Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.
A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.
But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.
This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.
When it comes to art, particularly in the realms of entertainment, if it's not in the public domain, it's private property. And includes everything that has to do with private property.
I owned the original Mona Lisa, I could spray-paint it, toss it in a fire, or do whatever else I please with it. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, there are no laws whatsoever about such things with your own property.
Of course, like Lucas, I would be eternally unpopular and infamous for doing such a thing.
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.
After all, for the past 10 years, slashdot has been predicting that we'll be using bacteria, vodka, and other primitive elements to power our laptops non-stop for days.
What the article doesn't point out is that is that there is a strong possibility of a class-action lawsuit on the payouts of shares, as the Board of Directors of NETL did not properly hold the sales process and shop it out.
It seems that $50 for what was a $30 share a few days ago is quite generous, but there's a rather long legal history of boards that breach their fiduciary duties getting into serious legal trouble.
The fact that something like a dozen law firms are already trying to get involved the second this happened shows something is quite fishy about it. Some snippets from google news:
I don't know in what manner Windows precisely goes out of their way to "push you" into new major releases -- other than Windows Update nagging you to patch flagrant security holes to prevent Grandma's PC from becoming a botnet, there's nothing in the OS that does that.
As far it being a treadmill, perhaps that was the case in the 90's. But now? Windows XP came out in October, 2001 with an EOL in April, 2014. Windows Vista came out on January 2007 and has an EOL in April 2017. Given the widespread installations of Windows 7 both at home and in the office, one could expect a similar lifecycle.
As far as the ability to upgrade across major releases goes, watch this video. The guy goes from Windows 1.01 all the way to Windows 7 in VMWare. Other than having to convert to FAT32 and NTFS via LiveCD, the only thing it broke was his desktop background. Doom II still worked in all versions.
While I can certainly see the point he's making, most businesses have had large copier/printer/scanners that can send pdfs to a CIFS share on the network, e-mail pdfs via SMTP, and send faxes for years and years. These copiers typically come with the upgrade after rentals, and there are lesser $50-$100 inkjet home versions for smaller offices as well. A lot of companies do what the author posted and don't have fax machines.
But the main issues aren't signatures or other things mentioned at all: they're human factors and cost factors.
There are two on the sending of faxes:
1. Large and bureaucratic companies still have procedures from the mid-1990s that explicitly list faxes as the method, and it's a mess to get anyone to fix it. No one will disobey these procedures, as it's often a punishable offense. 2. There is rarely any proper setup, much less the required training to end faxing and go paperless. Whether management, IT, or the copier company should do it is irrelevant. No one seems to wish to invest the necessary time for proper training, particularly if there are dozens of facilities and hundreds of office employees.
And two on the receiving of faxes:
3. People will balk on relying on e-mailed pdf's simply because there is a threat of it being lost to a spam filter. These spam filters often can't automatically choose well between a fax and an e-mailed, randomized PDF selling bootleg pills. One important fax lost and all trust is gone. Fax machines don't have this problem. 4. Fax machines often are still used simply to receive, but not always to send. If you are expecting a fax, only faxes will come out of a fax machine. It won't get confused with the dozens of other pages in the big printer/copier device, much less end up with piles of nameless pdfs in a CIFS share.
The reason time is listed as it is is due to the use of sundials. It's based on the angles of the shadows cast by the sun, which varies based on where you are on the earth and the use of a bizarre 1-12 system to measure it twice over. Not to mention humans having 10 fingers to measure with intuitively and a poor approximation of a 360 degrees being the percentage of a circle for the Sun orbiting the Earth (purposefully mis-stated).
Perhaps one could go to metric times or stardates, but even now you could use modern SI conventions far better.In practical use these days, who cares if you use UTC and have to be at work at 0200 hours instead of 8:00AM? The usability of being able to sort dates on an orderly basis under the YYYY-MM-DD convention (e.g. 2011-08-27 instead of 8/27/11) is also another important issue.
Of course, considering that the US still to this day considers adoption of the metric system to be far-out is a huge barrier. Even though no scientist or engineer would measure the precision of their work by the lengths of half their thumbs, size of their feet, the length of their step, or how much an ox can plow in a day. Even though the burden of such conversions caused Mars landers to crash.
