The idea of bringing Debian-style package management to Windows is not a new idea. Indeed, members of our own Slashdot community have been developing apt-get derived tools for many years, and have been responsible for a number of major advances in the field, including:
These projects truly are a testament to the true flexibility and power of apt-get, even within a Windows context. Side efforts, such as an ncurses based implementation of Mac OS X's Expose feature for dealing with multiple apt-get sessions, a SIMD/MMX accelerated apt-get, interplanetary control software with apt-get, and last but not least, a dselect-based implementation of iTunes.
While I applaud the efforts of those seeking to bring a more GNU/Linux-like package management experience to Windows, we should not forget the efforts of the early pioneers.
The advantage Dell has is a model (and price) range that actually covers the massive gap between a 1.66Ghz Core Duo based machine and a quad-core Xeon based machine.
A small nitpick: There's not just one huge step from the entry level Mac mini to the MacPro. Apple has the iMac, which uses Core 2 Duo processors running from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz. Benchmarks show that the 2.33GHz dual-core iMac outperforms the low-end 2.0GHz quad-core MacPro for certain tasks.
Of course the iMac may not be your cup of tea, and I'm not suggesting that it fills all the various niches that Dell's model range does. But it's the stepping stone from Mac mini to MacPro.
Completely. Going against the usual trend, I've only had good experiences with Dell tech support, and then lacklustre experiences with Apple tech support.
Did you get the 3-year onsite, next business day warranty with your new Inspiron? That was the warranty that both of the machines I have had repaired came with. Similarly to you, I am dreading when the 3-year AppleCare expires on my current 12" PowerBook. Good luck with the Inspiron.
Good luck trying to get service if something goes wrong.
Let the battle of the anecdotes begin. A few years ago the hard drive died in my Inspiron 4100. A quick phone call and a technician visit on-site the next day had the whole thing sorted out. Total time spent on the phone and with the repair technician was probably 20 minutes. Last week, an Optiplex GX270 died at work. A phone-based technician went through troubleshooting with me and figured it was a faulty motherboard in under 10 minutes. Again, a tech showed up on time the next day to replace the motherboard, and had the whole job done in around 15 minutes.
I'm happy to pay a bit more to keep SUVs off the roads. I just moved from Canada (where petrol guzzlers are on the rise) to Australia (where there are very few SUVs).
I don't know which part of Australia you're looking at, but four wheel drives (SUVs if you must) are still very common, in Sydney at least. Fortunately, social attitudes seem to be turning against the use of large 4WD vehicles like Toyota Landcruisers in urban areas. There has also been definite shift away from traditional large cars like the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore to smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles.
How is "whingeing" actually pronounced? Is it like "winging" but sounds like wine-ging? "Whining" is what I always see this as.
Pronounced win-jing. It's not a made up word. It's in common use here in Australia. An example of its use might be "I wish those spoilt lard-arse Yanks would stop whingeing about the cost of petrol".
The Australian is Australia's national level newspaper. It's quite well respected and generally deals with Australia wide events and news.
Is it possible to claim that any News Ltd publication is well respected? I pick up The Australian from time to time, and quickly remember why I don't read it regularly. It's just like the Daily Telegraph, except printed on broadsheet, and where the editors are allowed access to a dictionary.
I've also read in the Register that the Twin Towers from WTC are still there. I mean, wouldn't one of the beta testers check for that?
Yeah, that's a bit of a surprising omission in the quality checking process. Hopefully the beta testers will take the time to edit all the maps of Iraq where buildings have been destroyed by bombing too.
For the life of me cannot see why eBay would require glutathione S transferases to be included with each auction. I suspect most bidders would already posses a number of isoforms.
Seriously? Word v.X barely keeps up with my typing on my 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook, and still feels sluggish on my 1.6GHz G5 PowerMac. Maybe we have different ideas of what 'flies' means.
What I find amazing is how RMS is lambasted for being "arrogant" but Torvalds get's a free pass.
