A person can have violent thoughts or even violent urges and not act on them. That people think about violence while or immediately after playing a violent game does not force them to actually act on those thoughts in reality.
Why waste time you don't need to rendering a page that downloads at 24Mb/s? Your fast connection only downloads the page. Something still has to render it.
IE not being portable doesn't keep them from testing it on XP or Vista, nor from testing IE * which isn't released against Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (or beta 3 now). Instead they're announcing results for IE 8, which hasn't been released, against Firefox 3.0.5, which has already been superseded by two more point releases. Chrome, BTW, is up to 1.0.1.154.48 right now. 1.0.0 isn't exactly a fair test against IE 8, either.
How about they test their released software against the competition's released software and their betas and release candidates against the competition's betas and release candidates?
IE 8 beta or release candidate is ahead of two released browsers that have been superseded by newer released versions. Where's the data for Firefox 3.1 beta 2? How about Firefox 3.0.6 or 3.0.7 and Chrome 1.0.1.154.xx? Something's fishy when a company feels the need to benchmark their still-beta product against older released versions of the competition. That's especially true when the competition, in the case of Firefox, also has a freely available beta out with huge performance increases.
It also helps to benchmark your beta or release candidate against two point releases back of your most feared competitor who also has a beta available. Why is this IE8 vs. Firefox 3.0.5 rather than IE 7 vs. FF 3.0.x and IE8 vs. Firefox 3.1beta? I think we know. FF 3.1 beta must eat IE8's lunch.
Being busy for the sake of being busy isn't much help. Being engaged in meaningful activities one enjoys gives someone something to anticipate and something to lose. Sure, gainfully employed people with hobbies sometimes snap, but how common is that?
There's a reason the lonely, angry societal dropout is so feared. A desperate man is a dangerous man. Look at violent crimes vs. income sometime. Look at total crime vs. income. Look at crimes per profession or crimes per social type.
When you're doing nothing but hanging out on a street corner or drinking cheap lager in a cheap pub, you're more likely to be both the perpetrator and the victim of certain types of crimes. Not many cuttings or stabbings take place in an office. Not many people who have money and spend all day earning it hang out in dark alleys to steal money from others.
Obligatory xkcd for you, and it's even a recent one: correlation.
Unfortunately, most idiots who spout drivel like this don't even have a strong correlation in the first place. Sales of violent video games may be up, and knife crimes might be up, but is it even the kids playing the games committing the crimes?
Giving adolescents more productive things to do is the best way to fight teen crime. If they're busy earning money, cleaning the parks as volunteers, acting in community theatre, playing music, dancing, painting, or playing organized sports they're less likely (and have less free time) to go out and commit crimes.
Perhaps giving your youth some say in their lives and something to do besides play video games and stick people with knives might get them more involved with positive influences. Teens are rebellious largely because they are ignored as children when they want to do something as an adult, but held to adult responsibilities when they try to act like children. Give them an outlet for their raging hormones and a way to actually use the skills you're drilling into their heads in school rather than those they pick up from video games.
Oh, a dual-screen Mac with two touchscreens and a pop-up touch keyboard on either one would be freaking awesome. I'm more of a Linux guy, but that product would open my wallet in a heartbeat.
These are not just for web surfing and email. They are for anyone who run lightweight local apps or who works mostly on remote systems who just needs a client. That client might be a web browser, email client, Citrix client, ssh, rdp, vnc, or something else.
A 1.6Ghz processor and 512 MB of RAM was a top-shelf runaway just a few years ago, so I'm not sure why people get the idea that an office suite, ticketing system, warehouse tracking package, contact database, to-do-list, fairly light graphics editing, and even light video editing.
Just because a computer doesn't play Crysis doesn't mean it's not a useful tool. Many computers are purchased by businesses for business use. A business computer has no reason to play the latest games or do high-def video production outside certain industries. Why should a business pay $500 or $700 for a laptop instead of $250 or $350 for a smaller laptop that still runs all the software the user needs?
