Er, a bluetooth keyboard makes sense to my wife. And I would advise you against trying to change her mind on this. Just trust me -- it might not make sense to you, or me, but it makes sense to a good half of the population:-/
Er, no... almost every other (non-corrupt) country manages to have extremely accurate elections. Now, and in the past. Using such technologies as paper. Oh, and some of them are bigger than the US of A, and have more people.
Presumably ulimit can prevent it, and/etc/limits would enforce the ulimits. However, (with memories of windows), in order for users not to complain about why x) doesn't work, redhat etc. ship with no limits.
Oh, and eventually it does stop on fedora -- about 5 mins...
Your statement is mostly true, but most of the OSX developers have come from an OS9 background and they still usually do things in a 'single user is boss' kind of way.
To pick a random example, fink packages are essentially debian packages + a patch. Almost all debian packages can be installed without root (this being the 'unix way') but a great many fink packages accidentially lose this ability and require you to have root. Why? Because the programmer never thought you wouldn't.
Similarly, most shareware requires the administrator's password to install? Sure, occasionally you get a nice.dmg that can just be copied, but 90% of the time you need administrator. Why again? Because the programmer never thought the user doesn't have administrator. Try for a while taking your iMac, getting a friend to set the admin password without telling you, and seeing how little you can do with it.
So what am I trying to say with this far too long post? Basically that while the mac keeps expecting admin, exploits are going to be easy.
Just use gtkpod, and copy the music to and from the ipod using a convenient graphical interface. As for resetting the ipod if you've screwed it up with DRM, I find the following command works every time: dd if=ipod_firmware of=/dev/sda1. Not graphical yet, but perhaps in the next version of gtkpod?
You're kidding, right? There is a massive number of extra procedures and paperwork preformed soley to make future litigation fail. The doctors know there is no point in the procedure, but if they don't do it and the patient turns around and sues them, they don't have to struggle with the "but I didn't need to do that because it was obvious" excuse.
Closely related, have you had a look at what proportion of your medical bills is purely litigation insurance? Wouldn't you like 25% off all your medical bills. I'm sure the money you save could easily pay for some sort of backup medical insurance.
Now, your post said 'frivolous' litigation. So it could be that most of the litigation is 'non-frivolous'. Do you really believe that?
Disclaimer: I'm sure somebody could come up with an equally invalid fault in the oilmen argument.
Say we're talking about 15 elections. To be able to predict them accurately is a 1 in 2^15 chance or 1 in 32768. All you need to have is 32 thousand things going on and you're all but assured that one of them will be a perfect predictor.
It reminds me of a stock scam from a few years back. You mail out aprediction on some random stock to 10,000 people. Half you say it will rise, half you say it will fall. Repeat until you've been right 10 times in a row. Now contact the 10 people you were right for, and offer to sell them your method for $LOTS. How many people would turn down someone who was right ten times in a row.
Of course, like every other non-american, I'm desperately hoping Bush loses
Some people like the 3rd party candidates
on
Verified Voting
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· Score: 1
I think you'll find that all of the 3rd party candidates have a dedicated following that genuinely like their candidate.
However, part of appealing sufficiently to the masses means you lose the real loyalty that makes people really like you.
Until America changes its voting system from FPP to something decent, that won't change.
Re:Trying to answer the question that was asked...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 1
Answering your question is somewhat more tricky, since we don't all have immediate access to bulk purchase prices. However, look at the xbox. It is sold with the intention of making little to no money on the hardware and most certainly purchased in bulk. It costs $150 including retail profit.
Now, several of its specs are more than we need here, so presumably we could lower the price slightly. But I'd be surprised if you could get it below $140 including retail profit, or $120 excluding retail profit.
You'll find special deals to achieve this, but nothing else will come close. And you can bet those special deals have all sorts of terms and conditions that you don't want.
Just to prove the point, how many MBs do you know that are under $50? How many CPUs? I managed to find a new athlon 2000+ combo for $80, but even there I was having to get special deals (pcboost.com).
A search on pricewatch returned a duron 950 for under $100, but actually going to the website showed that 'targetpcinc.com' was out of the 950 and had replaced it with a duron 1200, raising the price to $107. Not only that, but the system had no ram and no HDD. Ram starts at $18, a HDD is $40. So I can barely get a machine for $17. And if you've ever tried installing linux with no floppy and no CD, you know how 'desirable' a CD reader is. That would bring the machine to $190. Throw in a keyboard and mouse and you should just avoid breaking $200. Oh, plus shipping and sales tax.
