"Why was this posted in the Linux category? This has more to do with Microsoft than Linux.
The Linux Community should pay very careful attention to what's going on here with Walmart. They could learn a few things. Here's two reasons why Linux users should care:
1.) It means that Walmart doesn't think that Linux is ready for entry-level consumers unless it behaves like Windows. The fact that they're shipping Lindows with it shows that Walmart is looking for a viable solution. Heck, this sort of thing could have made me a Linux user not too long ago.
Linux is still very much a niche product. If the Linux community wants it to be more proliferated, then they need to start getting Linux software on the shelves at Walmart. Once that starts happening, then Walmart will feel at ease with selling machines sans-MS. I mean think about it, Walmart has computers to sell but no software on the shelves for it...
2.) It shows that there is a need in the marketplace for machines w/o the MS tax. Linux users should be very happy about that. It means that one day we may be able to buy a Laptop without an OS. I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't mind saving $500 (most of the big companies ram Office down your throat too...) on my new laptop.
This is an opportunity for Linux, and bad news for MS. The Linux community'd do good to make as an impressive of showing as possible. If Walmart gets tons of returns because people feel like they have the ugly duckling OS, then who knows when that opportunity will show up again?
Wouldn't matter if they did. What are they gonna do, change the bits every Service Pack? All that'll do is give Lindows incentive to figure out what they did and correct it. Given the release rate of SP's, that wouldn't be near as challenging as Trillian's attempts to stay on AOL's network.
Toy Story had 2D backgrounds all over the place. The only difference was that they generated them instead of taking photos. If you had ever done 3D animation before, you'd know there is little difference.
What you said does not change my point at all. Dinosaur was still a CG movie. It was made to see if Disney could do what Pixar does. As I said earlier, they didn't do too well because they didn't realize what makes Pixar so great. Whether or not they photo'd backgrounds has absolutely 0% to do with anything I said.
"What's disturbing is that people from my parents' generation seem to have a deep-seated expectation that the salespeople really will know what they're talking about..."
Heh it's funny because the term 'Salesman' implies "Man who sells", as opposed to "Man who knows what he's talking about."
Sometimes they hide the fact by calling them 'advisors'. They all do the same thing, though: They make sure you buy something.
"with a smug attitide. he said "No operating system can see a hard disk larger then 8 Gig"
You have really high expectations of a guy who makes $8 an hour.
I mean seriously, I used to be a salesman, I know for a fact his job is not to be knowledgable. His job is to make sure you leave money behind before you leave the store. You should never depend on 'expert' advice from the guy that you are buying from. Nobody has ever gotten a BS degree and went on to sell computers.
If you need to know what type of RAM your computer uses, look it up. If you need to know whether or not you want a Radeon or a Geforce, then go to www.tomshardware.com. If you want to know which way to the hard-drive aisle, then you may ask the guy in the blue shirt.
I'm not telling you this to say "You're dumb and you don't know how to shop at Best Buy...", I'm telling you this because no retail chain trains their salespeople to dispense facts, only incentives to buy. Take any of these stories about Best Buy, go through in Notepad and replace 'Best Buy' with 'Circuit City', and guess what, you get a believable story.
The only knowledgable sales people I've ever met sold video games.
Understood. The reason I said that was that you referred to him/her as a 'thug'. Thought you'd appreciate the feedback explaining why I responded the way I did.:)
"We don't have bestbuy her (UK), but from all their problems, its a wonder people still shop there..."
That's because those of us that are satisfied Best Buy customers don't want to argue with people who require a salesman to show them which Compaq to buy. You can imagine how that convo'd go, right?
"That stupid Best Buy salesman had no idea what a hard-drive is!"
"err, why did you need a Best Buy salesman to tell you what a hard drive is?"
"STFU!"
"Hey! All I'm saying is..."
"Look those salesman making $8 should know everything there is to know about what I want! I mean if they don't know what a hard drive is, why are they selling there anyway?"
"Fair enough, but if you know so much about what you're looking for, why do you need their help?"
