Let's have all of these really poor people spending 6 months of their pittance salaries on one one of your crappy operating systems or applications rather than on food, sanitation or agricultural implements.
Good move, Bill! And they can starve to death while you put a new extension on the house and buy Melinda a new pair of diamond earrings.
I run my entire Gentoo system from 1GB with multiple browser windows, email, a dozen ssh sessions, and compiling updates or the latest code I'm working on and NEVER touch the swap file.
You forgot to add "... for the one hour of the week when it's not emerging or compiling" on the end of the above statement.
Actually, I'm just joking - I run Gentoo myself, tried Ubuntu recently, thought it was nice but too restrictive, and then went back to Gentoo.
With the OLPC you quite clearly have a system that is not heavyweight enough to run Windows Fister but could potentially run a cut-down version of XP.
Microsoft has also committed itself beyond the point of no return to Fister and to prematurely scrapping XP - despite Fister being "Windows ME Part 2", having to climb down on that decision would be a huge loss of face to Microsoft.
So what better than to find an excuse for continuing to support XP (and therefore do a U-Turn) than to push getting it onto the OLPC platform? Microsoft gets to "reinvigorate" XP on the OLPC and Fister fades into obscurity...
Apple knew that if it got people using the Mac at an early age they'd use it later.
What planet are you on???
Over here in Europe, I've worked in IT/Telecoms support for 20+ years now, have a whole heap of friends in the computer industry and I have seen or heard of someone owning a Mac a total of ***THREE*** times:
1. A close buddy of mine has been given a Mac by his IT department because it came into their hands somehow and they didn't know what to do with it. He doesn't have much idea what to do with it either.
2. An American tutor on a training course I was on some two years ago had a Macbook.
3. A posing student-type was sat with one in the corner of Starbucks in my home town the other week - and he was making damned sure everyone saw his little silver Apple logo.
Sorry, but by that track record I know of ***MORE*** people using Commodore Amigas and AmigaOS than I do owning a Mac!!!
I don't know - what of it? I don't use a portable MP3 player. I use my computer, which is already used for other work. So there are zero petrochemicals or mining used for me to consume MP3s. Even if I did use a portable player, a portable CD player would consume more resources, because it is a lot larger and contains many mechanical components.
Okay, so you're playing your MP3s on a PC with something in excess of a 300W PSU. And I'm playing them on a CD player with maybe a 100W PSU. So who's using more electricity and therefore burning more hydrocarbons to have that electricity generated then?
What does that have to do with anything? Even if you don't throw away the CD, the energy and materials have already been consumed in the manufacturing process.
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The point I am making is that I am more likely to recycle a CD by virtue of selling it second hand when I have finished with it - whereas electronic goods are likely to be just dumped.
I enjoy my music on a high-quality hi-fi (I hate headphones, and have great speakers). And there's little practical difference between well-compressed music and CDs.
I agree, to a point. Encode MP3s at 192kbps or above and there's probably little difference to the CD. But start encoding at that rate, file sizes get much bigger and the whole point of MP3 (i.e "portability") starts to get lost.
Even then, it's possible to buy (or pirate) uncompressed music online.
Ah, now I see where you're going with this argument! You justify piracy as being "eco-friendly"! That's a new one on me!
And downloads are capable of higher quality than CD.
Where did you get that little factoid from? How can something probably encoded from a CD in the first place be of a higher quality than what the CD was???
CDs are limited to 16-bit 44.1 kHz quality. Downloads can go up to any bitrate or depth possible.
Whoa there now, sonny! "kHz" or "kiloHertz" is a measurement of sound frequency, bitrate is "kbps" or "kilobits per second" is a measurement of sampling rate. So now please explain to me how you can compare two entirely different measurements?
Sounds like you're in denial that buying CDs consumes a lot more energy and resources than downloading.
