Spent $20 on one of their "indi" games, and it was really an alpha. Full of bugs and features that basically made you have to restart the game every 5 minutes. I could get through one mission much less the compaign. AI was about worthless. I didn't post on the forums for support because many others with exactly the same issues had posted and instead of receiving support, they're issue was treated as if they committed blasphemy against the all holy of indi games. The non-working AI was excused by supporters as being not needed because you should have someone come over to your house and play with you.
Too bad Bush was busy taking a record number of vacations days of any prior president and kept putting off that meeting. Yeh, the one meeting where Clinton's intelligence staff volunteered to meet with them to brief Bush on urgent security matters.
Most Linux distros come with all kinds of UI enhancements that are inconsistent from release to release and are just junk fluff IMO. The only consistency you can get is at the command line, and even then from distro to distro you get different shells.
I'm not saying one or the other is better. Both OS's are victims of people adding all kinds of extra apps and thinking "hey this is cool" instead of going for a polished professional OS. Windows 7 IMO has gone the farthest in the direction of usability/stability of desktop OS's I've used. I still have yet to find a Linux distro that I feel comfortable recommended to family/friends.
Look at Android(a Linux based OS) and all the bloatware you get with carrier provided phones. You can't even uninstall most of it, and the OS itself is often modified in ways that make me sick. Only those savvy enough to flash an alternate ROM can resolve these problems. So it has nothing to do with Windows.
You are just going off on a Windows bashing tangent that has nothing to do with bloatware. Advocating for free windows has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. As far as application level DRM, that already can and does exist in some Linux applications.
Security holes (not spelled wholes) have affected Linux which were around for weeks before patched and required admins to workaround/hack to plug in the meantime.
These things exist in Linux to some degree or another, and would be on par with Windows if it had the same size user base, and Android is proof of that.
I would like to add that this isn't an imagine problem with open source OS's. It is very rampant with the Android OS with carrier often doing incompotent things to the OS or adding bloatware that has the ability to uninstall/move to SD disabled. IMO this is the only thing that puts Android phones at a disadvantage to iPhones. It amazes me that I have so few problems with my Android, but someone can hand me their Android(because they are having some problem) and I feel like I'm using a different/substandard OS.
I feel like Google or the Android community needs to institute some sort of Android User Freedom certification, which certifies carrier builds after a review. I.e., all non essential apps must have uninstallation available, some standards on usability/interface, etc. There'd be alot to work out in the standard. Then the local geeks, when asked by friends/family for suggestions, can simply say "Buy a phone with the Android User Freedom logo".
I think this would go further in reducing fragmentation than some of Google's other efforts, and improve the quality/consistency of the Android ecosystem.
I would like to differentiate where the problem is, and provide suggestions on how people can avoid this problem.
This is a problem with buying from certain manufacturers/retailers who add bloatware. Simply don't support this practice with your purchases. It has nothing to do with the OS. Linux and Android are just as susceptible to this if not more since the OS is open source, such as when wireless providers modify the Android OS itself(rather than simply adding applications) which can cripple the OS with bloated features, instability, or poorly designed UI. In this case you can't simply uninstall an app to undo the problem, but usually must flash the device. I'm not saying the OS being open source is a bad thing; I'm just pointing out how some carriers abuse this.
Examples of how to avoid bloatware(for phones or computers). Phones: -Only buy phones which come with the stock/vanilla Android OS. I personally prefer the Nexus devices for this reason. Additionally, these devices usually will have OS updates available earlier than others. -If your phone does have a lot of bloatware, something like Cyanogen mod(if supported on your phone) can give you a OS with less bloat and more freedom. I actually flashed my Nexus One with Cyanogen and freed up alot of internal memory. Even my stock Nexus One had slowly become bloated with apps that I didn't need over time like Twitter, which came along with OS updates and could not be moved off internal storage or uninstalled. I went from 5 mb free internal storage(which is a serious problem) to 100 mb free internal storage.