If you want to keep current with a browser like Firefox without having to compile your own version, you have to have a system with SSE2 instructions. That means a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, not an ancient late-90s system. Usability for modern web browsing also requires heavy amounts of running javascript with modern DOM/CSS standards, which even P4/A64's can have significant struggles doing. Running Flash 10.X also requires a hefty system, and most P4/A64's barely meet the minimum system requirements.
And Win2K (abandonware since July 2010) still only supports IE6 as its system's browser. Unless you spend a lot of time to customize it to root out any access to the IE6 Trident engine and security model under Win2K, your systems are vulnerable to the same crap US-CERT pointed out in 2004. And Windows XP will be in the same unpatched, abandonware boat as Win2K in little over 2.5 years (April 2014).
Blame it on Windows, but would you really install an exploitable Debian 2.X / or even 3.0 from the same time line in the Linux world? And if you don't care about usability on the web, care about security, and have rock-bottom systems, have people use Lynx. Good luck with that.
As I had pointed out, shipping to Africa is rife with corruption. Don't expect it to arrive if you're not 100% sure it's legitimate, which is something taken for granted in most of Americas/Europe/Asia shipping. UPS will ship systems legitimately at that cost, but Dell also ships their brand new computers for sale to Africa legitimately as well with an advanced, low-cost supply chain. Granted, there's still a huge shipping markup in Africa, but it's far cheaper to just buy new PCs in Africa than to ship ancient and often broken PCs there.
The tax writeoff notion is not even legal. Computers have a straight-line depreciation to scrap value after five years. If you claim the $1500 PC you bought in 1998 with said graphics cards is still worth $1500, it's not legitimate. Especially if you're a business with large numbers of old PCs, you would get busted by your third-party accountants. If you want to skip the dump costs, anything near a minor or major city will have a multi-annual computer recycling event where you can dump old junk all you want.
Prematurely? The latest video card listed would be the 11-year old Voodoo3/4/5 cards. Most of the cards are 15 years old. All of the cards listed worked almost entirely on bizarre proprietary drivers and were built specially for the hardcore gamers of the time.
The only thing that would be dropped in a distro containing modern software is 3D acceleration support, and the cards listed couldn't even render Quake 3 from 11-12 years ago properly, if at all. Support for OpenGL 3.0, which came out in 2008, still isn't finished in Mesa because of support for crapware that.
And it's OSS, so DIY if you really want that support to continue.
A developer talented enough to sustain modern 3D acceleration standards for 15-year old proprietary hardware could do much more for the FLOSS community.
Despite how much people are bashing this decision, I completely agree with what MESA is doing and you're saying.
The cards listed are not just outdated, but ancient and byzantine. Even as a teenager, I recall it being extremely difficult to get mid-90s cards working under Windows for purely 3D gaming functions. Their chipsets followed no standards and were completely proprietary. They pre-dated both OpenGL on the desktop (GLQuake, 1997) and DirectX 6. I had to install bizarre drivers and programs, copy.dll files to game folders, and so forth to get 3D rendering working properly under such cards, even the 1999 Voodoo 3 which also followed the older non-standards. I could imagine that developing for them, particularly to modern standards, would be far worse of a nightmare.
Most graphics cards, integrated or not, shipped in the past 4 years have been built to be beefy enough to support Windows Aero (Windows Vista, 2007). Even 9-10 years ago, even the most basic graphics hardware shipped could at least do OpenGL/DirectX 8 cleanly without proprietary crapware just so they wouldn't freeze when running the 3D text screen saver in Windows XP.
And again, if you have still-functioning 14-year old hardware from the mid-90s and just have to have the pitiful 800x600 16-bit color 3D acceleration (not 2D graphics, those still will work) from that era, grab any distribution of Linux predating changes made on August 27, 2011.
The big question is why someone would want to ship such legacy hardware to Africa in the first place. The fact that there are major non-profits that do so has always baffled me.
A quick look at the UPS shipping calculator indicates it would cost upwards of $1300 just to ship a 60lb box (tower + CRT monitor + accessories) to Lagos, Nigeria, much less transport it via truck to a rural area. One could find far cheaper shipping costs than that, but it's expensive to have legitimate shipping to Africa, as things sent there have a bad record of being confiscated.
For anything within the range of those shipping costs, you could buy two modern systems from a distributor. It costs $577 to purchase a Core 2 Duo system in Lagos. That's a much better deal than dealing with often broken legacy hardware with mid/late-90s graphics cards.
