Even if the site is only 50% effective, it will be better than the estimate used in this article, since that estimate does not count
Of course, at least the first two reasons you give for why Linux counts might be understated (which the author ADMITS is the case), hold true as well for Windows. There are PLENTY of people with Windows installed who did not pay for the license. THere are LOTS of offices who order clones or bare-bones machines and have their tech guys install the same copy of Windows on all of them.
Well put. If a comparable NT exploit were available you can bet the Slashdot
editors and readers would have been quick to drag MS over the coals. But since
this is a Linux love-fest, we just get a pointer to the fix, and probably later
some rationalizations as to how this points to the Linux's superiority, or how
this is really minor anyways. Reminds me of arguments I used to foolishly
engage in with creationists; anything that supports their argument is treated
as scientific evidence, while anything contradictory is dismissed out of hand
or ignored completely.
Yes, there are people out there like that, but I don't believe they're the majority for a second!
And I do believe that the majority of people are MORE THAN WILLING to download MP3s of songs they have never purchased. I believe that lots of people are buying CD burners ONLY to burn verbatim copies of their friends' CDs, or to burn discs full of songs they downloaded off Napster (songs which they never bought), and that almost all CD-R media sold goes towards this purpose. I believe that the "people are willing to pay for it if you give them a chance" hyperbole here is nothing more than hyperbole, spouted off by people who more often than not also possess MP3s/CDs to which they have no claim of fair use.
I say this because the vast majority of people I know with computers do this as well, or are always asking their friends to do it for them. And before you charge me with having particularly dishonest acquaintances, I challenge you to take a good, honest look around at the people you know - are you really trying to say that the majority of them own all the CDs containing the songs in their MP3 collection ? I doubt it.
I also believe that most - perhaps the majority - of people would be more than willing to steal *real*, physical goods, if there was no fear of repercussion and if there was no way they could be caught or identified (as is the case with MP3s and the like now). Look at all the apparently normal people who engage in looting in times when the police obviously would not be able to do anything about it. I'm specifically thinking of situations like the LA riots, where lots of normal people (and lots of thugs, also, to be sure), looted everything in sight wherever they could do so freely. This is why we have locks on our doors. This is why we have security systems and surveillance. Would you have this "dead wood" cleared as well ? Do you have equal confidence that the store in the mall would be in business a month from now if they just put all their merchandise out in an empty store, fielded queries through videoconferencing to a remote site, and just put out a donation box for payments, with no security at all ?
Come on, the record studios aren't stupid, despite what many would like to believe. There are some extremely smart, well-educated, and business-and-tech-savvy people in their ranks, and they are all charged with the responsibility of making good business decisions for their (rightfully) self-interested companies. If there really was evidence that most people were willing to pay for music then there is no way they would waste time trying to implement rights management. If there really was evidence that they could make as much money by pure electronic distribution, sans rights management, they would do it in a second. The very need to implement these schemes points to the fallacies in your assumption that the majority of people are willing to engage in a donation system, or even that the majority of people are willing to pay for things they could easily steal for free.
As for your claims that "DRM hurts our economy...very badly", well I have to basically leave that since you provide no evidence - just faith - that the absence of DRM would HELP the economy. I can't see how preventing people from illegally distributing and copying music and software they don't own can possibly HELP the economy.
You know, I wrote a long reply to this post which keeps getting rejected by the Slashdot engine because of an "Invalid form key". So I'm condensing a reply one last time.
The evidence that your proposed donation system won't work is in the very records of donations to the site you advertise (www.buskware.org). A measly $5.60 has been collected for this tool which you purport can take the place of conventional payment schemes. If people are so willing to pay for things they find useful but do not have to pay for, why isn't buskware.org raking in the money ?
All your original analysis does is presuppose that the user has *need* for more than, say, 10 usages. Which, by itself, admits that if you did NOT need this many usages, disposable cameras could well justify itself. All the arguments about why disposable digitals make no sense could be made verbatim to argue that disposable 35mm cameras make no sense, for these cost far more than the contained film. But disposable 35mms are hugely popular and appropriate for many situations. I keep thinking I should pack a disposable in my backpack/glove compartment/office just for those special occassions where I wouldn't otherwise have a camera handy.