In case you haven't noticed, Linux has drivers for Windows file systems. Yes, that includes NTFS. Yes, that even includes writing to NTFS. There are also ext2 drivers for Windows for that matter. It's easy to mount another OS's partition. They might even be using a loopback filesystem on top of NTFS for Presto.
I never said I use Puppy only for fast boot times. Puppy has very capable tools that don't use many resources throughout the entire package selection. It worked with my wireless chipset, my audio, my video and everything else on my laptop the first time I tried it. I didn't need to download any drivers, tweak any config files, or recompile anything. It's also very light on memory, disk space, and CPU requirements while it's running. That allows me to use an older, cheaper laptop for longer without upgrading just for fancy 3D animated desktops. Out of the box I had CD and DVD burning, network scanning, pen testing, packet sniffing, an office suite, multiple browsers, gcc, Perl, and a choice of solid text editors. That I can shut it down and boot it back up in less than ten seconds rather than messing with suspending to disk is just one feature.
I used to have a Psion Series 5mx that I used for anything and everything, running both Epoc (the precursor to Symbian OS) and Debian. I could use it to write a report, write an application, ssh into a server, balance my checkbook, and a whole lot more with a full keyboard plus stylus. If you've never used a palmtop computer that hosts real applications and the programming tools to write your own, then maybe you just can't see the value in that solution that I do.
Having the ability to do those things a palmtop can with access to your Windows files (which the product site says plainly you can do from within Presto) and then being able to reboot into Windows might just be a nice feature for some people. Just because you don't want or need the feature (or even understand that it's possible to read and write to another OS's file system without special BIOS support) doesn't mean someone else won't find that valuable.
It really is much like the embedded apps in full-blown laptops, only it doesn't cost any extra for hardware. The bookmarks if they're smart will be using the same data store between Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, or at least will be managed with one of the online bookmark plugins.
My main laptop actually does get booted and shut down rather than using suspend. I use Puppy Linux on it, and it boots or shuts down in less than four seconds. I might use suspend-to-disk if it ran a bigger Linux distro or Windows. My Windows-only desktops suspend to disk, while my Linux-only desktops just keep running so they don't miss their many automated tasks. If I needed Windows on my laptop, I'd have done something like Presto on my own.
I think the biggest question isn't whether someone out there will use something like this. It's whether those people who see the need and are comfortable with Linux for a desktop have a need for Xandros to put it together for them.
I don't think the target is the typical user. The typical PC user is a desktop user. Even when they're using a laptop, they use it like a portable desktop.
I think the target here is the road warrior who most of the time just needs a palmtop style device for its convenience but who needs to carry a laptop for its broader capabilities. Some people carry both a palmtop for quick work and a Windows laptop for work that requires a Windows-only application. It'd be nice to carry one less device. It's not everyone that fits in that market, but it could well be a market worth having.
Suspending to disk is often a viable alternative to a quick boot. For people who actually carry a laptop on long trips, suspend to RAM can be a considerable waste of running time.
I don't think the real point here is to replace Windows. I think it's to supplement it. Perhaps by showing the two off together they're hoping to educate people about alternatives to Windows. From what I can tell of Xandros, though, they're far more interested in making a buck than about caring about the technology.
It's Xandros. Presto is a product name, not the name of the company. Xandros has been in the Linux distro game for years.
The Presto site linked from the summary says it installs in a dual-boot setup and gives people a choice to boot into Windows. If that's too difficult, think of it as similar to Boot Camp -- Windows or Linux at any boot. Most Linux distros actually support this, but Presto appears to default to it.
It can be uninstalled from Windows, so conversion really isn't an apparent priority.
If you had looked at the site for about 45 seconds, you could have noticed that the product installs in a dual-boot setup and gives the option to boot into Windows. It's not a new company called PResto, BTW. It's a product called Presto from Xandros, which has been putting out their own Linux distro for years.
