My debian machine lost it's harddrive recently, coincidently about one hour before I had to head out of town for the weekend. So I needed to install something on some random harddrive and get my email server backup, quickly. Well, all I had laying around was the 5.1 install cds that I had downloaded when they were announced on/., with the intention of trying out FreeBSD sometime in the nebulous future. So I installed FreeBSD for the first time ever, and have all my accounts added back, along with the various services I needed (named, smtp, and ssh) on and configured, in about 45 minutes. That included going through the install with no documentation at all (my internet connection was also routed through the debian box). That was very impressive, to me at least. Now, granted, after I got back I spent every night for a week dinking around figuring out how things are different, switching from sendmail to postfix, upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2.1, adding ext2 support to copy over all my data, setting up X and sound, setting up support for my Zire 72, and playing around with ports until it became second nature.
So, my thoughts having been on FreeBSD for a couple months? Honestly, I dunno. I haven't noticed any speed difference at all, despite many a BSDer's claim to the contrary (this is a 750Mhz Duron with 1.25GB ram). I had to switch out my soundcard (Envy24-based Chaintech for an SB64 I had laying around) because it wasn't supported. The support for my Zire seems to be much nicer (I've always had problems in Linux with USB-based Palms, and tools like KPilot). I really like the init system, and/etc/rc.conf is nice (once you figure out what's supposed to be in there). It's a bit of a pain when trying to run various things (like nagios), where scripts and whatnot are written for Linux and break subtly (or completely) on FreeBSD. However, that's generally a one-line fix of some sort (change an argument passed to ps or nslookup, for instance), so it's not a huge deal. I've never liked Gentoo, and doing a 'portupgrade -a' makes me long for 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I really like the kernel configuration, it works like a champ. I've recompiled my kernel probably six or seven times (chasing various hardware and software settings), and I've never had a single thing go wrong. I really wish it supported my APC usb-based UPS, but it doesn't.
In summary, when I change hardware in the near future, I'll probably end up putting debian back on. The expanded hardware support, removal of all those little 'bumps' in making software work correctly, and ease and quickness of upgrading and installing software make debian win out. However, if it wasn't for Debian, FreeBSD would be my choice. I use (and administer) Redhat WS3 at work, and I'll take BSD over it any day of the week:-)
Of course, my ideal setup would be a G5 with OSX as my desktop, and OpenBSD on my server. That would be kinda doable if I still had seperate computers for workstation and server (Linux as desktop, OpenBSD on server), but the ever decreasing pool of working hardware forced me down to one. And I'm not masochistic enough to run OpenBSD on the desktop...
You, my friend, are wrong. I'm in the middle of migrating all of our layout and design people from Sun workstations to $1K Dell's w/Linux, because the price to performance ration is just too dag'gon compelling. To give numbers, this is how it breaks down: we pay roughly $1,000 for a machine with a 3.4Ghz PIV, NVidia GPU (440MX 64MB), large enough harddrive, dvd/cdrw, and etc. Then we load it up with our own ram (I work for a RAM manufacturer, so I'll admit we cheat there). Add in the cost of a Redhat Enterprise WS license cost, and we have an initial cost of about $1100 with recurring annual costs of less than $100. All parts are covered under warranty for the first three years, which is about as long as we'll have these machines anyway. Compare that to a Blade 2k. Again with minimal RAM, we pay $5k for a dual-900Mhz U-III, decent harddrive, and a crappy video-card. In addition to the initial cost, we have support contracts that cost $181 per month per machine (Gold, I believe, not Platinum). That's $2175 per year. And, according to our benchmarks running our tools, it's between 3 to 5 times slower than the x86 solution (depending on the tool). Now, reliability estimates aside (we're only about 4 months into the rollout, and as such are still working out various issues), I can't think of a single reason to keep Blades on engineer's desktops. And, for the vast majority of our users (i.e., greater than 95%), Linux is all they need. They use the same web and mail tools that they're used to on Sun (Mozilla), and Crossover Office and/or Citrix fill in the gaps (when OpenOffice falls down, which isn't often).
So just *saying* that Suns are as cheap as x86 w/Linux doesn't make it so. And when you take a $2000 per year per machine difference, and multiply by 500 machines, you're starting to talk real money, even by corporation standards. And that's ignoring all of the compute servers that we are rolling over to Opterons w/Linux, for the same reason. We estimate that we'll be sending approx. $1.5 Million a year less to Sun by this time next year, in support contracts alone.
