The X-Box looks to be a great piece of hardware, but personally I don't see much that it's doing that you don't already see in high-end graphics engines. Personally, I might buy one just to figure out how to slap Linux or *BSD on it and get it running in the corner as a rendering powerhouse, but other then that...I don't view it as that special.
Kind of sad about Bleem...there was going to be a Linux port of their new game Halo, which looks schweet (and I spend much more time coding than gaming, so that's a real compliment). Now that MS has 'em, probably no port.:(
This seems rather ass-backwards to me; Metallica is suing their fans, and now Apple is doing something rather similar? Apple has only recently gotten back on their feet, thanks in a large part to the dedication of the Apple user community. It just seems wrong to me to turn around and bash that community in the face.
That would be like Debian turning around, claiming copyright to all the GPL software they support, and then trying to slap the FSF with a lawsuit...
Why the hell should they target a company that has been supporting the Linux community? The best office suite (IMHO) for Linux is shipped by Corel, and they have been helping to popularize Linux as much (if not more) than Mandrake.
In the call center I work in, most of our Linux calls are divided evenly among Mandrake and Corel. Corel may not be the best distro, but it still is helping to let newbies out of their Microsoft world and play with a real OS instead of a glorified word processor.
Maybe I'm strange, but I would give tips to a website that provided useful information. Not every time I come there, yes, but let's put this into perspective. Let's say that I'm a student, and that I desperately need a piece of information that I find on one of these "free" websites that has an online "tip jar". I go to the site, get my data, click on the "tip jar" and leave a dollar or so, and go merrily on my way. The next ten times I visit the site, I might leave nothing -- but a decently-sized information site will have enough in the way of visitors to potentially make the InterTip worthwhile.
"Sponsorship" is also an idea -- companies with employees who use the site regularly can "sponsor" the site, and in exchange they simply get a listing on the "sponsors" page, and possibly a little logo that says "This site sponsored by X." It's not a banner ad, and won't generare revenue for company X, because they'll be paying for a service they find useful.
Writer of this Haiku Knows not of life sans Windows, Where crashes roam free.
I haven't had any usability problems with the software I use under Linux. Didn't when I started, don't know.
WP is nifty, ApplixWare is for the MS Works user, and StarOffice is good...just too big for my tastes. We are not, however, a bunch of geeks hacking LaTeX out from vi or emacs every time we want to write a document.
And, besides -- when was the last time a macro virus attacked Pine?
This is nice to see (HP taking responsiblity and all), but it doesn't seem to be a trend. System specs are (now) often misquoted, especially by the manufacturer. Hell -- look at Microsoft. Minimum system requirements for Win98 were, IIRC, something like a 486DX2/50 with 16M of RAM.
The "frills" are actually pretty common, at least here in California. A WebTV unit isn't that expensive, and I can find swimming pools / weight rooms / etc at apartments up here in Sacramento. For a lot less than the Bay or SV. Silicon Valley's biggest problem is the same one that most of the Bay Area suffers -- population density. It's a basic supply-and-demand problem; the supply of housing is low, the demand is astronomical, and so the prices will rise to meet what the market will bear.
It wouldn't be that hard to design a very stripped-down version of an X server to run on something like an Itsy. The problem with your 40M install of X is that the X you are installing has to deal with multiple hardware platforms, and the inherent bugs^h^h^h^hfeatures of each. I'm working on my own little custom GUI for a car-based MP3 player (using an old color laptop display) with svgalib, and the stuff I'm writing is ending up pretty small. With something like an Itsy, things could be done even smaller, as the hardware is known in-and-out by the software developers.
Does this mean that I'll have to pay some British tennis ball manufacturer every time I mow my lawn, because I'm producing that "fresh cut grass" smell? The idea of patenting something that already exists in nature is absurd. This would be like genetically engineering a bluejay and then trying to get a restraining order against God (or whoever/whatever) for manufacturing bluejays without your permission. They'll probably patent the "scent of a woman" next...
