It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today, except for the small disk drive.
Even WITH all the extensive DSP functions added into these ARM chips, I'll still put an Intel / AMD processor up against a similarly clocked ARM chip absolutely any day. That leaves the phone you're describing perhaps faster than my laptop from close to a decade ago, but that's about it... I'd put my money on a P4 to run circles around it (assuming a decent video card). Phones only FEEL fast because the software is so aggressively optimized for performance on low-end hardware. Port Android to x86, and watch it fly on whatever old hardware you've got lying around. And that's today... The early PDAs felt pretty snappy with ~36MHz ARM chips for the basic apps on decent OSes like EPOC/Symbian, too.
When did the idea of a reliable case design that protects the important stuff go out of fashion?
The exact SECOND that GORILLA GLASS and capacitative touch-screens came along... eliminating the need to make horrible design decisions around protecting an incredibly fragile screen.
When I'm doing some light reading on my droid, I don't want it to be twice as wide, with part of it (the keyboard) flapping around, when I don't need it.
Conversely, I wouldn't buy a smartphone without a keyboard, and a slider works pretty well, not requiring me to do any contortions to hold both pieces of the phone, or worrying about it collapsing.
I'd love it if somebody came out with a slider which had a hinge which could optionally be used to convert it to a laptop form factor (eliminating the need for a kickstand as well), but not making standard hand-held slide-out mode any more difficult. Keyboards would need to get just a bit bigger, and keys a bit less resistive, and most people could actually touch-type on them. Long live the Psion 5MX.
2) Mailing Lists and IRC channels on fire with reports about everything from aliens, aliens raping people, mad cow disease attack, the Russians invading on the East Coast, ICBM launch confirmed by a friend at an undisclosed military location, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I remember all that, too, but that doesn't undermind the idea, it just means we need a hierarchy, rather than wikipedia style anarchy or a "truthiness" system such as/. moderation.
There was certainly good information going around. NANOG is a great place to start because it's unbiased, unemotional technical information about which routes are down. That could be complimented by the worlds biggest nagios monitoring system, just grabbing a couple SNMP values from random devices spread all over the country.
With GPS and wifi in every phone, you could also get a good picture of where there is abnormal activity, such as a dead spot where there is typically constant cell traffic. And drill down to the exact spots where people are making lots of calls, and where they aren't.
Hey, you could even supplament that with some monitoring of a few networked webcams, if you had a list of all those before the fact, ready to go.
Is that why pretty much every major city in the US with a bridge or tall building peed themselves and put their respective cities in some sort of watch/lockdown combination?
No, actually that happened because all the major, upstanding news organizations started spewing complete crap about bombs blowing up the capitol building in DC, armed gunman outside of other landmarks picking off people, etc.
In the fog of that morning, for a few hours, public information made it sound convincingly like the we might be seeing the first in a series of military attacks on the US mainland from another major military power, leading up to a total war, or perhaps even an all-out invasion.
It's ridiculous in hindsight, now that we know it started and ended with 4 jumbo jets. But at the time, nobody knew the scope of the attacks, and anything seemed possible. So any plausible military target seemed apotential target. Imagine if, after hearing the WTC & Pentagon was attacked, the capitol was bombed, and more, it was followed-up with news of Chinese naval forces attacking Taiwan, Philipines, Hawaii, etc. Yes, people were preparing for good old WWIII, and not without cause.
"Planes Hijacked!" is worthless. What action that could have been broadcast on EAS would have saved a single life?
In a perfect world, if an alert went out at 8:47am that a hijacked 767 had crashed into the world trade center, and someone on United Flight 175 had gotten the alert immediately, I'm willing to bet the message would have been loud and clear to any of the passengers (as it was on United Flight 93), and something would have happened in those 16 minutes which would have saved several hundred lives in the process.
And if we can't send out an alert that fast, or didn't recognize the need immediately, there was a window of just over a half hour after the SECOND jet was crashed, in which to notify the passengers of flight 77 and save over 100 lives in the Pentagon. And yes, possibly their own as well.
And in either case, even if the message didn't get through to the passengers, a message about more hijacked planes flying around could have spurred life-saving evacuations as well.
Certainly more competition is good, especially in the mobile phone market where there's barely any.
There's actually quite a bit of competition, but I can't figure out why so few people make use of it. We have 4 major cell service providers... Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint/Nextel. Those are listed in order of market share AND service price... Why is that? In addition, those 4 are just the contract providers. They are further broken down into multiple pre-paid service providers.
On that note, small-ish, up and coming companies like MetroPCS and to a lesser extent cricket, have been growing very quickly from nothing into significant players. I'm as shocked as anybody, but it's true.
