Just get text dumps of shakespeare plays, send them through a text to speech app, and pretend it's the "great elizabethan literature as performed by steven hawking" show.
We have 100's of resume's for your "boring job", none of which will waste company time downloading talk radio shows on the internet. What kind of lameass pirates talk radio shows anyways? That's besides the point. Clean out your cubicle.
I'm not looking to pay a monthly fee for streaming movies (which never works, I'd love to see a 500+kbps stream last for two hours over my cablemodem without hiccups).
Streaming video looks like crap.
I'm looking to download the movies - in DivX or whatever - that I can burn to disc and watch in my DivX set-top box, or game console.
Since they're lower quality than DVD, I'd say 5-10 bucks would be a fair price.
XBox only runs at 700 and can play more than tetris.
Why do people think a game needs a 3.6ghz processor? It's all about the capabilities of the video chipset, and I've been reading a lot about ATI's forays into embedded video lately.
Whether it's the best "textbook" architecture or not, it's entrenched itself in the computer world so deeply that x86 will be around forever.
It works, engineers and coders are familiar with it.. The embedded world is still largely about ASM routines and tight little loops that dont leave the cache, etc, etc.. You can write and test your fancy-shamcy hand-assembled routine at your leisure on your desktop computer.... There are plenty of upsides, and the only downside is the "other stuff looks better on paper" argument.
It's a newcomer to the embedded world, but will no doubt take a strong hold.
Yes, they do. They prevented SP1 from installing on machines with blacklisted corporate keys, but Windows Update has always worked, and they recently announced that even those installs will be able to install SP2. It was covered on/. too.
The reasoning was it was better than having umpteen zillion unpatched boxes out there DDoS'ing their website.
I don't see what's "bizarre" about the accident. A guy ran into a 3 year old kid and then pissed off before the police showed up, it wouldnt matter if he was on a Segway, skateboard, or even jogging.
Joggers run into kids cars, bikes, people, all the time. I've seen joggers listening to their ipods, both eyes staring intently at their little heartbeat monitor thingie.
There is no car traffic an the mall anymore, IIRC.
I doubt they'd let a Segway in there either, could be packed with explosives or whatnot.
Besides, once you get away from the mall, smithsonian, etc, you're in nothing but the filthiest, dirtiest slum I've seen in my life.
It makes you want to run screaming to the safe streets of downtown Baltimore. I'm not trying to flame either, DC should be a national disgrace. I work 5 minutes outside of DC, where we keep all doors to our office locked because someone once broke in and raped and assaulted the receptionist.
No politician or lobbyist actually lives inside the beltway, of course. They're limoed with escorts daily at taxpayer expense.
Computer drawback #1: You spend more time configurign some games to run properly than you do playing them. Screwing around with resolutions, detail levels, AA and AF, etc, etc..
Computer drawback #2: No good gamepad support. FPS and strategy games are the only genre's which are better with keyboard and mouse. Arcade/platform/racing/etc titles are much more comfortable with a gamepad. No good gamepads exist. I've pissed away countless bucks to have axes out of center or drifting, sticky buttons, etc.. Best PC gamepad I've used - by far - is an xbox gamepad with a usb plug soldered on. This is beyond many people though. And it drags you back to my issue #1, you spend forever configuring the pad for each specific game.
Computer drawback #3: My couch is more comfortable than my task chair, and my widescreen is easier on the eyes than my monitor.
This is an old and lame debate. Some games I love on computer, for the extra detail, online, etc.. Some games I wouldnt play anywhere but on a console or in an arcade.
Gigabyte SINXP: 100 bucks (great motherboard - dual everything! dual ram, dual RAID controllers SATA and PATA, dual bios..)
3.06 P4, 533 fsb was 300 when I bought it (was the fastest p4 on the block).. Could have gone cheaper with an athlon rig, but as a developer AMD left a bad taste in my mouth years ago and haven't risked it... Anyways, you can get a 3.4 with 800mhz fsb for 2 something
2x80 gig WD caviar's - 80 bucks at best buy after rebate.. A buck of gig for raid 0 silliness.. (No I dont care if my array crashes)
Radeon 9800 non-pro - 150 bucks at Circuit City back when. I cant for the life of me see a real life differnce between this and the pro. Yeah benchmark scores are lower, I'm talking about real life game performance.
100 bucks for the PSU, the 450 watt Antec. Cheap PSUs will bite you in the ass. And a cheap PSU is what Dell/eMachines/etc are going to ship.
And thats the base system. I chucked an old SB Live value edition card in there because the digital out on the onboard sound kept popping. Those are what, 20 bucks these days?