From there the f word is used alot. Heh. You can see why none of us want to rush to Best Buy's defense. Most of the reasoning I've heard so far is typical of any retailer, not just Best Buy. They just had their bad straw drawn at Best Buy.
"Let the record show: you do NOT have to stop and let that thug check your receipt."
Yeah!!! Fight the power!! Don't let those guys glance at your receipt! Give 'em hell! It'll only ruin the nice man's day and add conflict you wouldn't normally have!
"The place is run like the don't trust any of their customers..."
I've got stories about stupid Best Buy salesmen. I totally agree that they are awful. However, Best Buy has two things going that I really like:
1.) Their return policy is awesome. Any time I want to buy something (like a DVD burner or a vid card), and I have concerns about whether it'll work or not, I buy it at Best Buy because I have a month to sort out whether it'll be worthwhile or not. I've only needed to take advantage of that policy once.
2.) I've had good luck with their prices. I wouldn't say they are the absolute lowest, but they are usually low enough that it's worth the trip.
These two points alone negate most of the complaints I hear about Best Buy that'd make me not want to shop there.
However... this unencrypted cashier business does bother me. Where I live, there are all kinds of ways people try to steal identities. Best Buy is giving them too big of an opportunity here. It wouldn't be that hard to sniff the airwaves and pull out credit card #'s etc.
Fortunately, though, Slashdot's attention to it will likely mean they'll hop on that right away. But who knows.
I won't stop shopping there, but I will only use my credit card there instead of my debit card. My credit card company is far more responsive to theft than my bank is. (Ironic, isn't it? My credit card is loaning me money...)
I disagree. Pixar (consciously) does not make photo-realistic movies.
Errr, okay I didn't think I needed to specify, but I guess I do.
Disney wanted to do all-CG movies. Disney thought that Pixar was lacking in photo-realism, so they tried to 'fix' that in Dinosaur.
It is kind of like when somebody says "Quake made lots of money, so let's make a Quake Killer":
"Okay, what we'll do is we'll take what's wrong with Quake and fix it. First we'll make the players jump higher, because I hate that I can't jump that high. Then, I'll give them twice as many weapons. Then, I'll use photos as textures so it looks more real. And finally, I'll do Matrix-esque slow-mo effects, because the Matrix is hot."
Disney failed to understand what Pixar was about, which is kind of ironic considering they pioneered in the type of animation that Pixar is doing today.
Heh no offense, but a 'K6 233' wasn't exactly top notch quality, heh.
Kudos for Linux for being reliable there, obviously MS could learn from them in that case. I do have one question, though: Did all the hardware you had in it work, or did you have to make a functionality compromise?
Also, I should have clarified: I will not defend the 9X platform at all. It's CRAP. I'm a very happy 2K user.
It's not my intention to roast Linux, so please don't feel like I'm setting you up to argue with you. Just curious, really. I'm joining the Linux world soon, my office is switching it's engineers over to it.
"The reason for using Linux is that for just about every task other than day-to-day desktop shit, it is a faster, more secure, cheaper, and more stable platform than most anything out there."
No, that's not really the reason in this case. The most attractive reason for them is the wide-open configuration capabilities. They can turn computers into reliable appliances. Windows and Macintosh are great desktop OS's, there's little need to replace those for the animators. (although it would be advantageous if their tools all ran on Linux... as of last year, not all of them were available)
They really need the Linux boxes for rendering clusters and for creating new animation tools.
"we need to create a puppet and motion capture it. You, get me a Linux computer. You, go to go to Radio Shack and build the puppet." -- This is the type of solution where Linux has real value for Disney and ILM etc.
Basically, they're killing off pixar and moving it in-house,
They can't. Pixar has superior talent and tools. Shrek and Ice Age were beautiful, but they were not Pixar quality. They threw a lot of nice effects in there, but the writing was pretty bland.
Dinosaur was an attempt to do what Pixar was doing, but it failed. The result? They are working with Pixar to do more movies. (Lucky for us!)