I think we should probably have a set of faked passport profiles, with names insulting to MS.
At the risk of being spammed, I am the proud owner of the "windows_sucks" hotmail account.
As an aside, I had to cast about for quite a while before settling on that one...all the "legitimate" accounts I tried to get were all taken, which makes me wonder how far MS can really go in providing accounts for everyone. There is a limit at which the ungainliness of your address becomes a serious hindrance.
Billy Joe is considering installing Linux on his home LAN : "I won't be saving anything, since Windows came installed on my machines anyways, but I figure the additional security and stability are worth the free download", he said, before asking how to properly secure a Linux box.
His wife Bobby Sue, on the other hand, steadfastly continues to use Windows on her desktop, but says she "is seriously considering switching from Notepad to Emacs".
Son Billy Joe Jr indicated that he will be staying with his "Speak and Spell" until Linux incorporates speech synthesis into the kernel.
I don't like the idea of these people selling this information, especially when you can get it free
How is this any different than (say) O'Reilly selling books on Perl/Oracle/Linux, when people can get all that information for free on the web as well ? Someone has gone to the trouble of packaging the information, and sending it to people who may not even have web access, or may want printed instructions, so I say all the more power to them.
Don't forget, since much of many albums is chaff, Taco probably did not rip the whole CD and so his presumed album count is probably much higher than your estimate. I own MANY CDs where I would only bother ripping one or two songs, and more than a few where I wouldn't bother ripping any. As far as I'm concerned you would have to be a fool to rip crappy songs from an album...it sort of defeats the purpose.
But the precise assumptions here don't matter. You and I and everyone else *know* that in all probability Taco has some MP3s he did NOT pay for.
choose 'notepad' (or 'vi') and you can write directly onto the watch. That'd be cool.
I don't even want to begin imagining what a pain in the ass using vi would be with pen-input !!! ESC-w-q-!, by the time I'm finished making all the penstrokes to save my file the damn battery would already have run out. Of course, the battery would have run out just launching emacs, but still...
I installed it, and it wanted to install 1.7 GB of stuff right off the bat. It took me a while to go, one-by-one, down the list to cull enough stuff so that I could actually install on a 1.5 GB partition. Also, it doesn't seem smart enough to tell that, while my root partition might have 1.5 GB, I have designated a/usr partition where much of the stuff Mandrake will install will go.
What happened to the days when you could install a perfectly functional Linux system with X, apache, perl,gcc, etc. in less than 40 MB ?
Am I the only person who finds it incredibly ironic that an article like this would appear on one of the most random, poorly-researched,
redundant, late and haphazard news sites on the net?
You are not. I get the sense that Slashdot editors and readers thinks much more of themselves because usage spiked on Sept. 11 and many users were forced to get second-hand news that way. To which I reply, almost everybody who *could* got their news that day by turning on the television or turning on the radio. Only if people were unable to do this did they check the Net, and only if their favorite real news site (cnn, abcnews) was clogged did they go to Slashdot.
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, newspapers were handing out free issues in our city - they weren't handing out pages with URLs to their websites. On the morn of Sept. 12, people went straight to the newstand to pick up the paper where we found far more in-depth coverage than we could get off the web.
So politicians advertise URLs in their campaigns now. Big deal. Elections are still won and lost on television, and in the papers.
On the flip side, look how many patches and service packs come out for Windows, but they don't make the Slashdot home page. Good to see we're covering the bad as well as the good.
What are you talking about ? Seems like Slashdot is constantly running stories about this or that bug in Outlook, or Powerpoint, or IE, or....
If WinXP had as big a showstopper flaw as this one in 2.4.11, you can bet the criticism here would be loud, ridiculing, and vociferous, even if MS released a patch for it in the same timeframe. As it is, there is really no criticism, just a big mutual love-in. You are deluded if you think Linux flaws are covered with the same scrutiny here that Windows' shortcomings are.
Now that the hard drive has memory to burn (so to speak) it stops being a mere storage device and becomes a "autonomous storage unit" that has it's own CPU to assist the computer in it's search for information.
