Only real disappointment is the lack of an AGP slot. You're stuck with the onboard video.
Wal-Mart promised a 10 GB hard drive, but it shipped with a 20 GB.
I got a no-OS box and installed Red Hat 9, so I can't speak about Lindows. But I can say RH9 installed easily with no driver problems.
128 MB of RAM just isn't enough for RH9, X-Windows and a few apps. I spent $25 for another 128 MB (it takes PC133).
The Post article said shipping costs $80. I'm guessing that's for overnight. I paid $25 for UPS ground. So my total out-of-pocket was $200 + $25 shipping + $25 RAM for a decent machine that's faster than the Win98 machine it's sitting next to (that cost $800 when I bought it a few years ago).
The fan is a little louder than I'd like, but that's not surprising for a Duron-powered machine. But it's maybe 1.25 x as loud as your average PC, so it's not horrible.
but it occurs to me that Wal-mart's core customer group...
Hey, Rip Van Winkle, you need to look around a little bit. Wal-Mart's core customer group is everybody. They're the world's largest retailer, the world's largest private employer, and now #1 on the Fortune 500.
According to this article in Slate, Wal-Mart, with $244 billion in revenues last year, represents nearly 2.5 percent of the U.S. economy. Worldwide, they employ 1.38 million.
This will never get adopted, since it is both unworkable and unnecessary.
It's unworkable, because, in the case of U.S. Zip Codes, the current codes are tied to post offices and carrier routes, which don't necessarily subdivide neatly into equally-sized geographic areas. Tying postal codes to arbitrary geographic regions would be a step backwards.
But it's also unnecessary. Why force each postal system to adopt a uniform coding scheme? Why not let them keep their coding schemes and append a country code to the front.
This works for phone numbers: Each national phone system need not have the same number of digits in their phone numbers. They simply need a unique country code.
The intervals between tones are the same in F# as in C#
Not precisely true, at least on keyboard instruments. A major third plus a major third plus a major fourth should yield an ocatave, but the math doesn't work out that way. So compromises must be made, which is done by tempering the piano. Due to the tempering, intervals do change slightly from key to key.
In wind and string instruments, the player has more control of the pitch of each note, but when playing in ensembles, an effort is generally made to play in tune with the keyboard instruments.
The Treasury looked into including holograms, but could not find a hologram that could survive crumpling, laundering, etc.
A mangled bill is still legal tender, so they put a lot of research into the durability of bills and their security features.
... for the same reason that I subscribed to eMusic for about 18 months. In this market, there is no decent music on the radio most hours of the day. I'd welcome the ability to easily time sift the few decent shows of the week to those hours when I'd like to have music on.
I emphasize "easily," because, in theory, I could use a tape deck to time shift, but that would be much more trouble than it's worth.
I agree that the Pentagon wastes more money in a nanosecond than I make in a year. But we do need national defense, so we can't solve the problem of DOD wastefulness by padlocking the doors.
On the other hand, we do not need a manned space program. We can solve that problem by just pulling the plug.
Re:What is an acceptable risk?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just wondering, what do people here feel is an acceptable risk?
You can't weigh risk without looking at the benefits. And the lack of benefits is the biggest problem the Shuttle and ISS programs have.
The Shuttle is not cost-effective for commercial space applications. The science conducted on the Shuttle and ISS is a joke.
As an American tax payer, I'm outraged that billions of my tax dollars are being spent on a pork-barrel jobs program for aging engineers at NASA and bloated defense/space contractors.
There just aren't enough commerical or scientific benifits to justify spending more money and lives on manned space flight. It's time to shut down the shuttle program, abandon the ISS, and refocus a much smaller NASA on orbiting telescopes and unmanned exploration of the solar system.
The airlines aren't banning cell phone because they want you to use their in flight phone.
I doubt that. Most of the in-flight phones are being stripped out of airplanes, because not enough people use them to justify the added weight. Those air phones are a thing of the past.
