Then yeah both KDE and Gnome will seem like hogs. I am doing this on a Dual P3 900mhz with 512mb, not a super machine but hardly bad and the speed difference is staggering. Switching desktops wich I do a lot is a breeze in XFCe, a pain in KDE and slow in gnome. KDE gets off because I had different wallpapers for each desktop in that one but Gnome doesn't even support that.
Only thing I miss in XFce is that konsole doesn't seem to want to work well. A tabbed multi terminal app is very very usefull to me:) a cli junky who wants pretty pictures.
But I think we can't really hope for KDE and Gnome to become much faster. That is not their aim. Other windows managers do that.
Eheh. And why don't we give driving classes in rocket cars eh?
Mandrake I can see as it is easy to setup. But debian and slackware? Give me a break.
Yes an experienced linux user probably thinks they are easie. Dos users too. There are however windows users out there who don't know what a cli is. These people would be hardpressed to install Windows (notice how windows install is still extremely primitive text only with little help) let alone these linux distros.
No the author selected two distros squarely aimed at the non computer litterate. Don't bitch about the options. Write your own review.
Hell count the number of cross platform games at the moment. X-box, PS2, Gamecube, Windows, Mac and Linux are all platforms. Games get ported according to demand but it has happened and continues to happen. Soon we will have the first game that runs on everything:). I think it will be unreal or quake/doom game.
Although Mandrake and Suse are easy from a linux users point of view. You know the kind that grew up with command line installs and handwritten config files this is just a bit much for inexperienced people.
Lindows and Xandros aim at these people. Sure perhaps there are "better" distros out there. But this is 1 person doing a review. I am already glad he did 2. Doing a review of every linux distro out there would require pretty much all of the newspapers staff. Cause either they do all or limit themselves. Limit yourselve and you will also have people claim "hey you left out X".
Those last group of car owners you mention stay the hell away from messing with their car. You don't see them installing new brakes then yell at the mechanic to fix it while doing 120 down a mountain. Well actually they do but we got the darwin awards for those.
Anyway I am not that hopefull that these kind of people are safe on linux. I still don't see how a "click me to run" virus/worm will be stopped by linux. Can you as a user send out a ton of emails? Yes? then so can a worm. Can you delete all the important files? Yes? Then so can a worm (oh and the important files are the OS files they are save on the install CD. The important stuff is the stuff you can write too. Your data). Can you conect to remote ports? Yes? Then so can a worm.
But mplayer in my setup for playing web content has no progresss bars or anything. I don't mind since use mplayer on the command line anyway as I don't get or need a gui but I can see some people might miss it.
This guy did. Also mov playblack is always a hit and miss since there is no official codec for linux or even a free one. You may never have encountered a problem but they do occur. Even more problematic are the streaming movies.
On the whole I found the review pretty much accurate to my own experience. Lack of polish but passing "the good enough" test with some bits a lot easier and the bits that are worse not affecting me.
There are still open games. They are called flight sims.
But yeah really really open games are impossible at the moment. Even if you limit the world it seems an impossible task.
Lets examine his own game Black & White (widely reviewed in reviews as an excellent games wich is prove enough game reviews are not worth the paper they are printed on) an "open" game. Except it isn't is it. You were constantly tehtered to this rather crap "city" and its braindead inhabitants. So instead of exploring and teaching your creature you were constanstly trying to manage the population. To much food and overcrowding, too little and they starve and impossible to get it right. My solution, grow plenty and have my creature eat the population. Actually I tried to be nice at first but one of my houses was build wrong with the door apparently under the ground so lots of people were trapped inside. Didn't notice this until I destroyed it since and they all came out burning and I went from good to evil in the time it took my ape to get out the marshmellows.
To many of the current games still require idiotic micro management and restrictions because the developers seem unable to make a functioning AI or world model.
Exactly how many times have you started a mission to save the entire world from thousands of heavily armed bad guys with 1 pistol and 2 clips of ammo? Worst offender recently was Silent Storm. Crack team of commandos at the height of WW2 and you are even told by the guy in the armoury "we got the finest of the british army at your disposal". What you get? 1 submachine gun, 1 rifle a few clips of ammo oh and a bandage. Wheee!
As call of duty and medal of honor have shown some of the best moments in a fps aren't you with 1 pistol against 100 enemies but you and 100 allies against 100 enemies. Now that is the kinda stuff I want to see. Not me the single superman but playing a character in world wich behaves real without all the inconvenient bits of actually being in a war.
Of course this is a lot harder. Give you a single pistol and you will be to busy ducking and running to notice that the dozen or so enemies are not actually a match they just got insane firepower and health points.
