You're just another one of those shits who think that wealth is God's way of showing
approval of your thieving ways and that poverty is His way of showing disapproval of their unambitious ways.
I find convincing people to switch their OS is nearly impossible, but getting them to use
other FOSS programs is rather simple: just deleted the propriety stuff and install the FOSS
equivalent on their machines.
Once you have people using all the apps you mentioned, they basically won't even notice the difference
with switching to Linux and KDE. You'll still have one major problem with getting them to actually
try Linux, however - They already have a legal OEM copy of XP (or Vista).
You or I or the typical Slashdotter might think nothing of reinstalling the OS on a machine,
but the average user never does so - They'll usually price out a new PC before
they even consider using their XP "recovery" disc. At that point, you can suggest
Linux.
When someone tells you they need a new computer (because their current 6 month old dual core
2GB box has so much spyware they can't use it anymore), and asks you about which brand of PC
to get (brand? Yeah, riiiiiiight) - THEN you can suggest they try installing
Linux before buying a new machine. Of course, this will mean volunteering a few hours of your
time, since they'll want your "help", but given the choice between trying something out and
spending a few hundred bucks, amost people will at least give it a try.
This is yet another opportunity for you educated people to express your disdain
for Christianity (and Judaism indirectly) religions: Downmod the above!
Welcome to the exciting world of "sarcasm". The GP did express his disdain
for superstitious BS such as otherwise-rational people fearing the spooooooooky
Mark of the Beast.
I absolutely oppose any proposals to "chip" humans (for ID purposes - Put me at
the front of the line to have a machine/neural interface jack installed, however), but doing so
for religious reasons makes any valid objections less convincing by association.
That's been already worked out for them: One on the forehead, and another on the right hand.
Well, the frontal sinus would make an ideal location for them... Well within
the ability of modern endoscopic techniques; no visiable lump as with subcutaneous
insertion; virtually no way for the animal - er, prisoner - to remove it without
medical assistance; and, it lies close enough to the surface to respond to a reasonably
low-powered scanner.
Now, the wrist, on the other hand, not such a great place. The whole area has entirely
too many tendons and nerves to make deep implantation viable, and a shallow SQ implant
would likely cause some distress due to visible (if minor) disfigurement and increased
risk of abrasion over the implantation site. I'd say we should proably keep the hand
reserved solely for barcodes.
They can sound better if you have a good turntable with a good cartridge
Not to disagree with someone on the same side of this issue, but... No, they most certainly
cannot sound better. Regardless of quality, a mechanical stylus has something that a CD's laser
does not: inertia in its plane of movement/measurement. That alone limits both the dynamic range and
frequency response of vinyl (or any mechanically-sampled waveform) to well under what a CD offers (and
not even in the same ballpark as DVD-A).
That said, turntables with a laser "stylus" do exist - But these two cannot physically
match the quality of a CD, for one simple reason - The vinyl master also used a
mechanical stylus to lay down the track.
I get so sick of this discussion coming up every few months. I sincerely have to
wonder whether to attribute the problem to ignorance or hipster-pretense. This shouldn't
remain an open issue like religion or VI-vs-Emacs - We have a very measureable difference
between the two mediums, and vinyl fails any way that you look at it. It simply cannot
reproduce a waveform as accurately as CD audio, end of story.
no, in that situation, rich people can choose, rich people can choose to pollute as much as they like and
do whatever they want, and poor people get screwed over. as always.
Give the class-warfare angle a rest, please.
Yes, we have a distribution-of-wealth problem in the world today - Just as we always have, and
just as we always will. But that very inbalance means that if rich people "choose to pollute
as much as they like", they at least fall into a tiny minority of the population that can afford to
do so.
And keep in mind, the lower tiers of "rich people" (the majority of them) didn't get that way
by throwing away money to keep their homes an extra degree or two cooler. And even if they really do choose
to pay more just to carry on their wasteful habits, well, that makes them a little less rich,
doesn't it?
This is the sort of naive, knee-jerk reaction that makes sense when you don't understand how the grid works.
People don't give two shakes of a rat's ass how the grid works. We pay (quite a lot, IMO) for a 24/7 service, and
expect it to goddamn-well work when we need it. And at 2pm in July in SoCal during a santa anna, you need
air conditioning.
TFA is about a solution to high peak loads.
