...and the Perl 6 interpreter (parrot) is essentially complete...
Actually, parrot is a virtual machine meant to run interpreted languages. That's one of the cool things about it -- ruby and python could both be written to run on it, and then a parrot-to-machine-code compiler could be written, and I could finally compile ruby. Yay!
...Open source as software by geeks FOR geeks, and damn the 'ignorant' masses (ie, those who fall under the 95th percentile for intelligence. You know, MOST of the population
Ah, looks like we missed a myth: The myth that geekdom is somehow directly related to intelligence; if only it were true that all the geeks (and pseudo-geeks and wannabe-geeks) were in the top 5% of intelligence, we'd all be a lot happier. As it is, "geek" has apparently become both a label worth having and a label cheaply gotten, and I've certainly seen plenty of (often self-proclaimed) geeks who are nowhere near that vaunted 95% percentile (much less the 99th).
Basically, you're smoking crack if you think there's some huge geek to intelligence correlation, and you are smoking some especially vile form of crack if you think that Slashdot is somehow representative of real geeks. It might have been so 4 years ago, but these days 90% of the posts are just parrots of a hundred other posts, most of them written years ago. Please, guys, if you aren't saying something original either 1) shut up, or 2) just post a link to the original. It makes everyone's lives easier.
But Spotlight is just indexing the same metadata that is in HFS+ under Jaguar, plus data that it pulls out of the file, not out of the filesystem. There is significant improvement in the mechanism and the interface, but it is not a "database filesystem."
As far as I can tell, that is incorrect; Dominic (the authoer of BeFS) has added additional metadata capabilities to HFS+, so Spotlight is actually 1) indexing that metadata, and 2) using interpreters to pull and index data from various file formats. See those post, for instance. While I agree that this does not create a true database filesystem, I would say that it's close to what BeOS had, which is the closest anyone has come.
I must admit interest in MS's claim that they're going to create a true database filesystem; while it is obviously technically feasible, it's just as stupid now as it was years ago when Be decided to back off theirs. Thus, I expect MS to produce a solution that does what they said it would do while sucking so much that no one uses it. It will be interesting to watch.
As to the claim that Apple is just doing all front-end stuff while MS is actually doing technology, I call baloney on that one. Apple has been good recently at creating and then utilyzing really good technology (although it's usually protocols, not servers). All of the technology available via.Mac is available to everyone, even if the servers themselves aren't. I can (and did) create a WebDAV server to store and share my calendars, and I can mount this WebDAV server as a local filesystem. Rendezvous/Zeroconf is another good example of a tech that Apple has developed, championed, and then been a real leader on.
I agree that there are big differences, though: Spotlight is based on proven technology and will surely arrive in 2005, while WinFS is a huge gamble, will increase costs dramatically (both licensing and maintenance), and will also arrive no earlier than 2006, without actually being based on proven tech at all. If their history is anything to go by, it will be 2010 or so before WinFS is usable.
OS X on x86 would share another disadvantage with Solaris on x86 - multithreading. Apps on the Mac usually make quite heavy use of multithreading, which is something that x86 does very badly...
It's not exactly the same thing, but Mac OS X sucks at multitasking. You can talk all you want, but when my laptop is hammered and I log into it over ssh, I get serious delays. OTOH, when my linux or solaris (both x86) boxes are hammered, I never get delay on the CLI.
I fully agree that Intel's multiprocessing architecture sucks -- shared CPU data buses, no separate instruction buses, all that crap. I fully agree that PPC and Athlons are better. But there's something seriously wrong with OS X's scheduler, and it's pretty gross. I use Macs, I'll continue using them (although only for their laptops until the cases get more expandable -- 2 hard drives? get outta here!), but I'll never use them as my main workstation because they don't like doing too much at one time.
What the heck are you smoking? Maybe 20 atm feels solid, but my city bikes go to 125psi and my road bike to 145psi, and if they get 20 psi _low_ I notice immediately. Other than my mountain bike (which has tubeless tires, thus allowing esp. low pressures), I haven't ridden a bike with a psi below about 90 in maybe 5 years -- I can tell immediately because it has a huge impact on both feel and handling. Ugh.
