So? There are other non-free/open apps on Linux. We use Oracle on Linux where I work. Picasa is not Free, but it is free; which is nice. Also, in the process of this effort, Google has contributed tons of patches to Wine which will help other porting efforts.
You can't expect the IT world to change from proprietary/closed to open over night. It will take time. This is a very good step in the right direction IMO. I would love to see more free apps on Windows brought over to Linux.
Having more "mainstream" apps on Linux could help standardize Linux more. By standardize I mean having less of a pain on picking what file manager to use, or what email app to use,...
Read Google's Picasa Linux FAQ. There are a bunch of silly things like that a company faces when trying to bring an app to Linux. For example, if you select "locate on disk" for an image, what file manager does Picasa use to show the location? Nautilus? Konq? What if you don't have one of those? If you want to send a picture in an email, what email program? etc, etc. Picasa seems to have gone with the main two (gnome/kde) for most options which seems like the best choice. However, Efforts like this could turn into standard ways to do things on Linux. For example, maybe Freedesktop.org will come up with standard commands and standard parameters that will launch your default browser, mail client, file manager, audio player, picture viewer, etc.
Microsoft makes a killing on their software from the majority of all the corps in the world running it for most of their desktops. You can get MS Home for less than $150. I said $100 for Mac OS X because there is only so much the average person will go out and buy Mac OS X for. The average person gets MS Home with their PC so the don't see the costs. My $100 was mostly for Mac OS X. Not all the extras. The $100 consumer version would be a little more lean. It would cost more for the current software bundle with OS X.
I just want to see some price competition from Apple. I really think they can make a *huge* dent in the home market (which could lead to the big bucks corp market) if they just got more competitive on price. Most of my family members want a basic computer for no more than $500. For $500 you can get a very decent system from Dell. From Apple you cannot get anything. The closest you can get is spending an extra $100 and then you have just a computer with no keyboard, mouse or monitor. I would really like to know why Apple doesn't want to go after the home market. Apple has had to learn by now that the home market is not going to come to them unless they not only offer a better product, but make that product close in price to the competition. Take the iPod for example. People liked the features and style and the price was not much more then the other mainstream offerings. It became a no-brainer to spend an extra $50 to get an iPod.
Take a look at this Dell page. This is the mainstream US market. For $300 you can get a very usable system with monitor. Apple can't touch anything on this page price-wise. I would like to see Apple have 2 offerings below $600. One low end similar in spec to the $300 one from Dell and one around the $600 price point. The non-Intel mini was a joke. The processor was slow and the dog-slow hard drive made the system really bad to use. I know two people that work that now "hate" Apple because they got mini's and complained how slow they were.
How will Mac zealots claim "superior" hardware when Apple is throwing in the same stuff that you get in a commodity PC? The Inetl graphics are really crappy for anything more than a *budget* PC. And the prices I see over at Apple put them way out of that budget price range.
What exactly is going to be the reason for why a Mac costs more? OS X? If so, then there is only a small amount more Apple could charge, say maybe $100 more. Anything over that and you are paying for an Apple name. All of the parts in Apple's Intell based systems are made overseas like all the parts in a PC. So exactly where is the "Apple Advantage"?
I was hoping that Apple could really leap into the mainstream with the move to Intel. I thought Apple could lower prices by using commodity parts and maybe they would even see the light and offer their software for sale. I think Apple would make a killing selling all of their software for the PC. They could certainly make some in-roads in the home user market.
Huh? They don't even come close. The shared memory is *much* slower than dedicated memory on a modern ATI or NVidia. I just got a new laptop with the i9xx and while it can do excellerated OpenGL under Linux/Win, the frame rates are nohting great. I have a dog-old 64MB Nvidia Geforce-3 Ti 500 on my desktopo that blows my new 128MB i9xx away. The GF-3 gets at least 3x - 4x more frames/sec. The next laptop I buy will have a real video card that doesn't suck up my main memory.