It requires very little in terms of setup -- all you have to do is get a good text editor, like Notepad2, and write a.html file. Feedback to how your code works is as instant as hitting the F5 key in a browser.
There's a lot to with getting started with programming that has to do with barriers to entry. Having to set up a development environment, deal with compiler errors and such, and not getting instant and familiar feedback is quite a barrier.
If you know HTML and CSS, you should have a lot of fun with it. Grab jQuery, too -- it's easy to do amazing things very simply with it, and you'll learn a lot about OOP along the way just using it.
You'll be able to use it very nicely in the future. Once you want to do something else, however soon that is, move onto that with what you've learned.
Paranoia and profits is why you can skip LAN'ing, or even discourage it.
Anything that doesn't have to phone home to function is easily cracked. Roughly ten years ago, I played Starcraft 1 constantly, through single player and dozens of LAN parties, and never paid for it. I never cared much for battle.net.
And unlike 10 years ago, the cases where people cannot phone home with broadband access, or even internet access itself, are rare. Even console systems are borderline dependent on internet access these days. As far as camping/moving/etc goes, most reasonably-populated areas have 3G, and you'll have 3G just about everywhere in a few years.
Therefore, it's rather simple what to do. LANs without internet access are probably only 1% of gameplay these days. Maybe only 1% of gamers won't buy it because of this.
If the game wasn't required to phone home in any manner, perhaps 20% of people will probably just play the game cracked off of bittorrent. The answer's obvious: go with the extra 19% of purchases. Is it fair to those who enjoy LANs? No. Call it tyranny of the majority, call it what you will.
If you want to LAN, you can always play SC1, or just play board games.
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
One only has to remember what things were like with Linux 10 years ago, in the year 2000, to know why the interest just isn't as strong today.
At the time, it had a massive advantage over the Windows 98 platform, which was the common desktop at the time -- it crashed constantly and required formatting every few months, and was vulnerable to total crap like TCP/IP flooding, running unlimitedly powerful.vbs scripts, typing "con con" into a console, and giving IE basically Admin access to your system through ActiveX. Doing anything from zipping a file to hex editing to writing code to making simple video and sound files required outright piracy and the use of horrible freeware -- friendly, open source, cross-platform apps and web apps weren't common. Winamp was a shining example of a great, free program back then, and it wasn't open source and came bundled with AOL crapware.
Linux, on the other hand was rock solid. It didn't crash, it had anything you needed readily available and installable. Need a web server, an IDE, a hex editor, an image editor more advanced than mspaint, PERL, an audio player, an IRC client or anything else? It was there, no running keygens or installing adware. Same with using existing things like ICQ, IRC, the web, usenet, etc. And they were actually competitive in terms of friendliness compared to what was on the Windows platform. You could also script them no problem from a totally OP command line.
But it was a terrible pain to install for a young amateur compared to just popping a LiveCD today. Have fun partitioning your HD with raw fdisk (cfdisk if lucky) and setting up XFree86 by hand to see any graphics. Try setting up non-PNP ISA devices with screwy drivers -- often you had to go hardware swapping for something specific, like a $10 Crystal Sound card. Try rebuilding the Kernel with an ALSA patch to get that to run. Try not using a packaging system for anything -- RPM was terrible at the time, you were better off just compiling things.
But socially, if you could pull it off, you were pretty elite. You had a solid, invulnerable, insanely powerful OS with every tool you'd want at your hands. It was rebellious against the suits and it had the promise of an open source world. The programming was much better -- OpenGL was way, way easier to write for than DirectX 6, which was just nasty, and was cross-platform to boot. The internet population was far more technical at the time and also respected it. Social networking / multimedia was years away from being mainstream at the time. Anyone who ran Linux wasn't a 'n00b' or a 'lamer' on primitive web forums, Usenet, IRC, etc.
Today? Windows XP/Vista/7 has been comparatively stable and isn't nearly as vulnerable, unless you're just stupid. There's mountains of OSS software out there for every task that runs under Windows, if it wasn't built to run under Windows. No one cares that you run Linux, and will just get frustrated if you can't run the 10% of things a PC can. Ten years ago, the biggest PC game -- Quake 3 -- ran great under Linux, but try getting MWF2 to run under it today.
So there's no real motivation to get into it now -- it doesn't have the appeal comparatively it did 10 years ago.
The maturity element is utter silliness. This is like saying "16 year olds shouldn't hold a job."
