I personally think the Chromebook along with the Google Online Cloudstuff has its niche already and stands a real chance at becoming the prime choice for household computing.
In my experience, one of the main things people use a "household computer" for is playing music and movies, both of which the Chromebook absolutely sucks at.
Unique "actual apps" that require Windows are actually far and few between. The behemoth - MS Office, Games, Image/Video Editing, CAD, IDEs.
I would agree that you probably don't need Microsoft Office, but if you're really saying there are Web apps that do anything that people use Photoshop for, you need your head examined.
As for what else you might need that the Chromebook doesn't provide, it depends on your usage style. What about a really good FTP client? If you send files back and forth in the course of your work, a Chromebook isn't going to cut it for you. What about a telnet client to log into servers? What about having a hotkey that pops up a nice calculator? Yes, you can punch formulas into Google, but it's not really the same. What about recording audio? I've used Audacity to record audio tracks for podcasts at work before, and while there's a mic jack on the Chromebook, but I don't know how to use it except for video chat. What about packaging stuff in Zip files? Chromebooks don't understand Zip files at all. Forget IDEs, what about a simple HTML editor? I know of a few attempts to make a Web-based HTML editor but I wouldn't describe any of them as anything other than "painful." But let's say you found one -- what about if you had a stack of fourteen HTML files that all needed one search-and-replace change; is there any way to do that on the Web?
Maybe these all sound like nitpicks, but there all the kinds of things I do with a computer during my workday and they are all cases where I would be frustrated if all I had was a Chromebook. Even my Eee PC will allow me to do all of these things and run Chrome, and it would be cheaper.
As for your comments about security, yes, I guess that's true, but is it really worth giving up all the things that real computers can help us do? Google's argument seems like saying that learning to read can give people bad ideas, so we should all just go to church and have the pastor read the Bible to us. It's an interesting model, but as a "power user" it just doesn't sit well with me. I'm still happier with the frustrations of having a Windows PC on an office network where the IT department has locked everything down and I have to run some kind of odious antivirus software etc. than the idea of only having a Chromebook to get my work done.
I've had three BlackBerrys and none of them ever did that. Maybe the new ones suck harder than the old ones, I don't know.
One thing I did do, however, is configure my BlackBerry so that it would switch itself off at say 4am, then switch back on at 8am. I got the equivalent of a soft reboot for free every night, plus I saved four hours worth of battery.
BES is nothing like Google Apps. They're complimentary technologies, but they don't do the same thing at all. You may as well say Microsoft SQL Server is easily matched by Apache.
How so? Pretty much all Android handsets allow you to log into your Google account and have your calendar, contacts, email, etc. synced automatically. Is that not what BES does for most people?
I own an HP 50g, but I find it a lot more convenient to program a macro on my PC keyboard to pull up a 50g emulator. I also have a 48 emulator on my Android phone. Both beat the hell out of the stock OS calculators, and I can use RPN any time I want.
About as long as I'd survive swimming in any other pool of other non-toxic stuff with a similar viscosity, I'd imagine.
Who says diarrhea is non-toxic? There's a reason your body starts trying to violently get rid of as much intestinal bulk as possible, you know. Usually it's because it's swarming with bacteria or viruses. In the case of cholera, the organism is adapted to cause you to get diarrhea so it can spread itself. Dive into a swimming pool of cholera diarrhea and you literally take your life in your hands.
The above comment is exactly what is wrong with movies today. Scriptwriters are frigging morons.
That's not fair. The average screenwriter gets contracted to write a script, gets paid for said script, and has nothing more to do with it after that. The script sits in some producer's desk for a year or two, then gets pulled out, dusted off, and handed off to some script doctor for rewrites. Then it gets handed off to someone else, and if we're really lucky, it gets handed off to someone else to polish so that all the product placements fit into the plot. Then it gets shot, and the director rewrites a few scenes on the fly, on the urging of the producers. And then we have our movie. If screenwriters were such idiots, you'd think we'd hear more of them showing off wherever they could when their movies make hundreds of millions of dollars. The truth is, the finished films have long since ceased to be "their" movies.
I think after what they did with Doom the only thing that is certain about this movie is that it will not have space or invaders.