TFA "solves" the problem by depriving people of the right to decide what to spend their money on.
Don't get me wrong - I fully support some fairly extreme energy conservation measures. But without exception,
we need to get people to "choose" to adopt them out of financial pressures, rather than compulsorily. Can't get
people to use CFLs? Put a tax on incandescents to make them cost the same as CFLs, and watch their usage plummet.
Can't get people to raise the thermostat? At $0.50/KWh, you'll see just how many people can get by at 80F rather
than 72F. Can't get people to stop driving SUVs with single-digit fuel efficiency? Yeah, $5+ per gallon gasoline
will end that trend this summer.
But in all of those, you can still choose to pay the same for shorter-lived less-efficient lightbulbs; You
can still choose to keep the AC at 65F; You can still choose to start the Ford Exploder 15 minutes
early to let it warm up for your daily trip to the end of the driveway to get the mail. And some people will - But not
many, and I'll thank the fools who do for subsidizing the cost of clean air at the same time they try to maximize
their personal waste.
If your reputation is on the line and it looks like your stuff just randomly broke, I really don't think you'd be laughing either.
From the posted video, most of the presenters seemed more amused than annoyed (with one notable exception).
Also, with the same thing happening randomly around the convention, I think everyone realized they had a practical
joker rather than defective products.
The magnets are excellent for opening rental and library DVD cases...
They also work wonderfully on those annoying "inventory control" dye-pack
tags that clerks all too frequently seem to "forget" to remove from your new
shirt. Just stick the magnet at the end, you'll hear or feel a subtle click,
and the metal pin will pop right out (it should do so easily - If you
feel resistance, you don't have it right and will make a mess if you pull
too hard).
You can also use them to deactivate the strips in books and CDs that trigger
door alarms (but NOT the RFID ones, which look like a 1.5x1.5" sticker with a
slightly thicker center and spiral around the outer edge).
But remember what the signs always say, these devices exist "for your protection".
Not just for laughs from having some minimum-wage-slave frisk you at the door while
everyone looks at you like a thief because another minimum-wage-slave
couldn't bother to do their job and pass your purchase over the magic pad-o'-deactivation.
not to mention malls, offices, restaurants and other businesses.
Oh, no, they won't install them in any commercial location, only private homes.
Making people uncomfortable in their own homes, no problem; Interfering with Holy Commerce, now, they just
don't play games there. Won't happen.
Remember, this involves a state that has to pump in water from two states away because of
regular yearly droughts that make the US SouthEast this year look like a bunch of crybabies, yet
when they implement watering bans, they exempt businesses; And even on mornings when they do actually
get a bit of rain, those businesses will still leave the sprinklers on, because it costs less
than having Jose drop by and manually interrupt the cycle.
In any other state, I'd consider this proposal offensive enough to incite riots. But California?
Heh. Relax and just watch the show.
No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP.
As an admin of a medium-sized corporate network of XP boxes, might I ask why that
matters? Personally I encourage my users to use the
Portable Edition of Firefox, as it doesn't require any installer
(I can preconfigure it exactly as I want, and just copy the installed dir to
any machine), but even if I needed to use the old-fashioned.exe installer,
why would that matter?
Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down.
So you trust your users to behave and use a locked down IE, but you don't trust
them enough to limit their browsing to sites the company would disaprove of?
Not to say I disagree - Quite the opposite, I pretty much understand completely - I
simply don't count on them behaving in the first place. But I find it a
whole lot more effective to restrict users at the proxy (and block all non-proxied
traffic).
Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles
FireFox Portable very neatly solves that problem. Install the whole thing to
their My Documents, it stores the entire profile under the installed dir, and
you have no problems with permissions.
Alternatively, you could flip Billy G the finger, run Linux, and spend cash on another 750GB.
XP has its place - But "headless home file server" does not match that description. And $169?
Why the hell would you pay more for a stripped-down version?
From what I have been told, there are more jobs for Java and
Data Warehouse development teams compared to lower-level programmers.
"More jobs" does not mean "better" or "higher paid". It all depends on
what you want.
For the next few years at least,.NET and SQL will get you a job. But, do
you want to write nothing but crappy VB.NET (or even C#, a small step
up) apps with toy forms for data entry and retrieval?
