I seriously doubt that we'd face extinction, short of a world-wide climatic effect. Yes, we'd have dead and dying people everywhere, and there would be plagues.
However, humans are quite versatile. Our life expectancy might be shot down to the 40's, but we'd still be able to find food if there was any such thing left to be found. Unlike many animals, we can eat both meat and plants, and we're not really hindered like many species by regional boundries or climates.
Short of world-wide universal extinction of all bugs, plants, and animals, I think we'll survive as a species. There would be regions where growing things would still be possible, and small groups of people would re-start society from the ground up. There's a fair amount of evidence that such world-wide catastrophies occured in the past (such as the supposed "atlantean distruction"), resulting in many deaths, but still people survived, formed new cultures, and 'progressed' to where we are now. They kept parts of their culture and beliefs - not necessarily in the same state that they were originally - and formed the cultures of our ancestors.
I could see it all happening again. The western world could go to war with the east, and annihilate the large power centers of the world. The butterfly effect would take out all the other societies, wars would errupt, and disease and famine would strike. Enterprising individuals would store up goods, go into what is left of the wilderness and survive, while the lesser, weaker humans would simply try to perpetuate their futile existence and die.
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
It doesn't matter which ones stick around, really. They're based off of debian. It will be trivial (provided they don't deviate too much from the Debian Way of doing things, that is) to simply switch over to an official testing or unstable source and keep on functioning.
Or just reinstall with something else; you made a seperate/home partition, right?
We've been in recession for 3, approaching 4, years. Things look quite bleak for anyone that's been associated with IT, as they've lost jobs, lost wages (or at the very least, not gotten appropriate wage increases to match inflation), or any number of other financial setbacks.
It's kind of hard to start a business when you're thousands in debt, can't find a job to get out of debt, and have living bills on top of that. Particularly when starting a business will always require money to get started.
I was still pretty young, but I was still aware of the reputation of Japanese cars: they were a bit more expensive, and cost more to repair, but they NEVER BROKE DOWN.
The quality of Jap cars has actually gone down, what with Ford getting involved and buying Toyota (I think), and the overall globalization of such companies.
Autos now are more expensive and of poorer quality than they were 15-20 years ago. You see almost as many older cars on the road now as you do new ones - I suspect because the old ones simply keep keeping on, while new ones expire relatively quickly in proportion.
The crazy thing is, half-inbred "geeks" (the ones that knew enough to be dangerous) in the 90's would often back MS up in this defense, because either a) they didn't know what really caused it, and "that's just how computers worked", b) they didn't want to blame their precious Microsoft/Bill Gates, or c) they didn't want to accept blame for making their friends/family for running software that's utter shit.
That's why people think it's natural for computers to destroy their work.
An H&K USP 40 cal w/ a 4 pound trigger and hollow point won't injure anyone, either. They'll be dead. Unless you hit them in the limb - but only for a short while. They'll likely bleed to death.
If a male breaks into the residence of a female, she's got a good reason to fear for her life and safety. $800 goes a long way for soundness of mind when you purchase a gun - and it's not something that can be broken through or disarmed while the potential victim hides in the back room, clutching their cell phone, crying on the phone to an apathetic 911 dispatch.
A fucking yetti hologram or any other such childish nonsense won't deter anyone. A "home security" system wouldn't do much, either. If you want to go the geeky route, it -might- deter "crime of opportunity" type criminals if you install video cameras and put signs up on the windows, etc. that make mention of "cameras". An alarm won't do anything to the will of a criminal that's going in for jewelry or something quickly then getting his ass out; having his picture taken probably would.
As far as conventional "security" sytems for homes, they're shit. I've got an aquantance that lives in a nice neighborhood where there was some break-ins a couple years back. His neighbor got a top-of-the-line security system. The neighbor was the next victim, and the criminal got away. The next target was my aquantance - who owns a gun. The crook didnt quite make it out the door. My aquantance saved the penal system quite a lot of money with his sub-grand investment.
Short of a gun, get a dog. A big one. But women don't tend to like those.
sounds like this is the re-envisionment of George Lucas' Star Wars. It has all the same elements (sci-fi/fantasy, clear good/bad division, heroes and heroines, 50's pulp fiction feel, destroys the 3rd wall effectively, good music...), but drastically outperforms Episode I.:)
It (or the principles, at least) should be required for all college professors to read and comprehend.
