I personally find a full-sized fully-functional laptop much better. You can get them around $500 right now, and most of them will browse the Internet and write up simple office documents quite well. The mini-laptops are nice as a third computer (desktop, laptop, mini-laptop), but like the SMART car, are only useful to those who can afford to have the third one as a luxury.
On the other hand, my brother-in-law, who is not a Linux Guru (he's actually a recently converted disgruntled windows user), had no problem installing the proprietary NVidia drivers on his installation of Mandriva Free. Also, 2008.1 free ships with Codeina, which is supposed to help you install proprietary video and sound codecs not included in the base Mandriva Free install. So it's really hard to say how "free" Mandriva Free really is anymore.
To bring up a car analogy, nobody complains that there are 2000 different models of cars. Having more models of cars means you are more likely to find a car that suits you well. And since all the cars are built to be compatible, we can all drive on the same roads, without worrying about which model of car everyone else is driving.
Why did they opt to use Mandriva One, over Mandriva Free? Mandriva Free is a bigger download, but comes with a lot more software on the disk. It also seems more suited to an actual install, whereas Mandriva One is more of a Live CD.
If your significant other is going to get angry, and create a big problem, because they mistyped your address and you didn't get their email, then I would say that your significant other needs to be let go anyway. So what, you didn't get the email. I often go days without checking my email if I happen to be busy. If my significant other wants to talk to me, she'll find some other way.
I remember this being the reason I disabled my catch-all address for my domain, a couple of years ago. I was not only getting tons of bounce-backs from things that looked like they were being sent from my domain, I was also getting a lot of spam mail sent to random-non-existent-but-caught-by-the-catch-all addresses.
That's like AT&T losing their common carrier status because they refuse to kick a known mob boss off their network. I would actually argue, that doing something to stop the illegal activity would cause them to lose their common carrier status. The common carrier status (if Google even has any in this situation) means that they don't have to do anything to stop illegal activity occurring on their network.
I had the same problem. What's really terrible is that I don't think they ever fixed the problem. That drove me nuts for a few weeks trying to figure out why all my downloads were corrupted.
Reminds me of the "PARS" I used to get off usenet. I think it was bacally a RAR split up into hundreds of pieces, with parity information in each of the files. You only needed to download a certain percentage of the files to reconstruct the original file. It was great, because often pieces of the file would go missing, or become corrupted somewhere along the way.
The bandwidth is great. But the latency is terrible. You could probably ship few petabytes to the next town over in a couple hours (if you ignore writing out the tapes in the first place). With a regular network, it would take much longer. However, if you only need to send a couple megabytes, it will still take a couple hours. A traditional wired network works much better in this case.
However, the amount of money gained in BluRay isn't just in the player, it's in the movies people buy to put in the player.In your scenario, they make more with selling them at $500, but not when you account for the extra 5000 people who are buying movies. Besides, they are probably selling for much closer to cost then your numbers point out. They don't care how much they make off the players. They really want people buying the movies.
Connecting to the rest of the city would be nice for some things, but if you want to connect to the internet, and not just your city intranet, you're going to have to connect to some big pipe eventually.
I fail to see why MS would want to compete with Google so much. Sure, they are both really big companies, but that's about all they have in common. MS makes the majority of their money from Windows, Office, a bunch of other software, and also by selling hardware like XBox, or many varied computer peripherals. Google makes money (I'm still confused here) by selling advertising space on their extremely popular search engine. Microsoft also has a search engine, although I'm pretty sure I've never used it, and can't recall anybody else using it either. Although apparently lots of people do. Google also has an office suite, but it works through your web browser, and you have to be on the internet to use it. Usage of the office suite requires that you upload your documents to Google's servers. Google's office suite is severly limited compared to MS Office. I don't understand why MS would be so afraid of Google. If they were smart they would try to partner with Google, although I doubt Google would go for it. MS needs to stop trying to be everything to everyone if they want to survive another 3 or 4 decades. Sure that's a long way off, but they should be looking that far ahead. MS is so far entrenched now that they don't have to worry about the next 10-15 years. However, if they don't get their act together soon, that may be all they have left.
By the time MS releases this, there will probably be a $99 BluRay player available at Walmart, Or whatever the Australian equivalent is. Now that Blu Ray is the clear winner, people won't be so hesitant to buy them, and prices will drop.
Another solution would be to get a cheap lowpower laptop and use that whenever you don't required the full power of your overclocked gaming rig. When you're playing games, if you really thing you need the power, then feel free to use it. Otherwise, if you're just browsing slashdot, a $500 laptop would probably do the job just as well.
The difference is that you can buy a $30 corded drill and it will outperform the $150 cordless drill. It will also never run out of juice, and the battery will never die. You could probably use it for 30 years without any problems.
