> Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how > much better the system is for developers.
Bull. You don't care for eye candy. I don't care for eye candy. End users care. No matter how hard we wish it were otherwise it remains a fact. And if the new stuff makes things easier for developers it usually means more stuff gets developed. And remember, users don't buy an OS for what IT does, they buy for the applications they can run on it. So if KDE4 enables better apps to get written faster that benefits users.
As someone who has used GNOME since it first replaced FVWM95 as RedHat's default DE I'm starting to consider KDE. The last of the license issues (that launched GNOME in the first place) are finally fixed and GNOME has been making it crystal clear I'm not in their target audience for years.
It's time to define "nature" and why I don't get to be considered "natural."
I can't imagine anything I'd write being better than what RAH wrote long ago, so....
There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled 'Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" -- but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race -- i.e., his own self-hatred.
In the case of "Naturists" such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women -- it strikes me as a fine arrangement -- and perfectly "natural".
Of course his use of 'naturist' betrays the age of the quote, now it would be environmentalist or Green.
> No wonder if you tend to post opinions about TV shows that you admittedly haven't watched.
Dunno, I saw the ads and concluded it was almost certainly a product of demented Hollywierd politics. The summary basically agrees only they say it like it is a good thing.
Sounds like I called it spot on and wisely avoided wasting time on crap. I'm pretty accurate in assessing a movie or tv show by a watching a trailer or two. I usually end up seeing at least parts of the stuff I saw a trailer for and said "that will be crap" and 90% of the time I was right, it is crap. Still have too many false positives though.
It really isn't hard. You can save a lot of time and eliminate at lot by some obvious rules. The Rock is in it? It's crap. Vin Diesel? Crap. Is the project a vehicle for a wrestler or rapper trying to launch an acting career? Big warning sign. Jerry Bruckheimer is ivolved? Oh God no! And so on.
>..none of them run around in spandex, and that's kind of the point. They're equal. > It's a universe where gender isn't an issue.
I never watched the actual show, only the ads. If you are right and Starbuck is basically the same character Dirk Benedict origionally played and the relationship with Capt. Apollo is basically the same I'd have to withdraw the objection.
> To address your point about Al-Jazeera... it's as good a source of journalism as I've > encountered in western mainstream.
Thank you. It is one thing to make what should be an outrageous asertion, but it is wonderful when some clown pops in and not only agrees but goes even beyond. So you see Al Jazerra as the sort of 'good journalism' that you hoped you would get from Pravda but were disappointed by. O K.
I mean hey, I like hitting foreign sources too just to observe the difference and sometimes they do cover stories that never appear in US outlets, especially back in the pre internet days. And there was actually a time when the BBC World Service on shortwave was the fracking Voice of God. The Truth, or as close as mortal man was ever going to get to it, delivered in most of the worlds's tongues.
But Pravda or Radio Moscow? Good for laughs or if you wanted to hear the official Kremlin line but never for real news or journalism. They got a little better for a time after the Empire fell but with the rise of Putin quickly backslid to their comfort zone of official state mouthpiece.
> Are folks who blow themselves up, or lob rockets into populated areas barbarians? Probably.
If you have to ask the question you answered everyone else's questions about you. Bluntly, one of the things pretty much avery civilized person realized when the fighting stopped after WWII, when the bloodlust faded and everybody saw the smoking ruins vast swaths of the world had become, was that bombing the shit out of civilian populations was something that had to be put out of bounds. No we wouldn't ever stop colleratal damage completely but aiming at civilians AS the target had to stop.
So if the 'Palistinians' want to bomb a military target that is ok by me so long as they understand the concept 'act of war' and the consequences therein. Even if civilians die. Bombing civilians, on purpose, puts them outside the rules of war and personally if Israel decides they have had enough and goes all Old Testament on their asses I'll stand by and just say they had it coming.
Technology makes a free society impossible if we allow terrorism to be a legitimate tactic. It is just too easy to blow crap up. The logical consequence of that is we have a choice, lose the free society or make terrorism off limits by destroying any group who even threatens to use it without mercy. Or perhaps you can think of a third option?
Destroying any group who uses terrorism, thus denying them any possibility of benefitting from the tactic can supress terror sponsoring groups pretty well. Note that nothing can stop a rogue individual. This is a problem we are going to have to deal with at some point as the damage a single individual can inflict continues to rise. Damned if I have any ideas though.
> They are desperate, and desperate people take up arms.
Bullshit. The problem is they aren't desperate enough. The fools think they can win because the western world keeps restraining Israel's hand, thus they conclude that eventually they can win. They can't. The second it looks like they will win (i.e. exterminate the state of Israel) the US will jump in and bring on the end of the frackin' world as we know it. You know that, I know that. They don't believe it. It is only when they truly understand that Israel isn't leaving that peace will become possible.
When Israel pulled out of Gaza they could have seized on that opportunity and built a real country. Had they done so they could have had the West Bank by now and a two state solution. Everybody happy, unicorns and rainbo
> The ad that Slashdot is choosing to serve with this story is for Al Jazeera. > Am I the only one that thinks that's kind of funny?
No, it's totally appropriate. The problem with BDS is it caused too many unstable people to go all the way from opposing their own country's policies/leader to outright being on the side of the fracking barbarians. (to add a little ontopic humor) In any sane world Al Jazeera would be on the list of terror supporting entities and doing business with them would get you sent to prison. Here in bizarro world they are heros who speak 'truth to power.'
And this gets to why I never watched a single episode of BSG's reboot. It had hollywierd politics all over it from day one of the prerelease PR campaign. And just from the ads it was obvious it had as little to do with the origional work as the new writers could manage. So I had the question I have for all these remakes that aren't: If you hated the origional that much why didn't you just write something new?
Ok, a remake could have lost the stupid robot dog/dagit and few would have cared. But recasting Starbuck as a female? Good way to totally reimagine the central relationship at the core of the story in the unholy names of political correctness and throwing T&A at teenage fanbois (of the sort of whacked off to six of nine) who probably ain't the core audience of a politicized (and from a couple of reviews, more plot driven than blowing crap up with lots of CGI) show like BSG in the first place. Then they totally lose the origional concept of the Cylons? Just start over and call it something else.
