Nobody runs Steam just for the sake of it. It is a means to an end, that is it is used to play games. Mint is only an option if all the games they played on XP also work on Linux.
Point, but, it sounds like the choice could soon be, play *none* of the games they used to play on XP, or buy another laptop. Given that, maybe playing *some* of the games they used to play on Linux may be at least a stopgap solution.
Itâ(TM)s funny that in a post about going with a new generation of video encoding, people are arguing that the u.s, isps cant upgrade because theyâ(TM)re stuck with an old Infrastructure l!
The argument is that they're comparable situations -- a new, perhaps better technology unable to gain traction because the old technology is too ingrained. Or am I missing something here?
Steam runs on Mint.....just sayin'.... I have Mint running on two xp-era laptops with solid state PATA drives and they're surprisingly snappy. Get an extended lease on life for aging laptops. Unless you just *have* to have one of those new 128 GB Lenovo monstrosities.
Why not convince the people behind a good open source video player (vlc springs to mind) and a good converter tool (handbrake springs to mind) to support a promising new codec? Geeks start using it, and we rapidly see whether it's worth pursuing or not. This strategy has worked for other codecs.
If we sit on our hands waiting for the industry to adopt a new standard, we'll still be using mp4 when cockroaches inherit the earth.
I think his point was that first world countries had been (still are in many areas) hamstrung by having a wired telephone infrastructure in place for a century or more, and reluctance by the local government and providers to replace it with something different. Similar to the way current encoding methods are ingrained.
And yes, emerging countries often end up with a better data infrastructure than the older parts of first world countries. (I'm told cell service is often better too.) I live in a recent suburb outside Portland, OR, and I have fiber to the house. Downtown, 1.5 Mbps DSL is often the only choice.
In my experience, Microsoft tech support participation in forums just gets in the way and increases frustration. Typically it's an offshore person pasting in a script like "Please update your video drivers to the latest version". And then a user who actually read what the OP had written offers the real solution. So, really no loss.
Seems the real use for windows in airplanes is to take pictures of where you are or what you see along the way. If you can still take photos of the virtual windows, that need seems to be met.
With the tales recently of windows failing in airplanes and sucking people out of the plane, maybe getting rid of them would be a good thing.
> What's been missing, in my opinion, is a richer gesture-based GUI.... There should be a rich, standard set of gestures,
There's only one gesture I'd ever use with Windows.
Ok ok I get it, really. My proposal was OS-agnostic because I don't really care who does it as long as it's rich enough to reasonably do content creation and has a library that's available cross-platform. (If M$ does it, it'll probably be an Edge plug-in that just repurposes their accessibility suite, and everyone will lose interest for another decade or so...)
I think the horsepower is already there -- but there needs to be better ways to take advantage of it. What's been missing, in my opinion, is a richer gesture-based GUI. The touch based GUIs we have now are not standard across platforms, and are generally only concerned with desktops, not applications. And so, on our touch device, we can navigate to an app and open it by touch, but once in the app if it has any complexity at all, we're reduced to a KVM or some device that mimics a mouse, because that's the kind of input the app expects. And the solution we're expected to accept is a laptop with a detachable touch sensitive screen for when we want to cruise through netflix, which we have to reattach to the rest of the laptop to do any serious work.
As consumers, we need to significantly raise our expectations. There should be a rich, standard set of gestures, in a commonly available library, that applications can use and understand. You shouldn't have to touch a mouse or use a mouse-analog device for most operations in-app. You shouldn't have to touch a keyboard unless you're inputting a substantial amount of text. (And even then, voice recognition has become a valid replacement for casual text input.)
Faster computers, faster network access, more portability, longer battery life, are all good things, but most of them (with the exception of battery life) are already Good Enough. What we need is something to DO with this hardware besides looking at cat videos.
And I know, I know, content creation is a much smaller market than cat video watching. So I don't expect this to be fixed any time soon.
IANAL, but I did a short (one day) contract for a lawyer not long ago, and one of the things I learned on the assignment is that age is a protected class. It's not just "you can't discriminate on age" but that there are fairly strong penalties for doing so.
The issue I think is that it's just been an assumed way for doing business, and the cost of litigation (another thing I learned at that assignment) and the *length* of litigation (minimum 18 months) makes it highly unlikely that any individual or small group of individuals would pursue it.
So like the Hollywood casting couch, discrimination based on age is something "everyone does but nobody talks about". Unlike the casting couch, I don't see age discrimination ever becoming a big deal. I think mostly because the media cares very little about brackets outside tween-18 and 18-24.
