The best thing about this is that they will be forced to make their code more efficient to work on slower PC's.
Sorry that won't happen. This new lightweight XP is gonna be the barebones OS, with IE/OE, Media Player and probably a terminal services client. That is ALL it is. They are cutting out features and doing nothing at all (or the barest minumum) of code optimisation. This is MS we are talking about here--they haven't done anything radical with their OS since NT 3.1 came out. Innovation might be BillGs favourite word, but MS rarely does that--they mostly just evolve.
Other apps could probably be installed, but then those old machines would be bogged down just as before. MS' strategy is to try and entice cash-strapped enterprises to keep their MS infrastructure: Instead of buying 30 new workstations, just buy 30 licenses of "barebones XP" and a $5000 server to handle the apps. I don't see much there forcing MS to take the bloat out of their software.
Problem with that idea is that there isn't much cost savings up front (perhaps none at all) vs. upgrading the workstations, because the customer still has to buy a big app server and most likley upgrade ther office suite software, etc. too...in addition to licenses for the barebones XP (unless they give that away with server CALs).
Any admin worth his salt will figure out he could just get the application server and run terminal services on the Win98 boxes without upgrading them...or better yet just convert all the terminals to Linux...and save up front and get all the same TCO benefits in the long run. I don't think this dog of an XP distro will hunt.
I think I'm missing your point, or perhaps you're missing the point of the device.
I've seen a couple of posts about with the term "enforce parenting" suggesting that it is a bad thing, and I'm not clear what is meant there. I don't think this invention is the proper way to encourage kids to be active because it associates physical activity with "work" required to earn TV privleges. I'd say it's better to use TV as a reward for ACTUAL work like homework or chores...but is that "enforcing parenting" too? And what is wrong with that?
So many kids these days are rude little brats and it seems they need a good bit of parental enforcement if you ask me, so if discipline/enforcement of rules/involvement in childs life is what you mean when you say "enforce parenting" then I'm all for it.
The TV/video game/computer is a good reward for good behaviour and finishing work (just like allowances, toys, etc are). To have a lasting effect however I think physical activity has to be FUN--kids will still grow up to be fat couch potatoes if they are raised to associate such activity with "work". So not only do I agree that for me personally I wouldn't ever buy these "TV shoes"...and the exercise bike is an even dumber idea...just go and get REAL bikes for the whole family and go outside for a ride together.
If RIAA ran Walmart it wouldn't have shoplifters prosecuted for theft, it would launch ridiculous civil suits against them.
If you stole a shirt from RIAA's Walmart, it would sue you $14.95 in loss/damages plus $1.5 million for pain, suffering, legal costs, etc.
I agree that Cuban's logic is flawed, but I might amend the argument. RIAA has tried to sue for silly amounts, somewhere along the lines of $2500 per song. I believe that the defendant could argue that since there is a legal $5/month service from Yahoo that a more resonable assessment would be $5 * number of months known to offend * a reasonable estimate of the number of people who got songs from your PC in a given month. It is that last factor that is different from Cuban's argument--unfortunately what a reasonable estimate is debatable.
So instead of these dumb multi-million lawsuits against teenage girls and grandparents that do nothing but make bad PR and settlemsnt at a small fraction of the original amount you'd do something like this:
$5 * 6 months * 500 USERS (not songs) uploaded to in a given month is...$15000. I'd bet that in most cases it is much less than 500 unique users who get all or part of a file from your machine when logged into P2P. In any case $15K is mcuh less ridiculous than millions but still enough to remind the offenders that it is wrong.
BTW, comapring copyright infringement to shoplifting isn't really accurate either because despite what RIAA says, violating copyright is NOT THEFT. When you steal a shirt you are denying the victim the use of said shirt. When you download music the artist (or more likely the publisher) still owns the rights and paying customers can still hear the music. Just to make it clear...
DOWNLOADING MUSIC IS *NEVER* STEALING...
HOWEVER...it IS violationg copyright... AND VIOLATING COPYRIGHT IS ALSO WRONG.
The problem is that RIAA et al want to prosecute people for copyright infringement much more harshly than deserved--more than what some people get for things like theft, assault and rape. A reality check is required for people all around.
Actually you are dead wrong--it has been a recommendation for over a year now. Also, XHTML 1.1 and the proper mime types for XHTML have been final recommendations for even longer yet. It'd be really nice if my site that validates as clean XHTML 1.1 and proper CSS level 1 according to current, finalised standards was not treated like "tag soup" becasue IE barfs on "application/xhtml+xml" and only eats it if I serve it as "text/html". Since IE goes into "quirks mode" it also breaks all manner of CSS stuff too--even worse than if it was in "standards" mode. This means I must craft my compliant code to downgrade gracefully enough for IE, and that makes IE look primitive. The only other alternative is to deliberately break with standards and perpetuate the rot that is all to pervasive on the WWW. IE6 STILL doesn't dupport the DOM correctly either, which makes life difficult too.
Tabbed browsing is nice but it doesn't help developers who want to write future-proofed websites with some guarantee of compatibility with the present. I hope that the shortcomings I mentioned have been addressed in IE7 along with tabs. And in the case of tabs, I hope MS examines the use of tabs in ALL of its apps, and makes them consistent between Excel, IE, Visual Studio, tabbed dialogue boxes, etc...because the notion of tabs is NOT inconsistent with Windows UI. That is an excuse MS uses to explain their neglect of IE.
Anyways, I do not consider IE at present to be a "modern browser"--it is stuck in the leagues of "antique" browsers like Netscape Navigator 4.x. Simply adding tabs or any other UI goodies will mot make IE7 "modern" and will not stop competition from Mozilla (though it may slow it a bit). Only by addressing compliance issues with the DOM, XHTML up to 1.1 and CSS up to 2.1 will make it worhty of being included in the "modern" category. By doing so MS would be doing the web a tremendous service too.
While I do disagree with the statement that "too much technology kills the game" I still think that that true innovation in gaming relative to the size of the industry is almost at an all time low. Your examples fail to convince me otherwise:
* IMHO perfection of "cel shading" adds nothing important to gameplay at all. While it is a technical innovation, Zelda Windwaker provides nothing of note in terms of actual gameplay innovation.
* Halo 2 is more of the same--I see not innovation here at all, just refinement/evolution of the same ideas we've been playing with since Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Half-Life, Halo I etc etc
* The PSP didn't demonstrate the effective melding of game console and movie player--The PS2 and XBox did that before. The PSP just made it portable. It's not even a new idea--playing music, video and games on a portable device was happening on PocketPC Windows devices long before PSP came out. The PS just made it better.
* WoW isn't anything extra special. What about games like Everquest? Or even The Sims Online? There are a lot of MMORPG style games that appeal to the masses. And as far as re-defining video games as "art" I'd have to say Myst was more of a pioneer. I also remember thinking there was quite an "artistic" componenet to much earlier RPGs--maybe "Alternate Reality" for the Atari computers?
* GTA3 the FIRST truly mass market game? you have a really short memory. I'd say Pong was the first. If you mean "mass market" as in how movies are promoted with music, food, clothing, TV series etc etc licensing empires, that would be Pac Man (There was clothing, TV shows, lunch pails, McDonalds happy-meal yous and so on). If that isn't massive enough then Super Mario Brothers was even more massively marketed. In any case, how mass marketed a game is doesn't indicate how innovative it is. GTA3 is ZERO innovation--it is the THIRD IN A SERIES OF SIMILAR GAMES. Even the original brings together ideas seen in several older games.
Yes they might all be good games and they definitely have great graphics. Of course they wouldn't be the same without the same level of graphics. I'd argue however that truly great games would be just as enjoyable to play with PS1 level graphics--the extra bells and whistles just make it hold the attention of passive spectators more. As for Space Invaders, I still do play it from time to time through emulation or one of the many Java/Flash/etc copycats.
I agree that modern technology can help artists with inspiring ideas. Katamari Damarcy is a good example of a cool new game, but there is nothing visually in that game that you couldn't push a PS1 to do well enough to support the gameplay.
I think that even today if you took a PS1 and added more memory and an ethernet port it is possible to make really fun, addictive and successful games. Unfortunately though, I'd have to say that the "originality-to-fluff" ratio is not only NOT the best it's ever been--it is probably the LOWEST it's been since the pre-NES industry crash.
Calgary? Isn't that the strip club capitol of Canada?
I can tell you as a native Calgarian that Calgary is far from being the strip club capitol of Canada. The reason probably has to do with the fact that active members of the OpenBSD community live here more than anything else--that and the fact Calgary is a very well-connected city (among the most-wired cities in North America and maybe the best in Canada along with maybe Ottawa and Vancouver).