I suggest we in Illinois stop paying the members of our General Assembly until they start doing actual work which benefits the residents of the state. That'll be a start at the budget deficit they caused and apparently feel is less important than showing their ignorance of fifth-grade science.
I paid $1400 for a 286 20Mhz with 1MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive, EGA video card, Sound Blaster 16, 2x CD-ROM, 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, EGA monitor, and 9-pin four-color dot matrix printer. Later I paid $135 for a 2400 bps modem (with 4800 receive and 9600 send fax capability). Now get off my lawn!
Well, I agree that imagined threats can be used as effectively as real ones. Terrorism is a real threat, though. It's a tiny threat compared to most others facing a US citizen every day, but a tiny threat is still a threat.
It'd be better if more people spent more time thinking about traffic safety and wiring their houses properly and less time worrying about some guy in a cave in Pakistan blowing up their kid's school. Then we wouldn't have so many people dying in careless driving crashes and house fires caused by faulty wiring, and probably no more people dying from terrorism.
There's still that small chance of another terrorist attack on US soil, but why worry about small ones when there are so much more common risks?
Google is headquartered in California, and I'm pretty certain Microsoft, Yahoo, and others do business there. The idea might be fought by some on jurisdictional grounds, but the idea itself is stupid.
Why in the world would you want to tell people, "These fuzzy-looking buildings are the ones we really care about the most. Targeting these would cause us the most grief"?
Either you want all the details fuzzed or none of them. The address of a building can be deduced pretty easily once you've pointed it out to them on the map. From there they can get public records of building plans or do their own surveillance planning. Why narrow the search to the most vulnerable or most valuable targets for them?
Actually, learning two counting systems may help or hinder math skills. I'm not sure which would happen. It certainly seems like the different conjugations based on the nature of the objects would hinder communicating ideas about numbers, though, especially to people speaking other languages. Thanks for pointing that out.
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A person can have violent thoughts or even violent urges and not act on them. That people think about violence while or immediately after playing a violent game does not force them to actually act on those thoughts in reality.
It also has TraceMonkey, and the tests included JavaScript performance.
Why waste time you don't need to rendering a page that downloads at 24Mb/s? Your fast connection only downloads the page. Something still has to render it.
IE not being portable doesn't keep them from testing it on XP or Vista, nor from testing IE * which isn't released against Firefox 3.1 beta 2 (or beta 3 now). Instead they're announcing results for IE 8, which hasn't been released, against Firefox 3.0.5, which has already been superseded by two more point releases. Chrome, BTW, is up to 1.0.1.154.48 right now. 1.0.0 isn't exactly a fair test against IE 8, either.
How about they test their released software against the competition's released software and their betas and release candidates against the competition's betas and release candidates?
IE 8 beta or release candidate is ahead of two released browsers that have been superseded by newer released versions. Where's the data for Firefox 3.1 beta 2? How about Firefox 3.0.6 or 3.0.7 and Chrome 1.0.1.154.xx? Something's fishy when a company feels the need to benchmark their still-beta product against older released versions of the competition. That's especially true when the competition, in the case of Firefox, also has a freely available beta out with huge performance increases.
It also helps to benchmark your beta or release candidate against two point releases back of your most feared competitor who also has a beta available. Why is this IE8 vs. Firefox 3.0.5 rather than IE 7 vs. FF 3.0.x and IE8 vs. Firefox 3.1beta? I think we know. FF 3.1 beta must eat IE8's lunch.
Being busy for the sake of being busy isn't much help. Being engaged in meaningful activities one enjoys gives someone something to anticipate and something to lose. Sure, gainfully employed people with hobbies sometimes snap, but how common is that?
There's a reason the lonely, angry societal dropout is so feared. A desperate man is a dangerous man. Look at violent crimes vs. income sometime. Look at total crime vs. income. Look at crimes per profession or crimes per social type.
