It doesn't sound like machine error, but instead stupid user error.
Except for this last part which didn't sound that great:
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
Is that a voting machine feature? It fills in some "default" candidates for you? That certainly sounds like a machine error to me.
I've never quite understood why this is such a problem to create a decent voting machine. Most websites have more intelligence than these things need to have. They do what, display a menu and record the choice made. Sounds hard. Add in some bit of encryption and send the result to a central server to tally. Wow, I think the last time I bought a book on Amazon it did all that too - and it even managed to get the identity right, and provided a record of the transaction. Sounds a lot like what a voting machine needs to do, eh?
Heavens forbid that a corporation might put ethics ahead of profit. If I offered Cisco a hundred bucks to kill my neighbor, would the defense argument be that if they didn't do it, someone else would've?
Its even more hypocritical than that, if these companies are anything like the other big corporations I've worked at, they mandate a certain ethical standard for all their employees. So you have the company on one hand touting the ethics and moral guidelines that all their employees have to abide by, while at the same time using the other hand to do very un-ethical things such as censorship and restriction of free speech (things that decidedly not in agreement with universal human rights).
Its completely absurd, and all done in the name of profit - which in China is absurd in itself since its only short-term profit. The Chinese government strictly controls the amount of foreign investment allowed in companies, guaranteeing in time that home-grown Chinese corporations will eventually move into dominant positions. So all these companies are sacrificing ethics, making excuses, all for a little bit of profit, following this stupid pipe dream that they will become -the- dominant player in China, when its already been decided at the beginning that Chinese corps will ultimately win out. And the irony is that by being so complicit in it all these corps are guaranteeing that outcome...
AMD apparantly cannot multiply. 4x4 = 16. The 4x4 architecture is two dual-core CPUs on a single motherboard (2x2=4 cores). This is pretty damn annoying and I wish they would rename it to something a little more accurate to whats going on...
Well thats not the worst of it. Its actually part-time 4x4, so when your networking starts to get bogged down, you need to get out and lock the hub...
For example, I guarantee that if you had bought that K750i through Verizon that the ability to use recorded sounds as a ringtone -- or indeed get them from any other source but VCast -- would have been disabled.
I would have to agree, I use Verizon now, and previously I had been on Tmobile. Verizon to me seemed very much more directed at controlling what one can/can't do with their phone. For instance having to purchase a service just to be able to sync the phonebook to your computer, uhh no thanks. Thankfully BitPim took care of the sync and data limitations (allows one to sync and download ringtones, wallpapers, etc), and HowardForums exists, which informed me how to get the more unusual stuff working (transferring DVD movies to the phone and such). Those two things vastly improved my experience with my current Verizon phone.
Sad thing is when people complain about how the phones in Japan and such are so much better, the issue is not technology or the phone itself, its that our telco's here won't market any phone they can't use to extort money with (via content and/or airtime charges). Blocking bluetooth data because one can circumvent their data/airtime charges when near a LAN, ringtone downloads (with "use" limits), charging to send AND receive txt messages (typically fractions of a kB in size), charging retarded fees per kB of data, or my Verizon favorite - charging per minute when using a web browser even if its not transferring data (!) - all a bunch of subtle or not so subtle methods of extorting cash. The telco's in this country suck, so I highly recommend everybody to: get BitPim and read the forums (because you know THE MAN hates it when people know that stuff)
With the exception of Ravenholm (still creeps me out), most of the combat in HL2 is against things that shoot back which I prefer.
I refer to Ravenholm as the "silent hill" section of the game. Personally I don't like it that much, its dark, creepy, and not all that entertaining. Unlike other sections where I usually go off and explore every corner of the map, in Ravenholm I usually just try to go straight from beginning to end of the map. Actually if you think about the "big picture" the HL2 map is kind of funny - you fight a combine stronghold at the dam, turn right literally just after the dam and run into the rebel stronghold, go thru a tunnel from there to emerge in ravenholm (where daylight doesn't seem to reach for some odd reason, despite the bright sunny sky at the dam) - its just funny that all these areas are pretty much on top of each other.
EP1 has some similar zombie sections. In my opinion EP1 overuses the zombie rush, which gets old and irritating. And the grenade zombie guys are just plain irritating in and of themselves. No matter how hard you fight off the rush there is always the one grenade guy who spawns in behind you and takes you out.
Overall I thought EP1 was great though. The beginning citadel "re-entry" sequence was quite entertaining, the doctor's speech being broadcast was amusing, and the near constant presence of alyx with her comments was fun. Too bad EP2 is so far off, mabye Valve needs to hire the mod developers out there to pick up the pace.