I can't tell you the number of times that, in college, I've felt like that largely due to professors that don't give a fuck, don't challenge the students, or even try to make their subjects interesting, while giving large and tedious homework assignments. It's led to my partial loss of interest in many academic fields which, prior to the professors in question, I enjoyed reading and studying about on my own time.
Here's to year 6 and my 4th pick of undergraduate course!
Developers don't add stuff to the "core OS" because they can't. They're not allowed.
Linux is an independent project. It's not run by committee of slashdotters or anything so mundane. It's a situation where Torvalds' word is final. Anything someone were to add would likely have to be a fork - and there are quite a few such forks.
Another thing: you're ignorant about exactly what Linux is. Linux is a kernel. Nothing more, nothing less. RedHat, et al, are distributions. They have a lot of different software. A distro is simply a collection of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of packages.
Your Windows-centric view of an OS is pedantic and disturbing. I hope you don't work in computing.
Maybe for someone that's only been using linux for a short while, and started with a snazzy RedHat, SuSE, or Mandrake install, this would be a huge step up in complexity and learning potential. However, I'd say it's a bad idea because it takes way too long for the amount of learning that actually takes place: the "gentoo process" automates all the complex things that actually lead to learning; the processing time merely gives an illusion to how to administer a linux machine. I've seen quite a few gentoo people that think they knew a lot, and ended up being bumblefucks when it came to touching anything else.
My recommendation: start with the current debian stable. You'll learn what individual modules do, and you'll start with a minimal installation and be able to configure everything on your own.
Alternatively, start with LFS (linux from scratch). You'll have to start with some sort of Linux install, and it wouldn't matter which. The idea, though, is to learn how to do -everything- from scratch.
Most courses will just teach you how to set up and configure a couple services and some basics about the system, while you don't learn actually how the services work on the system, or get a 'feel' how things work. As a Windows admin, I'm sure you're well aware of the importance of having a "feel" for how a well-tuned system works. The same applies for Linux, just as Windows or a Ford or Chevy.
Whatever path you pick, I'd recommend keeping a notebook full of, well, notes. Not just commands, but principles. It'll help you cement the ideas in our mind. I'd recommend pen and paper vs. a computer, as I find it results in better retention for some reason.
I don't know about you, but the features in WinFS (or the proposed features, at least) can't "manage music" any better than my current setup.
Root music dir: "music" - I know, that's pretty counter-intuitive. Under that: hardcore emo punk techno jazz 80's ce ltic rock orchestral themes... and then, within each of those directories, I've got these directories of band names; within them, directories of albums. How could WinFS provide anything above the current Windows file manager with its various views (tree, flat with previews, etc.) which could possibly suppliment this method of organization?
If people aren't going to bother organizing things into directories or giving intelligent file names to their data, they're sure as hell not going to bother with meta data. Unless WinFS has a full slew of data identification algorithms and a massive database of known matches, there's nothing that WinFS could offer here.
Organization is a mechanism we employ to help us find things. WinFS can not add to this ability, but simply provide a different mechanism for organization. I don't see it helping much, however, as humans have been grouping things into categories and sub categories since the beginning of time, and that is how we think. Unless we're talking about an obscene amount of data, where this would be a "poor man's database", I can't see any practical use for anyone with half a brain.
It would be better for MS to actually enforce the use of "My Documents".
This sounds like the US: lots of expensive computers bought for schools where there is no need, no practical application for them all, or even a single fucking use, as there's way too many.
Computers are education's snake oil, and Microsoft the salesman.
Nonsense. USB flash storage is perfectly inexpensive.
You can purchase 64M keys for as little as $15. That's not the uber-inexpensive price of a floppy (under 2 dollars), but they're cheap enough to trust with someone that you need to get data to long enough for them to get the data.
And, at 64M or more, there's really little need to "stack" them. You've got 64M, ffs. I've got one 64M dongle, and it's more than sufficient for my portable storage needs for misc. files.
Aside from that, laptops are getting pretty omnipresent, as are networks and connections to the Internet. The need for floppies - or any portable media - is significantly reduced by these facts, as it's relatively easy to get online and even mail yourself a file.
remember 5 or so years ago when all the planes had handsets built into the seatbacks for the passengers behind them to use?
then cell phones became universal amongst business travelers overnight, and the airline's bitched and moaned about all their lost revenue.
now they're "working on something" to allow cell phones to be used in-flight? they can already be used in-flight, as they've got direct line-of-sight with quite a few towers.
does anyone remember when cell phones were actually banned from use in airplanes? was it before, during, or after the advent of the seat-back airline phones that cost exhorbinant amounts?
if during or after (or even shortly before and possibly associated), doesn't it seem a bit suspicious that the ban might be directly linked to the installation of the seat-back phones? ie, "cell phones are dangerous, so use our 30 cent/minute phones instead".
