Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ? Is there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it, I am sure their lawyers are or would be as agressive about patents and infringements as Intel) ? Surely it can't be just about performance - Transmeta lacks sorely, and I cannot imagine the day when Slashdot posts an article crowing with glee about how the P8 trounces the AMDXP6400 or whatever.
Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.
I gotta love how Linux zealots downplay the difficulty in switching users to Linux but then jump on top of Microsoft when they change their UI - as if that made the abhorrent UIs currently available on Linux somehow even approximately as useable as (the still crappy) Windows UI.
Just as well. I'll wait for Civ III Gold Multiplayer, and dump another fifty bucks to them.
Good call, it didn't occur to me that this omission was probably just a clever marketing ploy. (Do I recall that they did the same thing with Civ II ??) Since with this knowledge I am now forewarned, I will be holding off buying Civ III until the inevitable multilpayer release.
The review on Adrenaline Vault indicates that there is no multiplayer option. If this is true I won't be buying the game. These days multiplayer play is an absolute necessity.
The presumption that forcing rental places to pay the full $55 will make rental prices go through the roof is, as presented, flawed. It assumes that the added cost of the DVDs will be such that the rental companies MUST charge significantly more to make up the difference. I expect that the cost of media is actually very small relative to the overhead of paying rent and staffing the store, so even a doubling of media price should not mean a doubling of rental prices. It assumes that rental places are forced to use the cheaper, non-rental DVDs because otherwise they would not make any money at all - i.e., that the margins on the rental business are razor sharp and depend critically on the price of the DVD. But a possibility is that these rental places are just looking to save every buck they can, and that they would still make a comfortable (albeit smaller) margin renting out $55 CDs.
Ultimately the price of rentals will NOT be determined solely by the cost of the media to the renting company. It will be determined by the market forces of supply and demand. The price will largely be determined by what price consumers are willing to pay. Given that DVDs are relatively inexpensive now (5-6 times the price of a 2-day rental in Canada), I think it is clear that the maximum price for (say) a 2-day DVD rental is clearly bounded and not much more than what those prices are now, and hence it seems unlikely DVD rental prices would ever go "through the roof".
Every evening, after the lights have been turned off and everyone has been put to sleep, I go to my terminal in my dusty attic. I log on to Slashdot and through bleary eyes I could swear I see stories that I thought had died long ago. I read further, and find that others also seem to have believed these phantom topics to be long dead, but usually within a few weeks, the stories are mysteriously back again, chasing me to my nightmares.
We should note that the referred to article presented only a synopsis of her argument. Claims here, for instance, that the inherent cheapness of the digital format should mean *more* photos are kept depends on the assumption that photographers do keep every image they shoot, as they almost have to if shooting on film. But as anyone who has ever owned a digital camera knows, one of the great beauties of the digital camera is the ability to discard photos that aren't quite right for whatever reason - for the appliaction I use them for, this is the entire raison d'etre of the digital camera.
And sure, it is possible to archive every single photo you take on CD, but if you're taking even as few as 20 rolls of film every day on a high-MP digital camera, I would suggest the time it takes to archive these all on CDs would be prohibitive - moreso if you imagine these people are in the field with no ready access to power.
The viewpoint I think is most worth considering here is not the knee-jerk "you are luddite" reactions, but well-considered findings resulting from empirical study of both professional photojournalists and casual home-use photographers who use digital cameras and film. How do they change their behavior when working with one medium or another ? How many photos actually end up getting archived of each type of medium ? Do some types of digital photos tend to get discarded in some non-random fashion ?
Since this woman is an established photographer and has written a dissertation, I am prepared to assume she has considered these issues in her thesis, and the source article suggests she has done the sort of empirial work needed to render a meaningful opinion. I think it is a safe bet to assume most of the Slashdot readers here have not done this work.
Ignoring the most enthusiastic 10% of computer world makes sense?
There is no way anything close to '10% of [the] computer world' runs Linux. The most optimistic estimates of Linux's share relate to server installations, and often to websites run under Linux (the count of which can vastly exceed the number of actual machines running Linux). Since the vast majority of Linux machines are actually installed in offices/ISPs/server farms, this hardly seems like a market worth targeting by a gaming company. Maybe one day it will be, but it sure does not make sense now.