So for the next Black & White (still in production?). Get rid of the insane micro management. Make it easier to control the creature (how often did you punish or reward for the wrong thing because the interface lagged?). Make crap like mouse gestures optional or at least talk to people who know how they work (opera does them great for me). Here is a tip. If you draw a cirle too fast it looks like a square to a computer. (to few point of reference)
Unless you are one of the "meat comes from the supermarket" people then this study is taking the proper approach.
Sure I could say that all the resources needed for making 1 pc is:
1 case avg 5kg
1 mobo 300 grams?
2 cpu 200 grams?
4 x 1gb memory. 100 grams?
Coolers. 1kg
PSU. 1kg
etc
and in way I would be right. But only to people who would believe this stuff is delivered by little daemons in the middle of the night.
So the figures are the costs in raw materials used in the complete production process of a pc. This is btw not enviromentalist. It is economics. Only by knowing what it costs to produce something can you determine its worth and thereby the minimum selling price.
Cars last for a hella of a lot longer then PC's and can be more easily recycled.
Proof? Total your car and total your pc and see for wich you still can get money. You will have to pay someone to take the PC of your hands but the car still fetches a few hundred from a scrap merchant.
Simply bending metal is I am afraid like saying meat comes from the supermarket. Last time I checked there where no metal sheet mines. It either has to be taken from ore wich is a gigantic process involving insane amounts of rock being boiled to extract tiny amounts of metal or recovered from scrap iron. Even the later still requires a lot of work to sort it all out (I am not even going to mention the costs of removing plastics and paint from the scrap iron) melt it down and get it into nice metal sheets for bending.
Still the case is probably the least wastefull. but also the least likely to be replaced in an upgrade. Why after all. For several generations of PC's it has been ATX motherboards so one size fits all. Power supply? Unless it is broken again why upgrade?
No the biggest offender is the MOBO. Countless different materials wich are difficult to recover and only yielding tiny amounts. Scrap the case and you got a few kilos of metal. Scrap a mother board and you are talking a few grams of sellable stuff. You can get paid for a truckload of cases, you will have to pay someone to scrap the mobos.
Mobo is a bastard for other reasons as well. The case can be used over multiple generations and so can stuff like the monitors and HD's. But with each new CPU generation you need a new MOBO.
Your last comment is so wrong that I think you really are someone who thinks meat comes from a supermarket?
Water that has been used can be used again? Not unless your into watersports.
Polluted water does not magically clean itself. Sure water polluted by going through humans and animals gets cleaned eventually after several years going throught the natural cycle. Same is not true for industrial polluted water. Heavy metals have a tendency to stick around in the water supply.
Yes water can be recycled but if you are an industry then you need to do it yourselve and this costs money. A lot of it. Best would be if factories used a closed cycle. However most do not and so the water is very much wasted. Unless you enjoy drinking water with the extra tang of lead and mercury.
Drinkable water is a resource that renews itself at a certain rate. Sadly we humans seem very capable of consuming it a greater rate. Luckily we are also capable of adding to the renewal process but this seems to only happen when people or companies are ordered at pain of fines to do this.
Drinkable and non-drinkable. The last is in plentifull supply. The first is not.
Usually during manufacturing they use clean drinkable water wich emerges from the other end un-drinkable. There are systems in wich the cycle is closed or in wich polution does not take place but these are rare and expensive. Polluted water is in fact a useless byproduct. Unfit for drinking (for obvious reasons) unfit for cooling (even drinking water isn't clean enough for that) and unfit for production unless your a Pepsi fan.
But you can filter water to become drinkable can't you? Well yes. To a certain degree and at a cost. So if factory X takes water from a river and then dumps it back with pollution then it is taking Y amount of drinkable water from everyone down stream.
So this is probably the figure they are talking about. No water is not in itself in any danger of running out. We can always build more refining installations. But these in turn too cause pollution (how do you think they are powered) wich then you will have to clean up. Unless you like your drink with heavy metals?
I seen plenty of Dell P3's in offices that have dual cpu capabilitie but only 1 cpu installed. Yes P3's are hard to come by but instead of replacing all PC's in your business take out half. Put their CPU's and memories in the P3's you are keeping and voila. Very nice fast machines.
You can also do a lot with a simple memory upgrade.
This is after all the business market. Not the home user market. For office use a dual P3 is even better (with the right modern OS) then a single P4. No more lag while your wordproccessor starts up.
With such an upgrade you just doubled the life of the Mobo, memory, cpu, HD, expansion cards, cables and monitor. 50% reduction in waste. Not bad eh?
