Gee...lets take that logic to the hackneyed metaphor of...the automobile! "Why would anyone want to work on an Aston Martin Coupe when the minivan or the Reliant "K" car is in such wide use?" Get it now?
No? Then let me spell it out in small words for ya: "Widely adopted" i.e Windows, OS/X etc does not always equate to the best. See "'reality' TV". Does that help a teensy-weensy bit...?
Blah blah blah. When I game, I game with my closest friends, and we're geographically dispersed (we knew each other before there was an "online"). We have our own private TeamSpeak server and we shoot the shit as if we were around a table playing cards or watching a movie. I also usually have 3 books on the go at any given time (fiction, non-fiction/biography, astronomy/physics), have a wonderful wife, am active in my community, hold down a job, hike every weekend etc. And guess what? Games are FUN! They're not passive, like TV, and you have to coordinate carefully with others and use strategy, reflexes, detailed observation. Your comment verges on "troll" and is mired in elitist ignorance.
Nothing personal, but fro where I sit, fuck you. Seriously. The Call of Duty games have sold utter boatloads in their first week for both consoles and PC's. So do other FPS games. I play COD World at War (because it's the last COD version that let's users create their on servers without paying additional fees to Activison, create unique maps without having to pay for them from Activision, create mods without having to pay more to Activision...you get the idea). In these games, my average ping of 49Ms gives me a huge advantage over most other players, who can range between 75 and 100, 200, 500+ Ms. So, for a boatload of gamers, ping is king, I've spent a bit more money on a Cisco router that let's me adjust QOS per port, gone for a Fiber to the CO high speed internet connection (waiting for the fiber to the home upgrade), and optimized the snot out of my system and network to give me the best pings.For you Farmville types, a sub-mediocre Internet connection is just fine. Burt you do not represent everyone else. So STFU with your idiotic statement that your requirements are representative of the rest of the Netizens. Because they are absolutely not. Not even close.
That guy gives assholes a bad name. Let this be a lesson to you kids. What your parents said is true: Whatever you send in an email, pretend it's written on a postcard.
Oh screw it! You're asking them to read the frikkin' manual or the equivalent thereof! Who does that?!? JUST DO IT! And if traveling at warp speed causes disruptions in the space-time continuum, we'll just reduce speeds and perhaps eliminate warp-speed travel, as long as the Klingons and Romulans do as well.
1. Pork
2. Some researchers get media attention
3. Some researchers might get to play with the laser.
The whole idea is so lame. Please, give the money to a real condensed matter physicist, or a chemist or a materials scientist please.
I'll feed ya, Anonymous Coward!:-) Why is it lame? Potentially (and admittedly it will eat giga-watts of electricity) it could confirm some very fundamental elements of theoretical physics. That, to me, is worth every giga-penny. Advancement of fundamental knowledge is money well-spent. Do you have something against science on the frontiers? Just askin'.
Bastard. You said it before I could. If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I've switched to Mint running the last Gnome 2.x. Please, PLEASE, somebody fork Gnome so that that the goodness that is Gnome 2 can live on with nice tweaks and features. This shitty OS X imitator that's Unity is like watching a bad Pearl Jam cover band with an alcoholic lead singer with nodules on his vocal chords, and Gnome three is just a big bad barrel of WTF?!? I want a simple interface that just gets out of the way and lets me work. Gnome 2.x does that. Why dump it for eye-candy-ish half-baked buggy trash? Coding to the lowest common denominator just will not fucking bring the masses. Want Linux to be hot and cool with the masses? Find a hardware manufacturer that says screw the short-term in terms of profits, is going to be uncompromising in search of excellence in design, and will create an interface that is elegant and will attract coders. Saint.Jobs did it. Shuttleworth's a pale imitator. Anyone else? (Full disclosure: I don't own a Mac, though I run OS X Leopard in vitualization now and then. I like my iPhone. I prefer my HP TouchPad running WebOS to the iPad that I had for 4 weeks. I'm typing this in Windows 7 on my gaming rig. My other PC runs Linux Mint and my work laptop is set to dual boot Windows 7 and Mint. No one from IT has come into my cubicle yelling at me. Yet).
Welll....The OS is fucking superior to iOS - it really is quite nice. It needs more polish, but the multi-tasking is damned nice. The card interface is brilliant and is more intuitive than iOS (full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 as does my wife and I run OSX in virtualization on PC's on VMWare Workstation despite Apple's odd restrictions). Sure, there aren't 1000 fart apps for it (I found just 1) but as a content consumption and unified communications device it borders on excellent...and you get the ability to play Flash. Overclock the sucker (did I mention that HP embraces Home-brew?) and add some cool hacks and you have a bitchin' beast that as a bonus plays Angry Birds. I can read e-books,.pdfs, remotely connect to my PC and servers, edit MS Office docs...