I mean, unless you've kind of got a death wish. It's about the best way to get hit by a car -- they are far more likely to see you if you are on the road, but when some guy turns directly into you because he didn't see you on the sidewalk...
Oh, and it's usually illegal.
Get a city map, pick some routes that are calmer (i.e., avoid industrial areas, find some back roads, get off the 4 lane commuting routes), and check them out on the weekends. Once you find a good route or two, try it to work. Set a goal of doing it twice a week 6 months a year. You'll never look back.:)
This always annoys me. How is it that a word has come to mean almost its exact opposite? The answer? It hasn't. No amount of "hackers" claiming otherwise will ever make "hack" mean "elegent, clever, solution". It will always mean the duct-tape and baling twine solution. It is possible for a hack to be a clever hack, but notice how you have to add the word "clever" for it to work? Yes, you can have an impressive hack (which is why McGuyver was popular), but not all hacks are impressive, and many aren't clever.
Really. Just because a bunch of techies who can't do things well try to redefine a word doesn't mean they succeed. If everything you do is a hack, you need to rethink your career.
I would certainly allow an additional definition of 'hack' as being something like 'to modify something so that it performs other than its intended function', but again notice the complete lack of judgement on that statement.
Get over yourselves. A hacker is still someone who does a hack job, and a hack is still a short term, usually crappy solution. If you want it to mean something else, make a different word; 'hack' already has a meaning.
I can't get linux to poweroff my LCD connected with DVI.
It's incredibly, incredibly annoying to replace a boot drive in linux (although this is partially the fault of x86). LILO sucks.
XFree86 is an absolute abomination. I can plug as many monitors as I want into my mac and they all just work. Instantly. Right then. No configuration, no logout, no reboot, no nothing. And I can change resolutions, and all that other 1994 crap that Linux still can't do.
I plug in USB devices on Mac OS X, and they just work. No insmod, no 'find/lib/modules -name "*usb*"'.
I download PalmGUI and hey, it just synchronizes. No effort.
Bluetooth synchronization with my cell phone just works. Right into my addressbook. Now my wife has all the phone numbers I have.
The list goes on and on. The fact that some people are successfully using Linux for a desktop does _not_ mean that it's ready. Your experience is purely anecdotal; you and your family are not representative. Do you maintain your linux boxes, or do you make your 8 year old do it? Does your wife fight with LILO or Grub, or do you? Do they load the drivers for the webcam, or do you?
I personally would not want to see Apple in Microsoft's position, because I think Jobs would quite possibly be worse for the computing world, but they're playing nice right now. Comparing them to M$ and SCO is just stupid.
The vast majority of the stuff they do now is based on open protocols, and a lot of times these are protocols developed at Apple and then released. Rendezvous is probably the best example; this is something that computers users desperately need (yes, you too, even if you don't know it) and Apple's actually given us some hope we'll see it.
No, Aqua itself isn't open, but the Unix underpinnings are, and Apple does everything they can to give advancements back. Safari is based on an OSS rendering engine, and they've contributed back to that project quite a bit. They used an open (if not common) format for their audio (sorry, does Ogg have DRM? No? Then Apple can't use it).
As to the link you provided, that's totally unrelated. The guy is employed as a software developer at Apple. All employers have non-compete agreements with their employees, and all employers are somewhat harsh about employees doing things at home that are related to what they do at work. I'm currently under the thumb of a contract in which I'm modifying my own GPL'd code for the company but I can't rerelease the code. Incredibly stupid and annoying, but incredibly standard. And, of course, totally unrelated to this topic or to SCO.
As to control of the hardware and software, I guess it depends on your definition of "control". I can't think of any senses in which Apple has control of either my hardware or software. I can install whatever I want on my Macs, and it will only take <1 second to get through the BIOS, as opposed to the shite x86 boxes and their shite BIOS. I have control of the software too, in the sense that I've upgraded the crap out of OS X and strangely Apple hasn't seemed to mind. What do you mean by "control"?
...he just did not do a good job of making the point.
His main point is that if this happened to you on a PC, you could easily go to another vendor and run the same software on different hardware. Your Dell died and you think it's not going to recover? Drop the drive (or dd, or rsync, or whatever) into an IBM and you're basically good to go.
