Is because the U.S. fails so much at math that people can't figure out they'll be paying $2000 over their 2-year contract for their "free" locked phone.
I could have modded 'troll', but I opt to point out the bleeding obvious: I pay ~$2,400 over my two year contract for the balance of the handset cost, voice, data, and SMS service for two lines. Also, My phone wasn't free, it was $200 up front (HTC Rhodium).
-My point about the security quote is that the majority of people who hear "UNIX" think a religious person who had an..."irreversible" surgery. If you say "it's more secure than Windows" you may get some more nods, and I do agree that a default *nix config is better for Joe Sixpack than a default Windows config (though Vista and 7 have gotten this much better - just TRY and delete the system sounds, I DARE you).
-Vista users generally take one of the following paths: 1.) tough it out with Vista (for those who have dealt with it for the past year or two, it's not THAT bad, especially with some more RAM). This seems to be the most common approach. 2.) Buy a new machine. This is more common amongst those who had among the early machines that shipped with RTM builds, and is obviously going to get more common as time progresses. 3.) Use the Windows 7 disc from their other Dell machine, ask their hot daughter to ask their class nerd for a corporate copy, or some other dubiously legal method. 4.) Buy an OEM copy from Newegg for $99, or the 3-pack from Wal-Mart for $125.
--While I too consider the lack of iTunes to be an advantage, there have been plenty of people for whom their backup requirements were comprehensively covered by "My photos and my iTunes". Presumably, the one thing we fully agree upon is that iTunes is a terrible piece of software, especially on the Windows platform. It's among the reasons I switch back to Windows Mobile from a first-gen iPhone. Unfortunately for us though, the general populace is willing to tough it out with iTunes so that they can get their iPod working. The fact that Creative could have easily overtaken them during the formative years and didn't has as much to do with this as anything else, but that's besides the point.
--Firewire video is great - if you're still using MiniDV and filming in SD. While I do personally prefer this workflow, the FlipVideo camera, HDD/flash memory based models have mostly overtaken the market. Many of these use AVCHD, or some variant of MPEG-4. KDenLive looks pretty good, but it's no iMovie or Pinnacle Studio 14. This is both to its credit and against it.
--Postscript is wonderful, but it makes a pretty broad assumption - that your printer supports PostScript. The decade old HP 8000DN in my office at work speaks both postscript and PCL, and as such will likely talk to just about any hardware and any desktop OS long after HP deprecates manufacturing MKs, drums, and toner for it. This does not, however, apply to the overwhelming majority of consumer inkjet printers. This also doesn't account for the more popular multifunction devices - even if one does speak postscript, that still leaves the scanning bed, faxing system, and sometimes other functionality unaccounted for.
--That's exactly the case. "What I have does what I need it to do. What you're suggesting would require significant amounts of work with a disproportional amount of benefit". SQL Query story above had some learning exchanged for lots of benefit. Switching to Linux, for many, involves lots of work for seemingly guaranteed less benefit.
--dual booting has its own sets of headaches (not the least of which is guessing how much space you'll need amongst your partitions), and having multiple OSes kills a decent amount of the security argument (e.g. boot sector viruses can easily hose LiLo/Grub) and the cost argument (still need to pay for Windows and a security suite).
--Neither does the iPad, but people are somehow managing to be productive on it. 25 years ago, people were managing to be productive with Lotus, WordPerfect, and Paradox on DOS, so it must be possible. Actually, being forced to focus on one thing at a time might, for some people, be a boon to productivity.
Yes, by most accounts it is. Moreso if you bundle in the iPod Touch.
However, the iPad also has the iTunes Media Store connected to it. It's synaptic on steroids in that you can get all your apps (which P.S. are invariably designed for a multitouch environment), music, movies, TV series, and eBooks from a single place with a single search box and password.
Linux may have Synaptic, and I'll even give it Amazon MP3 since I've got that on my Android phone, but AFAIK no place to get video content unless you're ripping it yourself.
iPad + iPad ecosystem is doing very well. Linux isn't quite there yet on the media front. Getting them there is going to be a battle of wills, since the *AAs want DRM, and the devs don't want DRM. There's only one way this Butter Battle is going to end at this point, especially since in this sense, Linux/Android needs Big Media more than the inverse.
>>Freedom [whylinuxisbetter.net] to learn about anything (e.g. SQL as you explained)
This assumes the user WANTS to learn about anything computer related. Anyone believing this is a benefit to the user is at disconnect with general userland. Here is exactly what the majority of computer users want to learn: "The absolute bare minimum required to do the tasks I want to do". In the case of the SQL queries above, the managers essentially saw dollar signs and thus the "bare minimum" factor had been raised. The ability to do more than that is akin to be buying a car that can drive at 160MPH - Jeff Gordon might find it useful, but I can't legally drive over 55, de facto speed limits hover 70 in clear weather, and the fastest I've ever driven was 85.
>>It's like UNIX with proper multi-user management and a mature security architecture [whylinuxisbetter.net]. Ask 100 people off the street if this sentence makes ANY sense whatsoever to them. These people work AROUND spyware infections until they are no longer able to do so. These people are the ones that I saw at a fair who gave their name, street address, and their home phone number in exchange for a free ice cream cone.
>>It almost never crashes [whylinuxisbetter.net]. Getting warmer. Most people would agree that this is a desirable attribute, and definitely the strongest on the list.
>>Proper file system meaning no need to defrag your drive [whylinuxisbetter.net] While most people would again consider this desirable, too many treat this like backing up - something they should do, they know is a good idea to do, but simply don't.