You could specialize off of that, data analysis has the potential
for some fun (not talking about financial accounting here - I mean coding
nonlinear trending/forecasting models, which can get into some of the
coolest soft-AI techniques out there). You could focus on graphics, work
on new ways to present data to users. If you really want to do low-level
code, I can tell you firsthand that firmware rocks, will rake in the dough,
but it can burn you out quickly (so have a backup plan).
Mostly, realize that you need to do something fundamentally not fun,
or no employer would pay you to do it. So, the real work comes from finding
a way to make it fun to you. And only you know what that means.
Because although it may seem like they force another
upgrade on us every year, I'd say it actually comes out to about
two to three years per modem.
Which, at $2/month, means it would cost me more to rent it than
to buy my own. And in any case, I'd far rather give my
money to NewEgg than to Time Warner... Not to mention, if I buy
my own I can get a unit decent enough to keep sync, vs the
bottom-of-the-barrel crap they loan to renters.
It more pisses me off that I have basically the same throughput
now as I did with my very first pre-DOCSIS cablemodem almost a
decade ago now, despite two orders of magnitude improvement between
then and now.
Now, in large enterprises, there would be policy in place
to keep Joe from being able to do that.
"Policies" can't keep Joe from unplugging his network cable
because he can't tell it from a phone jack.
Sorry, but I'll worry about my job right after the next world war
makes computers nothing more than antique paperweights. Until then,
I pity the company without at least some form of on-site IT
staff, surveys and "experts" and now books not withstanding.
it becomes easier to make the local PC be a really stripped down
install where the user can't adjust anything
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon where office workers report much
more satisfaction with their work environment when you give them their
own (fake) thermostat?
Regardless of the company owning the hardware, people view their work
machine as "their" machine. And even if they never go so far as to change
the desktop wallpaper, they very much like the fact that they can.
Amazing how big CES has gotten in the last 7 years. Now it's the center of the universe. Don't forget to mention DVR for OCAP.
Don't know if you meant that as sarcasm, but for at least 15 years, I've always waited until after the
January CES to make any large tech purchases... Not because I always want the cutting edge (in fact, I usually
avoid most of the newest of the new at the CES), but because it drives the price of the last year's
toys over a cliff.
Or looked at a bit more cynically - It happens after the holiday season for a reason.;-)
It's nice that it might scrub pollutants but it seems the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity.
Great idea in the equatorial region, but solar really doesn't count as an option in the polar two-thirds of the planet (at least not until
we have near-100% efficient PV panels that cost a pittance).
I would also point out that very few companies seem to want to build solar power plants, even in ideal places such as
the vast tracts of desert wasteland in the US SouthWest. I presume this results because the long term costs might look
great, but the books would take a big hit up front, and most companies (or at least, their current boards) couldn't care
less beyond next quarter.
Given those two facts, we can either talk endlessly about why we don't use cool-tech-X, or we can deal with
the reality we have now: We use a LOT of cheap and dirty coal power plants. And it costs considerably less to
retrofit them with spiffy scrubbers such as TFA mentions than it does to rebuild new clean plants.
Also, who says only power plants can use this? Why couln't I (and everyone else who might care enough to give
something like this a try) buy one (probably a scaled-down version to make it affordable) and toss it in my
backyard? Five or ten tons a year, times a few hundred thousand people who want a free gallon or two of gasoline
per day, could really make a difference.
No one renewable energy source will solve all our problems. Between them all, however, perhaps we can at
least keep the planet habitable for a few more generations of humans.
I thought those were enabled as default in XP as well?
Indexing no, restore yes (though I believe it works differently in XP, I still turn it off
and see a not insignificant performance boost), shadow volumes no.
Though various things you install may turn those on for you, a vanilla XP SP2c Pro install
has them set as I describe above.
Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't
be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it.
You say that like it matters - Do you really believe "wealth" doesn't exist without
the underlying pyramid-scheme of fiat currencies?
Perhaps more relevantly - The US Treasury just last month cracked down on a popular
form of exactly what you claim we wouldn't have without the government. Doesn't it strike
you as strange that they would need to have laws against something that can't exist?
If you don't like it, start bartering.
Sorry, no can do - The government expects its share of that too... Except that
leads to the intentionally unmeetable requirement of paying taxes with money you don't
have.
A company unable to understand a license is probably not good enough to protect your computer...
