Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM.
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 1
"nation's inability to think"???
I think you're anthropomorphizing a bit there. No nation in the history of the earth has ever had a thought of any kind. Many people have had many thoughts while being citizens of various nations.
Talking about what nation invented what items is silly. Now if you wanted to discuss what nations that various talented inventors prefer to live in that might be an interesting discussion or it might not.
Don't get too wrapped up in your geographical proximity to talented minds unless you earned that proximity through objectively judged competition.
I bought a Brother MFC-5460CN this past spring for under $100 after rebate, but it looks like Office Depot may be screwing me out of the rebate which was $40 or $50. They claimed I didn't send in the UPC from the box (which I certainly did) and I haven't heard anything since I called to argue with them and mailed them photocopies of the UPC and the original paperwork.
Anyway, I've had it for 3 or 4 months now and the software says the ink cartridges are about half full. I just ordered replacement cartridges, 2 of each color including black, for $42.95 total including shipping which doesn't seem terribly expensive to me.
The Brother replaces a Canon S750 ink jet printer. I hardly ever bought ink for that thing and when I did, I think the cartridges were under 10 bucks even at a retail office store. It lasted me 4 or 5 years and then developed a logic fault. Print quality was still fine, but it would hang with an obscure error message and a flashing light after printing a single page. If I didn't mind power cycling it between every page I could still be using it now.
Seems to me that a laser printer could develop that sort of logic fault just as well as an ink jet so I think I got my money's worth out of that inexpensive printer.
I've got a 19" and a 21" monitor plus an ultraportable laptop, so I don't print much. If you just need the occasional hard copy and the convenience of being able to make photocopies at home I recommend the Brother. If you need to print high volumes get a laser. Oh, and don't count on the rebate, seems to me that a lot of these rebates are pure scams.
I don't see how I can take seriously any comparison of "typical computer use" that excludes web browsing. They claim "zero advance in productivity" but completely overlook the fact that "productivity" is probably just a small fraction of overall computer use.
If you exclude web browsing, online gaming, recreational photo editing, music recording, video editing, etc. then you're probably excluding 50-90% of modern computer use.
So yes, for the couple of percent of people whose needs were completely satisfied by a Mac Plus in the 80s it might be best to never upgrade. The rest of us are spending lots of time doing things that we simply couldn't do on computers in the 80s. Whether you consider our activities "productive" or not is just splitting hairs and arguing semantics.
Who is manufacturing these laptops that have a boot up time worth worrying about? I remember booting laptops running Windows NT years ago, but modern laptops (by which I mean 4 to 5 years old) don't have to boot very often. I generally reboot my laptops once a month or so. Is this really a complaint about Linux power management problems? With Windows XP Pro I just open the lid, type my password and use the laptop. That applies to my Lifebook and Thinkpad as well as my wife's Thinkpad and Dell. I only run Linux on servers so I haven't had any experience with Linux power management.
For the heck of it I just stuck my P2120 on a kitchen scale. It's 3.75 pounds. That's with both the drive bay battery and the extra high capacity main battery. My bay battery is a couple years old and I haven't timed it from full charge to fully dead, but I get at least 8 hours minimum, probably more like 10+. Here's a rough comparison of the specs.
Folio vs P2120 Weight: 2.4# vs 3.75# Battery Life: 5 hours claimed vs 8+ hours conservative Screen: 10.2" vs 10.5" diagonal Resolution: 1024x768 vs 1280x768 RAM: 256MB vs 512MB
Now, I paid $2000 3 or 4 years ago and I've replaced both batteries. I also upgraded the internal 802.11 from b to g and I don't have Bluetooth built in at all or SD or Compact Flash slots (although I do have a PCMCIA slot that I've never used).
If this new device from Palm is under $500 it might be interesting, but frankly I'm unimpressed. I'm waiting without much hope for a device the same size and weight of my P2000 but with at least 5 times the CPU power and at least double the RAM.
As the owner of a Fujitsu P2000 (P2120 specifically) this is certainly a device I'm interested in, but 5 hours of battery life is way too short and I don't see much to indicate whether this is a fully open Linux system.
