Did we already forget that Ubuntu also installed such and without consent [slashdot.org] (and Linux Mint) - here you atleast have the change to disallow installing it.
As someone mentioned here, it's not alarming as you make it seem. It's only in the alpha version and not meant for the release version. Granted, I would have liked them to be a bit more forward about it, I'm not terribly upset.
I primarily run Ubuntu, although I've gotten very similar results from both Windows Vista and Fedora. I never really thought about installing a minimal version of Linux to get more battery life, so I might give that a try after summer break. An editor won't be an issue since I typically use vim. I'm probably going to buy a new laptop or netbook for taking notes, but it's still something I'll look at, especially if it gives me that little bit of extra battery life.
My latest laptop advertised 2.5 hours of battery life, which I would've been fine with. It's enough to last through two classes, after which I can normally find a power outlet.
I wasn't very careful looking at the battery life, and, to my dismay, I took it home to find out it could only hold a charge for 1.5 hours. This is even on pretty conservative settings with the screen dimmed as low as possible. Now that it's starting to age, I'm down to about 1 hour of battery, which doesn't even last through my 75 minute classes.
Most people expect 2.5 hours of "good use" out of a laptop battery when new. This number hasn't really changed since 1998 or so. I can't remember the last time I used battery life when evaluating a laptop - if you NEED more than 2.5 hours of battery life, you just buy a second battery.
I have to wonder what program you are using to output the audio. On my desktop, there are settings that allow the audio to be routed immediately to output without processing in PulseAudio or anything.
But, more to the point, your latency relies on the program itself much more. I've been doing quite a bit of low-latency audio programming using both ALSA and PulseAudio, and they both get extremely small if you know what you're doing. With ALSA, I've gotten to around 1ms, while I can easily get PulseAudio to approximately 5ms. Using a PC that has two cores, I've gotten the numbers cut down to around 0.5ms and 2ms, respectively.
If you're having a real touchy time getting response that low, you likely have to bump up priority of the process. Using ALSA, simply setting the application to realtime scheduling will do it. With PulseAudio, you're going to need to set the audio server itself to realtime as well as the application (I haven't done too much testing with that, but that seems to be the consensus online). As a parent suggested, you probably want to look at using JACK. It does most of the dirty work for you.
I learned most of this working on a low-latency audio application. Just yesterday I got the thing to route a guitar at low latency using ALSA, and I'm looking to finish up the Pulse portion this next week or so.
That strncpy probably isn't what you're looking for. From here: "If the array pointed to by s2 is a string that is shorter than n bytes, null bytes are appended to the copy in the array pointed to by s1, until n bytes in all are written." So that function isn't a very good idea if your destination buffer is really large and your source buffer is very small.
For a safe strcpy, you're probably going to want something like strcpy(dest, src, (dest src ? dest : src)). You can expand that out to a full if statement if inline conditionals give you a headache.
Not quite. My karma is only "good", and I just got the option today. I'm not sure what qualifies you. However, I myself decided not to check the box. I figure that I deserve ads since I don't subscribe.
Well, having taken a graduate class on crypto, you're guaranteed to leak some kind of information unless your using a system with perfect secrecy, but that requires that your key be as long as your message. With modern cryptosystems, short keys (short compared to the message) are used, so some type of information is being leaked, although
it is greatly obfuscated through the algorithm of the cryptosystem. I don't believe you can say for certainty that no information is leaked, but the premise is that a robust system ought not to leak noticeable information unless the attackers discovered the key. My professor said that designing a system that fit this description is closer to an art since the mathematics says some information should be leaked.
Disclaimer: This is what I know from a limited amount of experience with, so a lot of the details are fuzzy or incomplete. Please feel free to correct me (politely).
Yet many of my ~200 page books for college cost well over $100, making it about $0.50 per page. Besides, it's a price that would likely be worth it for many, especially so for a short. Heck, this is cheaper than many of the used books that are 1/2 or 1/4 the price. And yes, I know that college textbooks are already ridiculously expensive, but that's a different story.
Woahhhh... sounds like I just met myself online from a parallel universe. So you went with BASIC? Huh... I did Visual Basic. You programmed a slot machine... I programmed tic-tac-toe. You learned bass guitar and keyboard. I went with electric guitar and piano a few months back. You started a service-based company. I started a information-based website.
