They wrap the innards of a netbook into the a casing regular size casing. Look at the space wasted on the fastenings for the screen bezel and the additional thickness added by all those thick plastic sheets between motherboard and keycaps. With that much space and weight wasted, at least they could have gone on the full eco-trip and made the casing out of cardboard or recycled wood. They totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.
To me, that laptop seems very compact. I suppose they used thick plastic for casing because it's easy to mold, but in production, I assume better quality and thinner material would be used.
The concept is, in my opinion, great: they don't go out of their way to prevent users from disassembling the laptop, and that's the major difference between what they made and all other laptops. Hard disks and ram are already standard, but as long as manufacturers start manufacturing standard size/connection displays, power supplies and motherboards (perhaps there already are standard mb sizes for laptops, I don't know), laptop cases would become as cheap and disposable as desktop cases.
That's the whole point of this laptop: don't like your motherboard/cpu? Replace it. Don't like the size of your laptop? Get a new case, perhaps one without thick plastic, new display, new keyboard and reuse all other components and sell the old case and display on ebay.
I have allergies each spring. After I tried several different medications, I finally found one which advertises as "non-drowsy" - essentially a low dose of loratadine. I started taking it and yeah, it both worked and didn't make me feel sleepy all day long.
A couple of months later, I talked to a friend who is a doctor, and he told me (not knowing that I take that medication) that clinical studies for the medication showed that it worked for about 50% of people who took the drug, as well as for around 50% of people who were on placebo (I can't remember if it was 50, but the percentage was about the same). I read some more upon it, and the conclusion most knowledgeable people made was that the dosage of loratadine in the drug is too low, and that it works only as a placebo.
Knowing what I know, I still take that medication and it still helps me. Perhaps the low dosage really works for me, but more likely, I keep being fooled by a placebo I know about...
When did Mozilla switch their focus from a fast lightweight browser that outperformed the competition to the near bloated mess it's winding up as now?
I think that happened with 1.0 RC1 release. Some people are still mourning their Firefox 0.7
Seriously, we've been over this a long time ago. Firefox is good because it can be as bloated as you want it to be. I, for one, am glad that Firefox never mistook usability for lack of features (like some other open source projects which I shan't name).
I don't get how they can take a class if they don't understand the English required for it. Learning physics is not only learning the equations, rules, formulas and what not, it's also learning the vocabulary of the subject.
I came to the US for college and I majored in Political Science. I had to prove that I had good written and spoken English by taking TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) with a certain mark. All other foreign students had to do the same, and those who didn't had to take some ESL courses before starting their regular course.
A part of my education was learning English and I never requested to use a dictionary during a test, though I often carried an English-English paper one around. All tests I took were on subjects covered in class, so if I didn't understand concepts of e.g. "urban development" or what a "legal brief" is, it sure wouldn't help me to be able to translate that to my own language. Also, as I majored in social science, a big part of my grade was in-class participation where dictionaries electronic translators can't really help.
I can't imagine how someone can successfully follow a lecture in English and then need a dictionary to do a test on it. Besides, using those electronic translators or even English-Some other language is very dumbing... Jeez, spend 4 years in USA attending a university and go back to Korea without knowing English? Money well spent...
That's exactly what Ritalin is supposed to do. A friend of mine was diagnosed with ADHD and it had a calming effect on him. On one hand, he says he could concentrate better in classes, but opted to stop using Ritalin because it affected his lifestyle. And yes, he certainly seemed a more boring company, but I can't say he looked like a zombie or anything... He was just calmer.
He let me pop one of his pills. It had absolutely opposite effect on me. It was the effect that I imagine taking speed would have. I became hyperactive, couldn't concentrate and had a very hard time falling asleep that night.
What is needed is a good new fork with strong support.
How many open source projects "with strong support" can you name? Linux is, the way I see it, one of the biggest and most important open source projects out there, thus facing toughest challenges. In this decade, at least, I haven't seen that many complaints about stability of the project.
Compare that to projects like OpenOffice and their challenges, or the time CentOS's boss ran away with the key...
There is no guarantee that changing who controls Linux will have a positive impact on the project. Personally, I don't even see any problems within the project that can't be solved internally...
