I was pretty hesitant about the new keyboard, since I just got one of the lower-end laptops for someone else with the older ("blue enter") keyboard and really liked it, but hadn't used enough to grow acclimated, so I can't really compare. The pictures of the new keyboard looked a lot like the MacBook 2008 laptop which I'd been using (it died) which I wasn't thrilled about.
Actually using it though it's not at all the same. The keys have a nice inward curve to them, they're solid, full-sized, and I haven't had any trouble typing (didn't even have to get used to it). Escape is nice and reachable, it's got PgUp/PgDn as part of the arrow keypad, and I don't even have to curl my thumb to reach the left Alt. These are the things I've noticed. I haven't noticed any missing keys or annoyances during regular typing.
Oh and of course the TrackPoint rocks, as always. The gritty touchpad I'm not thrilled about, but it works and I don't use it that much anyway (because TrackPoint!). All the input stuff is highly configurable (if a bit arcane) under Linux.
Get a Thinkpad. I just got a W530 with a 1920x1080 screen, one of the few you can find outside Apple. It has great Linux support, even down to the silly fingerprint reader. I can easily get 7 hours or so on the battery with the recommended tweaks. There's a whole wiki just for Thinkpad stuff.
It ships with Windows 7, but you never have to boot into Windows. You can blow away the whole drive, "recovery" and "boot" partitions, and never look back. It has a conventional BIOS in addition to UEFI (disabled by default; leave it that way), so you shouldn't have any issues there.
It's a tank, it's not terribly sexy like an ultrabook, but it's great if you want a desktop-fast Linux-friendly workstation laptop.
The first and worst reason is fear; the popular media plays up "drones used to kill X in Y" as if there are autonomous roaming vehicles that randomly blow up villages instead of being little different than regular military aircraft doing the same thing, except for expense and pilot risk. Clearly, because of this, Obama, who will personally be controlling these (of course), wants these autonomous drones (ignore contradiction!) in every city and town killing people who don't agree with The Liberal Socialist Agenda or whatever.
A better reason is keeping the use of these by local law enforcement to a minimum, because they're small, relatively inexpensive, and perhaps ripe for privacy abuse, although this is a bit of a stretch. We definitely don't want to live in a surveillance society run by your local small-town cops with nothing better to do than harass people.
Err, you're comparing GHz between a SoC ARM and PPC64 with a dedicated GPU? Let's put it this way: the WiiU is compared favorably to the current generation consoles (PS3/360) in terms of performance, edging them out in a number of ways (and given they're half a decade old, we should hope!).
The Tegra3 was used on numerous devices last year. Go find one in the same class, performance-wise, as the PS3 or 360. Or even the PS Vita, which is a few notches below the PS3, with its 2GHz quad-core ARM and its quad-core PowerVR GPU.
Even compared to the Wii U, this is still a toy. The hardware is 2+ generations old, and is easily outclassed by current-generation phones and other devices. This already looked pretty iffy when they announced it, and this year it's just bad. You can be pretty sure Nintendo and other developers will be putting out games for the WiiU for at least 3-5 years; where will Ouya be even next year?
Even now, 6+ years after its release, I can pick up amazing new AAA games for the PS3 and 360. I'm in the middle of Ni No Kuni, and hoping to finish that fast enough to keep up with other releases. Halo 4 hit the 360 not that long ago. The consoles may have cost $500+ on release, but over 5-6 years, the libraries are pretty stocked. At $100 a year, that's not terrible, because with the Ouya, you're going to be wanting a new one every year. And the games aren't going to be as good.
All in all, not as great a price as it seems.
Re:Gnome is officially dead. KDE has won.
on
Gnome Goes JavaScript
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Gnome has always been on the wrong track from day 1. It was a political response to KDE's use of Qt (which was QPL back then) and always a mishmash of libraries and utility applications rather than a fundamentally solid desktop environment. That it might have been usable at some point is more luck than anything.
I don't use KDE (or GNOME, I prefer RiscOS On X because it's insanely fast and powerful), but at least KDE has had a solid vision from the get-go, if sometimes flawed.
