That's all true, but there's something to be said for getting in on the ground floor. Microsoft is trying its best to recruit the top salesfolk, and these're guys and gals who might well have their eyes on management slots. Joining a new, well-funded operation can be a good lure for the upwardly mobile.
You also have to consider the future of the company - has Apple shot its load, or are there other must-have products in the pipeline? And a Microsoft store? Ever heard of Gateway stores?
The entire reason for Apple stores were those tiny niches at a CompUSA and other places, where Apple was relegated to the background as an afterthought. They wanted a place to showcase their products and not be presented as second-fiddle or second-tier. Also, it's a place for people to play and gawk at their stuff, play toys for gadget geeks.
Microsoft may have some things, but Xbox and Zune is at every Walmart. What exactly do they have to showcase that isn't at the big box stores (Yeah, I know ipods/iphone is at walmart, but the notebooks aren't...)
I meant an Arm-based notebook is out, not this new chip, because my previous parent post said:
Whether the ARM chip performance is even adequate for normal netbook applications (e.g. watching youtube) is an open question until somebody tries it. Sure, ARM threw out this number of 5x, which is a meaningless number until we get a better overall idea of how fast and slow it is on different tasks.
Which may not give us an idea what the new chip can't do, but it will give us a good idea of the minimum the new chip can do (i.e. if the old chip can handle youtube, so can the new).
Whether the ARM chip performance is even adequate for normal netbook applications (e.g. watching youtube) is an open question until somebody tries it. Sure, ARM threw out this number of 5x, which is a meaningless number until we get a better overall idea of how fast and slow it is on different tasks.
Quite a few states have emissions testing every year or every other year. Make them get a sticker that also has the mileage. The next year, you figure out the difference. Pay the tax. Odometer fails it's the same as if ODB readiness fails.
I'm really starting to despise your type. Government demands blatantly unreasonable tax to bolster it's fat ass, and people such as yourself immediately offer a "compromise" that makes "everyone happy."
Except it always seems to creep in one direction: big-ass government nickel and diming everywhere.
No new systems, bureacracies, or bullshit, where 70% of the money is spent administering it. Add 10 cents to the gas tax and be done with it. Or better yet, find a way to cut costs.
Are these damn players becoming like cell phones? Do app stores matter? Makes no sense to me.
First, when making an argument, consider you are not the only person in the world, so yes, someone somewhere probably needs something more/different/whatever.
And yes, App stores matter. Developers like them for saless. Non-geeks like them because it's a trustworthy point to get software that's pretty much guaranteed to be malware-free and won't hijack your system. Ubuntu, in fact, has an essentially same functionality in synaptic. Perhaps, if they were to leverage that into a store, it could help linux grow further.
Not all software can be free software. Can't sell support contracts for games and the like.
There is also cool software to be had for the iPhone - like some small apps to help you learn chinese or japanese, etc. App stores help promote this type of thing.
So the idea is that making it easier to leave google makes you more likely to stay with google?
This is an excellent idea on google's part. It's like that old IT truism whereby the more necessary a programmer becomes, the sooner you should get rid of him.
It could help small businesses and organizations decide to go with google, if they have guarantee of local backups as well. Nothing is more annoying than being able to put data in, but not getting it out in any timely, consistent fashion - which is the failure of many web-based solutions. Especially as Google is aiming to have all the productivity tools on the web - email, web, documents, etc.
1GB of RAM is more then enough, all you need to do is to make sure you OS is bloatware free.
640k should be enough for anybody!
Meanwhile, desktops at Walmart now have around 3-8GB ram. And knowing OEMs, those netbooks are hardly bloatware free.
I consider 2GB minimum these days for a notebook. Although the grandparent does a fantastic job of explaining why all the netbooks at Dell are only 1GB (no upgrades) although I see the Ubuntu option now can be upgraded to 2gb for a whopping $75 which wasn't previously available before.
I have talked to several people that own or have owned netbooks. Most of the people don't like them. One person in general got a netbook from there husband. He got it since it was the cheapest thing he could buy. She hates it with a passion, but it does sorta what she wants just slowly. If I had to guess this type of story could be repeated over and over again. It was the cheapest thing so it was purchased even though the person that actually has to use it doesn't like it.
It's comments like these and an above comment about the N270/280 not playing flash well that has me looking at the 13" Mac Book Pro instead, rather than having both a "real" notebook and a netbook seperately. For me it isn't the price, just a compromise on screen size.
I can't wait until the multi-core Atoms and ARMs are out and in use in netbooks.
Do programmers deserve their own holiday ahead of other professions?
Probably not ahead of scientists/mathematicians/enginneers. But still, pretty cool.