I accept that a huge OEM would be able to get better prices. But twice as good and I start smelling fish...
There is a lot of truth to this. But if you look at the list of things you're giving (sound, printer, ethernet, video, wireless) you'll notice they're getting increasingly 'modern'. Within a year you will likely find wireless works perfectly (it already does for many devices, though my atmel wlan requires a (GPLed) driver not included in the kernel).
But that's not to say your comment won't be applicable in a year, you'll just have to say 'bluetooth' instead of wireless, or whatever the hot new technology of 2005 is. My feeling is that for most people, linux will 'just work' first time now. This was less true two years ago, and it will be even more true in two years time.
I'd have to disagree with this one too. When you buy a piece of hardware for windows, the driver was written under incredible time pressure -- remember the difference between financial success and failure for a product is measured in weeks, so the driver just cannot be late.
By comparison, shortly after the device comes out a reverse-engineered driver will be available for linux. It will be clunky and hard to install, slower, more buggy, etc. Later versions will fix the bugs, then fix the efficiency, then fix the installation issues, then tie in with hardware autodetection. Soon enough, the linux drivers exceed the windows ones.
So, if you get your hardware the moment it is released to the public, you will probably find the windows drivers better. If you wait until things become affordable then you're probably going to find linux drivers at least as good.
That the sale of an xbox costs MSFT money is a popular myth among people who don't understand economics. Let me try and explain it simply:
Microsoft spent a lot of money developing the xbox. Microsoft also spent a lot on infrastructure, advertising, and other such 'fixed' costs. When you calculate the cost to MS of every xbox they sell, you amortise these fixed costs over all xboxes sold, along with the variable cost (the cost per unit). A naive conclusion from this is that when you buy an xbox, Microsoft loses money. If you instead compute the raw cost of producing an xbox to MS (i.e. just the variable cost), then you find it costs them less than you paid for it. Conclusion: Every time you buy an xbox, MSFT's coffers are increased.
How do you reconcile those two things? Pretty easily. MS makes money off the sale of their xbox hardware, but not enough to justify them developing the xbox. Some people buy xbox games, and these people make MSFT a lot of profit. Is this profit enough to justify the money they've blown bringing a product to market? Perhaps, or perhaps not, we'll see. But every time you buy an xbox, you know you're helping make Bill just that tiny bit richer.
In case you haven't got it yet, let me give you an analogy. Say you've got a business idea, your company: "Winc" is going to start selling bottled water for $50/bottle. You plan to spend $50M on advertising to convince people that they really want to buy your water - it is much more cool than the water evian sells, for instance. Now, anybody could tell you this is a stupid business plan, and it is going to lose money because hardly anybody will buy the water. But an accountant would describe it in terms of the profit (loss) per bottle sold. In this case, you might be loosing $10,000 for every bottle you sell. But if I walk into a shop and buy a bottle, you make almost $50 profit. Do you follow?
I trained my spam filter on bounces as well as regular messages. It got a little confused at first but soon got the hang of distinguishing real bounces from spam/virus bounces.
I installed it at the house of my 'friend' Susan... The camera is at her house, but the program is running at mine... It is for her security, in case she is burgled again.
Oh sure, MythTV has a lot going for it. And it is very easy to accidentially include addons like a big HDD or a DVD writer in the cost when comparing to a TiVo, which is hardly an accurate comparison.
But TiVo is available as a lifetime subscription for less than the cost of a mythtv box.
I don't think MythTV can be described as cheap. A VIA based MythTV box, using a Hauppauge 250 in an aesthetically acceptable case will set you back about $600. That's more than enough to pay for Tivo.
Of course, this is because certain component manufacturers are suffering from low demand, or are milking the market (you choose). For instance a case is $100 but you can buy a complete DVD player (including power supply) for less than that - and it will look better. Just throw out the inside and plug the VIA MB in... Similarly, the hauppauge with its ivy tuner costs more than the entire TiVo, despite the TiVo including an ivy tuner!
Recipe books are bought by several different groups of people, those seeking to enhance their coffee table are one of them. Another group is the cronically unconfident, who need to be told what they already know. A third group just likes dreaming of yummy things, this is the same market as travel books. A fourth group doesn't know anything about cooking and needs a book full of basic recipies. A fifth group already knows a lot about one cuisine but wants to see different techniques. A sixth group wants a stable background of recipe like a blank canvas that they can use to develop an idea from. A _seventh_ group is looking for a present for someone who likes to cook. Sadly, this last group is the largest.
