What does it matter if we don't develop single unit supercomputers. Clearly in a free market if these thing had value they would be persued. There is not predetory tax laws on supercomputer, or any other regulations on domestic use. The only reason development has slowed is there is not much market for the beasts.
There are many reasons for that too, for one other then in stealer, neculear, mathematic, and bio research feilds few industries need more computing power then can be had off the shelf any day of the week. That was not true yesterday it took all sorts of custom hardware to make CGI happen in films that can be done now in my basement in resonable time frames. So no more super computer market there the ROI is gone I am sure this plays out in all sorts of other engineering feilds as well.
Many places where you do need super computing power can be done with clusterd systems that are cheap to build and cheap to maintain.
At least people in the pure science and research fields have learned to be better thinkers and programers, they found ways to do things in parallel that were traditionally serial. Things that still are serial can be made to work on a cluster, sure it might take longer then a single computer considered to be equal FLOPSwise but considering I could either spend all the money I saved makeing my cluster bigger and more powerful so I can get back to equal time or on other profitable efforts while I wait there is again no ROI.
It so happens that may of the most interestin questions in math, physics and computer science such as quatum theory need massive amounts of parallel work, rather then serial so that works better on a cluster anyway.
If there is a real reason to do it people will build supercomputer, because there is nothing stopping them other then economics. No need to fear Supercomputers are not going away. Everyone else that needs that kinda proc-ing power will settle for clusters, as well they should. This is just another largly obsolete industry wanting someone to bail them out because they have failed to adapt to a changing market. If they are going to die we should let them, just like we should let the Universitys adapt or die, and the RIAA needs to adapt or die, we need to stop proping up obsolete undustries so new ones can replace them!
The Democratic part gave up being about the people along time ago. The DNC is not the party of FDR or even Jimmy Carter anymore although he is to stupid to see it. Farther the Republican part spent many years being run by assoholes and steered far from its roots as well. It was not untill the eighties where forward thinking men like Ronald Regan and Gorge H. Bush restored some of the real original direction of the GOPs historic great leaders like Lincoln and made it about personal responsibility and freedome to choose, then house republicans perverted that vision again durring the Clinton years. The Jury is still out on Gorge W. Bush, Its hard to tell when he has been forced into so many reactionary dicisions due to terror attacks and war. Still I will vote for him and have higher hopes he will someday respect my liberty and me as a person being capable of takeing care of myself and demanding my responsiblity. Kerry wants you to be dependant, he and his croneys want to stay in power by takeing yours away, he wants to decide how to spend the wealth you create. Bush wants to be powerful too but I think he would rather be a despit then playing on your fears a(') la Kerry. The Truth is we need to kickout most of Congress and I can't name a single senator I approve of its time to elect some turly independant conservatives or perhaps libraterians who will turely represent the people and protect the American ideal which really is Libraterian by todats standards. I want people who will take there direction from our preamble.
Current the Republicans are bad but the Dems are worse. I know its cool to hate rebublicans but if you do then you had better hate the democrats as well unless you reall do whish you could have lived in soviate Russia. Where politicans vote on you:-).
The space program such as it is; is a huge waste of resources. That is not to say that a space program is a waste of resources just the one we have, the same is true for education.
Its a good solution to the problem of DVDs being two layers of plastic can being damaged when flexed. Sure you can avoid it by using sleves instead of center button cases(which most if not all movies are shipped in oddly enough) but there is little you can do other then use care when it comes to the slimline drive in your notebook. Also caddys were only irritating because it was an extra step if they were put into the case like a floopy disk or a minidisk then it would be a non-issue. You easily keep the package then enough that you could still use pages.
