4) costs less to purchase initially than two of its consumable refills do
This is the important one, along with your #1. A toy printer is any printer that is super cheap until you use it - at which point it becomes horribly expensive.
Unfortunately, they're wildly popular. Dell can give them away for free because the manufacturer will make a killing as soon as the user buys a replacement cartridge. This is that same scam that tries to make compatible cartriges proprietary - because their profit is entirely dependant on selling the user ink for, literally, more money than gold by weight.
The resources for Linux programming aren't as centralized as they are for commerical systems, but they are very good quality after the couple seconds it takes to figure out where they are.
I'd start with the following:
The man pages and info documentation included with any Linux system.
The Gnome and KDE developer sites. If you're developing commercial software, develop for Gnome and your app will work fine on KDE.
For specific applications like graphics and audio, you may need to use other libraries (i.e. libsdl and wxWidgets)
If you have any questions, there is 24/7 live human technical support for application developers on IRC. Don't undervalue this - being able to ask a real human and get an immediate answer is huge. (try asking in irc.freenode.net #linux or #debian for what channel to ask specific questions if you can't figure it out)
Why are you so attached to forked filesystems? There's no technical advantage that I'm aware of to making the filesystem more complicated rather than making the file manager more complicated.
Either way, anyone who actually wanted to implement something like that would need to deal with all the issues that come from producing a completely new operating system. I'd reccommend that you either do it, or accept the fact that modern operating systems are eithor Unix or watered down VMS - and that the MacOS/Desktop Linux solution of hiding Unix is probably the best end user solution in the forseeable future.
The way I look at it is that a Windows PC is another kind of game console - like an X-Box or Playstation. If you want to play Age of Empires III, you'll need a WindowsPC.
Most computer users, expecially in business settings, don't need a WindowsPC game console - they need a desktop computer. For a desktop computer, Linux is a perfectly functional operating system.
Your story about your friend is interesting, but the fact is that setting up new installation of Windows is no less complex than a Ubuntu install. MP3s may work by default on Windows, but getting random video codecs working can be easier on Linux (usually if you get one working, you get them all working whereas on Windows you'll download a codec pack that screws up your system or find a 3ivX video that doesn't work).
That doesn't make an attack profile based on latencies greater than the useful lifetime of computer software any more feasable. It'd be like trying to perform attacks on the current internet using only data from the wayback machine set to 1990 - except harder.
What he's talking about is really basic stuff. There's no reason expect to be able to get a job without some background knowledge. Applying to a Unix admin job not knowing what ssh or 'df' are is like applying to be a carpenter and not knowing the difference between a hammer and a board - yes, it's possible to train people in, but it's a reasonable expectation that everyone who applys knows it.
He didn't fuck up the quote at all. The theory that he was mentioning takes your quote and further determines "If it's going to take 4 times as much time to solve 1/4th as much problem, we'd be better off ignoring the problem".
This plan always gets shoddy results, but you can usually sell a shoddy product for more than 1/5th of the price of a quality product, hence saving 80% of the work can seem like a good business choice.
The microsoft web fonts are available on any debian-derived distribution in the "msttcorefonts" package. The list is: Andale, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings.
Unfortunately, Tahoma has not been authorized by microsoft for redistribution, so you'll need to manually move it from a Windows installation if you want to use it. It would probably be better to use one of the excellent free fonts included in Ubuntu, because then you can redistribute the font you're using if you want to. The Bitsteam Vera family are my personal favorites.
For one computer, that would be security through obscurity. For "the computers on the internet" (which is what he was referring to), it would be a perfectly valid security claim.
With IPv4, and 100 million vulnerable connected computers, a worm will find a computer to infect in an average of 42 attempts. That means that with an optimal task distribution algorithm, the worm can infect every infectable computer on the network in the time it takes that first computer to try 1500 addresses. That's like 5 minutes.
With IPv6, that sort of attack wouldn't be feasable. Instead of taking an average of 42 trys to find the first target, it would take 3*10^30 trys. At a billion trys per second, that's still ten million billion years to find the first target. Realistically, the attack space could probably be reduced significantly, but even given the portion of an IPv6 address that is assigned by an ISP, you'd need to guess the user's MAC address to contact their computer.
One of the points of IPv6 is that people are assigned addresses that are "theirs", forever; they can take them to any provider, any where and they'll work.
Not true. That would be a routing nightmare. With IPv6, everyone is supposed to rely on DNS and automatically assigned IP addresses even more than they do today.
What would you rather have again? Good CPU or good GPU?
Once you have a decent CPU, most games are GPU-bound. Therefore, its far more important to have a top of the line video card for gaming than to have an amazing processor.
A good video card will significantly increase your enjoyment of computer games. As long as you're using junk cards, I'm not suprised that you are happy with the X-box graphics - a good video card (and the controls) are really what defines the computer gaming experience.
