For the money, I'd rather have a Yamaha Zuma, (MSRP $1699). (or Honda or Suzuki equivilent) Plus, it runs on gasoline so I don't have to plug it in for 8 hours to recharge it. I can just pull up to any service station and get another 100+ miles for $2.
So let's recap: Segway HT: Range 10-15 miles. Top speed 15 mph. Must find electrical outlet to recharge with. Cost - 5,000. Gasoline Scooter: Range - 100+ miles, easily refilled with gas. Cost - 1,700. Bicycle: Range: variable. Fuel: biomass. Cost - $200.
Strange, the less it costs, the more sense it makes.
I'd like to know why it is you think moving to Linux is such a good idea when it seems that you're incapeable of administering a Windows XP box. And I quote...
I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98.
I don't mean for this to be flamebait, but a good Win XP setup does not crash 5 times a week. There are really two likely scenarios: one is that you have a faulty driver for some of your hardware, the other, and perhaps more likely, is that you have software written for Win 98 that is trying to force itself into parts of the OS where it doesn't belong. Do yourself a favor, decide between 98 and XP and do a clean install of one or the other, then be very selective about what you install and allow your kids to run.
But my real concern is the CD-ROM games and Windows based games. I can't see my 3 year-old putting a CD-ROM into the drive and expecting it to auto-load and run like it does on XP -- without issues -- even with a perfect installation of WINE, hey, maybe I'm wrong, but is there a way to have it work as good as windows?
No. Let me elaborate: No. If you want to run Windows CD ROM games, and a slew of other Windows programs then just run Windows. If you want to start introducing them to other less expensive alternatives, try Open Office, Mozilla, GNU Chess/Winboard, and others of the like. Then be prepared to deal with the complaints that at school they have Office XP and MS Word has features A, B, C and D, and why don't we? As they show an interest, get them their own PC and let them have at it.
It's been my experiance that drive failures come in batches. Actually, it's been my experiance that electronics failures come in batches. Of the hundreads of systems I've worked on, I've seen hard drive failure rates of only around 3%. But most of those drives were all part of the same order. I haven't seen any increase recently in any one brand of drive. And not anything that relates to decreased warranties. I've seen higher failure rates on laptops, but I expect that from machines that get hauled around here and there.
The question posed made mention of complaints on the Internet about Fujitsu. But this is really what the internet is about. I mean, other then the most efficient porn delivery system in the history of the world. The Internet is about people making unfounded complaints because they think the 'system' is screwing them over. They tell lots of horror stories, but rarely is there any credible evidance to back them up. But it's out there on the Internet, and I can read it, so it must be true, right?
Most states that carry a sales tax require you to report and pay tax on all untaxed sales from out of state exceeding a certain dollar amount. So if you've ever bought a computer over the net, you've most likely met the threshold and could be guilty of tax evasion if you didn't report the purchase and pay tax on it. Since this is all on the honor system and there's no means to track it, states see only a negligable income from this.
Not only do you have to contend with different rates for different localities, but you have to mess with different exemptions and ways of classifying products for tax purposes
This is why out of state taxes have to this point not been forced on sellers. Also, states lack jurisdiction to force outstate merchants to report taxes. Sales tax is always linked to the buyer because taxing the seller would put them at a competative disadvantage in national markets, hurting the state's overall tax by reducing sales and income. (And really pissing off your constituents)
Of course, any economics professor will tell you that a sales tax is fundamentally regressive. Makes me wonder why we have a sales tax at all. Oh, wait, I know, politicians are dumb. In any given heirarchy, people will rise to their own level of incompitance.
I'd rather have slower progressive scan than faster interlaced anyday. That's why I prefer monitors over TVs.
If you want better looking 3D acceleration, look into motion blur. Properly done, a blurred 25FPS render can look as good to the eye as a 120FPS static render with no blur. Don't believe me? Go watch a movie in a theatre. Each frame captures that captures a hand in motion tricks the eye into seeing it that much "clearer" than a faster camera would look.