> I'm not sure what's wrong with a website running IIS, either. Last time I checked, the NetCraft > top10 uptime list had quite a few of those, which means that they do work.
Quite a few... interesting way to say ONE (#5) for the December report and TWO for November (#6 and #7).
Seriously, ignorant people host on Windows.... or Microsoft's slaves. That's the explanation of sites like Dell.com, they can't piss off Microsoft. You see lots of mom and pop etailers (the ignorant) hosting on Microsoft and big ones who have extensive business relationships with em. Then you see those who Microsoft essentially pay to run their stuff by giving them free consultants and often free licenses to do big conversions so they will have case studies for their PR dept. Have I left out any major classes of Microsoft hosting customers? Oh yea, places like Hotmail that Microsoft outright buys so they can (after years of pain) convert them to their inferior tech. And a few where politics dictates the tech decisions.
Sites where skilled and competent IT people picked Microsoft Internet technology based on it's technical or economic merits? Perhaps you can name one, I can't.
> When the tuner is not, the consumption is as claimed.
Of course the report is that it is downloading updates via the tuner most of the time. Obviously that isn't needed and probably isn't normal. The problems here are that a) Sony eityher has a firmware bug or the local PBS station is hosing the broadcast of the schedule data, b) without a kill-a-watt being deployed nobody would ever know if their TV has a similar problem and c) Sony didn't provide a way to kill a feature that for most people is a waste of time and electricity.
A program guide in the TV is pretty useless for most people who already have a settop box (cable or sat) that provides guide data. For those on an antenna it is a perfectly aceptable feature to have so no problem including it, just provide a way for most owners to turn the darned thing off.
> With that logic I could say XP is a service pack of 2000.
No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines. It had some pretty major teething problems because of it. Later service packs have corrected most of the problems, which is the big problem facing Microsoft. XP is finally a fairly stable operating system. If they could have fixed the 'everyone runs as root' problem inherited when they had to have backwards compatibility with Windows 9X it would have been really good.
> Operating systems don't need to be evolutionary, and in many cases it better they aren't.
As someone using Linux I totally agree. It is the major changes (breakage is bad) that tend to get distros flamed. The problem is asking people to fork over ~$100 for fixes to product defects and a few minor UI improvments that is finally starting to cause problems for Microsoft after getting away with it several times in the past.
> I think people keep forgetting history when it comes to MS operating systems.
Not me. I haven't actually used their newer crap much but I have been following their antics for a long time. Their BASIC interpreters were pretty good, quality has went downhill ever since.
No, service packs are a free download. Windows 7 is Vista SE. Remember Win98SE? It was a service pack but they needed some cash and made people buy it as a version upgrade. Looks like history is about to repeat with Vista except this time they also have to change the name because Vista has gained such a horrible brand identity. It's now the Edsel of Operating Systems. Like the Edsel, Vista probably doesn't deserve all of the rap it has got but reality and PR aren't on the same planet with each other.
The big takeaway from all of the Windows 7 reviews though is that if you hate Vista you will probably hate Windows 7.
They are saying you can run Windows 7 on a netbook. Ya, like you could run Vista on one. Yes it installs and sorta runs but XP runs better.
Windows 7 toned down the security nags a bit and added some nice chrome to the taskbar. Haven't even heard Microsoft itself claim any other major differences with Vista other than yet another IE rev that is currently so broke it might not make the cut. Bugfixes and a couple of minor UI tweaks do not a major version make. We are firmly in point release territory at best, service pack sounds closer to what they are going to ship. They are going to call it a new version because they need a fresh hit of revenue.
The really cheep netbooks in the pipeline, the ones most likely to be ARM based at first, tend to only have 800x480 displays so an app that barely fits in 800x600 isn't going to be usable.
I'm still waiting for one of the cheap netbooks to be available to purchase though. Lots of talk, but to date no URL to go with a credit card to buy quantity one. Really hope the different groups putting together these new ARM based machines can agree on some standards for bootloading and such so each one won't be all but tied to the one modified distro it ships with.
> Support with Microsoft Office will probably never be "bug for bug" complete.
Microsoft Office isn't bug for bug compatible between versions. So that isn't a problem unless OO.o has notably more incompatible than say Office2007 would be vs OO.o 3 when opening those old Office2000 files.
> In fact, you may want to keep a copy around for comparison.
Well before putting ANY new software into production you want to run lots of tests on your existing datasets. If it doesn't work on YOUR data it doesn't matter if it works for everyone else. That would go for both Office2007 and OO.o 3.0.
> And depending how competent everyone else is, it may require some training, which means the cost > is not zero -- it's lower, but not zero.
An upgrade from Office2000 to OO.o 3.0 should be less pain than Office2000 to Office2007. Docx support coes easier with Office2007 but versions of OO.o (the Microsoft/Novell version) do support the horrible undead abortion of a format. Probably shouldn't worry too much about it though, Microsoft will be adding ODF support in their next version and that should be the end of the docx experiment.
[sarcasm] Oh I dunno. Showhorning JavaScript into everything because... well because why exactly? That the Gnomes are doing it somehow doesn't suprise me in the least. Nothing invented in the UNIX world has ever interested those guys in the slightest.
Sounds like we need a new language just for this, ya know, a language optimised to be a scripting language to easily embed into other programs and thus avoid reinventing the wheel over and over. [/sarcasm]
It's worse. Even if you can handwave your way around how you manage to stay in the same spot on the earth there are bigger implications. The BTTF Delorean has a fixed power input for a time jump. It wouldn't take much work to demonstrate that the total kenetic energy of the Delorean and it's passengers can vary widely as measured by the reference frame of the earth, the very frame it isn't moving relative to depending exactly where/when you leave at arrive. So where does the energy excess or deficit get resolved from?
And all hell breaks out if you assume whatever mechanism that is anchoring it to track along the Earth's surface as it moves forward/backward in time can be modified to allow slipage or anchoring to a different frame of reference, perhaps the Sun. Because then you DO have a spaceship on your hands as soon as you put the passengers in a suit or seal the craft. Travel a about a light hour in space and slip the same time through time and you can instantly translate yourself to another planet. Instantly. Of course if you expect to arrive in a stable orbit around Mars for example (or better, on the surface) there is more unpleasantness with the change in your kenetic energy.