A little OT but maybe interesting to some:
Although Calgary and Alberta is not nearly as red-neck/socially conservative as people outside the province often make it out to be, Calgary (and indeed all the prarie provinces) have quite a puritan heritage--for example, Alberta was led by a premier nicknamed "Bible Bill" Aberhart for many years, and in Calgary from prohibition well into the 60s men and women couldn't be in mixed company in any venue that served alcohol (in later days--1950's the city relaxed laws allowing establishments to serve alcohol to both genders in the same room during the Exhibition and Stampede).
Things have changed a lot since then, but Calgary still doesn't have that big an appetite for strip clubs considering the size of the city. If post-hacking peeler-shows is what they were after I think they would pick a venue somewhere in Quebec--it seems that province embraced more socially liberal attitudes than anywhere else in Canada, except for a few interesting exceptions (in terms of equality for women it was opposite--Alberta and the praries were ahead of the game there and Quebec was the last province in Canada with universal sufferage).
Maybe that is why Ottawa is known for it's Linux activity--it is both a high-tech city AND is closer to the stripper-action as it sits on the Ontario-Quebec border.
And therin lies the double-edged sword. Just about everyone on/. complains about Microsoft's auto-update feature saying that it's intrusive, and they don't want some company to have control of what is installed on their PC's.
I have no problem with the concept up auto update--I like having the latest stuff on my workstation. The problem is the IMPLEMENTATION of auto-update.
Mozilla's doesn't bring enough attention to it (however, contrary to some other posters arguments I have found it is NOT hard at all--my retired-farmer parents who are decidedly not experts picked it up immediately once they knew what the icon was).
Microsoft's auto-update is TOO intrusive. Given most/.ers tend to be libertarian-minded and tech-savvy, the combination makes Windows Update annoying and offensive to this audience--indeed it is annoying to all but casual and beginning users. Plus, Win Update is not nearly transparent enough--it gives little to no indication of what data it is sending to or receiving from your PC, nor does it indicate when it checks for updates. The default settings are for it to do everything without intervention, confirmation or notification--OK for home users but a nightmare for sysadmins (which is why corporate standard install images often turn off auto-install of updates).
Here is what I would suggest for auto-update:
1. Make more of it driven by applications rather than the OS--more "distributed"--and contain the OS auto-update solely to kernel, system binaries/libraries, basic shared components.
2. Allow the process to be automatic, but make it more TRANSPARENT. Check for updates at predictable intervals (on login, maybe at midnight,etc) and have an unobtrusive but clearly labelled status box indicating what is happening (like when your buddy logs into your IM but in plain language says "retrieving list of updates" etc).
3. Allow for more granularity in settings for expert users or operation tailored to corporate deployments, and put in the control panel an easy-to-find "turn it all off" button. Windows has this "system restore" crap which comes in really useful when you want to re-install those worms and trojans accidentally, and the option to turn it off is buried in the most illogical place on Me, and it isn't much better under XP.
4. How about being more responsive with bugfixes Microsoft? Mozilla is non-profit and manages to fix critical issues within a week, and the process is quite transparent. Microsoft makes you wait at least a month 'till the next regular update cycle, and the process of making and testing fixes is pretty much unknown outside of Microsoft.
Just a few suggestions--there are more, but my point is that MS pretty much as long a way to go as Mozilla in this dept. A lot of MS's challenges have to do with the basic architecture of Windows being flawed (it is too monolithic, so bugs can have wide-ranging effects as can the patches).
As I am not a regular Mac OSX user, I am curious on how that platform handles updates. Could MS and F/OSS people learn something here?
And you could add 2 giant fans to blow air across the fins to keep it even cooler!
That is actually a good idea that really would make cooling more efficient. Larger fans can move as much or more volumes of air at slower RPMs than smaller fans. Lower RPMs means less wear on bearings and quieter operation.
IIRC that is the strategy used in the new BTX form factor cases--the heat sync on the CPU is really big with a lot of fins and a big fan that draws air through those fins and over the motherboard (to cool the chipset). Current ATX setups are most often laid out poorly for cooling, and you end up seeing high-end systems with 3 or more fans in the case. It is the need for multiple small fans that makes these PCs noisy, not the fact that they require fans at all.
I still think it would be great to see the return of the days when chips and power supplies ran cool enough to allow for practical convection cooling. My fanless Atari ST was blissfully quiet--even the comparable IBM ATs of the day that only had a single fan in the power supply were horribly loud next to it.
You're right! I remember those--they were excellent! I bet there are still reporters who won't part with them today. Only thing is I'd venture to say that the Tandy 100 was probably nicer to type on. Even so, these new machines have much richer functionality.
I fear however, that these machines will not see the light of day outside India--aside from specialised uses like the security system terminal mentioned in the article. Hopefully (in my dreams I'm sure) someone at Radio Shack would catch wind of these machines and get them sold at stores all over North America (The new Tandy Model 100-II? Or maybe Model 300?). I would definitely be interested in one!
If that isn't in the cards then perhaps some enterprising people on this side of the world will make a cheap, portable and machine that is practical to use for everyday tasks (PDAs and nifty smartphones will alwasy be limited by their form factor). To this day there has always been something wrong with American efforts of this type. They are either tied to a service (like one poster suggested would happen---free PC with a 2 year contract for internet at $24.95/mo or some crap), or they are too proprietary or have design shortcomings (almost always due to feature creep--trying to be a "convergence device").
Yes, all models have built in Ethernet and dial-up modems for networking and can dock to a PC like a Palm
Does it have wireless or a network port
Yes, it is an extra cost option but still is a sub-$500 model
If you are going to have high speed networks in at least the urban areas you could use a network based storage system. With wireless you could have what would amount to a HUGE hard drive at all times.
The designer had those in mind, along with the ability to dock with a full-sized PC for data exchange and storage.
I want want to hack
It runs Linux and open source apps..you could hack those today
I just hope it comes with bluetooth so I can use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it.
No answer to that in the articles, unlike every other question you asked;-) but I agree it would be great and wouldn't add great cost. OTOH, it could make it vulnerable to a bluetooth virus. The flexible keyboard is neat though
Might make a cool car computer as well
Might? It already does...from the Times of India link in the/. post:
Mobilis' innvative features had already been used in the elctronic dashboard of country's indigenous electric car, REVA, Sibal said adding Some other car manufacturers had shown interest in the technology to make it part of their cars' dashboards.
I figured if someone was so interested they might actually read the article...but at least there is interest in it.
For $230, you can get a new Dell 2.4GHz Celeron box on sale with a refurbished monitor.
You either found a really short-term special offer or you are full of sh*t. The machine you mention is in fact $298 and NOT $230. Even if you go refurbished the price is $259. You also have to pay for shipping. So you have not refuted the price point argument entirely.
If you buy the cheapest Dell new they have a special offer for that price (normally $375) and include a printer (the crappy re-badged Lexmark inkjet poor-excuse-for-a-printer--and you do still have to pay the inflated price of $25 to get the cable to actually USE it). In any case, these Dell machines do not include the display. In any case they are not competitive on price alone against these Indian machines. They might get closer if they ditched WinXP for Linux but even then it would still be a bit more.
There are a few more things to consider as well--The Dell is a clunky desktop machine which uses much more power than the portable Indian machines. The Indian machines have LCD displays, touch-screen options, flexible keyboards, etc. They appear to be simpler and more rugged, and they support localisation for several Indian languages. Not sure Dell has an offering to match for its Indian customers.
You seem to agree with me that we should not live with the status quo...
We should work toward a better system...then you quickly demonstrate exactly the attitudes and actions that are slowing and preventing progres in personal computing today...
in the mean time we have to live with the fact that Linux is not a complete solution
[...]
So which is it? "Work towards something better" or "live with the fact"?
I just recently disabled IE on my system, and I'm about to re-enable it, because the brokerage firm I just switched to (Interactive Brokers) doesn't support anything but IE.
Notwithstanding the facts that the W3C was a very new standards body when Mosaic was developed, and that the center tag indeed WAS in the original HTML standard, this is EXACTLY WHY poorly-implemented old standards and non-standard extensions hang on for so long. You switched to a broker with inferior online service (to err is human--I've done the same). IMHO you did the wrong thing...instead of complaining about the non-compliant website and moving to another broker if there was no action taken to correct the deficiency, you decided to resurrect a buggy, insecure browser to use for your (most likely critical) financial transactions.
I no longer use IE for online financial services at all--I do not believe it is trustworthy enough for the task. I use Firefox and Epiphany because although they are not perfect, they are less visible targets and when there are vulnerabilities they are addressed much more quickly than those in IE. When my bank updated their website a couple years ago and broke some of the functionality I let them know I was no longer going to use their online services until the problem was resolved--then I opened up an account with a competing bank that not only had a branch 2 blocks away, but also had a web banking site that worked with Mozilla browsers (I kept my original accounts but only used them through the tellers and ATMs at the local branch).