Btw. From a transistor count perspective, a $250 video card smokes a Pentium 4. A Nvidia 7800 GTX has 300 million transistors, compared to 125 million for an Intel Pentium IV "Prescott" 3.2 ghz.
Another interesting point is that a GeForce 7800 GTX has more transistors than an X-box, a PS2, and an Athlon 64 FX 55 combined.
The 6600 isn't a bad card, and if you're on a budget I'd totally recommend it. On the other hand, you can get significantly better performance for more money.
Now, I'm not saying that these games aren't fun at 1024x768 with dynamic lighting turned off, blob shadows, and "medium" resolution textures, but it's still like the difference between watching a movie on an old television versus seeing it in a theater.
If you have the money, you can make your games look significantly better for the price of two games. Why *wouldn't* you do it?
The brackets for video cards are: under $100 - trash. $100 - $200 - cheap. $200 - $300 - mid-range. $300+ - high end.
This is based off of what price ranges you need to be in to get the same performance as the next bracket up from the last generation, ignoring new graphics features. It took two full product design cycles for Nvidia's trash card (now the 6200) to match the old mid range card (The Ti 4400).
According to this pattern, you won't be able to get the performance of a 7800 GT out of a sub $100 video card for two full design cycles, or about 4 years from now in 2009.
F.E.A.R. actually has really nice graphics on a decent card. Your problem is the FX 5200. It doesn't really support any of the graphics options that new games use like programable shaders, while actually being a slower card than the midrange cards of the previous generation.
You can get a 6600GT for like $120 now, and if that's too expensive for you you can probably find a GeForce Ti 4400 on Ebay for like $25, which would be a solid upgrade from the 5200.
Until you get to about the $250 range, image quality doubles for every $60. The real question is: Are you actually interested in playing current video games? If so, a $250 card is clearly worth it. If not, then an X-box or Playstation isn't worth it either.
$250 is a small price to pay for a good GPU. The gaming experience really is $60 better than a $190 card, which easily is worth $60 more than a $130 card.
For the cost of 2 new video games you can double your screen resolution and add stuff like HDR lighting (So you can actually see stuff in poorly lit rooms in games). I really don't see why you wouldn't do it.
I really don't understand this. A video card is a module that you drop into a computer to let it play video games. People seem perfectly happy to spend $300 for a console every five years - I see no reason why it isn't reasonable to spend $250 on a new video card every 3 years for a higher end than consoles computer gaming experience.
It comes with a fully functional suite of desktop productivity software, also for $0.
You can download more software through the built in package manager at no cost. Ubuntu has 17000+ software packages available.
You can legally share it with your friends.
No vendor lock-in. Linux is supported by numerous different companies and individuals, many of whom offer support at levels up to and including programming new features for any of the standard applications.
The second hand information I've heard from actual blind people implies that emacs for the blind is a better platform for blind people than any screenreader + gui hack.
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This is the important one, along with your #1. A toy printer is any printer that is super cheap until you use it - at which point it becomes horribly expensive.
Unfortunately, they're wildly popular. Dell can give them away for free because the manufacturer will make a killing as soon as the user buys a replacement cartridge. This is that same scam that tries to make compatible cartriges proprietary - because their profit is entirely dependant on selling the user ink for, literally, more money than gold by weight.
I'd start with the following:
Either way, anyone who actually wanted to implement something like that would need to deal with all the issues that come from producing a completely new operating system. I'd reccommend that you either do it, or accept the fact that modern operating systems are eithor Unix or watered down VMS - and that the MacOS/Desktop Linux solution of hiding Unix is probably the best end user solution in the forseeable future.
The way I look at it is that a Windows PC is another kind of game console - like an X-Box or Playstation. If you want to play Age of Empires III, you'll need a WindowsPC. Most computer users, expecially in business settings, don't need a WindowsPC game console - they need a desktop computer. For a desktop computer, Linux is a perfectly functional operating system. Your story about your friend is interesting, but the fact is that setting up new installation of Windows is no less complex than a Ubuntu install. MP3s may work by default on Windows, but getting random video codecs working can be easier on Linux (usually if you get one working, you get them all working whereas on Windows you'll download a codec pack that screws up your system or find a 3ivX video that doesn't work).
That doesn't make an attack profile based on latencies greater than the useful lifetime of computer software any more feasable. It'd be like trying to perform attacks on the current internet using only data from the wayback machine set to 1990 - except harder.
Right... and it's looking like it's not going to work that way any more. Sorry.
What he's talking about is really basic stuff. There's no reason expect to be able to get a job without some background knowledge. Applying to a Unix admin job not knowing what ssh or 'df' are is like applying to be a carpenter and not knowing the difference between a hammer and a board - yes, it's possible to train people in, but it's a reasonable expectation that everyone who applys knows it.