I can't fanthom why people are paying over $100 per month for their phone service, particularly when Boost and Virgin are offering unlimited everything (voice, data, text, etc) for under $60/mo. and generally, for much less. Eg. Boost drops as low as $35/mo for unlimited everything after a couple years, and Virgin has plans with fewer minutes from $35/mo. Both have the nationwide coverage of the Sprint/Nextel network, which out here in CA I've found to be just as reliable as Verizon & AT&T.
So consider that perhaps YOU are the problem. Not you the consumer, but you, personally, are ripping yourself off, and facilitating further monopolization of the market with your cash. You're asking for competition, but it's pretty clear you aren't actually comparison shopping for your phone service or you wouldn't have quite the complaints that you do. So you tell me, what is it you can't get from those 4 major contract providers, or their many affiliates, which you think yet another entry into the market will provide? Free fortune cookies?
Re:I guess Ellison changed his mind
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Solaris 11 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I guess Ellison changed his mind about cloud computing...
Quite the opposite. In your own link he summarized by saying:
"I'm not going to fight this thing." but "I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than change the wording on some of our ads."
And sure enough, their ads now show how great Solaris is for cloud computing. Based on what?... zones, which have been in Solaris for a number of years.
Re:Best comment in article:
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
On the contrary - the British never used VIFF in combat.
I for one really like Gnome 3 because it is finally no longer a Windows 95 clone like Gnome 2.
Yes, good old Windows 95... menu bar across the top, Umm, what?
GNOME 1.x was quite a bit like Win95, GNOME 2.x snagged some of the worst elements from MacOS, crippling itself in the process.
What is the obsession with Windows 95 being the gold standard on which all desktop environments need to be based???
Windows 95 had many problems, but when you simplify the desktop to it's minimum, it inherently looks a bit like Win95.
I use Blackbox. It operates NOTHING like Win95, but you know, it does have a toolbar, and in Fluxbox, the default is to put a list of tasks in there... And you can even configure it to put a button on the toolbar to open the menu (it's completely useless, because it's a non-descript triangle, and doesn't even say "MENU", but I digress) so pretty quickly you've got something that looks a bit like Win95, though it sure doesn't act like it.... Multiple virtual desktops, NO desktop icons, etc.
XFce (based on CDE) as well. There's a bar across the bottom, and when you iconify things they become icons on the desktop, so it looks a bit like Win95, though, again, it doesn't work anything like it. If anything, Mac OSX copied some elements of CDE and Windows 7 copied a mix of Mac OSX and CDE.
And in AfterStep, there's a bar, it's just vertical, and a 3-pane file dialog, and...
I think the question should be, what is with YOUR obsession with using desktop environments which clone Windows? Get the hell away from GNOME and KDE, and there's a whole world of desktop environments out there doing different and innovative things.
Didn't you actually listen to what they said? Dealers were lying about the purchase price, giving people a "discount", and the tax credits were tied to eg. KW/Hs and similar, which the vehicle in question happened to meet.
This guy knows jack about marketing. You really think a hard-sell, where they compare specs between the iPhone and Droid-of-the week will really convince anyone? Anybody remember the iPod ads, which had nothing but dancing silhouettes? If anything, competitors have learned how to fight apple, and are doing a better job of it every day.
1. Android ads most certainly DO list some of the things you wont get on an iPhone. Even the hot leather-clad girl fighting the robot, where nobody says anything, shows the Bionic with a big 4G LTE logo on it... that's a 1st tier feature the iPhone isn't going to be able to boast. And they get it out to people with a commercial people will WANT to watch, rather than a boring and heavy-handed spec-fest.
And how about the Droid 1/2/3? It's easy for anyone to see that they can get an android device with a slider (keyboard) built-in, but cant get that from Apple. They feature that fact heavily in commercials as well, like the stupid snow man / alien promo they had plastered everywhere for weeks, showing super-fast texting. For me, the lack of a keyboard is show-stopper #1. I'm absolutely swimming in phones, here... I could get a free iPhone from my employer, no questions asked, but without a keyboard, I would play with it for a week and toss it in a drawer somewhere, even if it had every app and every other feature I could possibly want.
Of course they aren't going to call out the iPhone directly, ever, because no publicity is bad publicity, and they might inadvertently help Apple's message reach more people. Hence the "Leading Brand" or "Brand X" we so often see used in ads, so that suggestion is right out. Again, this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
2. The old PDAs from a decade ago and more, all had IRDA. I used it to great effect writing-up huge reports with charts and graphs embedded, and printing it out directly to the nearest IRDA laser printer from my Psion 5MX. These days, wifi printers are very common, and some printers even let you just email the file. While I think direct printing support in smart phones would still be a good feature these days, it hass become much easier to do without it.