There is ZERO TECHNICAL REASON for an IE-only requirement, and with the increasing popularity of other platforms sites that impose brower restrictions are giving the impression that their IT resources are behind the times and incapable of meeting their responsibilities when it comes to ensuring interoperability--particularly when the organisation in question is in the financial services sector. These business should be made aware of this--politely but in plain language. By "living with the fact" of the current situation, rolling over and using IE you condone those sloppy practices. I hope in the very least you made Interactive Broker aware of the problem.
I don't run Firefox because I find it inferior to IE in rendering pages as they were intended (yes, we live in an IE world, deal with it).
Actually that is incorrect "technically" speaking. Generally, Firefox is significantly better at rendering pages as they are intended as it complies much better with the CSS standard than IE. The results might not look like what the designer intended, but it is much closer to what the code says it should do.
Anyways, why do we have to live with being in an IE world...just because IE is dominant? That's kind of foolish given that IE development has been stagnant for years, has fundamental design flaws and inconsistently implements CSS. As a result, website code is far less maintainable and secure than it could be. If all web browsers followed web standards and good design practices we would have just a small fraction of the problems we hae today.
Looking at it another way: Linux is inferior at games compared to Windows, and "we live in a Windows world" so should we just give up on Linux, sit back and deal with a virus infested, poorly architected system like Windows?
You must be a bit young, or a bit new to personal computing. The firstgeneration of personalcomputers were all implemented using a passive backplane architecture.
Nowadays chips are cheap so the whole system is disposable--if that multi-hundred-pin superscalar chip fries you just drop in a whole new board, which today becomes a full blown PC with the addition of CPU, RAM and HD. Back in the day even the primitive 6502 was several hours wage for most people and reliability wasn't as good, so integration was a bad thing--at least with cards if one blows there is a good chance the $1000s of other circuitry were still intact. Thus, you had a nice chunky cabinet full of cards---CPU, RAM, terminal I/O or maybe a video card, floppy controller, etc etc.
Industrial controllers are still almost always backplane-and-card setups to this day. Modern controllers have taken this to a new level and are typically hot-pluggable as well. In industrial settings, servicability and maximum availability are more important than lowest cost, so in any critical operation you won't see a PLC processor with integrated network, digital I/O, etc etc etc...'cause you'll never be able to hot-swap chips that are surface-mount soldered to a processor board.
...to discount their products to education. MS already walks a fine line in this area as they have already virtually eliminated their profit margin on educational licenses. If they were to discount further or start giving away software they may run afoul of anti-trust and/or international trade anti-dumping laws (they already do give away software as charitable donations, but there is a limit to how much they can legally donate).
If MS were to engage in dumping practises in developing nations and with nonprofits and education would probably be unwise from a marketing strategy standpoint as well. MS wants to promote software as something powerful, proprietary and valuable in terms of dollars. If they raise kids on "free" software then in MS view they are teaching kids that their products are "worthless". As such they should at least require students to cover the costs of producing the product.
As a corporation in the forefront on the war against software piracy, MS also must establish strict license compliance enforcement practices with all customers, even schools and charities and even in cases when they donate software for free. To do anything less would be hypocritical, and might make it look like MS condones piracy by students and teachers. I happen to agree with that view as I take a dim view of "relative morality"/"situational ethics"--if MS is going to be the champion of commercial software then everybody has to follow the same rules.
That said, I think it would be hard for most educators to to argue in favour of MS in the classroom over Free software--and not just because some study put the TCO 1/5 lower for Linux. Back when I was still in grade school there was a raging debate about Coca-Cola funding renovations to our gymnasium because of the strings attached--the scoreboard and some other equipment would've sported giant coke logos, we would've had to replace all our vending machines and we would've had to change the concession stand menu (becasue the hostess snacks, Dr. Pepper and Hires root beer we sold were Pepsico properites). Other schools were being offered similar deals as well (one was an A/V system upgrade and free newsfeeds for current events classes, where the school was required to play corporate ads). In all these cases, teachers and a good deal of parents objected strongly to what some of the more vocal opponents termed "corporate indoctrination".
It seems to me that letting a big corporation own a school's IT infrastructure runs counter to everything those educators believe in. If Coca-Cola and McDonalds couldn't make such deals or had to substantially modify them, then why would we expect any less scruitiny from hardware and software companies? It was such a terrible thing to see the Coke logo all over our school, so what makes it OK now to have the MS logo on the startup screens of every PC? In the name of moral/ethical consistency, all these educators who do not like overt commercial presence in public education should be fighing to get Free software into the classroom--perhaps not eliminating MS but at least to teach students that there are alternatives.
BTW I think the same should apply to Apple (and should have in the past). I think it's great that MS and Apple support education but I think if there are too many strings attached to their generosity it should be rejected (especially if it involves exclusivity or terms & conditions obviously meant to diminish the presence of competitors in the classroom). I was lucky enough to be a young student at a time and place where we could see the alternatives--the first PCs in our school were Commodore PETs (which was typical in Canadian schools in the early 80s as Commodore was founded in Canada), but Apple II+ and IBM PCs and newer Commodore machines followed and kids got to see the advantages and disadvantages of all of them.
I'm all for a drastic increase in the presence of Free software in the classroom in the name of promoting choice.
...You just have to provide the right environment.
(FYI "Penny Wise Pound Foolish" was coined before Tony Blair's great grandparents were even born)
Why would kids line up at Windows machines while the Linux machine next to it is free? Because the people in charge of the PCs at schools are too stupid or to busy to manage a Windows PC properly, and so they are rolled out with default or factory installs. Kids get no end of joy playing mindless games, chatting on MSN, installing talking purple gorillas and comet-tail mouse cursors and so on.
If you took the time to do a PROPER install that wouldn't be an administrative hell of chronic malware infections, as well as locking down stuff to focus students on their work, then Windows wouldn't be any more appealing than Linux.
You might want to make sure both blatforms are on a level playing field too, by selecting or crafting a well executed distro of Linux and installing it on the same hardware as Windows. Linux has only gotten it together recently on the desktop although it has always been architecturally superior to Windows, so it won't help the cause by using aged hardware and a distro that is more than 2 years old.
Better yet, why put a strain on your resources by supporting a heterogenous environment? Dump everything else and go ALL Linux then there will be no difference from workstation to workstation. There is almost nothing a school needs that isn't handled by Linux, and if enforcing a sigle platform choice is good enough for MS and Apple, then why not Red Hat or Novell?
Don't write off the competition either
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Firefox isn't really much more than an annoyance, because it will never have the marketing muscle to compete with MSIE
Funny, I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about full page ads in national newspapers or even a formal campaign for the "spread IE" movement. MS' strategy with IE seems to be extreme stealth marketing--it amounts basically to putting a blue 'E' on the screen of its much more hyped, flagship product.
the reason why MSIE destroyed Netscape's dominance wasn't its superiority, it was because MSIE was just there, an easy mouse click away on every new Windows 95 PC, whereas Navigator wasn't, and needed to be installed from scratch.
I agree with you on the superiority point; IE was a cruddy re-badge of Spyglass Mosaic when I saw it. However, if memory serves me, the very first time I saw Windows 95 (the VERY FIRST release--the one I saw was installed from genuine 3.5" FLOPPIES) did NOT come with IE at all (it wasn't even hidden in there anywhere). I think the very first IE was included in a "Plus! Pack". I think it was a few months after the Win95 debut that IE was bundled in, and I don't believe it was never on the floppy disk ditribution of Win95.
There is also a difference between now and then--it is not all that inconvenient to try out new browsers in the age of broadband connections, so the threshold of tolerance is lower for bugs/quirks/security holes/stagnation in IE5. Even so, despite slow dial-up and spending extra for a boxed version being the only options for people to get Netscape, IE sucked so badly that the only thing they used it for was to get to netscapes download page. It wasn't until IE hit version 4 that it was close to par, and by version 4 Netscape was getting crufty. Although bundling IE for free propped it up considerably, ultimately Netscape did themselves in
Yes it is a waste if you are only doing one thing like just routing/IP Masq or jusst a print server, but if you have an old PC and know Linux or BSD you can do a lot more with it than a little box.
I have an older PC that is a print server too--except that it has a big hard drive so it is a good file server too...oh yeah it also is my email server, Samba domain controller and database server too. If you are playing with all that stuff you might as well throw a printer on it--one less "wall wart", one less device on the net to configure, etc etc.
Despite all the functions it does it is quite a modest computer--the PC that fills this role is generally made of leftover parts and it started life as a Pentium 120 with 32megs of RAM. I've upgraded it since but the only new function I added was to add Samba as a domain controller. It does create a bigger single point of failure but it is suitable for home or small office.