Because Torvalds has rolled his sleeves up, gotten his hands dirty, and been behind one of the biggest disruptive technology revolutions in IT history. On the other hand, RMS did some amateur hacking work 20 years ago and has done nothing except sit in his free office, eat free Twinkies and moan like a bitch ever since.
I'm sorry. He also came up with the GPL, which is just a legalese way of saying "Gimme gimme gimme!!!". That's why he gets called arrogant while Torvalds gets a free pass.
The leaders of several Iraqi-based terrorist organisations don't seem to have any difficulty calculating cash rewards for the successful termination of American lives. Where there's a supply and a demand, there's a market.
They were too expensive. An O2 workstation cost well over AUD $5000, and it shipped with anaemic RAM and hard drive configurations. Compare that to its nearest competitor, the Moulinex 4-slice Popmatique toaster. It could be found for as low as AU $39.95 at certain department stores and performed well in both bread, crumpet and English muffin modes. SGI used to be king of the hill in this sort of stuff, but they got complacent and priced themselves out of the market. We shouldn't be surprised that others came along and...ate their lunch.
Genomics was the study of genomes, or all the DNA of an organism. Proteomics was the study of the proteome, or all the proteins produced by an organism. After this study, can we expect to see scroteomics?
I do not understand why AM/FM is of "dubious quality" to so many people. Doesn't anyone listen to Stern? NPR? AM talk? News, sports and weather? Random and unexpected (mostly) playlist?
No. The complete and utter shit that is played on almost all radio stations was one of the primary reasons that I bought a large-capacity MP3 player in the first place (in this case, an iPod).
Re:Here is what all the hype was about.
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
Face it, the guys that scream "HALO!" at the top of their lungs are just not PC players. If they were, their buffet plate would be very full.
Rubbish. I've been playing games on the PC since 1988, and Halo on the Xbox is still one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've had. Great story, balls to the wall action, and an incredibly entertaining co-op multiplayer mode perfectly suited to a beers, pizza and throwing-the-controller-at-each-other-swearing environment. Sure, there are games on the PC which do as good a job. But there are thousands that don't.
Credit where credit is due, without the elitist PC vs. console player bullshit.
The low-end iMac G5 is - almost spec for spec - last year's low-end PowerMac G5. I should know: I have one (and paid nearly $1000 more for it).
The 1.6GHz iMac G5 appears to only use single-channel DDR RAM, whereas the 1.6GHz PowerMac uses dual channel. Then there's the stuff everyone else mentioned...533MHz FSB instead of 800MHz, no FireWire 800, 10/100 ethernet instead of gigabit, shitty non-upgradable 64MB nVidia FX 5200 graphics, only VGA out (no DVI), no PCI slots, only 1 SATA bay instead of 2, low-speed laptop sourced optical drive.
There are a lot of differences. It just depends if you need all the expandability and extra speed, or if you'd prefer to have a small form factor and a built-in 17" LCD.
Comparing nothing but military might, the world consists of one Ultrapower and a bunch of pipsqueaks. There is nothing in France's arsenal to stop the US military from invading France, not even if all the hairy armpit girls stood upwind.
Not even their nuclear weapons? Sure, the US would wipe out every single French citizen, and then half of England, Spain, Belgium and Germany too. But might not 50 million crispy-charred US citizens be a little bit of a deterrent?
Ok, today we're looking at the Sony DVDA-69, a mid range digital video camera from one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers. As always, we subjected the DVDA-69 to our usual array of real-world tests...not the fake kind you see in "Camcorder Enthusiast Magazine" where they test colour reproduction on scences of bounching beachballs, or testing the zoom lens on closeup shots of the Sydney Opera House, but real life stuff. Let's begin.