And using your smartphone as a remote control? It would be a mildly amusing gimmick for about 5 seconds, then nobody would ever use it again... It's a PITA to turn on and unlock your cell phone, and the battery life is horrendous. And do you gain any benefits from the integration of remote into your phone? Nope, not a thing. I'm sure you could find some tiny remote to hang off your keychain if you wanted it. Seriously, give 30 seconds of thought to how you would actually have to use it, and it becomes obvious what a horrible idea it is. I'll stick with the tiny remote on my coffee table that lasts for years on a single AAA battery, thanks.
3. iPhone accessories work because iPhones come in very few shapes and sizes. An accessory port on all Android phones would still require device-specific accessories, so you've gained precisely nothing. And convincing manufacturers to standardize on given dimensions? Forget about it.
4. Microphone and Webcam? Relly? Again, you're asking for your smart phone to provide the features of a $20 device. Adding this capability doesn't provide any particular additional benefit beyond (partially) replacing that same $20 device. It's a worthless idea that isn't worth the effort.
5. Many companies tried ad-revenue sharing with their users during the dot-com bubble. They all went horribly wrong, were subject to rampant fraud, an paid out so little... pennies, that nobody, who wasn't looking to defraud the system, was interested.
as a non-native speaker, I find it painful to read "it's" instead of "its" in almost every/. post...
Please explain... "its" is an exception... about the only place a possessive doesn't need an apostrophe.
I would naturally expect that ignoring an exception, rather than following it, would be easier for a non-native speaker to understand.
Do other properly-used noun possessives like "John's" cause you similar pain?
Or do all uses of the apostrophe in general just make the English language intolerable, and this is just the one improper usage of an apostrophe which you see the opportunity to eliminated?
This car has range and performance similar to the Leaf and the upcoming Focus, yet will cost less than 1/5 what either of those overpriced toys go for, and also looks better. What's your excuse?
The Leaf seems to be reasonably priced. They're unable to meet demand as-is, and while they're turning a profit on the thing, it's not a cash cow by any means.
The $7,000 price-tag of this toy seems to really only be materials cost of drive-train+frame&interior. The batteries are meant to be "leased" rather than purchased, so they're probably damn expensive, and just being excluded from the price. The Leaf's battery costs about $18,000 alone (according to the WSJ), about half the cost of the whole vehicle. And that doesn't count actual production and R&D costs. I'm betting once more plants come online, and the supply of Leafs increases, you could lease one for pretty close to the same price as this toy. Plus the Leaf is a 4-door, with cargo room, and all the modern safety features, and certification by the NHTSA.
I wouldn't drive this tiny tin can of a death trap if they were giving it away... I'm not willing to risk driving on the California freeways without nice big crumple zones giving me a fighting chance... I'm sure it will have its use, but it certainly won't be competing with the Leaf for sales.
(Sidenote, if I can get a tax credit of up to $7500 from Uncle Sam for purchasing an EV, does that mean I actually MAKE $500 to drive this thing?
The US government isn't so idiotic as to hand out a fixed amount of cash for meeting some nebulous metric (ie. electric car). I don't know the specifics of the electric car tax credit, but I'm willing to bet it's a PERCENTAGE of the purchase price, which tops-out at 7500 (so they don't encourage purchasing an electric Hummer).
One of the best inventions for a train was its braking system. You have to apply energy to *prevent* a train car from braking. This prevents run-away cars.
Yes, you have to apply energy to release the brakes... Sounds safe right? Except when the air line gets kinked, the brakes stay released, you can't apply them, and you won't know it until you try it out...
Yeah, it's not a particularly good invention at all. Dynamic braking is probably much more significant.
Besides, there's a whole category of systems like this... they're called "fail safe" systems. Hence the term that gets abused to mean all sorts of other crap.
Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?
No, it's not ironic at all, as greece most certainly is a functioning and healthy democracy.
What you're talking about is DIRECT democracy (also known as "mob rule"), which, while it has some pros, has far more cons. Voting for representatives, who then make decisions for you, is still democracy, and reeally is a much healthier and more stable form of democracy.
There's good reason to avoid mob rule, and instead choose your representatives wisely. Where you might disagree with them could very well be where they are right and your are wrong...
Look -- there _has_ to be some downside to intelligence. Neuroses, depression, whatever. Otherwise, the entire human race would have self-selected for some higher intelligence level than IQavg=98 sd=15.
Yes there is a reason... Larger human brains require larger heads, but we have long since passed the limit of what can pass through the birth canal, and not kill the mother and child in the process. Our history is littered with women dying in child birth.