Nope, I just think it's a damn stupid way of arguing against CDs - especially to someone who does not accept man-made global warming, considers Al Gore a complete charlatan feathering his own political nest, and believes that the climate is changing because of a *NATURAL* planetary cycle (see under "Ice Ages which happened long before man was ever on this planet").
What I'm Waiting To See Implemented In A Game....
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Level Design For Games
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What about the petrochemicals and mining required to manufacture the MP3 player that you need to play your portable music on? The chances are, you'll throw the thing away ever couple of years whereas a CD can be sold on or even give to charity to be sold.
Sure, a lot of CDs are thrown into landfill sites, but I doubt very much these are proper bought music CDs - more like freebies on magazines, which, I agree, could be distributed far more responsibly.
So please don't lecture me on recycling - if anything, that's a very weak argument to put forward anyway and I doubt very much that you yourself recycle everything you possibly can at maximum efficiency.
If you want to go ahead and waste your money on lower quality music formats, then go do it - and let me enjoy my nice quality plastic disks on a nice hi-fi setup.
Actually, a lot of people like myself prefer CDs - I for one will ***NEVER*** pay for downloadable digital content and I am a huge music fan.
Those people who claim CDs are not worth the money because they have "only one or two good songs on them" are just not listening to the correct music. With care and research, it's possible to never buy a duff CD - yes, even download the album on Usenet or Bittorrent to preview it first before deciding to buy it.
And if you do that properly, what it means is you end up never buying a bad CD and always buy it for the best price - this makes music great value for money and something you appreciate - therefore, you are more likely to continue paying for it.
Yes, I do use MP3s for portability but I make them myself and nothing beats listening to a proper CD on a reasonable hi-fi setup.
Can we not all work to really pushing down the prices of CDs so that everyone gets the option of either a nice shiny disk or ripping MP3s themselves?
Personally, I'm happy with CD prices anyway. I research my music really well, I know an album will be good before I buy it, and I then find the cheapest prices online without every stepping through the doors of rip-off (UK) music stores like HMV or Zavvi (formerly known as Virgin).
Therefore, people who say that CDs are overpriced because they contain only one or good tracks are, quite frankly, listening to the wrong music, probably the plasticized manufactured trash that's hyped to hell because it makes the most money for the record companies.
I am never going to pay for an MP3 download, just like a lot of other (probably older) music fans. But I'm happy to buy a nice shiny CD with some sleeve notes I can read while I'm listening to the music on a reasonably good hi-fi and then rip a few tracks for myself for when I go to the gym.
If I buy a Nintendo game, whether on disc, cartridge, etc., my only expectations are that I can play it on my Nintendo console, that it plays exactly as advertising has told me it would and that it's not buggy enough to stop me completing it.
If I buy an audio CD, my expectations are that I can play it on any CD player or PC, and possibly rip it to MP3 or OGG for my own personal use on a portable player. If a rootkit installs itself on my PC to restrict that, then unless I have been clearly warned about that before I purchased the CD, then that is obviously not fair to me, the purchaser of that CD.
Yes, but the fact is I can go and mooch around the games shop trade-in racks whenever I happen to be in the area - but I'm certainly not going to get into a panic if they've not got what I want or stand outside queueing for something for hours.
Sorry, but I don't get this materialism shit. I like money, I like spending it on things I like but I'm not going to get all hot and bothered if I can't buy something I want because it's out of stock - it isn't that important to me.
I think the only thing I'd say is just recognise you have to put in some of your own effort with Linux, it won't come to you.
Most people don't appreciate the real power of a UNIX-like OS is the command line and what you can do there with scripting and command piping that let's you start to understand the real power of it.
The best thing to do is just take your time with it and don't just try it because you don't like Microsoft or think there's some kind of cool factor. I use it most of the time, even at work, but I still keep XP around for gaming and a few really useful tools I like using.
The important thing is just use what tools get the job done in whatever OS you need to.
