0 robberies and 0 arson ? That must be a smaller town than mine. Even when I was living in the country, arson was a common occurrence - common insofar as failing businesses were quite content to burn the place down and claim insurance, rather than file for bankruptcy. It wasn't so much man-on-man crime as it was petty fraud.
Then I must live in a distant universe devoid of IBM. Pointy heads around here don't give a crap about Linux, largely because it's a government area and they won't touch Linux with a ten foot pole. It's Windows all the way, not that I agree with it.
Most people in my city think of IBM as that formerly ginormous company that now makes crappy little PCs and PC-based point-of-sale systems. Their support is absolute shite (30+ days turnaround for RMAs to million-dollar regional accounts). The hardware itself is a disaster, they build those PCs worse than the shadiest Chinese OEMs... I guess I should be grateful, IBM gear creates a ton of lucrative support calls for me. The fact that I could build a more reliable machine for less than the cost of one onsite call, well that's just not good no matter how you spin in.
As much as I believe what you're saying, and want to agree with your points, there's just not enough good in IBM's presence to convince the masses. A handful of mainframe techies in California simply isn't enough to drive any PR.
I blame Namco for releasing the same regurgitated crap for 25 years.
People certainly won't be going to the arcades for single-player games or palette-swapped sequels to Soul Edge. There's also the ridiculous prices being charged for games - I can tolerate (begrudgingly) paying a dollar for a big game like DDR or Drummania where you actually get 5-6 minutes of play. I can't stand paying that much for a crappy low-res racing game with anime physics and "gone in 60 seconds" difficulty.
There's just no fun in the arcades anymore. It's all been done, and now it's tired. Long gone are the days where people would line up at lunch time to challenge the local Street Fighter champ, or shove two rolls of quarters into Terminator 2 to beat it with a friend. Fact is, most people would rather play those classics than the new garbage that's come out in the last ten years.
What about that coin-eating gem, Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom ? That was a blast to play with 3 random strangers... where are those games today ? I don't want to go to an arcade just to get my ass whooped by the inevitable asian black-wannabe kids at some obscure coin-slut game.
The Wii didn't kill Namco, it just made painfully obvious how badly Namco has sucked over the years. Namco died of natural causes.
Aren't you just a charming troll ? With your critical tone yet lack of counter-points.
Yes, COM is the foundation layer upon which OLE, ActiveX, ADO and countless other interfaces are built. Is it as seamless and elegant as SOM/DSOM ? Who knows ? Is it in use today by millions of developers ? YES! Unlike SOM.
I'm not saying SOM is worse or better than COM; I don't know. On one hand, we're all suspicious of Microsoft, but what has IBM done for us lately ? They stopped being relevant the day they killed OS/2.
The biggest problem with security is that it is put in the hands of the lowest blue-collared individuals. Very few people aspire to become security guards. They end up in that job because it pays well and only requires a high-school diploma or GED. These buffoons have been taught that explosives can be made out of common household items, but they lack that special magic we call INTELLECT to understand that the reverse is equally true.
Yeah, so right this minute I probably have traces of crystal meth on my hands. I haven't used, sold nor produced it, but I withdrew some cash from the ATM a few minutes ago. Cletus Lawman is convinced I'm a drug-smuggling terrorist.
The problem with the world is that stupid wins over smart every time.
Well then things are indeed very different for you folks.
Up here, I've been to quite a few bankruptcy auctions for tech false-starts and office surplus. All but one required a refundable deposit to enter. Maybe my area has a bigger problem with the large student population (damn kids) or the even larger starving-tech-on-a-work-visa population. Either way, I had no trouble with the process and frankly I'm quite happy to not be contending with petty losers.
There are other cities out there than just Detroit, New York and Fort Lauderdale.
As a matter of fact, I live in a rather nonviolent city. It's big, it's full of people I can't stand, but the worse that might happen to me is to be name-called by some girl-drink-drunk college jock. Heck, I'm probably one of the more violent people around here due to my excessively frank (and vicious) tongue. Sure, every once in a while someone gets shot or stabbed - everyone acts scared for a few weeks and things go back to normal for another year. Most importantly, the people getting in trouble are typically the ones actively seeking it in the first place. It's not like Joe Random and his quiche-eating wife get mugged every other week.
