Where can you get a physical Marge Simpson centerfold to hang on your office wall?
Uh... from a scan downloaded from the internet, printed on one of the many large-format color laserjets scattered around the cube farm? Seriously, who's going to actually buy this thing? The pics are going to be all over the internet within minutes of the issue hitting the stand. Good luck to Playboy in getting enough C&D letters to go around. Those things should be mailed, you know.
And if you'd want to hang it up, it'd be enough to get you escorted to the door by security.
Are there people out there who have more than 4GB of memory but still run old 32b operating systems? How uncharacteristically anachronistic of any technology enthusiast...
Sorry, but I won't apologize. I tried 64-bit Vista, and it was a disaster for me, but all I use Windows for is gaming. (At the time, I was mainly playing Fallout 3, and it just wouldn't work right.) So I run good, ol' 32-bit XP, SP3. I have two 768 MB video cards, so I know this is really hurting me, but I'm kind of stuck. At least I take advantage of my 8GB of RAM when I'm in Linux, using things like VirtualBox and KVM.
I may try the Win 7 RC to see how it fares with gaming on my machine, just before it expires.
I'm half-tempted to try this hack, but I just know -- without even reading the article -- that it will just lead to a reinstall.
Seriously? You're going to compare the level of crazy of someone (allegedly) making a (credible) threat on someone else's life -- perhaps many people's -- and that of someone who spends "too much" time playing a video game? Seriously?
Seems to me that the Mechanical Turk system pre-selects those sharp enough to be in a position to use a computer with internet access. It's not truly random. This tilts the responses in a particular direction. I'm not sure what it means, but to get back to any sort of generalized result, you'd have to now come up with a way to gauge these responders versus the general population, wouldn't you?
Seconded. I used VMware for years and years, but switched over to VirtualBox about a year ago. I, personally, don't see much difference. However, at our small company, we've setup all of our infrastructure on KVM VM's. We have about a dozen. Now, these are all running Gentoo Linux ON Gentoo Linux, but I've played with Windows-based VM's, and it seems to run just as well. Anyway, the point I wanted to add was: try libvirt for managing these VM's. I have found it to be pretty slick.
I've been beta testing it for months. I was having a pretty good time with it. A couple weeks ago, they re-leveled all the classes, and it stopped being any fun for me.
Up until that point, I was getting annoyed at how unavoidable getting killed by snipers was. Now, they have a policy that there should be no one-shot-one-kills in the game, but it seemed like half the time you got sniped, you couldn't get to cover fast enough to avoid the second shot and death. Now that they changed the classes, you WON'T get to cover in time. After you get to middling level (say, 12 - 15), you're going to be playing on servers that have snipers who have several points in "piercing shot," and who have bought the "quick" sniper rifle, and you're going to die in two shots as quick as you can say "bang bang."
I went to the forums to complain about the issue, and the thread got to be several pages long, but I never saw a response to any of the gameplay changes from the devs. If they would have just published their compiled stats, it may have made some sense. But without that, I can't understand it. It seemed that half the people playing Nationals already WERE commandos. They didn't need any more incentive for that.
In the process of actually IMPROVING the sniper, they made the soldier's "grenade spam" almost useless. Yes, I played a soldier almost exclusively, but that didn't bother me as much as the sniper issue. The forums were LIT UP about the GS issue.
Other issues, as have already been brought up: SLOW. You really have to take your time to get used to how slow the game moves. PACKS. You MUST work as a group to really succeed, and it happens JUST as rarely as in other Battlefield games.:-(
Tanks take, like 3 or 4 GOOD shots to kill someone (more like 5 or 6), but can be blown up with just 2 TNT packs. Heck they even take about 4 shots to kill another tank! Person-to-person, you can be killed in about a second, so tanks wind up being... strange.
Planes are almost useless. I hate BF2's planes, because someone who's really good with them can rule the whole server, and there's nothing you can do about it. Don't worry about that in BFH! They're just a big, fat target for small arms fire, which can bring them down in seconds.
One issue no one talks about, but I know everyone is annoyed by: SPAWN POINTS. You can't choose where you spawn. I realize that this is intentional, and I understand this mechanic to keep the action hot at "the line." But when you're working on an award, sometimes you need to spawn at certain points. Maybe that's home base, to get a tank; maybe that's near the center, to capture a flag. The way the game runs (SLOW!), you could spend HALF the time in the level running back to home base to get a vehicle.