He didn't fuck up the quote at all. The theory that he was mentioning takes your quote and further determines "If it's going to take 4 times as much time to solve 1/4th as much problem, we'd be better off ignoring the problem". This plan always gets shoddy results, but you can usually sell a shoddy product for more than 1/5th of the price of a quality product, hence saving 80% of the work can seem like a good business choice.
The microsoft web fonts are available on any debian-derived distribution in the "msttcorefonts" package. The list is: Andale, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings. Unfortunately, Tahoma has not been authorized by microsoft for redistribution, so you'll need to manually move it from a Windows installation if you want to use it. It would probably be better to use one of the excellent free fonts included in Ubuntu, because then you can redistribute the font you're using if you want to. The Bitsteam Vera family are my personal favorites.
With IPv4, and 100 million vulnerable connected computers, a worm will find a computer to infect in an average of 42 attempts. That means that with an optimal task distribution algorithm, the worm can infect every infectable computer on the network in the time it takes that first computer to try 1500 addresses. That's like 5 minutes.
With IPv6, that sort of attack wouldn't be feasable. Instead of taking an average of 42 trys to find the first target, it would take 3*10^30 trys. At a billion trys per second, that's still ten million billion years to find the first target. Realistically, the attack space could probably be reduced significantly, but even given the portion of an IPv6 address that is assigned by an ISP, you'd need to guess the user's MAC address to contact their computer.
Not true. That would be a routing nightmare. With IPv6, everyone is supposed to rely on DNS and automatically assigned IP addresses even more than they do today.
Unless you actually RTFA, in which case you see that the actual figures were somewhat higher than that.
So... what you're really saying is that as a Windows user you find Windows easier to use than other stuff that you haven't bothered to learn.
Once you have a decent CPU, most games are GPU-bound. Therefore, its far more important to have a top of the line video card for gaming than to have an amazing processor.
A good video card will significantly increase your enjoyment of computer games. As long as you're using junk cards, I'm not suprised that you are happy with the X-box graphics - a good video card (and the controls) are really what defines the computer gaming experience. Btw. From a transistor count perspective, a $250 video card smokes a Pentium 4. A Nvidia 7800 GTX has 300 million transistors, compared to 125 million for an Intel Pentium IV "Prescott" 3.2 ghz. Another interesting point is that a GeForce 7800 GTX has more transistors than an X-box, a PS2, and an Athlon 64 FX 55 combined.
A 46 minute episode in SDTV format looks great as a 350 meg XviD, so you can easily fit the whole thing in at about 800 gigs.
The 6600 isn't a bad card, and if you're on a budget I'd totally recommend it. On the other hand, you can get significantly better performance for more money.
Now, I'm not saying that these games aren't fun at 1024x768 with dynamic lighting turned off, blob shadows, and "medium" resolution textures, but it's still like the difference between watching a movie on an old television versus seeing it in a theater.
If you have the money, you can make your games look significantly better for the price of two games. Why *wouldn't* you do it?
$209 is a midrange card.
The brackets for video cards are:
under $100 - trash.
$100 - $200 - cheap.
$200 - $300 - mid-range.
$300+ - high end.
This is based off of what price ranges you need to be in to get the same performance as the next bracket up from the last generation, ignoring new graphics features. It took two full product design cycles for Nvidia's trash card (now the 6200) to match the old mid range card (The Ti 4400).
According to this pattern, you won't be able to get the performance of a 7800 GT out of a sub $100 video card for two full design cycles, or about 4 years from now in 2009.
F.E.A.R. actually has really nice graphics on a decent card. Your problem is the FX 5200. It doesn't really support any of the graphics options that new games use like programable shaders, while actually being a slower card than the midrange cards of the previous generation. You can get a 6600GT for like $120 now, and if that's too expensive for you you can probably find a GeForce Ti 4400 on Ebay for like $25, which would be a solid upgrade from the 5200.
Until you get to about the $250 range, image quality doubles for every $60. The real question is: Are you actually interested in playing current video games? If so, a $250 card is clearly worth it. If not, then an X-box or Playstation isn't worth it either.
$250 is a small price to pay for a good GPU. The gaming experience really is $60 better than a $190 card, which easily is worth $60 more than a $130 card. For the cost of 2 new video games you can double your screen resolution and add stuff like HDR lighting (So you can actually see stuff in poorly lit rooms in games). I really don't see why you wouldn't do it.
I really don't understand this. A video card is a module that you drop into a computer to let it play video games. People seem perfectly happy to spend $300 for a console every five years - I see no reason why it isn't reasonable to spend $250 on a new video card every 3 years for a higher end than consoles computer gaming experience.
The second hand information I've heard from actual blind people implies that emacs for the blind is a better platform for blind people than any screenreader + gui hack.
Current IBM server CPUs have 36 megs of cache. Some desktop applications are significantly more cache limited than webserving (for example) is.