I think if you've done enough installs of each, you'd know exactly what the he is talking about. In my experience, it's fairly rare to ever have to do anything besides install Linux to get all hardware working. The exceptions are on very new hardware where sometimes drivers have not been released for Linux yet or using unusually old Linux versions.
On most versions of Windows the experience is quite different. To get a system functional, one generally needs to track down drivers for each piece of hardware individually, usually from the manufacturer's website. To do this often requires opening up the case of the PC to see what hardware is installed, using another computer with a working internet connection to download the drivers and transfer them via physical media to the new install. This is usually necessary since network adapters are generally non functional under windows immediately after install.
Really, unless you're set up for it and know the specific hardware you're installing on, a Windows install really is a full day affair, whereas Linux installs usually just work. While this isn't always the case, the vast majority of the time it is.
This isn't an endorsement of Linux on the desktop by any means. It's just a fact that Linux usually has all the drivers you need bundled with the kernel.
The benefit of ReadyBoost isn't strictly speaking tied to the ready boot device's latency or transfer rate. It's the fact that distributing some small random reads to another device can dramatically reduce the number of seeks required by the hard drive, exponentially improving its performance. As most of us probably already know, hard drives are at their worst when they are trying to multitask which is why ReadyBoost can make such a huge difference.
I have to go and disagree with you there about Ubuntu. Big Ubuntu fan, but certainly not innovative. Been using Ubuntu since 2006 and it's become a new struggle with each new release to find a software combination that works on each of my machines. I'd love to say the new Unity interface is innovative but it doesn't even run stable on two of my machines and more importantly it provides me with dramatically less functionality than my previous desktop environment. Even Xfce is miles above unity in terms of raw usability.
And Android, innovative? Come on! It's an answer to innovation...a competitor, albeit a very good one. Like AMD is to Intel. But when was the last time Android offered something really new to the mobile market?
After ten years of using Linux on the desktop I realize there's two big things that it needs to succeed on the desktop:
1. Some kind of strong incentive to listen to customer demand and implement what ordinary people demand in the way ordinary people demand it. Linux and free software geeks will be extremely unhappy if this ever happens, but the "this is free software so we don't have to listen to users" attitude is one of the biggest things holding GNU/Linux back.
2. A greater openness to corporate investment and an acceptance that most of the software users demand is going to come to Linux either as proprietary and closed source or not at all. I was extremely excited several years ago when apps like Nero started being ported to my platform of choice, only to see the movement pissed on by die-hard Linux fans everywhere who somehow believed that companies were actually going to open source their software and join the great free software utopia they dreamed of creating. Can you say "out of touch with reality"?
In the GNU/Linux community there is a great chasm between reality and the ideology put forth by Stallman and his followers. I no longer think that free software is ever going to be marketable to the masses. The attitude is all wrong and no matter how good it is, it just seems it's never going be to quite what customers demand. I think people will always be willing to pay for something that's made based on what the market demands long before they'll spend their precious time trying to make something work that's made the way some engineer feels like making it in his spare time.
I'm a low-level JVM developer for a large software company. I spend my time working very close to the hardware, hacking OS kernels and tracking the latest changes to interfaces and hardware so that I can best take advantage of new features to make the VM run better. But I'm more and more inclined to let someone else go through the pain of making my personal technology work for me. I very much doubt I'll bother installing Linux on my next new PC or Mac. Now that I'm no longer a poor graduate student the economics just don't work anymore.
This is what I would expect to happen when people make music based on what has previously sold rather than making music as a form of personal artistic expression: I would expect convergence on a smaller and smaller family of sounds and lyrics that appeal to the maximum number of people with less and less individuality. I would argue that this largely defeats the purpose of having music created by humans for other humans. It turns it into a homogeneous product where the musicians themselves are ultimately interchangeable.
It's also why I feel that no self-respecting musician should spend too much time worrying about trying to sound like famous musician X. It's a waste of time because at best you might end up just sounding like the other guy. At worst, you'll think you sound like him but you'll really just sound like a pathetic knock off (which is what usually happens). And in either case, if people want to hear the other guy, they can go to his show and go buy his CD.