Finally, cheaters. Because of the speed and size of the levels in this game, cheaters are even more annoying in BFH than other online games. You just can't get away from them. Maybe PunkBuster is fixing this, but I doubt it. It doesn't keep cheaters out of any other game I play with it! And I see post after post about problems with it. (I know it's been hassling me since I gave up on BFH and tried to play BF2. I keep getting kicked out with some sort of "file corruption" problem. Thanks, guys!) When I get on a server (in any game I play) that has an obvious hacker, I just go somewhere else. There's plenty of options. Well, in BFH, you can't choose your server, and I've gotten dumped back into the same server after leaving. That's doubly annoying.
I've been using Linux on the desktop since early '95. Full time since about '97. For years and years and years, I waited -- sometimes impatiently -- for things like automatic mounting of CD's and USB sticks, and non-crashing (and non-duplicating) sync'ing of my various Palm devices. When they worked; they were great, and you're right. When they weren't working, there was a lot of fooling around with drivers and modules and init scripts and config files. But now all of that stuff works great. (At least for me, but I know I'm pretty hard on OS's, expecting them to be able to 14 things at once while I'm not looking.)
So, yeah, another front end for something like emerge or dpkg or rpm is something that will have problems, but that's how the problems get worked out in open source. I'm all for it. If enough people buy into it, there could be a version that goes on EVERY Linux distro, and figures out how to install the software for that particular platform. Even if all it did was handle that part and provide a slick way to zero in on the best-working applications for the task at hand, it would immediately cause Linux usage to skyrocket.
Look at it this way: when a user first loads up Linux, he asks himself, "Now what do I do?" He doesn't know that "xchat" is an IRC application, nor does he realize that there are DOZENS of alternatives. What about Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, Opera, Seamonkey, Konqueror, links or lynx? NONE of them even say "browser" in their name. But seeing them in a category of "web browsers," and knowing that Firefox and (say) Konqueror were, by far, the most popular choices would give a newbie a huge leg up in deciding what to use. (Yes these would probably be installed by default. I'm just using this as an obvious example.)
Yeah, I just installed the current Ubuntu on some old PIII's I had in my garage. My intention was to sell them as "Facebook machines" for all of $25 in the big, yearly neighborhood garage sale. Unfortunately, it ran as well as I imagine Vista would on those machines, and I gave up hope of selling them. (And I sure wasn't going to put Win98 or 2000 on them!) Now they can just rest as backups for my "servers" that run Gentoo -- with no GUI.
I appreciate that. Being as EVERY browser I've tried (including a binary download of Firefox and Opera) is just as flaky as the next, I would think that it was, indeed, something like that. However, Flash is sort of part-and-parcel to the web these days -- along with JavaScript -- like it or not. Removing either is really a non-answer. It needs to work. I can run for months without a crash on either of my Gentoo workstations, so I know that the technology is sound on Linux in general. I'm just frustrated with Ubuntu.
I've got an Eee that I ordered with Linux. Their version came off in about an hour. I tried Easy Peasy for a few hours till I found Ubuntu Netbook Remix. (I've been a Gentoo fan for years, so I haven't followed that really closely.) Everything about UNR is fantastic except for one thing: browsers crash on it very frequently. And by "very frequently," I mean every time I use it. Unfortunately, running a browser is the single biggest use case for a netbook. I've read the forums; I've tried the suggestions; nothing works for me. I can't even get gdb to give me any useful info. At this point, I'm hoping that a big update comes out that magically fixes it. Until then, I keep looking for something else to try. Maybe Moblin? Maybe Win7? (Yeah, yeah, I know, but I have 9 computers at home. I just want the thing to WORK.) I'd put Gentoo on it, but I don't want to thrash the SSD, and I can't figure out how to get a cross-compiler going on my workstation. (Well, that, and I know I'd spend a MONTH tweaking everything to get it to the same level of functionality -- laptop-wise -- that UNR has out of the box.)
You don't achieve a stranglehold on the desktop OS market without getting something right...
No, you get a stranglehold on the desktop market by being the lowest common multiple of easy and cheap until you have sufficient leverage so as to be impossible to ignore, and then you start strong-arming your vendors and competitors until your monopoly is complete. What Microsoft did right was NOT having any sort of DRM in their products until they had their de facto monopoly.
Disclaimer: IAAC. I know several wealthy Christians, even one -ridiculously- wealthy one, and I'm talking real, dyed-in-the-wool, no-hypocrisy-within-sight Christians. Depending on your point of view, I might be considered wealthy. Certainly, as a computer programmer in America who's doing alright despite "this economy" (thank God), I'm more wealthy than the majority of the world's population.