The real secret to making a successful computer animated movie is not in how many rendering cycles you throw at it to make it pretty, it's in telling an emotive story. If you want to see what I mean, watch the Birds cartoon that debuted with Monsters, Inc. Not only was it hilarious, but it told an amusing story without a single line of dialog.
That isn't the type of movie you make by throwing money at it.
"If you are writting an OS, then it is your responsiblity to write it correctly. If you can't do that, then you should get out of the business. "
Heh I passed this comment around the software engineers this morning. Thanks for providing us with a laugh at your expense.:)
They are of the opinion that design evolves. When the platform gets more complicated, the problems to anticipate geometrically rise.
With that said: At least Windows can smoothly be installed on nearly any machine out there. I have no doubt that Linux is great, but I couldn't even get the video drivers to go past 640 by 480, even though my laptop's card was supported.
I have a Win2k box that's been up for about 60 days now. It's a home-brew PVR.
I've watched an NT server box running IIS stay up for a good 90 days. The only reason it's not longer is that we had to shut it down to move it.
I think it really depends on how ya build it. The biggest instability is caused by hardware. If your hardware has fatal drivers, don't expect it to run for very long.
My main entertainment computer (also Win2k...) has an uptime of over a week. But I play the shit out of games like Quake. When I don't play those games, my uptime's seriously longer.
Everybody knows that Windows has a lot more games than Linux.:P
Nope, I'm going to sound like I'm so smart that nothing seems new to me. Ah, somebody wrote up a description of how to make your own detection system. Wait a minute, alarms using pressure switches have been done before!! Geez, can't they work spooky interaction into it or something?
Damn. This must be a slow news day if I can't be entertained by a a description of what is involved. No siree, I wouldn't want to learn anything. If Compaq and Dell can build stuff into their systems that sounds the same, then it isn't worth me knowing about. Hmm my computer doesn't have one of these. I guess I never thought about that when I built my own computer. Pity, I don't have an intrusion detection system.
Oh I know, I don't need one! My friends all shout 'First Post!'.
"Bullshit. Spyro was for PSOne, and I played through the game on a burned copy, and there were no missing keys. I made the copy myself from renting it and doing a 1:1 CD Copy. "
A.) 'Bullshit' is a very rude way to reply. Do you really need to invite challenge?
B.) Spyro the Dragon was also available on PC, and that is what I was referring to. (I wasn't very commital because I didn't feel like looking it up, but since you challenged me...)
C.) And when exactly did you make this copy? CD burners have gotten a whole lot more interesting since 1999, and the game came out late 1998. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you couldn't make that copy the day it came out.
In other words, you didn't prove me wrong, at all, whatsoever.
The RIAA is making matters worse. If they truely think that the internet is responsible for them losing money, the worst thing they did was sue companies involved out of business.
If the RIAA had figured out a way of turning Napster/Audio Galaxy into a business, then the majority of music downloaders would be there using the service legitimately.
What has happened instead, is they shut down the popular way of getting music. The result is that the people hooked on this service are going to go underground and acquire music through alternative means. If they can't get music from Kazaa, then they'll head to IRC or other de-centralized sources.
They basically blew up the central location for music swapping, forcing everybody into smaller cells. Now, if the RIAA does ever provide a service, few people will head towards it.
Oops. Songs will still get traded, but now the RIAA has little to no hope of ever getting money for it. I'd feel sorry for them if they didn't call me a thief because I own a CDR-drive.
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe they will also thrown in that, "Lindows just works more like my Brain does."
Ouch! Be sure to cast your spokesman correctly, you don't want Robin Williams saying that!
"Why was this posted in the Linux category? This has more to do with Microsoft than Linux.
The Linux Community should pay very careful attention to what's going on here with Walmart. They could learn a few things. Here's two reasons why Linux users should care:
1.) It means that Walmart doesn't think that Linux is ready for entry-level consumers unless it behaves like Windows. The fact that they're shipping Lindows with it shows that Walmart is looking for a viable solution. Heck, this sort of thing could have made me a Linux user not too long ago.
