Why [don't] the developers find something better to copy from? Say, Mac OS.
Because every time a Linux developer tries, Slashdot has to run a story called "Another Apple Cease-and-Desist."
Anyway, how different can you really get from either when you're stuck with concepts like widgets, buttons, titlebars, windows, etc. -- and if you throw these out -- some paradigm for computing sans windows or buttons, for example -- who's going to use it?
Certainly not end-users. If you don't give them a "Start" menu at this point, they're not going to get it. If you don't give them a window and a title bar, they certainly won't.
I know, I know. We don't want Linux to be used. Only studied by the technically curious. And we don't care about Apple and it's copyrights. Anarchy! Anarchy! Down with the end-users! Down with the corporations! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Which christian church would you have me attend? The aryan assembly of God? The baptists who want women to "submit" to men? The Mormons who waged war in Utah against the entire U.S. army? The Catholics who led an inquisition responsible for the deaths of millions?
Maybe Jesus loves you, but he sure as hell doesn't love everybody. The actions of his churches are proof.
Women aren't treated as sex objects in Muslim countries because society's conditioned them not to? Bah!
1. Yes, they are. Rape and incest in some areas of the Middle East are epidemic. Women may routinely be bought, sold, stolen or killed because of their sexual behavior or perceived sexual potential.
2. Conditioned? What do you mean by this? The pervasive influence of religion and a given cultural context? Funny, you ignore our religion and culture: a vengeful, violent biblical God who thinks nothing of wiping people out with plague, flood and famine on a whim; broken families where one or both parents are long since gone; abandoned children left by working parents with underpaid day care staff, all in the interest of affording a boat; parents who refuse to take the time to give their kids the tools to deal with a modern world full of sex and violence, preferring instead to fight against sex education and "godless" ethics-based guidelines...
You know, I was beaten up or beat someone up nearly every day in grammar school. My first day of kindergarten, I was knocked down at kicked silly.
Know what? This was decades ago before the prevalence of the video game industry or the media saturaion of ultra-violent Hollywood. Care to know what the causal factor was in my neighborhood?
-- Apathetic parents who couldn't be bothered to get upset when their kid beat someone up in school -- or couldn't even be bothered to find out that it was happening in their kids' lives to begin with.
-- Just enough "poverty" to keep people fighting for the middle class by working long jobs and keeping their children in day care.
-- A culture of judgmental administrators who were constantly making these kids feel worthless. After all, they were nothing but mindless, violent punks from broken families who would never amount to anything and thus weren't very important in the grand scheme of things anyway...
Sound like any recent cases you can name? Take your right wing views about the Big Bad Liberal Media "America Should Eat Itself" Conspiracy and put it somewhere painful.
Air pressure would not be an issue.
on
First Arcology?
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· Score: 2
Air pressure...
I don't know that air pressure would be a problem. I live in a well-populated area (Salt Lake City) in which around a million and a half people live at about 4300 feet.
I routinely fly to the west coast at sea level, with no ill effects coming or going.
In fact, I can drive to almost 7000 feet within about half an hour, and that doesn't bother me either. So I doubt a 3700 feet building would be much of a health risk -- at least not on purely elevation-related grounds.
Re:Question about Keyboard PDAs w/Unicode
on
PDAs, PDAs
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· Score: 2
Here's one option for a much-less-than-$800 CE PDA with a keyboard:
There are a number of others from various manufacturers. Just search the Web, eBay or online stores for "Handheld PC" and "Handheld PC Pro" or "HPC" and "HPC Pro" instead of "PocketPC".
The form factor of a CE device determines the class of device it is. Now I'm not a Microsoft rep, so don't quote me on this, but I believe that PocketPC and PalmPC CE devices are pen-based and have a 320x240 display, Handheld PC (HPC) devices are pen or pen/keyboard and have a 480x240 display and Handheld PC Pro (HPC Pro) devices are 640x480 and always have a keyboard, like a mini laptop.
You know, this wouldn't be so hard. Kernel, C and SDL libraries, a few binaries... You could probably squeeze enough Linux and drivers to support a nice 3D-enabled game into 20 megabytes or less on a game disc.
You're right that it's not possible for an individual to be unbiased.
However, it's perfectly easy for a television network to be. Just do what PBS does: air incredible conservatives alongside incredible liberals and do both with nice production values.
What I'm saying is that if you show lots of viewpoints from people with all kinds of different individual biases, that's pretty damn close (as far as I'm concerned) to unbiased content.