Picked up a new 19" monitor at Office Depot for 90 bucks after rebates. Mid-range monitor, but looks great and is better than anythign I've seen ship with a Dell. LCD panels suck for gaming, IMO. They look crappy outside of their native resolution, and I wont be able to run everything at 1280x1024.. And motion blur is still an issue despite all the claims otherwise..
So 300+100+80+150+20 = 650 bucks for the components. 90 bucks for the monitor, and hell, lets go super crazy and blow 200 bucks for super duper boomslang mice and keyboards and a 50 dollar ratpadz mousepad. (3M makes a very similar pad you can get for 10 bucks at office depot)
So lets round up to $1000 for the whole ball of wax. That leaves me 4000 bucks for the case.
4000 bucks buys a whole fucking lot of LED fans and blinking neon lights.
I guess I forgot other stuff. 120 bucks for a Pioneer A06 DVD+-R(W), and another 40 for a regular DVD-Rom drive. Cant remember what it is, it was just the cheapest one that I bought so I wouldnt gunk up the burner with grimey discs.
Forgot RAM too... A gig of Kingston ValueRAM 400. I don't overclock, and this was the only pair of sticks that work stably in my system - that includes some wayyyyy overpriced Corsair XMS platinum edition mega-shit. That was about 200 bucks.
Anyhow, I really would just love to see what Dell et all ship for $5,000. I know Alienware buyers (yeah the machines are great gaming boxes) take it straight up the ass.
But hell, for $5,000 I'd have dual Athlon64s, X800 XT, 4 gigs of RAM, a RAID-5 array of 15k megasuperawesomeuberdrives, a blowjob hole, etc, etc..
It's not even a gnome thing. I'd like to see a package format defined that everyone can use.
I used to use slackware (still do on most boxes) and I'd find some app I wanted to install, alas no slackware.tgz package. Maybe an rpm or something (but rpm2tgz never worked for me), so I'd end up installing from source.
So now I'm trying out gentoo. Oops, no ebuild for what I want. Or maybe I don't know the name of it. After browsing around the portage trees for an hour or so, I'm back to installing from source tarballs again.
Distros, well even projects, all have different ideas of where stuff should go, too./bin,/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin.../opt/bin (what does opt mean?) hell OpenLDAP seems to like to put it's daemons in/usr/libexec.
I frankly don't see the point in the unix style "binaries in this folder, config files in this one, data in this one" thing. I like the c:\program files\nameofprogram and "My Documents" way of handling things. That'll never change in unix land, but it sure is nice.
I understand the logic.. You can have all the/*/bin folders on seperate read-only partitions or network shares,/tmp on a ramdisk,/home on an nfs share, etc.. But who does that on a desktop system? Most have one big partition for all of it.
But the active people are much less likely to sit on their asses for hours at a time perusing a bunch of song titles deciding which one they want for free.
And active people eat Big Mac's too. They just dont eat 3 of them at a sitting every day.
And if you think eating 3 of McD's taco salads instead will make you thin and attractive, you're a moron.
There are a million ISA/PCI/etc devices like that. I remember in high school we had a prototyping I/O card for electronics class, it had a fat port on the back that you could connect to an optional external card that had screwdown terminals. Programming it was dead simple, we'd mock stuff up in QuickBasic but you could have used anything you wanted.
The coolest thing about it, was that it was - to the computer - an addon LPT port. So you could build your gizmo easily with the screw-down terminals, and once it was working you could easily replace the bare wires to the IO card with a DB25 connector and have an actual useful thing.
Google around, there are a million such devices. They dont come standard on Dells because the people who would want one build their own machines.
I found it funny.. Kids spend big bucks on primo thermal compounds to make their computer go faster when toothpaste works just as well (yeah, it'll dry out and only work for a few days, but still)..
I dunno, they'll pass up row after row of (many much better) books that say "for beginners", "introduction to" or "learn.... in 10 easy steps" and buy the one that says "idiot" or "dummy".
It's a "see I'm not one of them, I'm just like you!" thing.
And when I see someone reading the books in public - invariably proudly held aloft rather than flat on a table so everyone can see what the title is - it is a reflection of the reader.
It's Unixes. Stupid latin rules don't apply to proper nouns.
If there was a club of people named Felix, you'd call them Felixes, not Felii, Felixen or Felices.
Pluralizing any proper noun computer term is either adding an s or an es. Anything else (the tireless virii thing) is just people trying to sound smarter or more cultured than they are.
Boxen isnt a word either. That's just utterly stupid.