It would help if the Delorean required more energy as it travelled greater distances on the time axis. Just because Doc Brown wasn't interested in dinosaurs and thus never tried it, nothing in the films appear to prohibit going that far on exactly the same charge.
What is relevant is that she received a laptop configured in a manner she was unfamiliar with.
No, what is relevant is her story doesn't pass the smell test. It's an astroturf campaign.
Go to Dell.com and TRY to recreate her story. The only Linux you can easily find is the little mini and that ain't what she bought. You have to search on linux in the search bar to find any of their other Ubuntu offerings and the page you get dropped on says this:
Not sure Open Source is for You?
The main thing to note is that when you choose open source you don't get a Windows® operating system. If you're here by mistake and you are looking for a Dell PC with Windows, please use the following link.
Assume she somehow managed to get there, which is improbable enough. If she bought after reading that she is not college material.
And this ignores the fact she was buying a computer for college and didn't a) inquire as to their requirements before purchase and b) didn't get in on the discounts most colleges have on both the laptop itself and she could have probably picked up Windows+Office at a massive student discount. Colleges are full of nerds who would have been happy to help her either install Windows or learn to use Ubuntu for the price of pizza and her company. The town has a LUG for crying out loud, help was at hand.
> You're saying that because Apple went up 300% in that time period, that it would not do very well going forward?
Exactly. Dig into the numbers like sales/share, profit/share, P/E Ratio, debt ratios, etc. When a stock gets 'hot' and everybody wants in the price will do a moonshot. That's basic supply & demand at work. As it shoots up, odds are it will go up far faster than the company is actually growing. When it hits crazy valuations based on those hard performance numbers you sell a large chunk to those idjits buysing stocks based on some shouting head on MSNBC. If you can't find another good prospect that hasn't become popular (thus overpriced) sit on the cash or buy some short term bonds.
Odds are the ferets in the day trading pits will soon find another stock to fall madly in love with and the price will fall back to earth. It still might be pretty high but it will return to some semblance of a relationship with current business or at least the near term prospects. Then you can buy some more if you still have the cash sitting on the sidelines. Buying a stock today based on what some pundit says they will be selling/earning ten years out is dumb once enough idiots have priced the stock up to valuations that only make sense if that prediction is true. No more upside (already priced to perfection) and almost unlimited downside. Dumb.
I have rode AAPL up twice in the past. Did RedHat once. I got out when they went crazy. No way they were going to be moving enough cash anytime soon to justify some of the prices they were trading at. Got back into RH recently at about $8 while the whole market was tanking. Starting to sniff around AAPL again but it ain't low enough for a vulture like me quite yet.
> 1. Apple has got the best operating system available, stable, and for the moment feature complete.
I'll agree on that point. For a mass market the various Linux distros aren't playing in Apple's league. Vista is a punch line and Windows 7 is likely to be and be seen as Vista SE.
> 2. The iPhone has a nice lead over the competition.
Yes, but without Steve to pour the Flavoraid where will the next version come from? Cell phones have a short shelf life and the biggest feature of the i* products is Steve pitching them.
> 3. iTunes store just made a major step forward that gave them feature parity with their competition...
Yes, because they were forced into it. Make no mistake, Apple depended on the DRM to lock customers into an eternal stream of future iPods which keeps people using iTunes and even sells Macs. Without the locks you can buy anybody's player.
> 4. Apple's brand still has a lot of "shiny gloss to it
No. Steve's brand has a lot of gloss. Which is why we are having this thread in the first place. Even billg@microsoft.com didn't have that kind of star power. As Bill has backed away from Microsoft the stock has just sat there. Of course that is what it has been doing since the.bomb, just sitting there. Apple without Steve isn't much more than a design house.
> 5. Jobs going might be a *good* thing,...
No. So long as Steve draws breath the things you hope for will never be permitted.
> I just don't see that Jobs going changes the fundamentals of the company all that much.
Everyone else disagrees with you. Apple was swirling the toilet bowl when Steve came back and the assumption is that without His reality distortion field it wouldn't be three years before the Apple Death Watch started again.
> I don't run a datacenter, but I sure would like to get rid of the power bricks...
DC vs AC wouldn't help you rid yourself of power bricks. No more than it can help a datacenter get rid of power supplies in each server. Telco equipment runs on 48 volts not to save electricity but because of the way telephone exchanges are built. Telephones don't go down, period. So how do they accomplish this miracle? Huge battery banks. Back in the day a DC-AC conversion system large enough to run a whole switch plus drive every telephone would have been all but impossible. So they just ran everything directly from the batteries and used the mains to charge the batteries.
This DC in the datacenter thing is just a green craze that will pass. It is pure unadulterated snake oil. Go reread the summary. They ain't even doing the smart thing and adopting the telco 48V standard. Does anything in a server run on 48V? No. Does anything in a server run on the 400V they are proposing? No. So a DC-DC conversion will be needed, i.e. a switch mode power supply. Guess what is in a current server? A switch mode power supply. Current PC power supplies are available with efficiencies over 90% without buying too far off the mainstream. I seriously doubt these DC powered supplies will be much better and in the end that is the ONLY number that matters. Except these DC installations have to factor in the power loss from the big AC-DC conversion and worry about redundency, backup power, etc.
> But his last 10 years or so, he has worked in the IT industry.
No. You just listed the resume of a LAWYER, not a tech type. The guy is a lawyer that has worked for a couple of tech companies in a legal capacity or business operations capacity, never as a technical type.
But I'll bet he is deeply connected to the corrupt monsters who run Chicago, just like almost every other Obama pick.
> I find it incredibly irritating that the default for nearly every distro is to overwrite > the existing bootloader rather than attempt to use a more sane solution..
Well the default is intended to ensure the newly installed OS will boot and will continue to boot after the next regularly scheduled reinstall of Windows. Of course Windows will probably hose you anyway when that happens since it doesn't even ASK whether it can nuke your MBR.