At least "that godawful UI" is easy to use, if slow and ugly. Sure, Nokias have an interface that runs about four times as fast, too bad it's about ten times harder to navigate. I found everything I was looking for on my V300 without a manual, and quickly too
Are you serious about this? I've owned several Motorola phones up until recently, from about 2000 to 2005, probably about 4 phones in all (mostly because I wanted GSM). They have all had bad interfaces IMO. As near as I can tell Mot had not changed their software significantly over the entire period. I could tell each successive one was simply the one before with a few more icons/menus added to it. And what the hell is with the phone book?!? over all my phones they could never figure out how to collapse multiple numbers under one name (scrolling the phone book was a pain in the ass, every person had 3 entries).
Finally I decided to forego GSM and picked up a LG VX9800. It was like being let out of a dungeon - seriously night and day compared to my old Mot phones. The biggest problem on the 9800 menu system is an occasional lack of consistency (sometimes OK button == "done", sometimes right/left softkey == "done", stuff like that).
I think this is a very good move for Mot to open source their system. They are in desperate need of a UI upgrade (mabye that changed recently with the Razr, I don't know, but it was apparent to me that nobody was upgrading it before). Too bad the national carriers never carry this stuff.
I did not. The article was written by someone else and is commonly referred to by people on fedoraforum. Fortunately someone took the time to write it.
In short, I have done all these things. And never has it been so complicated. I just find it unfair that you would be comparing yourself running FC5 to another user with issues on Gentoo. I know it isn't that hard. Next install, I would suggest you use fedorafaq.org for help, it is a lot simpler.
Not really, returning to the original point of the thread, the fact is that neither FC5 or Gentoo are an easy to use drop in replacement for Windows. They both require a large amount of post installation work in general and especially for multimedia, as the default installs are completely lacking in that regard. You are assuming that because its easy for you it should be obvious and/or easy for everyone else. I've setup my system using info from fedorafaq.org, fedoraforum.org, and articles such as the one I linked to. It required a lot of research and reading. Not obvious stuff, and certainly not a drop-in-and-go kind of replacement. For instance, I wasn't aware until recently that linux could even play wmv files, now I know better.
I was suprised recently just because of the sheer contrast in setting up the WinXP machine compared to FC5. The WinXP took me mabye 3hrs, yet FC5 took about a week - and I've been a casual linux user since RH5, so I had at least some idea where to look for answers and info. Certainly the FC5 install was more complicated - it had RAID, devel software, certain packages, editors, etc I wanted to use, but it has just taken an inordinate amount of time to setup. For a new user with no idea I imagine it would be nothing short of painful. Actually in terms of what the default distro installs, and what I wanted on the system (in terms of usability - devel, multimedia, etc) there hasn't been much improvement in terms of setup time over successive FC installs. Although perhaps the devel team isn't concerned with such things...
I bought this fanless 7600GS a month ago, and it works great in my quiet pc.
I put this same card in my FC5 machine. Originally I was searching for fanless cards at the low end (7300), but I couldn't find any, so I widened the scope and found that card. I was skeptical that it would work without video glitches or heat problems, but so far its worked great. On a 1600x1200 desktop on FC5 the driver reports the GPU core temp at about 50C, and an external temp probe I have on the heatsink reports about 45C. Those temps seem to hold even with long uptime. As a bonus the video outputs would work for using the machine as a DVR.
With the close button in the corner, I have to aim the mouse pointer one time. When the close button is constantly moving, it's just plain old harder to be efficient. Plus, I find when I'm closing many tabs I often close one I don't want when using Safari. I hope they let the user choose and keep the upper right close button in place AND have the tab located button as well. They could even set it up in preferences so the user could choose one or the other or both. That way, everyone's personal preference is served.
I absolutely second this. A close button that constantly moves around - uhh, no thanks. As I read that bit in the article I immediately thought of how freaking irritating that would be. That alone will keep me from migrating off v1.5 unless its optional (either that or it would force me to learn how to write extensions to put it back where it should be!).
Yep, I use linux for PHP/Apache/mysql developments. I also write some shell scripts. All of this is under Gentoo. When it comes to media however, I'm lost. I can't burn a CD/DVD, I can't wathch video, hell, I've never even gotten the audio to work.
I've run into the same problem. I recently set up a Windows machine for someone else, and a Fedora Core 5 machine for myself. The windows machine was 1 CD for the OS, 2 CDs for Office, and a half dozen downloads for video driver, firewall, anti-virus, web browser etc...
