So give Windows a local permissioning system that works (a Win-chmod?) and come up with some simple profiles to select by default a point-and-clicky way.. stuff like, "Teenager", "Technical Adult", "Non-Technical Adult (n00b)", and "Computer Guy".
The only limitation to Linux as a wholesale replacement for Windows is that the GUI still isn't *right*. Gnome and KDE are both -good-, but neither are -great-, about it. They feel like Windows 3.1 to me, where there's a GUI, and that's great, but you could still see the DOS prompt trying to peek out under it everywhere. With Gnome at least, it feels (to me) like the GUI just helps you find where to put the command-line stuff, but you still need to know all the bashes and slashes to make the machine comply, when a checkbox would have gotten it done.
I haven't had a chance to try the new Unity interface on Ubuntu yet, hopefully that will be *it*. The old Ubuntu was the closest I could find to a *right* GUI on Linux to date, unless you count Android (which I'd love to run as a PC OS). We need a couple of game designers to come up with a simple, HUD-like interface for dealing with Linux. Give us a Linux you could use with an Xbox 360 controller or a Wiimote, and I'll show you the death of Windows.
The thing is, a word like shit or fuck is merely a nuisance, but that word hurts people very deeply and there is never any valid context to use it. Yes, we have mods, but I was out of mod points to eliminate it, and still feel like something needs to be done to excoriate that kind of hate from our societal discourse. (And, FWIW, I'm a white guy in the South).
Not ambiguous at all. In the original Star Trek 4 (fixed on the VHS release) you could see the Budweiser logo on the cylindrical probe if you watched it in frame-by-frame. It was a beer can.
CmdrTaco, can we please add a feature that automatically blocks any post with that word in it? There is absolutely no useful context for that word in 2011.
This is getting ridiculous. Half the posts on/. are "Oh noes, companies can find out when I X!" If companies want that information, they'll just look at your Facebook account, where you posted pictures of your office, your cat, check-in data at the porn store up on the corner, and links to your YouTube video of your marijuana plants for all the world to see. We cannot simultaneously be a society that wants to share everything and keep everything secret.
But that's buying and continuing production. There's a few shows they could definitely do that with, that died recently (Sarah Connor, and Legend of the Seeker... maybe Dollhouse) but other than that, buy dead shows and just show them as re-runs to save production budget for a handful of quality shows. Yes. low-budget shows can be decent, but big-budget shows like Stargate draw the "wow factor" that brings people to the channel. Once they tune in for Stargate, they might watch BSG that comes on after, or whatnot. I used to watch a crapload of "Painkiller Jane", even though it sucked, because I'd catch it in the hour between SG-1 and Atlantis.
That could be great - G4 is another channel that doesn't have enough content to satisfy its core audience. Another thing this merged company could do would be to air its pilots as webisodes - have 10 pilots, and then let fans view them all and vote on which ones get made into real shows.
And this likely because the channel has gone to absolute poop. I watched SG:U until the midseason break of Season 1, after having been a rabid SG-1 and SG-A fan for years, and by the midseason, SG:U just didn't grip me. I haven't turned SyFy back on since. My wife occasionally watches Sanctuary (one of the few shows worth keeping), but usually watches it on Netflix.
SyFy, if they have any hope of surviving, needs to re-name itself back to Sci-Fi (or perhaps something like "The Geek Channel", ditch all but the top-notch shows on its current roster, and fill in the rest of the space with things their original core demographic actually like. I mean really, how many white and nerdy guys (think: Stargate audience) watch WWE, really? What's next, NASCAR?
Seriously, the biggest problem with the channel is that they're trying to do all original sci-fi content, which, for quality stuff, is EXPENSIVE to produce. Each episode of SG-1 had the budget of a small movie. They're bringing in the Ghost Hunters and that other BS because it's cheap. Buying the rights to failed series from other networks (for example, what they did with Sarah Connor Chronicles) will enable them to stop spending money on production of mediocre crap, pooling resources onto a few shows that they can then put some quality into. I'd much rather see the channel divest itself of the wrestling crap and continue to cater to the original geek culture it was marketed for - buy and air re-runs of things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Legend of the Seeker (hell, restart that one!), Witchblade, Dark Angel, and maybe some anime.
Yes, but Netflix and porn sites don't need to buy enough servers to serve up THE ENTIRE INTERWEBS. How much bandwidth did Netflix use? If we're lucky, your movie site will be that big.
