That's really all I want to know. Why? The screen shot doesn't show me any compelling reason to want a 3d desktop and I've never seen any 3d desktop's that offer anything that will help me to increase my productivity.
So again my question is, why? Why is this a good idea?
At first I thought that's what this article was about and I wildly clicked on the read more link to see just how I can stop evolution from taking 10 seconds to display a new message after I click on the message...
Imagine my disapointment when I started reading and actually found they mean the real evolution and not the ponderously slow email program...
The classic novice user Web setup is to have Windows IE maximized with the sidebar open
Does _anyone_ use the sidebar? I find it's the first thing I shut off as it eats up space and serves no real useful purpose. If a novice user has it open I imagine it's only because they don't know how to turn it off.
First they hire "Garth Brooks" as their spokesman and now they target bloggers... I think they are showing their total lack of "clue" when it comes to marketing. Why not mix the two and go after redneck bloggers who dig bad country music?
Or maybe they should think about picking up Britney Spears now that Pepsi has dropped her for Shakira...
You may be taking him too literally. Basically he talks like a a great big marketing guru, or a politician even. Bill probably has a pretty good understanding of what most business's need today but it's his job to try to sell software which means creating needs or making people think they need something they haven't got.
When Bill talks it's all marketing and it's all about selling Microsoft products.
Since when are laywers a beacon for what a fair punishment should be? I thought a laywers job was to understand the law and to represent his/her client, not decide what's fair or not fair regarding the law.
Quite frankly given the number of laywers who do their best to circumvent the true spirit of the law I don't want them making any public statements on my behalf...
This could be viewed as good thing for any aspiring coders out there who want to take over the project. I mean this pretty much falls in line with the whole open source concept that these projects can never really die.
If you're a top flight coder who is looking to make a name for yourself then this could be your big opportunity.
Since when do they sell PC's/laptops???? I guess I'm out of the loop here because I thought they were strictly a linux distro aimed at traditional Windows users. Who makes the hardware here?
It is pretty cheap though, I would think it would be easy to buy one and wipe the drive and install RedHat or FreeBSD on it.
Could there be anything more silly than worrying about the movie representation of a software developer?
Jesus, why are some developers so delusional that they envision themselves as these important cool people that the rest of the world finds so interesting. They try way toooo hard to be "different" and think that shooting nerf guns in the office makes them "cool."
I can't help but think all this is just one giant mind fuck. The IT industry is such a volatile industry that seems to love to be lead around by the nose and is greatly influenced by the flavour of the month.
Why not try to take a look at some of the long time methods used by engineering industries to see how they go about designing bridges and cars and stuff like? Do you think that GM people stand around and talk about Extreme Engineering for their engineers who design high tech engines?
After you lose your job and get kicked out of your home/apt you can move to an abandoned airfield and live in a little shanty like the old Hoovervilles back in the depression era.
I'm printing out all the local maps right now. Thanks slashdot!!!
Game reviews are so subjective I don't know why anyone would put any stock in them.
I could write up a review of the latest version of nethack describing how intense it is and how it sucks you right into the game and eats up hours of your life which would be a bunch of blather to someone who only enjoys FP shooters. Of course that's an exageration to prove my point but you get the idea.
I would rather see faster hard drives with more throughput and faster memory and faster network connections, etc. It's too bad we haven't seen Moore's law for hard drive I/O. For the common PC person these are most likely the bottlenecks not the chips themselves.
Of course there isn't as much glory in making a hard drive when compared with a CPU with a cool name.
But now that's it 2003 and you can get FREE (as in mp3) *nix pretty why would this or getting a shell account for that matter, even be relevant? I can understand why trying to get a shell account was of value in 1990 but today when you can run *nix at home for FREE I don't get it.
So is Solaris and HP-UX and IRIX, although Solaris will still be around for a while.
Who do you think Linux has been taking market share away from? It hasn't been Windows as much as the hard core *nix's. The problem is that it doesn't pay IBM or Sun or HP to maintain their own version of *nix if they aren't able to sell enough service contracts and generate enough money to keep the OS moving forward. Thus they die and move to using Linux where they don'thave to invest as much money into research and dev because much of that is done for free.
This is actually the rightful conclusion for *nix as all the splintering that happened is now going to un-happen and migrate to Linux.
Ah Ha, my delusional friend, the burden of proof is upon you as you are the one making claims and I was simply pointing out your lack of logic and how you have based your faulty conclusions upon false positives.
Using slashdot as a means for a proof is just silly when you consider that slashdot caters to a very small percentage of people on the planet (althogh most slashdotters seem to think otherwise) who tend to have strong biases one way or the other (Mac zealots, Linux zealots, Windows zealots, Amiga zealots, etc.) In fact my whole point relates directly to debunking the person who has a 5 year old Mac that's still running so they think that that means that Macs are the best value or "Cheaper in the long run" or a better long term value proposition or whatever. I pointed out how this means nothing and gave similar anecdotal evidence from my experience showing old PC's that were much cheaper that are still servicable. Yet you don't seem to think that has any bearing on the discusion....
