They already sell mobile printers for netbooks. A bit pricey, but they fill a niche for sales people on the road. They can print their orders, etc., right at the customers' desk and get the signature then and there, instead of "I'll send you a contract" and giving them time to change their mind, so yes, definitely, there's room for more customized applications.
Now, the OEMs often start up the computer and 'accept' all the licensing conditions in advance, eliminating specifically that path.
Not possible here, since you have to select either an English or French installation when you first boot up, and it then installs the "right" version, and prompts you to make your backup DVDs.
It shouldn't be possible in the US either, since you have to accept the license agreement in order to make your backup install media.
That'll teach them not to ship proper installation media!
Does it really take 2 gigs of disk space to empower someone to write Java?
No, I do it fine in a terminal - edit with vim, compile to classes with javac.
However, there are a lot of plugins that are useful, or interesting, or will save you from writing redundant code, or set up an environment so that you can write for mobile phones, etc. Why not explore if you have the disk space?
When trojan software labels itself as nvidia.cpl or atidrv.sys, or msofficectl, have fun scanning for it searching for "AntiVirus2009". You won't find it. Even searching for the raw string on your hard drive won't find it if the name is encyphered. Stop being such a shameless MS fanboi. The registry was a mistake - even Microsoft now admits it.
especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957
It doesn't take a genius to see the connection - rays from the satellites are making us dumb!
Want proof? Look at the stupidity on satellite TV - 837 channels and nothing on.
... and the gubbermint conspired to make things worse - with the switch-over to digital broadcasting, the poor could have been FREE - but no, they gave subsidies for set-top conversion boxes so even the poor will remain in thrall.
It's all a plot to cover up the climate change caused by all those rocket launches!
(All kidding aside, what sort of sense of "entitlement" do you have to have to feel that people need to be given set-top boxes? Stupid politicians. Then again, it's OPM - Other People's Money. Bail out the broadcasters. Bail out the banks. Bail out the worst car manufacturer in a century. Where the #@%! is MY bailout?
The point is that putting keys in random places, as AntiVirus2009 does, means that antivirus software can't determine if it's malware or not, especially since the program that it runs is ALSO randomly named on each machine, usually replacing a valid but non-critical OS file.
Actually, the price per gig is going to stop dropping. Currently, there's a worldwide glut for flash memory - so much so that creditors of one of the largest manufacturing plants forced the owners into bankruptcy because they figured they had to cut their losses - there's no quick turnaround in view.
Once all the chips that are being liquidated below cost work their way through the system, prices should stabilize.
Also, I'd hope that the flash used in an SSD is better than those el-cheapo thumb drives, or you're going to find yourself waiting a long time to do anything...
Platters also continue to get bigger in laptops. This spring, the largest drive I could get was 320 gigs (my lappy has 2 drives, so that gives me "only" 640 gigs). Now I can buy 500 gig hds for the same price I paid 6 months ago for those 320 gig drives. The "SSD uses less electricity" myth has been debunked in lots of places, ditto "It's faster". I wouldn't be surprised to see 1TB in hard drives by this time next year.
Also, cache sizes are going up.
Noise? I did a du -sh/home yesterday, which really gives the hard drive a workout. Couldn't hear a thing. Newer drives are QUIET!
I don't see SSDs taking the place of platters in regular laptops before the middle of the next decade. They have a long way to go in terms of capacity.
... Sell PDAs with juicy emails on them for bonus bux.
"Somebody made a mistake," one owner told us. "People's numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased."'"
Just the numbers and addresses - not the emails!
As a reporter, which are you more interested in, anyway - phone numbers and addresses, or campaign emails? As a user, which would you prefer were erased - your name and address, or your emails?
If they can't even get that right, it's a good thing they lost.
Beagle is a huge problem on single-core machines. At least on dual-core, you still have enough spare cycles so you can turn do a "ps ax | grep beagled" and then "kill -9" it.
But that means nobody will be able to make a living writing applications for these netbooks -- they already have all the software their users need.
Netbooks increase the application space, which means more opportunities for niche software. For example, now that netbooks are so cheap, more companies will give their employees one to use on the road. So now there's more opportunity to add value by writing code for a particular business need that just opened up because of the cheap netbook? Or for charging for modifying gpl software to cater to a particular need, and contribute back to "the community" at the same time?
I don't know abut Ubuntu, but on many distros, you can turn off or suspend real-time indexing. Otherwise, you're indexing the file system, any web pages you crawl, etc. That takes a lot of juice.