You're spreading yourself too thin. If you're not a designer, don't try to be one, you have more important things to deal with. Get your boss to hire a design firm - if they don't think it's worth the money, then it certainly isn't worth your time.
My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com
That's the new productivity-enhancing feature of Vista - it breaks all the fun wasteful things people love to do, so all that's left is boring boring work!
Actually for most auctions, you either need to be pre-qualified or pay a deposit before even entering the auction hall. They have no patience for deadbeat bidders and neither should eBayers.
For retail stores, you get face time with the buyer, and an experienced shopkeeper can read a person quite well within a few seconds. The truth is, retail gets a LOT of idiots who either waste your time and piss you off (because they're jobless antisocial tards), or they might just rob you outright. Online sales are no different, and a huge site like eBay is bursting at the seams with petty crooks and shit disturbers.
It's all too common for a moron to make a high bid on your item, then back out of the deal a week after the auction has closed, you've paid your fees and the #2 and #3 bidders have bought someone else's identical item. The seller's only recourse in such events is to wade through a lengthy claim process. Add a few scammers who file frivolous chargebacks (they're everywhere!), and you quickly realize that eBay sellers have it rough as it is.
By taking away what little means they have to fight back against fraud and abuse, eBay will likely turn into an absolute clusterfuck where common people get burned and big sellers find somewhere else to do their business.
Since they absorbed Paypal, things have been getting worse with each passing year.
From the looks of it, the core only provides some basic common functionality, I'm guessing the cell radio, audio in/out and a primary CPU. Everything else is tacked on via the "sleeves".
My hunch is that this thing will be clumsy, fragile and expensive. Hey, just like the iPhone that already does all those things with a cooler interface!
That's funny, I also consider that 100% security is not a valid goal, in fact it is impossible. It's yet another unreachable ideal that brings in tons of cash for nothing.
Far more important than any security contractor, is a proper risk assessment. There's no sense in building a million-dollar lock if it's only guarding a half-eaten twinkie. You look at the cost of various types of breaches, and the cost of a security measure times it's % efficiency, and pick the cheaper of the two.
In many cases, simply restructuring the network or the data it contains can buy you much more security than any product or policy. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen networks that were sealed shut from the internet, but wide open on the inside. All it takes is a jackass employee with a Wi-Fi hub and the whole thing goes to hell. Give your users what they need and nothing more, and you'll avoid a whole bunch of problems for free.
I would be fine with the performance hit, if it came with a visual improvement to justify the slowdown.
DX10 looks pretty much the same as DX9. _Maybe_ it's the game's fault for not taking advantage of DX10's new features... or maybe it's all just a whole lotta nothing with a ton of hype.
One prime example: Lord of The Rings Online. It recently added a DX10 rendering mode - the big difference is that ponds and rivers now crash "realistically" onto shore, instead of overlapping abruptly like the ignorant polygons they are. There's no reason why DX9 couldn't do this, just look at the first level of Far Cry for a years-old example of gorgeous beach effects.
Even worse example: Lost Planet. Wow. I mean I thought the game was gorgeous in DX9, and I've yet to find a screenshot in DX10 that sports any noticeable differences. Just because the shadows are darker, doesn't mean squat! Darker lighting is NOT a feature of the display engine.
If anything, DX10 is making game developers lazy. They're dropping effects in DX9, perhaps because they're easier to implement in DX10 and thus "not worth the effort". Or maybe they're getting a bit of a push from Microsoft to cheapen the DX9 renderer and sugarize the Vista-infected version. Who knows... today's gaming industry is a terrible aberration, looking more and more like the dreaded film industry with each passing year.
My U.S. History is a bit weak, given that I don't live there, but wasn't there a certain fellow who fought for freedom, waaaaaaay back in the day ? The kind of freedom that occasionally requires people to kill their oppressors and bring balance to their world ?
