There's also Mandriva and Novell/Suse that offer enterprise support. A quick visit to their web page will show you that that is what they are focussing on, while the free community releases aren't really pushed at all, and are only available if you know what you are looking for. There's probably a couple other linux distros that do the same, but these are the ones i'm familiar with.
Counting votes isn't a serial process. Counting can be done in Parallel. In fact it can be highly parallelized. In Canada, everybody from a certain neighbourhood goes to a nearby school or community centre to vote. Then when the polls close, each school/community centre counts their votes and reports their totals. All the votes can be counted independantly of what's going on at some other polling station. Some polling station even post their results before others are even closed. This system scales perfectly well. It can work for a population of 3000, 3,000,000, 30,000,000, or 300,000,000. So the time to count votes is not dependant on how many votes their are, but only how finely you distribute the counting load.
Well, I don't think all the comments would be bad. Head over to Rate My Professors if you want to see this kind of think in action. There's plenty of profs who get good ratings. There's also some professors I consider pretty terrible who got a few good ratings. Different people like different things. And there's not much an employer could do to stop ex-employees from posting. There isn't much they could do to stop a current employee from posting. If they kept no data about who posted, then they wouldn't have anything for employers to find out who did the postings. I could see a lot of problems happening with companies posting for themselves to get the ratings up, or posting against rival companies to get the ratings down. I think that this would be the biggest problem to overcome, and not the fact that people would only vote against companies they hated, or not vote at all because they are afraid of retaliation.
I don't think NDA's would come into it very much. Unless you are giving out technical information about what the company is doing, I fail to see where the problem would be. I don't think they can stop you from telling your friends about how much your job sucks, they probably can't stop you from telling the whole world either. Making it anonymous would be very important, as you wouldn't want to lose your job by giving your company bad ratings. Even if your job is satisfactory, I could see people losing jobs for giving their employer a less than stellar rating.
I wish there was a job site where users could comment on the job, even after the job was filled, giving rankings to the employers and interview process. You could even have a tagging system to tag jobs as contract, full time, new grad,or only accepts resumes in word format. I think that many of the job websites out there do a really poor job for the people trying to find the job. A site where the people searching could categorize the stuff themselves would really help to get the stuff organized better. Granted, you'd still have people trying to move the good jobs under cobol so they are the only ones applying, but I think those kinds of things could be worked out.
Why couldn't the driver be compiled on boot up. Save the compiled driver to the hard drive, or an included USB stick. You'd only have to do this once. Same thing goes for updates. Download them off the net and put them somewhere on the person's computer. It wouldn't take too much to install them to "C:\Program Files" which is where games are usually stored now anyway. This could also not only include updates to the game, but also driver updates. I think we could see a lot of games going this way if Mac and Linux get more popular. If someone put together a good package that could be used for games, they could sell it to gaming houses, who would then be easily able to sell games on Mac, Windows and Linux without any extra development time. This is why consoles often see more games than the PC. Because they are a lot easier program for since you don't have to deal with so many different systems.
If this is the case, why don't game developers put out a Linux Live DVD with their game pre installed. This way it runs if you have one of the supported video cards, and no more having to worry about background processes getting in the way of your gaming. I think this would be a great way to deliver games on the Computer, as the way we do it no often leads to a less than stellar performance, because you have Norton Antivirus and 17 other memory resident things running that you don't really want to/know how to shut down every time you want to play a game.
This is so true. When we were in university, we used to play Quake 2 and NFS 2. We had access to Quake 3 and NFS 4, but most people's computers couldn't run those games, so we just played the older ones. It's more fun when you have more people. Once in a while when everyone who wanted to play could run the more advanced games, we would play those, but we had not qualms about playing a game which required a slower computer just to get more people in on the game.
Because with windows, it's impossible to keep your settings (which are in the registry) and do a clean install. If they used a more sane unix type thing where all your settings are in/etc and/home, then it would be much easier to do a fresh install, without losing all your settings.
That's a lot of literature to go through. Anybody get a link to a point-list version of exactly what is different between the versions. No fluff, just straight and to the point. Kind of Like, Windows XP Home = 1,2,3. Windows XP Pro = 1,2,3 And IIS. I don't want to have to wade through tons of text to figure this stuff out.