Because Apple does not let you run OS X on any other hardware, you are completely dependent on them for making your software work. If you get used to a certain environment and certain applications but then the hardware fails, you're screwed.
Not so with anything on the x86 platform. It may not be easy, but linux, Windows, and others can be moved to different hardware from different vendors pretty easily.
In other words, using Apple's software is _both_ software and hardware lock-in, and he hates it.
I thought the guilt thing was silly, tho. Use what works best for you; I find it takes hours more a month to maintain my stupid linux box (often just because it's x86) than my powerbook, even though I do much more crap to the powerbook. I'm certainly not going to feel guilty for just using my computer, instead of maintaining it.
It's different because the engine isn't in the wheel, the engine is the wheel. Rather than having, say, an engine per wheel with an axle coming out of each engine to drive the wheel, the rotor of the engine is actually the wheel itself. The magnets that cause rotation in the electric engine are mounted to the wheel instead of being mounted to an internal rotor, so electricity coursing through the engine results in spinning of wheel, rather than spinning a rotor which spins an axle which spins a wheel.
This removes any friction from axles (no bearings, no grease, no physical contact at all) and significantly simplifies the physical process while also making the whole package smaller.
So yes, this actually is a significant improvement on existing solutions. RTFA.
It could be your eyes, or the way your lcd is configured, or, uh, have you been smoking strange things recently?
I've got two LCDs, a Dell 1900FP and a 1901FP, plus my 15" powerbook. Any one of those three kicks the crap out of my Dell 21" trinitrons. What do I mean by "kicks the crap out of"? I mean that I can use any of those screens for 16 hours a day, no problem, but I can't use the trinitrons without serious eye fatigue. Oh sure, before I had the LCDs I didn't know it was eye fatigue, but even spending 10 minutes looking at a crt after using LCDs exclusively just hurts my eyes.
Maybe it's that your eyes aren't fucked enough. I know plenty of people who can't tell the difference between a CRT at 60Hz and one at 100Hz, but I can immediately tell if a CRT is below about 85Hz.
Of course, I don't know what you mean by "quality"? Do you mean weight? I hope not, because one of the things I love about LCDs is how light they are. Do you mean depth? Again, I hope not. Do you mean build quality? How could you even compare LCDs and CRTs in that area, considering how different they are?
LCDs on DVI shouldn't require any adjustment at all, but if you use VGA to connect an LCD, you will almost definitely have to screw with the settings. My 1900FP looked like total crap on my Ultra 5 until I spent about three minutes testing a bunch of different settings; true tweaking, as there wasn't really any method to it. I found a setting that looks just as good as DVI, though, and now it looks awesome. The 17" trinitron sitting next to it is basically burning a hole in my skull, even at 85Hz.
I very gladly pay a premium for LCDs; even though I was gifted with two eyes, I don't really think of it as having a "spare", so I try to do everything I can to preserve them.
...is going to be a camera phone for just this reason. I'm going to take a shot of my ass* and send it to everyone I can. I don't know if it's quite "bluejacqing" or whatever, but I bet it'd be fun.
*Actually, I might send a picture of something slightly more... personal.:)
Despite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently, she did.
No, she didn't. She just kept saying "you need to tie the business to the resource". That's just as much gibberesh as anything else. What exactly am I supposed to tie to what? Applications to hardware? My business goals with IT expenditures? There is no such thing as "business" in this sense. Is your business your customers? Your shareholders? Your inventory? Your employees? Which of those am I tying to a resource? Which resource? If my business is services, then my business is my employees, but then, my resources are also my employees, so they're already tied.
It's more gibberish. And her "specific" example was not specific. She gave an example of something someone did, but she didn't provide specifics on how it got done, or how that was "tying the business to the resource".
As to automating things, no, she didn't even say that. She just basically said that HP would be willing to send lots of expensive consultings to your work to figure out how to "tie the business to the resource", but does not ever say what the heck that is, and certainly does not ever say it's automation. Companies like HP hate automation, because it leaves less room for consultants.
less monitors (to a minimum of one, obviously), more virtual desktops.