No. I just think Nintendo have done far more to make fun interesting games than Microsoft or Sony have.
Plus I've never bought a music CD protected by a Nintendo rootkit or stayed up into the small hours reinstalling Nintendo Windows XP on a relative's PC because of viruses and spyware.:-)
Whilst I'm pleased to see Nintendo pulling ahead of the XBox and the PS3, this is all just about clever marketing at stupid people.
This is a self-fulfilling scenario where inducing an artificial shortage (by not making enough) creates a huge demand because every kid has to show his/her friends he's managed to get a Wii and every parent is made to feel like a terrible parent because he/she's not managed to get one for the kids.
Yet were there enough Wiis in the stores, it would not be such an "exclusive" item and less people would want it because everyone who wants one can get one.
Sometimes the sheeple (probably the same people that camp outside stores for an iPhone) need to step beyond material possessions some time and think about how they are ultimately just being manipulated by big fat corporations.
And as to the people selling them at twice the price on eBay - good luck to them. They've recognised a market of stupid people and capitalised on it.
Me? I'll wait a couple of months after Xmas and buy a Wii when they're cheaper - at the moment I'm having great fun buying up ultra-cheap Gamecube games from all the trade-ins the Wii frenzy has generated.
Whilst I agree entirely with your statement, as an avid gamer in my mid-40s who uses Linux most of the time but keeps a copy of XP for gaming, I have to admit that the state of the PC games market currently is absolutely turgid.
FPS games are now built to a formula where prettiness of the game is inversely proportional to its length and I find very little new content in them that makes me want to go buy any of them. Aside from completing Half-Life Episode 2 recently (which itself was short but good value with the included extras), I'm going back to original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D with the various revamped engines that are in existence at the moment.
So as PCs get faster, the overhead to run virtual machines and emulators becomes less important, meaning that older games can be run in Linux - therefore negating the need for Windows entirely.
Linux *could be* a better OS if it had some more polish (sorry/.ers).
I'm happy to enter into a reasoned discussion as to how Linux can be improved, but can you please clarify the above statement? What do you mean by "polish"?
Oh, and for the record, I'm not libertarian, but honestly if even a free product needs government help to survive...
Why do you believe Free Software and/or Linux needs any help to survive? It exists despite Microsoft and true non-zealots in the Free Software movement consider that any individual has a choice - just because you use Windows does not mean you cannot use Firefox, The Gimp, OpenOffice or a myriad of other free software applications.
Likewise, much as I despise Microsoft and their business practices, I'm actually loathe to see the government step in and do anything about them - simply because in a capitalist economy, it's entirely up to the consumer to decide whether or not a particular product survives or not. So if people are stupid enough not to consider the ramifications of using Microsoft software then that's actually their problem.
People within the Free Software movement have a duty and a right to educate everyone else about the benefits FOSS provides, and if Microsoft do anything to stifle competition unfairly then they need to be reigned in. But the fact is there is no "Windows vs Linux war" - Linux is what it is, it does what it "says on the tin" and you can either use it or not use it, that's your choice.
It appears you are mistaking editing an undocumented registry file for having access to features that are only available that way, while ignoring command line tools that accomplish the same tasks more easily, reliably, and securely.
Actually, I was talking about no such thing. I was thinking more about Linux/UNIX where it is possible to totally customise the operating system to the way you want it - whether it's dropping in a specific shell like BASH or Korn, dropping in a Perl, Python, Ruby or other interpreter for scripting, or a compiler to compile up your own source code.
My minimal experience with OS X on someone else's machine was that most of this kind of stuff is locked away from the user.
The OS world is much bigger than just the desktop space.
Server sales of Linux are far exceeding those of Windows currently and I myself work for a US telecoms company where just about all of our products have migrated away from Windows, Solaris, HP-UX and SCO onto Red Hat Linux.
As people get more exposure to Linux in the workplace by virtue of what they have to support, they're bound to want to try Linux at home also - one reason why Ubuntu's popularity is on a dramatic increase.
