Out of curiosity, will the upcoming Chart module for 2.3 fix that for you? They completely redesigned the charting UI. I didn't see anything that specifically mentioned variable use, though.
OpenOffice does have VBA support, but it doesn't work for everything. Most sane scripts should run... anything an Excel "Wizzard" did probably is going to have a problem, though. There's a bunch of info on the OO site about what parts of the language they do support, and what's planned. Info on that at: http://vba.openoffice.org/
Go try to install Windows on a hard drive. The second question it asks is about a fresh install versus a recovery. Will a fresh install trash your data? It doesn't say for sure. Next it asks about partitions, but doesn't tell you what happens if you do things, or what a partition is.
The Windows installer has less documentation than the Ubuntu installer. It *can't* resize a partition, and it has absolutely no online help. It makes no attempt to dual-boot with another OS. It can't share partitions between OS'. I'm guessing that you manage to use Windows, even though it has all the same problems in the installer as Ubuntu, and even though it is actually less clear about what is going on.
This isn't to say that Ubuntu couldn't be improved, because it certainly can be. I'm just saying that your excuses for not even getting through the first, incredibly basic, and very well documented step goes to show that you are certainly *not* reasonably computer savvy. I thought the installer was pretty obvious about what was going on, but I'm computer savvy, and wanted to do the partitions manually anyway. I also know a good amount about how my computer works, already.
After actually reading the article, the reasons they switched to MS Office are:
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
You still use a radio to signal on copper wiring. Cisco may have been talking about wireless, but it's more likely that they were just talking about fibre optic as the way of the future rather than copper lines. You can transmit a high speed signal much further, and much faster, without amplification over fibre optic than you can over copper. It's trivial to run gigabit over a fibre cable that's miles long, but you really can't do that with traditional copper line.
You should notice quite a bit of similarity between the two! Wireless looks a bit like both of the above, but with more care paid to exacting power levels and frequencies. A wire is a lot like having the whole RF spectrum all to yourself. The problem with wireless is that it's a shared medium... the more users you have, the less everyone can do.
You are right in that this doesn't solve the problem of the last mile. It does show that you don't need nearly as much support equipment to do what we do today, in that you can serve a much larger area from a single hub by doing it this way. This also shows that very high throughput long haul links are a lot easier and cheaper than telecoms let on.
Again, just because you've decided that the price of gas should be artificially inflated does not make public transit magically work for the majority of situations. Now, if you forcibly move everyone closer together, build new cities, and provide excellent public transit, this could work. Of course, you'd also probably also have a civil war, and your plan would collapse.
What is more likely to happen is that the cost of fuel will rise. Correspondingly, the price of goods and services will increase. People will have little choice but to pay the increased costs. Eventually, you may well have more carpooling and public transit. However, you may also have an increase in base pay, as people will demand more money so that they can afford to pay for the ramifications of the artificially increased fuel prices. The trend will be for businesses to leave the US for countries that don't do your plan, the US economy will shrink, and we'll use less energy.
You see, your situation does not reduce the supply of fuel, but only increases the price. If fuel wasn't available, then you have a change. Of course, this will likely return you to warfare, as the public will still demand fuel. Destroying First World economies because you think gas being expensive will fix things is pretty short sighted. Just because Europe does it, doesn't make it right. Politics aside, Europe is settled in a wildly different manner than the US.
And actually, I've decided that very little truth comes out of the mouths of the right *or* the left. I know full well that we need to find other energy sources, but I also know that most of the highly publicly touted reasons for the need are complete bullshit.
Well, I suppose you could knock down substantial portions of US cities to build light rail. Of course, besides being kind of dumb, you also wouldn't have anyone left to ride them. If you go to the mid-west, you have "real cities", I suppose, it's just that there still isn't good public transit.
Yes, many US cities are poorly laid out. There isn't anything that can be done about that now, so we must make due. Making due means buses and lots of personal vehicles for a lot of places.
Also, Europe doesn't have this crazy ever-present public transit system that many people seem to think. You still have to go by car if you are traveling to a smaller municipality, and you certainly need a car to get around in rural areas. Europe is just a lot smaller, and more built during times when there wasn't high speed transit available (ie: before cars).
As to the carbon credits, honestly, trains would be prohibitively expensive if I made up a new huge fee that you had to pay to run one. Carbon credits are the same thing: an arbitrary limitation that carries an arbitrary price tag. The *only* thing that would do is make things cost more. We'd still be driving cars, and we'd still have bad public transit, but the general public would just have a lot less money. All of the yahoos that say we should tax the hell out of gasoline ignore this problem, too. You don't make it fixed by making it more expensive, you just give the government more money and slow the economy.