Of these groups, the first, third, fourth and seventh will buy the same number of cookbooks as they did before. Of the other groups, the sixth group is as likely to increase their purchases as decrease them (since a reliable recipe book is an essential starting point). So, you will lose some sales to the second and fifth group.
And this is supposed to be an example of where it performs badly?
I've posted here since/. seems to prevent me replying to your post from last month; sorry to anyone else reading this, it has no relationship to the RIAA:-)
I tried your idea of making a stew so as to be able to prepare dinner quickly. I made a Massaman curry on monday night, and through the week it only took about twenty minutes on the other days to bring it to the boil, add cubed potato and cook up some rice to go with it.
Anyway, it worked pretty well. It was quite nice, and very quick. So thanks for the idea:)
Either this is a badly written troll, or you really need to drink your morning coffee before posting.
a) The parent was discussing LOCAL network connections, not remote.
b) X works perfectly on 10Mb/s -- try it sometime. Sure, I wouldn't want to run gimp or mplayer like that, but e.g. surfing the web is fine. X certainly doesn't need 100Mb/s, and even mplayer will run fine at that speed (though of course you're better to use mplayer's built in streaming and run it locally). There is no X app which needs more than 100Mb (can Doom III run on X? that might), your theory of requiring gigabit is just crazy.
c) NoMachine is free, or rather 99.5% of NoMachine is free (the libraries that do everything). Sure, a point-and-click app is available for cash but a point-and-click app is also freely available (using the same free libraries).
So if George Bush went to China, you'd expect the Chinese government to write his speech? Bush would almost certainly consult Chinese diplomats, but his speech would be written by his own team. Strangley, that doesn't seem to be what happened here, or perhaps it is exactly what happened?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Er, a bluetooth keyboard makes sense to my wife. And I would advise you against trying to change her mind on this. Just trust me -- it might not make sense to you, or me, but it makes sense to a good half of the population :-/
Sure, but you'd be better using google yourself.
Er, no... almost every other (non-corrupt) country manages to have extremely accurate elections. Now, and in the past. Using such technologies as paper. Oh, and some of them are bigger than the US of A, and have more people.
This exists. For outlook you can integrate popfile. For other things we're still a way off (perhaps 3 months?).
:)
:)
Here are some steps if you are too impatient
Download and install monkeyplexer.
Configure it to scan your mail dirs etc.
Write a cron job that calls it to scan your mail dirs every hour.
Otherwise, wait 3-6 months
Presumably ulimit can prevent it, and /etc/limits would enforce the ulimits. However, (with memories of windows), in order for users not to complain about why x) doesn't work, redhat etc. ship with no limits.
Oh, and eventually it does stop on fedora -- about 5 mins...
Right, I just tried it on ext3 and reiserfs. Neither even blinked.
:(){ :|:&};: :)
However, the person who posted
was onto something. That killed the machine I typed it at
Your statement is mostly true, but most of the OSX developers have come from an OS9 background and they still usually do things in a 'single user is boss' kind of way.
.dmg that can just be copied, but 90% of the time you need administrator. Why again? Because the programmer never thought the user doesn't have administrator. Try for a while taking your iMac, getting a friend to set the admin password without telling you, and seeing how little you can do with it.
To pick a random example, fink packages are essentially debian packages + a patch. Almost all debian packages can be installed without root (this being the 'unix way') but a great many fink packages accidentially lose this ability and require you to have root. Why? Because the programmer never thought you wouldn't.
Similarly, most shareware requires the administrator's password to install? Sure, occasionally you get a nice
So what am I trying to say with this far too long post? Basically that while the mac keeps expecting admin, exploits are going to be easy.
Just use gtkpod, and copy the music to and from the ipod using a convenient graphical interface. As for resetting the ipod if you've screwed it up with DRM, I find the following command works every time: dd if=ipod_firmware of=/dev/sda1. Not graphical yet, but perhaps in the next version of gtkpod?
You're kidding, right? There is a massive number of extra procedures and paperwork preformed soley to make future litigation fail. The doctors know there is no point in the procedure, but if they don't do it and the patient turns around and sues them, they don't have to struggle with the "but I didn't need to do that because it was obvious" excuse.