But QoS can be implemented using standard routers. I.e., the routers that every enterprise workplace already has. Connected to via the WAPs and switches that every enterprise already has. Which is my point, really. The "in my house" was meant firmly tongue in cheek:-). As the guy in the article says, they just got done rolling out cisco waps everywhere in the building. Why can't they use those?
Every 802.11b wireless device I've ever heard of sucks batteries like a fat kid with a slurpy. The example the article uses is a hospital staff. Is the phone going to last an entire 18-hour shift without recharging? That would be seriously impressive.
Secondly, why the need to have a special WAP? I can see having to have some sort of control-device, that's obvious. But it really ought to work with any standard WAP, and route to the PBX. I see that really hurting the chances of wide-spread adoption in a lot of places (like my house!). It would be like having a IP telephony system that made you replace all your hubs and switches. Just ain't gonna happen.
It seems like everytime something along these lines happens, we get news reports detailing all the various ways that our lives will be disrupted and/or the world can come to an end. And in the meantime, I have *yet* to actually have *anything* noticeable happen as a result of a sunspot/solar flare. No loss of cell service. No random computer crashes. Nothing even close to actual power loss. Much like how constant terror alerts reduce the feeling of eminent danger, I'm now to the point that I'd say "meh" to anything short of a Texas-sized asteroid hurtling directly towards earth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the *worst* slashdot theme, color-wise, yet? I mean, we've had some doozies, but this looks really bad. I mean, the logo looks just like someone using gimp's script-fu and the color very closely matches the color of my three year-old's puke.
Although Mac OS X has an optional X11 server that can be used to porn X11 programs over
That has to be the funniest typo I've seen in a while. The best part being, of course, that on qwerty keyboards at least, "n" and "t" are quite far apart, making one suspect some sort of Freudian slip. Thank you!
Ridiculous power? Where I work, we are buying 3.4Ghz P4s with 4 Gigs of RAM for all of our engineers. Granted, I work at a memory manufacturer so the RAMs easy to come by, but we're only paying about $1K for the machines themselves. So I don't think its a stretch at *all* to say that in '07, a top-of-the-line machine from today will be the minimum reqs for a top-of-the-line game then. That's the "thing" about computers: today's overpowered monster is tomorrow's weakling.
Oh, and the speed of the machine has jack-all to do with making original games or not. If you can make an original game for a 1Mhz C64, or an Apple II, or a 286, then you can make one for any desktop machine in use today.
What the hell? As long as Linux doesn't support NX, which *will be* supported in the *upcoming* SP2, it will be seen as deficient in comparision? Okay, ignore the fact that they themselves state there are already patches for Redhat, while SP2 hasn't actually shipped. I'm just wondering what the fascination with NX is. I mean, it's a nifty idea, but I can't imagine anyone getting down the wire of choosing between XP or Linux as the right tool for a job, and deciding on XP because of NX. I mean, come-on. This is just idiocy. Not that I had any respect for Gartner to lose, but if I did, there it went... There are plenty of differences, strengths and weaknessess on both sides, to differentiate between XP and Linux. Supporting the NX bit is not one of them at this time.
Are you kidding? U2's last good album was Joshua Tree. They haven't put out an album with more than one or two good songs since. To say that their last album is when they started fleecing us is to be off by a good fifteen years:-)
Oh, and the Pumpkins only have about six good songs. If you want a band that started out great and have just gotten better with age, try REM. Except for Monster, they can't seem to put out a bad album.
Okay, I think I'm done presenting my opinion as fact. Flame on!
So my 750Mhz Duron w/GeForce MX 440 is *not* going to work? That sucks. I guess I'll go back to playing nethack...
By the way, if people are still playing Doom 3* twenty-five years after it comes out, *then* we can start talking about the benefits of emphasizing gameplay over gee-whiz special effects that won't be gee-whiz in 6 months. Until then, call me elitist, call me old-fashioned, but don't call me bored!
I'm probably not alone in that my understanding (flawed as it is) of the Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics, and other Big Science Questions is based almost entirely on "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell". Well, that and "Cosmos":-). But in those two books, he does an excellent job of explaining, well, *the universe* in a way that even I can understand. And that is no mean feat! So hats off to Hawking, may you lay down the phat beats for many more years to come!