I don't understand why you would *want* your hard drive to do this. All this is work best done with 'real' RAM; i.e. one the application itself has access to. How is the drive supposed to know what it is supposed to cache/retrieve; and how is it supposed to know where it is supposed to find it ? Functionality like this belongs - with some limited exception - in the application itself. It only sometimes makes sense for this to happen in the OS; but I can not ever imagine when you would want your hard drive to govern how it uses what is essentially system RAM in the fashion you describe (ignoring special cases where you are buffering for hardware reasons).
I have to agree with you. The MIT instructors argue - convincingly - that the course materials hardly constitute an MIT education, so I don't think this can devalue your own education. However, I do have to wonder how the MIT Board of Trustees justifies a big expenditure like this. How does this action benefit their own students ? Possibly it could serve some larger good, but tuitions and the like are not paid to MIT in its capacity as a charity. Most alumni are probably not donating money to MIT to benefit people who are not at MIT. It seems like MIT should primarily be concerned with doing right by their own students, and frankly I can't see how this kind of initiative benefits them. If this were an inexpensive project that would be one thing, but we are talking about a tenth of a billion dollars. If I were at MIT, I would think this borders on irresponsibility.
It's not as simple as critics of these programs make it, though. Athletic programs add immeasurably to the esprit de corps of the student and alumni bodies. They also add to the bottom line in ways that are not obvious or direct. I went to a school with a powerful athletic program and the effect of, say, a contending basketball or football program is amazing. Students and alumni buy tons more athletic jerseys, baseball caps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers - all at HUGE markups - so the school's licensing revenues jump. Alumni see their school name in the news and they donate way more money. And students identify with their school more strongly when they can follow and latch on to their team and track their exploits weekly. They are happier to be there. They have something else to talk about with their friends. And when they become alumni, they will have happier memories of rallying behind their school banner and will be more likely to donate. These effects occur, too, when you are watching a pro basketball or football game and you see that so-and-so played at UCLA or Stanford or Michigan State, which is why these statistics are advertised.
Let me see if I understand this, one of the reasons you left the DoD is because they couldn't come around to running a free OS ? I wonder what your job there must have been, such that you decided you just could not work there unless you ran Linux - did they hire you as an Open-source evangelist ? When you accepted the position did you think the DoD was hiring you to convert them over to Linux, instead of, say, doing some other job ? What exactly was your job title such that running Linux was so crucial to your job satisfaction there ? And what about that slashdot story where a few office workers were loudly and roundly ridiculed because they just couldn't be productive on Linux ? Why isn't this story just as ridiculous ?
Re:i have no problem with your bizarre taste in ga
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2
porting games well suited for linux and linux users is what Loki needs to do.
I defy you to name games that are 'well suited for linux and linux users'. Since presumably linux users are such because of the superiority of the product, rather than some feature/quirk/defect of their personality, what do you propose defines Linux users ? Is it our ability to read source code and unpack tar files ? Is it our interest in arguing about distributions and editors ? Our fervor in arguing that some forms of intellectual property are wrong while others inviolable ?
Get real, Linux users are as heterogeous as any other group of computer enthusiasts and hobbyists; Chinese nationals are unified in their culture and language and history. The only kind of game that I can imagine appealing "Linux users" as a group would involve shooting/killing/maiming/ridiculing Bill Gates in effigy. Which, I believe at least one of which has already largely been done and ships with some distributions.
Re:this is neither healthy nor a sign of life
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2
By this argument we should see Linux ports of Karateka, Ancient Art of War, and Lemonade coming out from Loki very shortly.
I don't know how the British postal service works, but if - as I assume - it is publically funded then this seems like a collosal waste of money. It's not like people are not using the British mail because they are off using some other mail provider's stamps, is it ? How exactly do they justify the expense needed to commission and produce these stamps ? The only way I could see this being justified is if these were super-expensive, for collector-consumption-only stamps.
But if I could get a hologram stamp of Princess Di's head before, during, and after it goes through the windshield, I would buy one.
