That would be sorta neat, would we be able to buy them at dirt-cheap prices, crack them open and salvage their hardware? Come on, 128Megs, 80 gigs, and a GeForce card for approx. $200?
I haven't been reading about the XBox, but I'm guessing it's just an everything-soldered-into-one, and it's not going to have an ATX motherboard, AGP slot and IDE interface, so making use of the above hardware isn't going to be that easy, huh?
I don't get MS, why don't they just make an even-more-dumbed-down version of Windows that is robust, easy (to play game: insert CD, "AutoRun" configures game, start game) and is specialised for games/multimedia/whatever else they think of? They've got the hardware already..
And considering it's just a PC, won't someone be able to write, say, a word processing program for it? They should, so they can charge people money to print over the net because the box doesn't have a parallel port..
People, please read the story carefully. The problem is that Windows ME is just that GUI that is just Windows 1.0 with bloat added, and it still goes on top of DOS. Now, this means they still have DOS under it, there's just no way for it to kill itself and give everyone pure DOS.
W2K was built from the ground up, not as a thing on top of DOS. It has command line support, because well, some people found it useful. But it can't reboot to DOS, for well, because, if W2K kills itself, your computer would probably hang, while WinME, in so far as I can see it being an "extension" of Windows 1.0, would be able to terminate all of its processes and that would give the users DOS. If that's still possible, why not allow it? In my opinion, why block access to DOS?
If it was given, I think most lusers would avoid the option to go to DOS anyway, but it would be nicely there when the power users need to use it.
The following is no longer on topic. Stop reading here.
I can't believe how dumbed down Windows has become over the years, it is trying to approach the ease of use of Apples/Macs but has so far only achieved it very slowly. It continues to suck. I'm still using it and other MS products because well, it's got what X-Windows doesn't (I don't keep up with X-Windows so this is probably wrong):
- Consistent GUI
- Drag and Drop
- Other things I've taken for granted.
But here's one, I've got AfterStep, and to change the colors of emacs I have to go hunting for some obscure line in a file somewhere. In Windows it's in Display Properties. Of course Gnome probably fixes my problem, but installing Gnome is annoyingly hard (dependancies that mean I have to reinstall the whole OS anyway.. in Windows the only dependencies you get is "please update your MFC/Visual Basic dlls).
Penicillin was also developed by NASA to protect the astronauts from infectious diseases.
Maybe he was being sarcastic, perhaps in reply to this incorrect (is it really?) comment:
Did you know a nasa engineer invented the microchip for the apollo missions, sparking 3rd generation computers?
Because if I'm not mistaken, the microchip was invented by someone who worked for Texas Instrument (whose name I unfortunately can't recall at the moment). Or was it was a different type of microchip?
Well NASA did invent Velcro, Tang and the pen that could write upside down.
Need I mention the old funny factoid about them spending a million dollars to come up with that pen, while the Soviets brought pencils to space with them?
Yes, that's something I noticed, and I'm glad the first post mentions it. I'm a newbie(TM) but I've learnt about the anti-Katz movement and tend to agree with their argument, that all Katz ever do is try to feed on the insecurity some geeks may have about themselves. Now to be off-topic (or rather on-topic, since I'm going to rant about one of the movie's actresses), yes, Rebecca Romjin Stamos is a dumb bitch. She was on some show about supermodels once, and I (perhaps unfortunately) watched the interviews as well as the videoclips (nice clips they were), and at one stage they talked to her, and her answer: "How does it feel to be a model? I don't know, how did Louis Amstrong feel when he walked on the moon?" and then, rambling about teamwork, "There's no "I" in "team". There's no "I" in "unity"." If you want to get some sort of a geek statement here, I find it unfortunate and perhaps unfair that along with Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, etc, etc, she'll make millions of bucks because she's got a pair of titties, while I (and perhaps others here, I dare not say "we"), the geek(s), have to do real work to make a living.