At least as close as you can get in the real world.
Relative to other television content, I don't think PBS has any bias at all. Some of the programming I see on PBS is actually conservative in bias.
Dan Rather = liberal bias.
Bill Buckley = not a very liberal bias...
All in all, I think that PBS is probably the only truly un-biased source of information out there. Not to mention that it is certainly the only accurate source of information on television in the US.
The day that PBS goes under is the day I hollow out my TV for goldfish.
I'm liking AMD... There's still nothing as fast on the market, esp. with 1.4 GHz Thunderbirds hitting the channel this month. And even with half-price P4, the price/performance ratio is still in favor of AMD.
What I'm liking even better, though, is all of the hammer stuff coming down the pipe. If I remember right, AMD's line will go be 64-bit as well but will be backward compatible with x86.
IA-64 will not.
Yeah, yeah, I know... "Kill X86!"
Well... why? If AMD's 64-bit series turns out to outperform IA-64 and it will still old x86 software faster than IA-64 as well and it's cheaper than the same generation Intel CPU (once again), then why in the hell should I buy Intel?
Add to that the fact that AMD is entering the SMP world with superior bus technology borrowed from Alpha and I think AMD has it won for a while, memory bandwidth not withstanding.
I want nothing more than a handheld that is actually a full computer with a small display. I am left in the cold by all of these tiny I-do-nothing-useful devices that are really just electronic replacements for a minimalist secretary.
Closest I've ever come to this dream is a Newton MP2100, but if possible, I'd like something even more functional. I'd love to be able to run X apps on a handheld and to install the biggest, baddest flash card (of whichever type) I can so that I can carry all of my important data with me all the time.
Now if only somebody would make a handheld that didn't try so damn hard to fit into a shirt pocket. Here's my ideal handheld:
6-8 hour battery life.
480x320 or 640x480 screen that measures 5.5x4 or so (half sheet of letter-size paper).
Thickness of 0.5 inches.
500MB or more of storage.
Linux+X plus any applications I can compile/develop for it.
Pen-based.
Weighs less than 2 lbs.
Reasonably fast (the speed of the most recent PocketPC machines or maybe a little faster).
Kind of like a Casio Fiva MPC-501 but at a sub-$1000 price point, rather than an over-$2000 price point.
Forgot to mention... I'm not affiliated with EBgames.com. I'm just thrilled to be able to play these games in Linux without having to reboot -- I owned the Windows versions already. I just never thought it was worth it to buy the Linux versions as well -- until this deal.
Many of the already released games are going for $9.99 at EBGames.com! Just search for "linux" when you get there!
I got Descent 3, Heretic II, Soldier of Fortune, Quake III Arena, Heavy Gear II and Heroes of Might and Magic III this week (six games) for less than $70.00 after shipping!
And they were fast to ship, too!
Long live Loki and Loki games! They're identical to the Windows versions on my GeForce2 under XFree86 4.0.
For a long while, StarOffice shipped with the retail versions of several distributions. I was introduced to StarOffice this way -- StarOffice 3.1 came with a retail Linux distribution I bought several years ago.
Problem is, people didn't like it.
Point: let the market decide. "De facto" standards usually emerge in the open marketplace, not when dictated by corporations. There just aren't any office suites, e-mail/PIM applications, etc. in the Linux world that are good enough yet to really get people going.
But it will happen. And when it does, Red Hat won't be causing it, but they will be making sure they include it because it's what the users want and it will sell units!
There's a large difference between 8" floppies and CD-ROM. The installed base of CD reading mechanisms (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, PlayStation, Dreamcast, SegaCD, Saturn, PS2, 3DO, VCD, home stereos, walkmans) is many orders of magnitude greater than the installed base of 8" floppy drives ever was.
Even two or three hundred years from now, a reasonably skilled technician or at worst a team of them will be able to dig up a CD mechanism from somewhere, fix it up and get it reading data. CD mechnisms are like Ford's Model T -- only much more common -- and let's face it, there are still a reasonable number of Model T's running around to auto shows, and there isn't nearly the historical incentive to keep a Model T running that there is to ensure that there will always be a CD-ROM reader running somewhere.
And it's likely that if most people are like I am (I value my data and my work) they will continue to migrate data to new formats as they emerge.