Linux is still very much a niche product. If the Linux community wants it to be more proliferated, then they need to start getting Linux software on the shelves at Walmart. Once that starts happening, then Walmart will feel at ease with selling machines sans-MS. I mean think about it, Walmart has computers to sell but no software on the shelves for it...
2.) It shows that there is a need in the marketplace for machines w/o the MS tax. Linux users should be very happy about that. It means that one day we may be able to buy a Laptop without an OS. I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't mind saving $500 (most of the big companies ram Office down your throat too...) on my new laptop.
This is an opportunity for Linux, and bad news for MS. The Linux community'd do good to make as an impressive of showing as possible. If Walmart gets tons of returns because people feel like they have the ugly duckling OS, then who knows when that opportunity will show up again?
"The other 50% will be perfectly happy until they discover that their new Hallmark Greeting Card Maker won't work...."
Just imagine when they pick up their new PC, then walk over to the software aisle and pick up a few things....
Wouldn't matter if they did. What are they gonna do, change the bits every Service Pack? All that'll do is give Lindows incentive to figure out what they did and correct it. Given the release rate of SP's, that wouldn't be near as challenging as Trillian's attempts to stay on AOL's network.
*drums his fingers*
Didn't read my sig, didja?
Toy Story had 2D backgrounds all over the place. The only difference was that they generated them instead of taking photos. If you had ever done 3D animation before, you'd know there is little difference.
What you said does not change my point at all. Dinosaur was still a CG movie. It was made to see if Disney could do what Pixar does. As I said earlier, they didn't do too well because they didn't realize what makes Pixar so great. Whether or not they photo'd backgrounds has absolutely 0% to do with anything I said.
"What's disturbing is that people from my parents' generation seem to have a deep-seated expectation that the salespeople really will know what they're talking about..."
Heh it's funny because the term 'Salesman' implies "Man who sells", as opposed to "Man who knows what he's talking about."
Sometimes they hide the fact by calling them 'advisors'. They all do the same thing, though: They make sure you buy something.
"with a smug attitide. he said "No operating system can see a hard disk larger then 8 Gig"
You have really high expectations of a guy who makes $8 an hour.
I mean seriously, I used to be a salesman, I know for a fact his job is not to be knowledgable. His job is to make sure you leave money behind before you leave the store. You should never depend on 'expert' advice from the guy that you are buying from. Nobody has ever gotten a BS degree and went on to sell computers.
If you need to know what type of RAM your computer uses, look it up. If you need to know whether or not you want a Radeon or a Geforce, then go to www.tomshardware.com. If you want to know which way to the hard-drive aisle, then you may ask the guy in the blue shirt.
I'm not telling you this to say "You're dumb and you don't know how to shop at Best Buy...", I'm telling you this because no retail chain trains their salespeople to dispense facts, only incentives to buy. Take any of these stories about Best Buy, go through in Notepad and replace 'Best Buy' with 'Circuit City', and guess what, you get a believable story.
The only knowledgable sales people I've ever met sold video games.
"I didn't say "give 'em hell".
:)
Understood. The reason I said that was that you referred to him/her as a 'thug'. Thought you'd appreciate the feedback explaining why I responded the way I did.
In other words, you don't want to provide the information that'll hang yourself. I understand totally.
:)
Good day.
"That makes me really, really glad that I refuse to sign Best Buy's electronic signature pads..."
I'm not worried. Every time I sign on one of those things, it looks NOTHING like my signature.
(serious! go try it! it's like signing a glide point!)
"We don't have bestbuy her (UK), but from all their problems, its a wonder people still shop there..."
That's because those of us that are satisfied Best Buy customers don't want to argue with people who require a salesman to show them which Compaq to buy. You can imagine how that convo'd go, right?
"That stupid Best Buy salesman had no idea what a hard-drive is!"
