There are plenty of serious servers running Linux. But FreeBSD is also a viable choice. FreeBSD on the desktop is pretty much a non-player except among people who also run FreeBSD servers.
There are plenty of high fidelity earbuds available. Etymotic pioneered the category; now you can also buy products from Shure, Ultimate Ears, Bowers & Wilkins, Sennheiser, Klipsch, Westone, JH Audio and more. Even Grado makes some now. Bring money; most of these will cost you over $100, in some cases well over - the most expensive JH Audio and Shure models sell for $1000 or so. To be clear, these are IN-ear products; if you're looking at the kind that just kind of sit in the ear rather than having a firm seal, they're pretty much all terrible.
It is possible to blow out a pair of earbuds by cranking the volume up too high, but usually they will sound awful because of increasing distortion well before the danger point. Most earbud failures are mechanical problems - breaks in the cable or connections coming loose. Presumably this new technology will be neither more nor less prone to those problems than existing earbuds are.
What is really dead is upper-middle range audio. The kind that Bose pretends to be but mostly isn't. The kind of stuff you'd have bought at Tweeter or in the Magnolia section of Best Buy, or at a local independent shop if you are lucky enough to still have one. What few products remain are home theater rigs that are all about more more more instead of better.
High end audio isn't dead. Up at the really expensive end of the curve people are still buying. The shops that specialize in that gear also have more affordable options where you would have a total system cost in the $2000 - $5000 range, but few people know to look for them.
The high end content is also lacking. DVD-Audio and SACD are dead formats. Download services like HDTracks exist but have a limited selection of music - and sadly, when they have new music it's usually only 24/44.1 instead of using higher sample rates. (I presume that means the stuff is being recorded, mixed, and mastered at 44.1 - a sad state of affairs.) A handful of Blu-Ray releases have high resolution audio but it's rare.
Even if the software run on the SaaSS site is ostensibly open, it is impossible for an end user to verify that the site is actually running the posted source code without modifications. All such sites must be treated as untrusted entities.
The GNU project did not succeed at internally creating a full Unix-like OS. Notably, their kernel effort, HURD, took a very long time and has not achieved significant real world acceptance.
But... the free/libre software culture that GNU created DID create a full Unix-like OS. A lot of the code came directly from GNU and GNU-sponsored efforts (emacs, gcc, bison, bash...); other code came from outside efforts that were inspired by the free software ethos. As the definition of what a Unix-like OS included expanded, GNU continued to contribute with projects like GTK and GNOME, and other people pitched in with Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, all the P scripting languages, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and many many more things.
So... hats off to GNU and the FSF. Without free software, our world of computing would be a very different place. The world owes them a huge debt.
Saturn never formally abandoned the no haggle policy but it got less rigid near the end. And the company started offering rebates that also affected pricing. It was part of their downfall, giving up one of the things that made them special. GM had a brand that people were so enthusiastic about that they actually traveled to Tennessee for owner events - and then they threw it away.
You were able to order Saturns online at one point, but they were delivered to you at a local dealer. It didn't actually make any difference to the people who worked at the dealership - Saturn representatives were not paid commissions, they were salaried employees, another thing that made the company special. (Notably, the Apple Store also uses a no-commission model.) It led to a no-pressure experience on the dealership floor, very unlike most car showrooms. That may have also changed near the end.
The third thing GM did was shift Saturn away from selling internally developed and built cars (like the original sedan and station wagon) and shift them over to selling cars that were designed, and in some cases built, in other parts of GM. That started with the L series, which was an Opel design built at a plant in Maryland. Saturn cars lost both their uniqueness and their emphasis on quality.
The last car actually designed by Saturn (rather than being a design shared with other parts of GM) was made in 2002. The special labor contract that the Tennessee plant had was ended in 2004. By then, nearly everything that had made Saturn "a different kind of car company" was gone.
GM was caught between a rock and a hard place. Saturn's way of doing business - emphasis on quality, long model runs with only small changes year to year, fixed price selling, no commissions, radically different work contracts (the Saturn plants had a union and wages were comparable to the rest of GM, but they had almost no work rules so everybody was free to do everything) - was so unlike the rest of the company that the split couldn't be sustained. GM either had to make Saturn like the rest of the company (which is what they did, and what ultimately killed Saturn) or make the rest of the company like Saturn.