And can't but think it will be yet another forgotten day - secretary's day, siblings day, etc. All exist, all forgotten. Every day is proclaimed something and the novelty wore off or never caught on. Probably the only novel thing would be to have a "regular" day where nothing is officially remembered/celebrated/commerated/pissed_on/whatever.
I dumped Firefox for Chrome. I've been using FF ever since it came out years back. As you say, stability... but that isn't Open Source's fault. Just that the same process runs all the tabs. You will like Chrome for stability. Only thing I miss is adblock/noscript (adblock you can staple on somehow) and the ability to bring back up recent tabs you accidently killed.
I've been on Ubuntu and back several times. Like it, but have to use Windows or Mac Apps, so this is a non-Ubuntu issue (although they had samba set up very crappy the last time I tried to use it on a windows lan).
The thing with open source Apps is just trying to get into them. I think something like Gnucash is very powerful, and I want to use it, but compared to Mint or Quickbooks, it's just hard to grok. They lack that easy-to-use polish and for some programs, I don't want to sit there hours learning, I just want to do something quick, dirty, simple.
Needless to say, it's linux based. I only wish it had higher res than 1024x600... but that is par for the course in current netbooks (though some have ~1300x768 now). On the plus side, it's also a tablet as you can remove the entire bottom half in seconds.
It seems that Apple has made a well-timed and completely innovative and ground-breaking price-cut on their products, plus a brand new low-end iPod. Perhaps they are trying to throw a wrench into the machinations of the massive unstoppable juggernaut that is the Zune.
To be fair, Zune is getting an OLED screen this year, and will be able to play 720p through HDMI on a TV. Although I have to question the wisdom of calling it "HD" when it's own screen is only 480x272, lower than current iPod Touch. May confuse some customers and really piss them off that they didn't buy a miniature HD screen (especially when trying to browse the web and finding out that most websites still need side to side scrolling).
Overall, I was hoping for more from Apple. It's just coasting.
Maybe, but be sure they'll charge you a fine. You go away for a week and come home to find the city has "helpfully" mowed your lawn and sent you a bill for $200. And yet they do nothing about the dozens of properties with foot tall weeds in the from yard owned by banks and real estate agencies. Grumble grumble. Get off my lawn!
Happened with my parents once in the 1980s with a rental property that was recently vacated. They went for a trip, and found a mowing bill coming back home - a single mowing being $500-600 (forget exact amount but up there, especially back then). Later, after they sold the place, they found out that a local councilman was the brother-in-law to the guy who owned the mowing company.
In keeping with your analogy, a cop illegally searches your house and finds weed, you go to court and the evidence is thrown out, but, having been arrested for smoking weed in public at the same time and now knowing you have weed in your house and coincidentally knowing you use facebook, the cops subpoena Facebook without using the found weed, just your having been arrested in public to get the warrant. Facebook sends them the stuff on your account which includes pictures of the weed in your house. The pictures are still valid, untainted evidence.
In subpoena-ing facebook, have they gotten probable cause without relying on the illegal search to obtain that knowledge in the first place?
P.S. I don't have weed in my house, but I do have weeds on my lawn. Can the government come and confiscate them?
I prefer the person that is bearable and can learn competently.
There are few true geniuses in the world. The vast majority of people who have an chip on their shoulder probably wouldn't be a good team player anyway... and even if they are above average, with that type of attitude, probably would leave disaster in their wake when they leave - even if it's as simple and seemingly harmless thing as lack of documentation of what they were doing or making.
Why does the summary talk about "Precedent from the Jammie Thomas" when this case is in Mexico, while Jammie Thomas was in USA? Precedent's in USA aren't precedents everywhere (how many times this shit has to be told to americans?) and most of other countries actually have sane amount of compensations in copyright infringement cases, unlike USA.
RIAA sister organizations around the world actually point to USA and screams "Be more like them!" when trying to roughshod legislation through... so it only seems fair.
Being somewhat serious here, there will be no keyboard layout war. QWERTY has won the day as the defacto standard. I know there are a few people who will cling to claims of DVORAK being better/faster and they may be right, but the energy/economics/brainshare required to overcome QWERTY as a standard is enormous, and it won't happen.
I think there's more chance of the US changing to the metric system than DVORAK seriously contending against QWERTY.