"err, why did you need a Best Buy salesman to tell you what a hard drive is?"
"STFU!"
"Hey! All I'm saying is..."
"Look those salesman making $8 should know everything there is to know about what I want! I mean if they don't know what a hard drive is, why are they selling there anyway?"
"Fair enough, but if you know so much about what you're looking for, why do you need their help?"
From there the f word is used alot. Heh. You can see why none of us want to rush to Best Buy's defense. Most of the reasoning I've heard so far is typical of any retailer, not just Best Buy. They just had their bad straw drawn at Best Buy.
"Let the record show: you do NOT have to stop and let that thug check your receipt."
Yeah!!! Fight the power!! Don't let those guys glance at your receipt! Give 'em hell! It'll only ruin the nice man's day and add conflict you wouldn't normally have!
"The place is run like the don't trust any of their customers..."
I've got stories about stupid Best Buy salesmen. I totally agree that they are awful. However, Best Buy has two things going that I really like:
1.) Their return policy is awesome. Any time I want to buy something (like a DVD burner or a vid card), and I have concerns about whether it'll work or not, I buy it at Best Buy because I have a month to sort out whether it'll be worthwhile or not. I've only needed to take advantage of that policy once.
2.) I've had good luck with their prices. I wouldn't say they are the absolute lowest, but they are usually low enough that it's worth the trip.
These two points alone negate most of the complaints I hear about Best Buy that'd make me not want to shop there.
However... this unencrypted cashier business does bother me. Where I live, there are all kinds of ways people try to steal identities. Best Buy is giving them too big of an opportunity here. It wouldn't be that hard to sniff the airwaves and pull out credit card #'s etc.
Fortunately, though, Slashdot's attention to it will likely mean they'll hop on that right away. But who knows.
I won't stop shopping there, but I will only use my credit card there instead of my debit card. My credit card company is far more responsive to theft than my bank is. (Ironic, isn't it? My credit card is loaning me money...)
I disagree. Pixar (consciously) does not make photo-realistic movies.
Errr, okay I didn't think I needed to specify, but I guess I do.
Disney wanted to do all-CG movies. Disney thought that Pixar was lacking in photo-realism, so they tried to 'fix' that in Dinosaur.
It is kind of like when somebody says "Quake made lots of money, so let's make a Quake Killer":
"Okay, what we'll do is we'll take what's wrong with Quake and fix it. First we'll make the players jump higher, because I hate that I can't jump that high. Then, I'll give them twice as many weapons. Then, I'll use photos as textures so it looks more real. And finally, I'll do Matrix-esque slow-mo effects, because the Matrix is hot."
Disney failed to understand what Pixar was about, which is kind of ironic considering they pioneered in the type of animation that Pixar is doing today.
Heh no offense, but a 'K6 233' wasn't exactly top notch quality, heh.
Kudos for Linux for being reliable there, obviously MS could learn from them in that case. I do have one question, though: Did all the hardware you had in it work, or did you have to make a functionality compromise?
Also, I should have clarified: I will not defend the 9X platform at all. It's CRAP. I'm a very happy 2K user.
It's not my intention to roast Linux, so please don't feel like I'm setting you up to argue with you. Just curious, really. I'm joining the Linux world soon, my office is switching it's engineers over to it.
"The reason for using Linux is that for just about every task other than day-to-day desktop shit, it is a faster, more secure, cheaper, and more stable platform than most anything out there."
No, that's not really the reason in this case. The most attractive reason for them is the wide-open configuration capabilities. They can turn computers into reliable appliances. Windows and Macintosh are great desktop OS's, there's little need to replace those for the animators. (although it would be advantageous if their tools all ran on Linux... as of last year, not all of them were available)
They really need the Linux boxes for rendering clusters and for creating new animation tools.
"we need to create a puppet and motion capture it. You, get me a Linux computer. You, go to go to Radio Shack and build the puppet." -- This is the type of solution where Linux has real value for Disney and ILM etc.
