If most Windows users cannot handle Linux that really says something about the usability of Linux. Sure most Windows users may not be as computer savvy as even the bottom of the barrel Slashdotter, but they _can_ use Windows.
Having used Windows, Linux and OS X (in that order chronologically), I have found that:
I like OS X a lot. Sure its pretty, but it also works without much hassle.
Linux is great if you want and need complete control of everything. At one point I did. Now I don't, it slows me down and keeps me from what I should be doing.
XP is not bad as long as you are very strict about what software is installed. If you are not, it feels dirty to use after a few months.
If you have a multi-button mouse that you use with OS X try setting a couple of the Expose functions to mouse buttons -- I find it very handy. I use a 5-button beast and use the thumb button for "show all" and another for "show desktop". At first I thought the Expose was just eye candy, but after using it for a couple of months I really wish XP (at work) had something similar.
I am only familiar with the Stephen King book The Running Man. Was there also one by Dick? A quick Google search didn't find it, but that may just be me.
the real difficulty would be maintaining the smooth look of the mini... nothing like a jagged hole to keep the minimalists happy. A dock could be cool for all the ipoders out there.
One thing (that I know of) is that there is a lot of extra markup that must be used for a table-based layout. All the table's, tr's, td's and extra options (border=0, cellpadding=1,...) makes for much larger HTML files. This data is sent for every request, which results in a lot of wasted bandwidth ($) compared to using CSS. Good use of CSS allows for relatively small content pages that all share the same layout. Overall this translates to less traffic for the same result.
A second issue is flexibility. Tables lock you into a layout and requires a rewrite all your pages to change a layout. CSS on the other hand allows for flexible layouts that can be drastically different -- sort of like a website skin.
You are right that it is very possible to make a nice table based-layout and a horrible CSS-based layout. Tables to not necessarily lead to bad layouts. IMHO, they (tables, not the layouts made with them) are just not as good as CSS for layouts
But they are only more likely to get in through a window because the door is locked. Its far less suspicious for someone, even a stranger carrying a laptop/tv/etc, to walk through a front door than to crawl through a window.
Thats a great idea! I have many fond memories from college that involve signing my roomate up for hundreds of explicit mailing lists using some simple application that let you enter and email and check categories. It backfired somewhat though as he really enjoyed many of the porn services.
I many be wrong (an please correct me if so), but doesn't the term NMR come from the fact that the resonance occurs at an atomic level. NMR is not nuclear in the sense of meltdowns or radiation. I know that I would much rather have an MRI than an X-ray....but thats just me.
Those "kind" of people are ALMOST as bad as the type that rant and rave about the type of software someone uses on their personal computer.
I find it intertesting how these people that go on suicide missions are generally considered crazy. To me, they seem more passionate about a belief. Lots of people say they would do anything for something they believe it. The difference is the people blowing themselves up mean it. While I do not agree with their tactics, or even their believes in most cases, its hard not to admire their conviction -- as long as its from a safe distance.
If the customers (more than just the slashdot crowd) truely want/need a feature then a company will provided or cease to exist. The all-powerful users that need complete control of every miniscule aspect of their hardware and software create a niche market that is targeted by small producers and products trying to differentiate themselves from the masses.
I find it a bit scarry that you can change these things from within windows rather than the BIOS. This seems like its more likely that an average user would modify the values and cause problems. Nothing like low core voltage or high FSB to give a nice stable system! Computer too loud? I'll just turn off the fan - much better.
At my work, we are not allowed to use company resources for personal use. This includes playing audio CDs on our computers, playing digital audio on our workstations, etc. So a portable player is a good solution. I should probably not be posting to slashdot either...hmmm.
For anyone RAM shopping for an Apple, check out OWC. They are not the cheapest, but I was able to get 2GB of Samsung memory for my PowerBook for $300 less than the upgrade from 512MG->2GB that Apple offered. It looks like the current pice is ~$290 per stick, down about $60 from 2 months ago.
I don't see why jpeg2000-based compression should be significantly more computationally intensive than plain old jpeg. Unless something has drastically changed, jpeg2000 is a wavelet coder and jpeg is a dct coder. Both the DCT and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) have efficient implementations (DWT using iterated filterbanks, can't remember DCTs) so the major difference would have to lie in the coding step rather than the transform step. I don't see why the coding step should be any/much harder for wavelet coefficient vs DCT coefficients.
People don't buy a computer so they can run a OS on it.
That is just simply not true. After years of using Mandrake and the various Windows I decided to switch to Apple largely for the OS. I ended up going for a 1.5 Ghz G4 Powerbook with 2 GB ram. Sure, its a bit slower in raw power than my Toshiba P15 laptop (2.8 GHz Hyperthread P4 + 512 MB RAM) but it litterally took seconds to get
1) Dual displays working
2) Wireless
3) Digital Camera
4) External drives
5) Power management
Don't get me wrong, all these are available under windows and linux as well. However, setup for many of these took considerable time the FIRST time i had to do it under linux. In particular, getting dual displays from the laptop was a pain for me and wireless was always a little hit-and-miss until a recent upgrade to the (now very nice) madwifi drivers. I could never get power management to work worth a damn in linux -- makes a laptop much less portable.