If you want to boot several operating systems have Ubuntu (you didn't mention a distro and you are lacking in clue, thus almost certainly an Ubuntu user) install GRUB to the partition you installed the OS on and since you obviously undertstand the XP/Vista bootloader you can add the stanza to it to chainload.
> Why can't this be a default option so that I don't have to worry about the fact that deleting > my new, temporary Linux install will leave my machine unbootable?
For pretty much the same reason Microsoft doesn't modify GRUB and make itself the non-default system. We assume that when you install Linux you are going to be actually using it, thus the default is to take over the MBR and make the newly installed system the default boot and the legacy OEM preload the optional one. However, unlike Microsoft we penguins aren't so arrogant as to think we are the ONLY OS in existence so we do autodetect the presence of a legacy OS and offer to prepopulate it on the GRUB menu, and make an easilly selected option available to install the bootloader outside the MBR in a secondary OS mode, something Microsoft will probably never do. Of course this isn't just to support Microsoft, many Linux folk have multiple distros installed and those features simplify installing, reunstalling and upgrading a collection of Free operating systems.
> Finally, if you're going to tell me that you wouldn't work somewhere that wanted a DOC > for your resume, thats good for you,
Really, I wouldn't do it. Remember, unless you are truly desperate the hiring process is two way. You should be checking out the potential employer while they check you out. Like most people here on/. I'd be working in IT. I reason that any IT shop that can't deal with a resume in PDF format in 2009 is giving out a pretty big blinking neon sign that they are incompetent. Do YOU want to work with idiots that haven't figured out that Word is not capable of and not intended to interchange formatted documents without the risk of loss of formatting? Worse, that are too dumb to open Acroread? I don't, life is too short to deal with a company that would probably already be in the fc deadpool.... if fc.com weren't themselves f**ked. This economy is going to be pruning out the weak, be somewhere clueful if ya can manage even if it pays a little less.
> Okay, seriously: How would the GPL keep device manufacturers from integrating Open file > systems into their hardware?
Reread "the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code" again. Writing a filesystem less trivial than FAT isn't easy, especially if you want to get it right. So if I were proposing a replacement I wouldn't pick ext[23] for example because of the GPL. Let every camera maker and music player's semi-skilled and over worked monkeys try to reimplement ext2 and watch the fun trying to read cards written in one device elsewhere, like say a printer with a card slot. But ext2 would have the advantage that a driver already exists for Windows.
> I'm genuinely curious - exactly what other issues besides lack of Windows support could > stop manufacturers from building different file systems into their storage devices?
The big one would be the tower of babel problem. Unless someone imposes order on em every vendor would support a different, almost certainly homegrown, filesystem that would subtly vary between products and major versions. They would supply a buggy driver for Windows -current release and if enough wailing went up a wildly inaccurate spec. Even if the holders of the SD trademark handed a non microsoft filesystem spec down as part of the rest of the specification you could bet Sony wouldn't have adopted it for their latest memory stick, etc. Madness, but we live in a mad world.
> Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and > replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?
1. NTFS is to complex and undocumented to be used in embedded consumer electronics.
2. Microsoft needs to keep control over the file system used in consumer electronics. If they hadn't offered this up (for a small fee of course) vendors might have been forced to look elsewhere... at the many filesystems in Linux or BSD that easily scale to the sizes required and have free reference implementations available, although the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code.
If I had to guess Microsoft will give em a sweet deal on the license fees so long as they give desktop linux some patent hell on implementing support, thus allowing SuSE to ride their trojan horse again.
And from the 2TB upper limit I'm guessing the are not reworking the maximum block size so there will still eventually have to a "LBA48" style incompatibility breakage at some point. Because 2T on a full size SD card isn't decades away.
> The display across the room is a 1080p HDTV with a 40" - 75" screen.
Yea and if you generate much 1080p video on that little thing you won't have nuts. And you still will have problems reading text from across the room, even with a 75" screen.
> The keyboard-PC can't store much of anything, but you can shop Amazon.com. do the IM video chat thing, > stream radio from Live365 or Netflix video, and embarass your kids with the baby photos you slip into > your homemade USB slide-shows. just as grandad did when he brought out the Kodak projector.
Which of those things could you not do with a MythTV (Or a Windows Media Center if yer bent like that) sitting connected to the TV and a thirty dollar wireless keyboard in your lap? Which will cost less and be more practical? The prototype is barely getting an hour of battery life, push it up to six and it still isn't very practical. A wireless keyboard will typically run months. So where is the benefit from moving the computing out from beside the display where it belongs (wired network and display, AC power, easy addition of storage as needed, etc.) and into the keyboard.
No, much better if you do the wireless display the other way and let the settop box drive the small screen. If you assume a wireless link with enough speed for hdmi you could also keep the USB and audio ports on the thing and slave them via wireless.
> It is also in there best interests to set the stage to ditch all legacy 32bit apps they sell.
Not likely. Windows 7 will sell vastly more 32bit copies than 64bit. It's the device drivers. Existing 32bit drivers will work on 7 and many vendors have yet to ship any 64bit drivers for any Windows version. None would go to the trouble of bringing up a 64bit driver for a discontinued product. Therefore anyone not in a position to do a green field reset of their computing experience will stick with 32bit until the memory limit becomes too much pain to bear, then look for Microsoft to offer up PAE versions to the home user to keep 32bit alive a few more years.
It's a chicken & egg thing. To get widespread 64bit adoption we need widspread availibility of drivers for at least one whole product life cycle. But nobody will invest in 64bit drivers without proven demand. Then you add in the whole DRM nightmare involved in 64bit drivers for Windows and it is easy to see why vendors refuse to play ball.
Contrast with Linux. Every in tree driver went 64bit pretty much as soon as the first 64bit arch (Alpha) went into the tree. But even there there were issues with 3rd party drivers not seeing the need to invest in 64bit. Nvidia, ATI, Adobe, etc. Adobe was sorked around by getting 32bit plugins to run in 64bit browsers. But teh video problem was a real ballbreaker for quite a while. Thankfully we had a small list of video hardware with free drivers and thus 64bit support. I made the 64bit jump at home in 2003 but had to settle for a Radeon 9200 until things improved.
