As we've seen over the
years, one of the great successes of Linux was that it had a strong
leader, who set goals and directions, and was able to get people to do
what he wanted -- or find someone else to do it. This latter part is
also a key element; there was no sense that anyone else "owned" a piece
of Linux (although de facto "ownership" has happened in some parts); if
you didn't produce, Linus would use someone else's code. If you wanted
people to use your stuff, you had to keep moving.
Which is something to respond next time you hear some GNU dweeb insist that Linux be called GNU/Linux. So GNU contributed a lot of code. So did a lot of other people. LT's leadership is what made it happen. All the more absurd because the GNU OS has been "almost done" for decades.
The one Ives design I really like is the stalk iMac. Putting the display on a stalk allows the user to optimize its place — good ergonomics, minimized footprint, yada yada. Except it now seems obvious that the stalk iMac, like all of Ives creations, was about branding. All iMac models are identifiable by the fact that they're a single unit. In the early iMacs they just crammed the system hardware into the monitor box. In the recent iMacs, the system hardware has gotten small enough so they just have to make the panel a little thicker. But in between, there was a time when they wanted to do an LCD iMac, but the system hardware was still to big for a "where's the computer" model. Solution: two boxes, but connect them with a stalk.
I see that in all the IVE designs. They're cool looking and they create a strong identity. Good branding. Nothing wrong with that — except there's more to good products than good branding. At least that's what I think. The industry obviously Thinks Different.
I recently bought an iAudio U2. Ugly little thing, but I like it a lot better than the 5 or so other MP3 players I've owned over the years. It just comes closer to my ideal feature set than any competing product. If products were more about good, easy-to-use features and less about "branding" and "style", I'd spend a lot more money on them. But I guess I'm just not a typical consumer.
It's more a statement of how a product loyalist is blind to its shortcomings. I recently switched web presence providers after not having reliable service for months. Lots of customers were unhappy about this provider's ineptitude. But every complaint on the company's blog was greeted by angry denunciations by people who thought we were a bunch of ungrateful wimps.
Dude, Hollerith cards are for programs. You keep your data on a 9-track tape. That way you know the computer is doing something by the fact that the tape reels are moving back and forth.
This is an old Hollywood convention, and I was very amused to see it revived on Lost. Of course, I have to suspend my disbelief in order to overlook the fact that these tape drives were still working decades after being installed in "the hatch". And also the fact that they were connected to an Apple II!
Attention, would be science and technology writers: don't babble for 3 or 4 pages before you get around to explaining what you're talking about and why it's so kewl. In this case, the Cell is a ordinary Power processor core supplemented by a bunch of on-chip vector processors. Which actually is pretty damned cool, but not as mysterious as Blachford makes it sounds.
So regular expressions are evil because they're too hard to maintain? If that's you're argument, you need to come up with an alternative that isn't time consuming to code and doesn't require advanced skills that are difficult to master. Good programmers don't hand code fancy solutions any more often than they have to. They rely on well-documented, well-tested language features and APIs. Which describes Perl regular expressions to a T, whatever their shortcomings.
Anyway, Perl regular expressions don't have to be "line noise". That's just the way sloppy people are used to coding. Perl actually allows you to create a clearly formated regular expression in which the structure is pretty obvious, with a little commenting. It does this by providing high-level metacharacters, and by allowing you to use blanks for formatting instead of representing blanks.
Mega, Kilo, picky, picky, picky. Anyway, there's more to processor power than clock speed. As I recall, the 6510 in the C-64 didn't even have hardware multiplication!
I really think a 300Mhz system (or even a 100Mhz system) is capable of running most office software. What kills most of them is that they were sold with 64 to 128 MB of RAM in order to keep the price down. You need at least 256 MB to run MS Office without VM thrashing. That big honking spreadsheet you mention probably spends more time waiting for cells to get swapped in and out of memory than it does waiting to do the simple arithmetic you see in a typical spreadsheet.
However for 99% of business users anything over 1Ghz is probably over kill.
Dude, for 99% of business users, anything over 300Khz is overkill. It just just doesn't take a lot of processing power to run a spreadsheet or format a Word file. Most older machines would benefit more from a RAM upgrade or a defragramented swap file than they would from a faster CPU.
At least until Vista comes out:)
Actually, the official requirements for Vista emphasis the graphics processor more than the CPU — as they should. Of course, this won't prevent computer salespeople from using Vista to sell Quad-Core systems....
