Yeah, no kidding. Of all the books, from all the publishers in the world, Animal Farm and 1984 are the two books that would be the most disastrous to pull in such a fashion.
This is what happens when the general populous (and thus, your average corporate officer or businessman) is illiterate. They pull stupid shit like this and don't even realize they're a part of Orwellian behavior.
The Kindle has another concrete advantage over hacked PSPs (well, several, but they're due to one cause): the lack of LCD and the presence of the 'e-ink' screen technology. It results in surface which is easier to read (and more like paper) as well as very significant battery life increases. IE, you can just pick it up and read it, throw it in a bag or your closet, and forget about it for a while without worrying about your "book" losing its charge.
Nay, they do not entirely live by the will of the publishers. The customers are the other half of the equation. Bow out like this to enough publishers and they will end up killing the digital book market for themselves (as well as Kindle sales).
Maybe if they'd release good games, they'd not have this issue. I've been gaming since I was knee high, but have always been very picky on which platforms and games I'd pay for: I'd run into entirely too many platform rentals as a kid that I'd end up paying $3-5 for, playing for 5 minutes, and returning the same afternoon to drop $50 on a game I'd only play for a couple minutes due to how much it sucks.
That said, I just bought a new computer - the first time in years - with the hopes of maybe getting a little gaming action. Why now? Simple: upcoming games look appealing, for the first time in years. The news of the new Mechwarrior game coming out is wonderful and adds to that appeal. But I have not seen anything released in the last year or two whcih even remotely appeals to me.
Oh yeah, it's also summertime, during a depression. I wonder if that has anything to do with a precipitous drop in sales?
I never did expect W7 to work like it does, honestly. I first saw W7 on someone else's dual core AMD laptop with 1G of RAM, and I was largely unimpressed (it did not run very fast). Interestingly, it appears to run better on low-end systems (the ones I've tested, at least) than Vista does, by quite a bit. I don't quite understand it, particularly given its comparable (to clock, etc.) anemia on a fast system.
I'm certain. I installed W7 for the first time on this system, with the explicit expectation that it would a) not install, then b) not boot, and finally c) not work worth a damn. I was able to browse the web in IE8 without any marked sluggishness or "swap" hitting. Beyond that, I didn't look at how much RAM was being used; I'm sure supercache and such is largely responsible for the excessive RAM use, with the reality being that the system can actually perform decently on less.
I'm tempted to try installing it on a host with 256Mb, a configuration characteristic I'm well aware is completely unusable with the common OEM XP install. It's not apples and apples, but it should at least be enlightening (if what I think will happen does).
If we'd continued the Apollo missions, we'd have found either:
1) That there was indeed a prehistoric alien civilization on the backside of the moon. 2) That it was almost impossible to hide the continued war between advanced US and Russian spaceships on the backside of the moon. 3) There was indeed a better alternative to space icecream.
You can improve on that list quiet a bit; based on my experience, it goes like this:
NT4: short of being terribly stable, it was a suitable and functional desktop OS for PCs in a corporate/business environment. 3.1: great if you only ran office apps by themselves, but useless if you needed networking and/or 95: a drastic improvement over its predecessors in many ways, but still suffered horribly from the whole "need to go to DOS to actually use all 8Mb of RAM" problems. Severe hardware limitations for about 1+ year after release. Not decent until SP2 (at which point is was way too bloated for 16 megs. 98: Utter rot of the same kind that 95 suffered. Not decent until SP1. Only upsides were that the amount of ram used wasn't increasing as fast the common RAM installation, and that gaming was once again possible without going to DOS. 2000: a drastic improvement in stability and not that much worse than 98 in resource use. Gaming wasn't tenable until after SP1, but still pretty crappy. ME: Not even worth a mention: utter shit in every way. XP: significantly better than 2k for media and games, but also not really all that stable until after the first SP. Vista: broke more things than ME, significantly more bloated and slow, and unusable on the hardware it shipped on for about the first year. The first SP only improved things marginally, and it's still rot. W7 RC: faster, lighter, and more stable than Vista and with better performance than XP in many respects. Able to game "out of the box" for even picky/unstable games like Fallout 3 with only minor fussing. Slight incompatibility with old apps, but not too significantly.
