Because some of us feel that Apple is a scumbag company. Their case design is pretentious, their performance is less than what you can get for a comparably priced PC, their CEO is nothing but Bill Gates in a turtleneck, their legal department makes Stalin look like a friendly guy, and their "innovation" isn't. Besides, Processor emulation by its very nature is slower than the original thing. There's no amount of coding in the world that'll make an emulated system anywhere near as fast as a top of the line system. I'd rather trade a bit of convenience in getting my system set up exactly the way I want it than having some asshole from cupertino tell me how I should work with my system. By getting Openstep 5^W^WOS X, I give up a good amount of freedom to get a system exactly the way I want it.
This is of course, only if you ignore the fact that the kids had the fucking propane tanks in the school rigged to explode. Suppose they didn't have a gun, what would have happened? They probably would have just blown up the school, causing many more deaths than happened with their illegally obtained guns. Care to counter?
Ah, but you wouldn't need to upgrade the entire distro, just the kernel. By and large, in the case of needing hardware support only found in a new kernel, one would just have to upgrade the kernel, not any of the userland tools at all. The end result is a system that works just like the old one, only it runs faster. With windows, on the other hand, upgrading the kernel is only possible by upgrading the user interface, which implies retraining to some degree as you get them up to speed on the new system.
If the old version is working, why do you need support for it?
Because you never know when some date-sensitive problem is going to arise, or a crash due to a coding bug, or any number of problems that can occur in a large enterprise environment. In such a case, having a tech you can call who has access to the inner workings of the OS is damn near a necessity. Shit happens; you have a support contract for when you're stumped, and need someone whose been there.
If it were me, I'd be looking to upgrade because WinNT is OLD, and it's time for something new. But that's just me.
So you're willing to spend the hundreds of hours testing every app used on the end-users' systems? Willing to contact vendors to ask about upgrade paths and patches for custom applications which may rely on deprecated system functions? Willing to pay hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to upgrade the systems to the requirements of later versions of windows? We're talking about enterprise computing environments here where even much of Office is overkill for the average user's needs.
WinNT still Just Works for a large number of people. What's "old" to you is something that's reliable, and whose quirks are known and well-understood. Upgrading to any new software will involve retraining users who are familiar with an older system, and that means lost money and productivity. If it's not broken, why fix it?
Fine, create a.login file that starts x and restores the session with the xsession system that's been in X since forever and a day. xsession does save one's desktop exactly as they left it, even if the computer's been turned off. Session saving is an underutilized feature that's miles beyond anything found in the windows or mac environments.
These Linux hackers should leave the Xbox alone and devote some time to improving X performance on the desktop, or something else useful.
I totally disagree. Hacking a console and writing a graphics rendering system are pretty much non-orthagonal processes. There's a lot of different programming skills that don't easily cross over. The xbox hack scene is, by and large, dominated by college students, part time security folks, and other hobbyists, who don't really have the skills to work on something as complex as you mentioned.
As far as your complaints as to cheating and the xbox, maybe you need to complain to Microsoft. Ask them why a third party can't set up a server for xbox games, so lan partiers, etc, can use their own server and control who plays and who doesn't. End-user authentication is still an important security tool, why is microsoft leaving it out of the loop?
Hrnnn, 16 aircraft carriers laid out in a 4x4 grid. Lessee, we'd have a shitload of firepower, 80000 people, and with all those pilots, enough ego to be seen from orbit. Course, we'd also have a terrible military strategy, as 16 aircraft carriers in one battle group would mean an overconcentration of force, thus limiting the effectiveness of all that firepower. Too much time and resources would be spent getting aircraft into position, etc, thus such a cluster of carriers would be bound by input and output. Thus, a beowulf of carriers would cause more problems than it would solve
Use your head for just a moment here. Military technology, be it a howitzer, or an aircraft carrier, wears out in time, or is obsoleted. Thus, one needs to be constantly building and replacing hardware so that a military fleet retains its competetive advantage. As another poster pointed out, the Navy is also readying to retire an older aircraft carrier, so there is no change in the number of carriers in use.
Additionally, more large ships such as aircraft carriers can mean improved morale. Crews of these very large ships are out at sea for months at a time. More ships means that one can more readily cycle crews in and out, resulting in shorter, less stressful deployments, which can improve safety and morale. So, quit jerking your knee like that, and realize that the world is more complicated than you seem to believe it is.
