Your system has a problem. I have 8 on a few systems (what with being a Windows sysadmin) and none take near that long. My home system takes 20ish seconds, but it is a SSD with UEFI boot which makes it pretty speedy. My desktop at work takes about 40 seconds, the VMs take about 60 seconds. This is time form me hitting restart until the login screen is displayed.
So, in the event you are continuing to use Windows 8, or even if you aren't, you really should troubleshoot that system because it isn't the OS that is related to the boot time. It boots fairly quickly in most situations, and really quickly when given new hardware (since it can UEFI boot).
When it does, you suddenly stop hating it. Stardock has a program that makes Metro apps do just that, called Modern Mix. They go from annoying to being just any other program when you use it. Not that there are really any amazing Metro apps, but they become just programs like any other with this and you can use them without any issue.
Now given that Stardock was able to implement this rather quickly and easily as a third party, this means there's no real technical reason they are full screen only in 8, it was a marketing decision. On a desktop system, the desktop should have the place of primacy, and it doesn't in 8. You have to knock on a couple of 3rd party tool (Start 8 and Modern Mix) to get that which is silly.
It is also common in the industry, to improve on something on an existing process. Intel does it every tingle process with their tick-tock strategy. They make a new process and release a chip with a largely existing design on it, then they make a new design on that process that is more efficient, then a new process, and so on. You see it with the GPU makers, they release updates outside of when the process shrinks and so on.
There was never anything saying that increasing transistor count was the only way to increase performance.
Games now are cheaper than they were when they were on the SNES. $50 in 1993 dollars is like $78 today. Also budgets for games have gone WAY up.
Also I'm not sure where you are getting $80 for new releases (presuming we are talking US dollars). $60 is what games seem to be going for checking stores currently.
I do agree the no used games thing is bullshit, and I'm hoping someone takes them to task on that (sounds like the EU may) however the pricing is not out of line. Making a game isn't cheap, and they tend to provide pretty good entertainment for the money. If you want cheaper games, with lower production values, you can have that too with indy games and B-list publishers like Paradox Interactive. However with first flight games, well the cost has to be paid somehow.
It is bad on Slashdot. People here love to hate MS, so if MS takes the long view on something, that's bad. If they take the short view on something else, that's also bad. It is a matter of zealotry, not fact.
In fact MS has been good at the long view idea for quite some time. When they get in to a market, often their first showing isn't that impressive. Many companies who do that say "Oh well, guess we can't compete," and fold. MS sticks with it, keeps improving, keeps trying. They don't always do that, and when they do they don't always succeed, but they've done it a lot.
You are shilling for them. You created a brand new account, just to post in this thread. It is transparent shilling. You might want to be a little more cautious in the future on geek type forums. The posters often know how to check up on other posters, shit like this is real easy to notice.
Doesn't matter how baseless it is, you can file suit. However, that is not to say you'll succeed or it is a good idea. A judge can throw the case out in pre-trial, and can impose sanctions if it is an extremely stupid suit.
In PETA's case, I imagine this is largely a publicity stunt and something to try and harass detractors. They wouldn't really want this to go to trial as it would not go in their favour.
Our central infrastructure is on Hyper-V at work now on account of VMWare wanting way too much money. We use a lot of RHEL systems and they all work well. Our web server, MySQL server, puppet server, that sort of thing all run on Hyper-V. The Linux admin didn't have much trouble with it. The main limitation I'm aware of is that you can't do dynamic memory.
While it isn't ad Linux friendly as VMWare, it seems to work just fine. As to which between them you should use, depends on features and price. In our case Hyper-V was "free" since we have software assurance with MS campus wide and VMWare wanted like $20,000 per system for vSphere with the feature set we wanted, so it was stacked heavily to Hyper-V. You case may be different, so make sure to check out both.
However don't write off Hyper-V because it is MS. With Server 2012 it is a real, no-shit, enterprise virtualization solution that works well and has loads of good features. They fixed their rubbish networking from 2008R2 also, their virtual switches are exceedingly fast, and it supports full SR-IOV if your NICs do.
I was very pleased when I tried it out, our Linux admin liked it, so we migrated (we had an old VMWare 3 setup). Migrating VMs was easy too. Uninstall VMWare tools, use the Starwind converter to go from vmdk to vhd, use Hyper-V to go from vhd to vhdx (and make it fixed size), set up a VM, start it, and install the integration services.
I keep hearing this kind of thing from ARM fans. Ok, show it to me. You can't, because it doesn't exist, nor anything even close to it. What that means is you are just hoping this is the case, making things up, not that it is actually the case.