Tripod stability: This is important. The DVDA-69 has a shock-stabilised tripod mount, which allowed it to score a perfect 5 out of 5 for the "4-way fat bitch fuck fest test". As regular readers know, this is where we get over 500kg of pounding lesbian flesh to get jiggy in a tub of jelly and film the whole damn thing. Lesser cameras produce an unwatchable shaking mess due to the harsh vibrations. The DVDA-69 felt barely a tremor during this tough test due to the inertial stabilisation and digial shake correction. Fantastic.
Flesh and genital colour tone reproducibility: The DVDA-69 was presented with our standard test panel of 3 vaginas (one hairy, one pierced, one shaved) and 3 penises (one regular, one large, one 'rock splitter'), and tested for accurate flesh tone reproducibility. The CCD sensor did a reasonable job, reporting back 89% faithful colour repro even on an 8x macro pussy zoom shot, but for those seeking ultimate chromatic reproduction, try the new Panasonic CockViewer 7000 (see our previous review). 3 stars out of 5 on this test.
Sound capture authenticity: Again, we used our standard voice test panel of "Oh yeah do you like that bitch?", "I'm gonna cum all over your titties!" and "Give it to me give it to me give it to me SQUEEAAALLL", captured through the standard camera microphone. The DVDA-69 did a good job of capturing mid to high end frequencies (it scored a perfect 100% in the 'anal jab scream' test, but there was some distortion in the optional 'blacks on blondes' sub test where our Barry White sound-alike test subject was able to induce a bit of fuzziness with an orgasmic "Oooooohhh yeeeaaaahhh". 4 out of 5 stars.
Environmental robustness:. The toughest test of all. Basically everyone just jizzes all over the camera lens and we see if it still works. Things were going well until some spooge leaked into the tape compartment, requiring tedious manual cleaning. Not a real competitor here, and certainly bested by the Canon PowerGyno A700 Intruder Edition, which was not disturbed by even the most savage gang banging facial action. Sony is really going to need to work on this if it is going to be seen as a serious player in the home market. 2 out of 5.
Summary: A reasonable entry by Sony into the crowded home camcorder market. Good performance for standard types of fuck-filming, and you can expect your pounding, flabby buttocks to be faithfully presented on the screen during playback. The camera has several ease-of-use features, such as a 'Thumb-off' record button, allowing the user to simply hang the camera around their neck when filming 1st-person blow job scenes, allowing both hands to be used to guide the girl's head onto the end of your cock. But the lack of moisture resistance means that hardcore users will need to look elsewhere for top-quality gyno movies. 3 out 5 stars overall.
The easier course would be to simply skip all this, go into biotech, and work in anonymity doing drug development, but without ever having to deal about funding problems or paying the rent.
Maybe this is true in the pharmaceutical world, but not in 'real' biotech, ie: risky, small start-up type operations with only one or two solid products (if that), and plenty of blue-sky projects and antsy investors. I've spent the last 5 years working for a biotech 'startup' (they really can't be called a startup anymore after over 5 years I suppose), and in my experience, to use a cliche, the only constant is change. One week everything is rosy, investors are flooding in, and research projects are being approved. The next, purchase orders for critical reagents and equipment are being cancelled without explanation and there's a hiring freeze. And then the week after that, an entirely new business unit has been created with 15 new staff and everything is back on track again. Run that cycle through for 5 years and tell me it's any better than a university. At least you know you have funding for the next 2 years or whatever if you get a grant. It's maddening to not make any real progress for years at a time due to the chronic uncertainty that your project could be cancelled tomorrow, that your next order for $200 worth of antibodies will be knocked back, or university payscales are getting updated for inflation yet again, and yours supposedly 'better' commercial salary is now less than what you could get paid at a university (and get to publish your work too).
Of course, a lot of my experience derives from the fact that this particular biotech startup was (and still is) managed by vain, incompetent, and highly delusional former university scientists, whose idea of being 'business types' is to be seen reading a copy of the Financial Review or Business Review Weekly from time to time. Unfortunately for them, the 'reality distortion field' has just about worn off with investors, and some pretty serious shit is about to hit the fan. Fortunately I've recently left:-).