I'm running WinXP Pro on my P2000 and although it's getting on in age and leaves a lot to be desired in the CPU department (Transmeta CPUs never lived up to the hype), I certainly wouldn't trade it in on a locked down device.
If this thing from Palm doesn't support fully open installation of standard desktop applications then I don't see much point in it.
That hardly seems impressive. A while back I bought a Brother printer/scanner/copier/fax for $140 with a $50 rebate and they threw in an extended warranty at no extra charge. The cartriges are $9.19 for color and $18.27 for black at Newegg. I don't print much, but it's nice to have a scanner with a 35 page sheet feeder and the abilty to make color copies is cool.
Before that I had a Canon S750. It worked great, the ink cartriges weren't very expensive and lasted for ages (I don't print a lot, but need to be able to print occasionally.) It lasted me three or for years with no decrease in print quality, but the electronics went wacky. It would only print the first page of any job and then go into an error mode. Pressing the power button reset it so it could print another page.
Every printer story on Slashdot is filled with whiners complaining about how expensive ink jets are an how they clog, and how the quality decreases. Either these people abuse their printers or they don't do their research before buying.
That's a great price, but Newegg currently has that exact drive (Maxtor One Touch III 500GB) for $155. Amazon doesn't seem to have it but they have a 300GB version for $170 and a 600GB version for $417. www.maxtorstore.com is also selling the 300GB version for $170.
So, if you managed to get a deal buying it for $20 less than the already low price at Newegg then good for you, but don't pretend that that's the common going rate for external hard drives.
We've had good luck with Lucent Bricks. Very easy to use, a wide range of models with absolutely identical interface. Just choose a model based on how many ports you need or how much throughput. They run the Inferno operating system which is based on Bell Labs' uber-geek Plan 9 OS.
In particular, active-standby is brilliant. Need high availability? Just buy a second Brick of the same model and plug it into all the same switches/vlans as the first. The entire configuration of the backup consists of exactly one checkbox, that's literally all. In the user interface it looks like you're configuring one device but if that checkbox is checked and you have a second Brick then every change you make automatically gets made to both the active and standby.
Need more firewalls? They're all managed through the same management station. They can share host group definitions, service group definitions, and rulesets. Very powerful and very easy to use. Very flexible reporting is also integrated into the same interface.
Roomba is not for anybody with computers or AV equipment or lamps or stairs or area rugs.
I just bought a Maytag upright for $99 and it works great. My Roomba languishes unused. Whenever it would run it would eat cords, fall over the edge of the step down, try to devour the entire bathroom rug, and get lost under the bed unable to find its base station. I tried it in the living room but it can't climb from a hardwood floor onto an area rug.
The scheduler remote is lousy and requires line of sight. The dirt catch bin has to be emptied manually after every run, so the scheduler function isn't really all that useful.
Using the Maytag manually is just a lot less aggravation than the Roomba. And I can't imagine that a Dyson upright works 4-5 times better than a $99 Maytag so I can't see paying 4-5 times the price. I doubt a Dyson "Roomba" will be sufficiently better than a real Roomba. Probably just an expensive gimmick.
What you're looking for is called 'Public Transportation'. Look it up sometime.
I looked it up, it doesn't exist.
Ok, technically it exists, but it doesn't exist where I am or where I want to go so it may as well not exist as far as I'm concerned.
I suppose I could leave all my friends and family behind and start a new life in a city where there's fabulous public transportation. Seems a bit extreme though.
Telecommuting may decrease the urge to "climb the corporate ladder" if the pay is sufficient. I've found that telecommuting is a strong job satisfaction component. Now, I'm not the type of person who would have ever climbed to the corner office at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. If I had a shot at that sort of oppulence I'd be foolish to risk missing out by losing "face time".
But as far as climbing a bit faster in the middle levels of corporate IT? The job satisfaction of avoiding the 10 rush hour commutes per week, the large home office, home cooked food instead of cafeteria or lunch bag amounts to quite a lot of non-monetary compensation.