But if you don't want those other programmes, why are you downloading them? What I mean is that Linux and Win32 both have net installers....
I think if you try downloading Phoenix, you'll understand his point better. Phoenix isn't the browser component of Mozilla; it's a pared-down Gecko-based brower that launches faster, consumes less memory and has a simpler interface than the Mozilla browser component.
It's kind like of the difference between wearing a suit and wearing jeans.
The point you're making is this: If you find the suit uncomfortable, you can take off the jacket, remove the tie, and unbutton the top button on your shirt. Sure you can, but you're still wearing scratchy wool pants and a starched shirt.
Once you give Phoenix a try, you'll see that it's like a nice, comfortable pair of jeans. Once you try it, you won't want to go back.
The article attributes poor DVD playback to the lack of hardware decoding, but adds that the vendor promised:
The new "M series" would be coming out soon that did include the decoder and took care of the poor playback.
"M Series" refers to the naming convention of the motherboards. The tested model is a VIA EPIA. The "M Series" are the lastest EPIA motherboards, which add several improvements, including DDR RAM and hardware MPEG-2 decoding.
I've been looking at an EPIA M6000, which, with it's low-power VIA Eden processor, requires no CPU cooling fan. I figured it would be an idea mobo to build a fanless home PC around.
It turns out that the hardware MPEG-2 decoder in the onboard graphics adapter does allow it to play DVDs smoothly at 30 fps. It also makes an excellent platform for an MP3 jukebox. However VIA has not provided Linux drivers for the MPEG-2 decoder.
With a little more driver support from VIA, the EPIA-M series of motherboards could have a lot of virtues -- especially in silent and low-power computing applications.
Tom's Hardware has an informative review of three VIA EPIA mobos -- including one of the "M Series" models.
These forums are an excellent starting point to find out more:
As somebody that has needed to be reachable 24/7/365...
You are deluding yourself.
Even in the medical and networking professions, there are few emergencies that cannot wait an hour until you check your messages during intermission.
In those exeptionally rare cases where a person really needs to be instantly reachable, there are alternatives to disrupting an entire theatre full of people.
In the dark ages (five or ten years ago), many professions had a concept of being "on call," which had a corresponding concept of not being reachable.
No one is irreplaceable. There must be someone else who can do the work you do. If not, your employer should hire one. You and he can then rotate who is on call. Being on call means staying near the phone -- and not going to the theatre. As an employee you are remunerated for this inconvenience.
Without a doubt, the old system was more civilized. And surely your ego is out of control if you truly think you're irreplaceable 24/7/365.
It's not "obfuscated" so much as it's "optimized." The whole idea seems to be for Word to save as quickly as possible--which the doc file is best at for Word for some reason, probably becuase it's derived from how the program structures documents, and not how some document spec says documents should be handled.
In an era of 2+ GHz computers with 7200+ rpm hard drives, it seems odd that Microsoft would be unable to write an application than can quickly save and open text files that, on average, run well under 50 kilobytes.
The real question is, will they be able to guilt everybody into not pirating their music...
It's not a matter of guilt. It's a matter of giving customers something they value enough to spend money on.
I subscribe to emusic because they offer a selection of music I like, single-click downloads of full albums (try to get that from Kazaa), and.mp3 format that I can use however I want.
The participating record labels like it, because it gives them a revenue stream from their back catalogue that otherwise would do nothing for them
Their service doesn't carry to the newest albums; in fact, it has only a fraction of the selection of your local Tower Records, so it's never going to be all things to all people.
But the important thing is that it's good enough to get me to open my wallet. Isn't that the basis of every profitable business?
This reminds me of the MPAA's infamous NC-17 rating. They wanted to create a rating for very-adult-but-not-explicity-pornographic films, but it never went anywhere, because theatre chains refused to screen NC-17 films. As a result, American consumers have no choice to view these films in a theatre, even if they want to.
