I have the logitech cordless mouseman optical. It can with a badass wireless keyboard too. You've probably seen it around its got all those fancy buttons and a volume dial. It was worth every penny. Anyway the LED in the mouse is red, but if the mouse isn't moving the LED blinks rapidly rather than being a constant on. I assume this is to save batteries. What's even cooler is if you wait a while the light still blinks, but less rapidly. Because it's wireless I don't think I'm going to fudge with the LEDs because it might mess with my battery life. But I'm sure someone can hack something together that makes the LED change colors rather than blink rapidly.
I think a better use of time would be to have all these programmers here develop a better OCR. Then you wouldn't need the proofreading and could just feed books into the scanner. I mean there are lots of things wrong with OCR and reasons why it can't be absolutely perfect, but it CAN bet better. If we just write one line of code a day each we'll have better OCR in no time.
while there may be some environmental issues concerning chip manufacture. The benefit that the microprocessor has brought to human society far outweighs any environmental cost.
The business model that comes is this. First you connect the dvd player to the internet. Then you sell movies for a resonable price. Cable TV's Pay-Per-View seems to be reasonable enough that people use it. The only difference is that when someone pays to view they save the movie and can watch it as many times as they want. DivX format would probably be optimal for this kind of service. It uses the least bandwith to transfer the file and more of them can be stored on the drive. And since it is lower quality than an actual DVD people will still go out and buy their favorite movies on optical media.
This would be especially awesome if they have a large database of old movies that are relatively cheaper to download and if they also provide newer movies that were just in theatres, even at a slightly higher price, so you don't have to wait for DVDs to come out (even though the waiting time has greatly decreased).
I see many people spending a dollar a day watching all the movies they always wanted to see and never did.
much about Macs. However, I do know about changing regions on DVD drives. Inside most DVD Rom drives are these physical switch type things, and they are limited in number. Everytime you change the region one of them breaks. If they are all broken your drive is done for. The way to beat this is to change the region on the drive to region 0. This way it can play 99% of all the DVDs out there without changing every single time.
I also reccomend getting an Apex DVD player. Apex is this crappy brand name that makes legitimate dvd players you can buy in wal-mart for like 60 bucks. They are pieces of crap, shoddy workmanship, cheap plastic, etc. But they're DVD players for 60 bucks. Anyway many of the Apex DVD players have secret menus you can get by pressing secret key combinations on the remote control. You can find out which models and which key combinations with google. These secret menus are not advertised nor in the instruction manual, so apex doesn't get sued. But the menu pretty much lets you change region at will as many times as you want, as well as convert NTSC and PAL. It's pretty amazing for 60 bucks. And heck DVD on a big TV screen beats DVD on a little computer monitor any day.
WindowsME, that's the problem! Use windows 98 SE. Other than 2000 professional it's as good as it gets in terms of windows. ME was a downgrade if anything from 98. Some Microsoft recruiters were at the job fair here, and even they came out and plainly admitted that ME was a big mistake. Just back up her files to CD-R, format the drive, install 98SE, apply service packs, install word97 or openoffice put backed up files back on hard drive. All done! I guarantee it will crash far less than ME.
Graphics cards are expensive because they don't sell in large quantities. The supply of high-end video cards is low so price is high. The supply is low because demand is low. Very few people other than a few gamers per town has a geforce 4. Most people with dells and gateways have whatever old card comes in there. And a whole crapload of pre-built machines come with on-board video. And for the needs of the vast majority of people a TNT2 is more than they will ever need.
My current PC is a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2 32MB video card. I bought this machine when the TNT2 first came out. There have been 4 geforce cards since then. And the only games that don't run on my computer are the new UT and America's Army. Every other 3D game runs just fine on my machine. I plan to buy a new PC soon. So I can encode movies faster and play Doom3. But I'm probably going to buy a motherboard that has the nforce2 chipset. Sure it's a crummy built in video card. But it's a geForce 4 built in. Even though the board probably wont be as fast as a KT400 with DDR400 and a video card in the AGP slot, it's a deal you can't beat. Motherboard, sound card, ethernet card, and video card for the price of just a motherboard. I probably wont use the built in sound card often, but all the operating systems I use fully support having 2 sound cards and using them simultanously, so I dont' see where I can go wrong. To read more about the nforce2 chipset check out Nvida or anandtech
It wont make the fastest gaming machine, but it will still make a good enough one, for a low low price.