Computers: -Sometimes you can call sales and request that you get only the stock OS on your computer or laptop. I know businesses have been able to request Dell laptops be provided this way. -Build your own computer or buy barebone, and load the stock OS yourself. -Take note of bloatware when using other's computers, or go to a store where the model is setup and you can test drive. Take note of which manufacturers have the most OEM bloatware. If you are used to helping other's with their computers, it is usually pretty obvious what apps are things they didn't install, and are bloatware. -Be wary of a computer that advertises lots of free software. If it is really full version software, then you are paying for its cost somewhere in the price of the computer. Better to buy a computer without this hidden cost, and use the savings to buy the software that you pick out(instead of the OEM's choices). If it is only trial software, then maybe the computer is a very tiny bit cheaper as a result, and your time is probably worth more than the trouble of dealing with the bloatware and "Trial Expired" popups. So either way, avoid bundled software. I don't even like bundled antivirus.
Maybe not in the case of CDI/IBM, but otherwise contractors working for the government cost 2x what it would cost them for direct hire(including benefits). They just want the freedom to increase/decrease workforce as needed. It gets around alot of red tape as well in terms of both hiring/firing. If there is a hiring/pay freeze instituted at the state level, but your agency has enough money to hire needed employees, then pay for "services" of an agency. What's ironic is the blindly broad hiring/pay freeze results in agencies wasting money in this case.
I do agree that many of the articles on Slashdot use overly sensational wording, usually borderlining on inaccurate in the name of making the story sound more interesting than it is. I don't see why a straightforward summary of the story can't speak for itself. We as readers are perfectly capable of forming our own strong emotions. It's like being a hamburger and having someone else's saliva on it already under the pretense that you can't take care of that digestive process yourself.
Some of the international versions of textbooks use really thin paper like this. So there is some pre-existing technology that should preclude this patent from being valid.
Anything with mass("things") cannot travel at the speed of light.
As you approach the speed of light, the thrust required to continue to accelerate approaches infinity. The result is that you will never reach the speed of light. This is because as you approach the speed of light, your mass approaches infinity.
Only massless particles, like light, can travel at the speed of light. That is why they are exempt from the above, because they are massless.
It is believed that sub atomic particles can sometimes react to one another over a distance at a speed faster than light. I.e. quantum entaglement. But no mass is actually travelling, it is subatomic particle(s) reacting to some nearby subatomic particle. Thus quantum teleportation could perhaps send "information" at a speed faster than light, and use existing mass at the destination to construct an object based on the information transmitted.
I don't understand what you mean? You can't compare the internal fork if they don't provide access to it. Do you mean just looking at the meta data of the tree, rather than the source itself? Not trying to be difficult, just curious.
I'm speaking off the top of my head, but I think the memristors supposedly used significantly less power(and hence generate less heat). But they were indeed much much denser, so as you point out, the heat/area might not have been lower. I had never considered that before.
In an earlier post he indicated that they forked the code into the kernal, such that the fork they use in RTS is and has always been their own code, and they maintain the open fork separately of that. From his wording, it sounded like the fork that went into the kernal has never been brought back into RTS. As noted by a later poster, these accusations, as well as any proof that the accusations are wrong, would be very difficult to prove either way. I'm not really sure what outcome Red Hat is expecting.
I agree somewhat. I believe many things are patented which shouldn't be, because usually they are violated not by someone copying an inovation, but by someone putting the obvious puzzle pieces together. On the other hand, I don't think we should easily dismiss something so successful on the basis of it being obvious. I think there's something to be said about putting a polish on something, offering it on a fairly open hardware platform(while Windows is not open, you are not walled into one single hardware provider), and making it intuitive enough for the average person. Computers are extremely complex, yet people on the completely opposite end of that spectrum can leverage them. There's something to be said for that.
There is an art to getting all the pieces to fit together, be polished, and be intuitive. I don't think I'd want any of my less tech savvy relatives/friends have to deal with people who do nothing but flame them and tell them to go read the man page whenever something is not intuitive. Some people take pride in being able to use something that isn't inherently difficult, except the fact that it is difficult only because it is non-intuitive. As such they berate anyone who isn't willing to go through the same painful learning curves they have, and have little interest in making it more intuitive. Praise be those in the Linux community who are a little more humble and strive to ease people into Linux adoption.
I can think of another OS that's populated by a few arrogant d bags, though usually pretty well informed except when they want to selective ignore certain facts because it doesn't support their polarized d baggery(I don't think baggery is a word but whatever).
Yes, the quote I saw was "The company said the first chips were about 50 times the cost of flash memory by size".
As I had guessed previously, they are touting it as an SSD cache as one potential application. So for an extra $25 maybe you get 512mb cache on your SSD, and hopefully protects you from lost write buffers during a power loss since it's non-volatile. That last bit is speculation though, it could be more complicated.
