Atom is really, really poor at running Flash, which is what Joe Average cares of. If YouTube and web games don't work on your new netbook, and Flash banners grind your browser to a halt, that's a major problem for consumers. The anecdotal evidence I have of people purchasing netbooks, the primary decision point in getting one was the price. I haven't personally talked to a single netbook owner who was happy about the device's performance more than a week after they got it, so you can probably consider yourself to be in a minority, with a specific primary use-case that does work on the device. For most other people, netbooks just didn't perform well enough.
My mother despises MacOS and can't "figure anything out." I've made some relatives get a Mac and I concur. While I do think Macs make you more productive than Windows or Linux (with exceptions, of course), I don't think Mac OS is any easier to learn than Windows.
The few older people I've guided through the OS are having severe usability problems, some of which are stuff which is actually done better in Windows. For example, OS X doesn't have a way to lock the Dock from accidental drags by default. I dislike the Start Bar but at least there Joe Average won't accidentally remove his apps by one misguided click'n'drag.
I'm happy to deal with these issues though. The relatives who insist on Windows without bothering about security upgrades are much harder. Maybe you could ask your mom whether she'd prefer to have to do her own support for updates and virus protection or have you help her with the mac?:)
I believe the exact sales figures haven't been published but the Fallout series has sold millions of copies worldwide. This squarely puts Fallout into the "well known game" segment.
And hey, I don't care. Fallout 1 & 2 are my all-time favorite adventure games. I'm seriously worried about my life going down the drain if a Fallout MMO ever comes out.:)
You're assuming everyone is going to Sun's Java developer website. If you google for "java download" or go to java.com and click the big honking arrow on the top of the page (or whichever way most of the consumers do), you end up here:
This page has exactly one download button that points to a download which in turn just happens to be the JRE. I fail to see how you end up on a page with Netbeans if you're looking to download Java and don't automatically start from java.sun.com.
Uhh... I bet you haven't ever administrated a large website.
When you have a lot of concurrent users, the amount of TCP sockets you can have open on a given server while still maintaining good throughput is limited. If all users out there had 20 sockets open to each server, making sites scale would be seriously hard on very large sites.
I do agree the two socket limit is a bit low but 20 would be a total overkill.
If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously!
Umm, nobody puts a server with 250 watt power supply into a data center.
Any serious rack mount server has at least 500 watt power supply and most of the time there's two of them in the box. Heck, you'll find dual 500 watt power supplies even in one rack unit boxes. If you go check the 4 rack unit boxes, many specify maximum input of more than 1500 watts of power. Hence a 44-unit rack can easily pull in close to 20k watts. For a data center, you don't want to go anywhere near the maximum specified amount of output power of the generator so if you count a generous 30% safety margin for the generator, you actually end up with a maximum of about 80 racks of support from one generator and that's not actually too much. If you want to make sure a generator failure doesn't pull down the system, you'll need two generators...
So yes, you do actually need a really stiff generator for even modest size datacenter if you want to provide top-notch quality. I'm glad I'm not in that line of business...
With such simple, easy to obtain, objective like that I'm sure they will have absolutely no problem living up to people's expectations.
Hell yeah. I was in the GDC keynote this year and I recall that by that time they had already created over 400 prototypes for the simulation models in the game. 400 for crying out loud! What I gathered is what they're trying to achieve is anything but simple. If they were just creating a simulation then sure, it'd be "easy" to create one. But making a game that's based on a simulation, man, that's tough.
(You were being sarcastic, right?)
Not quite last mile, but..
on
Own the Last Mile
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In the apartment complex I live in, we installed HomePNA equipment that's owned by the complex. As a result, we're paying an ISP only for the hooked ADSL connections and thus have been able to both cut down costs get a faster connections over time. I'm paying $2 a month for a 1 mbit/s connection so this strategy certainly has worked for us. Yes, the total bandwidth (16mbit/s) is shared by everyone participating but this far I've actually gotten that amount of bandwidth every time I tried.