Basically, they're killing off pixar and moving it in-house,
They can't. Pixar has superior talent and tools. Shrek and Ice Age were beautiful, but they were not Pixar quality. They threw a lot of nice effects in there, but the writing was pretty bland.
Dinosaur was an attempt to do what Pixar was doing, but it failed. The result? They are working with Pixar to do more movies. (Lucky for us!)
The real secret to making a successful computer animated movie is not in how many rendering cycles you throw at it to make it pretty, it's in telling an emotive story. If you want to see what I mean, watch the Birds cartoon that debuted with Monsters, Inc. Not only was it hilarious, but it told an amusing story without a single line of dialog.
That isn't the type of movie you make by throwing money at it.
It's not like a did a search for (+1, Arrogance) and wrote a parody of it.
"If you are writting an OS, then it is your responsiblity to write it correctly. If you can't do that, then you should get out of the business. "
:)
Heh I passed this comment around the software engineers this morning. Thanks for providing us with a laugh at your expense.
They are of the opinion that design evolves. When the platform gets more complicated, the problems to anticipate geometrically rise.
With that said: At least Windows can smoothly be installed on nearly any machine out there. I have no doubt that Linux is great, but I couldn't even get the video drivers to go past 640 by 480, even though my laptop's card was supported.
I have a Win2k box that's been up for about 60 days now. It's a home-brew PVR.
:P
I've watched an NT server box running IIS stay up for a good 90 days. The only reason it's not longer is that we had to shut it down to move it.
I think it really depends on how ya build it. The biggest instability is caused by hardware. If your hardware has fatal drivers, don't expect it to run for very long.
My main entertainment computer (also Win2k...) has an uptime of over a week. But I play the shit out of games like Quake. When I don't play those games, my uptime's seriously longer.
Everybody knows that Windows has a lot more games than Linux.
"How was Code Red a "poor design decision" on Microsoft's part?"
Because everybody knows that Jolt has more energy.
Nope, I'm going to sound like I'm so smart that nothing seems new to me. Ah, somebody wrote up a description of how to make your own detection system. Wait a minute, alarms using pressure switches have been done before!! Geez, can't they work spooky interaction into it or something?
Damn. This must be a slow news day if I can't be entertained by a a description of what is involved. No siree, I wouldn't want to learn anything. If Compaq and Dell can build stuff into their systems that sounds the same, then it isn't worth me knowing about. Hmm my computer doesn't have one of these. I guess I never thought about that when I built my own computer. Pity, I don't have an intrusion detection system.
Oh I know, I don't need one! My friends all shout 'First Post!'.
I'm not paying $10 for one song.
"Bullshit. Spyro was for PSOne, and I played through the game on a burned copy, and there were no missing keys. I made the copy myself from renting it and doing a 1:1 CD Copy. "
A.) 'Bullshit' is a very rude way to reply. Do you really need to invite challenge?
B.) Spyro the Dragon was also available on PC, and that is what I was referring to. (I wasn't very commital because I didn't feel like looking it up, but since you challenged me...)
C.) And when exactly did you make this copy? CD burners have gotten a whole lot more interesting since 1999, and the game came out late 1998. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you couldn't make that copy the day it came out.
In other words, you didn't prove me wrong, at all, whatsoever.
The RIAA is making matters worse. If they truely think that the internet is responsible for them losing money, the worst thing they did was sue companies involved out of business.
If the RIAA had figured out a way of turning Napster/Audio Galaxy into a business, then the majority of music downloaders would be there using the service legitimately.
What has happened instead, is they shut down the popular way of getting music. The result is that the people hooked on this service are going to go underground and acquire music through alternative means. If they can't get music from Kazaa, then they'll head to IRC or other de-centralized sources.
They basically blew up the central location for music swapping, forcing everybody into smaller cells. Now, if the RIAA does ever provide a service, few people will head towards it.
Oops. Songs will still get traded, but now the RIAA has little to no hope of ever getting money for it. I'd feel sorry for them if they didn't call me a thief because I own a CDR-drive.