Trademark law is on MS's side, they'll win this. If the guy is lucky, it'll be in ICANN's arbitration and he'll just lose the name. If he's unlucky, it'll go to US courts as a trademark issue and he may owe MS lawyer fees when he loses (which he will).
This stuff isn't a case of "First guy to grab it gets to extort whatever they want." Trademark law doesn't work that way. If someone has a legit trademark on something they defend, they are going to get it.
So if you register a generic name that a company wants, ya that you can pretty much charge whatever for. However if you own a domain that is their trademark, they'll take that away from you, if they want it.
The company my father worked at prior to retirement encountered this. Their name had been registered by some individual with the same last name as the company. So they approached him and offered him quite a bit, like 20,000 pounds (company was headquartered in the UK, and this guy lived in the UK) for the domain and his trouble moving to a new one. Guy said no. So, to court it went (this was prior to the resolution process via ICANN). The guy lost, and got nothing for it, as the company had a trademark on the name.
People can be really stupid when it comes to this. They think having a domain name that is something a company has should be the jackpot to quick riches, and will turn down reasonable offers. I remember an eBay auction I saw once for the domain "generalmills.cc" at a time when they already owned generalmills.com. The dipstick trying to sell it seemed to think that $10 million was a good opening bid.
So MS may well have contacted this guy and said "Hey you have a domain we'd like, we'll give you a couple grand for your trouble," and he replied "Nope, I want millions," so they are taking him to ICANN's arbitration. If that doesn't rule in their favour, it'll probably go to court as a trademark issue.
This dude is just trying to get himself attention and Slashdot is obliging. I mean for one, building an "office suite" is not necessarily impressive. All that office suite actually means is a program that does word processing, spreadsheets, maybe presentations. Well, there can be a great range in that. High end office suites, like Microsoft Office, do a whole lot of complex shit and do it well, and has a bunch of well built tools (like a spell checker and so on). However a crap office suite might do little more than you'd get out of Wordpad and SSS.
Then there's the fact that "alpha" has traditionally meant in software "feature incomplete, still under heavy development." These days given that beta often seems to mean that (it used to mean feature complete, working on bugs) alpha might mean "Well, it complies now and runs sometimes!"
It would not be very hard to set a rather low goal for what constitutes an "office suite," bash the basis of that out, and then call it an alpha. I can't try it, since I do not care to install Java on my system, but looking at the screen shots, it looks like he did precisely that. It looks exceedingly simple, largely using a bunch of the built in Java controls. That's fine and all, but I don't find that really that impressive for 30 days of work. Part of the point of managed languages like Java, C#, that kind of thing it to be able to bash together something basic pretty quick.
So ya, I'm voting that he's just publicity whoring. If he wants to call us back when 1.0 comes out, then I'll have a look. Maybe then it'll be something cool, but I kinda doubt it. Personally I'd stick to MS Office, Google Docs, Libre Office, or whatever your current preferred suite is.
Slashdot seems to have lots of ARM fanboys that look at ARM's low power processors and assume that ARM could make processors on par with Intel chips but much more efficient. They seem to think Intel does things poorly, as though they don't spend billions on R&D.
Of course that would beg the question as to why ARM doesn't and the answer is they can't. The more features you blot on to a chip, the higher the clock speed, and so on, the more power it needs. So you want 64-bit? More power. Bigger memory controller? More power. Heavy hitting vector unit? More power. And so on.
There's no magic ju ju in ARM designs. They are low power designs, in both sense of the word. Now that's wonderful, we need that for cellphones. You can't be slogging around with a 100 watt chip in a phone or the like. However don't mistake that for meaning that they can keep that low consumption and offer performance equal to the 100 watt chip.
But when I was a surveyor's assistant we usually tried to close surveys to less than an inch. We were really, really, precise about locations. Maybe that was just a weird firm, but I suspect not, I think that's SOP. Given that we placed markers that precise, it is hard to imagine that the physical structures, items, etc got placed more than a couple inches off.
I can't imagine roadways would be much different.
So ya, as you say, these things are known pretty precisely. Turns out that even pre-GPS you could get really good measurements, if you did it right.
Also having done that, it makes me think all the metric stuff is a little silly. It really isn't that hard to go back and forth. Most contracts were in US units, however some government contracts were in metric. So what did we do? Switched the digital theodolite and computer to metric and worked with that.
Really metric only shines when you talk science or engineering, when you are doing more advanced things like inter-unit conversion. There the standardization is so damn useful, hence why science, including in the US, is done and taught in metric (or at least it was when I went to school).