Anyway...the grass isn't always greener on the other side. If you're thinking about launching into the commercial world of biotech, check your facts carefully. An extra $5000 a year isn't worth it when your publication output drops off to nothing, you get stuck on dead-end underfunded project after project, and you have to deal with some of the most ignorant PHBs to sit their arses behind the wheel of an investor-funded BMW.
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These projects truly are a testament to the true flexibility and power of apt-get, even within a Windows context. Side efforts, such as an ncurses based implementation of Mac OS X's Expose feature for dealing with multiple apt-get sessions, a SIMD/MMX accelerated apt-get, interplanetary control software with apt-get, and last but not least, a dselect-based implementation of iTunes.
While I applaud the efforts of those seeking to bring a more GNU/Linux-like package management experience to Windows, we should not forget the efforts of the early pioneers.
The advantage Dell has is a model (and price) range that actually covers the massive gap between a 1.66Ghz Core Duo based machine and a quad-core Xeon based machine.
A small nitpick: There's not just one huge step from the entry level Mac mini to the MacPro. Apple has the iMac, which uses Core 2 Duo processors running from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz. Benchmarks show that the 2.33GHz dual-core iMac outperforms the low-end 2.0GHz quad-core MacPro for certain tasks.
Of course the iMac may not be your cup of tea, and I'm not suggesting that it fills all the various niches that Dell's model range does. But it's the stepping stone from Mac mini to MacPro.
YMMV is always true of any company
Completely. Going against the usual trend, I've only had good experiences with Dell tech support, and then lacklustre experiences with Apple tech support.
Did you get the 3-year onsite, next business day warranty with your new Inspiron? That was the warranty that both of the machines I have had repaired came with. Similarly to you, I am dreading when the 3-year AppleCare expires on my current 12" PowerBook. Good luck with the Inspiron.
Good luck trying to get service if something goes wrong.
Let the battle of the anecdotes begin. A few years ago the hard drive died in my Inspiron 4100. A quick phone call and a technician visit on-site the next day had the whole thing sorted out. Total time spent on the phone and with the repair technician was probably 20 minutes. Last week, an Optiplex GX270 died at work. A phone-based technician went through troubleshooting with me and figured it was a faulty motherboard in under 10 minutes. Again, a tech showed up on time the next day to replace the motherboard, and had the whole job done in around 15 minutes.
Looks like YMMV with Dell.
This is a cable TV show. Viewers already pay for it.
And thank you very much for it. It means that it can be shown on the free-to-air channel SBS here in Australia...without ads!
I confess that I hate Aussie-speak and Brit-speak. It always comes across as some third-world, local lingo that the speakers think is cool.
Oh stop whingeing about it.
I'm happy to pay a bit more to keep SUVs off the roads. I just moved from Canada (where petrol guzzlers are on the rise) to Australia (where there are very few SUVs).
I don't know which part of Australia you're looking at, but four wheel drives (SUVs if you must) are still very common, in Sydney at least. Fortunately, social attitudes seem to be turning against the use of large 4WD vehicles like Toyota Landcruisers in urban areas. There has also been definite shift away from traditional large cars like the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore to smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles.
Pronounced win-jing. It's not a made up word. It's in common use here in Australia. An example of its use might be "I wish those spoilt lard-arse Yanks would stop whingeing about the cost of petrol".
It's not just Europeans (speaking as an Australian).
Is it possible to claim that any News Ltd publication is well respected? I pick up The Australian from time to time, and quickly remember why I don't read it regularly. It's just like the Daily Telegraph, except printed on broadsheet, and where the editors are allowed access to a dictionary.
Are you sure it's an IBM PS/2 keyboard? The PS/2 wasn't released until 1987
I mean, wouldn't one of the beta testers check for that?
Yeah, that's a bit of a surprising omission in the quality checking process. Hopefully the beta testers will take the time to edit all the maps of Iraq where buildings have been destroyed by bombing too.