Back when a hard drive had a meg or two of cache, a "hybrid drive" made some sort of sense for reads (but not writes - flash memory needs to write too large a block size). Now with hard drives coming with 16 and 32 meg of cache (even laptop drives now come with 8 to 16 meg of cache) there's no real performance gain - just additional cost and compexity,
I should point out I switched to using my laptop as my main at-work box a few months ago - my former work box at the office is now YACS - Yet Another Community Server - for stuff I don't feel like moving to the BSD box (or for test databases that take up too much room).
Many external hard drives are made from batches of hard drives that failed QC at their full capacity. They get reformatted at a lower capacity (so the heads aren't stroked across the whole platter, for example, or the drive's firmware modified so it doesn't use a defective platter). Your LaCie could very well have maxtor drives in it, in which case it's a real piece of shit - the maxtorgates (seagates from what was Maxtors' China plant) are absolute crap. Out of 12 drives so far, I've had ONE that lasted more than a month.
Those "usb backup solutions" are cheap for a reason.
The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid. Every artist is influenced by what has gone before. "If I can see further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" applies to art, music, and literature, not just to science.
Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright. Imagine how much poorer we'd all be, how many fewer new devices we'd have, if patents were valid for 95 years? Copyright should be no different.
Most people won't touch sci-fi with a barge pole and will consider it a geeky propeller head argument. The story would actually turn them off. In fact I'd say asking someone who isn't into sci-fi to read sci-fi for a better grasp of the moral of the story will be put off both sci-fi and the moral you're trying to convey.
Most people actually like Sci-fi - they just don't know it's really sci-fi, or they don't even think abut it. Whether it's ET or the last Indiana Jones stinker (or Keanu Reeve's latest one, for that matter) or Ironman, it's sci-fi.
Then again, much of our life today is sci-fi to the previous generation. Cell phones a lot smaller than Kirk's communicator, that have global reach. And can make videos. And contain computers more powerful, and with more memory, than the ones that went to the moon. Refrigierators with no moving parts, no compressor to break down. Microwave ovens as "throw them out if they break", instead of $900 "Radar Ranges". 19" colour TVs? Heck, 35" color TVs are obsolete - welcome to the flat panel display. Laser printers ("laser WHAT? You can't print with a laser. The paper would burn up!" they'd say). The patch. CDs, which didn't even exist then, obsolete! Microfiber clothing. Water-based paints that you can actually scrub! Free software. Businesses whose whole modus operandi, their economic model, is based on enabling the free sharing of software and information. Memory foam. Memory wire. Data cards smaller, and more densely packed with information, than the ones on Star Trek. MRI and CT scanners. Electric cars. Cars that don't need an oil change and grease job every 3,000 miles, and spark plugs, rotor, cap, wires and points every 10,000.
We've gone from videophones being "pie in the sky" to "webcam free with every laptop sold - see and talk to anyone, anywhere." Try to find a laptop that doesn't have a webcam. Satellite reception - gone from theory to huge base stations with antennas that look like radio astronomers' kit to a pizza-sized dish, 50' of cable, and a small box - buy from the store around the corner, next to all the other stuff that didn't even exist 50 years ago.
Science fiction? We're living it, to the point where we don't even recognize sci-fi on the big screen.
Obviously this question hasn't been answered for the general public because this is like the 4th year in a row that this question has been asked on Slashdot.
Nah... it's like a quiz on economic theory - the questions don't change, but over time the answers do.
Hardware changes, software changes, the economics change. 20 years ago, hard drives were so expensive that they weren't practical for backups. Nowadays, hard drives are throw-away items.
Ummmm, they also have this cool thing now called a USB Drive, available in 500GB and larger sizes.
Just plug it into a USB port on your computer and it works just like an internal drive. Copy all your data to it, unplug it and store it in a safe place.
What is this 500GB and larger USB drive you speak of...
Certainly not flash memory. More likely an external hard drive with a USB connector. More problems than an internal hard drive, due to lack of ventilation, etc.
I doubt stiction is that big a problem. I had a computer that literally sat for a decade before I decided to boot it up "just for the heck of it" - ahh, the good old days of 17-second bootups
links with actual information. NOT links to sell me shit!
Time to think of distributed search, rather than being dependent on Google or any other one search engine.
Besides, think of the legal implications. You sit down at a coworkers' 'puter and look for some pictures of kittens for the company Christmas newsletter. You search Google for "cute kittens" and the "personalized results" are all porn links or videos of kittens being tortured and killed, based on that users' search preferences.