If you are 15 or 16 years old, you can go into the workforce, and many do so. The workforce has plenty of 18-23 year olds, not to mention people well into their 50s and beyond. This is similar to the people at community colleges.
And like workforces, community colleges don't take any shit. If you even try to pull the stuff you could do in high school in class, you're kicked out. The people who pass the test likely wouldn't, though, and would probably mature faster in an adult environment than they would being stuck in rooms full of 14-15 year old juvenile delinquents.
The notion of being able to test out of compulsory education at a certain age would the best thing to ever happen to America's outdated Prussianist education system.
Seriously, this launch is a bit premature. Sure, such technologies exist, but with no market for it.
Unless they're requiring red and blue glasses, no one can watch it in 3D -- 3D broadcasting requires 240hz televisions alongside enough shutter glasses to cover a 20+ person sports gathering.
The American consumer is already tapped out on debt, since they maxed out their credit cards on flat-panel HDTVs in the age of subprime lending, and are probably only using them to watch low-res basic cable now that they have to pay the bills.
It'll be a good 10-15 years before 3D broadcasting will even be considered normal. Yet it's not entirely stupid -- in the business world, people still fall for the "Reagan Star Wars" tactic. Just convince the competition you're revolutionary and they'll waste all their cash trying to catch up to something infeasible...
Considering how much Japan's economy depends on rare earth metals such as Neodymium.
Take the Prius, for example -- it has about 50lbs of rare earth metals in it alone, and Toyota expects to sell them by the millions by 2012. Not to mention things such as all the consumer electronics Japan makes that also are dependent on them, particularly the flat screen televisions that adorn homes and restaurants alike.
The Japanese still haven't apologized to China to this day for what they did in WW2, and even deny things like the Rape of Nanking even occurred. The Chinese haven't forgotten, however -- state-run television there shows movies about Japanese massacres on a near daily basis. There's also other issues like Taiwan, leftover chemical weapons, national perceptions of one another, and the sort.
Japan had better begin rebuilding their relations quickly with the Chinese -- especially for the US's sake, considering how many high-grade/precision military weapons they use in Afghanistan require them as well. The hundreds of billions of dollars in war reparations the Japanese owe to the Chinese would be worth it to prevent what would be their total economic collapse if China cuts them off...
I still am not entirely sure about this project -- there seems to be more of a reliance on technology as an end in itself, simply crossing fingers for some kind of digital third-world transformation to occur.
Instead of outcomes, they seem to be focusing on outputs, namely laptops distributed. But what are they supposed to do with them practically? Does it give them a pocket library, replacing books if not thousands of books? Will this help them with agriculture? Are there any structured curriculums for learning? Can it do anything with disaster recovery, like help locate food and water? Are there guides on it for setting up sanitation systems and preventing disease?
It seems just to be a bunch of vague educational programs wrapped in sweet talk without any specific outcomes intended.
If you want to see how this turns out, look at America's school system, for example, where there's been at least a 20-year focus on giving every child a computer for the sake of it. Granted, some school systems use technology in an excellent fashion. But how many billions were spent on computers that did nothing more than, on occasion, provide a replacement for typewriters when students needed to type a proper paper?
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.
A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.
But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.
This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.
When it comes to art, particularly in the realms of entertainment, if it's not in the public domain, it's private property. And includes everything that has to do with private property.
I owned the original Mona Lisa, I could spray-paint it, toss it in a fire, or do whatever else I please with it. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, there are no laws whatsoever about such things with your own property.
Of course, like Lucas, I would be eternally unpopular and infamous for doing such a thing.
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.
Just dial 9.1.1.1!
Or in the IPv6 world, 0009:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001.
After all, for the past 10 years, slashdot has been predicting that we'll be using bacteria, vodka, and other primitive elements to power our laptops non-stop for days.
http://slashdot.org/story/01/11/15/1914208/Methanol-Fuel-Cell-Battery-For-Your-Laptop
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/10/17/1630245/Fuel-Cell-Laptop-announced-by-Toshiba
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/03/25/0056230/Enzyme-Bio-Battery-Runs-on-Ethanol
http://slashdot.org/story/03/06/07/2110231/DoCoMo-Will-Launch-Fuel-Cell-Mobile-Phones-By-2005
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/09/08/113239/Bacteria-Powered-Batteries
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/06/03/11/1745258/Laptop-Fuel-Cells-Coming-Soon
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/0110232/Potato-Powered-Batteries-Debut
As with the "Year of the Linux Desktop", I'll believe it when I see it.