Take Deus Ex (the first one) for example. Incredible story, awesome gameplay, and a complex game world all lead to a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Granted, it was a literary's game, as it had a lot of references to culture and literature, but I think that certainly added rather than subtracted from the overall gameplay experience. It had a head to it, unlike most games which are fairly base in their approach to entertainment.
Max Payne is another example of a stunning presentation and execution. Though drastically different in gameplay, it still had an awesome story and felt "finished". Nothing was out of place.
All the good films that are remembered tend to have these same elements. They get you involved with the characters and the story and help you form emotional attachments.
B&W had some good things about it, but the overall implimentation was lacking. The bugs were frustrating, the gameplay drawn out and poorly paced, and the actual goal and the method by which to execute it were pretty nebulous until you got further into it... never played Populous. I don't remember anything about it.
The main issue here is that corporations are greedy for profits.
Profit margins, specifically. if something doens't yield a certain profit over a certain period of time, fuck it.
That, and people are mostly satisfied with the broadband that they have. You don't need much bandwidth for chat, games, and browsing. Usually just browsing and chat. Joe Average doesn't need synchronous 10Mbit up/down. He probably wouldn't care for it over his current setup if he had it, as he'd not know what to do with it.
This will continue as long as the "only" option is the current telcos. They'll milk their current business model for $35/month for 'minimal' bandwidth as long as possible.
Computers are a drug, just like any other substance. Computers (and technology) provide a medium that consumes a person's attention. We geeks are hooked to the mental distraction that computers provide from the real world: social interaction, the stress of daily obligations, the tedious and unchanging nature of much of life. In my life, many of the geeks I know have other addictions: smoking, drinking, caffine.
Look up the stereotypical behavior of a drug addict, and you'll notice that, if you too are a computer geek, these behaviors match your own quite well.
Re:The device isn't usually the issue for me
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
re: software on the Zaurus - it is good. just don't use the sharp rom. use openzaurus (openzaurus.org). It is many times better: more stable, more features, and easier to manage. I'd suggest (beta) version 3.3.7-1 (something like that).
My one gripe about the zaurus is that all the cool peripherals that are needed to get it to do what I want cost a good deal of money.;) that, and the applications take a fair bit of time to load from flash. but I got mine (5500) for free, so I really can't complain.:P
I've been talking a lot about this lately. My ideal 'portable' (laptop, handtop, whatever) would have:
256 greyscale LCD (to conserve power) with decent resolution/size so that text would be readable at arm's length w/o being bunched. Having the option for interchangeable color/greyscale LCDs at time of purchase (or after purchase) would also be nice, but not really necessary, IMO
SD, CF, and possibly a PCMCIA slot for expansion and storeage
chicklet buttons/keys (or something like them) with generic/programmable function - none of these fairly useless "application" buttons which just take up pocket real estate most of the time. It would also be nice to be able to have an easy mechanism by which I can assign them (for instance, have one of the buttons be 'enter' or 'ok', another for 'open the sound recording software and start recording' - the zaurus 5500 which I have comes close to this)
IR and probably bluetooth - for more expandability, but also potentially for a...
fully-typeable, non-cramping keyboard - I don't care if it's built into the device somehow (doubtful it could be easily achieved), or independent (similar to the pocketop). I don't want to have to learn a new, proprietary input method to enter text at a reasonable speed on a portable device.
at least 5 hours of operational battery life, because I don't want to have to recharge it daily
the ability to blank the screen and still have the machine running (the zaurus can do this, but it's hindered still by battery life. I should be able to run the device -all day- while performing audio/text input in this mode)
a sturdy design with screen protection the zaurus, as well, is decent enough in this dept. for me, with a plastic 'shield' purchaseable seperately
as compact a design as possible - it should only be marginally larger than the screen itself, with maybe 1.5cm at the bottom/side/whatever for buttons. depth of the device isn't -too- important, but no thicker than, say, 3cm. That might be a bit too thick - I don't have a ruler, and my brain doesn't often use metric. Maybe more like 2.5cm.