You're failing to mention that every company operating in Finland also has to pay to the church. Part of the "communal tax" that's mandatory to all companies is paid to the Lutheran Church, no matter who works in the company. Effectively this causes everyone spending money in the country contributing to the Church. Last year they got 86 million euros this way, or about 17 euros per capita. I'd rather have that in my pocket and have a couple more pints.;)
IANAL, AFAIK (and a couple other acronyms later) an EULA is not valid in most countries of the world unless it's a signed piece of paper or digitally signed in a manner equivalent to a real signature. I have no idea if a shrink-wrap or a web checkbox EULA has been put to trial in US but I wouldn't be surprised that even there the courts didn't think the EULA practices of most companies are somewhat fishy. I know for a fact the Finnish ombudsman and the law considers EULAs of practically no worth.
What I've found particularly odd about EULAs is that most of the time they're repeating things already in the law. It's useless to repeat piracy and hacking is illegal in the EULA if it's already illegal. If it's not, it's not like the EULA is going to make a difference, in or out of the court.
Nope, there's a big difference between these libraries.
The Y! framework still requires you to write HTML and Javascript - they just make implementing DHTML effects + AJAX less painful.
The Google framework removes the base need for HTML and Javascript authoring from the application development process entirely. Obviously you'll want to make the app look nice and need custom styling but in order to actually develop the functionality, zero HTML is needed.
As a consequence you can use the Yahoo stuff with any backend implementation language (PHP, Java, whatever) while the Google framework is limited to strictly Java. I don't mind though.:)
You have to convince all 200+ countries to demilitarize. Simultaneously. You won't be able to.
True, however some are trying. The Finnish military has announced they're cutting down on the number of permanent staff quite significantly. It doesn't mean they're demilitarizing to any extent but proves there are countries out there who aren't actually increasing the military costs every year.
Coming to think of it I wouldn't be surprised we're the only country in the world to do so.:) Maybe it's because we have Conan O'Brien on our side now and he'll protect us. Does anyone have other examples of governments trying to reduce the military spending?
One big a bullet is to not promise too much in the beginning. If your read the initial lists of features Longhorn was supposed to have, no wonder it's late - MS indicated they'd reinvent the wheel on every part of the OS. Similarly on 360, they promised a hell of a lot given the project schedule. Most likely if you downclocked the CPU's in 360 by 10% the number of issues people are having would be dramatically reduced but then the machine wouldn't sound as good in marketing as it does now.
If you look at Apple as a sample, they're doing pretty well at only telling the release schedule when they know they can hold it. OS X has had a number of new versions come over the years now and each of them has improved things a lot. None of the updates has been nearly as big a change as what Longhorn promises to deliver on the Windows platform but that doesn't matter since users have happily installed all these updates that made their computers better.
Coming to think of it, hearing Steve Jobs announce the next iPod's specs six months before it ships would sound really odd.:)
Interesting.. Some reports Finnish reader of this news in Sektori.com (in Finnish) reports Contents\GO.EXE file seems to contain parts of the LAME player. Can anyone verify this? Is Sony distributing LGPL software on the CDs?
"The wording from the security company has me thinking they're just trying to make a name for themselves."
I was just about to comment the same - if every Internet Explorer crash bug was reported with this much visibility, Slash would be full of news every day.
I'd be quite happy to get an EU-wide system though and I live in one of the countries you mentioned.
In Finland, if a musician want to get royalties on their music, they have to join Teosto. After you join, you waive the right to protect your rights to the organization and thus loose control over your own music. For example, the organization requires artists pay the royalties on their own productions if they want to distribute them for free over then Internet.
I have a couple friends who wanted to put MP3's of a couple songs that didn't make it to a CD to web to promote their new album but they couldn't do it since they would have had to pay Teosto for each download.
Teosto is also incredibly protective of the format in which you've purchased your music and was integral part in getting the new Finnish copyright law through which makes converting protected CD's to MP3 illegal. For non-protected music, they even try to get people to purchase a license to convert old recordings - DJ's are expected to pay 800 EUR / year for the privilege of converting old vinyls to CD's so they could play them in new joints that don't have an old-style record player.
And this is the organization which is supposed to protect the artist's rights! You don't get money if you don't join and if you do, they do a good job trying to protect you from yourself.