If "Christianity" forbad lending, I don't know where "they" got it from. There are scriptures dealing with usury in the old testament. It was alright to lend with interest, just not to someone else of the faith.;-)
I'm writing to note that it's "easier" for the camel, but not impossible. The trick here is that it's the LOVE of money which is the root of all evil, according to scripture, not money itself. King David was one of the richest people the world had ever seen back in his day, and he was "a man after God's own heart."
Take this for what it's worth, but since you seemed so reasonable (on Slashdot?!), I just wanted to chime in with my view.
I had an underspec-ed, but GOOD, Antec PS for my dual Athlon motherboard. I fried both SCSI hard drives TWICE, a video card, sound card, and finally, the SCSI controller, before I realized that it just didn't have enough juice. (Everything but the controller was under warranty.) That being said, modern systems use a lot less energy these days, but now I don't ever skimp on a PS....
Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda. I mean, that is normal early in the relationship. Think about dating, you're primarily there to try to get in her pants. And usually...good sex leads the guy to thinking marriage might not be bad 'cause he'd like to keep that to himself on a perm. basis. The deep relationship that you're talking about, that comes along later after you are 'trapped' so to speak in marriage and are stuck together. If it doesnt' develop, the marriage isn't gonna work.
Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards! Honestly, this is at the root of everything that's wrong in the world now. And it's not just the obtuseness of how to go about interacting with women, lest you misunderstand me. It's the complete abdication of anything resembling acting like an adult, and taking a long-term, responsible view of the future.
You DATE to find out if it will work. The SEX is just a side benefit. Try thinking with your BRAIN for a change. If the sex is good, you'll think ANY woman would be a good wife, and that's just STUPID. I know. Been there. Done that.
(Full disclosure: Happily married to the perfect wife and mother for 15 years. 3 kids. Deliriously sated with what happens behind closed doors. Did nothing but smooch until we were married.)
Viruses don't matter anymore. It's all about trojans now. A stupid person using Ubuntu is just as easy to infect with a trojan as a stupid person using Windows is.
That's just FUD. At _least_ on Ubuntu -- and this is suspending my disbelief that you could get something coded up for Linux that would actually do this... AND WORK on more than a tiny fraction of one particular distro's userbase -- you're going to have to enter your password to get root access. On Windows, you have an endless stream of dialog boxes that hassle you, and the average person has gotten so inurred with the process that they just click everything that pops up. Thus we have the situation where users click on pop-ups from web sites, and keep clicking right on through the rest of the permission boxes that try to prevent them from doing something stupid. In other words, it's NOT just user stupidity. Windows is being _complicit_ in this exercise. Although Windows fans (I used to be one) will say that you can "run as..." another user, using that every day will get you so frustrated with Microsoft's mechanism that you'll soon get over it and run as a full-fledged administrator again. I thought that things would improve over time. Maybe they have, but I've not seen it.
The 10's of thousands of coders at Microsoft have had 15 years.
The further point being that Microsoft could certainly do WinFS if they were so inclined. What's annoying about this situation is that they keep talking about it like it's going to make things "better," promise to put it in Windows, their lapdogs in the technical press (e.g., Gartner) parrot this line of reasoning (thereby reinforcing it), and then pull it again, just before releasing something we can look at. It's almost like they haven't really ever been serious about it... Hmm... Like it's just a piece of propoganda designed to make people stay on their OS and not go to other choices... Hmm...
Please read the following carefully: WinFS was an abstraction layer THAT WAS GOING TO RUN ATOP NTFS
It's also worth pointing out that Microsoft accomplished everything they wanted to do with WinFS in the file and metadata search platform that's in Vista and 7.
It's also worth noting that I KNOW that WinFS is more than "just" a filesystem, but my comment was intended to point out -- perhaps unsuccessfully with humor -- that I don't perceive the problem to be as complex as, say, coding and creating the assets for a triple-A video game title. After all, just 2 guys coded up a filesystem with database-like features in just 10 months for BeOS, which shipped in '97. The 10's of thousands of coders at Microsoft have had 15 years.
I love it! Here's our infamous "Gartner" group in prime form. FTFPDF, we see that they are predicting the arrival of WinFS anywhere from late 2008 to early 2010.
Now, anyone who's been around as long as Gartner knows that Microsoft has been promising this "feature" since Windows codename "Cairo," which was announced in 1991, and publically demo'ed in '93. There was a lot of hope that it would be delivered in NT 4.0. That's roughly 16 years folks. WAY more time than they had to develop Duke Nukem Forever, and it's just a _file system_.