Depends on the bandwidth into the machine more than anything else. Most/.ings, unless the database explodes into a shower of sparks, are limited by the bandwidth of the machine more than anything else. It'll be quite easy to/. it if it's only got a T1 or so. If it's got a 10Gb connection or two, I'd imagine that the system load wouldn't even be noticed.
and a bunch of confused users not knowing what "distribution" to run on their Linksys access point.
I call bullshit on this one. Most users will go about their merry day not caring about what their AP runs, because they don't need to. TiVOs run Linux, have a vocal hacking community, and do you see the average TiVO user thinking about distros? No. This allows those people that want to play with their hardware a bit larger of an opportunity to do so. Giving their kernel patches back to the community just makes sense.
PC mobos already come with digital audio output. SP-DIF has connector formats other than optical hookups, you know. So really, it's mac users playing catchup here, not PC makers. Besides, for the vast majority of computer users, digital output isn't a real issue. If it is, an Audigy Platinum is only a couple hundred dollars, and offers more audio connectivity than you can shake a stick at.
I'd say that you're overblowing the Mac's potential here. You're forgetting that the Athlon64 is going to be shipping at about the same time as the G5, and will offer pretty much everything you mentioned -- 64 bit architecture, SATA, etc. Plus, Athlon64-based systems will be at least several hundred dollars less expensive than the G5. If anything AMD, not Apple, will usher in the 64 bit desktop, as The Rest of Us will actually be able to afford Athlon64s.
As a quick correction, the crusoe isn't a RISC chip. It's VLIW, which shares some design similarities, but at the same time, is much, much different.
I don't know about you, but I blame the Dutch Tulip Craze^W^W^WDot Com Bust for the lack of a Unix-optimized version of the Crusoe. The original benefit of the Crusoe's code-morphing technology was supposed to be the fact that it would be able to run nearly any other platform's code natively. Then, the bubble popped, and the Crusoe was delegated to the small market of low-power consumption x86 compatible chips.
IMO the whole thing's a shame. TMTA would have probably been a lot healthier if they would have offered a native VLIW chip in addition to the Crusoe, so that embedded people who didn't care about x86 compatibility could use this damn nice chip to provide real good, low power devices for markets such as set-top boxes, where x86 compatibility is a non-issue.
step 1.5 can be avoided by creating step.5: setting up a dynamic DNS service on their computer so you just have to ssh into grandfathers_computer.dynamicdnsservice.com.
Depends on the user, etc. My grandmother's P133 lasted her 6 years before the mobo went bad and it began randomly bluescreening. The only upgrade in that time was a new hard drive as the 2 gigger in there was full, and some more RAM so she could use her scanner. Admittedly, she's nowhere near a power user, but still, it served her well. My mother's computer is a similar story. Lasted her about 5 years before she decided to get a new one. It still works wonderfully; I may ask her for it for use in my efforts to learn clustering.
As far as your unprecidented overuse of unprecidented, I don't think so. As far as stability goes, there are still systems out there that are far more stable than OS X. Pit OS X against a system running VMS and OS X looks buggy. As far as UNIX integration, take a look at a Sun, or an SGI workstation for real UNIX integration; while you're looking at that SGI workstation, examine it for real case design that looks good, yet isn't over-flashy. As far as UI goes, the Mac UI has always bugged me; it's intangible, I know, but simply put, the interface has always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, I may be a bit biased here. I'm clamoring for a nice Athlon64 system, which will be coming out at about the same time as the G5, and will actually be affordable. I'd be willing to place money on a good Athlon64 system being 1/2 the cost of the cheapest G5 at introduction. I just see AMD's 64 bit line giving the better bang for the buck than Apple.
A whole lot of nothing is what it costs them. That scam used to work way back in the day, but nowadays, any prepaid mail over a certain amount is simply tossed at no cost to the permit holder. Additionally, by doing such action, you're potentially opening up yourself to a mail fraud rap. So doing such an action isn't just pointless, it's potentially very stupid.
I think that the healthy Japanese subnotebook market can pretty well debunk that myth. PCs can be made just as light as Apple laptops, hell, PC-based subnotebooks are hovering around the 2 pound point. It's just that the majority of the laptop market doesn't really care about a laptop that's just a pound or so heavier.