I have access to an iPad and Playbook at work, as do my colleagues, And I've played with both over several weeks. Meh. 9 out of 39 of us bought TouchPads for what it can do, and for the potential to run Android in a dual-boot config. That was my primary reason for jumping on the low-cost 32Gb Touch pad - running Android...until I started using WebOS and dove deep into modding the device. Too bad HP will let it die a painful death. WebOS, we hardly knew ye...
Fuck dd-wrt. Hasn't everyone switched over to openwrt or tomato these days?
I'm a Toamto-holic. dd-wrt just would not work properly on my Cisco/LinksysWRT160N V3 despite careful configuration changes etc. In frustration I installed Tomato and it worked first try right out of the gate. I had also used it on an older Linksys router and it never gave me any grief. Its features cover off my needs and it's been completely hassle free. Just my own experience.
I've kept an external one for 5 years now and it comes in handy. I recently acquired a lightly used 4-year-old HP Proliant rackmount server that has no DVD/ROM and I have no USB sticks available. Having the external drive let me install ClearOS and get a damned useful router/gateway/ftp/web server running in a few hours. I also have a basement closet full of a huge variety of old/new cables, components, etc etc. you never know when you'll need that old widget.
thats the thing, the browser on webos is terrible. Opening links in a new card is painfully slow. Coming to Slashdot, and going through the front page opening a new link in a new card like a tabbed browser is the worst ux ever.
It doesn't have to be that way. I added a replacement Kernel that lets me boost the CPU to 1.836 Ghz, added some patches that stop some logging services, a tweak here, a change there...Slashdot comes up in +/- 3 seconds. Opening a site in a new card 5-6 seconds. Not bad at all.
Wish I had mod points for OP. Nailed it. Add apps for very specific content (Ted Talks, Khan Learning) and there's no reason not to get this at firesale prices
I went in to the Best Buy in the nearby city this morning. I got there at 9:20. The store didn't open until 10:00. Next door was a Staples. They were open, so I went in. A sales guy said that they had 15, and they sold within 5 minutes of opening. He also said that both Best Buy locations in town were sold out (when I left Staples, a lineup was forming at BB). Another customer overheard my conversation with Sales Guy, and said that the Source by Circuit City in the mall across the street showed 2 available on their website. I got there and there was a lineup already. Crap. Light-bulb goes off. In a town about 30km away, there is a Staples and a Source. I high-tail it there, and get to the Staples 1 minute before 10:00 opening. As I walk up, there is a crowd of 8 or so, but I just breeze in past them, ask the opener how many are left. He says 2 of the 32Gb and before he finishes, I say "I'll take one". Score! Herd mentality kept the group bunched together. I was Jonesing and came from a too-fast drive. Adrenalin was driving me.
It really is not a bad unit, especially at 80% off. It's actually quite good. It's very functional, but the inevitable Android hack has me excited.
To the person who modded me down: Are you willing to pay more to keep receiving your paper copy of your favourite magazine? If so. how much more? How much profit will you allow the publisher to make? Should the writers be allowed to make a living wage? I'm not being factitious - these are serious, germane questions. Unless we can answer these questions honestly, most periodicals cannot survive.
You have the right to vote with your wallet, but I don't have to agree with your decision. Personally, I initially had a hard time getting used to e-copies of mags, but I adapted. The publishing world is in rough shape right now, and as commercial entities, they have to be profitable. With the economy in the dumps, people aren't subscribing or buying as much off of the newsstands, and advertisers are guarding their cash carefully. Your choice: read free commentary on the 'net with no guarantee of quality or accuracy, or "suck it up buttercup" and read e-version written by professionals and edited by professionals. I'd rather switch mediums than give up quality.
As a member of an organization that also has a publishing arm that includes a periodical (I'm on the Publishing Committee), I can tell you that the costs of publishing and distributing dead-tree copies is astronomical (pun intended), and unless your subscription fees are stupid-high or you have enough advertisers to off-set most of the costs, you will be drowning in a sea of red ink. We had to make the tough decisions to 1.) allow limited advertising, and 2.) go to all digital, with printed copies provided for an additional nominal fee for those that desired them. For those with their fingers in their ears chanting "na-na-na-can't-hear-you", good riddance. Commercial organizations have to pay writers, freelancers, printers, the postal service, utility bills, rents, taxes etc. I'm surprised that so many have survived this long. As a non-profit, we operate on a shoe-string budget. Those of you who begrudge commercial periodicals their meagre margins and who have made the tough decision to keep publishing and keep employing writers, fuck you. Fuck you to Heck. Get with the 21st century or go away. You won't be missed.
