I agree that money has a lot to do with it. It's disgusting that it requires millions of dollars to win any major election. Anybody who even has a chance to seriously run in such an election is already bought and paid for.
I also think a major problem is that people are more interested in voting for the winning side than voting for someone that will do a good job. Essentially that means almost everyone elected is from one of the two main parties and they were elected less because of what they'll do than because they convinced enough people they were the winning side. At best people vote to keep the other major canidate from winning. The lesser of two evils method is a bad way to govern.
Law seems a useless thing to study. I could see studying government but I wouldn't want to study old cases and rulings and all that stuff that is constantly changing anyway. It seems a useless topic to me. If I study physics or engineering I can go do something with it when I'm done. If I study law what can I do with it except argue about it with other people who studied law? It's like Slashdot but wearing a suit, covering less interesting topics, and being paid a lot.
Is the phrase "Nobody's perfect." saying to little? Seriously, I don't think you can discredit somebodies achievements because of their failures.
For that matter is there evidence that the slaves weren't willing partners? (I never have actually studied the topic.) A man that is intelligent and powerful and literally your owner might appeal to certain types of women. Likewise I doubt any man alive has never dreamed of having a lustful and willing slave girl. Deny it if you want but that relationship is a deep part of human tradition and I doubt it's yet been bred out yet by our 'civilized' behavior.
Also if somebody isn't considered human I don't think you could really call it rape. It'd be like beastiality. Not because the slaves weren't human but because they weren't human in the eyes of the person commiting the act.
Then again you have to seriously question our societies general taboo on sex both then and now. If you want a strong society you'll have as many children as you can properly care for and train in the ways of your society. It's foolish not to be having lots of children because our society does have the resources to care for them all. To have children you need to have more sex. To get a better genetic blend you need people having sex with more partners. One major problem with our society is that the stupid people sit around popping out kids while the educated talented people delay having children and usually have fewer children. Not a good thing unless you want a country ran by people that learned everything they know from Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. So for all of those who have ever read and understood a book with big words and no pictures get off your ass and go breed.:)
I'm not a surfer but this looks like fun. It's like a JetSki you can carry around. I'd definately try it. All you cool surfers may complain and bash it for it's lack of purity of the sport but I can see this as being really fun and a popular new toy.
Re:Why review only the beta version?
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
Hey Pinky, I think his example was FreeBSD - Not Linux. I know such things are hard for you to grasp.
You listed the problem completely right. You fail to read the instructions so you find completing the task difficult. Try reading the instructions and maybe you'll find that things go together easily.
If you're a complete dumbass just use the prepackaged version. For debian that means, at most, adding a line to your sources. For RedHat that means downloading a couple rpm's and doing a quick 'rpm -U *.rpm'. Even compiling from source I've never ran into a problem. It all works easily if you have any clue what you're doing and bother to read the instructions.
MPlayer does seem odd to use at first if you've only used programs like Xine, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player but once you get over the bump of having to learn to use the command-line you'll find that MPlayer is a much more powerful program than your wimpy lil GUI programs. Want a pretty frontend anyway? Go download one. MPlayer is especially designed to make it easy for other developers to make their own frontends for it.
When I first started trying to use MPlayer I got annoyed because it wouldn't run for me.. then I actually read the directions and presto it worked. Amazing. My problem was that I hadn't bothered to find out that you need to tell MPlayer the audio and video drivers you need.
Installing was never a problem for me. I've installed on several computers from source, rpm, and deb and all have went off without a hitch. Again just follow the directions and everything works. The config script located all the codecs I had installed by itself.. even some that I'd put in unlikely places.
I don't like GUI programs for watching DVD's so after a first attempt at using it (which worked) I just stopped using it. Why would you need a GUI? The whole OS is your GUI. I setup Nautilus to open movies in MPlayer and installed the plugin patch so MPlayer would work with Mozilla. That works very well for most use. When I rip a DVD I have it also build a script that tells MPlayer how to play the movie to the best of it's abilities. My ripping program then adds an option to my 'Videos' menu to make playing the movie as simple as running any other program.
I don't have a problem with speed for playback and I'm using a 933Mhz C3 CPU with no fancy video card to boost things along. If you're Athlon can't keep up I'd say you've probably selected the wrong audio/video drivers or are trying to do something fancy you need not do.