Your terminology of "a piddling amount" can definitely be applied to the elitist Mac owners but certainly not to Linux.
If OS X was made for x86 (without jumping through hoops to make it happen) then you could say that Microsoft had competition.
Yeah, right. Because myriads of Windows users are just going to flock to their local computer store to hand over their $129 for OS X - just like they did for the copy of Windows that came on their PC or the copy of Ubuntu they downloaded freely from the Internet.
None the less, they have a very advanced operating system and extremely secure.
...which you have to pay for and can only run on a Mac - unlike the countless extremely secure and free Linux and BSD operating systems.
And I'd argue that an "advanced operating system" is one that is entirely open that allows the user to interact with it in any number of ways through shell access, scripting and programming in whichever way the user wants.
Correct me if I'm wrong as in 25 years of experience in the computer industry, I've never found the need to own a single Apple product, but in my little experience with OS X, most of the advanced interactive features are *LOCKED AWAY* from the user. So how does this make OS X "advanced"?
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Good move, Bill! And they can starve to death while you put a new extension on the house and buy Melinda a new pair of diamond earrings.
You forgot to add "... for the one hour of the week when it's not emerging or compiling" on the end of the above statement.
Actually, I'm just joking - I run Gentoo myself, tried Ubuntu recently, thought it was nice but too restrictive, and then went back to Gentoo.
Microsoft has also committed itself beyond the point of no return to Fister and to prematurely scrapping XP - despite Fister being "Windows ME Part 2", having to climb down on that decision would be a huge loss of face to Microsoft.
So what better than to find an excuse for continuing to support XP (and therefore do a U-Turn) than to push getting it onto the OLPC platform? Microsoft gets to "reinvigorate" XP on the OLPC and Fister fades into obscurity...
What planet are you on???
Over here in Europe, I've worked in IT/Telecoms support for 20+ years now, have a whole heap of friends in the computer industry and I have seen or heard of someone owning a Mac a total of ***THREE*** times:
1. A close buddy of mine has been given a Mac by his IT department because it came into their hands somehow and they didn't know what to do with it. He doesn't have much idea what to do with it either.
2. An American tutor on a training course I was on some two years ago had a Macbook.
3. A posing student-type was sat with one in the corner of Starbucks in my home town the other week - and he was making damned sure everyone saw his little silver Apple logo.
Sorry, but by that track record I know of ***MORE*** people using Commodore Amigas and AmigaOS than I do owning a Mac!!!
Okay, so you're playing your MP3s on a PC with something in excess of a 300W PSU. And I'm playing them on a CD player with maybe a 100W PSU. So who's using more electricity and therefore burning more hydrocarbons to have that electricity generated then?
What does that have to do with anything? Even if you don't throw away the CD, the energy and materials have already been consumed in the manufacturing process.
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The point I am making is that I am more likely to recycle a CD by virtue of selling it second hand when I have finished with it - whereas electronic goods are likely to be just dumped.
I enjoy my music on a high-quality hi-fi (I hate headphones, and have great speakers). And there's little practical difference between well-compressed music and CDs.
I agree, to a point. Encode MP3s at 192kbps or above and there's probably little difference to the CD. But start encoding at that rate, file sizes get much bigger and the whole point of MP3 (i.e "portability") starts to get lost.
Even then, it's possible to buy (or pirate) uncompressed music online.
Ah, now I see where you're going with this argument! You justify piracy as being "eco-friendly"! That's a new one on me!
And downloads are capable of higher quality than CD.
Where did you get that little factoid from? How can something probably encoded from a CD in the first place be of a higher quality than what the CD was???
CDs are limited to 16-bit 44.1 kHz quality. Downloads can go up to any bitrate or depth possible.