For every day use though? It doesn't really matter. All that matters is you have a feel for the units, and you can have that for both no problem. I really can't see what the compelling reason to convert to metric for everyday use is. Even in countries that have converted, you find plenty of unit mixture. In Canada you will see things at grocers sold in pounds, gallons, etc. It is amusing that in the same grocer you can see meats side by side, some priced by pound, some by 100 grams.
Then all over you find some units that defy either system. Like ever buy a home AC? They are sized in "tons" however if you've had a look at the unit you realize that it is far lighter than the figure. So what the hell does that mean? It means how many tons of ice per day you'd need to equal the cooling capacity. Seriously. It started way back in the day when it was a new concept, and that was a comparable method of measure.
I really think people make a bigger deal of this than is warranted. I certainly don't think there should be any resistance to using the metric system, it is great, but in terms of forcing a conversion, I fail to see what that gains you.
It can also mean "no preset limit" which is what it usually mean for Internet plans. They don't have a hard and fast limit, you can use it without hitting some magic number when you get cut off or charged. However that doesn't mean you can just go crazy and use the max all the time.
This is also how it needs to be, if you want cheap Internet. If you think companies can cheaply provide Internet service where everyone uses it full bore 24/7, then you haven't done much looking in to network infrastructure. The only way it works is if people play nice and use it when they need it, and let it be used by other people the rest of the time.
When your chosen platform can't do something, just redefine the goal and then hate on anyone who doesn't accept that definition. So any game I can't get on Linux is a "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" game? Well then count me in as wanting to play those! Of games I've played lately that don't run on Linux Skyrim has topped the list, 200 hours in it so far. It is an extremely entertaining game, I have gotten my money's worth and more out of it. Also on the list would be Xcom, Torchlight 2, Deus Ex, Fallen Enchantress, Shogun 2 Total War, Terraia and so on. Now if those are all "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" games according to you, fine, but I don't care I liked them, a lot, and want to play them. Crysis? Not on the list, I didn't care for it, so I haven't bought any of the sequels.
Frankly the measure of how good the platform is for gaming isn't how many games you can find for it, it is how many games that you want to play run on it. That'll vary person to person. However trying to point to a bunch of little indy or half-finished OSS titles isn't going to make many gamers happy. Sorry, but I want Skyrim, it is all kinds of worth it and not just for the graphics (though when yo uload up some mods those are pretty impressive too). I don't want Vega Strike.
If you want higher resolutions and frame rates, you need more powerful GPUs to handle it. For example moving to 2560x1600 or to 120fps doubles the pixel requirement over 1920x1080@60fps. So whatever amount of power you needed to achieve 1080p60, double that for either of those targets. 4k will require a quadrupling, and 120fps 4k would require 8x the power.
All this is assuming you are getting 60fps in the first place. Now maybe you are fine with trading off lower frame rates, or lower resolutions, that's all up to you. If 720p30 is your target, you can get away with a whole lot less power. However that doesn't mean that nobody wants to target higher resolutions or frame rates.
There are also other visual quality settings to consider, like anti-aliasing and so on that can require more power. Depending on what you are targeting with that, you can need a lot of power.
Personally I really find frame rates much below 60 pretty annoying in most games. I really like the feeling of fluidity you get. 120 fps is even better, but the monitor I normally use doesn't handle that. Well maintaining that 60fps at a 2.5k resolution is not a trivial feat. I don't think a $250 graphics card would do that for most games.
Seriously, for some people, gaming is their hobby and that kind of money is not that much when you talk what people spend on hobbies. My coworker just bought himself like a $2000 turbo for his car, to replace (or augment, I'm not sure) the one that's already there. He has no need for it, but he likes playing with his car.
Now that you, and most others, don't want to spend that kind of money is understandable and not problematic. There's a reason why companies have a lineup of stuff and why the high end stuff is just for those with plenty of money. It also doesn't scale linearly since the higher end something is, the less units get sold, and so the more the fixed costs influence the unit cost.
However don't hate on it. That you don't wish to spend that kind of money doesn't mean that nobody should. Also you should be glad people do: The expensive parts fund the cheap parts. They can recover more R&D costs on these units, letting them sell lower end parts for less, since lower end parts are the same tech, just less of it.
When you post stuff like that, and fanboys mod it to +5, it looks really silly. The reason isn't because it is not true, but because it is not impressive. Yes, Linux has a few games for it including some older Source games. Yay. Trying to imply that because it has Steam it has games is silly. Roughly 6 of my 163 Steam games will run on Linux and most of those are the older Source engine games.
