And I know it is easy enough for people to sit back and criticize what others have done. Especially geeks, and technology geeks, with their "Worst. Operating System. Ever."
But I can say, without regret, as an armchair critic, that if I had thousands of programmers, billions of dollars, and six years, and the experience behind developing the world's most commercially successful operating system...I could make something better than Vista. With those type of resources, the end result should be something unambiguously great.
I totally didn't believe you, until I checked out ebay. And it seems like you can.
And then I remembered about methamphetamines. Not that I am suggesting that all this stuff is stolen, some of it might have just been put together by tweakers out of paper clips and bottle tops during a two week tweaking session.
Well, this is new information and changes my analysis. I didn't know there was a legal precedent for situations where they displayed one thing, but still gave (in small print) information that the sold items would not look exactly like advertised items.
And yet, I still believe there is so many technical legal points to be debated about this. Everything is advertised looking as ideally as possible, but when does that cross over into deception?
Of course, there is a lot of companies advertising, so I am not sure if they all included the fine print. But as long as they did, I don't think it can be considered false advertising.
I might say it is more like being wired for a normal oven, but not for a commercial oven. Or just not wired for an oven that was as pretty as it looked in the brochure. The point is, the Vista capable computers are still capable as Vista, just not to run Aero, which I think most materials said needed more resources. I read the Microsoft page before Vista came out, and I think they were fairly clear on the difference. I should also note that I am not a Microsoft apologist at all, and haven't even run Windows since 2004. But I think that you can't blame a company for their marketing unless they actually lie, instead of just having images that misled some people.
I think that Microsoft is being wrongly sued in this, and I bet the suit will be thrown out quickly enough.
Basically, what it seems to be is a consumer thought that "Windows Vista Capable" meant that the computer would be able to do all the pretty things that Microsoft portrayed in ads.
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package. Or even, for that matter, that even after buying an SUV, you are not suddenly scaling mountains in the wilderness.
I don't think that Microsoft was concealing anything. They were advertising a product with its niftiest features, but I think that about 15 minutes of research would have let someone know that they couldn't use the Aero interface. Microsoft used marketing and advertising to make their product look the best, that isn't the same as cheating someone.
Sure, I think "The Wheel" and "The Inclined Plane" are great technically, but marketing never found a way to really get their brand loyalty started in the vital 18-24 demographic.
I would have to say that the AI for Wesnoth, an open-source Turn Based Strategy, is one of the better AIs I have encountered (for that genre of games). Although it isn't that the AI is that well done, it is that the rule set is simple enough that an AI can follow it. I've played Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic and Masters of Orion, the trinity of TBS games. Although they were often very good, the AI could only win in all of them due to "cheating" of a sort. The reason was that the various different factors to be considered were behind the planning ability of an AI. For example, in Heroes of Might and Magic II, there were seven different resources that a player could collect. Often, towards the end of the game, even while it was badly losing, the AI would be running around trying to grab resources, and would lose because of it. In Civilization II, because there was so many different units and improvements to be built, the AI would produce useless units, or spend all their time building improvements to cities that were about to be captured. The algorithm for keeping track of so many factors is impossible to make in an AI. AIs can't understand what is relevant and what is not.
So, in Wesnoth, there is only one resource to be considered, gold. Damage is also a straightforward mathematical calculation. So with the simpler rule set, the AI can play in a relevant way. Not that the rule set is simple in the sense of easy, it has a few factors, but those few factors can be combined in intricate ways.
So Wesnoth has one of the better AIs in my view, although of course it can still be tricked and worked around, but then any AI can be.
is not totally accurate, I am sure, and does not totally cover all the intricacies of different economies, but on the face of it, it seems that many European countries are doing pretty well for themselves. Many European countries have large surpluses (Germany is #3), and even the EC countries that have deficits (United Kingdom, and Spain, for example), have deficits that are smaller, both in total terms and per capita.
The United States has been running big trade and budget deficits for a while now, supported for a large part by Chinese investors and the Chinese Central Bank buying American stocks and bonds. And I think the consensus amongst economists (and, for that matter, simple logic) is that this can't go on forever, and that eventually the Chinese are going to want to invest their money elsewhere.
So, what would be even more embarrassing then our economy hitting a brick wall because the Chinese are pulling all their money out, is the Chinese pulling all their money out because they want to put it into a currency that can be used to by VIRTUAL FLOWERS.
What exact technology sectors are these people looking at? From this:
"Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services,"
(leaving off the question of how seriously we can take someone who uses a term like "e-leadership")
It seems like when they say "technology" they mean "information technology". Which of course, to most people, maybe especially on Slashdot, seems like a given. But of course there is technological innovation beyond informational technology. Did they take into account advances in medicine, agriculture, construction, aeronautics, machinery, or fabric production? These technological fields aren't perhaps growing at the exponential rate that information technology is, but they are still very important.