If government gets so far out of line that it becomes a threat, it needs to be fought, knocked down and slain. The whole point of democracy was to run things from the ground up, people in control of their environment, their health, their economy and their destiny. Why do we vote if our elected leaders act like fascist tyrants ? The biggest difference between North American leaders and the despot dictators of Africa and the Middle East, is that the North Americans feel the need to lie about their betrayals - they're every bit as evil and corrupt.
Every time I read about grand projects like these, I wonder how they come up with these ridiculous numbers for costs. Yeah, so I'm a bit of a socialist, and I don't think large-scale projects that benefit large swaths of the population should come with a price tag. I know we're going to be extinct long before any Star Trek communism ever has a chance, but it's still not a bad thing to shoot for.
Look at it this way: if we had a clear path to cure some horrible disease, be it AIDS, cancer, diabetes... and the only thing standing in our way is a patent-hoarding Megacorp holding the cure hostage for twelve quadrillion dollars... I'd volunteer in a heartbeat to go Robin Hood on those jerks and kill 'em all, to benefit the human race at large.
I personally don't see the great appeal of MagLev trains, but I've only ridden a train twice in my life. There are many "futuristic" things within our reach, held back only by evil, dirty money. Money shouldn't matter after a certain point - money's for little guys like you and me to trade, not to synthetically restrain our evolution.
I'm new here (riiiiiiight!). What's the official/. stance on TPB ? Pro or Con ?
On one hand, what they're doing is technically illegal, and they're fully aware of it. On the other hand, they're doing it for a very good reason: to test, provoke and popularize the concept of free speech and of course, to bring grand attention to the evils of modern copyright law (Thank^H^H^H^H^HFUCK YOU Sonny Bono!)
Personally, I like The Piraty Bay's attitude and I support their cause. The fact that they have a real life political party that's got quite a bit of traction (for a niche party), that just makes it even more respectable to my eyes. In today's reality of court abuses and rampant corruption, an outfit like Piratbyran is a much needed counterbalance to corporate terrorism.
Good.. good! Thank you for posting the good things in this misshapen OS.
Now I'm going to tell you why I don't run Vista. I have Vista, I want to try Vista, but here's my dilemma: I have 8gb of Ram on my gaming rig. Ya, it's overkill but hey it's a bitchin' fast machine.
Vista x64 will handle the 8gb, but it has painful driver issues because apparently it's hard to write 64-bit device drivers. Translation: the chinese scam-shop that manufactures our relabeled hardware writes spaghetti code and it's incredibly painful to port it to 64-bit.
Vista 32-bit still has the dumb 4gb limitation. It actually supports PAE, and could easily handle all my Ram, the same way that Windows 2003 Enterprise does it right now, but there's an artificially-imposed memory limit in the OS. Market differentiation or some bullshit. That was fine in the XP days, back when few PC's even had 512mb and 2gb was considered obscene, but today Ram is cheap and plentiful - more importantly it's required for these bloated apps. Lose the 4gb limit!
So I have to choose between hardware support but waste half my ram, or go 64-bit and put my hand in the fire with shoddy untested drivers and a bunch of companies that still ignore the 64-bit market after 5 years of popularity.
Vista may well suck less than people think, but until these core issues are resolved, it's worthless to me.
I'd probably end up really lazy and just work from my bed
Err.. that's kinda the point of telecommuting, isn't it ? Less expenses, more comfort, and ultimately you become more productive if you're the kind of person suited to telecommuting.
Yep, because slashdotters are just dying to move out to the country, far far away from techie things and urban comforts. We like the simple folk, don't we ?
Hey, for all I know, maybe a lot of you do, but I sure don't. The last time I lived in the "country", I was 5 minutes from the capital, and I still hated it. Now I live downtown, and my rent costs have skyrocketed but at least I'm not surrounded by truck-driving gun-shooting freaks.
You nailed it. Compatibility on Linux is great if you're not on the bleeding edge. That's the shortcoming of no commercial support.