Perhaps you should wait for the stable release to do your review? Reviews on pre-releases aren't really an honest look at what a program can do. Obviously it has faults.. that is what pre-release canidates are for.:)
I'm sure that if somebody worked out a good port and rather than releasing the code themselves they sent it back to the company that there'd be some interest. Other than SCO most companies don't have their head completely up their ass. A good port, even of slightly outdated code, that they didn't have to pay for might prompt them to sponsor the project by giving the project updated code (with an NDA of course) and agreeing to release the patches for running the program in Linux. Especially if the coders involved were being good about not releasing anything to the public until they got permission.
Avoid being seen as an enemy and if you do a good hack you might get what you want.. and maybe a job offer with it.
True, but if it's not a fast moving topic again I don't need to buy the book because then it's probably at the library or I've already memorized it. I mean how many books do you need to read on topics that don't change much? You read it once and then you just remember. No reason to buy 400 books on the topic if one book will cover it and nothing changes after that one book. For example I own a book on plumbing techniques. It was a fine book but I don't need to buy a new plumbing book because the subject of plumbing hasn't hanged much. I don't suddenly need to go study plumbing.NET in order to stay current for my job. It's not a complaint, it's just a fact of book shopping. My only complaint is that I like buying and reading books.. I wish they had more books for me to buy.:)
If their knowledge never goes out of date then I probably learned it a long time ago.. so again I have no need to buy the book. The only non-fiction books I buy anymore is on odd off the all topics that isn't covered well online yet but those are getting harder to find.
Sadly, in my experience, the last person to be laid off is the person that makes the least money.. not the hardest worker.
HR people are idiots anyway for the most part. If you want a job then you'd best feed them exactly what they want to hear. I mean really aren't most HR people just secretaries that like to think their management? Look at how many terms they get wrong in job postings. I remember one very amusing posting from around 1996 that wanted a web developer with 10 years of experience. Haha. You see stuff like that all the time.
I've got that down to a science. I have an app that can track down pr0n much better than Google. All the tricks of hand entering URL's to locate the proper sites and bypass site security except automated.;)
I keep thinking of trying to sell my program but I'm not sure if that'd count as a hacker tool or just a specialized web browser.
I'd rather read large chunks of info in the form of a book but unfortunately books are always out-of-date and tend to be dumbed down. It's hard to find anything in-depth about the latest technology. By the time it reaches being a book I already know the information so it isn't worth reading the book.
If they'd perfect those book printers they were working on that'd be great. To just be able to go into a bookstore and load the PDF or whatever and have a real book come out would be perfect.
Even then though I'd still use the electronic form for a reference just because it's so much easier to look things up with a computer.
I'm afraid it'd take one hell of an employer to convince me to be anything but paranoid of them and when I'm paranoid of lossing my job I go out of my way to find alternate jobs and make less effort at my current job. I'd rather have two part time jobs than a full time job for that reason. That way if one job decides to stab me in the back I'm not totally screwed. Unfortunately that means I'm never really doing my best for my employer. Sure, if I was getting paid well enough that I could afford to go through six month stints without work then that'd help cure my paranoia.. but in this job market that isn't happening.:)
It evidently hasn't made much difference so far. I've gone through cycles at several companies where as soon as the product was ready to ship they fired the entire development staff. That's highly motivational come the next job.
Maybe your own boss will stick up for you but do they really have much influence? Unless you're pretty high up the ladder yourself the answer is probably no. So again.. showing your company loyality will probably get you zip. They don't pay better for loyality and then don't hang on to your longer for loyality. At least not in most companies.
The corporate structure is lacking in personal relationships to help hold things together. I think I want it to be how it is in old mafia movies. All one big disturbed family. You're not being paid for doing the job. You're being paid for guarding the back of your uncle's best friend's father. In turn they'll see that you're paid well and that neither they nor the rival shoots you through the head. If some stuff gets done along the way well that's just an extra. Remove the risk of death and that'd be about right.
I like what he says about his expectations about being loyal to the company you work for. Most of us, at least deep down, expect that those days we come in sick or work a 20 hour day will show loyality to our employer that will be repaid with loyality right back. Then wouldn't fire you.. you're as good as best buds afterall. You're in it together.
