they can't talk quietly.
It's not just kids either. I walk around a major University here in the US and practically everyone has them and is always on them. It's the first thing they do out of class. It's what they do on the bus. It's become a cult and a horrible addiction.
I'm not saying cell phones aren't important. They have many great uses and I plan on getting one as soon as I graduate (not enough comfortable capital yet because of rising education costs) for work and long distance (much cheaper!!!).
Does anyone agree with me? It seems like there's more people out there that don't have a need for them - especially the younger croud. Live life; meet new people - like the people sitting next to you in the bus; and get off the damn phone.
No kidding! While I hate that Lego kept adding "special pieces" for practically one purpose, the base set and a few cool thinks like pnuematic pumps could build anything! I used to build entire cities out of base parts until lego started commercializing them with "special parts". Lincoln logs build log houses and huts. Maybe a tower or two.
Sure, you could build a city out of lincoln logs, but when's the last time you've heard of a log city (village) surviving very long?
You can sync other devices with this, too. You can sync many different phones, PDA's, PIMs (Outlook and some others), and Yahoo and / or Excite. It's been a while since I've used it, but they may have added more.
But they do it in entirely different ways. When you benchmark something for performance, you have to have a common ground. Yes, they do both let you run Windows apps on linux, but in completely different ways. Of course an emulator will run slower, but a virtual machine won't, sans the currently-used resources from the other running OS.
It seems to me that comparing VMWare (and the like) to Wine is like comparing apples and oranges. VMWare actually creates a virtual machine posting BIOS again and thus starting your target platform by the partition you're in. Wine emulates function calls on linux (and libraries, of course) but still runs as the base operating system. How do these even compare?
I don't care how much I get mod'd down for this or flamed, but best of wishes to you, Loki! It's good to know that a linux company out there can make money, even if they have to file a Chapter 11. Hope you get out soon and can get back to offerring great games for a great OS (well, OS'es anyway).
Let me offer another angle on this topic: the end of the world. Revelations speaks about the mark of the devil, having the symbol "666" embedded in our hands or foreheads. It goes on to read that the mark of the beast is over-capitolization and the love of the money. Abusing the capitolization like we already are now is a start. Embedded chips like this (which you know will happen someday) is just another sign fulfilled. Not many left now; be weary.
It's clear that any government office in the US is managed by older men and women, most of which probably don't know much more than how to turn a computer on and get email. These are the people making decisions that affect us technologically savvy people and our jobs. Lobbyists tell them what they want to know, and as we've seen with RIAA and other large groups, they get their way even if they're not telling the truth.
What the government needs, including USPTO, is people that specifically deal with technology - people that understand this stuff like many of the fine people that use Slashdot everyday. We can't know everything about all the patents for technology, but we might have better insight as where to start.
I've only used the USPTO databases (rather, the public accessible databases) a few times - just for curiosity's sake - but I know that the information dealing with technology can be gotten. You just have to know what you're looking for. Joe Smith who uses AOL might not understand the technology behind the patent pending technology, so he's not going to know where to start. Now, CowboyNeal sees the technology and investigates it further (or perhaps already knows about it because of the fast-paced Slashdot News service) and know exactly (or close to) where to start looking.
This isn't a be-all, end-all solution, but it's something the government definitely needs to think about as a whole. We need people that understand technology making policy on technology lest we patent and put a stop to everything technological so that no one can innovate ideas based on current innovations or use technology to better this world (like multilingual DNS).
Well of course they'll insist that phones aren't harmful and get a patent on 'brain sheilds'. If phones were harmful, no one would give them money. And if they didn't have a patent on 'brain shields', they couldn't make money from a stupid, no-brainer idea off other companies. Money, fella's. That's what it's all about. Money...and brain sheilds.
Now here's the real question: why would they even create brain sheilds? If they rot our brains with phones, we'll be more likely to buy crappy cell/pcs plans at high rates for few minutes and no roaming features. Guess they didn't think that one through enough after all.
Anything else than what they have now would be great! Anyone else notice that their drivers have turned into full-bore applications? They're memory intensive, take an hour or two to install, and need superfluous 16-bit, ugly windows that run everytime you need to print something. That's not a driver, that's an application!