Whoa there now, sonny! "kHz" or "kiloHertz" is a measurement of sound frequency, bitrate is "kbps" or "kilobits per second" is a measurement of sampling rate. So now please explain to me how you can compare two entirely different measurements?
Sounds like you're in denial that buying CDs consumes a lot more energy and resources than downloading.
Nope, I just think it's a damn stupid way of arguing against CDs - especially to someone who does not accept man-made global warming, considers Al Gore a complete charlatan feathering his own political nest, and believes that the climate is changing because of a *NATURAL* planetary cycle (see under "Ice Ages which happened long before man was ever on this planet").
... Duke Nukem Forever.
Sure, a lot of CDs are thrown into landfill sites, but I doubt very much these are proper bought music CDs - more like freebies on magazines, which, I agree, could be distributed far more responsibly.
So please don't lecture me on recycling - if anything, that's a very weak argument to put forward anyway and I doubt very much that you yourself recycle everything you possibly can at maximum efficiency.
If you want to go ahead and waste your money on lower quality music formats, then go do it - and let me enjoy my nice quality plastic disks on a nice hi-fi setup.
Those people who claim CDs are not worth the money because they have "only one or two good songs on them" are just not listening to the correct music. With care and research, it's possible to never buy a duff CD - yes, even download the album on Usenet or Bittorrent to preview it first before deciding to buy it.
And if you do that properly, what it means is you end up never buying a bad CD and always buy it for the best price - this makes music great value for money and something you appreciate - therefore, you are more likely to continue paying for it.
Yes, I do use MP3s for portability but I make them myself and nothing beats listening to a proper CD on a reasonable hi-fi setup.
Personally, I'm happy with CD prices anyway. I research my music really well, I know an album will be good before I buy it, and I then find the cheapest prices online without every stepping through the doors of rip-off (UK) music stores like HMV or Zavvi (formerly known as Virgin).
Therefore, people who say that CDs are overpriced because they contain only one or good tracks are, quite frankly, listening to the wrong music, probably the plasticized manufactured trash that's hyped to hell because it makes the most money for the record companies.
I am never going to pay for an MP3 download, just like a lot of other (probably older) music fans. But I'm happy to buy a nice shiny CD with some sleeve notes I can read while I'm listening to the music on a reasonably good hi-fi and then rip a few tracks for myself for when I go to the gym.
If I buy a Nintendo game, whether on disc, cartridge, etc., my only expectations are that I can play it on my Nintendo console, that it plays exactly as advertising has told me it would and that it's not buggy enough to stop me completing it.
If I buy an audio CD, my expectations are that I can play it on any CD player or PC, and possibly rip it to MP3 or OGG for my own personal use on a portable player. If a rootkit installs itself on my PC to restrict that, then unless I have been clearly warned about that before I purchased the CD, then that is obviously not fair to me, the purchaser of that CD.
Well I'm sure if you queue up all night outside of Tandy's or some other electronics store, you'll be able to get hold of another.
Sorry, but I don't get this materialism shit. I like money, I like spending it on things I like but I'm not going to get all hot and bothered if I can't buy something I want because it's out of stock - it isn't that important to me.
I think the only thing I'd say is just recognise you have to put in some of your own effort with Linux, it won't come to you.
Most people don't appreciate the real power of a UNIX-like OS is the command line and what you can do there with scripting and command piping that let's you start to understand the real power of it.
The best thing to do is just take your time with it and don't just try it because you don't like Microsoft or think there's some kind of cool factor. I use it most of the time, even at work, but I still keep XP around for gaming and a few really useful tools I like using.
The important thing is just use what tools get the job done in whatever OS you need to.
I'm doing the same thing for Duke Nukem Forever - no sign of it yet though.
Well then she'd better go and have one then - it's not good for the bladder holding it in like that.
Sorry, I was waiting for an "I'd like a Wii" statement...