>>It's a lot cheaper [whylinuxisbetter.net]. To them, Windows is free because the cost of an OEM license is baked into the sticker price of their laptop.
Caveats: -The Sims doesn't work, nor do any Valve/Steam games. -iTunes won't work. The comparable program (Amarok) will sync music, but doesn't access the iTunes Media Store, doesn't back up your iPhone (or activate it), and doesn't sync apps. -Many digital camcorders won't work (No AVCHD editing). -Printers could possibly work out of the box, could work with a bit of configuration, could work with a lot of configuration, or might not work at all. The same is true for some more obscure wireless chipsets, and some specialty hardware.
Get a group of 100 people, present them your list, and then present them mine. Let me know if you need to start counting on more than one hand how many you can sell with your list.
Opensuse 11.3 KDE is really, REALLY nice. I like it a lot. It worked with most of my hardware out of the box. It's pretty, checked my Facebook just fine, my wireless chipset (a mainstream Intel N adapter) worked flawlessly, and its package manager is simple to use. I really like it, and I'd be running it if I weren't tied to Windows specific software (and no, I'm not running Serato in WINE).
Ultimately, the issue is that Linux captures those who are ideologically opposed to running a proprietary OS very well. The rest of the less-tech-savvy world has a VERY different list of things that are beneficial to them. If you're determined to alter your workflow to fit your OS choice, then you could be productive in DOS if you wanted to. That doesn't make switching to DOS a good idea.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I think that "many" is a bit generous here. Yes, AA batteries are thicker than the Macbook Air, the Dell Adamo, probably a handful of Sony units, and I think there was an ultrathin Thinkpad released a year or two ago. All of the above have something in common: they were EXPLICITLY built to be as thin as possible, to the point where "it's ridiculously thin" was the primary selling feature.
By contrast, you could comfortably fit "C" size batteries into my XPS M1730; a round of "D" batteries is a couple millimeters away if we're assuming a lid-open design.
AA batteries would theoretically fit into every netbook I've come across, as well as every 14", 15", and 17" notebook I can recall. Whether a set of AA batteries would be able to pump out enough juice to power any of these machines is another argument entirely, but your statement was, if I could rephrase, "The thickness of the thickest point on a significant minority of recent-generation laptops is less than the circumference of a AA battery", to which I must disagree.
Seriously, in the robotic future, if everyone is given a basic wage whether they work or not, and robots provide all our needs, then maybe we can 'all get along' after all. Money will become less and less important, and yet we will be richer than ever before.
I've heard that before, but even that relies on an idealistic utopia that assumes:
-People will no longer lust after power or material possessions. If this was true, there'd be more equality now. -The only reason greed exists is in response to people not having their basic needs met. Again, this flies in complete contrast to why the rich still demand more money. -People fight solely because their basic needs aren't met. Well, there are plenty of places in Africa where this could be true, but there have been plenty of first world nations where fighting has happened and the overwhelming majority of the populations had been met. People fight over food and territory, but for other reasons like ideologies and religions, which don't stop just because they've eaten today.
Essentially, people are evil. History books are littered with examples of people who are greedy, arrogant, never satisfied, and embody the worst of humanity. Sorry, but as the number of people whose basic needs are met increase, the likelihood of a war breaking out in spite of our robotic overlords approaches 1, and that assumes that the robots themselves better resemble Wall-E than Skynet and don't themselves become the enemy.
Of course not. That's why I think Medicare and SS needs to be more like Welfare and Food Stamps - you are only eligible for the program if you are poor, or run out of cash. Otherwise if you are well-off, you pay your medicine, food, and rent using your OWN savings instead of asking government to do it for you. A "safety net" not an entitlement.
...Fine, but then either bake SS into the federal taxes, or allow me to opt out. SS was initially designed to be a government mandated savings plan, so if it's no longer that, then let me save up my own money.
I appreciate the additional information. Despite the film aspect of it being wrong, I'm pretty sure that the polarizer being in front of the projector enables plastic glasses instead of genlocked active shutter glasses required for 3D TV.
1.) My guess is that your cocktail napkin math and the number crunchers' copies of Excel yield two different sets of numbers. 2.) Because $12.50/ticket for a family of four grosses $50, while a first-run DVD release of a movie will gross $20, tops - and the studios net more from the theaters than the disc release. The trick is getting people to opt for the theatrical release rather than a Netflix rental.
Movies at the theater - even 3D ones - are shown on film. Essentially, two images are displayed, and the polarization of the glasses are designed to isolate one image from the other. The film is designed to use the same polarity as the glasses, and all is well.
3D televisions still rely on refresh rates. They may not use interlacing as the old NTSC/PAL systems did, but it still requires refreshing at a rate and starting point that isn't necessarily a given. If you fast forward five seconds and three frames, you may end up on a "left frame" or a "right frame". the active shutter glasses are designed to essentially "genlock" the picture with the polarity of the glasses. As such, the movie theater glasses are plastic lenses, while the ones you get with a 3D TV have additional circuitry for timing and polarization.
different ideas. Google's home page is great if you're actually searching for stuff. Yahoo is a bit better at putting some ideas in front of you when you're not quite sure what to look for. While the page may not be layed out perfectly, it does have much more information on it and I've read some articles on it (and -don't judge me bro- MSN.com) that I wouldn't necessarily have searched for, but was worth 2 minutes of my time to skim through. The fact that I got distracted by half a dozen ads has made Yahoo a dollar or three as well.