120 FPS is impossible on my system: my monitor has a refresh rate of of only 85 hertz. Seriously, the bottleneck isn't the AGP bus. It's usually the GPU and the CPU.
"Microsoft has organized a huge security program" and (Linux is) "less disciplined but more timely" -- such soundbites have been carefully calculated.
Actually, what this is implying is that once Microsoft patches a file, they spend three months testing it to make sure it won't break another piece of the system. It would be equally bad to fix one problem and cause two more, which they've done before. So, yes, they do rely on security through obscurity while they're testing a patch. Not always a bad thing.
It would seem to me that in the long haul, Microsoft would support such efforts because they could sell more devices (and potentially more software if they licensed an opensource validation library)... "
The flaw in this piece of logic is that Microsoft doesn't make money on the X-Box unit itself. It makes money from licensing the SDK and runtime libraries to developers. So Microsoft has a keen interest in keeping mod chips out of XBoxen. If an alternate platform (ie, Linux) were available for creating XBox games, Microsoft would be unable to generate royalties on the games and would simply lose money on every X-Box sold.
That's why amendment IX of the Bill of Rights reads The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I'm normally against unnecessary legislation, but moving fair use rights out of a grey area is more or less a good thing. Right now, it seems, courts usually side with the copyright holder. Unfortunately, by the time these bills get out of committee, they'll be gutted and sabatoged, but it's a nice effort.
Since/. likes to repeat over and over again how evil patents and other intellectual property can be, I recommend a simple solution (which I have recommended many times before, and the article itself touches on briefly) - Compulsory licensing of intellectual property with royalties appealable to an arbitration board. Especially for patents, but also would work well for copyrights.
And, as an aside to the editors of Slashdot: I would just like to say, "We get it." The USPTO issues a slew of bad patents every day. You can go and find some real news to report on.
Citadel/UX? Bah, Bah I say. Citadel.NET is the future. I should know, I wrote it. (sources available at dev.darktower.info) Best thing about it is now Unix system to maintain. It's also fully compatible with Webadel. telnet darktower.info to try it out.:) (Note, the sources are a little out of date. I plan on putting the newer revisions up soon.)
Where I vote in Minnesota they use a paper ballot that is machine read. And, the machine returns your ballot if it is invalid (unreadable mark, voted for too many candidates.) Plus, in case of a machine failure, the ballots can be hand-counted. So the problem is not so much that there's a machine involved, just that it's a poorly designed one.
Likewise, open source software would not help the machines in Florida. The problems with most closed source products arise from the fact that they were poorly designed, not whether they're open or closed source. Windows suffers from chronic security problems because it was never really designed to be a truly secure system. Furthermore, Microsoft has, until very recently, been more interested in adding features than improving security.
Open source is overrated. Real men write everything from scratch. Like my email server, mail program and BBS. There's still quite a bit of work remaining to be done on my OS before it reaches the minimum level of functionality (likewise with my Basic compiler), so meanwhile, I'm running Win2k.
The biggest problem is that telcos are trying to piggyback new solutions onto old technology. The time is nearly ripe for a major revolution in communications: Rip out the old worthless infrastructure and run independant fiber lines to each house. Start getting everyone setup to run Voice over IP, design a backbone that can handle the bandwith, and eliminate long distance calls! Never worry about giving people your new number every time you move.
I also believe in putting solar panels on every south facing rooftop in the country (Seattle and Portland get exceptions: there's no sun there.)
How 'bout this - shell out $20 a month for HBO and Showtime. Well, scratch Showtime. Since Beggars and Choosers was cancled, it ain't worth it anymore.
Another thing the tester didn't mention was the problems involved in setting up a non-admin user account to work with 3rd party software. Flash, Fireworks and many other apps were throwing up all kinds of errors due to the user acct not having enough access to the registry, directory permission problems etc. Sort these last points out took at least another hour and would probably cause most people to just say "the hell with it" and run as administrator (with the inevitable re-infection at some point)...
Typical Linux FUD. Microsoft improves security and gets flamed because poorly written software no longer works.