It seems like this study might have been paid for by an electronics industry group.
The first thing I would critique about this (amongst many others) is that it is a ranked list. At least in the BBC summary, it doesn't describe the objective rankings of the countries.
For example, if it was on a 100 point scale, the US could have slipped from, say, 99.9 to 99.8, and that would have been enough to slip from first to seventh. Or maybe the objective score would have been a much larger slide. Maybe the US objectively climbed, but just not at the same rate as the other countries. Being that all ten of the top countries have the same mature technological apparatus, I am imagining that whatever shuffling took place in the ratings was rather minor. The actual differences between technology adaption between the US and Iceland might be almost indistinguishable.
Its actually pretty easy, such technology for spreading of gooey stuff already is quite sophisticated when it comes to keyboards. We just have to apply it other places.
1. How relevant is it to have memory that is this fast? As I understand it, no matter how fast memory is, if there isn't enough of it, your computer has to read and write from swap space on the hard drive, and even the fastest harddrive is at least a million times slower than slow memory, since it is a matter of nanoseconds vs. milliseconds (someone might correct me on the technicalities of this). So wouldn't lots of normal speed, or even slow memory, work better than too little ultra-fast memory? (Someone should just build a system that can support 8 gigs of 30 pin SiMMs!)
2. Am I a cranky old man who isn't up on this trend of memory needing active cooling? The closest I've seen is RAMBUS with aluminum sinks built in. It seems that no matter how efficient the cooling system claims to be, active cooling is another thing that can go wrong. I would much rather have slower memory that I don't have to worry about frying, then fast memory that is dependent on a fan that may break.
So, with those things in mind, how worthwhile is this?
I think it should be pointed out that not all Linux users are unwashed hippies. Some are unwashed punks. Others are unwashed geeks. But yes, it is fair to say that all of them are unwashed.
Slashdot Mirror
An important move to make, so that no one else can get the 7 armies a turn bonus for holding the entire continent.
It isn't always too cold. Sometimes it is too hot.
I haven't used Vista.
And don't really plan to.
And I know it is easy enough for people to sit back and criticize what others have done. Especially geeks, and technology geeks, with their "Worst. Operating System. Ever."
But I can say, without regret, as an armchair critic, that if I had thousands of programmers, billions of dollars, and six years, and the experience behind developing the world's most commercially successful operating system...I could make something better than Vista. With those type of resources, the end result should be something unambiguously great.
In Soviet Russia, Linux Gear Buys YOU
You can get a Gig of SoDimm DDR for 70 dollars?
I totally didn't believe you, until I checked out ebay. And it seems like you can.
And then I remembered about methamphetamines. Not that I am suggesting that all this stuff is stolen, some of it might have just been put together by tweakers out of paper clips and bottle tops during a two week tweaking session.
Well, aren't we new-fangled! My mother's 386 laptop running Windows 3.11 certainly didn't try to manage any of my media files!
Well, this is new information and changes my analysis. I didn't know there was a legal precedent for situations where they displayed one thing, but still gave (in small print) information that the sold items would not look exactly like advertised items.
And yet, I still believe there is so many technical legal points to be debated about this. Everything is advertised looking as ideally as possible, but when does that cross over into deception?
Most Microsoft materials include information that not all Vista capable computers can run all features:
v ista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windows
(There is the official word, for example)
Of course, there is a lot of companies advertising, so I am not sure if they all included the fine print. But as long as they did, I don't think it can be considered false advertising.
Well, that would be a separate issue, if there were not drivers for the cards it came with.
The lawsuit seems to be over whether "Vista Capable" means "Vista with Aero Ready".
I might say it is more like being wired for a normal oven, but not for a commercial oven. Or just not wired for an oven that was as pretty as it looked in the brochure.
The point is, the Vista capable computers are still capable as Vista, just not to run Aero, which I think most materials said needed more resources. I read the Microsoft page before Vista came out, and I think they were fairly clear on the difference.
I should also note that I am not a Microsoft apologist at all, and haven't even run Windows since 2004. But I think that you can't blame a company for their marketing unless they actually lie, instead of just having images that misled some people.
I think that Microsoft is being wrongly sued in this, and I bet the suit will be thrown out quickly enough.
Basically, what it seems to be is a consumer thought that "Windows Vista Capable" meant that the computer would be able to do all the pretty things that Microsoft portrayed in ads.
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package. Or even, for that matter, that even after buying an SUV, you are not suddenly scaling mountains in the wilderness.
I don't think that Microsoft was concealing anything. They were advertising a product with its niftiest features, but I think that about 15 minutes of research would have let someone know that they couldn't use the Aero interface. Microsoft used marketing and advertising to make their product look the best, that isn't the same as cheating someone.
Sure, I think "The Wheel" and "The Inclined Plane" are great technically, but marketing never found a way to really get their brand loyalty started in the vital 18-24 demographic.