Plus I've never bought a music CD protected by a Nintendo rootkit or stayed up into the small hours reinstalling Nintendo Windows XP on a relative's PC because of viruses and spyware. :-)
This is a self-fulfilling scenario where inducing an artificial shortage (by not making enough) creates a huge demand because every kid has to show his/her friends he's managed to get a Wii and every parent is made to feel like a terrible parent because he/she's not managed to get one for the kids.
Yet were there enough Wiis in the stores, it would not be such an "exclusive" item and less people would want it because everyone who wants one can get one.
Sometimes the sheeple (probably the same people that camp outside stores for an iPhone) need to step beyond material possessions some time and think about how they are ultimately just being manipulated by big fat corporations.
And as to the people selling them at twice the price on eBay - good luck to them. They've recognised a market of stupid people and capitalised on it.
Me? I'll wait a couple of months after Xmas and buy a Wii when they're cheaper - at the moment I'm having great fun buying up ultra-cheap Gamecube games from all the trade-ins the Wii frenzy has generated.
FPS games are now built to a formula where prettiness of the game is inversely proportional to its length and I find very little new content in them that makes me want to go buy any of them. Aside from completing Half-Life Episode 2 recently (which itself was short but good value with the included extras), I'm going back to original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D with the various revamped engines that are in existence at the moment.
So as PCs get faster, the overhead to run virtual machines and emulators becomes less important, meaning that older games can be run in Linux - therefore negating the need for Windows entirely.
I'm happy to enter into a reasoned discussion as to how Linux can be improved, but can you please clarify the above statement? What do you mean by "polish"?
Why do you believe Free Software and/or Linux needs any help to survive? It exists despite Microsoft and true non-zealots in the Free Software movement consider that any individual has a choice - just because you use Windows does not mean you cannot use Firefox, The Gimp, OpenOffice or a myriad of other free software applications.
Likewise, much as I despise Microsoft and their business practices, I'm actually loathe to see the government step in and do anything about them - simply because in a capitalist economy, it's entirely up to the consumer to decide whether or not a particular product survives or not. So if people are stupid enough not to consider the ramifications of using Microsoft software then that's actually their problem.
People within the Free Software movement have a duty and a right to educate everyone else about the benefits FOSS provides, and if Microsoft do anything to stifle competition unfairly then they need to be reigned in. But the fact is there is no "Windows vs Linux war" - Linux is what it is, it does what it "says on the tin" and you can either use it or not use it, that's your choice.
Actually, I was talking about no such thing. I was thinking more about Linux/UNIX where it is possible to totally customise the operating system to the way you want it - whether it's dropping in a specific shell like BASH or Korn, dropping in a Perl, Python, Ruby or other interpreter for scripting, or a compiler to compile up your own source code.
My minimal experience with OS X on someone else's machine was that most of this kind of stuff is locked away from the user.
Server sales of Linux are far exceeding those of Windows currently and I myself work for a US telecoms company where just about all of our products have migrated away from Windows, Solaris, HP-UX and SCO onto Red Hat Linux.
As people get more exposure to Linux in the workplace by virtue of what they have to support, they're bound to want to try Linux at home also - one reason why Ubuntu's popularity is on a dramatic increase.
Your terminology of "a piddling amount" can definitely be applied to the elitist Mac owners but certainly not to Linux.
Yeah, right. Because myriads of Windows users are just going to flock to their local computer store to hand over their $129 for OS X - just like they did for the copy of Windows that came on their PC or the copy of Ubuntu they downloaded freely from the Internet.
And I'd argue that an "advanced operating system" is one that is entirely open that allows the user to interact with it in any number of ways through shell access, scripting and programming in whichever way the user wants.
Correct me if I'm wrong as in 25 years of experience in the computer industry, I've never found the need to own a single Apple product, but in my little experience with OS X, most of the advanced interactive features are *LOCKED AWAY* from the user. So how does this make OS X "advanced"?
Fedora? Slackware? Debian? Gentoo? Puppy? SuSE? Red Hat?