You are confusing a GUI with the OS, in both cases, the OS is Linux, the GUI is what's drastically different.
Not really; I know the difference. The problem is that if every single existing GUI element has to be either replaced or rewritten (menus, window frames, multi-select list boxes, scroll bars, anything involving mouseovers, and every application that uses them), you're essentially starting off new. Granted, if you start with linux, you could just fork every.single.project that depends on X/QT/GTK and give then a place in your new ecosystem, but until you do, the only apps ready to be run on your GUI are terminal/background programs, which frankly takes away a lot of the benefit of using an existing OS to begin with. Not all of it--you still have plenty of existing libraries--but a lot of it.
Let me rephrase it then: the iPad shows with crystal clarity the difference between a traditional GUI and a designed-for-touch GUI when using a tablet.
I'm not aware of any existing full-scale OS--including Linux--where existing applications can be cleanly ported to 'designed for touch' GUI. Therefore, if you want a designed-for-touch GUI, you need a designed-for-touch OS.
Now maybe Android will be exactly what you're looking for, with the right hardware--a full OS/GUI stack designed for touch with the power of a full computer. But so far, nobody else has really done it. I mean, hell, it is a good idea. I like to think that eventually a portable OS with an intuitive interface will merge with the full power of linux scripting, development, etc, on a processor strong enough to really carry the whole setup. However, I don't think that the iPad shows that restricted OS+Touch GUI is a bad combination.
While you have something of a point, this also means that presumed-private images (whether they were in actuality or not), as opposed to media that was always meant for distribution, are up for grabs. Objecting to that is not hypocrisy.
Or for fans of scientific notation, 1.3 × 10^9 cubic km. Or 1.3 billion cubic km, if you prefer. Or 1.3 cubic megameters, not that anyone actually would find that useful, although I find it fascinating.
I don't really know why you and GP put it in terms of 10^7. Putting it in terms of 10^6 makes a little sense, since it equates to "millions". 130 ten-millions is a strange metric (no pun intended).
Calling help desk with a legitimate problem and getting talked down to is also infuriating. Don't accept the patient's self-diagnosis on faith, sure, but you sound like you're endorsing brushing people off. There's no excuse for a GP not at least looking into something that worries the patient. If you know the research and you can confidently say, "that's not it," then fine. If you don't know, look it up and get back to them. If it's beyond you, refer them to a specialist. All of those things are part of your job description.
If you are really trying to say that we should avoid taking potential problems seriously just because there is a lot of ignorance in the matter, or are trying to say that we should avoid looking into things ourselves and only accept the Diagnosis From On High, I hope your attempt to be a doctor is shot down in flames. No offense.
They add emphasis, but they don't add content--or if they do, it's in a nuanced way that may or may not actually be descriptive. You may be choosing your choice of emphatic invectives intentionally, or you may just be spewing bullshit all over the floor.
For instance, what's the difference between these invectives? How do you know whether they actually mean them to be distinct from each other?
A twat A dick An ass An asshole An assface A shithead A shitface A dumbass A smartass A wiseass A twatface A shit-for-brains A retard A fucktard A dumbfuck A fuckhead A bitch A fucking bitch A giant fucking bitch
This is of course without going into the difference between swearing, cursing, profanity, obscenity, and other subclassifications of invective language.
I have a netbook that, when only barely running windows and chrome, still manages to be slow. Coverflow seems memory-intensive and like it's the sort of thing that would best be done on the GPU anyway, which for a cheap computer is not going to be very powerful.
If you're keeping--let's look at that screenshot--ten or more rendered pages in video memory at the same time, noting that each is probably at least as big as the screen, you're probably beyond the netbook market. You could certainly do it with a decent laptop, but part of the point of chromeOS is a small, cheap, net-only computer.
Yeah. Hell, if they packed enough supplies along with me, I'd work pretty much until death to set up what I could, see how sustainable I could make it, take measurements, and maybe leave behind a greenhouse or some other achievement that could be used by others somewhere down the line.
Now, personally, I wouldn't want them to be planning on my dying within a couple days if it were that, but hell, I just had four months of travelling in a space ship, plus the honor of being first and/or one of the few to live on another planet. And hell, unless I'm mistaken, I'd probably be the first to die on another planet.