My desktop is layed out with four virtual desktops. #1 for web-browsing with two copies of konqueror, one for documentation of project(s) I'm working on, the other for normal surfing, both with multiple tabs. #2 for my terminal (konsole) full-screened using multiple tabs. shift-[left|right]arrow makes speeding around the various tabs quick and painless. #3 for email, that is, kmail and korganizer (I tried Kontact, it crashed on me once and that was it, back to kmail). #4 is for "other". If I open any other gui app than konq, konsole, or kmail, (that would be a once a week occurence at most) it goes on that desktop. The only time I have to touch the mouse is on desktop #1, and even then only to click links (alt-o to focus on url-bar and highlight, j and k or spacebar to scroll). Every app is full-screened, using all the desktop real-estate my 21" monitor has to offer, and I spend the absolute minimum amount of time screwing around with playing "find the window" or "place the window just right".
Hopefully this helps explain why some people like tabs in their terminals. It fits very well with the (warning, stupid word coming up) paradigm I use all throughout my desktop.
Re:Not surprising, and not bad.
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The biggest problem I have (and why I'm staying on OS9, at least on one machine) is the gigantic stack of kids games, all written in the mid to late '90s, that my kids love. Things like Putt Putt, Dora, Legos, Farmhouse, Math Rabbit, etc. On the other hand, even the 450Mhz G3 iMac that they're using is grossly over-powered for their needs. If it ever dies I'll just get a $100 used POS and be right back up again...
But this is the same problem that MS faces, trying to get people off of Win98 (and 95!). You can talk about making a break with backwards compatability all you want, but in reality, stuff sticks around for *decades* after you thought it would...
Check out the motorola v66. Flip phone, so little chance of accidental button pushing (and power is under the cover, where it should be!). Monochrome, been on the market for a couple years now, so you can get one for $20, battery life is great, and it gets great reception. I carry it in my front pocket all day, every day.
Except that GPL Qt is available for the Mac. So, it is functionally no different than programming something in pure Qt for Linux, at least with regards to promoting their 'commercial' and 'proprietary' product. Unless you are also against all Qt programming in Linux? Or are you fully against free software on the Mac? Which one is it? I mean, you did notice the part of the summary that said 'and free Qt-based applications on the Mac.', right?
To see a woman demonstrating software? I mean, I assume they didn't put her on the stage and say thinks like "Hey! *Even* women can go this!". It was a 'by example' thing. So the women and non-chauvanistic men would be offended...why?
Spoken like someone that doesn't watch network television. Yes, most of it's crap, just like most of, well, anything. But then you get shows like "Scrubs", "Arrested Development", "Malcolm in the Middle", "Angel", and "Coupling" (BBC version), all of which I can watch using just an antenna. I wouldn't call any of those shakespeare, but that's not the point. They *are* good t.v. shows. But you didn't want to actually judge something by its qualities. A quick bash is easier...
I, for one, got really interested in Linux as I was working as a 'screwdriver monkey' for a mom&pop computer shop. All I would see all day was people's crappy machines with problems, the vast majority manifesting as crashes in Windows (locks, BSODs, etc). After dealing with that all day, I had absolutely no patience with Windows on my home machine, and searched for something different. I ended up in Linux because it was free, used BeOS for a long while after I went to Comdex and saw a demo, dinked around with various BSDs, and even Solaris x86, before ending back on linux. But really, my main motivation was "Anything But Microsoft". Logical? Not really, but in the end it gave me the experience I needed to land a good job as a *nix SA, a really nice desktop (KDE 3.x), and the confidence to try new things (which explains my iBook and iMac:-).
And I have one Windows machine in the house, for the kids games, but it will probably be replaced very soon with an iMac running OSX + Classic. It's crashy as hell, and a piece of junk, but that's really a combination of me not caring for it and having a bunch of kids games installed (does *anything* jack a computer up as quick as kid's games?). I don't really blame MS for that. I haven't worked at that shop for a few years, so my seething hatred has simmered to a mere dislike. B-)
Anyway, that's one person's reasons for going to Linux. Well, you asked...