Ha ha ha! What shock when you're fired or laid off. Does it matter how much you sacrificed for your employer? Nope, not a damn bit. All those pep talks about being in it together.. they're complete bullshit. You may as well have gone home on time every day instead of missing out on quality time. Of course now there is no way I'm going to believe any employer when then make promises and ask for loyality and a little extra effort. Two words.. blow me. I'm not going to be gungho to finish projects ahead of schedule anymore.
I set mine to run once a week. I think on Sunday afternoons. I also limit it to things I'm likely to want to locate and won't know where to look.. so it ignores my huge disks full of ripped movies, porn, mp3's, etc.
Most of the people I see having trouble searching just don't know how to to search for things properly. My parents are a prime example. They knw how to get to Google but not how to pick the combination of keywords most likely to return the result they're looking for. I wish I could think of a way to put into code my mental process for doing this.. if I could then maybe Google would hire me.:)
The other major problem is that many webpages aren't made to be easy to locate. At times they don't even include the subject of the page anywhere inside the page's contents. This doesn't exactly make it easier for searchers to find your site especially when you take into account the spam peckers that are including your search terms in their totally unrelated pages just to sneak hits.
Better yet you could build this into the shower buddy (those things women use to hold their shampoo and stuff in the shower) along with a pinpoint camera and a WiFi connection. Especially if they later release a version with some of their less speedy (and hungry) CPU's it should be able to run on a small battery for the length of several showers. Give it the ability to play mp3's and the women you gave them to might even keep the batteries replaced for you. Woot!
Of course you could save money by using just a normal camera and tranceiver but that's less cool.;)
Have some hacker spirit man. Just cus something is cheaper doesn't make it better. You could make yourself a laptop unlike what anyone else has. Maybe throw out the screen, keyboard, and dorky mouse nipples and use iGlasses and a nifty wireless one handed keyboard/mouse combo.;)
You haven't used one of these obviously. My mini-itx system with 933Mhz C3 processor can easily keep up with a 1Ghz Celeron processor. The CPU itself may not be quite as fast but with the mobo designed so tightly with the CPU it seems to give it the little boost needed to compete. By running Linux instead of Windows you can compete a 933Mhz C3 with more like a 1.2Ghz Celeron.
The power usage of the C3 also kicks the ass of the Celeron. You'd get better battery life and not scorch your manly parts if you left your laptop sitting on your lap.
There are already laptops being made from the mini-itx boards. These will just make it possible to produce even smaller laptops and maybe even things like handhelds. If only you could buy screens at an affordable price. It'd probably be cheaper to buy full monitors and just toss the case the monitor came in. If I could find a good touch screen I might do just that. Maybe I can find a broken tablet PC somewhere with a working screen and hack it onto one of these boards.
I like the daughter boards you can buy for mini-ITX systems. Probably these will soon have something similar available. If that'd the case then the power supply will tuck right in and not really take up any more space. Very cool for projects that need to be in tight spaces. I've been waiting for these nano boards to start selling for a while now.. playing with the idea of slipping in a CF and making a lil computer that can fit inside the wall behind a fairly normal looking wallplate (like a lightswitch) with nothing visible except the monitor, speaker, and usb ports.
I wouldn't put hard caps on anything. Mostly because the economy is to fluid and any caps you set would instantly be out-of-date and need a whole list of exceptions. Going back to the original discussion I'd suggest if we're going to tax at all (Which again I'm against) it should be the people that derive the most benefit from the system (obviously the wealthy) should pay the highest taxes. If the whole system were computerized I'd suggest offsets to taxes based on the average citizens confidence in the persons trustworthiness.. but that kind of thing just wouldn't work at all with the botched system we have today.
If you made boats then sure what Bill Gates does probably won't matter.. until the day he decides the software boom is over and decides to corner the boat market and catch the next big wave. As you say we have anti-trust laws just for this purpose but obviously they aren't working very well. Which is the kind of thing we need to work on correcting. I'd like to see the general attitude of the society change too. There is to much reliance on the government and big business and not enough on ourselves or our neighbors. To often people would rather not make the effort to do things themselves. That is exactly why people get totally screwed whenever the government or a corporation decides something stupid. An example would be that copyrights will probably last for eternity minus a day and people still won't bestir themselves to stop the bending of the law against them. At most they'll come on Slashdot and bitch and moan.