I "joke" that github is my social network of choice.. but it's not really a joke. A lot of real actual stuff happens on github, and it's highly useful.
The distribution features you've mentioned have arguably been provided for awhile by SourceForge (which was great for its time), but nothing beats the sheer speed, simplicity, and focus on the code that github provides. And while git beats the pants off everything else, I dread having to deal with "other" sites (*cough*gitorious*cough*) because they're just not as fast and useful as github. That is, git alone doesn't make github what it is.
I just wish their private hosting was a little less pricey, but hey whatever the market will bear.
In a democracy *the people* are the arbiters of what is 'nonsense' and what is not.
Don't make me laugh. If popular news media, slashdot, and 4chan are any indication of anything, it's that "nonsense" appeals far more than "sense". A lot of people are going to vote for something because they think it's funny.
If the majority of people were reliable arbiters of sense, we'd have a lot fewer problems in the world.
The Galaxy Note series use Wacom technology which, according to Wikipedia, was patented and is now expired. This is separate from the touchscreen, and provides stuff like pressure, tilt, and multi-device support (though I'm not sure if the latter is supported on Samsung devices). In short, it works really well, it's well-proven, and it's not patentable.
As much as I am not a fan of Facebook (or on it at all), they run the hardware and wrote the software. You were the one willing to sign up to be their product and agree to their contract. Any right you had to complain already got clicked away.
I'm not sure this is the best argument (as I am sure there are others), since a multi-thousand-dollar seat cost is probably easily outweighed by investing in more render nodes, which you'd probably end up wanting anyway.
With as far as Blender has come from its early days, though, I'm guessing the day is coming when it will simply be the best. The Free(tm) nature and easy extensibility could make it the preferred target for academic and other research.
The only real threat they face are young individuals with novel ideas forming small/nimble businesses that totally upset the existing market landscape.
Yes but let's not pretend Apple is a "young upstart" just trying to live the American Dream. They're the problem, as much as any other large corp. And unfortunately this is a clear counterexample to your "the only real threat they face" assertion. Apple won't play nice with the other megacorps. This is really a bigger threat, because it means your cartel-esque arrangements can't be made.
I expect everyone else to band together and make an example out of Apple for any other megacorp who wants to try this in the future, which is what's essentially happening in this case.
I hope that Steve Jobs' thermonuclear approach to Android will backfire on an epic level: once the patent wars leave the shell of dead corporations strewn all over the landscape, people will huddle together and promise themselves "never again" And the only way to do that: no more patents.
That is not the only way. The more probable approach is that the next round of "standards" won't be, that corps involved (e.g., Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and others who are usually involved in actual R&D) will patent the hell out of everything, and this time no Mr. FRAND Nice Guy. Everyone will know Apple is the enemy unwilling to share its toys in the sandbox, and no one will let Apple play. Apple gets squashed out of the market, and it's a lesson to the next company who wants to try the same approach.
It's an old boys' club, the yes man gets ahead, and messengers get shot when exposing contradictions.
I don't really think this is a contradiction. I think the reality of the party line is more "Corporations are people.. the only people." Less government, less taxes, less regulation, more rights. These apply to real people: corporations, not you or me.
The desire for fulfill the prophesies of Moore's law and to have ever faster and more powerful computing has already exhausted itself.
While software has been hampered by web "technology" over the last decade, we are hardly at the pinnacle of software and computing... it's more like the Dark Ages, actually. Some stuff is being done elsewhere (GPUs, mobile), but we're still mired in fundamentally stagnant and backwards principles on the desktop (and server, really).
Games are just about as good as they are going to get without new display technologies.
Laughable. Let's assume anything video-related is "new display technology," and that we certainly have a long way to go to realtime radiosity and raytracing at extremely high resolution in a mobile device, then toss it 3D for good measure, so that's a given. But in terms of gameplay, all the computing and RAM you can get can be eaten up for a very long while. Simulation in games, today, isn't anything like what it could be. If I can't build a city at the SimCity level, zoom in and rampage through it at the GTA level, and walk up to each and every person on the street and learn their personal history and daily routines at an RPG level, then go into every structure and demolish it bit-by-bit with full soft-body dynamics, you've got quite a long way to go.