-It's a pretty well established, matured PROTOCOL. Many other chat applications use some principles of IRC on the back end (I've dealt with several java and AJAX-based chat/support products that boil down to a really shiny skin over IRC) -It's used a lot for the file transfer functionality (we only swap Linux distros! really!) -the alternatives to it have been AIM/MSN/ICQ (which are better for one-on-one chats, but not for groups or an "open door policy"), full-blown chatrooms (which have existed for quite a while, and again also use some flavor of IRC), and Facebook Chat (great idea, terrible implementation, but useful courtesy of Digsby)
I think facebook is a bit different than myspace in that it's EVERYWHERE. Myspace was a cool place to find people I haven't spoken to in a while, but required an actual visit to their site. Facebook has almost completely replaced personal e-mails. Both of my phones have access to every phone number of every one of my Facebook friends who post them. Facebook has SMS alerts, Outlook 2010 integration, and, though I despise them personally, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Also, it was much simpler to actually find the information you're looking for, rather than reading yellow text on a sparkly white background.
I'll bet bucks to beans that Murdoch would have laughed you out of his office by saying that Myspace should figure out indirect ways of making their service useful that wouldn't involve serving up an ad at the same time. He would have downright pissed in his pants if you told him in 2005 that in four years Myspace would be the 00's Geocities at the hands of a college kid whose alternative service did just that. Okay, now I totally want to do that now. Excuse me while I fire up my Delorean. Anyone got some Plutonium?
This principle works, until it's coupled with a group of teachers who are slow to actually fail a child because the parents are quick to file a lawsuit. If high school kids want to spend their day on Facebook and fail their math class, fine. The issue is that the current crop of parents act like shielding their kids from consequences is helping them. Until that changes, tax dollars will pay for tech toys, kids will misuse them, test scores will drop, parents will threaten, teachers will give D+ grades to kids that don't deserve them, and politicians will once again lower the bar to get a passing grade in order to maintain property values amongst the local homeowners associations in order for them to get re-elected, and the cycle starts all over again.
Me personally, I like the way computers worked in the classroom in 1995. If you were done with your seatwork, you got to use the computer. It was up to you to figure out how to use it though, the teacher had no clue. It encouraged problem solving, critical thinking, and *real* cooperative learning. Admittedly we only played games on them once we figured out what we were doing, but back then there was more of a process leading up to getting the game to play. Today, these young whippersnappers don't even have to put in a CD-ROM to get things working anymore, to say nothing about having to work with the command line. And yes, I do in fact want you off of my lawn.
Wish I could share this notion, but alas, I do not.
If you go back in history a bit, you'll find plenty of relics along the way. You'll find Sean Fanning's Napster, ScourXchange, WinMX, Morpheus, Kazaa, Bearshare, and now Limewire. I don't care about any of those. My example right now is DVDXCopy. Back when DVDXCopy came out, I remember seeing it in the acrylic boxes at CompUSA, being sold for $100 a pop. Its claim to fame: making it stupid simple to make copies of copy protected DVDs. IMO it propelled the DVD burner into standard gear on computers in less than half the time a standard migration would have taken. Ironically, it was among the first mainstream applications (besides Windows XP and Office XP) to require activation.
The MPAA sent a few love letters to 321 Studios, brought them to court, and won. 321 Studios tried to keep their shelf space next to Nero and Roxio, but they were more expensive and brought less to the table since they had a whole lot of court fees that Roxio didn't. They went bankrupt in 2004.
What does this have to do with customers not getting viruses anymore? Well, DVDXcopy had the notoriety of copying commercial movies, so people would google the term...and get plenty of fake versions of it containing adware, malware, and plenty of other shadyness. It was a huge problem because everyone was getting infected and not knowing it. At the very least, I got plenty of calls from people who were wondering why the price was so high when the company itself had gone under, and why there were so many popup ads on their computers.
Admittedly, Google and Bing have both gotten much better at filtering out malware serving websites, so it might not be as much of a problem. Still, if people were able to get themselves infected with limewire, they're going to be dumb enough to either move onto another Gnutella client (Frostwire has gotten plenty of traction recently even before the C&D) where the same sets of files will inevitably be shared, or they'll keep searching for Limewire until something makes a green, fruit-like icon appear on the desktop and let them download Justin_Bieber_Rare_Live_Recording.mp3.exe.
You may be correct there, but what Gecko might be pretty good at doing is coming up with an alternative to Powerpoint. Office presentations may be a 'solved problem', but there are generally two types of Powerpoints - the dull, text-on-a-screen kind, and the over-the-top kind that seem to require the use of every transition simply due to their existence. Compound this with the jitter problems that basically require a GeForce 480 to render 100% smoothly, and I'd say that Mozilla Presentations could be a piece of software that would be both useful and play to their strengths (i.e. screen rendering).
The iTunes hate comes from the fact that VLC, a leaner install of Winamp, FOObar2000, Mediamonkey, and countless other random applications on Softpedia don't have 101MByte installers, don't add half a dozen services to my startup. Quicktime (which has had plenty of security vulnerabilities over the last few years) and Bonjour (which "simplifies" networking at the expense of adding another network attack surface) are both non-optional installs. Syncing an iOS device requires a bunch of guesswork and voodoo as to whether iTunes will ACTUALLY do what you want it to do, or delete all your files. There is still no legit way to play purchased movie or TV episode besides iTunes/Quicktime, and playing them back takes triple the CPU time for me than an XviD in GOMplayer.