Are they still paying for the class? Then get off their fuckin' backs about showing up all the time.
A university is not a business. Nobody pays full freight, not even the rich kids whose parents pony up $20K a year to send them to an Ivy League school. When you sign up, you're not buying a service that you can choose not to use. You're joining an learning community that doesn't work if everybody isn't serious about participating. This is a community that lots of people would like to be a part of, but mostly can't because there are only so many slots. If you don't want to participate, you should drop out and let that one-time-only learning opportunity go to somebody who actually wants to use it.
It just encourages sociopaths to enter previously innocuous rackets.
And why is that bad? Would you rather have sociopaths committing armed robbery or selling bogus software?
Anyway, I'm a little tired of the way sociopaths tend to dominate every discussion of criminal penalties. Most criminals aren't sociopaths, and trying to design your criminal justice system around sociopaths is stupid. That system is supposed to deter and rehabilitate, and those are things you can't do with outright sociopaths.
some of them Pentium IIs but it's better than what they had, which was nothing. Most of the machines will be donated with edubuntu
You talk about P2s as if they're almost worthless. In fact, the configuration you're talking about will work very well for things like web browsing and word processing. Sure, you can run the lastest version XP or Office on most P2s, but that's because they're bloatware.
Computer geeks often forget that most computer users just don't need most of the raw processing power that the current crop of computers provide. You do not need a gighertz processor to surf the web or write papers, and run a simple database or spreadsheet. And that accounts for about 90% of the non-recreational use of computers.
I used to be part of the team that documented Kylix, Borland's attempt at a Linux-based IDE. I used to run Kylix on a 266 Mhz P2, without problem. (Officialy Kylix requires a processor that's twice as fast, but that's pure nonsense.) Meanwhile I used a much more powerful P3 system to run Borland's Windows products, and also the authoring tools (Word, basically, plus a lot of scripts) I needed to write with. Where the Linux box breezed along, the Windows box could barely keep up.
None of the above should be interpreted as a criticism of Tech Serv's efforts to bring computing to low-income students; this effort is, in fact, extremely praiseworthy.
Yes, people who lie and people who are incompetent are often the same people. But so what? The dichotomy is not between two kinds of people, but between two motivations.
For example (any similarities with a certain world leader are strictcly coincidental!): suppose I'm a police chief and I announce that I'm going to devote most of the resources of my department to busting a certain criminal mastermind because I believe him to be behind most of the crime in my city. So I take the dude down,and it turns out that he was small potatoes, and getting him off the street accomplished very little — indeed the other criminals had a field day while I was chasing him. Some people claim that my whole crusade has some private motivation, such as concealling my own corruption.
Now, maybe I'm an incompetent police chief and maybe I'm dishonest. I could even be both. But that doesn't explain my motivation. Did I honestly believe the guy was as big a criminal as I thought he was or not? Did I lie about this particular thing or was I misinformed about this particular thing? That's a real dichotomy.
9. Charge for shipping--but not too much. Bidders don't pay much attention to shipping costs when placing bids, say professors at UC Berkeley and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. CDs listed with a starting price of one cent with $3.99 shipping averaged 21% higher final sale prices than CDs set with an opening price of $4 and no shipping charge. But when the professors listed CDs with a $2 starting price and a $6 shipping cost, five of the 20 CDs went unsold.
That really should be obvious. But a lot of sellers just don't seem to understand that blatant dishonesty works against them. I recently did a "buy it now" bid for an MP3 player that was listed at $1 for the player itself and $30 for "shipping". Fine, I thought, $31, shipping included — not a bad price for an MP3 player. What I failed to notice (because eBay doesn't list insurance charges prominently) was a mandatory $41 insurance charge. Sent an email to the seller asking how it could cost more than an item was worth to insure it, but all I got back was boilerplate email about how there's more to shipping costs than postage.
I finally decided to take the negative feedback hit from refusing to pay. (EBay was nice enough about lifting my nonpayment "first strike" when I explained the issues.) The item's still there, only the seller has realized that a bogus insurance charge is not a strong sellng point. So now it's listed at $1 with $71 for "shipping"! Some people just don't have a clue.
Fucking karma whore. If you don't have something to contribute to the discussion, please go find some other, less obnoxious way to justify your worthless existence.