* I still regularly use a machine equipped with 128 MB of RAM...Linux works well on it, and even Win2k is fine as long as you don't load it down with too much crap
* The poster of this article seems astonished at having as much memory on the graphics card as on the motherboard. In the late 80s and into the early 90s this was commonplace: my first PC box was a real screamer--a 25 MHz 386DX with 1 MB RAM and a Trident SVGA card...also with 1 MB RAM so I could do a whopping 1024*768 with 256 colours. It had a gigantic 40MB drive too. At the time, more than 1MB ram was not really useful unless you used OS/2 or tinkered with Windows (this was just before Win 3.0 came out so Windows was next to useless). I believe other machines like Amiga could use as much memory for video as was available for the system as well.
* I decided I was getting old when I saw 800 and XL close together and thought "what does an old Atari machine have to do with this?"
...then you just don't "get it" at all--not what is possible in hardware engineering today, nor the philospohy behind Free (libre) and open systems.
Up to a certain complexity, fab services are available even to home hobbyists for a reasonable cost, and for large runs it is quite inexpensive. The REALLY big cost is in SET-UP costs to produce ASICs. Besides, fabrication costs are no different than for proprietary hardware--the licensing model for the intellectual property has nothing to do with how hard it is to physically build it.
Furthermore, even if the production model will be expensive to get going, these days hardware engineering is like programming--you don't sit at a desk taping out masks and such like they did when they made the 6502 processor. Its all source code in Verilog or VHDL these days. Therefore, if Linux can be successful then why not open hardware?
It is in the development/engineering where these cards can have an edge over ATI and NVidia--they pay massive dollars to hire people to design the hardware and drivers and lawyers to keep it all secret. This project has no monetary design costs. I for one don't even care if they don't ever produce a single card themselves, as long as they get the evaluation FPGA board and all the source designs/code complete. THAT is what is most important, besides having some manufacurers pick up the design.
Money is the least important part of this project. The industry is going to start stagnating now becasue the players are much too proprietary--by hoarding information and research they duplicate efforts and slow or stop development of interoperability standards. Insistence on keeping drivers proprietary hurts the software industry (particularly open projects and smaller proprietary competitors) and props up Microsoft.
Last but not least, an open design lowers the barrier of entry for smaller players and others who do not have graphics IP--right now card makers are at the mercy of two major players who design and make chips. If this project succeeds, many other chip makers can make graphics cards AND chips. Also, since the design is open, even if a chip maker discontinues or goes bankrupt others can use the design themselves. Widely licensing to many chipmakers is the biggest reason why the 6502 CPU was so successful--it was produced by MOSTek/Commodore, Rockwell, NCR, GTE, WDC, Synertek and many more. If Commodore hoarded its design and made all the chips themselves, do you really think so many computer makers, including arch-rivals Apple and Atari, would've stuck with the 6502 for so long if they only had one company--a sometimes competitor--to depend on for their CPU? Even if the 6502 was the cheaper option I doubt they would be comfortable with that. WDC and Rockwell also kept that design alive lonnger and improved it where Commodore wouldn't (CMOS version, added more defined opcodes, 16-bit extensions...).
If these guys play their cards right--especially if they can put out a few thousand GPU chips and get the ball rolling for others to jump on board it could revolutionise the industry and level the playing field for Linux and others on the desktop--and the more people on board the more rapidly the design could be improved. And unlike the case with the 6502, these improvements could be shared and standardised--and chip makers who contribute these enhancements can still have "first mover" advantage as an incentive to innovate.
If I was a well-to-do player in the Linux/open source community like Bob Young I'd certainly throw a few million their way...
I don't know if they've been paying any attention (I presume they have), but FPGAs have gotten extremely cheap as of late.
You're right, and in fact if the production run is small enough and the design is not too complex FPGAs are actually quite a bit cheaper than custom ASICs or gate arrays (this is becase although the setup costs are huge for a custom ASIC, the production cost is relatively much smaller). In the case of an open graphics card however there are other factors:
* The GPU is probably too complex for the really cheap FPGAs to work.
* PC Graphics chipsets and cards are not niche products and they probalby want to be prepared for high volume production. If that is the case, the per-unit cost of setting up for ASIC production shrinks
* most importantly...SPEED. Those ultracheap FPGAs are too slow to handle 3-D processing for megapixel graphics at 100FPS, which is what you need to do to compete with ATI and NVidia. The FPGA evaluation board they are releasing will probably run at some fraction of the intended frequency of the final product.
But the problem is these are students and they have work to do.
So what? Crap happens...virus ate your thesis, power went out, printer ran out of ink, blah blah blah. Thing is that if you are a responsible person you have contingencies in place to minimise or eliminate the impact of such incidents. If the work is important, you keep backups, spare ink cartriges, update your antivirus, OS, apps, etc...and most importantly you don't procrastinate to the point where you are in crisis mode. If you don't do all of the above then you should be prepared to follow Murphy's Law. If a mishap is unavoidable, you could be granted an extension.
Thing is, it is standard practice for net admins EVERYWHERE to pull the plug at their discretion should your computer be found to causing network disruption. Taht is a standard condition of almost all terms of service. My ISP would knock you off very quickly should they discover an open mail relay, ping flood or other unusual level of activity, and I pay extra for business-grade service. I agree with other posters here--this guy should put in some F/OSS tools to help manage these problems, and immediately terminate all network connectivity of infected machines ASAP.
"I have work to do" be damned. Seriously. Part of growing up and going to school is to learn--and people have to learn the consequences of their actions or inactions--that's life. You have to keep your house clean, pay your bills on time, obey the speed limit and traffic signals, etc. If you don't there are negative consequences. Same goes for PC use: ignoring the TOS, not updating your machine, downloading comet cursors and talking gorillas and chat icons and P2P warez is just inviting trouble. Users who repeatedly do those things despite warnings deserve no sympathy at all and should recieve all the wrath the BOFH can deliver.
The best wireless power device in the home I can think of is the microwave oven. Given the effects that such wireless power has on my lunch over a span of mere minutes, I do not think mass adoption of wireless power would be a particularly good idea.
...for a company to "eat it's own dog food". Unfortunately in the case of MS, its software truly IS a "dog's breakfast".
It does seem to me that the performance (or lack thereof) of MSN Messenger and related properties points to teething pains in the upgrade process. It happens quite often that you cannot sign in to Messenger or hotmail for brief periods and on some occasions you get punted. From what I have seen the problem is quite intermittent--can't sign in? Wait 15 minutes. It doesn't seem to be related to ISPs either--two people in the same area of the city with the same ISP will report different results.
Maybe it is just my experience, but I have found the problems are more likely associated with the sign-in process. I've only tried this once but it DID happen: Girlfriend couldn't sign into MSN from her place on cable internet. I COULD sign into MSN at my place (ADSL which surprisingly works faster than her cable most of the time). Though it might be a problem with the cable ISP, so tried to sign in under HER account at MY place. It did NOT work using HER account on either machine from two different ISPs, BUT...MY sign-in worked form BOTH places.
If someone has ready access to different machines on different connections and has problems signing into MSN, you might wat to try ths out and see if it was a fluke or if it really IS a problem linked to the user. My theory is that some of the problems are related to MS systems relying on a some kind of distributed database of user credentials, and that in the process of "improving" things with 64-bit systems that sections of this database drop out from time to time.
It's all great and wonderful that MS wants to stay cutting edge and maintain capacity to handle their huge demand, but how they seem to go about it really irritates me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! It's like their upgrades are often a massive, disruptive undertaking. Can they not roll this stuff out more gradually--like over a couple of years instead of a few problem-plagued weeks and months?
The frustrating part is that even paying users are subjected to some of these problems--so much for getting what you pay for. Even my free Yahoo account seems to be more reliable these days.
At one time it both irritated me AND paid my mortgage. When I was paying my mortgage by being a self-employed "professional nerd" my job started out being a consultant/developer implementing projects ranging from web-based apps running on Linux/Apache/mod-perl/etc to MS Access database and VB apps.
Then the dreaded SQL slammer worm hit...then bagle...and blaster...and sasser...etc etc etc. Then there were the clerks who were just clever enough to figure out how to put spyware-infested screensavers and Kazaa and such on their machines. "Real" project work petered out with the summer and I needed to eat and this work paid the bills. Unfortuantely that work never went away and I lost the time and drive to pursue work that I intended to do.
That sort of sh*t might pay the mortgage, but it literally contributed to a bout of depression. After three years with my own company I sought and found permanent employment with someone else doing something more intellectually rewarding. The company I set up when I was set up still exists but it is no longer paying my mortgage. I occasionally do side work under that company, but I have resolved to limit it exclusively to free software projects and services.
Windows does provide work for a lot of people, but I personally would rather put myself out of work than submit myself to that kind of misery every day on the job. Ironically, I work for a heavily Microsoft-based company. I am much happier here, however, because my employer is a big company where dealing with that crap is handled by another department. It's much easier being on the user end of the tech support call, even if it is sometimes frustrating for both parties.
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The best thing about this is that they will be forced to make their code more efficient to work on slower PC's.