It is fairly trivial to explain why carbon credits and the Kyoto Treaty do nothing except serve as a welfare system to third world and developing countries.
Trains and highway have different efficiencies, though. A train is an excellent way to move a lot of something a long distance. Highways are excellent for non-linear, lowest time transit, or local distribution. I couldn't take a train to my home, for example. I would need to take a taxi, bus, or personal car to get there from the train station. I couldn't take a train to work, since the time lost getting to the train, getting on the train, getting off the train, and getting from the station to work far exceeds the travel time to just drive.
Going between cities is where trains are the most useful. Moving about inside, or around, a city is where the highways are most needed. Rural areas, and there a lot of them in most every country, still need highways nearly all travel.
The unmanaged system of highways allows for all of the same things as trains, though less efficiently, but also allows for *substantially* more freedom of movement and independence of travel time. The right answer, as it always has been, is to use both.
BTW - it isn't just Amtrak that has problems in the US. Nearly all public transit systems are doing their best to approach complete uselessness. It is still faster and less expensive, for me to own, insure, and operate a car where I live than it is to use public transit. This is in metrowest Massachusetts, for reference. NYC is better, but the subway is still no picnic, and light rail can be hell there, too, but it's still a lot better than driving, usually.
For what it's worth, if rail was the better option in the US, business would use it more. As it turns out, you get more for your money by moving things around with trucks and planes. Transit times are much lower, and you can deal with changes in volume and the need to reroute things much more easily.
As per that link, copyright infringement is a civil matter except in either of these two cases:
"(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,"
The excerpt you qote is from the *BACKGROUND* of the patent. It has nothing to do with what is being patented. The nature of the patent is listed under *CLAIMS*, of which there are 88 that neet to be met for an infringment. This patent is not one of the ridiculous swinging sideways types that sometimes get passed. Please, go and actually read the list of claims before you decide a patent is bogus.
Actually, States are *not* forbidden from taxing interstate commerce. They just have to treat goods from another state the same as good from their own. If they want to prevent buying wine over the Internet and having it shipped over the border, then they have to stop all wine shipments from Internet purchases. If they want a tax on goods from another state, they have to tax their own goods, as well.
What is being said is that if you live in a state with sales tax, and you buy from anothe state, you are obliged to report that to the state and pay the tax as if you bought it locally. As a vendor, you may be required to collect the sales tax directly if you have a presence in a state with sales tax, and someone in that state purchases from you.
No, that's the point; privacy is *not* a "grey area". The expectation always was that we have privacy. There is no mention of privacy in the Constitution, which means that the government has no power to limit it. Further, individuals have rights and expectations. An organization has nothing but limited liability. Much later we create this ridiculous construct of virtual citizenship that people lacking foresight allowed.
That card is using a DEC Tulip compatible chipset (the Davicom 9102). It's been supported by the kernel for quite a few years, so I doubt that it's the kernel's fault. As a quick thing to check, try killing all dhclient/dhclient3 processes, and running "dhclient eth0" by hand. That would tell you whether it was network-manager/dhclient or something more, at least. You could also trying manually configuring with "ifconfig eth0 my.full.ip.address netmask 255.255.255.0 up" and see if you get some network access. If you do that, you'll need to also do "route add default gw gate.way.ip.address" to get off your LAN.
FWIW, I'm running one fresh install of Feisty without problems on my NForce board (MCP51). I did an upgrade from Edgy on a Broadcom BCM5754 desktop, and a laptop with a Broadcom BCM5751 and an Intel 2200BG 802.11g miniPCI card. If you have time and another network card, I'm sure the Ubuntu people would appreciate you trying it out and posting a bug report on Launchpad.
Putting that into a larger perspective makes it much worse. It would mean that two out of MS' last three operating systems were flops. Considering that the remaining one was a minor update to an existing product, it doesn't look that great.
We'll have to see what happens with Office 2007. If that product flops as well, then investors are likely going to start selling off their stock, and/or demanding a reorg and firings.
Perhaps the the industrial age was allowed by a warmer climate? Just because you decided that human activity caused temperature increases doesn't make it so. It *is* possible that increases in temperature allowed, even encouraged, human development. We were in a minor ice age just before we really started to do these things, after all.
More interesting is how, using the UN's own charts and graphs, you can prove that temperature increased *before* CO2 levels increased. Even that doesn't mean anything by itself, because correlation is not causation. The truth is that we *don't know* exactly what is causing our current climate changes. It is, however, politically convenient to blame it on ourselves, since that is letting people gobble up power left and right. The human factor is also the only one that we can reasonably do anything about, although it is the most minor of the known contributing factors.