I'd wondered throughout my career whether this would change when boomers started to age out, when there was a higher chance of there being enough motivated people to pursue class action lawsuits, but it didn't really, and now we're pretty much at the end of boomers in the workforce. I suspect things are just going to get more grim for old pharts.
Yes. It *is* arguably a problem with how the government is spending its money. If you've ever worked in the defense industry (I spent 7 years with a military contractor, until I got frustrated and quit) you'd see that this is exactly how it is. Doing work for the government vs commercial requires a massively larger amount of overhead. Whether it *should* or not is an interesting but separate debate.
But as someone else said, this may be sour grapes. SpaceX built cheap, reliable, reusable rockets. They put quite a bit of time and money into those three aspects. It's paying off now. Ariane's huge disadvantage at this point is that they sunk everything into single-use rockets, and it's (probably) too late now to catch up.
> Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
Cable TV companies, for instance.
> In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff.
So be a smaller company, that gets more done cheaper. Or put some of that excess staff on R&D, and see what else can be done. New methods of propulsion, more reliable, longer lasting, and self-maintaining life support systems. Put the "reusable" idea to work on the idea of really long trips. There's still a lot to do in space travel. Building single-use earth-orbit rockets just to keep people employed doesn't make sense.
Actually it would be such a case if this was about ULA who was being paid multiple times what spaceX was for the same thing. Ariane and the traditional companies like Boeing had a sweet sweet deal all these years, that's why they have trouble competing
Ok, I'm not saying the EM drive works or doesn't work. But at just a couple watts, maybe they're seeing secondary effects that would be swamped out by the thrust from the drive at the full 50 watts? I have to say, what they've seen so far seems pretty conclusive that the actual effect isn't what we thought it was. But I think a conclusive test requires full power. Or at least, more power.
There isn't a kid-specific desktop or distro that I'm aware of, and I'm not sure that'd be advisable anyway. Instead of kid-specific, maybe a regular distro and desktop with some unneeded things left out.
I'd start with Mint. It's easy to set up (which means it's easy to re-image if things get too screwed up) easy to maintain, and no more difficult to use than any other desktop.
My "serious work" laptop runs CentOS to maintain compatibility with the RHEL servers at my work. But the casual usage laptop I share with the family runs Mint. (It's a repurposed laptop that doesn't have the grunt to run Windows 10, but with an SSD and maxed out ram, runs Linux just fine.)
Mind you, we have a couple of Winders desktops for things only Winders can do, but the number of Microsoft-only applications we still have to deal with as a family is steadily dwindling. (I've said this before, but the ONLY thing I need in order to be able to dump the Big Two (OSX/Windows) is a native port of Adobe CC to Linux. ANY version of Linux -- I'm not picky.)
More like 5k for each sensor. Check out Sea-Bird - they make the gold standard for many types of oceanographic sensors. They are very expensive and very good.
With traditional oceanographic measurements, the most expensive part of acquiring data is physically going to the location from where you want to acquire the measurement. The cost of the sensors is nothing in comparison. As a result, you have expensive, high quality sensors being the norm. With these autonomous boats there might be a push to reduce sensor costs because the sensors will make up a greater percentage of the total cost. Time will tell...
So, it would be worthwhile me developing a fleet of pirate robots to plunder that booty.
I've had the same email address since the early nineties, back when we didn't see the harm in having our email addresses in plaintext on Usenet (boy does that sound dumb now) and even despite spam filters I have to wade through junk mail on a daily basis.
Every so often I browse through the email caught by my spam filter, on the off chance that I am missing something important. (I have a photography business and get job offers through email.) The Nigerian Prince, God Fearing Mom, Crooked General, Post Office Worker and the like are pretty common, and if I run across a scam I hadn't heard of before, I'll read through it so I know how to warn friends and family.
The thing is, even the best of them are really poorly written. Syntax is off, language is stilted, word choice is poor -- there's still a lot of indications that these things are written by people with not a lot of education. (So much so that they can be an entertaining read for certain values of humor.)
These things are easy to spot, and have been in the news for, like, ever. Why are people still falling for them? Do victims lack the sophistication to recognize badly written and totally implausible scams?
The snarky part of me wants to add "I blame public schools".
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody runs Steam just for the sake of it. It is a means to an end, that is it is used to play games. Mint is only an option if all the games they played on XP also work on Linux.
Point, but, it sounds like the choice could soon be, play *none* of the games they used to play on XP, or buy another laptop. Given that, maybe playing *some* of the games they used to play on Linux may be at least a stopgap solution.