And just because Linux users are 'enthusiastic' does not mean they are any more likely to buy a game, any more than enthusiastic Solaris users are going to be more likely to buy a game that happens to run on Solaris. The few remaining Amiga users, for instance, are evidently very enthusiastic, but it would be a very poor business plan indeed that proposed catering to this enthusiastic market.
Linux will never run "windows apps better than windows" because Windows is a moving target. The day WINE or whatever comes close to really threatening Windows is the day Microsoft will make just enough changes to *something* that will set screw the emulation up *just enough* as to be unusable.
As someone else has pointed out, IBM tried the exact same route with OS/2, which did run Windows better than Windows, with predictable results. The problem was Windows kept 'evolving' and many of the later (not much later, at that) Windows apps just did not work. For the larger purposes of Linux evangelizing, Windows emulation is worthless if it is not 100%, because nist people are just going to be PO'ed at anything less.
Uh, what exactly does converting to an OODBMS and "Java-based solutions" have to do with converting from (or to) a "UNIX environment" ? What does moving "the operation over to a Linux system" mean in the context of abandoning Java and/or OODBMS ? How does an "OO architecture" preclude or relate to using or not using Linux ? Moderators, in case you don't understand, the answer is that running a Linux or Unix system has nothing to do with whether or not use either OODBMSes OR Java - because both run on Linux/Unix, so the original post makes no sense at all.
Methinks from the above (and your handle) that your post is a joke aimed at highlighting the moderator's ineptness. Shame on the moderator for letting it through - evidence enough that all you need to do be moderated up is throw in enough buzzwords to confuse the moderators (who don't really know much about the issues anyways).
Since I thought the problem originally specified usage of 8 TB/day, stored indefinitely, I can't really see how this solution could work, as you would quickly overrun capacity, and I suppose buying new machines every couple of days is not an option.
they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'"
What does this mean ? Is he comparing the "bad old days" with supposed "good recent days", the latter when every piece of information can be accessed by a single program ? Schlepping up numbers or words on a webpage does not constitute real 'access' any more than does providing printouts or plain text files - you still need a program (or human) to parse the output, and this is usually trivial compared to the work involved in using that information.
And what does this have to do anyways with MS trying to block access to websites when using anything but Explorer ? This is an attempt to make ALL their information accessible by a SINGLE program, and NOT an attempt to make every piece of information accessible by a DIFFERENT program.
We owe him a debt of gratitude for inventing the web but as far as I am concerned his invention does not make Berners-Lee's opinions on these subjects any more or less valuable than any other reasonably astute person, and his opinions are even less valuable to me when they range to social commentary. Most of his writings I have found to be incoherent or self-contradictory.
Slashdot-editor comments aside, certainly NOT ALL 'real' development requires access to the registry, just as NOT ALL 'real' (say) Linux development requires root access or any number of other privileges commonly denied users. For instance, most developers don't have permission to run ifconfig; but how many of them really need it ? Restricting access to the registry makes perfect sense in exactly the same sense that not everyone needs to be in group wheel.
I wonder how Slashdot's brass would react if somebody paid the measly subscription fee, then wrote a spider to go suck up the content and redistribute it verbatim on their own site - with no royalties being paid, of course. I would see this as no different than the ripping of songs from albums and their subsequent royalty-free redistribution. How would they reconcile this with the "information wants to be free", fair-use, and anti-RIAA/MPAA party lines that get run up the flagpole so often ?
Of course, the beauty would be if the code used Slashcode and the developers used Sourceforge...
How is this newsworthy ?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 2
Sorry, but I just cannot see how the distribution media really is newsworthy. Who cares ? At best it saves an admin a few CD changes, but as most people probably realize a standard install of the average distro only needs the first (sometimes the second) CD; especially if you are installing a server without all the application junk. More advanced users who have to install a bunch of boxes are almost certainly doing unattended network installs, and these are the people who would most benefit from saving a few media changes - except they don't have to change any media anyways ! Finally, I don't know what sort of servers most people find themselves administering but I can't think of any at our company that feature DVD drives.