The day some serious company picks up Linux and pushes it to the hardware manufacturers in a way they can understand, is the day we'll see kickass Linux desktops overtake Windows. Right now, when I boot into Linux, half my gear goes catatonic - no fancy display drivers, no exotic hardware support, and certainly none of these home-automation thingamajigs that have invaded my apartment. I still swear by Linux as a server OS, but the desktop is a faint dream for me.
I tried an OS based on a microkernel, and the government took my baby away!
Heeeere's the thing, the concept of a microkernel is sound, and for some of us more experimental coders, there was a ton of micro-like coding being doing in the 90's. The problem is that it requires a very different mindset or strategy to succede. You can't have a hundred half-tards submitting code all over the place, else the elegant microkernel quickly grows into a beowulf cluster of bloated chunks with duplicated functionality and piss-poor message passing.
Micros work well with small teams, where one person has dictatorial oversight and keeps everything nice and tight. It requires more detailed planning, unless you enjoy rewriting all your interfaces every other week.
Performance ? Meh. If done right, you won't notice. The problem is that it's exceptionally difficult to do it right for a mass-appeal OS kernel, because the sheer amount of code overwhelms most people's patience and discipline. We simply don't have the meta-tools to properly manage such things (yet).
Don't ever leave more money in your PayPal account than you can afford to lose.
That is the most important thing with PayPal. They are not a bank, they are not bound by the familiar laws and the federal reserve doesn't give a damn about your funds. If PayPal spontaneously decides they don't like you, they can freeze your account and there's nothing you can do to get those funds back, short of suing them despite the covenant not-to-sue in their TOS.
I've seen countless sites get effectively defrauded out of tens of thousands of dollars by PayPal. It would be slightly different if they actually refunded the money to the donators, but they just seize it and accuse you of fraud. It's kind of a bank deciding you have too much money and saying "This is mine now, FOAD!".
PayPal is not a bank. It's a convenient service with some serious shortcomings, that one uses at their own risk.
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0 robberies and 0 arson ? That must be a smaller town than mine. Even when I was living in the country, arson was a common occurrence - common insofar as failing businesses were quite content to burn the place down and claim insurance, rather than file for bankruptcy. It wasn't so much man-on-man crime as it was petty fraud.
Then I must live in a distant universe devoid of IBM. Pointy heads around here don't give a crap about Linux, largely because it's a government area and they won't touch Linux with a ten foot pole. It's Windows all the way, not that I agree with it.
Most people in my city think of IBM as that formerly ginormous company that now makes crappy little PCs and PC-based point-of-sale systems. Their support is absolute shite (30+ days turnaround for RMAs to million-dollar regional accounts). The hardware itself is a disaster, they build those PCs worse than the shadiest Chinese OEMs... I guess I should be grateful, IBM gear creates a ton of lucrative support calls for me. The fact that I could build a more reliable machine for less than the cost of one onsite call, well that's just not good no matter how you spin in.
As much as I believe what you're saying, and want to agree with your points, there's just not enough good in IBM's presence to convince the masses. A handful of mainframe techies in California simply isn't enough to drive any PR.
I blame Namco for releasing the same regurgitated crap for 25 years.
People certainly won't be going to the arcades for single-player games or palette-swapped sequels to Soul Edge. There's also the ridiculous prices being charged for games - I can tolerate (begrudgingly) paying a dollar for a big game like DDR or Drummania where you actually get 5-6 minutes of play. I can't stand paying that much for a crappy low-res racing game with anime physics and "gone in 60 seconds" difficulty.
There's just no fun in the arcades anymore. It's all been done, and now it's tired. Long gone are the days where people would line up at lunch time to challenge the local Street Fighter champ, or shove two rolls of quarters into Terminator 2 to beat it with a friend. Fact is, most people would rather play those classics than the new garbage that's come out in the last ten years.
What about that coin-eating gem, Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom ? That was a blast to play with 3 random strangers... where are those games today ? I don't want to go to an arcade just to get my ass whooped by the inevitable asian black-wannabe kids at some obscure coin-slut game.
The Wii didn't kill Namco, it just made painfully obvious how badly Namco has sucked over the years. Namco died of natural causes.