Are we going to have hybrid HDD's with an SSD and then MRAM and then the usual volatile cache?
Actually MRAM, if fast enough to replace traditional caches on RAID cards and Hard drives, could(barring other complications) eliminate many of the problems where you lose power or some other failure occurs and causes incomplete writes that hadn't been flushed from cache. It would hold the cache and could complete the operation when the system recovers.
Unless you're recording video most of the day non stop, or have a DB processing a huge number of transactions(which should be on a server, not your desktop), then a quality SSD should outlast your harddrive. If SSD's had been the forerunners, followed by HDD's, people would be talking about all the things that go wrong with an HDD at 3-5 years lifetime. Except they would probably be just oblivious of the all the failure scenarios that an HDD can suffer. At least with an SSD there is a predictable wearing, and no difficult to predict mechanical wearing. They produce a 10th of the heat as well, but there is conflicting views on whether heat plays a role in HDD failure.
SSDs do seem to have a tendancy to be DOA or die in the first couple of weeks more often than HDDs, but that seems to be a quality control problem unrelated to write endurance. How often that is really the case is hard to say as well without hard statistics, so I emphasize "seem to".
As possible speculative circumstantial evidence of this, HP is delaying memeristors due to concern that it would cannibalize their partner's flash business. I think that's a bad move anyhow. They should take the opportunity to be ahead of the game for awhile with an exclusive product, and charge a premium for it. The extra premium would offset losses of flash sales(which really would not be much because there's a good chance the Joe Shmoe was going to by a competitor's flash anyway).
I'm hoping the density of memristors, being speculated at an order of magnitude better than flash, will lend themselves to low cost. They already have the other two. This is why technologies like this are speculated at becoming a "universal" memory. It's all hope and dreams at this point. I'm sure lots of people at one point and time would have not believed for a moment that flash could ever become a consumer harddrive.
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Spent $20 on one of their "indi" games, and it was really an alpha. Full of bugs and features that basically made you have to restart the game every 5 minutes. I could get through one mission much less the compaign. AI was about worthless. I didn't post on the forums for support because many others with exactly the same issues had posted and instead of receiving support, they're issue was treated as if they committed blasphemy against the all holy of indi games. The non-working AI was excused by supporters as being not needed because you should have someone come over to your house and play with you.
Too bad Bush was busy taking a record number of vacations days of any prior president and kept putting off that meeting. Yeh, the one meeting where Clinton's intelligence staff volunteered to meet with them to brief Bush on urgent security matters.
Smashing ignorance like a boss.
I've found Windows 7 to be a very clean OS IMO.
Most Linux distros come with all kinds of UI enhancements that are inconsistent from release to release and are just junk fluff IMO. The only consistency you can get is at the command line, and even then from distro to distro you get different shells.
I'm not saying one or the other is better. Both OS's are victims of people adding all kinds of extra apps and thinking "hey this is cool" instead of going for a polished professional OS. Windows 7 IMO has gone the farthest in the direction of usability/stability of desktop OS's I've used. I still have yet to find a Linux distro that I feel comfortable recommended to family/friends.
Look at Android(a Linux based OS) and all the bloatware you get with carrier provided phones. You can't even uninstall most of it, and the OS itself is often modified in ways that make me sick. Only those savvy enough to flash an alternate ROM can resolve these problems. So it has nothing to do with Windows.
You are just going off on a Windows bashing tangent that has nothing to do with bloatware. Advocating for free windows has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. As far as application level DRM, that already can and does exist in some Linux applications.
Security holes (not spelled wholes) have affected Linux which were around for weeks before patched and required admins to workaround/hack to plug in the meantime.
These things exist in Linux to some degree or another, and would be on par with Windows if it had the same size user base, and Android is proof of that.
I would like to add that this isn't an imagine problem with open source OS's. It is very rampant with the Android OS with carrier often doing incompotent things to the OS or adding bloatware that has the ability to uninstall/move to SD disabled. IMO this is the only thing that puts Android phones at a disadvantage to iPhones. It amazes me that I have so few problems with my Android, but someone can hand me their Android(because they are having some problem) and I feel like I'm using a different/substandard OS.