The bigger question isn't media, but sofware. I'm very confident we'll be able to get our files from ISO9660 discs, but I already have a bunch of WordStar and old MacWrite/MacPaint files I can't open and it's only been a decade. We'll be able to retrieve the raw data, but will be actually be able to interpret and make use of it?
P.S. I still have an old Siemens 8" floppy drive, single-sided, hard sector. About five years ago I still had an old floppy controller with an odd WD chip on it that could talk to it using OS-9. No way to talk to it with my Linux box, though...
Um... I can only pray that this technology doesn't go mainstream. I live in a city with lots of traffic and I find the smell of fries and fast food (i.e. vegetable oils burning) in general to be one of the most physically nauseating sensations around. What's more, being in a fast-food-laden area (say, a mall's food court) for any period of time inevitably leaves a film of grease on my skin and clothes. And that's now going into my lungs all the time?
If all of the cars in suburban neighborhoods start to emit fry-smelling smoke to the same degree that they emit smoke-smelling smoke today, there may well be another smell pervasive in car-heavy areas: sidewalk puke from all of the nauseated, hacking citizens. I'll take smog over fry smoke any day.
Not necessarily... The Kyro II retails for $149.99; I just bought an eVGA GeForce2 GTS Pro from a local wholesaler for under $170 and I've seen Radeon DDR cards for as low as $130 locally.
The Radeon performs slightly worse than the Kyro II, the GF2-Pro slightly better. Thus, I'd say that the Kyro II is right in line with other cards in its price range.
10 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (1000 MHz).
vs.
13 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (850 MHz).
You start needing to encode 2 hours of video and it's a 12 hour difference. You start doing MPEG-2 work as a part-time job, and you're talking about saving days or even weeks over the course of a month. What's a week's wages worth to you? That extra few MHz can matter, so you buy what you can afford and then you get what you can out of it.
The general public doesn't give a rat's ass about science in general.
Try asking any of the following to the average joe on the street:
How many stars are in our solar system?
What does binary mean?
What does e=mc^2 stand for and whose idea was it?
What heats the food in a microwave oven?
What does "organic" mean?
If you can get a scientifically accurate answer for just one out of these five basic questions, you're batting above average. The number of people out there who can answer all five intelligently is probably about 1% of the US population, if not less.
But more to the point, and here's where NASA budget cuts (among others) come in: the average joe will also tell you that this stuff just isn't that important.
What is important? The 234986 different awards organizations for music and movies... Tolerance of serial killers, bimanual transsexuals and the non-working poor... Survivor... The 234986 different types of [bastardized if you ask me] martinis that you can get at a club... Getting out of the club with company after downing all 234986 martinis...
Most people who don't overclock act like overclocking a CPU is some kind of geeky insanity bordering on the unethical. But most people who do overclock don't put half a car in their computer case...
It's usually like this: I had a $160 budget for my CPU and heat-sink combo. Instead of buying a T-bird 900 for $148 and an $8 heat-sink/fan to go with it, I bought a $118 T-bird 850 and a $29.00 Taisol heat-sink/fan to go with it. No anti-freeze, no crazy hardware, just a larger hunk of steel and a larger diameter fan.
Then, I experimented once I got the 850 CPU to see what I could clock it at. At 1100 MHz, it wouldn't POST or boot. At 1050 MHz, it would boot and run stable under loads, temperature measured (by simple onboard hardware) at about 43 degrees celsius.
So, I backed it down to 1000 MHz in the interest of ensuring stability, ran a continuous 3D benchmark on it for 120 hours straight to make sure it didn't crash or overheat at that speed, and then put it into service. For the same price as a slower T-bird 900 and a cheaper heat-sink/fan, I now own a T-bird running at 1.0 GHz at around 39-40 degrees celsius, well within the rated temperature range for the T-bird Athlon processor as per AMD specs.
No aquarium pumps, no sawing, no bending, puncturing, no hazardous substances... My case remains quiet and the sides are all on. The processor runs an MPEG-2 encoder under Linux 24/7 and has done so very well for months now.
THIS is how most overclockers work, I think, and it's not insane at all. It's called getting the most for your buck. For those of you who think it's unethical... Well... Be sure to always buy your hard drive upgrades direct from Compaq, rather than from a third-party, "aftermarket" hard drive dealer. But hard drive's are more expensive that way, you say?
Hey, it's in your paperwork. Always use only genuine Compaq parts for upgrades. To do anything else is to break The Rules[TM].