Eh? The way I remember it, the Doom movie was a pretty dead-on version of Doom III, albeit with more characters a fewer monsters. They even had a whole section of the movie that went into first-person shooter mode. How much more like Doom could they have made it?
Though not sequels, Space Invaders was made old with the release of Galaxian (space invaders with up to a squadron of 3 dive-bombing aliens), which in turn was uprooted by Galaga (Galaxian but now the flying around was the main thing).
Then Gorf gave you a mish-mash of all of the above.
I recently learned that Gmail makes this really easy. Basically, you can attach anything you want to your Gmail address by adding a "+" sign. So if your Gmail address was "Asic.Eng@Gmail.com," you could sign up for Web sites as "Asic.Eng+SketchyRetailer@Gmail.com" or "Asic.Eng+pr0n@Gmail.com" and they will all be delivered to your regular inbox. You can, however, setup filters based on the "To:" header, so if any one of those addresses starts sending you spam, you can just flag it for the trash bin and forget about it. Even though I don't really use Gmail myself, I thought this was a pretty nifty feature.
Actually I KNOW it is much better and I'll explain why...webmail.
But more importantly, it's the spam filters those webmail providers are running.
I still get my mail through my own server -- that is to say, it arrives via my shared-hosting provider's server. My provider runs SpamAssassin on the server, which to my knowledge is free. I get virtually no spam. For a while I was having it all go to a "spam" inbox, because I was paranoid about false positives. Now I just let it all go to the bit dumpster. I still get a little bit of spam here and there, but it seems like the Bayesian filters eventually catch up and even those disappear after a while. So although I still do download my email (and if it was the 90s, I would be doing it over a modem), I don't download much spam, and it's for the same reason people who use webmail don't worry about spam: Spam filtering.
2. Because Linux under VM is completely dependent on Windows networking, what robs it from most of its superior functionality.
Really? So if I'm running Firefox in a Linux VM on Windows, I'm going to be crying my eyes out about the terrible state of inferior Windows networking? Pull the other one.
3. s/networking/filesystem/
This is just bullshit, since Linux in a VM doesn't use the Windows filesystem except to read and write one or two gigantic VM files.
4. VM, even best ones, introduce annoying UI quirks that user would attribute to Linux.
Such as?
5. User will never learn anything about Linux if he will have Windows environment to do everything he does, even if setting up a superior configuration under Linux is a matter of minutes.
Obviously not. It's impossible to learn anything about Linux by using Linux. You're a troll.
I dunno, I kinda doubt busy professionals who spent years in medical school to get where they are would appreciate having to wear Tyvek clothes all day, when there are other solutions.
I wasn't even thinking about the sock angle, because I read TFA and it says almost nothing about that. This compound's main application is going to be in healthcare settings.
I freely admit I'm pretty ignorant of microbiology but given the choice I'd wager heavily that boiling water is more efficacious than than a chemical treatment.
We'll agree on "at least as effective," but the problem is that you can't have your hospital staff lounge in vats of boiling water while they deal with patients. It's not like a scalpel where you use it once and throw it into the autoclave. Healthcare workers wear their garments all day.
It would be prohibitively expensive, and it probably wouldn't work. You would need to wash your scrubs etc. every day, immediately before starting your shift. If you washed them after your shift, then hung them up or put them in a locker, they could potentially be contaminated again. You can also pick up a pathogen when working with one patient, then carry it on your clothes to the next. If this spray makes garments permanently resistant to pathogens, even that would stop happening. It could cut down nosocomial infections a lot.
I use OpenOffice almost daily, but for very simple stuff. The truth is, it still lacks many features that Office offers.
So does Lotus Notes, which is the suite referenced here. I think this was really mostly about trying to get the university to transition from Domino to SharePoint.
If Visa would shut down it's operation in Germany today, I'd say 90% of the people would not even notice and for 9.5% the minor inconvience would last less than two weeks (until car rental companies changed the insurance process). The remaining few would bicker a little bit and then move on.
The German people, maybe. Travelers would be a little more put off, and I doubt German merchants would be willing to give up sales to international customers. Or do you really expect the first step of international travel should be to send away for a local bank card months in advance?
in Germany EC/Maestro vastly dominates Visa/Mastercard
In perception only, since Maestro is owned by Mastercard. Similarly, your carte bleue might also be a Visa card (particularly if you want to use it outside of France). I don't know anything about Denmark's system.