No. Your monthly bill from your ISP is equivalent to paying your cable bill (cable being the medium that the message is transmitted across). You still have to watch commercials (which pay for the individual shows, kinda). Now, being a "Slashdot Subscriber" is somewhat equivalent to paying for HBO, and you *don't* have commercials.
They tried the 'you don't pay for anything, advertising will foot the bill for everything' approach and it sucked. And now even NetZero makes you pay a monthly fee (IIRC, I haven't looked over their offerings for a while).
And I suppose movies and music are also more relevant and important.
Um, yes? Because:
If video games are a form of entertainment, they're as relevant as other forms of entertainment.
is demonstratably untrue. Old people are entertained by feeding pidgeons at the park. My toddler is entertained by banging pots together. Some people are entertained by jumping out of perfectly-working airplanes. There are a lot of people entertained in a lot of different ways. Just because gaming is your favorite one doesn't mean that it's special.
I work in a programming group at a tech company: if anyone is going to have a preponderance of gamers, it'd be us, right? Except out of a group of 7 people, we have three that don't game at all, three that are very casual gamers (own consoles because of the kids, play a game or two a month), and one guy with no kids that owns an x-box and buys a few games a month.
Contrast that with movies/tv/music. We have an unofficial 'monday morning movie review' where we talk about what movies we saw over the weekend. A lot of our conversation during the week is regarding television shows that we watch. And we are constantly giving each other cd's to check out (by constantly, I mean about twice a week). I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that in a non-geek group in a non-tech company, gaming would be of even less relevance.
Please note that I'm not knocking gaming as a pasttime. I used to be really into it (on the c64, and later on MUDs), and still enjoy a good game every once in a while. But there's simply no getting around the fact that for the majority of America, the latest gaming news is not as relevant as the weather, politics, the latest movies, or whats on T.V. That will change, within the next 10-20 years, as the nintendo generation continues to get older, but for now it's the truth.
Well, for most people, the weather and who is running the country is more relevant and important than a story about the latest video game. But you're right: video games, 4H, and after-school plays should all get dedicated reporters that do nothing but follow them.
Slashdot Mirror
My debian machine lost it's harddrive recently, coincidently about one hour before I had to head out of town for the weekend. So I needed to install something on some random harddrive and get my email server backup, quickly. Well, all I had laying around was the 5.1 install cds that I had downloaded when they were announced on /., with the intention of trying out FreeBSD sometime in the nebulous future. So I installed FreeBSD for the first time ever, and have all my accounts added back, along with the various services I needed (named, smtp, and ssh) on and configured, in about 45 minutes. That included going through the install with no documentation at all (my internet connection was also routed through the debian box). That was very impressive, to me at least. Now, granted, after I got back I spent every night for a week dinking around figuring out how things are different, switching from sendmail to postfix, upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2.1, adding ext2 support to copy over all my data, setting up X and sound, setting up support for my Zire 72, and playing around with ports until it became second nature.
/etc/rc.conf is nice (once you figure out what's supposed to be in there). It's a bit of a pain when trying to run various things (like nagios), where scripts and whatnot are written for Linux and break subtly (or completely) on FreeBSD. However, that's generally a one-line fix of some sort (change an argument passed to ps or nslookup, for instance), so it's not a huge deal. I've never liked Gentoo, and doing a 'portupgrade -a' makes me long for 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I really like the kernel configuration, it works like a champ. I've recompiled my kernel probably six or seven times (chasing various hardware and software settings), and I've never had a single thing go wrong. I really wish it supported my APC usb-based UPS, but it doesn't.
:-)
So, my thoughts having been on FreeBSD for a couple months? Honestly, I dunno. I haven't noticed any speed difference at all, despite many a BSDer's claim to the contrary (this is a 750Mhz Duron with 1.25GB ram). I had to switch out my soundcard (Envy24-based Chaintech for an SB64 I had laying around) because it wasn't supported. The support for my Zire seems to be much nicer (I've always had problems in Linux with USB-based Palms, and tools like KPilot). I really like the init system, and
In summary, when I change hardware in the near future, I'll probably end up putting debian back on. The expanded hardware support, removal of all those little 'bumps' in making software work correctly, and ease and quickness of upgrading and installing software make debian win out. However, if it wasn't for Debian, FreeBSD would be my choice. I use (and administer) Redhat WS3 at work, and I'll take BSD over it any day of the week
Of course, my ideal setup would be a G5 with OSX as my desktop, and OpenBSD on my server. That would be kinda doable if I still had seperate computers for workstation and server (Linux as desktop, OpenBSD on server), but the ever decreasing pool of working hardware forced me down to one. And I'm not masochistic enough to run OpenBSD on the desktop...