I type dvorak. First, I spent many years on the computer on qwerty, before taking a free online lesson 3-4 years back for about 3 hours, and then stopping qwerty cold turkey for several months to reinforce the lesson. It wasn't hard, and there are supposedly even better layouts like Neo (in German): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Tastaturbelegung
Now, I agree with you. Qwerty won the layout war long ago. However, I disagree that it even needs to be a war. Every OS I have encountered easily changes from qwerty to dvorak or hundreds of other layouts with a few clicks from the control panel (or a line on the CLI). The only time I have encountered were on terminals... but as I don't write reports on them, it really doesn't phase me although I could use a dvorak->qwerty webapp if need be.
As to curriculum -> I think we try to teach our kids too much. They don't need to know everything, just learn how to think and expected basic skills. I agree that typing is one of the more important communication methods today. It doesn't matter if they learn qwerty or dvorak or neo... in my above experience, the few hours spent learning one is insignificant, what is significant are typing concepts universal to layouts - home row and the like.
However, we often pile more and more in the pursuit of academic excellence, for every thing we add, why not lighten the burden by removing something archaic? I don't see much use for cursive anymore. The printed word, sure. But everytime I encountered cursive, it usually was someone's illegible scibble, usually a doctor's note the pharmacist will magically decode (or is guessing at) and even that is disappearing (I have seen, using printouts instead). About the only real use is for signatures, which I am sure people will continue to find a way to make their own illegible scribble all their own.
Exactly. Fascism aspect of fascism is corporate fascism, what is essentially Eisenhower warned of against in his departing speech about the Military-Industrial Complex, but instead of war against countries, this is a marriage of state and corporation, while waging war on crime, drugs, etcetera.
It's hard to argue it is socialism, socialism at least pretends to be for the people, if nothing else. But it's hard to argue that music will disappear without this tax, or will be even impacted at all. What happens if the music industry withdrew entirely from Canada? The pirates would run rampant. So the people don't lose either way.
To give into this, would be a slippery slope into having computers taxed heavily since they can play copyright music, games, pictures, and movies. Which I'm sure, the entertainment industry would love.
I read that the original argument for patents was to avoid the secretive guilds of the medieval era. That is, in exchange for temporary societal protection and granting of monopoly, information was opened up. Now, perhaps that was the argument needed when back in the day, all you really "owned" was what you could protect and horde.
But I wonder how much of that purpose today's patents actually achieve in obtaining, for the public, new info worth having, rather than obvious variants, rehashed variants, or things that could be reversed engineered from products of the company. Many of the interesting things still are done under "propietary" (read: secret) processes.
I'll continue to buy it on CD and rip it to MP3, thanks.:)
Lossless Flac here.
I stop paying my subscription, I'm left with nothing. It's as simple as that. Because of the internet, I no longer have subscriptions to magazines/newspapers. I already yanked off my cable bill for online programming and trying to get rid of the landline phone/fax via various means. Why would I want to go in reverse and acquire another ongoing cost/subscription?
A subscription sounds great for exploring music. But Pandora is also great for that. It also lets me buy them on the spot. I already have trouble finding 10 great songs every month I need to have, or whatever the amount the subscription cost divided by $1/track is.
I am using chrome now. I don't use chrome for the UI. Indeed, I miss the the clear "File Edit...." horizontal list. I also miss plug-ins, specifically adblock-plus and noscipt (yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks). I also don't like I can't right click on pictures and find their properties, specifically file size. Now I have to inspect element and it still doesn't have this info. Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.
I am neutral about the home page which shows sites most visited. I guess I could make an edit list to keep some sites off, but then that itself will be in a list somewhere on the computer.
I do like how I can move the tabs around and even make a tab into a new window (although I find this happens way too often by accident). But the feature I really dumped Firefox for was that each tab is a seperate process, no more hangups or spinning wheels. No more sudden crashes that were becoming all too frequent on Firefox. I have a lot of tabs open, I really don't feel like one page hang (or take down) everything.
If Firefox does this, I'm going back. If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay. It's as simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
You also have to consider the future of the company - has Apple shot its load, or are there other must-have products in the pipeline? And a Microsoft store? Ever heard of Gateway stores?
The entire reason for Apple stores were those tiny niches at a CompUSA and other places, where Apple was relegated to the background as an afterthought. They wanted a place to showcase their products and not be presented as second-fiddle or second-tier. Also, it's a place for people to play and gawk at their stuff, play toys for gadget geeks.
Microsoft may have some things, but Xbox and Zune is at every Walmart. What exactly do they have to showcase that isn't at the big box stores (Yeah, I know ipods/iphone is at walmart, but the notebooks aren't...)
I meant an Arm-based notebook is out, not this new chip, because my previous parent post said:
Which may not give us an idea what the new chip can't do, but it will give us a good idea of the minimum the new chip can do (i.e. if the old chip can handle youtube, so can the new).