With modern C-sections (and germ theory, and antibiotics) that huge barrier to human evolution is no longer a relevant limiting factor.
Either you are on a journalling filesystem or you need to be fired.
Your magical thinking just makes you look like a fool. Plenty of advanced and reliable file systems don't do journaling. UFS2 immediately comes to mind. Many factors are vastly more important than journaling or no journaling, such as barriers (would you like to guess what feature LVM doesn't support?) and write cache.
Also, the whole point of consolidating in/usr/ is so that you can mount/usr as read-only and take useful snapshots of it and stuff, which you can't do now because read-only and non-read-only stuff is all interspersed in /.
Once again, some idiot has to tell me I just CAN'T do things which I frequently do...
They address that by saying "There is no way to reliably bring up a modern system with an empty/usr,"
This is bullshit. I know because I've done it plenty. I've setup servers with minimal / filesystems for years, because/usr and all other filesystems are iSCSI/NFS/etc. mounts that aren't brought-up until needed (as indicated by heartbeat, or whatnot).
There are only a couple spots that need to be fixed (with RHEL5 init scripts) to allow booting multiuser without/usr mounted. One is the use of head/tail, and grep -m1 is sufficient. The other is a single pam lib in/usr/lib that needs to be copied to/lib (or lib64 if that's your thing...).
If / is corrupted then trusting your recovery tools on / seems like a bad idea.
The idea behind / being a separate filesystem is that / is so damn small, and barely ever being written to, that there's next to no chance of it getting corrupted. If you throw a bunch of crap onto/, and have RPMs updating it 2,000 times a day, then you're just simply screwed.
Building an initrd image just for this task is insane added complexity and overhead, and really, nobody is going to actually do that... This will just turn Linux into Windows, where everyone mindlessly accepts that the most trivial day-to-day issues will cause the system to fail to boot, and requires a boot disc to fix.
I understand the desire to consolidate bin and sbin, but putting everything into/usr is a tremendously foolish move, for very, very little reason.
I can't imagine why you would think that. Do you know what Dvorak is? They layout was expressly designed for two-handed typing. A completely random layout selection would would better for one-handed or one-fingered typing, and certainly Qwerty is as well (though neither is ideal).
I'm a dvorak typist. I can tell you it's miserable to use when not in an ideal position. 1-fingered typing on Dvorak is a one-fingered marathon.
...I could have lied and said how great the build quality was.
If you want to use your keyboard as a club, buy a clunky old, all-metal AT model for $8. If you want to type on it, $50 isn't a bad price for a good ergonomic layout.
For the record, I have no association with the company. Just a (hesitant) customer.
The $50 model is the older, cheaper one. I don't have any experience with their newer, $100 model on their website... the build quality could have gotten better, I don't know. Is $100 more to your liking?
I use Dvorak. Not only am I too cool for Unity, I'm too cool for damn near All Smart Phones (missing Dvorak physical or on-screen keyboards)
You don't want or need a Dvorak on-screen keyboard. You can't touch-type on a tiny touch-screen, so a Dvorak layout would just be more work. Swype provides a superior model for on-screen input, as long as you want to enter dictionary words.
my Laptop Computer (not a Notebook -- it doesn't burn my legs) can do everything a Smart-Phone or "Tablet" does for 1/2 the price and twice the power...
I'm completely with you for using a netbook rather than a tablet. However, you're not going to convince anyone to give up their smartphones.
Having a minimal computer with you AT ALL TIMES, is something you won't give-up once you've really tried it. If nothing else, it completely changes the dynamic when traveling, even short trips. Being able to instantly find the nearest restaurant, hotel, shopping, etc., in an area you know nothing about, is the ultimate killer app.
Having access to the whole world of streaming radio and podcasts, in addition to your full personal music collection, in a small portable device that you'll always have with you, is also huge. Never mind all the news and reading material you could want with any decent RSS reader. Most also work pretty well for watching videos or full movies. That's huge for those who don't have a media-center PC/DVR up and working at home to begin with.
I'll adopt to any keyboard with decent layout, as long keys arranged in damn columns instead of a typewriter pattern.
Heard of the TypeMatrix? Only $50USD (new) on eBay. Dual-labeled, and hardware switchable between QWERTY and DVORAK.
Fair warning, the build quality is crap. Tiny little plastic tabs holding everything together (internally), super-thin PS/2 cord. etc. But it is undeniably great to type on, and the lack of a number pad makes switching between keyboard and mouse vastly easier.
The biggest design problem is that with flat keys and no intentional texture, you get no sense of the keys center / borders, so hitting two keys at once becomes more common. Despite that, it's still a great little keyboard design.