The latter would have been the better course but a far more difficult one. It would have required massive union negotiations, radical changes to the corporate culture, and turning the way dealerships did business upside down. The last is overdue anyway; car dealers no longer make much money selling cars, most of their profits are in service.
The open source driver for ATI cards has improved by leaps and bounds; on older hardware it now outperforms the closed legacy driver. (It still lags behind on new systems.) It might be just the thing for your old X1600.
Installing one of the Ubuntu variants is a better way to switch than just installing a window manager, because it makes sure that you get all the software that's meant to go with your new choice of desktop. And it's dead simple; you only have to install ONE package (xubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, etc.) to get the new desktop choice you want.
Once you have done that, logging into the desktop of your choice is an option on the login screen. You can make your favorite the default.
If your system is tight on disk space (mostly important for laptops with SSDs) you might prefer to just install the variant you want from the start; that will likely save you a gigabyte or so. Otherwise it's no big deal; there is no performance penalty to having the extra options, just a space penalty.
The impossible to grab borders are mostly a problem on 12.04. By 13.04 they had made the grab area significantly larger (though they did not make the borders VISUALLY fatter) so it is no longer a problem. I never installed 12.10 so I don't know whether the change was in that version.
The name Unity was meant to signify bringing together the desktop, phone, tablet, and netbook (small desktop screen) interfaces. It actually is the closest thing I have seen to a single interface that works acceptably for all of those devices (much better than Windows 8 for example, which fails badly for the desktop case unless you add in a bunch of stuff to turn it back into something more like the Windows 7 interface), though it's a compromise compared to a dedicated design for each.
The harder question is whether a single interface is a goal that makes sense. Ultimately I'm inclined to think that it does not. The desktop use case is sufficiently different from the other three to merit a design of its own.
That's $210 for all 5.5 seasons, not for just the last one. And it's more expensive than buying the boxed sets of the seasons one at a time, though that's in part because the first three now sell for reduced prices. And the boxed set gets you an extra documentary and some swag.
ReiserFS got dropped largely because Reiser dropped the ball on maintenance and bug fixing. All his attention shifted to Reiser v4 (which, to be fair, was an ambitious attempt to create a filesystem technically superior to everything) to the detriment of the v3 installed base.
"Allowed" isn't really the right term when the owners of Hulu are themselves major content owners. This includes Comcast, which now owns NBC Universal.
You can, and those cars are already aerodynamic for handling reasons. The Tesla Roadster is an example of a car that followed that model. But that form factor is impractical for most car owners; a body that can haul four people and some cargo (like the Tesla Model S) is going to be a bigger seller.
Yes, we still have CDMA. Even in LTE-enabled locations, you still need it on the CDMA carriers (Verizon and Sprint) because neither has yet deployed VoLTE (voice over LTE). MetroPCS was the only US carrier to deploy VoLTE and that is disappearing as they transition from CDMA to GSM. In the long term it's likely that all carriers will move to VoLTE. Verizon has announced that they plan to start rolling out VoLTE service in the first half of 2014; Sprint and T-Mobile have both talked about VoLTE but have not announced time frames.
It's likely that the next Nexus phone will offer all of that, plus GSM voice and EDGE data. The only notable omission is the lack of 2500MHz LTE support, which is not currently needed but will be when Sprint starts to deploy LTE on the Clearwire spectrum, but you would also need CDMA support to make that useful at present.
Side note: there is no reason to buy the Nexus 7 LTE in the US without one of the carrier options. The T-Mobile and AT&T versions include the same unlocked device, plus a SIM and a special offer from the carrier that you are not obliged to accept. T-Mobile gives you a free month of service (truly free with no obligation, they don't even ask for a credit card); AT&T gives you a $100 credit if you accept a 2 year contract.
The refarming has been most aggressive in areas that have MetroPCS service. MetroPCS (now a subsidiary of T-Mobile US and in the process of shifting to GSM; it was originally a CDMA carrier) has been actively marketing "bring your own phone" to AT&T customers, so it is important for T-Mobile/MetroPCS to have HSPA+ on the bands that AT&T uses in those areas.