I will say that the i9xx is *much* better then the i8xx. So if you want a budget laptop like I did, it is an acceptable tradeoff. I put 2GB of DDR2 PC4200 in my laptop and I can play Call Of Duty 1 under Linux OK which is enough for me since I am not a big gamer. However thinking the i9xx can go up against a somewhat modern ATI/NVidia is silly. It can't even keep pace with my GF-3.
do any VNC-like clients actually support 16 color graphics?
Yup. Looking at my vnc client I have 8 colors/colours, 64 colors/colours, 256 colors/colours or Full colors/colours. The VNC viewer has colors spelled/spelt as colours, which is wrong ; )
Uhh, about 95% of the PC using *modern* world? Almost everyone that buys a computer will pay the MS-Tax. Most home users are not building their own or buying a barebones so they pay for the MS license with the PC purchase, even if they will not use MS Windows.
The majority of corporations in the modern world also pay. It would cost a company more to get sued for infringement than to just pay the MS-tax.
Finally, anyone with half a brain could come to the conclusion that MS is making Billions a year, someone must be paying them.
The simple answer is because.NET's performance is inferior to compiled code.
Maybe in pure number crunching. However I find Mono/.Net to be fast and the memory foot print is not bad. Subjectively I think the apps I run with Mono are faster than equivelent Java apps and non-subjectively they use a whole lot less memory.
I use Linux for my desktop at home and use Mono for some apps. I develop C#/.Net on MS Windows at work. When I fire up F-Spot with Mono on Linux it starts up in about 2 seconds tops.
The vast majority of apps nowadays are IO limited, and spend most of their time idling whilst they wait for on the hard drive/network for more data
I recently had to update some old financial app that is written in VB 6. The app is slow. It takes about 15 minutes to do its processing. I wasn't given the time to rewrite it correctly in an OO language like C#. Some prototypes in C# I did showed processing could come down to 5 minutes or so. This app is ran multiple times when it is used. Saving 10 minutes per-execution * X executions/day * Y days = nice productivity/money savings.
Well, you've left out those 60 people who are twiddling their thumbs for 100 hours because the "super-speedy C version" of their app doesn't exist yet.
That is just completly stupid. Do you think those 60 people were hired to just sit and wait for the "super-speedy C version" of the app? Don't you think those 60 people have other processes/applications in place to use until they get that "super-speedy C version" of the app? Don't you think those 60 people have *other* jobs to do? Assuming 60 people would be paid $8.00/hour for 100 hours to do nothing is just stupid.
My argument was to the GP stating that I think it is stupid to think that developer time is the only thing that matters or is the most important thing in software development. For a software company yes, the former may be true. However for most of corporate America that do not produce software for sale, employee productivity is usually one of the top priorities.
Here is another quick example. Where I work they switched to a People Soft portal. The thing is total bloat-ware. It takes about 5 seconds to login (it used to be closer to 10). The previous old-school ASP portal was crappy but login took about 2 seconds. We could have re-written it in PHP/C#/Java and kept a 2-3 second login. Most people would think what is the big deal about an extra 3-4 seconds to login? Well it is not a big deal for 10 employees. However we have 150,000+ and average about 200,000 employee logins per week. 200,000 * 3 extra seconds = 166.6 hours a week that employees are waiting to login instead of working. And that is just login times. Add in all the other waiting some of the big bloated People Soft apps and the lost productivity gets ugly.
Of course you can now counter and say that the people may be waiting an extra average of 5 seconds for login, however they are saving 8 seconds trying to find applications in the portal. Trying to figure out true ROI could be never ending. My original post was simply that it is silly to look only at developer time. I think that non-developer productivity is more important for non-IT companies.
And another one right back at you. Developer time is not always the most important thing. It may be important for a *software* company, but for a company that makes their money from anything besides software, it usually is not. For example, where I work we have 150,000+ employees. A *very* small fraction of them are programmers. Here is an example for you: say I write a program in.Net that is used by 60 people to do some processing and that processing takes 10 minutes. The same application in C/Win32 does the same task in 8 minutes. That is 2 minutes per day times 60 people or 120 minutes/2 hours per day. We can use a very low wage of say $8.00/h * 2 hours = $16 a day; 5 days/week = $80/week; 52 weeks/year = $4,160 a year. Now say that application is used for 2 years we come to $8,320 in lost productivitiy. Even if it took me an extra 100 hours to write the app in C/Win32 at $50/h that would only be $5,000. Still less than the 2 years of lost productivity. If you add more workers into the mix, things only get worse.