The way I see it is that school isn't fun. I mean I'm a CS Major going for my BS and college is awesome. But classes aren't. Most of the suck. I'm getting out of here asap. I like coding though, so when I get a job in the real world, it will be fun because I'll be coding. If you've already got degrees, don't get more, just get a job that you like and get on with life. If you spend all your time in school you wont have any time to spend on "real life".
Yeah, I know those guys who wont switch up languages. Sometimes I think that they've forgotten all the other languages and refuse to write in them because they don't want you to know they forgot how. I've found that Perl nazis are usually the exception. They remember how to write in other languages. They just have some strange belief that Perl is the best language for everything, when it isn't.
Use the language best suited to the task at hand. Don't use a handsaw to put a nail in the wall. It's fun when somebody does, but it's really silly and impractical. It's ok if your writing something for fun to use whatever language you like. But at work you should choose wisely.
Oh, the vatican has a great collection of erotica eh? That must be why only the priests in America are raping little boys. The ones in Italy get to jerk off to porn instead!
That's very impressive. I mean the most I did was get a 14.4 modem into a normal Commodore 64. And I've seen guys who took Apple][gs machines and installed hard drives, cd burners, nics, and got everything from wolf3d and down to run on them. Even web browsing and AIM.
Even though it's not practical or useful for the average person I think it's good that there is proof that unless you are playing games or doing other high powered tasks like encoding video, that you don't need a new powerful machine.
my parents have DSL from the phone company. What they do is plug it in, then give you a CD and tell you to install it yourself. If you aren't careful it does some pretty crazy stuff. Your computer will turn into a giant ad for the phone company if you don't play it smart. There is one program you need to install though, its the one that lets you log into the DSL network. I don't know if it does underhanded things, and I forget what it's called. But the DSL is crazy fast, so I'm not going to complain.
When I'm not coding one monitor has instant messenging, winamp, a little browser window, all that stuff you want to keep your eye on. The other monitor has what I'm doing in full screen, gaming, video watching, etc.
When I'm coding on one monitor I use 4 desktops, 1 for instant messenging/mp3 playing, one for text editors, one for browser windows with documentation, and one with shells. If I had two monitors I would probably keep the code open all the time and switch off the documentation with the other two desktops in the second monitor.
If I come across a great deal of money it's two flat-screens ahoy!
Totally in agreement here. It's fine if you bash Microsoft for horrible business practices, because Microsoft is a big corporation with monopolistic practices. However, that fact is completely seperate from the quality of their product. You might not like it but Windows 2000 doesn't suck.
As for the laptop, it kicks ass. I would totally buy one if I wasn't piss poor. And I found out recently alienware makes laptops (I'm behind the times) they look frickin' sweet.
Here's another post probably nobody will ever see, but the whole population of the world can fit in Texas. http://www.pop.org/students/texas1.html see? do the math. Even if you use a huge overestimage that the world has 8 billion people in it as opposed to 6 or 7 you still get more than 900 square feet of living space per person.
That's assuming single story living space with "paper" walls in-between. If you expand to nearby states like Oklahoma and you make two story houses you can have room for roads and yards.
The US is 15% of the worlds population using 75% of the world's resources. We pay our farmers to make less food. There is no such thing as overpopulation. There is only poor distribution of resources. There are only fat people in the US. I wonder why? I wonder why terrorists hate us.
Using 85% of the surface of the earth? Some people are taking more than their fair share and some people aren't getting enough. So in the end there's no room for the trees.