If you want to talk about basing your corporate purchasing decisions on "features" like WinFS, then all this slagging off on Linux as not being "there yet" is directly hyporcritical, now, isn't it?
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Yeah. It was fun then, and it can be fun some more.
I don't understand the industry. Having the latest graphics engine ranks about 5 on my list of things that make a game fun. Me? I'd be OVERJOYED to be playing, say, the fifth SWKOTOR story on the EXACT SAME GRAPHICS ENGINE. I understand that you need to keep up to some degree, but it just gets old.
I was really excited when Valve seemed to be on track to deliver lots of game content while staying with the same engine. And they have, basically. TF2 is still based on Source, and that's what they're focusing on. I wish they'd do more with the HL2 franchise, but the concept is the same and I applaud that. I own TF2, but I hardly ever play it.
However, do you truly believe that Ubuntu has superior device support versus Windows? If so please let me know so that I can ignore the rest of your reply.
Except for the fiasco that was winmodems, driver support under Linux has ALWAYS been better than under Windows. Don't let anyone tell you any different. Regardless, feel free to ignore whatever you'd like. I won't presume to convince you (personally) otherwise.
To say that Windows drivers are less hassle than Linux drivers?... Are *you* serious? Would you like to talk about the 3-day, 24-hour ordeal I went through a couple months back, when I finally decided to try Vista on my (then) 6-month-old Asus motherboard? Complete and utter disaster trying to get the RAID drivers working! BSOD's all over the place. Several reinstalls. Nothing working. Finally just put XP back on. Please!
I suppose you'll bring up wireless drivers on Linux or something. The one time I encountered poor Linux drivers for a wireless chipset, ndiswrapper saved the day and that was it. Took maybe an hour to sort out.
You know what, I've got another canard:
I'VE WASTED JUST AS MUCH TIME SCREWING WITH WINDOWS AS I HAVE WITH LINUX. AT LEAST LINUX WAS FREE.
"Holistic usability," indeed. Have you (and not you, spyrochaete, personally, but anyone saying these kinds of things) actually installed Ubuntu? Have you "lived" in it for a week? Again, don't presume to understand Linux's shortcomings until you can say you have. Because you'll never understand its strengths until you've made it your daily work environment for a month, or, even better, done an upgrade.
I tried one of the Windows betas, but I gave up because it was buggy. I installed the new Ubuntu RC, and it was an absolute dream. It felt light years ahead of any Windows I had ever used.
As for your comment about Windows replacing Linux when the software support is there, I think it's going to take more than that. Ubuntu's slick UI and unparalleled driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over it's lifespan. Oh wait. It's free. Double win.
Want a terminal emulator (for programming routers)? Want an SSH client? Want a network sniffer? Want an http server? Smtp? Want any of 10,000 software packages? It's a couple clicks away with Synaptic. Don't tell me that Windows beats Linux for software installation. That's pathetically riduculous to anyone who's actually USED Linux for anything. Just because you can't get -- specifically -- Photoshop or Office or... well, that's pretty much it -- for Linux doesn't mean that software support isn't "there." There are plenty of applications to get the job done, do it the way YOU want to, and not the one single way that someone else supposes you should.
Plus, you can get a lot more support for free because people can look inside the code, actually figure out what the heck is going on, and explain it. If that's not enough, I'm betting you can get support for Ubuntu from Canonical for less cost than you can get support for Windows from Microsoft. And better support. I've called Microsoft support. Three out of four times, their "advice" was "reinstall."
Look. Enough. I'm tired of these old chestnuts from people who install Linux once or twice, can't figure out how to do anything, and then claim that Windows is the only credible OS on the market. Please. I don't have a problem with Microsoft fanboys. I have a problem with ANYONE who raves about ANYTHING without really knowing anything about the alternatives.
(Disclaimer(s): I'm a Gentoo fanboy, but I have Ubuntu NBR on an Asus Eee. For some reason, Firefox is buggier than the Everglades in August, but otherwise, it's fantastic, and there are several other credible browsers available. Yes, I use Windows, but only on my main machine, and only for gaming.)
Sounds like someone hasn't had very good luck with using Linux on the desktop. Yeah, well, me neither, but it hasn't stopped me from using it on my desktop machines (both at home and at work) for over 10 years now. You can say it sucks, but, in my experience, it just sucks DIFFERENTLY than the alternatives.
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Where can you get a physical Marge Simpson centerfold to hang on your office wall?
Uh... from a scan downloaded from the internet, printed on one of the many large-format color laserjets scattered around the cube farm? Seriously, who's going to actually buy this thing? The pics are going to be all over the internet within minutes of the issue hitting the stand. Good luck to Playboy in getting enough C&D letters to go around. Those things should be mailed, you know.