If I couldn't telecommute I'd probably jump from job to job and company to company in order to maximize my income, but as long as I can telecommute a lot of the time and as long as the job isn't too unpleasant and as long as the pay covers my expenses, I don't have a whole lot of motivation to look for a new job.
X10 Hardware is so miserable. I can't vouch for the stuff being mentioned above, but I can certainly testify to the general crappiness of X10. I am so sick of slow unreliable X10 junk. I've got filters, signal boosters, and and a signal analyzer, but X10 still just isn't reliable and even when it works it's slow.
If designing on a budget at the expense of quality and functionality is a geek requirement then I guess I'm not a geek. But maybe I am a geek since I haven't ripped out all this X10 crap yet and replaced it with something that works well.
You've more or less asked what's the best car for driving to and from work and around town. Good luck with that.
There's a huge variety of pro and semi-pro audio gear on the market. If you've got detailed requirements then you need to start reading tech specs and reviews. If you don't have detailed requirements then just search for "usb audio interface" and/or "firewire audio interface" and pick something in the $100-$200 range.
There are a vast number of features and quite a wide price range and I really doubt there's an objective "best" any more than there's an objective "best" car that everyone would agree is better than all the others.
The article conspicuously fails to state whether Wal-Mart was correct or not.
The article assumes that Wal-Mart sent DVDs back to Disney out of spite, but what if Wal-Mart merely made an accurate assessment of the situation? Did Wal-Mart sell out of the whatever titles they returned? Were there customer complaints about lack of these titles? Or was Wal-Mart correct in its assessment that the demand would be lower?
I don't know if it's right or wrong, but from what I've read Wal-Mart requires its vendors to agree that they'll take back overstock if demand is less than expected. If Wal-Mart can send back "cases and cases" of DVDs and still keep the titles on the shelves than they're simply behaving sensibly.
If they can't keep the titles on the shelves then this seems to be a classic case of "cut off your nose to spite your face". We're talking purchase here, right? Not rental? If you're renting a DVD and they don't have the one you want you might rent a different one. If you're shopping to buy a specific DVD, I can't imagine that you'd simply buy something else if the store doesn't have the one you're looking for.
We're not talking about interchangeable products here. If you want "Lost" on DVD and Wal-Mart doesn't have it you'll go elsewhere. Personally I find deepdiscountdvd.com to be a great source, but there are countless others. What percentage of the US is really so cut off from civilization that if Wal-Mart doesn't carry "Lost" they can't get it some other way?
How can any x-y graph without units on the y axis be useful? Without units this entire thing is just mental masturbation. You can play around with it if that sort of thing makes you happy, but I can't see any actual value coming out of it because without numbers it's just meaningless pictures.
our last car was stolen by prying the door open and bending the frame, leaving the window totally intact but at a wild angle, i didnt even know that was possible with bear hands.
You'd be amazed at what's possible with bear hands. They are amazingly strong. I bet a hungry polar or grizzly bear could peel the entire roof off your car if it wanted to eat you.
Yes, you should really say "X users that know what they're doing". There's some black magic text file editing involved. I can run MythTV on my box's VGA output or on its PVR350 TV output, but I've absolutely failed to get it to run mythfrontend on the TV out while simultaneously running an independent desktop session on the VGA out. It can allegedly be done, but it's not obvious how.
If Windows or OS X had the ability you can bet it would be a matter of checking a check box in a control panel. It's great that Linux has some exotic capabilities, but not everybody enjoys scouring a bazillion different mailing lists and web forum posts for obscure clues to exactly what to put into a text file to get something to work.
As long as Microsoft and Apple keep adding easy to use features there will be vast hordes of people willing to pay money for them. Those hordes won't care that Linux could have accomplished the same thing years earlier because those hordes wouldn't have spent the hours or weeks of research necessary to make Linux do those things. But they'll gladly pay Apple or Microsoft ~$100 because their time is more valuable than that.