What would have happened if they hadn't regulated this? Every bank would still have complied? Yeah. Right.
Regulation is often seen as meddling by the very same people that need to have regulation to do anything at all. When did american car companies improve the safety of their cars. After regulation or after they countless reports that their car were deathtraps?
Your industry wouldn't be as regulated if your industry behaved. They have however a proven track record of needing a nanny. Goverment does not come with a crystal ball that can detect wether Bank A has at time period X responsible management. They must treat all the same. We, the people, demand that they do this. As you said we don't want another depression thanks to bad bank management.
Invite only. So now we are not invited to computer
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Invite only. So now we geeks are not invited to computer parties as well? Dang.
BSD isn't safe. Even Windows itself isn't safe. We got a maddog and you are thinking it will stop attacking? McInsane even said that they might go after BSD as well.
And unlike linux BSD doesn't have any large backers. Who is going to pay your lawyers? No BSD better hope that linux wins this battle. If it looses all the other free software projects are next. SCO would be rich and have precedent.
That settlement would mean nothing to SCO. Truth doesn't. Why should a deal they never signed do?
Bioware released neverwinter nights for linux. Well kinda off. Their license with their windows installer supplier forbids them from using other installer software. Meaning someone else had to write an installer script. Not to difficult for the linux community but still prove that idiotic contracts keep getting signed.
Granted this was using two different products at the same time but close enough.
I can't speak for console games as I don't play them. However PC games are a mixed bag. UFO Aftermath was widely considered to be impossible while say Deus EX 2 was a cakewalk. Call of Duty on normal settings can be completed in a couple of hours with only a few reloads for when you get hit by mortars or walk face first into a machine gun. On veteran every mistake is lethal and it becomes almost a platform with you learning were enemies are coming from.
Of course this is just how I experienced those games. Other players may rate them completly differently.
A good example is perhaps the C&C series. Despite the fact that it is now in its 1 millionth release the games still follows the exact same structure. First mission 2 units. Second mission 3 units. Third mssion 4 units. And so on. Frustating for seasoned players who already know how to play the game but needed to not alienate new players. Some games use tutorials for this. C&C wastes the first few missions on this.
I recently played the platformer Prince of Persia. Well partially. Upto the second timed bit. 2 tries and then I gave up. To fucking hard I am not a 12 year old boy anymore. That game for me was totally wrongly balanced. To much work to little fun. However the owner of that game had no troubles with it. Faster reflexes the timed bits were easy for him.
I seen only a handfull of games that really had good difficulty settings. Good difficulty settings go further then just easy normal hard. They allow you to say disable certain aspects of the game that you may find annoying. Flightsims are usually very easy to setup. Don't like blacking out? Disable it. No rudder? Disable drift. The ancient System Shock allowed you to alter the amount of puzzles vs combat vs exploring. If only some designer had thought of allowing me to disable timed sequenzes from Prince of Persia. Had thought of making the first game started in UFO Aftermath not to be on the highest difficulty level or even better have presented the selection screen to the user. Deus EX 2 is probably beyond saving.
Games that are to hard are usually the fault of the designers being unable to fathom that gamers perhaps do not have the experience with the game that they do. Games that are to easy are either trying not to alienate new players or just lack good coding to have effective AI.
Oh well thank god for the PC and modding. UFO Aftermath has a lot of mods out that rebalance the game. Making your weapons just a tad more powerfull and the aliens weapons just a little bit less. If you played it then you should be able to appreciate slower alien rockets with less power while your guns generally do more damage. The offical patches also address the game balance but don't go far enough. Perhaps this is the future? Rather then get it right out of the box games will be balanced by playtesting by the gamers?
Contrary to popular believe their is such a thing as bad publicity. Just ask the british royal family.
Yes some people may now know their name. But ask yourselve this. How many today have decided to take their hosting elsewhere? This is not the internet boom anymore. Hosting providers can't afford to be picky anymore. I think some manager somewhere made a huge miscalculation. Worse there is talk about and nmap already did this of revoking SCO license to use opensource products. Could this also be extended to licensees? After all this company just put its signature on a document claiming everything SCO said is true. Therefore breaking the GPL.
I think when the dust settles this company will have egg on its face for years to come. 2010 Salesrep "We offer the most advanced hosting services in the world." Customer "Oh yeah weren't you the idiots that wasted money on an illegal license?" Salesrep "Damn"
What some people are questioning is wether the right crime is being used. You don't convict a shop lifter of arson. A speeder of drinking and so on.
He committed an attack against 911, took over peoples pc's, released a trojan, waster police time. Plenty for a judge to send him to jail. This guy sounds more like an idiot then a hardened criminal and for idiots even a week jailtime is enough.
