I agree. The only thing thats actually big about this notebook (other than the size ofcourse) is the hard-drive - the rest are nothing *that* great.
However, one selling point maybe the fact that this notebook is just $1,499 - which is quite cheap considering the configuration (and the fact that if you are a gamer, it comes with Nvidia's GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics card).
The rest of the features are cool, but nothing *so* special. Honestly, I would rather have a desktop for way lesser price than a beast that weighs so much.
I liked the part where the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film award, for the Canadian movie, The Barbarian Invasions came up on stage and said something along the lines of, "Thank God LoTR was not nominated in this category" :)
That, in itself spoke volumes. Kudos to Peter Jackson!
Before someone screams "Yay! Another victory for the anti-Microsoft lobby", its worth noting that this is not good.
From the article -
China says it is merely trying to level the playing field for its own software companies.
Bah! If every country were to level the "playing fields" - there is no point in such things as patents and WTO laws.
Why does the US still buy Japanese and Chinese products? Maybe the US should "level" the playing fields too. Why does any other country have to respect any other country's patent or trade laws?
As much as I like the fact that this means widespread adoptation of Linux - just remember that they are essentially violating even the basic trade law premises of free and fair trade.
The article's ending makes it worse -
So far, Linux has not made big inroads. IDC software analyst Jenny Jin estimates it has "a very small percentage" of the operating system market, probably less than 4 percent.
I wonder what this means. Homegrown Windows like OS? Whatever it is, this is plain wrong.
While other countries respect trade laws at the expense of their workers, industry and economy, why should China be allowed to be any different?
Well, NSAs involvement with closed source would be bad - even if they introduced backdoors, there is no way you are going to be able to find it, unlike in the case of Open Source:)
On another note, not to troll, but I was wondering if you had any references to substantiate your argument on Microsoft lobbying against NSA Linux (just out of curiosity!).
Do you read all of your source code before you use the software?
No, but if someone made changes and enhancements to my code or related to my code, I would most definitely like to see the changes.
Especially if its an agency like the NSA.
And am sure, so would the contributors to the various kernel and networking parts of Linux (or for that matter other Open Source works).
Besides, ever seen your average mail (and the number of mails) on Bugtraq or Security Focus mailing lists? There are quite a few people out there who would be quite interested.
Also, remember that even if NSA wanted to introduce backdoors, this would be too early - they would need to build up the trust to a level when people will get a little careless and then take advantage:)
You make a very good point, but I will not say that you are entirely right, and I will add that this is not true for all research schools, either.
The school that I goto (and the one I went to) are/were primarily engineering + research schools, and had pretty strict policies on grading - however, the real freedom was in choosing your pre-requisites and getting them waived off based on your research.
Besides, all the courses am taking now are mostly research project based (with say, ~30% or less from exams/quizzes/assignments/papers) - you publish a paper from your project and you are assured of an A.
I landed a B in a course I had done exceptionally well in all aspects simply because of issues with the team and that our research was not "publication quality" and "good engineering" although theoretically we had got high grades in both the aspects.
Good schools have this reputation and snub factor, if you ask me - it does not matter how good you are, a lot of times they put you down because they want to. And most good research schools fall under this category.
Crichton writes books that're *just* right for a Hollywood movie. Gibson is not like that -- in fact, he almost sounded against making movies out of his books. He said it would be right if they don't screw it up (which is quite unlikely), but I don't care as there isn't much that I'm gonna get in terms of financial benefits.
Gibson likes to think of how the future would be - he thinks and extrapolates, rather than weave out Hollywood style crap like most writers out there. His books are generally very well researched and far fetched.
He made a remark on how in Pattern Recognition, how one of the lead characters does not like corporate logos and trademarks, she is quite comfortable with having Star Bucks all over the place. Think of where he is going with this kind of writing -- go figure:)
I also feel that Gibson now understands that writing about corporations no longer matters as they are THERE -- there is nothing new. Its more fun if you wrote about the future, not the present. And thats precisely what he is doing, I think!
He gave a talk at Georgia Tech last week, and it was quite cool.