For the life of me cannot see why eBay would require glutathione S transferases to be included with each auction. I suspect most bidders would already posses a number of isoforms.
Are you talking about VB, Tooheys and XXXX? Yes. These are a national disgrace.
But if you're talking about Coopers, James Squires or Little Creatures...then you and I need to step out into the car park and have a little chat...
Seriously? Word v.X barely keeps up with my typing on my 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook, and still feels sluggish on my 1.6GHz G5 PowerMac. Maybe we have different ideas of what 'flies' means.
Because Torvalds has rolled his sleeves up, gotten his hands dirty, and been behind one of the biggest disruptive technology revolutions in IT history. On the other hand, RMS did some amateur hacking work 20 years ago and has done nothing except sit in his free office, eat free Twinkies and moan like a bitch ever since.
I'm sorry. He also came up with the GPL, which is just a legalese way of saying "Gimme gimme gimme!!!". That's why he gets called arrogant while Torvalds gets a free pass.
The leaders of several Iraqi-based terrorist organisations don't seem to have any difficulty calculating cash rewards for the successful termination of American lives. Where there's a supply and a demand, there's a market.
They were too expensive. An O2 workstation cost well over AUD $5000, and it shipped with anaemic RAM and hard drive configurations. Compare that to its nearest competitor, the Moulinex 4-slice Popmatique toaster. It could be found for as low as AU $39.95 at certain department stores and performed well in both bread, crumpet and English muffin modes. SGI used to be king of the hill in this sort of stuff, but they got complacent and priced themselves out of the market. We shouldn't be surprised that others came along and...ate their lunch.
Genomics was the study of genomes, or all the DNA of an organism. Proteomics was the study of the proteome, or all the proteins produced by an organism. After this study, can we expect to see scroteomics?
No. The complete and utter shit that is played on almost all radio stations was one of the primary reasons that I bought a large-capacity MP3 player in the first place (in this case, an iPod).
Rubbish. I've been playing games on the PC since 1988, and Halo on the Xbox is still one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've had. Great story, balls to the wall action, and an incredibly entertaining co-op multiplayer mode perfectly suited to a beers, pizza and throwing-the-controller-at-each-other-swearing environment. Sure, there are games on the PC which do as good a job. But there are thousands that don't.
Credit where credit is due, without the elitist PC vs. console player bullshit.
The 1.6GHz iMac G5 appears to only use single-channel DDR RAM, whereas the 1.6GHz PowerMac uses dual channel. Then there's the stuff everyone else mentioned...533MHz FSB instead of 800MHz, no FireWire 800, 10/100 ethernet instead of gigabit, shitty non-upgradable 64MB nVidia FX 5200 graphics, only VGA out (no DVI), no PCI slots, only 1 SATA bay instead of 2, low-speed laptop sourced optical drive.
There are a lot of differences. It just depends if you need all the expandability and extra speed, or if you'd prefer to have a small form factor and a built-in 17" LCD.
Not even their nuclear weapons? Sure, the US would wipe out every single French citizen, and then half of England, Spain, Belgium and Germany too. But might not 50 million crispy-charred US citizens be a little bit of a deterrent?
Ok, today we're looking at the Sony DVDA-69, a mid range digital video camera from one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers. As always, we subjected the DVDA-69 to our usual array of real-world tests...not the fake kind you see in "Camcorder Enthusiast Magazine" where they test colour reproduction on scences of bounching beachballs, or testing the zoom lens on closeup shots of the Sydney Opera House, but real life stuff. Let's begin.
Tripod stability: This is important. The DVDA-69 has a shock-stabilised tripod mount, which allowed it to score a perfect 5 out of 5 for the "4-way fat bitch fuck fest test". As regular readers know, this is where we get over 500kg of pounding lesbian flesh to get jiggy in a tub of jelly and film the whole damn thing. Lesser cameras produce an unwatchable shaking mess due to the harsh vibrations. The DVDA-69 felt barely a tremor during this tough test due to the inertial stabilisation and digial shake correction. Fantastic.