The temperature change over the 20th century is around 1 degree (Celsius). Much of that increase occurred in the first half of the century, too. The sunspot activity that you mention is more closely aligned with the end of an ice age.
Not quite. GNU Image Manipulation Program is more of a backronym than anything. They decided that they wanted to call it "The GIMP" and tried to justify such a horrible name. You see this occasionally in amateur projects, and this is one reason they *stay* that way is the name. The GIMP got popular despite the name, because it is a capable program.
None of the other projects you mentioned, save the Wii, have any potentially offensive connotations. It doesn't matter what the silly thing supposedly stands for. The menu items and branding is "THE GIMP", and that offends a great many english speakers.
Ekiga is fine, as a name, since it is unique and fairly memorable. Skype is fine, too, but it does have more brand recognition today. There are products out there that do have names as bad as "turd on a stick" and they mostly still exist because of the name. They are always a very niche product, and so they don't make the manufacturer very much money. For example, there is a ski goggle anti-fogging cleaner called "Cat Crap" that works really well, but most people haven't heard of it. The first time you buy it is either for the novelty, or because someone told you it was great. It isn't a product that you can really mass advertise, though, because it will get too many people upset.
Actually, mechanical pencils kind of suck. You don't know how much graphite you have left, and the damn stuff breaks *way* too easily. With a wooden pencil, it's obvious how much you have left, and it's really hard to break the point.
Of course, you're right. Every rinky-dink hardware manufacturer writes a driver for Windows. A lot of those drivers are complete garbages, but they do exist, at least.
I *have* run into hardware that just wouldn't work in Windows. That hardware has always been older hardware, with one exception to date. I have had a terrible amount of trouble getting my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 PVR to work right in Windows. Every time I reboot the damn system, I have to reinstall the drivers, on three different machines.
I also do have hardware that doesn't work on my Linux box. The IR blaster on my IR dongle won't work, for example. I've had occasional trouble with the extra keys on keyboards, especially on laptops, and such.
I'm a little surprised about those network and sound cards never working. I'd be curious to know whether they work now, or, at least what they were, so that I can avoid them. I am generally careful to not buy hardware without Linux support, and that's for two reasons. The first is that I like Linux more than Windows, and the second is that the unsupported hardware tends to be pretty crappy stuff.
I have a USB webcam, a scanner, a few video boards, a sound card, a couple of network cards, and a *lot* of Windows software, that won't work in any version of Windows based on NT. With the exception of the scanner, it will all work in Linux. The scanner *might* work, but I haven't bothered to look. It's some half software based cheap thing anyway.
There are lists of incompatible hardware for Windows, too. Vista breaks a *lot* of old hardware. This was the case for W2k and XP, as well. In just about every case, this is because MS realized that their driver model was still horrid, and went to something new. It's a real pain in the butt, though they do eventually manage to come up with something that at least works, most of the time.
I can make XP or W2K work with all of my hardware. Of course, I have to install drivers for a lot of it, but it will still work. MS could have released update revisions of their OS that included the additional hardware support, but without all the new gimmicks. This is likely to work without any new bugs being introduced, since you're just essentially adding new drivers. While they were at it, they could update to include the patches that were out and tested at that time.
Linux supports a lot more hardware out of box than Windows XP does. I'd imagine that it supports more than Vista does, too, because Linux still works with older hardware. In some cases, I find Linux is even more convenient to use with random hardware.
Also, a vehicle with a manual transmission has *many* advantages over a vehicle with an automatic one. You get better gas mileage, a lower weight vehicle, your brakes last longer, and you can drive more safely in poor weather by slowing down without braking, just to name a few. As far as I'm concerned, the auto is arguably more convenient, but I don't see it as such for me.
Yes, previously releases except for WinME. Unfortunately, the manufacturers didn't remember that product, or they may have considered the possibility of Vista being another MS failure. Then again, they went for WinME full steam ahead, and forgot about MS BOB.
Win95 had a huge uptake because Windows 3.1 sucked. There really hasn't been another rollout that's had such a fast uptake. People are still running Win98 and Win2000 in large numbers, though most people are running XP. The majority using WinME have moved to pirating a version that actually works.
OpenAL games all fine. OpenAL doesn't use DirectSound3D to do audio transformation.
What we would be really lucky with is if the game manufacturers realize that you can't trust MS API's to continue to exist and function. Maybe the next thing they'll drop or change will be something in DirectPlay, or DirectInput. The more that happens, the more likely we end up with a cross-platform replacement. Then all of the Mac and Linux and whatever users get to play their games, without a Windows license being involved.