Well, I can tell you from first-hand experience with at least half a dozen versions of their
software that their uninstaller sucks golf-balls through the garden hose...
Of course, I can say the same for Symantec, and don't really consider this at all accidental.
After all, most OEM PCs come with 3 month's to a year's free AV support, and Zeus help anyone
who decides they want to switch to a different AV package instead of the preinstalled one.
I've had to tell more than one person "Well, you can either put McCafee back on, or you can
reinstall Windows". These things hook themselves too deeply for me to safely remove, and I
consider myself pretty damned good at disabling unwanted software.
Okay, explain how "sell to poorer 1st-worlders for $200" competes
with "free for 3rd-worlders"? You mention that "the OLPC isn't
limited to the dirt floor hut schools", but that doesn't really
address the issue. So what? Yes, a poor rural US school
could use an XO, but you ignore the fact that if they
can afford to buy a Classmate, then OLPC shouldn't
give them anything.
Why is a non-compete among partners difficult to understand?
Apparently we disagree on whether or not this counts as
competition, and we don't have teams of marketroids and lawyers
telling us one way or the other.
A low-end laptop with Windows would compete with the OLPC
Ah! Now we see your real objection here... Nothing to do with
Intel or OLPC - You just don't want Microsoft involved, even if they
give away the Windows licenses.
Zealotry doesn't help our cause (and I say "our" because I mostly
agree with you, right up until you lose sight of the goal out of
prejudice against MS) - Just use the right tools for the job.
Everybody wants a piece of the $$$$$ and after they
see that there is market for something they will try to milk the cow!!
I would normally agree with you... Except that a commercial low-end laptop
offering by Intel wouldn't compete with the OLPC. Quite the opposite,
in fact! OLPC had Intel pouring money and technology into a project that
would effectively give away what Intel hoped to sell.
I consider myself pretty hardcore anti-corporate, and I find it pretty
hard to call Intel the bastards on this one. They wanted to sell to a
market that OLPC didn't want to touch (and apparently didn't want to let
anyone else touch, either).
Slashdot Mirror
You're just another one of those shits who think that wealth is God's way of showing approval of your thieving ways and that poverty is His way of showing disapproval of their unambitious ways.
And I got modded down as a troll?
I find convincing people to switch their OS is nearly impossible, but getting them to use other FOSS programs is rather simple: just deleted the propriety stuff and install the FOSS equivalent on their machines.
Once you have people using all the apps you mentioned, they basically won't even notice the difference with switching to Linux and KDE. You'll still have one major problem with getting them to actually try Linux, however - They already have a legal OEM copy of XP (or Vista).
You or I or the typical Slashdotter might think nothing of reinstalling the OS on a machine, but the average user never does so - They'll usually price out a new PC before they even consider using their XP "recovery" disc. At that point, you can suggest Linux.
When someone tells you they need a new computer (because their current 6 month old dual core 2GB box has so much spyware they can't use it anymore), and asks you about which brand of PC to get (brand? Yeah, riiiiiiight) - THEN you can suggest they try installing Linux before buying a new machine. Of course, this will mean volunteering a few hours of your time, since they'll want your "help", but given the choice between trying something out and spending a few hundred bucks, amost people will at least give it a try.
This is yet another opportunity for you educated people to express your disdain for Christianity (and Judaism indirectly) religions: Downmod the above!
Welcome to the exciting world of "sarcasm". The GP did express his disdain for superstitious BS such as otherwise-rational people fearing the spooooooooky Mark of the Beast.
I absolutely oppose any proposals to "chip" humans (for ID purposes - Put me at the front of the line to have a machine/neural interface jack installed, however), but doing so for religious reasons makes any valid objections less convincing by association.
That's been already worked out for them: One on the forehead, and another on the right hand.
.
Well, the frontal sinus would make an ideal location for them... Well within the ability of modern endoscopic techniques; no visiable lump as with subcutaneous insertion; virtually no way for the animal - er, prisoner - to remove it without medical assistance; and, it lies close enough to the surface to respond to a reasonably low-powered scanner
Now, the wrist, on the other hand, not such a great place. The whole area has entirely too many tendons and nerves to make deep implantation viable, and a shallow SQ implant would likely cause some distress due to visible (if minor) disfigurement and increased risk of abrasion over the implantation site. I'd say we should proably keep the hand reserved solely for barcodes.
