"Codices" is the plural of codex (i.e. book), not codec. Unless the summary really does mean that Dell is throwing in a collection of books from Fluendo about the mp3, wma, and wmv formats, in which case I apologize.
The problem with 'testing' is that it doesn't get security updates in a timely way. You have to do some gyrations to get the package out of unstable just that one time or else wait two weeks. That's how it was a few months ago anyway.
I was just reading something the other day about how Ashton-Tate named the first version of dBase 'dBase II' to make it sound more stable and established. It could be a myth but it's too funny not to be true on some level. We're talking about a company named after a non-existent partner after all.
It's true that you can get laptops for under $1k, but it's quite a bit harder to find a 13.3" one like the MacBook for much less. I've seen the Toshiba Satellite for about $750 at Best Buy when it's on sale for $150 off list, but that's about it. Dells and Sonys are both >$1k, and HP and Gateway don't even offer that form factor. I bought a 13.3" myself recently since for me it's about the right spot between portability and usefulness, and in that niche the MacBook is not too badly priced (but I still didn't buy one). The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, seems way overpriced to me for what you get.
Metroid Prime is not an FPS, it is a 3D platformer and exploration game. As evidence I offer the fact that I actually finished it, while I am utterly beyond pathetic at real FPS games where you have to aim the gun yourself.
Natural selection in humans is pretty much out the window already. I don't see any correlation between how successful someone is in our society and how widely their genes are propagated, if anything there could well be an inverse relationship between success (in terms of education, money, etc) and number of children produced.
Why would an American have been able to answer your question in 10 minutes when someone overseas couldn't? Are Americans just naturally smarter? I'm old enough to remember days before outsourced call centers and crummy customer service is hardly a new phenomenon.
It always comes around to this eventually. Activities for which there are no good free software solutions are stupid and only an idiot would want to do them. It's the GNU equivalent of Godwin's Law.
What's the big deal about binary blobs? If I buy a wireless card that has the firmware in a ROM chip on the card rather than having a blob to download, how is that any more free? I can't modify the firmware in either case. In fact, the blob is probably slightly preferable in that if the vendor ships an update, I can just extract the new blob over the old one whereas the hardwired one probably needs a program to download it to the card that only works under Windows.
You would reasonably guess that 'funaho' on YouTube is the same funaho on some email server, but you couldn't prove it. If YouTube-funaho was accused of something and they came after you, you could just say "that's not me". Now, together with the IP address it would be a stronger case, but they'd still need your ISP to cooperate to put it together, since it could just be your neighbor impersonating you to get you in trouble.
I used to work at a clone vendor way back in the 386 days, and I remember one time prepping a computer for a magazine review. My boss told me we already had editor's choice locked up because we were about the only outfit that advertised in this particular rag, and sure enough that was the case when the issue came out. It was some scuzzbag magazine that I can't even remember the name of, so I don't mean this to imply that everybody does it, but I have seen it happen before also.
The "haters" are complaining about laptop batteries in general, so if someone is paying them to troll against subnotebooks they're not getting their money's worth. Who's paying you to come here and bash Vista?
I bought a cheapo laptop with a P3-600 and 320MB of RAM (circa 2002) and put Arch Linux on it just for fun. I was really disappointed at how sluggishly it runs Firefox and Thunderbird, it almost made me long for the good ol' days of Netscape 3.04. I used to run that on an AMD 5x86-133 and it was way more pleasant. Of course, this was back before CSS and Web 2.0 ruined everything.:-)
The "article" is just a reprinted press release from Billion. Of course they blame SP3, since the alternative is admitting their products are buggy pieces of junk.
When I was an undergraduate physics major our department had a few-weeks class in the summer on machining. We learned how to grind our own lathe tools and turn things on the lathe, how to use a milling machine to make all kinds of stuff out of aluminum, how to cut screw threads, etc. It was a blast, and when I went on to grad school I made all kinds of parts for the experiment I worked on in the shop. If your department has a machine shop you should ask if they have a class like this, it's pretty fun.
What you are describing is condensed matter physics, and just about any research university will have multiple faculty working in that area. It is a pretty big business.
I also have a Celeron 2.4GHz, in a little mini-tower case, set up as a PVR with Sage TV. One day I was watching it and it suddenly turned itself off. I tried to turn it on a couple of times but it would only get a few seconds into the POST and then turn off again. I took off the side of the case and found the heatsink+fan just dangling from its power cord. One corner of the plastic frame around the CPU that the heatsink clips onto had broken, and the whole assembly just fell off. I had to order a new frame directly from Intel for $10 (nobody sells them!), and in the meantime I tipped the case over on its side so that the heatsink could rest on the CPU. When the frame arrived I put it back together and it's been fine ever since.
I miss Usenet. With the right reader, it was smart enough to know which messages I'd already seen and which were new, and could hide new messages on threads I wasn't interested in. Web forums like Slashdot are a big step backwards, technology-wise.
When I grew up we had no idea what free software was, all we had were our Apple II's, C64's, etc, that were pretty much 100% proprietary. Yet, we somehow learned about computers by reading books and writing our own programs in the cruddy BASIC interpreters they came with. A kid with XP, Java/Python/what-have-you, and the Internet is a million times better off than we were. I swear, some of you people act like it's a tragedy if someone grows up not knowing Bourne shell scripting. The platform you learn on isn't that important, as long as you are learning the concepts.
PS: Besides, you can use a computer to learn about things other than the computer itself, right?
Uh, they didn't use the term. If they were trying to confuse people, they would have called it "open source", but they didn't. I don't see what the problem is.
