The tagline is all about the software that comes preinstalled. But really, living with Linux on a laptop is all about hardware support. Can it suspend to RAM or disk - even if 3d acceleration is enabled and I forget to remove my PCMCIA devices first? Can I dock and undock with a docking station - each time switching over to my high-res external desktop display - without rebooting? Does the WiFi work - including support for all the weird security and authorization mechanisms? These are the important questions a linux laptop buyer should ask.
When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.
If there's something about that I don't "get", I'd rather stay ignorant.
I think that's always how it is. My elderly grandfather recently bought a computer. He had my sister type up his memoirs on it, then declared he had got his money's worth from the computer and was done with it. We set him up with Internet and showed him how to browse the web and send email. He said it was hard to use the mouse, so we set it up with big buttons and fonts, but no dice. Finally we just realized he just didn't want to get it, so I'm back to printing out pictures and sending them in the mail. And I feel the same way about instant messaging. I'm not too dumb to understand it, it just isn't how I operate and I don't want it.
I'll forgive you because you've apparently never worked in a beaurocracy before, but "timecard fraud" is simply the normal way to fire somebody you don't like in a beaurocracy. It's the "crime" that 100% of employees are guilty of. Watch anybody for a while and you'll catch them not furiously working away, at some point.
But seriously, do you believe she would have been fired if the content of her speech had been something else?
Somebody says that about virtually every story with the word "robot" in it, which makes me wonder if those making the observation are working with a nonstandard definition of the word. In this case, I think you're mistaken - I get the impression that at least the autonomic actions, like breathing, tapping a foot, and shifting in the chair, run automatically. Quote: "it runs on semiautonomous motion programs." I doubt he's wearing a sensor that conveys the precise timing of his breathing.
Ishiguro said he wants the robot to have sonzai-kan, or presence. His group will try to quantify the elusive quality that makes people sit up and take notice, and figure out how it can be captured and transmitted.
But how do you know the gaze of an intelligent person can't be replicated?
But myspace should have extremely low expenses. It's just a website with user-generated content, right? So making a couple bucks per year from each member is perfectly viable.
I was listening to the radio this morning, and a middle-aged radio host said to him myspace is like the VCR was to his parents' generation - it has no purpose and just sits there blinking 12:00. I don't "get" myspace either (never visited), but it must be popular if even people on the radio who don't know what it is, still know about it.
You left out "sanction of torture," "secrect network of East European prisons," "alienation of our Allies (other than ones small enough to bribe)," and "a doubling of gas prices due to destabilization of the middle east."
But the product cannot begin to mature until it is actually released. Then you can start to see the price drops, motherboard availability, bug workarounds, etc. A head start is a head start.
You're missing the whole point. "Web 2.0" does generally refer to Ajax and more interactive user interfaces, but that's not what this guy means by "Search 2.0", namely new and improved relevancy models, user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence and, a rich user experience. In other words, it's about improving search results. The only one possibly relevant to your complaint is "rich user experience," but even so I don't know how you got "ads" from that. Really, you're complaining about the tail end of the first generation of search, which devolved into "portals" full of irrelevant results, ads, and other unwanted links.
I suppose if anything, your post and the subseqent moderation show one thing: when you try to jump on a naming buzzword like "Web 2.0," it tends to bring along some baggage.
The real problem is that browsers aren't following standards, not that CSS is broken.
Complex standards are difficult to fully and accurately implement, and likely to have many holes. Maybe the problem is the whole idea of CSS in the first place.
Personally, I think the whole effort to separate content from formatting on the client side is misguided. Content producers don't want to sacrifice control over formatting, and content consumers don't bother messing around with the formatting anyways. Pushing this much functionality out to the client, where it has to be right the first time and consistent between all implementations, is a recipe for disaster.
Do you have a cite? I've always suspected doctors collectively manipulate the market this way, but I couldn't find a credible source, nor an explanation of how it works. Is it just as simple as doctors dictating how many new doctors will be trained? How hard is it for doctors trained elsewhere to transfer? I think it's time for a medical H1B visa program.