"QuickPDF" on my Android has a very simple "Reading View" button, which works very well most of the time, and almost entirely solves the problem. There's still an occasion here and there when you need to shut it off to see what "see below" or whatever is supposed to mean, but otherwise a very good solution to the problem. Now if the XPDF guys just felt the desire to code something similar...
Then again, I'm sympathetic to the hard-coded size woes, when someone else's size of choice doesn't quite work for you.
there seems to be no evidence that the ShenWei SW-3 is a Loongson/Godson chip. There is nothing to be found on what the instruction set of the CPU is, and no evidence that it implements the MIPS instruction set
The MIPS based Loongson/Godson chip is the only reasonably advanced processor known to be developed in China, and the government has spent obscene amounts of money over the past decade+ on it.
It's extremely unlikely domestic Chinese companies have secretly developed the capability to design some other architecture than Loongson, just a few years behind the state of the art. The alternative is that they up and stole a core design, and did minor modifications on it, which they are very well known to have done time and again.
Personally... I like this development. MIPS is a damn good design. If domestic Chinese design and manufacturing result in a dirt cheap MIPS architecture to compete with x86 and ARM, it could only be a good thing, and I'd jump at the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Even WITH all the extensive DSP functions added into these ARM chips, I'll still put an Intel / AMD processor up against a similarly clocked ARM chip absolutely any day. That leaves the phone you're describing perhaps faster than my laptop from close to a decade ago, but that's about it... I'd put my money on a P4 to run circles around it (assuming a decent video card). Phones only FEEL fast because the software is so aggressively optimized for performance on low-end hardware. Port Android to x86, and watch it fly on whatever old hardware you've got lying around. And that's today... The early PDAs felt pretty snappy with ~36MHz ARM chips for the basic apps on decent OSes like EPOC/Symbian, too.
The exact SECOND that GORILLA GLASS and capacitative touch-screens came along... eliminating the need to make horrible design decisions around protecting an incredibly fragile screen.
When I'm doing some light reading on my droid, I don't want it to be twice as wide, with part of it (the keyboard) flapping around, when I don't need it.
Conversely, I wouldn't buy a smartphone without a keyboard, and a slider works pretty well, not requiring me to do any contortions to hold both pieces of the phone, or worrying about it collapsing.
I'd love it if somebody came out with a slider which had a hinge which could optionally be used to convert it to a laptop form factor (eliminating the need for a kickstand as well), but not making standard hand-held slide-out mode any more difficult. Keyboards would need to get just a bit bigger, and keys a bit less resistive, and most people could actually touch-type on them. Long live the Psion 5MX.
Don't get me wrong, I remember all that, too, but that doesn't undermind the idea, it just means we need a hierarchy, rather than wikipedia style anarchy or a "truthiness" system such as /. moderation.
There was certainly good information going around. NANOG is a great place to start because it's unbiased, unemotional technical information about which routes are down. That could be complimented by the worlds biggest nagios monitoring system, just grabbing a couple SNMP values from random devices spread all over the country.
With GPS and wifi in every phone, you could also get a good picture of where there is abnormal activity, such as a dead spot where there is typically constant cell traffic. And drill down to the exact spots where people are making lots of calls, and where they aren't.
Hey, you could even supplament that with some monitoring of a few networked webcams, if you had a list of all those before the fact, ready to go.
No, actually that happened because all the major, upstanding news organizations started spewing complete crap about bombs blowing up the capitol building in DC, armed gunman outside of other landmarks picking off people, etc.
In the fog of that morning, for a few hours, public information made it sound convincingly like the we might be seeing the first in a series of military attacks on the US mainland from another major military power, leading up to a total war, or perhaps even an all-out invasion.
It's ridiculous in hindsight, now that we know it started and ended with 4 jumbo jets. But at the time, nobody knew the scope of the attacks, and anything seemed possible. So any plausible military target seemed apotential target. Imagine if, after hearing the WTC & Pentagon was attacked, the capitol was bombed, and more, it was followed-up with news of Chinese naval forces attacking Taiwan, Philipines, Hawaii, etc. Yes, people were preparing for good old WWIII, and not without cause.
In a perfect world, if an alert went out at 8:47am that a hijacked 767 had crashed into the world trade center, and someone on United Flight 175 had gotten the alert immediately, I'm willing to bet the message would have been loud and clear to any of the passengers (as it was on United Flight 93), and something would have happened in those 16 minutes which would have saved several hundred lives in the process.
And if we can't send out an alert that fast, or didn't recognize the need immediately, there was a window of just over a half hour after the SECOND jet was crashed, in which to notify the passengers of flight 77 and save over 100 lives in the Pentagon. And yes, possibly their own as well.