I guess folks dont want to be seen as a nerd, and think it's cool to not understand a computer or whatever. That was the thing in high school, no girl would ever admit she was good at math.
I knew a girl who had a 97% average in calculus, but would act stupid and go "tee hee i dont know" when she needed to figure out the 10% tip for a dinner bill. Stupid is supposed to be sexy, or something.
All the same, I don't know why people line up to buy books that define them as a dummy or idiot.
I could see "Unix for people who have no clue about Unix". Hell, there are plenty of dummy books about stuff I have no clue about, but I'm not a dummy, and wouldnt buy them.
Why not an advanced series: "The smelly fat sexless windbags guide to sendmail.cf"? Or "The sleazeball ambulance chasers guide to civil aquisition law"?
Whatever, label yourselves an idiot or a dummy. When I see someone with one of those books, I sure do.
It's just one of the oddest cultural phenomenons out there. No wonder America is slipping in science and tech, when it's cool to be a "dummy" but terribly uncool to be smart.
Then only the rich companies who could afford to lose a patent fight would be allowed into the system.
Say I invent something, an actual unique new device. A machine that makes super-fast transistors out of recycled chewing gum or something.
Then sleaze-co starts using my invention, I try to sue. They bring a barrage of buzzword-spouting techies and slick lawyers to confuse the hell out of the judge and jury.
Without a billion-dollar war chest, I'd be risking bankruptcy by patenting my invention.
The legal system is an adversarial one. The best fighter wins, and that person is not necessarily in the right.
Would you want to sue Microsoft, knowing you were right and they were wrong, but realizing if the judge doesnt see it that way you'd wind up millions of dollars (or pounds) in the hole?
Slashdot Mirror
Just get text dumps of shakespeare plays, send them through a text to speech app, and pretend it's the "great elizabethan literature as performed by steven hawking" show.
Because you're fired!
We have 100's of resume's for your "boring job", none of which will waste company time downloading talk radio shows on the internet. What kind of lameass pirates talk radio shows anyways? That's besides the point. Clean out your cubicle.
Signed,
Your Boss
Of course it's nothing new. It's been called a diary, or journal, or log book for hundreds of years.
I'm not looking to pay a monthly fee for streaming movies (which never works, I'd love to see a 500+kbps stream last for two hours over my cablemodem without hiccups).
Streaming video looks like crap.
I'm looking to download the movies - in DivX or whatever - that I can burn to disc and watch in my DivX set-top box, or game console.
Since they're lower quality than DVD, I'd say 5-10 bucks would be a fair price.
It's 10 years old in base 53, a nice round number.
XBox only runs at 700 and can play more than tetris.
Why do people think a game needs a 3.6ghz processor? It's all about the capabilities of the video chipset, and I've been reading a lot about ATI's forays into embedded video lately.
Whether it's the best "textbook" architecture or not, it's entrenched itself in the computer world so deeply that x86 will be around forever.
It works, engineers and coders are familiar with it.. The embedded world is still largely about ASM routines and tight little loops that dont leave the cache, etc, etc.. You can write and test your fancy-shamcy hand-assembled routine at your leisure on your desktop computer.... There are plenty of upsides, and the only downside is the "other stuff looks better on paper" argument.
It's a newcomer to the embedded world, but will no doubt take a strong hold.
It's always Microsoft's problem.
I'd like to know, percentagewise, how many linux/bsd/unix boxes are out there with known security holes that have never been patched.
I mean, patching windows is easy, just clicking a button. Upgrading to the latest version of $APP on a unix machine usually isnt.
Yes, they do. They prevented SP1 from installing on machines with blacklisted corporate keys, but Windows Update has always worked, and they recently announced that even those installs will be able to install SP2. It was covered on /. too.
The reasoning was it was better than having umpteen zillion unpatched boxes out there DDoS'ing their website.
Bikes aren't on the sidewalks and Segway's shouldn't be either.
Sidewalks are for walking, pedestrians. Take your segway on the side of the road.
Most cities will ban them from sidewalks as soon as they show up. Put them into those diamond cyclist lanes.
I don't see what's "bizarre" about the accident. A guy ran into a 3 year old kid and then pissed off before the police showed up, it wouldnt matter if he was on a Segway, skateboard, or even jogging.
Joggers run into kids cars, bikes, people, all the time. I've seen joggers listening to their ipods, both eyes staring intently at their little heartbeat monitor thingie.
There is no car traffic an the mall anymore, IIRC.
I doubt they'd let a Segway in there either, could be packed with explosives or whatnot.
Besides, once you get away from the mall, smithsonian, etc, you're in nothing but the filthiest, dirtiest slum I've seen in my life.