Thanks to the internet can choose which news to read. My choice may not be the best choice, but due to this article I think I'll be reading the Icelandian Newspaper in addition to googlenews and slashdot.
Remember if you restrict the press too much you end up with Russia during the cold war. If you don't restrict it enough you end up with the national enquirer. If there is absolute freedom of the press it can become difficult to discern fact from fiction. That's why only the intelligent and the wealthy seem to know what's really going on. The intelligent figure it out and the wealthy pay someone else to.
I think it would be more like software piracy. They don't care if you pirate a game now and then, and they don't care if you have a zillion mp3s. They only go after the people with high volume. If I run an ftp with hundreds of warez programs on it and I have another one with all my mp3s and I'm using mad bandwith. Then they come after. So as long as you don't bring back 10 billion copies of animal farm they aren't going to think twice about you bringing it into the US. Which means if you set up an ftp with ebooks of these and the server was located in say France, there isn't much that can happen. Sure the american book company can sue you, but would they win?
I don't know
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 1, Informative
what the cross-over plugin is, and I don't want Office. Even though 100$ is a low price for office. But as for the enhanced version of KDE 2.2, it's gotta have some crazy enhancements to make it worth paying for. KDE3 is free and suits my needs. I'll wait for a lot more people to buy it and tell me about it before I see if the enhancements are worth the cash.
in two different situations. Situation #1 a good or sort of good movie is in the Movies 10. It's one of those theatres that shows movies that aren't quite out on DVD yet, and for cheap. 50 cents for a Wednesday Matinee! holy crap! I sometimes go to see shitty movies for that low low price.
I also go to see big movies when they come out at Tinsletown. Sure it's like 8 bucks to see LotR on opening night, but the experience of being there and everyone of your friends and aquaintances from all over town showing up in the same place can't be beat.
Other than that the movies aren't worth it. I like previews before a movie, but I don't like Coca-Cola ads. If I was going to drink something I would have bought it BEFORE the movie started.
I've never used the warranty on a hard drive. I mean I've had drives crash, but strangely (and I'm sure it's just by chance) that they all happened to be western digital drives. I've got an IBM drive now that works, but is slightly defective. But most of my drives are seagate, and I've never had a problem with a seagate drive ever. I've never even seen one crash, except for a really really old one that was 1 gigabyte. But then again I've got a 20 MB Seaget SCSI drive that still works. So in the end this means I can get drives cheaper because I'm not paying for a warranty I wont use. Good, it's time I bought a new computer anyway. Seagate Barracuda here I come.
There were commercials on tv for this over a month ago. It's still cool though. It shows that someone in the us is trying to catch up and replace our old crappy wireless phone tech. I'm still waiting for the all-in-one handheld device. Until then I'm not buying anything.
By all-in-one I mean I want a Digital Camera/Cell Phone/Pager/mp3 player/PDA with wireless networking all in one no bigger than palm-sized package. Yes, I know it will cost a lot of money, but I don't see it as an impossibility. We've already got combinations of the different parts, there just isn't something that encompasses all of them in one device. When someone finally does it, I'm there. Yes, I know about the treo and the clie, they come close, but not close enough.
Yeah, that screen/ratpoison window manager he's got there, it's reeeealy useful. NOT. I know that many of you are linux guys who weild the CLI like a deadly katana. I know that using the CLI as opposed to a GUI is faster and more powerful. However, there is one large problem with it. It's hard. It requires a great deal of effort to learn all of the commands and how to use them effectively. Sure someone can learn ls, mv, cp, rm, really quick. But things like grep, awk, etc. Require a lot more.
As I see it the number 1 reason why windows/mac are still beating linux out is that in linux you can't avoid opening a shell and getting a CLI at some point. For me, if something isn't easy and graphical it's useless. In Windows I can install/update a driver in 5 or 6 clicks of the mouse. In linux it requires me to do all kinds of crazy kernel stuff. It would take me more time to learn how to install the driver in linux and actually make it work properly than it would take me to just install windows.