The fact that my evidence is anecdotal, which I readily admit, IS THE WHOLE BASIS FOR MY POINT. You provide anecdotal evidence and I provide anecdotal evidence yet you claim that yours has more value because it's yours???? That's basically your argument as I understand it.
Now to address a few of your latest points:
to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed
I need you to define what you mean by "utility" here. As I understand it a computer is a tool and I can install software on that tool to accomplish a certain goal(s). I'm not sure how an old slower Mac would offer me more utility than an old slow PC or a cheap new blazing PC. I need a little help with that.
To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world
Then you did miss my point. My RS/6000 has a PPC 233 Mhz chip and is actually a very functional box. I could use it as my main computer if I had to. The reason I wouldn't is simply because I can buy a PC for less than a grand that would quite simply blow the doors off that old box, thusly making me much more productive and offering me much more utility.
The premise that a Mac has some kind of magic associated with it that would keep it modern as it grows old versus that of an aging PC is severely lacking in logic.
There is also no word in yet if it will cause cancer or format your hard drive...
There is also no word in yet if it will blast your brain with secret radio waves that will make you submit to secret commands from the government but it's a good idea to always wear your tin-foil hat anyways.
But is this really a surprise anymore? I think we've gotten beyond the marketing hype that exploded when the dot com bubble burst and people are simply looking for the best value proposition. We truly have seen a major paradigm shift over the past few years for many grassroots companies.
Sadly it's the fortune 500 corporate america that has yet to embrace common sense and as they still feel the need to live by the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset which some see as a way to survive. Large corporations have very differnt forces driving them.
Why would you want to go through the pain the the arse of loading up a P2P client, then going through the search process, then clicking download.. oh wait, it's queued up, okay I'll go try some other people, okay, click on download, oh wait, that person logged off, okay, OH IT'S COMING DOWN NOW!!! Oh wait, the guy it's coming down from is also allowing 35 other downloads and I'm getting it at.0005K which should complete sometime in August. Okay I'm getting another one, oh wait, that's an older vesion... oh crap... etc
Really. I can go to the distribitors website and click on "download" and save myself all the trouble.
I hope you understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific proof becasue you don't seem to based upon your post.
I happen to work for a software company and I am looking at an old Pentiom 133 that I use for a print server which has to be from 97-98. This thing is as generic as you can get for a cheap PC from that era and it runs 24/7 with only occasional reboots. (NT4) Does that mean that I go around telling people how great PowerSpec PC's are and how they're better than Macs because they cost 1/3 of what a new Mac cost and run for 5-6 years with no maintainence???? No, of course not.
I deal with clients (government) who are still running old 486's with DOS on them. I see lots of old pentiums with Win 95 on them. Does that mean I run around telling everone how great 486's were? No, of course not. Christ, I still have a commodore 64 that was given to me in 1984 that boots up so by your method of proof it was the best computer evar.
Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? Is any of this making sense to you?
Slashdot Mirror
That's really all I want to know. Why? The screen shot doesn't show me any compelling reason to want a 3d desktop and I've never seen any 3d desktop's that offer anything that will help me to increase my productivity.
So again my question is, why? Why is this a good idea?
At first I thought that's what this article was about and I wildly clicked on the read more link to see just how I can stop evolution from taking 10 seconds to display a new message after I click on the message...
Imagine my disapointment when I started reading and actually found they mean the real evolution and not the ponderously slow email program...
Does _anyone_ use the sidebar? I find it's the first thing I shut off as it eats up space and serves no real useful purpose. If a novice user has it open I imagine it's only because they don't know how to turn it off.
First they hire "Garth Brooks" as their spokesman and now they target bloggers... I think they are showing their total lack of "clue" when it comes to marketing. Why not mix the two and go after redneck bloggers who dig bad country music?
Or maybe they should think about picking up Britney Spears now that Pepsi has dropped her for Shakira...
You may be taking him too literally. Basically he talks like a a great big marketing guru, or a politician even. Bill probably has a pretty good understanding of what most business's need today but it's his job to try to sell software which means creating needs or making people think they need something they haven't got.
When Bill talks it's all marketing and it's all about selling Microsoft products.
Quite frankly given the number of laywers who do their best to circumvent the true spirit of the law I don't want them making any public statements on my behalf...
If you're a top flight coder who is looking to make a name for yourself then this could be your big opportunity.
It is pretty cheap though, I would think it would be easy to buy one and wipe the drive and install RedHat or FreeBSD on it.
One can't deny that NT was "based" on VMS.
In fact I recall reading somehere that MS was initially promoting NT as VMS on the desktop, or something along those lines.
Could there be anything more silly than worrying about the movie representation of a software developer?
Jesus, why are some developers so delusional that they envision themselves as these important cool people that the rest of the world finds so interesting. They try way toooo hard to be "different" and think that shooting nerf guns in the office makes them "cool."
Damn, this one really takes the cake.
I'll bet ol Dave is just thrilled to finally be interacting with all his fans here on slashdot...