FC5 on the other hand was 5 CDs for install, a couple dozen package downloads from all over, and a good bit of configuration file editing. Now of course after this install the FC5 machine had capabilities the WinXP box didn't - I added quite a bit of development software, a minimal install would take mabye 2 CDs. However to show the gap in whats required to get FC5 to the same level as WinXP check out this page: Fedora Core 5 Installation Notes
Its a fantastic writeup about how to get the multimedia working, however look at the length of that page. Its an incredible amount of post installation stuff to do, and if that guy didn't take the time to write it up I probably never would have figured it out. Other distros may be better, but FC5 isn't even close as an easy to use drop in replacement.
The funny part is that these completely incompetent CEO's have no clue as to who they are dealing with. If Google wanted to they could put a nice hurt on them all in short order. Google owns a crapload of wonderful dark fiber all over the place.
I would think they could do much worse without the need to use dark fiber. Just find offensive ISPs IP block, and greatly slow or regulate access from that IP range (or better yet redirect access to a special google page indicating that access cannot be had through said ISP). Then sit back and watch their 1.5mil customers abandon them. Seriously this is a case of who exactly needs who - I know if my ISP had limited or no access to Google I would be dropping them ASAP. I pay for universal access, not some regulated crap connection.
Even worse, windmills steal energy from the planet, and due to the requirement of the conservation of energy, will slow down earth's rotation, destroy its orbit, and send us crashing into the sun!
Well that would be true, but we would take the power from all our nuclear generators, use it to make the wind turbines spin backwards - thus making the planet spin backwards and go backwards thru time, saving us from annihilation in the sun. So obviously nuclear power and wind generators are the salvation of humanity, QED.
Well if this were to happen. I would be one of the first to make a counter hardware device that sits between the cable box and the tv that switches that flag off in the signal. For the flag to work, it would have to sit in a predictible place in the signal's bit-stream, so you just make a tv commercial-flag-bridge to take the signal in, modify the flag, and spit it out. That way the tv would always think it was on a show, and never in a commercial.
I would go this route as well. However I can't see it happening because it completely breaks the ability to flip through channels at all. Imagine flipping through channels - as soon as you hit one showing a commercial you get stuck there for what, minutes? Just not possible, nobody would buy that. Actually people would buy it, and then immediately return it - "TV is broken, it doesn't change channels..."
On the plus side however, since they patented it, nobody else can implement it either (at least for the next 20 years *laugh* Way to go Philips! - I knew you were looking out for the consumer!)
... they destroyed the thing they feared by disbanding the IE team the moment it wiped out Netscape.
I've always wondered about this. For a company that claims itself a technological innovator, IE is an amazingly mundane program (especially after all their PR about being web/net centric). Prior to the rise of Firefox its as if they looked at IE and said "yup, this is pretty much the perfect web browser, guess we don't need to work on it anymore". I mean really, did they seriously believe that? Or its as you said, they got to the dominant position and thought nobody could knock them off their pedestal.
Of course now there is Firefox with all its extensions that just truly puts IE to shame. So now MS is back to "innovating" (aka copying features) again. I can't ever see MS "innovating" the myriad of capabilities offered by the hundreds of available extensions for Firefox. Again they are a follower as they always have been.
Let's not forget about the fancy smancy Windows key they put on it.
Argh, the most worthless keys ever added to a keyboard. Whoever invented that complete waste of space that serves no purpose other than to diminish the size of the space/alt/control keys needs to be taken out back and beat to a pulp. Another tragedy of microsoft's innovation at work...
Wow, thats an incredible video. More shocking than the destruction itself, I'm more amazed at how complicit the demolition crews and police are in the whole operation. It makes me wonder how many truly pissed off people it takes to start a revolution...
I've always thought Nedit was an awesome editor. Nearly 30 different language modes, and runs on every system I've ever used - HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, *BSD, OSX, WinXP... The advanced editing modes are unlike anything I've seen in other editors. You can drag-and-drop a rectangular block of comments or such anywhere you want (and optionally all the other text flows out of the way). I've used it for everything from Perl, to C++, to Verilog.
I've got my users so spooked about phishing they are asking permission to even check their mail (not really, but pretty close).
I would think one could easily wipe out phishing problems if the email client to browser connection was disabled (which really exists for no other reason than convenience). There is no reason a web link in an email HAS to open the link in a browser. If you force people to type the URL of their bank into a browser window instead of simply clicking on the link in an email they would always end up at the right site, not some man-in-the-middle portal.