And if you'd want to hang it up, it'd be enough to get you escorted to the door by security.
Are there people out there who have more than 4GB of memory but still run old 32b operating systems? How uncharacteristically anachronistic of any technology enthusiast...
Sorry, but I won't apologize. I tried 64-bit Vista, and it was a disaster for me, but all I use Windows for is gaming. (At the time, I was mainly playing Fallout 3, and it just wouldn't work right.) So I run good, ol' 32-bit XP, SP3. I have two 768 MB video cards, so I know this is really hurting me, but I'm kind of stuck. At least I take advantage of my 8GB of RAM when I'm in Linux, using things like VirtualBox and KVM.
I may try the Win 7 RC to see how it fares with gaming on my machine, just before it expires.
I'm half-tempted to try this hack, but I just know -- without even reading the article -- that it will just lead to a reinstall.
Seriously? You're going to compare the level of crazy of someone (allegedly) making a (credible) threat on someone else's life -- perhaps many people's -- and that of someone who spends "too much" time playing a video game? Seriously?
Seems to me that the Mechanical Turk system pre-selects those sharp enough to be in a position to use a computer with internet access. It's not truly random. This tilts the responses in a particular direction. I'm not sure what it means, but to get back to any sort of generalized result, you'd have to now come up with a way to gauge these responders versus the general population, wouldn't you?
Seconded. I used VMware for years and years, but switched over to VirtualBox about a year ago. I, personally, don't see much difference. However, at our small company, we've setup all of our infrastructure on KVM VM's. We have about a dozen. Now, these are all running Gentoo Linux ON Gentoo Linux, but I've played with Windows-based VM's, and it seems to run just as well. Anyway, the point I wanted to add was: try libvirt for managing these VM's. I have found it to be pretty slick.
I've been beta testing it for months. I was having a pretty good time with it. A couple weeks ago, they re-leveled all the classes, and it stopped being any fun for me.
Up until that point, I was getting annoyed at how unavoidable getting killed by snipers was. Now, they have a policy that there should be no one-shot-one-kills in the game, but it seemed like half the time you got sniped, you couldn't get to cover fast enough to avoid the second shot and death. Now that they changed the classes, you WON'T get to cover in time. After you get to middling level (say, 12 - 15), you're going to be playing on servers that have snipers who have several points in "piercing shot," and who have bought the "quick" sniper rifle, and you're going to die in two shots as quick as you can say "bang bang."
I went to the forums to complain about the issue, and the thread got to be several pages long, but I never saw a response to any of the gameplay changes from the devs. If they would have just published their compiled stats, it may have made some sense. But without that, I can't understand it. It seemed that half the people playing Nationals already WERE commandos. They didn't need any more incentive for that.
In the process of actually IMPROVING the sniper, they made the soldier's "grenade spam" almost useless. Yes, I played a soldier almost exclusively, but that didn't bother me as much as the sniper issue. The forums were LIT UP about the GS issue.
Other issues, as have already been brought up: SLOW. You really have to take your time to get used to how slow the game moves. PACKS. You MUST work as a group to really succeed, and it happens JUST as rarely as in other Battlefield games. :-(
Tanks take, like 3 or 4 GOOD shots to kill someone (more like 5 or 6), but can be blown up with just 2 TNT packs. Heck they even take about 4 shots to kill another tank! Person-to-person, you can be killed in about a second, so tanks wind up being... strange.
Planes are almost useless. I hate BF2's planes, because someone who's really good with them can rule the whole server, and there's nothing you can do about it. Don't worry about that in BFH! They're just a big, fat target for small arms fire, which can bring them down in seconds.
One issue no one talks about, but I know everyone is annoyed by: SPAWN POINTS. You can't choose where you spawn. I realize that this is intentional, and I understand this mechanic to keep the action hot at "the line." But when you're working on an award, sometimes you need to spawn at certain points. Maybe that's home base, to get a tank; maybe that's near the center, to capture a flag. The way the game runs (SLOW!), you could spend HALF the time in the level running back to home base to get a vehicle.
Finally, cheaters. Because of the speed and size of the levels in this game, cheaters are even more annoying in BFH than other online games. You just can't get away from them. Maybe PunkBuster is fixing this, but I doubt it. It doesn't keep cheaters out of any other game I play with it! And I see post after post about problems with it. (I know it's been hassling me since I gave up on BFH and tried to play BF2. I keep getting kicked out with some sort of "file corruption" problem. Thanks, guys!) When I get on a server (in any game I play) that has an obvious hacker, I just go somewhere else. There's plenty of options. Well, in BFH, you can't choose your server, and I've gotten dumped back into the same server after leaving. That's doubly annoying.