Of course, the whole article was deeply flawed, particularly in that it was an OEM install of Windows, not Microsoft standard. Let's not forget either, that Win2k is now about 2 years out of date. A better comparison would have been against a retail version of WinXP.
How on earth they expect a modem user to download at least 50MB of patches is beyond me! Luckily I have ADSL so it only took a few hours to finish the reinstall, on a modem, I doubt I'd have bothered with "SP3".
Fortunately, Microsoft also has a new Critical Update delivery system that can quietly download patches in the background and let you know when they are ready to install. Gee, that's gotta make life easier for dial-up users.
Actually, BASIC is alive and well. Really, if you want a nice freindly modern language, use VB.NET and find some good math libraries. I find VB to create far more readable code than any other language I've worked with. (Having at one point or another used BASIC, C, C++, C#, Pascal, Fortran, x86 assembly, 6502 assembly and 68k assembly.)
The point Microsoft made in their response was that this can be fixed on an application by application basis. I personally would be interested in seeing this attack carried out against a program that is part of the standard Microsoft desktop.
Curiously, when I downloaded "Shatter" from the article, Norton AV flagged the file with the exploit code, sploit.bin, as the "W32.Beavuh" virus. However, Symantec provides no further detail of this. I suspect this is merely NAV doing its part to beef up security, forcing would be crackers to actually come up with their exploit code.
Perhaps I should clarify. I am a card carrying Microsoft whore. I also think.NET is the best thing to happen to BASIC since VB was first released. For me, none of my old VB programs are good candidates for porting to VB.NET. Parts of them are, and there are chunks of code that I can copy in unaltered, but more often, I end up rewriting large sections of code. This isn't all bad, in that I end up writing better code and programs. But back to topic, I'll happily give up backwards compatability for a substantially improved product.
No, Microsoft freely admits (and almost brags) that they came to a realization that to fix BASIC, they first had to completely break it.
Back to the origional post... "made to incorporate the advances in the last 7 years of its life and without the requirement to keep compatibility with old versions."
It's called C#. Use it, love it, be a card carrying Microsoft whore.
See if we could get thousands of slashdot users in the same channel on the same server at the same time on the same day... that'd be nifty.
That'd never work. Too many infantile script kiddies out there. Getting together was always one of my favorite parts of my old BBS days. The Richmond, VA meetup failed, also, but that's because the venue no longer existed. Ooops.
Ultimately, as long as there is a demand for Linux, one, maybe two, commercial distros will survive. There certainly isn't room in the market right now for more than that. Reality is, all you Linux lovers should be thrilled that some of the less successful distros are failing. That will bring more attention and resrouces to the few that are successful. Survival of the fittest. And those of you who regard Red Hat as evil probalby use Debian. Problem solved.
However, the other point you make, that film degrades over time is very relevant. A film print nowadays costs about $6000, and will be showing noticable wear after 2 weeks (as said to me by a film person). And film needs to be physically transported etc.
By the end of opening weekend, you can see the dropoff in quality, especially around the reel changes. Scratches, breaks, etc.
I have mixed feelings about digital. When I saw SW2, it wasn't quite as sharp as I was expecting. However, it was completely flicker free. That was actually somewhat of a dissapointment - removing the mystique of celluloid. It was like watching a DVD at home, only on a bigger screen, with bad popcorn, and tickets for me and my wife cost as more than most DVDs.
.NET is (for purposes here) a runtime environment/API. It's predicated upon Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL): basically, code that's easily compiled for a specific CPU or Operating system. The whole system is based upon a Just-In-Time compiler. It's all compiled to native code and executed as a normal program.
As for whether or not this constitutes an Operating System, that's a little vague. It does provide some memory management functions (garbage collection), but it certainly doesn't do a lot of OS type things (device drivers, file systems). An operating system is many things, and.NET is just a small but growing part of the Windows(tm) operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
For the money, I'd rather have a Yamaha Zuma, (MSRP $1699). (or Honda or Suzuki equivilent) Plus, it runs on gasoline so I don't have to plug it in for 8 hours to recharge it. I can just pull up to any service station and get another 100+ miles for $2.