We also need to ask how many people have had *good* experiences. Now, it is clear from reading some of these posts that many users have had good experiences with them. But posting this sort of question here, where a large selection bias probably exists and where people who have had good luck are much *less* likely to post their success stories, is going to result in a very skewed picture of IBM - or other - problems. So even if a dozen Slashdot users wrote in with their own horror stories, I wouldn't know what to make of the results, especially since horror stories of other manufacturers are not solicited at the same time. No basis is therefore provided here for us to evaluate any results.
Don't ask a question if the results you get back won't mean much !
What if Windows sockets are faster? What if Windows Disk IO is faster? What about Windows Asynchronous I/O?
I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here, they would be roundly and loudly shot down with 1) criticisms of the testing protocol, and/or 2) criticisms of the bias of the testing agency. Of course, the same criticisms are just as valid in this case, but of course they are here largely ignored (one poster so far excepted).
All of which just goes to show that the essence of the whole 'Linux-rocks/Windows-sucks' horse that is always being flogged here is that this horse is ultimately flogged by (sometimes blind) faith. Few of the Linux zealots here are going to believe any benchmark/test unless it favors Linux (in which case, they will all praise the study to high heaven) - just look at the lengths people here go to argue that GNOME/KDE provide better-than-mediocre desktops. Similarly, few Windows advocates are going to be convinced that their platform of choice is inferior.
Since all these articles thus amount to preaching to the converted, I suggest that the Slashdot editing team hereafter mark all such articles of theirs as 'Redundant'.
Hey, why can't we rate parent Slashdot articles, anyways ??
Similarly, with a Transmeta processor, if you could for example put multiple sensors in your house that would wirelessly transmit humidity and
temp readings to a central unit that would adjust the thermostat for,
So why would such simple-minded code need the code-morphing technology that defines Transmeta ? As far as I can tell, code-morphing only makes sense in higher-end computing devices; application in the embedded market where device requirements are far simpler seems to nullify any advantage Transmeta might have. In fact, the overhead this technology almost certainly imposes, along with the overheads associated with the bevy of patents surround Transmeta's (here superfluous) technologies would probably place such chips at a marked disadvantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the site is only 50% effective, it will be better than the estimate used in this article, since that estimate does not count
Of course, at least the first two reasons you give for why Linux counts might be understated (which the author ADMITS is the case), hold true as well for Windows. There are PLENTY of people with Windows installed who did not pay for the license. THere are LOTS of offices who order clones or bare-bones machines and have their tech guys install the same copy of Windows on all of them.
Well put. If a comparable NT exploit were available you can bet the Slashdot
editors and readers would have been quick to drag MS over the coals. But since
this is a Linux love-fest, we just get a pointer to the fix, and probably later
some rationalizations as to how this points to the Linux's superiority, or how
this is really minor anyways. Reminds me of arguments I used to foolishly
engage in with creationists; anything that supports their argument is treated
as scientific evidence, while anything contradictory is dismissed out of hand
or ignored completely.
Yes, there are people out there like that, but I don't believe they're the majority for a second!
And I do believe that the majority of people are MORE THAN WILLING to download MP3s of songs they have never purchased. I believe that lots of people are buying CD burners ONLY to burn verbatim copies of their friends' CDs, or to burn discs full of songs they downloaded off Napster (songs which they never bought), and that almost all CD-R media sold goes towards this purpose. I believe that the "people are willing to pay for it if you give them a chance" hyperbole here is nothing more than hyperbole, spouted off by people who more often than not also possess MP3s/CDs to which they have no claim of fair use.
I say this because the vast majority of people I know with computers do this as well, or are always asking their friends to do it for them. And before you charge me with having particularly dishonest acquaintances, I challenge you to take a good, honest look around at the people you know - are you really trying to say that the majority of them own all the CDs containing the songs in their MP3 collection ? I doubt it.