Flesh and genital colour tone reproducibility: The DVDA-69 was presented with our standard test panel of 3 vaginas (one hairy, one pierced, one shaved) and 3 penises (one regular, one large, one 'rock splitter'), and tested for accurate flesh tone reproducibility. The CCD sensor did a reasonable job, reporting back 89% faithful colour repro even on an 8x macro pussy zoom shot, but for those seeking ultimate chromatic reproduction, try the new Panasonic CockViewer 7000 (see our previous review). 3 stars out of 5 on this test.
Sound capture authenticity: Again, we used our standard voice test panel of "Oh yeah do you like that bitch?", "I'm gonna cum all over your titties!" and "Give it to me give it to me give it to me SQUEEAAALLL", captured through the standard camera microphone. The DVDA-69 did a good job of capturing mid to high end frequencies (it scored a perfect 100% in the 'anal jab scream' test, but there was some distortion in the optional 'blacks on blondes' sub test where our Barry White sound-alike test subject was able to induce a bit of fuzziness with an orgasmic "Oooooohhh yeeeaaaahhh". 4 out of 5 stars.
Environmental robustness:. The toughest test of all. Basically everyone just jizzes all over the camera lens and we see if it still works. Things were going well until some spooge leaked into the tape compartment, requiring tedious manual cleaning. Not a real competitor here, and certainly bested by the Canon PowerGyno A700 Intruder Edition, which was not disturbed by even the most savage gang banging facial action. Sony is really going to need to work on this if it is going to be seen as a serious player in the home market. 2 out of 5.
Summary: A reasonable entry by Sony into the crowded home camcorder market. Good performance for standard types of fuck-filming, and you can expect your pounding, flabby buttocks to be faithfully presented on the screen during playback. The camera has several ease-of-use features, such as a 'Thumb-off' record button, allowing the user to simply hang the camera around their neck when filming 1st-person blow job scenes, allowing both hands to be used to guide the girl's head onto the end of your cock. But the lack of moisture resistance means that hardcore users will need to look elsewhere for top-quality gyno movies. 3 out 5 stars overall.
Maybe this is true in the pharmaceutical world, but not in 'real' biotech, ie: risky, small start-up type operations with only one or two solid products (if that), and plenty of blue-sky projects and antsy investors. I've spent the last 5 years working for a biotech 'startup' (they really can't be called a startup anymore after over 5 years I suppose), and in my experience, to use a cliche, the only constant is change. One week everything is rosy, investors are flooding in, and research projects are being approved. The next, purchase orders for critical reagents and equipment are being cancelled without explanation and there's a hiring freeze. And then the week after that, an entirely new business unit has been created with 15 new staff and everything is back on track again. Run that cycle through for 5 years and tell me it's any better than a university. At least you know you have funding for the next 2 years or whatever if you get a grant. It's maddening to not make any real progress for years at a time due to the chronic uncertainty that your project could be cancelled tomorrow, that your next order for $200 worth of antibodies will be knocked back, or university payscales are getting updated for inflation yet again, and yours supposedly 'better' commercial salary is now less than what you could get paid at a university (and get to publish your work too).
Of course, a lot of my experience derives from the fact that this particular biotech startup was (and still is) managed by vain, incompetent, and highly delusional former university scientists, whose idea of being 'business types' is to be seen reading a copy of the Financial Review or Business Review Weekly from time to time. Unfortunately for them, the 'reality distortion field' has just about worn off with investors, and some pretty serious shit is about to hit the fan. Fortunately I've recently left :-).
Anyway...the grass isn't always greener on the other side. If you're thinking about launching into the commercial world of biotech, check your facts carefully. An extra $5000 a year isn't worth it when your publication output drops off to nothing, you get stuck on dead-end underfunded project after project, and you have to deal with some of the most ignorant PHBs to sit their arses behind the wheel of an investor-funded BMW.