All of that ignores the fact that I personally (and thousands of other people) have had our accounts hacked, (and yes, I was using a strong password) since that's a store issue, not a code issue.
Interesting. About two years ago, my car stereo was stolen. There was no broken glass, so I only assumed that I left my car door unlocked. The thief stole the stereo, and even reassembled the bracket - the stereo had an OEM mount that took some effort to reinstall, and he did so after it was removed. The real twist was that it was a lower end Kenwood deck I bought for $200 new. This guy took that stereo, but left my camera bag, which had a Canon EOS Rebel XT and a bunch of accessories. He clearly went through it because the wires were all over the place and it was on the front passenger seat, while I knew I'd left it on the floor in the back. The police officer that took the report was in a state of disbelief, and I really couldn't blame him. The most logical thing we could postulate was that the thief was interested in the stereo specifically because he already had a buyer that was more than just a generic pawn shop.
1.) If you're ordering a THOUSAND machines from Dell, widdling that price down should be easy enough. Get a quote from Dell. Get a quote from HP. Go back and forth between them (ideally with the same sales reps), and before lunchtime, one of them will have shaved at least $200 per unit off the sticker price.
2.) Stick with an OEM for that kind of volume. What you're paying for (or at least what you SHOULD be paying for) is a 3 year, kitchen sink, no questions asked warranty. We've got them on the Dell machines at work. I had a question about a server that was two years out of warranty, and I got an English speaking support rep. I had a power supply die on an in-warranty desktop, and a new power supply was on my desk the next morning. If I wanted a Dell tech to swap the part out, all I had to do was say so.
2b.) If you build yourself, you're stuck supporting everything, and dealing with the finger pointing crap. If there's a mobo issue, you're going to be on the phone dealing with Asus trying to convince them that it's not the RAM, the processor, the GPU, or the SATA drives, and in order to make the argument, you'll be stuck swapping all those components out to prove it. If you go with an OEM, it's Dell/HP's headache to isolate the issue and replace the faulty part.
3.) like has been said before, about the only thing that can make your job a bit easier on yourself is to do some sort of disk imaging. You'd be retarded to install Windows manually unit by unit. The only problem with that plan is that you'll need identical hardware each time. Acronis' Universal Hardware Restore is supposed to deal with that on paper, but I haven't had success with it. If you can purpose one of those machines to be a server and throw Server 2008/R2 on it, you can use Windows Deployment Services on it, but even that requires a certain degree of planning. In any case, procuring identical hardware in two years will be near impossible shy of eBay, but with an OEM that's a given.
4.) It's also prudent to order a few extra spares and keep them on the shelf. Either image them before they go out, or use them to swap out bad parts to get the users' machine back into production before you call for warranty service.
5.) If the computers end up with capacitor issues or overheating problems, it's obviously not good. The difference is that if Dell or Toshiba built them, it's your fault and you get to keep your job. If you build them, even though 95% of Slashdot would agree that it's not your fault that the motherboards shipped with bad capacitors, don't even TRY to explain that to your boss - just post your resume up to Monster.com.
Building machines in the office works well on a smaller scale. If you had a 5 member team of engineers doing the AutoCAD thing in their own section, then yeah build those - you'd spend plenty less building over getting Precision units and could build them all out in less than a week. Don't kid yourself into believing that assembling hardware day in, day out, for months at a time, is a good idea. You'll spend enough time designing an image and building out the software stack (corporate Windows licensing and Windows Deployment Services come in VERY handy for this), but your best bet is to whittle the OEMs down to a more reasonable price, pay for the kitchen sink warranty, and give yourself as few headaches as possible. Even if it takes you two days to get the best possible price from an OEM, there's no conceivable way that you'd come out behind.
Video games have been doing this for as long as graphic accelerator cards have been in existence. using tools to specify the exact parameters of what is being rendered and saving the output to a file instead of simply displaying it on the screen does, in my opinion, constitute "bleeding obvious". Additionally, while 3DStudio Max, Maya, or After Effects might not have used GPU acceleration prior to 2004, Amiga had all kinds of video-oriented add-in cards. Hell, Matrox RT-2000 units did real-time 3D effects on proprietary hardware accelerators from as far back as 1999. They even rendered MPEG-2 in real-time, something that was laughable on the top-of-the-line 733MHz P3 processors of the day. The difference is that the Matrox and Amiga cards didn't also accelerate Wolfenstein 3D, and Geforce cards didn't offload the CPU for video rendering for some time. The fact that game GPUs and processing GPUs weren't a single card at the time should have nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Non-CPU processors were accelerating video encoding and I can personally produce hardware that did it prior to 2004.
It's not that they don't exist, but if you're going to shop for a computer from an OEM, a purchase of a computer without a copy of Windows will essentially be purchased on that basis. The number of computers that ship with Linux/BSD pale in comparison to Windows units, and even fewer will have vendor support from third parties if another OS is loaded. For most, it's better to choose a computer (especially a laptop) based on its hardware, and if you want that selection, you're basically stuck with having a Windows product key sticker on the bottom. It may not be difficult per se, but it does require one to go out of their way to find it.
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Is because the U.S. fails so much at math that people can't figure out they'll be paying $2000 over their 2-year contract for their "free" locked phone.
I could have modded 'troll', but I opt to point out the bleeding obvious: I pay ~$2,400 over my two year contract for the balance of the handset cost, voice, data, and SMS service for two lines. Also, My phone wasn't free, it was $200 up front (HTC Rhodium).