You, my friend, are wrong. I'm in the middle of migrating all of our layout and design people from Sun workstations to $1K Dell's w/Linux, because the price to performance ration is just too dag'gon compelling. To give numbers, this is how it breaks down: we pay roughly $1,000 for a machine with a 3.4Ghz PIV, NVidia GPU (440MX 64MB), large enough harddrive, dvd/cdrw, and etc. Then we load it up with our own ram (I work for a RAM manufacturer, so I'll admit we cheat there). Add in the cost of a Redhat Enterprise WS license cost, and we have an initial cost of about $1100 with recurring annual costs of less than $100. All parts are covered under warranty for the first three years, which is about as long as we'll have these machines anyway. Compare that to a Blade 2k. Again with minimal RAM, we pay $5k for a dual-900Mhz U-III, decent harddrive, and a crappy video-card. In addition to the initial cost, we have support contracts that cost $181 per month per machine (Gold, I believe, not Platinum). That's $2175 per year. And, according to our benchmarks running our tools, it's between 3 to 5 times slower than the x86 solution (depending on the tool). Now, reliability estimates aside (we're only about 4 months into the rollout, and as such are still working out various issues), I can't think of a single reason to keep Blades on engineer's desktops. And, for the vast majority of our users (i.e., greater than 95%), Linux is all they need. They use the same web and mail tools that they're used to on Sun (Mozilla), and Crossover Office and/or Citrix fill in the gaps (when OpenOffice falls down, which isn't often).
So just *saying* that Suns are as cheap as x86 w/Linux doesn't make it so. And when you take a $2000 per year per machine difference, and multiply by 500 machines, you're starting to talk real money, even by corporation standards. And that's ignoring all of the compute servers that we are rolling over to Opterons w/Linux, for the same reason. We estimate that we'll be sending approx. $1.5 Million a year less to Sun by this time next year, in support contracts alone.
But QoS can be implemented using standard routers. I.e., the routers that every enterprise workplace already has. Connected to via the WAPs and switches that every enterprise already has. Which is my point, really. The "in my house" was meant firmly tongue in cheek :-). As the guy in the article says, they just got done rolling out cisco waps everywhere in the building. Why can't they use those?
Ooh, you're right. How could I have forgotten that pile? Theory: blind monkeys on crack pick /.'s colors. Proof? In the puddin'.
Every 802.11b wireless device I've ever heard of sucks batteries like a fat kid with a slurpy. The example the article uses is a hospital staff. Is the phone going to last an entire 18-hour shift without recharging? That would be seriously impressive.
Secondly, why the need to have a special WAP? I can see having to have some sort of control-device, that's obvious. But it really ought to work with any standard WAP, and route to the PBX. I see that really hurting the chances of wide-spread adoption in a lot of places (like my house!). It would be like having a IP telephony system that made you replace all your hubs and switches. Just ain't gonna happen.
It seems like everytime something along these lines happens, we get news reports detailing all the various ways that our lives will be disrupted and/or the world can come to an end. And in the meantime, I have *yet* to actually have *anything* noticeable happen as a result of a sunspot/solar flare. No loss of cell service. No random computer crashes. Nothing even close to actual power loss. Much like how constant terror alerts reduce the feeling of eminent danger, I'm now to the point that I'd say "meh" to anything short of a Texas-sized asteroid hurtling directly towards earth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the *worst* slashdot theme, color-wise, yet? I mean, we've had some doozies, but this looks really bad. I mean, the logo looks just like someone using gimp's script-fu and the color very closely matches the color of my three year-old's puke.
Just thought I'd mention.
That has to be the funniest typo I've seen in a while. The best part being, of course, that on qwerty keyboards at least, "n" and "t" are quite far apart, making one suspect some sort of Freudian slip. Thank you!