I'd probably piss everyone off trying to think of a pithy quote for my last words though.
Politicians are still human in exactly the same way your or I am. They may be capable of amplifying their faults with power and screwing up entire countries, but they are not inherently mad.
Further, there is actually no reason to truly think it would reduce crime. Computer systems are actually pretty easy to hack, even if they check in regularly, and criminals would very quickly have a monetary incentive to crack it. It's no different from DRM, in a way.
This is *really bad* from a freedom perspective. As soon as computers can reliably and safely drive cars, anyone who *dares* drive the car themselves will be considered negligent; they'll probably pass a law against it. And with pervasive networking, you can be assured the police will have the ability to remotely disable your vehicle, should the need arise (the can already do it with GM vehicles, which is problematic enough...). I do not look forward to a future where my movement *in my own vehicle* can be arbitrarily and capriciously monitored and regulated remotely.
You know, there's a reason why "slippery slope" is classified as a logical fallacy rather than a logical argument.
Well, my limited understanding is that the (outgoing) pressure inside of an active star is super-huge, and only balanced out by the force of gravity due to scale. If you suddenly redistribute the mass by yanking on it with a big gravity source, it seems to me that a huge amount of pressurized plasma would escape. If it loses enough mass, it could fall below the mass limit of fusion, or below the temperature limit of fusion, or something. I'm not an astrophysicist, though.
You do have a point though--it would most likely reform anyway.
I'm sorry, the term is indeed entirely inaccurate, I just assumed people would understand what I meant.
A star has two major forces at the core--gravity and pressure. They are normally in equal balance with each other, which is why it maintains its size. If the mass density of the star changes suddenly, there will be places where the pressure may be higher or lower than the gravity. Or, that was my assumption, and what I meant by "rift". I understand that it has no physically existent surface.
Raising this point causes a random question to pop into my mind. How hard would you have to pull on a star (by passing by it with a strong gravity well, for example) to kill the star?
I guess it's more about the force difference between the force applied to different sides of the star, but I'm curious. If a rift opens up in the side of the star, the high pressure plasma inside has to be pretty eager to escape.
GP said ChromeOS is the toaster of computers. You're saying that there's no use for a toaster if you have a toaster oven. Do you normally use one to make toast? Especially if you already have a toaster?
I'm just glad the discussion isn't toaster vs regular oven anymore. Well, in this thread, at least.
(Would bakeries be mainframes? Hm... We need more bread-based analogies)
Frankly I've had the same idea that they and the article are about. It seems most natural.
Especially with IPv6, if everyone had their own personal server that only they have write access to, which becomes their identity, their personal storage, their homepage (obviously), a place for them to put web apps that they want to access globally, including blogging and microblogging...
Personally, I imagine having an XMPP server (with network bridges) there in order to keep IM records globally, too, whichever IM device or service you use. Obviously a mail server, too, even if it just forwards to a gmail account or something.
Throw in a little disk encryption (which only the user has the key to) and SSL, and you have your own personal home in the clouds. Whether you use DNS to put a name to it or whether your IPv6 becomes a de facto personal ID, you've got a place that belongs to you, and contains your social networking profile plus all the rest of your data. If your provider regularly backs up your (encrypted) disk for you, you needn't worry about losing it, either. And if they host tons of those servers in a single farm, all the local interoperability is virtually instant.
The obvious question is why you can't do something like that with any web server you own... which is a fair question. One obvious answer is the lack of a readily available set of inter-operating tools (for now). Also, if you restrict the apps on that server--in particular, no multimedia--then the bandwidth usage of any particular server is very low, and it's likely most of the disk images would be small, too. So, if you were going to use this just for social networking, it would be overkill to pay normal hosting fees.
Personally, I would love to work on such a project myself if my life wasn't such a mess at the moment.
Software as a service is more useful than music as a service if only because buying and maintaining a computer costs a lot of money. The less expense and trouble involved in the process, the more valuable SaaS is compared to "owning" your software--as with a lot of open source software, where it's yours, now YOU make it work.
Today, playing media is something that can be done anywhere on extremely cheap hardware with lots of storage, and many of the devices that play it have no OS maintenance overhead--any updates at all would just be pushed over the net or done with a quick update. Owning your own music has no additional overhead the way owning software does, and in fact as DRM is showing clearly, leasing content DOES have overhead.