Slashdot Mirror
> Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how
> much better the system is for developers.
Bull. You don't care for eye candy. I don't care for eye candy. End users care. No matter how hard we wish it were otherwise it remains a fact. And if the new stuff makes things easier for developers it usually means more stuff gets developed. And remember, users don't buy an OS for what IT does, they buy for the applications they can run on it. So if KDE4 enables better apps to get written faster that benefits users.
As someone who has used GNOME since it first replaced FVWM95 as RedHat's default DE I'm starting to consider KDE. The last of the license issues (that launched GNOME in the first place) are finally fixed and GNOME has been making it crystal clear I'm not in their target audience for years.
I can't imagine anything I'd write being better than what RAH wrote long ago, so....
Of course his use of 'naturist' betrays the age of the quote, now it would be environmentalist or Green.
> No wonder if you tend to post opinions about TV shows that you admittedly haven't watched.
Dunno, I saw the ads and concluded it was almost certainly a product of demented Hollywierd politics. The summary basically agrees only they say it like it is a good thing.
Sounds like I called it spot on and wisely avoided wasting time on crap. I'm pretty accurate in assessing a movie or tv show by a watching a trailer or two. I usually end up seeing at least parts of the stuff I saw a trailer for and said "that will be crap" and 90% of the time I was right, it is crap. Still have too many false positives though.
It really isn't hard. You can save a lot of time and eliminate at lot by some obvious rules. The Rock is in it? It's crap. Vin Diesel? Crap. Is the project a vehicle for a wrestler or rapper trying to launch an acting career? Big warning sign. Jerry Bruckheimer is ivolved? Oh God no! And so on.
> ..none of them run around in spandex, and that's kind of the point. They're equal.
> It's a universe where gender isn't an issue.
I never watched the actual show, only the ads. If you are right and Starbuck is basically the same character Dirk Benedict origionally played and the relationship with Capt. Apollo is basically the same I'd have to withdraw the objection.
> To address your point about Al-Jazeera... it's as good a source of journalism as I've
> encountered in western mainstream.
Thank you. It is one thing to make what should be an outrageous asertion, but it is wonderful when some clown pops in and not only agrees but goes even beyond. So you see Al Jazerra as the sort of 'good journalism' that you hoped you would get from Pravda but were disappointed by. O K.
I mean hey, I like hitting foreign sources too just to observe the difference and sometimes they do cover stories that never appear in US outlets, especially back in the pre internet days. And there was actually a time when the BBC World Service on shortwave was the fracking Voice of God. The Truth, or as close as mortal man was ever going to get to it, delivered in most of the worlds's tongues.
But Pravda or Radio Moscow? Good for laughs or if you wanted to hear the official Kremlin line but never for real news or journalism. They got a little better for a time after the Empire fell but with the rise of Putin quickly backslid to their comfort zone of official state mouthpiece.
> Are folks who blow themselves up, or lob rockets into populated areas barbarians? Probably.
If you have to ask the question you answered everyone else's questions about you. Bluntly, one of the things pretty much avery civilized person realized when the fighting stopped after WWII, when the bloodlust faded and everybody saw the smoking ruins vast swaths of the world had become, was that bombing the shit out of civilian populations was something that had to be put out of bounds. No we wouldn't ever stop colleratal damage completely but aiming at civilians AS the target had to stop.
So if the 'Palistinians' want to bomb a military target that is ok by me so long as they understand the concept 'act of war' and the consequences therein. Even if civilians die. Bombing civilians, on purpose, puts them outside the rules of war and personally if Israel decides they have had enough and goes all Old Testament on their asses I'll stand by and just say they had it coming.
Technology makes a free society impossible if we allow terrorism to be a legitimate tactic. It is just too easy to blow crap up. The logical consequence of that is we have a choice, lose the free society or make terrorism off limits by destroying any group who even threatens to use it without mercy. Or perhaps you can think of a third option?
Destroying any group who uses terrorism, thus denying them any possibility of benefitting from the tactic can supress terror sponsoring groups pretty well. Note that nothing can stop a rogue individual. This is a problem we are going to have to deal with at some point as the damage a single individual can inflict continues to rise. Damned if I have any ideas though.
> They are desperate, and desperate people take up arms.
Bullshit. The problem is they aren't desperate enough. The fools think they can win because the western world keeps restraining Israel's hand, thus they conclude that eventually they can win. They can't. The second it looks like they will win (i.e. exterminate the state of Israel) the US will jump in and bring on the end of the frackin' world as we know it. You know that, I know that. They don't believe it. It is only when they truly understand that Israel isn't leaving that peace will become possible.
When Israel pulled out of Gaza they could have seized on that opportunity and built a real country. Had they done so they could have had the West Bank by now and a two state solution. Everybody happy, unicorns and rainbo
> The ad that Slashdot is choosing to serve with this story is for Al Jazeera.
> Am I the only one that thinks that's kind of funny?
No, it's totally appropriate. The problem with BDS is it caused too many unstable people to go all the way from opposing their own country's policies/leader to outright being on the side of the fracking barbarians. (to add a little ontopic humor) In any sane world Al Jazeera would be on the list of terror supporting entities and doing business with them would get you sent to prison. Here in bizarro world they are heros who speak 'truth to power.'
And this gets to why I never watched a single episode of BSG's reboot. It had hollywierd politics all over it from day one of the prerelease PR campaign. And just from the ads it was obvious it had as little to do with the origional work as the new writers could manage. So I had the question I have for all these remakes that aren't: If you hated the origional that much why didn't you just write something new?
Ok, a remake could have lost the stupid robot dog/dagit and few would have cared. But recasting Starbuck as a female? Good way to totally reimagine the central relationship at the core of the story in the unholy names of political correctness and throwing T&A at teenage fanbois (of the sort of whacked off to six of nine) who probably ain't the core audience of a politicized (and from a couple of reviews, more plot driven than blowing crap up with lots of CGI) show like BSG in the first place. Then they totally lose the origional concept of the Cylons? Just start over and call it something else.
> I'm not sure what's wrong with a website running IIS, either. Last time I checked, the NetCraft
> top10 uptime list had quite a few of those, which means that they do work.