In all seriousness, I've found a lot of the same. Most of the time, I find people discussing problems without and producing solutions. I find a lot of people like learning random skills, picking up a programming language here or there, but not actually applying these things. Presented with a problem, they have to tools to solve it but no understanding of how to get around it to solve the thing. It drives me crazy.
Who says it's all about the control you have? I play both PC and console FPS games. I consider the "hindrance" of a joystick to be an obstacle that makes the games that much more different. You can't turn around blazing fast, but nobody on a console can. This moves gameplay away from running into the middle of a crowd and picking off people at high speeds. Instead, things like sneaking up behind someone becomes very valuable. For me, I turn the sensitivity way up in order to get an advantage, putting it at 10 for the first Halo, but moving down to 8 for the Halo III (mostly due to lag from somewhere between the wireless controllers or the LCD TV I use now).
So, you really like that control for a PC game that allows you to aim anywhere almost instantaneously? Great. I like it too. I also like console games where aim is more difficult, forcing you to keep your aimer pointed directly at where you expect the enemy. One isn't better than the other. They each have their perks. To each his own.
In Xubuntu, you should be able to drag a window to off the screen using alt. I'm using it now, and it works just fine. Really helped with my girlfriend's computer using an Eee PC where half the windows don't fit on the screen properly.
My main gripe is that windows like to move to different workspaces without my consent. For example, search for something in firefox using '/', then move to a different workspace. Wait a few seconds, and look, there's Firefox, now on your current workspace. I've tried enabling focus-stealing prevention and various other options to no avail.
I think that we're probably going to see people defending Obama himself rather than his decision. I personally voted for him and generally support him (at least more than McCain), but I abhor this appointment. I hope that Obama will appoint other, anti-RIAA people to help balance things out. I don't follow politics enough to know all the ins and outs, so I can't provide any real insight in this decision. Hopefully some fellow/.ers will give some useful insight other than the typically "Politics as usual", "Democrats suck", "Both parties are the same", etc that goes on every time something political comes up. Maybe something new and useful, like an analysis of his other advisors and appointments to see if there are other pro-RIAA as well as anti-RIAA people.
"Yes, it does have problems, sometimes it even burps while copying files, which is bizarre to me, since it's such a basic function."
I've had significant issues with copying files in Vista. I haven't run Vista in about 6 months, so they may have corrected it by now, although I know service pack 1 has not fixed it. The problem occurs when you try to copy a ton of very small files. Say, for example, you create 1,000,000 files at 1 bytes a piece. Now, this should be approximately 1MB (okay, overhead for the file tree and such, meh). When I tried copying this to a flash drive (tried it on two different Vista PCs), it took ages. It seemed to have something like a 0.5 second overhead per file it had to copy regardless of its file size. Instead of waiting for a day to copy, I zipped up all the files, put it on the flash drive. Rebooted into Ubuntu. Extracted the files to the Ubuntu partition. Then copied them back onto the flash drive. This process took me all of about 20 minutes (something like 500MB of data).
Hopefully it has been fixed by now, but this painful experience has made me shy away from Vista. I have run into a few other issues that were pretty horrible, including my laptop coming pre-installed with a non-functional copy of Vista, and the recovery partition being entirely unable to boot. Installing Alcohol 120% and watching the system blue screen every time I booted it was pretty aggravating (it was fixable given an illegally downloaded Vista boot disc to repair it). All in all, Vista isn't so bad, but there are some definite show-stopper issues that got me, and it wouldn't be surprising to see other have unpleasantly stepped on these land-mines as well.
Department of Justice this week said it has placed criminal charges or convictions against more than 255 defendants in the past two fiscal years -- 145 in 2008 and 110 in 2007. That 255 number represents more than a six-fold increase from fiscal year 2005, when the DOJ said about 40 individuals or companies were convicted of over 100 criminal violations of export control laws.
So, there were 255 defendants charged or convicted for a period of two years. And there were 40 invidivudals/companies convicted in solely 2005. First of all, they are comparing numbers from two years with the numbers of one year. Also, they are comparing being charged or convicted with those who were only convicted. To me, those statistics sound funny.
So, I tried out OpenNIC. Seems pretty cool, except that I can't seem to find any content out there. Almost every non-ICANN TLD I seem to find can't resolve other than the OpenNIC domains. For example, almost all the results from grep.geek return webpages that don't seem to exist. Is this a problem with the DNS servers? Are all these websites defunct and everything is out of date? With some polish, I might just convince some geeky friends of mine to use this. It would be good fun typing in grep.geek and surprising people that it/actually/ resolves.