It makes you want to run screaming to the safe streets of downtown Baltimore. I'm not trying to flame either, DC should be a national disgrace. I work 5 minutes outside of DC, where we keep all doors to our office locked because someone once broke in and raped and assaulted the receptionist.
No politician or lobbyist actually lives inside the beltway, of course. They're limoed with escorts daily at taxpayer expense.
Computer drawback #1: You spend more time configurign some games to run properly than you do playing them. Screwing around with resolutions, detail levels, AA and AF, etc, etc..
Computer drawback #2: No good gamepad support. FPS and strategy games are the only genre's which are better with keyboard and mouse. Arcade/platform/racing/etc titles are much more comfortable with a gamepad. No good gamepads exist. I've pissed away countless bucks to have axes out of center or drifting, sticky buttons, etc.. Best PC gamepad I've used - by far - is an xbox gamepad with a usb plug soldered on. This is beyond many people though. And it drags you back to my issue #1, you spend forever configuring the pad for each specific game.
Computer drawback #3: My couch is more comfortable than my task chair, and my widescreen is easier on the eyes than my monitor.
This is an old and lame debate. Some games I love on computer, for the extra detail, online, etc.. Some games I wouldnt play anywhere but on a console or in an arcade.
The solution, own both.
Man they see those wannabe computer gurus coming.
My system...
Gigabyte SINXP: 100 bucks (great motherboard - dual everything! dual ram, dual RAID controllers SATA and PATA, dual bios..)
3.06 P4, 533 fsb was 300 when I bought it (was the fastest p4 on the block).. Could have gone cheaper with an athlon rig, but as a developer AMD left a bad taste in my mouth years ago and haven't risked it... Anyways, you can get a 3.4 with 800mhz fsb for 2 something
2x80 gig WD caviar's - 80 bucks at best buy after rebate.. A buck of gig for raid 0 silliness.. (No I dont care if my array crashes)
Radeon 9800 non-pro - 150 bucks at Circuit City back when. I cant for the life of me see a real life differnce between this and the pro. Yeah benchmark scores are lower, I'm talking about real life game performance.
100 bucks for the PSU, the 450 watt Antec. Cheap PSUs will bite you in the ass. And a cheap PSU is what Dell/eMachines/etc are going to ship.
And thats the base system. I chucked an old SB Live value edition card in there because the digital out on the onboard sound kept popping. Those are what, 20 bucks these days?
Picked up a new 19" monitor at Office Depot for 90 bucks after rebates. Mid-range monitor, but looks great and is better than anythign I've seen ship with a Dell. LCD panels suck for gaming, IMO. They look crappy outside of their native resolution, and I wont be able to run everything at 1280x1024.. And motion blur is still an issue despite all the claims otherwise..
So 300+100+80+150+20 = 650 bucks for the components. 90 bucks for the monitor, and hell, lets go super crazy and blow 200 bucks for super duper boomslang mice and keyboards and a 50 dollar ratpadz mousepad. (3M makes a very similar pad you can get for 10 bucks at office depot)
So lets round up to $1000 for the whole ball of wax. That leaves me 4000 bucks for the case.
4000 bucks buys a whole fucking lot of LED fans and blinking neon lights.
I guess I forgot other stuff. 120 bucks for a Pioneer A06 DVD+-R(W), and another 40 for a regular DVD-Rom drive. Cant remember what it is, it was just the cheapest one that I bought so I wouldnt gunk up the burner with grimey discs.
Forgot RAM too... A gig of Kingston ValueRAM 400. I don't overclock, and this was the only pair of sticks that work stably in my system - that includes some wayyyyy overpriced Corsair XMS platinum edition mega-shit. That was about 200 bucks.
Anyhow, I really would just love to see what Dell et all ship for $5,000. I know Alienware buyers (yeah the machines are great gaming boxes) take it straight up the ass.
But hell, for $5,000 I'd have dual Athlon64s, X800 XT, 4 gigs of RAM, a RAID-5 array of 15k megasuperawesomeuberdrives, a blowjob hole, etc, etc..
It's not even a gnome thing. I'd like to see a package format defined that everyone can use.
.tgz package. Maybe an rpm or something (but rpm2tgz never worked for me), so I'd end up installing from source.
/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin... /opt/bin (what does opt mean?) hell OpenLDAP seems to like to put it's daemons in /usr/libexec.
/*/bin folders on seperate read-only partitions or network shares, /tmp on a ramdisk, /home on an nfs share, etc.. But who does that on a desktop system? Most have one big partition for all of it.
