I remember trying it a long time ago and it didn't work right for me, so I never went back. It may have improved by now, but my current Linux distro works fine for me--why should I bother?
Well, and what's your "downstream" and "upstream" bandwidth? It's whatever you agree to contractually. Comcast is selling you (and effectively has always been selling you) a channel with a maximum bandwidth of, say, 40 Mbps, but a smaller sustained bandwidth. Now those bandwidth numbers have been made explicit, which is a good thing.
Why do you put up with this shit?
Swedes pays $300/year for the mere right to watch television, Fins and Norwegians even more. Danes pay more than $400/year, and you have to pay that even if you just have an Internet connection that's faster than 256kbps. Let's not even get into all the other ways in which Scandinavian governments and businesses suck money out of people's pockets, restrict their freedoms, and support a large population of people who don't work. Why do you put up with that kind of shit?
Windows... is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Windows.
This is exactly how Windows releases in the past have worked and failed; just go and read the forums and archives. But with Windows, users are so used to buggy releases that many don't even bother installing before SP1 or later.
This again comes from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X releases are properly tested and maintained and tend to be in more professional quality.
The current Mac OS X release erased people's hard drives, among many other problems. It also runs on a tiny number of hardware configurations compared to Linux and declared many machines obsolete and unsupported. Previous Mac OS X releases have had massive problems. More importantly, Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are basically just bug fix releases with few new features. Windows 7 is a bug fix and performance release Windows Vista, which failed so badly that large parts of the industry simply refused to install it.
And, of course, after a new OS release from Apple or Microsoft, there is massive problems with end user applications because neither Microsoft nor Apple update those. They're saying "not my problem" and leaving the mess for vendors and users to fix. In contrast, Ubuntu actually tests and fixes integration of a massive collection of third party applications.
But why don't the Linux distros go to same lenghts? It shouldn't be impossible, unless of course, commercial projects are maintained more professionally.
Both your premise and your conclusion are wrong. Linux distros go through great length to test their releases, and their releases are of high quality. And, unlike Microsoft and Apple, Ubuntu has releases like clockwork, release that include huge amounts of new functionality, driven by the changes in the contributing projects.
Both Apple and Microsoft's previous OS releases were so buggy that Windows 7 and Snow Leopard have little new functionality and focus instead on massive bug fixing. And because they couldn't handle support of old hardware and fix their bugs, they simply declared large amounts of hardware obsolete and don't work on it at all. In contrast, Ubuntu installs on a huge range of hardware and with a huge range of configurations.
If you make up your "facts" as you go along, of course you can reach any conclusion you like. Well, I suppose that shows that Apple and Microsoft have one thing that's more professional: their PR and disinformation departments.
Because Apple makes fucking shiploads of money from that market share? Apple and AT&T didn't feel the crisis mostly because of the iPhone.
Yes, but they have the premium market segment. It doesn't make sense for a lot of companies to compete for that. And the premium segment is limited in size.
Mac, Windows, and X11 all are client/server window systems with a separate user process for rendering. X11 was designed from the ground up for that model, while both the Mac and Windows started off with different models and tried to retrofit an X11-like model onto their existing APIs. It's not surprising that they don't do it so well.
People tend to overestimate Windows and Mac performance for a couple of reasons. For example, Macs cache a lot more stuff than other platforms (and use a ton of memory to do it). And the X11 back-ends for cross platform libraries and ports are usually not very well written, and people blame X11 when they should be blaming those libraries.
Why would a company care who fills their app store if they still get stuck at market share numbers as low as Apple's?
Besides, all those Apple app store numbers are bogus. I use both platforms, and there are more apps that I actually want to use for Android than for iPhone.
The iPhone is a single form factor premium product that has a pretty small market share and is defended by aggressive fanboys. Why would anybody focus on killing it, and why would anybody care?
The real targets for Android are Symbian, Blackberry, and WinMo. Is Android better than them? I think pretty clearly yes.
The fact that you personally are too dumb to separate the political aspects from the scientific aspects of intelligence doesn't invalidate intelligence as a scientific concept. Intelligence is a measurable phenomenon, it is widely and reliably used in diagnostic medicine, and it clearly also has had a strong effect on human evolution.
So-called smart people always confuse uneducated people with less intelligent people. Maybe they're not that smart after all.
Nobody really knows for certain what the true relationships between heredity, intelligence, economic success, nutrition, and education are. Your view is just as colored by political preferences as other views.
Biologically, speciation based on intelligence is quite a plausible possibility for humanity in the future, and analogous events have happened for other species in the past.
For starters, IEEE floating point is a lousy design, from its needlessly complex special cases to its atrocious error handling. That kind of poor and overly complex design is symptomatic for a lot of floating point software.