He actually explained why he had stopped blogging. He felt that when he had the "urge" to write or do something, the net is an easy outlet but not the best. Writing, on the other hand is a more organized and better outlet, and ofcourse has better benefits:)
I had also asked him about why he had ended Neuromancer in a way that almost killed all the characters (in terms of a future) -- and his response was something along the lines of, even if down the line I'm so broke that I want to write a sequel, I should not be able to, because it won't be the work of the moment. He said that he would ideally like to re-write Neuromancer, and felt bad about how he had not thought about cellphones and other common technologies being common in the real future:)
A really cool guy, and he really gave very proper answers for everything. And yes, he said his favourite book was Idoru.
And I strongly recommend reading Pattern Recognition to those of who who have not -- that book rocks!
Yeah, but you miss the very concept of reservation.
Indian schools have a category for people who have been supposedly been deprived of the facilities owing to their caste in the past. Hence there is the concept of reservation -- one where you are admitted if you belong to a supposedly lower caste merely because in the past your ancestors were discriminated against.
These are called Scheduled Castes & Tribes and other backward communities.
Now, tonnes of people in medical schools have far less than what it takes to legitimately get into medical school, and pass out of one. So, if you belong to whats construed as a "backward community", you are allowed to slack off, and thats a trump card that many use to get through school even though they do not deserve to be there.
Tell me honestly, would you really like someone with inferior skills who passed out owing to his race of birth was allowed to pass out to work on you? I would not.
And yeah, all the rich and the famous in India including the politicians themselves do not trust Indian medicos -- they goto US or UK (or Europe) for treatment. That in itself would say a lot.
Not in my life would I trust my life with an Indian doctor. No sir.
Re:Why why why
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Its not that simple.
I would think the Microsoft analogy is flawed, simply because if something goes wrong with the console, you just lose your $200 (or whatever) piece of hardware.
On the other hand, you mess up with your car and do something stupid, people would have accidents. They could get hurt. And they could die.
And no guesses as to what would happen then - these companies would get sued to kingdom come by some opportunitistic f**ks.
And guess what? There will be a thriving blackmarket industry that will promise all kinds of things, which would result in more problems for the companies.
Hurt + Death + Blackmarket + Increased Responsibility == Bad Bad Idea
They're better off simply not letting you do all this rather than risk the consequences.
On the other hand, there is hardly even a thriving blackmarket area for stuff like hacking consoles (unlike cars, where the duplicate blackpart industry is BIG).
So why Microsoft is not letting you do all this? I have no idea. Probably coz they're a bunch of megalomaniacs.
I know this is intended to be funny, but it makes me wonder.
Are we at a state where social skills are more important than intellectual skills? Often, the more intelligent ones are the ones with really poor social skills.
Just think about it - the Slashdot crowd is largely the cream (or atleast a significant part) of the intellectual populace.
And if this is the case, the *intelligent* ones are actually being beaten by the less capable ones. The more intellectual ones are the ones who are single.
And these are the ones who are capable of changing the world, who are capable of doing radical things, who can think outside the box. However, these very people are socially so inept.
Does this not fly in the face of Darwinism? Just wondering, as someone who had a bad breakup the day before Valentine's day:)
Hmmm, for one, OEM Vendors and established dealers who cannot afford to sell pirated copies?
When they have to preload and bundle OSes with their hardware, a higher overhead would hurt them real bad. Which is why, they'd rather prefer something cheaper, even though it may not be the best alternative.
If you ask, how does it make a difference to MS? Can't they sell the same thing cheaper? Then the answer would be no, simply because they'd be pressurized by other vendors in the same way.
So the solution is to come up with an excuse for a price cut, and thats precisely what they're doing.
It does not matter whether or not its got features added/removed. What is crucial is the price cut, and how they've come up with it. And its a means of attracting more OEM vendors.
You're right, most of these are kids who have just learnt programming on Windows. I'll quote from the article --
''This guy,'' he proclaimed, ''is the best at Visual Basic.''
In the virus underground, that's love. Visual Basic is a computer language popular among malware authors for its simplicity; Philet0ast3r has used it to create several of the two dozen viruses he's written.
This is the problem - back when I was a kid, I used to mess around with things like TSRs and assembly code to create things that had virus like behaviour to scare the crap out of my teachers in school.
These days, these kids just pick up an odd scripting language or two, or some easy language like VB and just do malicious code simply because its easy.
This is not programming or 'crazy skills' - its sheer adoloscence being shown in another way.