The same thing would happen here. If all possibly-objectional content were segregated into its own top-level domain, nine out of ten ISPs would drop access to.prn to limit their liability and/or bandwidth costs.
Few people would actually have access to the.prn domains. So either they would be subject to de facto censorship, or they would migrate back to.com and other domains to preserve their visibility.
All in all, a lousy idea.
Moxi's questionable business practices ...
on
Is MOXI Toast?
·
· Score: 2
BusinessWeek published an article on Moxi's death spiral about a month ago. They found typical dot-bomb out-of-control expenses, and slimy things like renting expensive office space from insiders. Worse, someone at Moxi impersonated a BW reporter in a witch hunt to try to root out who was talking to the press.
Good riddance.
Re:Why not only give copyrights to artists?
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 2
IMHO artists would get a lot more money for their creations, and corps would have to 'court' them in order to keep them, and their art, as an asset. Of course this might lead to treating artists like professional athletes...hmmm.
No, I think a more likely outcome would be for publishers and distributors to be more reluctant to sign up authors. Simple microeconomics predicts that if you diminish the publisher/distributor's upside potential, you will also diminish his tolerance for risk.
So maybe the pro sports analogy holds true: The mega stars will get richer (Tom Clancy will do just fine, just as A-Rod does in baseball), while everyone else gets poorer.
"There was no copyright law to protect authors and I could, and did, infringe on everything"
There may have been another explanation for this quote. The U.S. government was very slow to recognize foreign copyrights. I don't remember when this changed, but I do know that Charles Dickens never made a dime off of the millions of his books sold in the U.S.
The Ben Hur screenwriter might have simply been saying that the book (whose origin I don't know) may have had no copyright protection in the U.S. at that time due to it having a non-American author or some other loophole that no longer exists.
not possible. a corporation is an abstract construct. abstract constructs do not create. everything that has ever been created has been created either by living beings or natural forces or god if you so beleive, but nothing has ever been created by a corporation. what were you thinking?
Yes, but corporations can pay their employees and vendors to create content on their behalf as "work for hire."
If I create content on company time, I don't own it unless my employer and I have an explicit agreement that gives me ownership rights. This makes sense if you consider some analogies to more tangible products: Should UAW members demand to own the cars they assemble? No. They're getting paid to build them.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't happen without the cooperation of the big entertainment companies, who are very wary of giving Microsoft too much power.
This article from the current issue of BusinessWeek summarizes the situation well.
but it occurs to me that Wal-mart's core customer group ...
Hey, Rip Van Winkle, you need to look around a little bit. Wal-Mart's core customer group is everybody. They're the world's largest retailer, the world's largest private employer, and now #1 on the Fortune 500.
According to this article in Slate, Wal-Mart, with $244 billion in revenues last year, represents nearly 2.5 percent of the U.S. economy. Worldwide, they employ 1.38 million.
This will never get adopted, since it is both unworkable and unnecessary.
It's unworkable, because, in the case of U.S. Zip Codes, the current codes are tied to post offices and carrier routes, which don't necessarily subdivide neatly into equally-sized geographic areas. Tying postal codes to arbitrary geographic regions would be a step backwards.
But it's also unnecessary. Why force each postal system to adopt a uniform coding scheme? Why not let them keep their coding schemes and append a country code to the front.
This works for phone numbers: Each national phone system need not have the same number of digits in their phone numbers. They simply need a unique country code.
If it's a major fourth, then it will, of course, be a subdominant language.
The intervals between tones are the same in F# as in C#
Not precisely true, at least on keyboard instruments. A major third plus a major third plus a major fourth should yield an ocatave, but the math doesn't work out that way. So compromises must be made, which is done by tempering the piano. Due to the tempering, intervals do change slightly from key to key.
In wind and string instruments, the player has more control of the pitch of each note, but when playing in ensembles, an effort is generally made to play in tune with the keyboard instruments.
This is, of course, hopelessly off topic.
