I need a PC for work, communications, information, music, photos and films anyhow. It doesn't make any sense to split gaming off from that into a separate device.
It makes sense if you want to play games with your family.
It makes sense if the Wii controller or Kinect gets you up on your feet and physically active
It makes sense if you want game play on the fifty to seventy inch HDTV screen or wall sized projection with theatrical quality surround sound.
When we talk about debt its every country for himself. When we talk about corruption and murder is every country for himself. Talk about hacking... OMG now we are a union of countries?
It always surprises the geek when one of his own is expected to do hard time.
Crimes of violence are almost always isolated events and are prosecuted locally --- as they have been for millennia. Hacking is a crime that has taken on a global dimension.
Prior to 9/11, the policy for a skyjacking was sit tight and wait for ransom demands
Threats to kill people will correctly go unheeded and the cockpit door will stay closed. Even flights with insufficient other passengers still won't lose control.
You are assuming that everyone who puts a knife to the throat of a hostage is a political terrorist -- that they are behaving "rationally" in the pursuit of some definable political objective.
The cockpit door may remain closed, but a flight attendant may be killed, and others may die.
How many such casualties are you prepared to accept? How many such casualties will a flight crew be prepared to accept?
The calculus of death is easy to accept when you are sitting behind a desk in Washington.
Not so much when it is measured by the cameras focusing on the fourteen year old girl bleeding to death in the aisles just beyond your reach,
What worries the stewardess is the out-if-control passenger with a knife.
The flight crew may be safe behind their armored door.
But she is out there, utterly exposed --- and you are wedged in your seat five rows back and in no position to help her.
The TSA weaved and bobbed around answering the question of how many casualties it was prepared to accept in an incident like this --- and that in the end was fatal.
Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Taking land out of production has never been an easy choice to make. Each crop in the rotation has its own labor and material cost. Different skills. Different tools. It adds up.
The fact is that most people don't need any of the advanced features offered by Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. They don't know what a PivotTable is and they don't use the 500 statistical functions in Excel. They also don't need to buy Office to do this because they can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or Google docs.
Most people who have only a casual need for an office suite have always relied on affordable alternatives like Microsoft Works. But that still leaves about 16-20% of the US work force who are statistically defined as clerical workers and those in other trades and professions who rely on Word, Excel and so on.
In a population of 333 million, that adds up to quite a significant number.
The geek is fixed-focused on the stand-alone office suite ---- which is all that FOSS has to offer. Microsoft tends to think in terms of integrated office systems. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
Microsoft started as a language vendor (not typically considered an "app") selling BASIC, then got into the O/S business by buying QDOS and selling it at a ridiculous markup to IBM, who just wanted something quick for their (they though) ill-fated "personal computer".
DOS wasn't Microsoft's only successful entrant in the OS business at that time.
Xenix was Microsoft's version of Unix intended for use on microcomputers.
Microsoft purchased a license for Version 7 Unix from AT&T in 1979, and announced on August 25, 1980 that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market.
Xenix varied from its 7th Edition origins by incorporating elements from BSD, and soon (for a time) possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix version due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86 processor.
Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone to IBM in time for the scheduled release of the new IBM micro --- with a full suite of development tools soon to follow. It proposed a non-excusive deal for a product that would hit the streets at an unprecedented $50 retail list.
This was not what IBM was hearing from Digital Research.
There was nothing "ill-fated" about the IBM PC.
The basic form factor of console - external keyboard - and "80 column" monitor has changed little in over thirty years.
Support for standardized third party plug-in cards meant that improvements in graphics, sound and other capabilities would emerge very quickly. The port from CP/M was easy, with most software niches being filled by some very familiar names within a year or two.
Rubbish. If the movie industries continue to not provide access because of no-DRM then they'll continue to suffer piracy and have physical media and cinema as their only distribution methods instead.