Instead, if they spent their time tinkering with the internals of a Linux Kernel or coding other cool stuff (like, Scene graphics programs, for instance!) it would be a much better use of their time and enthusiasm.
Worst case, people who dislike such stuff will start sites which will let *others* post their thoughts on the site.
Can you blame a blogger site simply because a few of the bloggers choose to say something offensive? Not anymore than you can sue Slashdot for the opinions of its readers.
The fine line that says all the comments belong to the user saves Slashdot from the pain!:)
And then, will it be made mandatory for such SITES to keep track of all the IPs? What if I start a site in a country with less stiffer laws?
The thing is, it will end up being a pain for legitimate users, which is a very good point you raised.
However, painful as it may seem, we can always find a way out:) Not as easy as before, but then again freedom comes at a price. Unfortunate, but true.
A lot of govt. organizations in India today use OSS. For every area of the govt that uses Microsoft software, there is atleast one other counterpart which uses OSS.
In fact, the last time I checked, a lot of states were having budget deficits. Guess what is it that they cut down on?
I know for a fact that several nationalized banks as well as other govt agencies have switched to OSS.
You think MS would get scared merely by the "threat" of OpenSource? The reason they are really scared is because there are parts of the nation that use OSS, and it works.
Now THAT would explain why Microsoft is opening so many branches in India -- primarily because they would have the excuse of providing jobs, and to feed those jobs they would need the govts money for software.
Do not think MS would be doing this unless there is a benefit for them.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the obvious one, mate.
;-)
Sean Connery voice:
"Elvish has left the building..?"
Shoot, does Infinium even have anough employees to man a booth that size?
;-)
Not man dude, *woman* - its E3 for heaven's sake!
They'll borrow heavily bottomed lasses from the neighbourhood's stripclubs if they need people so badly
Bah! Who goes to E3 to see the cool stuff anyway. Its all about the babes, baby. Ahan!
I agree. The only thing thats actually big about this notebook (other than the size ofcourse) is the hard-drive - the rest are nothing *that* great.
However, one selling point maybe the fact that this notebook is just $1,499 - which is quite cheap considering the configuration (and the fact that if you are a gamer, it comes with Nvidia's GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics card).
The rest of the features are cool, but nothing *so* special. Honestly, I would rather have a desktop for way lesser price than a beast that weighs so much.
Nonsense! We're all the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers out here buddy.
Them Martians then screwed it up with that whatchacallit infection and went phut!
Why do you think reality shows are so popular?
I liked the part where the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film award, for the Canadian movie, The Barbarian Invasions came up on stage and said something along the lines of,
:)
"Thank God LoTR was not nominated in this category"
That, in itself spoke volumes. Kudos to Peter Jackson!
Before someone screams "Yay! Another victory for the anti-Microsoft lobby", its worth noting that this is not good.
From the article -
China says it is merely trying to level the playing field for its own software companies.
Bah! If every country were to level the "playing fields" - there is no point in such things as patents and WTO laws.
Why does the US still buy Japanese and Chinese products? Maybe the US should "level" the playing fields too. Why does any other country have to respect any other country's patent or trade laws?
As much as I like the fact that this means widespread adoptation of Linux - just remember that they are essentially violating even the basic trade law premises of free and fair trade.
The article's ending makes it worse -
So far, Linux has not made big inroads. IDC software analyst Jenny Jin estimates it has "a very small percentage" of the operating system market, probably less than 4 percent.
I wonder what this means. Homegrown Windows like OS? Whatever it is, this is plain wrong.
While other countries respect trade laws at the expense of their workers, industry and economy, why should China be allowed to be any different?
Well, NSAs involvement with closed source would be bad - even if they introduced backdoors, there is no way you are going to be able to find it, unlike in the case of Open Source :)
On another note, not to troll, but I was wondering if you had any references to substantiate your argument on Microsoft lobbying against NSA Linux (just out of curiosity!).
Thanks.
Do you read all of your source code before you use the software?
:)
No, but if someone made changes and enhancements to my code or related to my code, I would most definitely like to see the changes.
Especially if its an agency like the NSA.
And am sure, so would the contributors to the various kernel and networking parts of Linux (or for that matter other Open Source works).
Besides, ever seen your average mail (and the number of mails) on Bugtraq or Security Focus mailing lists? There are quite a few people out there who would be quite interested.