You make the common mistake of considering the sequels to be the same sort of book as the original Dune. The first book is mostly an adventure novel. The later books are much more weighted towards religion, politics, and philosophy. Book 2 and 3 are tough to get through (at least the first time, I found they were easier and more enjoyable upon re-reading). You definitely can't approach them expecting the same hero-villian adventure-battle-conquest scenario.
Frankly, Lord of the Rings is a grade school fairy tale compared to the Dune series. There are very few books that address the scope of history that Dune presents. The first book is a basic adventure but the subsequent books explore the nature of heros, mesiahs, and rulers throughout a vast span of (future) history.
Last time I went grocery shopping I used the self checkout. Out of a variety of deli and produce products that I bought, there were two items I didn't buy. One was a pre-sealed package of sliced turkey. The bar code registered correctly, but then the computer removed it from the screen and said the product required "assistance" to buy it. The other was a bag of seedless green grapes. After picking them off of the produce lookup screen it told me to weigh them. After weighing them, it told me that "this product cannot be purchased at this time".
So I left them at the check out counter, paid for the rest of my groceries and left the store.
It didn't really occur to me to attribute this to Orwell/Big Brother/1984. I just assumed that some underpaid supermarket employee screwed up somewhere when configuring the computer system.
You are an inhuman monster. It's not bad enough that a child has been mistreated, you think they should kill themself to spare you the inconvenience of being aware of their pain. If someone has been abused as a child they will have a hard time ever living a normal life, but they are just as deserving of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as anyone else even if it's more difficult for them than others. As long as they don't allow their pain to lead them to cause harm to others they are just as deserving of equal rights as anyone else, no matter what psychological harm they've suffered.
I spend way to much time trying to overcome the flood of paper and other junk in the real world cluttering up my desk and surrounding flat surfaces. Why would I want that on my computer? What's needed are better more efficient ways of finding stuff even though you barely remember what it was or what it looked like. Maybe a compulsive organization freak could deal with this system, but for ordinary people it'll probably just reduce their computer desktop to even worse disorganized chaos than their real desk.
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"nation's inability to think"???
I think you're anthropomorphizing a bit there. No nation in the history of the earth has ever had a thought of any kind. Many people have had many thoughts while being citizens of various nations.
Talking about what nation invented what items is silly. Now if you wanted to discuss what nations that various talented inventors prefer to live in that might be an interesting discussion or it might not.
Don't get too wrapped up in your geographical proximity to talented minds unless you earned that proximity through objectively judged competition.
I bought a Brother MFC-5460CN this past spring for under $100 after rebate, but it looks like Office Depot may be screwing me out of the rebate which was $40 or $50. They claimed I didn't send in the UPC from the box (which I certainly did) and I haven't heard anything since I called to argue with them and mailed them photocopies of the UPC and the original paperwork.
Anyway, I've had it for 3 or 4 months now and the software says the ink cartridges are about half full. I just ordered replacement cartridges, 2 of each color including black, for $42.95 total including shipping which doesn't seem terribly expensive to me.
The Brother replaces a Canon S750 ink jet printer. I hardly ever bought ink for that thing and when I did, I think the cartridges were under 10 bucks even at a retail office store. It lasted me 4 or 5 years and then developed a logic fault. Print quality was still fine, but it would hang with an obscure error message and a flashing light after printing a single page. If I didn't mind power cycling it between every page I could still be using it now.
Seems to me that a laser printer could develop that sort of logic fault just as well as an ink jet so I think I got my money's worth out of that inexpensive printer.
I've got a 19" and a 21" monitor plus an ultraportable laptop, so I don't print much. If you just need the occasional hard copy and the convenience of being able to make photocopies at home I recommend the Brother. If you need to print high volumes get a laser. Oh, and don't count on the rebate, seems to me that a lot of these rebates are pure scams.
I don't see how I can take seriously any comparison of "typical computer use" that excludes web browsing. They claim "zero advance in productivity" but completely overlook the fact that "productivity" is probably just a small fraction of overall computer use.
If you exclude web browsing, online gaming, recreational photo editing, music recording, video editing, etc. then you're probably excluding 50-90% of modern computer use.