Sorry that won't happen. This new lightweight XP is gonna be the barebones OS, with IE/OE, Media Player and probably a terminal services client. That is ALL it is. They are cutting out features and doing nothing at all (or the barest minumum) of code optimisation. This is MS we are talking about here--they haven't done anything radical with their OS since NT 3.1 came out. Innovation might be BillGs favourite word, but MS rarely does that--they mostly just evolve.
Other apps could probably be installed, but then those old machines would be bogged down just as before. MS' strategy is to try and entice cash-strapped enterprises to keep their MS infrastructure: Instead of buying 30 new workstations, just buy 30 licenses of "barebones XP" and a $5000 server to handle the apps. I don't see much there forcing MS to take the bloat out of their software.
Problem with that idea is that there isn't much cost savings up front (perhaps none at all) vs. upgrading the workstations, because the customer still has to buy a big app server and most likley upgrade ther office suite software, etc. too...in addition to licenses for the barebones XP (unless they give that away with server CALs).
Any admin worth his salt will figure out he could just get the application server and run terminal services on the Win98 boxes without upgrading them...or better yet just convert all the terminals to Linux...and save up front and get all the same TCO benefits in the long run. I don't think this dog of an XP distro will hunt.
I think I'm missing your point, or perhaps you're missing the point of the device.
I've seen a couple of posts about with the term "enforce parenting" suggesting that it is a bad thing, and I'm not clear what is meant there. I don't think this invention is the proper way to encourage kids to be active because it associates physical activity with "work" required to earn TV privleges. I'd say it's better to use TV as a reward for ACTUAL work like homework or chores...but is that "enforcing parenting" too? And what is wrong with that?
So many kids these days are rude little brats and it seems they need a good bit of parental enforcement if you ask me, so if discipline/enforcement of rules/involvement in childs life is what you mean when you say "enforce parenting" then I'm all for it.
The TV/video game/computer is a good reward for good behaviour and finishing work (just like allowances, toys, etc are). To have a lasting effect however I think physical activity has to be FUN--kids will still grow up to be fat couch potatoes if they are raised to associate such activity with "work". So not only do I agree that for me personally I wouldn't ever buy these "TV shoes"...and the exercise bike is an even dumber idea...just go and get REAL bikes for the whole family and go outside for a ride together.
If RIAA ran Walmart it wouldn't have shoplifters prosecuted for theft, it would launch ridiculous civil suits against them.
If you stole a shirt from RIAA's Walmart, it would sue you $14.95 in loss/damages plus $1.5 million for pain, suffering, legal costs, etc.
I agree that Cuban's logic is flawed, but I might amend the argument. RIAA has tried to sue for silly amounts, somewhere along the lines of $2500 per song. I believe that the defendant could argue that since there is a legal $5/month service from Yahoo that a more resonable assessment would be $5 * number of months known to offend * a reasonable estimate of the number of people who got songs from your PC in a given month. It is that last factor that is different from Cuban's argument--unfortunately what a reasonable estimate is debatable.
So instead of these dumb multi-million lawsuits against teenage girls and grandparents that do nothing but make bad PR and settlemsnt at a small fraction of the original amount you'd do something like this:
$5 * 6 months * 500 USERS (not songs) uploaded to in a given month is...$15000. I'd bet that in most cases it is much less than 500 unique users who get all or part of a file from your machine when logged into P2P. In any case $15K is mcuh less ridiculous than millions but still enough to remind the offenders that it is wrong.
BTW, comapring copyright infringement to shoplifting isn't really accurate either because despite what RIAA says, violating copyright is NOT THEFT. When you steal a shirt you are denying the victim the use of said shirt. When you download music the artist (or more likely the publisher) still owns the rights and paying customers can still hear the music. Just to make it clear...
DOWNLOADING MUSIC IS *NEVER* STEALING...
HOWEVER...it IS violationg copyright... AND VIOLATING COPYRIGHT IS ALSO WRONG.
The problem is that RIAA et al want to prosecute people for copyright infringement much more harshly than deserved--more than what some people get for things like theft, assault and rape. A reality check is required for people all around.
CSS 2.1 is not a W3C recommendation yet
Actually you are dead wrong--it has been a recommendation for over a year now. Also, XHTML 1.1 and the proper mime types for XHTML have been final recommendations for even longer yet. It'd be really nice if my site that validates as clean XHTML 1.1 and proper CSS level 1 according to current, finalised standards was not treated like "tag soup" becasue IE barfs on "application/xhtml+xml" and only eats it if I serve it as "text/html". Since IE goes into "quirks mode" it also breaks all manner of CSS stuff too--even worse than if it was in "standards" mode. This means I must craft my compliant code to downgrade gracefully enough for IE, and that makes IE look primitive. The only other alternative is to deliberately break with standards and perpetuate the rot that is all to pervasive on the WWW. IE6 STILL doesn't dupport the DOM correctly either, which makes life difficult too.
Tabbed browsing is nice but it doesn't help developers who want to write future-proofed websites with some guarantee of compatibility with the present. I hope that the shortcomings I mentioned have been addressed in IE7 along with tabs. And in the case of tabs, I hope MS examines the use of tabs in ALL of its apps, and makes them consistent between Excel, IE, Visual Studio, tabbed dialogue boxes, etc...because the notion of tabs is NOT inconsistent with Windows UI. That is an excuse MS uses to explain their neglect of IE.
Anyways, I do not consider IE at present to be a "modern browser"--it is stuck in the leagues of "antique" browsers like Netscape Navigator 4.x. Simply adding tabs or any other UI goodies will mot make IE7 "modern" and will not stop competition from Mozilla (though it may slow it a bit). Only by addressing compliance issues with the DOM, XHTML up to 1.1 and CSS up to 2.1 will make it worhty of being included in the "modern" category. By doing so MS would be doing the web a tremendous service too.
While I do disagree with the statement that "too much technology kills the game" I still think that that true innovation in gaming relative to the size of the industry is almost at an all time low. Your examples fail to convince me otherwise:
* IMHO perfection of "cel shading" adds nothing important to gameplay at all. While it is a technical innovation, Zelda Windwaker provides nothing of note in terms of actual gameplay innovation.
* Halo 2 is more of the same--I see not innovation here at all, just refinement/evolution of the same ideas we've been playing with since Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Half-Life, Halo I etc etc
* The PSP didn't demonstrate the effective melding of game console and movie player--The PS2 and XBox did that before. The PSP just made it portable. It's not even a new idea--playing music, video and games on a portable device was happening on PocketPC Windows devices long before PSP came out. The PS just made it better.
* WoW isn't anything extra special. What about games like Everquest? Or even The Sims Online? There are a lot of MMORPG style games that appeal to the masses. And as far as re-defining video games as "art" I'd have to say Myst was more of a pioneer. I also remember thinking there was quite an "artistic" componenet to much earlier RPGs--maybe "Alternate Reality" for the Atari computers?
* GTA3 the FIRST truly mass market game? you have a really short memory. I'd say Pong was the first. If you mean "mass market" as in how movies are promoted with music, food, clothing, TV series etc etc licensing empires, that would be Pac Man (There was clothing, TV shows, lunch pails, McDonalds happy-meal yous and so on). If that isn't massive enough then Super Mario Brothers was even more massively marketed. In any case, how mass marketed a game is doesn't indicate how innovative it is. GTA3 is ZERO innovation--it is the THIRD IN A SERIES OF SIMILAR GAMES. Even the original brings together ideas seen in several older games.
Yes they might all be good games and they definitely have great graphics. Of course they wouldn't be the same without the same level of graphics. I'd argue however that truly great games would be just as enjoyable to play with PS1 level graphics--the extra bells and whistles just make it hold the attention of passive spectators more. As for Space Invaders, I still do play it from time to time through emulation or one of the many Java/Flash/etc copycats.
I agree that modern technology can help artists with inspiring ideas. Katamari Damarcy is a good example of a cool new game, but there is nothing visually in that game that you couldn't push a PS1 to do well enough to support the gameplay.
I think that even today if you took a PS1 and added more memory and an ethernet port it is possible to make really fun, addictive and successful games. Unfortunately though, I'd have to say that the "originality-to-fluff" ratio is not only NOT the best it's ever been--it is probably the LOWEST it's been since the pre-NES industry crash.
Calgary? Isn't that the strip club capitol of Canada?
I can tell you as a native Calgarian that Calgary is far from being the strip club capitol of Canada. The reason probably has to do with the fact that active members of the OpenBSD community live here more than anything else--that and the fact Calgary is a very well-connected city (among the most-wired cities in North America and maybe the best in Canada along with maybe Ottawa and Vancouver).