Yesterday I installed Ubuntu. I can't install the language patch (click on it in Opera, garbage on my screen. right click and save as, now I have it saved but how to install it??) I can't use bittorrent, (can't install wine because I don't know how to install a package handler because of the above problem)
Most people who come from Windows expect Linux to behave just like their old environment.
On Linux, things are NOT installed by downloading executables from the web and running them. We have package management for that (and most of them work without a glitch).
On Linux, drivers are a foreign concept. We have modules which are, in most modern distros, included pre-installed and loaded on demand by hardware detection.
Both those things are perhaps better or worse on Linux than on Windows, but the bottomline: they are different.
I've been using Linux for over a decade now and haven't touched Windows much. Imagine my frustration when I decided to install Windows once on a friend's computer:
I had to go through his CD collection and then web to find drivers. NOTHING worked out of the box.
NONE of my applications of choice were installed by default, so I had to go through a scavenger hunt online to find basic apps, like a secure browser and a photo organizer.
I spent hours online reading about different firewalls, antivirus programs, malware, adware, *ware protection and removal... Not easy at all!
Finally, I tried to connect his two windows machines so he could share files. Easy? Perhaps for somebody with a clue, but I was out there just like those newbs who come to Linux and try to figure out Samba.
My point is: there is a learning curve with anything. From what I read in your post, you agree that the learning curve is easier on Linux. Just because people learn how to use Windows doesn't mean Linux should be adapted to their knowledge...
This probably is a huge deal. It affects your legal status. It affects how much time you will spend dealing with bureaucracy. Also, it may affect how you deal with your money.
E.g. as a freelancer - if you work contract-by-contract, you get to do with your money as you wish. If you have an "agency" of a sort, you can still treat money as your own and you pay dues (apart from income tax, stuff like pension, social security, medical, etc.) as a fixed amount.
If you are a full fledged company, you have to assign yourself a fixed salary which determines how much you will spend on those "social services". It means you can't just withdraw and handle your money any way you want.
My Ubuntu installation at work installed a Firefox extension by default. It also made numerous modifications to packages installed on my computer - from bash to Xorg to Gnome. Both legal and morally acceptable.
Same thing is with Microsoft, with the only difference being that there is no assumed connection between Windows and Firefox (Microsoft doesn't package Firefox)
Your OS will tamper with the rest of your machine. The question is: do you trust your operating system with your computer?
I used to work at an American university where we received a huge amount of notices from MPAA, Sony & friends. This was some 7 years ago and affected students living in dorms and using the university ISP.
We implemented the three strikes rule, but we ourselves were well aware of the flaws:
Notices were NEVER checked for authenticity. They arrived by email and we had no check on the headers. We processed them so routinely that even if they came from completely bogus addresses - we'd never know.
We trusted the notices. When we received a list of material infringed upon by an IP - we took it for granted that the list was correct.
People who got cought red handed (with infringing material on their hard disks) didn't need to be sharpest to say that their computers got compromised by a malicious virus. Nowadays, pretty much everybody has a wireless router - they just need to claim it was unsecured and somebody stole their bandwidth.
We should really start rethinking how we think about copyright. At least in the country I'm in now, you cannot commit a crime without an intent. What stops everyone from claiming ignorance on how computers work and what happens when you run a P2P program? On the other hand, what stops corporations from claiming infringement on an IP? What sort of evidence can you provide that somebody transmitted pieces of your work online and how can you prove that you didn't alter the evidence to your cause?
I'm sorry that they dropped PHP. PHP can be great for learning OO programming. It quickly offers excellent real-world examples of programming: a typical example would be making a blog application. In that example, students can learn how to think in terms of objects (a blog entry is an object, each comment is an object, etc.), they can even construct a simple ORM (which will essentially teach them to use stuff like Hibernate with Java).
Also, PHP has those neat features, like implementing Iterator, creating ArrayObjects, etc. which can all teach students how to work with linked lists, how to reuse code, etc.
I started learning OO programming with C++, and I was infinitely bored by console apps with cats and dogs inheriting properties from animal class.
Finally, even students can now afford a couple of bucks a month hosting with PHP, and show off their work to the world.
In Serbia, we have blinking green, just before yellow. It actually makes yellow usable as "clear the intersection" time. It's mostly on boulevards where people drive a bit faster (around 60km/h).