Exactly my point, thank you. for you all you others out there, I know what "w.i.n.e." stands for and, quite frankly, they're wrong. they reimplement functionality provided by DLLs with their own libs and can even use Windows DLLs if you want.
Not only should we support and embrace companies like Loki for doing such a great job and helping to make SDL a great gaming layer (hopefully more game programmers will then use it instead of DirectX for cross-platform games from the get-go), but we should embrace native linux games.
We all know that Wine is a bit of a resource hog, since it emulates windows on top of another OS, and Windows is a resource hog on its own, so now you've got two hogs and that can only lead to trouble (anyone seen Hannibal?). Running natively makes the games much faster and gives linux the boost that it needs for people and organizations (like PC Mag that claims there's not enough apps for linux when the reverse is actually true).
If you want to run your games fast like they should be, go native!
If you want to support the linux world, support the companies that do an excellent job porting games to SDL.
If you want Tux to kick Borg Gates's ass, support native games.
If you want linux to start getting on more desktops - even of home users - let their be software...and it was good.
We all want linux to succeed, so lets support native linux games (and other programs, as well, like StarOffice and KOffice, etc) and the companies that work hard to get good software for linux that attracts attention!
Fact of the matter is, Microsoft released Windows 2K with over 65,000 bugs! Maybe if they had hundreds - if not thousands - of eyes pearing at source code, bugs would be fixed because people discover them and usually offer a fix, especially the thousands - if not millions - good programmers that do this kind of stuff as a second living.
Take Mozilla, for example. Yes, there were far too many primary developers and Mozilla was originally a to keep organized, but at least bugs got fixed due to the help of so many people viewing and review source for and bug testing. Maybe Microsoft should learn from this!
What about combinin efforts? AltaVista already wants to own all search engines (hence the patent), why don't they form deals with other search engines that quite frankly suck (like excite or lycos) and distribute the work load?
Of course, leave Google out of the mix. They already kick ass.
You don't need a Mac to download QuickTime. There is a Windows port that works just as well. Just go to apple.com, click QuickTime, download, and download the [gulp] Windows port.
Now hopefully they start going after other frivilous patents like British Telecomm (the hyper-link) and AltaVista. In both cases (and so many more), prior art has been shown but the patent office still issues patents! Are they stupid or just dump? Perhaps the patent lawyers that worked on the cases should be looked into, too, and barred from patent cases if nothing else.
This is clearly a case of companies grabbing technology and honing it for money and name-sake, but they didn't invent it! This is bad business practice as well, and I urge you/. readers to keep usage of such sites to a minimum (obviously you can't with the hyperlink very easily).
Maybe it's time courts (like the Supreme Court?) start evaluating whether or not people should be able to patent certain technologies that have become a mainstay in the Internet community, like XML, HTTP, the hyperlink, SGML, indexes, etc. If companies keep privatizing what they don't own in the first place, bye-bye Internet, hello big-brother rule again!
Maybe they prefer CS for administrative jobs because it shows people can stick to their jobs and hang in there when the going gets rough, and not just "flunk" out to an easier course of action (or course, in this case: CIS/MIS)
If nothing else, better understanding
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
I'm in computer science at Iowa State University and we pretty much make fun of the MIS (CIS) students here, calling them CS dropouts (which is usually the case). But, then again, the computer engineering students usually poke fun at us, too.
I have a coworker that graduated MIS and I'm about ready to graduate and we'll make the same, pretty much, but you can still tell a difference in level of understand. I get more development tasks and have a deeper knowledge of (hold your breath) Windows programming, although a lot of that wasn't acquired through school. But the theory is still taught (which they tell me is good) so if you can handle it, my suggestion is take CS instead of CIS.
Of course, CprE does seem to offer a whole lot more as far as opportunity, pay, and, of course, work load!
Binaries are good if you just want to test out the product and see how it is. Since Linux is trying to target newbies and home-users, rpms, debian packages, and the like are good for those kinds of people.
If the users have enough knowledge and want to customize the source or recompile with different libraries or what not, they can use autoconf or change / view the source code to do different things or even see how something is done in case they want to use a similar concept in their programming.
Personally, I like srpms because you can still modify the source code but keep an inventory of software installed via the system rpm database.