I think your "reality" is a little narrow. There is a lot more complexity to figuring out ROI then what the MS marketing machine has convinced you of. Even my example leaves out a lot of details like the added cost of migrating to a newer toolset to support.Net, etc.
an operating system IS supposed to be as efficient and speedy as possible
This isn't talking about an OS. It is referring to USER-LAND tools. I don't think anyone is expecting MS to rewrite the kernel in C# or managed C++. However, how can one be confident in.Net if MS won't port their USER-LAND tools to it? Why not a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr, regedit etc? All of those would be great in.Net and would show MS's customers that MS is behind.Net 100%. As it looks to me,.Net is the "soup of the day" at MS..Net will be replaced in 3-5 years with something else that will require MS customers to re-purchase their development tool chain.
an operating system IS supposed to be as efficient and speedy as possible
I think this could be said for *all* applications. I want the desktop apps I write to be "as efficient and speedy as possible". I want the web-apps I write to be "as efficient and speedy as possible". Going by your statment it sounds like I should not use.Net for anything. I mean who wants to use something that is not as speedy and efficient as possible?
As the trolls would say, "Move along, nothing to see here".
I think there is something to see here. Why doesn't MS port their non-OS apps to.Net? MS wants their customers to always port software to the latest and greatest MS language/environment of the year, so why doesn't MS do the same?
I basically stopped reading after I read he was 26. I am 33, though I don't consider that old. The guy was talking about beer and pr0n. That sounds like the mentality of a young gamer to me, not that there is anything wrong with that. I went through the phase.
Now at 33, with a wife, 2 kids and a 3rd that has been "cooking" for about 9 weeks now, my gaming needs are far different. I just went out and bought Madden 2005 and Dungeon Siege 2. Played them both for about 1 hour each and I am bored with them. I really wish there were old-style RPG games coming out where there is a story, turn based and it is not just a click fest. I don't care about online gaming. I don't have time to chat in some online RPG with a bunch of kids that don't have any thing in common with me.
My only option has been to download dosBox and fire up the old "Secret of the Silver Blades" D&D game. It is still fun to play, though obviously the graphics are really outdated. I wish there were more games like this that are TRUE turn-based RPG's where I can think about the battles and actions, use the different spells instead of one or two "quick" spells with a right-click as a monster is hacking me up. Does anyone have any good suggestions on newer versions of these types of games?
Why did you chop off the first part? He/She was referring to the entertainment/internet ops. Last I heard, the MSN ISP was not pulling in the customers. Last I heard, XBox has been in the red since day one. Last I heard, XBox 360 has tons of bugs. Maybe MSN search is making some profit, but that doesn't negate what the GP stated. If you look at these two business units, they will most likely be in the red. Most of MS's business units are in the red except for OS and Office. Google on the other hand, is in the black.
Me personally, I will boycott any companies that tried to gang up on Google just because they cannot compete one-on-one with Google. If a company comes along and can beat Google, I would gladly try them out. However, I would not try out companies that try to compete on business terms instead of technical/service terms. If MS/AOL wants to beat Google, let them offer a better product/service. As of now, Google offers the best features/speed for me. I guess MS can't take their own medicine.
Uhhh... can you run the 32-bit, x86 only binary win32 codecs? Uhh... I didn't think so. Mplayer supports a nice number of formats out-of-the-box, however, the major codecs need the 32-bit, x86 only binary win32 codecs, which, Uhh... won't run on your "NetBSD powered 64bit SparcStation".
Just read TFM from MPlayer:
STEP2: Installing Binary Codecs
MPlayer and libavcodec have builtin support for the most common audio and video formats, but some formats require external codecs. Examples include Real, Indeo and QuickTime audio formats. Support for Windows Media formats except WMV9 exists but still has some bugs, your mileage may vary. This step is not mandatory, but recommended for getting MPlayer to play a broader range of formats. Please note that most codecs only work on Intel x86 compatible PCs.