With this kind of organizations in control, I'd be happy to get a Europe-wide agency as it can't get _any_ worse than it is now and at least I'd be more likely to get a good selection of music to the local iTunes store.
Sure, sure. I remember distinctly how poor drivers ground my PC to a halt when formatting a floppy under Win 95's "semi-co-operative almost-pre-emptive" multitasking. Macs at least were honest about the machine not letting you do anything when formatting.:)
Go to Finder, press Apple-F to open the Find menu. In the area labelled "Search for items whose", change "Name" in the pulldown menu to "Content". Type the words you want to search in the textbox, click Search. You'll get your files sorted by relevance to your query.
From your terminology, it seems to me you're using Windows.
In the current version of OS X, Finder's Find feature is actually quite fast. I just checked, my two year old 1GHz Powerbook finds all of my harddrive's 1124 ".doc" files in about ten seconds. If I use the default location for searches (my Home directory), the search is much faster - to the point where it really is faster to use the search than navigate the folders.
If Tiger is faster than this, I'll be very positively surprised.
And yes, I'm sure Longhorn will make you Explore less - I'll be happy with my Finder in the meantime.:)
Please answer the following question: what made him think people would use the itunes domain address for searching his search engine in the first place? Has he advertised the domain name in public?
If the only use for the domain has been to catch anyone who thinks there's an iTunes.co.uk service and he hasn't advertised any service under that name, it's quite clear he's been relying on someone launching a service with the name.
I've seen a ton of sites being captured for the use of directing users to a "search engine". Most of these engines are either blatant marketing ploys or virus-spreading sites. If you've checked the Quick Quid site, you'll see it's mostly the former. If you sign up, you're allowing your address to be sold to third parties who may contact you with just about any means, including messages to your mobile!
Exactly how is this service described with the name "iTunes"?
Slashdot Mirror
Atom is really, really poor at running Flash, which is what Joe Average cares of. If YouTube and web games don't work on your new netbook, and Flash banners grind your browser to a halt, that's a major problem for consumers. The anecdotal evidence I have of people purchasing netbooks, the primary decision point in getting one was the price. I haven't personally talked to a single netbook owner who was happy about the device's performance more than a week after they got it, so you can probably consider yourself to be in a minority, with a specific primary use-case that does work on the device. For most other people, netbooks just didn't perform well enough.
The few older people I've guided through the OS are having severe usability problems, some of which are stuff which is actually done better in Windows. For example, OS X doesn't have a way to lock the Dock from accidental drags by default. I dislike the Start Bar but at least there Joe Average won't accidentally remove his apps by one misguided click'n'drag.
I'm happy to deal with these issues though. The relatives who insist on Windows without bothering about security upgrades are much harder. Maybe you could ask your mom whether she'd prefer to have to do her own support for updates and virus protection or have you help her with the mac?
I believe the exact sales figures haven't been published but the Fallout series has sold millions of copies worldwide. This squarely puts Fallout into the "well known game" segment.
:)
And hey, I don't care. Fallout 1 & 2 are my all-time favorite adventure games. I'm seriously worried about my life going down the drain if a Fallout MMO ever comes out.
PEBKAC.
You're assuming everyone is going to Sun's Java developer website. If you google for "java download" or go to java.com and click the big honking arrow on the top of the page (or whichever way most of the consumers do), you end up here:
http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp
This page has exactly one download button that points to a download which in turn just happens to be the JRE. I fail to see how you end up on a page with Netbeans if you're looking to download Java and don't automatically start from java.sun.com.
Uhh... I bet you haven't ever administrated a large website.
When you have a lot of concurrent users, the amount of TCP sockets you can have open on a given server while still maintaining good throughput is limited. If all users out there had 20 sockets open to each server, making sites scale would be seriously hard on very large sites.
I do agree the two socket limit is a bit low but 20 would be a total overkill.
If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously!
Umm, nobody puts a server with 250 watt power supply into a data center.