Personally, I would be seriously pissed if I knew that some of my tuition was going to pay for an iPod/iPhone. I don't want an iPhone because Verizon has been working perfectly fine for me so far and I'm not about to switch. I don't want an iPod touch since since, after all, I've been perfectly content without an mp3 player at all. Great, it might be useful to some classes when a professor decides to integrate it into their class. How many classes are going to require this? Would a laptop (which I already own) suffice instead? I don't really don't want to get stuck with a single company force feeding me their products because of the university I attend. Give me some third party options at the very least. What gets me so epically pissed is that they pass it off as ACU paying for it when we know where that money comes from: tuition aka students.
Granted, I have some classes where internet access is more or less a must, but I'd rather have a nice, full keyboard and a reasonable screen that I can put my own software on rather than being shoved a piece of hardware required by the university. Give options, don't mandate one (or two nearly identical) devices.
Yes, Microsoft will have to directly compete against Linux, but the bigger question is will Microsoft play fair. From Microsoft's history, I have to doubt that Linux and Windows will be given equal opportunity. What's going to stop these countries from purchasing Windows solely because the OS appears to work rather than which system provides better overall capabilities.
Also, weren't the specs of the OLPC laptop already bumped up in order to theoretically support Windows as they're now doing? If so, that would mean that the goal of the laptop to be super-dirt cheap was already subverted by being able to put MS on the thing anyway. Don't get me wrong, the whole project isn't an abysmal failure, but I have to believe that attempting to get MS to function on the laptop has already derailed a lot of the original project's intent. You know, that whole learning thing. Instead, I feel that Windows will simply teach the user to become accustomed to the status quo.
For me, a few years back, I got an email similar to the one posted, and I went ahead with selling my domain. I owned two domain names for the same website, and the domain they wished to purchase was my old one (I transitioned everything to the new one a year prior) so I no longer really had a need for that domain. I kept it only because the name was a super short and it was dirt cheap. I went ahead with the deal anyway since I didn't really have anything to lose. The transfer was through Paypal, so no real sensitive information changed hand. In the end, everything worked out fine and I ended up with over a thousand extra bucks.
I figured this would be good food for thought, although don't presume that my rather good experience is a green light. Heck, I took a few days to contemplate it before committing to it.
It came as a pretty big shock to me when I saw his vote on the bill while still retaining some hope. I came to/. to read about it, and you guys really brought my spirits down much further. A day passed, I read his comment, analyzed it, talked it over with others, and, although it's one tough blow, I don't believe that he is failing to retain his principles. I watched him at a rally in Ohio during the primary season, and, even then, he stress that we needed certain security measures against terrorism and specifically supported FISA.
Yeah, I know that I despise the telecom immunity, but there's a whole lot more to the guy than just that. Watch his interview at Google, actually look for things without freaking out at the first sight of something you dislike. Yeah, it's against the normal flow of/. to actually be optimistic and not complain about something, but I do have hope that some people actually see things without the black cloud of impending doom constantly looming over.
In the end, it still is politics, no matter how noble a candidate seems. Yeah, I've browsed quite a bit of Obama's policies at great detail, and even if he epically failed me on this specific issue, there's still others I see. So, I still have some hope left that even with this blunder, there will be a positive outcome if Obama gets elected.
Yeah, another post mentioned that a SSD's power consumption during load is higher than another magnetic disk on idle... here it is:
"The SanDisk SDD drive at LOAD requires 1.0 mW while Hitachi HDD requires 1.1 mW at IDLE"
Of course, benchmarks are always a better indicator. Also, to be clear, as mentioned in the article (which I'm sure nobody else read), the test was performed by repeatedly running a benchmark on the system until it ran out of battery, so the test with the SSD is likely to have run the test more often.
I believe this comment from the article could explain some of this away.
'There could be a systematic error in the benchmarks shown: if the flash based "disks" are faster then the whole system CPU/MEM/Chipset would draw much more power with flash "disks" compared with conventional disks - just because the benchmarks could run more often in the same time.
Maybe one should compare something like playing video from disk where it is assured that the systems do precisely the same work?'
You could also use one of their alpha and beta builds for the next version of Ubuntu (Hardy Haron right now). The entire system was working fine for me until a week ago when fglrx died. However, I have ended up primarily using Zenwalk recently since I prefer Xfce (and don't feel Xubuntu is as slick).