Having Steam doesn't mean you get games. It means there's a platform to sell games on that many Linux users will hate on (costs money, has DRM, no source code). The games themselves have to be ported and so far, not much of that has been going on.
It does not strengthen your point when you go and make a rather silly argument. The "but it has Steam!" argument that keeps getting trotted out when someone comments on Linux and gaming reminds me of Mac users back in the 90s pointing to the 10 or so old titles you could find in the store as proof that there were plenty of games on the Mac.
Linux gaming is not in a good state currently, and trying to mask that is silly.
In those places, a $100 bill would work as well or better than a passport for getting through checkpoint guards. The idea that someone would bother with your passport number in trying to forge a passport to get through there is rather laughable, since they didn't even bother to check said number to see if it was legit.
At a border with better security? Not going to work. Passports have a lot more security to them than that, particularly now.
Basically if places have weak security, the have weak security. Someone isn't going to bother to try to get a legit name and number to forge a passport. If they have tight security, then it wouldn't do any good as they check the other features, which wouldn't match.
See if the point of someone having your information is to, well, be able to access your information then it needs to be stored in that format. A password can be hashed, but something like name and address needs to be stored in text. Encrypting it is the kind of thing that does a limited amount of good. They may well encrypt it on disk, but the software that accesses it still needs to be able to decrypt it, wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't. So if someone busts in through a problem in the software, they can get your data.
It is easy to get mad and say companies should "do something" but ask yourself what that something is, I mean really analyze the problem, and then try and come up with a solution that works. It is harder.
We deal with that kind of thing at work. Securing data isn't just a magic switch you can flick. Like our new storage array has self-encrypting drives. Great, we can, with no performance loss, encrypt everything on it... However that only really helps against it getting stolen, or if we forgot to wipe the disks when we decommission it. Being that all data is encrypted, the unit has the password (it is a power-on kind of thing) so if you bust in over the network, well then you can get at the data unencrypted.
For more sensitive stuff you can take it a step further, use Sophos (ya that is what they bought, no not my choice) full disk or file container encryption. That means that if a system with it is lost, nobody can get the data. However, when that system is online and the FS mounted, again a break in can get at the data.
The only way to stop network breakins from being a possible compromise is to take the systems entirely off the Internet. Not only is that unfeasible in normal cases, but it is impossible if you are talking the system that is to handle talking to the users online.
I can't come up with a way that you can have a system where the data is secure, even if the system gets compromised. Of course you try and stop systems from getting compromised, but the idea that data should be stored somehow that even if a system gets broken in to you can't get at it is rather silly.
For example the powers that be at work decided that the important thing was 3 of the 4 groups (upper, lower, numbers, and punctuation are the groups), and length, with 14+ being what makes it happy. So you input a short phrase like "I like puppies" it'll call it strong and take it. However if you input "@la2wo!d?o-z4" it'll call it weak because it is too short. Input something like "niecrlazleswiariucriuml7priu8roab7iuyluc0oawr1u5pl" and it'll reject it because there are only 2 of the 4 groups).
There's no further analysis, it is just a length and groups thing, with rather poorly defined groups.
Also in terms of strength, while there's no perfect one, measuring bits of entropy, which you can do, is pretty good. However few sites use anything that advanced.
I'd say I'm a pretty security aware individual, what with working in IT and all that. I do defense in depth on computer and physical security, I'm proactive about things, etc. Seems to have worked, I've never had a system owned.
So I never reuse passwords, right?
Wrong, I do all the time. Almost every forum online I have the same password for, and it is a weak one. Why? Because I don't care. Oh no, someone might hack my forum account and... I dunno, post something as me! Whatever would I do? I'm not going to bother to generate a great, unique, password for every site.
However my bank account? Random password (I don't seem to have trouble remembering them), long, and it requires two factor authentication. That protects my finances, and those matter. So security on that is pretty high.
The idea that everyone is going to have a high security password for every site and not reuse it is silly. There are plenty of things where if your account got compromised, you just don't care so much.
Also it can make sense to group systems. All my systems at home use a single password. There is no reason for them not to. They are all in the same security context, basically. It is no different than at work where my single account gets me access to any domain system.
The director. Not sure why he likes it so much but it is added in, mechanically, by him shining lights at the cameras. They really need to hire someone to poke him with a sharp stick when he tries to do that. I'm not sure why he likes it so much, but he does. In behind the scenes stuff he talks about how much he likes the look of it.