This window manager that he presents is useful, if you are a crazy CLI type of guy. I want a fully customizeable, pretty, and powerful GUI. I don't want to ever be presented with a CLI. It's unecessary. The GUI was invented for a reason, and it was successful for a reason. It gives the user visual cues as to the correct way to achieve their goals. The CLI gives you a prompt that require the user to know what to type in with absolutely no help whatsoever. Yeah, there are man pages, if you know about them!
I realize the CLI is powerful and if you know what you are doing, as I'm sure many of you do, that it is more efficient for you to have a simplified window manager like this. But for everyone else in the real world Windows/KDE/Gnome/Mac is the way to go. The option of a CLI is available in all of those, but you never have to go to it if you don't want to.
Rather than trying to get away from the desktop we should find ways to make it prettier, faster, more responsive, and more intuitive. I think that using something besides X is a good way to start, but I dont' see that happening any time soon. Sure a stripped down window manager might be more efficient for.01% of the population. And it's great, you've got what you want. But 99% of the people need a better, complete, window manager.
The biggest problem I've seen in the open source world is that the people writing the software write it for themselves. Big software companies like MS and Adobe write software for the least common denominator. I wonder why more people use their stuff??
I can understand Microsoft and Sony going against Modchips, but why Nintendo? A mod-chip isn't going to do anything to a gamecube. I haven't seen anyone be able to bootleg gamecube games yet. AFAIK they are mini-dvds that spin backwards. That's a tough one to copy.
It's also interesting how they go after lik-sang, but http://www.modchips.com aka http://www.gamegizmo.com is still up, and selling the best chips around. We modded our PSOne with one, and it works great.
It's just like the Napster thing. They go after Napster, but Kazaa, Morpheus, WinMX all get to live.
If 10 companies are breaking the law can't you sue them all at once?
Slashdot Mirror
I have the logitech cordless mouseman optical. It can with a badass wireless keyboard too. You've probably seen it around its got all those fancy buttons and a volume dial. It was worth every penny. Anyway the LED in the mouse is red, but if the mouse isn't moving the LED blinks rapidly rather than being a constant on. I assume this is to save batteries. What's even cooler is if you wait a while the light still blinks, but less rapidly. Because it's wireless I don't think I'm going to fudge with the LEDs because it might mess with my battery life. But I'm sure someone can hack something together that makes the LED change colors rather than blink rapidly.
I think a better use of time would be to have all these programmers here develop a better OCR. Then you wouldn't need the proofreading and could just feed books into the scanner. I mean there are lots of things wrong with OCR and reasons why it can't be absolutely perfect, but it CAN bet better. If we just write one line of code a day each we'll have better OCR in no time.
while there may be some environmental issues concerning chip manufacture. The benefit that the microprocessor has brought to human society far outweighs any environmental cost.
The business model that comes is this. First you connect the dvd player to the internet. Then you sell movies for a resonable price. Cable TV's Pay-Per-View seems to be reasonable enough that people use it. The only difference is that when someone pays to view they save the movie and can watch it as many times as they want. DivX format would probably be optimal for this kind of service. It uses the least bandwith to transfer the file and more of them can be stored on the drive. And since it is lower quality than an actual DVD people will still go out and buy their favorite movies on optical media.
This would be especially awesome if they have a large database of old movies that are relatively cheaper to download and if they also provide newer movies that were just in theatres, even at a slightly higher price, so you don't have to wait for DVDs to come out (even though the waiting time has greatly decreased).
I see many people spending a dollar a day watching all the movies they always wanted to see and never did.
much about Macs. However, I do know about changing regions on DVD drives. Inside most DVD Rom drives are these physical switch type things, and they are limited in number. Everytime you change the region one of them breaks. If they are all broken your drive is done for. The way to beat this is to change the region on the drive to region 0. This way it can play 99% of all the DVDs out there without changing every single time.