-My point about the security quote is that the majority of people who hear "UNIX" think a religious person who had an..."irreversible" surgery. If you say "it's more secure than Windows" you may get some more nods, and I do agree that a default *nix config is better for Joe Sixpack than a default Windows config (though Vista and 7 have gotten this much better - just TRY and delete the system sounds, I DARE you).
-Vista users generally take one of the following paths:
1.) tough it out with Vista (for those who have dealt with it for the past year or two, it's not THAT bad, especially with some more RAM). This seems to be the most common approach.
2.) Buy a new machine. This is more common amongst those who had among the early machines that shipped with RTM builds, and is obviously going to get more common as time progresses.
3.) Use the Windows 7 disc from their other Dell machine, ask their hot daughter to ask their class nerd for a corporate copy, or some other dubiously legal method.
4.) Buy an OEM copy from Newegg for $99, or the 3-pack from Wal-Mart for $125.
--While I too consider the lack of iTunes to be an advantage, there have been plenty of people for whom their backup requirements were comprehensively covered by "My photos and my iTunes". Presumably, the one thing we fully agree upon is that iTunes is a terrible piece of software, especially on the Windows platform. It's among the reasons I switch back to Windows Mobile from a first-gen iPhone. Unfortunately for us though, the general populace is willing to tough it out with iTunes so that they can get their iPod working. The fact that Creative could have easily overtaken them during the formative years and didn't has as much to do with this as anything else, but that's besides the point.
--Firewire video is great - if you're still using MiniDV and filming in SD. While I do personally prefer this workflow, the FlipVideo camera, HDD/flash memory based models have mostly overtaken the market. Many of these use AVCHD, or some variant of MPEG-4. KDenLive looks pretty good, but it's no iMovie or Pinnacle Studio 14. This is both to its credit and against it.
--Postscript is wonderful, but it makes a pretty broad assumption - that your printer supports PostScript. The decade old HP 8000DN in my office at work speaks both postscript and PCL, and as such will likely talk to just about any hardware and any desktop OS long after HP deprecates manufacturing MKs, drums, and toner for it. This does not, however, apply to the overwhelming majority of consumer inkjet printers. This also doesn't account for the more popular multifunction devices - even if one does speak postscript, that still leaves the scanning bed, faxing system, and sometimes other functionality unaccounted for.
--That's exactly the case. "What I have does what I need it to do. What you're suggesting would require significant amounts of work with a disproportional amount of benefit". SQL Query story above had some learning exchanged for lots of benefit. Switching to Linux, for many, involves lots of work for seemingly guaranteed less benefit.
--dual booting has its own sets of headaches (not the least of which is guessing how much space you'll need amongst your partitions), and having multiple OSes kills a decent amount of the security argument (e.g. boot sector viruses can easily hose LiLo/Grub) and the cost argument (still need to pay for Windows and a security suite).
--Neither does the iPad, but people are somehow managing to be productive on it. 25 years ago, people were managing to be productive with Lotus, WordPerfect, and Paradox on DOS, so it must be possible. Actually, being forced to focus on one thing at a time might, for some people, be a boon to productivity.
Yes, by most accounts it is. Moreso if you bundle in the iPod Touch.
However, the iPad also has the iTunes Media Store connected to it. It's synaptic on steroids in that you can get all your apps (which P.S. are invariably designed for a multitouch environment), music, movies, TV series, and eBooks from a single place with a single search box and password.
Linux may have Synaptic, and I'll even give it Amazon MP3 since I've got that on my Android phone, but AFAIK no place to get video content unless you're ripping it yourself.
iPad + iPad ecosystem is doing very well. Linux isn't quite there yet on the media front. Getting them there is going to be a battle of wills, since the *AAs want DRM, and the devs don't want DRM. There's only one way this Butter Battle is going to end at this point, especially since in this sense, Linux/Android needs Big Media more than the inverse.
>>Freedom [whylinuxisbetter.net] to learn about anything (e.g. SQL as you explained)
This assumes the user WANTS to learn about anything computer related. Anyone believing this is a benefit to the user is at disconnect with general userland. Here is exactly what the majority of computer users want to learn: "The absolute bare minimum required to do the tasks I want to do". In the case of the SQL queries above, the managers essentially saw dollar signs and thus the "bare minimum" factor had been raised. The ability to do more than that is akin to be buying a car that can drive at 160MPH - Jeff Gordon might find it useful, but I can't legally drive over 55, de facto speed limits hover 70 in clear weather, and the fastest I've ever driven was 85.
>>It's like UNIX with proper multi-user management and a mature security architecture [whylinuxisbetter.net].
Ask 100 people off the street if this sentence makes ANY sense whatsoever to them. These people work AROUND spyware infections until they are no longer able to do so. These people are the ones that I saw at a fair who gave their name, street address, and their home phone number in exchange for a free ice cream cone.
>>It almost never crashes [whylinuxisbetter.net].
Getting warmer. Most people would agree that this is a desirable attribute, and definitely the strongest on the list.
>>Proper file system meaning no need to defrag your drive [whylinuxisbetter.net]
While most people would again consider this desirable, too many treat this like backing up - something they should do, they know is a good idea to do, but simply don't.
>>It's a lot cheaper [whylinuxisbetter.net].
To them, Windows is free because the cost of an OEM license is baked into the sticker price of their laptop.
Caveats:
-The Sims doesn't work, nor do any Valve/Steam games.