I can't help but think all this is just one giant mind fuck. The IT industry is such a volatile industry that seems to love to be lead around by the nose and is greatly influenced by the flavour of the month.
Why not try to take a look at some of the long time methods used by engineering industries to see how they go about designing bridges and cars and stuff like? Do you think that GM people stand around and talk about Extreme Engineering for their engineers who design high tech engines?
After you lose your job and get kicked out of your home/apt you can move to an abandoned airfield and live in a little shanty like the old Hoovervilles back in the depression era.
I'm printing out all the local maps right now. Thanks slashdot!!!
You may be right but you need the bandwith to be there and it's got to be cheap enough for the average USian teen to be able to afford it.
The cell phones became killer in the US when you could get one for next to nothing with 300 "FREE" minutes for $29 clams per month.
I'm already seeing the "Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]" in my logs.
I suspect there will be much fun poked at this in the Microsoft lunch rooms and around the water coolers.
Looks good but is it the killer app that the industry is looking for to drive sales for new devices?
With the economy still in the crapper it's gonna take a real killer "gotta have" device to make people shell out some dough right now
Game reviews are so subjective I don't know why anyone would put any stock in them.
I could write up a review of the latest version of nethack describing how intense it is and how it sucks you right into the game and eats up hours of your life which would be a bunch of blather to someone who only enjoys FP shooters. Of course that's an exageration to prove my point but you get the idea.
I would rather see faster hard drives with more throughput and faster memory and faster network connections, etc. It's too bad we haven't seen Moore's law for hard drive I/O. For the common PC person these are most likely the bottlenecks not the chips themselves.
Of course there isn't as much glory in making a hard drive when compared with a CPU with a cool name.
But now that's it 2003 and you can get FREE (as in mp3) *nix pretty why would this or getting a shell account for that matter, even be relevant? I can understand why trying to get a shell account was of value in 1990 but today when you can run *nix at home for FREE I don't get it.
Who do you think Linux has been taking market share away from? It hasn't been Windows as much as the hard core *nix's. The problem is that it doesn't pay IBM or Sun or HP to maintain their own version of *nix if they aren't able to sell enough service contracts and generate enough money to keep the OS moving forward. Thus they die and move to using Linux where they don'thave to invest as much money into research and dev because much of that is done for free.
This is actually the rightful conclusion for *nix as all the splintering that happened is now going to un-happen and migrate to Linux.
Makes sense to me.
Using slashdot as a means for a proof is just silly when you consider that slashdot caters to a very small percentage of people on the planet (althogh most slashdotters seem to think otherwise) who tend to have strong biases one way or the other (Mac zealots, Linux zealots, Windows zealots, Amiga zealots, etc.) In fact my whole point relates directly to debunking the person who has a 5 year old Mac that's still running so they think that that means that Macs are the best value or "Cheaper in the long run" or a better long term value proposition or whatever. I pointed out how this means nothing and gave similar anecdotal evidence from my experience showing old PC's that were much cheaper that are still servicable. Yet you don't seem to think that has any bearing on the discusion....
The fact that my evidence is anecdotal, which I readily admit, IS THE WHOLE BASIS FOR MY POINT. You provide anecdotal evidence and I provide anecdotal evidence yet you claim that yours has more value because it's yours???? That's basically your argument as I understand it.
Now to address a few of your latest points:
to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed
I need you to define what you mean by "utility" here. As I understand it a computer is a tool and I can install software on that tool to accomplish a certain goal(s). I'm not sure how an old slower Mac would offer me more utility than an old slow PC or a cheap new blazing PC. I need a little help with that.
To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world
Then you did miss my point. My RS/6000 has a PPC 233 Mhz chip and is actually a very functional box. I could use it as my main computer if I had to. The reason I wouldn't is simply because I can buy a PC for less than a grand that would quite simply blow the doors off that old box, thusly making me much more productive and offering me much more utility.
The premise that a Mac has some kind of magic associated with it that would keep it modern as it grows old versus that of an aging PC is severely lacking in logic.
There is also no word in yet if it will blast your brain with secret radio waves that will make you submit to secret commands from the government but it's a good idea to always wear your tin-foil hat anyways.
Sheesh...
Sadly it's the fortune 500 corporate america that has yet to embrace common sense and as they still feel the need to live by the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset which some see as a way to survive. Large corporations have very differnt forces driving them.
Really. I can go to the distribitors website and click on "download" and save myself all the trouble.
I happen to work for a software company and I am looking at an old Pentiom 133 that I use for a print server which has to be from 97-98. This thing is as generic as you can get for a cheap PC from that era and it runs 24/7 with only occasional reboots. (NT4) Does that mean that I go around telling people how great PowerSpec PC's are and how they're better than Macs because they cost 1/3 of what a new Mac cost and run for 5-6 years with no maintainence???? No, of course not.
I deal with clients (government) who are still running old 486's with DOS on them. I see lots of old pentiums with Win 95 on them. Does that mean I run around telling everone how great 486's were? No, of course not. Christ, I still have a commodore 64 that was given to me in 1984 that boots up so by your method of proof it was the best computer evar.
Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? Is any of this making sense to you?