(really, you could flatten this loop anywhere, but the only realistic place to break out of it is at step 4)
The problem is that the only one of those things most execs give a flying damn about addressing is (1). If along with their new DRM they added amazing new capabilities--say creating a mobile device with apps and sleek form factor that plays your protected content anywhere, to address (2), or giving an online store to easily purchase content to fix (3)--then that wouldn't be half bad. Unless of course Apple does that, in which case fuck all.
But seriously. I have an iTouch with some limited content on it, and will be upgrading to its bigger cousin when I have the money to spare. It does kind of bother me that I can't take my iTunes-bought video and put it on various devices--along with other objections--but the iPhone OS model, which is culminated in the iPad, is really an object lesson for people who think that suing is the only way to stop piracy.
Yes, iPhones get hacked, and yes, they only operate with iTunes, and yes, apps and music are still stolen a lot in spite of their efforts. However, the biggest advantage they have over the *AAs is that they give you compelling reason to use their products. And hey guess what! The consumers love them for it.
And no Apple bashing, please. This isn't comparing Apple to Linux, Microsoft, or Google. It's comparing them to RIAA/MPAA. I think we can all agree they're better than THEM.
Well, okay, that's an intriguing data point. Where is the seek speed set, though? In the OS, BIOS, some kind of per-drive firmware, or is it set by the hardware itself?
It seems like if vibration is causing re-seeking in general, you could cut the seek speed for all the drives in a data center to limit the problem. I'm kind of surprised that something as precision-oriented as (what are now) super-capacity hard drives don't have any accounting for this, when if that's the solution, they should have been right up there with fan controls as a reasonable tweak for overclockers.
Or if they do, I'm pretty sure I've never heard about it.
Of course it's true. File sharing by necessity takes up a lot of net resources to get at best the same rate you would get off a good direct download site. You have to worry about viruses, you have to worry about prosecution, etc. You take up the task anyway, because you want to see the show, and if you waited until it was on TV, or on DVD, or whatever, you wouldn't want to watch it anymore, or you'd be busy with something else, or etc.
I can only believe that the tiniest fraction of pirates are doing it because it's illegal. They're acquiring it. Once they have it, they watch it. That's all there is to the equation, except when it comes to sharing the experience with friends, or saving a copy for later.
It takes a sociopath to say "They want to watch our movies, even if it means jumping over some trivial hurdles! That means they want to destroy our business!" and I'm sick of hearing about it.
I think you should have included more of the GP quote, just for clarity.
If the choice is between reporting something and being fired, keeping your mouth shut, or quitting, I would report what happened and be prepared to quit if they try to tell you that you should be fired.
Losing your job can be devastating, but FFS, especially when you involve authority figures like schools, the truth is bigger than your job. If your silence costs the school district money from embezzlement, or keeps a psycho administrator in charge, or lets sick people take pictures of minors, then speak up. There WILL be other jobs.
I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.
This is true of all apps, just more obviously and thoroughly with games. That's why all those touchscreen tablets that were running normal OSes flopped--if you wanted to use them in any meaningful way, you had to dance around the fact they were designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. Yet somehow this tablet that everyone thought was so worthy of scorn for not being a full OS does well because it forces the programmers to deal with that question before they get put in the marketplace.
Well, it is ironic, for one, considering the context and the comment.
For two, it's generally understood--right or wrong--that if a man and titties should be in the same room, there shan't be a single other thing on the man's mind other than them titties, in which case he's not just distracted, he's completely gone.
For three, it does show a certain level of arrogance to not just be distracted but just completely not care. I dunno what the culture is like in the senate but most places "NSFW" rules apply and it a severe faux pas to take your jollies on the clock.
Four, is he fucking stupid? Does he think nobody's behind him? Or did he just assume nobody would call him on it and/or have a camera?
Slashdot Mirror
You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.
I keep saying it--anyone who wants a job in politics should not by any means be allowed to take the job.
I think someone else said that before me, but I forget who.
You are confusing a GUI with the OS, in both cases, the OS is Linux, the GUI is what's drastically different.