So I guess your Uhh... "NetBSD powered 64bit SparcStation" does not infact run MPlayer "just fine". Unless you don't care about support for the major codecs in use.
MPlayer will build. However, the whole point to this topic is that you cannot use the binary-only, x86 only dll files on non-x86 systems. They just won't work. Sure, MPlayer has support for many formats, however if you get a QuickTime Sorenson file or a newer WMV9, etc, you are SOL. The DLL files will only work on 32-bit x86. Just read the README from MPLayer:
STEP2: Installing Binary Codecs
MPlayer and libavcodec have builtin support for the most common audio and video formats, but some formats require external codecs. Examples include Real, Indeo and QuickTime audio formats. Support for Windows Media formats except WMV9 exists but still has some bugs, your mileage may vary. This step is not mandatory, but recommended for getting MPlayer to play a broader range of formats. Please note that most codecs only work on Intel x86 compatible PCs.
Unpack the codecs archives and put the contents in a directory where MPlayer will find them. The default directory is/usr/local/lib/codecs/ (it used to be /usr/local/lib/win32 in the past, this also works) but you can change that to something else by using the '--with-codecsdir=DIR' option when you run './configure'.
While WMV9 is not a bad codec, it is certainly not the best. WMV9 is a very "slow" codec when it comes to encoding. Also, the only encoders for WMV9 only work on MS Windows. So if you want to encode on Mac and/or Linux you are SOL. You can get a Mac decoder for WMV9, but you won't be able to encode on that platform. I guess MS wants their codec to be MS-Only? If you want to encode/decode on Linux, well you will have to settle for MPlayer 32-bit x86 only MS Windows dll files. Search Google for a "video codec shootout" and you should find plenty of links. WMV9 does well in final quality, thought it has always done poorly in encoding time, WMV9 is usually the "last of the pack" when it comes to encoding times.
Personally I would rather encode in a codec that is A) faster, B) much more universal, than use WMV9. The latest DivX is much faster than WMV9 and had just as good, if not better image quality. DivX also has the benefits of being far more universal of a codec than WMV9.
You listed *players* not codecs. I will assume you meant one of the players you listed with the binary win32 codecs that usually get installed under/usr/lib/win32. They do work well and I use them. However, they are basically 32-bit x86 only, so if you are not running 32-bit x86, you are SOL. Maybe the GP is running PPC Linux or a 64-bit Linux? Or maybe the GP doesn't want to run binary only win32 dll files on his computer?
Is OpenOffice 2.0 named that because of the relative size of the tarball compared to 1.2 or because of the relative startup time for the application compared to 1.2?
OO.org 2 is has a very fast startup time for me. I have a FULL OO.org 2 install on XP SP2 and the OO.org 2 directory is only 201 MB. I also have a full MS Office 2003 install. Talk about bloat. A few hundred megs more than OO.org 2.
The average Linux disto has used a lot more than the average Windows with equivalent software (Office suite and development suite) for some time for me
Probably because you have tons of unneeded development libraries and docs installed. I stopped using Fedora Core because how big the base install is. I now use Ubuntu and only install what I need and the whole distro comes on just one CD. As far as MS development tools go, what are you using? Because I have MS Visual Studio.Net 2003 Enterprise and it is pretty big:
Well, I think your proposal is pretty good. As a former U.S.M.C, I agree with you about 97%. I am not a pacifist. So I do not think war is totaly wrong/bad, however I think it is very ugly and should be a last resort. I think what Regan did was the best option. He led the USA to defeat the U.S.S.R without firing a single shot. He beat them politically. Anyway, I agree with you 100% that if our "leaders" want to send _us_ to war, then they _need_ to be responsible for that decision with their lives. If I can die because of their decision, then so should they.
To me, it is really simple. If our "leaders" want a war, then they need to be the first in, and on the front lines. The U.S.M.C. has a motto of "First to go, last to know". Which sadly is all too true. Anytime our military is ordered/voted to take action and a war is not officially declared, those "leaders" should have to put on the flak-jacket and carry their M-16 like the rest of the military is expected to.