Of course keylogging trojans and viruses are a different problem...
I would go farther than that, it seems that many companies go so far off in the "better graphics" direction that they completely lose the fun aspect of the game entirely. I recall playing Master of Orion 2 on quite a number of very long nights, and it was excellent. The graphics were 2D and sprites, with some still renders I think. Nothing stellar, but the gameplay was great.
Then when MOO3 came out I rushed to buy it - surely it was improved yes? In fact the gameplay was so horrible I had to question if the developers had even played MOO2 before (I mean come on - the freaking build queue was only 3 slots deep). It was such a bad sequel it was literally an insult to its predecessor.
Same thing happened with Deus Ex - I got a copy of the original when I bought a graphics card. Had never heard of it before, but after playing it I was hooked. It wasn't the graphics (although it was 3D), and it wasn't really the gameplay itself (AI was a little poor, and the augmentation system depleted itself of power way too fast) - it was the storyline that got me. I thought the storyline was awesome. It was long and intriguing, I thought they could have cut a movie or a miniseries directly from it.
And when the sequel came out it was better right? No, they released the console-adapted Deus Ex:Invisible War, which was a dumbed down disaster that could be finished in 10 hours. Honestly I never understood why companies bother spending years of R&D on a game, and then give it only 10 hours of play time. IMO, cut the graphics in half and double up on the storyline/plot/levels and it would be a much better experience.
On the flip side there are games like Descent, basic graphics and good action with a very thin story (although I always wished they would give it a better storyline). What the heck ever happened to the Descent series?!? Someone bring it back, I'll buy it!
The reason for picking on China is xenophobia, plain, old and simple, dressed up in McCarthy era justifications around communism.
Hardly. The fact is that China is really the only adversary who potentially has the military strength and intent to engage the US. North Korea and Taiwan are both problem areas where the Chinese and American viewpoints are very different. I'm sure European and Middle Eastern countries spy as well, but the US is not going to be invaded by Germany or Jordan.
I'm sure China would just love to get a bunch of bugged PCs into places like the LLNL or NSA. Having a backdoor into the US labs developing missile defence systems would be their dream come true.
Eventually the Taiwan problem is going to have to be resolved. I can see this happening either by the Chinese government eventually becoming more moderate (ideally becoming democratic, but more likely giving up on the hardline Taiwan stance), or by a military conflict (eventually their economic and military strength will reach a level where they will think they can do whatever they want - its just a matter of time). I imagine the hardliners see the latter as the road to "reunification", so its very much in their interest to spy all they can. Lenovo might just be another part of their effort.
I hated reviews. It was a process I generally barely tolerated because it turned the managers into backstabbing weasels. Interdepartmental politics always trumped the significant value of my contributions...
I think this is just a function of the way big corps work. I've seen it at two other companies (as a hardware engineer, not software). It seems the big corps always use some sort of relative ranking system, which taken to an extreme becomes just stupid.
In my experience we were subjected to a rigid bell curve system where 15% or 20% or somesuch -had- to be rated below average. It didn't matter if you had a group with 10 of the smartest people in history, 20% of them would be ranked as underachievers - it was just a retarded system, everyone hated it (and sure enough I heard it eventually got replaced, though I didn't hang around to find out the new system - I jumped to a better job at a smaller company with not as much of the big corp mentality)
I think HR at these big corps just degenerate over time into mindless collections of administratium. They can't figure out why they always lose their best engineers, so they continue making lame attempts at employee satisfaction "surveys". Not useful surveys mind you, just the lame attempt to show that HR is trying their best to retain people. I actually asked an HR person once after doing one such survey why they didn't have any section for user comments, and she replied "well that would just take too long to read them all". (Yeah, I guess one wouldn't want to overburden HR with doing their job by getting useful information...)
I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve and his crew would like nothing more than OS-X86 to be available tomorrow running on hundreds of x86 PCs across the globe.
I don't think so. Apple seems to view itself as a hardware manufacturer, and OSX seems to be a vehicle for shipping hardware. I imagine they take that stance as 1) they don't have a dominant enough position to support themselves with only software, 2) they want absolute control over the system components (limits what they have to write drivers for), and 3) they're greedy (commodity hardware at a non-commodity price).
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It doesn't sound like machine error, but instead stupid user error.
Except for this last part which didn't sound that great:
Is that a voting machine feature? It fills in some "default" candidates for you? That certainly sounds like a machine error to me.