But that's why it is there, one of the very primary creative forces in the movie really likes it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your system has a problem. I have 8 on a few systems (what with being a Windows sysadmin) and none take near that long. My home system takes 20ish seconds, but it is a SSD with UEFI boot which makes it pretty speedy. My desktop at work takes about 40 seconds, the VMs take about 60 seconds. This is time form me hitting restart until the login screen is displayed.
So, in the event you are continuing to use Windows 8, or even if you aren't, you really should troubleshoot that system because it isn't the OS that is related to the boot time. It boots fairly quickly in most situations, and really quickly when given new hardware (since it can UEFI boot).
When it does, you suddenly stop hating it. Stardock has a program that makes Metro apps do just that, called Modern Mix. They go from annoying to being just any other program when you use it. Not that there are really any amazing Metro apps, but they become just programs like any other with this and you can use them without any issue.
Now given that Stardock was able to implement this rather quickly and easily as a third party, this means there's no real technical reason they are full screen only in 8, it was a marketing decision. On a desktop system, the desktop should have the place of primacy, and it doesn't in 8. You have to knock on a couple of 3rd party tool (Start 8 and Modern Mix) to get that which is silly.
It is also common in the industry, to improve on something on an existing process. Intel does it every tingle process with their tick-tock strategy. They make a new process and release a chip with a largely existing design on it, then they make a new design on that process that is more efficient, then a new process, and so on. You see it with the GPU makers, they release updates outside of when the process shrinks and so on.
There was never anything saying that increasing transistor count was the only way to increase performance.
Games now are cheaper than they were when they were on the SNES. $50 in 1993 dollars is like $78 today. Also budgets for games have gone WAY up.
Also I'm not sure where you are getting $80 for new releases (presuming we are talking US dollars). $60 is what games seem to be going for checking stores currently.
I do agree the no used games thing is bullshit, and I'm hoping someone takes them to task on that (sounds like the EU may) however the pricing is not out of line. Making a game isn't cheap, and they tend to provide pretty good entertainment for the money. If you want cheaper games, with lower production values, you can have that too with indy games and B-list publishers like Paradox Interactive. However with first flight games, well the cost has to be paid somehow.
It is bad on Slashdot. People here love to hate MS, so if MS takes the long view on something, that's bad. If they take the short view on something else, that's also bad. It is a matter of zealotry, not fact.
In fact MS has been good at the long view idea for quite some time. When they get in to a market, often their first showing isn't that impressive. Many companies who do that say "Oh well, guess we can't compete," and fold. MS sticks with it, keeps improving, keeps trying. They don't always do that, and when they do they don't always succeed, but they've done it a lot.
You are shilling for them. You created a brand new account, just to post in this thread. It is transparent shilling. You might want to be a little more cautious in the future on geek type forums. The posters often know how to check up on other posters, shit like this is real easy to notice.
So fuck off PETArd. You are fooling nobody.
Doesn't matter how baseless it is, you can file suit. However, that is not to say you'll succeed or it is a good idea. A judge can throw the case out in pre-trial, and can impose sanctions if it is an extremely stupid suit.
In PETA's case, I imagine this is largely a publicity stunt and something to try and harass detractors. They wouldn't really want this to go to trial as it would not go in their favour.
Our central infrastructure is on Hyper-V at work now on account of VMWare wanting way too much money. We use a lot of RHEL systems and they all work well. Our web server, MySQL server, puppet server, that sort of thing all run on Hyper-V. The Linux admin didn't have much trouble with it. The main limitation I'm aware of is that you can't do dynamic memory.
While it isn't ad Linux friendly as VMWare, it seems to work just fine. As to which between them you should use, depends on features and price. In our case Hyper-V was "free" since we have software assurance with MS campus wide and VMWare wanted like $20,000 per system for vSphere with the feature set we wanted, so it was stacked heavily to Hyper-V. You case may be different, so make sure to check out both.
However don't write off Hyper-V because it is MS. With Server 2012 it is a real, no-shit, enterprise virtualization solution that works well and has loads of good features. They fixed their rubbish networking from 2008R2 also, their virtual switches are exceedingly fast, and it supports full SR-IOV if your NICs do.
I was very pleased when I tried it out, our Linux admin liked it, so we migrated (we had an old VMWare 3 setup). Migrating VMs was easy too. Uninstall VMWare tools, use the Starwind converter to go from vmdk to vhd, use Hyper-V to go from vhd to vhdx (and make it fixed size), set up a VM, start it, and install the integration services.
I keep hearing this kind of thing from ARM fans. Ok, show it to me. You can't, because it doesn't exist, nor anything even close to it. What that means is you are just hoping this is the case, making things up, not that it is actually the case.