The fact that NetLogic has patents that would take 5 years for Broadcom to rival makes it a very worthwhile investment.
But I found those that first link very informative however. All investors do need to read that, especially with the ongoing lawsuit.
What the article doesn't point out is that is that there is a strong possibility of a class-action lawsuit on the payouts of shares, as the Board of Directors of NETL did not properly hold the sales process and shop it out.
It seems that $50 for what was a $30 share a few days ago is quite generous, but there's a rather long legal history of boards that breach their fiduciary duties getting into serious legal trouble.
The fact that something like a dozen law firms are already trying to get involved the second this happened shows something is quite fishy about it. Some snippets from google news:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/harwood-feffer-llp-announces-investigation-of-netlogic-microsystems-inc-2011-09-12
http://www.pr-inside.com/netlogic-microsystems-inc-takeover-under-r2806236.htm
http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20110912006442/en/netlogic/NASDAQ%3A-NETL/netl
I don't know in what manner Windows precisely goes out of their way to "push you" into new major releases -- other than Windows Update nagging you to patch flagrant security holes to prevent Grandma's PC from becoming a botnet, there's nothing in the OS that does that.
As far it being a treadmill, perhaps that was the case in the 90's. But now? Windows XP came out in October, 2001 with an EOL in April, 2014. Windows Vista came out on January 2007 and has an EOL in April 2017. Given the widespread installations of Windows 7 both at home and in the office, one could expect a similar lifecycle.
As far as the ability to upgrade across major releases goes, watch this video. The guy goes from Windows 1.01 all the way to Windows 7 in VMWare. Other than having to convert to FAT32 and NTFS via LiveCD, the only thing it broke was his desktop background. Doom II still worked in all versions.
http://rasteri.blogspot.com/2011/03/chain-of-fools-upgrading-through-every.html
While I can certainly see the point he's making, most businesses have had large copier/printer/scanners that can send pdfs to a CIFS share on the network, e-mail pdfs via SMTP, and send faxes for years and years. These copiers typically come with the upgrade after rentals, and there are lesser $50-$100 inkjet home versions for smaller offices as well. A lot of companies do what the author posted and don't have fax machines.
But the main issues aren't signatures or other things mentioned at all: they're human factors and cost factors.
There are two on the sending of faxes:
1. Large and bureaucratic companies still have procedures from the mid-1990s that explicitly list faxes as the method, and it's a mess to get anyone to fix it. No one will disobey these procedures, as it's often a punishable offense.
2. There is rarely any proper setup, much less the required training to end faxing and go paperless. Whether management, IT, or the copier company should do it is irrelevant. No one seems to wish to invest the necessary time for proper training, particularly if there are dozens of facilities and hundreds of office employees.
And two on the receiving of faxes:
3. People will balk on relying on e-mailed pdf's simply because there is a threat of it being lost to a spam filter. These spam filters often can't automatically choose well between a fax and an e-mailed, randomized PDF selling bootleg pills. One important fax lost and all trust is gone. Fax machines don't have this problem.
4. Fax machines often are still used simply to receive, but not always to send. If you are expecting a fax, only faxes will come out of a fax machine. It won't get confused with the dozens of other pages in the big printer/copier device, much less end up with piles of nameless pdfs in a CIFS share.
The reason time is listed as it is is due to the use of sundials. It's based on the angles of the shadows cast by the sun, which varies based on where you are on the earth and the use of a bizarre 1-12 system to measure it twice over. Not to mention humans having 10 fingers to measure with intuitively and a poor approximation of a 360 degrees being the percentage of a circle for the Sun orbiting the Earth (purposefully mis-stated).
Perhaps one could go to metric times or stardates, but even now you could use modern SI conventions far better .In practical use these days, who cares if you use UTC and have to be at work at 0200 hours instead of 8:00AM? The usability of being able to sort dates on an orderly basis under the YYYY-MM-DD convention (e.g. 2011-08-27 instead of 8/27/11) is also another important issue.
Of course, considering that the US still to this day considers adoption of the metric system to be far-out is a huge barrier. Even though no scientist or engineer would measure the precision of their work by the lengths of half their thumbs, size of their feet, the length of their step, or how much an ox can plow in a day. Even though the burden of such conversions caused Mars landers to crash.