I've never quite understood why this is such a problem to create a decent voting machine. Most websites have more intelligence than these things need to have. They do what, display a menu and record the choice made. Sounds hard. Add in some bit of encryption and send the result to a central server to tally. Wow, I think the last time I bought a book on Amazon it did all that too - and it even managed to get the identity right, and provided a record of the transaction. Sounds a lot like what a voting machine needs to do, eh?
Heavens forbid that a corporation might put ethics ahead of profit. If I offered Cisco a hundred bucks to kill my neighbor, would the defense argument be that if they didn't do it, someone else would've?
Its even more hypocritical than that, if these companies are anything like the other big corporations I've worked at, they mandate a certain ethical standard for all their employees. So you have the company on one hand touting the ethics and moral guidelines that all their employees have to abide by, while at the same time using the other hand to do very un-ethical things such as censorship and restriction of free speech (things that decidedly not in agreement with universal human rights).
Its completely absurd, and all done in the name of profit - which in China is absurd in itself since its only short-term profit. The Chinese government strictly controls the amount of foreign investment allowed in companies, guaranteeing in time that home-grown Chinese corporations will eventually move into dominant positions. So all these companies are sacrificing ethics, making excuses, all for a little bit of profit, following this stupid pipe dream that they will become -the- dominant player in China, when its already been decided at the beginning that Chinese corps will ultimately win out. And the irony is that by being so complicit in it all these corps are guaranteeing that outcome...
AMD apparantly cannot multiply. 4x4 = 16. The 4x4 architecture is two dual-core CPUs on a single motherboard (2x2=4 cores). This is pretty damn annoying and I wish they would rename it to something a little more accurate to whats going on...
Well thats not the worst of it. Its actually part-time 4x4, so when your networking starts to get bogged down, you need to get out and lock the hub...
For example, I guarantee that if you had bought that K750i through Verizon that the ability to use recorded sounds as a ringtone -- or indeed get them from any other source but VCast -- would have been disabled.
I would have to agree, I use Verizon now, and previously I had been on Tmobile. Verizon to me seemed very much more directed at controlling what one can/can't do with their phone. For instance having to purchase a service just to be able to sync the phonebook to your computer, uhh no thanks. Thankfully BitPim took care of the sync and data limitations (allows one to sync and download ringtones, wallpapers, etc), and HowardForums exists, which informed me how to get the more unusual stuff working (transferring DVD movies to the phone and such). Those two things vastly improved my experience with my current Verizon phone.
Sad thing is when people complain about how the phones in Japan and such are so much better, the issue is not technology or the phone itself, its that our telco's here won't market any phone they can't use to extort money with (via content and/or airtime charges). Blocking bluetooth data because one can circumvent their data/airtime charges when near a LAN, ringtone downloads (with "use" limits), charging to send AND receive txt messages (typically fractions of a kB in size), charging retarded fees per kB of data, or my Verizon favorite - charging per minute when using a web browser even if its not transferring data (!) - all a bunch of subtle or not so subtle methods of extorting cash. The telco's in this country suck, so I highly recommend everybody to: get BitPim and read the forums (because you know THE MAN hates it when people know that stuff)
With the exception of Ravenholm (still creeps me out), most of the combat in HL2 is against things that shoot back which I prefer.
I refer to Ravenholm as the "silent hill" section of the game. Personally I don't like it that much, its dark, creepy, and not all that entertaining. Unlike other sections where I usually go off and explore every corner of the map, in Ravenholm I usually just try to go straight from beginning to end of the map. Actually if you think about the "big picture" the HL2 map is kind of funny - you fight a combine stronghold at the dam, turn right literally just after the dam and run into the rebel stronghold, go thru a tunnel from there to emerge in ravenholm (where daylight doesn't seem to reach for some odd reason, despite the bright sunny sky at the dam) - its just funny that all these areas are pretty much on top of each other.
EP1 has some similar zombie sections. In my opinion EP1 overuses the zombie rush, which gets old and irritating. And the grenade zombie guys are just plain irritating in and of themselves. No matter how hard you fight off the rush there is always the one grenade guy who spawns in behind you and takes you out.
Overall I thought EP1 was great though. The beginning citadel "re-entry" sequence was quite entertaining, the doctor's speech being broadcast was amusing, and the near constant presence of alyx with her comments was fun. Too bad EP2 is so far off, mabye Valve needs to hire the mod developers out there to pick up the pace.
The better analogy would be if a private company wanted to put up toll booths on public roads and start charging tolls.
Sadly, our government is working on that too.