There wouldn't be any consequences. I don't know anybody who's actually bought windows as a retail product. The Windows users I know fall into two categories:
1. The group who got Windows on an OEM CD with their computer and still use it whenever they need to install Windows on another machine.
2. The group who pirate Windows or have "donorware" OEM CDs that they got from friends who bought new computers which, in turn, came with their own new OEM Windows disc.
The market implications seem to me to be small, since Windows is not a big retail product. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of MS Office upgrades in retail packaging on acquaintances' shelves. Interestingly, MS Office is much more expensive than MS Windows. I think that making Windows free would, if anything, reinforce the total market dominance which Windows and MS Office already enjoy, but would likely have little additional effect.
Wrong. Criticism is just that -- criticism -- and does NOT make one an instant holocaust supporter or an anti-semite.
Nothing pisses me off more than the current cultural belief in America that once suffering somewhere in the past has been found (i.e. Jews, African Americans, women, etc.) these groups are given a pass on all criticism, culpability, responsibility -- forever.
It's bullshit. If the Israelis do something evil, they do something evil. If they do something good, they do something good, like everybody else. Saying that is not anti-semitism, it is common sense. But of course common sense was lost long ago in the western world...
Nobody in the US seems to understand or care about the plight of the Palestinians or about Arab culture.
Certainly nobody in Israel cares... Which is a shame; a formerly oppressed people have allowed themselves to become the oppressor and their own suffering is cheapened because of it.
You're also right in that IBM has nothing to do with either side today, and years ago (whatever the truth) is years ago. Yes, the holocaust happened, but the holocaust is OVER, folks.
Or are many of you also in the camp who believe that all of the African Amercian men in prison should be let out because they were influenced by their "genetic memory" when they committed their crime, and that the white folks should agree to live under slavery for two hundred years to compensate still-discombobulated African Americans?
I regret slavery and the holocaust, but neither one gives the formerly oppressed group a "get out of jail free card" for the rest of time. What Israel is doing now is wrong. Sharon started this when peace was nearly (finally) at hand. He's a warmonger and an Arab hater as much as Hitler was a warmonger and a Jew hater.
I wish both of these lovely and worthwhile cultures could just get along and stop being so racist toward each other. And I get very tired of Israelis and Israel-supporters who simply say that either you are on Israel's side or you are miseducated. That is the sort of self-serving egoism and ethnocentrism that las led to the conflict in the first place.
And I wish we could return to discussing technology on Slashdot instead of politics.
What about all of the MWave owners with older chipsets? I've got a 760XD and my sister is using a 760C and both have a lovely built-in MWave modem and sound capability which isn't supported by Linux or by this driver. Okay, so my 760XD is a few years old now... but it's still got a 1024x768 display, a Pentium 166MMX processor and over 100MB memory -- it's impossible for me to justify dropping thousands on a TP600 just to get a better MWave chip. IBM made a nice machine in the 760XD, and that's why I've still got it.
Someone at flexion.org used to be thinking about an MWave for Linux project, but apparently discontinued it when IBM started their "official" MWave for Linux project... But I'm assuming that since support for current machines is already done now at IBM, support for earlier machines is never likely to be forthcoming...
*sigh*
There are so many Thinkpad 760-series machines and IBM Aptivas out there with the older MWave chip... Many more than there are Thinkpad 600 and 770 machines, I'd venture to guess.
Please, IBM -- I bought the machine. It cost me lots of dough. I've been loyal and bought Thinkpads over the years... I like 'em. I just want to run Linux on 'em. Can't you help me out...?
Slashdot Mirror
Why [don't] the developers find something better to copy from? Say, Mac OS.
Because every time a Linux developer tries, Slashdot has to run a story called "Another Apple Cease-and-Desist."
Anyway, how different can you really get from either when you're stuck with concepts like widgets, buttons, titlebars, windows, etc. -- and if you throw these out -- some paradigm for computing sans windows or buttons, for example -- who's going to use it?
Certainly not end-users. If you don't give them a "Start" menu at this point, they're not going to get it. If you don't give them a window and a title bar, they certainly won't.
I know, I know. We don't want Linux to be used. Only studied by the technically curious. And we don't care about Apple and it's copyrights. Anarchy! Anarchy! Down with the end-users! Down with the corporations! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Which christian church would you have me attend? The aryan assembly of God? The baptists who want women to "submit" to men? The Mormons who waged war in Utah against the entire U.S. army? The Catholics who led an inquisition responsible for the deaths of millions?