I also believe that most - perhaps the majority - of people would be more than willing to steal *real*, physical goods, if there was no fear of repercussion and if there was no way they could be caught or identified (as is the case with MP3s and the like now). Look at all the apparently normal people who engage in looting in times when the police obviously would not be able to do anything about it. I'm specifically thinking of situations like the LA riots, where lots of normal people (and lots of thugs, also, to be sure), looted everything in sight wherever they could do so freely. This is why we have locks on our doors. This is why we have security systems and surveillance. Would you have this "dead wood" cleared as well ? Do you have equal confidence that the store in the mall would be in business a month from now if they just put all their merchandise out in an empty store, fielded queries through videoconferencing to a remote site, and just put out a donation box for payments, with no security at all ?
Come on, the record studios aren't stupid, despite what many would like to believe. There are some extremely smart, well-educated, and business-and-tech-savvy people in their ranks, and they are all charged with the responsibility of making good business decisions for their (rightfully) self-interested companies. If there really was evidence that most people were willing to pay for music then there is no way they would waste time trying to implement rights management. If there really was evidence that they could make as much money by pure electronic distribution, sans rights management, they would do it in a second. The very need to implement these schemes points to the fallacies in your assumption that the majority of people are willing to engage in a donation system, or even that the majority of people are willing to pay for things they could easily steal for free.
As for your claims that "DRM hurts our economy...very badly", well I have to basically leave that since you provide no evidence - just faith - that the absence of DRM would HELP the economy. I can't see how preventing people from illegally distributing and copying music and software they don't own can possibly HELP the economy.
You know, I wrote a long reply to this post which keeps getting rejected by the Slashdot engine because of an "Invalid form key". So I'm condensing a reply one last time.
The evidence that your proposed donation system won't work is in the very records of donations to the site you advertise (www.buskware.org). A measly $5.60 has been collected for this tool which you purport can take the place of conventional payment schemes. If people are so willing to pay for things they find useful but do not have to pay for, why isn't buskware.org raking in the money ?
All your original analysis does is presuppose that the user has *need* for more than, say, 10 usages. Which, by itself, admits that if you did NOT need this many usages, disposable cameras could well justify itself. All the arguments about why disposable digitals make no sense could be made verbatim to argue that disposable 35mm cameras make no sense, for these cost far more than the contained film. But disposable 35mms are hugely popular and appropriate for many situations. I keep thinking I should pack a disposable in my backpack/glove compartment/office just for those special occassions where I wouldn't otherwise have a camera handy.
I think we should probably have a set of faked passport profiles, with names insulting to MS.
At the risk of being spammed, I am the proud owner of the "windows_sucks" hotmail account.
As an aside, I had to cast about for quite a while before settling on that one...all the "legitimate" accounts I tried to get were all taken, which makes me wonder how far MS can really go in providing accounts for everyone. There is a limit at which the ungainliness of your address becomes a serious hindrance.
Billy Joe is considering installing Linux on his home LAN : "I won't be saving anything, since Windows came installed on my machines anyways, but I figure the additional security and stability are worth the free download", he said, before asking how to properly secure a Linux box.
His wife Bobby Sue, on the other hand, steadfastly continues to use Windows on her desktop, but says she "is seriously considering switching from Notepad to Emacs".
Son Billy Joe Jr indicated that he will be staying with his "Speak and Spell" until Linux incorporates speech synthesis into the kernel.
How is this any different than (say) O'Reilly selling books on Perl/Oracle/Linux, when people can get all that information for free on the web as well ? Someone has gone to the trouble of packaging the information, and sending it to people who may not even have web access, or may want printed instructions, so I say all the more power to them.
Maybe it just means he's doing worse financially then we all imagine.
Where the hell are my mod points when I need 'em. That was damn funny.
Don't forget, since much of many albums is chaff, Taco probably did not rip the whole CD and so his presumed album count is probably much higher than your estimate. I own MANY CDs where I would only bother ripping one or two songs, and more than a few where I wouldn't bother ripping any. As far as I'm concerned you would have to be a fool to rip crappy songs from an album...it sort of defeats the purpose.
But the precise assumptions here don't matter. You and I and everyone else *know* that in all probability Taco has some MP3s he did NOT pay for.
choose 'notepad' (or 'vi') and you can write directly onto the watch. That'd be cool.