One already out based on the beagle board:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
I'm really starting to despise your type. Government demands blatantly unreasonable tax to bolster it's fat ass, and people such as yourself immediately offer a "compromise" that makes "everyone happy."
Except it always seems to creep in one direction: big-ass government nickel and diming everywhere.
No new systems, bureacracies, or bullshit, where 70% of the money is spent administering it. Add 10 cents to the gas tax and be done with it. Or better yet, find a way to cut costs.
First, when making an argument, consider you are not the only person in the world, so yes, someone somewhere probably needs something more/different/whatever.
And yes, App stores matter. Developers like them for saless. Non-geeks like them because it's a trustworthy point to get software that's pretty much guaranteed to be malware-free and won't hijack your system. Ubuntu, in fact, has an essentially same functionality in synaptic. Perhaps, if they were to leverage that into a store, it could help linux grow further.
Not all software can be free software. Can't sell support contracts for games and the like.
There is also cool software to be had for the iPhone - like some small apps to help you learn chinese or japanese, etc. App stores help promote this type of thing.
This is an excellent idea on google's part. It's like that old IT truism whereby the more necessary a programmer becomes, the sooner you should get rid of him.
It could help small businesses and organizations decide to go with google, if they have guarantee of local backups as well. Nothing is more annoying than being able to put data in, but not getting it out in any timely, consistent fashion - which is the failure of many web-based solutions. Especially as Google is aiming to have all the productivity tools on the web - email, web, documents, etc.
640k should be enough for anybody!
Meanwhile, desktops at Walmart now have around 3-8GB ram. And knowing OEMs, those netbooks are hardly bloatware free.
I consider 2GB minimum these days for a notebook. Although the grandparent does a fantastic job of explaining why all the netbooks at Dell are only 1GB (no upgrades) although I see the Ubuntu option now can be upgraded to 2gb for a whopping $75 which wasn't previously available before.
It's comments like these and an above comment about the N270/280 not playing flash well that has me looking at the 13" Mac Book Pro instead, rather than having both a "real" notebook and a netbook seperately. For me it isn't the price, just a compromise on screen size.
I can't wait until the multi-core Atoms and ARMs are out and in use in netbooks.
Probably not ahead of scientists/mathematicians/enginneers. But still, pretty cool.
And can't but think it will be yet another forgotten day - secretary's day, siblings day, etc. All exist, all forgotten. Every day is proclaimed something and the novelty wore off or never caught on. Probably the only novel thing would be to have a "regular" day where nothing is officially remembered/celebrated/commerated/pissed_on/whatever.
I dumped Firefox for Chrome. I've been using FF ever since it came out years back. As you say, stability... but that isn't Open Source's fault. Just that the same process runs all the tabs. You will like Chrome for stability. Only thing I miss is adblock/noscript (adblock you can staple on somehow) and the ability to bring back up recent tabs you accidently killed.
I've been on Ubuntu and back several times. Like it, but have to use Windows or Mac Apps, so this is a non-Ubuntu issue (although they had samba set up very crappy the last time I tried to use it on a windows lan).
The thing with open source Apps is just trying to get into them. I think something like Gnucash is very powerful, and I want to use it, but compared to Mint or Quickbooks, it's just hard to grok. They lack that easy-to-use polish and for some programs, I don't want to sit there hours learning, I just want to do something quick, dirty, simple.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
Needless to say, it's linux based. I only wish it had higher res than 1024x600... but that is par for the course in current netbooks (though some have ~1300x768 now). On the plus side, it's also a tablet as you can remove the entire bottom half in seconds.
To be fair, Zune is getting an OLED screen this year, and will be able to play 720p through HDMI on a TV. Although I have to question the wisdom of calling it "HD" when it's own screen is only 480x272, lower than current iPod Touch. May confuse some customers and really piss them off that they didn't buy a miniature HD screen (especially when trying to browse the web and finding out that most websites still need side to side scrolling).
Overall, I was hoping for more from Apple. It's just coasting.
Happened with my parents once in the 1980s with a rental property that was recently vacated. They went for a trip, and found a mowing bill coming back home - a single mowing being $500-600 (forget exact amount but up there, especially back then). Later, after they sold the place, they found out that a local councilman was the brother-in-law to the guy who owned the mowing company.
Nice, "free" country we have sometimes.
In subpoena-ing facebook, have they gotten probable cause without relying on the illegal search to obtain that knowledge in the first place?
P.S. I don't have weed in my house, but I do have weeds on my lawn. Can the government come and confiscate them?
Scams are older than the human species.
The world doesn't get weirder, although I wonder if it gets more gullible...