Why stop there? I've got two monitors with 9 virtual desktops each (I use Cntl-arrow keys with the desktops arranged in a grid, so switching between them uses my very fast spatial memory), and I utilize almost all of them. I usually devote the middle workspace to something large and obvious (web browsing on the left and something else -- monitoring window? -- on the right) as a navigation aid, and then most of the other workspaces have three terminals filling them.
I agree with the basic idea, though -- people who survive without either virtual workspaces or multiple monitors just confuse me. But try both sometime, which is easy on linux, and you'll really appreciate it.
First, your eyes are pretty amazing if you using 2048x1536 on a 21"...
Second, no one said you had to have 17" monitors; I've had two 21" monitors on my desk for the last 7 years.
And third, have you actually tried dual monitors? If not, then you couldn't "get it". Every time I have to work with only one monitor, it feels like trying to drive with a windshield that's far too small. I also use 9 workspaces with both of my monitors, which means that i've got 18 workspaces across two monitors, and they're usually almost all full of something or other (I'm a sysadmin, so I multitask somewhat excessively).
As to your idea of comparing the results of spending a given amount of money, it's pointless. Yeah, if you've only got $500, get one better monitor rather than 2 crappy ones. But the study isn't about the best way to spend a given amount of money -- it's about maximising the productivity of your workers. You go to any company in the world and tell them you have a method of immediately increasing the productivity of most of their office workers by 10%, and see how long it takes them to start writing a check.
This is why the study talks about ROI -- spend the extra money on an extra monitor, and you'll make that extra money back almost immediately, and then you will continue to make money on that investment for a long time. You're looking at it from the perspective of someone who uses a computer for fun, which makes ROI meaningless, whereas companies look at it from the perspective of spending money to make money.
"I haven't tried it, which means that it's silly and pointless." Yeah, great argument, keep up the good work.
Except that Jean-Louis Gasee' et. al. refused to be bought out (you can do that when you're a privately held company): they insisted that Apple pay a per-unit liscence fee, regardless of any modifications to the code that Apple produced.
Untrue. Be refused to be bought for less than $150 million, which Apple thought was too high. Instead, they bought Next for $450 million. And rest is crappy lickable history.
I think you are referring to irony, but one wouldn't know so from your post:
irony, n - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
Your statements just describe things that suck, not things that are ironic. Please, base your definitions of words on actual reading, not music, because apparently musicians are just as illiterate as the rest of America. It's crappy when it rains on your wedding day, but it's ironic if it happens after you chide all your friends for not preparing for rain on their wedding days yet you yourself don't prepare for it on your day. It's lame when you've got lots of spoons but need a knife, it's ironic when you've been slowly trading knives for spoons and you never actually need a knife until you run out of them.
My favorite, most poignant story of irony is a racist skinhead who decided he couldn't stay in any longer. When he informed the rest of the skinheads, they beat him up and left him almost unconscious on the side of the road. Multiple white people passed him by and did not help him, and finally a black couple saw him and helped him. See, that's irony, not just crappy
Speaking as one of the main motivators behind the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network, the group that helped stop the bill in TN, no, the EFF wasn't terribly useful here. The didn't have effective legal analyses (we had to do our own), they didn't have good technical analyses (again, we did our own), and they also didn't have good alternative legislation (um, again, our own).
All of this can be found at our web site, so hopefully others won't start so quite from scratch.
In this case, save your money and spend some time; create your own tech-friendly lobby in your state, and begin monitoring this kind of stuff. It sucks to watch sausage get made, but if you don't get involved, you've got no one but yourself to blame. We're planning on starting a formal non-profit to continue fighting for the right to innovate with technology, and I recommend that other states do the same.
Can you name any modern computer company that INVENTED, not just built off of, any technology?
Yeah, tons.
Sun: NFS
Sun: NIS/NIS+
Sun: NSS/PAM
Intel and others: USB
AMD and others: Hypertransport
Sun: Java
Yeah, there's a lot of Sun in there, because I know their stuff better, but come off it. Companies invent stuff all the time, it just doesn't always turn into a viable product, and it doesn't often show up as a unique, identifiable thing.