I have my doubts that Visa or Mastercard would shoot themselves in the foot that badly by pulling out of the European market. What an absurd thought. It's worth billions to them.
The United States is not the center of the universe. The EU, being a huge market, has sufficient clout to do major corporations serious harm.
On the other hand, do you really think the EU would want to be shut out of as important a payment processing market as Visa or Mastercard? If anything, there's plenty of incentive for the EU to side with the credit card companies against Wikileaks.
patents are not ownership. That is just a euphemism. Patents are government mandated monopolies. Closer to fascism than capitalism.
So what do you call land ownership? Who says that someone else can't just come and sleep in your backyard? The government. You didn't make the land and you didn't discover it. It was here millions of years before you were ever born and it will probably be here millions of years after. So how can you "own" it?
In fact, you can't effectively own anything without laws that say it's yours.
The fact that you would even comment on socialism means you clearly don't understand the parents argument.
The fact that you would talk about "fascism" and "feudalism" means you clearly have never read a history book. Go talk to someone who profits by licensing his patents to the federal government, and then explain to me how fascist patents are. Go file a few papers and incorporate yourself as a business, and then explain to me the tyranny of corporate feudalism.
And before all else, maybe you should just sit down and take a few deep breaths.
You do realise that patents and corporations have nothing to do with capitalism, yes? Given that they are government-granted protections, you could argue that they're antithetical to capitalism.
You could argue that, but you would sound pretty stupid. For starters, how does having a government and laws make you anti-capitalist? You can't even have a stable monetary system without government-granted protection of the currency.
A corporation is a legal structure that codifies ownership of property. The corporation owns assets and conducts business; individual shareholders own portions of the total value of that entity. That is what you'd describe as anti-capitalist behavior?
Similarly, patents grant ownership of implementations of ideas. There's that O-word again.
If you really think these ideas are socialism at work, I don't think you've talked to many real socialists.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think the Chromebook along with the Google Online Cloudstuff has its niche already and stands a real chance at becoming the prime choice for household computing.
In my experience, one of the main things people use a "household computer" for is playing music and movies, both of which the Chromebook absolutely sucks at.
Full disclosure: I wrote the review.
Unique "actual apps" that require Windows are actually far and few between. The behemoth - MS Office, Games, Image/Video Editing, CAD, IDEs.
I would agree that you probably don't need Microsoft Office, but if you're really saying there are Web apps that do anything that people use Photoshop for, you need your head examined.
As for what else you might need that the Chromebook doesn't provide, it depends on your usage style. What about a really good FTP client? If you send files back and forth in the course of your work, a Chromebook isn't going to cut it for you. What about a telnet client to log into servers? What about having a hotkey that pops up a nice calculator? Yes, you can punch formulas into Google, but it's not really the same. What about recording audio? I've used Audacity to record audio tracks for podcasts at work before, and while there's a mic jack on the Chromebook, but I don't know how to use it except for video chat. What about packaging stuff in Zip files? Chromebooks don't understand Zip files at all. Forget IDEs, what about a simple HTML editor? I know of a few attempts to make a Web-based HTML editor but I wouldn't describe any of them as anything other than "painful." But let's say you found one -- what about if you had a stack of fourteen HTML files that all needed one search-and-replace change; is there any way to do that on the Web?
Maybe these all sound like nitpicks, but there all the kinds of things I do with a computer during my workday and they are all cases where I would be frustrated if all I had was a Chromebook. Even my Eee PC will allow me to do all of these things and run Chrome, and it would be cheaper.
As for your comments about security, yes, I guess that's true, but is it really worth giving up all the things that real computers can help us do? Google's argument seems like saying that learning to read can give people bad ideas, so we should all just go to church and have the pastor read the Bible to us. It's an interesting model, but as a "power user" it just doesn't sit well with me. I'm still happier with the frustrations of having a Windows PC on an office network where the IT department has locked everything down and I have to run some kind of odious antivirus software etc. than the idea of only having a Chromebook to get my work done.
Full disclosure: I wrote the review.
I've had three BlackBerrys and none of them ever did that. Maybe the new ones suck harder than the old ones, I don't know.
One thing I did do, however, is configure my BlackBerry so that it would switch itself off at say 4am, then switch back on at 8am. I got the equivalent of a soft reboot for free every night, plus I saved four hours worth of battery.