Trademark law is on MS's side, they'll win this. If the guy is lucky, it'll be in ICANN's arbitration and he'll just lose the name. If he's unlucky, it'll go to US courts as a trademark issue and he may owe MS lawyer fees when he loses (which he will).
This stuff isn't a case of "First guy to grab it gets to extort whatever they want." Trademark law doesn't work that way. If someone has a legit trademark on something they defend, they are going to get it.
So if you register a generic name that a company wants, ya that you can pretty much charge whatever for. However if you own a domain that is their trademark, they'll take that away from you, if they want it.
It was a fan site, they went down, squatter registered it, and now here we are.
The company my father worked at prior to retirement encountered this. Their name had been registered by some individual with the same last name as the company. So they approached him and offered him quite a bit, like 20,000 pounds (company was headquartered in the UK, and this guy lived in the UK) for the domain and his trouble moving to a new one. Guy said no. So, to court it went (this was prior to the resolution process via ICANN). The guy lost, and got nothing for it, as the company had a trademark on the name.
People can be really stupid when it comes to this. They think having a domain name that is something a company has should be the jackpot to quick riches, and will turn down reasonable offers. I remember an eBay auction I saw once for the domain "generalmills.cc" at a time when they already owned generalmills.com. The dipstick trying to sell it seemed to think that $10 million was a good opening bid.
So MS may well have contacted this guy and said "Hey you have a domain we'd like, we'll give you a couple grand for your trouble," and he replied "Nope, I want millions," so they are taking him to ICANN's arbitration. If that doesn't rule in their favour, it'll probably go to court as a trademark issue.
This dude is just trying to get himself attention and Slashdot is obliging. I mean for one, building an "office suite" is not necessarily impressive. All that office suite actually means is a program that does word processing, spreadsheets, maybe presentations. Well, there can be a great range in that. High end office suites, like Microsoft Office, do a whole lot of complex shit and do it well, and has a bunch of well built tools (like a spell checker and so on). However a crap office suite might do little more than you'd get out of Wordpad and SSS.
Then there's the fact that "alpha" has traditionally meant in software "feature incomplete, still under heavy development." These days given that beta often seems to mean that (it used to mean feature complete, working on bugs) alpha might mean "Well, it complies now and runs sometimes!"
It would not be very hard to set a rather low goal for what constitutes an "office suite," bash the basis of that out, and then call it an alpha. I can't try it, since I do not care to install Java on my system, but looking at the screen shots, it looks like he did precisely that. It looks exceedingly simple, largely using a bunch of the built in Java controls. That's fine and all, but I don't find that really that impressive for 30 days of work. Part of the point of managed languages like Java, C#, that kind of thing it to be able to bash together something basic pretty quick.
So ya, I'm voting that he's just publicity whoring. If he wants to call us back when 1.0 comes out, then I'll have a look. Maybe then it'll be something cool, but I kinda doubt it. Personally I'd stick to MS Office, Google Docs, Libre Office, or whatever your current preferred suite is.
Slashdot seems to have lots of ARM fanboys that look at ARM's low power processors and assume that ARM could make processors on par with Intel chips but much more efficient. They seem to think Intel does things poorly, as though they don't spend billions on R&D.
Of course that would beg the question as to why ARM doesn't and the answer is they can't. The more features you blot on to a chip, the higher the clock speed, and so on, the more power it needs. So you want 64-bit? More power. Bigger memory controller? More power. Heavy hitting vector unit? More power. And so on.
There's no magic ju ju in ARM designs. They are low power designs, in both sense of the word. Now that's wonderful, we need that for cellphones. You can't be slogging around with a 100 watt chip in a phone or the like. However don't mistake that for meaning that they can keep that low consumption and offer performance equal to the 100 watt chip.
But when I was a surveyor's assistant we usually tried to close surveys to less than an inch. We were really, really, precise about locations. Maybe that was just a weird firm, but I suspect not, I think that's SOP. Given that we placed markers that precise, it is hard to imagine that the physical structures, items, etc got placed more than a couple inches off.
I can't imagine roadways would be much different.
So ya, as you say, these things are known pretty precisely. Turns out that even pre-GPS you could get really good measurements, if you did it right.
Also having done that, it makes me think all the metric stuff is a little silly. It really isn't that hard to go back and forth. Most contracts were in US units, however some government contracts were in metric. So what did we do? Switched the digital theodolite and computer to metric and worked with that.
Really metric only shines when you talk science or engineering, when you are doing more advanced things like inter-unit conversion. There the standardization is so damn useful, hence why science, including in the US, is done and taught in metric (or at least it was when I went to school).