I would have to say that the AI for Wesnoth, an open-source Turn Based Strategy, is one of the better AIs I have encountered (for that genre of games).
Although it isn't that the AI is that well done, it is that the rule set is simple enough that an AI can follow it.
I've played Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic and Masters of Orion, the trinity of TBS games. Although they were often very good, the AI could only win in all of them due to "cheating" of a sort. The reason was that the various different factors to be considered were behind the planning ability of an AI. For example, in Heroes of Might and Magic II, there were seven different resources that a player could collect. Often, towards the end of the game, even while it was badly losing, the AI would be running around trying to grab resources, and would lose because of it. In Civilization II, because there was so many different units and improvements to be built, the AI would produce useless units, or spend all their time building improvements to cities that were about to be captured. The algorithm for keeping track of so many factors is impossible to make in an AI. AIs can't understand what is relevant and what is not.
So, in Wesnoth, there is only one resource to be considered, gold. Damage is also a straightforward mathematical calculation. So with the simpler rule set, the AI can play in a relevant way. Not that the rule set is simple in the sense of easy, it has a few factors, but those few factors can be combined in intricate ways.
So Wesnoth has one of the better AIs in my view, although of course it can still be tricked and worked around, but then any AI can be.
This list:
_ current_account_balance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
is not totally accurate, I am sure, and does not totally cover all the intricacies of different economies, but on the face of it, it seems that many European countries are doing pretty well for themselves. Many European countries have large surpluses (Germany is #3), and even the EC countries that have deficits (United Kingdom, and Spain, for example), have deficits that are smaller, both in total terms and per capita.
The United States has been running big trade and budget deficits for a while now, supported for a large part by Chinese investors and the Chinese Central Bank buying American stocks and bonds. And I think the consensus amongst economists (and, for that matter, simple logic) is that this can't go on forever, and that eventually the Chinese are going to want to invest their money elsewhere.
So, what would be even more embarrassing then our economy hitting a brick wall because the Chinese are pulling all their money out, is the Chinese pulling all their money out because they want to put it into a currency that can be used to by VIRTUAL FLOWERS.
Oh, they are "influential, talented and powerful"
:)
They should go to bars and try to pick up girls by pointing that out
What exact technology sectors are these people looking at?
From this:
"Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services,"
(leaving off the question of how seriously we can take someone who uses a term like "e-leadership")
It seems like when they say "technology" they mean "information technology". Which of course, to most people, maybe especially on Slashdot, seems like a given. But of course there is technological innovation beyond informational technology. Did they take into account advances in medicine, agriculture, construction, aeronautics, machinery, or fabric production? These technological fields aren't perhaps growing at the exponential rate that information technology is, but they are still very important.
It seems like this study might have been paid for by an electronics industry group.
The first thing I would critique about this (amongst many others) is that it is a ranked list. At least in the BBC summary, it doesn't describe the objective rankings of the countries.
For example, if it was on a 100 point scale, the US could have slipped from, say, 99.9 to 99.8, and that would have been enough to slip from first to seventh. Or maybe the objective score would have been a much larger slide. Maybe the US objectively climbed, but just not at the same rate as the other countries. Being that all ten of the top countries have the same mature technological apparatus, I am imagining that whatever shuffling took place in the ratings was rather minor. The actual differences between technology adaption between the US and Iceland might be almost indistinguishable.
Well, that all depends on if you consider water to mean "H20" or to mean "liquid water".
You are exaggerating, it also includes Office.
Its actually pretty easy, such technology for spreading of gooey stuff already is quite sophisticated when it comes to keyboards. We just have to apply it other places.
Two questions?
1. How relevant is it to have memory that is this fast? As I understand it, no matter how fast memory is, if there isn't enough of it, your computer has to read and write from swap space on the hard drive, and even the fastest harddrive is at least a million times slower than slow memory, since it is a matter of nanoseconds vs. milliseconds (someone might correct me on the technicalities of this). So wouldn't lots of normal speed, or even slow memory, work better than too little ultra-fast memory? (Someone should just build a system that can support 8 gigs of 30 pin SiMMs!)
2. Am I a cranky old man who isn't up on this trend of memory needing active cooling? The closest I've seen is RAMBUS with aluminum sinks built in. It seems that no matter how efficient the cooling system claims to be, active cooling is another thing that can go wrong. I would much rather have slower memory that I don't have to worry about frying, then fast memory that is dependent on a fan that may break.
So, with those things in mind, how worthwhile is this?
But you can say to all your other smooove Linux dudes, "Hey Dapper Drakes, lets go out and find some Fiesty Fawns!"
Yes, and I am sure your "girlfriend", who also "uses Linux" really appreciated it.
I think it should be pointed out that not all Linux users are unwashed hippies. Some are unwashed punks. Others are unwashed geeks. But yes, it is fair to say that all of them are unwashed.