The Treasury looked into including holograms, but could not find a hologram that could survive crumpling, laundering, etc. A mangled bill is still legal tender, so they put a lot of research into the durability of bills and their security features.
... for the same reason that I subscribed to eMusic for about 18 months. In this market, there is no decent music on the radio most hours of the day. I'd welcome the ability to easily time sift the few decent shows of the week to those hours when I'd like to have music on.
I emphasize "easily," because, in theory, I could use a tape deck to time shift, but that would be much more trouble than it's worth.
I agree that the Pentagon wastes more money in a nanosecond than I make in a year. But we do need national defense, so we can't solve the problem of DOD wastefulness by padlocking the doors.
On the other hand, we do not need a manned space program. We can solve that problem by just pulling the plug.
Just wondering, what do people here feel is an acceptable risk?
You can't weigh risk without looking at the benefits. And the lack of benefits is the biggest problem the Shuttle and ISS programs have.
The Shuttle is not cost-effective for commercial space applications. The science conducted on the Shuttle and ISS is a joke.
As an American tax payer, I'm outraged that billions of my tax dollars are being spent on a pork-barrel jobs program for aging engineers at NASA and bloated defense/space contractors.
There just aren't enough commerical or scientific benifits to justify spending more money and lives on manned space flight. It's time to shut down the shuttle program, abandon the ISS, and refocus a much smaller NASA on orbiting telescopes and unmanned exploration of the solar system.
The airlines aren't banning cell phone because they want you to use their in flight phone.
I doubt that. Most of the in-flight phones are being stripped out of airplanes, because not enough people use them to justify the added weight. Those air phones are a thing of the past.
But if you don't want those other programmes, why are you downloading them? What I mean is that Linux and Win32 both have net installers....
I think if you try downloading Phoenix, you'll understand his point better. Phoenix isn't the browser component of Mozilla; it's a pared-down Gecko-based brower that launches faster, consumes less memory and has a simpler interface than the Mozilla browser component.
It's kind like of the difference between wearing a suit and wearing jeans.
The point you're making is this: If you find the suit uncomfortable, you can take off the jacket, remove the tie, and unbutton the top button on your shirt. Sure you can, but you're still wearing scratchy wool pants and a starched shirt.
Once you give Phoenix a try, you'll see that it's like a nice, comfortable pair of jeans. Once you try it, you won't want to go back.
The article attributes poor DVD playback to the lack of hardware decoding, but adds that the vendor promised:
The new "M series" would be coming out soon that did include the decoder and took care of the poor playback.
"M Series" refers to the naming convention of the motherboards. The tested model is a VIA EPIA. The "M Series" are the lastest EPIA motherboards, which add several improvements, including DDR RAM and hardware MPEG-2 decoding.
I've been looking at an EPIA M6000, which, with it's low-power VIA Eden processor, requires no CPU cooling fan. I figured it would be an idea mobo to build a fanless home PC around.
It turns out that the hardware MPEG-2 decoder in the onboard graphics adapter does allow it to play DVDs smoothly at 30 fps. It also makes an excellent platform for an MP3 jukebox. However VIA has not provided Linux drivers for the MPEG-2 decoder.
With a little more driver support from VIA, the EPIA-M series of motherboards could have a lot of virtues -- especially in silent and low-power computing applications.
Tom's Hardware has an informative review of three VIA EPIA mobos -- including one of the "M Series" models.
These forums are an excellent starting point to find out more:
VIA Arena Linux Area
LinITX.com Forum
Someone at DaimlerChrysler obviously is thinking about the same sort of future:
http://www.mopar.com/chrysler/Uprod.html.
Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?
If we're lucky, they will all die of brain cancer.
As somebody that has needed to be reachable 24/7/365 ...
You are deluding yourself. Even in the medical and networking professions, there are few emergencies that cannot wait an hour until you check your messages during intermission. In those exeptionally rare cases where a person really needs to be instantly reachable, there are alternatives to disrupting an entire theatre full of people.