Why use RFID at all, since it doesn't matter which particular surgical implement was left behind. How about a simple metal detector? It wouldn't catch some things, like sponges, but if they can put an RFID chip on there, why not a (cheaper) stainless steel bb embedded in the sponge?
It's a set of perl scripts I wrote. I wouldn't object to distributing it, but it's all command-line, and not well documented. I have found that making polished software for others to use is about 100x harder than making custom software for me to use.
Perhaps MythTV could incorporate the ideas though. It's all driven by a permanent database of numeric ratings for shows and movies, and a "killfile" of movies not to record (even if they're wonderful, but you've already watched them). Once a week or so I run a script which sequentially presents upcoming movies in rank order of how much I'm likely to want to record them based on simple heuristics. (Anything previously ranked and/or killfiled is excluded). I can then push a button and search for the film on IMDB. Then I enter a numeric score for the movie which is added to the database. Then a daemon tries to maximize the total score of the collection by recording shows. It's all very fine and efficient... if the user is a computer scientist:)
I suspect there are lots of people like me who have decent
jobs and are willing to pay for the product they want rather
than settle for a cheaper product that isn't what they want.
I guess we'll have to wait and see just how large that market is. I look at PCs. From the early 80s to the late 90s, PC technology advanced rapidly, but the average price of a computer stayed high (say $2400?). There was lots of new technology, and people were willing to pay for it. Then, in the late 90s, something funny happened; people decided to take tech advances in the form of lower prices instead of increased capability. Technical progress slowed, and prices dropped through the floor. Computers got "good enough." You can still buy a $3000 PC, but most people don't do that any more.
With the cheaper XBox 360 and the much cheaper Wii, not to mention the PS2 which is still selling well, I have to wonder how much demand there is for a console that costs as much as a PC.
I don't think the story is wrong, neither do I think you are wrong. When the company is tanking, the board says "We need a superstar CEO, let's start throwing money around!" When the company is doing well, the board says "the CEO deserves a massive reward!" Or, if the company tanks with the new CEO, the board says, "We need to fire this CEO! Too bad we signed on to that multi-million-dollar golden parachute. Oh well, it was the right decision at the time. Let's get a bold, expensive new CEO who has the guts to declare bankruptcy and shed our pension obligations!"
So which CEOs aren't overpaid? None of them, of course:) I think CEO pay is just a cultural thing. There's only 1 CEO, so their pay isn't much of a competitive disadvantage on a company, almost no matter how inflated.
I am grateful to Netflix for finally letting me turn my.txt file of "maybe checkout this movie someday" into an actual list that I'm actually plowing through.
My homebrew PVR serves exactly the same purpose, when a movie becomes available it records it if there is enough space, after erasing lower-scored shows if necessary to make space. Instead of 3 discs out at a time, it can hold more like 20. And I have exactly the "problem" this story describes; I always delete shows after I watch them, yet the oldest recording in my queue is coming up to its first birthday. I can't bring myself to erase it, because I know it's a good movie that got good reviews, and someday I'll get to it, but now it's summer, and there's plenty of daylight for other things...
Besides, there is no way to thoroughly and objectively evaluate the security of software anyways, especially something as large as XP. Just let that sink in for a minute. All that can happen to Vista is some people will say it's less secure, others will say it's more secure, and the market will consider it a wash and make buying decisions based on features and appearance, as usual.
What? No. They're only talking about 16 KHz sampling here, which would capture sounds up to 8 KHz. You can hear 8 KHz directly, these are not "unused" octaves.
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The tagline is all about the software that comes preinstalled. But really, living with Linux on a laptop is all about hardware support. Can it suspend to RAM or disk - even if 3d acceleration is enabled and I forget to remove my PCMCIA devices first? Can I dock and undock with a docking station - each time switching over to my high-res external desktop display - without rebooting? Does the WiFi work - including support for all the weird security and authorization mechanisms? These are the important questions a linux laptop buyer should ask.