I also reccomend getting an Apex DVD player. Apex is this crappy brand name that makes legitimate dvd players you can buy in wal-mart for like 60 bucks. They are pieces of crap, shoddy workmanship, cheap plastic, etc. But they're DVD players for 60 bucks. Anyway many of the Apex DVD players have secret menus you can get by pressing secret key combinations on the remote control. You can find out which models and which key combinations with google. These secret menus are not advertised nor in the instruction manual, so apex doesn't get sued. But the menu pretty much lets you change region at will as many times as you want, as well as convert NTSC and PAL. It's pretty amazing for 60 bucks. And heck DVD on a big TV screen beats DVD on a little computer monitor any day.
WindowsME, that's the problem! Use windows 98 SE. Other than 2000 professional it's as good as it gets in terms of windows. ME was a downgrade if anything from 98. Some Microsoft recruiters were at the job fair here, and even they came out and plainly admitted that ME was a big mistake. Just back up her files to CD-R, format the drive, install 98SE, apply service packs, install word97 or openoffice put backed up files back on hard drive. All done! I guarantee it will crash far less than ME.
Graphics cards are expensive because they don't sell in large quantities. The supply of high-end video cards is low so price is high. The supply is low because demand is low. Very few people other than a few gamers per town has a geforce 4. Most people with dells and gateways have whatever old card comes in there. And a whole crapload of pre-built machines come with on-board video. And for the needs of the vast majority of people a TNT2 is more than they will ever need.
My current PC is a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2 32MB video card. I bought this machine when the TNT2 first came out. There have been 4 geforce cards since then. And the only games that don't run on my computer are the new UT and America's Army. Every other 3D game runs just fine on my machine.
I plan to buy a new PC soon. So I can encode movies faster and play Doom3. But I'm probably going to buy a motherboard that has the nforce2 chipset. Sure it's a crummy built in video card. But it's a geForce 4 built in. Even though the board probably wont be as fast as a KT400 with DDR400 and a video card in the AGP slot, it's a deal you can't beat. Motherboard, sound card, ethernet card, and video card for the price of just a motherboard. I probably wont use the built in sound card often, but all the operating systems I use fully support having 2 sound cards and using them simultanously, so I dont' see where I can go wrong.
To read more about the nforce2 chipset check out
Nvida or
anandtech
It wont make the fastest gaming machine, but it will still make a good enough one, for a low low price.
The way I see it is that school isn't fun. I mean I'm a CS Major going for my BS and college is awesome. But classes aren't. Most of the suck. I'm getting out of here asap. I like coding though, so when I get a job in the real world, it will be fun because I'll be coding. If you've already got degrees, don't get more, just get a job that you like and get on with life. If you spend all your time in school you wont have any time to spend on "real life".
I thought it looked more like this... /**
* WMP
*/
void main(void){
Searchforillegalstuff();
ReporttoRIAA();
SendpersonalinfotoMS();
Pretendtoplaymusicandvideo();
Crash(BLUE_SCREEN);
}
Oh, I think it's just because we are using different coding standards.
Yeah, I know those guys who wont switch up languages. Sometimes I think that they've forgotten all the other languages and refuse to write in them because they don't want you to know they forgot how. I've found that Perl nazis are usually the exception. They remember how to write in other languages. They just have some strange belief that Perl is the best language for everything, when it isn't.
Use the language best suited to the task at hand. Don't use a handsaw to put a nail in the wall. It's fun when somebody does, but it's really silly and impractical. It's ok if your writing something for fun to use whatever language you like. But at work you should choose wisely.
Oh, the vatican has a great collection of erotica eh? That must be why only the priests in America are raping little boys. The ones in Italy get to jerk off to porn instead!
That's very impressive. I mean the most I did was get a 14.4 modem into a normal Commodore 64. And I've seen guys who took Apple][gs machines and installed hard drives, cd burners, nics, and got everything from wolf3d and down to run on them. Even web browsing and AIM.
Even though it's not practical or useful for the average person I think it's good that there is proof that unless you are playing games or doing other high powered tasks like encoding video, that you don't need a new powerful machine.