Why doesn't Bush send his daughters to the FRONT line? Why shouldn't his to daughters be subject to what we are? Why shouldn't the Bush daughters be subject to having their heads cut off with a dull blade like others in the military?
While I am not the biggest fan of Michael Moore, one of the videos I watched was actually pretty good. He went around DC and was asking all of our "representitives" why their kids were not taking part in the "war effort". Sadly, most just ran away from the camera.
As a U.S.M.C I agree with most of what you said. These ultra rich, corrupt politicians have no problem sending me or others off to die while they continue to get the big "phat" pay checks.
However, what I don't totally agree with is this statement:
If political leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defensive[1]) purposes, they have to put their own lives at risk as well.
Why should it be OK to send people to die for "defensive" purposes? A defensive op could very easily turn to an offensive one where you are fighting for you life.
My position is simple. If you attack the USA, we come and blow the crap out of you. Otherwise we don't fight. By attack I do not mean just some "official" military attack. 9-11 was enough for us to blow the crap out of Afghanistan IMO. However, to just keep going "since we are in the neighborhood" is pretty wrong. We knew Afghanistan had a part in 9-11, not directly, but indirectly. IMO we should have hit them harder. But to continue and go on to Iraq was wrong. Where do we go next? Do we just keep going throughout the Middle East until we wipe it out?
I think a much better approach is to be the "sleeping giant". We should refrain from war as much as we can, we shouldn't just start attacking for any reason. However, if a nation does cross that line, then we go in fast and hard and bring them down. That should send a nice message around the world that A) we don't want to fight. B) if we do have to fight, we are doing it to win.
When I think of how much money has been spent on the "war" on terror, the "war" on drugs, the "war" on $POLITICAL_TERM, it is just sickening.
That sounds pretty nice! I don't know of anything like that in the USA. $30 - $35 a month is really cheap! For Digital cable, 5 mbps internet and unlimted local/long distance digital phone I pay about $130 USD a month.
What does Cisco bring to the table that nobody else does or can?
Consolidation? I have a "digital" house. We have digital cable, digital Internet access and digital phone. My digital phone comes in to a digital phone/cable router box and then goes into a Linksys cable/dsl router. My digital cable comes in through a Scientific-Atlanta set-top-box which offers video on demand, HD and 100's of channels. What I would like to see is ONE box that can bring digital goodness to my house. I don't want multiple devices in my house. I want one. I cannot get VOD on my computer because only gets digital Internet. With one set-top-box in the house, any device could get any of the offered services.
I can see an one-in-all set-top-box from Cisco that lets me have digital cable, digital Internet, digital phone, home router, VOD on any TV/computer, and WI-FI covering the house, media streaming, etc. Now that would be something I would like.
I live in Maryland (which doesn't issue carry permits unless you're politically connected), so my right to bear arms is violated on a daily basis.
So move out of that crappy state or file a suit and take it to the Supreme Court if you have to. Letting your rights be violated by one state is not the same thing as the Federal government taking away a constitutional right. I live in Florida and a law was recently passed that _allows_ us to use deadly force anywhere it may be necessary.
Thanks to the USA-PATRIOT act, I might be one of the 30,000+ US citizens with no links to terrorism who was a subject of a national security letter. I'll never know, because of the gag order that accompanies them. My (9th amendment) right to know, as previously guaranteed by the FOIA act and other laws, has been nullified.
Again, if your rights were violated, why don't you fight for them? I personally have never heard of something like this.
My right to petition the government for grievances and to peaceably assemble is violated every time I'm herded into a "free speech zone".
When did this happen? On what occasion did you try to peaceably assemble and had the govt. of Maryland herd you to another location? And if this personally happened to you, why didn't you do something about it? Maybe call the ACLU?
My right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures disappears the moment I get in to a motor vehicle, whether I'm driving it or not.
When did this happen to you? Were you pulled over and a cop forcibly searched your motor vehicle without cause?