Maybe Jesus loves you, but he sure as hell doesn't love everybody. The actions of his churches are proof.
What an utterly simplistic view of the world.
Women aren't treated as sex objects in Muslim countries because society's conditioned them not to? Bah!
1. Yes, they are. Rape and incest in some areas of the Middle East are epidemic. Women may routinely be bought, sold, stolen or killed because of their sexual behavior or perceived sexual potential.
2. Conditioned? What do you mean by this? The pervasive influence of religion and a given cultural context? Funny, you ignore our religion and culture: a vengeful, violent biblical God who thinks nothing of wiping people out with plague, flood and famine on a whim; broken families where one or both parents are long since gone; abandoned children left by working parents with underpaid day care staff, all in the interest of affording a boat; parents who refuse to take the time to give their kids the tools to deal with a modern world full of sex and violence, preferring instead to fight against sex education and "godless" ethics-based guidelines...
You know, I was beaten up or beat someone up nearly every day in grammar school. My first day of kindergarten, I was knocked down at kicked silly.
Know what? This was decades ago before the prevalence of the video game industry or the media saturaion of ultra-violent Hollywood. Care to know what the causal factor was in my neighborhood?
-- Apathetic parents who couldn't be bothered to get upset when their kid beat someone up in school -- or couldn't even be bothered to find out that it was happening in their kids' lives to begin with.
-- Just enough "poverty" to keep people fighting for the middle class by working long jobs and keeping their children in day care.
-- A culture of judgmental administrators who were constantly making these kids feel worthless. After all, they were nothing but mindless, violent punks from broken families who would never amount to anything and thus weren't very important in the grand scheme of things anyway...
Sound like any recent cases you can name? Take your right wing views about the Big Bad Liberal Media "America Should Eat Itself" Conspiracy and put it somewhere painful.
Air pressure...
I don't know that air pressure would be a problem. I live in a well-populated area (Salt Lake City) in which around a million and a half people live at about 4300 feet.
I routinely fly to the west coast at sea level, with no ill effects coming or going.
In fact, I can drive to almost 7000 feet within about half an hour, and that doesn't bother me either. So I doubt a 3700 feet building would be much of a health risk -- at least not on purely elevation-related grounds.
Here's one option for a much-less-than-$800 CE PDA with a keyboard:
Cassiopeia A21S
There are a number of others from various manufacturers. Just search the Web, eBay or online stores for "Handheld PC" and "Handheld PC Pro" or "HPC" and "HPC Pro" instead of "PocketPC".
The form factor of a CE device determines the class of device it is. Now I'm not a Microsoft rep, so don't quote me on this, but I believe that PocketPC and PalmPC CE devices are pen-based and have a 320x240 display, Handheld PC (HPC) devices are pen or pen/keyboard and have a 480x240 display and Handheld PC Pro (HPC Pro) devices are 640x480 and always have a keyboard, like a mini laptop.
Good luck in your search.
You know, this wouldn't be so hard. Kernel, C and SDL libraries, a few binaries... You could probably squeeze enough Linux and drivers to support a nice 3D-enabled game into 20 megabytes or less on a game disc.
Not a bad idea.
You're right that it's not possible for an individual to be unbiased.
However, it's perfectly easy for a television network to be. Just do what PBS does: air incredible conservatives alongside incredible liberals and do both with nice production values.
What I'm saying is that if you show lots of viewpoints from people with all kinds of different individual biases, that's pretty damn close (as far as I'm concerned) to unbiased content.
At least as close as you can get in the real world.
Dan Rather = liberal bias.
Bill Buckley = not a very liberal bias...
All in all, I think that PBS is probably the only truly un-biased source of information out there. Not to mention that it is certainly the only accurate source of information on television in the US.
The day that PBS goes under is the day I hollow out my TV for goldfish.
What I'm liking even better, though, is all of the hammer stuff coming down the pipe. If I remember right, AMD's line will go be 64-bit as well but will be backward compatible with x86.
IA-64 will not.
Yeah, yeah, I know... "Kill X86!"
Well... why? If AMD's 64-bit series turns out to outperform IA-64 and it will still old x86 software faster than IA-64 as well and it's cheaper than the same generation Intel CPU (once again), then why in the hell should I buy Intel?
Add to that the fact that AMD is entering the SMP world with superior bus technology borrowed from Alpha and I think AMD has it won for a while, memory bandwidth not withstanding.