I've been using Linux on the desktop since early '95. Full time since about '97. For years and years and years, I waited -- sometimes impatiently -- for things like automatic mounting of CD's and USB sticks, and non-crashing (and non-duplicating) sync'ing of my various Palm devices. When they worked; they were great, and you're right. When they weren't working, there was a lot of fooling around with drivers and modules and init scripts and config files. But now all of that stuff works great. (At least for me, but I know I'm pretty hard on OS's, expecting them to be able to 14 things at once while I'm not looking.)
So, yeah, another front end for something like emerge or dpkg or rpm is something that will have problems, but that's how the problems get worked out in open source. I'm all for it. If enough people buy into it, there could be a version that goes on EVERY Linux distro, and figures out how to install the software for that particular platform. Even if all it did was handle that part and provide a slick way to zero in on the best-working applications for the task at hand, it would immediately cause Linux usage to skyrocket.
Look at it this way: when a user first loads up Linux, he asks himself, "Now what do I do?" He doesn't know that "xchat" is an IRC application, nor does he realize that there are DOZENS of alternatives. What about Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, Opera, Seamonkey, Konqueror, links or lynx? NONE of them even say "browser" in their name. But seeing them in a category of "web browsers," and knowing that Firefox and (say) Konqueror were, by far, the most popular choices would give a newbie a huge leg up in deciding what to use. (Yes these would probably be installed by default. I'm just using this as an obvious example.)
So, please, bring it on, warts and all.
He misread the uptime guarantee. It actually said that they provide 9 5's of service. And they're doing FANTASTIC at maintaining it, too!
Yeah, I just installed the current Ubuntu on some old PIII's I had in my garage. My intention was to sell them as "Facebook machines" for all of $25 in the big, yearly neighborhood garage sale. Unfortunately, it ran as well as I imagine Vista would on those machines, and I gave up hope of selling them. (And I sure wasn't going to put Win98 or 2000 on them!) Now they can just rest as backups for my "servers" that run Gentoo -- with no GUI.
I appreciate that. Being as EVERY browser I've tried (including a binary download of Firefox and Opera) is just as flaky as the next, I would think that it was, indeed, something like that. However, Flash is sort of part-and-parcel to the web these days -- along with JavaScript -- like it or not. Removing either is really a non-answer. It needs to work. I can run for months without a crash on either of my Gentoo workstations, so I know that the technology is sound on Linux in general. I'm just frustrated with Ubuntu.
I've got an Eee that I ordered with Linux. Their version came off in about an hour. I tried Easy Peasy for a few hours till I found Ubuntu Netbook Remix. (I've been a Gentoo fan for years, so I haven't followed that really closely.) Everything about UNR is fantastic except for one thing: browsers crash on it very frequently. And by "very frequently," I mean every time I use it. Unfortunately, running a browser is the single biggest use case for a netbook. I've read the forums; I've tried the suggestions; nothing works for me. I can't even get gdb to give me any useful info. At this point, I'm hoping that a big update comes out that magically fixes it. Until then, I keep looking for something else to try. Maybe Moblin? Maybe Win7? (Yeah, yeah, I know, but I have 9 computers at home. I just want the thing to WORK.) I'd put Gentoo on it, but I don't want to thrash the SSD, and I can't figure out how to get a cross-compiler going on my workstation. (Well, that, and I know I'd spend a MONTH tweaking everything to get it to the same level of functionality -- laptop-wise -- that UNR has out of the box.)
Well, they _could_ target something like SuSE's desktop, or Ubuntu's LTS.
You don't achieve a stranglehold on the desktop OS market without getting something right...
No, you get a stranglehold on the desktop market by being the lowest common multiple of easy and cheap until you have sufficient leverage so as to be impossible to ignore, and then you start strong-arming your vendors and competitors until your monopoly is complete. What Microsoft did right was NOT having any sort of DRM in their products until they had their de facto monopoly.
Disclaimer: IAAC. I know several wealthy Christians, even one -ridiculously- wealthy one, and I'm talking real, dyed-in-the-wool, no-hypocrisy-within-sight Christians. Depending on your point of view, I might be considered wealthy. Certainly, as a computer programmer in America who's doing alright despite "this economy" (thank God), I'm more wealthy than the majority of the world's population.