If you turn off all of the services that MS added in XP, you have Windows 2000 with a few minor modifications. There are two things that I noticeably like about XP over 2000. The power management support is much nicer, and the system boots much more quickly.
XP has two service packs, and a bunch of hotfixes. 2000 has four and a half service packs, and a bunch of hotfixes, and isn't being actively supported. Most of the XP hotfixes are for IE, and you can bet they apply to 98/ME/2000 as well. There have been a bunch of fixes of UPnP, which you should disable anyway. There have bee numerous fixes for WMP, whose current version is arbitrarily unavailable on 2000, and for.NET, which doesn't come by default.
IOW, once you turn off the bloat and things that are insecure, you have Win2000, but with better power management and a faster boot process. Except you'd be getting fixes and updates.
Product activation is easily "fixed", and that's why MS completely screws the customer with the even more draconian system in Vista.
Vista, on the other hand, gets you a ton of bugs, a lot of broken software, a lot of broken hardware, a slower system that you can't "fix" by turning it off, a horrid blurry eye-straining UI, and a broken new security model. You also get the huge pile of security issues that we don't know about, since they rewrote so many random systems and they haven't been proven yet.
Also, you mention "Win2k + insecurity + bloat + product activation." Vista is, in fact, the same thing, and worse. You still have the core of the NT kernel, and it works mostly the same as on Win2k. Then you add all the insecurity of all the new code and existing problems, all of the bloat from the "we did it this way because it's like the standard, but *proprietary*"-syndrome and the rush to fill my screen with useless garbage. You get the treble increased memory requirements, and that's over XP. You also get even worse product activation and user intrusive DRM. So, you get all of the things you hate about XP, but they are more prolific. By your own logic, that makes Vista a *larger* step backwards than XP.
There would be some benefit for you in switching to Solaris, too, but there would also be a lot of disadvantages. If you're going to comment on it, at least tell the truth: you're only switching to Vista because you feel like it.
If nobody migrates to Vista, then games won't require DirectX10. This is a win for everyone, except Microsoft. It might even end up a win for them, if it gets the MS directors to fire Steve Ballmer.
Again, your specific reasons for migrating are: "an API that nobody is using" and "an OS that nobody is using". Those *are* specific reasons, but they're not very good ones.
First problem is that no laptop, and no consumer desktop, would be able to power all of that off their power supply. A laptop couldn't power a CRT, and most decent sized external LCD panels, on their power brick. You are demanding a computer be a power distribution system for external peripherals, and that is stupid as their are designed today. Being able to power a mobile printer, any reasonable external storage, a VOIP phone, etc, would be very useful. Fortunately, we *already can do that*, so it isn't a big deal. The only things that have occasional issues are external storage devices, and the well designed ones work fine. Or you could use firewire, in which case you don't have the problem.
A printer doesn't move, so it isn't a big deal for it to have two wires. The same is true of a desktop chassis, and a display. I wouldn't want to power a subwoofer off of my PC, even if I could supply it enough power. You could eliminate the data cables to your printers by purchasing the correct printers. Many include 802.11 network support, which eliminates the data cables from your PC to the printers.
You have a special case situation, regardless. Practically speaking, nobody has two printers on their desk. Most people don't have a scanner, or they have an all in one printer/scanner unit. Many people don't even have a printer. What needs to be taken care of, realistically, would be the cables for the monitor, speakers, and computer. So, counting here, the monitor is two, the computer is one, and the scanner is two. The printer is one, because we eliminate the unnecessary second one. That means you could have the same functional setup, with one cable between the monitor and computer, one between the speakers and the computer, one between speakers, and four power cables. You could eliminate the cable between speakers, and the speaker power cable, if you have speakers on your monitor. So, grand total, you have two data cables, and three power cables.
What USB deliverable power the way you're talking about would mean is larger motherboards, since they now need to have thicker traces to carry the power, and many more components to isolate the power from the useful electronics. Also, don't forget that you would need much larger power supplies. You would create an entire range of external devices that wouldn't work on laptops.
As far as the laptop, I would worry about the heat dissipation, since you probably just started a fire with that discharge. *Nobody* designs laptops for that scenario, and I would be amazed if they ever did. You would take a step back to the late 1980s in laptop weight and size to fit all of the parts for this little idea, unless you want to burn people and destroy equipment. You shouldn't be able to because none of the electronics are designed for even a fraction of that power draw, and it would be dangerous.
There is a difference between powering up to 1A so that you can run larger drives, and trying to start your car off your laptop. One is a minor technical change, and the other is asinine.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity, will the upcoming Chart module for 2.3 fix that for you? They completely redesigned the charting UI. I didn't see anything that specifically mentioned variable use, though.