So let's recap:
Segway HT: Range 10-15 miles. Top speed 15 mph. Must find electrical outlet to recharge with. Cost - 5,000.
Gasoline Scooter: Range - 100+ miles, easily refilled with gas. Cost - 1,700.
Bicycle: Range: variable. Fuel: biomass. Cost - $200.
Strange, the less it costs, the more sense it makes.
I'd like to know why it is you think moving to Linux is such a good idea when it seems that you're incapeable of administering a Windows XP box. And I quote...
I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98.
I don't mean for this to be flamebait, but a good Win XP setup does not crash 5 times a week. There are really two likely scenarios: one is that you have a faulty driver for some of your hardware, the other, and perhaps more likely, is that you have software written for Win 98 that is trying to force itself into parts of the OS where it doesn't belong. Do yourself a favor, decide between 98 and XP and do a clean install of one or the other, then be very selective about what you install and allow your kids to run.
But my real concern is the CD-ROM games and Windows based games. I can't see my 3 year-old putting a CD-ROM into the drive and expecting it to auto-load and run like it does on XP -- without issues -- even with a perfect installation of WINE, hey, maybe I'm wrong, but is there a way to have it work as good as windows?
No. Let me elaborate: No. If you want to run Windows CD ROM games, and a slew of other Windows programs then just run Windows. If you want to start introducing them to other less expensive alternatives, try Open Office, Mozilla, GNU Chess/Winboard, and others of the like. Then be prepared to deal with the complaints that at school they have Office XP and MS Word has features A, B, C and D, and why don't we? As they show an interest, get them their own PC and let them have at it.
It's been my experiance that drive failures come in batches. Actually, it's been my experiance that electronics failures come in batches. Of the hundreads of systems I've worked on, I've seen hard drive failure rates of only around 3%. But most of those drives were all part of the same order. I haven't seen any increase recently in any one brand of drive. And not anything that relates to decreased warranties. I've seen higher failure rates on laptops, but I expect that from machines that get hauled around here and there.
The question posed made mention of complaints on the Internet about Fujitsu. But this is really what the internet is about. I mean, other then the most efficient porn delivery system in the history of the world. The Internet is about people making unfounded complaints because they think the 'system' is screwing them over. They tell lots of horror stories, but rarely is there any credible evidance to back them up. But it's out there on the Internet, and I can read it, so it must be true, right?
Most states that carry a sales tax require you to report and pay tax on all untaxed sales from out of state exceeding a certain dollar amount. So if you've ever bought a computer over the net, you've most likely met the threshold and could be guilty of tax evasion if you didn't report the purchase and pay tax on it. Since this is all on the honor system and there's no means to track it, states see only a negligable income from this.
Not only do you have to contend with different rates for different localities, but you have to mess with different exemptions and ways of classifying products for tax purposes
This is why out of state taxes have to this point not been forced on sellers. Also, states lack jurisdiction to force outstate merchants to report taxes. Sales tax is always linked to the buyer because taxing the seller would put them at a competative disadvantage in national markets, hurting the state's overall tax by reducing sales and income. (And really pissing off your constituents)
Of course, any economics professor will tell you that a sales tax is fundamentally regressive. Makes me wonder why we have a sales tax at all. Oh, wait, I know, politicians are dumb. In any given heirarchy, people will rise to their own level of incompitance.
I'd rather have slower progressive scan than faster interlaced anyday. That's why I prefer monitors over TVs. If you want better looking 3D acceleration, look into motion blur. Properly done, a blurred 25FPS render can look as good to the eye as a 120FPS static render with no blur. Don't believe me? Go watch a movie in a theatre. Each frame captures that captures a hand in motion tricks the eye into seeing it that much "clearer" than a faster camera would look.
120 FPS is impossible on my system: my monitor has a refresh rate of of only 85 hertz. Seriously, the bottleneck isn't the AGP bus. It's usually the GPU and the CPU.