For every day use though? It doesn't really matter. All that matters is you have a feel for the units, and you can have that for both no problem. I really can't see what the compelling reason to convert to metric for everyday use is. Even in countries that have converted, you find plenty of unit mixture. In Canada you will see things at grocers sold in pounds, gallons, etc. It is amusing that in the same grocer you can see meats side by side, some priced by pound, some by 100 grams.
Then all over you find some units that defy either system. Like ever buy a home AC? They are sized in "tons" however if you've had a look at the unit you realize that it is far lighter than the figure. So what the hell does that mean? It means how many tons of ice per day you'd need to equal the cooling capacity. Seriously. It started way back in the day when it was a new concept, and that was a comparable method of measure.
I really think people make a bigger deal of this than is warranted. I certainly don't think there should be any resistance to using the metric system, it is great, but in terms of forcing a conversion, I fail to see what that gains you.
It can also mean "no preset limit" which is what it usually mean for Internet plans. They don't have a hard and fast limit, you can use it without hitting some magic number when you get cut off or charged. However that doesn't mean you can just go crazy and use the max all the time.
This is also how it needs to be, if you want cheap Internet. If you think companies can cheaply provide Internet service where everyone uses it full bore 24/7, then you haven't done much looking in to network infrastructure. The only way it works is if people play nice and use it when they need it, and let it be used by other people the rest of the time.
When your chosen platform can't do something, just redefine the goal and then hate on anyone who doesn't accept that definition. So any game I can't get on Linux is a "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" game? Well then count me in as wanting to play those! Of games I've played lately that don't run on Linux Skyrim has topped the list, 200 hours in it so far. It is an extremely entertaining game, I have gotten my money's worth and more out of it. Also on the list would be Xcom, Torchlight 2, Deus Ex, Fallen Enchantress, Shogun 2 Total War, Terraia and so on. Now if those are all "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" games according to you, fine, but I don't care I liked them, a lot, and want to play them. Crysis? Not on the list, I didn't care for it, so I haven't bought any of the sequels.
Frankly the measure of how good the platform is for gaming isn't how many games you can find for it, it is how many games that you want to play run on it. That'll vary person to person. However trying to point to a bunch of little indy or half-finished OSS titles isn't going to make many gamers happy. Sorry, but I want Skyrim, it is all kinds of worth it and not just for the graphics (though when yo uload up some mods those are pretty impressive too). I don't want Vega Strike.
If you want higher resolutions and frame rates, you need more powerful GPUs to handle it. For example moving to 2560x1600 or to 120fps doubles the pixel requirement over 1920x1080@60fps. So whatever amount of power you needed to achieve 1080p60, double that for either of those targets. 4k will require a quadrupling, and 120fps 4k would require 8x the power.
All this is assuming you are getting 60fps in the first place. Now maybe you are fine with trading off lower frame rates, or lower resolutions, that's all up to you. If 720p30 is your target, you can get away with a whole lot less power. However that doesn't mean that nobody wants to target higher resolutions or frame rates.
There are also other visual quality settings to consider, like anti-aliasing and so on that can require more power. Depending on what you are targeting with that, you can need a lot of power.
Personally I really find frame rates much below 60 pretty annoying in most games. I really like the feeling of fluidity you get. 120 fps is even better, but the monitor I normally use doesn't handle that. Well maintaining that 60fps at a 2.5k resolution is not a trivial feat. I don't think a $250 graphics card would do that for most games.
Seriously, for some people, gaming is their hobby and that kind of money is not that much when you talk what people spend on hobbies. My coworker just bought himself like a $2000 turbo for his car, to replace (or augment, I'm not sure) the one that's already there. He has no need for it, but he likes playing with his car.
Now that you, and most others, don't want to spend that kind of money is understandable and not problematic. There's a reason why companies have a lineup of stuff and why the high end stuff is just for those with plenty of money. It also doesn't scale linearly since the higher end something is, the less units get sold, and so the more the fixed costs influence the unit cost.
However don't hate on it. That you don't wish to spend that kind of money doesn't mean that nobody should. Also you should be glad people do: The expensive parts fund the cheap parts. They can recover more R&D costs on these units, letting them sell lower end parts for less, since lower end parts are the same tech, just less of it.
When you post stuff like that, and fanboys mod it to +5, it looks really silly. The reason isn't because it is not true, but because it is not impressive. Yes, Linux has a few games for it including some older Source games. Yay. Trying to imply that because it has Steam it has games is silly. Roughly 6 of my 163 Steam games will run on Linux and most of those are the older Source engine games.