And naturally our reps here in Texas take the wrong stand on Net Neutrality also. Argh, why can't we get people with a clue elected to this state...
At least "that godawful UI" is easy to use, if slow and ugly. Sure, Nokias have an interface that runs about four times as fast, too bad it's about ten times harder to navigate. I found everything I was looking for on my V300 without a manual, and quickly too
Are you serious about this? I've owned several Motorola phones up until recently, from about 2000 to 2005, probably about 4 phones in all (mostly because I wanted GSM). They have all had bad interfaces IMO. As near as I can tell Mot had not changed their software significantly over the entire period. I could tell each successive one was simply the one before with a few more icons/menus added to it. And what the hell is with the phone book?!? over all my phones they could never figure out how to collapse multiple numbers under one name (scrolling the phone book was a pain in the ass, every person had 3 entries).
Finally I decided to forego GSM and picked up a LG VX9800. It was like being let out of a dungeon - seriously night and day compared to my old Mot phones. The biggest problem on the 9800 menu system is an occasional lack of consistency (sometimes OK button == "done", sometimes right/left softkey == "done", stuff like that).
I think this is a very good move for Mot to open source their system. They are in desperate need of a UI upgrade (mabye that changed recently with the Razr, I don't know, but it was apparent to me that nobody was upgrading it before). Too bad the national carriers never carry this stuff.
Assuming you wrote the article linked to...
I did not. The article was written by someone else and is commonly referred to by people on fedoraforum. Fortunately someone took the time to write it.
In short, I have done all these things. And never has it been so complicated. I just find it unfair that you would be comparing yourself running FC5 to another user with issues on Gentoo. I know it isn't that hard. Next install, I would suggest you use fedorafaq.org for help, it is a lot simpler.
Not really, returning to the original point of the thread, the fact is that neither FC5 or Gentoo are an easy to use drop in replacement for Windows. They both require a large amount of post installation work in general and especially for multimedia, as the default installs are completely lacking in that regard. You are assuming that because its easy for you it should be obvious and/or easy for everyone else. I've setup my system using info from fedorafaq.org, fedoraforum.org, and articles such as the one I linked to. It required a lot of research and reading. Not obvious stuff, and certainly not a drop-in-and-go kind of replacement. For instance, I wasn't aware until recently that linux could even play wmv files, now I know better.
I was suprised recently just because of the sheer contrast in setting up the WinXP machine compared to FC5. The WinXP took me mabye 3hrs, yet FC5 took about a week - and I've been a casual linux user since RH5, so I had at least some idea where to look for answers and info. Certainly the FC5 install was more complicated - it had RAID, devel software, certain packages, editors, etc I wanted to use, but it has just taken an inordinate amount of time to setup. For a new user with no idea I imagine it would be nothing short of painful. Actually in terms of what the default distro installs, and what I wanted on the system (in terms of usability - devel, multimedia, etc) there hasn't been much improvement in terms of setup time over successive FC installs. Although perhaps the devel team isn't concerned with such things...
I bought this fanless 7600GS a month ago, and it works great in my quiet pc.
I put this same card in my FC5 machine. Originally I was searching for fanless cards at the low end (7300), but I couldn't find any, so I widened the scope and found that card. I was skeptical that it would work without video glitches or heat problems, but so far its worked great. On a 1600x1200 desktop on FC5 the driver reports the GPU core temp at about 50C, and an external temp probe I have on the heatsink reports about 45C. Those temps seem to hold even with long uptime. As a bonus the video outputs would work for using the machine as a DVR.
With the close button in the corner, I have to aim the mouse pointer one time. When the close button is constantly moving, it's just plain old harder to be efficient. Plus, I find when I'm closing many tabs I often close one I don't want when using Safari. I hope they let the user choose and keep the upper right close button in place AND have the tab located button as well. They could even set it up in preferences so the user could choose one or the other or both. That way, everyone's personal preference is served.
I absolutely second this. A close button that constantly moves around - uhh, no thanks. As I read that bit in the article I immediately thought of how freaking irritating that would be. That alone will keep me from migrating off v1.5 unless its optional (either that or it would force me to learn how to write extensions to put it back where it should be!).
Yep, I use linux for PHP/Apache/mysql developments. I also write some shell scripts. All of this is under Gentoo. When it comes to media however, I'm lost. I can't burn a CD/DVD, I can't wathch video, hell, I've never even gotten the audio to work.