-iTunes won't work. The comparable program (Amarok) will sync music, but doesn't access the iTunes Media Store, doesn't back up your iPhone (or activate it), and doesn't sync apps.
-Many digital camcorders won't work (No AVCHD editing).
-Printers could possibly work out of the box, could work with a bit of configuration, could work with a lot of configuration, or might not work at all. The same is true for some more obscure wireless chipsets, and some specialty hardware.
Get a group of 100 people, present them your list, and then present them mine. Let me know if you need to start counting on more than one hand how many you can sell with your list.
Opensuse 11.3 KDE is really, REALLY nice. I like it a lot. It worked with most of my hardware out of the box. It's pretty, checked my Facebook just fine, my wireless chipset (a mainstream Intel N adapter) worked flawlessly, and its package manager is simple to use. I really like it, and I'd be running it if I weren't tied to Windows specific software (and no, I'm not running Serato in WINE).
Ultimately, the issue is that Linux captures those who are ideologically opposed to running a proprietary OS very well. The rest of the less-tech-savvy world has a VERY different list of things that are beneficial to them. If you're determined to alter your workflow to fit your OS choice, then you could be productive in DOS if you wanted to. That doesn't make switching to DOS a good idea.
My laptop, both my servers, and both my smartphones for a mod point right now. Manual Mod +999,999,999,999,999,999 I agree (aka "insightful).
Obviously B'Elanna Torres was not a part of the design team, if she were
...the instruction manual would be written in Klingon.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I think that "many" is a bit generous here. Yes, AA batteries are thicker than the Macbook Air, the Dell Adamo, probably a handful of Sony units, and I think there was an ultrathin Thinkpad released a year or two ago. All of the above have something in common: they were EXPLICITLY built to be as thin as possible, to the point where "it's ridiculously thin" was the primary selling feature.
By contrast, you could comfortably fit "C" size batteries into my XPS M1730; a round of "D" batteries is a couple millimeters away if we're assuming a lid-open design.
AA batteries would theoretically fit into every netbook I've come across, as well as every 14", 15", and 17" notebook I can recall. Whether a set of AA batteries would be able to pump out enough juice to power any of these machines is another argument entirely, but your statement was, if I could rephrase, "The thickness of the thickest point on a significant minority of recent-generation laptops is less than the circumference of a AA battery", to which I must disagree.
It will probably converge towards Star Trek's vision of zero money. Or at least a system where money isn't required for most every day things.
Starfleet or the Ferengi?
Seriously, in the robotic future, if everyone is given a basic wage whether they work or not, and robots provide all our needs, then maybe we can 'all get along' after all. Money will become less and less important, and yet we will be richer than ever before.
I've heard that before, but even that relies on an idealistic utopia that assumes:
-People will no longer lust after power or material possessions. If this was true, there'd be more equality now.
-The only reason greed exists is in response to people not having their basic needs met. Again, this flies in complete contrast to why the rich still demand more money.
-People fight solely because their basic needs aren't met. Well, there are plenty of places in Africa where this could be true, but there have been plenty of first world nations where fighting has happened and the overwhelming majority of the populations had been met. People fight over food and territory, but for other reasons like ideologies and religions, which don't stop just because they've eaten today.
Essentially, people are evil. History books are littered with examples of people who are greedy, arrogant, never satisfied, and embody the worst of humanity. Sorry, but as the number of people whose basic needs are met increase, the likelihood of a war breaking out in spite of our robotic overlords approaches 1, and that assumes that the robots themselves better resemble Wall-E than Skynet and don't themselves become the enemy.
Of course not. That's why I think Medicare and SS needs to be more like Welfare and Food Stamps - you are only eligible for the program if you are poor, or run out of cash. Otherwise if you are well-off, you pay your medicine, food, and rent using your OWN savings instead of asking government to do it for you. A "safety net" not an entitlement.
...Fine, but then either bake SS into the federal taxes, or allow me to opt out. SS was initially designed to be a government mandated savings plan, so if it's no longer that, then let me save up my own money.
I appreciate the additional information. Despite the film aspect of it being wrong, I'm pretty sure that the polarizer being in front of the projector enables plastic glasses instead of genlocked active shutter glasses required for 3D TV.
1.) My guess is that your cocktail napkin math and the number crunchers' copies of Excel yield two different sets of numbers.
2.) Because $12.50/ticket for a family of four grosses $50, while a first-run DVD release of a movie will gross $20, tops - and the studios net more from the theaters than the disc release. The trick is getting people to opt for the theatrical release rather than a Netflix rental.
with regards to point #3...
Movies at the theater - even 3D ones - are shown on film. Essentially, two images are displayed, and the polarization of the glasses are designed to isolate one image from the other. The film is designed to use the same polarity as the glasses, and all is well.
3D televisions still rely on refresh rates. They may not use interlacing as the old NTSC/PAL systems did, but it still requires refreshing at a rate and starting point that isn't necessarily a given. If you fast forward five seconds and three frames, you may end up on a "left frame" or a "right frame". the active shutter glasses are designed to essentially "genlock" the picture with the polarity of the glasses. As such, the movie theater glasses are plastic lenses, while the ones you get with a 3D TV have additional circuitry for timing and polarization.