Just don't ask for a replacement for "naked clippy".;-)
I just tried this and - easter eggs of easter eggs - got an 800x600 JPEG of Melinda French/Gates on her wedding night. She was reading "Visual Basic for Dummies".
I have long been unable to login to Hotmail (after trying to login I never get a page returned) on various Linux boxes running NS 4.7, whereas I can login fine from my NT box right beside it. I have always been working under the tacit assumption that MS was either intentionally not replying to an 'unpreferred' browser, or was generating HTML that would somehow trip up NS on my platform.
Anyone else have problems accessing Hotmail with Netscape on Linux
The original article indicated that the hinges have broke several times within 2 years. If the warranty is for only 1 year, as I suppose, then I don't think Dell has any obligation to the poster. If, however, the defects occurred before the warranty expired, and if they were repaired, then some companies will extend the warranty period.
For instance, I had an old Thinkpad 560 laptop. Loved it, but the case cracked a little bit while under warranty. No problem, just called IBM. They sent a prepaid mailer to my office, I stuck the thing in and had a fixed machine a few weeks later, all done under warranty. I was further informed that whenever IBM services a machine they extend whatever warranty period remains by another 3 months. Anyways, I had a couple of other problems in it while still under warranty and IBM never gave me a problem - always fixing it with little hassle to me, and always extending the warranty period a little bit more.
Of course, once my computer broke outside of the warranty period, they wouldn't fix it under warranty, but as far as I was concerned their obligation to me was 100% discharged.
Any OS based on the desktops-dont-need-security idea, with a 0-security setting, must be forgotten and I don't see how people seriously consider using them seriously.
While I am not agreeing with your point at all, your argument is absolutely irrelevant to the deaths of the three OSes mentioned.
While it is cool that you can charge via a firewire cable, anyone know whether this is the *only* way to charge it ? Because if you can only charge it by firewire then it would seem you're obligated to drag around a computer (with firewire, no less) just to charge the thing. I can imagine being on a road trip in a hotel and I just want to listen to music, I don't have (or don't want to unpack) my computer just to recharge. The real possibilities for this thing lie in being able to *un*tether yourself from a computer.
The answer to the question "In this climate of increasing security consciousness, how far can vigilance go before it becomes an invasion of our rights? " is, only so far as to upset a large number of their employees enough that they quit and cannot be replaced by employees who would welcome a more secure environment to work in. People are often told to "vote with their pocketbooks", and I would say that in essence the same advice applies here as well.
Learning Emacs is a big investment, and whether it makes you more productive or not, you won't feel like abandoning it after all that.
This is a great point. There is a well-established finding in social psychology that people who have invested more or are made to believe they have invested more in something find that something to be more valuable. The layman's interpretation is that people need to resolve the fact that they invested a lot in something with the value of that investment, and since the investment is known and immutable, the only way to resolve the discrepancy is to conclude the result of the investment must have been "worth it". After all, people would feel pretty foolish if they invested all that time learning *every* intricacy of (say) Emacs, and Lisp, only to conclude (say) they were nearly as functional in vi or notepad.
I would argue it is fair to say that anyone who takes the time to learn Emacs or vi has invested a considerable amount of time in either program. So I sometimes wonder whether the religious fervor people show for Emacs or vi (or, for that matter, Linux/*BSD, Mysql, Oracle, Perl, etc.) is due more to this psychological phenomenon than to the actual merits of the target of said fervor.
yeah i would love to see AOL move to a smaller, lithe, tightly coded browser that would spring up and start 'a parsing
Surely you are not talking about Mozilla here, are you ? On every machine I have tried running Mozilla on, it runs like a pig that has had two of its legs broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I know have the hype comes from the readership here, but I just keep wondering why AMD and a few other companies like Transmeta get covered here so lovingly. Is it because Slashdot readers don't like frontrunners ? Is there something inherently open-source-dogma-friendly about the corporate philosophies about AMD and Transmeta (though I doubt it, I am sure their lawyers are or would be as agressive about patents and infringements as Intel) ? Surely it can't be just about performance - Transmeta lacks sorely, and I cannot imagine the day when Slashdot posts an article crowing with glee about how the P8 trounces the AMDXP6400 or whatever.
Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.
I gotta love how Linux zealots downplay the difficulty in switching users to Linux but then jump on top of Microsoft when they change their UI - as if that made the abhorrent UIs currently available on Linux somehow even approximately as useable as (the still crappy) Windows UI.
Anybody else find it funny that Taco didn't decide to make the title "InfoWorld says Win2k is much faster than WinXP" ??
Just as well. I'll wait for Civ III Gold Multiplayer, and dump another fifty bucks to them.
Good call, it didn't occur to me that this omission was probably just a clever marketing ploy. (Do I recall that they did the same thing with Civ II ??) Since with this knowledge I am now forewarned, I will be holding off buying Civ III until the inevitable multilpayer release.
The review on Adrenaline Vault indicates that there is no multiplayer option. If this is true I won't be buying the game. These days multiplayer play is an absolute necessity.
The presumption that forcing rental places to pay the full $55 will make rental prices go through the roof is, as presented, flawed. It assumes that the added cost of the DVDs will be such that the rental companies MUST charge significantly more to make up the difference. I expect that the cost of media is actually very small relative to the overhead of paying rent and staffing the store, so even a doubling of media price should not mean a doubling of rental prices. It assumes that rental places are forced to use the cheaper, non-rental DVDs because otherwise they would not make any money at all - i.e., that the margins on the rental business are razor sharp and depend critically on the price of the DVD. But a possibility is that these rental places are just looking to save every buck they can, and that they would still make a comfortable (albeit smaller) margin renting out $55 CDs.
Ultimately the price of rentals will NOT be determined solely by the cost of the media to the renting company. It will be determined by the market forces of supply and demand. The price will largely be determined by what price consumers are willing to pay. Given that DVDs are relatively inexpensive now (5-6 times the price of a 2-day rental in Canada), I think it is clear that the maximum price for (say) a 2-day DVD rental is clearly bounded and not much more than what those prices are now, and hence it seems unlikely DVD rental prices would ever go "through the roof".
Next thing you know the British government is going to ban dental work. Ooops, "The Big Book of British Smiles" provides evidence they already have...
Every evening, after the lights have been turned off and everyone has been put to sleep, I go to my terminal in my dusty attic. I log on to Slashdot and through bleary eyes I could swear I see stories that I thought had died long ago. I read further, and find that others also seem to have believed these phantom topics to be long dead, but usually within a few weeks, the stories are mysteriously back again, chasing me to my nightmares.
We should note that the referred to article presented only a synopsis of her argument. Claims here, for instance, that the inherent cheapness of the digital format should mean *more* photos are kept depends on the assumption that photographers do keep every image they shoot, as they almost have to if shooting on film. But as anyone who has ever owned a digital camera knows, one of the great beauties of the digital camera is the ability to discard photos that aren't quite right for whatever reason - for the appliaction I use them for, this is the entire raison d'etre of the digital camera.
And sure, it is possible to archive every single photo you take on CD, but if you're taking even as few as 20 rolls of film every day on a high-MP digital camera, I would suggest the time it takes to archive these all on CDs would be prohibitive - moreso if you imagine these people are in the field with no ready access to power.
The viewpoint I think is most worth considering here is not the knee-jerk "you are luddite" reactions, but well-considered findings resulting from empirical study of both professional photojournalists and casual home-use photographers who use digital cameras and film. How do they change their behavior when working with one medium or another ? How many photos actually end up getting archived of each type of medium ? Do some types of digital photos tend to get discarded in some non-random fashion ?
Since this woman is an established photographer and has written a dissertation, I am prepared to assume she has considered these issues in her thesis, and the source article suggests she has done the sort of empirial work needed to render a meaningful opinion. I think it is a safe bet to assume most of the Slashdot readers here have not done this work.
Ignoring the most enthusiastic 10% of computer world makes sense?