I've run into the same problem. I recently set up a Windows machine for someone else, and a Fedora Core 5 machine for myself. The windows machine was 1 CD for the OS, 2 CDs for Office, and a half dozen downloads for video driver, firewall, anti-virus, web browser etc...
FC5 on the other hand was 5 CDs for install, a couple dozen package downloads from all over, and a good bit of configuration file editing. Now of course after this install the FC5 machine had capabilities the WinXP box didn't - I added quite a bit of development software, a minimal install would take mabye 2 CDs. However to show the gap in whats required to get FC5 to the same level as WinXP check out this page: Fedora Core 5 Installation Notes
Its a fantastic writeup about how to get the multimedia working, however look at the length of that page. Its an incredible amount of post installation stuff to do, and if that guy didn't take the time to write it up I probably never would have figured it out. Other distros may be better, but FC5 isn't even close as an easy to use drop in replacement.
The funny part is that these completely incompetent CEO's have no clue as to who they are dealing with. If Google wanted to they could put a nice hurt on them all in short order. Google owns a crapload of wonderful dark fiber all over the place.
I would think they could do much worse without the need to use dark fiber. Just find offensive ISPs IP block, and greatly slow or regulate access from that IP range (or better yet redirect access to a special google page indicating that access cannot be had through said ISP). Then sit back and watch their 1.5mil customers abandon them. Seriously this is a case of who exactly needs who - I know if my ISP had limited or no access to Google I would be dropping them ASAP. I pay for universal access, not some regulated crap connection.
Even worse, windmills steal energy from the planet, and due to the requirement of the conservation of energy, will slow down earth's rotation, destroy its orbit, and send us crashing into the sun!
Well that would be true, but we would take the power from all our nuclear generators, use it to make the wind turbines spin backwards - thus making the planet spin backwards and go backwards thru time, saving us from annihilation in the sun. So obviously nuclear power and wind generators are the salvation of humanity, QED.
Well if this were to happen. I would be one of the first to make a counter hardware device that sits between the cable box and the tv that switches that flag off in the signal. For the flag to work, it would have to sit in a predictible place in the signal's bit-stream, so you just make a tv commercial-flag-bridge to take the signal in, modify the flag, and spit it out. That way the tv would always think it was on a show, and never in a commercial.
I would go this route as well. However I can't see it happening because it completely breaks the ability to flip through channels at all. Imagine flipping through channels - as soon as you hit one showing a commercial you get stuck there for what, minutes? Just not possible, nobody would buy that. Actually people would buy it, and then immediately return it - "TV is broken, it doesn't change channels..."
On the plus side however, since they patented it, nobody else can implement it either (at least for the next 20 years *laugh* Way to go Philips! - I knew you were looking out for the consumer!)
I've always wondered about this. For a company that claims itself a technological innovator, IE is an amazingly mundane program (especially after all their PR about being web/net centric). Prior to the rise of Firefox its as if they looked at IE and said "yup, this is pretty much the perfect web browser, guess we don't need to work on it anymore". I mean really, did they seriously believe that? Or its as you said, they got to the dominant position and thought nobody could knock them off their pedestal.
Of course now there is Firefox with all its extensions that just truly puts IE to shame. So now MS is back to "innovating" (aka copying features) again. I can't ever see MS "innovating" the myriad of capabilities offered by the hundreds of available extensions for Firefox. Again they are a follower as they always have been.
Let's not forget about the fancy smancy Windows key they put on it.
Argh, the most worthless keys ever added to a keyboard. Whoever invented that complete waste of space that serves no purpose other than to diminish the size of the space/alt/control keys needs to be taken out back and beat to a pulp. Another tragedy of microsoft's innovation at work...
Wow, thats an incredible video. More shocking than the destruction itself, I'm more amazed at how complicit the demolition crews and police are in the whole operation. It makes me wonder how many truly pissed off people it takes to start a revolution...
I've always thought Nedit was an awesome editor. Nearly 30 different language modes, and runs on every system I've ever used - HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, *BSD, OSX, WinXP... The advanced editing modes are unlike anything I've seen in other editors. You can drag-and-drop a rectangular block of comments or such anywhere you want (and optionally all the other text flows out of the way). I've used it for everything from Perl, to C++, to Verilog.
I've got my users so spooked about phishing they are asking permission to even check their mail (not really, but pretty close).
I would think one could easily wipe out phishing problems if the email client to browser connection was disabled (which really exists for no other reason than convenience). There is no reason a web link in an email HAS to open the link in a browser. If you force people to type the URL of their bank into a browser window instead of simply clicking on the link in an email they would always end up at the right site, not some man-in-the-middle portal.