Yes, I can, and did, figure out everything i needed (except power) but honestly do not really care to spend my time reading man pages and how-to's to get fairly basic features working. I consider this similar to how I no longer enjoy building my own computer. I would much rather buy a pre-built system that has the cooling, noise, power, etc figured out. My time is too valuable to me to spend doing things I find teadious and booring. OS X is great for people who simply want to use their computer as a tool.
I realize that many enjoy these things. Then Linux is great for you.
I do not play (m)any games and generally dislike windows so I choose not to use it.
In the end I am very happy with my decision to switch to the Powerbook. I no longer have to worry about my computer working because it just does. As an added benefit, powerbooks are amazingly quiet. This can not be said for the Toshiba P15 laptop (except maybe as a cruel joke).
Re:I call foul: CENSORSHIP
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but you already can - 's', 'e', 'x' are all entered with the left hand. just use the mouse to submit and you are free with your right for "anything you can think of"
I can't really either of these being a problem (although the idea of the second one is interesting). Unless FF allows sites to query which extensions are installed there would be no way to only allow non-adblock users. Requiring a load of an ad is fine. An extension would quickly be created that downloads adds but does not display them (a slight modification of adblock).
If you _really_ hate ads, why not stick it to them. Write an extension that does not display ads at all, but continually loads them. This way you get to inflict double pain -- the advertiser has no chance to sell you anything (or even get a click) and you use as much of their bandwidth as possible.
This of leads to other ideas such as a DOS extension (e.g. hit MS whenever FF is running X 5,000,000 FF users).
Along those lines of thinking... the should probably hold some massive death match tournament to find the pilots of these things. Finally a use for all those hours of my youth/adult life "wasted" -- can't wait to tell the wife.
The software update capability is OS X is pretty damn impressive. It shows a list of what software has updates, lets me choose which to install and handles everything else for me. The only action I may have to take is accept a EULA, but this only happened the first time I updated some apps.
The windows update is pretty good, but I don't really care for the "automatically download and install" option. Also, why do many updates take SO long to install? Not a huge issue, but annoying. In addition some updates (i.e. SP2) are so large that they are difficult to work with. For example, my wife's computer is an older laptop with ~700 MB of free space -- I cannot use windows update to install SP2 even though the update is smaller than 700 MB. This is very annoying.
Until recently I used Mandrake and found the bundled package updater hit-and-miss. At first it worked great, but after a while I started to get errors/messages about package signatures. After a while I just gave up and didn't bother (mostly due to my powerbook arriving).
From my experience, I would rank them
OS X (easiest)
Win XP
Mandrake (hardest)
To do what? The problem is really one of sampling, which means we cannot improve the resolution (i.e. quality) of the image with some a priori information. The best you could hope to due with the Fourier Transform is to interpolate the image, but you would only get more samples in the image and still have the same crappy resolution.
It is likely that there would be some improvements that could be made by processing several images -- adjacent frames in a video sequence or multiple angles from different cammeras, the latter would probably work much better.
Slashdot Mirror
Having used Windows, Linux and OS X (in that order chronologically), I have found that:
If you have a multi-button mouse that you use with OS X try setting a couple of the Expose functions to mouse buttons -- I find it very handy. I use a 5-button beast and use the thumb button for "show all" and another for "show desktop". At first I thought the Expose was just eye candy, but after using it for a couple of months I really wish XP (at work) had something similar.
I am only familiar with the Stephen King book The Running Man. Was there also one by Dick? A quick Google search didn't find it, but that may just be me.
Making it an option would be nice for people that want it. Add the integrated dock for $50 or something.
the real difficulty would be maintaining the smooth look of the mini... nothing like a jagged hole to keep the minimalists happy. A dock could be cool for all the ipoders out there.
One thing (that I know of) is that there is a lot of extra markup that must be used for a table-based layout. All the table's, tr's, td's and extra options (border=0, cellpadding=1,...) makes for much larger HTML files. This data is sent for every request, which results in a lot of wasted bandwidth ($) compared to using CSS. Good use of CSS allows for relatively small content pages that all share the same layout. Overall this translates to less traffic for the same result.
A second issue is flexibility. Tables lock you into a layout and requires a rewrite all your pages to change a layout. CSS on the other hand allows for flexible layouts that can be drastically different -- sort of like a website skin.
You are right that it is very possible to make a nice table based-layout and a horrible CSS-based layout. Tables to not necessarily lead to bad layouts. IMHO, they (tables, not the layouts made with them) are just not as good as CSS for layouts
Can anyone else verify this story for me?
But they are only more likely to get in through a window because the door is locked. Its far less suspicious for someone, even a stranger carrying a laptop/tv/etc, to walk through a front door than to crawl through a window.
Thats a great idea! I have many fond memories from college that involve signing my roomate up for hundreds of explicit mailing lists using some simple application that let you enter and email and check categories. It backfired somewhat though as he really enjoyed many of the porn services.
I many be wrong (an please correct me if so), but doesn't the term NMR come from the fact that the resonance occurs at an atomic level. NMR is not nuclear in the sense of meltdowns or radiation. I know that I would much rather have an MRI than an X-ray....but thats just me.