OUT! Back to 4chan you go.
Aren't you just a charming troll ? With your critical tone yet lack of counter-points.
Yes, COM is the foundation layer upon which OLE, ActiveX, ADO and countless other interfaces are built. Is it as seamless and elegant as SOM/DSOM ? Who knows ? Is it in use today by millions of developers ? YES! Unlike SOM.
I'm not saying SOM is worse or better than COM; I don't know. On one hand, we're all suspicious of Microsoft, but what has IBM done for us lately ? They stopped being relevant the day they killed OS/2.
The biggest problem with security is that it is put in the hands of the lowest blue-collared individuals. Very few people aspire to become security guards. They end up in that job because it pays well and only requires a high-school diploma or GED. These buffoons have been taught that explosives can be made out of common household items, but they lack that special magic we call INTELLECT to understand that the reverse is equally true.
Yeah, so right this minute I probably have traces of crystal meth on my hands. I haven't used, sold nor produced it, but I withdrew some cash from the ATM a few minutes ago. Cletus Lawman is convinced I'm a drug-smuggling terrorist.
The problem with the world is that stupid wins over smart every time.
I second that statement. If OpenBSD refuses to fix it, and you think that's wrong, then prove them wrong.
Personally, I think OpenBSD should simply be left alone to die peacefully. I simply cannot stand that squirrelly OS.
Well then things are indeed very different for you folks.
Up here, I've been to quite a few bankruptcy auctions for tech false-starts and office surplus. All but one required a refundable deposit to enter. Maybe my area has a bigger problem with the large student population (damn kids) or the even larger starving-tech-on-a-work-visa population. Either way, I had no trouble with the process and frankly I'm quite happy to not be contending with petty losers.
There are other cities out there than just Detroit, New York and Fort Lauderdale.
As a matter of fact, I live in a rather nonviolent city. It's big, it's full of people I can't stand, but the worse that might happen to me is to be name-called by some girl-drink-drunk college jock. Heck, I'm probably one of the more violent people around here due to my excessively frank (and vicious) tongue. Sure, every once in a while someone gets shot or stabbed - everyone acts scared for a few weeks and things go back to normal for another year. Most importantly, the people getting in trouble are typically the ones actively seeking it in the first place. It's not like Joe Random and his quiche-eating wife get mugged every other week.
You're spreading yourself too thin. If you're not a designer, don't try to be one, you have more important things to deal with. Get your boss to hire a design firm - if they don't think it's worth the money, then it certainly isn't worth your time.
They all stopped writing good shows about a decade ago. I say fuck 'em all!
My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com
That's the new productivity-enhancing feature of Vista - it breaks all the fun wasteful things people love to do, so all that's left is boring boring work!
That's a FEATURE!
Actually for most auctions, you either need to be pre-qualified or pay a deposit before even entering the auction hall. They have no patience for deadbeat bidders and neither should eBayers.
For retail stores, you get face time with the buyer, and an experienced shopkeeper can read a person quite well within a few seconds. The truth is, retail gets a LOT of idiots who either waste your time and piss you off (because they're jobless antisocial tards), or they might just rob you outright. Online sales are no different, and a huge site like eBay is bursting at the seams with petty crooks and shit disturbers.
It's all too common for a moron to make a high bid on your item, then back out of the deal a week after the auction has closed, you've paid your fees and the #2 and #3 bidders have bought someone else's identical item. The seller's only recourse in such events is to wade through a lengthy claim process. Add a few scammers who file frivolous chargebacks (they're everywhere!), and you quickly realize that eBay sellers have it rough as it is.
By taking away what little means they have to fight back against fraud and abuse, eBay will likely turn into an absolute clusterfuck where common people get burned and big sellers find somewhere else to do their business.
Since they absorbed Paypal, things have been getting worse with each passing year.
From the looks of it, the core only provides some basic common functionality, I'm guessing the cell radio, audio in/out and a primary CPU. Everything else is tacked on via the "sleeves".
My hunch is that this thing will be clumsy, fragile and expensive. Hey, just like the iPhone that already does all those things with a cooler interface!