I feel like Google or the Android community needs to institute some sort of Android User Freedom certification, which certifies carrier builds after a review. I.e., all non essential apps must have uninstallation available, some standards on usability/interface, etc. There'd be alot to work out in the standard. Then the local geeks, when asked by friends/family for suggestions, can simply say "Buy a phone with the Android User Freedom logo".
I think this would go further in reducing fragmentation than some of Google's other efforts, and improve the quality/consistency of the Android ecosystem.
I would like to differentiate where the problem is, and provide suggestions on how people can avoid this problem.
This is a problem with buying from certain manufacturers/retailers who add bloatware. Simply don't support this practice with your purchases. It has nothing to do with the OS. Linux and Android are just as susceptible to this if not more since the OS is open source, such as when wireless providers modify the Android OS itself(rather than simply adding applications) which can cripple the OS with bloated features, instability, or poorly designed UI. In this case you can't simply uninstall an app to undo the problem, but usually must flash the device. I'm not saying the OS being open source is a bad thing; I'm just pointing out how some carriers abuse this.
Examples of how to avoid bloatware(for phones or computers).
Phones:
-Only buy phones which come with the stock/vanilla Android OS. I personally prefer the Nexus devices for this reason. Additionally, these devices usually will have OS updates available earlier than others.
-If your phone does have a lot of bloatware, something like Cyanogen mod(if supported on your phone) can give you a OS with less bloat and more freedom. I actually flashed my Nexus One with Cyanogen and freed up alot of internal memory. Even my stock Nexus One had slowly become bloated with apps that I didn't need over time like Twitter, which came along with OS updates and could not be moved off internal storage or uninstalled. I went from 5 mb free internal storage(which is a serious problem) to 100 mb free internal storage.
Computers:
-Sometimes you can call sales and request that you get only the stock OS on your computer or laptop. I know businesses have been able to request Dell laptops be provided this way.
-Build your own computer or buy barebone, and load the stock OS yourself.
-Take note of bloatware when using other's computers, or go to a store where the model is setup and you can test drive. Take note of which manufacturers have the most OEM bloatware. If you are used to helping other's with their computers, it is usually pretty obvious what apps are things they didn't install, and are bloatware.
-Be wary of a computer that advertises lots of free software. If it is really full version software, then you are paying for its cost somewhere in the price of the computer. Better to buy a computer without this hidden cost, and use the savings to buy the software that you pick out(instead of the OEM's choices). If it is only trial software, then maybe the computer is a very tiny bit cheaper as a result, and your time is probably worth more than the trouble of dealing with the bloatware and "Trial Expired" popups. So either way, avoid bundled software. I don't even like bundled antivirus.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Windows. There is nothing about Linux that prevents OEM's from loading software of their choosing.
Maybe not in the case of CDI/IBM, but otherwise contractors working for the government cost 2x what it would cost them for direct hire(including benefits). They just want the freedom to increase/decrease workforce as needed. It gets around alot of red tape as well in terms of both hiring/firing. If there is a hiring/pay freeze instituted at the state level, but your agency has enough money to hire needed employees, then pay for "services" of an agency. What's ironic is the blindly broad hiring/pay freeze results in agencies wasting money in this case.
"Being a hamburger", hmmm not quite what I intended to type.
I do agree that many of the articles on Slashdot use overly sensational wording, usually borderlining on inaccurate in the name of making the story sound more interesting than it is. I don't see why a straightforward summary of the story can't speak for itself. We as readers are perfectly capable of forming our own strong emotions. It's like being a hamburger and having someone else's saliva on it already under the pretense that you can't take care of that digestive process yourself.
Some of the international versions of textbooks use really thin paper like this. So there is some pre-existing technology that should preclude this patent from being valid.
Anything with mass("things") cannot travel at the speed of light.
As you approach the speed of light, the thrust required to continue to accelerate approaches infinity. The result is that you will never reach the speed of light. This is because as you approach the speed of light, your mass approaches infinity.
Only massless particles, like light, can travel at the speed of light. That is why they are exempt from the above, because they are massless.
It is believed that sub atomic particles can sometimes react to one another over a distance at a speed faster than light. I.e. quantum entaglement. But no mass is actually travelling, it is subatomic particle(s) reacting to some nearby subatomic particle. Thus quantum teleportation could perhaps send "information" at a speed faster than light, and use existing mass at the destination to construct an object based on the information transmitted.