Any serious rack mount server has at least 500 watt power supply and most of the time there's two of them in the box. Heck, you'll find dual 500 watt power supplies even in one rack unit boxes. If you go check the 4 rack unit boxes, many specify maximum input of more than 1500 watts of power. Hence a 44-unit rack can easily pull in close to 20k watts. For a data center, you don't want to go anywhere near the maximum specified amount of output power of the generator so if you count a generous 30% safety margin for the generator, you actually end up with a maximum of about 80 racks of support from one generator and that's not actually too much. If you want to make sure a generator failure doesn't pull down the system, you'll need two generators...
So yes, you do actually need a really stiff generator for even modest size datacenter if you want to provide top-notch quality. I'm glad I'm not in that line of business...
With such simple, easy to obtain, objective like that I'm sure they will have absolutely no problem living up to people's expectations.
Hell yeah. I was in the GDC keynote this year and I recall that by that time they had already created over 400 prototypes for the simulation models in the game. 400 for crying out loud! What I gathered is what they're trying to achieve is anything but simple. If they were just creating a simulation then sure, it'd be "easy" to create one. But making a game that's based on a simulation, man, that's tough.
(You were being sarcastic, right?)
In the apartment complex I live in, we installed HomePNA equipment that's owned by the complex. As a result, we're paying an ISP only for the hooked ADSL connections and thus have been able to both cut down costs get a faster connections over time. I'm paying $2 a month for a 1 mbit/s connection so this strategy certainly has worked for us. Yes, the total bandwidth (16mbit/s) is shared by everyone participating but this far I've actually gotten that amount of bandwidth every time I tried.
You're failing to mention that every company operating in Finland also has to pay to the church. Part of the "communal tax" that's mandatory to all companies is paid to the Lutheran Church, no matter who works in the company. Effectively this causes everyone spending money in the country contributing to the Church. Last year they got 86 million euros this way, or about 17 euros per capita. I'd rather have that in my pocket and have a couple more pints. ;)
IANAL, AFAIK (and a couple other acronyms later) an EULA is not valid in most countries of the world unless it's a signed piece of paper or digitally signed in a manner equivalent to a real signature. I have no idea if a shrink-wrap or a web checkbox EULA has been put to trial in US but I wouldn't be surprised that even there the courts didn't think the EULA practices of most companies are somewhat fishy. I know for a fact the Finnish ombudsman and the law considers EULAs of practically no worth.
What I've found particularly odd about EULAs is that most of the time they're repeating things already in the law. It's useless to repeat piracy and hacking is illegal in the EULA if it's already illegal. If it's not, it's not like the EULA is going to make a difference, in or out of the court.
Nope, there's a big difference between these libraries.
:)
The Y! framework still requires you to write HTML and Javascript - they just make implementing DHTML effects + AJAX less painful.
The Google framework removes the base need for HTML and Javascript authoring from the application development process entirely. Obviously you'll want to make the app look nice and need custom styling but in order to actually develop the functionality, zero HTML is needed.
As a consequence you can use the Yahoo stuff with any backend implementation language (PHP, Java, whatever) while the Google framework is limited to strictly Java. I don't mind though.
You have to convince all 200+ countries to demilitarize. Simultaneously. You won't be able to.
:) Maybe it's because we have Conan O'Brien on our side now and he'll protect us. Does anyone have other examples of governments trying to reduce the military spending?
True, however some are trying. The Finnish military has announced they're cutting down on the number of permanent staff quite significantly. It doesn't mean they're demilitarizing to any extent but proves there are countries out there who aren't actually increasing the military costs every year.
Coming to think of it I wouldn't be surprised we're the only country in the world to do so.
The missing packages include a lot of support libraries for old hardware which are useless on the new platform.
Can you create a list of missing libraries that are useful and/or needed on x86 Macs?
One big a bullet is to not promise too much in the beginning. If your read the initial lists of features Longhorn was supposed to have, no wonder it's late - MS indicated they'd reinvent the wheel on every part of the OS. Similarly on 360, they promised a hell of a lot given the project schedule. Most likely if you downclocked the CPU's in 360 by 10% the number of issues people are having would be dramatically reduced but then the machine wouldn't sound as good in marketing as it does now.