Terrorism sounds a bit over the top. Yes the attack was potentially serious but during a recent "flood" (few centimeters of water) you had idiots on tv claiming that 112 (our 911) was unable to respond when they called to have their cellar drained. Hello? Flooded cellar ain't an emergency and all these idiots DID overload 112 and stopped real calls from getting through. Are they all terrorists? No. Deserving a night in jail with a guy called bubba sure. But not terrorists.
While it may or may not be a good idea to have endless amounts of distros from a commercial perspective it is certainly fun and who knows maybe it will be just what is needed. Or not.
Point is it doesn't matter. He has an itch, didn't see anyone willing to scratch so is doing it himself. Maybe it will satisfy others peoples itches as well but if it doesn't it doesn't matter. His itch is being scratched. A non-commercial distro with 1 user who is satisfied is 100% succesful.
Better then all those whiners who want someone else to fix their problems.
But isn't redhat and mandrake and suse modular anyway? Not like they force me to install apache or a window manager. Just the if I want say xmms I bloody well going to have to install X for reasons that should be obvious. You may want MS to stop bundling IE but then don't go complaining that Windows Light doesn't come with a browser installed.
As for putting everything on the CD. Well yes I thought that was pretty nice. Since they want you to buy the thing it means that people with modems don't have to download several gig of extra data just to get a working desktop. KDE is about the only real offender insisting on installing games on every distro I tried.
A modern aircraft like say your typical airliner needs constant power from the engines to keep up enough speed to say up. Loose that engine power and you are in a very heavy glider. unless there is a run way within a few miles or something similar and there is a bloody good pilot at the controls then you are dead.
Loosing power on only one side is not a picnic even. The remaining engines will have to push harder to maintain speed but this makes the entire aircraft want to turn constantly. Very few runways come in corners.
Gliders on the other hand are designed to ehm well glide. This thing would never suffer an engine failure. Power system (it does have one) fail? Simply glide gently down giving you a far wider range in wich to find a suitable landing splot.
There are many reasons this can fail but worries about safety because of a lack of engines ain't one of them . Note that it isn't a balloon. With wings that size it could exchange hight for speed and with that control over its direction.
Even a company that pays its developers and can therefore demand things like obeying standards can't do this. Just look at how MS own applications store info. Is it in the registry? An ini file? Text ini or binary ini? Where are the ini's located?
Getting all opensource developers to use a single standard would be like herding cats. It makes a fun commercial but is never going to work and the poor devil who tries is going to be scratched and purred to death.
No the trick would be for an application to come along that is so damn good and easy to use that say one apache guru can easily keep that part up to date. One person who knows cups in and out to keep that part up to date. And so on.
Then if lots of the core apps can be configured then others will follow. Until then it is like wishing that someone would sort out the mess of command line options that have different meanings and spellings on each app. --version is that so hard? Try to get version info from a couple of applications will you?
So instead of waiting for people to come onboard I fear the only solution is to just build it. Build it and they will come. Now just to find a builder.
What this guy obviously doesn't get is that I don't need an easy to use OS. I do this kinda stuff for a living and fun so by now I can configure a video card over a remote connection using nothing more then a text editor.
You can't? Yes and? Maybe if you are a nice person and buy me a drink I will help you. Demanding I help you with threats of Microsoft software isn't going to work. Kinda like people who threaten to set themselve on fire. Yes and? Someone get the marshmallows.
He also seems to think I care about Microsoft. Only when I am playing games (and it has to be said it is getting more stable when you only play games on it). Do I mind that I need microsoft to play 99% of games? Might as well mind I need a game console to play console games. I am sure some people would feel that all console games should play on all consoles but I am not one of them so to me Windows is just another console.
Don't link me with the "???? is the year of the linux desktop" crowd please. Linux been my desktop for a couple of years now and quite frankly I am constantly moving desktops to get away from "easy" to powerfull and under my control.
Fetchmail is a nice tool and all but when I first used it it contained plenty of UI faults and "what the fuck does this do" elements. I was installed, I read the manual, I got it working.
The point is it doesn't matter. For the guy who wrote it it works. Now if it is developed in true unix style then their will be the "real" app wich uses configuration files and an configurator wich writes to these files. Leaving it open for anyone to write their own configurator.
The most easy to use configurator would be ONE single application that can configure everything in your setup. It would allow for it to know wich values have been used in say the configuration of your network so it knows wich values to use in your configuration of apache.