Smaller streets are usually too slow or jammed in traffic to even have this issue.
In some EU countries, I've seen the seconds count down of green (i.e. you have 5 seconds until the light goes yellow). That's also very useful.
P.S. I was really hoping to enclose blinking green into a <blink> tag... Doesn't seem to be supported anymore:(
The 2.x era will live on (and *my* magic crystall ball tells me it will do so for a long time.)
Not necessarily. GNOME being an open source project, it will be hard to motivate people to maintain whatever becomes obsolete in 2.30, and it will be even harder for distribution packagers to maintain a double set of GNOME (which is already notoriously tedious to package).
There is always XFCE for people who don't like 3.0 changes. Even now, differences between GNOME and XFCE are not that big, and since most of Gnome's DE functionality has been switching to GTK anyway (e.g. GVFS), XFCE will have access to it.
Perhaps in movies... My grandfather stayed alive because he didn't go to school one day during the war. Nazis got students out of classrooms in a school in Yugoslavia and shot them.
See what happened, and that was not an isolated incident by no means.
Partisans, who were guerrilla fighters of Yugoslavia, were never taken as POW, they were tortured and killed.
Both news writing and Wikipedia (encyclopedia) writing requires one to be impartial, to establish notability of the subject and to be precise.
The best part about it is that those students will quickly learn in the wiki process that their writing can be much improved and that there is more aspects to their subject then they thought.
I lived in USA for 6 years and the best thing there, in terms of citizen-government interaction, was that there was no mandatory ID cards.
Sure, an ID card is not that big of a deal at first. It's not much unlike a DL (which almost everyone carries around all the time anyway), and it's not like the police can't track you down all the time.
But this is what will happen:
First they mandate you always have to carry it with you.
Then, the police implies you have to show it to anyone with a badge on demand.
Finally, they will randomly stop you and check your ID... without a right that you refuse it.
Here in Serbia, quite literally, I can't even take a walk in the park anymore without a cop stopping me and asking for ID...
What really got me about this one was the attitude some developers had... constantly trying to justify their correctness, despite the huge backlash from users. I feel the trust relationship is kinda broken... but at least they finally came around and listened.
Fedora does this all the time (or at least, often enough for me to think it's all the time). Here is a couple of examples:
Fedora Core 2 included the infamous 4k stack option enabled in Kernel, because of which NVIDIA drivers didn't work (and os drivers sucked). Users complained to no avail - Fedora's developers decided to introduce a feature they thought was good at cost of breaking many desktops. We had to recompile kernels.
Fedora 9 introduced new GDM. This application was (and still is) crippled compared to the old one, but apparently a major rewrite was in order. The result was that configuration of many users (e.g. autologin, etc) was broken, that there was no configuration GUI that we were used to, usability was crippled for all systems that use remote login with many users, etc. But, new GDM was the future, so despite the breakage, Fedora's developers decided to push it.
PulseAudio, anyone? But that's common for most distributions...
My point is: Fedora is a polygon for testing new technologies to be included in RHEL. Nothing more, nothing less. Perfect users for it are RHEL admins who want to get a preview of future releases, not casual desktop users.
I work for a company in Serbia and we write code for an Italian corporation which also outsources their development to Brazil and India. I'm happy if comments are in English at all. Still, we get by just fine, as long as we agree on design patterns to use and writing clear and concise code.
Also, whatever happened to: "Comments should describe what the function is doing, not HOW it is doing it"?
It's a loaded poll. You call as many people as you can, and ask them questions like:
Q) How do you think introduction of socialism into our community that is caused by cheap Internet access will affect our already fragile economy?
a) Very badly.
b) Somewhat badly.
c) Not that badly.
Based on my experiences in a couple of 3rd world countries, I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of these users are at internet cafes - they spend the local equivalent of a couple of quarters for a couple hours and then the next user gets on.
"3rd world country" is a very wide definition, but I live in one of those country where we pull a lot of content but don't click on ads.
Here in Serbia, many people have good enough broadband connection, either at work or home, to watch a lot of videos.
However, we have no incentive whatsoever to click most of the ads. Paypal doesn't work here, and I wouldn't trust our post to ship any goods anyway. Also, most of the stuff to buy online (like premium memberships) are way too expensive for most of us.