A little OT but maybe interesting to some:
Although Calgary and Alberta is not nearly as red-neck/socially conservative as people outside the province often make it out to be, Calgary (and indeed all the prarie provinces) have quite a puritan heritage--for example, Alberta was led by a premier nicknamed "Bible Bill" Aberhart for many years, and in Calgary from prohibition well into the 60s men and women couldn't be in mixed company in any venue that served alcohol (in later days--1950's the city relaxed laws allowing establishments to serve alcohol to both genders in the same room during the Exhibition and Stampede).
Things have changed a lot since then, but Calgary still doesn't have that big an appetite for strip clubs considering the size of the city. If post-hacking peeler-shows is what they were after I think they would pick a venue somewhere in Quebec--it seems that province embraced more socially liberal attitudes than anywhere else in Canada, except for a few interesting exceptions (in terms of equality for women it was opposite--Alberta and the praries were ahead of the game there and Quebec was the last province in Canada with universal sufferage).
Maybe that is why Ottawa is known for it's Linux activity--it is both a high-tech city AND is closer to the stripper-action as it sits on the Ontario-Quebec border.
And therin lies the double-edged sword. Just about everyone on /. complains about Microsoft's auto-update feature saying that it's intrusive, and they don't want some company to have control of what is installed on their PC's.
/.ers tend to be libertarian-minded and tech-savvy, the combination makes Windows Update annoying and offensive to this audience--indeed it is annoying to all but casual and beginning users. Plus, Win Update is not nearly transparent enough--it gives little to no indication of what data it is sending to or receiving from your PC, nor does it indicate when it checks for updates. The default settings are for it to do everything without intervention, confirmation or notification--OK for home users but a nightmare for sysadmins (which is why corporate standard install images often turn off auto-install of updates).
I have no problem with the concept up auto update--I like having the latest stuff on my workstation. The problem is the IMPLEMENTATION of auto-update.
Mozilla's doesn't bring enough attention to it (however, contrary to some other posters arguments I have found it is NOT hard at all--my retired-farmer parents who are decidedly not experts picked it up immediately once they knew what the icon was).
Microsoft's auto-update is TOO intrusive. Given most
Here is what I would suggest for auto-update:
1. Make more of it driven by applications rather than the OS--more "distributed"--and contain the OS auto-update solely to kernel, system binaries/libraries, basic shared components.
2. Allow the process to be automatic, but make it more TRANSPARENT. Check for updates at predictable intervals (on login, maybe at midnight,etc) and have an unobtrusive but clearly labelled status box indicating what is happening (like when your buddy logs into your IM but in plain language says "retrieving list of updates" etc).
3. Allow for more granularity in settings for expert users or operation tailored to corporate deployments, and put in the control panel an easy-to-find "turn it all off" button. Windows has this "system restore" crap which comes in really useful when you want to re-install those worms and trojans accidentally, and the option to turn it off is buried in the most illogical place on Me, and it isn't much better under XP.
4. How about being more responsive with bugfixes Microsoft? Mozilla is non-profit and manages to fix critical issues within a week, and the process is quite transparent. Microsoft makes you wait at least a month 'till the next regular update cycle, and the process of making and testing fixes is pretty much unknown outside of Microsoft.
Just a few suggestions--there are more, but my point is that MS pretty much as long a way to go as Mozilla in this dept. A lot of MS's challenges have to do with the basic architecture of Windows being flawed (it is too monolithic, so bugs can have wide-ranging effects as can the patches).
As I am not a regular Mac OSX user, I am curious on how that platform handles updates. Could MS and F/OSS people learn something here?
And you could add 2 giant fans to blow air across the fins to keep it even cooler!
That is actually a good idea that really would make cooling more efficient. Larger fans can move as much or more volumes of air at slower RPMs than smaller fans. Lower RPMs means less wear on bearings and quieter operation.
IIRC that is the strategy used in the new BTX form factor cases--the heat sync on the CPU is really big with a lot of fins and a big fan that draws air through those fins and over the motherboard (to cool the chipset). Current ATX setups are most often laid out poorly for cooling, and you end up seeing high-end systems with 3 or more fans in the case. It is the need for multiple small fans that makes these PCs noisy, not the fact that they require fans at all.
I still think it would be great to see the return of the days when chips and power supplies ran cool enough to allow for practical convection cooling. My fanless Atari ST was blissfully quiet--even the comparable IBM ATs of the day that only had a single fan in the power supply were horribly loud next to it.
You're right! I remember those--they were excellent! I bet there are still reporters who won't part with them today. Only thing is I'd venture to say that the Tandy 100 was probably nicer to type on. Even so, these new machines have much richer functionality.
I fear however, that these machines will not see the light of day outside India--aside from specialised uses like the security system terminal mentioned in the article. Hopefully (in my dreams I'm sure) someone at Radio Shack would catch wind of these machines and get them sold at stores all over North America (The new Tandy Model 100-II? Or maybe Model 300?). I would definitely be interested in one!
If that isn't in the cards then perhaps some enterprising people on this side of the world will make a cheap, portable and machine that is practical to use for everyday tasks (PDAs and nifty smartphones will alwasy be limited by their form factor). To this day there has always been something wrong with American efforts of this type. They are either tied to a service (like one poster suggested would happen---free PC with a 2 year contract for internet at $24.95/mo or some crap), or they are too proprietary or have design shortcomings (almost always due to feature creep--trying to be a "convergence device").
...such as...
;-) but I agree it would be great and wouldn't add great cost. OTOH, it could make it vulnerable to a bluetooth virus. The flexible keyboard is neat though
/. post:
Or it is set up for network computing
Yes, all models have built in Ethernet and dial-up modems for networking and can dock to a PC like a Palm
Does it have wireless or a network port
Yes, it is an extra cost option but still is a sub-$500 model
If you are going to have high speed networks in at least the urban areas you could use a network based storage system. With wireless you could have what would amount to a HUGE hard drive at all times.
The designer had those in mind, along with the ability to dock with a full-sized PC for data exchange and storage.
I want want to hack
It runs Linux and open source apps..you could hack those today
I just hope it comes with bluetooth so I can use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it.
No answer to that in the articles, unlike every other question you asked
Might make a cool car computer as well
Might? It already does...from the Times of India link in the
Mobilis' innvative features had already been used in the elctronic dashboard of country's indigenous electric car, REVA, Sibal said adding Some other car manufacturers had shown interest in the technology to make it part of their cars' dashboards.
I figured if someone was so interested they might actually read the article...but at least there is interest in it.
For $230, you can get a new Dell 2.4GHz Celeron box on sale with a refurbished monitor.
You either found a really short-term special offer or you are full of sh*t. The machine you mention is in fact $298 and NOT $230. Even if you go refurbished the price is $259. You also have to pay for shipping. So you have not refuted the price point argument entirely.
If you buy the cheapest Dell new they have a special offer for that price (normally $375) and include a printer (the crappy re-badged Lexmark inkjet poor-excuse-for-a-printer--and you do still have to pay the inflated price of $25 to get the cable to actually USE it). In any case, these Dell machines do not include the display. In any case they are not competitive on price alone against these Indian machines. They might get closer if they ditched WinXP for Linux but even then it would still be a bit more.
There are a few more things to consider as well--The Dell is a clunky desktop machine which uses much more power than the portable Indian machines. The Indian machines have LCD displays, touch-screen options, flexible keyboards, etc. They appear to be simpler and more rugged, and they support localisation for several Indian languages. Not sure Dell has an offering to match for its Indian customers.
You seem to agree with me that we should not live with the status quo...
...then you quickly demonstrate exactly the attitudes and actions that are slowing and preventing progres in personal computing today...
We should work toward a better system
in the mean time we have to live with the fact that Linux is not a complete solution
[...]
So which is it? "Work towards something better" or "live with the fact"?
I just recently disabled IE on my system, and I'm about to re-enable it, because the brokerage firm I just switched to (Interactive Brokers) doesn't support anything but IE.
Notwithstanding the facts that the W3C was a very new standards body when Mosaic was developed, and that the center tag indeed WAS in the original HTML standard, this is EXACTLY WHY poorly-implemented old standards and non-standard extensions hang on for so long. You switched to a broker with inferior online service (to err is human--I've done the same). IMHO you did the wrong thing...instead of complaining about the non-compliant website and moving to another broker if there was no action taken to correct the deficiency, you decided to resurrect a buggy, insecure browser to use for your (most likely critical) financial transactions.
I no longer use IE for online financial services at all--I do not believe it is trustworthy enough for the task. I use Firefox and Epiphany because although they are not perfect, they are less visible targets and when there are vulnerabilities they are addressed much more quickly than those in IE. When my bank updated their website a couple years ago and broke some of the functionality I let them know I was no longer going to use their online services until the problem was resolved--then I opened up an account with a competing bank that not only had a branch 2 blocks away, but also had a web banking site that worked with Mozilla browsers (I kept my original accounts but only used them through the tellers and ATMs at the local branch).