It's pretty damn amazing that W7 is not only "not worse" than Vista, given the MS track record, it's better in almost every way. You can say Vista was a throw-out version, like ME was, except for the fact that they pushed it like crazy and put significant resources into making it the predominant OS, as well as completely changing many of the subsystems.
A lot of the hype isn't hype; due partially to how horribly bad Windows Vista is and partially due to the 'free RC' MS has provided, a lot of people (both geeks and non-geeks) have installed Windows 7.
Back when XP was in pre-release I had a friend who had a copy. This must've been around 2001 or so; I'm not really sure of the specifics. I saw it running on his machine; he liked it, he said. To me, it didn't look all that much different than 2k, and it was noteably slower on his machine. I (and many other geeks) said "pass" until around the first service pack (and when hardware was able to make up for the bloat in the software).
W7 is entirely different. It's been a solid product since the pre-7000 releases (partially due to MS taking a lot of the visual glitches out of startup/the interface, giving a heightened appearance of 'smoothness'). Many have found that, aside from a handful of applications not working, the OS is drastically, drastically better than Vista. On my ancient Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M, 20G disk), it performs quite well. Aside from a fairly lengthy boot, it's more responsive and feels less glitchy than XP ever did on the machine. It's also significantly faster/responsive than *gasp* Ubuntu 9.04 or 8.10 on the same hardware. (I should note that I had Linux installed on the laptop exclusively since I got it, starting with Mandrake 10, IIRC.)
I, as well as several other Linux geeks I know, have Windows 7 machines set up as their "gaming machine". I've got a Windows-fanatic friend who's been using W7 exclusively since 7000 or so. Can you imagine that happening with Vista, XP, or 2K? No, those products were, relatively, shit.
So yes, there are a lot of people using W7 with satisfaction, even people who were like you: skeptical of the pre-release bullshit.
It's not the "best OS Microsoft has put out yet". That's making room for previous versions being worth half a shit at their release.
Windows 7 is the only Microsoft OS that is not only markedly better than its predecessor but is the only release they've made where there is not something immediately noticeable as "broken for unknown reasons". That's a pretty big accomplishment for them!
Meh. Maybe I should just not post this comment. I'd forgotten about the "Windows XP Compatibility Mode" feature. That's inexplicably fucked.
This reminds me of a technique for cooling water in a desert which could tenably be applied to the data center as well.
Basically, a container is filled with water, closed/sealed, and wrapped with a damp/wet towel and buried in the ground (or just placed somewhere in the sun, I suppose). The evaporation of the moisture in the rag will draw the heat from the inside of the container, resulting in frigid water.
Put a data center on a dry coastal equatorial area and harness solar to desalinate the water. Build the data center under ground, with the roof of the center allowing easy flow of heat upwards, and then plant edible vegetation on top of the roof. Water the roof consistently to cool your data center during the day (and harvest the proceeds to sell/consume).
It may or may not be worth it financially, but it'd probably work.
At those latitudes the ambient subterranean temperature remains pretty ambient all year long. Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in. If you go all the way through the hill you can use the natural air currents to push/pull air through the tunnels, and the natural heat absorption qualities of stone will keep the temperature down. I'd be surprised if any active "cooling" were needed at all.
Put a true embedded system in a car, for instance. While it's off, it uses zero power, but by the time you're backing up your driveway, it's already doing it's thing.
Even the very-large 44+ foot trucks (ie, think: trans-shipping) are made out of non-metal components these days. the sides and roof are largely there for decreasing wind resistance.
Of the large vans used to move band and stage equipment around for events that I've seen, many of them have a steel (or aluminum) substructure frame, with either plastic, metal and plastic, or some sort of fiberboard construction. Even the older ones don't use all-metal cladding - it's too expensive!
