Great quote from the comments to this article, explaining the big problem with Windows:
Me: "I thought I installed antivirus software, but it's not running?"
Mom: "Oh, I uninstalled that - it kept keeping me from opening my emails"
Just about all the major problems with Windows are there: security as a bolt-on, ordinary users having administrator rights, Windows viruses, annoying operating system nag messages, and of course, a liberal dose of user cluelessness with that administrator access.
setting up a quiet space in your home will go a long way (earplugs work wonders at home and the office, seriously), and it's okay to stay home instead of go out.
Do you know me? I mean, I don't get out much, but you must have met me somewhere.
It cost AUD$199 and has a pretty crappy protective film over the screen (lots of air bubbles in the top half - managed to clear most of them away - not a show stopper, just not brilliant).
The Wifi packed it in within the first day - it hangs and reboots after a couple of minutes. But it does have ethernet and I don't *need* to use the Wifi anyway.
The app market wouldn't work, but I was able to download apps from other markets, including downloading to PC first when that was more convenient. I could install off a USB drive when I downloaded stuff to my PC. The tablet has a dongle with 2 USB ports and 1 ethernet port. the dongle falls out of the socket easily, but it was manageable.
The tablet works great with reading books and OK with PDFs. Movies are a bit finicky - haven't got it working perfectly yet - need exactly right codecs and resolution, I think, but I have the details - more testing.
Find the touch screen a bit finicky - sometimes doesn't register a touch, sometimes over-registers: so when scrolling, you might get no movement, a click instead of scrolling, scrolling exactly right, or scrolling way beyond what you meant. Similarly when using the onscreen keyboard. Could be better.
For $199 it was still a bargain, even with Android 1.6. Give the market another a year or so, and I can ditch this device and buy something better.
And like the parent said: not for grandma and grandpa, but a great little bargain for a hacker who just wants a new Android toy to play with.
Can't think why the vultures are circling over Ballmer, can you?
They heard him calling for "Developers! Developers!" and thought he was calling for "De vultures! De vultures!" (well you try hearing well when you are flying around up there).
While sad, it's been a smart business tactic for Microsoft. Let someone else take the risk first and do the legwork, then if it works out, bomb the market with a copy - albeit usually inferior, but often much cheaper.
Except... MS is no longer the low end either. I have just purchased a cheap tablet - 1/3 the price of an iPad. It runs Android. There are plenty of Android tablets, and more and more coming out all the time. And MS do not have much of an advantage in the ARM-based tablet market where Android operates, because Windows cannot rely on existing MS and third-party PC apps working on ARM: they don't. Microsoft would have to create an application landscape from scratch, with Apple and Android already established.
Personally, I think MS are no more likely to win here than they did with the Zune.
Actually, a lot of creationists' claims are falsifiable. They make arguments about geology, fossils, isotope dating etc. can that can be readily compared to reality. Trouble is they've all been thoroughly disproven, leading to a purely theological fallback position ("it's just made to look that way by God!") which is unfalsifiable.
Actually, you can use that. Just say: God created the world so that it looks as though it evolved. And in science, we study the way the world looks.
And now they're going to say they're pulling it because it didn't sell enough. Of course it didn't, they purposely made it that way; it's like they wanted it to fail from the get go.
Microsoft wanted it to fail from the get go.
I dare say Dell would love to get away from their abusive spouse. But unless Dell wants to quit the Windows PC market entirely (ie 90% of the desktop and laptop markets - especially outside the US and especially in the world of business computers) they have no choice but to knuckle under to Microsoft's every whim.
Unless someone hits Microsoft with a sensible anti-trust conviction, and hits them hard, they will not change. Or else, they will only change when the market shifts away from the desktop and traditional laptop enough to allow other competitors a fair go. (See iPad etc and Android devices for examples)
But MS has the laptop/desktop markets sewn up at present, with Apple alone competing and that principally in the US and in the high-priced and domestic end of the market.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Every new language starts out small and simple. Over time, it adds features, becomes more powerful, more "mature", more complex. Eventually it becomes gargantuan, so that only the old-timers who grew up with the language understand it.
So someone invents a new language, that is small and simple...
Without thinking about it, the industry has worked out that a good way to learn a complex language is to learn a simple language and grow with it.
I hate to say it, but the nature of CPUs has changed so much since the Core architecture that you might want to eBay that box and buy something like an Atom Nettop.
And next week we'll get a thread about "I just bought this G5 on ebay..."
You know, the Wright brothers airplane wasn't exactly a jumbo jet either...
Just saying.
And I hope you are not downloading music onto wax cylinders - they have made some improvements in the storage of music since Edison. It was a good first try, though.
OTOH, the Unicode consortium approved several years ago the symbol for the Argentinian austral (""), a currency that ended up dying an inglorious (yet entirely deserved) death a few months afterwards.
It died because everyone kept calling it "the Argentinian Nostril."
Just say "Argentinian austral" quickly a few times.