Yeah, they may be beaten to an inch of their lives like us, but at least we get a stale crust of bread and a glass of urine in the evening. Are you out of your fucking mind? Being screwed is being screwed, nevermind HOW they are being screwed in the USA. Idiot.
Mod the above post up. I run two Linux servers (ClearOS, Ubuntu Server) and 4 Linux desktops (3 dual-boot) at home. Linux Mint w/ gnome is stable, user-friendly, and recommended 110%. 2 will be migrated to Mint, One already has it, and one will stay with Lubuntu for quick boot/shutdown (down in 2 seconds! Up in 21).
Case Study: Client with 45 users; he's in charge of accounting, warehouse management and oh yeah: IT. He loves IT, has built some custom scripts, manages the domain, has kept the server humming for 7 years. Time for a new server. I do a full IT review/vulnerability assessment and make recommendations (sales/consulting/herb Tarlick guy w/ 20 years experience and a passion for all things IT. My home network is way out of proportion for the needs of 2 people) in concert with our systems engineers. We propose a solution, clearly define the scope - based on best-practices from long experience and membership and participation with a peer organization in our industry, and include in it an estimated cost. We include training for the guy and explicitly mention that he will be a part of the install process and that he will be trained. SLA's are clearly defined. We came in UNDER BUDGET, the network is locked down, solid, and the guy is happier than a pig in poop. He has told me that this was the best learning experience of his career. He figured out why some thing that he had previously set up didn't work, how to do it right, and so many other things that he hadn't considered.
By all means bring in people who know what they're doing. Vet them. Make sure that the contract includes training you (involving you in the installation process AND building your skills - skills that make you more valuable to your employer). This is an awesome opportunity for your career. You get to implement a 1st class solution, improve your skills at no personal expense to you, and make yourself more valuable to your employer.
Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
Gee...lets take that logic to the hackneyed metaphor of...the automobile! "Why would anyone want to work on an Aston Martin Coupe when the minivan or the Reliant "K" car is in such wide use?" Get it now? No? Then let me spell it out in small words for ya: "Widely adopted" i.e Windows, OS/X etc does not always equate to the best. See "'reality' TV". Does that help a teensy-weensy bit...?
Wish I had mod points. My 49ms (lowest on the crowded server) is gold in my FPS games.
Blah blah blah. When I game, I game with my closest friends, and we're geographically dispersed (we knew each other before there was an "online"). We have our own private TeamSpeak server and we shoot the shit as if we were around a table playing cards or watching a movie. I also usually have 3 books on the go at any given time (fiction, non-fiction/biography, astronomy/physics), have a wonderful wife, am active in my community, hold down a job, hike every weekend etc. And guess what? Games are FUN! They're not passive, like TV, and you have to coordinate carefully with others and use strategy, reflexes, detailed observation. Your comment verges on "troll" and is mired in elitist ignorance.
Citations please. Most of my fellow gamers (our clan has 450 members) are males in their late 30's to mid 60's, with about 15% female in their late 20's to late 40's.The average gamer is 37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture The average social game is a woman in her early 40's. http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/
Nothing personal, but fro where I sit, fuck you. Seriously. The Call of Duty games have sold utter boatloads in their first week for both consoles and PC's. So do other FPS games. I play COD World at War (because it's the last COD version that let's users create their on servers without paying additional fees to Activison, create unique maps without having to pay for them from Activision, create mods without having to pay more to Activision...you get the idea). In these games, my average ping of 49Ms gives me a huge advantage over most other players, who can range between 75 and 100, 200, 500+ Ms. So, for a boatload of gamers, ping is king, I've spent a bit more money on a Cisco router that let's me adjust QOS per port, gone for a Fiber to the CO high speed internet connection (waiting for the fiber to the home upgrade), and optimized the snot out of my system and network to give me the best pings.For you Farmville types, a sub-mediocre Internet connection is just fine. Burt you do not represent everyone else. So STFU with your idiotic statement that your requirements are representative of the rest of the Netizens. Because they are absolutely not. Not even close.
That guy gives assholes a bad name. Let this be a lesson to you kids. What your parents said is true: Whatever you send in an email, pretend it's written on a postcard.
Oh screw it! You're asking them to read the frikkin' manual or the equivalent thereof! Who does that?!? JUST DO IT! And if traveling at warp speed causes disruptions in the space-time continuum, we'll just reduce speeds and perhaps eliminate warp-speed travel, as long as the Klingons and Romulans do as well.