On the note of screenshots, I like to see what the program looks like a lot of times first before I try it so that I know what the program is capable of (as far as UI goes) and for visual appeal: I think a good-looking program is easier to use (not necessarily better) for newbies than some hacked-up Tk program.
It seems like every time newer, faster processors come out or more RAM is possible to shove onto a mobo, or larger hard drives are possible, M$ Office gets larger and more CPU intensive!
So, will software keep up the trend it is now from M$'s perspective or will it follow trend as open source usually does with good programmers (or groups of programmers) that try to keep the programs running with small footprints?
And as an aside, does this mean Quake II will startup instantaneously before we even click it?!
Oh, lighten up! The government already takes away practically everything we have that used to make America great - don't join them in taking away our comical humanity, too!
When is Intel going to dump the i386 architecture? The whole 15 IRQ thing is annoying! Yes, yes, I know that a lot of you will flame me and say "get a SCSI system," but some people can't always afford that kind of system (but I would love one!)
Most home users just buy their computers and expect them to work. Then they go off and buy all these extra periphials (that aren't USB) and eventually all the IRQs are taken. Sound cards alone usually take 2 IRQs! It doesn't take much to fill your system.
Now, don't get my wrong: I do like rh6.2 and use it at work and at home, but why would you use it for a game console? There are other distros out there that are streamlined, hence run faster. The faster they can get the base os to run, the less memory and processor speed we need to run games and the lower the cost. Of couse, I'm sure a free os like rh would lower the cost anyway, as opposed to the Dreamcast running Windows CE!
But why not choose another distro that is made for smaller devices. uCLinux might be a little too cut down, but aren't there better ones out there? I think I remember reading some right here at/. , but I don't remember.
One of the things that the Linux community is shooting for is to spread their support and usage to other people that use Windows. We want linux to be used as much (if not more) than Windows someday, and having a common look-and-feel (at least to start with, because you can always change it since it's open-sourced) will influence people a little more.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a definite Linux support and only have a Windows box for DVD/Dxr3 playback (for now), but one thing that is nice about Windows is the common look-and-feel, especially for someone who isn't used to it or new to computers or something like that. Sure would give them a little less apprehension, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Great, just another gimmic to attract the younger croud. As I walk around, I'm seeing a ton of teenagers with no more reason for a phone than to "stay in touch with all their friends". It's more like be bothered consitantly and cause headaches for everyone else because they can't talk quietly.
It's not just kids either. I walk around a major University here in the US and practically everyone has them and is always on them. It's the first thing they do out of class. It's what they do on the bus. It's become a cult and a horrible addiction.
I'm not saying cell phones aren't important. They have many great uses and I plan on getting one as soon as I graduate (not enough comfortable capital yet because of rising education costs) for work and long distance (much cheaper!!!).
Does anyone agree with me? It seems like there's more people out there that don't have a need for them - especially the younger croud. Live life; meet new people - like the people sitting next to you in the bus; and get off the damn phone.
No kidding! While I hate that Lego kept adding "special pieces" for practically one purpose, the base set and a few cool thinks like pnuematic pumps could build anything! I used to build entire cities out of base parts until lego started commercializing them with "special parts". Lincoln logs build log houses and huts. Maybe a tower or two.
Sure, you could build a city out of lincoln logs, but when's the last time you've heard of a log city (village) surviving very long?
You can sync other devices with this, too. You can sync many different phones, PDA's, PIMs (Outlook and some others), and Yahoo and / or Excite. It's been a while since I've used it, but they may have added more.
But they do it in entirely different ways. When you benchmark something for performance, you have to have a common ground. Yes, they do both let you run Windows apps on linux, but in completely different ways. Of course an emulator will run slower, but a virtual machine won't, sans the currently-used resources from the other running OS.
It seems to me that comparing VMWare (and the like) to Wine is like comparing apples and oranges. VMWare actually creates a virtual machine posting BIOS again and thus starting your target platform by the partition you're in. Wine emulates function calls on linux (and libraries, of course) but still runs as the base operating system. How do these even compare?
I don't care how much I get mod'd down for this or flamed, but best of wishes to you, Loki! It's good to know that a linux company out there can make money, even if they have to file a Chapter 11. Hope you get out soon and can get back to offerring great games for a great OS (well, OS'es anyway).