BES is nothing like Google Apps. They're complimentary technologies, but they don't do the same thing at all. You may as well say Microsoft SQL Server is easily matched by Apache.
How so? Pretty much all Android handsets allow you to log into your Google account and have your calendar, contacts, email, etc. synced automatically. Is that not what BES does for most people?
I own an HP 50g, but I find it a lot more convenient to program a macro on my PC keyboard to pull up a 50g emulator. I also have a 48 emulator on my Android phone. Both beat the hell out of the stock OS calculators, and I can use RPN any time I want.
About as long as I'd survive swimming in any other pool of other non-toxic stuff with a similar viscosity, I'd imagine.
Who says diarrhea is non-toxic? There's a reason your body starts trying to violently get rid of as much intestinal bulk as possible, you know. Usually it's because it's swarming with bacteria or viruses. In the case of cholera, the organism is adapted to cause you to get diarrhea so it can spread itself. Dive into a swimming pool of cholera diarrhea and you literally take your life in your hands.
Get MAME, get the original ROM, have the exact experience of the original (because it really is the original).
The above comment is exactly what is wrong with movies today. Scriptwriters are frigging morons.
That's not fair. The average screenwriter gets contracted to write a script, gets paid for said script, and has nothing more to do with it after that. The script sits in some producer's desk for a year or two, then gets pulled out, dusted off, and handed off to some script doctor for rewrites. Then it gets handed off to someone else, and if we're really lucky, it gets handed off to someone else to polish so that all the product placements fit into the plot. Then it gets shot, and the director rewrites a few scenes on the fly, on the urging of the producers. And then we have our movie. If screenwriters were such idiots, you'd think we'd hear more of them showing off wherever they could when their movies make hundreds of millions of dollars. The truth is, the finished films have long since ceased to be "their" movies.
I think after what they did with Doom the only thing that is certain about this movie is that it will not have space or invaders.
Eh? The way I remember it, the Doom movie was a pretty dead-on version of Doom III, albeit with more characters a fewer monsters. They even had a whole section of the movie that went into first-person shooter mode. How much more like Doom could they have made it?
Though not sequels, Space Invaders was made old with the release of Galaxian (space invaders with up to a squadron of 3 dive-bombing aliens), which in turn was uprooted by Galaga (Galaxian but now the flying around was the main thing).
Then Gorf gave you a mish-mash of all of the above.
Meh. I think this one shows more spirit.
I recently learned that Gmail makes this really easy. Basically, you can attach anything you want to your Gmail address by adding a "+" sign. So if your Gmail address was "Asic.Eng@Gmail.com," you could sign up for Web sites as "Asic.Eng+SketchyRetailer@Gmail.com" or "Asic.Eng+pr0n@Gmail.com" and they will all be delivered to your regular inbox. You can, however, setup filters based on the "To:" header, so if any one of those addresses starts sending you spam, you can just flag it for the trash bin and forget about it. Even though I don't really use Gmail myself, I thought this was a pretty nifty feature.
Actually I KNOW it is much better and I'll explain why...webmail.
But more importantly, it's the spam filters those webmail providers are running.
I still get my mail through my own server -- that is to say, it arrives via my shared-hosting provider's server. My provider runs SpamAssassin on the server, which to my knowledge is free. I get virtually no spam. For a while I was having it all go to a "spam" inbox, because I was paranoid about false positives. Now I just let it all go to the bit dumpster. I still get a little bit of spam here and there, but it seems like the Bayesian filters eventually catch up and even those disappear after a while. So although I still do download my email (and if it was the 90s, I would be doing it over a modem), I don't download much spam, and it's for the same reason people who use webmail don't worry about spam: Spam filtering.
2. Because Linux under VM is completely dependent on Windows networking, what robs it from most of its superior functionality.
Really? So if I'm running Firefox in a Linux VM on Windows, I'm going to be crying my eyes out about the terrible state of inferior Windows networking? Pull the other one.
3. s/networking/filesystem/
This is just bullshit, since Linux in a VM doesn't use the Windows filesystem except to read and write one or two gigantic VM files.
4. VM, even best ones, introduce annoying UI quirks that user would attribute to Linux.
Such as?