So yes, for the couple of percent of people whose needs were completely satisfied by a Mac Plus in the 80s it might be best to never upgrade. The rest of us are spending lots of time doing things that we simply couldn't do on computers in the 80s. Whether you consider our activities "productive" or not is just splitting hairs and arguing semantics.
Who is manufacturing these laptops that have a boot up time worth worrying about? I remember booting laptops running Windows NT years ago, but modern laptops (by which I mean 4 to 5 years old) don't have to boot very often. I generally reboot my laptops once a month or so. Is this really a complaint about Linux power management problems? With Windows XP Pro I just open the lid, type my password and use the laptop. That applies to my Lifebook and Thinkpad as well as my wife's Thinkpad and Dell. I only run Linux on servers so I haven't had any experience with Linux power management.
For the heck of it I just stuck my P2120 on a kitchen scale. It's 3.75 pounds. That's with both the drive bay battery and the extra high capacity main battery. My bay battery is a couple years old and I haven't timed it from full charge to fully dead, but I get at least 8 hours minimum, probably more like 10+. Here's a rough comparison of the specs.
Folio vs P2120
Weight: 2.4# vs 3.75#
Battery Life: 5 hours claimed vs 8+ hours conservative
Screen: 10.2" vs 10.5" diagonal
Resolution: 1024x768 vs 1280x768
RAM: 256MB vs 512MB
Now, I paid $2000 3 or 4 years ago and I've replaced both batteries. I also upgraded the internal 802.11 from b to g and I don't have Bluetooth built in at all or SD or Compact Flash slots (although I do have a PCMCIA slot that I've never used).
If this new device from Palm is under $500 it might be interesting, but frankly I'm unimpressed. I'm waiting without much hope for a device the same size and weight of my P2000 but with at least 5 times the CPU power and at least double the RAM.
As the owner of a Fujitsu P2000 (P2120 specifically) this is certainly a device I'm interested in, but 5 hours of battery life is way too short and I don't see much to indicate whether this is a fully open Linux system.
I'm running WinXP Pro on my P2000 and although it's getting on in age and leaves a lot to be desired in the CPU department (Transmeta CPUs never lived up to the hype), I certainly wouldn't trade it in on a locked down device.
If this thing from Palm doesn't support fully open installation of standard desktop applications then I don't see much point in it.
I hope we'll see some good detailed posts by people who've used both MythDora and KnoppMyth. Personally, I've only used KnoppMyth.
It seems that you are correct. But it would appear to also have other uses.
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http://www.duckproducts.com/creative/default.asp?
That hardly seems impressive. A while back I bought a Brother printer/scanner/copier/fax for $140 with a $50 rebate and they threw in an extended warranty at no extra charge. The cartriges are $9.19 for color and $18.27 for black at Newegg. I don't print much, but it's nice to have a scanner with a 35 page sheet feeder and the abilty to make color copies is cool.
Before that I had a Canon S750. It worked great, the ink cartriges weren't very expensive and lasted for ages (I don't print a lot, but need to be able to print occasionally.) It lasted me three or for years with no decrease in print quality, but the electronics went wacky. It would only print the first page of any job and then go into an error mode. Pressing the power button reset it so it could print another page.
Every printer story on Slashdot is filled with whiners complaining about how expensive ink jets are an how they clog, and how the quality decreases. Either these people abuse their printers or they don't do their research before buying.
That's a great price, but Newegg currently has that exact drive (Maxtor One Touch III 500GB) for $155. Amazon doesn't seem to have it but they have a 300GB version for $170 and a 600GB version for $417. www.maxtorstore.com is also selling the 300GB version for $170.
So, if you managed to get a deal buying it for $20 less than the already low price at Newegg then good for you, but don't pretend that that's the common going rate for external hard drives.
No
We've had good luck with Lucent Bricks. Very easy to use, a wide range of models with absolutely identical interface. Just choose a model based on how many ports you need or how much throughput. They run the Inferno operating system which is based on Bell Labs' uber-geek Plan 9 OS.