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html
Hopefully I can knock one of those right off your list. I use this to do the "Text to Columns" feature that OO doesn't come with stock.
p _id=87718&package_id=104183
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou
OpenOffice does have VBA support, but it doesn't work for everything. Most sane scripts should run... anything an Excel "Wizzard" did probably is going to have a problem, though. There's a bunch of info on the OO site about what parts of the language they do support, and what's planned. Info on that at: http://vba.openoffice.org/
Go try to install Windows on a hard drive. The second question it asks is about a fresh install versus a recovery. Will a fresh install trash your data? It doesn't say for sure. Next it asks about partitions, but doesn't tell you what happens if you do things, or what a partition is.
The Windows installer has less documentation than the Ubuntu installer. It *can't* resize a partition, and it has absolutely no online help. It makes no attempt to dual-boot with another OS. It can't share partitions between OS'. I'm guessing that you manage to use Windows, even though it has all the same problems in the installer as Ubuntu, and even though it is actually less clear about what is going on.
This isn't to say that Ubuntu couldn't be improved, because it certainly can be. I'm just saying that your excuses for not even getting through the first, incredibly basic, and very well documented step goes to show that you are certainly *not* reasonably computer savvy. I thought the installer was pretty obvious about what was going on, but I'm computer savvy, and wanted to do the partitions manually anyway. I also know a good amount about how my computer works, already.
After actually reading the article, the reasons they switched to MS Office are:
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
You still use a radio to signal on copper wiring. Cisco may have been talking about wireless, but it's more likely that they were just talking about fibre optic as the way of the future rather than copper lines. You can transmit a high speed signal much further, and much faster, without amplification over fibre optic than you can over copper. It's trivial to run gigabit over a fibre cable that's miles long, but you really can't do that with traditional copper line.
_ modulationy er
For more information, this is how things like cable modems work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude
And this is how Ethernet works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_physical_la
You should notice quite a bit of similarity between the two! Wireless looks a bit like both of the above, but with more care paid to exacting power levels and frequencies. A wire is a lot like having the whole RF spectrum all to yourself. The problem with wireless is that it's a shared medium... the more users you have, the less everyone can do.
You are right in that this doesn't solve the problem of the last mile. It does show that you don't need nearly as much support equipment to do what we do today, in that you can serve a much larger area from a single hub by doing it this way. This also shows that very high throughput long haul links are a lot easier and cheaper than telecoms let on.
Again, just because you've decided that the price of gas should be artificially inflated does not make public transit magically work for the majority of situations. Now, if you forcibly move everyone closer together, build new cities, and provide excellent public transit, this could work. Of course, you'd also probably also have a civil war, and your plan would collapse.
What is more likely to happen is that the cost of fuel will rise. Correspondingly, the price of goods and services will increase. People will have little choice but to pay the increased costs. Eventually, you may well have more carpooling and public transit. However, you may also have an increase in base pay, as people will demand more money so that they can afford to pay for the ramifications of the artificially increased fuel prices. The trend will be for businesses to leave the US for countries that don't do your plan, the US economy will shrink, and we'll use less energy.
You see, your situation does not reduce the supply of fuel, but only increases the price. If fuel wasn't available, then you have a change. Of course, this will likely return you to warfare, as the public will still demand fuel. Destroying First World economies because you think gas being expensive will fix things is pretty short sighted. Just because Europe does it, doesn't make it right. Politics aside, Europe is settled in a wildly different manner than the US.
And actually, I've decided that very little truth comes out of the mouths of the right *or* the left. I know full well that we need to find other energy sources, but I also know that most of the highly publicly touted reasons for the need are complete bullshit.
Well, I suppose you could knock down substantial portions of US cities to build light rail. Of course, besides being kind of dumb, you also wouldn't have anyone left to ride them. If you go to the mid-west, you have "real cities", I suppose, it's just that there still isn't good public transit.
Yes, many US cities are poorly laid out. There isn't anything that can be done about that now, so we must make due. Making due means buses and lots of personal vehicles for a lot of places.
Also, Europe doesn't have this crazy ever-present public transit system that many people seem to think. You still have to go by car if you are traveling to a smaller municipality, and you certainly need a car to get around in rural areas. Europe is just a lot smaller, and more built during times when there wasn't high speed transit available (ie: before cars).
As to the carbon credits, honestly, trains would be prohibitively expensive if I made up a new huge fee that you had to pay to run one. Carbon credits are the same thing: an arbitrary limitation that carries an arbitrary price tag. The *only* thing that would do is make things cost more. We'd still be driving cars, and we'd still have bad public transit, but the general public would just have a lot less money. All of the yahoos that say we should tax the hell out of gasoline ignore this problem, too. You don't make it fixed by making it more expensive, you just give the government more money and slow the economy.