They can sound better if you have a good turntable with a good cartridge
Not to disagree with someone on the same side of this issue, but... No, they most certainly cannot sound better. Regardless of quality, a mechanical stylus has something that a CD's laser does not: inertia in its plane of movement/measurement. That alone limits both the dynamic range and frequency response of vinyl (or any mechanically-sampled waveform) to well under what a CD offers (and not even in the same ballpark as DVD-A).
That said, turntables with a laser "stylus" do exist - But these two cannot physically match the quality of a CD, for one simple reason - The vinyl master also used a mechanical stylus to lay down the track.
I get so sick of this discussion coming up every few months. I sincerely have to wonder whether to attribute the problem to ignorance or hipster-pretense. This shouldn't remain an open issue like religion or VI-vs-Emacs - We have a very measureable difference between the two mediums, and vinyl fails any way that you look at it. It simply cannot reproduce a waveform as accurately as CD audio, end of story.
no, in that situation, rich people can choose, rich people can choose to pollute as much as they like and do whatever they want, and poor people get screwed over. as always.
Give the class-warfare angle a rest, please.
Yes, we have a distribution-of-wealth problem in the world today - Just as we always have, and just as we always will. But that very inbalance means that if rich people "choose to pollute as much as they like", they at least fall into a tiny minority of the population that can afford to do so.
And keep in mind, the lower tiers of "rich people" (the majority of them) didn't get that way by throwing away money to keep their homes an extra degree or two cooler. And even if they really do choose to pay more just to carry on their wasteful habits, well, that makes them a little less rich, doesn't it?
This is the sort of naive, knee-jerk reaction that makes sense when you don't understand how the grid works.
People don't give two shakes of a rat's ass how the grid works. We pay (quite a lot, IMO) for a 24/7 service, and expect it to goddamn-well work when we need it. And at 2pm in July in SoCal during a santa anna, you need air conditioning.
TFA is about a solution to high peak loads.
TFA "solves" the problem by depriving people of the right to decide what to spend their money on.
Don't get me wrong - I fully support some fairly extreme energy conservation measures. But without exception, we need to get people to "choose" to adopt them out of financial pressures, rather than compulsorily. Can't get people to use CFLs? Put a tax on incandescents to make them cost the same as CFLs, and watch their usage plummet. Can't get people to raise the thermostat? At $0.50/KWh, you'll see just how many people can get by at 80F rather than 72F. Can't get people to stop driving SUVs with single-digit fuel efficiency? Yeah, $5+ per gallon gasoline will end that trend this summer.
But in all of those, you can still choose to pay the same for shorter-lived less-efficient lightbulbs; You can still choose to keep the AC at 65F; You can still choose to start the Ford Exploder 15 minutes early to let it warm up for your daily trip to the end of the driveway to get the mail. And some people will - But not many, and I'll thank the fools who do for subsidizing the cost of clean air at the same time they try to maximize their personal waste.
If your reputation is on the line and it looks like your stuff just randomly broke, I really don't think you'd be laughing either.
From the posted video, most of the presenters seemed more amused than annoyed (with one notable exception).
Also, with the same thing happening randomly around the convention, I think everyone realized they had a practical joker rather than defective products.
The magnets are excellent for opening rental and library DVD cases...
They also work wonderfully on those annoying "inventory control" dye-pack tags that clerks all too frequently seem to "forget" to remove from your new shirt. Just stick the magnet at the end, you'll hear or feel a subtle click, and the metal pin will pop right out (it should do so easily - If you feel resistance, you don't have it right and will make a mess if you pull too hard).
You can also use them to deactivate the strips in books and CDs that trigger door alarms (but NOT the RFID ones, which look like a 1.5x1.5" sticker with a slightly thicker center and spiral around the outer edge).
But remember what the signs always say, these devices exist "for your protection". Not just for laughs from having some minimum-wage-slave frisk you at the door while everyone looks at you like a thief because another minimum-wage-slave couldn't bother to do their job and pass your purchase over the magic pad-o'-deactivation.
not to mention malls, offices, restaurants and other businesses.
Oh, no, they won't install them in any commercial location, only private homes. Making people uncomfortable in their own homes, no problem; Interfering with Holy Commerce, now, they just don't play games there. Won't happen.