Precisely.
If you want to keep current with a browser like Firefox without having to compile your own version, you have to have a system with SSE2 instructions. That means a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, not an ancient late-90s system. Usability for modern web browsing also requires heavy amounts of running javascript with modern DOM/CSS standards, which even P4/A64's can have significant struggles doing. Running Flash 10.X also requires a hefty system, and most P4/A64's barely meet the minimum system requirements.
And Win2K (abandonware since July 2010) still only supports IE6 as its system's browser. Unless you spend a lot of time to customize it to root out any access to the IE6 Trident engine and security model under Win2K, your systems are vulnerable to the same crap US-CERT pointed out in 2004. And Windows XP will be in the same unpatched, abandonware boat as Win2K in little over 2.5 years (April 2014).
Blame it on Windows, but would you really install an exploitable Debian 2.X / or even 3.0 from the same time line in the Linux world? And if you don't care about usability on the web, care about security, and have rock-bottom systems, have people use Lynx. Good luck with that.
As I had pointed out, shipping to Africa is rife with corruption. Don't expect it to arrive if you're not 100% sure it's legitimate, which is something taken for granted in most of Americas/Europe/Asia shipping. UPS will ship systems legitimately at that cost, but Dell also ships their brand new computers for sale to Africa legitimately as well with an advanced, low-cost supply chain. Granted, there's still a huge shipping markup in Africa, but it's far cheaper to just buy new PCs in Africa than to ship ancient and often broken PCs there.
The tax writeoff notion is not even legal. Computers have a straight-line depreciation to scrap value after five years. If you claim the $1500 PC you bought in 1998 with said graphics cards is still worth $1500, it's not legitimate. Especially if you're a business with large numbers of old PCs, you would get busted by your third-party accountants. If you want to skip the dump costs, anything near a minor or major city will have a multi-annual computer recycling event where you can dump old junk all you want.
Prematurely? The latest video card listed would be the 11-year old Voodoo3/4/5 cards. Most of the cards are 15 years old. All of the cards listed worked almost entirely on bizarre proprietary drivers and were built specially for the hardcore gamers of the time.
The only thing that would be dropped in a distro containing modern software is 3D acceleration support, and the cards listed couldn't even render Quake 3 from 11-12 years ago properly, if at all. Support for OpenGL 3.0, which came out in 2008, still isn't finished in Mesa because of support for crapware that.
And it's OSS, so DIY if you really want that support to continue.
A developer talented enough to sustain modern 3D acceleration standards for 15-year old proprietary hardware could do much more for the FLOSS community.
Despite how much people are bashing this decision, I completely agree with what MESA is doing and you're saying.
The cards listed are not just outdated, but ancient and byzantine. Even as a teenager, I recall it being extremely difficult to get mid-90s cards working under Windows for purely 3D gaming functions. Their chipsets followed no standards and were completely proprietary. They pre-dated both OpenGL on the desktop (GLQuake, 1997) and DirectX 6. I had to install bizarre drivers and programs, copy .dll files to game folders, and so forth to get 3D rendering working properly under such cards, even the 1999 Voodoo 3 which also followed the older non-standards. I could imagine that developing for them, particularly to modern standards, would be far worse of a nightmare.
Most graphics cards, integrated or not, shipped in the past 4 years have been built to be beefy enough to support Windows Aero (Windows Vista, 2007). Even 9-10 years ago, even the most basic graphics hardware shipped could at least do OpenGL/DirectX 8 cleanly without proprietary crapware just so they wouldn't freeze when running the 3D text screen saver in Windows XP.
And again, if you have still-functioning 14-year old hardware from the mid-90s and just have to have the pitiful 800x600 16-bit color 3D acceleration (not 2D graphics, those still will work) from that era, grab any distribution of Linux predating changes made on August 27, 2011.
The big question is why someone would want to ship such legacy hardware to Africa in the first place. The fact that there are major non-profits that do so has always baffled me.
A quick look at the UPS shipping calculator indicates it would cost upwards of $1300 just to ship a 60lb box (tower + CRT monitor + accessories) to Lagos, Nigeria, much less transport it via truck to a rural area. One could find far cheaper shipping costs than that, but it's expensive to have legitimate shipping to Africa, as things sent there have a bad record of being confiscated.