We swedes actually tried that with moose a couple of hundred years ago. The moose were actually quite good at killing people. Sadly almost all of them were swedes.
"It's not an "outdated idea". If you really think that copyrights and patents are a bad idea, you need only look at countries where they did not exist -- like Russia during its peak of Socialist power -- to see how that works out economically. Hint: it doesn't. "
A wild thought. It is *JUST* possible that some other aspect of communism, besides the lack of copyright, was responsible for the slow rate of development in the Soviet Union.
Your reasoning would lead us to conclude that the high rate of alcoholism and consumption of vodka was caused by the lack of copyrights... and that Mr Gorbachev need only turn back the clock, implement a proper copyright system, and become a Hero of the Soviet Union by saving them all from economic perdition.
Really not surprising. When the US was a small, backwater english colony, it was also famous for its piracy (of books, in that time).
It is the countries with the massive content industries that have the strict copyright regimes. Brasil isn't home to Hollywood or very many international music superstars.
Yep. Copyright (and patents) is imperialism carried out by means other than tanks. The tanks are just there in case some punk country STILL doesn't pay its tribute (aka copyright and patent licence fees).
Every little country realises that "intellectual property" is intellectual imperialism (a.k.a "we thought of it first!"). Every big country has forgotten that lesson from its past, and just goes around trying to figure out new ways to make the rest of the world pay it more tribute.
And in the case of the proton is *is* meaningful, because you are incorrect about the proton being a singularity. The proton is composed of three quarks, each with their own charges and charge fields.
So... if I have got this right, when you listen to protons, all you can hear is "Quark quark quark"?
Slashdot Mirror
See also this blog post from Microsoft's Raymond Chen.
Great quote from the comments to this article, explaining the big problem with Windows:
Me: "I thought I installed antivirus software, but it's not running?"
Mom: "Oh, I uninstalled that - it kept keeping me from opening my emails"
Just about all the major problems with Windows are there: security as a bolt-on, ordinary users having administrator rights, Windows viruses, annoying operating system nag messages, and of course, a liberal dose of user cluelessness with that administrator access.
If you don't like the FCC regulations, write your congressperson, get them changed.
You must be new here...
And by "here" he means "on this planet".
Hmmm ..."I see you're dressed like a vampire. Would you like a bottle of fresh blood?"
setting up a quiet space in your home will go a long way (earplugs work wonders at home and the office, seriously), and it's okay to stay home instead of go out.
Do you know me? I mean, I don't get out much, but you must have met me somewhere.
What happened to trust busting?
The trusts got themselves - or rather their representative - elected president.
These comments apply pretty well to my new "ePad" - a 7 inch tablet running Android 1.6: http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&id=3172
It cost AUD$199 and has a pretty crappy protective film over the screen (lots of air bubbles in the top half - managed to clear most of them away - not a show stopper, just not brilliant).
The Wifi packed it in within the first day - it hangs and reboots after a couple of minutes. But it does have ethernet and I don't *need* to use the Wifi anyway.
The app market wouldn't work, but I was able to download apps from other markets, including downloading to PC first when that was more convenient. I could install off a USB drive when I downloaded stuff to my PC. The tablet has a dongle with 2 USB ports and 1 ethernet port. the dongle falls out of the socket easily, but it was manageable.
The tablet works great with reading books and OK with PDFs. Movies are a bit finicky - haven't got it working perfectly yet - need exactly right codecs and resolution, I think, but I have the details - more testing.
Find the touch screen a bit finicky - sometimes doesn't register a touch, sometimes over-registers: so when scrolling, you might get no movement, a click instead of scrolling, scrolling exactly right, or scrolling way beyond what you meant. Similarly when using the onscreen keyboard. Could be better.
For $199 it was still a bargain, even with Android 1.6. Give the market another a year or so, and I can ditch this device and buy something better.
And like the parent said: not for grandma and grandpa, but a great little bargain for a hacker who just wants a new Android toy to play with.
Can't think why the vultures are circling over Ballmer, can you?
They heard him calling for "Developers! Developers!" and thought he was calling for "De vultures! De vultures!" (well you try hearing well when you are flying around up there).
Or maybe they are vultures who can code.
Look there could be lots of reasons.
While sad, it's been a smart business tactic for Microsoft. Let someone else take the risk first and do the legwork, then if it works out, bomb the market with a copy - albeit usually inferior, but often much cheaper.
Except ... MS is no longer the low end either. I have just purchased a cheap tablet - 1/3 the price of an iPad. It runs Android. There are plenty of Android tablets, and more and more coming out all the time. And MS do not have much of an advantage in the ARM-based tablet market where Android operates, because Windows cannot rely on existing MS and third-party PC apps working on ARM: they don't. Microsoft would have to create an application landscape from scratch, with Apple and Android already established.
Personally, I think MS are no more likely to win here than they did with the Zune.
and run it on hardware you designed and manufactured yourself
Using a brain that you .... oh, forget it.
