The year doesn't really enter into it. If you have the need for more memory, or for specific number-crunching applications, then sure--64 bit is the bee's knees.
Bejeweled is not going to benefit much from a 64 bit processor.
That 64 bit processors are the new hottness does not necessitate migrating to them.
1) Smartphones are not smart enough, nor convenient to type on. Also they are even slower than netbooks. Netbooks hit the "90% of tasks" pretty well. Smartphones are more like 60%. What people are calling netbooks are damn similar to what used to be called sub-notebooks. They've been a popular market segment for many years.
I would love a decent smartphone that would hit that 90% mark. Even 80% would be tempting. But if that comes, I don't think it will be because the smartphones got better. I think it'll be the netbooks that get smaller.
2) You're right. However the netbook does benefit from a purpose-built OS. The Eee-specific Ubuntu distributions, for example. XP is okay since it's so highly compatible. But MS would still, IMO, realize some benefits from a netbook-specific Windows 7 if only to halt the bleeding of marketshare.
3) Nonsense. The need for 64-bit is rare. Even apps like AutoCAD didn't care whether your processor was 32 or 64 bits until v2009, I believe.
Folks have had their shibboleths for a long time. Blind partisanship may make Linux less powerful than it could be, but it does worse things in politics.
Problem is, a lot of people like blind partisanship. Those that don't get shouted over. Lather, rinse, repeat and elect another slate of Republicrats.
Having been pleased, or at least as pleased as anybody could be with Slashdot, by reading the site in "light" mode for many, many years, I don't care one bit about how much "cool" stuff one can do with the site.
I do care that it's slow as molasses, though. And I care that the insightful and useful comments and commenters are becoming thin on the ground. And I care that many of the stories are dupes.
Most coffee is bad. It's amazing how little people know about such a popular drink.
Ordinary grocery store brand whole beans produce a thoroughly adequate pot of coffee if you grind them fresh and use a french press and carefully time your brew. Decant into a vacuum thermos and you've got coffee that will meet or beat practically anything else out there in less than 10 minutes. If the miniscule grounds inherent to coffee made in a french press annoy you, look up Alton Brown's brewing method on YouTube. Good coffee is very simple: freshly ground beans, filtered water at the right temperature and the right brewing time. Sorted.
If, on the other hand, you want a cappuccino or latte or something, paying Starbucks or whoever is worth the dough. Fiddly coffees require good (read expensive), clean machinery and lots of practice. Pays the man his money and move on with your life.
You almost had a point until you tried to equate hieroglyphs with comic books.
Let me guess--big comic book fan? I'm sorry your favorite literature is childish. On the upside you have all those pictures of large, heavily-muscled men to enjoy.
Also, you should actually read some of the classics like Watchmen before you presuppose that reading comics is only juvenile or low-brow entertainment.
I don't need to read Tiger Beat to know that it's not a reliable source of hard news.
Some things are simply self-evident. Books that are mostly pictures with few words are, in a word, unserious. No matter how much people wish it to be otherwise. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but to pretend otherwise is foolish.
I would have said that the fact nobody but comic book nerds know or care about The Watchmen is what kept people away.
Seriously, most people haven't the foggiest idea what The Watchmen is. A million years ago I used to collect comic books, and I've never read The Watchmen. And, more to the point, I don't care that I haven't read them. Because I don't collect comic books anymore.
Sorry, "graphic novels". (Comic book nerds: calling low-brow comic books by a fancy name does not make them high-brow. It makes you look like an idiot who seems to know that reading comic books is juvenile but wants to pretend otherwise.)
I'll probably see The Watchmen, but I'll wait until I can get it on Netflix.
Since student's really don't need to know the details about the planted seed life vs magic combinations of nutrients theories, the curriculum should just omit that part.
Jesus Christ people, you don't use an apostrophe to pluralize a noun. Fucking cut that shit out.
Screw evolution, I'd like to see basic literacy skills make a comeback.
What are our energy needs? How much of that can be provided by wind/solar? What is the environmental impact of massive solar and wind installations? What is the long-term cost of maintenance? What about expanding capacity? Energy storage?
Nothing is free. There are trade-offs for everything. I'm fairly convinced that wind/solar, where feasible, can replace a lot of energy needs and their trade-offs are, long term, less harmful. But it's not magic and shouldn't be sold as such.
I approach the issue from the standpoint of one planning a solar installation on a sailboat. When complete it would completely eliminate the need for an engine to recharge the battery. But even then it's not free. No pressurized water (other than gravity), no electric appliances more powerful than maybe a hand blender, and constant awareness of power usage. It's an acceptable trade-off for me, but it is a trade-off.