Put the device at or near the top of the stack and I suspect there'd be less signal impedance than if it were in the back seat of your car.
[quote]MS Makes money from Windows and Office. Google makes money from search based advertising. Nothing else really matters to either company.[/quote]
Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Yes, those are their primary markets. Google owns the online advertising market, and MS owns the online desktop OS and productivity markets. But things change: companies reach respective market saturation and need to continue to increase their revenue to make stock owners happy, and existing products (once reaching saturation) can not continue to meet those demands.
Why, then, even bother edging into other markets? Google is pushing Android, Chrome, gmail, and a myriad of other things; Microsoft has Xbox and its games, Zune, and so on. Why bother?
Because no product is a Sure Thing. There ARE competitors. MS is pushing into Google's primary domain (Bing), and Google is counteracting them by pushing back (Chrome). I doubt the similarity of connotation in Chrome and Bing's naming is just happenstance.
Yeah, and statistical rigour has proven so terribly accurate and useful over the past years, particularly when coming from a source like Morgan Stanley.
Sometimes, an astute observation is just that: an astute observation. There is a reason why progress and innovation do not occur within the tombs of analysts. There's no creativity or thought to their work, just numbers. They work within the system and have a very difficult time seeing outside said system to see the larger picture.
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's actually got anything revolutionary to say. I think it's just a case of people caught on the twitter media train suddenly realizing that twitter isn't god to everybody, despite what reports say.
.. which is exactly what GP was trying to say with his mention of the old parable.
People are gaga over twitter, for one reason or another. The kid Gets It, in that he understands that there's nothing of substance to be had with twitter. It's broadcast SMS, more or less: it has very limited practical applications that are not already met by a dozen other services (especially with the emergence of Facebook, email, etc. enabled phones).
Outside its practical applications, it's good for stalking celebrities who have an ego-maniacal personality. But that's about it.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
I believe companies such as Novell, RedHat, and IBM would disagree with you. As well as the tens of thousands of professionals who use Linux to accomplish work (probably almost as many as use Windows, these days). And the web statistics which give Linux almost as much presence (or more than) as OS X.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Because they are enamored with Apple, just like they are with Barack Obama: the media is quick to fall in love with a shiny, well-marketed toy which fits their "lifestyle".
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
Uh, good marketing and a candy-like shell? Because there is no objective reason for it: their media quality is only so-so and they're priced similarly to WinMo devices like the Zune.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux.
The market disagrees. And, as it pertains to this topic, almost everyone disagrees here, on slashdot and on a myriad of other geek news sites (though probably not on Apple forums).
That's why we've got creativity; new swear-words can be added. And of course, your mind gets dirtier in the process. Those same words should work just fine (just like "darn" works for some Christians, etc.).
It might also partially explain why people going through (say) cigarette withdraw symptoms are rude motherfuckers. They need a quick and immediate release channel for what they used to relieve via smoking. Then they have to re-learn how to be emotionally pleasant without the drugs.
I have a friend who is making some decent money right now doing presentation and one-on-one MS Office 2007 training. Yes, 2 years after it was released.
People still need to re-train, especially when there is a massive paradigm shift in the interface (pre-Office2007 to O2k7 is about as much change as UNIX was from VMS) and when they're not technologically savvy. Something like O2k7 takes even a professional Windows IT person (someone who lives and breathes software GUI and MS products) several months to get "comfortable".
What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?
KDE (the design's about 5+ years old at this point - since KDE 3): http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-01-14/files/katetest-kio_file.png
The 'file dialog' has been optionally "universalized" in KDE4 via dolphin: http://artipc10.vub.ac.be/serendipity/uploads/screenshots/kde4.1/kde4-desktop.jpg
Ok, so W7 finally gets similar functionality in a pre-release 7+ years after KDE had it. http://blogs.msdn.com/yvesdolc/archive/2009/01/07/windows-7-libraries-and-the-common-file-dialog.aspx
Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.