I find it intertesting how these people that go on suicide missions are generally considered crazy. To me, they seem more passionate about a belief. Lots of people say they would do anything for something they believe it. The difference is the people blowing themselves up mean it. While I do not agree with their tactics, or even their believes in most cases, its hard not to admire their conviction -- as long as its from a safe distance.
I find it a bit scarry that you can change these things from within windows rather than the BIOS. This seems like its more likely that an average user would modify the values and cause problems. Nothing like low core voltage or high FSB to give a nice stable system! Computer too loud? I'll just turn off the fan - much better.
At my work, we are not allowed to use company resources for personal use. This includes playing audio CDs on our computers, playing digital audio on our workstations, etc. So a portable player is a good solution. I should probably not be posting to slashdot either...hmmm.
http://scholar.google.com/ is not too bad either (as long as your university/company/etc has the proper subscriptions to the papers found).
my powerbook has an eject button -- its in upper-right most key (next to F12) and holding it for ~1sec will eject media in the drive.
For anyone RAM shopping for an Apple, check out OWC. They are not the cheapest, but I was able to get 2GB of Samsung memory for my PowerBook for $300 less than the upgrade from 512MG->2GB that Apple offered. It looks like the current pice is ~$290 per stick, down about $60 from 2 months ago.
I don't see why jpeg2000-based compression should be significantly more computationally intensive than plain old jpeg. Unless something has drastically changed, jpeg2000 is a wavelet coder and jpeg is a dct coder. Both the DCT and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) have efficient implementations (DWT using iterated filterbanks, can't remember DCTs) so the major difference would have to lie in the coding step rather than the transform step. I don't see why the coding step should be any/much harder for wavelet coefficient vs DCT coefficients.
for what?
That is just simply not true. After years of using Mandrake and the various Windows I decided to switch to Apple largely for the OS. I ended up going for a 1.5 Ghz G4 Powerbook with 2 GB ram. Sure, its a bit slower in raw power than my Toshiba P15 laptop (2.8 GHz Hyperthread P4 + 512 MB RAM) but it litterally took seconds to get
1) Dual displays working
2) Wireless
3) Digital Camera
4) External drives
5) Power management
Don't get me wrong, all these are available under windows and linux as well. However, setup for many of these took considerable time the FIRST time i had to do it under linux. In particular, getting dual displays from the laptop was a pain for me and wireless was always a little hit-and-miss until a recent upgrade to the (now very nice) madwifi drivers. I could never get power management to work worth a damn in linux -- makes a laptop much less portable.
Yes, I can, and did, figure out everything i needed (except power) but honestly do not really care to spend my time reading man pages and how-to's to get fairly basic features working. I consider this similar to how I no longer enjoy building my own computer. I would much rather buy a pre-built system that has the cooling, noise, power, etc figured out. My time is too valuable to me to spend doing things I find teadious and booring. OS X is great for people who simply want to use their computer as a tool.
I realize that many enjoy these things. Then Linux is great for you.
I do not play (m)any games and generally dislike windows so I choose not to use it.
In the end I am very happy with my decision to switch to the Powerbook. I no longer have to worry about my computer working because it just does. As an added benefit, powerbooks are amazingly quiet. This can not be said for the Toshiba P15 laptop (except maybe as a cruel joke).
but you already can - 's', 'e', 'x' are all entered with the left hand. just use the mouse to submit and you are free with your right for "anything you can think of"
If you _really_ hate ads, why not stick it to them. Write an extension that does not display ads at all, but continually loads them. This way you get to inflict double pain -- the advertiser has no chance to sell you anything (or even get a click) and you use as much of their bandwidth as possible.
This of leads to other ideas such as a DOS extension (e.g. hit MS whenever FF is running X 5,000,000 FF users).
Along those lines of thinking... the should probably hold some massive death match tournament to find the pilots of these things. Finally a use for all those hours of my youth/adult life "wasted" -- can't wait to tell the wife.
The software update capability is OS X is pretty damn impressive. It shows a list of what software has updates, lets me choose which to install and handles everything else for me. The only action I may have to take is accept a EULA, but this only happened the first time I updated some apps.
The windows update is pretty good, but I don't really care for the "automatically download and install" option. Also, why do many updates take SO long to install? Not a huge issue, but annoying. In addition some updates (i.e. SP2) are so large that they are difficult to work with. For example, my wife's computer is an older laptop with ~700 MB of free space -- I cannot use windows update to install SP2 even though the update is smaller than 700 MB. This is very annoying.
Until recently I used Mandrake and found the bundled package updater hit-and-miss. At first it worked great, but after a while I started to get errors/messages about package signatures. After a while I just gave up and didn't bother (mostly due to my powerbook arriving).
From my experience, I would rank them
OS X (easiest)
Win XP
Mandrake (hardest)
But installing software is making a copy. In fact, executing an application makes a copy in RAM. Many EULA grant the right to make these copies.
It is likely that there would be some improvements that could be made by processing several images -- adjacent frames in a video sequence or multiple angles from different cammeras, the latter would probably work much better.