I think countries like this are the problem, not the real 3rd world where hardly anyone has the bandwidth to watch videos and download music.
What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.
So, I'm attracted exclusively to women. That makes me straight because I have a penis. However, deep inside, I feel that I am a woman. Does that make me a lesbian with a penis?
No, that makes you a teenager with hormones. It may or may not have anything to do with how you feel in a decade or so...
If your site gained any popularity, they would make bots specifically to register in your website.
The whole point is to have as many different techniques as you can come up with. CAPTCHA became too hard for humans and too easy for computers because it is used so widely.
One of the CMS's I use makes you check a box to confirm you are not a bot, in addition to a preview button - works like a charm if you make it painfully clear to people that they have to submit after preview (not impossible). Other one makes you do simple math (e.g. What is 2 in addition to 6), and I also had 0 spam messages with it.
Sure, if those CMS's got more popular, they would have to come up with alternative methods, and change them often, but that's the way to go with spam...
Slashdot Mirror
To me, that laptop seems very compact. I suppose they used thick plastic for casing because it's easy to mold, but in production, I assume better quality and thinner material would be used.
The concept is, in my opinion, great: they don't go out of their way to prevent users from disassembling the laptop, and that's the major difference between what they made and all other laptops. Hard disks and ram are already standard, but as long as manufacturers start manufacturing standard size/connection displays, power supplies and motherboards (perhaps there already are standard mb sizes for laptops, I don't know), laptop cases would become as cheap and disposable as desktop cases.
That's the whole point of this laptop: don't like your motherboard/cpu? Replace it. Don't like the size of your laptop? Get a new case, perhaps one without thick plastic, new display, new keyboard and reuse all other components and sell the old case and display on ebay.
Very cool.
I have allergies each spring. After I tried several different medications, I finally found one which advertises as "non-drowsy" - essentially a low dose of loratadine. I started taking it and yeah, it both worked and didn't make me feel sleepy all day long.
A couple of months later, I talked to a friend who is a doctor, and he told me (not knowing that I take that medication) that clinical studies for the medication showed that it worked for about 50% of people who took the drug, as well as for around 50% of people who were on placebo (I can't remember if it was 50, but the percentage was about the same). I read some more upon it, and the conclusion most knowledgeable people made was that the dosage of loratadine in the drug is too low, and that it works only as a placebo.
Knowing what I know, I still take that medication and it still helps me. Perhaps the low dosage really works for me, but more likely, I keep being fooled by a placebo I know about...
This is the first thing I thought of. How long has VIM been doing this?
At least since 1998 (version 5.3), perhaps even earlier. Go here and download vim-5.3-src.tar.gz. Then grep -Rn "hlsearch". It was there.
I think that happened with 1.0 RC1 release. Some people are still mourning their Firefox 0.7
Seriously, we've been over this a long time ago. Firefox is good because it can be as bloated as you want it to be. I, for one, am glad that Firefox never mistook usability for lack of features (like some other open source projects which I shan't name).
I don't get how they can take a class if they don't understand the English required for it. Learning physics is not only learning the equations, rules, formulas and what not, it's also learning the vocabulary of the subject.
I came to the US for college and I majored in Political Science. I had to prove that I had good written and spoken English by taking TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) with a certain mark. All other foreign students had to do the same, and those who didn't had to take some ESL courses before starting their regular course.
A part of my education was learning English and I never requested to use a dictionary during a test, though I often carried an English-English paper one around. All tests I took were on subjects covered in class, so if I didn't understand concepts of e.g. "urban development" or what a "legal brief" is, it sure wouldn't help me to be able to translate that to my own language. Also, as I majored in social science, a big part of my grade was in-class participation where dictionaries electronic translators can't really help.
I can't imagine how someone can successfully follow a lecture in English and then need a dictionary to do a test on it. Besides, using those electronic translators or even English-Some other language is very dumbing... Jeez, spend 4 years in USA attending a university and go back to Korea without knowing English? Money well spent...
That's exactly what Ritalin is supposed to do. A friend of mine was diagnosed with ADHD and it had a calming effect on him. On one hand, he says he could concentrate better in classes, but opted to stop using Ritalin because it affected his lifestyle. And yes, he certainly seemed a more boring company, but I can't say he looked like a zombie or anything... He was just calmer.