That's my understanding of it, anyway.
different ideas. Google's home page is great if you're actually searching for stuff. Yahoo is a bit better at putting some ideas in front of you when you're not quite sure what to look for. While the page may not be layed out perfectly, it does have much more information on it and I've read some articles on it (and -don't judge me bro- MSN.com) that I wouldn't necessarily have searched for, but was worth 2 minutes of my time to skim through. The fact that I got distracted by half a dozen ads has made Yahoo a dollar or three as well.
pedantic warning:
IRC is different from the others listed in that:
-It's a pretty well established, matured PROTOCOL. Many other chat applications use some principles of IRC on the back end (I've dealt with several java and AJAX-based chat/support products that boil down to a really shiny skin over IRC)
-It's used a lot for the file transfer functionality (we only swap Linux distros! really!)
-the alternatives to it have been AIM/MSN/ICQ (which are better for one-on-one chats, but not for groups or an "open door policy"), full-blown chatrooms (which have existed for quite a while, and again also use some flavor of IRC), and Facebook Chat (great idea, terrible implementation, but useful courtesy of Digsby)
I think facebook is a bit different than myspace in that it's EVERYWHERE. Myspace was a cool place to find people I haven't spoken to in a while, but required an actual visit to their site. Facebook has almost completely replaced personal e-mails. Both of my phones have access to every phone number of every one of my Facebook friends who post them. Facebook has SMS alerts, Outlook 2010 integration, and, though I despise them personally, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Also, it was much simpler to actually find the information you're looking for, rather than reading yellow text on a sparkly white background.
I'll bet bucks to beans that Murdoch would have laughed you out of his office by saying that Myspace should figure out indirect ways of making their service useful that wouldn't involve serving up an ad at the same time. He would have downright pissed in his pants if you told him in 2005 that in four years Myspace would be the 00's Geocities at the hands of a college kid whose alternative service did just that. Okay, now I totally want to do that now. Excuse me while I fire up my Delorean. Anyone got some Plutonium?
This principle works, until it's coupled with a group of teachers who are slow to actually fail a child because the parents are quick to file a lawsuit. If high school kids want to spend their day on Facebook and fail their math class, fine. The issue is that the current crop of parents act like shielding their kids from consequences is helping them. Until that changes, tax dollars will pay for tech toys, kids will misuse them, test scores will drop, parents will threaten, teachers will give D+ grades to kids that don't deserve them, and politicians will once again lower the bar to get a passing grade in order to maintain property values amongst the local homeowners associations in order for them to get re-elected, and the cycle starts all over again.
Me personally, I like the way computers worked in the classroom in 1995. If you were done with your seatwork, you got to use the computer. It was up to you to figure out how to use it though, the teacher had no clue. It encouraged problem solving, critical thinking, and *real* cooperative learning. Admittedly we only played games on them once we figured out what we were doing, but back then there was more of a process leading up to getting the game to play. Today, these young whippersnappers don't even have to put in a CD-ROM to get things working anymore, to say nothing about having to work with the command line. And yes, I do in fact want you off of my lawn.
Wish I could share this notion, but alas, I do not.
If you go back in history a bit, you'll find plenty of relics along the way. You'll find Sean Fanning's Napster, ScourXchange, WinMX, Morpheus, Kazaa, Bearshare, and now Limewire. I don't care about any of those. My example right now is DVDXCopy. Back when DVDXCopy came out, I remember seeing it in the acrylic boxes at CompUSA, being sold for $100 a pop. Its claim to fame: making it stupid simple to make copies of copy protected DVDs. IMO it propelled the DVD burner into standard gear on computers in less than half the time a standard migration would have taken. Ironically, it was among the first mainstream applications (besides Windows XP and Office XP) to require activation.
The MPAA sent a few love letters to 321 Studios, brought them to court, and won. 321 Studios tried to keep their shelf space next to Nero and Roxio, but they were more expensive and brought less to the table since they had a whole lot of court fees that Roxio didn't. They went bankrupt in 2004.
What does this have to do with customers not getting viruses anymore? Well, DVDXcopy had the notoriety of copying commercial movies, so people would google the term...and get plenty of fake versions of it containing adware, malware, and plenty of other shadyness. It was a huge problem because everyone was getting infected and not knowing it. At the very least, I got plenty of calls from people who were wondering why the price was so high when the company itself had gone under, and why there were so many popup ads on their computers.
Admittedly, Google and Bing have both gotten much better at filtering out malware serving websites, so it might not be as much of a problem. Still, if people were able to get themselves infected with limewire, they're going to be dumb enough to either move onto another Gnutella client (Frostwire has gotten plenty of traction recently even before the C&D) where the same sets of files will inevitably be shared, or they'll keep searching for Limewire until something makes a green, fruit-like icon appear on the desktop and let them download Justin_Bieber_Rare_Live_Recording.mp3.exe.
You may be correct there, but what Gecko might be pretty good at doing is coming up with an alternative to Powerpoint. Office presentations may be a 'solved problem', but there are generally two types of Powerpoints - the dull, text-on-a-screen kind, and the over-the-top kind that seem to require the use of every transition simply due to their existence. Compound this with the jitter problems that basically require a GeForce 480 to render 100% smoothly, and I'd say that Mozilla Presentations could be a piece of software that would be both useful and play to their strengths (i.e. screen rendering).
The iTunes hate comes from the fact that VLC, a leaner install of Winamp, FOObar2000, Mediamonkey, and countless other random applications on Softpedia don't have 101MByte installers, don't add half a dozen services to my startup. Quicktime (which has had plenty of security vulnerabilities over the last few years) and Bonjour (which "simplifies" networking at the expense of adding another network attack surface) are both non-optional installs. Syncing an iOS device requires a bunch of guesswork and voodoo as to whether iTunes will ACTUALLY do what you want it to do, or delete all your files. There is still no legit way to play purchased movie or TV episode besides iTunes/Quicktime, and playing them back takes triple the CPU time for me than an XviD in GOMplayer.