Besides, I think that this Toshiba laptop is going more for the desktop replacement line than a true laptop line. For starters, it's got a regular P4 in there, not a P4M or Centrino; this will lead to a tiny battery life, which would be acceptable for a person who may only use said battery for a built-in UPS or for the occasional jaunt out.
Actually, a more likely, though somewhat unfortunate at least from a personal freedom standpoint, is that the DMCA wins on both counts. From what it sounds like, Corbis' suit against Amazon is on shaky ground in that they didn't give them a chance to rectify the situation before the suit was filed. Amazon's going to claim the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA apply to this case, as they simply provide a marketplace for the information; much like an ISP, they only provide the linkspace, and don't pay much mind to the sites unless a problem is brought to their attention. Chances are, the court's going to agree with this defense, and either dismiss the case against Amazon, or a jury is going to find Amazon not liable due to the safe-harbor clause.
This leaves the actual sellers. They are commiting copyright violations, and as they are removing encryption used to protect copyrighted images without authorization, they will be slammed by the DMCA. Thus there is no battle royale with the DMCA against the DMCA, as the two different clauses of the DMCA are going to be used with what will be two different parties.
would be a much cleaner, intuitive design, IMO. It does away with item numbers, which will only lead to maintenance problems Regardless as to the actual mechanics though, the functionality is definitely pretty damn good. Create something that's good looking and relatively lightweight, and I'm certain that it would be a hit.
Of course, if KDE's not your cup of tea, you can always go for just the core libs, and Xstroke. No recompiling required, and it works with any X app. I'm sure similar functionality is available in Windows as well. You just gotta look.
Does Safari do browser spoofing? If so, I'd say spoof it to almost look like NS 4.78, but put a comment on the end of the UA string to say something like "doesn't work as well as Safari" so that hopefully their log analysis tools will pick up that maybe it would be a good idea to do some testing with other browsers.
I've used cut/paste in gui-based file managers for years. While I usually have the directory open in another window/fm frame, sometimes I haven't created it yet, or it's only a couple directories away, and I don't want to fuss with resizing my fm just for a few files.
Besides, a good file management program won't cut/copy the actual file to the clipboard, just their location. When you paste to the new location, it just goes in and either moves or copies the file, the actual contents never touching the clipboard.
Okay, you're out in the field, miles from anything resembling an electical outlet. Do you want to carry around several pounds of heavy batteries, or a pound or two of fuel canisters to power your laptop running your experimental equipment. Or maybe you're on a long-haul flight from New York to Sidney. You can't afford first class, so you're stuck in coach, where there are no data ports. Once again, do you want to bother with the hassle of swapping out batteries halfway through the flight?
Yes, if you're near an electical outlet at all times, then you probably don't need a fuel cell. But if you're in a situation that you're quite possibly going to have a significant delay in getting to a power source, you're probably going to like the fact that fuel cells promise to provide long life, plus the capability of being able to hot swap without multiple power outlets. Yeah, it's not for everyone, but many people would find such a feature to be of great advantage when heading out onto the field.
I disagree. The next few "stable" versions of mozilla are going to be somewhat broken as they migrate to [thunder,fire]bird and rewrite a good amount of the underlying code to make it even faster and better. Additionally, 1.4 is going to be a long-lived branch, thus bug/security fixes are going to be backported to it, much like they're backported to Mozilla 1.0.x. This leads to assurances that 7.1.x are going to be as stable as possible, and free from security problems. Not every stable version of Mozilla is supported; unless the mozilla team says otherwise, the best way to think of releases is as gamma-level software. Pretty close to bug-free, but at the same time, not as bulletproof as a supported release.
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Because some of us feel that Apple is a scumbag company. Their case design is pretentious, their performance is less than what you can get for a comparably priced PC, their CEO is nothing but Bill Gates in a turtleneck, their legal department makes Stalin look like a friendly guy, and their "innovation" isn't. Besides, Processor emulation by its very nature is slower than the original thing. There's no amount of coding in the world that'll make an emulated system anywhere near as fast as a top of the line system. I'd rather trade a bit of convenience in getting my system set up exactly the way I want it than having some asshole from cupertino tell me how I should work with my system. By getting Openstep 5^W^WOS X, I give up a good amount of freedom to get a system exactly the way I want it.