Remember, this involves a state that has to pump in water from two states away because of regular yearly droughts that make the US SouthEast this year look like a bunch of crybabies, yet when they implement watering bans, they exempt businesses; And even on mornings when they do actually get a bit of rain, those businesses will still leave the sprinklers on, because it costs less than having Jose drop by and manually interrupt the cycle.
In any other state, I'd consider this proposal offensive enough to incite riots. But California? Heh. Relax and just watch the show.
all this does is make sure it's a real i.d.
No, it makes sure you have a Real(tm) ID.
Not quite the same.
No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP.
.exe installer,
why would that matter?
As an admin of a medium-sized corporate network of XP boxes, might I ask why that matters? Personally I encourage my users to use the Portable Edition of Firefox, as it doesn't require any installer (I can preconfigure it exactly as I want, and just copy the installed dir to any machine), but even if I needed to use the old-fashioned
Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down.
So you trust your users to behave and use a locked down IE, but you don't trust them enough to limit their browsing to sites the company would disaprove of?
Not to say I disagree - Quite the opposite, I pretty much understand completely - I simply don't count on them behaving in the first place. But I find it a whole lot more effective to restrict users at the proxy (and block all non-proxied traffic).
Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles
FireFox Portable very neatly solves that problem. Install the whole thing to their My Documents, it stores the entire profile under the installed dir, and you have no problems with permissions.
You can buy an OEM copy through Newegg for $169.
Alternatively, you could flip Billy G the finger, run Linux, and spend cash on another 750GB.
XP has its place - But "headless home file server" does not match that description. And $169? Why the hell would you pay more for a stripped-down version?
From what I have been told, there are more jobs for Java and Data Warehouse development teams compared to lower-level programmers.
.NET and SQL will get you a job. But, do
you want to write nothing but crappy VB.NET (or even C#, a small step
up) apps with toy forms for data entry and retrieval?
"More jobs" does not mean "better" or "higher paid". It all depends on what you want.
For the next few years at least,
You could specialize off of that, data analysis has the potential for some fun (not talking about financial accounting here - I mean coding nonlinear trending/forecasting models, which can get into some of the coolest soft-AI techniques out there). You could focus on graphics, work on new ways to present data to users. If you really want to do low-level code, I can tell you firsthand that firmware rocks, will rake in the dough, but it can burn you out quickly (so have a backup plan).
Mostly, realize that you need to do something fundamentally not fun, or no employer would pay you to do it. So, the real work comes from finding a way to make it fun to you. And only you know what that means.
You buy your cable modem? Why?
Because although it may seem like they force another upgrade on us every year, I'd say it actually comes out to about two to three years per modem.
Which, at $2/month, means it would cost me more to rent it than to buy my own. And in any case, I'd far rather give my money to NewEgg than to Time Warner... Not to mention, if I buy my own I can get a unit decent enough to keep sync, vs the bottom-of-the-barrel crap they loan to renters.
It more pisses me off that I have basically the same throughput now as I did with my very first pre-DOCSIS cablemodem almost a decade ago now, despite two orders of magnitude improvement between then and now.
The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year.
Great, so my cable company will force me to buy another new modem, while I'll still only get 2-3Mbps realistic speeds.
How about we stop screwing around... Just give me my FTTP already, preferably not tied to either phone or cable (so I can ditch both).
Now, in large enterprises, there would be policy in place to keep Joe from being able to do that.
"Policies" can't keep Joe from unplugging his network cable because he can't tell it from a phone jack.
Sorry, but I'll worry about my job right after the next world war makes computers nothing more than antique paperweights. Until then, I pity the company without at least some form of on-site IT staff, surveys and "experts" and now books not withstanding.
it becomes easier to make the local PC be a really stripped down install where the user can't adjust anything
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon where office workers report much more satisfaction with their work environment when you give them their own (fake) thermostat?
Regardless of the company owning the hardware, people view their work machine as "their" machine. And even if they never go so far as to change the desktop wallpaper, they very much like the fact that they can.
In the same way that food is a silly idea outside of the corn belt, and oil is a silly idea outside the middle east.
Corn and oil don't suffer massive transmission lossses over distances of mere hundreds of miles.
Amazing how big CES has gotten in the last 7 years. Now it's the center of the universe. Don't forget to mention DVR for OCAP.