I think they have more at stake to listen to their customers. You can't easily switch away from MS Windows, just because they don't fix bugs that you need fixed. However, with Linux, you can more easily (although it's still a hassle) switch from one vendor to another when you don't get the bug fixes you need. You will have more incentive to switch if the distro you are switching to is willing to fix the problems you are encountering. Another reason might just be less bureaucracy. When you submit a bug report to an open source project, there's a lot less red tape to go through to get the fix out the door. You can even fix it yourself if you like.
It brings up a lot of privacy concerns, especially considering they decided to drop the encrypted home folder ability from a recent upgrade. So, you can't encrypt your stuff, plus, you can't delete anything either. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Although I've always said it would be nice to have a source control system for your entire home directory, I'm not sure that it's something that should be turned on by default, or something that should include every file on the system. It would work much better if you could pick the folders you wanted to protect with this feature, and only those folders would be tracked.
My parents controlled what I ate in a very easy and non-technical way. They gave me a bag lunch. Granted, I didn't always eat it, and sometimes I grabbed fast food if I had some extra cash lying around, but most of the time I just ate what was in my lunch. I was a teenager, and didn't have a lot extra money lying around. At least, not money that I wanted to waste on things like food when I could be buying more interesting things. I really don't understand parents who buy lunch for their kids from the school cafeteria. It takes about 10 minutes to make them a much healthier and cheaper lunch, or even less time to just point them in the direction of the fridge (once they are old enough to make their own lunch). If they get in the habit of buying their lunch everyday, they are going to do the same thing in adulthood, and end up spending more money than they need to. I'm done school and work full time now, and still bring my lunch with me. Not because I don't have the money, but because it's healthier, tastes just as good, if not better, and lets me spend my cash on more interesting things.
I did the same thing with my older brother. Can't really say he likes Linux very much, but he likes it a lot more than Windows. He's planning on buying a new computer, this time probably a Mac. I think that switching him to Linux has shown him the light. 2 years with Mandrake and he hasn't had any problems, whereas he'd run into problems every other week with windows. He wants to go to Mac because there is better programs available, which is true to some extent. If I were him I'd stick with Linux. His distro is 2 years old and Linux has come a long way. But he doesn't want to upgrade, because if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
I'm not sure about video editing, as I haven't found a good application yet, but I haven't looked very hard. But as far as digital cameras go, I think that Linux has much better stuff than what you get with windows. Digikam for KDE or F-Spot for Gnome will make digital picture management a lot easier than what ever they are using on windows. It's usually the stuff that's included with the camera, which sucks beyond everything. Even Kodak "easyshare" stuff which is supposed to be some of the best, is some of the most annoying software there is. Placing tons of temporary files all over your hard drive that never get deleted.
I'm a righty and I use the num keys to control in FPS. Mouse in my Right hand, and left hand on the num pad. Thumb and forefinger on the + and Enter for front and back, 4 and 6 for strafe, 8 for jump and 2 for duck. Everything else on the numpad is configured depending on which game i'm playing. I learned this back in the days of Descent, and it hasn't failed me yet. I've been able to keep up with people who had years more exprience than I did, and practiced way more. The only reason these people usually beat me was due to memorizing the maps, and not to do with actual skill. Granted, I'm not a world class player, but I'm able to keep up with some people who think they are pretty good, and who spend entirely too much time playing video games.
And the crappy computer controllers are the reason I went to radio shack and picked up a $15 GC to USB adapter so I could use a quality gamepad on my computer. They have them available for PS2 and XBox Also. I don't know why, but for some reason, I've never found that any of the PC gamepads come close to what you can get for the consoles. Especially once you factor in cost.
Exactly. The only good thing i've heard about the XBox 360 is Geometry Wars. Nobody ever talks about the high cost, high graphics games. They are all swarming to play xBox live games with crappy graphics that are just fun to play. This is where I think the Wii will win out. With the entire back catalog for NES, SNES, N64 and others to choose from, even if they don't release all the games they will still have a pretty good library. For the time they took to program a couple emulators they already had the specs for, they gave themselves the ability to run 1000+ games that were already programmed. What would stop them from providing a PS1 emulator. If they can provide an N64 emulator, surely you can provide a PS1 emulator. And if they checked the copy protection on the games, I'm not sure if there's anything that Sony could do to stop them from running the games.
You're right, I just checked the wikipedia article on Super dodge ball and it states that it only appeared on SNES in Japan. It only appeared in America on the NES.