I believe that T-Mobile does the spectrum refarming in any area that gets LTE service. But lots of places, mostly outside urban centers, won't get LTE for years; it's not a priority for the GSM carriers because there isn't enough demand for data in those locations. LTE as deployed by US carriers isn't all that much faster than HSPA+ 42, but it is significantly more spectrum efficient which means the carrier can serve more data customers with the same amount of spectrum. LTE everywhere is more important for CDMA carriers because 3G CDMA data is much slower.
Green cars all tend to look the same for a reason - aerodynamics. Lower drag = more miles per charge. Lower drag also means more MPG for a gasoline-powered car but it's easier to just put in a bigger tank to get adequate range.
The mistake was not discontinuing the 4S. It's in Apple's interest, and the interest of the accessory community, to get rid of the old accessory connector and consolidate the market on the new Lightning connector. I expected that their announcement this fall would do that.
I'd mod this "funny" but I already commented on this topic. Cory isn't the sort to be anonymous, ever. And Little Brother is a wonderful book that can be downloaded for free: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
If the school is planning to develop apps for the tablets, it's much easier if all the students have the same model of tablet. Having multiple OSes involved would be even more of a challenge; suppose some showed up with iPads, some had Surfaces, and some had Android tablets? (And throw in the stray Playbook or two if you want to be obscure.)
It will have much better battery life than your Chromebook and it has a touch screen. So it's a bit of apples and oranges.
I'm typing this on a Samsung Chromebook and I love it. (I chose it over the inexpensive Intel-based Chromebooks because of its better keyboard and longer battery life. A new generation of Haswell-based Chromebooks is on the way; they should close the battery life gap.) But it's not for everybody. If you need to run software from the Windows world, one of the upcoming Bay Trail systems might be just what you need.
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There are plenty of serious servers running Linux. But FreeBSD is also a viable choice. FreeBSD on the desktop is pretty much a non-player except among people who also run FreeBSD servers.
We have no guarantees that processors from other companies don't have backdoors. Information about them just hasn't come out publicly yet.
There are plenty of high fidelity earbuds available. Etymotic pioneered the category; now you can also buy products from Shure, Ultimate Ears, Bowers & Wilkins, Sennheiser, Klipsch, Westone, JH Audio and more. Even Grado makes some now. Bring money; most of these will cost you over $100, in some cases well over - the most expensive JH Audio and Shure models sell for $1000 or so. To be clear, these are IN-ear products; if you're looking at the kind that just kind of sit in the ear rather than having a firm seal, they're pretty much all terrible.
It is possible to blow out a pair of earbuds by cranking the volume up too high, but usually they will sound awful because of increasing distortion well before the danger point. Most earbud failures are mechanical problems - breaks in the cable or connections coming loose. Presumably this new technology will be neither more nor less prone to those problems than existing earbuds are.
What is really dead is upper-middle range audio. The kind that Bose pretends to be but mostly isn't. The kind of stuff you'd have bought at Tweeter or in the Magnolia section of Best Buy, or at a local independent shop if you are lucky enough to still have one. What few products remain are home theater rigs that are all about more more more instead of better.
High end audio isn't dead. Up at the really expensive end of the curve people are still buying. The shops that specialize in that gear also have more affordable options where you would have a total system cost in the $2000 - $5000 range, but few people know to look for them.
The high end content is also lacking. DVD-Audio and SACD are dead formats. Download services like HDTracks exist but have a limited selection of music - and sadly, when they have new music it's usually only 24/44.1 instead of using higher sample rates. (I presume that means the stuff is being recorded, mixed, and mastered at 44.1 - a sad state of affairs.) A handful of Blu-Ray releases have high resolution audio but it's rare.
Even if the software run on the SaaSS site is ostensibly open, it is impossible for an end user to verify that the site is actually running the posted source code without modifications. All such sites must be treated as untrusted entities.
The GNU project did not succeed at internally creating a full Unix-like OS. Notably, their kernel effort, HURD, took a very long time and has not achieved significant real world acceptance.