Closest I've ever come to this dream is a Newton MP2100, but if possible, I'd like something even more functional. I'd love to be able to run X apps on a handheld and to install the biggest, baddest flash card (of whichever type) I can so that I can carry all of my important data with me all the time.
Now if only somebody would make a handheld that didn't try so damn hard to fit into a shirt pocket. Here's my ideal handheld:
Kind of like a Casio Fiva MPC-501 but at a sub-$1000 price point, rather than an over-$2000 price point.
Anybody got any ideas?
Don't know, but it doesn't look like pirated goods. The Q3A box was the nifty aluminum one. It's now my Q3A "bloody cookie" tin.
Forgot to mention... I'm not affiliated with EBgames.com. I'm just thrilled to be able to play these games in Linux without having to reboot -- I owned the Windows versions already. I just never thought it was worth it to buy the Linux versions as well -- until this deal.
I got Descent 3, Heretic II, Soldier of Fortune, Quake III Arena, Heavy Gear II and Heroes of Might and Magic III this week (six games) for less than $70.00 after shipping!
And they were fast to ship, too!
Long live Loki and Loki games! They're identical to the Windows versions on my GeForce2 under XFree86 4.0.
Problem is, people didn't like it.
Point: let the market decide. "De facto" standards usually emerge in the open marketplace, not when dictated by corporations. There just aren't any office suites, e-mail/PIM applications, etc. in the Linux world that are good enough yet to really get people going.
But it will happen. And when it does, Red Hat won't be causing it, but they will be making sure they include it because it's what the users want and it will sell units!
Even two or three hundred years from now, a reasonably skilled technician or at worst a team of them will be able to dig up a CD mechanism from somewhere, fix it up and get it reading data. CD mechnisms are like Ford's Model T -- only much more common -- and let's face it, there are still a reasonable number of Model T's running around to auto shows, and there isn't nearly the historical incentive to keep a Model T running that there is to ensure that there will always be a CD-ROM reader running somewhere.
And it's likely that if most people are like I am (I value my data and my work) they will continue to migrate data to new formats as they emerge.
The bigger question isn't media, but sofware. I'm very confident we'll be able to get our files from ISO9660 discs, but I already have a bunch of WordStar and old MacWrite/MacPaint files I can't open and it's only been a decade. We'll be able to retrieve the raw data, but will be actually be able to interpret and make use of it?
P.S. I still have an old Siemens 8" floppy drive, single-sided, hard sector. About five years ago I still had an old floppy controller with an odd WD chip on it that could talk to it using OS-9. No way to talk to it with my Linux box, though...
If all of the cars in suburban neighborhoods start to emit fry-smelling smoke to the same degree that they emit smoke-smelling smoke today, there may well be another smell pervasive in car-heavy areas: sidewalk puke from all of the nauseated, hacking citizens. I'll take smog over fry smoke any day.
Fry smog. Uggggggggggggghhh...
Not necessarily... The Kyro II retails for $149.99; I just bought an eVGA GeForce2 GTS Pro from a local wholesaler for under $170 and I've seen Radeon DDR cards for as low as $130 locally.
The Radeon performs slightly worse than the Kyro II, the GF2-Pro slightly better. Thus, I'd say that the Kyro II is right in line with other cards in its price range.
10 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (1000 MHz).
vs.
13 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (850 MHz).
You start needing to encode 2 hours of video and it's a 12 hour difference. You start doing MPEG-2 work as a part-time job, and you're talking about saving days or even weeks over the course of a month. What's a week's wages worth to you? That extra few MHz can matter, so you buy what you can afford and then you get what you can out of it.
Try asking any of the following to the average joe on the street:
If you can get a scientifically accurate answer for just one out of these five basic questions, you're batting above average. The number of people out there who can answer all five intelligently is probably about 1% of the US population, if not less.
But more to the point, and here's where NASA budget cuts (among others) come in: the average joe will also tell you that this stuff just isn't that important.
What is important? The 234986 different awards organizations for music and movies... Tolerance of serial killers, bimanual transsexuals and the non-working poor... Survivor... The 234986 different types of [bastardized if you ask me] martinis that you can get at a club... Getting out of the club with company after downing all 234986 martinis...
Science isn't even on America's radar any longer.