This makes a lot of sense. Men have an inate drive to be creative because unlike women, they are unable to create life. Even if you look at history, most of the famous writers, artists and musicians were men. I don't think it was all because of oppression. People do what they feel they want to do. I don't think we should try to be pushing people into doing things that they don't want to do. I saw enough unhappy people in university who were only in a certain program because their parents pushed them to do something, wasting not only their time, but lots of money in the process.
Exactly. They encouraged people to participate. That includes men and women. It's kind of says something when they have to specifically target women to get any response at all. In my software engineering program there was only about 6 girls. And half of them were there just cause they wanted to make a lot of money, not because they liked computers. I'm not sure why it's this way, but it just is. The same reason you see less men in Nursing or child care. It's not a bad thing, just that men and women like different things.
Well, I can't say i've ever seen them in the grocery stores, but there are quite a few stores that sell pipes and other paraphenelia. The stores make attempt to cover up that the pipes are for drugs, as the stores often have names like "high times" or something like that. There's no laws about owning things that can be used for drugs, or things with pictures of drugs. I even recall a story about them selling marijuana seeds in stores in Vancouver. Which they couldn't really arrest anyone for because the seeds don't contain any drugs. Granted BC seems to have a pretty lax attitude on the whole pot thing. It's not that dangerous of a drug, and they have other things to worry about.
Who cares if they ever get up to star trek level. The technology still sucks. It's much quicker and less annoying to the people around you to just type on your keyboard. Sure it has some uses such as those who don't have full use of their hands. We shouldn't abandon all research on the subject, becuase it does have it's uses, but I don't think it's something worth pushing on the general population, especially before the technology is actually ready. People already don't like their computers, pushing buggy technology like this out will just increase the problem.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060719 Firefox/1.5.0.5
Currently using 61 megs of memory, with 6 tabs, and scrolling through about 60 pictures in an online photo gallery to try to drive up the memory usage. Installed extensions include Reload Every, Video Downloader, DOM Inspector, Web Developer, and Talkback. Seems to me like there are no memory problems with Firefox.
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There's also Mandriva and Novell/Suse that offer enterprise support. A quick visit to their web page will show you that that is what they are focussing on, while the free community releases aren't really pushed at all, and are only available if you know what you are looking for. There's probably a couple other linux distros that do the same, but these are the ones i'm familiar with.
Counting votes isn't a serial process. Counting can be done in Parallel. In fact it can be highly parallelized. In Canada, everybody from a certain neighbourhood goes to a nearby school or community centre to vote. Then when the polls close, each school/community centre counts their votes and reports their totals. All the votes can be counted independantly of what's going on at some other polling station. Some polling station even post their results before others are even closed. This system scales perfectly well. It can work for a population of 3000, 3,000,000, 30,000,000, or 300,000,000. So the time to count votes is not dependant on how many votes their are, but only how finely you distribute the counting load.
Well, I don't think all the comments would be bad. Head over to Rate My Professors if you want to see this kind of think in action. There's plenty of profs who get good ratings. There's also some professors I consider pretty terrible who got a few good ratings. Different people like different things. And there's not much an employer could do to stop ex-employees from posting. There isn't much they could do to stop a current employee from posting. If they kept no data about who posted, then they wouldn't have anything for employers to find out who did the postings. I could see a lot of problems happening with companies posting for themselves to get the ratings up, or posting against rival companies to get the ratings down. I think that this would be the biggest problem to overcome, and not the fact that people would only vote against companies they hated, or not vote at all because they are afraid of retaliation.
I don't think NDA's would come into it very much. Unless you are giving out technical information about what the company is doing, I fail to see where the problem would be. I don't think they can stop you from telling your friends about how much your job sucks, they probably can't stop you from telling the whole world either. Making it anonymous would be very important, as you wouldn't want to lose your job by giving your company bad ratings. Even if your job is satisfactory, I could see people losing jobs for giving their employer a less than stellar rating.
I wish there was a job site where users could comment on the job, even after the job was filled, giving rankings to the employers and interview process. You could even have a tagging system to tag jobs as contract, full time, new grad,or only accepts resumes in word format. I think that many of the job websites out there do a really poor job for the people trying to find the job. A site where the people searching could categorize the stuff themselves would really help to get the stuff organized better. Granted, you'd still have people trying to move the good jobs under cobol so they are the only ones applying, but I think those kinds of things could be worked out.