(Now, GTK2/GNOME, on the other hand, is a bit of an ugly kludge akin to the newer OSX Finder interface, but that is largely an argument of preference, I think.)
You want to talk about a crappy interface, let's take a look at the paragraph-of-irritation style "file copy" dialog in W7:
Explain to me why I need 1"^2 icons, with sublimated text and the important bits shoved off into a corner or otherwise de-emphasized? It's almost as if they want you to just click "yes" and ignore what it says. How useless (and irritating). KDE4 isn't much better, but at least its evident where the better implementation came from (first):
http://imagebin.ca/img/8GQHAD.png
In closing, bitching about the file dialog (presumably in GNOME) as a reason why "linux" is not a modern operating system is comical, especially when the 'major look' as well as many of the nice-to-have features of W7 are (by the opinions of many MS and Linux fans alike) a near-copy of KDE 4 functionality/features/look/feel. And when you consider that it was only a couple years ago when MS got an actual security model on their desktop OS (which still doesn't really work properly). That seems like a pretty obvious requirement for a "modern operating system" to me.
[quote]Prototyping will be more difficult. If you discover a fatal bug in a non-trivial circuit, it can't be jumpered or otherwise worked around easily.[/quote]
Why not just prototype on PCB, then?
[quote]Calling it a "green" technology is insidious.[/quote]
Agreed and seconded! most "green" technology is just that: insidious. It's not green at all (and often, arguably not as 'green' as what it's replacing). Cases in point: E85/ethanol, biodiesel, lithium-powered cars, solar and lead-acid battery "green" power, and so on. All lies, on account of all the components involved taking a huge resource investment, and being very hard on the environment.
If your name is Michael Smith, you've got nothing to worry about. But if you had a less common name and there were quite a few collisions, it'd be a matter for concern. Likewise if you had a prominent presence associated with your name. Employers (and by employers, I mean HR) will often use anything and everything you say online against you.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no kidding. Of all the books, from all the publishers in the world, Animal Farm and 1984 are the two books that would be the most disastrous to pull in such a fashion.
This is what happens when the general populous (and thus, your average corporate officer or businessman) is illiterate. They pull stupid shit like this and don't even realize they're a part of Orwellian behavior.
The Kindle has another concrete advantage over hacked PSPs (well, several, but they're due to one cause): the lack of LCD and the presence of the 'e-ink' screen technology. It results in surface which is easier to read (and more like paper) as well as very significant battery life increases. IE, you can just pick it up and read it, throw it in a bag or your closet, and forget about it for a while without worrying about your "book" losing its charge.
Nay, they do not entirely live by the will of the publishers. The customers are the other half of the equation. Bow out like this to enough publishers and they will end up killing the digital book market for themselves (as well as Kindle sales).
Maybe if they'd release good games, they'd not have this issue. I've been gaming since I was knee high, but have always been very picky on which platforms and games I'd pay for: I'd run into entirely too many platform rentals as a kid that I'd end up paying $3-5 for, playing for 5 minutes, and returning the same afternoon to drop $50 on a game I'd only play for a couple minutes due to how much it sucks.
That said, I just bought a new computer - the first time in years - with the hopes of maybe getting a little gaming action. Why now? Simple: upcoming games look appealing, for the first time in years. The news of the new Mechwarrior game coming out is wonderful and adds to that appeal. But I have not seen anything released in the last year or two whcih even remotely appeals to me.
Oh yeah, it's also summertime, during a depression. I wonder if that has anything to do with a precipitous drop in sales?
That's interesting.
I never did expect W7 to work like it does, honestly. I first saw W7 on someone else's dual core AMD laptop with 1G of RAM, and I was largely unimpressed (it did not run very fast). Interestingly, it appears to run better on low-end systems (the ones I've tested, at least) than Vista does, by quite a bit. I don't quite understand it, particularly given its comparable (to clock, etc.) anemia on a fast system.