But... the free/libre software culture that GNU created DID create a full Unix-like OS. A lot of the code came directly from GNU and GNU-sponsored efforts (emacs, gcc, bison, bash...); other code came from outside efforts that were inspired by the free software ethos. As the definition of what a Unix-like OS included expanded, GNU continued to contribute with projects like GTK and GNOME, and other people pitched in with Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, all the P scripting languages, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and many many more things.
So... hats off to GNU and the FSF. Without free software, our world of computing would be a very different place. The world owes them a huge debt.
Saturn never formally abandoned the no haggle policy but it got less rigid near the end. And the company started offering rebates that also affected pricing. It was part of their downfall, giving up one of the things that made them special. GM had a brand that people were so enthusiastic about that they actually traveled to Tennessee for owner events - and then they threw it away.
You were able to order Saturns online at one point, but they were delivered to you at a local dealer. It didn't actually make any difference to the people who worked at the dealership - Saturn representatives were not paid commissions, they were salaried employees, another thing that made the company special. (Notably, the Apple Store also uses a no-commission model.) It led to a no-pressure experience on the dealership floor, very unlike most car showrooms. That may have also changed near the end.
The third thing GM did was shift Saturn away from selling internally developed and built cars (like the original sedan and station wagon) and shift them over to selling cars that were designed, and in some cases built, in other parts of GM. That started with the L series, which was an Opel design built at a plant in Maryland. Saturn cars lost both their uniqueness and their emphasis on quality.
The last car actually designed by Saturn (rather than being a design shared with other parts of GM) was made in 2002. The special labor contract that the Tennessee plant had was ended in 2004. By then, nearly everything that had made Saturn "a different kind of car company" was gone.
GM was caught between a rock and a hard place. Saturn's way of doing business - emphasis on quality, long model runs with only small changes year to year, fixed price selling, no commissions, radically different work contracts (the Saturn plants had a union and wages were comparable to the rest of GM, but they had almost no work rules so everybody was free to do everything) - was so unlike the rest of the company that the split couldn't be sustained. GM either had to make Saturn like the rest of the company (which is what they did, and what ultimately killed Saturn) or make the rest of the company like Saturn.
The latter would have been the better course but a far more difficult one. It would have required massive union negotiations, radical changes to the corporate culture, and turning the way dealerships did business upside down. The last is overdue anyway; car dealers no longer make much money selling cars, most of their profits are in service.
The open source driver for ATI cards has improved by leaps and bounds; on older hardware it now outperforms the closed legacy driver. (It still lags behind on new systems.) It might be just the thing for your old X1600.
Installing one of the Ubuntu variants is a better way to switch than just installing a window manager, because it makes sure that you get all the software that's meant to go with your new choice of desktop. And it's dead simple; you only have to install ONE package (xubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, etc.) to get the new desktop choice you want.
Once you have done that, logging into the desktop of your choice is an option on the login screen. You can make your favorite the default.
If your system is tight on disk space (mostly important for laptops with SSDs) you might prefer to just install the variant you want from the start; that will likely save you a gigabyte or so. Otherwise it's no big deal; there is no performance penalty to having the extra options, just a space penalty.
The impossible to grab borders are mostly a problem on 12.04. By 13.04 they had made the grab area significantly larger (though they did not make the borders VISUALLY fatter) so it is no longer a problem. I never installed 12.10 so I don't know whether the change was in that version.
The name Unity was meant to signify bringing together the desktop, phone, tablet, and netbook (small desktop screen) interfaces. It actually is the closest thing I have seen to a single interface that works acceptably for all of those devices (much better than Windows 8 for example, which fails badly for the desktop case unless you add in a bunch of stuff to turn it back into something more like the Windows 7 interface), though it's a compromise compared to a dedicated design for each.
The harder question is whether a single interface is a goal that makes sense. Ultimately I'm inclined to think that it does not. The desktop use case is sufficiently different from the other three to merit a design of its own.
That's $210 for all 5.5 seasons, not for just the last one. And it's more expensive than buying the boxed sets of the seasons one at a time, though that's in part because the first three now sell for reduced prices. And the boxed set gets you an extra documentary and some swag.