For anything within the range of those shipping costs, you could buy two modern systems from a distributor. It costs $577 to purchase a Core 2 Duo system in Lagos. That's a much better deal than dealing with often broken legacy hardware with mid/late-90s graphics cards.
http://www.eqhall.com/details.php?productID=00013
Simple, use javascript.
It requires very little in terms of setup -- all you have to do is get a good text editor, like Notepad2, and write a .html file. Feedback to how your code works is as instant as hitting the F5 key in a browser.
There's a lot to with getting started with programming that has to do with barriers to entry. Having to set up a development environment, deal with compiler errors and such, and not getting instant and familiar feedback is quite a barrier.
If you know HTML and CSS, you should have a lot of fun with it. Grab jQuery, too -- it's easy to do amazing things very simply with it, and you'll learn a lot about OOP along the way just using it.
You'll be able to use it very nicely in the future. Once you want to do something else, however soon that is, move onto that with what you've learned.
Paranoia and profits is why you can skip LAN'ing, or even discourage it.
Anything that doesn't have to phone home to function is easily cracked. Roughly ten years ago, I played Starcraft 1 constantly, through single player and dozens of LAN parties, and never paid for it. I never cared much for battle.net.
And unlike 10 years ago, the cases where people cannot phone home with broadband access, or even internet access itself, are rare. Even console systems are borderline dependent on internet access these days. As far as camping/moving/etc goes, most reasonably-populated areas have 3G, and you'll have 3G just about everywhere in a few years.
Therefore, it's rather simple what to do. LANs without internet access are probably only 1% of gameplay these days. Maybe only 1% of gamers won't buy it because of this.
If the game wasn't required to phone home in any manner, perhaps 20% of people will probably just play the game cracked off of bittorrent. The answer's obvious: go with the extra 19% of purchases. Is it fair to those who enjoy LANs? No. Call it tyranny of the majority, call it what you will.
If you want to LAN, you can always play SC1, or just play board games.
You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.
Blizzard knows this, and thus they take their time. A lot of time they spend on their core values (gameplay first, commit to quality, embrace your inner geek, etc) requires constant communication, and adding people makes this worse -- communication channels increase geometrically as people are added to a project.
For example, doubling the number of people on a team will quadruple the number of people who can talk to each other, making it much more difficult to synchronize efforts consistently. 50 developers will have 50 * (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.
Not to mention that new employees require significant training, or else they'll introduce significant amount of bugs and flaws into a program or other creative effort. You can actually end up worse than you started if you have more bugs, gameplay issues, inconsistent storylines, and so forth to fix at the end of the day than the beginning.
This is called Brooks' Law, and was detailed in 1975 by Fred Brooks in the book 'The Mythical Man Month'. Wikipedia article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
My first name: "where 1=1 "
My last name: "'; drop table users; --"
One only has to remember what things were like with Linux 10 years ago, in the year 2000, to know why the interest just isn't as strong today.
At the time, it had a massive advantage over the Windows 98 platform, which was the common desktop at the time -- it crashed constantly and required formatting every few months, and was vulnerable to total crap like TCP/IP flooding, running unlimitedly powerful .vbs scripts, typing "con con" into a console, and giving IE basically Admin access to your system through ActiveX. Doing anything from zipping a file to hex editing to writing code to making simple video and sound files required outright piracy and the use of horrible freeware -- friendly, open source, cross-platform apps and web apps weren't common. Winamp was a shining example of a great, free program back then, and it wasn't open source and came bundled with AOL crapware.
Linux, on the other hand was rock solid. It didn't crash, it had anything you needed readily available and installable. Need a web server, an IDE, a hex editor, an image editor more advanced than mspaint, PERL, an audio player, an IRC client or anything else? It was there, no running keygens or installing adware. Same with using existing things like ICQ, IRC, the web, usenet, etc. And they were actually competitive in terms of friendliness compared to what was on the Windows platform. You could also script them no problem from a totally OP command line.
But it was a terrible pain to install for a young amateur compared to just popping a LiveCD today. Have fun partitioning your HD with raw fdisk (cfdisk if lucky) and setting up XFree86 by hand to see any graphics. Try setting up non-PNP ISA devices with screwy drivers -- often you had to go hardware swapping for something specific, like a $10 Crystal Sound card. Try rebuilding the Kernel with an ALSA patch to get that to run. Try not using a packaging system for anything -- RPM was terrible at the time, you were better off just compiling things.