He let me pop one of his pills. It had absolutely opposite effect on me. It was the effect that I imagine taking speed would have. I became hyperactive, couldn't concentrate and had a very hard time falling asleep that night.
What is needed is a good new fork with strong support.
How many open source projects "with strong support" can you name? Linux is, the way I see it, one of the biggest and most important open source projects out there, thus facing toughest challenges. In this decade, at least, I haven't seen that many complaints about stability of the project.
Compare that to projects like OpenOffice and their challenges, or the time CentOS's boss ran away with the key...
There is no guarantee that changing who controls Linux will have a positive impact on the project. Personally, I don't even see any problems within the project that can't be solved internally...
Most people who come from Windows expect Linux to behave just like their old environment.
On Linux, things are NOT installed by downloading executables from the web and running them. We have package management for that (and most of them work without a glitch).
On Linux, drivers are a foreign concept. We have modules which are, in most modern distros, included pre-installed and loaded on demand by hardware detection.
Both those things are perhaps better or worse on Linux than on Windows, but the bottomline: they are different.
I've been using Linux for over a decade now and haven't touched Windows much. Imagine my frustration when I decided to install Windows once on a friend's computer:
My point is: there is a learning curve with anything. From what I read in your post, you agree that the learning curve is easier on Linux. Just because people learn how to use Windows doesn't mean Linux should be adapted to their knowledge...
This probably is a huge deal. It affects your legal status. It affects how much time you will spend dealing with bureaucracy. Also, it may affect how you deal with your money.
E.g. as a freelancer - if you work contract-by-contract, you get to do with your money as you wish. If you have an "agency" of a sort, you can still treat money as your own and you pay dues (apart from income tax, stuff like pension, social security, medical, etc.) as a fixed amount.
If you are a full fledged company, you have to assign yourself a fixed salary which determines how much you will spend on those "social services". It means you can't just withdraw and handle your money any way you want.
There is all sorts of implications...
My Ubuntu installation at work installed a Firefox extension by default. It also made numerous modifications to packages installed on my computer - from bash to Xorg to Gnome. Both legal and morally acceptable.
Same thing is with Microsoft, with the only difference being that there is no assumed connection between Windows and Firefox (Microsoft doesn't package Firefox)
Your OS will tamper with the rest of your machine. The question is: do you trust your operating system with your computer?
I used to work at an American university where we received a huge amount of notices from MPAA, Sony & friends. This was some 7 years ago and affected students living in dorms and using the university ISP.
We implemented the three strikes rule, but we ourselves were well aware of the flaws:
We should really start rethinking how we think about copyright. At least in the country I'm in now, you cannot commit a crime without an intent. What stops everyone from claiming ignorance on how computers work and what happens when you run a P2P program? On the other hand, what stops corporations from claiming infringement on an IP? What sort of evidence can you provide that somebody transmitted pieces of your work online and how can you prove that you didn't alter the evidence to your cause?
I'm sorry that they dropped PHP. PHP can be great for learning OO programming. It quickly offers excellent real-world examples of programming: a typical example would be making a blog application. In that example, students can learn how to think in terms of objects (a blog entry is an object, each comment is an object, etc.), they can even construct a simple ORM (which will essentially teach them to use stuff like Hibernate with Java).
Also, PHP has those neat features, like implementing Iterator, creating ArrayObjects, etc. which can all teach students how to work with linked lists, how to reuse code, etc.
I started learning OO programming with C++, and I was infinitely bored by console apps with cats and dogs inheriting properties from animal class.
Finally, even students can now afford a couple of bucks a month hosting with PHP, and show off their work to the world.
In Serbia, we have blinking green, just before yellow. It actually makes yellow usable as "clear the intersection" time. It's mostly on boulevards where people drive a bit faster (around 60km/h).
Smaller streets are usually too slow or jammed in traffic to even have this issue. In some EU countries, I've seen the seconds count down of green (i.e. you have 5 seconds until the light goes yellow). That's also very useful.
P.S. I was really hoping to enclose blinking green into a <blink> tag... Doesn't seem to be supported anymore :(
The 2.x era will live on (and *my* magic crystall ball tells me it will do so for a long time.)