The desktop PC has been maxed out and has been resorting to multi-processor and multi-core as the means to keep growing but meanwhile, the primary OS for most people running these systems is still not taking full advantage of even those advances.
This is true to some extent, but "resorting to multi-processor and multi-core" means the desktop isn't maxed out. The primary OS (and software) may not be taking advantage of these things, but they are there and we're far from done yet.
Microsoft shows no remorse over their architectural choices and show no signs of slimming down and getting lighter. So nothing points in Microsoft's direction... not even Microsoft. They are raising prices to make up for the lack of interest in what they are doing now.
Microsoft is irrelevant. They have been for a long time. They may not be going away anytime soon, but they've been irrelevant since Google used the web to effectively route technology around them (due to earlier attempted lock-in). Of course, this has resulted in aforementioned Dark Age of Software, but at least we're not stuck on one platform. We're at the point where Valve is looking to seriously move gaming away from Windows, and there are alternatives for everything else, so what happened before doesn't really apply to what can happen in the future.
Think about what we are seeing.
What we are seeing is ripe potential for a Computing Renaissance.
Just basing this on how many connections there are is pretty irrelevant. Are we really expecting there to be many unofficial major backbones crossing national borders? Could you really enumerate them if there were? Even assuming some random people have a line (wired or otherwise) across a border for network access, this is probably not going to route the majority of the country's traffic anyway, and is equally unlikely to be counted in this survey.
A real measure would be more like "how likely will an entity have to shut down their connection due to government pressure," but for that you need to analyze the legal system, political situation, history, etc. Of course, that's much more work than simple counting, but I suppose "simple counting" is the most we can expect from a pop media source.
Linux is "that hacker platform" while Windows is "what all businesses use".
Uh, sure. In 1993. It's 2012.. a vast number of businesses use Linux. It put the commercial Unixes out of business. Entire cities use Linux, even on the desktop. We have highly successful distros like Ubuntu that do nothing but pander to the non-hacker.
The only safety involved is "this here is Microsoft country, and the Microsofties on the board want Microsoft. MICROSOFT!" If you're getting generous donations, you don't want to piss off your corporate overlords.
Optimus with bumblebee works just like it would in Windows. Render using the nvidia card on-demand and display using the integrated card. This is perfectly fine. There is no "screwing around" involved if you use Ubuntu or similar idiot-oriented distros.
The switching bit is additional functionality; it's like switching in the BIOS between integrated and discrete, except you don't have to reboot. The common user is unlikely to care about this, nor is it necessary, but it's pretty nifty if you want it. Or are we going from complaining about lack of options to complaining about the existence of options?
I have an nvidia optimus/k1000m on a shiny new thinkpad w530. The kernel-included nouveau and intel drivers work fine. Switching between these without restarting is even theoretically possible with vga_switcheroo (though it apparently doesn't entirely work on the w530 specifically). Using the "optimus" bit is also perfectly possible with bumblebee.
However, even with bumblebee, the drivers are included with the kernel, allowing you to fully use KMS, bootup logos, etc. For full 3D, you can even still rely on the builtin intel drivers and use the proprietary nvidia drivers with bumblebee (or not, if your system allows you to switch fully to discrete mode).
Unlike the horrible movie, the book "I, Robot" was a series of short stories dealing with the ambiguity of the laws. (The movie was more some bizarre combination of "free the robots!" mixed with "the three laws are a lie".) Additionally, the ambiguity of the laws came up multiple times in the Robot/Foundation universe, such as in "The Naked Sun" and "The Robots of Dawn."
The laws are paradoxically hard-and-fast yet ambiguous. In any case where any law is essentially violated (using one of the workarounds), the robots "go crazy" or die. This applies to the Zeroth Law; witness the end of Giskard due to the mere inability to determine if an action was harmful or not.
In the end, it's something like a moral version of the Halting Problem. Even if you can define "harm" to the satisfaction of everyone, you can't determine if something ultimately leads to harm or not.