You're an anonymous coward. I say you work for the Gates Foundation.
Argumentum ad hominem. AC is either right or wrong regardless of who he works for. You didn't offer anything substantive to contradict the comment.
Ignoring the rest of the comment, this might be misconstrued as true. But argument + ad hominem doesn't magically turn into argumentum ad homenem just because your feelings are hurt. The ad hominem was not part of the argument.
"...to those who infringe above a certain threshold."
The sliding window approach allows ISPs to harvest just enough infringers to keep big content supplied with a steady stream of lawsuits with ready-made payouts. Not that big content is suffering in any measurable way from copyright infringement to begin with. The problem with these approaches is that they falsely assume that every download is another lost sales opportunity. The flaw in their reasoning here is that people's pockets don't suddenly get deeper as soon as they have no choice but to pay for content...they just view less content.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to get one of those numbered ticket dispensers? Then all the sexism could do something other than standing in line while waiting for its turn to come up.
I wonder if there's a patent out for the "sexism queue".
The science purely says that it is cheaper, not that it is less likely.
Science is great and all, but it's useless if you're incapable of interpreting the data.
Not that what's less likely? The science shows that women are much less likely to be involved in serious accidents, and much less likely to die in those accidents. In short, their driving is less likely to result in serious and costly accidents. By any reasonable measure, a good driver is one who gets safely from A to B. The science tells us that women do this better than men by a significant margin. And since we're talking about a serious accident, I think the science is very applicable in this case.
In other news, men certainly have bigger egos than women when it comes to driving.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you've done enough installs of each, you'd know exactly what the he is talking about. In my experience, it's fairly rare to ever have to do anything besides install Linux to get all hardware working. The exceptions are on very new hardware where sometimes drivers have not been released for Linux yet or using unusually old Linux versions.
On most versions of Windows the experience is quite different. To get a system functional, one generally needs to track down drivers for each piece of hardware individually, usually from the manufacturer's website. To do this often requires opening up the case of the PC to see what hardware is installed, using another computer with a working internet connection to download the drivers and transfer them via physical media to the new install. This is usually necessary since network adapters are generally non functional under windows immediately after install.
Really, unless you're set up for it and know the specific hardware you're installing on, a Windows install really is a full day affair, whereas Linux installs usually just work. While this isn't always the case, the vast majority of the time it is.
This isn't an endorsement of Linux on the desktop by any means. It's just a fact that Linux usually has all the drivers you need bundled with the kernel.
You sign your anonymous comments? Hmmm...
Arrogant Worms - Carrot Juice is Murder
I'm not some kind of hippy; I'm just not sure how long a plant could survive that kind of abuse.
That poor plant!
I see your point.
Most Apple customers these days aren't part of the fanbase. They're just regular people lately.
My iPad 3 pushes 12 hours of web browsing. Enough to not have to think about the battery if I charge it at night.
The benefit of ReadyBoost isn't strictly speaking tied to the ready boot device's latency or transfer rate. It's the fact that distributing some small random reads to another device can dramatically reduce the number of seeks required by the hard drive, exponentially improving its performance. As most of us probably already know, hard drives are at their worst when they are trying to multitask which is why ReadyBoost can make such a huge difference.
Huh? iOS is essentially the same OS as OSX with a different UI.
I have to go and disagree with you there about Ubuntu. Big Ubuntu fan, but certainly not innovative. Been using Ubuntu since 2006 and it's become a new struggle with each new release to find a software combination that works on each of my machines. I'd love to say the new Unity interface is innovative but it doesn't even run stable on two of my machines and more importantly it provides me with dramatically less functionality than my previous desktop environment. Even Xfce is miles above unity in terms of raw usability.
And Android, innovative? Come on! It's an answer to innovation...a competitor, albeit a very good one. Like AMD is to Intel. But when was the last time Android offered something really new to the mobile market?
You could always try Zenni Optical:
http://www.zennioptical.com/
After ten years of using Linux on the desktop I realize there's two big things that it needs to succeed on the desktop:
1. Some kind of strong incentive to listen to customer demand and implement what ordinary people demand in the way ordinary people demand it. Linux and free software geeks will be extremely unhappy if this ever happens, but the "this is free software so we don't have to listen to users" attitude is one of the biggest things holding GNU/Linux back.