Itâ(TM)s funny that in a post about going with a new generation of video encoding, people are arguing that the u.s, isps cant upgrade because theyâ(TM)re stuck with an old
Infrastructure l!
The argument is that they're comparable situations -- a new, perhaps better technology unable to gain traction because the old technology is too ingrained. Or am I missing something here?
Steam runs on Mint. ....just sayin'.... I have Mint running on two xp-era laptops with solid state PATA drives and they're surprisingly snappy. Get an extended lease on life for aging laptops. Unless you just *have* to have one of those new 128 GB Lenovo monstrosities.
Why not convince the people behind a good open source video player (vlc springs to mind) and a good converter tool (handbrake springs to mind) to support a promising new codec? Geeks start using it, and we rapidly see whether it's worth pursuing or not. This strategy has worked for other codecs.
If we sit on our hands waiting for the industry to adopt a new standard, we'll still be using mp4 when cockroaches inherit the earth.
I think his point was that first world countries had been (still are in many areas) hamstrung by having a wired telephone infrastructure in place for a century or more, and reluctance by the local government and providers to replace it with something different. Similar to the way current encoding methods are ingrained.
And yes, emerging countries often end up with a better data infrastructure than the older parts of first world countries. (I'm told cell service is often better too.) I live in a recent suburb outside Portland, OR, and I have fiber to the house. Downtown, 1.5 Mbps DSL is often the only choice.
It's ridiculous, but there it is.
Let that be a lesson to all of us: Don't use vendor support forums. Use independent forums.
It's just another way to force you to upgrade. Fortunately there are forums like bleepingcomputer, Tom's Hardware and others to take up the slack.
In my experience, Microsoft tech support participation in forums just gets in the way and increases frustration. Typically it's an offshore person pasting in a script like "Please update your video drivers to the latest version". And then a user who actually read what the OP had written offers the real solution. So, really no loss.
Seems the real use for windows in airplanes is to take pictures of where you are or what you see along the way. If you can still take photos of the virtual windows, that need seems to be met.
With the tales recently of windows failing in airplanes and sucking people out of the plane, maybe getting rid of them would be a good thing.
> What's been missing, in my opinion, is a richer gesture-based GUI.... There should be a rich, standard set of gestures,
There's only one gesture I'd ever use with Windows.
Ok ok I get it, really. My proposal was OS-agnostic because I don't really care who does it as long as it's rich enough to reasonably do content creation and has a library that's available cross-platform. (If M$ does it, it'll probably be an Edge plug-in that just repurposes their accessibility suite, and everyone will lose interest for another decade or so...)
I think the horsepower is already there -- but there needs to be better ways to take advantage of it. What's been missing, in my opinion, is a richer gesture-based GUI. The touch based GUIs we have now are not standard across platforms, and are generally only concerned with desktops, not applications. And so, on our touch device, we can navigate to an app and open it by touch, but once in the app if it has any complexity at all, we're reduced to a KVM or some device that mimics a mouse, because that's the kind of input the app expects. And the solution we're expected to accept is a laptop with a detachable touch sensitive screen for when we want to cruise through netflix, which we have to reattach to the rest of the laptop to do any serious work.
As consumers, we need to significantly raise our expectations. There should be a rich, standard set of gestures, in a commonly available library, that applications can use and understand. You shouldn't have to touch a mouse or use a mouse-analog device for most operations in-app. You shouldn't have to touch a keyboard unless you're inputting a substantial amount of text. (And even then, voice recognition has become a valid replacement for casual text input.)
Faster computers, faster network access, more portability, longer battery life, are all good things, but most of them (with the exception of battery life) are already Good Enough. What we need is something to DO with this hardware besides looking at cat videos.
And I know, I know, content creation is a much smaller market than cat video watching. So I don't expect this to be fixed any time soon.
IANAL, but I did a short (one day) contract for a lawyer not long ago, and one of the things I learned on the assignment is that age is a protected class. It's not just "you can't discriminate on age" but that there are fairly strong penalties for doing so.
The issue I think is that it's just been an assumed way for doing business, and the cost of litigation (another thing I learned at that assignment) and the *length* of litigation (minimum 18 months) makes it highly unlikely that any individual or small group of individuals would pursue it.
So like the Hollywood casting couch, discrimination based on age is something "everyone does but nobody talks about". Unlike the casting couch, I don't see age discrimination ever becoming a big deal. I think mostly because the media cares very little about brackets outside tween-18 and 18-24.