I know what makes me happy and it isn't money. If anything money is what makes me unhappy. Which is why I've spent years making an effort to get rid of damn near everything I owned and inventing ways to live cheaper.;)
With the right to pursue your own happiness comes the responsibility not to keep others from pursuit of the same goal. We police other types of people that put their own interest above society so why not certain types of the wealthy? Being a rapist might be pursuit of happiness for some people but I doubt many of us think society shouldn't present some control over such behavior. The same should be true of people that would become wealthy through disregard for others.
I'll agree that there will always be people who'd coast along doing the minimum. You're going to get people of that kind either way and most often they'll never raise above being poor. I'll also agree that the tax and welfare systems, as they are now, is contributing to the problem. Which is why I think if we're going to have either system at all we might as well do them well. I really don't think either system should be in place but if I'm going to pay taxes I want it to go towards things I find important. To me that would be better unemployment protection, medical coverage, etc.. not roads, jails, and inflated politicans paychecks.
I'll also agree that the government is the fat cat of fat cats. Taking and wasting money and resources outrageously. We, as a society, have given far to much control to the Federal government. They do far more than they were ever intended to do by the founders of our country. Some of the things they do are explicitly forbidden to the Federal government but they always seem to find a loophole to use as an excuse for doing it anyway.
I don't really have a problem with businesses in the few million dollar bracket. It's really only when they get into hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars that I have a problem. At that size even if the people in charge mean well the company just has so much power that it can cause massive harm at the smallest decision. Again there might be some people that have proven themselves so trustworthy that they should be allowed to control those resources but I don't think it'd be a majority of those that currently do control such resources. The insanity of the dot com bubble is proof that unproven people shouldn't suddenly find themselves in control of such resources. The world only needs so many beanbag chairs and nerf toys.
There is something to be said for buying stuff cheap but every time you buy the cheapest item you need to think about how it's being produced. Is it cheap because when you turn out 1,000,000 at once the materials and labor is more effeciently used or because the company has third world labor producing the parts for a nickle a day. Also is the cheap item as good of quality as the more expensive item. Again it comes down to balancing. Again I'm not attacking everyone that is wealthy or capitalism, I'm pointing out possible weaknesses that need to be watched and though about. Capitalism is a good system but like any system it isn't perfect. People that abuse it threaten to break it. Everything needs a balance, even the good things.
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I agree that money has a lot to do with it. It's disgusting that it requires millions of dollars to win any major election. Anybody who even has a chance to seriously run in such an election is already bought and paid for.
I also think a major problem is that people are more interested in voting for the winning side than voting for someone that will do a good job. Essentially that means almost everyone elected is from one of the two main parties and they were elected less because of what they'll do than because they convinced enough people they were the winning side. At best people vote to keep the other major canidate from winning. The lesser of two evils method is a bad way to govern.
Law seems a useless thing to study. I could see studying government but I wouldn't want to study old cases and rulings and all that stuff that is constantly changing anyway. It seems a useless topic to me. If I study physics or engineering I can go do something with it when I'm done. If I study law what can I do with it except argue about it with other people who studied law? It's like Slashdot but wearing a suit, covering less interesting topics, and being paid a lot.
Is the phrase "Nobody's perfect." saying to little? Seriously, I don't think you can discredit somebodies achievements because of their failures.
:)
For that matter is there evidence that the slaves weren't willing partners? (I never have actually studied the topic.) A man that is intelligent and powerful and literally your owner might appeal to certain types of women. Likewise I doubt any man alive has never dreamed of having a lustful and willing slave girl. Deny it if you want but that relationship is a deep part of human tradition and I doubt it's yet been bred out yet by our 'civilized' behavior.
Also if somebody isn't considered human I don't think you could really call it rape. It'd be like beastiality. Not because the slaves weren't human but because they weren't human in the eyes of the person commiting the act.
Then again you have to seriously question our societies general taboo on sex both then and now. If you want a strong society you'll have as many children as you can properly care for and train in the ways of your society. It's foolish not to be having lots of children because our society does have the resources to care for them all. To have children you need to have more sex. To get a better genetic blend you need people having sex with more partners. One major problem with our society is that the stupid people sit around popping out kids while the educated talented people delay having children and usually have fewer children. Not a good thing unless you want a country ran by people that learned everything they know from Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. So for all of those who have ever read and understood a book with big words and no pictures get off your ass and go breed.
I'm not a surfer but this looks like fun. It's like a JetSki you can carry around. I'd definately try it. All you cool surfers may complain and bash it for it's lack of purity of the sport but I can see this as being really fun and a popular new toy.