There's a lot more to evaluating an OS than counting the number of times it crashes. With both 2K and XP, the #1 issue is security. In particular, both OSs are magnets for malware. Not only are there security holes up the wazoo, but it's much too easy to design social engineering into a malware installer so that a user is tricked into using their administrator status to install the damn thing.
The security holes can maybe be patched with clever recoding and redesign. But the only way to fix the installation issue is to totally rearchitect the way Windows applications are installed and run. Microsoft has to make this change in order for Windows to continue to be viable.
Now it appears that they're doing a really fucked-up job of making this change. That doesn't change the fact that these changes are necessary, and that running Windows will continue to be a nightmare for many users until these change are implemented.
Anybody who describes XP as a "perfectly fine OS" is demonstrating extreme unawareness of the issues that most PC users face. In other words, Thurrott is an idiot.
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Which is something to respond next time you hear some GNU dweeb insist that Linux be called GNU/Linux. So GNU contributed a lot of code. So did a lot of other people. LT's leadership is what made it happen. All the more absurd because the GNU OS has been "almost done" for decades.
The one Ives design I really like is the stalk iMac. Putting the display on a stalk allows the user to optimize its place — good ergonomics, minimized footprint, yada yada. Except it now seems obvious that the stalk iMac, like all of Ives creations, was about branding. All iMac models are identifiable by the fact that they're a single unit. In the early iMacs they just crammed the system hardware into the monitor box. In the recent iMacs, the system hardware has gotten small enough so they just have to make the panel a little thicker. But in between, there was a time when they wanted to do an LCD iMac, but the system hardware was still to big for a "where's the computer" model. Solution: two boxes, but connect them with a stalk.
I see that in all the IVE designs. They're cool looking and they create a strong identity. Good branding. Nothing wrong with that — except there's more to good products than good branding. At least that's what I think. The industry obviously Thinks Different.
I recently bought an iAudio U2. Ugly little thing, but I like it a lot better than the 5 or so other MP3 players I've owned over the years. It just comes closer to my ideal feature set than any competing product. If products were more about good, easy-to-use features and less about "branding" and "style", I'd spend a lot more money on them. But I guess I'm just not a typical consumer.
It's more a statement of how a product loyalist is blind to its shortcomings. I recently switched web presence providers after not having reliable service for months. Lots of customers were unhappy about this provider's ineptitude. But every complaint on the company's blog was greeted by angry denunciations by people who thought we were a bunch of ungrateful wimps.
And then there's TiVO owners....
Are you channeling Bart Simpson or Bobby Hill?
Dude, Hollerith cards are for programs. You keep your data on a 9-track tape. That way you know the computer is doing something by the fact that the tape reels are moving back and forth.
This is an old Hollywood convention, and I was very amused to see it revived on Lost. Of course, I have to suspend my disbelief in order to overlook the fact that these tape drives were still working decades after being installed in "the hatch". And also the fact that they were connected to an Apple II!
Attention, would be science and technology writers: don't babble for 3 or 4 pages before you get around to explaining what you're talking about and why it's so kewl. In this case, the Cell is a ordinary Power processor core supplemented by a bunch of on-chip vector processors. Which actually is pretty damned cool, but not as mysterious as Blachford makes it sounds.
So regular expressions are evil because they're too hard to maintain? If that's you're argument, you need to come up with an alternative that isn't time consuming to code and doesn't require advanced skills that are difficult to master. Good programmers don't hand code fancy solutions any more often than they have to. They rely on well-documented, well-tested language features and APIs. Which describes Perl regular expressions to a T, whatever their shortcomings.
Anyway, Perl regular expressions don't have to be "line noise". That's just the way sloppy people are used to coding. Perl actually allows you to create a clearly formated regular expression in which the structure is pretty obvious, with a little commenting. It does this by providing high-level metacharacters, and by allowing you to use blanks for formatting instead of representing blanks.
Mega, Kilo, picky, picky, picky. Anyway, there's more to processor power than clock speed. As I recall, the 6510 in the C-64 didn't even have hardware multiplication!
I really think a 300Mhz system (or even a 100Mhz system) is capable of running most office software. What kills most of them is that they were sold with 64 to 128 MB of RAM in order to keep the price down. You need at least 256 MB to run MS Office without VM thrashing. That big honking spreadsheet you mention probably spends more time waiting for cells to get swapped in and out of memory than it does waiting to do the simple arithmetic you see in a typical spreadsheet.
Gosh darn, you ended the flame war before it had a chance to start. Shame on you!
Actually, this would be T5. T4 came out in 2003. And franchises, by definition, never die.