It is fairly trivial to explain why carbon credits and the Kyoto Treaty do nothing except serve as a welfare system to third world and developing countries.
Trains and highway have different efficiencies, though. A train is an excellent way to move a lot of something a long distance. Highways are excellent for non-linear, lowest time transit, or local distribution. I couldn't take a train to my home, for example. I would need to take a taxi, bus, or personal car to get there from the train station. I couldn't take a train to work, since the time lost getting to the train, getting on the train, getting off the train, and getting from the station to work far exceeds the travel time to just drive.
Going between cities is where trains are the most useful. Moving about inside, or around, a city is where the highways are most needed. Rural areas, and there a lot of them in most every country, still need highways nearly all travel.
The unmanaged system of highways allows for all of the same things as trains, though less efficiently, but also allows for *substantially* more freedom of movement and independence of travel time. The right answer, as it always has been, is to use both.
BTW - it isn't just Amtrak that has problems in the US. Nearly all public transit systems are doing their best to approach complete uselessness. It is still faster and less expensive, for me to own, insure, and operate a car where I live than it is to use public transit. This is in metrowest Massachusetts, for reference. NYC is better, but the subway is still no picnic, and light rail can be hell there, too, but it's still a lot better than driving, usually.
For what it's worth, if rail was the better option in the US, business would use it more. As it turns out, you get more for your money by moving things around with trucks and planes. Transit times are much lower, and you can deal with changes in volume and the need to reroute things much more easily.
As per that link, copyright infringement is a civil matter except in either of these two cases:
"(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,"
The excerpt you qote is from the *BACKGROUND* of the patent. It has nothing to do with what is being patented. The nature of the patent is listed under *CLAIMS*, of which there are 88 that neet to be met for an infringment. This patent is not one of the ridiculous swinging sideways types that sometimes get passed. Please, go and actually read the list of claims before you decide a patent is bogus.
Actually, States are *not* forbidden from taxing interstate commerce. They just have to treat goods from another state the same as good from their own. If they want to prevent buying wine over the Internet and having it shipped over the border, then they have to stop all wine shipments from Internet purchases. If they want a tax on goods from another state, they have to tax their own goods, as well.
What is being said is that if you live in a state with sales tax, and you buy from anothe state, you are obliged to report that to the state and pay the tax as if you bought it locally. As a vendor, you may be required to collect the sales tax directly if you have a presence in a state with sales tax, and someone in that state purchases from you.
No, that's the point; privacy is *not* a "grey area". The expectation always was that we have privacy. There is no mention of privacy in the Constitution, which means that the government has no power to limit it. Further, individuals have rights and expectations. An organization has nothing but limited liability. Much later we create this ridiculous construct of virtual citizenship that people lacking foresight allowed.
That card is using a DEC Tulip compatible chipset (the Davicom 9102). It's been supported by the kernel for quite a few years, so I doubt that it's the kernel's fault. As a quick thing to check, try killing all dhclient/dhclient3 processes, and running "dhclient eth0" by hand. That would tell you whether it was network-manager/dhclient or something more, at least. You could also trying manually configuring with "ifconfig eth0 my.full.ip.address netmask 255.255.255.0 up" and see if you get some network access. If you do that, you'll need to also do "route add default gw gate.way.ip.address" to get off your LAN.
FWIW, I'm running one fresh install of Feisty without problems on my NForce board (MCP51). I did an upgrade from Edgy on a Broadcom BCM5754 desktop, and a laptop with a Broadcom BCM5751 and an Intel 2200BG 802.11g miniPCI card. If you have time and another network card, I'm sure the Ubuntu people would appreciate you trying it out and posting a bug report on Launchpad.
Putting that into a larger perspective makes it much worse. It would mean that two out of MS' last three operating systems were flops. Considering that the remaining one was a minor update to an existing product, it doesn't look that great.
We'll have to see what happens with Office 2007. If that product flops as well, then investors are likely going to start selling off their stock, and/or demanding a reorg and firings.
Perhaps the the industrial age was allowed by a warmer climate? Just because you decided that human activity caused temperature increases doesn't make it so. It *is* possible that increases in temperature allowed, even encouraged, human development. We were in a minor ice age just before we really started to do these things, after all.
More interesting is how, using the UN's own charts and graphs, you can prove that temperature increased *before* CO2 levels increased. Even that doesn't mean anything by itself, because correlation is not causation. The truth is that we *don't know* exactly what is causing our current climate changes. It is, however, politically convenient to blame it on ourselves, since that is letting people gobble up power left and right. The human factor is also the only one that we can reasonably do anything about, although it is the most minor of the known contributing factors.