In particular, active-standby is brilliant. Need high availability? Just buy a second Brick of the same model and plug it into all the same switches/vlans as the first. The entire configuration of the backup consists of exactly one checkbox, that's literally all. In the user interface it looks like you're configuring one device but if that checkbox is checked and you have a second Brick then every change you make automatically gets made to both the active and standby.
Need more firewalls? They're all managed through the same management station. They can share host group definitions, service group definitions, and rulesets. Very powerful and very easy to use. Very flexible reporting is also integrated into the same interface.
Roomba is not for anybody with computers or AV equipment or lamps or stairs or area rugs.
I just bought a Maytag upright for $99 and it works great. My Roomba languishes unused. Whenever it would run it would eat cords, fall over the edge of the step down, try to devour the entire bathroom rug, and get lost under the bed unable to find its base station. I tried it in the living room but it can't climb from a hardwood floor onto an area rug.
The scheduler remote is lousy and requires line of sight. The dirt catch bin has to be emptied manually after every run, so the scheduler function isn't really all that useful.
Using the Maytag manually is just a lot less aggravation than the Roomba. And I can't imagine that a Dyson upright works 4-5 times better than a $99 Maytag so I can't see paying 4-5 times the price. I doubt a Dyson "Roomba" will be sufficiently better than a real Roomba. Probably just an expensive gimmick.
What you're looking for is called 'Public Transportation'. Look it up sometime.
I looked it up, it doesn't exist.
Ok, technically it exists, but it doesn't exist where I am or where I want to go so it may as well not exist as far as I'm concerned.
I suppose I could leave all my friends and family behind and start a new life in a city where there's fabulous public transportation. Seems a bit extreme though.
Telecommuting may decrease the urge to "climb the corporate ladder" if the pay is sufficient. I've found that telecommuting is a strong job satisfaction component. Now, I'm not the type of person who would have ever climbed to the corner office at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. If I had a shot at that sort of oppulence I'd be foolish to risk missing out by losing "face time".
But as far as climbing a bit faster in the middle levels of corporate IT? The job satisfaction of avoiding the 10 rush hour commutes per week, the large home office, home cooked food instead of cafeteria or lunch bag amounts to quite a lot of non-monetary compensation.
If I couldn't telecommute I'd probably jump from job to job and company to company in order to maximize my income, but as long as I can telecommute a lot of the time and as long as the job isn't too unpleasant and as long as the pay covers my expenses, I don't have a whole lot of motivation to look for a new job.
X10 Hardware is so miserable. I can't vouch for the stuff being mentioned above, but I can certainly testify to the general crappiness of X10. I am so sick of slow unreliable X10 junk. I've got filters, signal boosters, and and a signal analyzer, but X10 still just isn't reliable and even when it works it's slow.
If designing on a budget at the expense of quality and functionality is a geek requirement then I guess I'm not a geek. But maybe I am a geek since I haven't ripped out all this X10 crap yet and replaced it with something that works well.
You've more or less asked what's the best car for driving to and from work and around town. Good luck with that.
There's a huge variety of pro and semi-pro audio gear on the market. If you've got detailed requirements then you need to start reading tech specs and reviews. If you don't have detailed requirements then just search for "usb audio interface" and/or "firewire audio interface" and pick something in the $100-$200 range.
There are a vast number of features and quite a wide price range and I really doubt there's an objective "best" any more than there's an objective "best" car that everyone would agree is better than all the others.
The article conspicuously fails to state whether Wal-Mart was correct or not.
The article assumes that Wal-Mart sent DVDs back to Disney out of spite, but what if Wal-Mart merely made an accurate assessment of the situation? Did Wal-Mart sell out of the whatever titles they returned? Were there customer complaints about lack of these titles? Or was Wal-Mart correct in its assessment that the demand would be lower?
I don't know if it's right or wrong, but from what I've read Wal-Mart requires its vendors to agree that they'll take back overstock if demand is less than expected. If Wal-Mart can send back "cases and cases" of DVDs and still keep the titles on the shelves than they're simply behaving sensibly.