In the dark ages (five or ten years ago), many professions had a concept of being "on call," which had a corresponding concept of not being reachable.
No one is irreplaceable. There must be someone else who can do the work you do. If not, your employer should hire one. You and he can then rotate who is on call. Being on call means staying near the phone -- and not going to the theatre. As an employee you are remunerated for this inconvenience.
Without a doubt, the old system was more civilized. And surely your ego is out of control if you truly think you're irreplaceable 24/7/365.
It's not "obfuscated" so much as it's "optimized." The whole idea seems to be for Word to save as quickly as possible--which the doc file is best at for Word for some reason, probably becuase it's derived from how the program structures documents, and not how some document spec says documents should be handled.
In an era of 2+ GHz computers with 7200+ rpm hard drives, it seems odd that Microsoft would be unable to write an application than can quickly save and open text files that, on average, run well under 50 kilobytes.
Well, back to reloading Slashdot....
+1 Funny
The real question is, will they be able to guilt everybody into not pirating their music...
.mp3 format that I can use however I want.
It's not a matter of guilt. It's a matter of giving customers something they value enough to spend money on.
I subscribe to emusic because they offer a selection of music I like, single-click downloads of full albums (try to get that from Kazaa), and
The participating record labels like it, because it gives them a revenue stream from their back catalogue that otherwise would do nothing for them
Their service doesn't carry to the newest albums; in fact, it has only a fraction of the selection of your local Tower Records, so it's never going to be all things to all people.
But the important thing is that it's good enough to get me to open my wallet. Isn't that the basis of every profitable business?
provide for an adult-only domain such as .prn
.prn to limit their liability and/or bandwidth costs.
.prn domains. So either they would be subject to de facto censorship, or they would migrate back to .com and other domains to preserve their visibility.
This reminds me of the MPAA's infamous NC-17 rating. They wanted to create a rating for very-adult-but-not-explicity-pornographic films, but it never went anywhere, because theatre chains refused to screen NC-17 films. As a result, American consumers have no choice to view these films in a theatre, even if they want to.
The same thing would happen here. If all possibly-objectional content were segregated into its own top-level domain, nine out of ten ISPs would drop access to
Few people would actually have access to the
All in all, a lousy idea.
BusinessWeek published an article on Moxi's death spiral about a month ago. They found typical dot-bomb out-of-control expenses, and slimy things like renting expensive office space from insiders. Worse, someone at Moxi impersonated a BW reporter in a witch hunt to try to root out who was talking to the press.
Good riddance.
IMHO artists would get a lot more money for their creations, and corps would have to 'court' them in order to keep them, and their art, as an asset. Of course this might lead to treating artists like professional athletes...hmmm.
No, I think a more likely outcome would be for publishers and distributors to be more reluctant to sign up authors. Simple microeconomics predicts that if you diminish the publisher/distributor's upside potential, you will also diminish his tolerance for risk.
So maybe the pro sports analogy holds true: The mega stars will get richer (Tom Clancy will do just fine, just as A-Rod does in baseball), while everyone else gets poorer.
"There was no copyright law to protect authors and I could, and did, infringe on everything"
There may have been another explanation for this quote. The U.S. government was very slow to recognize foreign copyrights. I don't remember when this changed, but I do know that Charles Dickens never made a dime off of the millions of his books sold in the U.S.
The Ben Hur screenwriter might have simply been saying that the book (whose origin I don't know) may have had no copyright protection in the U.S. at that time due to it having a non-American author or some other loophole that no longer exists.
Yes, but corporations can pay their employees and vendors to create content on their behalf as "work for hire."
If I create content on company time, I don't own it unless my employer and I have an explicit agreement that gives me ownership rights. This makes sense if you consider some analogies to more tangible products: Should UAW members demand to own the cars they assemble? No. They're getting paid to build them.