There is no way anything close to '10% of [the] computer world' runs Linux. The most optimistic estimates of Linux's share relate to server installations, and often to websites run under Linux (the count of which can vastly exceed the number of actual machines running Linux). Since the vast majority of Linux machines are actually installed in offices/ISPs/server farms, this hardly seems like a market worth targeting by a gaming company. Maybe one day it will be, but it sure does not make sense now.
And just because Linux users are 'enthusiastic' does not mean they are any more likely to buy a game, any more than enthusiastic Solaris users are going to be more likely to buy a game that happens to run on Solaris. The few remaining Amiga users, for instance, are evidently very enthusiastic, but it would be a very poor business plan indeed that proposed catering to this enthusiastic market.
Linux will never run "windows apps better than windows" because Windows is a moving target. The day WINE or whatever comes close to really threatening Windows is the day Microsoft will make just enough changes to *something* that will set screw the emulation up *just enough* as to be unusable.
As someone else has pointed out, IBM tried the exact same route with OS/2, which did run Windows better than Windows, with predictable results. The problem was Windows kept 'evolving' and many of the later (not much later, at that) Windows apps just did not work. For the larger purposes of Linux evangelizing, Windows emulation is worthless if it is not 100%, because nist people are just going to be PO'ed at anything less.
Uh, what exactly does converting to an OODBMS and "Java-based solutions" have to do with converting from (or to) a "UNIX environment" ? What does moving "the operation over to a Linux system" mean in the context of abandoning Java and/or OODBMS ? How does an "OO architecture" preclude or relate to using or not using Linux ? Moderators, in case you don't understand, the answer is that running a Linux or Unix system has nothing to do with whether or not use either OODBMSes OR Java - because both run on Linux/Unix, so the original post makes no sense at all.
Methinks from the above (and your handle) that your post is a joke aimed at highlighting the moderator's ineptness. Shame on the moderator for letting it through - evidence enough that all you need to do be moderated up is throw in enough buzzwords to confuse the moderators (who don't really know much about the issues anyways).
Now watch me get modded down.
Plus it can store 12TB clustered.
Since I thought the problem originally specified usage of 8 TB/day, stored indefinitely, I can't really see how this solution could work, as you would quickly overrun capacity, and I suppose buying new machines every couple of days is not an option.
What does this mean ? Is he comparing the "bad old days" with supposed "good recent days", the latter when every piece of information can be accessed by a single program ? Schlepping up numbers or words on a webpage does not constitute real 'access' any more than does providing printouts or plain text files - you still need a program (or human) to parse the output, and this is usually trivial compared to the work involved in using that information.
And what does this have to do anyways with MS trying to block access to websites when using anything but Explorer ? This is an attempt to make ALL their information accessible by a SINGLE program, and NOT an attempt to make every piece of information accessible by a DIFFERENT program.
We owe him a debt of gratitude for inventing the web but as far as I am concerned his invention does not make Berners-Lee's opinions on these subjects any more or less valuable than any other reasonably astute person, and his opinions are even less valuable to me when they range to social commentary. Most of his writings I have found to be incoherent or self-contradictory.
Slashdot-editor comments aside, certainly NOT ALL 'real' development requires access to the registry, just as NOT ALL 'real' (say) Linux development requires root access or any number of other privileges commonly denied users. For instance, most developers don't have permission to run ifconfig; but how many of them really need it ? Restricting access to the registry makes perfect sense in exactly the same sense that not everyone needs to be in group wheel.
I wonder how Slashdot's brass would react if somebody paid the measly subscription fee, then wrote a spider to go suck up the content and redistribute it verbatim on their own site - with no royalties being paid, of course. I would see this as no different than the ripping of songs from albums and their subsequent royalty-free redistribution. How would they reconcile this with the "information wants to be free", fair-use, and anti-RIAA/MPAA party lines that get run up the flagpole so often ?
...