Fully half of all prime time Internet download traffic in the states was a licensed Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service. Walmart.com stocks 132 internet-enabled HDTVs.
It has reached the point where your cable service will stream to every media player in your home.
someone else will gladly come and take their place because there are many other film studios across the globe other than Hollywood
The UK has been successful in the US market and now and again the Canadians.
Japan has a niche market in animation. But as a significanr cultural export the Hollywood product has no peer.
Their business model is not viable, and it is now our job to keep it afloat?
Says the geek whose free-handed spending gas kept the big three sci-fi media franchises alive for fifty years ---
and whi is now throwing thick wads of cash to Disney to pay for its revival of Marvel Comics.
Big Media has strong alliances with Big Hardware and Big Services, something the geek tends to forget. Hardware accelerated HEVC and 4K video support, no problem. Server horsepower for raw compuatation in the single player game and 150 GB of cloud storage for game assets, no problem.
The odds that any random piece of consumer grade hardware with HDMI output will ship with a Netflix app approach 1 in 1.
The time the user spends in the walled garden of the app and app store is time not spent in the "open" world of the general purpose browser. The UI of the smartphone, tablet and Win 8 makes the deprecation of the browser explicit.
For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project.
The direct view through an amateur's optical telescope on the ground is awesome in its own right --- intimate and affordable.
He should inform the honorable judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters or whatever they are called.
The honorable judge isn't obliged to believe you and may ship you off to a local lock-up for contempt of court. To be held until your memory improves or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
The audience for the classic vampire story was not teen-age. Immortality at a price. Sexual license at a price.
It is hard to believe now, but there was a time when moviegoers did not know about vampires. Didn't know you do them in with a wooden stake through the heart, didn't know a ray of sunlight is injurious to their health, that they sleep in coffins all day and go about at night as bats and wolves. Didn't even know they drink the blood!
All that changed in a single magnificent cinematic achievement. The English solicitor has come by stagecoach past peasants fearfully crossing themselves and up a Mittel-Europa mountain-pass road to a castle of shattered and decayed battlements. On a grand staircase within, the unknown nobleman who has requested his presence awaits.
The accent of that menacing welcomer, his pauses and intonation, the graceful and slow hand motions, aristocratic bearing, formal white-tie wear with sash and raised-collar cape---does there exist a kid today who has not seen and heard and understood it all, in Saturday-morning cartoons, on cereal boxes, in television ads, comic books, greeting cards, toys, paint kits, plastic representations, Halloween costumes complete with gleaming fangs?
And who inspired all of this? Well, can you name a king off the top of your head? Of course you can: Richard III, Henry VIII, John, Edward VII. A czar? Peter, Nicholas II. A prince? Hamlet, Charles. A duke? Wellington. Now---quick---a count? Who comes to mind? What, Tolstoy ? Marie Antoinetteâ(TM)s boyfriend Axel Fersen? Monte Cristo? Please. There's only one count.
''I am Dracula. I bid you... velcome.''
Lugosi was fascinating, showing in poetic manner a soulless being, forsaken even as he is satanically deadly. From the stage version came the 1931 movie, which saved Universal from Depression bankruptcy. Can anyone forget ''Listen to them, the children of the night'' as the count hears the dark cries of tortured beings he has made undead, as he is himself? ''What music they make!''
From a tech perspective, Mr. Hughes didn't perform the broadcast, the BBC did - from England.
The geek has a tendency to construct over-elaborate and implausible technical arguments to evade the law. The broadcast originated in Nepal and was distributed through the networks and services of the BBC. End of story.
PETA pushes the article's circulation into the stratosphere, via the Streisand effect...
The geek overstates the significance of the "Streisand effect."
The audience for news on the web is fragmented along ideological and many other lines and served by countless websites and blogs, each competing for the attention of some tiny fraction of the whole.
The story that captures the attention of Slashdot may not rate so much as a single line elsewhere,
Google Glass is the very tiny tip of a huge iceberg. Assume you are being recorded at all times outside of your home. You may not like it, but it is a reality we live in.