I'm certain. I installed W7 for the first time on this system, with the explicit expectation that it would a) not install, then b) not boot, and finally c) not work worth a damn. I was able to browse the web in IE8 without any marked sluggishness or "swap" hitting. Beyond that, I didn't look at how much RAM was being used; I'm sure supercache and such is largely responsible for the excessive RAM use, with the reality being that the system can actually perform decently on less.
I'm tempted to try installing it on a host with 256Mb, a configuration characteristic I'm well aware is completely unusable with the common OEM XP install. It's not apples and apples, but it should at least be enlightening (if what I think will happen does).
I wasn't aware of that; interesting.
The technique I described wouldn't need to be done in Belgium, though. I'm sure any one of the Nordic states would be well suited for it.
If we'd continued the Apollo missions, we'd have found either:
1) That there was indeed a prehistoric alien civilization on the backside of the moon.
2) That it was almost impossible to hide the continued war between advanced US and Russian spaceships on the backside of the moon.
3) There was indeed a better alternative to space icecream.
You can improve on that list quiet a bit; based on my experience, it goes like this:
NT4: short of being terribly stable, it was a suitable and functional desktop OS for PCs in a corporate/business environment.
3.1: great if you only ran office apps by themselves, but useless if you needed networking and/or
95: a drastic improvement over its predecessors in many ways, but still suffered horribly from the whole "need to go to DOS to actually use all 8Mb of RAM" problems. Severe hardware limitations for about 1+ year after release. Not decent until SP2 (at which point is was way too bloated for 16 megs.
98: Utter rot of the same kind that 95 suffered. Not decent until SP1. Only upsides were that the amount of ram used wasn't increasing as fast the common RAM installation, and that gaming was once again possible without going to DOS.
2000: a drastic improvement in stability and not that much worse than 98 in resource use. Gaming wasn't tenable until after SP1, but still pretty crappy.
ME: Not even worth a mention: utter shit in every way.
XP: significantly better than 2k for media and games, but also not really all that stable until after the first SP.
Vista: broke more things than ME, significantly more bloated and slow, and unusable on the hardware it shipped on for about the first year. The first SP only improved things marginally, and it's still rot.
W7 RC: faster, lighter, and more stable than Vista and with better performance than XP in many respects. Able to game "out of the box" for even picky/unstable games like Fallout 3 with only minor fussing. Slight incompatibility with old apps, but not too significantly.
It's pretty damn amazing that W7 is not only "not worse" than Vista, given the MS track record, it's better in almost every way. You can say Vista was a throw-out version, like ME was, except for the fact that they pushed it like crazy and put significant resources into making it the predominant OS, as well as completely changing many of the subsystems.
A lot of the hype isn't hype; due partially to how horribly bad Windows Vista is and partially due to the 'free RC' MS has provided, a lot of people (both geeks and non-geeks) have installed Windows 7.
Back when XP was in pre-release I had a friend who had a copy. This must've been around 2001 or so; I'm not really sure of the specifics. I saw it running on his machine; he liked it, he said. To me, it didn't look all that much different than 2k, and it was noteably slower on his machine. I (and many other geeks) said "pass" until around the first service pack (and when hardware was able to make up for the bloat in the software).
W7 is entirely different. It's been a solid product since the pre-7000 releases (partially due to MS taking a lot of the visual glitches out of startup/the interface, giving a heightened appearance of 'smoothness'). Many have found that, aside from a handful of applications not working, the OS is drastically, drastically better than Vista. On my ancient Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M, 20G disk), it performs quite well. Aside from a fairly lengthy boot, it's more responsive and feels less glitchy than XP ever did on the machine. It's also significantly faster/responsive than *gasp* Ubuntu 9.04 or 8.10 on the same hardware. (I should note that I had Linux installed on the laptop exclusively since I got it, starting with Mandrake 10, IIRC.)
I, as well as several other Linux geeks I know, have Windows 7 machines set up as their "gaming machine". I've got a Windows-fanatic friend who's been using W7 exclusively since 7000 or so. Can you imagine that happening with Vista, XP, or 2K? No, those products were, relatively, shit.