Not really; I know the difference. The problem is that if every single existing GUI element has to be either replaced or rewritten (menus, window frames, multi-select list boxes, scroll bars, anything involving mouseovers, and every application that uses them), you're essentially starting off new. Granted, if you start with linux, you could just fork every.single.project that depends on X/QT/GTK and give then a place in your new ecosystem, but until you do, the only apps ready to be run on your GUI are terminal/background programs, which frankly takes away a lot of the benefit of using an existing OS to begin with. Not all of it--you still have plenty of existing libraries--but a lot of it.
Let me rephrase it then: the iPad shows with crystal clarity the difference between a traditional GUI and a designed-for-touch GUI when using a tablet.
I'm not aware of any existing full-scale OS--including Linux--where existing applications can be cleanly ported to 'designed for touch' GUI. Therefore, if you want a designed-for-touch GUI, you need a designed-for-touch OS.
Now maybe Android will be exactly what you're looking for, with the right hardware--a full OS/GUI stack designed for touch with the power of a full computer. But so far, nobody else has really done it. I mean, hell, it is a good idea. I like to think that eventually a portable OS with an intuitive interface will merge with the full power of linux scripting, development, etc, on a processor strong enough to really carry the whole setup. However, I don't think that the iPad shows that restricted OS+Touch GUI is a bad combination.
While you have something of a point, this also means that presumed-private images (whether they were in actuality or not), as opposed to media that was always meant for distribution, are up for grabs. Objecting to that is not hypocrisy.
Stupid, possibly, but not hypocrisy.
Or for fans of scientific notation, 1.3 × 10^9 cubic km. Or 1.3 billion cubic km, if you prefer. Or 1.3 cubic megameters, not that anyone actually would find that useful, although I find it fascinating.
I don't really know why you and GP put it in terms of 10^7. Putting it in terms of 10^6 makes a little sense, since it equates to "millions". 130 ten-millions is a strange metric (no pun intended).
Not that any of this matters or anything.
Calling help desk with a legitimate problem and getting talked down to is also infuriating. Don't accept the patient's self-diagnosis on faith, sure, but you sound like you're endorsing brushing people off. There's no excuse for a GP not at least looking into something that worries the patient. If you know the research and you can confidently say, "that's not it," then fine. If you don't know, look it up and get back to them. If it's beyond you, refer them to a specialist. All of those things are part of your job description.
If you are really trying to say that we should avoid taking potential problems seriously just because there is a lot of ignorance in the matter, or are trying to say that we should avoid looking into things ourselves and only accept the Diagnosis From On High, I hope your attempt to be a doctor is shot down in flames. No offense.
"I detect sarcasm."
"You have a to be a paladin to detect Thaco's sarcasm?"
"You have to be a noun to detect Thaco's sarcasm."
~ Goblins the webcomic
They add emphasis, but they don't add content--or if they do, it's in a nuanced way that may or may not actually be descriptive. You may be choosing your choice of emphatic invectives intentionally, or you may just be spewing bullshit all over the floor.
For instance, what's the difference between these invectives? How do you know whether they actually mean them to be distinct from each other?
A twat
A dick
An ass
An asshole
An assface
A shithead
A shitface
A dumbass
A smartass
A wiseass
A twatface
A shit-for-brains
A retard
A fucktard
A dumbfuck
A fuckhead
A bitch
A fucking bitch
A giant fucking bitch
This is of course without going into the difference between swearing, cursing, profanity, obscenity, and other subclassifications of invective language.
I was gonna say.
I have a netbook that, when only barely running windows and chrome, still manages to be slow. Coverflow seems memory-intensive and like it's the sort of thing that would best be done on the GPU anyway, which for a cheap computer is not going to be very powerful.
If you're keeping--let's look at that screenshot--ten or more rendered pages in video memory at the same time, noting that each is probably at least as big as the screen, you're probably beyond the netbook market. You could certainly do it with a decent laptop, but part of the point of chromeOS is a small, cheap, net-only computer.
Yeah. Hell, if they packed enough supplies along with me, I'd work pretty much until death to set up what I could, see how sustainable I could make it, take measurements, and maybe leave behind a greenhouse or some other achievement that could be used by others somewhere down the line.
Now, personally, I wouldn't want them to be planning on my dying within a couple days if it were that, but hell, I just had four months of travelling in a space ship, plus the honor of being first and/or one of the few to live on another planet. And hell, unless I'm mistaken, I'd probably be the first to die on another planet.