EMG sensors have been around forever; why would you want to attach them to healthy people? If you attach them to a functional muscle, you end up overloading functional signals in a way that's going to cause problems sometimes.
'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.
Gates understood technology a bit better than Ballmer. In particular, Gates understood technology just well enough to know what to steal from whom. Gates also understood technology just well enough to know when to get out and let somebody else take the blame for the inevitable decline of Microsoft.
While getting rid of salmonella is good, you can't get rid of all disease causing bacteria. And if the environment you live in is too sterile, your body just becomes more susceptible to other infections and to auto-immune disease.
Injecting antibiotics is about the worst thing you can do because it really messes up your bacterial ecology. Bacteria are a natural part of your body, and if you start killing them with antibiotics, things go wrong. Antibiotics should really only be taken when there is a serious infection present.
In addition to artificial gravity (via rotation), the solution may be to challenge the body with other microbes that are known to be not too harmful, similar to "pro-biotic drinks".
Despite Apple's insane press coverage and a Silicon Valley-centric view of reporters, the iPhone is still only 1/6 of the market in smartphones. A spectacular success for a newcomer, but not market domination. Even iPod, Apple's most successful product, has less than 1/4 market share. Apple has never managed to dominate a market. At best, they hit a peak at 15-20% and then slowly decline. In the end, there are only so many people willing to pay $500-$900 for an iPhone (and that's what it costs, whether it's hidden in subscription fees or paid up front).
Android, on the other hand, has the potential for some really low-cost devices ($100-$200), and its greater openness both towards carries and towards applications mean that it will likely overtake the iPhone in a couple of years.
Of course, the iPhone won't be "killed", just like the Mac won't be killed. Apple's market share dropped from an all-time high of 15% to a couple of percent and now is back at 3-4% worldwide, but it never disappeared.
Companies extracted the minerals without actually paying the true cost of their actions (and thereby generated higher profits), and now the taxpayer needs to pick up the bill. Of course, the relocation is only the tip of the iceberg: medical costs and environmental costs are likely to be many times over the cost of the relocation.
The App Store is a store, not a bazaar. They approve/deny products just as any store would.
Yes, but beyond a certain point and market share, it ceases to be "just like any store".
I take net neutrality to mean everyone has equal access to the internet,
Yes, iTunes shouldn't be regulated under net neutrality. But eventually, it might be regulated due to unfair business practices or monopolistic behavior. However, it doesn't have enough market share yet, and it is so overpriced and cumbersome that I doubt it ever will.
Ohh, right, you mean Microsoft said that unless Dell agrees to the terms of their contract, they would not sign the contract. *gasp* How horrible of them to not let Dell have their business without agreeing to the terms of their contract!
It's not just "horrible", it's against the law, and for good reason: without such restrictions on contracts, we wouldn't have a free market or a democracy.
Neither does your OS. It wouldn't be good for business, but there's no requirement that the OS must work with anything else.
Well, yes, there is such a requirement in this case. That's why regulators have stepped in. And it's not the first time: people were making the same stupid arguments that Microsoft and you are making with railroads and cars and oil, and regulators did step in and that was a good thing.
I'm arguing what's right, not what's legal.
What is "right" is that Microsoft should have been broken up into tiny little pieces for their numerous anti-competitive practices, lies, and misappropriation of other people's technologies. Microsoft violated the law, they effectively stole money from the public, and they were punished for it (although, arguably, not severely enough). And if they do it again, they will get punished again.
Yes, that's exactly what it does and that is what it's intended to do: it means you need fewer admins and they don't need to be as good, thereby lowering costs.
None of this applies to a private citizen importing from overseas or viewing a foreign website like hulu.
But it does indirectly apply to a company like Hulu allowing private citizens to import content from overseas.
The real reason they don't actually give the customer what they want is that there are too many pigs at the trough, sorry, middlemen, who would kick up an almighty stink if their gravy train disappeared.
Quite right. And those middlemen exist even more outside the US than inside. Look at France and their three strikes law, the UK and their excessive public TV charges, or Germany and their corrupt author's guilds. And the funny thing is: although Europe still produces the occasionally nice writer or artists, on the whole, if the entire European output of art since WWII were to disappear from the earth, hardly anybody would notice. Europe's golden ages of music, art, and literature have long since passed and the continent in mired in corruption and mediocrity.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember trying it a long time ago and it didn't work right for me, so I never went back. It may have improved by now, but my current Linux distro works fine for me--why should I bother?