Closely related, have you had a look at what proportion of your medical bills is purely litigation insurance? Wouldn't you like 25% off all your medical bills. I'm sure the money you save could easily pay for some sort of backup medical insurance.
Now, your post said 'frivolous' litigation. So it could be that most of the litigation is 'non-frivolous'. Do you really believe that?
Disclaimer: I'm sure somebody could come up with an equally invalid fault in the oilmen argument.
Say we're talking about 15 elections. To be able to predict them accurately is a 1 in 2^15 chance or 1 in 32768. All you need to have is 32 thousand things going on and you're all but assured that one of them will be a perfect predictor.
It reminds me of a stock scam from a few years back. You mail out aprediction on some random stock to 10,000 people. Half you say it will rise, half you say it will fall. Repeat until you've been right 10 times in a row. Now contact the 10 people you were right for, and offer to sell them your method for $LOTS. How many people would turn down someone who was right ten times in a row.
Of course, like every other non-american, I'm desperately hoping Bush loses
I think you'll find that all of the 3rd party candidates have a dedicated following that genuinely like their candidate.
However, part of appealing sufficiently to the masses means you lose the real loyalty that makes people really like you.
Until America changes its voting system from FPP to something decent, that won't change.
Answering your question is somewhat more tricky, since we don't all have immediate access to bulk purchase prices. However, look at the xbox. It is sold with the intention of making little to no money on the hardware and most certainly purchased in bulk. It costs $150 including retail profit.
Now, several of its specs are more than we need here, so presumably we could lower the price slightly. But I'd be surprised if you could get it below $140 including retail profit, or $120 excluding retail profit.
You'll find special deals to achieve this, but nothing else will come close. And you can bet those special deals have all sorts of terms and conditions that you don't want.
Just to prove the point, how many MBs do you know that are under $50? How many CPUs? I managed to find a new athlon 2000+ combo for $80, but even there I was having to get special deals (pcboost.com).
A search on pricewatch returned a duron 950 for under $100, but actually going to the website showed that 'targetpcinc.com' was out of the 950 and had replaced it with a duron 1200, raising the price to $107. Not only that, but the system had no ram and no HDD. Ram starts at $18, a HDD is $40. So I can barely get a machine for $17. And if you've ever tried installing linux with no floppy and no CD, you know how 'desirable' a CD reader is. That would bring the machine to $190. Throw in a keyboard and mouse and you should just avoid breaking $200. Oh, plus shipping and sales tax.
I accept that a huge OEM would be able to get better prices. But twice as good and I start smelling fish...
There is a lot of truth to this. But if you look at the list of things you're giving (sound, printer, ethernet, video, wireless) you'll notice they're getting increasingly 'modern'. Within a year you will likely find wireless works perfectly (it already does for many devices, though my atmel wlan requires a (GPLed) driver not included in the kernel).
But that's not to say your comment won't be applicable in a year, you'll just have to say 'bluetooth' instead of wireless, or whatever the hot new technology of 2005 is. My feeling is that for most people, linux will 'just work' first time now. This was less true two years ago, and it will be even more true in two years time.
I'd have to disagree with this one too. When you buy a piece of hardware for windows, the driver was written under incredible time pressure -- remember the difference between financial success and failure for a product is measured in weeks, so the driver just cannot be late.
By comparison, shortly after the device comes out a reverse-engineered driver will be available for linux. It will be clunky and hard to install, slower, more buggy, etc. Later versions will fix the bugs, then fix the efficiency, then fix the installation issues, then tie in with hardware autodetection. Soon enough, the linux drivers exceed the windows ones.
So, if you get your hardware the moment it is released to the public, you will probably find the windows drivers better. If you wait until things become affordable then you're probably going to find linux drivers at least as good.
Using the latest reverse-engineered nforce drivers (i.e. not the nvidia ones) I find nforce much more stable than Via ever was. YMMV, as always.
That the sale of an xbox costs MSFT money is a popular myth among people who don't understand economics. Let me try and explain it simply:
Microsoft spent a lot of money developing the xbox. Microsoft also spent a lot on infrastructure, advertising, and other such 'fixed' costs. When you calculate the cost to MS of every xbox they sell, you amortise these fixed costs over all xboxes sold, along with the variable cost (the cost per unit). A naive conclusion from this is that when you buy an xbox, Microsoft loses money. If you instead compute the raw cost of producing an xbox to MS (i.e. just the variable cost), then you find it costs them less than you paid for it. Conclusion: Every time you buy an xbox, MSFT's coffers are increased.