Quite a few... interesting way to say ONE (#5) for the December report and TWO for November (#6 and #7).
Seriously, ignorant people host on Windows.... or Microsoft's slaves. That's the explanation of sites like Dell.com, they can't piss off Microsoft. You see lots of mom and pop etailers (the ignorant) hosting on Microsoft and big ones who have extensive business relationships with em. Then you see those who Microsoft essentially pay to run their stuff by giving them free consultants and often free licenses to do big conversions so they will have case studies for their PR dept. Have I left out any major classes of Microsoft hosting customers? Oh yea, places like Hotmail that Microsoft outright buys so they can (after years of pain) convert them to their inferior tech. And a few where politics dictates the tech decisions.
Sites where skilled and competent IT people picked Microsoft Internet technology based on it's technical or economic merits? Perhaps you can name one, I can't.
> When the tuner is not, the consumption is as claimed.
Of course the report is that it is downloading updates via the tuner most of the time. Obviously that isn't needed and probably isn't normal. The problems here are that a) Sony eityher has a firmware bug or the local PBS station is hosing the broadcast of the schedule data, b) without a kill-a-watt being deployed nobody would ever know if their TV has a similar problem and c) Sony didn't provide a way to kill a feature that for most people is a waste of time and electricity.
A program guide in the TV is pretty useless for most people who already have a settop box (cable or sat) that provides guide data. For those on an antenna it is a perfectly aceptable feature to have so no problem including it, just provide a way for most owners to turn the darned thing off.
> With that logic I could say XP is a service pack of 2000.
No, XP was a fairly major merge of the NT and 9X product lines. It had some pretty major teething problems because of it. Later service packs have corrected most of the problems, which is the big problem facing Microsoft. XP is finally a fairly stable operating system. If they could have fixed the 'everyone runs as root' problem inherited when they had to have backwards compatibility with Windows 9X it would have been really good.
> Operating systems don't need to be evolutionary, and in many cases it better they aren't.
As someone using Linux I totally agree. It is the major changes (breakage is bad) that tend to get distros flamed. The problem is asking people to fork over ~$100 for fixes to product defects and a few minor UI improvments that is finally starting to cause problems for Microsoft after getting away with it several times in the past.
> I think people keep forgetting history when it comes to MS operating systems.
Not me. I haven't actually used their newer crap much but I have been following their antics for a long time. Their BASIC interpreters were pretty good, quality has went downhill ever since.
> Also known as Windows 1.0 SP86.
No, service packs are a free download. Windows 7 is Vista SE. Remember Win98SE? It was a service pack but they needed some cash and made people buy it as a version upgrade. Looks like history is about to repeat with Vista except this time they also have to change the name because Vista has gained such a horrible brand identity. It's now the Edsel of Operating Systems. Like the Edsel, Vista probably doesn't deserve all of the rap it has got but reality and PR aren't on the same planet with each other.
The big takeaway from all of the Windows 7 reviews though is that if you hate Vista you will probably hate Windows 7.
They are saying you can run Windows 7 on a netbook. Ya, like you could run Vista on one. Yes it installs and sorta runs but XP runs better.
Windows 7 toned down the security nags a bit and added some nice chrome to the taskbar. Haven't even heard Microsoft itself claim any other major differences with Vista other than yet another IE rev that is currently so broke it might not make the cut. Bugfixes and a couple of minor UI tweaks do not a major version make. We are firmly in point release territory at best, service pack sounds closer to what they are going to ship. They are going to call it a new version because they need a fresh hit of revenue.
The really cheep netbooks in the pipeline, the ones most likely to be ARM based at first, tend to only have 800x480 displays so an app that barely fits in 800x600 isn't going to be usable.
I'm still waiting for one of the cheap netbooks to be available to purchase though. Lots of talk, but to date no URL to go with a credit card to buy quantity one. Really hope the different groups putting together these new ARM based machines can agree on some standards for bootloading and such so each one won't be all but tied to the one modified distro it ships with.
> Support with Microsoft Office will probably never be "bug for bug" complete.
Microsoft Office isn't bug for bug compatible between versions. So that isn't a problem unless OO.o has notably more incompatible than say Office2007 would be vs OO.o 3 when opening those old Office2000 files.
> In fact, you may want to keep a copy around for comparison.
Well before putting ANY new software into production you want to run lots of tests on your existing datasets. If it doesn't work on YOUR data it doesn't matter if it works for everyone else. That would go for both Office2007 and OO.o 3.0.
> And depending how competent everyone else is, it may require some training, which means the cost
> is not zero -- it's lower, but not zero.
An upgrade from Office2000 to OO.o 3.0 should be less pain than Office2000 to Office2007. Docx support coes easier with Office2007 but versions of OO.o (the Microsoft/Novell version) do support the horrible undead abortion of a format. Probably shouldn't worry too much about it though, Microsoft will be adding ODF support in their next version and that should be the end of the docx experiment.
[sarcasm]
Oh I dunno. Showhorning JavaScript into everything because... well because why exactly? That the Gnomes are doing it somehow doesn't suprise me in the least. Nothing invented in the UNIX world has ever interested those guys in the slightest.
Sounds like we need a new language just for this, ya know, a language optimised to be a scripting language to easily embed into other programs and thus avoid reinventing the wheel over and over.
[/sarcasm]
> But it HAS to travel in space.
It's worse. Even if you can handwave your way around how you manage to stay in the same spot on the earth there are bigger implications. The BTTF Delorean has a fixed power input for a time jump. It wouldn't take much work to demonstrate that the total kenetic energy of the Delorean and it's passengers can vary widely as measured by the reference frame of the earth, the very frame it isn't moving relative to depending exactly where/when you leave at arrive. So where does the energy excess or deficit get resolved from?
And all hell breaks out if you assume whatever mechanism that is anchoring it to track along the Earth's surface as it moves forward/backward in time can be modified to allow slipage or anchoring to a different frame of reference, perhaps the Sun. Because then you DO have a spaceship on your hands as soon as you put the passengers in a suit or seal the craft. Travel a about a light hour in space and slip the same time through time and you can instantly translate yourself to another planet. Instantly. Of course if you expect to arrive in a stable orbit around Mars for example (or better, on the surface) there is more unpleasantness with the change in your kenetic energy.