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The X-Box looks to be a great piece of hardware, but personally I don't see much that it's doing that you don't already see in high-end graphics engines. Personally, I might buy one just to figure out how to slap Linux or *BSD on it and get it running in the corner as a rendering powerhouse, but other then that...I don't view it as that special.
Kind of sad about Bleem...there was going to be a Linux port of their new game Halo, which looks schweet (and I spend much more time coding than gaming, so that's a real compliment). Now that MS has 'em, probably no port. :(
This seems rather ass-backwards to me; Metallica is suing their fans, and now Apple is doing something rather similar? Apple has only recently gotten back on their feet, thanks in a large part to the dedication of the Apple user community. It just seems wrong to me to turn around and bash that community in the face.
That would be like Debian turning around, claiming copyright to all the GPL software they support, and then trying to slap the FSF with a lawsuit...
Why the hell should they target a company that has been supporting the Linux community? The best office suite (IMHO) for Linux is shipped by Corel, and they have been helping to popularize Linux as much (if not more) than Mandrake.
In the call center I work in, most of our Linux calls are divided evenly among Mandrake and Corel. Corel may not be the best distro, but it still is helping to let newbies out of their Microsoft world and play with a real OS instead of a glorified word processor.
// hello.cpp: "Hello, world!" for a Unix console.
#include
main() { cout "Hello, world!" endl; } Hmmm...wonder how much faster mine will run...
Maybe I'm strange, but I would give tips to a website that provided useful information. Not every time I come there, yes, but let's put this into perspective. Let's say that I'm a student, and that I desperately need a piece of information that I find on one of these "free" websites that has an online "tip jar". I go to the site, get my data, click on the "tip jar" and leave a dollar or so, and go merrily on my way. The next ten times I visit the site, I might leave nothing -- but a decently-sized information site will have enough in the way of visitors to potentially make the InterTip worthwhile.
"Sponsorship" is also an idea -- companies with employees who use the site regularly can "sponsor" the site, and in exchange they simply get a listing on the "sponsors" page, and possibly a little logo that says "This site sponsored by X." It's not a banner ad, and won't generare revenue for company X, because they'll be paying for a service they find useful.
Writer of this Haiku
Knows not of life sans Windows,
Where crashes roam free.
I haven't had any usability problems with the software I use under Linux. Didn't when I started, don't know.
WP is nifty, ApplixWare is for the MS Works user, and StarOffice is good...just too big for my tastes. We are not, however, a bunch of geeks hacking LaTeX out from vi or emacs every time we want to write a document.
And, besides -- when was the last time a macro virus attacked Pine?
This is nice to see (HP taking responsiblity and all), but it doesn't seem to be a trend. System specs are (now) often misquoted, especially by the manufacturer. Hell -- look at Microsoft. Minimum system requirements for Win98 were, IIRC, something like a 486DX2/50 with 16M of RAM.
The "frills" are actually pretty common, at least here in California. A WebTV unit isn't that expensive, and I can find swimming pools / weight rooms / etc at apartments up here in Sacramento. For a lot less than the Bay or SV. Silicon Valley's biggest problem is the same one that most of the Bay Area suffers -- population density. It's a basic supply-and-demand problem; the supply of housing is low, the demand is astronomical, and so the prices will rise to meet what the market will bear.
It wouldn't be that hard to design a very stripped-down version of an X server to run on something like an Itsy. The problem with your 40M install of X is that the X you are installing has to deal with multiple hardware platforms, and the inherent bugs^h^h^h^hfeatures of each. I'm working on my own little custom GUI for a car-based MP3 player (using an old color laptop display) with svgalib, and the stuff I'm writing is ending up pretty small. With something like an Itsy, things could be done even smaller, as the hardware is known in-and-out by the software developers.
Does this mean that I'll have to pay some British tennis ball manufacturer every time I mow my lawn, because I'm producing that "fresh cut grass" smell? The idea of patenting something that already exists in nature is absurd. This would be like genetically engineering a bluejay and then trying to get a restraining order against God (or whoever/whatever) for manufacturing bluejays without your permission. They'll probably patent the "scent of a woman" next...