My property can be taken without just compensation any time the government feels that someone else would pay more tax if they had it instead of me.
I agree with this one. I heard some cases of it happening here in Florida. However, I don't agree with the "without just compensation" part. All the cases I heard about the person(s) were given fair market value, though I still do nothing think it is OK. I think I heard that the Federal govt. is going to try to stop this by withholding money from states that take private property for commercial purposes.
What I want to know is, did all of these things you listed happen to _YOU_? Or are you just spewing out the typical anti-govt. junk? I hear people say the same things over and over, yet when I ask them when these types of things happened to them, it is always the same response, it never happened to them _personally_. Can you give us the details on when all of the things you listed above happened to _YOU_?
Maybe there have been a few isolated cases of the things you listed happening, however, I doubt it is very common. The person(s) involved should have faught back. They could get the media involved, call the ACLU, etc. Letting your rights be violated should not be accepted. Neither should exaggerating about the extent of rights violations in the USA.
I have lived on the east coast of the USA for all 32 years of my life. I have lived in NJ, PA, SC (USMC), NC (USMC) and now FL (Orlando area). I have never been "monitored" (neither have my wife or two kids) even close to what the Brits are doing. I would really like to know exactly how "we" are catching up? Or were you just trying to get some mod points by saying the typical crap like "USA sucks!"? You should throw in a "GWB SUCK @SS!" to get a few extra mods while your at it. It is real easy to make stupid "blanket" statements about the USA. However, when you compare reality in the USA to the rest of the world, we here in the USA are far better off over all.
Can you give me _ONE_ real example of how _YOUR_ rights have been violated here in the USA? Or are you just spewing the typical crap with no real evidence? I would honestly like to see you post back to this about how your right were violated or how you were "monitored".
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You can't expect the IT world to change from proprietary/closed to open over night. It will take time. This is a very good step in the right direction IMO. I would love to see more free apps on Windows brought over to Linux.
Having more "mainstream" apps on Linux could help standardize Linux more. By standardize I mean having less of a pain on picking what file manager to use, or what email app to use, ...
Read Google's Picasa Linux FAQ. There are a bunch of silly things like that a company faces when trying to bring an app to Linux. For example, if you select "locate on disk" for an image, what file manager does Picasa use to show the location? Nautilus? Konq? What if you don't have one of those? If you want to send a picture in an email, what email program? etc, etc. Picasa seems to have gone with the main two (gnome/kde) for most options which seems like the best choice. However, Efforts like this could turn into standard ways to do things on Linux. For example, maybe Freedesktop.org will come up with standard commands and standard parameters that will launch your default browser, mail client, file manager, audio player, picture viewer, etc.
We Americans are a perverted log ; )
I just want to see some price competition from Apple. I really think they can make a *huge* dent in the home market (which could lead to the big bucks corp market) if they just got more competitive on price. Most of my family members want a basic computer for no more than $500. For $500 you can get a very decent system from Dell. From Apple you cannot get anything. The closest you can get is spending an extra $100 and then you have just a computer with no keyboard, mouse or monitor. I would really like to know why Apple doesn't want to go after the home market. Apple has had to learn by now that the home market is not going to come to them unless they not only offer a better product, but make that product close in price to the competition. Take the iPod for example. People liked the features and style and the price was not much more then the other mainstream offerings. It became a no-brainer to spend an extra $50 to get an iPod.
Take a look at this Dell page. This is the mainstream US market. For $300 you can get a very usable system with monitor. Apple can't touch anything on this page price-wise. I would like to see Apple have 2 offerings below $600. One low end similar in spec to the $300 one from Dell and one around the $600 price point. The non-Intel mini was a joke. The processor was slow and the dog-slow hard drive made the system really bad to use. I know two people that work that now "hate" Apple because they got mini's and complained how slow they were.
What exactly is going to be the reason for why a Mac costs more? OS X? If so, then there is only a small amount more Apple could charge, say maybe $100 more. Anything over that and you are paying for an Apple name. All of the parts in Apple's Intell based systems are made overseas like all the parts in a PC. So exactly where is the "Apple Advantage"?