Ridiculous power? Where I work, we are buying 3.4Ghz P4s with 4 Gigs of RAM for all of our engineers. Granted, I work at a memory manufacturer so the RAMs easy to come by, but we're only paying about $1K for the machines themselves. So I don't think its a stretch at *all* to say that in '07, a top-of-the-line machine from today will be the minimum reqs for a top-of-the-line game then. That's the "thing" about computers: today's overpowered monster is tomorrow's weakling.
Oh, and the speed of the machine has jack-all to do with making original games or not. If you can make an original game for a 1Mhz C64, or an Apple II, or a 286, then you can make one for any desktop machine in use today.
Your reading skills are flawed. Re-read my post. Take especial care when you get to a sentence that starts with "Okay, ignore the fact".
What the hell? As long as Linux doesn't support NX, which *will be* supported in the *upcoming* SP2, it will be seen as deficient in comparision? Okay, ignore the fact that they themselves state there are already patches for Redhat, while SP2 hasn't actually shipped. I'm just wondering what the fascination with NX is. I mean, it's a nifty idea, but I can't imagine anyone getting down the wire of choosing between XP or Linux as the right tool for a job, and deciding on XP because of NX. I mean, come-on. This is just idiocy. Not that I had any respect for Gartner to lose, but if I did, there it went... There are plenty of differences, strengths and weaknessess on both sides, to differentiate between XP and Linux. Supporting the NX bit is not one of them at this time.
Are you kidding? U2's last good album was Joshua Tree. They haven't put out an album with more than one or two good songs since. To say that their last album is when they started fleecing us is to be off by a good fifteen years :-)
Oh, and the Pumpkins only have about six good songs. If you want a band that started out great and have just gotten better with age, try REM. Except for Monster, they can't seem to put out a bad album.
Okay, I think I'm done presenting my opinion as fact. Flame on!
So my 750Mhz Duron w/GeForce MX 440 is *not* going to work? That sucks. I guess I'll go back to playing nethack...
By the way, if people are still playing Doom 3* twenty-five years after it comes out, *then* we can start talking about the benefits of emphasizing gameplay over gee-whiz special effects that won't be gee-whiz in 6 months. Until then, call me elitist, call me old-fashioned, but don't call me bored!
*or any game based on its engine
I'm probably not alone in that my understanding (flawed as it is) of the Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics, and other Big Science Questions is based almost entirely on "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell". Well, that and "Cosmos" :-). But in those two books, he does an excellent job of explaining, well, *the universe* in a way that even I can understand. And that is no mean feat! So hats off to Hawking, may you lay down the phat beats for many more years to come!
My desktop is layed out with four virtual desktops. #1 for web-browsing with two copies of konqueror, one for documentation of project(s) I'm working on, the other for normal surfing, both with multiple tabs. #2 for my terminal (konsole) full-screened using multiple tabs. shift-[left|right]arrow makes speeding around the various tabs quick and painless. #3 for email, that is, kmail and korganizer (I tried Kontact, it crashed on me once and that was it, back to kmail). #4 is for "other". If I open any other gui app than konq, konsole, or kmail, (that would be a once a week occurence at most) it goes on that desktop. The only time I have to touch the mouse is on desktop #1, and even then only to click links (alt-o to focus on url-bar and highlight, j and k or spacebar to scroll). Every app is full-screened, using all the desktop real-estate my 21" monitor has to offer, and I spend the absolute minimum amount of time screwing around with playing "find the window" or "place the window just right".
Hopefully this helps explain why some people like tabs in their terminals. It fits very well with the (warning, stupid word coming up) paradigm I use all throughout my desktop.
The biggest problem I have (and why I'm staying on OS9, at least on one machine) is the gigantic stack of kids games, all written in the mid to late '90s, that my kids love. Things like Putt Putt, Dora, Legos, Farmhouse, Math Rabbit, etc. On the other hand, even the 450Mhz G3 iMac that they're using is grossly over-powered for their needs. If it ever dies I'll just get a $100 used POS and be right back up again...
But this is the same problem that MS faces, trying to get people off of Win98 (and 95!). You can talk about making a break with backwards compatability all you want, but in reality, stuff sticks around for *decades* after you thought it would...
Looks like the movie hosted on teambox won't allow anything referred from slashdot in. Just copy the url into a term and use wget (like a real man ;-).
Check out the motorola v66. Flip phone, so little chance of accidental button pushing (and power is under the cover, where it should be!). Monochrome, been on the market for a couple years now, so you can get one for $20, battery life is great, and it gets great reception. I carry it in my front pocket all day, every day.