Also, remember that even if NSA wanted to introduce backdoors, this would be too early - they would need to build up the trust to a level when people will get a little careless and then take advantage
LOL! Alright, my bad. Nice way of pointing it out, though :-p
You make a very good point, but I will not say that you are entirely right, and I will add that this is not true for all research schools, either.
The school that I goto (and the one I went to) are/were primarily engineering + research schools, and had pretty strict policies on grading - however, the real freedom was in choosing your pre-requisites and getting them waived off based on your research.
Besides, all the courses am taking now are mostly research project based (with say, ~30% or less from exams/quizzes/assignments/papers) - you publish a paper from your project and you are assured of an A.
I landed a B in a course I had done exceptionally well in all aspects simply because of issues with the team and that our research was not "publication quality" and "good engineering" although theoretically we had got high grades in both the aspects.
Good schools have this reputation and snub factor, if you ask me - it does not matter how good you are, a lot of times they put you down because they want to. And most good research schools fall under this category.
So you code in Perl too, eh?
I bet to disagree.
:)
:)
Crichton writes books that're *just* right for a Hollywood movie. Gibson is not like that -- in fact, he almost sounded against making movies out of his books. He said it would be right if they don't screw it up (which is quite unlikely), but I don't care as there isn't much that I'm gonna get in terms of financial benefits.
Gibson likes to think of how the future would be - he thinks and extrapolates, rather than weave out Hollywood style crap like most writers out there. His books are generally very well researched and far fetched.
He made a remark on how in Pattern Recognition, how one of the lead characters does not like corporate logos and trademarks, she is quite comfortable with having Star Bucks all over the place. Think of where he is going with this kind of writing -- go figure
I also feel that Gibson now understands that writing about corporations no longer matters as they are THERE -- there is nothing new. Its more fun if you wrote about the future, not the present. And thats precisely what he is doing, I think!
IMHO
He gave a talk at Georgia Tech last week, and it was quite cool.
:)
:)
He actually explained why he had stopped blogging. He felt that when he had the "urge" to write or do something, the net is an easy outlet but not the best. Writing, on the other hand is a more organized and better outlet, and ofcourse has better benefits
I had also asked him about why he had ended Neuromancer in a way that almost killed all the characters (in terms of a future) -- and his response was something along the lines of, even if down the line I'm so broke that I want to write a sequel, I should not be able to, because it won't be the work of the moment. He said that he would ideally like to re-write Neuromancer, and felt bad about how he had not thought about cellphones and other common technologies being common in the real future
A really cool guy, and he really gave very proper answers for everything. And yes, he said his favourite book was Idoru.
And I strongly recommend reading Pattern Recognition to those of who who have not -- that book rocks!
LOL! Knew I was gonna see this on Slashdot someday.
:) Geeks!
Goes right up there with, "IANAL, but basedon what I read on Slashdot...
Way to go! Wonder whats coming next?
I've never had sex, but based on what I hear on Slashdot?
*shakes head* *mumbles* *walks away*
Very well said. You just became my friend.
(Hats off!)
Yeah, but you miss the very concept of reservation.
Indian schools have a category for people who have been supposedly been deprived of the facilities owing to their caste in the past. Hence there is the concept of reservation -- one where you are admitted if you belong to a supposedly lower caste merely because in the past your ancestors were discriminated against.
These are called Scheduled Castes & Tribes and other backward communities.
Now, tonnes of people in medical schools have far less than what it takes to legitimately get into medical school, and pass out of one. So, if you belong to whats construed as a "backward community", you are allowed to slack off, and thats a trump card that many use to get through school even though they do not deserve to be there.
Tell me honestly, would you really like someone with inferior skills who passed out owing to his race of birth was allowed to pass out to work on you? I would not.
And yeah, all the rich and the famous in India including the politicians themselves do not trust Indian medicos -- they goto US or UK (or Europe) for treatment. That in itself would say a lot.
Not in my life would I trust my life with an Indian doctor. No sir.
Its not that simple.
I would think the Microsoft analogy is flawed, simply because if something goes wrong with the console, you just lose your $200 (or whatever) piece of hardware.
On the other hand, you mess up with your car and do something stupid, people would have accidents. They could get hurt. And they could die.
And no guesses as to what would happen then - these companies would get sued to kingdom come by some opportunitistic f**ks.