Serch works now because it DOESN'T tailor itself to any one person's world-view, or give me what it "thinks" I want. If it ever ends up just giving me "what it thinks I want", we'll end up with an echo chamber effect writ large.
Slashdot Mirror
They already sell mobile printers for netbooks. A bit pricey, but they fill a niche for sales people on the road. They can print their orders, etc., right at the customers' desk and get the signature then and there, instead of "I'll send you a contract" and giving them time to change their mind, so yes, definitely, there's room for more customized applications.
Not possible here, since you have to select either an English or French installation when you first boot up, and it then installs the "right" version, and prompts you to make your backup DVDs.
It shouldn't be possible in the US either, since you have to accept the license agreement in order to make your backup install media.
That'll teach them not to ship proper installation media!
No, I do it fine in a terminal - edit with vim, compile to classes with javac.
However, there are a lot of plugins that are useful, or interesting, or will save you from writing redundant code, or set up an environment so that you can write for mobile phones, etc. Why not explore if you have the disk space?
When trojan software labels itself as nvidia.cpl or atidrv.sys, or msofficectl, have fun scanning for it searching for "AntiVirus2009". You won't find it. Even searching for the raw string on your hard drive won't find it if the name is encyphered. Stop being such a shameless MS fanboi. The registry was a mistake - even Microsoft now admits it.
Isn't that an example of groupthink? Or did you "critically test, analyze, and evaluate" this idea?
I'd ask a group, but they're too stupid ...
(the housing bubble, Wall Street, gov't bailouts, etc. - provide enough real-life examples that the herd are just a bunch of dumb-as-shit cows :-)
It doesn't take a genius to see the connection - rays from the satellites are making us dumb!
Want proof? Look at the stupidity on satellite TV - 837 channels and nothing on.
It's all a plot to cover up the climate change caused by all those rocket launches!
(All kidding aside, what sort of sense of "entitlement" do you have to have to feel that people need to be given set-top boxes? Stupid politicians. Then again, it's OPM - Other People's Money. Bail out the broadcasters. Bail out the banks. Bail out the worst car manufacturer in a century. Where the #@%! is MY bailout?
The point is that putting keys in random places, as AntiVirus2009 does, means that antivirus software can't determine if it's malware or not, especially since the program that it runs is ALSO randomly named on each machine, usually replacing a valid but non-critical OS file.
The registry was a bad idea.
Actually, the price per gig is going to stop dropping. Currently, there's a worldwide glut for flash memory - so much so that creditors of one of the largest manufacturing plants forced the owners into bankruptcy because they figured they had to cut their losses - there's no quick turnaround in view. Once all the chips that are being liquidated below cost work their way through the system, prices should stabilize.
Also, I'd hope that the flash used in an SSD is better than those el-cheapo thumb drives, or you're going to find yourself waiting a long time to do anything ...
Platters also continue to get bigger in laptops. This spring, the largest drive I could get was 320 gigs (my lappy has 2 drives, so that gives me "only" 640 gigs). Now I can buy 500 gig hds for the same price I paid 6 months ago for those 320 gig drives. The "SSD uses less electricity" myth has been debunked in lots of places, ditto "It's faster". I wouldn't be surprised to see 1TB in hard drives by this time next year.
Also, cache sizes are going up.
Noise? I did a du -sh /home yesterday, which really gives the hard drive a workout. Couldn't hear a thing. Newer drives are QUIET!
I don't see SSDs taking the place of platters in regular laptops before the middle of the next decade. They have a long way to go in terms of capacity.
Just the numbers and addresses - not the emails!
As a reporter, which are you more interested in, anyway - phone numbers and addresses, or campaign emails? As a user, which would you prefer were erased - your name and address, or your emails?
If they can't even get that right, it's a good thing they lost.
Beagle is a huge problem on single-core machines. At least on dual-core, you still have enough spare cycles so you can turn do a "ps ax | grep beagled" and then "kill -9" it.
Netbooks increase the application space, which means more opportunities for niche software. For example, now that netbooks are so cheap, more companies will give their employees one to use on the road. So now there's more opportunity to add value by writing code for a particular business need that just opened up because of the cheap netbook? Or for charging for modifying gpl software to cater to a particular need, and contribute back to "the community" at the same time?
So buy it with Windows and get your refund.
Consider the refund as a payment by Microsoft for you installing Linux.
