Whatever company outsources the labor or imports/markets the dangerous merchandise should be held accountable. So if Barbie comes back with lead paint, Mattel should pay the price.
In response to all of the questions of the form "can it play flash". It's up to Adobe, not so much the hardware manufacturer. A manufacturer can included chips to offload video processing, etc., but if Adobe doesn't take advantage of the hardware capabilities, Flash won't play well.
Flash is terrible on everything but Windows. My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 can play 720p nicely using mplayer, but can't play 480p acceptably in flash. The problem is Adobe's exclusive control over the flash player. We need a real standard, hence the debate over html5 video codec inclusion.
So please realize more times than not that the shortcoming is with flash and Adobe, not with the hardware.
As expected, there are numerous responses with concerns about 911 availability. The biggest issue is that 911 depends on the reliability of the network it is used on. So since it's so important, why are we piggy backing it on other services. Maybe the FCC should set aside part of the spectrum for emergency frequencies and we can all have emergency radios in our house. Even if it's just an emergency beacon device of some sort, it might be enough.
I've got a UPS on mine. For those not technically inclined the VOIP provider could install one that alerted the provider when it needed replacement. It doesn't take much power to keep an ATA running so it shouldn't cost much. My cable internet has continued working on power outages, so I'm guessing the cable company (Cox) has battery backup in their system.
The phone companies use batteries for the same purpose. According to someone I know who worked for AT&T for 30 years, they started scaling back their battery capacity due to cost.
NTFS is recommended several times in response to this article and it troubles me. The next de facto portable filesystem standard is being determined by us in the same way mp3 was made a standard. Ask yourself if you really want to see NTFS become the standard? Personally I'd rather see a truly open filesystem become standard and I really don't want to see Microsoft have the leverage to make more patent threats. If you agree with me and have some integrity, please recommend an open standard.
Valid points. However, you're overlooking the significance of the $99 price point. This is what should be defined as a netbook instead of the $400 + options we've been calling netbooks. I'm impressed that they got wireless g and a 4 hour battery at this price. And the specs are very usable for a Linux distro. Use Abiword and Gnumeric instead of openoffice and firefox 3.5 is pretty zippy. That'll take care of most users. It probably doesn't have enough speed to handle flash, but what does. How's gnash coming these days?
These would do well if they could get them in Walmart. $99 for many people is not a large purchase and many people would pick them up as an extra "surf from the couch" laptop. I hope there continues to be a sub $100 laptop. Next year, maybe it will be a cortex A9 with some 3d graphics capabilities, wireless n and a 20G SSD. And maybe we'll even see models close to $70.
I wish dpkg would allow local installation without root privs. It would be a better option for installing.debs from 3rd party sources and would prevent malware from modifying rc scripts and such. Malware could still run to some capacity, but it'd be a step in the right direction.
The ideal solution would be to have a content agnostic data pipe, be it fiber, copper, or wireless. Most of us are stuck with the idea of "phone companies" and "cable companies". The most useful thing the government can do is make sure we have access to fast and RELIABLE data connections. The content companies can then compete in a free market and we'll have real choice.
My sister-in-law needed it for some course work as did one of my sister's friends. I think Microsoft knows who to target. In these cases it was a school requirement. It's easy to ignore silverlight for websites you don't have to visit, but there are ways of force feeding it.
I'd also like to add that Netflix movies are buffered at intervals instead of at a constant bitrate. This works really well with the likes of Cox's SpeedBoost and seems like it would not trigger Comcast's throttling.
Not trying to take up for Comcast, just informing. I use Cox and I've got two Rokus that sometimes play simultaneously and I've not had issues.
I've got a Roku hooked up to a 50" 1080p TV I watch at about 10 feet away. 720p streams from Netflix are 2Mbps and they look GOOD if the source material was good. Much better than youtube or VHS. Most of netflix videos are comparable to DVD quality about 95% of the time. Certain scenes (dark, foggy) will reveal compression artifacts, but generally compression artifacts are not an issue. I think 480p streams are about 1.3 Mbps.
I'm one to be bugged by poor quality. For example, I leave my mythtv HD recordings in their native format (don't transcode to mp4) because picture quality means more to me than file size. Picture quality is a subjective thing, but I think all but the most critical viewers would find Netflix's streams to be of good quality. And by good I mean, better than acceptable.
If i were you, i would work for FREE on your sparetime, what is what you are essentially doing
I do plenty of coding in my spare time that's NOT work. Like processing of my digital photos and videos for instance. Or a script to let me know when an item's price drops at Newegg. You seem to view ALL coding as work. I'm nearly 32 and I truly enjoy writing programs. I need to rest my eyes, hands, get exercise, etc. I enjoy time with my family and I enjoy playing sports, but I do not shun programming while not at "work".