Hey Pinky, I think his example was FreeBSD - Not Linux. I know such things are hard for you to grasp.
You listed the problem completely right. You fail to read the instructions so you find completing the task difficult. Try reading the instructions and maybe you'll find that things go together easily.
If you're a complete dumbass just use the prepackaged version. For debian that means, at most, adding a line to your sources. For RedHat that means downloading a couple rpm's and doing a quick 'rpm -U *.rpm'. Even compiling from source I've never ran into a problem. It all works easily if you have any clue what you're doing and bother to read the instructions.
MPlayer does seem odd to use at first if you've only used programs like Xine, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player but once you get over the bump of having to learn to use the command-line you'll find that MPlayer is a much more powerful program than your wimpy lil GUI programs. Want a pretty frontend anyway? Go download one. MPlayer is especially designed to make it easy for other developers to make their own frontends for it.
When I first started trying to use MPlayer I got annoyed because it wouldn't run for me.. then I actually read the directions and presto it worked. Amazing. My problem was that I hadn't bothered to find out that you need to tell MPlayer the audio and video drivers you need.
:)
Installing was never a problem for me. I've installed on several computers from source, rpm, and deb and all have went off without a hitch. Again just follow the directions and everything works. The config script located all the codecs I had installed by itself.. even some that I'd put in unlikely places.
I don't like GUI programs for watching DVD's so after a first attempt at using it (which worked) I just stopped using it. Why would you need a GUI? The whole OS is your GUI. I setup Nautilus to open movies in MPlayer and installed the plugin patch so MPlayer would work with Mozilla. That works very well for most use. When I rip a DVD I have it also build a script that tells MPlayer how to play the movie to the best of it's abilities. My ripping program then adds an option to my 'Videos' menu to make playing the movie as simple as running any other program.
I don't have a problem with speed for playback and I'm using a 933Mhz C3 CPU with no fancy video card to boost things along. If you're Athlon can't keep up I'd say you've probably selected the wrong audio/video drivers or are trying to do something fancy you need not do.
Perhaps you should wait for the stable release to do your review? Reviews on pre-releases aren't really an honest look at what a program can do. Obviously it has faults.. that is what pre-release canidates are for.
I'm sure that if somebody worked out a good port and rather than releasing the code themselves they sent it back to the company that there'd be some interest. Other than SCO most companies don't have their head completely up their ass. A good port, even of slightly outdated code, that they didn't have to pay for might prompt them to sponsor the project by giving the project updated code (with an NDA of course) and agreeing to release the patches for running the program in Linux. Especially if the coders involved were being good about not releasing anything to the public until they got permission.
Avoid being seen as an enemy and if you do a good hack you might get what you want.. and maybe a job offer with it.
True, but if it's not a fast moving topic again I don't need to buy the book because then it's probably at the library or I've already memorized it. I mean how many books do you need to read on topics that don't change much? You read it once and then you just remember. No reason to buy 400 books on the topic if one book will cover it and nothing changes after that one book. For example I own a book on plumbing techniques. It was a fine book but I don't need to buy a new plumbing book because the subject of plumbing hasn't hanged much. I don't suddenly need to go study plumbing.NET in order to stay current for my job. It's not a complaint, it's just a fact of book shopping. My only complaint is that I like buying and reading books.. I wish they had more books for me to buy. :)
If their knowledge never goes out of date then I probably learned it a long time ago.. so again I have no need to buy the book. The only non-fiction books I buy anymore is on odd off the all topics that isn't covered well online yet but those are getting harder to find.
Sadly, in my experience, the last person to be laid off is the person that makes the least money.. not the hardest worker.
HR people are idiots anyway for the most part. If you want a job then you'd best feed them exactly what they want to hear. I mean really aren't most HR people just secretaries that like to think their management? Look at how many terms they get wrong in job postings. I remember one very amusing posting from around 1996 that wanted a web developer with 10 years of experience. Haha. You see stuff like that all the time.
I've got that down to a science. I have an app that can track down pr0n much better than Google. All the tricks of hand entering URL's to locate the proper sites and bypass site security except automated. ;)
I keep thinking of trying to sell my program but I'm not sure if that'd count as a hacker tool or just a specialized web browser.