"Microsoft has organized a huge security program" and (Linux is) "less disciplined but more timely" -- such soundbites have been carefully calculated.
Actually, what this is implying is that once Microsoft patches a file, they spend three months testing it to make sure it won't break another piece of the system. It would be equally bad to fix one problem and cause two more, which they've done before. So, yes, they do rely on security through obscurity while they're testing a patch. Not always a bad thing.
It would seem to me that in the long haul, Microsoft would support such efforts because they could sell more devices (and potentially more software if they licensed an opensource validation library)... "
The flaw in this piece of logic is that Microsoft doesn't make money on the X-Box unit itself. It makes money from licensing the SDK and runtime libraries to developers. So Microsoft has a keen interest in keeping mod chips out of XBoxen. If an alternate platform (ie, Linux) were available for creating XBox games, Microsoft would be unable to generate royalties on the games and would simply lose money on every X-Box sold.
Dark Tower BBS - Telnet, HTML
That's why amendment IX of the Bill of Rights reads The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I'm normally against unnecessary legislation, but moving fair use rights out of a grey area is more or less a good thing. Right now, it seems, courts usually side with the copyright holder. Unfortunately, by the time these bills get out of committee, they'll be gutted and sabatoged, but it's a nice effort.
Since /. likes to repeat over and over again how evil patents and other intellectual property can be, I recommend a simple solution (which I have recommended many times before, and the article itself touches on briefly) - Compulsory licensing of intellectual property with royalties appealable to an arbitration board. Especially for patents, but also would work well for copyrights.
And, as an aside to the editors of Slashdot: I would just like to say, "We get it." The USPTO issues a slew of bad patents every day. You can go and find some real news to report on.
Citadel/UX? Bah, Bah I say. Citadel.NET is the future. I should know, I wrote it. (sources available at dev.darktower.info) Best thing about it is now Unix system to maintain. It's also fully compatible with Webadel. telnet darktower.info to try it out. :) (Note, the sources are a little out of date. I plan on putting the newer revisions up soon.)
Where I vote in Minnesota they use a paper ballot that is machine read. And, the machine returns your ballot if it is invalid (unreadable mark, voted for too many candidates.) Plus, in case of a machine failure, the ballots can be hand-counted. So the problem is not so much that there's a machine involved, just that it's a poorly designed one.
Likewise, open source software would not help the machines in Florida. The problems with most closed source products arise from the fact that they were poorly designed, not whether they're open or closed source. Windows suffers from chronic security problems because it was never really designed to be a truly secure system. Furthermore, Microsoft has, until very recently, been more interested in adding features than improving security.
Open source is overrated. Real men write everything from scratch. Like my email server, mail program and BBS. There's still quite a bit of work remaining to be done on my OS before it reaches the minimum level of functionality (likewise with my Basic compiler), so meanwhile, I'm running Win2k.
The biggest problem is that telcos are trying to piggyback new solutions onto old technology. The time is nearly ripe for a major revolution in communications: Rip out the old worthless infrastructure and run independant fiber lines to each house. Start getting everyone setup to run Voice over IP, design a backbone that can handle the bandwith, and eliminate long distance calls! Never worry about giving people your new number every time you move.
I also believe in putting solar panels on every south facing rooftop in the country (Seattle and Portland get exceptions: there's no sun there.)
I'm not trusting any government agency to handle my ghosting. I'll be using strictly black-market Russian designed technology.
How 'bout this - shell out $20 a month for HBO and Showtime. Well, scratch Showtime. Since Beggars and Choosers was cancled, it ain't worth it anymore.
Another thing the tester didn't mention was the problems involved in setting up a non-admin user account to work with 3rd party software. Flash, Fireworks and many other apps were throwing up all kinds of errors due to the user acct not having enough access to the registry, directory permission problems etc. Sort these last points out took at least another hour and would probably cause most people to just say "the hell with it" and run as administrator (with the inevitable re-infection at some point)...
Typical Linux FUD. Microsoft improves security and gets flamed because poorly written software no longer works.