This doesn't make me a rabid Ubuntu supporter. I tell most people who want to get started in GNU/Linux to use Ubuntu simply due to the fact that it typically just works and is fairly simple (that is Ubuntu worked first try for me most of the time, but that's just personal experience). If you really want bleeding edge, get a different distro or get Ubuntu's alpha or beta. After all, it's Linux, so you do have a choice.
Working my first programming job, I had to take over a project written in C#.NET without any experience in the language. The goal was to communicate through an RS-232 port for sending and receiving some data, including text and numbers. Looking at the previous code, I saw some really long, confusing method of converting a string to ASCII and sending it through. I really took me by surprise since I had never seen anything like it, and I proceeded by looking through documentation. I was hoping for something real nice with fwrite, but I instead I had to jump through some hoops to figure it out. The problem wasn't so much finding documentation, but figuring out what methods I needed to use. I felt overwhelmed with the number of options that were so similar, some of which appeared like they would work but some contained a small caveat that prevented it from working.
On another note, I was perplexed when I used a switch structure and attempted to let the code fall through to another label. The compiler complained and forced me to write a goto statement (is there a more elegant want to do that?). A little later, a senior programmer was reviewing my code an criticized me harshly for putting in a goto where it should simply fall through. I literally had to show him that it would not compile otherwise in order for him to believe me.
That is exactly why I'm probably going to get one over the summer. Right now, I have to walk about 15 minutes to class and back every day, and, on occassion, I have to make the trip two times a day. Now, seeing as I just paid my tuition bill today, my bank account is nearly empty and remain in this state for at least 3 more years of college. Because of this, the Eee PC is perfect for my needs, and doubly so since I can take advantage of the amazing wifi as well as the superb lan network in order to retrieve and store large files. As to high performance applications, I've still got a decent enough desktop in addition to my heavy and fairly cheap laptop that I can use while I'm at my dorm. Besides, the lack of movies on my laptop during class should help out my concentration anyway.
I find it rather funny that every time I see an article about Microsoft, I know that a large portion of the responses are going to be complaints and whining about how MS sucks, etc. Then, sooner than later, comes along a well written and often angry response, like the parent, that continues the whining and complaining by pointing out how everyone here on/. rips on MS. I see it as a nice trade-off since one can rather reliably get both sides of the issue, one way or another. I wouldn't consider this a weakness in/., but a strength. Of course this only works if assuming the reader themselves doesn't already have a predisposition towards MS or anti-MS, and, if they did, ranting isn't likely to convince them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Did we already forget that Ubuntu also installed such and without consent [slashdot.org] (and Linux Mint) - here you atleast have the change to disallow installing it.
As someone mentioned here, it's not alarming as you make it seem. It's only in the alpha version and not meant for the release version. Granted, I would have liked them to be a bit more forward about it, I'm not terribly upset.
I primarily run Ubuntu, although I've gotten very similar results from both Windows Vista and Fedora. I never really thought about installing a minimal version of Linux to get more battery life, so I might give that a try after summer break. An editor won't be an issue since I typically use vim. I'm probably going to buy a new laptop or netbook for taking notes, but it's still something I'll look at, especially if it gives me that little bit of extra battery life.
I wasn't very careful looking at the battery life, and, to my dismay, I took it home to find out it could only hold a charge for 1.5 hours. This is even on pretty conservative settings with the screen dimmed as low as possible. Now that it's starting to age, I'm down to about 1 hour of battery, which doesn't even last through my 75 minute classes.
Most people expect 2.5 hours of "good use" out of a laptop battery when new. This number hasn't really changed since 1998 or so. I can't remember the last time I used battery life when evaluating a laptop - if you NEED more than 2.5 hours of battery life, you just buy a second battery.
Oh, how I wish that were the case.
I have to wonder what program you are using to output the audio. On my desktop, there are settings that allow the audio to be routed immediately to output without processing in PulseAudio or anything.
But, more to the point, your latency relies on the program itself much more. I've been doing quite a bit of low-latency audio programming using both ALSA and PulseAudio, and they both get extremely small if you know what you're doing. With ALSA, I've gotten to around 1ms, while I can easily get PulseAudio to approximately 5ms. Using a PC that has two cores, I've gotten the numbers cut down to around 0.5ms and 2ms, respectively.