5. User will never learn anything about Linux if he will have Windows environment to do everything he does, even if setting up a superior configuration under Linux is a matter of minutes.
Obviously not. It's impossible to learn anything about Linux by using Linux. You're a troll.
I dunno, I kinda doubt busy professionals who spent years in medical school to get where they are would appreciate having to wear Tyvek clothes all day, when there are other solutions.
I wasn't even thinking about the sock angle, because I read TFA and it says almost nothing about that. This compound's main application is going to be in healthcare settings.
I freely admit I'm pretty ignorant of microbiology but given the choice I'd wager heavily that boiling water is more efficacious than than a chemical treatment.
We'll agree on "at least as effective," but the problem is that you can't have your hospital staff lounge in vats of boiling water while they deal with patients. It's not like a scalpel where you use it once and throw it into the autoclave. Healthcare workers wear their garments all day.
What's wrong with just washing the damn things?
It would be prohibitively expensive, and it probably wouldn't work. You would need to wash your scrubs etc. every day, immediately before starting your shift. If you washed them after your shift, then hung them up or put them in a locker, they could potentially be contaminated again. You can also pick up a pathogen when working with one patient, then carry it on your clothes to the next. If this spray makes garments permanently resistant to pathogens, even that would stop happening. It could cut down nosocomial infections a lot.
I use OpenOffice almost daily, but for very simple stuff. The truth is, it still lacks many features that Office offers.
So does Lotus Notes, which is the suite referenced here. I think this was really mostly about trying to get the university to transition from Domino to SharePoint.
If Visa would shut down it's operation in Germany today, I'd say 90% of the people would not even notice and for 9.5% the minor inconvience would last less than two weeks (until car rental companies changed the insurance process). The remaining few would bicker a little bit and then move on.
The German people, maybe. Travelers would be a little more put off, and I doubt German merchants would be willing to give up sales to international customers. Or do you really expect the first step of international travel should be to send away for a local bank card months in advance?
in Germany EC/Maestro vastly dominates Visa/Mastercard
In perception only, since Maestro is owned by Mastercard. Similarly, your carte bleue might also be a Visa card (particularly if you want to use it outside of France). I don't know anything about Denmark's system.
I have my doubts that Visa or Mastercard would shoot themselves in the foot that badly by pulling out of the European market. What an absurd thought. It's worth billions to them.
The United States is not the center of the universe. The EU, being a huge market, has sufficient clout to do major corporations serious harm.
On the other hand, do you really think the EU would want to be shut out of as important a payment processing market as Visa or Mastercard? If anything, there's plenty of incentive for the EU to side with the credit card companies against Wikileaks.
Debian / Ubuntu reminds me of a joke an old Rugby player told me.
I think that rugby player was Robert Duvall and the movie was Colors.
This is a lot of bitching from people who are supposed to be sysadmins and advanced users
...
SharePoint does take months to install and configure
Well played, sir!
patents are not ownership. That is just a euphemism. Patents are government mandated monopolies. Closer to fascism than capitalism.
So what do you call land ownership? Who says that someone else can't just come and sleep in your backyard? The government. You didn't make the land and you didn't discover it. It was here millions of years before you were ever born and it will probably be here millions of years after. So how can you "own" it?
In fact, you can't effectively own anything without laws that say it's yours.
The fact that you would even comment on socialism means you clearly don't understand the parents argument.
The fact that you would talk about "fascism" and "feudalism" means you clearly have never read a history book. Go talk to someone who profits by licensing his patents to the federal government, and then explain to me how fascist patents are. Go file a few papers and incorporate yourself as a business, and then explain to me the tyranny of corporate feudalism.
And before all else, maybe you should just sit down and take a few deep breaths.
You do realise that patents and corporations have nothing to do with capitalism, yes? Given that they are government-granted protections, you could argue that they're antithetical to capitalism.
You could argue that, but you would sound pretty stupid. For starters, how does having a government and laws make you anti-capitalist? You can't even have a stable monetary system without government-granted protection of the currency.
A corporation is a legal structure that codifies ownership of property. The corporation owns assets and conducts business; individual shareholders own portions of the total value of that entity. That is what you'd describe as anti-capitalist behavior?
Similarly, patents grant ownership of implementations of ideas. There's that O-word again.
If you really think these ideas are socialism at work, I don't think you've talked to many real socialists.