ReiserFS got dropped largely because Reiser dropped the ball on maintenance and bug fixing. All his attention shifted to Reiser v4 (which, to be fair, was an ambitious attempt to create a filesystem technically superior to everything) to the detriment of the v3 installed base.
"Allowed" isn't really the right term when the owners of Hulu are themselves major content owners. This includes Comcast, which now owns NBC Universal.
You can, and those cars are already aerodynamic for handling reasons. The Tesla Roadster is an example of a car that followed that model. But that form factor is impractical for most car owners; a body that can haul four people and some cargo (like the Tesla Model S) is going to be a bigger seller.
Yes, we still have CDMA. Even in LTE-enabled locations, you still need it on the CDMA carriers (Verizon and Sprint) because neither has yet deployed VoLTE (voice over LTE). MetroPCS was the only US carrier to deploy VoLTE and that is disappearing as they transition from CDMA to GSM. In the long term it's likely that all carriers will move to VoLTE. Verizon has announced that they plan to start rolling out VoLTE service in the first half of 2014; Sprint and T-Mobile have both talked about VoLTE but have not announced time frames.
The new version of the Nexus 7 tablet offers the following coverage:
LTE: 700/850/1700/1800/1900/2100 MHz
HSPA+: 850/900/1900/2100/AWS (1700/2100) MHz
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
It's likely that the next Nexus phone will offer all of that, plus GSM voice and EDGE data. The only notable omission is the lack of 2500MHz LTE support, which is not currently needed but will be when Sprint starts to deploy LTE on the Clearwire spectrum, but you would also need CDMA support to make that useful at present.
Side note: there is no reason to buy the Nexus 7 LTE in the US without one of the carrier options. The T-Mobile and AT&T versions include the same unlocked device, plus a SIM and a special offer from the carrier that you are not obliged to accept. T-Mobile gives you a free month of service (truly free with no obligation, they don't even ask for a credit card); AT&T gives you a $100 credit if you accept a 2 year contract.
The refarming has been most aggressive in areas that have MetroPCS service. MetroPCS (now a subsidiary of T-Mobile US and in the process of shifting to GSM; it was originally a CDMA carrier) has been actively marketing "bring your own phone" to AT&T customers, so it is important for T-Mobile/MetroPCS to have HSPA+ on the bands that AT&T uses in those areas.
I believe that T-Mobile does the spectrum refarming in any area that gets LTE service. But lots of places, mostly outside urban centers, won't get LTE for years; it's not a priority for the GSM carriers because there isn't enough demand for data in those locations. LTE as deployed by US carriers isn't all that much faster than HSPA+ 42, but it is significantly more spectrum efficient which means the carrier can serve more data customers with the same amount of spectrum. LTE everywhere is more important for CDMA carriers because 3G CDMA data is much slower.
Green cars all tend to look the same for a reason - aerodynamics. Lower drag = more miles per charge. Lower drag also means more MPG for a gasoline-powered car but it's easier to just put in a bigger tank to get adequate range.
The mistake was not discontinuing the 4S. It's in Apple's interest, and the interest of the accessory community, to get rid of the old accessory connector and consolidate the market on the new Lightning connector. I expected that their announcement this fall would do that.
I'd mod this "funny" but I already commented on this topic. Cory isn't the sort to be anonymous, ever. And Little Brother is a wonderful book that can be downloaded for free: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
If the school is planning to develop apps for the tablets, it's much easier if all the students have the same model of tablet. Having multiple OSes involved would be even more of a challenge; suppose some showed up with iPads, some had Surfaces, and some had Android tablets? (And throw in the stray Playbook or two if you want to be obscure.)
The grocery story already DOES charge companies to stock its products, and has been doing it for over a decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/29/news/mn-58869
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0415/130.html
It will have much better battery life than your Chromebook and it has a touch screen. So it's a bit of apples and oranges.
I'm typing this on a Samsung Chromebook and I love it. (I chose it over the inexpensive Intel-based Chromebooks because of its better keyboard and longer battery life. A new generation of Haswell-based Chromebooks is on the way; they should close the battery life gap.) But it's not for everybody. If you need to run software from the Windows world, one of the upcoming Bay Trail systems might be just what you need.