Let me offer another angle on this topic: the end of the world. Revelations speaks about the mark of the devil, having the symbol "666" embedded in our hands or foreheads. It goes on to read that the mark of the beast is over-capitolization and the love of the money. Abusing the capitolization like we already are now is a start. Embedded chips like this (which you know will happen someday) is just another sign fulfilled. Not many left now; be weary.
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
Simple as that? Got this off Microsoft's site.
It's clear that any government office in the US is managed by older men and women, most of which probably don't know much more than how to turn a computer on and get email. These are the people making decisions that affect us technologically savvy people and our jobs. Lobbyists tell them what they want to know, and as we've seen with RIAA and other large groups, they get their way even if they're not telling the truth.
What the government needs, including USPTO, is people that specifically deal with technology - people that understand this stuff like many of the fine people that use Slashdot everyday. We can't know everything about all the patents for technology, but we might have better insight as where to start.
I've only used the USPTO databases (rather, the public accessible databases) a few times - just for curiosity's sake - but I know that the information dealing with technology can be gotten. You just have to know what you're looking for. Joe Smith who uses AOL might not understand the technology behind the patent pending technology, so he's not going to know where to start. Now, CowboyNeal sees the technology and investigates it further (or perhaps already knows about it because of the fast-paced Slashdot News service) and know exactly (or close to) where to start looking.
This isn't a be-all, end-all solution, but it's something the government definitely needs to think about as a whole. We need people that understand technology making policy on technology lest we patent and put a stop to everything technological so that no one can innovate ideas based on current innovations or use technology to better this world (like multilingual DNS).
Well of course they'll insist that phones aren't harmful and get a patent on 'brain sheilds'. If phones were harmful, no one would give them money. And if they didn't have a patent on 'brain shields', they couldn't make money from a stupid, no-brainer idea off other companies. Money, fella's. That's what it's all about. Money...and brain sheilds.
Now here's the real question: why would they even create brain sheilds? If they rot our brains with phones, we'll be more likely to buy crappy cell/pcs plans at high rates for few minutes and no roaming features. Guess they didn't think that one through enough after all.
Anything else than what they have now would be great! Anyone else notice that their drivers have turned into full-bore applications? They're memory intensive, take an hour or two to install, and need superfluous 16-bit, ugly windows that run everytime you need to print something. That's not a driver, that's an application!
Exactly my point, thank you. for you all you others out there, I know what "w.i.n.e." stands for and, quite frankly, they're wrong. they reimplement functionality provided by DLLs with their own libs and can even use Windows DLLs if you want.
Not only should we support and embrace companies like Loki for doing such a great job and helping to make SDL a great gaming layer (hopefully more game programmers will then use it instead of DirectX for cross-platform games from the get-go), but we should embrace native linux games.
We all know that Wine is a bit of a resource hog, since it emulates windows on top of another OS, and Windows is a resource hog on its own, so now you've got two hogs and that can only lead to trouble (anyone seen Hannibal?). Running natively makes the games much faster and gives linux the boost that it needs for people and organizations (like PC Mag that claims there's not enough apps for linux when the reverse is actually true).
We all want linux to succeed, so lets support native linux games (and other programs, as well, like StarOffice and KOffice, etc) and the companies that work hard to get good software for linux that attracts attention!
Fact of the matter is, Microsoft released Windows 2K with over 65,000 bugs! Maybe if they had hundreds - if not thousands - of eyes pearing at source code, bugs would be fixed because people discover them and usually offer a fix, especially the thousands - if not millions - good programmers that do this kind of stuff as a second living.
Take Mozilla, for example. Yes, there were far too many primary developers and Mozilla was originally a to keep organized, but at least bugs got fixed due to the help of so many people viewing and review source for and bug testing. Maybe Microsoft should learn from this!
What about combinin efforts? AltaVista already wants to own all search engines (hence the patent), why don't they form deals with other search engines that quite frankly suck (like excite or lycos) and distribute the work load?
Of course, leave Google out of the mix. They already kick ass.
You don't need a Mac to download QuickTime. There is a Windows port that works just as well. Just go to apple.com, click QuickTime, download, and download the [gulp] Windows port.