I'd rather read large chunks of info in the form of a book but unfortunately books are always out-of-date and tend to be dumbed down. It's hard to find anything in-depth about the latest technology. By the time it reaches being a book I already know the information so it isn't worth reading the book.
If they'd perfect those book printers they were working on that'd be great. To just be able to go into a bookstore and load the PDF or whatever and have a real book come out would be perfect.
Even then though I'd still use the electronic form for a reference just because it's so much easier to look things up with a computer.
I'm afraid it'd take one hell of an employer to convince me to be anything but paranoid of them and when I'm paranoid of lossing my job I go out of my way to find alternate jobs and make less effort at my current job. I'd rather have two part time jobs than a full time job for that reason. That way if one job decides to stab me in the back I'm not totally screwed. Unfortunately that means I'm never really doing my best for my employer. Sure, if I was getting paid well enough that I could afford to go through six month stints without work then that'd help cure my paranoia.. but in this job market that isn't happening. :)
It evidently hasn't made much difference so far. I've gone through cycles at several companies where as soon as the product was ready to ship they fired the entire development staff. That's highly motivational come the next job.
Maybe your own boss will stick up for you but do they really have much influence? Unless you're pretty high up the ladder yourself the answer is probably no. So again.. showing your company loyality will probably get you zip. They don't pay better for loyality and then don't hang on to your longer for loyality. At least not in most companies.
The corporate structure is lacking in personal relationships to help hold things together. I think I want it to be how it is in old mafia movies. All one big disturbed family. You're not being paid for doing the job. You're being paid for guarding the back of your uncle's best friend's father. In turn they'll see that you're paid well and that neither they nor the rival shoots you through the head. If some stuff gets done along the way well that's just an extra. Remove the risk of death and that'd be about right.
I like what he says about his expectations about being loyal to the company you work for. Most of us, at least deep down, expect that those days we come in sick or work a 20 hour day will show loyality to our employer that will be repaid with loyality right back. Then wouldn't fire you.. you're as good as best buds afterall. You're in it together.
Ha ha ha! What shock when you're fired or laid off. Does it matter how much you sacrificed for your employer? Nope, not a damn bit. All those pep talks about being in it together.. they're complete bullshit. You may as well have gone home on time every day instead of missing out on quality time. Of course now there is no way I'm going to believe any employer when then make promises and ask for loyality and a little extra effort. Two words.. blow me. I'm not going to be gungho to finish projects ahead of schedule anymore.
I set mine to run once a week. I think on Sunday afternoons. I also limit it to things I'm likely to want to locate and won't know where to look.. so it ignores my huge disks full of ripped movies, porn, mp3's, etc.
Most of the people I see having trouble searching just don't know how to to search for things properly. My parents are a prime example. They knw how to get to Google but not how to pick the combination of keywords most likely to return the result they're looking for. I wish I could think of a way to put into code my mental process for doing this.. if I could then maybe Google would hire me. :)
The other major problem is that many webpages aren't made to be easy to locate. At times they don't even include the subject of the page anywhere inside the page's contents. This doesn't exactly make it easier for searchers to find your site especially when you take into account the spam peckers that are including your search terms in their totally unrelated pages just to sneak hits.
Careful who you try to eat - some women slap really hard.
Better yet you could build this into the shower buddy (those things women use to hold their shampoo and stuff in the shower) along with a pinpoint camera and a WiFi connection. Especially if they later release a version with some of their less speedy (and hungry) CPU's it should be able to run on a small battery for the length of several showers. Give it the ability to play mp3's and the women you gave them to might even keep the batteries replaced for you. Woot!
;)
Of course you could save money by using just a normal camera and tranceiver but that's less cool.
Have some hacker spirit man. Just cus something is cheaper doesn't make it better. You could make yourself a laptop unlike what anyone else has. Maybe throw out the screen, keyboard, and dorky mouse nipples and use iGlasses and a nifty wireless one handed keyboard/mouse combo. ;)
You haven't used one of these obviously. My mini-itx system with 933Mhz C3 processor can easily keep up with a 1Ghz Celeron processor. The CPU itself may not be quite as fast but with the mobo designed so tightly with the CPU it seems to give it the little boost needed to compete. By running Linux instead of Windows you can compete a 933Mhz C3 with more like a 1.2Ghz Celeron.
The power usage of the C3 also kicks the ass of the Celeron. You'd get better battery life and not scorch your manly parts if you left your laptop sitting on your lap.