Doom3 may have these things, but they don't make it any more scary. It's still bland, boring, and unimaginative. The discussion was about "terrifying," which it isn't, not "is it a FPS" or "does it have certain gameplay elements".
There are better FPS's. There are better Horror FPS's. Some of these are even actually scary. For instance, Amnesia. Doom 3 is just bad.
That said, the Doom3 engine may not be bad, and hey, it's GPL'd now, so you can even go fix it if it is. This is entirely orthogonal to Doom3 the game. But now you have a (probably good, mature, stable) 3D engine that can output to the Oculus Rift, and it's Free(tm).
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I was pretty hesitant about the new keyboard, since I just got one of the lower-end laptops for someone else with the older ("blue enter") keyboard and really liked it, but hadn't used enough to grow acclimated, so I can't really compare. The pictures of the new keyboard looked a lot like the MacBook 2008 laptop which I'd been using (it died) which I wasn't thrilled about.
Actually using it though it's not at all the same. The keys have a nice inward curve to them, they're solid, full-sized, and I haven't had any trouble typing (didn't even have to get used to it). Escape is nice and reachable, it's got PgUp/PgDn as part of the arrow keypad, and I don't even have to curl my thumb to reach the left Alt. These are the things I've noticed. I haven't noticed any missing keys or annoyances during regular typing.
Oh and of course the TrackPoint rocks, as always. The gritty touchpad I'm not thrilled about, but it works and I don't use it that much anyway (because TrackPoint!). All the input stuff is highly configurable (if a bit arcane) under Linux.
Get a Thinkpad. I just got a W530 with a 1920x1080 screen, one of the few you can find outside Apple. It has great Linux support, even down to the silly fingerprint reader. I can easily get 7 hours or so on the battery with the recommended tweaks. There's a whole wiki just for Thinkpad stuff.
It ships with Windows 7, but you never have to boot into Windows. You can blow away the whole drive, "recovery" and "boot" partitions, and never look back. It has a conventional BIOS in addition to UEFI (disabled by default; leave it that way), so you shouldn't have any issues there.
It's a tank, it's not terribly sexy like an ultrabook, but it's great if you want a desktop-fast Linux-friendly workstation laptop.
The first and worst reason is fear; the popular media plays up "drones used to kill X in Y" as if there are autonomous roaming vehicles that randomly blow up villages instead of being little different than regular military aircraft doing the same thing, except for expense and pilot risk. Clearly, because of this, Obama, who will personally be controlling these (of course), wants these autonomous drones (ignore contradiction!) in every city and town killing people who don't agree with The Liberal Socialist Agenda or whatever.
A better reason is keeping the use of these by local law enforcement to a minimum, because they're small, relatively inexpensive, and perhaps ripe for privacy abuse, although this is a bit of a stretch. We definitely don't want to live in a surveillance society run by your local small-town cops with nothing better to do than harass people.
Err, you're comparing GHz between a SoC ARM and PPC64 with a dedicated GPU? Let's put it this way: the WiiU is compared favorably to the current generation consoles (PS3/360) in terms of performance, edging them out in a number of ways (and given they're half a decade old, we should hope!).
The Tegra3 was used on numerous devices last year. Go find one in the same class, performance-wise, as the PS3 or 360. Or even the PS Vita, which is a few notches below the PS3, with its 2GHz quad-core ARM and its quad-core PowerVR GPU.
Even compared to the Wii U, this is still a toy. The hardware is 2+ generations old, and is easily outclassed by current-generation phones and other devices. This already looked pretty iffy when they announced it, and this year it's just bad. You can be pretty sure Nintendo and other developers will be putting out games for the WiiU for at least 3-5 years; where will Ouya be even next year?
Even now, 6+ years after its release, I can pick up amazing new AAA games for the PS3 and 360. I'm in the middle of Ni No Kuni, and hoping to finish that fast enough to keep up with other releases. Halo 4 hit the 360 not that long ago. The consoles may have cost $500+ on release, but over 5-6 years, the libraries are pretty stocked. At $100 a year, that's not terrible, because with the Ouya, you're going to be wanting a new one every year. And the games aren't going to be as good.
All in all, not as great a price as it seems.