The point people like me are trying to make is that you can't really expect developers who are working for free to do write this application. Opensource is based on volunteers and volunteers only do things they have an intrest in. So until someone stands up and says "Yeeh golly well lets write meself a bloody nice configuration tool" this will not happen.
It is not that it is impossible to write excellent documantation or write an intelligent configuration tool or create universal defaults. It is just that not everyone writing opensource software is either capable or intrested in doing it.
Mandrake and others have an intrest and have got the means to get other people intrested. Money.
ESR is bitching about CUPS when he should be bitching about Fedora. But note Fedora is the free version. If he complained about say Mandrake or Suse PAID version then I would be a lot more sympathetic.
What gets my goat is that people expect others to work for them for free. This just isn't what happens in either a capatalist, socialist or communist society.
So what's it going to be? Until $distro can use linux behind the scenes and beat Windows at its own game, linux will not take the desktop.
And it'll likely because people like you and the parent post held it back, to keep it "by geeks and for geeks."
You still don't get it. People like me DO NOT CARE. Why do you think that just because two people use a certain piece of software we should have the same goals?
One of the nice things about opensource is that anyone can contribute to it. Don't like how program X is configured? Then change it. Opensource is all about volunteers. Real volunteers not the army type "you, you and you just volunteerd".
Why should someone write code he never needs for someone who doesn't compensate him to satisfy a goal he doesn't share? Is kinda like me demanding you go around putting distributing leaflets for a political party.
But you give the answer already. It is up to $distro to make it easy. They have the goal of getting linux on peoples machines since they hope to receive compensation for it. In turn they should then compensate people to write software and manuals.
There is a great difference between closed software and open software. The difference is that closed software developers are paid to do stuff they have no real interest here. Follow the money as they say. Microsoft customer -> Microsoft -> Developer.
In opensource for some reason you expect the same kinda flow except without the money. Isn't going to happen.
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Only thing I miss in XFce is that konsole doesn't seem to want to work well. A tabbed multi terminal app is very very usefull to me :) a cli junky who wants pretty pictures.
But I think we can't really hope for KDE and Gnome to become much faster. That is not their aim. Other windows managers do that.
Mandrake I can see as it is easy to setup. But debian and slackware? Give me a break.
Yes an experienced linux user probably thinks they are easie. Dos users too. There are however windows users out there who don't know what a cli is. These people would be hardpressed to install Windows (notice how windows install is still extremely primitive text only with little help) let alone these linux distros.
No the author selected two distros squarely aimed at the non computer litterate. Don't bitch about the options. Write your own review.
Hell count the number of cross platform games at the moment. X-box, PS2, Gamecube, Windows, Mac and Linux are all platforms. Games get ported according to demand but it has happened and continues to happen. Soon we will have the first game that runs on everything :). I think it will be unreal or quake/doom game.
Lindows and Xandros aim at these people. Sure perhaps there are "better" distros out there. But this is 1 person doing a review. I am already glad he did 2. Doing a review of every linux distro out there would require pretty much all of the newspapers staff. Cause either they do all or limit themselves. Limit yourselve and you will also have people claim "hey you left out X".
Anyway I am not that hopefull that these kind of people are safe on linux. I still don't see how a "click me to run" virus/worm will be stopped by linux. Can you as a user send out a ton of emails? Yes? then so can a worm. Can you delete all the important files? Yes? Then so can a worm (oh and the important files are the OS files they are save on the install CD. The important stuff is the stuff you can write too. Your data). Can you conect to remote ports? Yes? Then so can a worm.
There is always a bigger idiot out there.
This guy did. Also mov playblack is always a hit and miss since there is no official codec for linux or even a free one. You may never have encountered a problem but they do occur. Even more problematic are the streaming movies.
On the whole I found the review pretty much accurate to my own experience. Lack of polish but passing "the good enough" test with some bits a lot easier and the bits that are worse not affecting me.
But yeah really really open games are impossible at the moment. Even if you limit the world it seems an impossible task.
Lets examine his own game Black & White (widely reviewed in reviews as an excellent games wich is prove enough game reviews are not worth the paper they are printed on) an "open" game. Except it isn't is it. You were constantly tehtered to this rather crap "city" and its braindead inhabitants. So instead of exploring and teaching your creature you were constanstly trying to manage the population. To much food and overcrowding, too little and they starve and impossible to get it right. My solution, grow plenty and have my creature eat the population. Actually I tried to be nice at first but one of my houses was build wrong with the door apparently under the ground so lots of people were trapped inside. Didn't notice this until I destroyed it since and they all came out burning and I went from good to evil in the time it took my ape to get out the marshmellows.
To many of the current games still require idiotic micro management and restrictions because the developers seem unable to make a functioning AI or world model.