News flash, dude: Intel is still number 1. Their problem is they have 90% of the market, while their investors think they should have 99%.
And why is that bad? Would you rather have sociopaths committing armed robbery or selling bogus software?
Anyway, I'm a little tired of the way sociopaths tend to dominate every discussion of criminal penalties. Most criminals aren't sociopaths, and trying to design your criminal justice system around sociopaths is stupid. That system is supposed to deter and rehabilitate, and those are things you can't do with outright sociopaths.
You talk about P2s as if they're almost worthless. In fact, the configuration you're talking about will work very well for things like web browsing and word processing. Sure, you can run the lastest version XP or Office on most P2s, but that's because they're bloatware.
Computer geeks often forget that most computer users just don't need most of the raw processing power that the current crop of computers provide. You do not need a gighertz processor to surf the web or write papers, and run a simple database or spreadsheet. And that accounts for about 90% of the non-recreational use of computers.
I used to be part of the team that documented Kylix, Borland's attempt at a Linux-based IDE. I used to run Kylix on a 266 Mhz P2, without problem. (Officialy Kylix requires a processor that's twice as fast, but that's pure nonsense.) Meanwhile I used a much more powerful P3 system to run Borland's Windows products, and also the authoring tools (Word, basically, plus a lot of scripts) I needed to write with. Where the Linux box breezed along, the Windows box could barely keep up.
None of the above should be interpreted as a criticism of Tech Serv's efforts to bring computing to low-income students; this effort is, in fact, extremely praiseworthy.
Profitable or not, you need a growing market to retain Wall Street's favor.
Sure, and with today's fuel prices, it would cost us hardly anything!
Yes, people who lie and people who are incompetent are often the same people. But so what? The dichotomy is not between two kinds of people, but between two motivations.
For example (any similarities with a certain world leader are strictcly coincidental!): suppose I'm a police chief and I announce that I'm going to devote most of the resources of my department to busting a certain criminal mastermind because I believe him to be behind most of the crime in my city. So I take the dude down,and it turns out that he was small potatoes, and getting him off the street accomplished very little — indeed the other criminals had a field day while I was chasing him. Some people claim that my whole crusade has some private motivation, such as concealling my own corruption.
Now, maybe I'm an incompetent police chief and maybe I'm dishonest. I could even be both. But that doesn't explain my motivation. Did I honestly believe the guy was as big a criminal as I thought he was or not? Did I lie about this particular thing or was I misinformed about this particular thing? That's a real dichotomy.
No, he's selling 2 cents for $1 plus shipping. About par for eBay!
That really should be obvious. But a lot of sellers just don't seem to understand that blatant dishonesty works against them. I recently did a "buy it now" bid for an MP3 player that was listed at $1 for the player itself and $30 for "shipping". Fine, I thought, $31, shipping included — not a bad price for an MP3 player. What I failed to notice (because eBay doesn't list insurance charges prominently) was a mandatory $41 insurance charge. Sent an email to the seller asking how it could cost more than an item was worth to insure it, but all I got back was boilerplate email about how there's more to shipping costs than postage.
I finally decided to take the negative feedback hit from refusing to pay. (EBay was nice enough about lifting my nonpayment "first strike" when I explained the issues.) The item's still there, only the seller has realized that a bogus insurance charge is not a strong sellng point. So now it's listed at $1 with $71 for "shipping"! Some people just don't have a clue.
Fucking karma whore. If you don't have something to contribute to the discussion, please go find some other, less obnoxious way to justify your worthless existence.
There's a lot more to evaluating an OS than counting the number of times it crashes. With both 2K and XP, the #1 issue is security. In particular, both OSs are magnets for malware. Not only are there security holes up the wazoo, but it's much too easy to design social engineering into a malware installer so that a user is tricked into using their administrator status to install the damn thing.
The security holes can maybe be patched with clever recoding and redesign. But the only way to fix the installation issue is to totally rearchitect the way Windows applications are installed and run. Microsoft has to make this change in order for Windows to continue to be viable.
Now it appears that they're doing a really fucked-up job of making this change. That doesn't change the fact that these changes are necessary, and that running Windows will continue to be a nightmare for many users until these change are implemented.
Anybody who describes XP as a "perfectly fine OS" is demonstrating extreme unawareness of the issues that most PC users face. In other words, Thurrott is an idiot.
You're assuming he knows the difference between an en and a de.