Except that GPL Qt is available for the Mac. So, it is functionally no different than programming something in pure Qt for Linux, at least with regards to promoting their 'commercial' and 'proprietary' product. Unless you are also against all Qt programming in Linux? Or are you fully against free software on the Mac? Which one is it? I mean, you did notice the part of the summary that said 'and free Qt-based applications on the Mac.', right?
To see a woman demonstrating software? I mean, I assume they didn't put her on the stage and say thinks like "Hey! *Even* women can go this!". It was a 'by example' thing. So the women and non-chauvanistic men would be offended...why?
Spoken like someone that doesn't watch network television. Yes, most of it's crap, just like most of, well, anything. But then you get shows like "Scrubs", "Arrested Development", "Malcolm in the Middle", "Angel", and "Coupling" (BBC version), all of which I can watch using just an antenna. I wouldn't call any of those shakespeare, but that's not the point. They *are* good t.v. shows. But you didn't want to actually judge something by its qualities. A quick bash is easier...
I, for one, got really interested in Linux as I was working as a 'screwdriver monkey' for a mom&pop computer shop. All I would see all day was people's crappy machines with problems, the vast majority manifesting as crashes in Windows (locks, BSODs, etc). After dealing with that all day, I had absolutely no patience with Windows on my home machine, and searched for something different. I ended up in Linux because it was free, used BeOS for a long while after I went to Comdex and saw a demo, dinked around with various BSDs, and even Solaris x86, before ending back on linux. But really, my main motivation was "Anything But Microsoft". Logical? Not really, but in the end it gave me the experience I needed to land a good job as a *nix SA, a really nice desktop (KDE 3.x), and the confidence to try new things (which explains my iBook and iMac :-).
And I have one Windows machine in the house, for the kids games, but it will probably be replaced very soon with an iMac running OSX + Classic. It's crashy as hell, and a piece of junk, but that's really a combination of me not caring for it and having a bunch of kids games installed (does *anything* jack a computer up as quick as kid's games?). I don't really blame MS for that. I haven't worked at that shop for a few years, so my seething hatred has simmered to a mere dislike. B-)
Anyway, that's one person's reasons for going to Linux. Well, you asked...
No. Your monthly bill from your ISP is equivalent to paying your cable bill (cable being the medium that the message is transmitted across). You still have to watch commercials (which pay for the individual shows, kinda). Now, being a "Slashdot Subscriber" is somewhat equivalent to paying for HBO, and you *don't* have commercials.
They tried the 'you don't pay for anything, advertising will foot the bill for everything' approach and it sucked. And now even NetZero makes you pay a monthly fee (IIRC, I haven't looked over their offerings for a while).
Um, yes? Because:
If video games are a form of entertainment, they're as relevant as other forms of entertainment.
is demonstratably untrue. Old people are entertained by feeding pidgeons at the park. My toddler is entertained by banging pots together. Some people are entertained by jumping out of perfectly-working airplanes. There are a lot of people entertained in a lot of different ways. Just because gaming is your favorite one doesn't mean that it's special.
I work in a programming group at a tech company: if anyone is going to have a preponderance of gamers, it'd be us, right? Except out of a group of 7 people, we have three that don't game at all, three that are very casual gamers (own consoles because of the kids, play a game or two a month), and one guy with no kids that owns an x-box and buys a few games a month.
Contrast that with movies/tv/music. We have an unofficial 'monday morning movie review' where we talk about what movies we saw over the weekend. A lot of our conversation during the week is regarding television shows that we watch. And we are constantly giving each other cd's to check out (by constantly, I mean about twice a week). I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that in a non-geek group in a non-tech company, gaming would be of even less relevance.
Please note that I'm not knocking gaming as a pasttime. I used to be really into it (on the c64, and later on MUDs), and still enjoy a good game every once in a while. But there's simply no getting around the fact that for the majority of America, the latest gaming news is not as relevant as the weather, politics, the latest movies, or whats on T.V. That will change, within the next 10-20 years, as the nintendo generation continues to get older, but for now it's the truth.
Well, for most people, the weather and who is running the country is more relevant and important than a story about the latest video game. But you're right: video games, 4H, and after-school plays should all get dedicated reporters that do nothing but follow them.