I was hoping that Apple could really leap into the mainstream with the move to Intel. I thought Apple could lower prices by using commodity parts and maybe they would even see the light and offer their software for sale. I think Apple would make a killing selling all of their software for the PC. They could certainly make some in-roads in the home user market.
I will say that the i9xx is *much* better then the i8xx. So if you want a budget laptop like I did, it is an acceptable tradeoff. I put 2GB of DDR2 PC4200 in my laptop and I can play Call Of Duty 1 under Linux OK which is enough for me since I am not a big gamer. However thinking the i9xx can go up against a somewhat modern ATI/NVidia is silly. It can't even keep pace with my GF-3.
The majority of corporations in the modern world also pay. It would cost a company more to get sued for infringement than to just pay the MS-tax.
Finally, anyone with half a brain could come to the conclusion that MS is making Billions a year, someone must be paying them.
I basically wanted to say what you did, except I tried late last night with one eye open : )
I use Linux for my desktop at home and use Mono for some apps. I develop C#/.Net on MS Windows at work. When I fire up F-Spot with Mono on Linux it starts up in about 2 seconds tops.
My argument was to the GP stating that I think it is stupid to think that developer time is the only thing that matters or is the most important thing in software development. For a software company yes, the former may be true. However for most of corporate America that do not produce software for sale, employee productivity is usually one of the top priorities.
Here is another quick example. Where I work they switched to a People Soft portal. The thing is total bloat-ware. It takes about 5 seconds to login (it used to be closer to 10). The previous old-school ASP portal was crappy but login took about 2 seconds. We could have re-written it in PHP/C#/Java and kept a 2-3 second login. Most people would think what is the big deal about an extra 3-4 seconds to login? Well it is not a big deal for 10 employees. However we have 150,000+ and average about 200,000 employee logins per week. 200,000 * 3 extra seconds = 166.6 hours a week that employees are waiting to login instead of working. And that is just login times. Add in all the other waiting some of the big bloated People Soft apps and the lost productivity gets ugly.
Of course you can now counter and say that the people may be waiting an extra average of 5 seconds for login, however they are saving 8 seconds trying to find applications in the portal. Trying to figure out true ROI could be never ending. My original post was simply that it is silly to look only at developer time. I think that non-developer productivity is more important for non-IT companies.
I think your "reality" is a little narrow. There is a lot more complexity to figuring out ROI then what the MS marketing machine has convinced you of. Even my example leaves out a lot of details like the added cost of migrating to a newer toolset to support
I basically stopped reading after I read he was 26. I am 33, though I don't consider that old. The guy was talking about beer and pr0n. That sounds like the mentality of a young gamer to me, not that there is anything wrong with that. I went through the phase.
Now at 33, with a wife, 2 kids and a 3rd that has been "cooking" for about 9 weeks now, my gaming needs are far different. I just went out and bought Madden 2005 and Dungeon Siege 2. Played them both for about 1 hour each and I am bored with them. I really wish there were old-style RPG games coming out where there is a story, turn based and it is not just a click fest. I don't care about online gaming. I don't have time to chat in some online RPG with a bunch of kids that don't have any thing in common with me.
My only option has been to download dosBox and fire up the old "Secret of the Silver Blades" D&D game. It is still fun to play, though obviously the graphics are really outdated. I wish there were more games like this that are TRUE turn-based RPG's where I can think about the battles and actions, use the different spells instead of one or two "quick" spells with a right-click as a monster is hacking me up. Does anyone have any good suggestions on newer versions of these types of games?
Me personally, I will boycott any companies that tried to gang up on Google just because they cannot compete one-on-one with Google. If a company comes along and can beat Google, I would gladly try them out. However, I would not try out companies that try to compete on business terms instead of technical/service terms. If MS/AOL wants to beat Google, let them offer a better product/service. As of now, Google offers the best features/speed for me. I guess MS can't take their own medicine.