Hell, everything in linux was invented by someone; the free software people sure as hell didn't think of it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
...and the Perl 6 interpreter (parrot) is essentially complete...
Actually, parrot is a virtual machine meant to run interpreted languages. That's one of the cool things about it -- ruby and python could both be written to run on it, and then a parrot-to-machine-code compiler could be written, and I could finally compile ruby. Yay!
Compiler != interpreter
...Open source as software by geeks FOR geeks, and damn the 'ignorant' masses (ie, those who fall under the 95th percentile for intelligence. You know, MOST of the population
Ah, looks like we missed a myth: The myth that geekdom is somehow directly related to intelligence; if only it were true that all the geeks (and pseudo-geeks and wannabe-geeks) were in the top 5% of intelligence, we'd all be a lot happier. As it is, "geek" has apparently become both a label worth having and a label cheaply gotten, and I've certainly seen plenty of (often self-proclaimed) geeks who are nowhere near that vaunted 95% percentile (much less the 99th).
Basically, you're smoking crack if you think there's some huge geek to intelligence correlation, and you are smoking some especially vile form of crack if you think that Slashdot is somehow representative of real geeks. It might have been so 4 years ago, but these days 90% of the posts are just parrots of a hundred other posts, most of them written years ago. Please, guys, if you aren't saying something original either 1) shut up, or 2) just post a link to the original. It makes everyone's lives easier.
But Spotlight is just indexing the same metadata that is in HFS+ under Jaguar, plus data that it pulls out of the file, not out of the filesystem. There is significant improvement in the mechanism and the interface, but it is not a "database filesystem."
As far as I can tell, that is incorrect; Dominic (the authoer of BeFS) has added additional metadata capabilities to HFS+, so Spotlight is actually 1) indexing that metadata, and 2) using interpreters to pull and index data from various file formats. See those post, for instance. While I agree that this does not create a true database filesystem, I would say that it's close to what BeOS had, which is the closest anyone has come.
I must admit interest in MS's claim that they're going to create a true database filesystem; while it is obviously technically feasible, it's just as stupid now as it was years ago when Be decided to back off theirs. Thus, I expect MS to produce a solution that does what they said it would do while sucking so much that no one uses it. It will be interesting to watch.
As to the claim that Apple is just doing all front-end stuff while MS is actually doing technology, I call baloney on that one. Apple has been good recently at creating and then utilyzing really good technology (although it's usually protocols, not servers). All of the technology available via .Mac is available to everyone, even if the servers themselves aren't. I can (and did) create a WebDAV server to store and share my calendars, and I can mount this WebDAV server as a local filesystem. Rendezvous/Zeroconf is another good example of a tech that Apple has developed, championed, and then been a real leader on.
I agree that there are big differences, though: Spotlight is based on proven technology and will surely arrive in 2005, while WinFS is a huge gamble, will increase costs dramatically (both licensing and maintenance), and will also arrive no earlier than 2006, without actually being based on proven tech at all. If their history is anything to go by, it will be 2010 or so before WinFS is usable.
OS X on x86 would share another disadvantage with Solaris on x86 - multithreading. Apps on the Mac usually make quite heavy use of multithreading, which is something that x86 does very badly ...
It's not exactly the same thing, but Mac OS X sucks at multitasking. You can talk all you want, but when my laptop is hammered and I log into it over ssh, I get serious delays. OTOH, when my linux or solaris (both x86) boxes are hammered, I never get delay on the CLI.
I fully agree that Intel's multiprocessing architecture sucks -- shared CPU data buses, no separate instruction buses, all that crap. I fully agree that PPC and Athlons are better. But there's something seriously wrong with OS X's scheduler, and it's pretty gross. I use Macs, I'll continue using them (although only for their laptops until the cases get more expandable -- 2 hard drives? get outta here!), but I'll never use them as my main workstation because they don't like doing too much at one time.
I personally usually involve some cranks, but otherwise I completely agree. :)
Even 20 psi can feel/look solid.