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That would be sorta neat, would we be able to buy them at dirt-cheap prices, crack them open and salvage their hardware? Come on, 128Megs, 80 gigs, and a GeForce card for approx. $200?
I haven't been reading about the XBox, but I'm guessing it's just an everything-soldered-into-one, and it's not going to have an ATX motherboard, AGP slot and IDE interface, so making use of the above hardware isn't going to be that easy, huh?
I don't get MS, why don't they just make an even-more-dumbed-down version of Windows that is robust, easy (to play game: insert CD, "AutoRun" configures game, start game) and is specialised for games/multimedia/whatever else they think of? They've got the hardware already..
And considering it's just a PC, won't someone be able to write, say, a word processing program for it? They should, so they can charge people money to print over the net because the box doesn't have a parallel port..
Let's make it so it can run games and office-type apps in it!
People, please read the story carefully. The problem is that Windows ME is just that GUI that is just Windows 1.0 with bloat added, and it still goes on top of DOS. Now, this means they still have DOS under it, there's just no way for it to kill itself and give everyone pure DOS.
W2K was built from the ground up, not as a thing on top of DOS. It has command line support, because well, some people found it useful. But it can't reboot to DOS, for well, because, if W2K kills itself, your computer would probably hang, while WinME, in so far as I can see it being an "extension" of Windows 1.0, would be able to terminate all of its processes and that would give the users DOS. If that's still possible, why not allow it? In my opinion, why block access to DOS?
If it was given, I think most lusers would avoid the option to go to DOS anyway, but it would be nicely there when the power users need to use it.
The following is no longer on topic. Stop reading here.
I can't believe how dumbed down Windows has become over the years, it is trying to approach the ease of use of Apples/Macs but has so far only achieved it very slowly. It continues to suck. I'm still using it and other MS products because well, it's got what X-Windows doesn't (I don't keep up with X-Windows so this is probably wrong):
- Consistent GUI
- Drag and Drop
- Other things I've taken for granted.
But here's one, I've got AfterStep, and to change the colors of emacs I have to go hunting for some obscure line in a file somewhere. In Windows it's in Display Properties. Of course Gnome probably fixes my problem, but installing Gnome is annoyingly hard (dependancies that mean I have to reinstall the whole OS anyway.. in Windows the only dependencies you get is "please update your MFC/Visual Basic dlls).
Maybe he was being sarcastic, perhaps in reply to this incorrect (is it really?) comment:
Did you know a nasa engineer invented the microchip for the apollo missions, sparking 3rd generation computers?
Because if I'm not mistaken, the microchip was invented by someone who worked for Texas Instrument (whose name I unfortunately can't recall at the moment). Or was it was a different type of microchip?
Well NASA did invent Velcro, Tang and the pen that could write upside down.
Need I mention the old funny factoid about them spending a million dollars to come up with that pen, while the Soviets brought pencils to space with them?
Yes, that's something I noticed, and I'm glad the first post mentions it. I'm a newbie(TM) but I've learnt about the anti-Katz movement and tend to agree with their argument, that all Katz ever do is try to feed on the insecurity some geeks may have about themselves. Now to be off-topic (or rather on-topic, since I'm going to rant about one of the movie's actresses), yes, Rebecca Romjin Stamos is a dumb bitch. She was on some show about supermodels once, and I (perhaps unfortunately) watched the interviews as well as the videoclips (nice clips they were), and at one stage they talked to her, and her answer: "How does it feel to be a model? I don't know, how did Louis Amstrong feel when he walked on the moon?" and then, rambling about teamwork, "There's no "I" in "team". There's no "I" in "unity"." If you want to get some sort of a geek statement here, I find it unfortunate and perhaps unfair that along with Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, etc, etc, she'll make millions of bucks because she's got a pair of titties, while I (and perhaps others here, I dare not say "we"), the geek(s), have to do real work to make a living.
AFAIK silicone and silicon are different things. If they weren't though, yes it's funny. Hey it's my First ever post to Slashdot!