I judge Star Trek writers based on whether and how many holodeck episodes they're responsible for. If you wrote holodeck episodes for Voyager, which was about a spaceship alone in the Delta quadrant, you get double the points docked.
The holodeck killed writers' imaginations to cater to the wardrobe department's fantasies.
This article is full of hope. Android is going to sweep away all competition "in three years"; Apple is having trouble, and due to the inherent nature of closed systems, will never be able to fix or improve it; a band of merry gnomes is going to dismantle all of the nuclear missiles in the world and turn them into slides for orphans.
I'm completely in favor of Android developing into a viable competitor, as it will improve both the iPhone and Android platforms. But since we only have ONE phone and a whole lot of enthusiasm, I think reserving judgement isn't such a crazy idea.
I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
I guess that could be true. More likely, however, it's a logical and convenient line that defines the start of human life. You can wait a long time, but a sperm will always be a sperm. However, after fertilization, under ordinary conditions, that bitty blob will become a human life. Any line you draw past that point is pretty arbitrary and subject to a lot of hand-waving.
(Cue "fertilization vs. implantation" arguments.)
Adam and Eve were never represented as having to develop. Moses's staff turned into a snake. Abraham's son Issac was spared from being sacrificed by a sheep that suddenly appeared entangled in a bush.
You've got miracles confused with the teaching of spontaneous generation.
I canceled mine over the secret throttling issue, so I can't join the protest this time around.
Is that another way of saying "I wanted to rent, rip and return DVDs as fast as possible, churning through 20 or more DVDs a month, but Netflix wouldn't let me. IT'S MY RIGHT TO BE A GREEDY DICK!"?
I ask because throttling was pretty much designed to deal with those people. One time I thought I was being throttled, but it turned out that my queue was just empty.
You may not be all that wrong about the '50s and '60s, but it's not because we collectively thought that school was for losers. Remember that the '50s and '60s were a time of great prosperity and innovation in this country, largely because we had escaped serious damage in WWII. This gave the US a tremendous advantage over Europe and many parts of Asia.
As in most things there are tradeoffs. That the US was basically undamaged meant we had a head start. But as the Europeans and Japanese were rebuilding they were also updating. Over the long term this has brought them many advantages compared to our older technology. Example: our high-speed train system basically stopped improving itself around this period, whereas the Europeans were innovating in this field.
Another tradeoff is that being on top makes you soft. We're #1, why should we work any harder? We have always had the greatest steel industry in the world, why should that ever change?
Of course, this state of affairs doesn't have to be permanent. It only becomes permanent when we enshrine mediocrity into unchangeable law in order to prop up one special interest or another.
That radio explains the high accident rate in Japan.
This idea that the Japanese love complexity is weird to me. When I think of Japanese design I think of minimalism--quality over quantity. Maybe this is a generational thing? Or is there an exemption for electronics?
The disruption that the Internet lowers the cost of having your voice heard to near zero. The newspaper's advantage isn't that they have reporters. The newspaper's advantage is that they have editors.
Don't forget about the junky radios. Sure, some are reasonably reliable, but I know too many people--me included--who have gone through too many of them. You basically have to budget for another radio every few years.
I like satellite radio, and think it's a good business model. But they need to unfuck their customer service and put the screws to their hardware manufacturers. Basically they need to run their business like a business and not as some kind of magic money machine based on dick and fart jokes by Howard Stern.
You're making the--quite absurd--assumption that people are not voting because of the Electoral College.
You could drop a daisy-cutter on Chicago and probably not kill anybody who knows what the Electoral College is, much less why it's there.
People don't vote because people are generally lazy and apathetic about things outside their immediate sphere of reference. Which is not to say that they don't have opinions about things outside their sphere--they just don't do anything about those opinions.
Even if that's true, what to do about it? Keeping up-to-date on the best BitTorrent sites is annoying and not worth anybody's time who is older that 25.
Your experience with BitTorrent is a lot different than mine. Maybe I'm not patient enough to figure out all the tricks. You may be able to download BSG 30 minutes after it airs, but what if you want something older? It's either not there, or only two people offer it and it takes a week to download.
I've basically never been satisfied with downloading things from BitTorrent. I'd much rather spend a couple of bucks and get it from iTunes. Or wait for it come out on DVD and have Netflix mail it to me. BitTorrent is a nifty technology that serves a niche, but otherwise it's a bigger PITA than spending some money.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. I can drink coffee right before bed and still conk out reliably.