What the heck are you smoking? Maybe 20 atm feels solid, but my city bikes go to 125psi and my road bike to 145psi, and if they get 20 psi _low_ I notice immediately. Other than my mountain bike (which has tubeless tires, thus allowing esp. low pressures), I haven't ridden a bike with a psi below about 90 in maybe 5 years -- I can tell immediately because it has a huge impact on both feel and handling. Ugh.
I mean, unless you've kind of got a death wish. It's about the best way to get hit by a car -- they are far more likely to see you if you are on the road, but when some guy turns directly into you because he didn't see you on the sidewalk...
:)
Oh, and it's usually illegal.
Get a city map, pick some routes that are calmer (i.e., avoid industrial areas, find some back roads, get off the 4 lane commuting routes), and check them out on the weekends. Once you find a good route or two, try it to work. Set a goal of doing it twice a week 6 months a year. You'll never look back.
This always annoys me. How is it that a word has come to mean almost its exact opposite? The answer? It hasn't. No amount of "hackers" claiming otherwise will ever make "hack" mean "elegent, clever, solution". It will always mean the duct-tape and baling twine solution. It is possible for a hack to be a clever hack, but notice how you have to add the word "clever" for it to work? Yes, you can have an impressive hack (which is why McGuyver was popular), but not all hacks are impressive, and many aren't clever.
Really. Just because a bunch of techies who can't do things well try to redefine a word doesn't mean they succeed. If everything you do is a hack, you need to rethink your career.
I would certainly allow an additional definition of 'hack' as being something like 'to modify something so that it performs other than its intended function', but again notice the complete lack of judgement on that statement.
Get over yourselves. A hacker is still someone who does a hack job, and a hack is still a short term, usually crappy solution. If you want it to mean something else, make a different word; 'hack' already has a meaning.
I can't get linux to poweroff my LCD connected with DVI.
/lib/modules -name "*usb*"'.
It's incredibly, incredibly annoying to replace a boot drive in linux (although this is partially the fault of x86). LILO sucks.
XFree86 is an absolute abomination. I can plug as many monitors as I want into my mac and they all just work. Instantly. Right then. No configuration, no logout, no reboot, no nothing. And I can change resolutions, and all that other 1994 crap that Linux still can't do.
I plug in USB devices on Mac OS X, and they just work. No insmod, no 'find
I download PalmGUI and hey, it just synchronizes. No effort.
Bluetooth synchronization with my cell phone just works. Right into my addressbook. Now my wife has all the phone numbers I have.
The list goes on and on. The fact that some people are successfully using Linux for a desktop does _not_ mean that it's ready. Your experience is purely anecdotal; you and your family are not representative. Do you maintain your linux boxes, or do you make your 8 year old do it? Does your wife fight with LILO or Grub, or do you? Do they load the drivers for the webcam, or do you?
Riiiiiight
I personally would not want to see Apple in Microsoft's position, because I think Jobs would quite possibly be worse for the computing world, but they're playing nice right now. Comparing them to M$ and SCO is just stupid.
The vast majority of the stuff they do now is based on open protocols, and a lot of times these are protocols developed at Apple and then released. Rendezvous is probably the best example; this is something that computers users desperately need (yes, you too, even if you don't know it) and Apple's actually given us some hope we'll see it.
No, Aqua itself isn't open, but the Unix underpinnings are, and Apple does everything they can to give advancements back. Safari is based on an OSS rendering engine, and they've contributed back to that project quite a bit. They used an open (if not common) format for their audio (sorry, does Ogg have DRM? No? Then Apple can't use it).
As to the link you provided, that's totally unrelated. The guy is employed as a software developer at Apple. All employers have non-compete agreements with their employees, and all employers are somewhat harsh about employees doing things at home that are related to what they do at work. I'm currently under the thumb of a contract in which I'm modifying my own GPL'd code for the company but I can't rerelease the code. Incredibly stupid and annoying, but incredibly standard. And, of course, totally unrelated to this topic or to SCO.
As to control of the hardware and software, I guess it depends on your definition of "control". I can't think of any senses in which Apple has control of either my hardware or software. I can install whatever I want on my Macs, and it will only take <1 second to get through the BIOS, as opposed to the shite x86 boxes and their shite BIOS. I have control of the software too, in the sense that I've upgraded the crap out of OS X and strangely Apple hasn't seemed to mind. What do you mean by "control"?