Of course, the whole article was deeply flawed, particularly in that it was an OEM install of Windows, not Microsoft standard. Let's not forget either, that Win2k is now about 2 years out of date. A better comparison would have been against a retail version of WinXP.
How on earth they expect a modem user to download at least 50MB of patches is beyond me! Luckily I have ADSL so it only took a few hours to finish the reinstall, on a modem, I doubt I'd have bothered with "SP3".
Fortunately, Microsoft also has a new Critical Update delivery system that can quietly download patches in the background and let you know when they are ready to install. Gee, that's gotta make life easier for dial-up users.
Actually, BASIC is alive and well. Really, if you want a nice freindly modern language, use VB.NET and find some good math libraries. I find VB to create far more readable code than any other language I've worked with. (Having at one point or another used BASIC, C, C++, C#, Pascal, Fortran, x86 assembly, 6502 assembly and 68k assembly.)
The point Microsoft made in their response was that this can be fixed on an application by application basis. I personally would be interested in seeing this attack carried out against a program that is part of the standard Microsoft desktop.
Curiously, when I downloaded "Shatter" from the article, Norton AV flagged the file with the exploit code, sploit.bin, as the "W32.Beavuh" virus. However, Symantec provides no further detail of this. I suspect this is merely NAV doing its part to beef up security, forcing would be crackers to actually come up with their exploit code.
Perhaps I should clarify. I am a card carrying Microsoft whore. I also think .NET is the best thing to happen to BASIC since VB was first released. For me, none of my old VB programs are good candidates for porting to VB.NET. Parts of them are, and there are chunks of code that I can copy in unaltered, but more often, I end up rewriting large sections of code. This isn't all bad, in that I end up writing better code and programs. But back to topic, I'll happily give up backwards compatability for a substantially improved product.
No, Microsoft freely admits (and almost brags) that they came to a realization that to fix BASIC, they first had to completely break it. Back to the origional post... "made to incorporate the advances in the last 7 years of its life and without the requirement to keep compatibility with old versions."
It's called C#. Use it, love it, be a card carrying Microsoft whore.
See if we could get thousands of slashdot users in the same channel on the same server at the same time on the same day... that'd be nifty.
That'd never work. Too many infantile script kiddies out there. Getting together was always one of my favorite parts of my old BBS days. The Richmond, VA meetup failed, also, but that's because the venue no longer existed. Ooops.
This place is run by GPL hippies(tm). Accept it.
Ultimately, as long as there is a demand for Linux, one, maybe two, commercial distros will survive. There certainly isn't room in the market right now for more than that. Reality is, all you Linux lovers should be thrilled that some of the less successful distros are failing. That will bring more attention and resrouces to the few that are successful. Survival of the fittest. And those of you who regard Red Hat as evil probalby use Debian. Problem solved.
However, the other point you make, that film degrades over time is very relevant. A film print nowadays costs about $6000, and will be showing noticable wear after 2 weeks (as said to me by a film person). And film needs to be physically transported etc.
By the end of opening weekend, you can see the dropoff in quality, especially around the reel changes. Scratches, breaks, etc.
I have mixed feelings about digital. When I saw SW2, it wasn't quite as sharp as I was expecting. However, it was completely flicker free. That was actually somewhat of a dissapointment - removing the mystique of celluloid. It was like watching a DVD at home, only on a bigger screen, with bad popcorn, and tickets for me and my wife cost as more than most DVDs.
Yep, and then Martians came on the radio and told us that Orson Wells had landed, but no one believed them.
.NET is (for purposes here) a runtime environment/API. It's predicated upon Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL): basically, code that's easily compiled for a specific CPU or Operating system. The whole system is based upon a Just-In-Time compiler. It's all compiled to native code and executed as a normal program.
.NET is just a small but growing part of the Windows(tm) operating system.
As for whether or not this constitutes an Operating System, that's a little vague. It does provide some memory management functions (garbage collection), but it certainly doesn't do a lot of OS type things (device drivers, file systems). An operating system is many things, and