So yes, there are a lot of people using W7 with satisfaction, even people who were like you: skeptical of the pre-release bullshit.
It's not the "best OS Microsoft has put out yet". That's making room for previous versions being worth half a shit at their release.
Windows 7 is the only Microsoft OS that is not only markedly better than its predecessor but is the only release they've made where there is not something immediately noticeable as "broken for unknown reasons". That's a pretty big accomplishment for them!
Meh. Maybe I should just not post this comment. I'd forgotten about the "Windows XP Compatibility Mode" feature. That's inexplicably fucked.
This reminds me of a technique for cooling water in a desert which could tenably be applied to the data center as well.
Basically, a container is filled with water, closed/sealed, and wrapped with a damp/wet towel and buried in the ground (or just placed somewhere in the sun, I suppose). The evaporation of the moisture in the rag will draw the heat from the inside of the container, resulting in frigid water.
Put a data center on a dry coastal equatorial area and harness solar to desalinate the water. Build the data center under ground, with the roof of the center allowing easy flow of heat upwards, and then plant edible vegetation on top of the roof. Water the roof consistently to cool your data center during the day (and harvest the proceeds to sell/consume).
It may or may not be worth it financially, but it'd probably work.
At those latitudes the ambient subterranean temperature remains pretty ambient all year long. Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in. If you go all the way through the hill you can use the natural air currents to push/pull air through the tunnels, and the natural heat absorption qualities of stone will keep the temperature down. I'd be surprised if any active "cooling" were needed at all.
Not needed? What about on mobile platforms?
Put a true embedded system in a car, for instance. While it's off, it uses zero power, but by the time you're backing up your driveway, it's already doing it's thing.
Even the very-large 44+ foot trucks (ie, think: trans-shipping) are made out of non-metal components these days. the sides and roof are largely there for decreasing wind resistance.
Of the large vans used to move band and stage equipment around for events that I've seen, many of them have a steel (or aluminum) substructure frame, with either plastic, metal and plastic, or some sort of fiberboard construction. Even the older ones don't use all-metal cladding - it's too expensive!
Put the device at or near the top of the stack and I suspect there'd be less signal impedance than if it were in the back seat of your car.
[quote]MS Makes money from Windows and Office.
Google makes money from search based advertising.
Nothing else really matters to either company.[/quote]
Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Yes, those are their primary markets. Google owns the online advertising market, and MS owns the online desktop OS and productivity markets. But things change: companies reach respective market saturation and need to continue to increase their revenue to make stock owners happy, and existing products (once reaching saturation) can not continue to meet those demands.
Why, then, even bother edging into other markets? Google is pushing Android, Chrome, gmail, and a myriad of other things; Microsoft has Xbox and its games, Zune, and so on. Why bother?
Because no product is a Sure Thing. There ARE competitors. MS is pushing into Google's primary domain (Bing), and Google is counteracting them by pushing back (Chrome). I doubt the similarity of connotation in Chrome and Bing's naming is just happenstance.
Yeah, and statistical rigour has proven so terribly accurate and useful over the past years, particularly when coming from a source like Morgan Stanley.
Sometimes, an astute observation is just that: an astute observation. There is a reason why progress and innovation do not occur within the tombs of analysts. There's no creativity or thought to their work, just numbers. They work within the system and have a very difficult time seeing outside said system to see the larger picture.
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's actually got anything revolutionary to say. I think it's just a case of people caught on the twitter media train suddenly realizing that twitter isn't god to everybody, despite what reports say.
.. which is exactly what GP was trying to say with his mention of the old parable.
People are gaga over twitter, for one reason or another. The kid Gets It, in that he understands that there's nothing of substance to be had with twitter. It's broadcast SMS, more or less: it has very limited practical applications that are not already met by a dozen other services (especially with the emergence of Facebook, email, etc. enabled phones).