Of course, the beauty would be if the code used Slashcode and the developers used Sourceforge
Sorry, but I just cannot see how the distribution media really is newsworthy. Who cares ? At best it saves an admin a few CD changes, but as most people probably realize a standard install of the average distro only needs the first (sometimes the second) CD; especially if you are installing a server without all the application junk. More advanced users who have to install a bunch of boxes are almost certainly doing unattended network installs, and these are the people who would most benefit from saving a few media changes - except they don't have to change any media anyways ! Finally, I don't know what sort of servers most people find themselves administering but I can't think of any at our company that feature DVD drives.
Just don't ask for a replacement for "naked clippy". ;-)
I just tried this and - easter eggs of easter eggs - got an 800x600 JPEG of Melinda French/Gates on her wedding night. She was reading "Visual Basic for Dummies".
Hotmail and MSDN will soon follow.
I have long been unable to login to Hotmail (after trying to login I never get a page returned) on various Linux boxes running NS 4.7, whereas I can login fine from my NT box right beside it. I have always been working under the tacit assumption that MS was either intentionally not replying to an 'unpreferred' browser, or was generating HTML that would somehow trip up NS on my platform.
Anyone else have problems accessing Hotmail with Netscape on Linux
The original article indicated that the hinges have broke several times within 2 years. If the warranty is for only 1 year, as I suppose, then I don't think Dell has any obligation to the poster. If, however, the defects occurred before the warranty expired, and if they were repaired, then some companies will extend the warranty period.
For instance, I had an old Thinkpad 560 laptop. Loved it, but the case cracked a little bit while under warranty. No problem, just called IBM. They sent a prepaid mailer to my office, I stuck the thing in and had a fixed machine a few weeks later, all done under warranty. I was further informed that whenever IBM services a machine they extend whatever warranty period remains by another 3 months. Anyways, I had a couple of other problems in it while still under warranty and IBM never gave me a problem - always fixing it with little hassle to me, and always extending the warranty period a little bit more.
Of course, once my computer broke outside of the warranty period, they wouldn't fix it under warranty, but as far as I was concerned their obligation to me was 100% discharged.
Any OS based on the desktops-dont-need-security idea, with a 0-security setting, must be forgotten and I don't see how people seriously consider using them seriously.
While I am not agreeing with your point at all, your argument is absolutely irrelevant to the deaths of the three OSes mentioned.
While it is cool that you can charge via a firewire cable, anyone know whether this is the *only* way to charge it ? Because if you can only charge it by firewire then it would seem you're obligated to drag around a computer (with firewire, no less) just to charge the thing. I can imagine being on a road trip in a hotel and I just want to listen to music, I don't have (or don't want to unpack) my computer just to recharge. The real possibilities for this thing lie in being able to *un*tether yourself from a computer.
The answer to the question "In this climate of increasing security consciousness, how far can vigilance go before it becomes an invasion of our rights? " is, only so far as to upset a large number of their employees enough that they quit and cannot be replaced by employees who would welcome a more secure environment to work in. People are often told to "vote with their pocketbooks", and I would say that in essence the same advice applies here as well.
Learning Emacs is a big investment, and whether it makes you more productive or not, you won't feel like abandoning it after all that.
This is a great point. There is a well-established finding in social psychology that people who have invested more or are made to believe they have invested more in something find that something to be more valuable. The layman's interpretation is that people need to resolve the fact that they invested a lot in something with the value of that investment, and since the investment is known and immutable, the only way to resolve the discrepancy is to conclude the result of the investment must have been "worth it". After all, people would feel pretty foolish if they invested all that time learning *every* intricacy of (say) Emacs, and Lisp, only to conclude (say) they were nearly as functional in vi or notepad.
I would argue it is fair to say that anyone who takes the time to learn Emacs or vi has invested a considerable amount of time in either program. So I sometimes wonder whether the religious fervor people show for Emacs or vi (or, for that matter, Linux/*BSD, Mysql, Oracle, Perl, etc.) is due more to this psychological phenomenon than to the actual merits of the target of said fervor.
For the record, I use Emacs.
yeah i would love to see AOL move to a smaller, lithe, tightly coded browser that would spring up and start 'a parsing
Surely you are not talking about Mozilla here, are you ? On every machine I have tried running Mozilla on, it runs like a pig that has had two of its legs broken.