I'd probably piss everyone off trying to think of a pithy quote for my last words though.
Your troll of an analogy is stretched. What is the toasting level supposed to represent?
If browsing the web is making toast, it seems like ChromeOS can do almost as much as a Chrome browser under normal linux/X can.
You can't toast sandwiches with it, only bread--no other web applications like IM--but that was taken care of in the initial analogy.
Politicians are still human in exactly the same way your or I am. They may be capable of amplifying their faults with power and screwing up entire countries, but they are not inherently mad.
Further, there is actually no reason to truly think it would reduce crime. Computer systems are actually pretty easy to hack, even if they check in regularly, and criminals would very quickly have a monetary incentive to crack it. It's no different from DRM, in a way.
This is *really bad* from a freedom perspective. As soon as computers can reliably and safely drive cars, anyone who *dares* drive the car themselves will be considered negligent; they'll probably pass a law against it. And with pervasive networking, you can be assured the police will have the ability to remotely disable your vehicle, should the need arise (the can already do it with GM vehicles, which is problematic enough...). I do not look forward to a future where my movement *in my own vehicle* can be arbitrarily and capriciously monitored and regulated remotely.
You know, there's a reason why "slippery slope" is classified as a logical fallacy rather than a logical argument.
Well, my limited understanding is that the (outgoing) pressure inside of an active star is super-huge, and only balanced out by the force of gravity due to scale. If you suddenly redistribute the mass by yanking on it with a big gravity source, it seems to me that a huge amount of pressurized plasma would escape. If it loses enough mass, it could fall below the mass limit of fusion, or below the temperature limit of fusion, or something. I'm not an astrophysicist, though.
You do have a point though--it would most likely reform anyway.
I'm sorry, the term is indeed entirely inaccurate, I just assumed people would understand what I meant.
A star has two major forces at the core--gravity and pressure. They are normally in equal balance with each other, which is why it maintains its size. If the mass density of the star changes suddenly, there will be places where the pressure may be higher or lower than the gravity. Or, that was my assumption, and what I meant by "rift". I understand that it has no physically existent surface.
Raising this point causes a random question to pop into my mind. How hard would you have to pull on a star (by passing by it with a strong gravity well, for example) to kill the star?
I guess it's more about the force difference between the force applied to different sides of the star, but I'm curious. If a rift opens up in the side of the star, the high pressure plasma inside has to be pretty eager to escape.
Gee so Chrome OS is for kids?
GP said ChromeOS is the toaster of computers. You're saying that there's no use for a toaster if you have a toaster oven. Do you normally use one to make toast? Especially if you already have a toaster?
I'm just glad the discussion isn't toaster vs regular oven anymore. Well, in this thread, at least.
(Would bakeries be mainframes? Hm... We need more bread-based analogies)
Frankly I've had the same idea that they and the article are about. It seems most natural.
Especially with IPv6, if everyone had their own personal server that only they have write access to, which becomes their identity, their personal storage, their homepage (obviously), a place for them to put web apps that they want to access globally, including blogging and microblogging...
Personally, I imagine having an XMPP server (with network bridges) there in order to keep IM records globally, too, whichever IM device or service you use. Obviously a mail server, too, even if it just forwards to a gmail account or something.
Throw in a little disk encryption (which only the user has the key to) and SSL, and you have your own personal home in the clouds. Whether you use DNS to put a name to it or whether your IPv6 becomes a de facto personal ID, you've got a place that belongs to you, and contains your social networking profile plus all the rest of your data. If your provider regularly backs up your (encrypted) disk for you, you needn't worry about losing it, either. And if they host tons of those servers in a single farm, all the local interoperability is virtually instant.
The obvious question is why you can't do something like that with any web server you own... which is a fair question. One obvious answer is the lack of a readily available set of inter-operating tools (for now). Also, if you restrict the apps on that server--in particular, no multimedia--then the bandwidth usage of any particular server is very low, and it's likely most of the disk images would be small, too. So, if you were going to use this just for social networking, it would be overkill to pay normal hosting fees.
Personally, I would love to work on such a project myself if my life wasn't such a mess at the moment.