Exactly how many times have you started a mission to save the entire world from thousands of heavily armed bad guys with 1 pistol and 2 clips of ammo? Worst offender recently was Silent Storm. Crack team of commandos at the height of WW2 and you are even told by the guy in the armoury "we got the finest of the british army at your disposal". What you get? 1 submachine gun, 1 rifle a few clips of ammo oh and a bandage. Wheee!
As call of duty and medal of honor have shown some of the best moments in a fps aren't you with 1 pistol against 100 enemies but you and 100 allies against 100 enemies. Now that is the kinda stuff I want to see. Not me the single superman but playing a character in world wich behaves real without all the inconvenient bits of actually being in a war.
Of course this is a lot harder. Give you a single pistol and you will be to busy ducking and running to notice that the dozen or so enemies are not actually a match they just got insane firepower and health points.
So for the next Black & White (still in production?). Get rid of the insane micro management. Make it easier to control the creature (how often did you punish or reward for the wrong thing because the interface lagged?). Make crap like mouse gestures optional or at least talk to people who know how they work (opera does them great for me). Here is a tip. If you draw a cirle too fast it looks like a square to a computer. (to few point of reference)
Sure I could say that all the resources needed for making 1 pc is:
and in way I would be right. But only to people who would believe this stuff is delivered by little daemons in the middle of the night.
So the figures are the costs in raw materials used in the complete production process of a pc. This is btw not enviromentalist. It is economics. Only by knowing what it costs to produce something can you determine its worth and thereby the minimum selling price.
Proof? Total your car and total your pc and see for wich you still can get money. You will have to pay someone to take the PC of your hands but the car still fetches a few hundred from a scrap merchant.
Simply bending metal is I am afraid like saying meat comes from the supermarket. Last time I checked there where no metal sheet mines. It either has to be taken from ore wich is a gigantic process involving insane amounts of rock being boiled to extract tiny amounts of metal or recovered from scrap iron. Even the later still requires a lot of work to sort it all out (I am not even going to mention the costs of removing plastics and paint from the scrap iron) melt it down and get it into nice metal sheets for bending.
Still the case is probably the least wastefull. but also the least likely to be replaced in an upgrade. Why after all. For several generations of PC's it has been ATX motherboards so one size fits all. Power supply? Unless it is broken again why upgrade?
No the biggest offender is the MOBO. Countless different materials wich are difficult to recover and only yielding tiny amounts. Scrap the case and you got a few kilos of metal. Scrap a mother board and you are talking a few grams of sellable stuff. You can get paid for a truckload of cases, you will have to pay someone to scrap the mobos.
Mobo is a bastard for other reasons as well. The case can be used over multiple generations and so can stuff like the monitors and HD's. But with each new CPU generation you need a new MOBO.
Your last comment is so wrong that I think you really are someone who thinks meat comes from a supermarket?
Water that has been used can be used again? Not unless your into watersports.
Polluted water does not magically clean itself. Sure water polluted by going through humans and animals gets cleaned eventually after several years going throught the natural cycle. Same is not true for industrial polluted water. Heavy metals have a tendency to stick around in the water supply.
Yes water can be recycled but if you are an industry then you need to do it yourselve and this costs money. A lot of it. Best would be if factories used a closed cycle. However most do not and so the water is very much wasted. Unless you enjoy drinking water with the extra tang of lead and mercury.
Drinkable water is a resource that renews itself at a certain rate. Sadly we humans seem very capable of consuming it a greater rate. Luckily we are also capable of adding to the renewal process but this seems to only happen when people or companies are ordered at pain of fines to do this.
Usually during manufacturing they use clean drinkable water wich emerges from the other end un-drinkable. There are systems in wich the cycle is closed or in wich polution does not take place but these are rare and expensive. Polluted water is in fact a useless byproduct. Unfit for drinking (for obvious reasons) unfit for cooling (even drinking water isn't clean enough for that) and unfit for production unless your a Pepsi fan.
But you can filter water to become drinkable can't you? Well yes. To a certain degree and at a cost. So if factory X takes water from a river and then dumps it back with pollution then it is taking Y amount of drinkable water from everyone down stream.
So this is probably the figure they are talking about. No water is not in itself in any danger of running out. We can always build more refining installations. But these in turn too cause pollution (how do you think they are powered) wich then you will have to clean up. Unless you like your drink with heavy metals?
You can also do a lot with a simple memory upgrade.
This is after all the business market. Not the home user market. For office use a dual P3 is even better (with the right modern OS) then a single P4. No more lag while your wordproccessor starts up.