I used to use slackware (still do on most boxes) and I'd find some app I wanted to install, alas no slackware
So now I'm trying out gentoo. Oops, no ebuild for what I want. Or maybe I don't know the name of it. After browsing around the portage trees for an hour or so, I'm back to installing from source tarballs again.
Distros, well even projects, all have different ideas of where stuff should go, too.
I frankly don't see the point in the unix style "binaries in this folder, config files in this one, data in this one" thing. I like the c:\program files\nameofprogram and "My Documents" way of handling things. That'll never change in unix land, but it sure is nice.
I understand the logic.. You can have all the
Can't people just install their own peer-to-peer and blogging apps?
Why not make an installation system that works as simply as clicking setuppackage.msi is in Windows and let the other problems solve themselves?
Why not just make a working desktop first?
Sheesh. Yeah, this year will be the year of linux-on-the-desktop now that we have integrated blogging. That was sure the barrier for entry to me.
Insightful? This has nothing whatsoever to do with SCO stock.
But the active people are much less likely to sit on their asses for hours at a time perusing a bunch of song titles deciding which one they want for free.
And active people eat Big Mac's too. They just dont eat 3 of them at a sitting every day.
And if you think eating 3 of McD's taco salads instead will make you thin and attractive, you're a moron.
There are a million ISA/PCI/etc devices like that. I remember in high school we had a prototyping I/O card for electronics class, it had a fat port on the back that you could connect to an optional external card that had screwdown terminals. Programming it was dead simple, we'd mock stuff up in QuickBasic but you could have used anything you wanted.
The coolest thing about it, was that it was - to the computer - an addon LPT port. So you could build your gizmo easily with the screw-down terminals, and once it was working you could easily replace the bare wires to the IO card with a DB25 connector and have an actual useful thing.
Google around, there are a million such devices. They dont come standard on Dells because the people who would want one build their own machines.
Have you read this?
I found it funny.. Kids spend big bucks on primo thermal compounds to make their computer go faster when toothpaste works just as well (yeah, it'll dry out and only work for a few days, but still)..
I dunno, they'll pass up row after row of (many much better) books that say "for beginners", "introduction to" or "learn .... in 10 easy steps" and buy the one that says "idiot" or "dummy".
It's a "see I'm not one of them, I'm just like you!" thing.
And when I see someone reading the books in public - invariably proudly held aloft rather than flat on a table so everyone can see what the title is - it is a reflection of the reader.
It's Unixes. Stupid latin rules don't apply to proper nouns.
If there was a club of people named Felix, you'd call them Felixes, not Felii, Felixen or Felices.
Pluralizing any proper noun computer term is either adding an s or an es. Anything else (the tireless virii thing) is just people trying to sound smarter or more cultured than they are.
Boxen isnt a word either. That's just utterly stupid.
my personal favorite is "umount".
Where's the fucking n?
How much productivity is gained by not having to type that n?
And why the second n if the first one was unneeded? Why not umout?
I guess folks dont want to be seen as a nerd, and think it's cool to not understand a computer or whatever. That was the thing in high school, no girl would ever admit she was good at math.
I knew a girl who had a 97% average in calculus, but would act stupid and go "tee hee i dont know" when she needed to figure out the 10% tip for a dinner bill. Stupid is supposed to be sexy, or something.
All the same, I don't know why people line up to buy books that define them as a dummy or idiot.
I could see "Unix for people who have no clue about Unix". Hell, there are plenty of dummy books about stuff I have no clue about, but I'm not a dummy, and wouldnt buy them.
Why not an advanced series: "The smelly fat sexless windbags guide to sendmail.cf"? Or "The sleazeball ambulance chasers guide to civil aquisition law"?
Whatever, label yourselves an idiot or a dummy. When I see someone with one of those books, I sure do.
It's just one of the oddest cultural phenomenons out there. No wonder America is slipping in science and tech, when it's cool to be a "dummy" but terribly uncool to be smart.
Then only the rich companies who could afford to lose a patent fight would be allowed into the system.
Say I invent something, an actual unique new device. A machine that makes super-fast transistors out of recycled chewing gum or something.
Then sleaze-co starts using my invention, I try to sue. They bring a barrage of buzzword-spouting techies and slick lawyers to confuse the hell out of the judge and jury.
Without a billion-dollar war chest, I'd be risking bankruptcy by patenting my invention.
The legal system is an adversarial one. The best fighter wins, and that person is not necessarily in the right.
Would you want to sue Microsoft, knowing you were right and they were wrong, but realizing if the judge doesnt see it that way you'd wind up millions of dollars (or pounds) in the hole?