:)
If you look at Apple as a sample, they're doing pretty well at only telling the release schedule when they know they can hold it. OS X has had a number of new versions come over the years now and each of them has improved things a lot. None of the updates has been nearly as big a change as what Longhorn promises to deliver on the Windows platform but that doesn't matter since users have happily installed all these updates that made their computers better.
Coming to think of it, hearing Steve Jobs announce the next iPod's specs six months before it ships would sound really odd.
The real question is...
Can it make someone blow you?
Interesting.. Some reports Finnish reader of this news in Sektori.com (in Finnish) reports Contents\GO.EXE file seems to contain parts of the LAME player. Can anyone verify this? Is Sony distributing LGPL software on the CDs?
"The wording from the security company has me thinking they're just trying to make a name for themselves."
I was just about to comment the same - if every Internet Explorer crash bug was reported with this much visibility, Slash would be full of news every day.
I'd be quite happy to get an EU-wide system though and I live in one of the countries you mentioned.
In Finland, if a musician want to get royalties on their music, they have to join Teosto. After you join, you waive the right to protect your rights to the organization and thus loose control over your own music. For example, the organization requires artists pay the royalties on their own productions if they want to distribute them for free over then Internet.
I have a couple friends who wanted to put MP3's of a couple songs that didn't make it to a CD to web to promote their new album but they couldn't do it since they would have had to pay Teosto for each download.
Teosto is also incredibly protective of the format in which you've purchased your music and was integral part in getting the new Finnish copyright law through which makes converting protected CD's to MP3 illegal. For non-protected music, they even try to get people to purchase a license to convert old recordings - DJ's are expected to pay 800 EUR / year for the privilege of converting old vinyls to CD's so they could play them in new joints that don't have an old-style record player.
And this is the organization which is supposed to protect the artist's rights! You don't get money if you don't join and if you do, they do a good job trying to protect you from yourself.
With this kind of organizations in control, I'd be happy to get a Europe-wide agency as it can't get _any_ worse than it is now and at least I'd be more likely to get a good selection of music to the local iTunes store.
I saw a photo of the screen on a website and the contrast looks exactly like my current screen. Where's the improvement?
Sure, sure. I remember distinctly how poor drivers ground my PC to a halt when formatting a floppy under Win 95's "semi-co-operative almost-pre-emptive" multitasking. Macs at least were honest about the machine not letting you do anything when formatting. :)
Go to Finder, press Apple-F to open the Find menu. In the area labelled "Search for items whose", change "Name" in the pulldown menu to "Content". Type the words you want to search in the textbox, click Search. You'll get your files sorted by relevance to your query.
From your terminology, it seems to me you're using Windows.
:)
In the current version of OS X, Finder's Find feature is actually quite fast. I just checked, my two year old 1GHz Powerbook finds all of my harddrive's 1124 ".doc" files in about ten seconds. If I use the default location for searches (my Home directory), the search is much faster - to the point where it really is faster to use the search than navigate the folders.
If Tiger is faster than this, I'll be very positively surprised.
And yes, I'm sure Longhorn will make you Explore less - I'll be happy with my Finder in the meantime.
Yes, games won't benefit. However everyone here seems to forget graphics accelerators aren't just for games anymore.
I'd love to see how much Apple's Core Image and Core Video benefit from the added RAM. Compositing at HD resolutions requires lots and lots of memory!
Seems like the hoaxters are aiming at the /. community now.
Yeah, right.
Please answer the following question: what made him think people would use the itunes domain address for searching his search engine in the first place? Has he advertised the domain name in public?
If the only use for the domain has been to catch anyone who thinks there's an iTunes.co.uk service and he hasn't advertised any service under that name, it's quite clear he's been relying on someone launching a service with the name.
I've seen a ton of sites being captured for the use of directing users to a "search engine". Most of these engines are either blatant marketing ploys or virus-spreading sites. If you've checked the Quick Quid site, you'll see it's mostly the former. If you sign up, you're allowing your address to be sold to third parties who may contact you with just about any means, including messages to your mobile!
Exactly how is this service described with the name "iTunes"?