Now hopefully they start going after other frivilous patents like British Telecomm (the hyper-link) and AltaVista. In both cases (and so many more), prior art has been shown but the patent office still issues patents! Are they stupid or just dump? Perhaps the patent lawyers that worked on the cases should be looked into, too, and barred from patent cases if nothing else.
This is clearly a case of companies grabbing technology and honing it for money and name-sake, but they didn't invent it! This is bad business practice as well, and I urge you /. readers to keep usage of such sites to a minimum (obviously you can't with the hyperlink very easily).
Maybe it's time courts (like the Supreme Court?) start evaluating whether or not people should be able to patent certain technologies that have become a mainstay in the Internet community, like XML, HTTP, the hyperlink, SGML, indexes, etc. If companies keep privatizing what they don't own in the first place, bye-bye Internet, hello big-brother rule again!
Maybe they prefer CS for administrative jobs because it shows people can stick to their jobs and hang in there when the going gets rough, and not just "flunk" out to an easier course of action (or course, in this case: CIS/MIS)
I'm in computer science at Iowa State University and we pretty much make fun of the MIS (CIS) students here, calling them CS dropouts (which is usually the case). But, then again, the computer engineering students usually poke fun at us, too.
I have a coworker that graduated MIS and I'm about ready to graduate and we'll make the same, pretty much, but you can still tell a difference in level of understand. I get more development tasks and have a deeper knowledge of (hold your breath) Windows programming, although a lot of that wasn't acquired through school. But the theory is still taught (which they tell me is good) so if you can handle it, my suggestion is take CS instead of CIS.
Of course, CprE does seem to offer a whole lot more as far as opportunity, pay, and, of course, work load!
Binaries are good if you just want to test out the product and see how it is. Since Linux is trying to target newbies and home-users, rpms, debian packages, and the like are good for those kinds of people.
If the users have enough knowledge and want to customize the source or recompile with different libraries or what not, they can use autoconf or change / view the source code to do different things or even see how something is done in case they want to use a similar concept in their programming.
Personally, I like srpms because you can still modify the source code but keep an inventory of software installed via the system rpm database.
On the note of screenshots, I like to see what the program looks like a lot of times first before I try it so that I know what the program is capable of (as far as UI goes) and for visual appeal: I think a good-looking program is easier to use (not necessarily better) for newbies than some hacked-up Tk program.
It seems like every time newer, faster processors come out or more RAM is possible to shove onto a mobo, or larger hard drives are possible, M$ Office gets larger and more CPU intensive!
So, will software keep up the trend it is now from M$'s perspective or will it follow trend as open source usually does with good programmers (or groups of programmers) that try to keep the programs running with small footprints?
And as an aside, does this mean Quake II will startup instantaneously before we even click it?!
Oh, lighten up! The government already takes away practically everything we have that used to make America great - don't join them in taking away our comical humanity, too!
When is Intel going to dump the i386 architecture? The whole 15 IRQ thing is annoying! Yes, yes, I know that a lot of you will flame me and say "get a SCSI system," but some people can't always afford that kind of system (but I would love one!)
Most home users just buy their computers and expect them to work. Then they go off and buy all these extra periphials (that aren't USB) and eventually all the IRQs are taken. Sound cards alone usually take 2 IRQs! It doesn't take much to fill your system.
Now, don't get my wrong: I do like rh6.2 and use it at work and at home, but why would you use it for a game console? There are other distros out there that are streamlined, hence run faster. The faster they can get the base os to run, the less memory and processor speed we need to run games and the lower the cost. Of couse, I'm sure a free os like rh would lower the cost anyway, as opposed to the Dreamcast running Windows CE!
But why not choose another distro that is made for smaller devices. uCLinux might be a little too cut down, but aren't there better ones out there? I think I remember reading some right here at /. , but I don't remember.
One of the things that the Linux community is shooting for is to spread their support and usage to other people that use Windows. We want linux to be used as much (if not more) than Windows someday, and having a common look-and-feel (at least to start with, because you can always change it since it's open-sourced) will influence people a little more.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a definite Linux support and only have a Windows box for DVD/Dxr3 playback (for now), but one thing that is nice about Windows is the common look-and-feel, especially for someone who isn't used to it or new to computers or something like that. Sure would give them a little less apprehension, wouldn't it?