That's funny, I also consider that 100% security is not a valid goal, in fact it is impossible. It's yet another unreachable ideal that brings in tons of cash for nothing.
Far more important than any security contractor, is a proper risk assessment. There's no sense in building a million-dollar lock if it's only guarding a half-eaten twinkie. You look at the cost of various types of breaches, and the cost of a security measure times it's % efficiency, and pick the cheaper of the two.
In many cases, simply restructuring the network or the data it contains can buy you much more security than any product or policy. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen networks that were sealed shut from the internet, but wide open on the inside. All it takes is a jackass employee with a Wi-Fi hub and the whole thing goes to hell. Give your users what they need and nothing more, and you'll avoid a whole bunch of problems for free.
I would be fine with the performance hit, if it came with a visual improvement to justify the slowdown.
DX10 looks pretty much the same as DX9. _Maybe_ it's the game's fault for not taking advantage of DX10's new features... or maybe it's all just a whole lotta nothing with a ton of hype.
One prime example: Lord of The Rings Online. It recently added a DX10 rendering mode - the big difference is that ponds and rivers now crash "realistically" onto shore, instead of overlapping abruptly like the ignorant polygons they are. There's no reason why DX9 couldn't do this, just look at the first level of Far Cry for a years-old example of gorgeous beach effects.
Even worse example: Lost Planet. Wow. I mean I thought the game was gorgeous in DX9, and I've yet to find a screenshot in DX10 that sports any noticeable differences. Just because the shadows are darker, doesn't mean squat! Darker lighting is NOT a feature of the display engine.
If anything, DX10 is making game developers lazy. They're dropping effects in DX9, perhaps because they're easier to implement in DX10 and thus "not worth the effort". Or maybe they're getting a bit of a push from Microsoft to cheapen the DX9 renderer and sugarize the Vista-infected version. Who knows... today's gaming industry is a terrible aberration, looking more and more like the dreaded film industry with each passing year.
My U.S. History is a bit weak, given that I don't live there, but wasn't there a certain fellow who fought for freedom, waaaaaaay back in the day ? The kind of freedom that occasionally requires people to kill their oppressors and bring balance to their world ?
If government gets so far out of line that it becomes a threat, it needs to be fought, knocked down and slain. The whole point of democracy was to run things from the ground up, people in control of their environment, their health, their economy and their destiny. Why do we vote if our elected leaders act like fascist tyrants ? The biggest difference between North American leaders and the despot dictators of Africa and the Middle East, is that the North Americans feel the need to lie about their betrayals - they're every bit as evil and corrupt.
Every time I read about grand projects like these, I wonder how they come up with these ridiculous numbers for costs. Yeah, so I'm a bit of a socialist, and I don't think large-scale projects that benefit large swaths of the population should come with a price tag. I know we're going to be extinct long before any Star Trek communism ever has a chance, but it's still not a bad thing to shoot for.
Look at it this way: if we had a clear path to cure some horrible disease, be it AIDS, cancer, diabetes... and the only thing standing in our way is a patent-hoarding Megacorp holding the cure hostage for twelve quadrillion dollars... I'd volunteer in a heartbeat to go Robin Hood on those jerks and kill 'em all, to benefit the human race at large.
I personally don't see the great appeal of MagLev trains, but I've only ridden a train twice in my life. There are many "futuristic" things within our reach, held back only by evil, dirty money. Money shouldn't matter after a certain point - money's for little guys like you and me to trade, not to synthetically restrain our evolution.
I'm new here (riiiiiiight!). What's the official /. stance on TPB ? Pro or Con ?
On one hand, what they're doing is technically illegal, and they're fully aware of it. On the other hand, they're doing it for a very good reason: to test, provoke and popularize the concept of free speech and of course, to bring grand attention to the evils of modern copyright law (Thank^H^H^H^H^HFUCK YOU Sonny Bono!)
Personally, I like The Piraty Bay's attitude and I support their cause. The fact that they have a real life political party that's got quite a bit of traction (for a niche party), that just makes it even more respectable to my eyes. In today's reality of court abuses and rampant corruption, an outfit like Piratbyran is a much needed counterbalance to corporate terrorism.