I got a crazy idea. How about turning off the air conditioning. I know, sounds like a crazy idea. But it might just work. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, it often gets to 40 degrees celcius, with high humidity. We don't have air conditioning. When it gets hot, we just make sure to drink lots and lots of water, and try to stay in the shade. And we have some fans going. Fans do require power, but nowhere close to as much as an air conditioner.
When you think about it though, 90mm X 45mm is 3.54" X 1.77". Which is roughly equal to the size of a standard 2x4 (4x2). All they did was in the conversion to metric was measure a standard 2x4, an start calling it a 90mm X 45 mm.
And as far as Memory goes, we should all follow Nintendo, and go with "blocks" which is ambigious enough that nobody could ever sue them. I don't understand why they just can't equate blocks with KB, or MB, or something else that's remotely useful, instead of 256 KB.
If it is too small of a difference for most users who don't know the terminology to notice, then why not just use the correct units. People who have no idea what a GB is will go on their way, and those of us who do understand the difference will be satisfied.
I do and don't agree. It seems like everybody is just waiting until they are really old to start having kids. A lot of people wait until they are 35 now. Myself, I'm 27 and have 2 kids. I really enjoy having kids, and it's nice to have enough energy to keep up with them. I also look forward to the future when they leave the nest, and I am still young enough to enjoy life. Not that I'm not enjoying life with kids. But they do limit how much free time you have for doing stuff on your own.
I have one of those "Vista Capable" laptops. What I just figured out the other day, is that if you switch to the "Windows Classic" theme, then the system actually runs quite smoothly. the dwm.exe process goes from about 90 MB to about 5 MB, and it runs just as quickly as XP did. For the most part anyway. I think that MS could have saved themselves a lot of bad press if they just would have told retailers to enable the classic theme by default on low end machines. Sure it wouldn't look pretty, but at least it would have been fast enough to be usable.
I live in Canada. It's basically been everyone on MSN for the last 7 or 8 years. Before that it was mostly ICQ. Yahoo Messenger had some popularity in the ICQ days, but seems to be pretty dead now.
Very exciting to me still. I'm only 27. In 15 years I'll only be 42. I'll still be young enough to take full advantage of this technology. 20 years may seem like a far way off, but it's actually quite close when you think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally find a full-sized fully-functional laptop much better. You can get them around $500 right now, and most of them will browse the Internet and write up simple office documents quite well. The mini-laptops are nice as a third computer (desktop, laptop, mini-laptop), but like the SMART car, are only useful to those who can afford to have the third one as a luxury.
On the other hand, my brother-in-law, who is not a Linux Guru (he's actually a recently converted disgruntled windows user), had no problem installing the proprietary NVidia drivers on his installation of Mandriva Free. Also, 2008.1 free ships with Codeina, which is supposed to help you install proprietary video and sound codecs not included in the base Mandriva Free install. So it's really hard to say how "free" Mandriva Free really is anymore.
To bring up a car analogy, nobody complains that there are 2000 different models of cars. Having more models of cars means you are more likely to find a car that suits you well. And since all the cars are built to be compatible, we can all drive on the same roads, without worrying about which model of car everyone else is driving.
Why did they opt to use Mandriva One, over Mandriva Free? Mandriva Free is a bigger download, but comes with a lot more software on the disk. It also seems more suited to an actual install, whereas Mandriva One is more of a Live CD.
If your significant other is going to get angry, and create a big problem, because they mistyped your address and you didn't get their email, then I would say that your significant other needs to be let go anyway. So what, you didn't get the email. I often go days without checking my email if I happen to be busy. If my significant other wants to talk to me, she'll find some other way.
I remember this being the reason I disabled my catch-all address for my domain, a couple of years ago. I was not only getting tons of bounce-backs from things that looked like they were being sent from my domain, I was also getting a lot of spam mail sent to random-non-existent-but-caught-by-the-catch-all addresses.
That's like AT&T losing their common carrier status because they refuse to kick a known mob boss off their network. I would actually argue, that doing something to stop the illegal activity would cause them to lose their common carrier status. The common carrier status (if Google even has any in this situation) means that they don't have to do anything to stop illegal activity occurring on their network.
I had the same problem. What's really terrible is that I don't think they ever fixed the problem. That drove me nuts for a few weeks trying to figure out why all my downloads were corrupted.
Reminds me of the "PARS" I used to get off usenet. I think it was bacally a RAR split up into hundreds of pieces, with parity information in each of the files. You only needed to download a certain percentage of the files to reconstruct the original file. It was great, because often pieces of the file would go missing, or become corrupted somewhere along the way.