And in either case, even if the message didn't get through to the passengers, a message about more hijacked planes flying around could have spurred life-saving evacuations as well.
There's actually quite a bit of competition, but I can't figure out why so few people make use of it. We have 4 major cell service providers... Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint/Nextel. Those are listed in order of market share AND service price... Why is that? In addition, those 4 are just the contract providers. They are further broken down into multiple pre-paid service providers.
On that note, small-ish, up and coming companies like MetroPCS and to a lesser extent cricket, have been growing very quickly from nothing into significant players. I'm as shocked as anybody, but it's true.
I can't fanthom why people are paying over $100 per month for their phone service, particularly when Boost and Virgin are offering unlimited everything (voice, data, text, etc) for under $60/mo. and generally, for much less. Eg. Boost drops as low as $35/mo for unlimited everything after a couple years, and Virgin has plans with fewer minutes from $35/mo. Both have the nationwide coverage of the Sprint/Nextel network, which out here in CA I've found to be just as reliable as Verizon & AT&T.
So consider that perhaps YOU are the problem. Not you the consumer, but you, personally, are ripping yourself off, and facilitating further monopolization of the market with your cash. You're asking for competition, but it's pretty clear you aren't actually comparison shopping for your phone service or you wouldn't have quite the complaints that you do. So you tell me, what is it you can't get from those 4 major contract providers, or their many affiliates, which you think yet another entry into the market will provide? Free fortune cookies?
Quite the opposite. In your own link he summarized by saying:
"I'm not going to fight this thing." but "I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than change the wording on some of our ads."
And sure enough, their ads now show how great Solaris is for cloud computing. Based on what?... zones, which have been in Solaris for a number of years.
TIME says you're wrong: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,951776,00.html
STOVL never used in combat? What do the Brits do with their tiny aircraft carriers, then? Particularly during the Falklands war?
Yes, good old Windows 95... menu bar across the top, Umm, what?
GNOME 1.x was quite a bit like Win95, GNOME 2.x snagged some of the worst elements from MacOS, crippling itself in the process.
Windows 95 had many problems, but when you simplify the desktop to it's minimum, it inherently looks a bit like Win95.
I use Blackbox. It operates NOTHING like Win95, but you know, it does have a toolbar, and in Fluxbox, the default is to put a list of tasks in there... And you can even configure it to put a button on the toolbar to open the menu (it's completely useless, because it's a non-descript triangle, and doesn't even say "MENU", but I digress) so pretty quickly you've got something that looks a bit like Win95, though it sure doesn't act like it.... Multiple virtual desktops, NO desktop icons, etc.
XFce (based on CDE) as well. There's a bar across the bottom, and when you iconify things they become icons on the desktop, so it looks a bit like Win95, though, again, it doesn't work anything like it. If anything, Mac OSX copied some elements of CDE and Windows 7 copied a mix of Mac OSX and CDE.
And in AfterStep, there's a bar, it's just vertical, and a 3-pane file dialog, and...
I think the question should be, what is with YOUR obsession with using desktop environments which clone Windows? Get the hell away from GNOME and KDE, and there's a whole world of desktop environments out there doing different and innovative things.
Didn't you actually listen to what they said? Dealers were lying about the purchase price, giving people a "discount", and the tax credits were tied to eg. KW/Hs and similar, which the vehicle in question happened to meet.
This guy knows jack about marketing. You really think a hard-sell, where they compare specs between the iPhone and Droid-of-the week will really convince anyone? Anybody remember the iPod ads, which had nothing but dancing silhouettes? If anything, competitors have learned how to fight apple, and are doing a better job of it every day.
1. Android ads most certainly DO list some of the things you wont get on an iPhone. Even the hot leather-clad girl fighting the robot, where nobody says anything, shows the Bionic with a big 4G LTE logo on it... that's a 1st tier feature the iPhone isn't going to be able to boast. And they get it out to people with a commercial people will WANT to watch, rather than a boring and heavy-handed spec-fest.
And how about the Droid 1/2/3? It's easy for anyone to see that they can get an android device with a slider (keyboard) built-in, but cant get that from Apple. They feature that fact heavily in commercials as well, like the stupid snow man / alien promo they had plastered everywhere for weeks, showing super-fast texting. For me, the lack of a keyboard is show-stopper #1. I'm absolutely swimming in phones, here... I could get a free iPhone from my employer, no questions asked, but without a keyboard, I would play with it for a week and toss it in a drawer somewhere, even if it had every app and every other feature I could possibly want.