Good.. good! Thank you for posting the good things in this misshapen OS.
Now I'm going to tell you why I don't run Vista. I have Vista, I want to try Vista, but here's my dilemma: I have 8gb of Ram on my gaming rig. Ya, it's overkill but hey it's a bitchin' fast machine.
Vista x64 will handle the 8gb, but it has painful driver issues because apparently it's hard to write 64-bit device drivers. Translation: the chinese scam-shop that manufactures our relabeled hardware writes spaghetti code and it's incredibly painful to port it to 64-bit.
Vista 32-bit still has the dumb 4gb limitation. It actually supports PAE, and could easily handle all my Ram, the same way that Windows 2003 Enterprise does it right now, but there's an artificially-imposed memory limit in the OS. Market differentiation or some bullshit. That was fine in the XP days, back when few PC's even had 512mb and 2gb was considered obscene, but today Ram is cheap and plentiful - more importantly it's required for these bloated apps. Lose the 4gb limit!
So I have to choose between hardware support but waste half my ram, or go 64-bit and put my hand in the fire with shoddy untested drivers and a bunch of companies that still ignore the 64-bit market after 5 years of popularity.
Vista may well suck less than people think, but until these core issues are resolved, it's worthless to me.
I'd probably end up really lazy and just work from my bed
Err.. that's kinda the point of telecommuting, isn't it ? Less expenses, more comfort, and ultimately you become more productive if you're the kind of person suited to telecommuting.
Yep, because slashdotters are just dying to move out to the country, far far away from techie things and urban comforts. We like the simple folk, don't we ?
Hey, for all I know, maybe a lot of you do, but I sure don't. The last time I lived in the "country", I was 5 minutes from the capital, and I still hated it. Now I live downtown, and my rent costs have skyrocketed but at least I'm not surrounded by truck-driving gun-shooting freaks.
You nailed it. Compatibility on Linux is great if you're not on the bleeding edge. That's the shortcoming of no commercial support.
The day some serious company picks up Linux and pushes it to the hardware manufacturers in a way they can understand, is the day we'll see kickass Linux desktops overtake Windows. Right now, when I boot into Linux, half my gear goes catatonic - no fancy display drivers, no exotic hardware support, and certainly none of these home-automation thingamajigs that have invaded my apartment. I still swear by Linux as a server OS, but the desktop is a faint dream for me.
I tried an OS based on a microkernel, and the government took my baby away!
Heeeere's the thing, the concept of a microkernel is sound, and for some of us more experimental coders, there was a ton of micro-like coding being doing in the 90's. The problem is that it requires a very different mindset or strategy to succede. You can't have a hundred half-tards submitting code all over the place, else the elegant microkernel quickly grows into a beowulf cluster of bloated chunks with duplicated functionality and piss-poor message passing.
Micros work well with small teams, where one person has dictatorial oversight and keeps everything nice and tight. It requires more detailed planning, unless you enjoy rewriting all your interfaces every other week.
Performance ? Meh. If done right, you won't notice. The problem is that it's exceptionally difficult to do it right for a mass-appeal OS kernel, because the sheer amount of code overwhelms most people's patience and discipline. We simply don't have the meta-tools to properly manage such things (yet).
Don't ever leave more money in your PayPal account than you can afford to lose.
That is the most important thing with PayPal. They are not a bank, they are not bound by the familiar laws and the federal reserve doesn't give a damn about your funds. If PayPal spontaneously decides they don't like you, they can freeze your account and there's nothing you can do to get those funds back, short of suing them despite the covenant not-to-sue in their TOS.
I've seen countless sites get effectively defrauded out of tens of thousands of dollars by PayPal. It would be slightly different if they actually refunded the money to the donators, but they just seize it and accuse you of fraud. It's kind of a bank deciding you have too much money and saying "This is mine now, FOAD!".
PayPal is not a bank. It's a convenient service with some serious shortcomings, that one uses at their own risk.