When you're doing nothing but hanging out on a street corner or drinking cheap lager in a cheap pub, you're more likely to be both the perpetrator and the victim of certain types of crimes. Not many cuttings or stabbings take place in an office. Not many people who have money and spend all day earning it hang out in dark alleys to steal money from others.
Obligatory xkcd for you, and it's even a recent one: correlation.
Unfortunately, most idiots who spout drivel like this don't even have a strong correlation in the first place. Sales of violent video games may be up, and knife crimes might be up, but is it even the kids playing the games committing the crimes?
Giving adolescents more productive things to do is the best way to fight teen crime. If they're busy earning money, cleaning the parks as volunteers, acting in community theatre, playing music, dancing, painting, or playing organized sports they're less likely (and have less free time) to go out and commit crimes.
Perhaps giving your youth some say in their lives and something to do besides play video games and stick people with knives might get them more involved with positive influences. Teens are rebellious largely because they are ignored as children when they want to do something as an adult, but held to adult responsibilities when they try to act like children. Give them an outlet for their raging hormones and a way to actually use the skills you're drilling into their heads in school rather than those they pick up from video games.
Oh, a dual-screen Mac with two touchscreens and a pop-up touch keyboard on either one would be freaking awesome. I'm more of a Linux guy, but that product would open my wallet in a heartbeat.
These are not just for web surfing and email. They are for anyone who run lightweight local apps or who works mostly on remote systems who just needs a client. That client might be a web browser, email client, Citrix client, ssh, rdp, vnc, or something else.
A 1.6Ghz processor and 512 MB of RAM was a top-shelf runaway just a few years ago, so I'm not sure why people get the idea that an office suite, ticketing system, warehouse tracking package, contact database, to-do-list, fairly light graphics editing, and even light video editing.
Just because a computer doesn't play Crysis doesn't mean it's not a useful tool. Many computers are purchased by businesses for business use. A business computer has no reason to play the latest games or do high-def video production outside certain industries. Why should a business pay $500 or $700 for a laptop instead of $250 or $350 for a smaller laptop that still runs all the software the user needs?
That's the story Nokia keeps spinning. They say specifically that they formed the Symbian Foundation after purchasing Symbian to consolidate the different Symbian flavors (S60, UIQ, etc) and take it Open Source.
In case you haven't noticed, Linux has drivers for Windows file systems. Yes, that includes NTFS. Yes, that even includes writing to NTFS. There are also ext2 drivers for Windows for that matter. It's easy to mount another OS's partition. They might even be using a loopback filesystem on top of NTFS for Presto.
I never said I use Puppy only for fast boot times. Puppy has very capable tools that don't use many resources throughout the entire package selection. It worked with my wireless chipset, my audio, my video and everything else on my laptop the first time I tried it. I didn't need to download any drivers, tweak any config files, or recompile anything. It's also very light on memory, disk space, and CPU requirements while it's running. That allows me to use an older, cheaper laptop for longer without upgrading just for fancy 3D animated desktops. Out of the box I had CD and DVD burning, network scanning, pen testing, packet sniffing, an office suite, multiple browsers, gcc, Perl, and a choice of solid text editors. That I can shut it down and boot it back up in less than ten seconds rather than messing with suspending to disk is just one feature.
I used to have a Psion Series 5mx that I used for anything and everything, running both Epoc (the precursor to Symbian OS) and Debian. I could use it to write a report, write an application, ssh into a server, balance my checkbook, and a whole lot more with a full keyboard plus stylus. If you've never used a palmtop computer that hosts real applications and the programming tools to write your own, then maybe you just can't see the value in that solution that I do.
Having the ability to do those things a palmtop can with access to your Windows files (which the product site says plainly you can do from within Presto) and then being able to reboot into Windows might just be a nice feature for some people. Just because you don't want or need the feature (or even understand that it's possible to read and write to another OS's file system without special BIOS support) doesn't mean someone else won't find that valuable.