Of course they aren't going to call out the iPhone directly, ever, because no publicity is bad publicity, and they might inadvertently help Apple's message reach more people. Hence the "Leading Brand" or "Brand X" we so often see used in ads, so that suggestion is right out. Again, this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
2. The old PDAs from a decade ago and more, all had IRDA. I used it to great effect writing-up huge reports with charts and graphs embedded, and printing it out directly to the nearest IRDA laser printer from my Psion 5MX. These days, wifi printers are very common, and some printers even let you just email the file. While I think direct printing support in smart phones would still be a good feature these days, it hass become much easier to do without it.
And using your smartphone as a remote control? It would be a mildly amusing gimmick for about 5 seconds, then nobody would ever use it again... It's a PITA to turn on and unlock your cell phone, and the battery life is horrendous. And do you gain any benefits from the integration of remote into your phone? Nope, not a thing. I'm sure you could find some tiny remote to hang off your keychain if you wanted it. Seriously, give 30 seconds of thought to how you would actually have to use it, and it becomes obvious what a horrible idea it is. I'll stick with the tiny remote on my coffee table that lasts for years on a single AAA battery, thanks.
3. iPhone accessories work because iPhones come in very few shapes and sizes. An accessory port on all Android phones would still require device-specific accessories, so you've gained precisely nothing. And convincing manufacturers to standardize on given dimensions? Forget about it.
4. Microphone and Webcam? Relly? Again, you're asking for your smart phone to provide the features of a $20 device. Adding this capability doesn't provide any particular additional benefit beyond (partially) replacing that same $20 device. It's a worthless idea that isn't worth the effort.
5. Many companies tried ad-revenue sharing with their users during the dot-com bubble. They all went horribly wrong, were subject to rampant fraud, an paid out so little... pennies, that nobody, who wasn't looking to defraud the system, was interested.
Please explain... "its" is an exception... about the only place a possessive doesn't need an apostrophe.
I would naturally expect that ignoring an exception, rather than following it, would be easier for a non-native speaker to understand.
Do other properly-used noun possessives like "John's" cause you similar pain?
Or do all uses of the apostrophe in general just make the English language intolerable, and this is just the one improper usage of an apostrophe which you see the opportunity to eliminated?
You've completely missed the context...
The Leaf seems to be reasonably priced. They're unable to meet demand as-is, and while they're turning a profit on the thing, it's not a cash cow by any means.
The $7,000 price-tag of this toy seems to really only be materials cost of drive-train+frame&interior. The batteries are meant to be "leased" rather than purchased, so they're probably damn expensive, and just being excluded from the price. The Leaf's battery costs about $18,000 alone (according to the WSJ), about half the cost of the whole vehicle. And that doesn't count actual production and R&D costs. I'm betting once more plants come online, and the supply of Leafs increases, you could lease one for pretty close to the same price as this toy. Plus the Leaf is a 4-door, with cargo room, and all the modern safety features, and certification by the NHTSA.
I wouldn't drive this tiny tin can of a death trap if they were giving it away... I'm not willing to risk driving on the California freeways without nice big crumple zones giving me a fighting chance... I'm sure it will have its use, but it certainly won't be competing with the Leaf for sales.
The US government isn't so idiotic as to hand out a fixed amount of cash for meeting some nebulous metric (ie. electric car). I don't know the specifics of the electric car tax credit, but I'm willing to bet it's a PERCENTAGE of the purchase price, which tops-out at 7500 (so they don't encourage purchasing an electric Hummer).
Yes, you have to apply energy to release the brakes... Sounds safe right? Except when the air line gets kinked, the brakes stay released, you can't apply them, and you won't know it until you try it out...
Yeah, it's not a particularly good invention at all. Dynamic braking is probably much more significant.
Besides, there's a whole category of systems like this... they're called "fail safe" systems. Hence the term that gets abused to mean all sorts of other crap.
No, it's not ironic at all, as greece most certainly is a functioning and healthy democracy.
What you're talking about is DIRECT democracy (also known as "mob rule"), which, while it has some pros, has far more cons. Voting for representatives, who then make decisions for you, is still democracy, and reeally is a much healthier and more stable form of democracy.
There's good reason to avoid mob rule, and instead choose your representatives wisely. Where you might disagree with them could very well be where they are right and your are wrong...
Yes there is a reason... Larger human brains require larger heads, but we have long since passed the limit of what can pass through the birth canal, and not kill the mother and child in the process. Our history is littered with women dying in child birth.
With modern C-sections (and germ theory, and antibiotics) that huge barrier to human evolution is no longer a relevant limiting factor.