Just read TFM from MPlayer:
So I guess your Uhh... "NetBSD powered 64bit SparcStation" does not infact run MPlayer "just fine". Unless you don't care about support for the major codecs in use.Personally I would rather encode in a codec that is A) faster, B) much more universal, than use WMV9. The latest DivX is much faster than WMV9 and had just as good, if not better image quality. DivX also has the benefits of being far more universal of a codec than WMV9.
You listed *players* not codecs. I will assume you meant one of the players you listed with the binary win32 codecs that usually get installed under /usr/lib/win32. They do work well and I use them. However, they are basically 32-bit x86 only, so if you are not running 32-bit x86, you are SOL. Maybe the GP is running PPC Linux or a 64-bit Linux? Or maybe the GP doesn't want to run binary only win32 dll files on his computer?
To me, it is really simple. If our "leaders" want a war, then they need to be the first in, and on the front lines. The U.S.M.C. has a motto of "First to go, last to know". Which sadly is all too true. Anytime our military is ordered/voted to take action and a war is not officially declared, those "leaders" should have to put on the flak-jacket and carry their M-16 like the rest of the military is expected to.
Why doesn't Bush send his daughters to the FRONT line? Why shouldn't his to daughters be subject to what we are? Why shouldn't the Bush daughters be subject to having their heads cut off with a dull blade like others in the military?
While I am not the biggest fan of Michael Moore, one of the videos I watched was actually pretty good. He went around DC and was asking all of our "representitives" why their kids were not taking part in the "war effort". Sadly, most just ran away from the camera.
However, what I don't totally agree with is this statement:
Why should it be OK to send people to die for "defensive" purposes? A defensive op could very easily turn to an offensive one where you are fighting for you life.My position is simple. If you attack the USA, we come and blow the crap out of you. Otherwise we don't fight. By attack I do not mean just some "official" military attack. 9-11 was enough for us to blow the crap out of Afghanistan IMO. However, to just keep going "since we are in the neighborhood" is pretty wrong. We knew Afghanistan had a part in 9-11, not directly, but indirectly. IMO we should have hit them harder. But to continue and go on to Iraq was wrong. Where do we go next? Do we just keep going throughout the Middle East until we wipe it out?
I think a much better approach is to be the "sleeping giant". We should refrain from war as much as we can, we shouldn't just start attacking for any reason. However, if a nation does cross that line, then we go in fast and hard and bring them down. That should send a nice message around the world that A) we don't want to fight. B) if we do have to fight, we are doing it to win.
When I think of how much money has been spent on the "war" on terror, the "war" on drugs, the "war" on $POLITICAL_TERM, it is just sickening.
That sounds pretty nice! I don't know of anything like that in the USA. $30 - $35 a month is really cheap! For Digital cable, 5 mbps internet and unlimted local/long distance digital phone I pay about $130 USD a month.
What I want to know is, did all of these things you listed happen to _YOU_? Or are you just spewing out the typical anti-govt. junk? I hear people say the same things over and over, yet when I ask them when these types of things happened to them, it is always the same response, it never happened to them _personally_. Can you give us the details on when all of the things you listed above happened to _YOU_?
Maybe there have been a few isolated cases of the things you listed happening, however, I doubt it is very common. The person(s) involved should have faught back. They could get the media involved, call the ACLU, etc. Letting your rights be violated should not be accepted. Neither should exaggerating about the extent of rights violations in the USA.
I have lived on the east coast of the USA for all 32 years of my life. I have lived in NJ, PA, SC (USMC), NC (USMC) and now FL (Orlando area). I have never been "monitored" (neither have my wife or two kids) even close to what the Brits are doing. I would really like to know exactly how "we" are catching up? Or were you just trying to get some mod points by saying the typical crap like "USA sucks!"? You should throw in a "GWB SUCK @SS!" to get a few extra mods while your at it. It is real easy to make stupid "blanket" statements about the USA. However, when you compare reality in the USA to the rest of the world, we here in the USA are far better off over all.
Can you give me _ONE_ real example of how _YOUR_ rights have been violated here in the USA? Or are you just spewing the typical crap with no real evidence? I would honestly like to see you post back to this about how your right were violated or how you were "monitored".