If you're having a real touchy time getting response that low, you likely have to bump up priority of the process. Using ALSA, simply setting the application to realtime scheduling will do it. With PulseAudio, you're going to need to set the audio server itself to realtime as well as the application (I haven't done too much testing with that, but that seems to be the consensus online). As a parent suggested, you probably want to look at using JACK. It does most of the dirty work for you.
I learned most of this working on a low-latency audio application. Just yesterday I got the thing to route a guitar at low latency using ALSA, and I'm looking to finish up the Pulse portion this next week or so.
That strncpy probably isn't what you're looking for. From here: "If the array pointed to by s2 is a string that is shorter than n bytes, null bytes are appended to the copy in the array pointed to by s1, until n bytes in all are written." So that function isn't a very good idea if your destination buffer is really large and your source buffer is very small.
For a safe strcpy, you're probably going to want something like strcpy(dest, src, (dest src ? dest : src)). You can expand that out to a full if statement if inline conditionals give you a headache.
Not quite. My karma is only "good", and I just got the option today. I'm not sure what qualifies you. However, I myself decided not to check the box. I figure that I deserve ads since I don't subscribe.
Well, having taken a graduate class on crypto, you're guaranteed to leak some kind of information unless your using a system with perfect secrecy, but that requires that your key be as long as your message. With modern cryptosystems, short keys (short compared to the message) are used, so some type of information is being leaked, although it is greatly obfuscated through the algorithm of the cryptosystem. I don't believe you can say for certainty that no information is leaked, but the premise is that a robust system ought not to leak noticeable information unless the attackers discovered the key. My professor said that designing a system that fit this description is closer to an art since the mathematics says some information should be leaked.
Disclaimer: This is what I know from a limited amount of experience with, so a lot of the details are fuzzy or incomplete. Please feel free to correct me (politely).
Yet many of my ~200 page books for college cost well over $100, making it about $0.50 per page. Besides, it's a price that would likely be worth it for many, especially so for a short. Heck, this is cheaper than many of the used books that are 1/2 or 1/4 the price. And yes, I know that college textbooks are already ridiculously expensive, but that's a different story.
Woahhhh... sounds like I just met myself online from a parallel universe. So you went with BASIC? Huh... I did Visual Basic. You programmed a slot machine... I programmed tic-tac-toe. You learned bass guitar and keyboard. I went with electric guitar and piano a few months back. You started a service-based company. I started a information-based website.
In all seriousness, I've found a lot of the same. Most of the time, I find people discussing problems without and producing solutions. I find a lot of people like learning random skills, picking up a programming language here or there, but not actually applying these things. Presented with a problem, they have to tools to solve it but no understanding of how to get around it to solve the thing. It drives me crazy.
Who says it's all about the control you have? I play both PC and console FPS games. I consider the "hindrance" of a joystick to be an obstacle that makes the games that much more different. You can't turn around blazing fast, but nobody on a console can. This moves gameplay away from running into the middle of a crowd and picking off people at high speeds. Instead, things like sneaking up behind someone becomes very valuable. For me, I turn the sensitivity way up in order to get an advantage, putting it at 10 for the first Halo, but moving down to 8 for the Halo III (mostly due to lag from somewhere between the wireless controllers or the LCD TV I use now).
So, you really like that control for a PC game that allows you to aim anywhere almost instantaneously? Great. I like it too. I also like console games where aim is more difficult, forcing you to keep your aimer pointed directly at where you expect the enemy. One isn't better than the other. They each have their perks. To each his own.
In Xubuntu, you should be able to drag a window to off the screen using alt. I'm using it now, and it works just fine. Really helped with my girlfriend's computer using an Eee PC where half the windows don't fit on the screen properly.
My main gripe is that windows like to move to different workspaces without my consent. For example, search for something in firefox using '/', then move to a different workspace. Wait a few seconds, and look, there's Firefox, now on your current workspace. I've tried enabling focus-stealing prevention and various other options to no avail.
I think that we're probably going to see people defending Obama himself rather than his decision. I personally voted for him and generally support him (at least more than McCain), but I abhor this appointment. I hope that Obama will appoint other, anti-RIAA people to help balance things out. I don't follow politics enough to know all the ins and outs, so I can't provide any real insight in this decision. Hopefully some fellow /.ers will give some useful insight other than the typically "Politics as usual", "Democrats suck", "Both parties are the same", etc that goes on every time something political comes up. Maybe something new and useful, like an analysis of his other advisors and appointments to see if there are other pro-RIAA as well as anti-RIAA people.