I love how you call people arrogant d bags and get a score 5, and I do the same and get a score 0. Proof that slashdot's mod system is a failure.
I don't understand what you mean? You can't compare the internal fork if they don't provide access to it. Do you mean just looking at the meta data of the tree, rather than the source itself? Not trying to be difficult, just curious.
I'm speaking off the top of my head, but I think the memristors supposedly used significantly less power(and hence generate less heat). But they were indeed much much denser, so as you point out, the heat/area might not have been lower. I had never considered that before.
In an earlier post he indicated that they forked the code into the kernal, such that the fork they use in RTS is and has always been their own code, and they maintain the open fork separately of that. From his wording, it sounded like the fork that went into the kernal has never been brought back into RTS. As noted by a later poster, these accusations, as well as any proof that the accusations are wrong, would be very difficult to prove either way. I'm not really sure what outcome Red Hat is expecting.
I agree somewhat. I believe many things are patented which shouldn't be, because usually they are violated not by someone copying an inovation, but by someone putting the obvious puzzle pieces together. On the other hand, I don't think we should easily dismiss something so successful on the basis of it being obvious. I think there's something to be said about putting a polish on something, offering it on a fairly open hardware platform(while Windows is not open, you are not walled into one single hardware provider), and making it intuitive enough for the average person. Computers are extremely complex, yet people on the completely opposite end of that spectrum can leverage them. There's something to be said for that.
There is an art to getting all the pieces to fit together, be polished, and be intuitive. I don't think I'd want any of my less tech savvy relatives/friends have to deal with people who do nothing but flame them and tell them to go read the man page whenever something is not intuitive. Some people take pride in being able to use something that isn't inherently difficult, except the fact that it is difficult only because it is non-intuitive. As such they berate anyone who isn't willing to go through the same painful learning curves they have, and have little interest in making it more intuitive. Praise be those in the Linux community who are a little more humble and strive to ease people into Linux adoption.
I can think of another OS that's populated by a few arrogant d bags, though usually pretty well informed except when they want to selective ignore certain facts because it doesn't support their polarized d baggery(I don't think baggery is a word but whatever).
Yes, the quote I saw was "The company said the first chips were about 50 times the cost of flash memory by size".
As I had guessed previously, they are touting it as an SSD cache as one potential application. So for an extra $25 maybe you get 512mb cache on your SSD, and hopefully protects you from lost write buffers during a power loss since it's non-volatile. That last bit is speculation though, it could be more complicated.
This would make it's low density less of an issue perhaps.
Are we going to have hybrid HDD's with an SSD and then MRAM and then the usual volatile cache?
Actually MRAM, if fast enough to replace traditional caches on RAID cards and Hard drives, could(barring other complications) eliminate many of the problems where you lose power or some other failure occurs and causes incomplete writes that hadn't been flushed from cache. It would hold the cache and could complete the operation when the system recovers.
Unless you're recording video most of the day non stop, or have a DB processing a huge number of transactions(which should be on a server, not your desktop), then a quality SSD should outlast your harddrive. If SSD's had been the forerunners, followed by HDD's, people would be talking about all the things that go wrong with an HDD at 3-5 years lifetime. Except they would probably be just oblivious of the all the failure scenarios that an HDD can suffer. At least with an SSD there is a predictable wearing, and no difficult to predict mechanical wearing. They produce a 10th of the heat as well, but there is conflicting views on whether heat plays a role in HDD failure.
SSDs do seem to have a tendancy to be DOA or die in the first couple of weeks more often than HDDs, but that seems to be a quality control problem unrelated to write endurance. How often that is really the case is hard to say as well without hard statistics, so I emphasize "seem to".
As possible speculative circumstantial evidence of this, HP is delaying memeristors due to concern that it would cannibalize their partner's flash business. I think that's a bad move anyhow. They should take the opportunity to be ahead of the game for awhile with an exclusive product, and charge a premium for it. The extra premium would offset losses of flash sales(which really would not be much because there's a good chance the Joe Shmoe was going to by a competitor's flash anyway).
I'm hoping the density of memristors, being speculated at an order of magnitude better than flash, will lend themselves to low cost. They already have the other two. This is why technologies like this are speculated at becoming a "universal" memory. It's all hope and dreams at this point. I'm sure lots of people at one point and time would have not believed for a moment that flash could ever become a consumer harddrive.
From Outer Space?