the ability to run linux - this is important for me; I'd prefer if it were a linux device, as I think the software that comes for linux PDAs is awesome. it also allows me to use the machine for a lot more than just keeping notes, as linux is quite versatile.
mininum specs somewhere around 250MHz ARM (Xscale 400MHz would do nicely), 64Mb RAM (96M would be nice), 32M internal storeage - this seems perfectly reasonable to expect for $400 or so, what with the fairly insignificant price of memory and the ever-decreasing cost of hw production
If the OS provides APIs which are administrator-only APIs for application development, they need to provide some mechanism for non-admin users to activate them selectively (ie, with the admin password). There's absolutely no reason why a user should not be able to run an application as a specific other user.
If I can't play a game as a non-administrator user due to restrictions with DirectX API, then there's a problem with the API. There are quite a few things like this in Windows.
Wow, my life must suck. My experience has been a complete counter-example to each of your points in some fashion (which you don't mention).
1) Campus-provided data storage is also some of the most unreliable storage I've ever seen. Need space to upgrade the server?/home gets fucked and quotas are reduced with no warning due to budgeting. Or simply because the sysadmin felt like cleaning. (Juniata College)
2) Labs cost 5 - 10 cents - per page - to print. That gets expensive quickly, unless you only have a couple things to print out each quarter. (South Dakota State University)
3) It gets painfully cold in the winters. Even though campus is only ~1 mile across (and most stuff is only a couple hundred yards), it is impossible to walk across it, as there are massive snow drifts covering all the open places. I'm talking about -20F, without wind chill factored in. There's often 40 mph winds out here in the winter, and it's the norm to have 30+ mph winds - so it feels like -50. It will take a skinny person such as myself well over an hour to recover from 5 minutes outdoors in such weather. (South Dakota)
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you jest - but I'll bite.
I seriously doubt that we'd face extinction, short of a world-wide climatic effect. Yes, we'd have dead and dying people everywhere, and there would be plagues.
However, humans are quite versatile. Our life expectancy might be shot down to the 40's, but we'd still be able to find food if there was any such thing left to be found. Unlike many animals, we can eat both meat and plants, and we're not really hindered like many species by regional boundries or climates.
Short of world-wide universal extinction of all bugs, plants, and animals, I think we'll survive as a species. There would be regions where growing things would still be possible, and small groups of people would re-start society from the ground up. There's a fair amount of evidence that such world-wide catastrophies occured in the past (such as the supposed "atlantean distruction"), resulting in many deaths, but still people survived, formed new cultures, and 'progressed' to where we are now. They kept parts of their culture and beliefs - not necessarily in the same state that they were originally - and formed the cultures of our ancestors.
I could see it all happening again. The western world could go to war with the east, and annihilate the large power centers of the world. The butterfly effect would take out all the other societies, wars would errupt, and disease and famine would strike. Enterprising individuals would store up goods, go into what is left of the wilderness and survive, while the lesser, weaker humans would simply try to perpetuate their futile existence and die.
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
It doesn't matter which ones stick around, really. They're based off of debian. It will be trivial (provided they don't deviate too much from the Debian Way of doing things, that is) to simply switch over to an official testing or unstable source and keep on functioning.
/home partition, right?
Or just reinstall with something else; you made a seperate
We've been in recession for 3, approaching 4, years. Things look quite bleak for anyone that's been associated with IT, as they've lost jobs, lost wages (or at the very least, not gotten appropriate wage increases to match inflation), or any number of other financial setbacks.
It's kind of hard to start a business when you're thousands in debt, can't find a job to get out of debt, and have living bills on top of that. Particularly when starting a business will always require money to get started.
Er, were you alive during the 80's?
I was still pretty young, but I was still aware of the reputation of Japanese cars: they were a bit more expensive, and cost more to repair, but they NEVER BROKE DOWN.
The quality of Jap cars has actually gone down, what with Ford getting involved and buying Toyota (I think), and the overall globalization of such companies.
Autos now are more expensive and of poorer quality than they were 15-20 years ago. You see almost as many older cars on the road now as you do new ones - I suspect because the old ones simply keep keeping on, while new ones expire relatively quickly in proportion.