Reality is what we choose to make it. not what the geek tells us it must be.
Except, no, that isn't the case, at least not in the United States. Neither is it in the case in Canada nor the United Kingdom. You have no expectation of privacy when you're in public, and unless someone tries to resell the image as part of stock photography or something you cannot stop them.
You are not, however, obliged to welcome the intruder warmly.
There are ways to make it perfectly clear that he is unwanted, ways to obstruct him without the threat of violence.
It's been said elsewhere that every electric car manufacturer has its own solution for the core technologies of batteries and charging.
There is only one car that you can re-charge at Better Place.
The wholly automated Better Place station costs around $500,000. That's not easy to recover when in all of Israel there were only about 700 of these cars on the roads.
There is something profoundly broken about our justice system in that the general public takes joy in imagining the likelihood of prison rape.
A casual visitor to Slashdot might be excused for thinking that it was the geek --- and not the general public --- who was obsessed with talk of prison rape and never more so then when one of his own is coming up for sentencing on a felony charge,
the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with (a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time
So who was buying the goods the Dutch were exporting?
Open Source a project to consolidate all national welfare transfer payments in a country of 63 million. Meeting all accounting and legal requirements. Now tell me how you recruit and manage OS "volunteers" with the depth and experience needed to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I need a PC for work, communications, information, music, photos and films anyhow. It doesn't make any sense to split gaming off from that into a separate device.
It makes sense if you want to play games with your family.
It makes sense if the Wii controller or Kinect gets you up on your feet and physically active
It makes sense if you want game play on the fifty to seventy inch HDTV screen or wall sized projection with theatrical quality surround sound.
When we talk about debt its every country for himself. When we talk about corruption and murder is every country for himself. Talk about hacking ... OMG now we are a union of countries?
It always surprises the geek when one of his own is expected to do hard time.
Crimes of violence are almost always isolated events and are prosecuted locally --- as they have been for millennia. Hacking is a crime that has taken on a global dimension.
This isn't rocket science.
Prior to 9/11, the policy for a skyjacking was sit tight and wait for ransom demands
Threats to kill people will correctly go unheeded and the cockpit door will stay closed. Even flights with insufficient other passengers still won't lose control.
You are assuming that everyone who puts a knife to the throat of a hostage is a political terrorist -- that they are behaving "rationally" in the pursuit of some definable political objective.
The cockpit door may remain closed, but a flight attendant may be killed, and others may die.
How many such casualties are you prepared to accept? How many such casualties will a flight crew be prepared to accept?
The calculus of death is easy to accept when you are sitting behind a desk in Washington.
Not so much when it is measured by the cameras focusing on the fourteen year old girl bleeding to death in the aisles just beyond your reach,
What worries the stewardess is the out-if-control passenger with a knife.
The flight crew may be safe behind their armored door.
But she is out there, utterly exposed --- and you are wedged in your seat five rows back and in no position to help her.
The TSA weaved and bobbed around answering the question of how many casualties it was prepared to accept in an incident like this --- and that in the end was fatal.
Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Taking land out of production has never been an easy choice to make. Each crop in the rotation has its own labor and material cost. Different skills. Different tools. It adds up.
The fact is that most people don't need any of the advanced features offered by Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. They don't know what a PivotTable is and they don't use the 500 statistical functions in Excel. They also don't need to buy Office to do this because they can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or Google docs.
Most people who have only a casual need for an office suite have always relied on affordable alternatives like Microsoft Works. But that still leaves about 16-20% of the US work force who are statistically defined as clerical workers and those in other trades and professions who rely on Word, Excel and so on.
In a population of 333 million, that adds up to quite a significant number.