Maybe I'm more at peace with my soul than you are.
The year doesn't really enter into it. If you have the need for more memory, or for specific number-crunching applications, then sure--64 bit is the bee's knees.
Bejeweled is not going to benefit much from a 64 bit processor.
That 64 bit processors are the new hottness does not necessitate migrating to them.
1) Smartphones are not smart enough, nor convenient to type on. Also they are even slower than netbooks. Netbooks hit the "90% of tasks" pretty well. Smartphones are more like 60%. What people are calling netbooks are damn similar to what used to be called sub-notebooks. They've been a popular market segment for many years. I would love a decent smartphone that would hit that 90% mark. Even 80% would be tempting. But if that comes, I don't think it will be because the smartphones got better. I think it'll be the netbooks that get smaller.
2) You're right. However the netbook does benefit from a purpose-built OS. The Eee-specific Ubuntu distributions, for example. XP is okay since it's so highly compatible. But MS would still, IMO, realize some benefits from a netbook-specific Windows 7 if only to halt the bleeding of marketshare.
3) Nonsense. The need for 64-bit is rare. Even apps like AutoCAD didn't care whether your processor was 32 or 64 bits until v2009, I believe.
Folks have had their shibboleths for a long time. Blind partisanship may make Linux less powerful than it could be, but it does worse things in politics.
Problem is, a lot of people like blind partisanship. Those that don't get shouted over. Lather, rinse, repeat and elect another slate of Republicrats.
Having been pleased, or at least as pleased as anybody could be with Slashdot, by reading the site in "light" mode for many, many years, I don't care one bit about how much "cool" stuff one can do with the site.
I do care that it's slow as molasses, though. And I care that the insightful and useful comments and commenters are becoming thin on the ground. And I care that many of the stories are dupes.
Most coffee is bad. It's amazing how little people know about such a popular drink.
Ordinary grocery store brand whole beans produce a thoroughly adequate pot of coffee if you grind them fresh and use a french press and carefully time your brew. Decant into a vacuum thermos and you've got coffee that will meet or beat practically anything else out there in less than 10 minutes. If the miniscule grounds inherent to coffee made in a french press annoy you, look up Alton Brown's brewing method on YouTube. Good coffee is very simple: freshly ground beans, filtered water at the right temperature and the right brewing time. Sorted.
If, on the other hand, you want a cappuccino or latte or something, paying Starbucks or whoever is worth the dough. Fiddly coffees require good (read expensive), clean machinery and lots of practice. Pays the man his money and move on with your life.
You almost had a point until you tried to equate hieroglyphs with comic books.
Let me guess--big comic book fan? I'm sorry your favorite literature is childish. On the upside you have all those pictures of large, heavily-muscled men to enjoy.
I don't need to read Tiger Beat to know that it's not a reliable source of hard news.
Some things are simply self-evident. Books that are mostly pictures with few words are, in a word, unserious. No matter how much people wish it to be otherwise. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but to pretend otherwise is foolish.
I would have said that the fact nobody but comic book nerds know or care about The Watchmen is what kept people away.
Seriously, most people haven't the foggiest idea what The Watchmen is. A million years ago I used to collect comic books, and I've never read The Watchmen. And, more to the point, I don't care that I haven't read them. Because I don't collect comic books anymore.
Sorry, "graphic novels". (Comic book nerds: calling low-brow comic books by a fancy name does not make them high-brow. It makes you look like an idiot who seems to know that reading comic books is juvenile but wants to pretend otherwise.)
I'll probably see The Watchmen, but I'll wait until I can get it on Netflix.
Jesus Christ people, you don't use an apostrophe to pluralize a noun. Fucking cut that shit out.
Screw evolution, I'd like to see basic literacy skills make a comeback.
What are our energy needs? How much of that can be provided by wind/solar? What is the environmental impact of massive solar and wind installations? What is the long-term cost of maintenance? What about expanding capacity? Energy storage?
Nothing is free. There are trade-offs for everything. I'm fairly convinced that wind/solar, where feasible, can replace a lot of energy needs and their trade-offs are, long term, less harmful. But it's not magic and shouldn't be sold as such.
I approach the issue from the standpoint of one planning a solar installation on a sailboat. When complete it would completely eliminate the need for an engine to recharge the battery. But even then it's not free. No pressurized water (other than gravity), no electric appliances more powerful than maybe a hand blender, and constant awareness of power usage. It's an acceptable trade-off for me, but it is a trade-off.