I don't even want to begin imagining what a pain in the ass using vi would be with pen-input !!! ESC-w-q-!, by the time I'm finished making all the penstrokes to save my file the damn battery would already have run out. Of course, the battery would have run out just launching emacs, but still...
I installed it, and it wanted to install 1.7 GB of stuff right off the bat. It took me a while to go, one-by-one, down the list to cull enough stuff so that I could actually install on a 1.5 GB partition. Also, it doesn't seem smart enough to tell that, while my root partition might have 1.5 GB, I have designated a /usr partition where much of the stuff Mandrake will install will go.
What happened to the days when you could install a perfectly functional Linux system with X, apache, perl,gcc, etc. in less than 40 MB ?
Am I the only person who finds it incredibly ironic that an article like this would appear on one of the most random, poorly-researched,
redundant, late and haphazard news sites on the net?
You are not. I get the sense that Slashdot editors and readers thinks much more of themselves because usage spiked on Sept. 11 and many users were forced to get second-hand news that way. To which I reply, almost everybody who *could* got their news that day by turning on the television or turning on the radio. Only if people were unable to do this did they check the Net, and only if their favorite real news site (cnn, abcnews) was clogged did they go to Slashdot.
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, newspapers were handing out free issues in our city - they weren't handing out pages with URLs to their websites. On the morn of Sept. 12, people went straight to the newstand to pick up the paper where we found far more in-depth coverage than we could get off the web.
So politicians advertise URLs in their campaigns now. Big deal. Elections are still won and lost on television, and in the papers.
On the flip side, look how many patches and service packs come out for Windows, but they don't make the Slashdot home page. Good to see we're covering the bad as well as the good.
What are you talking about ? Seems like Slashdot is constantly running stories about this or that bug in Outlook, or Powerpoint, or IE, or....
If WinXP had as big a showstopper flaw as this one in 2.4.11, you can bet the criticism here would be loud, ridiculing, and vociferous, even if MS released a patch for it in the same timeframe. As it is, there is really no criticism, just a big mutual love-in. You are deluded if you think Linux flaws are covered with the same scrutiny here that Windows' shortcomings are.
Now that the hard drive has memory to burn (so to speak) it stops being a mere storage device and becomes a "autonomous storage unit" that has it's own CPU to assist the computer in it's search for information.
I don't understand why you would *want* your hard drive to do this. All this is work best done with 'real' RAM; i.e. one the application itself has access to. How is the drive supposed to know what it is supposed to cache/retrieve; and how is it supposed to know where it is supposed to find it ? Functionality like this belongs - with some limited exception - in the application itself. It only sometimes makes sense for this to happen in the OS; but I can not ever imagine when you would want your hard drive to govern how it uses what is essentially system RAM in the fashion you describe (ignoring special cases where you are buffering for hardware reasons).
I have to agree with you. The MIT instructors argue - convincingly - that the course materials hardly constitute an MIT education, so I don't think this can devalue your own education. However, I do have to wonder how the MIT Board of Trustees justifies a big expenditure like this. How does this action benefit their own students ? Possibly it could serve some larger good, but tuitions and the like are not paid to MIT in its capacity as a charity. Most alumni are probably not donating money to MIT to benefit people who are not at MIT. It seems like MIT should primarily be concerned with doing right by their own students, and frankly I can't see how this kind of initiative benefits them. If this were an inexpensive project that would be one thing, but we are talking about a tenth of a billion dollars. If I were at MIT, I would think this borders on irresponsibility.
It's not as simple as critics of these programs make it, though. Athletic programs add immeasurably to the esprit de corps of the student and alumni bodies. They also add to the bottom line in ways that are not obvious or direct. I went to a school with a powerful athletic program and the effect of, say, a contending basketball or football program is amazing. Students and alumni buy tons more athletic jerseys, baseball caps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers - all at HUGE markups - so the school's licensing revenues jump. Alumni see their school name in the news and they donate way more money. And students identify with their school more strongly when they can follow and latch on to their team and track their exploits weekly. They are happier to be there. They have something else to talk about with their friends. And when they become alumni, they will have happier memories of rallying behind their school banner and will be more likely to donate. These effects occur, too, when you are watching a pro basketball or football game and you see that so-and-so played at UCLA or Stanford or Michigan State, which is why these statistics are advertised.