Not necessarily. GNOME being an open source project, it will be hard to motivate people to maintain whatever becomes obsolete in 2.30, and it will be even harder for distribution packagers to maintain a double set of GNOME (which is already notoriously tedious to package).
There is always XFCE for people who don't like 3.0 changes. Even now, differences between GNOME and XFCE are not that big, and since most of Gnome's DE functionality has been switching to GTK anyway (e.g. GVFS), XFCE will have access to it.
Perhaps in movies... My grandfather stayed alive because he didn't go to school one day during the war. Nazis got students out of classrooms in a school in Yugoslavia and shot them.
See what happened, and that was not an isolated incident by no means.
Partisans, who were guerrilla fighters of Yugoslavia, were never taken as POW, they were tortured and killed.
Both news writing and Wikipedia (encyclopedia) writing requires one to be impartial, to establish notability of the subject and to be precise. The best part about it is that those students will quickly learn in the wiki process that their writing can be much improved and that there is more aspects to their subject then they thought.
I lived in USA for 6 years and the best thing there, in terms of citizen-government interaction, was that there was no mandatory ID cards.
Sure, an ID card is not that big of a deal at first. It's not much unlike a DL (which almost everyone carries around all the time anyway), and it's not like the police can't track you down all the time.
But this is what will happen:
Here in Serbia, quite literally, I can't even take a walk in the park anymore without a cop stopping me and asking for ID...
Of coarse I already keep all my keys on a single keychain, just like most people. This probably wouldn't be any less secure.
You probably don't have your address, name or a phone number attached on the same keychain.
What really got me about this one was the attitude some developers had ... constantly trying to justify their correctness, despite the huge backlash from users. I feel the trust relationship is kinda broken ... but at least they finally came around and listened.
Fedora does this all the time (or at least, often enough for me to think it's all the time). Here is a couple of examples:
My point is: Fedora is a polygon for testing new technologies to be included in RHEL. Nothing more, nothing less. Perfect users for it are RHEL admins who want to get a preview of future releases, not casual desktop users.
I work for a company in Serbia and we write code for an Italian corporation which also outsources their development to Brazil and India. I'm happy if comments are in English at all. Still, we get by just fine, as long as we agree on design patterns to use and writing clear and concise code. Also, whatever happened to: "Comments should describe what the function is doing, not HOW it is doing it"?
It's a loaded poll. You call as many people as you can, and ask them questions like: Q) How do you think introduction of socialism into our community that is caused by cheap Internet access will affect our already fragile economy? a) Very badly. b) Somewhat badly. c) Not that badly.
Based on my experiences in a couple of 3rd world countries, I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of these users are at internet cafes - they spend the local equivalent of a couple of quarters for a couple hours and then the next user gets on.
"3rd world country" is a very wide definition, but I live in one of those country where we pull a lot of content but don't click on ads.
Here in Serbia, many people have good enough broadband connection, either at work or home, to watch a lot of videos.
However, we have no incentive whatsoever to click most of the ads. Paypal doesn't work here, and I wouldn't trust our post to ship any goods anyway. Also, most of the stuff to buy online (like premium memberships) are way too expensive for most of us.
I think countries like this are the problem, not the real 3rd world where hardly anyone has the bandwidth to watch videos and download music.
What I'm talking about is that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface.
Display drivers got updated?
So, I'm attracted exclusively to women. That makes me straight because I have a penis. However, deep inside, I feel that I am a woman. Does that make me a lesbian with a penis?
No, that makes you a teenager with hormones. It may or may not have anything to do with how you feel in a decade or so...
If your site gained any popularity, they would make bots specifically to register in your website.
The whole point is to have as many different techniques as you can come up with. CAPTCHA became too hard for humans and too easy for computers because it is used so widely. One of the CMS's I use makes you check a box to confirm you are not a bot, in addition to a preview button - works like a charm if you make it painfully clear to people that they have to submit after preview (not impossible). Other one makes you do simple math (e.g. What is 2 in addition to 6), and I also had 0 spam messages with it. Sure, if those CMS's got more popular, they would have to come up with alternative methods, and change them often, but that's the way to go with spam...