Why couldn't the driver be compiled on boot up. Save the compiled driver to the hard drive, or an included USB stick. You'd only have to do this once. Same thing goes for updates. Download them off the net and put them somewhere on the person's computer. It wouldn't take too much to install them to "C:\Program Files" which is where games are usually stored now anyway. This could also not only include updates to the game, but also driver updates. I think we could see a lot of games going this way if Mac and Linux get more popular. If someone put together a good package that could be used for games, they could sell it to gaming houses, who would then be easily able to sell games on Mac, Windows and Linux without any extra development time. This is why consoles often see more games than the PC. Because they are a lot easier program for since you don't have to deal with so many different systems.
If this is the case, why don't game developers put out a Linux Live DVD with their game pre installed. This way it runs if you have one of the supported video cards, and no more having to worry about background processes getting in the way of your gaming. I think this would be a great way to deliver games on the Computer, as the way we do it no often leads to a less than stellar performance, because you have Norton Antivirus and 17 other memory resident things running that you don't really want to/know how to shut down every time you want to play a game.
This is so true. When we were in university, we used to play Quake 2 and NFS 2. We had access to Quake 3 and NFS 4, but most people's computers couldn't run those games, so we just played the older ones. It's more fun when you have more people. Once in a while when everyone who wanted to play could run the more advanced games, we would play those, but we had not qualms about playing a game which required a slower computer just to get more people in on the game.
Because with windows, it's impossible to keep your settings (which are in the registry) and do a clean install. If they used a more sane unix type thing where all your settings are in /etc and /home, then it would be much easier to do a fresh install, without losing all your settings.
That's a lot of literature to go through. Anybody get a link to a point-list version of exactly what is different between the versions. No fluff, just straight and to the point. Kind of Like, Windows XP Home = 1,2,3. Windows XP Pro = 1,2,3 And IIS. I don't want to have to wade through tons of text to figure this stuff out.
I think they have more at stake to listen to their customers. You can't easily switch away from MS Windows, just because they don't fix bugs that you need fixed. However, with Linux, you can more easily (although it's still a hassle) switch from one vendor to another when you don't get the bug fixes you need. You will have more incentive to switch if the distro you are switching to is willing to fix the problems you are encountering. Another reason might just be less bureaucracy. When you submit a bug report to an open source project, there's a lot less red tape to go through to get the fix out the door. You can even fix it yourself if you like.
It brings up a lot of privacy concerns, especially considering they decided to drop the encrypted home folder ability from a recent upgrade. So, you can't encrypt your stuff, plus, you can't delete anything either. This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Although I've always said it would be nice to have a source control system for your entire home directory, I'm not sure that it's something that should be turned on by default, or something that should include every file on the system. It would work much better if you could pick the folders you wanted to protect with this feature, and only those folders would be tracked.
My parents controlled what I ate in a very easy and non-technical way. They gave me a bag lunch. Granted, I didn't always eat it, and sometimes I grabbed fast food if I had some extra cash lying around, but most of the time I just ate what was in my lunch. I was a teenager, and didn't have a lot extra money lying around. At least, not money that I wanted to waste on things like food when I could be buying more interesting things. I really don't understand parents who buy lunch for their kids from the school cafeteria. It takes about 10 minutes to make them a much healthier and cheaper lunch, or even less time to just point them in the direction of the fridge (once they are old enough to make their own lunch). If they get in the habit of buying their lunch everyday, they are going to do the same thing in adulthood, and end up spending more money than they need to. I'm done school and work full time now, and still bring my lunch with me. Not because I don't have the money, but because it's healthier, tastes just as good, if not better, and lets me spend my cash on more interesting things.
Yeah, but this guy is talking about Victoria BC. Not too many poor black inner-city residents. Mostly seniors and university students.