It would help if the Delorean required more energy as it travelled greater distances on the time axis. Just because Doc Brown wasn't interested in dinosaurs and thus never tried it, nothing in the films appear to prohibit going that far on exactly the same charge.
No, what is relevant is her story doesn't pass the smell test. It's an astroturf campaign. Go to Dell.com and TRY to recreate her story. The only Linux you can easily find is the little mini and that ain't what she bought. You have to search on linux in the search bar to find any of their other Ubuntu offerings and the page you get dropped on says this:
Assume she somehow managed to get there, which is improbable enough. If she bought after reading that she is not college material. And this ignores the fact she was buying a computer for college and didn't a) inquire as to their requirements before purchase and b) didn't get in on the discounts most colleges have on both the laptop itself and she could have probably picked up Windows+Office at a massive student discount. Colleges are full of nerds who would have been happy to help her either install Windows or learn to use Ubuntu for the price of pizza and her company. The town has a LUG for crying out loud, help was at hand.
> You're saying that because Apple went up 300% in that time period, that it would not do very well going forward?
Exactly. Dig into the numbers like sales/share, profit/share, P/E Ratio, debt ratios, etc. When a stock gets 'hot' and everybody wants in the price will do a moonshot. That's basic supply & demand at work. As it shoots up, odds are it will go up far faster than the company is actually growing. When it hits crazy valuations based on those hard performance numbers you sell a large chunk to those idjits buysing stocks based on some shouting head on MSNBC. If you can't find another good prospect that hasn't become popular (thus overpriced) sit on the cash or buy some short term bonds.
Odds are the ferets in the day trading pits will soon find another stock to fall madly in love with and the price will fall back to earth. It still might be pretty high but it will return to some semblance of a relationship with current business or at least the near term prospects. Then you can buy some more if you still have the cash sitting on the sidelines. Buying a stock today based on what some pundit says they will be selling/earning ten years out is dumb once enough idiots have priced the stock up to valuations that only make sense if that prediction is true. No more upside (already priced to perfection) and almost unlimited downside. Dumb.
I have rode AAPL up twice in the past. Did RedHat once. I got out when they went crazy. No way they were going to be moving enough cash anytime soon to justify some of the prices they were trading at. Got back into RH recently at about $8 while the whole market was tanking. Starting to sniff around AAPL again but it ain't low enough for a vulture like me quite yet.
> 1. Apple has got the best operating system available, stable, and for the moment feature complete.
I'll agree on that point. For a mass market the various Linux distros aren't playing in Apple's league. Vista is a punch line and Windows 7 is likely to be and be seen as Vista SE.
> 2. The iPhone has a nice lead over the competition.
Yes, but without Steve to pour the Flavoraid where will the next version come from? Cell phones have a short shelf life and the biggest feature of the i* products is Steve pitching them.
> 3. iTunes store just made a major step forward that gave them feature parity with their competition...
Yes, because they were forced into it. Make no mistake, Apple depended on the DRM to lock customers into an eternal stream of future iPods which keeps people using iTunes and even sells Macs. Without the locks you can buy anybody's player.
> 4. Apple's brand still has a lot of "shiny gloss to it
No. Steve's brand has a lot of gloss. Which is why we are having this thread in the first place. Even billg@microsoft.com didn't have that kind of star power. As Bill has backed away from Microsoft the stock has just sat there. Of course that is what it has been doing since the .bomb, just sitting there. Apple without Steve isn't much more than a design house.
> 5. Jobs going might be a *good* thing,...
No. So long as Steve draws breath the things you hope for will never be permitted.
> I just don't see that Jobs going changes the fundamentals of the company all that much.
Everyone else disagrees with you. Apple was swirling the toilet bowl when Steve came back and the assumption is that without His reality distortion field it wouldn't be three years before the Apple Death Watch started again.
> I don't run a datacenter, but I sure would like to get rid of the power bricks...
DC vs AC wouldn't help you rid yourself of power bricks. No more than it can help a datacenter get rid of power supplies in each server. Telco equipment runs on 48 volts not to save electricity but because of the way telephone exchanges are built. Telephones don't go down, period. So how do they accomplish this miracle? Huge battery banks. Back in the day a DC-AC conversion system large enough to run a whole switch plus drive every telephone would have been all but impossible. So they just ran everything directly from the batteries and used the mains to charge the batteries.
This DC in the datacenter thing is just a green craze that will pass. It is pure unadulterated snake oil. Go reread the summary. They ain't even doing the smart thing and adopting the telco 48V standard. Does anything in a server run on 48V? No. Does anything in a server run on the 400V they are proposing? No. So a DC-DC conversion will be needed, i.e. a switch mode power supply. Guess what is in a current server? A switch mode power supply. Current PC power supplies are available with efficiencies over 90% without buying too far off the mainstream. I seriously doubt these DC powered supplies will be much better and in the end that is the ONLY number that matters. Except these DC installations have to factor in the power loss from the big AC-DC conversion and worry about redundency, backup power, etc.
> But his last 10 years or so, he has worked in the IT industry.
No. You just listed the resume of a LAWYER, not a tech type. The guy is a lawyer that has worked for a couple of tech companies in a legal capacity or business operations capacity, never as a technical type.
But I'll bet he is deeply connected to the corrupt monsters who run Chicago, just like almost every other Obama pick.
> I find it incredibly irritating that the default for nearly every distro is to overwrite
> the existing bootloader rather than attempt to use a more sane solution..
Well the default is intended to ensure the newly installed OS will boot and will continue to boot after the next regularly scheduled reinstall of Windows. Of course Windows will probably hose you anyway when that happens since it doesn't even ASK whether it can nuke your MBR.
If you want to boot several operating systems have Ubuntu (you didn't mention a distro and you are lacking in clue, thus almost certainly an Ubuntu user) install GRUB to the partition you installed the OS on and since you obviously undertstand the XP/Vista bootloader you can add the stanza to it to chainload.