The answer is not what is given. The answer is:
1. Pork 2. Some researchers get media attention 3. Some researchers might get to play with the laser.
The whole idea is so lame. Please, give the money to a real condensed matter physicist, or a chemist or a materials scientist please.
I'll feed ya, Anonymous Coward! :-) Why is it lame? Potentially (and admittedly it will eat giga-watts of electricity) it could confirm some very fundamental elements of theoretical physics. That, to me, is worth every giga-penny. Advancement of fundamental knowledge is money well-spent. Do you have something against science on the frontiers? Just askin'.
Correction: I run Snow Leopard in virtualization. Whatever.
Bastard. You said it before I could. If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I've switched to Mint running the last Gnome 2.x. Please, PLEASE, somebody fork Gnome so that that the goodness that is Gnome 2 can live on with nice tweaks and features. This shitty OS X imitator that's Unity is like watching a bad Pearl Jam cover band with an alcoholic lead singer with nodules on his vocal chords, and Gnome three is just a big bad barrel of WTF?!? I want a simple interface that just gets out of the way and lets me work. Gnome 2.x does that. Why dump it for eye-candy-ish half-baked buggy trash? Coding to the lowest common denominator just will not fucking bring the masses. Want Linux to be hot and cool with the masses? Find a hardware manufacturer that says screw the short-term in terms of profits, is going to be uncompromising in search of excellence in design, and will create an interface that is elegant and will attract coders. Saint.Jobs did it. Shuttleworth's a pale imitator. Anyone else? (Full disclosure: I don't own a Mac, though I run OS X Leopard in vitualization now and then. I like my iPhone. I prefer my HP TouchPad running WebOS to the iPad that I had for 4 weeks. I'm typing this in Windows 7 on my gaming rig. My other PC runs Linux Mint and my work laptop is set to dual boot Windows 7 and Mint. No one from IT has come into my cubicle yelling at me. Yet).
Welll....The OS is fucking superior to iOS - it really is quite nice. It needs more polish, but the multi-tasking is damned nice. The card interface is brilliant and is more intuitive than iOS (full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 as does my wife and I run OSX in virtualization on PC's on VMWare Workstation despite Apple's odd restrictions). Sure, there aren't 1000 fart apps for it (I found just 1) but as a content consumption and unified communications device it borders on excellent...and you get the ability to play Flash. Overclock the sucker (did I mention that HP embraces Home-brew?) and add some cool hacks and you have a bitchin' beast that as a bonus plays Angry Birds. I can read e-books, .pdfs, remotely connect to my PC and servers, edit MS Office docs...
I have access to an iPad and Playbook at work, as do my colleagues, And I've played with both over several weeks. Meh. 9 out of 39 of us bought TouchPads for what it can do, and for the potential to run Android in a dual-boot config. That was my primary reason for jumping on the low-cost 32Gb Touch pad - running Android...until I started using WebOS and dove deep into modding the device. Too bad HP will let it die a painful death. WebOS, we hardly knew ye...
...RIM's product is the best, therefore, "BBKing". Further posts are unnecessary.
...wishing I had mod points...
Fuck dd-wrt. Hasn't everyone switched over to openwrt or tomato these days?
I'm a Toamto-holic. dd-wrt just would not work properly on my Cisco/LinksysWRT160N V3 despite careful configuration changes etc. In frustration I installed Tomato and it worked first try right out of the gate. I had also used it on an older Linksys router and it never gave me any grief. Its features cover off my needs and it's been completely hassle free. Just my own experience.
I've kept an external one for 5 years now and it comes in handy. I recently acquired a lightly used 4-year-old HP Proliant rackmount server that has no DVD/ROM and I have no USB sticks available. Having the external drive let me install ClearOS and get a damned useful router/gateway/ftp/web server running in a few hours. I also have a basement closet full of a huge variety of old/new cables, components, etc etc. you never know when you'll need that old widget.
thats the thing, the browser on webos is terrible. Opening links in a new card is painfully slow. Coming to Slashdot, and going through the front page opening a new link in a new card like a tabbed browser is the worst ux ever.
It doesn't have to be that way. I added a replacement Kernel that lets me boost the CPU to 1.836 Ghz, added some patches that stop some logging services, a tweak here, a change there...Slashdot comes up in +/- 3 seconds. Opening a site in a new card 5-6 seconds. Not bad at all.