I'd wondered throughout my career whether this would change when boomers started to age out, when there was a higher chance of there being enough motivated people to pursue class action lawsuits, but it didn't really, and now we're pretty much at the end of boomers in the workforce. I suspect things are just going to get more grim for old pharts.
Who cares?
"...and someday we'll tell our children that we burned our food for fuel..."
Yes. It *is* arguably a problem with how the government is spending its money. If you've ever worked in the defense industry (I spent 7 years with a military contractor, until I got frustrated and quit) you'd see that this is exactly how it is. Doing work for the government vs commercial requires a massively larger amount of overhead. Whether it *should* or not is an interesting but separate debate.
But as someone else said, this may be sour grapes. SpaceX built cheap, reliable, reusable rockets. They put quite a bit of time and money into those three aspects. It's paying off now. Ariane's huge disadvantage at this point is that they sunk everything into single-use rockets, and it's (probably) too late now to catch up.
The lesson also might be, "redefine the market, or make a new market".
> Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
Cable TV companies, for instance.
> In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff.
So be a smaller company, that gets more done cheaper. Or put some of that excess staff on R&D, and see what else can be done. New methods of propulsion, more reliable, longer lasting, and self-maintaining life support systems. Put the "reusable" idea to work on the idea of really long trips. There's still a lot to do in space travel. Building single-use earth-orbit rockets just to keep people employed doesn't make sense.
Actually it would be such a case if this was about ULA who was being paid multiple times what spaceX was for the same thing. Ariane and the traditional companies like Boeing had a sweet sweet deal all these years, that's why they have trouble competing
Trouble, or lack of incentive?
Ok, I'm not saying the EM drive works or doesn't work. But at just a couple watts, maybe they're seeing secondary effects that would be swamped out by the thrust from the drive at the full 50 watts? I have to say, what they've seen so far seems pretty conclusive that the actual effect isn't what we thought it was. But I think a conclusive test requires full power. Or at least, more power.
There isn't a kid-specific desktop or distro that I'm aware of, and I'm not sure that'd be advisable anyway. Instead of kid-specific, maybe a regular distro and desktop with some unneeded things left out.
I'd start with Mint. It's easy to set up (which means it's easy to re-image if things get too screwed up) easy to maintain, and no more difficult to use than any other desktop.
My "serious work" laptop runs CentOS to maintain compatibility with the RHEL servers at my work. But the casual usage laptop I share with the family runs Mint. (It's a repurposed laptop that doesn't have the grunt to run Windows 10, but with an SSD and maxed out ram, runs Linux just fine.)
Mind you, we have a couple of Winders desktops for things only Winders can do, but the number of Microsoft-only applications we still have to deal with as a family is steadily dwindling. (I've said this before, but the ONLY thing I need in order to be able to dump the Big Two (OSX/Windows) is a native port of Adobe CC to Linux. ANY version of Linux -- I'm not picky.)
More like 5k for each sensor. Check out Sea-Bird - they make the gold standard for many types of oceanographic sensors. They are very expensive and very good.
With traditional oceanographic measurements, the most expensive part of acquiring data is physically going to the location from where you want to acquire the measurement. The cost of the sensors is nothing in comparison. As a result, you have expensive, high quality sensors being the norm. With these autonomous boats there might be a push to reduce sensor costs because the sensors will make up a greater percentage of the total cost. Time will tell...
So, it would be worthwhile me developing a fleet of pirate robots to plunder that booty.
I SO want to see that on youtube.
"Hundred thousand dollar pieces of equipment are just floating around free!"
I've had the same email address since the early nineties, back when we didn't see the harm in having our email addresses in plaintext on Usenet (boy does that sound dumb now) and even despite spam filters I have to wade through junk mail on a daily basis.
Every so often I browse through the email caught by my spam filter, on the off chance that I am missing something important. (I have a photography business and get job offers through email.) The Nigerian Prince, God Fearing Mom, Crooked General, Post Office Worker and the like are pretty common, and if I run across a scam I hadn't heard of before, I'll read through it so I know how to warn friends and family.
The thing is, even the best of them are really poorly written. Syntax is off, language is stilted, word choice is poor -- there's still a lot of indications that these things are written by people with not a lot of education. (So much so that they can be an entertaining read for certain values of humor.)
These things are easy to spot, and have been in the news for, like, ever. Why are people still falling for them? Do victims lack the sophistication to recognize badly written and totally implausible scams?
The snarky part of me wants to add "I blame public schools".