This is of course, only if you ignore the fact that the kids had the fucking propane tanks in the school rigged to explode. Suppose they didn't have a gun, what would have happened? They probably would have just blown up the school, causing many more deaths than happened with their illegally obtained guns. Care to counter?
Ah, but you wouldn't need to upgrade the entire distro, just the kernel. By and large, in the case of needing hardware support only found in a new kernel, one would just have to upgrade the kernel, not any of the userland tools at all. The end result is a system that works just like the old one, only it runs faster. With windows, on the other hand, upgrading the kernel is only possible by upgrading the user interface, which implies retraining to some degree as you get them up to speed on the new system.
So you're willing to spend the hundreds of hours testing every app used on the end-users' systems? Willing to contact vendors to ask about upgrade paths and patches for custom applications which may rely on deprecated system functions? Willing to pay hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to upgrade the systems to the requirements of later versions of windows? We're talking about enterprise computing environments here where even much of Office is overkill for the average user's needs.
WinNT still Just Works for a large number of people. What's "old" to you is something that's reliable, and whose quirks are known and well-understood. Upgrading to any new software will involve retraining users who are familiar with an older system, and that means lost money and productivity. If it's not broken, why fix it?
Fine, create a .login file that starts x and restores the session with the xsession system that's been in X since forever and a day. xsession does save one's desktop exactly as they left it, even if the computer's been turned off. Session saving is an underutilized feature that's miles beyond anything found in the windows or mac environments.
As far as your complaints as to cheating and the xbox, maybe you need to complain to Microsoft. Ask them why a third party can't set up a server for xbox games, so lan partiers, etc, can use their own server and control who plays and who doesn't. End-user authentication is still an important security tool, why is microsoft leaving it out of the loop?
Hrnnn, 16 aircraft carriers laid out in a 4x4 grid. Lessee, we'd have a shitload of firepower, 80000 people, and with all those pilots, enough ego to be seen from orbit. Course, we'd also have a terrible military strategy, as 16 aircraft carriers in one battle group would mean an overconcentration of force, thus limiting the effectiveness of all that firepower. Too much time and resources would be spent getting aircraft into position, etc, thus such a cluster of carriers would be bound by input and output. Thus, a beowulf of carriers would cause more problems than it would solve
Additionally, more large ships such as aircraft carriers can mean improved morale. Crews of these very large ships are out at sea for months at a time. More ships means that one can more readily cycle crews in and out, resulting in shorter, less stressful deployments, which can improve safety and morale. So, quit jerking your knee like that, and realize that the world is more complicated than you seem to believe it is.
Depends on the bandwidth into the machine more than anything else. Most /.ings, unless the database explodes into a shower of sparks, are limited by the bandwidth of the machine more than anything else. It'll be quite easy to /. it if it's only got a T1 or so. If it's got a 10Gb connection or two, I'd imagine that the system load wouldn't even be noticed.
I call bullshit on this one. Most users will go about their merry day not caring about what their AP runs, because they don't need to. TiVOs run Linux, have a vocal hacking community, and do you see the average TiVO user thinking about distros? No. This allows those people that want to play with their hardware a bit larger of an opportunity to do so. Giving their kernel patches back to the community just makes sense.
PC mobos already come with digital audio output. SP-DIF has connector formats other than optical hookups, you know. So really, it's mac users playing catchup here, not PC makers. Besides, for the vast majority of computer users, digital output isn't a real issue. If it is, an Audigy Platinum is only a couple hundred dollars, and offers more audio connectivity than you can shake a stick at.
I'd say that you're overblowing the Mac's potential here. You're forgetting that the Athlon64 is going to be shipping at about the same time as the G5, and will offer pretty much everything you mentioned -- 64 bit architecture, SATA, etc. Plus, Athlon64-based systems will be at least several hundred dollars less expensive than the G5. If anything AMD, not Apple, will usher in the 64 bit desktop, as The Rest of Us will actually be able to afford Athlon64s.
I don't know about you, but I blame the Dutch Tulip Craze^W^W^WDot Com Bust for the lack of a Unix-optimized version of the Crusoe. The original benefit of the Crusoe's code-morphing technology was supposed to be the fact that it would be able to run nearly any other platform's code natively. Then, the bubble popped, and the Crusoe was delegated to the small market of low-power consumption x86 compatible chips.