The geek is fixed-focused on the stand-alone office suite ---- which is all that FOSS has to offer. Microsoft tends to think in terms of integrated office systems. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
Microsoft started as a language vendor (not typically considered an "app") selling BASIC, then got into the O/S business by buying QDOS and selling it at a ridiculous markup to IBM, who just wanted something quick for their (they though) ill-fated "personal computer".
DOS wasn't Microsoft's only successful entrant in the OS business at that time.
Xenix was Microsoft's version of Unix intended for use on microcomputers.
Microsoft purchased a license for Version 7 Unix from AT&T in 1979, and announced on August 25, 1980 that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market.
Xenix varied from its 7th Edition origins by incorporating elements from BSD, and soon (for a time) possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix version due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86 processor.
Xenix
Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone to IBM in time for the scheduled release of the new IBM micro --- with a full suite of development tools soon to follow. It proposed a non-excusive deal for a product that would hit the streets at an unprecedented $50 retail list.
This was not what IBM was hearing from Digital Research.
There was nothing "ill-fated" about the IBM PC.
The basic form factor of console - external keyboard - and "80 column" monitor has changed little in over thirty years.
Support for standardized third party plug-in cards meant that improvements in graphics, sound and other capabilities would emerge very quickly. The port from CP/M was easy, with most software niches being filled by some very familiar names within a year or two.
If a particular method of search or seizure would have been viewed as unreasonable in 1791, then that is exactly what the Fourth Amendment prohibits.
How can you know possibly what would seem "unreasonable" to someone born in 1761?
How they would perceive the modern world and technologies which evolved over two hundred years after they were born?
Linux has worked wonderfully on my desktop for over 10 years.
What am I supposed to make of your argument when I don't know your level of skill or how you use your computer?
The TRASH-80 could be quite practical and every now and again you'll find one still in service. That doesn't make it the system of choice for 2013.
Rubbish. If the movie industries continue to not provide access because of no-DRM then they'll continue to suffer piracy and have physical media and cinema as their only distribution methods instead.
Fully half of all prime time Internet download traffic in the states was a licensed Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service. Walmart.com stocks 132 internet-enabled HDTVs.
It has reached the point where your cable service will stream to every media player in your home.
someone else will gladly come and take their place because there are many other film studios across the globe other than Hollywood
The UK has been successful in the US market and now and again the Canadians.
Japan has a niche market in animation. But as a significanr cultural export the Hollywood product has no peer.
What most of us wanted back was the Start menu, not just the Start button.
Not here.
The Start menu quickly becomes cramped, unreadable and unmanageable. I have left it behind and I am not going back.
Their business model is not viable, and it is now our job to keep it afloat?
Says the geek whose free-handed spending gas kept the big three sci-fi media franchises alive for fifty years ---
and whi is now throwing thick wads of cash to Disney to pay for its revival of Marvel Comics.
Big Media has strong alliances with Big Hardware and Big Services, something the geek tends to forget. Hardware accelerated HEVC and 4K video support, no problem. Server horsepower for raw compuatation in the single player game and 150 GB of cloud storage for game assets, no problem.
The odds that any random piece of consumer grade hardware with HDMI output will ship with a Netflix app approach 1 in 1.
The time the user spends in the walled garden of the app and app store is time not spent in the "open" world of the general purpose browser. The UI of the smartphone, tablet and Win 8 makes the deprecation of the browser explicit.
For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project.
The direct view through an amateur's optical telescope on the ground is awesome in its own right --- intimate and affordable.
He should inform the honorable judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters or whatever they are called.
The honorable judge isn't obliged to believe you and may ship you off to a local lock-up for contempt of court. To be held until your memory improves or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
The geek brings into court over-complicated and improbable scenarios, to be presented in a way which will seriously piss off a judge and jury.
"Suck it in, dolts, it all makes sense the way I tell it!"
Slashdot is now a teen chat board?
The audience for the classic vampire story was not teen-age. Immortality at a price. Sexual license at a price.