The crazy thing is, half-inbred "geeks" (the ones that knew enough to be dangerous) in the 90's would often back MS up in this defense, because either a) they didn't know what really caused it, and "that's just how computers worked", b) they didn't want to blame their precious Microsoft/Bill Gates, or c) they didn't want to accept blame for making their friends/family for running software that's utter shit.
That's why people think it's natural for computers to destroy their work.
I second that.
An H&K USP 40 cal w/ a 4 pound trigger and hollow point won't injure anyone, either. They'll be dead. Unless you hit them in the limb - but only for a short while. They'll likely bleed to death.
If a male breaks into the residence of a female, she's got a good reason to fear for her life and safety. $800 goes a long way for soundness of mind when you purchase a gun - and it's not something that can be broken through or disarmed while the potential victim hides in the back room, clutching their cell phone, crying on the phone to an apathetic 911 dispatch.
A fucking yetti hologram or any other such childish nonsense won't deter anyone. A "home security" system wouldn't do much, either. If you want to go the geeky route, it -might- deter "crime of opportunity" type criminals if you install video cameras and put signs up on the windows, etc. that make mention of "cameras". An alarm won't do anything to the will of a criminal that's going in for jewelry or something quickly then getting his ass out; having his picture taken probably would.
As far as conventional "security" sytems for homes, they're shit. I've got an aquantance that lives in a nice neighborhood where there was some break-ins a couple years back. His neighbor got a top-of-the-line security system. The neighbor was the next victim, and the criminal got away. The next target was my aquantance - who owns a gun. The crook didnt quite make it out the door. My aquantance saved the penal system quite a lot of money with his sub-grand investment.
Short of a gun, get a dog. A big one. But women don't tend to like those.
Sure it is.
Just not at the time being. Wait a while until they can figure out how to best use it to their political advantage.
you know, there's a possibility that it's not a fusion bomb that they set off.
It's possible they've discovered another type of nuclear reaction, fission. It only takes one "eureka!" to figure something out for the first time.
I s'pose it's also remotely possible they've got another type of tech, or it actually is just a fusion bomb.
That just tells me that there's a need for a different kind of futuristic sci-fi. There's a lot of appeal to many people for "steam punk" futures...
I intend to see such a book written.
sounds like this is the re-envisionment of George Lucas' Star Wars. It has all the same elements (sci-fi/fantasy, clear good/bad division, heroes and heroines, 50's pulp fiction feel, destroys the 3rd wall effectively, good music...), but drastically outperforms Episode I. :)
Managers?
It (or the principles, at least) should be required for all college professors to read and comprehend.
I can't tell you the number of times that, in college, I've felt like that largely due to professors that don't give a fuck, don't challenge the students, or even try to make their subjects interesting, while giving large and tedious homework assignments. It's led to my partial loss of interest in many academic fields which, prior to the professors in question, I enjoyed reading and studying about on my own time.
Here's to year 6 and my 4th pick of undergraduate course!
Developers don't add stuff to the "core OS" because they can't. They're not allowed.
Linux is an independent project. It's not run by committee of slashdotters or anything so mundane. It's a situation where Torvalds' word is final. Anything someone were to add would likely have to be a fork - and there are quite a few such forks.
Another thing: you're ignorant about exactly what Linux is. Linux is a kernel. Nothing more, nothing less. RedHat, et al, are distributions. They have a lot of different software. A distro is simply a collection of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of packages.
Your Windows-centric view of an OS is pedantic and disturbing. I hope you don't work in computing.
This seems like a horrible recommendation to me.
Maybe for someone that's only been using linux for a short while, and started with a snazzy RedHat, SuSE, or Mandrake install, this would be a huge step up in complexity and learning potential. However, I'd say it's a bad idea because it takes way too long for the amount of learning that actually takes place: the "gentoo process" automates all the complex things that actually lead to learning; the processing time merely gives an illusion to how to administer a linux machine. I've seen quite a few gentoo people that think they knew a lot, and ended up being bumblefucks when it came to touching anything else.
My recommendation: start with the current debian stable. You'll learn what individual modules do, and you'll start with a minimal installation and be able to configure everything on your own.
Alternatively, start with LFS (linux from scratch). You'll have to start with some sort of Linux install, and it wouldn't matter which. The idea, though, is to learn how to do -everything- from scratch.
Most courses will just teach you how to set up and configure a couple services and some basics about the system, while you don't learn actually how the services work on the system, or get a 'feel' how things work. As a Windows admin, I'm sure you're well aware of the importance of having a "feel" for how a well-tuned system works. The same applies for Linux, just as Windows or a Ford or Chevy.