When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.
But seriously, do you believe she would have been fired if the content of her speech had been something else?
Somebody says that about virtually every story with the word "robot" in it, which makes me wonder if those making the observation are working with a nonstandard definition of the word. In this case, I think you're mistaken - I get the impression that at least the autonomic actions, like breathing, tapping a foot, and shifting in the chair, run automatically. Quote: "it runs on semiautonomous motion programs." I doubt he's wearing a sensor that conveys the precise timing of his breathing.
Seriously, I can't think of any other role in society that would be more easily performed by a robot! The job description is simple: walking manequin.
But myspace should have extremely low expenses. It's just a website with user-generated content, right? So making a couple bucks per year from each member is perfectly viable.
I was listening to the radio this morning, and a middle-aged radio host said to him myspace is like the VCR was to his parents' generation - it has no purpose and just sits there blinking 12:00. I don't "get" myspace either (never visited), but it must be popular if even people on the radio who don't know what it is, still know about it.
You left out "sanction of torture," "secrect network of East European prisons," "alienation of our Allies (other than ones small enough to bribe)," and "a doubling of gas prices due to destabilization of the middle east."
Other sports have suffered from the same thing - when one player (or team) was so dominant, the games were just boring and interest waned.
But the product cannot begin to mature until it is actually released. Then you can start to see the price drops, motherboard availability, bug workarounds, etc. A head start is a head start.
I suppose if anything, your post and the subseqent moderation show one thing: when you try to jump on a naming buzzword like "Web 2.0," it tends to bring along some baggage.
Personally, I think the whole effort to separate content from formatting on the client side is misguided. Content producers don't want to sacrifice control over formatting, and content consumers don't bother messing around with the formatting anyways. Pushing this much functionality out to the client, where it has to be right the first time and consistent between all implementations, is a recipe for disaster.
Do you have a cite? I've always suspected doctors collectively manipulate the market this way, but I couldn't find a credible source, nor an explanation of how it works. Is it just as simple as doctors dictating how many new doctors will be trained? How hard is it for doctors trained elsewhere to transfer? I think it's time for a medical H1B visa program.
Why use RFID at all, since it doesn't matter which particular surgical implement was left behind. How about a simple metal detector? It wouldn't catch some things, like sponges, but if they can put an RFID chip on there, why not a (cheaper) stainless steel bb embedded in the sponge?
Perhaps MythTV could incorporate the ideas though. It's all driven by a permanent database of numeric ratings for shows and movies, and a "killfile" of movies not to record (even if they're wonderful, but you've already watched them). Once a week or so I run a script which sequentially presents upcoming movies in rank order of how much I'm likely to want to record them based on simple heuristics. (Anything previously ranked and/or killfiled is excluded). I can then push a button and search for the film on IMDB. Then I enter a numeric score for the movie which is added to the database. Then a daemon tries to maximize the total score of the collection by recording shows. It's all very fine and efficient... if the user is a computer scientist :)
With the cheaper XBox 360 and the much cheaper Wii, not to mention the PS2 which is still selling well, I have to wonder how much demand there is for a console that costs as much as a PC.
You didn't even mention the PS3's stupendous. price. Money talks, and the PS3 is just too expensive.
So which CEOs aren't overpaid? None of them, of course :) I think CEO pay is just a cultural thing. There's only 1 CEO, so their pay isn't much of a competitive disadvantage on a company, almost no matter how inflated.
I don't think the main point is to find the Warez, but rather to "educate" the children by enlisting them in the battle.
Besides, there is no way to thoroughly and objectively evaluate the security of software anyways, especially something as large as XP. Just let that sink in for a minute. All that can happen to Vista is some people will say it's less secure, others will say it's more secure, and the market will consider it a wash and make buying decisions based on features and appearance, as usual.
What? No. They're only talking about 16 KHz sampling here, which would capture sounds up to 8 KHz. You can hear 8 KHz directly, these are not "unused" octaves.