I think there is a 9V battery in that contraption, going by voltage reader.
get electrocuted when they go outside?
I prefer the person that is bearable and can learn competently.
There are few true geniuses in the world. The vast majority of people who have an chip on their shoulder probably wouldn't be a good team player anyway... and even if they are above average, with that type of attitude, probably would leave disaster in their wake when they leave - even if it's as simple and seemingly harmless thing as lack of documentation of what they were doing or making.
RIAA sister organizations around the world actually point to USA and screams "Be more like them!" when trying to roughshod legislation through... so it only seems fair.
I type dvorak. First, I spent many years on the computer on qwerty, before taking a free online lesson 3-4 years back for about 3 hours, and then stopping qwerty cold turkey for several months to reinforce the lesson. It wasn't hard, and there are supposedly even better layouts like Neo (in German):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Tastaturbelegung
Now, I agree with you. Qwerty won the layout war long ago. However, I disagree that it even needs to be a war. Every OS I have encountered easily changes from qwerty to dvorak or hundreds of other layouts with a few clicks from the control panel (or a line on the CLI). The only time I have encountered were on terminals... but as I don't write reports on them, it really doesn't phase me although I could use a dvorak->qwerty webapp if need be.
As to curriculum -> I think we try to teach our kids too much. They don't need to know everything, just learn how to think and expected basic skills. I agree that typing is one of the more important communication methods today. It doesn't matter if they learn qwerty or dvorak or neo... in my above experience, the few hours spent learning one is insignificant, what is significant are typing concepts universal to layouts - home row and the like.
However, we often pile more and more in the pursuit of academic excellence, for every thing we add, why not lighten the burden by removing something archaic? I don't see much use for cursive anymore. The printed word, sure. But everytime I encountered cursive, it usually was someone's illegible scibble, usually a doctor's note the pharmacist will magically decode (or is guessing at) and even that is disappearing (I have seen, using printouts instead). About the only real use is for signatures, which I am sure people will continue to find a way to make their own illegible scribble all their own.
Exactly. Fascism aspect of fascism is corporate fascism, what is essentially Eisenhower warned of against in his departing speech about the Military-Industrial Complex, but instead of war against countries, this is a marriage of state and corporation, while waging war on crime, drugs, etcetera.
It's hard to argue it is socialism, socialism at least pretends to be for the people, if nothing else. But it's hard to argue that music will disappear without this tax, or will be even impacted at all. What happens if the music industry withdrew entirely from Canada? The pirates would run rampant. So the people don't lose either way.
To give into this, would be a slippery slope into having computers taxed heavily since they can play copyright music, games, pictures, and movies. Which I'm sure, the entertainment industry would love.
I read that the original argument for patents was to avoid the secretive guilds of the medieval era. That is, in exchange for temporary societal protection and granting of monopoly, information was opened up. Now, perhaps that was the argument needed when back in the day, all you really "owned" was what you could protect and horde.
But I wonder how much of that purpose today's patents actually achieve in obtaining, for the public, new info worth having, rather than obvious variants, rehashed variants, or things that could be reversed engineered from products of the company. Many of the interesting things still are done under "propietary" (read: secret) processes.
That is what e-ink is trying to correct.
Lossless Flac here.
I stop paying my subscription, I'm left with nothing. It's as simple as that. Because of the internet, I no longer have subscriptions to magazines/newspapers. I already yanked off my cable bill for online programming and trying to get rid of the landline phone/fax via various means. Why would I want to go in reverse and acquire another ongoing cost/subscription?
A subscription sounds great for exploring music. But Pandora is also great for that. It also lets me buy them on the spot. I already have trouble finding 10 great songs every month I need to have, or whatever the amount the subscription cost divided by $1/track is.
I am using chrome now. I don't use chrome for the UI. Indeed, I miss the the clear "File Edit...." horizontal list. I also miss plug-ins, specifically adblock-plus and noscipt (yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks). I also don't like I can't right click on pictures and find their properties, specifically file size. Now I have to inspect element and it still doesn't have this info. Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.
I am neutral about the home page which shows sites most visited. I guess I could make an edit list to keep some sites off, but then that itself will be in a list somewhere on the computer.
I do like how I can move the tabs around and even make a tab into a new window (although I find this happens way too often by accident). But the feature I really dumped Firefox for was that each tab is a seperate process, no more hangups or spinning wheels. No more sudden crashes that were becoming all too frequent on Firefox. I have a lot of tabs open, I really don't feel like one page hang (or take down) everything.
If Firefox does this, I'm going back. If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay. It's as simple as that.
He's not a well-known engineer.
He's a well-known actor/comedian that happens to have studied electrical engineering.