Well, and what's your "downstream" and "upstream" bandwidth? It's whatever you agree to contractually. Comcast is selling you (and effectively has always been selling you) a channel with a maximum bandwidth of, say, 40 Mbps, but a smaller sustained bandwidth. Now those bandwidth numbers have been made explicit, which is a good thing.
Why do you put up with this shit?
Swedes pays $300/year for the mere right to watch television, Fins and Norwegians even more. Danes pay more than $400/year, and you have to pay that even if you just have an Internet connection that's faster than 256kbps. Let's not even get into all the other ways in which Scandinavian governments and businesses suck money out of people's pockets, restrict their freedoms, and support a large population of people who don't work. Why do you put up with that kind of shit?
Windows ... is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Windows.
This is exactly how Windows releases in the past have worked and failed; just go and read the forums and archives. But with Windows, users are so used to buggy releases that many don't even bother installing before SP1 or later.
This again comes from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X releases are properly tested and maintained and tend to be in more professional quality.
The current Mac OS X release erased people's hard drives, among many other problems. It also runs on a tiny number of hardware configurations compared to Linux and declared many machines obsolete and unsupported. Previous Mac OS X releases have had massive problems. More importantly, Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are basically just bug fix releases with few new features. Windows 7 is a bug fix and performance release Windows Vista, which failed so badly that large parts of the industry simply refused to install it.
And, of course, after a new OS release from Apple or Microsoft, there is massive problems with end user applications because neither Microsoft nor Apple update those. They're saying "not my problem" and leaving the mess for vendors and users to fix. In contrast, Ubuntu actually tests and fixes integration of a massive collection of third party applications.
But why don't the Linux distros go to same lenghts? It shouldn't be impossible, unless of course, commercial projects are maintained more professionally.
Both your premise and your conclusion are wrong. Linux distros go through great length to test their releases, and their releases are of high quality. And, unlike Microsoft and Apple, Ubuntu has releases like clockwork, release that include huge amounts of new functionality, driven by the changes in the contributing projects.
Both Apple and Microsoft's previous OS releases were so buggy that Windows 7 and Snow Leopard have little new functionality and focus instead on massive bug fixing. And because they couldn't handle support of old hardware and fix their bugs, they simply declared large amounts of hardware obsolete and don't work on it at all. In contrast, Ubuntu installs on a huge range of hardware and with a huge range of configurations.
If you make up your "facts" as you go along, of course you can reach any conclusion you like. Well, I suppose that shows that Apple and Microsoft have one thing that's more professional: their PR and disinformation departments.
Because Apple makes fucking shiploads of money from that market share? Apple and AT&T didn't feel the crisis mostly because of the iPhone.
Yes, but they have the premium market segment. It doesn't make sense for a lot of companies to compete for that. And the premium segment is limited in size.
Mac, Windows, and X11 all are client/server window systems with a separate user process for rendering. X11 was designed from the ground up for that model, while both the Mac and Windows started off with different models and tried to retrofit an X11-like model onto their existing APIs. It's not surprising that they don't do it so well.
People tend to overestimate Windows and Mac performance for a couple of reasons. For example, Macs cache a lot more stuff than other platforms (and use a ton of memory to do it). And the X11 back-ends for cross platform libraries and ports are usually not very well written, and people blame X11 when they should be blaming those libraries.
Why would a company care who fills their app store if they still get stuck at market share numbers as low as Apple's?
Besides, all those Apple app store numbers are bogus. I use both platforms, and there are more apps that I actually want to use for Android than for iPhone.
What's there to improve?
What about Europe's educational system? Is it improving?
The iPhone is a single form factor premium product that has a pretty small market share and is defended by aggressive fanboys. Why would anybody focus on killing it, and why would anybody care?
The real targets for Android are Symbian, Blackberry, and WinMo. Is Android better than them? I think pretty clearly yes.
The fact that you personally are too dumb to separate the political aspects from the scientific aspects of intelligence doesn't invalidate intelligence as a scientific concept. Intelligence is a measurable phenomenon, it is widely and reliably used in diagnostic medicine, and it clearly also has had a strong effect on human evolution.
So-called smart people always confuse uneducated people with less intelligent people. Maybe they're not that smart after all.
Nobody really knows for certain what the true relationships between heredity, intelligence, economic success, nutrition, and education are. Your view is just as colored by political preferences as other views.
Biologically, speciation based on intelligence is quite a plausible possibility for humanity in the future, and analogous events have happened for other species in the past.
For starters, IEEE floating point is a lousy design, from its needlessly complex special cases to its atrocious error handling. That kind of poor and overly complex design is symptomatic for a lot of floating point software.
EMG sensors have been around forever; why would you want to attach them to healthy people? If you attach them to a functional muscle, you end up overloading functional signals in a way that's going to cause problems sometimes.