Whatever path you pick, I'd recommend keeping a notebook full of, well, notes. Not just commands, but principles. It'll help you cement the ideas in our mind. I'd recommend pen and paper vs. a computer, as I find it results in better retention for some reason.
I don't know about you, but the features in WinFS (or the proposed features, at least) can't "manage music" any better than my current setup.
e ltic ... and then, within each of those directories, I've got these directories of band names; within them, directories of albums. How could WinFS provide anything above the current Windows file manager with its various views (tree, flat with previews, etc.) which could possibly suppliment this method of organization?
Root music dir: "music" - I know, that's pretty counter-intuitive.
Under that:
hardcore
emo
punk
techno
jazz
80's
c
rock
orchestral
themes
If people aren't going to bother organizing things into directories or giving intelligent file names to their data, they're sure as hell not going to bother with meta data. Unless WinFS has a full slew of data identification algorithms and a massive database of known matches, there's nothing that WinFS could offer here.
Organization is a mechanism we employ to help us find things. WinFS can not add to this ability, but simply provide a different mechanism for organization. I don't see it helping much, however, as humans have been grouping things into categories and sub categories since the beginning of time, and that is how we think. Unless we're talking about an obscene amount of data, where this would be a "poor man's database", I can't see any practical use for anyone with half a brain.
It would be better for MS to actually enforce the use of "My Documents".
This sounds like the US: lots of expensive computers bought for schools where there is no need, no practical application for them all, or even a single fucking use, as there's way too many.
Computers are education's snake oil, and Microsoft the salesman.
Nonsense. USB flash storage is perfectly inexpensive.
You can purchase 64M keys for as little as $15. That's not the uber-inexpensive price of a floppy (under 2 dollars), but they're cheap enough to trust with someone that you need to get data to long enough for them to get the data.
And, at 64M or more, there's really little need to "stack" them. You've got 64M, ffs. I've got one 64M dongle, and it's more than sufficient for my portable storage needs for misc. files.
Aside from that, laptops are getting pretty omnipresent, as are networks and connections to the Internet. The need for floppies - or any portable media - is significantly reduced by these facts, as it's relatively easy to get online and even mail yourself a file.
remember 5 or so years ago when all the planes had handsets built into the seatbacks for the passengers behind them to use?
then cell phones became universal amongst business travelers overnight, and the airline's bitched and moaned about all their lost revenue.
now they're "working on something" to allow cell phones to be used in-flight? they can already be used in-flight, as they've got direct line-of-sight with quite a few towers.
does anyone remember when cell phones were actually banned from use in airplanes? was it before, during, or after the advent of the seat-back airline phones that cost exhorbinant amounts?
if during or after (or even shortly before and possibly associated), doesn't it seem a bit suspicious that the ban might be directly linked to the installation of the seat-back phones? ie, "cell phones are dangerous, so use our 30 cent/minute phones instead".
THere are some games that have awesome creators.
Take Deus Ex (the first one) for example. Incredible story, awesome gameplay, and a complex game world all lead to a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Granted, it was a literary's game, as it had a lot of references to culture and literature, but I think that certainly added rather than subtracted from the overall gameplay experience. It had a head to it, unlike most games which are fairly base in their approach to entertainment.
Max Payne is another example of a stunning presentation and execution. Though drastically different in gameplay, it still had an awesome story and felt "finished". Nothing was out of place.
All the good films that are remembered tend to have these same elements. They get you involved with the characters and the story and help you form emotional attachments.
B&W had some good things about it, but the overall implimentation was lacking. The bugs were frustrating, the gameplay drawn out and poorly paced, and the actual goal and the method by which to execute it were pretty nebulous until you got further into it... never played Populous. I don't remember anything about it.
The main issue here is that corporations are greedy for profits.
Profit margins, specifically. if something doens't yield a certain profit over a certain period of time, fuck it.
That, and people are mostly satisfied with the broadband that they have. You don't need much bandwidth for chat, games, and browsing. Usually just browsing and chat. Joe Average doesn't need synchronous 10Mbit up/down. He probably wouldn't care for it over his current setup if he had it, as he'd not know what to do with it.
This will continue as long as the "only" option is the current telcos. They'll milk their current business model for $35/month for 'minimal' bandwidth as long as possible.
No mystery there.