The temperature change over the 20th century is around 1 degree (Celsius). Much of that increase occurred in the first half of the century, too. The sunspot activity that you mention is more closely aligned with the end of an ice age.
Not quite. GNU Image Manipulation Program is more of a backronym than anything. They decided that they wanted to call it "The GIMP" and tried to justify such a horrible name. You see this occasionally in amateur projects, and this is one reason they *stay* that way is the name. The GIMP got popular despite the name, because it is a capable program.
None of the other projects you mentioned, save the Wii, have any potentially offensive connotations. It doesn't matter what the silly thing supposedly stands for. The menu items and branding is "THE GIMP", and that offends a great many english speakers.
Ekiga is fine, as a name, since it is unique and fairly memorable. Skype is fine, too, but it does have more brand recognition today. There are products out there that do have names as bad as "turd on a stick" and they mostly still exist because of the name. They are always a very niche product, and so they don't make the manufacturer very much money. For example, there is a ski goggle anti-fogging cleaner called "Cat Crap" that works really well, but most people haven't heard of it. The first time you buy it is either for the novelty, or because someone told you it was great. It isn't a product that you can really mass advertise, though, because it will get too many people upset.
Actually, mechanical pencils kind of suck. You don't know how much graphite you have left, and the damn stuff breaks *way* too easily. With a wooden pencil, it's obvious how much you have left, and it's really hard to break the point.
Of course, you're right. Every rinky-dink hardware manufacturer writes a driver for Windows. A lot of those drivers are complete garbages, but they do exist, at least.
I *have* run into hardware that just wouldn't work in Windows. That hardware has always been older hardware, with one exception to date. I have had a terrible amount of trouble getting my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 PVR to work right in Windows. Every time I reboot the damn system, I have to reinstall the drivers, on three different machines.
I also do have hardware that doesn't work on my Linux box. The IR blaster on my IR dongle won't work, for example. I've had occasional trouble with the extra keys on keyboards, especially on laptops, and such.
I'm a little surprised about those network and sound cards never working. I'd be curious to know whether they work now, or, at least what they were, so that I can avoid them. I am generally careful to not buy hardware without Linux support, and that's for two reasons. The first is that I like Linux more than Windows, and the second is that the unsupported hardware tends to be pretty crappy stuff.
I have a USB webcam, a scanner, a few video boards, a sound card, a couple of network cards, and a *lot* of Windows software, that won't work in any version of Windows based on NT. With the exception of the scanner, it will all work in Linux. The scanner *might* work, but I haven't bothered to look. It's some half software based cheap thing anyway.
There are lists of incompatible hardware for Windows, too. Vista breaks a *lot* of old hardware. This was the case for W2k and XP, as well. In just about every case, this is because MS realized that their driver model was still horrid, and went to something new. It's a real pain in the butt, though they do eventually manage to come up with something that at least works, most of the time.
I can make XP or W2K work with all of my hardware. Of course, I have to install drivers for a lot of it, but it will still work. MS could have released update revisions of their OS that included the additional hardware support, but without all the new gimmicks. This is likely to work without any new bugs being introduced, since you're just essentially adding new drivers. While they were at it, they could update to include the patches that were out and tested at that time.
Linux supports a lot more hardware out of box than Windows XP does. I'd imagine that it supports more than Vista does, too, because Linux still works with older hardware. In some cases, I find Linux is even more convenient to use with random hardware.
Also, a vehicle with a manual transmission has *many* advantages over a vehicle with an automatic one. You get better gas mileage, a lower weight vehicle, your brakes last longer, and you can drive more safely in poor weather by slowing down without braking, just to name a few. As far as I'm concerned, the auto is arguably more convenient, but I don't see it as such for me.
Yes, previously releases except for WinME. Unfortunately, the manufacturers didn't remember that product, or they may have considered the possibility of Vista being another MS failure. Then again, they went for WinME full steam ahead, and forgot about MS BOB.
Win95 had a huge uptake because Windows 3.1 sucked. There really hasn't been another rollout that's had such a fast uptake. People are still running Win98 and Win2000 in large numbers, though most people are running XP. The majority using WinME have moved to pirating a version that actually works.
OpenAL games all fine. OpenAL doesn't use DirectSound3D to do audio transformation.
What we would be really lucky with is if the game manufacturers realize that you can't trust MS API's to continue to exist and function. Maybe the next thing they'll drop or change will be something in DirectPlay, or DirectInput. The more that happens, the more likely we end up with a cross-platform replacement. Then all of the Mac and Linux and whatever users get to play their games, without a Windows license being involved.