If "Christianity" forbad lending, I don't know where "they" got it from. There are scriptures dealing with usury in the old testament. It was alright to lend with interest, just not to someone else of the faith. ;-)
I'm writing to note that it's "easier" for the camel, but not impossible. The trick here is that it's the LOVE of money which is the root of all evil, according to scripture, not money itself. King David was one of the richest people the world had ever seen back in his day, and he was "a man after God's own heart."
Take this for what it's worth, but since you seemed so reasonable (on Slashdot?!), I just wanted to chime in with my view.
I had an underspec-ed, but GOOD, Antec PS for my dual Athlon motherboard. I fried both SCSI hard drives TWICE, a video card, sound card, and finally, the SCSI controller, before I realized that it just didn't have enough juice. (Everything but the controller was under warranty.) That being said, modern systems use a lot less energy these days, but now I don't ever skimp on a PS....
Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda. I mean, that is normal early in the relationship. Think about dating, you're primarily there to try to get in her pants. And usually...good sex leads the guy to thinking marriage might not be bad 'cause he'd like to keep that to himself on a perm. basis. The deep relationship that you're talking about, that comes along later after you are 'trapped' so to speak in marriage and are stuck together. If it doesnt' develop, the marriage isn't gonna work.
Good graciousness! Absolutely everything about this is backwards! Honestly, this is at the root of everything that's wrong in the world now. And it's not just the obtuseness of how to go about interacting with women, lest you misunderstand me. It's the complete abdication of anything resembling acting like an adult, and taking a long-term, responsible view of the future.
You DATE to find out if it will work. The SEX is just a side benefit. Try thinking with your BRAIN for a change. If the sex is good, you'll think ANY woman would be a good wife, and that's just STUPID. I know. Been there. Done that.
(Full disclosure: Happily married to the perfect wife and mother for 15 years. 3 kids. Deliriously sated with what happens behind closed doors. Did nothing but smooch until we were married.)
Viruses don't matter anymore. It's all about trojans now. A stupid person using Ubuntu is just as easy to infect with a trojan as a stupid person using Windows is.
That's just FUD. At _least_ on Ubuntu -- and this is suspending my disbelief that you could get something coded up for Linux that would actually do this... AND WORK on more than a tiny fraction of one particular distro's userbase -- you're going to have to enter your password to get root access. On Windows, you have an endless stream of dialog boxes that hassle you, and the average person has gotten so inurred with the process that they just click everything that pops up. Thus we have the situation where users click on pop-ups from web sites, and keep clicking right on through the rest of the permission boxes that try to prevent them from doing something stupid. In other words, it's NOT just user stupidity. Windows is being _complicit_ in this exercise. Although Windows fans (I used to be one) will say that you can "run as..." another user, using that every day will get you so frustrated with Microsoft's mechanism that you'll soon get over it and run as a full-fledged administrator again. I thought that things would improve over time. Maybe they have, but I've not seen it.
(I keep hitting submit when I want to preview...)
The 10's of thousands of coders at Microsoft have had 15 years.
The further point being that Microsoft could certainly do WinFS if they were so inclined. What's annoying about this situation is that they keep talking about it like it's going to make things "better," promise to put it in Windows, their lapdogs in the technical press (e.g., Gartner) parrot this line of reasoning (thereby reinforcing it), and then pull it again, just before releasing something we can look at. It's almost like they haven't really ever been serious about it... Hmm... Like it's just a piece of propoganda designed to make people stay on their OS and not go to other choices... Hmm...
Please read the following carefully: WinFS was an abstraction layer THAT WAS GOING TO RUN ATOP NTFS
It's also worth pointing out that Microsoft accomplished everything they wanted to do with WinFS in the file and metadata search platform that's in Vista and 7.
It's also worth noting that I KNOW that WinFS is more than "just" a filesystem, but my comment was intended to point out -- perhaps unsuccessfully with humor -- that I don't perceive the problem to be as complex as, say, coding and creating the assets for a triple-A video game title. After all, just 2 guys coded up a filesystem with database-like features in just 10 months for BeOS, which shipped in '97. The 10's of thousands of coders at Microsoft have had 15 years.
I love it! Here's our infamous "Gartner" group in prime form. FTFPDF, we see that they are predicting the arrival of WinFS anywhere from late 2008 to early 2010.
Now, anyone who's been around as long as Gartner knows that Microsoft has been promising this "feature" since Windows codename "Cairo," which was announced in 1991, and publically demo'ed in '93. There was a lot of hope that it would be delivered in NT 4.0. That's roughly 16 years folks. WAY more time than they had to develop Duke Nukem Forever, and it's just a _file system_.