There are facets of work life that are stressful and require "RELAXATION" time, but for me, coding is not one of them. I receive the same enjoyment and satisfaction from coding, whether it be at home or work. I have believed for some time and I maintain from my experience that the best craftsmen are those that truly enjoy the craft.
How about software that drops restrictions after X years. Does anyone know of an existing license that does this? I'm working on software that I want to revert to BSD after a time period.
Say you want a snapshot for each of 30 days. You'll end up with a directory for each day. If you started with 12TB and 1TB changed, your backups for 30 days combined will be 13TB. Plus there are no funky metadata formats.
Installed it and played with it. The interface is NOTHING like OpenOffice. It's built on Eclipse so uses SWT and looks much nicer than OpenOffice (because it's mostly native widgets I think). Another large difference is that everything is contained in a single frame. New documents are opened in tabs within the frame. I couldn't find a way to break a tab out into its own window in the short time I tested it. I'm sure some people would prefer multiple windows.
It would be nice if this got some significant market share and helped to push open formats. Interesting.
I went to IBM's site, downloaded it and as I was trying to install it, dpkg (or frontend) told me a newer version was available in the repo. Sure enough:
~$ sudo aptitude install symphony [sudo] password for (me): Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done The following NEW packages will be installed:
symphony 0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded. Need to get 189MB of archives. After unpacking 455MB will be used. Writing extended state information... Done Get:1 http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty/partner symphony 1.3-1jaunty1 [189MB]
Correct, but in the context GPS is obviously short for GPS Receiver as nobody would mistakenly understand that it comes with satellites too. There's never any confusion when someone says they have a GPS Nav in their car or that their phone has a GPS. Very unlike the CPU example I gave which is altogether incorrect. Context DOES matter and allows for some level of inexactness. Otherwise, communication would be too cumbersome. And that was my point. I get confused when a semi-knowledgeable computer user says their "CPU is broken" because it's confusing even in the context of computer systems.
The original post was about misinterpretation and/or misuse of the term "memory". It was ambiguous to slashdot users and in my experience this happens too frequently in computer system discussions among both laymen and professionals. I think it's somewhat to blame on the lack of sufficient terminology.
Slashdot Mirror
Typing in notepad for 11 hours? Why?
Whatever company outsources the labor or imports/markets the dangerous merchandise should be held accountable. So if Barbie comes back with lead paint, Mattel should pay the price.
In response to all of the questions of the form "can it play flash". It's up to Adobe, not so much the hardware manufacturer. A manufacturer can included chips to offload video processing, etc., but if Adobe doesn't take advantage of the hardware capabilities, Flash won't play well.
Flash is terrible on everything but Windows. My 3 year old Pentium-M laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 can play 720p nicely using mplayer, but can't play 480p acceptably in flash. The problem is Adobe's exclusive control over the flash player. We need a real standard, hence the debate over html5 video codec inclusion.
So please realize more times than not that the shortcoming is with flash and Adobe, not with the hardware.
As expected, there are numerous responses with concerns about 911 availability. The biggest issue is that 911 depends on the reliability of the network it is used on. So since it's so important, why are we piggy backing it on other services. Maybe the FCC should set aside part of the spectrum for emergency frequencies and we can all have emergency radios in our house. Even if it's just an emergency beacon device of some sort, it might be enough.
I've got a UPS on mine. For those not technically inclined the VOIP provider could install one that alerted the provider when it needed replacement. It doesn't take much power to keep an ATA running so it shouldn't cost much. My cable internet has continued working on power outages, so I'm guessing the cable company (Cox) has battery backup in their system.
The phone companies use batteries for the same purpose. According to someone I know who worked for AT&T for 30 years, they started scaling back their battery capacity due to cost.
If you're doing .NET, you're married to Microsoft.
In my eyes, the main thing mono has done is prove that .NET is not cross platform.
NTFS is recommended several times in response to this article and it troubles me. The next de facto portable filesystem standard is being determined by us in the same way mp3 was made a standard. Ask yourself if you really want to see NTFS become the standard? Personally I'd rather see a truly open filesystem become standard and I really don't want to see Microsoft have the leverage to make more patent threats. If you agree with me and have some integrity, please recommend an open standard.
Valid points. However, you're overlooking the significance of the $99 price point. This is what should be defined as a netbook instead of the $400 + options we've been calling netbooks. I'm impressed that they got wireless g and a 4 hour battery at this price. And the specs are very usable for a Linux distro. Use Abiword and Gnumeric instead of openoffice and firefox 3.5 is pretty zippy. That'll take care of most users. It probably doesn't have enough speed to handle flash, but what does. How's gnash coming these days?
These would do well if they could get them in Walmart. $99 for many people is not a large purchase and many people would pick them up as an extra "surf from the couch" laptop. I hope there continues to be a sub $100 laptop. Next year, maybe it will be a cortex A9 with some 3d graphics capabilities, wireless n and a 20G SSD. And maybe we'll even see models close to $70.