Having Steam doesn't mean you get games. It means there's a platform to sell games on that many Linux users will hate on (costs money, has DRM, no source code). The games themselves have to be ported and so far, not much of that has been going on.
It does not strengthen your point when you go and make a rather silly argument. The "but it has Steam!" argument that keeps getting trotted out when someone comments on Linux and gaming reminds me of Mac users back in the 90s pointing to the 10 or so old titles you could find in the store as proof that there were plenty of games on the Mac.
Linux gaming is not in a good state currently, and trying to mask that is silly.
In those places, a $100 bill would work as well or better than a passport for getting through checkpoint guards. The idea that someone would bother with your passport number in trying to forge a passport to get through there is rather laughable, since they didn't even bother to check said number to see if it was legit.
At a border with better security? Not going to work. Passports have a lot more security to them than that, particularly now.
Basically if places have weak security, the have weak security. Someone isn't going to bother to try to get a legit name and number to forge a passport. If they have tight security, then it wouldn't do any good as they check the other features, which wouldn't match.
See if the point of someone having your information is to, well, be able to access your information then it needs to be stored in that format. A password can be hashed, but something like name and address needs to be stored in text. Encrypting it is the kind of thing that does a limited amount of good. They may well encrypt it on disk, but the software that accesses it still needs to be able to decrypt it, wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't. So if someone busts in through a problem in the software, they can get your data.
It is easy to get mad and say companies should "do something" but ask yourself what that something is, I mean really analyze the problem, and then try and come up with a solution that works. It is harder.
We deal with that kind of thing at work. Securing data isn't just a magic switch you can flick. Like our new storage array has self-encrypting drives. Great, we can, with no performance loss, encrypt everything on it... However that only really helps against it getting stolen, or if we forgot to wipe the disks when we decommission it. Being that all data is encrypted, the unit has the password (it is a power-on kind of thing) so if you bust in over the network, well then you can get at the data unencrypted.
For more sensitive stuff you can take it a step further, use Sophos (ya that is what they bought, no not my choice) full disk or file container encryption. That means that if a system with it is lost, nobody can get the data. However, when that system is online and the FS mounted, again a break in can get at the data.
The only way to stop network breakins from being a possible compromise is to take the systems entirely off the Internet. Not only is that unfeasible in normal cases, but it is impossible if you are talking the system that is to handle talking to the users online.
I can't come up with a way that you can have a system where the data is secure, even if the system gets compromised. Of course you try and stop systems from getting compromised, but the idea that data should be stored somehow that even if a system gets broken in to you can't get at it is rather silly.
For example the powers that be at work decided that the important thing was 3 of the 4 groups (upper, lower, numbers, and punctuation are the groups), and length, with 14+ being what makes it happy. So you input a short phrase like "I like puppies" it'll call it strong and take it. However if you input "@la2wo!d?o-z4" it'll call it weak because it is too short. Input something like "niecrlazleswiariucriuml7priu8roab7iuyluc0oawr1u5pl" and it'll reject it because there are only 2 of the 4 groups).
There's no further analysis, it is just a length and groups thing, with rather poorly defined groups.
Also in terms of strength, while there's no perfect one, measuring bits of entropy, which you can do, is pretty good. However few sites use anything that advanced.
I'd say I'm a pretty security aware individual, what with working in IT and all that. I do defense in depth on computer and physical security, I'm proactive about things, etc. Seems to have worked, I've never had a system owned.
So I never reuse passwords, right?
Wrong, I do all the time. Almost every forum online I have the same password for, and it is a weak one. Why? Because I don't care. Oh no, someone might hack my forum account and... I dunno, post something as me! Whatever would I do? I'm not going to bother to generate a great, unique, password for every site.
However my bank account? Random password (I don't seem to have trouble remembering them), long, and it requires two factor authentication. That protects my finances, and those matter. So security on that is pretty high.
The idea that everyone is going to have a high security password for every site and not reuse it is silly. There are plenty of things where if your account got compromised, you just don't care so much.
Also it can make sense to group systems. All my systems at home use a single password. There is no reason for them not to. They are all in the same security context, basically. It is no different than at work where my single account gets me access to any domain system.
The director. Not sure why he likes it so much but it is added in, mechanically, by him shining lights at the cameras. They really need to hire someone to poke him with a sharp stick when he tries to do that. I'm not sure why he likes it so much, but he does. In behind the scenes stuff he talks about how much he likes the look of it.
But that's why it is there, one of the very primary creative forces in the movie really likes it.