Wish I had mod points for OP. Nailed it. Add apps for very specific content (Ted Talks, Khan Learning) and there's no reason not to get this at firesale prices
There are already folks working on getting Android (honeycomb) and Ubuntu on it. http://liliputing.com/2011/08/hp-touchpad-afterlife-hackers-bringing-android-ubuntu-to-hps-tablet.html
I went in to the Best Buy in the nearby city this morning. I got there at 9:20. The store didn't open until 10:00. Next door was a Staples. They were open, so I went in. A sales guy said that they had 15, and they sold within 5 minutes of opening. He also said that both Best Buy locations in town were sold out (when I left Staples, a lineup was forming at BB). Another customer overheard my conversation with Sales Guy, and said that the Source by Circuit City in the mall across the street showed 2 available on their website. I got there and there was a lineup already. Crap. Light-bulb goes off. In a town about 30km away, there is a Staples and a Source. I high-tail it there, and get to the Staples 1 minute before 10:00 opening. As I walk up, there is a crowd of 8 or so, but I just breeze in past them, ask the opener how many are left. He says 2 of the 32Gb and before he finishes, I say "I'll take one". Score! Herd mentality kept the group bunched together. I was Jonesing and came from a too-fast drive. Adrenalin was driving me. It really is not a bad unit, especially at 80% off. It's actually quite good. It's very functional, but the inevitable Android hack has me excited.
To the person who modded me down: Are you willing to pay more to keep receiving your paper copy of your favourite magazine? If so. how much more? How much profit will you allow the publisher to make? Should the writers be allowed to make a living wage? I'm not being factitious - these are serious, germane questions. Unless we can answer these questions honestly, most periodicals cannot survive.
You have the right to vote with your wallet, but I don't have to agree with your decision. Personally, I initially had a hard time getting used to e-copies of mags, but I adapted. The publishing world is in rough shape right now, and as commercial entities, they have to be profitable. With the economy in the dumps, people aren't subscribing or buying as much off of the newsstands, and advertisers are guarding their cash carefully. Your choice: read free commentary on the 'net with no guarantee of quality or accuracy, or "suck it up buttercup" and read e-version written by professionals and edited by professionals. I'd rather switch mediums than give up quality.
As a member of an organization that also has a publishing arm that includes a periodical (I'm on the Publishing Committee), I can tell you that the costs of publishing and distributing dead-tree copies is astronomical (pun intended), and unless your subscription fees are stupid-high or you have enough advertisers to off-set most of the costs, you will be drowning in a sea of red ink. We had to make the tough decisions to 1.) allow limited advertising, and 2.) go to all digital, with printed copies provided for an additional nominal fee for those that desired them. For those with their fingers in their ears chanting "na-na-na-can't-hear-you", good riddance. Commercial organizations have to pay writers, freelancers, printers, the postal service, utility bills, rents, taxes etc. I'm surprised that so many have survived this long. As a non-profit, we operate on a shoe-string budget. Those of you who begrudge commercial periodicals their meagre margins and who have made the tough decision to keep publishing and keep employing writers, fuck you. Fuck you to Heck. Get with the 21st century or go away. You won't be missed.
Yeah, they may be beaten to an inch of their lives like us, but at least we get a stale crust of bread and a glass of urine in the evening. Are you out of your fucking mind? Being screwed is being screwed, nevermind HOW they are being screwed in the USA. Idiot.
Mod the above post up. I run two Linux servers (ClearOS, Ubuntu Server) and 4 Linux desktops (3 dual-boot) at home. Linux Mint w/ gnome is stable, user-friendly, and recommended 110%. 2 will be migrated to Mint, One already has it, and one will stay with Lubuntu for quick boot/shutdown (down in 2 seconds! Up in 21).
Case Study: Client with 45 users; he's in charge of accounting, warehouse management and oh yeah: IT. He loves IT, has built some custom scripts, manages the domain, has kept the server humming for 7 years. Time for a new server. I do a full IT review/vulnerability assessment and make recommendations (sales/consulting/herb Tarlick guy w/ 20 years experience and a passion for all things IT. My home network is way out of proportion for the needs of 2 people) in concert with our systems engineers. We propose a solution, clearly define the scope - based on best-practices from long experience and membership and participation with a peer organization in our industry, and include in it an estimated cost. We include training for the guy and explicitly mention that he will be a part of the install process and that he will be trained. SLA's are clearly defined. We came in UNDER BUDGET, the network is locked down, solid, and the guy is happier than a pig in poop. He has told me that this was the best learning experience of his career. He figured out why some thing that he had previously set up didn't work, how to do it right, and so many other things that he hadn't considered. By all means bring in people who know what they're doing. Vet them. Make sure that the contract includes training you (involving you in the installation process AND building your skills - skills that make you more valuable to your employer). This is an awesome opportunity for your career. You get to implement a 1st class solution, improve your skills at no personal expense to you, and make yourself more valuable to your employer. Good luck!