2. A greater openness to corporate investment and an acceptance that most of the software users demand is going to come to Linux either as proprietary and closed source or not at all. I was extremely excited several years ago when apps like Nero started being ported to my platform of choice, only to see the movement pissed on by die-hard Linux fans everywhere who somehow believed that companies were actually going to open source their software and join the great free software utopia they dreamed of creating. Can you say "out of touch with reality"?
In the GNU/Linux community there is a great chasm between reality and the ideology put forth by Stallman and his followers. I no longer think that free software is ever going to be marketable to the masses. The attitude is all wrong and no matter how good it is, it just seems it's never going be to quite what customers demand. I think people will always be willing to pay for something that's made based on what the market demands long before they'll spend their precious time trying to make something work that's made the way some engineer feels like making it in his spare time.
I'm a low-level JVM developer for a large software company. I spend my time working very close to the hardware, hacking OS kernels and tracking the latest changes to interfaces and hardware so that I can best take advantage of new features to make the VM run better. But I'm more and more inclined to let someone else go through the pain of making my personal technology work for me. I very much doubt I'll bother installing Linux on my next new PC or Mac. Now that I'm no longer a poor graduate student the economics just don't work anymore.
I think I've just discovered the next movie theater murderer.
How did this get modded "Insightful"? :)
Yes, you are correct. Or put differently, a decrease in the dynamic range of the recording.
Those aren't chords. They're keys and their relative minors.
This is what I would expect to happen when people make music based on what has previously sold rather than making music as a form of personal artistic expression: I would expect convergence on a smaller and smaller family of sounds and lyrics that appeal to the maximum number of people with less and less individuality. I would argue that this largely defeats the purpose of having music created by humans for other humans. It turns it into a homogeneous product where the musicians themselves are ultimately interchangeable.
It's also why I feel that no self-respecting musician should spend too much time worrying about trying to sound like famous musician X. It's a waste of time because at best you might end up just sounding like the other guy. At worst, you'll think you sound like him but you'll really just sound like a pathetic knock off (which is what usually happens). And in either case, if people want to hear the other guy, they can go to his show and go buy his CD.
There's really no substitute for your own sound.
The medical term comes from the shape of the EKG when someone dies: it becomes a horizontal line. That seems to be what's being described.
Somebody's off their rocker. ;)
You're an anonymous coward. I say you work for the Gates Foundation.
Argumentum ad hominem. AC is either right or wrong regardless of who he works for. You didn't offer anything substantive to contradict the comment.
Ignoring the rest of the comment, this might be misconstrued as true. But argument + ad hominem doesn't magically turn into argumentum ad homenem just because your feelings are hurt. The ad hominem was not part of the argument.
Funny that we're both right, isn't it: http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=788126 ("Serious" is the important distinction here.)
"...to those who infringe above a certain threshold."
The sliding window approach allows ISPs to harvest just enough infringers to keep big content supplied with a steady stream of lawsuits with ready-made payouts. Not that big content is suffering in any measurable way from copyright infringement to begin with. The problem with these approaches is that they falsely assume that every download is another lost sales opportunity. The flaw in their reasoning here is that people's pockets don't suddenly get deeper as soon as they have no choice but to pay for content...they just view less content.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to get one of those numbered ticket dispensers? Then all the sexism could do something other than standing in line while waiting for its turn to come up.
I wonder if there's a patent out for the "sexism queue".
The science purely says that it is cheaper, not that it is less likely.
Science is great and all, but it's useless if you're incapable of interpreting the data.
Not that what's less likely? The science shows that women are much less likely to be involved in serious accidents, and much less likely to die in those accidents. In short, their driving is less likely to result in serious and costly accidents. By any reasonable measure, a good driver is one who gets safely from A to B. The science tells us that women do this better than men by a significant margin. And since we're talking about a serious accident, I think the science is very applicable in this case.
:)
In other news, men certainly have bigger egos than women when it comes to driving.