It really is much like the embedded apps in full-blown laptops, only it doesn't cost any extra for hardware. The bookmarks if they're smart will be using the same data store between Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, or at least will be managed with one of the online bookmark plugins.
My main laptop actually does get booted and shut down rather than using suspend. I use Puppy Linux on it, and it boots or shuts down in less than four seconds. I might use suspend-to-disk if it ran a bigger Linux distro or Windows. My Windows-only desktops suspend to disk, while my Linux-only desktops just keep running so they don't miss their many automated tasks. If I needed Windows on my laptop, I'd have done something like Presto on my own.
I think the biggest question isn't whether someone out there will use something like this. It's whether those people who see the need and are comfortable with Linux for a desktop have a need for Xandros to put it together for them.
I don't think the target is the typical user. The typical PC user is a desktop user. Even when they're using a laptop, they use it like a portable desktop.
I think the target here is the road warrior who most of the time just needs a palmtop style device for its convenience but who needs to carry a laptop for its broader capabilities. Some people carry both a palmtop for quick work and a Windows laptop for work that requires a Windows-only application. It'd be nice to carry one less device. It's not everyone that fits in that market, but it could well be a market worth having.
Suspending to disk is often a viable alternative to a quick boot. For people who actually carry a laptop on long trips, suspend to RAM can be a considerable waste of running time.
I don't think the real point here is to replace Windows. I think it's to supplement it. Perhaps by showing the two off together they're hoping to educate people about alternatives to Windows. From what I can tell of Xandros, though, they're far more interested in making a buck than about caring about the technology.
If you had looked at the site for about 45 seconds, you could have noticed that the product installs in a dual-boot setup and gives the option to boot into Windows. It's not a new company called PResto, BTW. It's a product called Presto from Xandros, which has been putting out their own Linux distro for years.
I suggest we in Illinois stop paying the members of our General Assembly until they start doing actual work which benefits the residents of the state. That'll be a start at the budget deficit they caused and apparently feel is less important than showing their ignorance of fifth-grade science.
That's a good guess. It was 1992. Now, what year was I learning BASIC programming on the Atari 600 XL? ;-)
I paid $1400 for a 286 20Mhz with 1MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive, EGA video card, Sound Blaster 16, 2x CD-ROM, 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, EGA monitor, and 9-pin four-color dot matrix printer. Later I paid $135 for a 2400 bps modem (with 4800 receive and 9600 send fax capability). Now get off my lawn!
Well, I agree that imagined threats can be used as effectively as real ones. Terrorism is a real threat, though. It's a tiny threat compared to most others facing a US citizen every day, but a tiny threat is still a threat.
It'd be better if more people spent more time thinking about traffic safety and wiring their houses properly and less time worrying about some guy in a cave in Pakistan blowing up their kid's school. Then we wouldn't have so many people dying in careless driving crashes and house fires caused by faulty wiring, and probably no more people dying from terrorism.
There's still that small chance of another terrorist attack on US soil, but why worry about small ones when there are so much more common risks?
Google is headquartered in California, and I'm pretty certain Microsoft, Yahoo, and others do business there. The idea might be fought by some on jurisdictional grounds, but the idea itself is stupid.
Pointing to outside threats is an ages-old tactic to distract people from inside threats.
Why in the world would you want to tell people, "These fuzzy-looking buildings are the ones we really care about the most. Targeting these would cause us the most grief"?
Either you want all the details fuzzed or none of them. The address of a building can be deduced pretty easily once you've pointed it out to them on the map. From there they can get public records of building plans or do their own surveillance planning. Why narrow the search to the most vulnerable or most valuable targets for them?
Actually, learning two counting systems may help or hinder math skills. I'm not sure which would happen. It certainly seems like the different conjugations based on the nature of the objects would hinder communicating ideas about numbers, though, especially to people speaking other languages. Thanks for pointing that out.