There are already laptops being made from the mini-itx boards. These will just make it possible to produce even smaller laptops and maybe even things like handhelds. If only you could buy screens at an affordable price. It'd probably be cheaper to buy full monitors and just toss the case the monitor came in. If I could find a good touch screen I might do just that. Maybe I can find a broken tablet PC somewhere with a working screen and hack it onto one of these boards.
I like the daughter boards you can buy for mini-ITX systems. Probably these will soon have something similar available. If that'd the case then the power supply will tuck right in and not really take up any more space. Very cool for projects that need to be in tight spaces. I've been waiting for these nano boards to start selling for a while now.. playing with the idea of slipping in a CF and making a lil computer that can fit inside the wall behind a fairly normal looking wallplate (like a lightswitch) with nothing visible except the monitor, speaker, and usb ports.
I wouldn't put hard caps on anything. Mostly because the economy is to fluid and any caps you set would instantly be out-of-date and need a whole list of exceptions. Going back to the original discussion I'd suggest if we're going to tax at all (Which again I'm against) it should be the people that derive the most benefit from the system (obviously the wealthy) should pay the highest taxes. If the whole system were computerized I'd suggest offsets to taxes based on the average citizens confidence in the persons trustworthiness.. but that kind of thing just wouldn't work at all with the botched system we have today.
;)
If you made boats then sure what Bill Gates does probably won't matter.. until the day he decides the software boom is over and decides to corner the boat market and catch the next big wave. As you say we have anti-trust laws just for this purpose but obviously they aren't working very well. Which is the kind of thing we need to work on correcting. I'd like to see the general attitude of the society change too. There is to much reliance on the government and big business and not enough on ourselves or our neighbors. To often people would rather not make the effort to do things themselves. That is exactly why people get totally screwed whenever the government or a corporation decides something stupid. An example would be that copyrights will probably last for eternity minus a day and people still won't bestir themselves to stop the bending of the law against them. At most they'll come on Slashdot and bitch and moan.
I know what makes me happy and it isn't money. If anything money is what makes me unhappy. Which is why I've spent years making an effort to get rid of damn near everything I owned and inventing ways to live cheaper.
With the right to pursue your own happiness comes the responsibility not to keep others from pursuit of the same goal. We police other types of people that put their own interest above society so why not certain types of the wealthy? Being a rapist might be pursuit of happiness for some people but I doubt many of us think society shouldn't present some control over such behavior. The same should be true of people that would become wealthy through disregard for others.
I'll agree that there will always be people who'd coast along doing the minimum. You're going to get people of that kind either way and most often they'll never raise above being poor. I'll also agree that the tax and welfare systems, as they are now, is contributing to the problem. Which is why I think if we're going to have either system at all we might as well do them well. I really don't think either system should be in place but if I'm going to pay taxes I want it to go towards things I find important. To me that would be better unemployment protection, medical coverage, etc.. not roads, jails, and inflated politicans paychecks.
I'll also agree that the government is the fat cat of fat cats. Taking and wasting money and resources outrageously. We, as a society, have given far to much control to the Federal government. They do far more than they were ever intended to do by the founders of our country. Some of the things they do are explicitly forbidden to the Federal government but they always seem to find a loophole to use as an excuse for doing it anyway.
I don't really have a problem with businesses in the few million dollar bracket. It's really only when they get into hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars that I have a problem. At that size even if the people in charge mean well the company just has so much power that it can cause massive harm at the smallest decision. Again there might be some people that have proven themselves so trustworthy that they should be allowed to control those resources but I don't think it'd be a majority of those that currently do control such resources. The insanity of the dot com bubble is proof that unproven people shouldn't suddenly find themselves in control of such resources. The world only needs so many beanbag chairs and nerf toys.
There is something to be said for buying stuff cheap but every time you buy the cheapest item you need to think about how it's being produced. Is it cheap because when you turn out 1,000,000 at once the materials and labor is more effeciently used or because the company has third world labor producing the parts for a nickle a day. Also is the cheap item as good of quality as the more expensive item. Again it comes down to balancing. Again I'm not attacking everyone that is wealthy or capitalism, I'm pointing out possible weaknesses that need to be watched and though about. Capitalism is a good system but like any system it isn't perfect. People that abuse it threaten to break it. Everything needs a balance, even the good things.