> Why can't this be a default option so that I don't have to worry about the fact that deleting
> my new, temporary Linux install will leave my machine unbootable?
For pretty much the same reason Microsoft doesn't modify GRUB and make itself the non-default system. We assume that when you install Linux you are going to be actually using it, thus the default is to take over the MBR and make the newly installed system the default boot and the legacy OEM preload the optional one. However, unlike Microsoft we penguins aren't so arrogant as to think we are the ONLY OS in existence so we do autodetect the presence of a legacy OS and offer to prepopulate it on the GRUB menu, and make an easilly selected option available to install the bootloader outside the MBR in a secondary OS mode, something Microsoft will probably never do. Of course this isn't just to support Microsoft, many Linux folk have multiple distros installed and those features simplify installing, reunstalling and upgrading a collection of Free operating systems.
> ..all the new stuff starting with XP is incredibly ugly!
Amen. Yet they comtinue to belch out more of the stuff with every version, never getting a clue.
Of course with Windows 7 (aka Vista SE) they removed the classic art and UI. Balmer knows best.
> Finally, if you're going to tell me that you wouldn't work somewhere that wanted a DOC
> for your resume, thats good for you,
Really, I wouldn't do it. Remember, unless you are truly desperate the hiring process is two way. You should be checking out the potential employer while they check you out. Like most people here on /. I'd be working in IT. I reason that any IT shop that can't deal with a resume in PDF format in 2009 is giving out a pretty big blinking neon sign that they are incompetent. Do YOU want to work with idiots that haven't figured out that Word is not capable of and not intended to interchange formatted documents without the risk of loss of formatting? Worse, that are too dumb to open Acroread? I don't, life is too short to deal with a company that would probably already be in the fc deadpool.... if fc.com weren't themselves f**ked. This economy is going to be pruning out the weak, be somewhere clueful if ya can manage even if it pays a little less.
> Okay, seriously: How would the GPL keep device manufacturers from integrating Open file
> systems into their hardware?
Reread "the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code" again. Writing a filesystem less trivial than FAT isn't easy, especially if you want to get it right. So if I were proposing a replacement I wouldn't pick ext[23] for example because of the GPL. Let every camera maker and music player's semi-skilled and over worked monkeys try to reimplement ext2 and watch the fun trying to read cards written in one device elsewhere, like say a printer with a card slot. But ext2 would have the advantage that a driver already exists for Windows.
> I'm genuinely curious - exactly what other issues besides lack of Windows support could
> stop manufacturers from building different file systems into their storage devices?
The big one would be the tower of babel problem. Unless someone imposes order on em every vendor would support a different, almost certainly homegrown, filesystem that would subtly vary between products and major versions. They would supply a buggy driver for Windows -current release and if enough wailing went up a wildly inaccurate spec. Even if the holders of the SD trademark handed a non microsoft filesystem spec down as part of the rest of the specification you could bet Sony wouldn't have adopted it for their latest memory stick, etc. Madness, but we live in a mad world.
> Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and
> replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?
1. NTFS is to complex and undocumented to be used in embedded consumer electronics.
2. Microsoft needs to keep control over the file system used in consumer electronics. If they hadn't offered this up (for a small fee of course) vendors might have been forced to look elsewhere... at the many filesystems in Linux or BSD that easily scale to the sizes required and have free reference implementations available, although the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code.
If I had to guess Microsoft will give em a sweet deal on the license fees so long as they give desktop linux some patent hell on implementing support, thus allowing SuSE to ride their trojan horse again.
And from the 2TB upper limit I'm guessing the are not reworking the maximum block size so there will still eventually have to a "LBA48" style incompatibility breakage at some point. Because 2T on a full size SD card isn't decades away.
> The display across the room is a 1080p HDTV with a 40" - 75" screen.
Yea and if you generate much 1080p video on that little thing you won't have nuts. And you still will have problems reading text from across the room, even with a 75" screen.
> The keyboard-PC can't store much of anything, but you can shop Amazon.com. do the IM video chat thing,
> stream radio from Live365 or Netflix video, and embarass your kids with the baby photos you slip into
> your homemade USB slide-shows. just as grandad did when he brought out the Kodak projector.
Which of those things could you not do with a MythTV (Or a Windows Media Center if yer bent like that) sitting connected to the TV and a thirty dollar wireless keyboard in your lap? Which will cost less and be more practical? The prototype is barely getting an hour of battery life, push it up to six and it still isn't very practical. A wireless keyboard will typically run months. So where is the benefit from moving the computing out from beside the display where it belongs (wired network and display, AC power, easy addition of storage as needed, etc.) and into the keyboard.
No, much better if you do the wireless display the other way and let the settop box drive the small screen. If you assume a wireless link with enough speed for hdmi you could also keep the USB and audio ports on the thing and slave them via wireless.
> It is also in there best interests to set the stage to ditch all legacy 32bit apps they sell.
Not likely. Windows 7 will sell vastly more 32bit copies than 64bit. It's the device drivers. Existing 32bit drivers will work on 7 and many vendors have yet to ship any 64bit drivers for any Windows version. None would go to the trouble of bringing up a 64bit driver for a discontinued product. Therefore anyone not in a position to do a green field reset of their computing experience will stick with 32bit until the memory limit becomes too much pain to bear, then look for Microsoft to offer up PAE versions to the home user to keep 32bit alive a few more years.
It's a chicken & egg thing. To get widespread 64bit adoption we need widspread availibility of drivers for at least one whole product life cycle. But nobody will invest in 64bit drivers without proven demand. Then you add in the whole DRM nightmare involved in 64bit drivers for Windows and it is easy to see why vendors refuse to play ball.
Contrast with Linux. Every in tree driver went 64bit pretty much as soon as the first 64bit arch (Alpha) went into the tree. But even there there were issues with 3rd party drivers not seeing the need to invest in 64bit. Nvidia, ATI, Adobe, etc. Adobe was sorked around by getting 32bit plugins to run in 64bit browsers. But teh video problem was a real ballbreaker for quite a while. Thankfully we had a small list of video hardware with free drivers and thus 64bit support. I made the 64bit jump at home in 2003 but had to settle for a Radeon 9200 until things improved.