Radio Shack Coco 2 in the house
my parents have DSL from the phone company. What they do is plug it in, then give you a CD and tell you to install it yourself. If you aren't careful it does some pretty crazy stuff. Your computer will turn into a giant ad for the phone company if you don't play it smart. There is one program you need to install though, its the one that lets you log into the DSL network. I don't know if it does underhanded things, and I forget what it's called. But the DSL is crazy fast, so I'm not going to complain.
When I'm not coding one monitor has instant messenging, winamp, a little browser window, all that stuff you want to keep your eye on. The other monitor has what I'm doing in full screen, gaming, video watching, etc.
When I'm coding on one monitor I use 4 desktops, 1 for instant messenging/mp3 playing, one for text editors, one for browser windows with documentation, and one with shells. If I had two monitors I would probably keep the code open all the time and switch off the documentation with the other two desktops in the second monitor.
If I come across a great deal of money it's two flat-screens ahoy!
Totally in agreement here. It's fine if you bash Microsoft for horrible business practices, because Microsoft is a big corporation with monopolistic practices. However, that fact is completely seperate from the quality of their product. You might not like it but Windows 2000 doesn't suck.
As for the laptop, it kicks ass. I would totally buy one if I wasn't piss poor. And I found out recently alienware makes laptops (I'm behind the times) they look frickin' sweet.
1. Print butterflies
2. Paste all over every major city
3. Microsoft gets in trouble
4. weeeeeeeeee!
profit!
Here's another post probably nobody will ever see, but the whole population of the world can fit in Texas. http://www.pop.org/students/texas1.html
see? do the math. Even if you use a huge overestimage that the world has 8 billion people in it as opposed to 6 or 7 you still get more than 900 square feet of living space per person.
That's assuming single story living space with "paper" walls in-between. If you expand to nearby states like Oklahoma and you make two story houses you can have room for roads and yards.
The US is 15% of the worlds population using 75% of the world's resources. We pay our farmers to make less food. There is no such thing as overpopulation. There is only poor distribution of resources. There are only fat people in the US. I wonder why? I wonder why terrorists hate us.
Using 85% of the surface of the earth? Some people are taking more than their fair share and some people aren't getting enough. So in the end there's no room for the trees.
Oh well.
Thanks to the internet can choose which news to read. My choice may not be the best choice, but due to this article I think I'll be reading the Icelandian Newspaper in addition to googlenews and slashdot.
Remember if you restrict the press too much you end up with Russia during the cold war. If you don't restrict it enough you end up with the national enquirer. If there is absolute freedom of the press it can become difficult to discern fact from fiction. That's why only the intelligent and the wealthy seem to know what's really going on. The intelligent figure it out and the wealthy pay someone else to.
I think it would be more like software piracy. They don't care if you pirate a game now and then, and they don't care if you have a zillion mp3s. They only go after the people with high volume. If I run an ftp with hundreds of warez programs on it and I have another one with all my mp3s and I'm using mad bandwith. Then they come after.
So as long as you don't bring back 10 billion copies of animal farm they aren't going to think twice about you bringing it into the US. Which means if you set up an ftp with ebooks of these and the server was located in say France, there isn't much that can happen. Sure the american book company can sue you, but would they win?
what the cross-over plugin is, and I don't want Office. Even though 100$ is a low price for office. But as for the enhanced version of KDE 2.2, it's gotta have some crazy enhancements to make it worth paying for. KDE3 is free and suits my needs. I'll wait for a lot more people to buy it and tell me about it before I see if the enhancements are worth the cash.
in two different situations.
Situation #1 a good or sort of good movie is in the Movies 10. It's one of those theatres that shows movies that aren't quite out on DVD yet, and for cheap. 50 cents for a Wednesday Matinee! holy crap! I sometimes go to see shitty movies for that low low price.
I also go to see big movies when they come out at Tinsletown. Sure it's like 8 bucks to see LotR on opening night, but the experience of being there and everyone of your friends and aquaintances from all over town showing up in the same place can't be beat.