Gnome has always been on the wrong track from day 1. It was a political response to KDE's use of Qt (which was QPL back then) and always a mishmash of libraries and utility applications rather than a fundamentally solid desktop environment. That it might have been usable at some point is more luck than anything.
I don't use KDE (or GNOME, I prefer RiscOS On X because it's insanely fast and powerful), but at least KDE has had a solid vision from the get-go, if sometimes flawed.
I "joke" that github is my social network of choice .. but it's not really a joke. A lot of real actual stuff happens on github, and it's highly useful.
The distribution features you've mentioned have arguably been provided for awhile by SourceForge (which was great for its time), but nothing beats the sheer speed, simplicity, and focus on the code that github provides. And while git beats the pants off everything else, I dread having to deal with "other" sites (*cough*gitorious*cough*) because they're just not as fast and useful as github. That is, git alone doesn't make github what it is.
I just wish their private hosting was a little less pricey, but hey whatever the market will bear.
Don't make me laugh. If popular news media, slashdot, and 4chan are any indication of anything, it's that "nonsense" appeals far more than "sense". A lot of people are going to vote for something because they think it's funny.
If the majority of people were reliable arbiters of sense, we'd have a lot fewer problems in the world.
The Galaxy Note series use Wacom technology which, according to Wikipedia, was patented and is now expired. This is separate from the touchscreen, and provides stuff like pressure, tilt, and multi-device support (though I'm not sure if the latter is supported on Samsung devices). In short, it works really well, it's well-proven, and it's not patentable.
When you pay the grocery store for a tin of nuts, the nuts do not get a cut.
As much as I am not a fan of Facebook (or on it at all), they run the hardware and wrote the software. You were the one willing to sign up to be their product and agree to their contract. Any right you had to complain already got clicked away.
I'm not sure this is the best argument (as I am sure there are others), since a multi-thousand-dollar seat cost is probably easily outweighed by investing in more render nodes, which you'd probably end up wanting anyway.
With as far as Blender has come from its early days, though, I'm guessing the day is coming when it will simply be the best. The Free(tm) nature and easy extensibility could make it the preferred target for academic and other research.
Yes but let's not pretend Apple is a "young upstart" just trying to live the American Dream. They're the problem, as much as any other large corp. And unfortunately this is a clear counterexample to your "the only real threat they face" assertion. Apple won't play nice with the other megacorps. This is really a bigger threat, because it means your cartel-esque arrangements can't be made.
I expect everyone else to band together and make an example out of Apple for any other megacorp who wants to try this in the future, which is what's essentially happening in this case.
That is not the only way. The more probable approach is that the next round of "standards" won't be, that corps involved (e.g., Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and others who are usually involved in actual R&D) will patent the hell out of everything, and this time no Mr. FRAND Nice Guy. Everyone will know Apple is the enemy unwilling to share its toys in the sandbox, and no one will let Apple play. Apple gets squashed out of the market, and it's a lesson to the next company who wants to try the same approach.
Got root?
I don't really think this is a contradiction. I think the reality of the party line is more "Corporations are people .. the only people." Less government, less taxes, less regulation, more rights. These apply to real people: corporations, not you or me.
While software has been hampered by web "technology" over the last decade, we are hardly at the pinnacle of software and computing... it's more like the Dark Ages, actually. Some stuff is being done elsewhere (GPUs, mobile), but we're still mired in fundamentally stagnant and backwards principles on the desktop (and server, really).
Laughable. Let's assume anything video-related is "new display technology," and that we certainly have a long way to go to realtime radiosity and raytracing at extremely high resolution in a mobile device, then toss it 3D for good measure, so that's a given. But in terms of gameplay, all the computing and RAM you can get can be eaten up for a very long while. Simulation in games, today, isn't anything like what it could be. If I can't build a city at the SimCity level, zoom in and rampage through it at the GTA level, and walk up to each and every person on the street and learn their personal history and daily routines at an RPG level, then go into every structure and demolish it bit-by-bit with full soft-body dynamics, you've got quite a long way to go.