There is ZERO TECHNICAL REASON for an IE-only requirement, and with the increasing popularity of other platforms sites that impose brower restrictions are giving the impression that their IT resources are behind the times and incapable of meeting their responsibilities when it comes to ensuring interoperability--particularly when the organisation in question is in the financial services sector. These business should be made aware of this--politely but in plain language. By "living with the fact" of the current situation, rolling over and using IE you condone those sloppy practices. I hope in the very least you made Interactive Broker aware of the problem.
I don't run Firefox because I find it inferior to IE in rendering pages as they were intended (yes, we live in an IE world, deal with it).
Actually that is incorrect "technically" speaking. Generally, Firefox is significantly better at rendering pages as they are intended as it complies much better with the CSS standard than IE. The results might not look like what the designer intended, but it is much closer to what the code says it should do.
Anyways, why do we have to live with being in an IE world...just because IE is dominant? That's kind of foolish given that IE development has been stagnant for years, has fundamental design flaws and inconsistently implements CSS. As a result, website code is far less maintainable and secure than it could be. If all web browsers followed web standards and good design practices we would have just a small fraction of the problems we hae today.
Looking at it another way: Linux is inferior at games compared to Windows, and "we live in a Windows world" so should we just give up on Linux, sit back and deal with a virus infested, poorly architected system like Windows?
...are destined to repeat it:
i'd not heard of this before.
You must be a bit young, or a bit new to personal computing. The first generation of personal computers were all implemented using a passive backplane architecture.
Nowadays chips are cheap so the whole system is disposable--if that multi-hundred-pin superscalar chip fries you just drop in a whole new board, which today becomes a full blown PC with the addition of CPU, RAM and HD. Back in the day even the primitive 6502 was several hours wage for most people and reliability wasn't as good, so integration was a bad thing--at least with cards if one blows there is a good chance the $1000s of other circuitry were still intact. Thus, you had a nice chunky cabinet full of cards---CPU, RAM, terminal I/O or maybe a video card, floppy controller, etc etc.
Industrial controllers are still almost always backplane-and-card setups to this day. Modern controllers have taken this to a new level and are typically hot-pluggable as well. In industrial settings, servicability and maximum availability are more important than lowest cost, so in any critical operation you won't see a PLC processor with integrated network, digital I/O, etc etc etc...'cause you'll never be able to hot-swap chips that are surface-mount soldered to a processor board.
...to discount their products to education. MS already walks a fine line in this area as they have already virtually eliminated their profit margin on educational licenses. If they were to discount further or start giving away software they may run afoul of anti-trust and/or international trade anti-dumping laws (they already do give away software as charitable donations, but there is a limit to how much they can legally donate).
If MS were to engage in dumping practises in developing nations and with nonprofits and education would probably be unwise from a marketing strategy standpoint as well. MS wants to promote software as something powerful, proprietary and valuable in terms of dollars. If they raise kids on "free" software then in MS view they are teaching kids that their products are "worthless". As such they should at least require students to cover the costs of producing the product.
As a corporation in the forefront on the war against software piracy, MS also must establish strict license compliance enforcement practices with all customers, even schools and charities and even in cases when they donate software for free. To do anything less would be hypocritical, and might make it look like MS condones piracy by students and teachers. I happen to agree with that view as I take a dim view of "relative morality"/"situational ethics"--if MS is going to be the champion of commercial software then everybody has to follow the same rules.
That said, I think it would be hard for most educators to to argue in favour of MS in the classroom over Free software--and not just because some study put the TCO 1/5 lower for Linux. Back when I was still in grade school there was a raging debate about Coca-Cola funding renovations to our gymnasium because of the strings attached--the scoreboard and some other equipment would've sported giant coke logos, we would've had to replace all our vending machines and we would've had to change the concession stand menu (becasue the hostess snacks, Dr. Pepper and Hires root beer we sold were Pepsico properites). Other schools were being offered similar deals as well (one was an A/V system upgrade and free newsfeeds for current events classes, where the school was required to play corporate ads). In all these cases, teachers and a good deal of parents objected strongly to what some of the more vocal opponents termed "corporate indoctrination".
It seems to me that letting a big corporation own a school's IT infrastructure runs counter to everything those educators believe in. If Coca-Cola and McDonalds couldn't make such deals or had to substantially modify them, then why would we expect any less scruitiny from hardware and software companies? It was such a terrible thing to see the Coke logo all over our school, so what makes it OK now to have the MS logo on the startup screens of every PC? In the name of moral/ethical consistency, all these educators who do not like overt commercial presence in public education should be fighing to get Free software into the classroom--perhaps not eliminating MS but at least to teach students that there are alternatives.
BTW I think the same should apply to Apple (and should have in the past). I think it's great that MS and Apple support education but I think if there are too many strings attached to their generosity it should be rejected (especially if it involves exclusivity or terms & conditions obviously meant to diminish the presence of competitors in the classroom). I was lucky enough to be a young student at a time and place where we could see the alternatives--the first PCs in our school were Commodore PETs (which was typical in Canadian schools in the early 80s as Commodore was founded in Canada), but Apple II+ and IBM PCs and newer Commodore machines followed and kids got to see the advantages and disadvantages of all of them.
I'm all for a drastic increase in the presence of Free software in the classroom in the name of promoting choice.
...You just have to provide the right environment.
(FYI "Penny Wise Pound Foolish" was coined before Tony Blair's great grandparents were even born)
Why would kids line up at Windows machines while the Linux machine next to it is free? Because the people in charge of the PCs at schools are too stupid or to busy to manage a Windows PC properly, and so they are rolled out with default or factory installs. Kids get no end of joy playing mindless games, chatting on MSN, installing talking purple gorillas and comet-tail mouse cursors and so on.
If you took the time to do a PROPER install that wouldn't be an administrative hell of chronic malware infections, as well as locking down stuff to focus students on their work, then Windows wouldn't be any more appealing than Linux.
You might want to make sure both blatforms are on a level playing field too, by selecting or crafting a well executed distro of Linux and installing it on the same hardware as Windows. Linux has only gotten it together recently on the desktop although it has always been architecturally superior to Windows, so it won't help the cause by using aged hardware and a distro that is more than 2 years old.
Better yet, why put a strain on your resources by supporting a heterogenous environment? Dump everything else and go ALL Linux then there will be no difference from workstation to workstation. There is almost nothing a school needs that isn't handled by Linux, and if enforcing a sigle platform choice is good enough for MS and Apple, then why not Red Hat or Novell?
Firefox isn't really much more than an annoyance, because it will never have the marketing muscle to compete with MSIE
Funny, I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about full page ads in national newspapers or even a formal campaign for the "spread IE" movement. MS' strategy with IE seems to be extreme stealth marketing--it amounts basically to putting a blue 'E' on the screen of its much more hyped, flagship product.
the reason why MSIE destroyed Netscape's dominance wasn't its superiority, it was because MSIE was just there, an easy mouse click away on every new Windows 95 PC, whereas Navigator wasn't, and needed to be installed from scratch.
I agree with you on the superiority point; IE was a cruddy re-badge of Spyglass Mosaic when I saw it. However, if memory serves me, the very first time I saw Windows 95 (the VERY FIRST release--the one I saw was installed from genuine 3.5" FLOPPIES) did NOT come with IE at all (it wasn't even hidden in there anywhere). I think the very first IE was included in a "Plus! Pack". I think it was a few months after the Win95 debut that IE was bundled in, and I don't believe it was never on the floppy disk ditribution of Win95.
There is also a difference between now and then--it is not all that inconvenient to try out new browsers in the age of broadband connections, so the threshold of tolerance is lower for bugs/quirks/security holes/stagnation in IE5. Even so, despite slow dial-up and spending extra for a boxed version being the only options for people to get Netscape, IE sucked so badly that the only thing they used it for was to get to netscapes download page. It wasn't until IE hit version 4 that it was close to par, and by version 4 Netscape was getting crufty. Although bundling IE for free propped it up considerably, ultimately Netscape did themselves in
Yes it is a waste if you are only doing one thing like just routing/IP Masq or jusst a print server, but if you have an old PC and know Linux or BSD you can do a lot more with it than a little box.
I have an older PC that is a print server too--except that it has a big hard drive so it is a good file server too...oh yeah it also is my email server, Samba domain controller and database server too. If you are playing with all that stuff you might as well throw a printer on it--one less "wall wart", one less device on the net to configure, etc etc.
Despite all the functions it does it is quite a modest computer--the PC that fills this role is generally made of leftover parts and it started life as a Pentium 120 with 32megs of RAM. I've upgraded it since but the only new function I added was to add Samba as a domain controller. It does create a bigger single point of failure but it is suitable for home or small office.