Nothing is free. It's foolish to say so and demonstrates you haven't thought sufficiently about the problem.
I judge Star Trek writers based on whether and how many holodeck episodes they're responsible for. If you wrote holodeck episodes for Voyager, which was about a spaceship alone in the Delta quadrant, you get double the points docked.
The holodeck killed writers' imaginations to cater to the wardrobe department's fantasies.
I hope the article is right
This article is full of hope. Android is going to sweep away all competition "in three years"; Apple is having trouble, and due to the inherent nature of closed systems, will never be able to fix or improve it; a band of merry gnomes is going to dismantle all of the nuclear missiles in the world and turn them into slides for orphans.
I'm completely in favor of Android developing into a viable competitor, as it will improve both the iPhone and Android platforms. But since we only have ONE phone and a whole lot of enthusiasm, I think reserving judgement isn't such a crazy idea.
I guess that could be true. More likely, however, it's a logical and convenient line that defines the start of human life. You can wait a long time, but a sperm will always be a sperm. However, after fertilization, under ordinary conditions, that bitty blob will become a human life. Any line you draw past that point is pretty arbitrary and subject to a lot of hand-waving.
(Cue "fertilization vs. implantation" arguments.)
You've got miracles confused with the teaching of spontaneous generation.
Is that another way of saying "I wanted to rent, rip and return DVDs as fast as possible, churning through 20 or more DVDs a month, but Netflix wouldn't let me. IT'S MY RIGHT TO BE A GREEDY DICK!"?
I ask because throttling was pretty much designed to deal with those people. One time I thought I was being throttled, but it turned out that my queue was just empty.
You may not be all that wrong about the '50s and '60s, but it's not because we collectively thought that school was for losers. Remember that the '50s and '60s were a time of great prosperity and innovation in this country, largely because we had escaped serious damage in WWII. This gave the US a tremendous advantage over Europe and many parts of Asia.
As in most things there are tradeoffs. That the US was basically undamaged meant we had a head start. But as the Europeans and Japanese were rebuilding they were also updating. Over the long term this has brought them many advantages compared to our older technology. Example: our high-speed train system basically stopped improving itself around this period, whereas the Europeans were innovating in this field.
Another tradeoff is that being on top makes you soft. We're #1, why should we work any harder? We have always had the greatest steel industry in the world, why should that ever change?
Of course, this state of affairs doesn't have to be permanent. It only becomes permanent when we enshrine mediocrity into unchangeable law in order to prop up one special interest or another.
That radio explains the high accident rate in Japan.
This idea that the Japanese love complexity is weird to me. When I think of Japanese design I think of minimalism--quality over quantity. Maybe this is a generational thing? Or is there an exemption for electronics?
Dunno if he was in Falujah or not.
The disruption that the Internet lowers the cost of having your voice heard to near zero. The newspaper's advantage isn't that they have reporters. The newspaper's advantage is that they have editors.
Do you have doubts?
IT IS SCIENCE!
Skepticism is heresy. Turn in your Feynman decoder ring. You are shunned.
Don't forget about the junky radios. Sure, some are reasonably reliable, but I know too many people--me included--who have gone through too many of them. You basically have to budget for another radio every few years.
I like satellite radio, and think it's a good business model. But they need to unfuck their customer service and put the screws to their hardware manufacturers. Basically they need to run their business like a business and not as some kind of magic money machine based on dick and fart jokes by Howard Stern.
You're assuming I picked Chicago because I thought it was in Iowa.
Your assumption is wrong.
Good day.
You're making the--quite absurd--assumption that people are not voting because of the Electoral College.
You could drop a daisy-cutter on Chicago and probably not kill anybody who knows what the Electoral College is, much less why it's there.
People don't vote because people are generally lazy and apathetic about things outside their immediate sphere of reference. Which is not to say that they don't have opinions about things outside their sphere--they just don't do anything about those opinions.
Even if that's true, what to do about it? Keeping up-to-date on the best BitTorrent sites is annoying and not worth anybody's time who is older that 25.
Your experience with BitTorrent is a lot different than mine. Maybe I'm not patient enough to figure out all the tricks. You may be able to download BSG 30 minutes after it airs, but what if you want something older? It's either not there, or only two people offer it and it takes a week to download.
I've basically never been satisfied with downloading things from BitTorrent. I'd much rather spend a couple of bucks and get it from iTunes. Or wait for it come out on DVD and have Netflix mail it to me. BitTorrent is a nifty technology that serves a niche, but otherwise it's a bigger PITA than spending some money.