Computers are a drug, just like any other substance. Computers (and technology) provide a medium that consumes a person's attention. We geeks are hooked to the mental distraction that computers provide from the real world: social interaction, the stress of daily obligations, the tedious and unchanging nature of much of life. In my life, many of the geeks I know have other addictions: smoking, drinking, caffine.
Look up the stereotypical behavior of a drug addict, and you'll notice that, if you too are a computer geek, these behaviors match your own quite well.
re: software on the Zaurus - it is good. just don't use the sharp rom. use openzaurus (openzaurus.org). It is many times better: more stable, more features, and easier to manage. I'd suggest (beta) version 3.3.7-1 (something like that).
;) that, and the applications take a fair bit of time to load from flash. but I got mine (5500) for free, so I really can't complain. :P
My one gripe about the zaurus is that all the cool peripherals that are needed to get it to do what I want cost a good deal of money.
256 greyscale LCD (to conserve power) with decent resolution/size so that text would be readable at arm's length w/o being bunched. Having the option for interchangeable color/greyscale LCDs at time of purchase (or after purchase) would also be nice, but not really necessary, IMO
SD, CF, and possibly a PCMCIA slot for expansion and storeage
chicklet buttons/keys (or something like them) with generic/programmable function - none of these fairly useless "application" buttons which just take up pocket real estate most of the time. It would also be nice to be able to have an easy mechanism by which I can assign them (for instance, have one of the buttons be 'enter' or 'ok', another for 'open the sound recording software and start recording' - the zaurus 5500 which I have comes close to this)
IR and probably bluetooth - for more expandability, but also potentially for a...
fully-typeable, non-cramping keyboard - I don't care if it's built into the device somehow (doubtful it could be easily achieved), or independent (similar to the pocketop). I don't want to have to learn a new, proprietary input method to enter text at a reasonable speed on a portable device.
at least 5 hours of operational battery life, because I don't want to have to recharge it daily
the ability to blank the screen and still have the machine running (the zaurus can do this, but it's hindered still by battery life. I should be able to run the device -all day- while performing audio/text input in this mode)
a sturdy design with screen protection the zaurus, as well, is decent enough in this dept. for me, with a plastic 'shield' purchaseable seperately
as compact a design as possible - it should only be marginally larger than the screen itself, with maybe 1.5cm at the bottom/side/whatever for buttons. depth of the device isn't -too- important, but no thicker than, say, 3cm. That might be a bit too thick - I don't have a ruler, and my brain doesn't often use metric. Maybe more like 2.5cm.
the ability to run linux - this is important for me; I'd prefer if it were a linux device, as I think the software that comes for linux PDAs is awesome. it also allows me to use the machine for a lot more than just keeping notes, as linux is quite versatile.
mininum specs somewhere around 250MHz ARM (Xscale 400MHz would do nicely), 64Mb RAM (96M would be nice), 32M internal storeage - this seems perfectly reasonable to expect for $400 or so, what with the fairly insignificant price of memory and the ever-decreasing cost of hw production
Yes, it is a shortcoming of the OS.
If the OS provides APIs which are administrator-only APIs for application development, they need to provide some mechanism for non-admin users to activate them selectively (ie, with the admin password). There's absolutely no reason why a user should not be able to run an application as a specific other user.
If I can't play a game as a non-administrator user due to restrictions with DirectX API, then there's a problem with the API. There are quite a few things like this in Windows.
Wow, my life must suck. My experience has been a complete counter-example to each of your points in some fashion (which you don't mention).
/home gets fucked and quotas are reduced with no warning due to budgeting. Or simply because the sysadmin felt like cleaning. (Juniata College)
1) Campus-provided data storage is also some of the most unreliable storage I've ever seen. Need space to upgrade the server?
2) Labs cost 5 - 10 cents - per page - to print. That gets expensive quickly, unless you only have a couple things to print out each quarter. (South Dakota State University)
3) It gets painfully cold in the winters. Even though campus is only ~1 mile across (and most stuff is only a couple hundred yards), it is impossible to walk across it, as there are massive snow drifts covering all the open places. I'm talking about -20F, without wind chill factored in. There's often 40 mph winds out here in the winter, and it's the norm to have 30+ mph winds - so it feels like -50. It will take a skinny person such as myself well over an hour to recover from 5 minutes outdoors in such weather. (South Dakota)
Yes, I've been to some shitty schools.