With such an upgrade you just doubled the life of the Mobo, memory, cpu, HD, expansion cards, cables and monitor. 50% reduction in waste. Not bad eh?
Regulation is often seen as meddling by the very same people that need to have regulation to do anything at all. When did american car companies improve the safety of their cars. After regulation or after they countless reports that their car were deathtraps?
Your industry wouldn't be as regulated if your industry behaved. They have however a proven track record of needing a nanny. Goverment does not come with a crystal ball that can detect wether Bank A has at time period X responsible management. They must treat all the same. We, the people, demand that they do this. As you said we don't want another depression thanks to bad bank management.
Invite only. So now we geeks are not invited to computer parties as well? Dang.
And unlike linux BSD doesn't have any large backers. Who is going to pay your lawyers? No BSD better hope that linux wins this battle. If it looses all the other free software projects are next. SCO would be rich and have precedent.
That settlement would mean nothing to SCO. Truth doesn't. Why should a deal they never signed do?
Granted this was using two different products at the same time but close enough.
Of course this is just how I experienced those games. Other players may rate them completly differently.
A good example is perhaps the C&C series. Despite the fact that it is now in its 1 millionth release the games still follows the exact same structure. First mission 2 units. Second mission 3 units. Third mssion 4 units. And so on. Frustating for seasoned players who already know how to play the game but needed to not alienate new players. Some games use tutorials for this. C&C wastes the first few missions on this.
I recently played the platformer Prince of Persia. Well partially. Upto the second timed bit. 2 tries and then I gave up. To fucking hard I am not a 12 year old boy anymore. That game for me was totally wrongly balanced. To much work to little fun. However the owner of that game had no troubles with it. Faster reflexes the timed bits were easy for him.
I seen only a handfull of games that really had good difficulty settings. Good difficulty settings go further then just easy normal hard. They allow you to say disable certain aspects of the game that you may find annoying. Flightsims are usually very easy to setup. Don't like blacking out? Disable it. No rudder? Disable drift. The ancient System Shock allowed you to alter the amount of puzzles vs combat vs exploring. If only some designer had thought of allowing me to disable timed sequenzes from Prince of Persia. Had thought of making the first game started in UFO Aftermath not to be on the highest difficulty level or even better have presented the selection screen to the user. Deus EX 2 is probably beyond saving.
Games that are to hard are usually the fault of the designers being unable to fathom that gamers perhaps do not have the experience with the game that they do. Games that are to easy are either trying not to alienate new players or just lack good coding to have effective AI.
Oh well thank god for the PC and modding. UFO Aftermath has a lot of mods out that rebalance the game. Making your weapons just a tad more powerfull and the aliens weapons just a little bit less. If you played it then you should be able to appreciate slower alien rockets with less power while your guns generally do more damage. The offical patches also address the game balance but don't go far enough. Perhaps this is the future? Rather then get it right out of the box games will be balanced by playtesting by the gamers?
Yes some people may now know their name. But ask yourselve this. How many today have decided to take their hosting elsewhere? This is not the internet boom anymore. Hosting providers can't afford to be picky anymore. I think some manager somewhere made a huge miscalculation. Worse there is talk about and nmap already did this of revoking SCO license to use opensource products. Could this also be extended to licensees? After all this company just put its signature on a document claiming everything SCO said is true. Therefore breaking the GPL.
I think when the dust settles this company will have egg on its face for years to come. 2010 Salesrep "We offer the most advanced hosting services in the world." Customer "Oh yeah weren't you the idiots that wasted money on an illegal license?" Salesrep "Damn"
He committed an attack against 911, took over peoples pc's, released a trojan, waster police time. Plenty for a judge to send him to jail. This guy sounds more like an idiot then a hardened criminal and for idiots even a week jailtime is enough.
Terrorism sounds a bit over the top. Yes the attack was potentially serious but during a recent "flood" (few centimeters of water) you had idiots on tv claiming that 112 (our 911) was unable to respond when they called to have their cellar drained. Hello? Flooded cellar ain't an emergency and all these idiots DID overload 112 and stopped real calls from getting through. Are they all terrorists? No. Deserving a night in jail with a guy called bubba sure. But not terrorists.
Point is it doesn't matter. He has an itch, didn't see anyone willing to scratch so is doing it himself. Maybe it will satisfy others peoples itches as well but if it doesn't it doesn't matter. His itch is being scratched. A non-commercial distro with 1 user who is satisfied is 100% succesful.
Better then all those whiners who want someone else to fix their problems.