The bandwidth is great. But the latency is terrible. You could probably ship few petabytes to the next town over in a couple hours (if you ignore writing out the tapes in the first place). With a regular network, it would take much longer. However, if you only need to send a couple megabytes, it will still take a couple hours. A traditional wired network works much better in this case.
However, the amount of money gained in BluRay isn't just in the player, it's in the movies people buy to put in the player.In your scenario, they make more with selling them at $500, but not when you account for the extra 5000 people who are buying movies. Besides, they are probably selling for much closer to cost then your numbers point out. They don't care how much they make off the players. They really want people buying the movies.
Connecting to the rest of the city would be nice for some things, but if you want to connect to the internet, and not just your city intranet, you're going to have to connect to some big pipe eventually.
I fail to see why MS would want to compete with Google so much. Sure, they are both really big companies, but that's about all they have in common. MS makes the majority of their money from Windows, Office, a bunch of other software, and also by selling hardware like XBox, or many varied computer peripherals. Google makes money (I'm still confused here) by selling advertising space on their extremely popular search engine. Microsoft also has a search engine, although I'm pretty sure I've never used it, and can't recall anybody else using it either. Although apparently lots of people do. Google also has an office suite, but it works through your web browser, and you have to be on the internet to use it. Usage of the office suite requires that you upload your documents to Google's servers. Google's office suite is severly limited compared to MS Office. I don't understand why MS would be so afraid of Google. If they were smart they would try to partner with Google, although I doubt Google would go for it. MS needs to stop trying to be everything to everyone if they want to survive another 3 or 4 decades. Sure that's a long way off, but they should be looking that far ahead. MS is so far entrenched now that they don't have to worry about the next 10-15 years. However, if they don't get their act together soon, that may be all they have left.
By the time MS releases this, there will probably be a $99 BluRay player available at Walmart, Or whatever the Australian equivalent is. Now that Blu Ray is the clear winner, people won't be so hesitant to buy them, and prices will drop.
Another solution would be to get a cheap lowpower laptop and use that whenever you don't required the full power of your overclocked gaming rig. When you're playing games, if you really thing you need the power, then feel free to use it. Otherwise, if you're just browsing slashdot, a $500 laptop would probably do the job just as well.
The difference is that you can buy a $30 corded drill and it will outperform the $150 cordless drill. It will also never run out of juice, and the battery will never die. You could probably use it for 30 years without any problems.
I got a crazy idea. How about turning off the air conditioning. I know, sounds like a crazy idea. But it might just work. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, it often gets to 40 degrees celcius, with high humidity. We don't have air conditioning. When it gets hot, we just make sure to drink lots and lots of water, and try to stay in the shade. And we have some fans going. Fans do require power, but nowhere close to as much as an air conditioner.
When you think about it though, 90mm X 45mm is 3.54" X 1.77". Which is roughly equal to the size of a standard 2x4 (4x2). All they did was in the conversion to metric was measure a standard 2x4, an start calling it a 90mm X 45 mm.
And as far as Memory goes, we should all follow Nintendo, and go with "blocks" which is ambigious enough that nobody could ever sue them. I don't understand why they just can't equate blocks with KB, or MB, or something else that's remotely useful, instead of 256 KB.
If it is too small of a difference for most users who don't know the terminology to notice, then why not just use the correct units. People who have no idea what a GB is will go on their way, and those of us who do understand the difference will be satisfied.
I do and don't agree. It seems like everybody is just waiting until they are really old to start having kids. A lot of people wait until they are 35 now. Myself, I'm 27 and have 2 kids. I really enjoy having kids, and it's nice to have enough energy to keep up with them. I also look forward to the future when they leave the nest, and I am still young enough to enjoy life. Not that I'm not enjoying life with kids. But they do limit how much free time you have for doing stuff on your own.
Cue the obligatory 8 bit D&D link.
I have one of those "Vista Capable" laptops. What I just figured out the other day, is that if you switch to the "Windows Classic" theme, then the system actually runs quite smoothly. the dwm.exe process goes from about 90 MB to about 5 MB, and it runs just as quickly as XP did. For the most part anyway. I think that MS could have saved themselves a lot of bad press if they just would have told retailers to enable the classic theme by default on low end machines. Sure it wouldn't look pretty, but at least it would have been fast enough to be usable.
I live in Canada. It's basically been everyone on MSN for the last 7 or 8 years. Before that it was mostly ICQ. Yahoo Messenger had some popularity in the ICQ days, but seems to be pretty dead now.
Very exciting to me still. I'm only 27. In 15 years I'll only be 42. I'll still be young enough to take full advantage of this technology. 20 years may seem like a far way off, but it's actually quite close when you think about it.