Your magical thinking just makes you look like a fool. Plenty of advanced and reliable file systems don't do journaling. UFS2 immediately comes to mind. Many factors are vastly more important than journaling or no journaling, such as barriers (would you like to guess what feature LVM doesn't support?) and write cache.
Once again, some idiot has to tell me I just CAN'T do things which I frequently do...
This is bullshit. I know because I've done it plenty. I've setup servers with minimal / filesystems for years, because /usr and all other filesystems are iSCSI/NFS/etc. mounts that aren't brought-up until needed (as indicated by heartbeat, or whatnot).
There are only a couple spots that need to be fixed (with RHEL5 init scripts) to allow booting multiuser without /usr mounted. One is the use of head/tail, and grep -m1 is sufficient. The other is a single pam lib in /usr/lib that needs to be copied to /lib (or lib64 if that's your thing...).
The idea behind / being a separate filesystem is that / is so damn small, and barely ever being written to, that there's next to no chance of it getting corrupted. If you throw a bunch of crap onto /, and have RPMs updating it 2,000 times a day, then you're just simply screwed.
Building an initrd image just for this task is insane added complexity and overhead, and really, nobody is going to actually do that... This will just turn Linux into Windows, where everyone mindlessly accepts that the most trivial day-to-day issues will cause the system to fail to boot, and requires a boot disc to fix.
I understand the desire to consolidate bin and sbin, but putting everything into /usr is a tremendously foolish move, for very, very little reason.
I can't imagine why you would think that. Do you know what Dvorak is? They layout was expressly designed for two-handed typing. A completely random layout selection would would better for one-handed or one-fingered typing, and certainly Qwerty is as well (though neither is ideal).
I'm a dvorak typist. I can tell you it's miserable to use when not in an ideal position. 1-fingered typing on Dvorak is a one-fingered marathon.
...I could have lied and said how great the build quality was.
If you want to use your keyboard as a club, buy a clunky old, all-metal AT model for $8. If you want to type on it, $50 isn't a bad price for a good ergonomic layout.
For the record, I have no association with the company. Just a (hesitant) customer.
The $50 model is the older, cheaper one. I don't have any experience with their newer, $100 model on their website... the build quality could have gotten better, I don't know. Is $100 more to your liking?
You don't want or need a Dvorak on-screen keyboard. You can't touch-type on a tiny touch-screen, so a Dvorak layout would just be more work. Swype provides a superior model for on-screen input, as long as you want to enter dictionary words.
I'm completely with you for using a netbook rather than a tablet. However, you're not going to convince anyone to give up their smartphones.
Having a minimal computer with you AT ALL TIMES, is something you won't give-up once you've really tried it. If nothing else, it completely changes the dynamic when traveling, even short trips. Being able to instantly find the nearest restaurant, hotel, shopping, etc., in an area you know nothing about, is the ultimate killer app.
Having access to the whole world of streaming radio and podcasts, in addition to your full personal music collection, in a small portable device that you'll always have with you, is also huge. Never mind all the news and reading material you could want with any decent RSS reader. Most also work pretty well for watching videos or full movies. That's huge for those who don't have a media-center PC/DVR up and working at home to begin with.
Heard of the TypeMatrix? Only $50USD (new) on eBay. Dual-labeled, and hardware switchable between QWERTY and DVORAK.
Fair warning, the build quality is crap. Tiny little plastic tabs holding everything together (internally), super-thin PS/2 cord. etc. But it is undeniably great to type on, and the lack of a number pad makes switching between keyboard and mouse vastly easier.
The biggest design problem is that with flat keys and no intentional texture, you get no sense of the keys center / borders, so hitting two keys at once becomes more common. Despite that, it's still a great little keyboard design.
"QuickPDF" on my Android has a very simple "Reading View" button, which works very well most of the time, and almost entirely solves the problem. There's still an occasion here and there when you need to shut it off to see what "see below" or whatever is supposed to mean, but otherwise a very good solution to the problem. Now if the XPDF guys just felt the desire to code something similar...
Then again, I'm sympathetic to the hard-coded size woes, when someone else's size of choice doesn't quite work for you.
The MIPS based Loongson/Godson chip is the only reasonably advanced processor known to be developed in China, and the government has spent obscene amounts of money over the past decade+ on it.
It's extremely unlikely domestic Chinese companies have secretly developed the capability to design some other architecture than Loongson, just a few years behind the state of the art. The alternative is that they up and stole a core design, and did minor modifications on it, which they are very well known to have done time and again.
Personally... I like this development. MIPS is a damn good design. If domestic Chinese design and manufacturing result in a dirt cheap MIPS architecture to compete with x86 and ARM, it could only be a good thing, and I'd jump at the chance.