...he just did not do a good job of making the point.
His main point is that if this happened to you on a PC, you could easily go to another vendor and run the same software on different hardware. Your Dell died and you think it's not going to recover? Drop the drive (or dd, or rsync, or whatever) into an IBM and you're basically good to go.
Because Apple does not let you run OS X on any other hardware, you are completely dependent on them for making your software work. If you get used to a certain environment and certain applications but then the hardware fails, you're screwed.
Not so with anything on the x86 platform. It may not be easy, but linux, Windows, and others can be moved to different hardware from different vendors pretty easily.
In other words, using Apple's software is _both_ software and hardware lock-in, and he hates it.
I thought the guilt thing was silly, tho. Use what works best for you; I find it takes hours more a month to maintain my stupid linux box (often just because it's x86) than my powerbook, even though I do much more crap to the powerbook. I'm certainly not going to feel guilty for just using my computer, instead of maintaining it.
This removes any friction from axles (no bearings, no grease, no physical contact at all) and significantly simplifies the physical process while also making the whole package smaller.
So yes, this actually is a significant improvement on existing solutions. RTFA.
It could be your eyes, or the way your lcd is configured, or, uh, have you been smoking strange things recently?
I've got two LCDs, a Dell 1900FP and a 1901FP, plus my 15" powerbook. Any one of those three kicks the crap out of my Dell 21" trinitrons. What do I mean by "kicks the crap out of"? I mean that I can use any of those screens for 16 hours a day, no problem, but I can't use the trinitrons without serious eye fatigue. Oh sure, before I had the LCDs I didn't know it was eye fatigue, but even spending 10 minutes looking at a crt after using LCDs exclusively just hurts my eyes.
Maybe it's that your eyes aren't fucked enough. I know plenty of people who can't tell the difference between a CRT at 60Hz and one at 100Hz, but I can immediately tell if a CRT is below about 85Hz.
Of course, I don't know what you mean by "quality"? Do you mean weight? I hope not, because one of the things I love about LCDs is how light they are. Do you mean depth? Again, I hope not. Do you mean build quality? How could you even compare LCDs and CRTs in that area, considering how different they are?
LCDs on DVI shouldn't require any adjustment at all, but if you use VGA to connect an LCD, you will almost definitely have to screw with the settings. My 1900FP looked like total crap on my Ultra 5 until I spent about three minutes testing a bunch of different settings; true tweaking, as there wasn't really any method to it. I found a setting that looks just as good as DVI, though, and now it looks awesome. The 17" trinitron sitting next to it is basically burning a hole in my skull, even at 85Hz.
I very gladly pay a premium for LCDs; even though I was gifted with two eyes, I don't really think of it as having a "spare", so I try to do everything I can to preserve them.
...is going to be a camera phone for just this reason. I'm going to take a shot of my ass* and send it to everyone I can. I don't know if it's quite "bluejacqing" or whatever, but I bet it'd be fun.
:)
*Actually, I might send a picture of something slightly more... personal.
No, she didn't. She just kept saying "you need to tie the business to the resource". That's just as much gibberesh as anything else. What exactly am I supposed to tie to what? Applications to hardware? My business goals with IT expenditures? There is no such thing as "business" in this sense. Is your business your customers? Your shareholders? Your inventory? Your employees? Which of those am I tying to a resource? Which resource? If my business is services, then my business is my employees, but then, my resources are also my employees, so they're already tied.
It's more gibberish. And her "specific" example was not specific. She gave an example of something someone did, but she didn't provide specifics on how it got done, or how that was "tying the business to the resource".
As to automating things, no, she didn't even say that. She just basically said that HP would be willing to send lots of expensive consultings to your work to figure out how to "tie the business to the resource", but does not ever say what the heck that is, and certainly does not ever say it's automation. Companies like HP hate automation, because it leaves less room for consultants.
*GONG* Keep trying.
That and if you want a Superdrive or built in bluetooth, you need to buy a PB.
The new iBooks include builtin Bluetooth as a BTO option, which means I'll probably go ahead and spring for one of these.Since when were slashdot readers significantly more technically competent than, say, a chalkboard eraser?