How do you reconcile those two things? Pretty easily. MS makes money off the sale of their xbox hardware, but not enough to justify them developing the xbox. Some people buy xbox games, and these people make MSFT a lot of profit. Is this profit enough to justify the money they've blown bringing a product to market? Perhaps, or perhaps not, we'll see. But every time you buy an xbox, you know you're helping make Bill just that tiny bit richer.
In case you haven't got it yet, let me give you an analogy. Say you've got a business idea, your company: "Winc" is going to start selling bottled water for $50/bottle. You plan to spend $50M on advertising to convince people that they really want to buy your water - it is much more cool than the water evian sells, for instance. Now, anybody could tell you this is a stupid business plan, and it is going to lose money because hardly anybody will buy the water. But an accountant would describe it in terms of the profit (loss) per bottle sold. In this case, you might be loosing $10,000 for every bottle you sell. But if I walk into a shop and buy a bottle, you make almost $50 profit. Do you follow?
I trained my spam filter on bounces as well as regular messages. It got a little confused at first but soon got the hang of distinguishing real bounces from spam/virus bounces.
From the article:
I installed it at the house of my 'friend' Susan...
The camera is at her house, but the program is running at mine...
It is for her security, in case she is burgled again.
Yeah, Right.
Oh sure, MythTV has a lot going for it. And it is very easy to accidentially include addons like a big HDD or a DVD writer in the cost when comparing to a TiVo, which is hardly an accurate comparison.
But TiVo is available as a lifetime subscription for less than the cost of a mythtv box.
I don't think MythTV can be described as cheap. A VIA based MythTV box, using a Hauppauge 250 in an aesthetically acceptable case will set you back about $600. That's more than enough to pay for Tivo.
Of course, this is because certain component manufacturers are suffering from low demand, or are milking the market (you choose). For instance a case is $100 but you can buy a complete DVD player (including power supply) for less than that - and it will look better. Just throw out the inside and plug the VIA MB in... Similarly, the hauppauge with its ivy tuner costs more than the entire TiVo, despite the TiVo including an ivy tuner!
Recipe books are bought by several different groups of people, those seeking to enhance their coffee table are one of them. Another group is the cronically unconfident, who need to be told what they already know. A third group just likes dreaming of yummy things, this is the same market as travel books. A fourth group doesn't know anything about cooking and needs a book full of basic recipies. A fifth group already knows a lot about one cuisine but wants to see different techniques. A sixth group wants a stable background of recipe like a blank canvas that they can use to develop an idea from. A _seventh_ group is looking for a present for someone who likes to cook. Sadly, this last group is the largest.
Of these groups, the first, third, fourth and seventh will buy the same number of cookbooks as they did before. Of the other groups, the sixth group is as likely to increase their purchases as decrease them (since a reliable recipe book is an essential starting point). So, you will lose some sales to the second and fifth group.
And this is supposed to be an example of where it performs badly?
Hiya kfg,
/. seems to prevent me replying to your post from last month; sorry to anyone else reading this, it has no relationship to the RIAA :-)
:)
I've posted here since
I tried your idea of making a stew so as to be able to prepare dinner quickly. I made a Massaman curry on monday night, and through the week it only took about twenty minutes on the other days to bring it to the boil, add cubed potato and cook up some rice to go with it.
Anyway, it worked pretty well. It was quite nice, and very quick. So thanks for the idea
Corrin
Either this is a badly written troll, or you really need to drink your morning coffee before posting.
a) The parent was discussing LOCAL network connections, not remote.
b) X works perfectly on 10Mb/s -- try it sometime. Sure, I wouldn't want to run gimp or mplayer like that, but e.g. surfing the web is fine. X certainly doesn't need 100Mb/s, and even mplayer will run fine at that speed (though of course you're better to use mplayer's built in streaming and run it locally). There is no X app which needs more than 100Mb (can Doom III run on X? that might), your theory of requiring gigabit is just crazy.
c) NoMachine is free, or rather 99.5% of NoMachine is free (the libraries that do everything). Sure, a point-and-click app is available for cash but a point-and-click app is also freely available (using the same free libraries).
So if George Bush went to China, you'd expect the Chinese government to write his speech? Bush would almost certainly consult Chinese diplomats, but his speech would be written by his own team. Strangley, that doesn't seem to be what happened here, or perhaps it is exactly what happened? ;-)