I heard that the Balmernator is graduating to spinning cubicles - with the marketroids still in them - if Windows 7 is as big a flop as VistaME.
I don't know abut Ubuntu, but on many distros, you can turn off or suspend real-time indexing. Otherwise, you're indexing the file system, any web pages you crawl, etc. That takes a lot of juice.
Back when a hard drive had a meg or two of cache, a "hybrid drive" made some sort of sense for reads (but not writes - flash memory needs to write too large a block size). Now with hard drives coming with 16 and 32 meg of cache (even laptop drives now come with 8 to 16 meg of cache) there's no real performance gain - just additional cost and compexity,
I should point out I switched to using my laptop as my main at-work box a few months ago - my former work box at the office is now YACS - Yet Another Community Server - for stuff I don't feel like moving to the BSD box (or for test databases that take up too much room).
Many external hard drives are made from batches of hard drives that failed QC at their full capacity. They get reformatted at a lower capacity (so the heads aren't stroked across the whole platter, for example, or the drive's firmware modified so it doesn't use a defective platter). Your LaCie could very well have maxtor drives in it, in which case it's a real piece of shit - the maxtorgates (seagates from what was Maxtors' China plant) are absolute crap. Out of 12 drives so far, I've had ONE that lasted more than a month.
Those "usb backup solutions" are cheap for a reason.
Re: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid. Every artist is influenced by what has gone before. "If I can see further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" applies to art, music, and literature, not just to science.
Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright. Imagine how much poorer we'd all be, how many fewer new devices we'd have, if patents were valid for 95 years? Copyright should be no different.
Most people actually like Sci-fi - they just don't know it's really sci-fi, or they don't even think abut it. Whether it's ET or the last Indiana Jones stinker (or Keanu Reeve's latest one, for that matter) or Ironman, it's sci-fi.
Then again, much of our life today is sci-fi to the previous generation. Cell phones a lot smaller than Kirk's communicator, that have global reach. And can make videos. And contain computers more powerful, and with more memory, than the ones that went to the moon. Refrigierators with no moving parts, no compressor to break down. Microwave ovens as "throw them out if they break", instead of $900 "Radar Ranges". 19" colour TVs? Heck, 35" color TVs are obsolete - welcome to the flat panel display. Laser printers ("laser WHAT? You can't print with a laser. The paper would burn up!" they'd say). The patch. CDs, which didn't even exist then, obsolete! Microfiber clothing. Water-based paints that you can actually scrub! Free software. Businesses whose whole modus operandi, their economic model, is based on enabling the free sharing of software and information. Memory foam. Memory wire. Data cards smaller, and more densely packed with information, than the ones on Star Trek. MRI and CT scanners. Electric cars. Cars that don't need an oil change and grease job every 3,000 miles, and spark plugs, rotor, cap, wires and points every 10,000.
We've gone from videophones being "pie in the sky" to "webcam free with every laptop sold - see and talk to anyone, anywhere." Try to find a laptop that doesn't have a webcam. Satellite reception - gone from theory to huge base stations with antennas that look like radio astronomers' kit to a pizza-sized dish, 50' of cable, and a small box - buy from the store around the corner, next to all the other stuff that didn't even exist 50 years ago.
Science fiction? We're living it, to the point where we don't even recognize sci-fi on the big screen.
Actually, its steganography, but I used typoganography to hide the "s" :-)
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it ...
Nah ... it's like a quiz on economic theory - the questions don't change, but over time the answers do.
Hardware changes, software changes, the economics change. 20 years ago, hard drives were so expensive that they weren't practical for backups. Nowadays, hard drives are throw-away items.
What is this 500GB and larger USB drive you speak of ...
Certainly not flash memory. More likely an external hard drive with a USB connector. More problems than an internal hard drive, due to lack of ventilation, etc.
I doubt stiction is that big a problem. I had a computer that literally sat for a decade before I decided to boot it up "just for the heck of it" - ahh, the good old days of 17-second bootups
Time to think of distributed search, rather than being dependent on Google or any other one search engine.
Besides, think of the legal implications. You sit down at a coworkers' 'puter and look for some pictures of kittens for the company Christmas newsletter. You search Google for "cute kittens" and the "personalized results" are all porn links or videos of kittens being tortured and killed, based on that users' search preferences.
Serch works now because it DOESN'T tailor itself to any one person's world-view, or give me what it "thinks" I want. If it ever ends up just giving me "what it thinks I want", we'll end up with an echo chamber effect writ large.