The vast majority of this data isn't stored. The vast majority of it is streaming porn and Netflix. Why did we pay some "scientist" for 3 years (read the summary, it says "three years ago") to calculate this, so we can all be amused by it on/. for 10 minutes? Part of the reason nobody's working in science anymore is that most of our government- and university-backed science is fluff like this to get your soundbite, rather than stuff that makes a difference in our world. Figure out how to GET to Neptune, not how to stack virtual books that high with 30-second free trials of every porn site in Russia.
There's a lot of that too, but the reality is that the medium has long outlived its usefulness. Eventually, they shut down the telegraph offices, because nobody used them for anything meaningful anymore.
Yes, and to use a dying, last-gasp solution like the postal service, $.45 is ridiculously too cheap. As I said in the original post, make it $3, and 80% of the remaining physical mail of non-packages will disappear in 30 days, replaced with electronic communication (or, mercifully, not at all in the case of spam).
I disagree that it couldn't be done profitably to rural areas. No, it couldn't be done every day, like mail is now. But if you have six rural towns surrounding a slightly larger town, you can say, there's a post office in the larger town, and we'll deliver to Specksville on Monday, Tinytown on Tuesday, etc. Not enough mail goes anywhere, let alone to rural areas, to justify six day a week service. Additionally, a cost hike on physical, non-package mail (letters, postcards, and spam) would help profitability. This is common-sense stuff that any business knows, but the government has trouble with (see the 15 trillion dollar debt): Higher revenue in, plus lower costs out, equals profitability.
Not here in the USA, sadly;( Largely because the postal service here subsidizes itself with all the ads that it then delivers - offering an opt-out would cost them money. I fail to understand why companies must comply with CAN-SPAM for email, where there is virtually no cost to dealing with spam messages, but there is no such restriction on a consumer's right to have pounds of garbage dropped in their lawn every day and a very real cost is incurred to do it.
Not a bad idea at all, actually. They've already discussed the possibility of using postal delivery trucks as Street View cameras.. they would get everyone's address, and they could do a lot of mail digitization for us (especially since they're already set up to give anyone who wants one a free email address).
Slashdot Mirror
Win! This is even better from the Air Guitar Shirt on ThinkGeek ;)
So give Windows a local permissioning system that works (a Win-chmod?) and come up with some simple profiles to select by default a point-and-clicky way.. stuff like, "Teenager", "Technical Adult", "Non-Technical Adult (n00b)", and "Computer Guy".
also, Google, WTG aspect ratio, with your ad text running right out of the billboard frame...
The only limitation to Linux as a wholesale replacement for Windows is that the GUI still isn't *right*. Gnome and KDE are both -good-, but neither are -great-, about it. They feel like Windows 3.1 to me, where there's a GUI, and that's great, but you could still see the DOS prompt trying to peek out under it everywhere. With Gnome at least, it feels (to me) like the GUI just helps you find where to put the command-line stuff, but you still need to know all the bashes and slashes to make the machine comply, when a checkbox would have gotten it done.
I haven't had a chance to try the new Unity interface on Ubuntu yet, hopefully that will be *it*. The old Ubuntu was the closest I could find to a *right* GUI on Linux to date, unless you count Android (which I'd love to run as a PC OS). We need a couple of game designers to come up with a simple, HUD-like interface for dealing with Linux. Give us a Linux you could use with an Xbox 360 controller or a Wiimote, and I'll show you the death of Windows.
The thing is, a word like shit or fuck is merely a nuisance, but that word hurts people very deeply and there is never any valid context to use it. Yes, we have mods, but I was out of mod points to eliminate it, and still feel like something needs to be done to excoriate that kind of hate from our societal discourse. (And, FWIW, I'm a white guy in the South).
Not ambiguous at all. In the original Star Trek 4 (fixed on the VHS release) you could see the Budweiser logo on the cylindrical probe if you watched it in frame-by-frame. It was a beer can.
This from someone who can't handle the signup process for a /. account?
It's an ATOM processor.
CmdrTaco, can we please add a feature that automatically blocks any post with that word in it? There is absolutely no useful context for that word in 2011.
Not everyone does, but I am willing to bet that at least 60-70% of the /. userbase does.
This is getting ridiculous. Half the posts on /. are "Oh noes, companies can find out when I X!" If companies want that information, they'll just look at your Facebook account, where you posted pictures of your office, your cat, check-in data at the porn store up on the corner, and links to your YouTube video of your marijuana plants for all the world to see. We cannot simultaneously be a society that wants to share everything and keep everything secret.