If you want to talk about basing your corporate purchasing decisions on "features" like WinFS, then all this slagging off on Linux as not being "there yet" is directly hyporcritical, now, isn't it?
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Yeah. It was fun then, and it can be fun some more.
I don't understand the industry. Having the latest graphics engine ranks about 5 on my list of things that make a game fun. Me? I'd be OVERJOYED to be playing, say, the fifth SWKOTOR story on the EXACT SAME GRAPHICS ENGINE. I understand that you need to keep up to some degree, but it just gets old.
I was really excited when Valve seemed to be on track to deliver lots of game content while staying with the same engine. And they have, basically. TF2 is still based on Source, and that's what they're focusing on. I wish they'd do more with the HL2 franchise, but the concept is the same and I applaud that. I own TF2, but I hardly ever play it.
However, do you truly believe that Ubuntu has superior device support versus Windows? If so please let me know so that I can ignore the rest of your reply.
Except for the fiasco that was winmodems, driver support under Linux has ALWAYS been better than under Windows. Don't let anyone tell you any different. Regardless, feel free to ignore whatever you'd like. I won't presume to convince you (personally) otherwise.
To say that Windows drivers are less hassle than Linux drivers?... Are *you* serious? Would you like to talk about the 3-day, 24-hour ordeal I went through a couple months back, when I finally decided to try Vista on my (then) 6-month-old Asus motherboard? Complete and utter disaster trying to get the RAID drivers working! BSOD's all over the place. Several reinstalls. Nothing working. Finally just put XP back on. Please!
I suppose you'll bring up wireless drivers on Linux or something. The one time I encountered poor Linux drivers for a wireless chipset, ndiswrapper saved the day and that was it. Took maybe an hour to sort out.
You know what, I've got another canard:
I'VE WASTED JUST AS MUCH TIME SCREWING WITH WINDOWS AS I HAVE WITH LINUX. AT LEAST LINUX WAS FREE.
"Holistic usability," indeed. Have you (and not you, spyrochaete, personally, but anyone saying these kinds of things) actually installed Ubuntu? Have you "lived" in it for a week? Again, don't presume to understand Linux's shortcomings until you can say you have. Because you'll never understand its strengths until you've made it your daily work environment for a month, or, even better, done an upgrade.
I tried one of the Windows betas, but I gave up because it was buggy. I installed the new Ubuntu RC, and it was an absolute dream. It felt light years ahead of any Windows I had ever used.
As for your comment about Windows replacing Linux when the software support is there, I think it's going to take more than that. Ubuntu's slick UI and unparalleled driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over it's lifespan. Oh wait. It's free. Double win.
Want a terminal emulator (for programming routers)? Want an SSH client? Want a network sniffer? Want an http server? Smtp? Want any of 10,000 software packages? It's a couple clicks away with Synaptic. Don't tell me that Windows beats Linux for software installation. That's pathetically riduculous to anyone who's actually USED Linux for anything. Just because you can't get -- specifically -- Photoshop or Office or... well, that's pretty much it -- for Linux doesn't mean that software support isn't "there." There are plenty of applications to get the job done, do it the way YOU want to, and not the one single way that someone else supposes you should.
Plus, you can get a lot more support for free because people can look inside the code, actually figure out what the heck is going on, and explain it. If that's not enough, I'm betting you can get support for Ubuntu from Canonical for less cost than you can get support for Windows from Microsoft. And better support. I've called Microsoft support. Three out of four times, their "advice" was "reinstall."
Look. Enough. I'm tired of these old chestnuts from people who install Linux once or twice, can't figure out how to do anything, and then claim that Windows is the only credible OS on the market. Please. I don't have a problem with Microsoft fanboys. I have a problem with ANYONE who raves about ANYTHING without really knowing anything about the alternatives.
(Disclaimer(s): I'm a Gentoo fanboy, but I have Ubuntu NBR on an Asus Eee. For some reason, Firefox is buggier than the Everglades in August, but otherwise, it's fantastic, and there are several other credible browsers available. Yes, I use Windows, but only on my main machine, and only for gaming.)
Sounds like someone hasn't had very good luck with using Linux on the desktop. Yeah, well, me neither, but it hasn't stopped me from using it on my desktop machines (both at home and at work) for over 10 years now. You can say it sucks, but, in my experience, it just sucks DIFFERENTLY than the alternatives.
[Citation needed] Ye ol' Swedish Chef is getting a little long in the tooth. For those with higher UID's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc_UCc8EQcQ&NR=1