I did the same thing with my older brother. Can't really say he likes Linux very much, but he likes it a lot more than Windows. He's planning on buying a new computer, this time probably a Mac. I think that switching him to Linux has shown him the light. 2 years with Mandrake and he hasn't had any problems, whereas he'd run into problems every other week with windows. He wants to go to Mac because there is better programs available, which is true to some extent. If I were him I'd stick with Linux. His distro is 2 years old and Linux has come a long way. But he doesn't want to upgrade, because if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
I'm not sure about video editing, as I haven't found a good application yet, but I haven't looked very hard. But as far as digital cameras go, I think that Linux has much better stuff than what you get with windows. Digikam for KDE or F-Spot for Gnome will make digital picture management a lot easier than what ever they are using on windows. It's usually the stuff that's included with the camera, which sucks beyond everything. Even Kodak "easyshare" stuff which is supposed to be some of the best, is some of the most annoying software there is. Placing tons of temporary files all over your hard drive that never get deleted.
I'm a righty and I use the num keys to control in FPS. Mouse in my Right hand, and left hand on the num pad. Thumb and forefinger on the + and Enter for front and back, 4 and 6 for strafe, 8 for jump and 2 for duck. Everything else on the numpad is configured depending on which game i'm playing. I learned this back in the days of Descent, and it hasn't failed me yet. I've been able to keep up with people who had years more exprience than I did, and practiced way more. The only reason these people usually beat me was due to memorizing the maps, and not to do with actual skill. Granted, I'm not a world class player, but I'm able to keep up with some people who think they are pretty good, and who spend entirely too much time playing video games.
And the crappy computer controllers are the reason I went to radio shack and picked up a $15 GC to USB adapter so I could use a quality gamepad on my computer. They have them available for PS2 and XBox Also. I don't know why, but for some reason, I've never found that any of the PC gamepads come close to what you can get for the consoles. Especially once you factor in cost.
Exactly. The only good thing i've heard about the XBox 360 is Geometry Wars. Nobody ever talks about the high cost, high graphics games. They are all swarming to play xBox live games with crappy graphics that are just fun to play. This is where I think the Wii will win out. With the entire back catalog for NES, SNES, N64 and others to choose from, even if they don't release all the games they will still have a pretty good library. For the time they took to program a couple emulators they already had the specs for, they gave themselves the ability to run 1000+ games that were already programmed. What would stop them from providing a PS1 emulator. If they can provide an N64 emulator, surely you can provide a PS1 emulator. And if they checked the copy protection on the games, I'm not sure if there's anything that Sony could do to stop them from running the games.
You're right, I just checked the wikipedia article on Super dodge ball and it states that it only appeared on SNES in Japan. It only appeared in America on the NES.
This makes a lot of sense. Men have an inate drive to be creative because unlike women, they are unable to create life. Even if you look at history, most of the famous writers, artists and musicians were men. I don't think it was all because of oppression. People do what they feel they want to do. I don't think we should try to be pushing people into doing things that they don't want to do. I saw enough unhappy people in university who were only in a certain program because their parents pushed them to do something, wasting not only their time, but lots of money in the process.
Exactly. They encouraged people to participate. That includes men and women. It's kind of says something when they have to specifically target women to get any response at all. In my software engineering program there was only about 6 girls. And half of them were there just cause they wanted to make a lot of money, not because they liked computers. I'm not sure why it's this way, but it just is. The same reason you see less men in Nursing or child care. It's not a bad thing, just that men and women like different things.
Well, I can't say i've ever seen them in the grocery stores, but there are quite a few stores that sell pipes and other paraphenelia. The stores make attempt to cover up that the pipes are for drugs, as the stores often have names like "high times" or something like that. There's no laws about owning things that can be used for drugs, or things with pictures of drugs. I even recall a story about them selling marijuana seeds in stores in Vancouver. Which they couldn't really arrest anyone for because the seeds don't contain any drugs. Granted BC seems to have a pretty lax attitude on the whole pot thing. It's not that dangerous of a drug, and they have other things to worry about.
Who cares if they ever get up to star trek level. The technology still sucks. It's much quicker and less annoying to the people around you to just type on your keyboard. Sure it has some uses such as those who don't have full use of their hands. We shouldn't abandon all research on the subject, becuase it does have it's uses, but I don't think it's something worth pushing on the general population, especially before the technology is actually ready. People already don't like their computers, pushing buggy technology like this out will just increase the problem.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060719 Firefox/1.5.0.5
Currently using 61 megs of memory, with 6 tabs, and scrolling through about 60 pictures in an online photo gallery to try to drive up the memory usage. Installed extensions include Reload Every, Video Downloader, DOM Inspector, Web Developer, and Talkback. Seems to me like there are no memory problems with Firefox.