Actually, a lot of creationists' claims are falsifiable. They make arguments about geology, fossils, isotope dating etc. can that can be readily compared to reality. Trouble is they've all been thoroughly disproven, leading to a purely theological fallback position ("it's just made to look that way by God!") which is unfalsifiable.
Actually, you can use that. Just say: God created the world so that it looks as though it evolved. And in science, we study the way the world looks.
If you think about it, China ... the shear size of the population
You 're right. I'd never thought about that.
Shearing the population of China is a huge task.
Slashdot makes you think, doesn't it?
And now they're going to say they're pulling it because it didn't sell enough. Of course it didn't, they purposely made it that way; it's like they wanted it to fail from the get go.
Microsoft wanted it to fail from the get go.
I dare say Dell would love to get away from their abusive spouse. But unless Dell wants to quit the Windows PC market entirely (ie 90% of the desktop and laptop markets - especially outside the US and especially in the world of business computers) they have no choice but to knuckle under to Microsoft's every whim.
Unless someone hits Microsoft with a sensible anti-trust conviction, and hits them hard, they will not change. Or else, they will only change when the market shifts away from the desktop and traditional laptop enough to allow other competitors a fair go. (See iPad etc and Android devices for examples)
But MS has the laptop/desktop markets sewn up at present, with Apple alone competing and that principally in the US and in the high-priced and domestic end of the market.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Every new language starts out small and simple. Over time, it adds features, becomes more powerful, more "mature", more complex. Eventually it becomes gargantuan, so that only the old-timers who grew up with the language understand it.
So someone invents a new language, that is small and simple...
Without thinking about it, the industry has worked out that a good way to learn a complex language is to learn a simple language and grow with it.
I hate to say it, but the nature of CPUs has changed so much since the Core architecture that you might want to eBay that box and buy something like an Atom Nettop.
And next week we'll get a thread about "I just bought this G5 on ebay..."
The summary fails to mention that the liked study only focuses on blind people.
In Soviet Russia blind people focus on the ... oh wait, they can't.
You know, the Wright brothers airplane wasn't exactly a jumbo jet either...
Just saying.
And I hope you are not downloading music onto wax cylinders - they have made some improvements in the storage of music since Edison. It was a good first try, though.
If you mashed up your phone, mixed it with clay, shaped the mass into a rectangular prism, and left it in the sun to dry, then I'd call it bricked.
To unbrick, just reverse the process.
Definitions. Why can't people keep them simple, like me?
OTOH, the Unicode consortium approved several years ago the symbol for the Argentinian austral (""), a currency that ended up dying an inglorious (yet entirely deserved) death a few months afterwards.
It died because everyone kept calling it "the Argentinian Nostril."
Just say "Argentinian austral" quickly a few times.
We swedes actually tried that with moose a couple of hundred years ago. The moose were actually quite good at killing people.
Sadly almost all of them were swedes.
I thought swedes were vegetables, not people.
"It's not an "outdated idea". If you really think that copyrights and patents are a bad idea, you need only look at countries where they did not exist -- like Russia during its peak of Socialist power -- to see how that works out economically. Hint: it doesn't. "
A wild thought. It is *JUST* possible that some other aspect of communism, besides the lack of copyright, was responsible for the slow rate of development in the Soviet Union.
Your reasoning would lead us to conclude that the high rate of alcoholism and consumption of vodka was caused by the lack of copyrights ... and that Mr Gorbachev need only turn back the clock, implement a proper copyright system, and become a Hero of the Soviet Union by saving them all from economic perdition.
Really not surprising. When the US was a small, backwater english colony, it was also famous for its piracy (of books, in that time).
It is the countries with the massive content industries that have the strict copyright regimes. Brasil isn't home to Hollywood or very many international music superstars.
Yep. Copyright (and patents) is imperialism carried out by means other than tanks. The tanks are just there in case some punk country STILL doesn't pay its tribute (aka copyright and patent licence fees).
Every little country realises that "intellectual property" is intellectual imperialism (a.k.a "we thought of it first!"). Every big country has forgotten that lesson from its past, and just goes around trying to figure out new ways to make the rest of the world pay it more tribute.
And in the case of the proton is *is* meaningful, because you are incorrect about the proton being a singularity. The proton is composed of three quarks, each with their own charges and charge fields.
So ... if I have got this right, when you listen to protons, all you can hear is "Quark quark quark"?
A side benefit of this approach is that you won't lose any drive capacity to filesystem overhead.
Well, TAR becomes your filesystem, as it includes basic filesystem information about file names and locations (and paths and permissions and...).
Of course, you could just write one file to a disk, starting at the first sector. Then you really would have no filesystem overhead.
Don't survey a subset of the users and then generalize that to all users. It's inherently unfair.
Apparently you missed the email telling everyone that the science of statistics had been invented.
so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It means that if we are very good, we come back as ravens.
Hmmm. Flight. Cool.