Puh-lease. People who never, ever spell 'lose' correctly cannot be expected to keep processor lines straight.
A month or two in the laboratory can often save an hour or two in the library.
This seems to be doubly so. Here's my computer corollary:
A month or two of hacking can often save an hour or two on Google.
Why stop there? I've got two monitors with 9 virtual desktops each (I use Cntl-arrow keys with the desktops arranged in a grid, so switching between them uses my very fast spatial memory), and I utilize almost all of them. I usually devote the middle workspace to something large and obvious (web browsing on the left and something else -- monitoring window? -- on the right) as a navigation aid, and then most of the other workspaces have three terminals filling them. I agree with the basic idea, though -- people who survive without either virtual workspaces or multiple monitors just confuse me. But try both sometime, which is easy on linux, and you'll really appreciate it.
First, your eyes are pretty amazing if you using 2048x1536 on a 21"...
Second, no one said you had to have 17" monitors; I've had two 21" monitors on my desk for the last 7 years.
And third, have you actually tried dual monitors? If not, then you couldn't "get it". Every time I have to work with only one monitor, it feels like trying to drive with a windshield that's far too small. I also use 9 workspaces with both of my monitors, which means that i've got 18 workspaces across two monitors, and they're usually almost all full of something or other (I'm a sysadmin, so I multitask somewhat excessively).
As to your idea of comparing the results of spending a given amount of money, it's pointless. Yeah, if you've only got $500, get one better monitor rather than 2 crappy ones. But the study isn't about the best way to spend a given amount of money -- it's about maximising the productivity of your workers. You go to any company in the world and tell them you have a method of immediately increasing the productivity of most of their office workers by 10%, and see how long it takes them to start writing a check.
This is why the study talks about ROI -- spend the extra money on an extra monitor, and you'll make that extra money back almost immediately, and then you will continue to make money on that investment for a long time. You're looking at it from the perspective of someone who uses a computer for fun, which makes ROI meaningless, whereas companies look at it from the perspective of spending money to make money.
"I haven't tried it, which means that it's silly and pointless." Yeah, great argument, keep up the good work.
Untrue. Be refused to be bought for less than $150 million, which Apple thought was too high. Instead, they bought Next for $450 million. And rest is crappy lickable history.
I think you are referring to irony, but one wouldn't know so from your post:
irony, n - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
Your statements just describe things that suck, not things that are ironic. Please, base your definitions of words on actual reading, not music, because apparently musicians are just as illiterate as the rest of America. It's crappy when it rains on your wedding day, but it's ironic if it happens after you chide all your friends for not preparing for rain on their wedding days yet you yourself don't prepare for it on your day. It's lame when you've got lots of spoons but need a knife, it's ironic when you've been slowly trading knives for spoons and you never actually need a knife until you run out of them.
My favorite, most poignant story of irony is a racist skinhead who decided he couldn't stay in any longer. When he informed the rest of the skinheads, they beat him up and left him almost unconscious on the side of the road. Multiple white people passed him by and did not help him, and finally a black couple saw him and helped him. See, that's irony, not just crappy
Please, read more, music less
.All of this can be found at our web site, so hopefully others won't start so quite from scratch.
In this case, save your money and spend some time; create your own tech-friendly lobby in your state, and begin monitoring this kind of stuff. It sucks to watch sausage get made, but if you don't get involved, you've got no one but yourself to blame. We're planning on starting a formal non-profit to continue fighting for the right to innovate with technology, and I recommend that other states do the same.
Go to tndigitalfreedom.org for more information. That's the starting point for our organizational efforts.
Yeah, tons.
- Sun: NFS
- Sun: NIS/NIS+
- Sun: NSS/PAM
- Intel and others: USB
- AMD and others: Hypertransport
- Sun: Java
Yeah, there's a lot of Sun in there, because I know their stuff better, but come off it. Companies invent stuff all the time, it just doesn't always turn into a viable product, and it doesn't often show up as a unique, identifiable thing.Hell, everything in linux was invented by someone; the free software people sure as hell didn't think of it. ;)