* I still regularly use a machine equipped with 128 MB of RAM...Linux works well on it, and even Win2k is fine as long as you don't load it down with too much crap
* The poster of this article seems astonished at having as much memory on the graphics card as on the motherboard. In the late 80s and into the early 90s this was commonplace: my first PC box was a real screamer--a 25 MHz 386DX with 1 MB RAM and a Trident SVGA card...also with 1 MB RAM so I could do a whopping 1024*768 with 256 colours. It had a gigantic 40MB drive too. At the time, more than 1MB ram was not really useful unless you used OS/2 or tinkered with Windows (this was just before Win 3.0 came out so Windows was next to useless). I believe other machines like Amiga could use as much memory for video as was available for the system as well.
* I decided I was getting old when I saw 800 and XL close together and thought "what does an old Atari machine have to do with this?"
...then you just don't "get it" at all--not what is possible in hardware engineering today, nor the philospohy behind Free (libre) and open systems.
Up to a certain complexity, fab services are available even to home hobbyists for a reasonable cost, and for large runs it is quite inexpensive. The REALLY big cost is in SET-UP costs to produce ASICs. Besides, fabrication costs are no different than for proprietary hardware--the licensing model for the intellectual property has nothing to do with how hard it is to physically build it.
Furthermore, even if the production model will be expensive to get going, these days hardware engineering is like programming--you don't sit at a desk taping out masks and such like they did when they made the 6502 processor. Its all source code in Verilog or VHDL these days. Therefore, if Linux can be successful then why not open hardware?
It is in the development/engineering where these cards can have an edge over ATI and NVidia--they pay massive dollars to hire people to design the hardware and drivers and lawyers to keep it all secret. This project has no monetary design costs. I for one don't even care if they don't ever produce a single card themselves, as long as they get the evaluation FPGA board and all the source designs/code complete. THAT is what is most important, besides having some manufacurers pick up the design.
Money is the least important part of this project. The industry is going to start stagnating now becasue the players are much too proprietary--by hoarding information and research they duplicate efforts and slow or stop development of interoperability standards. Insistence on keeping drivers proprietary hurts the software industry (particularly open projects and smaller proprietary competitors) and props up Microsoft.
Last but not least, an open design lowers the barrier of entry for smaller players and others who do not have graphics IP--right now card makers are at the mercy of two major players who design and make chips. If this project succeeds, many other chip makers can make graphics cards AND chips. Also, since the design is open, even if a chip maker discontinues or goes bankrupt others can use the design themselves. Widely licensing to many chipmakers is the biggest reason why the 6502 CPU was so successful--it was produced by MOSTek/Commodore, Rockwell, NCR, GTE, WDC, Synertek and many more. If Commodore hoarded its design and made all the chips themselves, do you really think so many computer makers, including arch-rivals Apple and Atari, would've stuck with the 6502 for so long if they only had one company--a sometimes competitor--to depend on for their CPU? Even if the 6502 was the cheaper option I doubt they would be comfortable with that. WDC and Rockwell also kept that design alive lonnger and improved it where Commodore wouldn't (CMOS version, added more defined opcodes, 16-bit extensions...).
If these guys play their cards right--especially if they can put out a few thousand GPU chips and get the ball rolling for others to jump on board it could revolutionise the industry and level the playing field for Linux and others on the desktop--and the more people on board the more rapidly the design could be improved. And unlike the case with the 6502, these improvements could be shared and standardised--and chip makers who contribute these enhancements can still have "first mover" advantage as an incentive to innovate.
If I was a well-to-do player in the Linux/open source community like Bob Young I'd certainly throw a few million their way...
I don't know if they've been paying any attention (I presume they have), but FPGAs have gotten extremely cheap as of late.
You're right, and in fact if the production run is small enough and the design is not too complex FPGAs are actually quite a bit cheaper than custom ASICs or gate arrays (this is becase although the setup costs are huge for a custom ASIC, the production cost is relatively much smaller). In the case of an open graphics card however there are other factors:
* The GPU is probably too complex for the really cheap FPGAs to work.
* PC Graphics chipsets and cards are not niche products and they probalby want to be prepared for high volume production. If that is the case, the per-unit cost of setting up for ASIC production shrinks
* most importantly...SPEED. Those ultracheap FPGAs are too slow to handle 3-D processing for megapixel graphics at 100FPS, which is what you need to do to compete with ATI and NVidia. The FPGA evaluation board they are releasing will probably run at some fraction of the intended frequency of the final product.
But the problem is these are students and they have work to do.
So what? Crap happens...virus ate your thesis, power went out, printer ran out of ink, blah blah blah. Thing is that if you are a responsible person you have contingencies in place to minimise or eliminate the impact of such incidents. If the work is important, you keep backups, spare ink cartriges, update your antivirus, OS, apps, etc...and most importantly you don't procrastinate to the point where you are in crisis mode. If you don't do all of the above then you should be prepared to follow Murphy's Law. If a mishap is unavoidable, you could be granted an extension.
Thing is, it is standard practice for net admins EVERYWHERE to pull the plug at their discretion should your computer be found to causing network disruption. Taht is a standard condition of almost all terms of service. My ISP would knock you off very quickly should they discover an open mail relay, ping flood or other unusual level of activity, and I pay extra for business-grade service. I agree with other posters here--this guy should put in some F/OSS tools to help manage these problems, and immediately terminate all network connectivity of infected machines ASAP.
"I have work to do" be damned. Seriously. Part of growing up and going to school is to learn--and people have to learn the consequences of their actions or inactions--that's life. You have to keep your house clean, pay your bills on time, obey the speed limit and traffic signals, etc. If you don't there are negative consequences. Same goes for PC use: ignoring the TOS, not updating your machine, downloading comet cursors and talking gorillas and chat icons and P2P warez is just inviting trouble. Users who repeatedly do those things despite warnings deserve no sympathy at all and should recieve all the wrath the BOFH can deliver.
The best wireless power device in the home I can think of is the microwave oven. Given the effects that such wireless power has on my lunch over a span of mere minutes, I do not think mass adoption of wireless power would be a particularly good idea.
...for a company to "eat it's own dog food". Unfortunately in the case of MS, its software truly IS a "dog's breakfast".
It does seem to me that the performance (or lack thereof) of MSN Messenger and related properties points to teething pains in the upgrade process. It happens quite often that you cannot sign in to Messenger or hotmail for brief periods and on some occasions you get punted. From what I have seen the problem is quite intermittent--can't sign in? Wait 15 minutes. It doesn't seem to be related to ISPs either--two people in the same area of the city with the same ISP will report different results.
Maybe it is just my experience, but I have found the problems are more likely associated with the sign-in process. I've only tried this once but it DID happen: Girlfriend couldn't sign into MSN from her place on cable internet. I COULD sign into MSN at my place (ADSL which surprisingly works faster than her cable most of the time). Though it might be a problem with the cable ISP, so tried to sign in under HER account at MY place. It did NOT work using HER account on either machine from two different ISPs, BUT...MY sign-in worked form BOTH places.
If someone has ready access to different machines on different connections and has problems signing into MSN, you might wat to try ths out and see if it was a fluke or if it really IS a problem linked to the user. My theory is that some of the problems are related to MS systems relying on a some kind of distributed database of user credentials, and that in the process of "improving" things with 64-bit systems that sections of this database drop out from time to time.
It's all great and wonderful that MS wants to stay cutting edge and maintain capacity to handle their huge demand, but how they seem to go about it really irritates me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! It's like their upgrades are often a massive, disruptive undertaking. Can they not roll this stuff out more gradually--like over a couple of years instead of a few problem-plagued weeks and months?
The frustrating part is that even paying users are subjected to some of these problems--so much for getting what you pay for. Even my free Yahoo account seems to be more reliable these days.
what irritates you, pays my mortgage
At one time it both irritated me AND paid my mortgage. When I was paying my mortgage by being a self-employed "professional nerd" my job started out being a consultant/developer implementing projects ranging from web-based apps running on Linux/Apache/mod-perl/etc to MS Access database and VB apps.
Then the dreaded SQL slammer worm hit...then bagle...and blaster...and sasser...etc etc etc. Then there were the clerks who were just clever enough to figure out how to put spyware-infested screensavers and Kazaa and such on their machines. "Real" project work petered out with the summer and I needed to eat and this work paid the bills. Unfortuantely that work never went away and I lost the time and drive to pursue work that I intended to do.
That sort of sh*t might pay the mortgage, but it literally contributed to a bout of depression. After three years with my own company I sought and found permanent employment with someone else doing something more intellectually rewarding. The company I set up when I was set up still exists but it is no longer paying my mortgage. I occasionally do side work under that company, but I have resolved to limit it exclusively to free software projects and services.
Windows does provide work for a lot of people, but I personally would rather put myself out of work than submit myself to that kind of misery every day on the job. Ironically, I work for a heavily Microsoft-based company. I am much happier here, however, because my employer is a big company where dealing with that crap is handled by another department. It's much easier being on the user end of the tech support call, even if it is sometimes frustrating for both parties.