But socially, if you could pull it off, you were pretty elite. You had a solid, invulnerable, insanely powerful OS with every tool you'd want at your hands. It was rebellious against the suits and it had the promise of an open source world. The programming was much better -- OpenGL was way, way easier to write for than DirectX 6, which was just nasty, and was cross-platform to boot. The internet population was far more technical at the time and also respected it. Social networking / multimedia was years away from being mainstream at the time. Anyone who ran Linux wasn't a 'n00b' or a 'lamer' on primitive web forums, Usenet, IRC, etc.
Today? Windows XP/Vista/7 has been comparatively stable and isn't nearly as vulnerable, unless you're just stupid. There's mountains of OSS software out there for every task that runs under Windows, if it wasn't built to run under Windows. No one cares that you run Linux, and will just get frustrated if you can't run the 10% of things a PC can. Ten years ago, the biggest PC game -- Quake 3 -- ran great under Linux, but try getting MWF2 to run under it today.
So there's no real motivation to get into it now -- it doesn't have the appeal comparatively it did 10 years ago.
The maturity element is utter silliness. This is like saying "16 year olds shouldn't hold a job."
If you are 15 or 16 years old, you can go into the workforce, and many do so. The workforce has plenty of 18-23 year olds, not to mention people well into their 50s and beyond. This is similar to the people at community colleges.
And like workforces, community colleges don't take any shit. If you even try to pull the stuff you could do in high school in class, you're kicked out. The people who pass the test likely wouldn't, though, and would probably mature faster in an adult environment than they would being stuck in rooms full of 14-15 year old juvenile delinquents.
The notion of being able to test out of compulsory education at a certain age would the best thing to ever happen to America's outdated Prussianist education system.
Seriously, this launch is a bit premature. Sure, such technologies exist, but with no market for it.
Unless they're requiring red and blue glasses, no one can watch it in 3D -- 3D broadcasting requires 240hz televisions alongside enough shutter glasses to cover a 20+ person sports gathering.
The American consumer is already tapped out on debt, since they maxed out their credit cards on flat-panel HDTVs in the age of subprime lending, and are probably only using them to watch low-res basic cable now that they have to pay the bills.
It'll be a good 10-15 years before 3D broadcasting will even be considered normal. Yet it's not entirely stupid -- in the business world, people still fall for the "Reagan Star Wars" tactic. Just convince the competition you're revolutionary and they'll waste all their cash trying to catch up to something infeasible...
Considering how much Japan's economy depends on rare earth metals such as Neodymium.
Take the Prius, for example -- it has about 50lbs of rare earth metals in it alone, and Toyota expects to sell them by the millions by 2012. Not to mention things such as all the consumer electronics Japan makes that also are dependent on them, particularly the flat screen televisions that adorn homes and restaurants alike.
The Japanese still haven't apologized to China to this day for what they did in WW2, and even deny things like the Rape of Nanking even occurred. The Chinese haven't forgotten, however -- state-run television there shows movies about Japanese massacres on a near daily basis. There's also other issues like Taiwan, leftover chemical weapons, national perceptions of one another, and the sort.
Japan had better begin rebuilding their relations quickly with the Chinese -- especially for the US's sake, considering how many high-grade/precision military weapons they use in Afghanistan require them as well. The hundreds of billions of dollars in war reparations the Japanese owe to the Chinese would be worth it to prevent what would be their total economic collapse if China cuts them off...
I still am not entirely sure about this project -- there seems to be more of a reliance on technology as an end in itself, simply crossing fingers for some kind of digital third-world transformation to occur.
Instead of outcomes, they seem to be focusing on outputs, namely laptops distributed. But what are they supposed to do with them practically? Does it give them a pocket library, replacing books if not thousands of books? Will this help them with agriculture? Are there any structured curriculums for learning? Can it do anything with disaster recovery, like help locate food and water? Are there guides on it for setting up sanitation systems and preventing disease?
It seems just to be a bunch of vague educational programs wrapped in sweet talk without any specific outcomes intended.
If you want to see how this turns out, look at America's school system, for example, where there's been at least a 20-year focus on giving every child a computer for the sake of it. Granted, some school systems use technology in an excellent fashion. But how many billions were spent on computers that did nothing more than, on occasion, provide a replacement for typewriters when students needed to type a proper paper?
Let's hope the same doesn't happen here.