If they can't keep the titles on the shelves then this seems to be a classic case of "cut off your nose to spite your face". We're talking purchase here, right? Not rental? If you're renting a DVD and they don't have the one you want you might rent a different one. If you're shopping to buy a specific DVD, I can't imagine that you'd simply buy something else if the store doesn't have the one you're looking for.
We're not talking about interchangeable products here. If you want "Lost" on DVD and Wal-Mart doesn't have it you'll go elsewhere. Personally I find deepdiscountdvd.com to be a great source, but there are countless others. What percentage of the US is really so cut off from civilization that if Wal-Mart doesn't carry "Lost" they can't get it some other way?
How can any x-y graph without units on the y axis be useful? Without units this entire thing is just mental masturbation. You can play around with it if that sort of thing makes you happy, but I can't see any actual value coming out of it because without numbers it's just meaningless pictures.
our last car was stolen by prying the door open and bending the frame, leaving the window totally intact but at a wild angle, i didnt even know that was possible with bear hands.
You'd be amazed at what's possible with bear hands. They are amazingly strong. I bet a hungry polar or grizzly bear could peel the entire roof off your car if it wanted to eat you.
Yes, you should really say "X users that know what they're doing". There's some black magic text file editing involved. I can run MythTV on my box's VGA output or on its PVR350 TV output, but I've absolutely failed to get it to run mythfrontend on the TV out while simultaneously running an independent desktop session on the VGA out. It can allegedly be done, but it's not obvious how.
If Windows or OS X had the ability you can bet it would be a matter of checking a check box in a control panel. It's great that Linux has some exotic capabilities, but not everybody enjoys scouring a bazillion different mailing lists and web forum posts for obscure clues to exactly what to put into a text file to get something to work.
As long as Microsoft and Apple keep adding easy to use features there will be vast hordes of people willing to pay money for them. Those hordes won't care that Linux could have accomplished the same thing years earlier because those hordes wouldn't have spent the hours or weeks of research necessary to make Linux do those things. But they'll gladly pay Apple or Microsoft ~$100 because their time is more valuable than that.
You make the common mistake of considering the sequels to be the same sort of book as the original Dune. The first book is mostly an adventure novel. The later books are much more weighted towards religion, politics, and philosophy. Book 2 and 3 are tough to get through (at least the first time, I found they were easier and more enjoyable upon re-reading). You definitely can't approach them expecting the same hero-villian adventure-battle-conquest scenario.
Frankly, Lord of the Rings is a grade school fairy tale compared to the Dune series. There are very few books that address the scope of history that Dune presents. The first book is a basic adventure but the subsequent books explore the nature of heros, mesiahs, and rulers throughout a vast span of (future) history.
Last time I went grocery shopping I used the self checkout. Out of a variety of deli and produce products that I bought, there were two items I didn't buy. One was a pre-sealed package of sliced turkey. The bar code registered correctly, but then the computer removed it from the screen and said the product required "assistance" to buy it. The other was a bag of seedless green grapes. After picking them off of the produce lookup screen it told me to weigh them. After weighing them, it told me that "this product cannot be purchased at this time".
So I left them at the check out counter, paid for the rest of my groceries and left the store.
It didn't really occur to me to attribute this to Orwell/Big Brother/1984. I just assumed that some underpaid supermarket employee screwed up somewhere when configuring the computer system.
You are an inhuman monster. It's not bad enough that a child has been mistreated, you think they should kill themself to spare you the inconvenience of being aware of their pain. If someone has been abused as a child they will have a hard time ever living a normal life, but they are just as deserving of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as anyone else even if it's more difficult for them than others. As long as they don't allow their pain to lead them to cause harm to others they are just as deserving of equal rights as anyone else, no matter what psychological harm they've suffered.
I spend way to much time trying to overcome the flood of paper and other junk in the real world cluttering up my desk and surrounding flat surfaces. Why would I want that on my computer? What's needed are better more efficient ways of finding stuff even though you barely remember what it was or what it looked like. Maybe a compulsive organization freak could deal with this system, but for ordinary people it'll probably just reduce their computer desktop to even worse disorganized chaos than their real desk.