Outside its practical applications, it's good for stalking celebrities who have an ego-maniacal personality. But that's about it.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
I believe companies such as Novell, RedHat, and IBM would disagree with you. As well as the tens of thousands of professionals who use Linux to accomplish work (probably almost as many as use Windows, these days). And the web statistics which give Linux almost as much presence (or more than) as OS X.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Because they are enamored with Apple, just like they are with Barack Obama: the media is quick to fall in love with a shiny, well-marketed toy which fits their "lifestyle".
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
Uh, good marketing and a candy-like shell? Because there is no objective reason for it: their media quality is only so-so and they're priced similarly to WinMo devices like the Zune.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux.
The market disagrees. And, as it pertains to this topic, almost everyone disagrees here, on slashdot and on a myriad of other geek news sites (though probably not on Apple forums).
That's why we've got creativity; new swear-words can be added. And of course, your mind gets dirtier in the process. Those same words should work just fine (just like "darn" works for some Christians, etc.).
It might also partially explain why people going through (say) cigarette withdraw symptoms are rude motherfuckers. They need a quick and immediate release channel for what they used to relieve via smoking. Then they have to re-learn how to be emotionally pleasant without the drugs.
I have a friend who is making some decent money right now doing presentation and one-on-one MS Office 2007 training. Yes, 2 years after it was released.
People still need to re-train, especially when there is a massive paradigm shift in the interface (pre-Office2007 to O2k7 is about as much change as UNIX was from VMS) and when they're not technologically savvy. Something like O2k7 takes even a professional Windows IT person (someone who lives and breathes software GUI and MS products) several months to get "comfortable".
What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?
KDE (the design's about 5+ years old at this point - since KDE 3):
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-01-14/files/katetest-kio_file.png
The 'file dialog' has been optionally "universalized" in KDE4 via dolphin: http://artipc10.vub.ac.be/serendipity/uploads/screenshots/kde4.1/kde4-desktop.jpg
Ok, so W7 finally gets similar functionality in a pre-release 7+ years after KDE had it.
http://blogs.msdn.com/yvesdolc/archive/2009/01/07/windows-7-libraries-and-the-common-file-dialog.aspx
Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.
(Now, GTK2/GNOME, on the other hand, is a bit of an ugly kludge akin to the newer OSX Finder interface, but that is largely an argument of preference, I think.)
You want to talk about a crappy interface, let's take a look at the paragraph-of-irritation style "file copy" dialog in W7:
http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/general-discussion/4566d1234384335-copy-replace-dialog-there-way-get-old-one-like-xp-screen2.png
Explain to me why I need 1"^2 icons, with sublimated text and the important bits shoved off into a corner or otherwise de-emphasized? It's almost as if they want you to just click "yes" and ignore what it says. How useless (and irritating). KDE4 isn't much better, but at least its evident where the better implementation came from (first):
http://imagebin.ca/img/8GQHAD.png
In closing, bitching about the file dialog (presumably in GNOME) as a reason why "linux" is not a modern operating system is comical, especially when the 'major look' as well as many of the nice-to-have features of W7 are (by the opinions of many MS and Linux fans alike) a near-copy of KDE 4 functionality/features/look/feel. And when you consider that it was only a couple years ago when MS got an actual security model on their desktop OS (which still doesn't really work properly). That seems like a pretty obvious requirement for a "modern operating system" to me.
[quote]Prototyping will be more difficult. If you discover a fatal bug in a non-trivial circuit, it can't be jumpered or otherwise worked around easily.[/quote]
Why not just prototype on PCB, then?
[quote]Calling it a "green" technology is insidious.[/quote]
Agreed and seconded! most "green" technology is just that: insidious. It's not green at all (and often, arguably not as 'green' as what it's replacing). Cases in point: E85/ethanol, biodiesel, lithium-powered cars, solar and lead-acid battery "green" power, and so on. All lies, on account of all the components involved taking a huge resource investment, and being very hard on the environment.
If your name is Michael Smith, you've got nothing to worry about. But if you had a less common name and there were quite a few collisions, it'd be a matter for concern. Likewise if you had a prominent presence associated with your name. Employers (and by employers, I mean HR) will often use anything and everything you say online against you.