It is hard to believe now, but there was a time when moviegoers did not know about vampires. Didn't know you do them in with a wooden stake through the heart, didn't know a ray of sunlight is injurious to their health, that they sleep in coffins all day and go about at night as bats and wolves. Didn't even know they drink the blood!
All that changed in a single magnificent cinematic achievement. The English solicitor has come by stagecoach past peasants fearfully crossing themselves and up a Mittel-Europa mountain-pass road to a castle of shattered and decayed battlements. On a grand staircase within, the unknown nobleman who has requested his presence awaits.
The accent of that menacing welcomer, his pauses and intonation, the graceful and slow hand motions, aristocratic bearing, formal white-tie wear with sash and raised-collar cape---does there exist a kid today who has not seen and heard and understood it all, in Saturday-morning cartoons, on cereal boxes, in television ads, comic books, greeting cards, toys, paint kits, plastic representations, Halloween costumes complete with gleaming fangs?
And who inspired all of this? Well, can you name a king off the top of your head? Of course you can: Richard III, Henry VIII, John, Edward VII. A czar? Peter, Nicholas II. A prince? Hamlet, Charles. A duke? Wellington. Now---quick---a count? Who comes to mind? What, Tolstoy ? Marie Antoinetteâ(TM)s boyfriend Axel Fersen? Monte Cristo? Please. There's only one count.
''I am Dracula. I bid you ... velcome.''
Lugosi was fascinating, showing in poetic manner a soulless being, forsaken even as he is satanically deadly. From the stage version came the 1931 movie, which saved Universal from Depression bankruptcy. Can anyone forget ''Listen to them, the children of the night'' as the count hears the dark cries of tortured beings he has made undead, as he is himself? ''What music they make!''
The Count [1998]
From a tech perspective, Mr. Hughes didn't perform the broadcast, the BBC did - from England.
The geek has a tendency to construct over-elaborate and implausible technical arguments to evade the law. The broadcast originated in Nepal and was distributed through the networks and services of the BBC. End of story.
PETA pushes the article's circulation into the stratosphere, via the Streisand effect...
The geek overstates the significance of the "Streisand effect."
The audience for news on the web is fragmented along ideological and many other lines and served by countless websites and blogs, each competing for the attention of some tiny fraction of the whole.
The story that captures the attention of Slashdot may not rate so much as a single line elsewhere,
Your boss tells a dirty joke at work... hello raise.
"Publish and be damned."
If your boss has a spine you will be out on the street in under five minutes.
Google Glass is the very tiny tip of a huge iceberg. Assume you are being recorded at all times outside of your home. You may not like it, but it is a reality we live in.
Reality is what we choose to make it. not what the geek tells us it must be.
Except, no, that isn't the case, at least not in the United States. Neither is it in the case in Canada nor the United Kingdom. You have no expectation of privacy when you're in public, and unless someone tries to resell the image as part of stock photography or something you cannot stop them.
You are not, however, obliged to welcome the intruder warmly.
There are ways to make it perfectly clear that he is unwanted, ways to obstruct him without the threat of violence.
It's been said elsewhere that every electric car manufacturer has its own solution for the core technologies of batteries and charging.
There is only one car that you can re-charge at Better Place.
The wholly automated Better Place station costs around $500,000. That's not easy to recover when in all of Israel there were only about 700 of these cars on the roads.
There is something profoundly broken about our justice system in that the general public takes joy in imagining the likelihood of prison rape.
A casual visitor to Slashdot might be excused for thinking that it was the geek --- and not the general public --- who was obsessed with talk of prison rape and never more so then when one of his own is coming up for sentencing on a felony charge,
the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with (a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time
So who was buying the goods the Dutch were exporting?
Agile Needs Testing? Open Source It.
Open Source a project to consolidate all national welfare transfer payments in a country of 63 million. Meeting all accounting and legal requirements. Now tell me how you recruit and manage OS "volunteers" with the depth and experience needed to do that.