Software as a service is more useful than music as a service if only because buying and maintaining a computer costs a lot of money. The less expense and trouble involved in the process, the more valuable SaaS is compared to "owning" your software--as with a lot of open source software, where it's yours, now YOU make it work.
Today, playing media is something that can be done anywhere on extremely cheap hardware with lots of storage, and many of the devices that play it have no OS maintenance overhead--any updates at all would just be pushed over the net or done with a quick update. Owning your own music has no additional overhead the way owning software does, and in fact as DRM is showing clearly, leasing content DOES have overhead.
(really, you could flatten this loop anywhere, but the only realistic place to break out of it is at step 4)
The problem is that the only one of those things most execs give a flying damn about addressing is (1). If along with their new DRM they added amazing new capabilities--say creating a mobile device with apps and sleek form factor that plays your protected content anywhere, to address (2), or giving an online store to easily purchase content to fix (3)--then that wouldn't be half bad. Unless of course Apple does that, in which case fuck all.
But seriously. I have an iTouch with some limited content on it, and will be upgrading to its bigger cousin when I have the money to spare. It does kind of bother me that I can't take my iTunes-bought video and put it on various devices--along with other objections--but the iPhone OS model, which is culminated in the iPad, is really an object lesson for people who think that suing is the only way to stop piracy.
Yes, iPhones get hacked, and yes, they only operate with iTunes, and yes, apps and music are still stolen a lot in spite of their efforts. However, the biggest advantage they have over the *AAs is that they give you compelling reason to use their products. And hey guess what! The consumers love them for it.
And no Apple bashing, please. This isn't comparing Apple to Linux, Microsoft, or Google. It's comparing them to RIAA/MPAA. I think we can all agree they're better than THEM.
Well, okay, that's an intriguing data point. Where is the seek speed set, though? In the OS, BIOS, some kind of per-drive firmware, or is it set by the hardware itself?
It seems like if vibration is causing re-seeking in general, you could cut the seek speed for all the drives in a data center to limit the problem. I'm kind of surprised that something as precision-oriented as (what are now) super-capacity hard drives don't have any accounting for this, when if that's the solution, they should have been right up there with fan controls as a reasonable tweak for overclockers.
Or if they do, I'm pretty sure I've never heard about it.
Of course it's true. File sharing by necessity takes up a lot of net resources to get at best the same rate you would get off a good direct download site. You have to worry about viruses, you have to worry about prosecution, etc. You take up the task anyway, because you want to see the show, and if you waited until it was on TV, or on DVD, or whatever, you wouldn't want to watch it anymore, or you'd be busy with something else, or etc.
I can only believe that the tiniest fraction of pirates are doing it because it's illegal. They're acquiring it. Once they have it, they watch it. That's all there is to the equation, except when it comes to sharing the experience with friends, or saving a copy for later.
It takes a sociopath to say "They want to watch our movies, even if it means jumping over some trivial hurdles! That means they want to destroy our business!" and I'm sick of hearing about it.
I think you should have included more of the GP quote, just for clarity.
If the choice is between reporting something and being fired, keeping your mouth shut, or quitting, I would report what happened and be prepared to quit if they try to tell you that you should be fired.
Losing your job can be devastating, but FFS, especially when you involve authority figures like schools, the truth is bigger than your job. If your silence costs the school district money from embezzlement, or keeps a psycho administrator in charge, or lets sick people take pictures of minors, then speak up. There WILL be other jobs.
I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.
This is true of all apps, just more obviously and thoroughly with games. That's why all those touchscreen tablets that were running normal OSes flopped--if you wanted to use them in any meaningful way, you had to dance around the fact they were designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. Yet somehow this tablet that everyone thought was so worthy of scorn for not being a full OS does well because it forces the programmers to deal with that question before they get put in the marketplace.
Well, it is ironic, for one, considering the context and the comment.
For two, it's generally understood--right or wrong--that if a man and titties should be in the same room, there shan't be a single other thing on the man's mind other than them titties, in which case he's not just distracted, he's completely gone.
For three, it does show a certain level of arrogance to not just be distracted but just completely not care. I dunno what the culture is like in the senate but most places "NSFW" rules apply and it a severe faux pas to take your jollies on the clock.
Four, is he fucking stupid? Does he think nobody's behind him? Or did he just assume nobody would call him on it and/or have a camera?