IMO the whole thing's a shame. TMTA would have probably been a lot healthier if they would have offered a native VLIW chip in addition to the Crusoe, so that embedded people who didn't care about x86 compatibility could use this damn nice chip to provide real good, low power devices for markets such as set-top boxes, where x86 compatibility is a non-issue.
step 1.5 can be avoided by creating step .5: setting up a dynamic DNS service on their computer so you just have to ssh into grandfathers_computer.dynamicdnsservice.com.
As far as your unprecidented overuse of unprecidented, I don't think so. As far as stability goes, there are still systems out there that are far more stable than OS X. Pit OS X against a system running VMS and OS X looks buggy. As far as UNIX integration, take a look at a Sun, or an SGI workstation for real UNIX integration; while you're looking at that SGI workstation, examine it for real case design that looks good, yet isn't over-flashy. As far as UI goes, the Mac UI has always bugged me; it's intangible, I know, but simply put, the interface has always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, I may be a bit biased here. I'm clamoring for a nice Athlon64 system, which will be coming out at about the same time as the G5, and will actually be affordable. I'd be willing to place money on a good Athlon64 system being 1/2 the cost of the cheapest G5 at introduction. I just see AMD's 64 bit line giving the better bang for the buck than Apple.
A whole lot of nothing is what it costs them. That scam used to work way back in the day, but nowadays, any prepaid mail over a certain amount is simply tossed at no cost to the permit holder. Additionally, by doing such action, you're potentially opening up yourself to a mail fraud rap. So doing such an action isn't just pointless, it's potentially very stupid.
Besides, I think that this Toshiba laptop is going more for the desktop replacement line than a true laptop line. For starters, it's got a regular P4 in there, not a P4M or Centrino; this will lead to a tiny battery life, which would be acceptable for a person who may only use said battery for a built-in UPS or for the occasional jaunt out.
You may laugh, but trust me, there are worse meat products out there than spam. Much worse. *shudders from the memories*
This leaves the actual sellers. They are commiting copyright violations, and as they are removing encryption used to protect copyrighted images without authorization, they will be slammed by the DMCA. Thus there is no battle royale with the DMCA against the DMCA, as the two different clauses of the DMCA are going to be used with what will be two different parties.
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would be a much cleaner, intuitive design, IMO. It does away with item numbers, which will only lead to maintenance problems Regardless as to the actual mechanics though, the functionality is definitely pretty damn good. Create something that's good looking and relatively lightweight, and I'm certain that it would be a hit.
Of course, if KDE's not your cup of tea, you can always go for just the core libs, and Xstroke. No recompiling required, and it works with any X app. I'm sure similar functionality is available in Windows as well. You just gotta look.
Does Safari do browser spoofing? If so, I'd say spoof it to almost look like NS 4.78, but put a comment on the end of the UA string to say something like "doesn't work as well as Safari" so that hopefully their log analysis tools will pick up that maybe it would be a good idea to do some testing with other browsers.
Besides, a good file management program won't cut/copy the actual file to the clipboard, just their location. When you paste to the new location, it just goes in and either moves or copies the file, the actual contents never touching the clipboard.
Yes, if you're near an electical outlet at all times, then you probably don't need a fuel cell. But if you're in a situation that you're quite possibly going to have a significant delay in getting to a power source, you're probably going to like the fact that fuel cells promise to provide long life, plus the capability of being able to hot swap without multiple power outlets. Yeah, it's not for everyone, but many people would find such a feature to be of great advantage when heading out onto the field.
I disagree. The next few "stable" versions of mozilla are going to be somewhat broken as they migrate to [thunder,fire]bird and rewrite a good amount of the underlying code to make it even faster and better. Additionally, 1.4 is going to be a long-lived branch, thus bug/security fixes are going to be backported to it, much like they're backported to Mozilla 1.0.x. This leads to assurances that 7.1.x are going to be as stable as possible, and free from security problems. Not every stable version of Mozilla is supported; unless the mozilla team says otherwise, the best way to think of releases is as gamma-level software. Pretty close to bug-free, but at the same time, not as bulletproof as a supported release.