It's usually like this: I had a $160 budget for my CPU and heat-sink combo. Instead of buying a T-bird 900 for $148 and an $8 heat-sink/fan to go with it, I bought a $118 T-bird 850 and a $29.00 Taisol heat-sink/fan to go with it. No anti-freeze, no crazy hardware, just a larger hunk of steel and a larger diameter fan.
Then, I experimented once I got the 850 CPU to see what I could clock it at. At 1100 MHz, it wouldn't POST or boot. At 1050 MHz, it would boot and run stable under loads, temperature measured (by simple onboard hardware) at about 43 degrees celsius.
So, I backed it down to 1000 MHz in the interest of ensuring stability, ran a continuous 3D benchmark on it for 120 hours straight to make sure it didn't crash or overheat at that speed, and then put it into service. For the same price as a slower T-bird 900 and a cheaper heat-sink/fan, I now own a T-bird running at 1.0 GHz at around 39-40 degrees celsius, well within the rated temperature range for the T-bird Athlon processor as per AMD specs.
No aquarium pumps, no sawing, no bending, puncturing, no hazardous substances... My case remains quiet and the sides are all on. The processor runs an MPEG-2 encoder under Linux 24/7 and has done so very well for months now.
THIS is how most overclockers work, I think, and it's not insane at all. It's called getting the most for your buck. For those of you who think it's unethical... Well... Be sure to always buy your hard drive upgrades direct from Compaq, rather than from a third-party, "aftermarket" hard drive dealer. But hard drive's are more expensive that way, you say?
Hey, it's in your paperwork. Always use only genuine Compaq parts for upgrades. To do anything else is to break The Rules[TM].
1. The group who got Windows on an OEM CD with their computer and still use it whenever they need to install Windows on another machine.
2. The group who pirate Windows or have "donorware" OEM CDs that they got from friends who bought new computers which, in turn, came with their own new OEM Windows disc.
The market implications seem to me to be small, since Windows is not a big retail product. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of MS Office upgrades in retail packaging on acquaintances' shelves. Interestingly, MS Office is much more expensive than MS Windows. I think that making Windows free would, if anything, reinforce the total market dominance which Windows and MS Office already enjoy, but would likely have little additional effect.
My ideal combination: 70% plot, 25% stunning graphics, 5% action.
Seriously.
Nothing pisses me off more than the current cultural belief in America that once suffering somewhere in the past has been found (i.e. Jews, African Americans, women, etc.) these groups are given a pass on all criticism, culpability, responsibility -- forever.
It's bullshit. If the Israelis do something evil, they do something evil. If they do something good, they do something good, like everybody else. Saying that is not anti-semitism, it is common sense. But of course common sense was lost long ago in the western world...
Nobody in the US seems to understand or care about the plight of the Palestinians or about Arab culture.
Certainly nobody in Israel cares... Which is a shame; a formerly oppressed people have allowed themselves to become the oppressor and their own suffering is cheapened because of it.
You're also right in that IBM has nothing to do with either side today, and years ago (whatever the truth) is years ago. Yes, the holocaust happened, but the holocaust is OVER, folks.
Or are many of you also in the camp who believe that all of the African Amercian men in prison should be let out because they were influenced by their "genetic memory" when they committed their crime, and that the white folks should agree to live under slavery for two hundred years to compensate still-discombobulated African Americans?
I regret slavery and the holocaust, but neither one gives the formerly oppressed group a "get out of jail free card" for the rest of time. What Israel is doing now is wrong. Sharon started this when peace was nearly (finally) at hand. He's a warmonger and an Arab hater as much as Hitler was a warmonger and a Jew hater.
I wish both of these lovely and worthwhile cultures could just get along and stop being so racist toward each other. And I get very tired of Israelis and Israel-supporters who simply say that either you are on Israel's side or you are miseducated. That is the sort of self-serving egoism and ethnocentrism that las led to the conflict in the first place.
And I wish we could return to discussing technology on Slashdot instead of politics.
Someone at flexion.org used to be thinking about an MWave for Linux project, but apparently discontinued it when IBM started their "official" MWave for Linux project... But I'm assuming that since support for current machines is already done now at IBM, support for earlier machines is never likely to be forthcoming...
*sigh*
There are so many Thinkpad 760-series machines and IBM Aptivas out there with the older MWave chip... Many more than there are Thinkpad 600 and 770 machines, I'd venture to guess.
Please, IBM -- I bought the machine. It cost me lots of dough. I've been loyal and bought Thinkpads over the years... I like 'em. I just want to run Linux on 'em. Can't you help me out...?