All of that ignores the fact that I personally (and thousands of other people) have had our accounts hacked, (and yes, I was using a strong password) since that's a store issue, not a code issue.
Interesting. About two years ago, my car stereo was stolen. There was no broken glass, so I only assumed that I left my car door unlocked. The thief stole the stereo, and even reassembled the bracket - the stereo had an OEM mount that took some effort to reinstall, and he did so after it was removed. The real twist was that it was a lower end Kenwood deck I bought for $200 new. This guy took that stereo, but left my camera bag, which had a Canon EOS Rebel XT and a bunch of accessories. He clearly went through it because the wires were all over the place and it was on the front passenger seat, while I knew I'd left it on the floor in the back. The police officer that took the report was in a state of disbelief, and I really couldn't blame him. The most logical thing we could postulate was that the thief was interested in the stereo specifically because he already had a buyer that was more than just a generic pawn shop.
Something, somewhere, is wrong...
1.) If you're ordering a THOUSAND machines from Dell, widdling that price down should be easy enough. Get a quote from Dell. Get a quote from HP. Go back and forth between them (ideally with the same sales reps), and before lunchtime, one of them will have shaved at least $200 per unit off the sticker price.
2.) Stick with an OEM for that kind of volume. What you're paying for (or at least what you SHOULD be paying for) is a 3 year, kitchen sink, no questions asked warranty. We've got them on the Dell machines at work. I had a question about a server that was two years out of warranty, and I got an English speaking support rep. I had a power supply die on an in-warranty desktop, and a new power supply was on my desk the next morning. If I wanted a Dell tech to swap the part out, all I had to do was say so.
2b.) If you build yourself, you're stuck supporting everything, and dealing with the finger pointing crap. If there's a mobo issue, you're going to be on the phone dealing with Asus trying to convince them that it's not the RAM, the processor, the GPU, or the SATA drives, and in order to make the argument, you'll be stuck swapping all those components out to prove it. If you go with an OEM, it's Dell/HP's headache to isolate the issue and replace the faulty part.
3.) like has been said before, about the only thing that can make your job a bit easier on yourself is to do some sort of disk imaging. You'd be retarded to install Windows manually unit by unit. The only problem with that plan is that you'll need identical hardware each time. Acronis' Universal Hardware Restore is supposed to deal with that on paper, but I haven't had success with it. If you can purpose one of those machines to be a server and throw Server 2008/R2 on it, you can use Windows Deployment Services on it, but even that requires a certain degree of planning. In any case, procuring identical hardware in two years will be near impossible shy of eBay, but with an OEM that's a given.
4.) It's also prudent to order a few extra spares and keep them on the shelf. Either image them before they go out, or use them to swap out bad parts to get the users' machine back into production before you call for warranty service.
5.) If the computers end up with capacitor issues or overheating problems, it's obviously not good. The difference is that if Dell or Toshiba built them, it's your fault and you get to keep your job. If you build them, even though 95% of Slashdot would agree that it's not your fault that the motherboards shipped with bad capacitors, don't even TRY to explain that to your boss - just post your resume up to Monster.com.
Building machines in the office works well on a smaller scale. If you had a 5 member team of engineers doing the AutoCAD thing in their own section, then yeah build those - you'd spend plenty less building over getting Precision units and could build them all out in less than a week. Don't kid yourself into believing that assembling hardware day in, day out, for months at a time, is a good idea. You'll spend enough time designing an image and building out the software stack (corporate Windows licensing and Windows Deployment Services come in VERY handy for this), but your best bet is to whittle the OEMs down to a more reasonable price, pay for the kitchen sink warranty, and give yourself as few headaches as possible. Even if it takes you two days to get the best possible price from an OEM, there's no conceivable way that you'd come out behind.
Video games have been doing this for as long as graphic accelerator cards have been in existence. using tools to specify the exact parameters of what is being rendered and saving the output to a file instead of simply displaying it on the screen does, in my opinion, constitute "bleeding obvious". Additionally, while 3DStudio Max, Maya, or After Effects might not have used GPU acceleration prior to 2004, Amiga had all kinds of video-oriented add-in cards. Hell, Matrox RT-2000 units did real-time 3D effects on proprietary hardware accelerators from as far back as 1999. They even rendered MPEG-2 in real-time, something that was laughable on the top-of-the-line 733MHz P3 processors of the day. The difference is that the Matrox and Amiga cards didn't also accelerate Wolfenstein 3D, and Geforce cards didn't offload the CPU for video rendering for some time. The fact that game GPUs and processing GPUs weren't a single card at the time should have nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Non-CPU processors were accelerating video encoding and I can personally produce hardware that did it prior to 2004.
It's not that they don't exist, but if you're going to shop for a computer from an OEM, a purchase of a computer without a copy of Windows will essentially be purchased on that basis. The number of computers that ship with Linux/BSD pale in comparison to Windows units, and even fewer will have vendor support from third parties if another OS is loaded. For most, it's better to choose a computer (especially a laptop) based on its hardware, and if you want that selection, you're basically stuck with having a Windows product key sticker on the bottom. It may not be difficult per se, but it does require one to go out of their way to find it.
I, for one, would NEVER pay Best Buy $30 to update my firmware.
However, I'd most definitely part with $30 to get it done by the Nerd Herd over at the Buy More.