But isn't redhat and mandrake and suse modular anyway? Not like they force me to install apache or a window manager. Just the if I want say xmms I bloody well going to have to install X for reasons that should be obvious. You may want MS to stop bundling IE but then don't go complaining that Windows Light doesn't come with a browser installed.
As for putting everything on the CD. Well yes I thought that was pretty nice. Since they want you to buy the thing it means that people with modems don't have to download several gig of extra data just to get a working desktop. KDE is about the only real offender insisting on installing games on every distro I tried.
Loosing power on only one side is not a picnic even. The remaining engines will have to push harder to maintain speed but this makes the entire aircraft want to turn constantly. Very few runways come in corners.
Gliders on the other hand are designed to ehm well glide. This thing would never suffer an engine failure. Power system (it does have one) fail? Simply glide gently down giving you a far wider range in wich to find a suitable landing splot.
There are many reasons this can fail but worries about safety because of a lack of engines ain't one of them . Note that it isn't a balloon. With wings that size it could exchange hight for speed and with that control over its direction.
Getting all opensource developers to use a single standard would be like herding cats. It makes a fun commercial but is never going to work and the poor devil who tries is going to be scratched and purred to death.
No the trick would be for an application to come along that is so damn good and easy to use that say one apache guru can easily keep that part up to date. One person who knows cups in and out to keep that part up to date. And so on.
Then if lots of the core apps can be configured then others will follow. Until then it is like wishing that someone would sort out the mess of command line options that have different meanings and spellings on each app. --version is that so hard? Try to get version info from a couple of applications will you?
So instead of waiting for people to come onboard I fear the only solution is to just build it. Build it and they will come. Now just to find a builder.
What this guy obviously doesn't get is that I don't need an easy to use OS. I do this kinda stuff for a living and fun so by now I can configure a video card over a remote connection using nothing more then a text editor.
You can't? Yes and? Maybe if you are a nice person and buy me a drink I will help you. Demanding I help you with threats of Microsoft software isn't going to work. Kinda like people who threaten to set themselve on fire. Yes and? Someone get the marshmallows.
He also seems to think I care about Microsoft. Only when I am playing games (and it has to be said it is getting more stable when you only play games on it). Do I mind that I need microsoft to play 99% of games? Might as well mind I need a game console to play console games. I am sure some people would feel that all console games should play on all consoles but I am not one of them so to me Windows is just another console.
Don't link me with the "???? is the year of the linux desktop" crowd please. Linux been my desktop for a couple of years now and quite frankly I am constantly moving desktops to get away from "easy" to powerfull and under my control.
The point is it doesn't matter. For the guy who wrote it it works. Now if it is developed in true unix style then their will be the "real" app wich uses configuration files and an configurator wich writes to these files. Leaving it open for anyone to write their own configurator.
The most easy to use configurator would be ONE single application that can configure everything in your setup. It would allow for it to know wich values have been used in say the configuration of your network so it knows wich values to use in your configuration of apache.
The point people like me are trying to make is that you can't really expect developers who are working for free to do write this application. Opensource is based on volunteers and volunteers only do things they have an intrest in. So until someone stands up and says "Yeeh golly well lets write meself a bloody nice configuration tool" this will not happen.
It is not that it is impossible to write excellent documantation or write an intelligent configuration tool or create universal defaults. It is just that not everyone writing opensource software is either capable or intrested in doing it.
Mandrake and others have an intrest and have got the means to get other people intrested. Money.
ESR is bitching about CUPS when he should be bitching about Fedora. But note Fedora is the free version. If he complained about say Mandrake or Suse PAID version then I would be a lot more sympathetic.
What gets my goat is that people expect others to work for them for free. This just isn't what happens in either a capatalist, socialist or communist society.
And it'll likely because people like you and the parent post held it back, to keep it "by geeks and for geeks."
You still don't get it. People like me DO NOT CARE. Why do you think that just because two people use a certain piece of software we should have the same goals?
One of the nice things about opensource is that anyone can contribute to it. Don't like how program X is configured? Then change it. Opensource is all about volunteers. Real volunteers not the army type "you, you and you just volunteerd".
Why should someone write code he never needs for someone who doesn't compensate him to satisfy a goal he doesn't share? Is kinda like me demanding you go around putting distributing leaflets for a political party.
But you give the answer already. It is up to $distro to make it easy. They have the goal of getting linux on peoples machines since they hope to receive compensation for it. In turn they should then compensate people to write software and manuals.
There is a great difference between closed software and open software. The difference is that closed software developers are paid to do stuff they have no real interest here. Follow the money as they say. Microsoft customer -> Microsoft -> Developer.
In opensource for some reason you expect the same kinda flow except without the money. Isn't going to happen.