Of course keylogging trojans and viruses are a different problem...
I would go farther than that, it seems that many companies go so far off in the "better graphics" direction that they completely lose the fun aspect of the game entirely. I recall playing Master of Orion 2 on quite a number of very long nights, and it was excellent. The graphics were 2D and sprites, with some still renders I think. Nothing stellar, but the gameplay was great.
Then when MOO3 came out I rushed to buy it - surely it was improved yes? In fact the gameplay was so horrible I had to question if the developers had even played MOO2 before (I mean come on - the freaking build queue was only 3 slots deep). It was such a bad sequel it was literally an insult to its predecessor.
Same thing happened with Deus Ex - I got a copy of the original when I bought a graphics card. Had never heard of it before, but after playing it I was hooked. It wasn't the graphics (although it was 3D), and it wasn't really the gameplay itself (AI was a little poor, and the augmentation system depleted itself of power way too fast) - it was the storyline that got me. I thought the storyline was awesome. It was long and intriguing, I thought they could have cut a movie or a miniseries directly from it.
And when the sequel came out it was better right? No, they released the console-adapted Deus Ex :Invisible War, which was a dumbed down disaster that could be finished in 10 hours. Honestly I never understood why companies bother spending years of R&D on a game, and then give it only 10 hours of play time. IMO, cut the graphics in half and double up on the storyline/plot/levels and it would be a much better experience.
On the flip side there are games like Descent, basic graphics and good action with a very thin story (although I always wished they would give it a better storyline). What the heck ever happened to the Descent series?!? Someone bring it back, I'll buy it!
The reason for picking on China is xenophobia, plain, old and simple, dressed up in McCarthy era justifications around communism.
Hardly. The fact is that China is really the only adversary who potentially has the military strength and intent to engage the US. North Korea and Taiwan are both problem areas where the Chinese and American viewpoints are very different. I'm sure European and Middle Eastern countries spy as well, but the US is not going to be invaded by Germany or Jordan.
I'm sure China would just love to get a bunch of bugged PCs into places like the LLNL or NSA. Having a backdoor into the US labs developing missile defence systems would be their dream come true.
Eventually the Taiwan problem is going to have to be resolved. I can see this happening either by the Chinese government eventually becoming more moderate (ideally becoming democratic, but more likely giving up on the hardline Taiwan stance), or by a military conflict (eventually their economic and military strength will reach a level where they will think they can do whatever they want - its just a matter of time). I imagine the hardliners see the latter as the road to "reunification", so its very much in their interest to spy all they can. Lenovo might just be another part of their effort.
(Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack :) )
Like this?, although not exactly "Diablo" like.
because there aren't really any good single-player RPGs out there to play!
Apparently he hasn't heard of Morrowind or Oblivion... At least I thought the elder scrolls series were pretty good RPGs.
I hated reviews. It was a process I generally barely tolerated because it turned the managers into backstabbing weasels. Interdepartmental politics always trumped the significant value of my contributions...
I think this is just a function of the way big corps work. I've seen it at two other companies (as a hardware engineer, not software). It seems the big corps always use some sort of relative ranking system, which taken to an extreme becomes just stupid.
In my experience we were subjected to a rigid bell curve system where 15% or 20% or somesuch -had- to be rated below average. It didn't matter if you had a group with 10 of the smartest people in history, 20% of them would be ranked as underachievers - it was just a retarded system, everyone hated it (and sure enough I heard it eventually got replaced, though I didn't hang around to find out the new system - I jumped to a better job at a smaller company with not as much of the big corp mentality)
I think HR at these big corps just degenerate over time into mindless collections of administratium. They can't figure out why they always lose their best engineers, so they continue making lame attempts at employee satisfaction "surveys". Not useful surveys mind you, just the lame attempt to show that HR is trying their best to retain people. I actually asked an HR person once after doing one such survey why they didn't have any section for user comments, and she replied "well that would just take too long to read them all". (Yeah, I guess one wouldn't want to overburden HR with doing their job by getting useful information...)
I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve and his crew would like nothing more than OS-X86 to be available tomorrow running on hundreds of x86 PCs across the globe.
I don't think so. Apple seems to view itself as a hardware manufacturer, and OSX seems to be a vehicle for shipping hardware. I imagine they take that stance as 1) they don't have a dominant enough position to support themselves with only software, 2) they want absolute control over the system components (limits what they have to write drivers for), and 3) they're greedy (commodity hardware at a non-commodity price).