But that's buying and continuing production. There's a few shows they could definitely do that with, that died recently (Sarah Connor, and Legend of the Seeker... maybe Dollhouse) but other than that, buy dead shows and just show them as re-runs to save production budget for a handful of quality shows. Yes. low-budget shows can be decent, but big-budget shows like Stargate draw the "wow factor" that brings people to the channel. Once they tune in for Stargate, they might watch BSG that comes on after, or whatnot. I used to watch a crapload of "Painkiller Jane", even though it sucked, because I'd catch it in the hour between SG-1 and Atlantis.
That could be great - G4 is another channel that doesn't have enough content to satisfy its core audience. Another thing this merged company could do would be to air its pilots as webisodes - have 10 pilots, and then let fans view them all and vote on which ones get made into real shows.
And this likely because the channel has gone to absolute poop. I watched SG:U until the midseason break of Season 1, after having been a rabid SG-1 and SG-A fan for years, and by the midseason, SG:U just didn't grip me. I haven't turned SyFy back on since. My wife occasionally watches Sanctuary (one of the few shows worth keeping), but usually watches it on Netflix.
SyFy, if they have any hope of surviving, needs to re-name itself back to Sci-Fi (or perhaps something like "The Geek Channel", ditch all but the top-notch shows on its current roster, and fill in the rest of the space with things their original core demographic actually like. I mean really, how many white and nerdy guys (think: Stargate audience) watch WWE, really? What's next, NASCAR?
Hell, some Star Trek wouldn't even suck for daytime space-filler.
Seriously, the biggest problem with the channel is that they're trying to do all original sci-fi content, which, for quality stuff, is EXPENSIVE to produce. Each episode of SG-1 had the budget of a small movie. They're bringing in the Ghost Hunters and that other BS because it's cheap. Buying the rights to failed series from other networks (for example, what they did with Sarah Connor Chronicles) will enable them to stop spending money on production of mediocre crap, pooling resources onto a few shows that they can then put some quality into. I'd much rather see the channel divest itself of the wrestling crap and continue to cater to the original geek culture it was marketed for - buy and air re-runs of things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Legend of the Seeker (hell, restart that one!), Witchblade, Dark Angel, and maybe some anime.
Yes, but Netflix and porn sites don't need to buy enough servers to serve up THE ENTIRE INTERWEBS. How much bandwidth did Netflix use? If we're lucky, your movie site will be that big.
I read the COMMENTS on the site, to see if anybody else felt the same way I did.
The vast majority of this data isn't stored. The vast majority of it is streaming porn and Netflix. Why did we pay some "scientist" for 3 years (read the summary, it says "three years ago") to calculate this, so we can all be amused by it on /. for 10 minutes? Part of the reason nobody's working in science anymore is that most of our government- and university-backed science is fluff like this to get your soundbite, rather than stuff that makes a difference in our world. Figure out how to GET to Neptune, not how to stack virtual books that high with 30-second free trials of every porn site in Russia.
There's a lot of that too, but the reality is that the medium has long outlived its usefulness. Eventually, they shut down the telegraph offices, because nobody used them for anything meaningful anymore.
Yes, and to use a dying, last-gasp solution like the postal service, $.45 is ridiculously too cheap. As I said in the original post, make it $3, and 80% of the remaining physical mail of non-packages will disappear in 30 days, replaced with electronic communication (or, mercifully, not at all in the case of spam).
I disagree that it couldn't be done profitably to rural areas. No, it couldn't be done every day, like mail is now. But if you have six rural towns surrounding a slightly larger town, you can say, there's a post office in the larger town, and we'll deliver to Specksville on Monday, Tinytown on Tuesday, etc. Not enough mail goes anywhere, let alone to rural areas, to justify six day a week service. Additionally, a cost hike on physical, non-package mail (letters, postcards, and spam) would help profitability. This is common-sense stuff that any business knows, but the government has trouble with (see the 15 trillion dollar debt): Higher revenue in, plus lower costs out, equals profitability.
Not here in the USA, sadly ;( Largely because the postal service here subsidizes itself with all the ads that it then delivers - offering an opt-out would cost them money. I fail to understand why companies must comply with CAN-SPAM for email, where there is virtually no cost to dealing with spam messages, but there is no such restriction on a consumer's right to have pounds of garbage dropped in their lawn every day and a very real cost is incurred to do it.
Sure, but then it all gets thrown away, to rot in a landfill forever... Either way, it's bad for the environment.
Not a bad idea at all, actually. They've already discussed the possibility of using postal delivery trucks as Street View cameras.. they would get everyone's address, and they could do a lot of mail digitization for us (especially since they're already set up to give anyone who wants one a free email address).