"Yes, it does have problems, sometimes it even burps while copying files, which is bizarre to me, since it's such a basic function." I've had significant issues with copying files in Vista. I haven't run Vista in about 6 months, so they may have corrected it by now, although I know service pack 1 has not fixed it. The problem occurs when you try to copy a ton of very small files. Say, for example, you create 1,000,000 files at 1 bytes a piece. Now, this should be approximately 1MB (okay, overhead for the file tree and such, meh). When I tried copying this to a flash drive (tried it on two different Vista PCs), it took ages. It seemed to have something like a 0.5 second overhead per file it had to copy regardless of its file size. Instead of waiting for a day to copy, I zipped up all the files, put it on the flash drive. Rebooted into Ubuntu. Extracted the files to the Ubuntu partition. Then copied them back onto the flash drive. This process took me all of about 20 minutes (something like 500MB of data). Hopefully it has been fixed by now, but this painful experience has made me shy away from Vista. I have run into a few other issues that were pretty horrible, including my laptop coming pre-installed with a non-functional copy of Vista, and the recovery partition being entirely unable to boot. Installing Alcohol 120% and watching the system blue screen every time I booted it was pretty aggravating (it was fixable given an illegally downloaded Vista boot disc to repair it). All in all, Vista isn't so bad, but there are some definite show-stopper issues that got me, and it wouldn't be surprising to see other have unpleasantly stepped on these land-mines as well.
Department of Justice this week said it has placed criminal charges or convictions against more than 255 defendants in the past two fiscal years -- 145 in 2008 and 110 in 2007. That 255 number represents more than a six-fold increase from fiscal year 2005, when the DOJ said about 40 individuals or companies were convicted of over 100 criminal violations of export control laws.
So, there were 255 defendants charged or convicted for a period of two years. And there were 40 invidivudals/companies convicted in solely 2005. First of all, they are comparing numbers from two years with the numbers of one year. Also, they are comparing being charged or convicted with those who were only convicted. To me, those statistics sound funny.
So, I tried out OpenNIC. Seems pretty cool, except that I can't seem to find any content out there. Almost every non-ICANN TLD I seem to find can't resolve other than the OpenNIC domains. For example, almost all the results from grep.geek return webpages that don't seem to exist. Is this a problem with the DNS servers? Are all these websites defunct and everything is out of date? With some polish, I might just convince some geeky friends of mine to use this. It would be good fun typing in grep.geek and surprising people that it /actually/ resolves.
Personally, I would be seriously pissed if I knew that some of my tuition was going to pay for an iPod/iPhone. I don't want an iPhone because Verizon has been working perfectly fine for me so far and I'm not about to switch. I don't want an iPod touch since since, after all, I've been perfectly content without an mp3 player at all. Great, it might be useful to some classes when a professor decides to integrate it into their class. How many classes are going to require this? Would a laptop (which I already own) suffice instead? I don't really don't want to get stuck with a single company force feeding me their products because of the university I attend. Give me some third party options at the very least. What gets me so epically pissed is that they pass it off as ACU paying for it when we know where that money comes from: tuition aka students.
Granted, I have some classes where internet access is more or less a must, but I'd rather have a nice, full keyboard and a reasonable screen that I can put my own software on rather than being shoved a piece of hardware required by the university. Give options, don't mandate one (or two nearly identical) devices.
Yes, Microsoft will have to directly compete against Linux, but the bigger question is will Microsoft play fair. From Microsoft's history, I have to doubt that Linux and Windows will be given equal opportunity. What's going to stop these countries from purchasing Windows solely because the OS appears to work rather than which system provides better overall capabilities.
Also, weren't the specs of the OLPC laptop already bumped up in order to theoretically support Windows as they're now doing? If so, that would mean that the goal of the laptop to be super-dirt cheap was already subverted by being able to put MS on the thing anyway. Don't get me wrong, the whole project isn't an abysmal failure, but I have to believe that attempting to get MS to function on the laptop has already derailed a lot of the original project's intent. You know, that whole learning thing. Instead, I feel that Windows will simply teach the user to become accustomed to the status quo.
For me, a few years back, I got an email similar to the one posted, and I went ahead with selling my domain. I owned two domain names for the same website, and the domain they wished to purchase was my old one (I transitioned everything to the new one a year prior) so I no longer really had a need for that domain. I kept it only because the name was a super short and it was dirt cheap. I went ahead with the deal anyway since I didn't really have anything to lose. The transfer was through Paypal, so no real sensitive information changed hand. In the end, everything worked out fine and I ended up with over a thousand extra bucks.