Slashdot Mirror
OOG SMASH HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD! There, fixed that for you.
PS: Man do I fucking hate the "fixed that for you" thing.
"Codices" is the plural of codex (i.e. book), not codec. Unless the summary really does mean that Dell is throwing in a collection of books from Fluendo about the mp3, wma, and wmv formats, in which case I apologize.
The problem with 'testing' is that it doesn't get security updates in a timely way. You have to do some gyrations to get the package out of unstable just that one time or else wait two weeks. That's how it was a few months ago anyway.
A bad sector is a bad sector. The filesystem makes no difference.
The project you're think of is called GNUStep.
I was just reading something the other day about how Ashton-Tate named the first version of dBase 'dBase II' to make it sound more stable and established. It could be a myth but it's too funny not to be true on some level. We're talking about a company named after a non-existent partner after all.
It's true that you can get laptops for under $1k, but it's quite a bit harder to find a 13.3" one like the MacBook for much less. I've seen the Toshiba Satellite for about $750 at Best Buy when it's on sale for $150 off list, but that's about it. Dells and Sonys are both >$1k, and HP and Gateway don't even offer that form factor. I bought a 13.3" myself recently since for me it's about the right spot between portability and usefulness, and in that niche the MacBook is not too badly priced (but I still didn't buy one). The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, seems way overpriced to me for what you get.
Metroid Prime is not an FPS, it is a 3D platformer and exploration game. As evidence I offer the fact that I actually finished it, while I am utterly beyond pathetic at real FPS games where you have to aim the gun yourself.
Natural selection in humans is pretty much out the window already. I don't see any correlation between how successful someone is in our society and how widely their genes are propagated, if anything there could well be an inverse relationship between success (in terms of education, money, etc) and number of children produced.
Why would an American have been able to answer your question in 10 minutes when someone overseas couldn't? Are Americans just naturally smarter? I'm old enough to remember days before outsourced call centers and crummy customer service is hardly a new phenomenon.
It always comes around to this eventually. Activities for which there are no good free software solutions are stupid and only an idiot would want to do them. It's the GNU equivalent of Godwin's Law.
What's the big deal about binary blobs? If I buy a wireless card that has the firmware in a ROM chip on the card rather than having a blob to download, how is that any more free? I can't modify the firmware in either case. In fact, the blob is probably slightly preferable in that if the vendor ships an update, I can just extract the new blob over the old one whereas the hardwired one probably needs a program to download it to the card that only works under Windows.
You would reasonably guess that 'funaho' on YouTube is the same funaho on some email server, but you couldn't prove it. If YouTube-funaho was accused of something and they came after you, you could just say "that's not me". Now, together with the IP address it would be a stronger case, but they'd still need your ISP to cooperate to put it together, since it could just be your neighbor impersonating you to get you in trouble.
Xandros is no great shakes either. It sounds like some kind of phony aphrodisiac cologne advertised in Hustler.
I used to work at a clone vendor way back in the 386 days, and I remember one time prepping a computer for a magazine review. My boss told me we already had editor's choice locked up because we were about the only outfit that advertised in this particular rag, and sure enough that was the case when the issue came out. It was some scuzzbag magazine that I can't even remember the name of, so I don't mean this to imply that everybody does it, but I have seen it happen before also.
OK, then maybe the question should be, who is less trustworthy, Wikipedia or Cringely?
The "haters" are complaining about laptop batteries in general, so if someone is paying them to troll against subnotebooks they're not getting their money's worth. Who's paying you to come here and bash Vista?
I bought a cheapo laptop with a P3-600 and 320MB of RAM (circa 2002) and put Arch Linux on it just for fun. I was really disappointed at how sluggishly it runs Firefox and Thunderbird, it almost made me long for the good ol' days of Netscape 3.04. I used to run that on an AMD 5x86-133 and it was way more pleasant. Of course, this was back before CSS and Web 2.0 ruined everything. :-)
The "article" is just a reprinted press release from Billion. Of course they blame SP3, since the alternative is admitting their products are buggy pieces of junk.
When I was an undergraduate physics major our department had a few-weeks class in the summer on machining. We learned how to grind our own lathe tools and turn things on the lathe, how to use a milling machine to make all kinds of stuff out of aluminum, how to cut screw threads, etc. It was a blast, and when I went on to grad school I made all kinds of parts for the experiment I worked on in the shop. If your department has a machine shop you should ask if they have a class like this, it's pretty fun.
What you are describing is condensed matter physics, and just about any research university will have multiple faculty working in that area. It is a pretty big business.
I also have a Celeron 2.4GHz, in a little mini-tower case, set up as a PVR with Sage TV. One day I was watching it and it suddenly turned itself off. I tried to turn it on a couple of times but it would only get a few seconds into the POST and then turn off again. I took off the side of the case and found the heatsink+fan just dangling from its power cord. One corner of the plastic frame around the CPU that the heatsink clips onto had broken, and the whole assembly just fell off. I had to order a new frame directly from Intel for $10 (nobody sells them!), and in the meantime I tipped the case over on its side so that the heatsink could rest on the CPU. When the frame arrived I put it back together and it's been fine ever since.
I miss Usenet. With the right reader, it was smart enough to know which messages I'd already seen and which were new, and could hide new messages on threads I wasn't interested in. Web forums like Slashdot are a big step backwards, technology-wise.
PS: Besides, you can use a computer to learn about things other than the computer itself, right?
Uh, they didn't use the term. If they were trying to confuse people, they would have called it "open source", but they didn't. I don't see what the problem is.