They are training your spam filters.
I wish dpkg would allow local installation without root privs. It would be a better option for installing .debs from 3rd party sources and would prevent malware from modifying rc scripts and such. Malware could still run to some capacity, but it'd be a step in the right direction.
Cartilage is still a problem. When it's gone it's gone, kinda like tread on a tire.
Look, my first car analogy on slashdot!
The ideal solution would be to have a content agnostic data pipe, be it fiber, copper, or wireless. Most of us are stuck with the idea of "phone companies" and "cable companies". The most useful thing the government can do is make sure we have access to fast and RELIABLE data connections. The content companies can then compete in a free market and we'll have real choice.
This could just be a problem with your router. Maybe it struggles to handle all of the torrent connections.
My sister-in-law needed it for some course work as did one of my sister's friends. I think Microsoft knows who to target. In these cases it was a school requirement. It's easy to ignore silverlight for websites you don't have to visit, but there are ways of force feeding it.
I'd also like to add that Netflix movies are buffered at intervals instead of at a constant bitrate. This works really well with the likes of Cox's SpeedBoost and seems like it would not trigger Comcast's throttling.
Not trying to take up for Comcast, just informing. I use Cox and I've got two Rokus that sometimes play simultaneously and I've not had issues.
I've got a Roku hooked up to a 50" 1080p TV I watch at about 10 feet away. 720p streams from Netflix are 2Mbps and they look GOOD if the source material was good. Much better than youtube or VHS. Most of netflix videos are comparable to DVD quality about 95% of the time. Certain scenes (dark, foggy) will reveal compression artifacts, but generally compression artifacts are not an issue. I think 480p streams are about 1.3 Mbps.
I'm one to be bugged by poor quality. For example, I leave my mythtv HD recordings in their native format (don't transcode to mp4) because picture quality means more to me than file size. Picture quality is a subjective thing, but I think all but the most critical viewers would find Netflix's streams to be of good quality. And by good I mean, better than acceptable.
If the guy was dishonest enough to backdate the document, he may very well backdate the metadata too.
If i were you, i would work for FREE on your sparetime, what is what you are essentially doing
I do plenty of coding in my spare time that's NOT work. Like processing of my digital photos and videos for instance. Or a script to let me know when an item's price drops at Newegg. You seem to view ALL coding as work. I'm nearly 32 and I truly enjoy writing programs. I need to rest my eyes, hands, get exercise, etc. I enjoy time with my family and I enjoy playing sports, but I do not shun programming while not at "work".
There are facets of work life that are stressful and require "RELAXATION" time, but for me, coding is not one of them. I receive the same enjoyment and satisfaction from coding, whether it be at home or work. I have believed for some time and I maintain from my experience that the best craftsmen are those that truly enjoy the craft.
How about software that drops restrictions after X years. Does anyone know of an existing license that does this? I'm working on software that I want to revert to BSD after a time period.
Linux does 100% of what I need. Windows doesn't. Windows must be worthless.
Using rsync with hard links lets you version your backups with good space efficiency and a simple structure.
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
Say you want a snapshot for each of 30 days. You'll end up with a directory for each day. If you started with 12TB and 1TB changed, your backups for 30 days combined will be 13TB. Plus there are no funky metadata formats.
And factor in gross weight. A large truck does much more damage to the road than a small car.
Installed it and played with it. The interface is NOTHING like OpenOffice. It's built on Eclipse so uses SWT and looks much nicer than OpenOffice (because it's mostly native widgets I think). Another large difference is that everything is contained in a single frame. New documents are opened in tabs within the frame. I couldn't find a way to break a tab out into its own window in the short time I tested it. I'm sure some people would prefer multiple windows.
It would be nice if this got some significant market share and helped to push open formats. Interesting.
I went to IBM's site, downloaded it and as I was trying to install it, dpkg (or frontend) told me a newer version was available in the repo. Sure enough:
~$ sudo aptitude install symphony
[sudo] password for (me):
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
symphony
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 189MB of archives. After unpacking 455MB will be used.
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty/partner symphony 1.3-1jaunty1 [189MB]
Cool!
Correct, but in the context GPS is obviously short for GPS Receiver as nobody would mistakenly understand that it comes with satellites too. There's never any confusion when someone says they have a GPS Nav in their car or that their phone has a GPS. Very unlike the CPU example I gave which is altogether incorrect. Context DOES matter and allows for some level of inexactness. Otherwise, communication would be too cumbersome. And that was my point. I get confused when a semi-knowledgeable computer user says their "CPU is broken" because it's confusing even in the context of computer systems.
The original post was about misinterpretation and/or misuse of the term "memory". It was ambiguous to slashdot users and in my experience this happens too frequently in computer system discussions among both laymen and professionals. I think it's somewhat to blame on the lack of sufficient terminology.