And guess what? There will be a thriving blackmarket industry that will promise all kinds of things, which would result in more problems for the companies.
Hurt + Death + Blackmarket + Increased Responsibility == Bad Bad Idea
They're better off simply not letting you do all this rather than risk the consequences.
On the other hand, there is hardly even a thriving blackmarket area for stuff like hacking consoles (unlike cars, where the duplicate blackpart industry is BIG).
So why Microsoft is not letting you do all this? I have no idea. Probably coz they're a bunch of megalomaniacs.
I know this is intended to be funny, but it makes me wonder.
:)
Are we at a state where social skills are more important than intellectual skills? Often, the more intelligent ones are the ones with really poor social skills.
Just think about it - the Slashdot crowd is largely the cream (or atleast a significant part) of the intellectual populace.
And if this is the case, the *intelligent* ones are actually being beaten by the less capable ones. The more intellectual ones are the ones who are single.
And these are the ones who are capable of changing the world, who are capable of doing radical things, who can think outside the box. However, these very people are socially so inept.
Does this not fly in the face of Darwinism? Just wondering, as someone who had a bad breakup the day before Valentine's day
Hmmm, for one, OEM Vendors and established dealers who cannot afford to sell pirated copies?
When they have to preload and bundle OSes with their hardware, a higher overhead would hurt them real bad. Which is why, they'd rather prefer something cheaper, even though it may not be the best alternative.
If you ask, how does it make a difference to MS? Can't they sell the same thing cheaper? Then the answer would be no, simply because they'd be pressurized by other vendors in the same way.
So the solution is to come up with an excuse for a price cut, and thats precisely what they're doing.
It does not matter whether or not its got features added/removed. What is crucial is the price cut, and how they've come up with it. And its a means of attracting more OEM vendors.
Thats why I said time and enthusiasm -- not intellect! :)
You're right, most of these are kids who have just learnt programming on Windows. I'll quote from the article --
''This guy,'' he proclaimed, ''is the best at Visual Basic.''
In the virus underground, that's love. Visual Basic is a computer language popular among malware authors for its simplicity; Philet0ast3r has used it to create several of the two dozen viruses he's written.
This is the problem - back when I was a kid, I used to mess around with things like TSRs and assembly code to create things that had virus like behaviour to scare the crap out of my teachers in school.
These days, these kids just pick up an odd scripting language or two, or some easy language like VB and just do malicious code simply because its easy.
This is not programming or 'crazy skills' - its sheer adoloscence being shown in another way.
Instead, if they spent their time tinkering with the internals of a Linux Kernel or coding other cool stuff (like, Scene graphics programs, for instance!) it would be a much better use of their time and enthusiasm.
The thing is, you will always find a way out.
:)
:) Not as easy as before, but then again freedom comes at a price. Unfortunate, but true.
Worst case, people who dislike such stuff will start sites which will let *others* post their thoughts on the site.
Can you blame a blogger site simply because a few of the bloggers choose to say something offensive? Not anymore than you can sue Slashdot for the opinions of its readers.
The fine line that says all the comments belong to the user saves Slashdot from the pain!
And then, will it be made mandatory for such SITES to keep track of all the IPs? What if I start a site in a country with less stiffer laws?
The thing is, it will end up being a pain for legitimate users, which is a very good point you raised.
However, painful as it may seem, we can always find a way out
A little offtopic, but apparently, the Swiss have developed some flying cars.
More details can be found here.
(yeah yeah, I know that they're technically hover-craft kinda thingys for brief over-water flight, but hey!)
You miss Parallel Processing and Clustering Capabilities, Graphical Prowess and things like support for realtime apps.
:)
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of each of those things! Wonder how they would be
Not true.
A lot of govt. organizations in India today use OSS. For every area of the govt that uses Microsoft software, there is atleast one other counterpart which uses OSS.
In fact, the last time I checked, a lot of states were having budget deficits. Guess what is it that they cut down on?
I know for a fact that several nationalized banks as well as other govt agencies have switched to OSS.
You think MS would get scared merely by the "threat" of OpenSource? The reason they are really scared is because there are parts of the nation that use OSS, and it works.
Now THAT would explain why Microsoft is opening so many branches in India -- primarily because they would have the excuse of providing jobs, and to feed those jobs they would need the govts money for software.
Do not think MS would be doing this unless there is a benefit for them.