Other than that the movies aren't worth it. I like previews before a movie, but I don't like Coca-Cola ads. If I was going to drink something I would have bought it BEFORE the movie started.
I've never used the warranty on a hard drive. I mean I've had drives crash, but strangely (and I'm sure it's just by chance) that they all happened to be western digital drives. I've got an IBM drive now that works, but is slightly defective. But most of my drives are seagate, and I've never had a problem with a seagate drive ever. I've never even seen one crash, except for a really really old one that was 1 gigabyte. But then again I've got a 20 MB Seaget SCSI drive that still works.
So in the end this means I can get drives cheaper because I'm not paying for a warranty I wont use. Good, it's time I bought a new computer anyway. Seagate Barracuda here I come.
There were commercials on tv for this over a month ago. It's still cool though. It shows that someone in the us is trying to catch up and replace our old crappy wireless phone tech. I'm still waiting for the all-in-one handheld device. Until then I'm not buying anything.
By all-in-one I mean I want a Digital Camera/Cell Phone/Pager/mp3 player/PDA with wireless networking all in one no bigger than palm-sized package. Yes, I know it will cost a lot of money, but I don't see it as an impossibility. We've already got combinations of the different parts, there just isn't something that encompasses all of them in one device. When someone finally does it, I'm there. Yes, I know about the treo and the clie, they come close, but not close enough.
Yeah, that screen/ratpoison window manager he's got there, it's reeeealy useful. NOT. I know that many of you are linux guys who weild the CLI like a deadly katana. I know that using the CLI as opposed to a GUI is faster and more powerful. However, there is one large problem with it. It's hard. It requires a great deal of effort to learn all of the commands and how to use them effectively. Sure someone can learn ls, mv, cp, rm, really quick. But things like grep, awk, etc. Require a lot more.
.01% of the population. And it's great, you've got what you want. But 99% of the people need a better, complete, window manager.
As I see it the number 1 reason why windows/mac are still beating linux out is that in linux you can't avoid opening a shell and getting a CLI at some point. For me, if something isn't easy and graphical it's useless. In Windows I can install/update a driver in 5 or 6 clicks of the mouse. In linux it requires me to do all kinds of crazy kernel stuff. It would take me more time to learn how to install the driver in linux and actually make it work properly than it would take me to just install windows.
This window manager that he presents is useful, if you are a crazy CLI type of guy. I want a fully customizeable, pretty, and powerful GUI. I don't want to ever be presented with a CLI. It's unecessary. The GUI was invented for a reason, and it was successful for a reason. It gives the user visual cues as to the correct way to achieve their goals. The CLI gives you a prompt that require the user to know what to type in with absolutely no help whatsoever. Yeah, there are man pages, if you know about them!
I realize the CLI is powerful and if you know what you are doing, as I'm sure many of you do, that it is more efficient for you to have a simplified window manager like this. But for everyone else in the real world Windows/KDE/Gnome/Mac is the way to go. The option of a CLI is available in all of those, but you never have to go to it if you don't want to.
Rather than trying to get away from the desktop we should find ways to make it prettier, faster, more responsive, and more intuitive. I think that using something besides X is a good way to start, but I dont' see that happening any time soon. Sure a stripped down window manager might be more efficient for
The biggest problem I've seen in the open source world is that the people writing the software write it for themselves. Big software companies like MS and Adobe write software for the least common denominator. I wonder why more people use their stuff??
I can understand Microsoft and Sony going against Modchips, but why Nintendo? A mod-chip isn't going to do anything to a gamecube. I haven't seen anyone be able to bootleg gamecube games yet. AFAIK they are mini-dvds that spin backwards. That's a tough one to copy.
It's also interesting how they go after lik-sang, but http://www.modchips.com aka http://www.gamegizmo.com is still up, and selling the best chips around. We modded our PSOne with one, and it works great.
It's just like the Napster thing. They go after Napster, but Kazaa, Morpheus, WinMX all get to live.
If 10 companies are breaking the law can't you sue them all at once?