I figured this would be good food for thought, although don't presume that my rather good experience is a green light. Heck, I took a few days to contemplate it before committing to it.
For more details, this blog post contains what Barack Obama had to say about his vote on the FISA bill (sorry, I couldn't find the original): http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/fib/gGxfss.
/. to read about it, and you guys really brought my spirits down much further. A day passed, I read his comment, analyzed it, talked it over with others, and, although it's one tough blow, I don't believe that he is failing to retain his principles. I watched him at a rally in Ohio during the primary season, and, even then, he stress that we needed certain security measures against terrorism and specifically supported FISA.
/. to actually be optimistic and not complain about something, but I do have hope that some people actually see things without the black cloud of impending doom constantly looming over.
It came as a pretty big shock to me when I saw his vote on the bill while still retaining some hope. I came to
Yeah, I know that I despise the telecom immunity, but there's a whole lot more to the guy than just that. Watch his interview at Google, actually look for things without freaking out at the first sight of something you dislike. Yeah, it's against the normal flow of
In the end, it still is politics, no matter how noble a candidate seems. Yeah, I've browsed quite a bit of Obama's policies at great detail, and even if he epically failed me on this specific issue, there's still others I see. So, I still have some hope left that even with this blunder, there will be a positive outcome if Obama gets elected.
Yeah, another post mentioned that a SSD's power consumption during load is higher than another magnetic disk on idle... here it is:
"The SanDisk SDD drive at LOAD requires 1.0 mW while Hitachi HDD requires 1.1 mW at IDLE"
Of course, benchmarks are always a better indicator. Also, to be clear, as mentioned in the article (which I'm sure nobody else read), the test was performed by repeatedly running a benchmark on the system until it ran out of battery, so the test with the SSD is likely to have run the test more often.
I believe this comment from the article could explain some of this away.
'There could be a systematic error in the benchmarks shown: if the flash based "disks" are faster then the whole system CPU/MEM/Chipset would draw much more power with flash "disks" compared with conventional disks - just because the benchmarks could run more often in the same time.
Maybe one should compare something like playing video from disk where it is assured that the systems do precisely the same work?'
You could also use one of their alpha and beta builds for the next version of Ubuntu (Hardy Haron right now). The entire system was working fine for me until a week ago when fglrx died. However, I have ended up primarily using Zenwalk recently since I prefer Xfce (and don't feel Xubuntu is as slick).
This doesn't make me a rabid Ubuntu supporter. I tell most people who want to get started in GNU/Linux to use Ubuntu simply due to the fact that it typically just works and is fairly simple (that is Ubuntu worked first try for me most of the time, but that's just personal experience). If you really want bleeding edge, get a different distro or get Ubuntu's alpha or beta. After all, it's Linux, so you do have a choice.
Working my first programming job, I had to take over a project written in C#.NET without any experience in the language. The goal was to communicate through an RS-232 port for sending and receiving some data, including text and numbers. Looking at the previous code, I saw some really long, confusing method of converting a string to ASCII and sending it through. I really took me by surprise since I had never seen anything like it, and I proceeded by looking through documentation. I was hoping for something real nice with fwrite, but I instead I had to jump through some hoops to figure it out. The problem wasn't so much finding documentation, but figuring out what methods I needed to use. I felt overwhelmed with the number of options that were so similar, some of which appeared like they would work but some contained a small caveat that prevented it from working.
On another note, I was perplexed when I used a switch structure and attempted to let the code fall through to another label. The compiler complained and forced me to write a goto statement (is there a more elegant want to do that?). A little later, a senior programmer was reviewing my code an criticized me harshly for putting in a goto where it should simply fall through. I literally had to show him that it would not compile otherwise in order for him to believe me.
I find it rather funny that every time I see an article about Microsoft, I know that a large portion of the responses are going to be complaints and whining about how MS sucks, etc. Then, sooner than later, comes along a well written and often angry response, like the parent, that continues the whining and complaining by pointing out how everyone here on /. rips on MS. I see it as a nice trade-off since one can rather reliably get both sides of the issue, one way or another. I wouldn't consider this a weakness in /., but a strength. Of course this only works if assuming the reader themselves doesn't already have a predisposition towards MS or anti-MS, and, if they did, ranting isn't likely to convince them anyway.