If you turn off all of the services that MS added in XP, you have Windows 2000 with a few minor modifications. There are two things that I noticeably like about XP over 2000. The power management support is much nicer, and the system boots much more quickly.
.NET, which doesn't come by default.
XP has two service packs, and a bunch of hotfixes. 2000 has four and a half service packs, and a bunch of hotfixes, and isn't being actively supported. Most of the XP hotfixes are for IE, and you can bet they apply to 98/ME/2000 as well. There have been a bunch of fixes of UPnP, which you should disable anyway. There have bee numerous fixes for WMP, whose current version is arbitrarily unavailable on 2000, and for
IOW, once you turn off the bloat and things that are insecure, you have Win2000, but with better power management and a faster boot process. Except you'd be getting fixes and updates.
Product activation is easily "fixed", and that's why MS completely screws the customer with the even more draconian system in Vista.
Vista, on the other hand, gets you a ton of bugs, a lot of broken software, a lot of broken hardware, a slower system that you can't "fix" by turning it off, a horrid blurry eye-straining UI, and a broken new security model. You also get the huge pile of security issues that we don't know about, since they rewrote so many random systems and they haven't been proven yet.
Also, you mention "Win2k + insecurity + bloat + product activation." Vista is, in fact, the same thing, and worse. You still have the core of the NT kernel, and it works mostly the same as on Win2k. Then you add all the insecurity of all the new code and existing problems, all of the bloat from the "we did it this way because it's like the standard, but *proprietary*"-syndrome and the rush to fill my screen with useless garbage. You get the treble increased memory requirements, and that's over XP. You also get even worse product activation and user intrusive DRM. So, you get all of the things you hate about XP, but they are more prolific. By your own logic, that makes Vista a *larger* step backwards than XP.
There would be some benefit for you in switching to Solaris, too, but there would also be a lot of disadvantages. If you're going to comment on it, at least tell the truth: you're only switching to Vista because you feel like it.
If nobody migrates to Vista, then games won't require DirectX10. This is a win for everyone, except Microsoft. It might even end up a win for them, if it gets the MS directors to fire Steve Ballmer.
Again, your specific reasons for migrating are: "an API that nobody is using" and "an OS that nobody is using". Those *are* specific reasons, but they're not very good ones.
First problem is that no laptop, and no consumer desktop, would be able to power all of that off their power supply. A laptop couldn't power a CRT, and most decent sized external LCD panels, on their power brick. You are demanding a computer be a power distribution system for external peripherals, and that is stupid as their are designed today. Being able to power a mobile printer, any reasonable external storage, a VOIP phone, etc, would be very useful. Fortunately, we *already can do that*, so it isn't a big deal. The only things that have occasional issues are external storage devices, and the well designed ones work fine. Or you could use firewire, in which case you don't have the problem.
A printer doesn't move, so it isn't a big deal for it to have two wires. The same is true of a desktop chassis, and a display. I wouldn't want to power a subwoofer off of my PC, even if I could supply it enough power. You could eliminate the data cables to your printers by purchasing the correct printers. Many include 802.11 network support, which eliminates the data cables from your PC to the printers.
You have a special case situation, regardless. Practically speaking, nobody has two printers on their desk. Most people don't have a scanner, or they have an all in one printer/scanner unit. Many people don't even have a printer. What needs to be taken care of, realistically, would be the cables for the monitor, speakers, and computer. So, counting here, the monitor is two, the computer is one, and the scanner is two. The printer is one, because we eliminate the unnecessary second one. That means you could have the same functional setup, with one cable between the monitor and computer, one between the speakers and the computer, one between speakers, and four power cables. You could eliminate the cable between speakers, and the speaker power cable, if you have speakers on your monitor. So, grand total, you have two data cables, and three power cables.
What USB deliverable power the way you're talking about would mean is larger motherboards, since they now need to have thicker traces to carry the power, and many more components to isolate the power from the useful electronics. Also, don't forget that you would need much larger power supplies. You would create an entire range of external devices that wouldn't work on laptops.
As far as the laptop, I would worry about the heat dissipation, since you probably just started a fire with that discharge. *Nobody* designs laptops for that scenario, and I would be amazed if they ever did. You would take a step back to the late 1980s in laptop weight and size to fit all of the parts for this little idea, unless you want to burn people and destroy equipment. You shouldn't be able to because none of the electronics are designed for even a fraction of that power draw, and it would be dangerous.
There is a difference between powering up to 1A so that you can run larger drives, and trying to start your car off your laptop. One is a minor technical change, and the other is asinine.