'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.
Gates understood technology a bit better than Ballmer. In particular, Gates understood technology just well enough to know what to steal from whom. Gates also understood technology just well enough to know when to get out and let somebody else take the blame for the inevitable decline of Microsoft.
While getting rid of salmonella is good, you can't get rid of all disease causing bacteria. And if the environment you live in is too sterile, your body just becomes more susceptible to other infections and to auto-immune disease.
Injecting antibiotics is about the worst thing you can do because it really messes up your bacterial ecology. Bacteria are a natural part of your body, and if you start killing them with antibiotics, things go wrong. Antibiotics should really only be taken when there is a serious infection present.
In addition to artificial gravity (via rotation), the solution may be to challenge the body with other microbes that are known to be not too harmful, similar to "pro-biotic drinks".
Why not rotate the ship for "artificial gravity"?
Despite Apple's insane press coverage and a Silicon Valley-centric view of reporters, the iPhone is still only 1/6 of the market in smartphones. A spectacular success for a newcomer, but not market domination. Even iPod, Apple's most successful product, has less than 1/4 market share. Apple has never managed to dominate a market. At best, they hit a peak at 15-20% and then slowly decline. In the end, there are only so many people willing to pay $500-$900 for an iPhone (and that's what it costs, whether it's hidden in subscription fees or paid up front).
Android, on the other hand, has the potential for some really low-cost devices ($100-$200), and its greater openness both towards carries and towards applications mean that it will likely overtake the iPhone in a couple of years.
Of course, the iPhone won't be "killed", just like the Mac won't be killed. Apple's market share dropped from an all-time high of 15% to a couple of percent and now is back at 3-4% worldwide, but it never disappeared.
GPS is receive-only, and many airlines allow it at cruising altitudes (like laptops, MP3 players, and anything else that doesn't try to transmit):
http://gpsinformation.net/airgps/airgps.htm
Companies extracted the minerals without actually paying the true cost of their actions (and thereby generated higher profits), and now the taxpayer needs to pick up the bill. Of course, the relocation is only the tip of the iceberg: medical costs and environmental costs are likely to be many times over the cost of the relocation.
Symbian is quite open these days, but its user interface and programming environment are beyond awful.
Software service providers have all the rights to lock down their applications and pre
Really? In what sense do you think they "have that right"? Morally? Constitutionally? Legally?
The App Store is a store, not a bazaar. They approve/deny products just as any store would.
Yes, but beyond a certain point and market share, it ceases to be "just like any store".
I take net neutrality to mean everyone has equal access to the internet,
Yes, iTunes shouldn't be regulated under net neutrality. But eventually, it might be regulated due to unfair business practices or monopolistic behavior. However, it doesn't have enough market share yet, and it is so overpriced and cumbersome that I doubt it ever will.
Ohh, right, you mean Microsoft said that unless Dell agrees to the terms of their contract, they would not sign the contract. *gasp* How horrible of them to not let Dell have their business without agreeing to the terms of their contract!
It's not just "horrible", it's against the law, and for good reason: without such restrictions on contracts, we wouldn't have a free market or a democracy.
Neither does your OS. It wouldn't be good for business, but there's no requirement that the OS must work with anything else.
Well, yes, there is such a requirement in this case. That's why regulators have stepped in. And it's not the first time: people were making the same stupid arguments that Microsoft and you are making with railroads and cars and oil, and regulators did step in and that was a good thing.
I'm arguing what's right, not what's legal.
What is "right" is that Microsoft should have been broken up into tiny little pieces for their numerous anti-competitive practices, lies, and misappropriation of other people's technologies. Microsoft violated the law, they effectively stole money from the public, and they were punished for it (although, arguably, not severely enough). And if they do it again, they will get punished again.
Yes, that's exactly what it does and that is what it's intended to do: it means you need fewer admins and they don't need to be as good, thereby lowering costs.
None of this applies to a private citizen importing from overseas or viewing a foreign website like hulu.
But it does indirectly apply to a company like Hulu allowing private citizens to import content from overseas.
The real reason they don't actually give the customer what they want is that there are too many pigs at the trough, sorry, middlemen, who would kick up an almighty stink if their gravy train disappeared.
Quite right. And those middlemen exist even more outside the US than inside. Look at France and their three strikes law, the UK and their excessive public TV charges, or Germany and their corrupt author's guilds. And the funny thing is: although Europe still produces the occasionally nice writer or artists, on the whole, if the entire European output of art since WWII were to disappear from the earth, hardly anybody would notice. Europe's golden ages of music, art, and literature have long since passed and the continent in mired in corruption and mediocrity.