This is true to some extent, but "resorting to multi-processor and multi-core" means the desktop isn't maxed out. The primary OS (and software) may not be taking advantage of these things, but they are there and we're far from done yet.
Microsoft is irrelevant. They have been for a long time. They may not be going away anytime soon, but they've been irrelevant since Google used the web to effectively route technology around them (due to earlier attempted lock-in). Of course, this has resulted in aforementioned Dark Age of Software, but at least we're not stuck on one platform. We're at the point where Valve is looking to seriously move gaming away from Windows, and there are alternatives for everything else, so what happened before doesn't really apply to what can happen in the future.
What we are seeing is ripe potential for a Computing Renaissance.
Just basing this on how many connections there are is pretty irrelevant. Are we really expecting there to be many unofficial major backbones crossing national borders? Could you really enumerate them if there were? Even assuming some random people have a line (wired or otherwise) across a border for network access, this is probably not going to route the majority of the country's traffic anyway, and is equally unlikely to be counted in this survey.
A real measure would be more like "how likely will an entity have to shut down their connection due to government pressure," but for that you need to analyze the legal system, political situation, history, etc. Of course, that's much more work than simple counting, but I suppose "simple counting" is the most we can expect from a pop media source.
When you're tethered to a power outlet, that's not "more portable". That's less portable.
Uh, sure. In 1993. It's 2012 .. a vast number of businesses use Linux. It put the commercial Unixes out of business. Entire cities use Linux, even on the desktop. We have highly successful distros like Ubuntu that do nothing but pander to the non-hacker.
The only safety involved is "this here is Microsoft country, and the Microsofties on the board want Microsoft. MICROSOFT!" If you're getting generous donations, you don't want to piss off your corporate overlords.
Optimus with bumblebee works just like it would in Windows. Render using the nvidia card on-demand and display using the integrated card. This is perfectly fine. There is no "screwing around" involved if you use Ubuntu or similar idiot-oriented distros.
The switching bit is additional functionality; it's like switching in the BIOS between integrated and discrete, except you don't have to reboot. The common user is unlikely to care about this, nor is it necessary, but it's pretty nifty if you want it. Or are we going from complaining about lack of options to complaining about the existence of options?
I have an nvidia optimus/k1000m on a shiny new thinkpad w530. The kernel-included nouveau and intel drivers work fine. Switching between these without restarting is even theoretically possible with vga_switcheroo (though it apparently doesn't entirely work on the w530 specifically). Using the "optimus" bit is also perfectly possible with bumblebee.
However, even with bumblebee, the drivers are included with the kernel, allowing you to fully use KMS, bootup logos, etc. For full 3D, you can even still rely on the builtin intel drivers and use the proprietary nvidia drivers with bumblebee (or not, if your system allows you to switch fully to discrete mode).
(spoilers, if you've never read Asimov)
Unlike the horrible movie, the book "I, Robot" was a series of short stories dealing with the ambiguity of the laws. (The movie was more some bizarre combination of "free the robots!" mixed with "the three laws are a lie".) Additionally, the ambiguity of the laws came up multiple times in the Robot/Foundation universe, such as in "The Naked Sun" and "The Robots of Dawn."
The laws are paradoxically hard-and-fast yet ambiguous. In any case where any law is essentially violated (using one of the workarounds), the robots "go crazy" or die. This applies to the Zeroth Law; witness the end of Giskard due to the mere inability to determine if an action was harmful or not.
In the end, it's something like a moral version of the Halting Problem. Even if you can define "harm" to the satisfaction of everyone, you can't determine if something ultimately leads to harm or not.
Doom3 may have these things, but they don't make it any more scary. It's still bland, boring, and unimaginative. The discussion was about "terrifying," which it isn't, not "is it a FPS" or "does it have certain gameplay elements".
There are better FPS's. There are better Horror FPS's. Some of these are even actually scary. For instance, Amnesia. Doom 3 is just bad.
That said, the Doom3 engine may not be bad, and hey, it's GPL'd now, so you can even go fix it if it is. This is entirely orthogonal to Doom3 the game. But now you have a (probably good, mature, stable) 3D engine that can output to the Oculus Rift, and it's Free(tm).