;-)
Don't know if you meant that as sarcasm, but for at least 15 years, I've always waited until after the January CES to make any large tech purchases... Not because I always want the cutting edge (in fact, I usually avoid most of the newest of the new at the CES), but because it drives the price of the last year's toys over a cliff.
Or looked at a bit more cynically - It happens after the holiday season for a reason.
It's nice that it might scrub pollutants but it seems the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity.
Great idea in the equatorial region, but solar really doesn't count as an option in the polar two-thirds of the planet (at least not until we have near-100% efficient PV panels that cost a pittance).
I would also point out that very few companies seem to want to build solar power plants, even in ideal places such as the vast tracts of desert wasteland in the US SouthWest. I presume this results because the long term costs might look great, but the books would take a big hit up front, and most companies (or at least, their current boards) couldn't care less beyond next quarter.
Given those two facts, we can either talk endlessly about why we don't use cool-tech-X, or we can deal with the reality we have now: We use a LOT of cheap and dirty coal power plants. And it costs considerably less to retrofit them with spiffy scrubbers such as TFA mentions than it does to rebuild new clean plants.
Also, who says only power plants can use this? Why couln't I (and everyone else who might care enough to give something like this a try) buy one (probably a scaled-down version to make it affordable) and toss it in my backyard? Five or ten tons a year, times a few hundred thousand people who want a free gallon or two of gasoline per day, could really make a difference.
No one renewable energy source will solve all our problems. Between them all, however, perhaps we can at least keep the planet habitable for a few more generations of humans.
I thought those were enabled as default in XP as well?
Indexing no, restore yes (though I believe it works differently in XP, I still turn it off and see a not insignificant performance boost), shadow volumes no.
Though various things you install may turn those on for you, a vanilla XP SP2c Pro install has them set as I describe above.
Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it.
You say that like it matters - Do you really believe "wealth" doesn't exist without the underlying pyramid-scheme of fiat currencies?
Perhaps more relevantly - The US Treasury just last month cracked down on a popular form of exactly what you claim we wouldn't have without the government. Doesn't it strike you as strange that they would need to have laws against something that can't exist?
If you don't like it, start bartering.
Sorry, no can do - The government expects its share of that too... Except that leads to the intentionally unmeetable requirement of paying taxes with money you don't have.
A company unable to understand a license is probably not good enough to protect your computer...
Well, I can tell you from first-hand experience with at least half a dozen versions of their software that their uninstaller sucks golf-balls through the garden hose...
Of course, I can say the same for Symantec, and don't really consider this at all accidental. After all, most OEM PCs come with 3 month's to a year's free AV support, and Zeus help anyone who decides they want to switch to a different AV package instead of the preinstalled one.
I've had to tell more than one person "Well, you can either put McCafee back on, or you can reinstall Windows". These things hook themselves too deeply for me to safely remove, and I consider myself pretty damned good at disabling unwanted software.
and I call bullshit on this
Okay, explain how "sell to poorer 1st-worlders for $200" competes with "free for 3rd-worlders"? You mention that "the OLPC isn't limited to the dirt floor hut schools", but that doesn't really address the issue. So what? Yes, a poor rural US school could use an XO, but you ignore the fact that if they can afford to buy a Classmate, then OLPC shouldn't give them anything.
Why is a non-compete among partners difficult to understand?
Apparently we disagree on whether or not this counts as competition, and we don't have teams of marketroids and lawyers telling us one way or the other.
A low-end laptop with Windows would compete with the OLPC
Ah! Now we see your real objection here... Nothing to do with Intel or OLPC - You just don't want Microsoft involved, even if they give away the Windows licenses.
Zealotry doesn't help our cause (and I say "our" because I mostly agree with you, right up until you lose sight of the goal out of prejudice against MS) - Just use the right tools for the job.
Everybody wants a piece of the $$$$$ and after they see that there is market for something they will try to milk the cow!!
I would normally agree with you... Except that a commercial low-end laptop offering by Intel wouldn't compete with the OLPC. Quite the opposite, in fact! OLPC had Intel pouring money and technology into a project that would effectively give away what Intel hoped to sell.
I consider myself pretty hardcore anti-corporate, and I find it pretty hard to call Intel the bastards on this one. They wanted to sell to a market that OLPC didn't want to touch (and apparently didn't want to let anyone else touch, either).