Let me see if I understand this, one of the reasons you left the DoD is because they couldn't come around to running a free OS ? I wonder what your job there must have been, such that you decided you just could not work there unless you ran Linux - did they hire you as an Open-source evangelist ? When you accepted the position did you think the DoD was hiring you to convert them over to Linux, instead of, say, doing some other job ? What exactly was your job title such that running Linux was so crucial to your job satisfaction there ? And what about that slashdot story where a few office workers were loudly and roundly ridiculed because they just couldn't be productive on Linux ? Why isn't this story just as ridiculous ?
porting games well suited for linux and linux users is what Loki needs to do.
I defy you to name games that are 'well suited for linux and linux users'. Since presumably linux users are such because of the superiority of the product, rather than some feature/quirk/defect of their personality, what do you propose defines Linux users ? Is it our ability to read source code and unpack tar files ? Is it our interest in arguing about distributions and editors ? Our fervor in arguing that some forms of intellectual property are wrong while others inviolable ?
Get real, Linux users are as heterogeous as any other group of computer enthusiasts and hobbyists; Chinese nationals are unified in their culture and language and history. The only kind of game that I can imagine appealing "Linux users" as a group would involve shooting/killing/maiming/ridiculing Bill Gates in effigy. Which, I believe at least one of which has already largely been done and ships with some distributions.
By this argument we should see Linux ports of Karateka, Ancient Art of War, and Lemonade coming out from Loki very shortly.
I don't know how the British postal service works, but if - as I assume - it is publically funded then this seems like a collosal waste of money. It's not like people are not using the British mail because they are off using some other mail provider's stamps, is it ? How exactly do they justify the expense needed to commission and produce these stamps ? The only way I could see this being justified is if these were super-expensive, for collector-consumption-only stamps.
But if I could get a hologram stamp of Princess Di's head before, during, and after it goes through the windshield, I would buy one.
We also need to ask how many people have had *good* experiences. Now, it is clear from reading some of these posts that many users have had good experiences with them. But posting this sort of question here, where a large selection bias probably exists and where people who have had good luck are much *less* likely to post their success stories, is going to result in a very skewed picture of IBM - or other - problems. So even if a dozen Slashdot users wrote in with their own horror stories, I wouldn't know what to make of the results, especially since horror stories of other manufacturers are not solicited at the same time. No basis is therefore provided here for us to evaluate any results.
Don't ask a question if the results you get back won't mean much !
What if Windows sockets are faster? What if Windows Disk IO is faster? What about Windows Asynchronous I/O?
I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here, they would be roundly and loudly shot down with 1) criticisms of the testing protocol, and/or 2) criticisms of the bias of the testing agency. Of course, the same criticisms are just as valid in this case, but of course they are here largely ignored (one poster so far excepted).
All of which just goes to show that the essence of the whole 'Linux-rocks/Windows-sucks' horse that is always being flogged here is that this horse is ultimately flogged by (sometimes blind) faith. Few of the Linux zealots here are going to believe any benchmark/test unless it favors Linux (in which case, they will all praise the study to high heaven) - just look at the lengths people here go to argue that GNOME/KDE provide better-than-mediocre desktops. Similarly, few Windows advocates are going to be convinced that their platform of choice is inferior.
Since all these articles thus amount to preaching to the converted, I suggest that the Slashdot editing team hereafter mark all such articles of theirs as 'Redundant'.
Hey, why can't we rate parent Slashdot articles, anyways ??
Similarly, with a Transmeta processor, if you could for example put multiple sensors in your house that would wirelessly transmit humidity and
temp readings to a central unit that would adjust the thermostat for,
So why would such simple-minded code need the code-morphing technology that defines Transmeta ? As far as I can tell, code-morphing only makes sense in higher-end computing devices; application in the embedded market where device requirements are far simpler seems to nullify any advantage Transmeta might have. In fact, the overhead this technology almost certainly imposes, along with the overheads associated with the bevy of patents surround Transmeta's (here superfluous) technologies would probably place such chips at a marked disadvantage.