I would like to add to my own coment. I would have perfered the blue-ray camp win this as at least the technical specs look more like they can be implemented in the OSS world more quickly as its still a form of mpeg 2, it would be just a matter of optimizing playback software for the new data rates and image sizes rather then knock-out a new codec implementation entirely even if it does borrow a great deal from Divix. Lets remember though long before blue-ray mpeg2 disks would have gotten out the door Sony and their gang would have cooked some DRM like system up for it even it was weak like CSS, they were by no streach of the imagination going to allow it to be as open as it might seem at the moment in final release. So its probably a steeper hill vs. steep hill situation and if M$ wins things are really not much worse.
Good, Sony is by far the only mega corp that really compeetes with M$ in the evil DRM/vendor lockin space. If the 800 pound gorillas want to step all over each others best laid plans well thats about as good as us little guys can hope for these days.
Back in the day I cheered the PC and its big distributers Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq. The were bring computers to the masses and on the cheap compared to Apple. I also cheered the PC because it was the comparatively open platform that people could really put their hands on and learn something. Now Dell/MicyShaft have closed the PC as much as the MAC for most people. Few even consider opening the thing themselves and Windows has been made so arbitrailly complex and deliberatly obfusticated you can't really even play with the software anymore. Naturally you can't get anything buy Winders from the major vendors at least not on a cheap box, because they are in bed with M$, worse yet if you do install any other OS you totally forefit any right to tech support, sure its a non-issue for us slashdoters but its scary for many people.
10 years ago I cheered that the old gaurd Apple was being crushed by that little upstart Microsoft with their supper flexible dos platform. I would have been happy to see them beaten compleetly to death by M$ now not so much. Microsoft has such a dominance with a product they took in a horrid direction which I now feel only contempt for. They have more abusive business practices then Apple or even IBM ever did. Their monoculture has devistated the industry in countless ways. Its really sad to see any of the other players hurt now.
Ok, your makeing my point exactly. YOU have gone through the trouble of pirating windows for them. There are the characteristic aunt Tille users. They don't want to do anything XP pro does not do right out of the box. If they did they'd be at the level of pirating XP themselves. As soon as they reach that level of comfort and knowleage with the PC it really would be easier to install a Linux Distro. They aint there yet so they should stick with what they know. Its also ok if they don't ever want to get there.
Now you should NOT BE HELPING THEM STEAL. Just because something is made by people you don't like and they charge to much for it does not give you the right to RIP them off to help your friends out. You should tell them look I would love to help you with your computer. You can buy a copy of windows or I can install a linux distro for you and point you at the documentation but I won't break the law. That is not being a jerk that is being a responsible citizen who respects the law and is avoiding exposing himself and friends/family to unneccecary liability. Its then there decision wether they buy Windows so you can help them, let you give them Linux and show them what they can read to learn or head off on their own.
This is an interesting point. I think I only paid a few hundred bucks for my TI99/4A with memory expansion floppy controller and a diskdrive. In all aspects other then raw number cruching which NOBODY did on pc sized systems back then it functionally blew the doors of PCs of its day. It had an 80x24 screen mode and it was 8-bit color I think. It also had a crude DPS that was way better then the PC speaker. The applications availible were much better then any of my 8086 friends had to work will too. I honestly don't know why the PC won out. AMIGA, or TI should have won out.
I am not sure that analogy makes since. We are already talking very custom computer hardware, here. That hardware no doubt required a great deal of engineering and for what that probably cost you are not going to waste that hardware running something generic designed to support similar but not exactly your system. You will probably pay some software engineers to develop a framework for supporting like hadware that you and others can benifet from in the future when you build the next supercomputer, and write more custome modular pices of OS level code to extract the max benifet of that custom hardware you just built.
So really we are already talking about a major inhouse development type project here. Its not an important cost center in the investment at this point to bring the talent on board to work out these "hacks" so if they can take a chasis like Linux and make it out perform *NIX or whatever else then thats exactly what someone makeing such a large investment in supercomputing is going to do.
I would say for the most part your right, I can think of only a couple of things that would be real nasty to do on a winbox without any arguments or user input however there are many things that could be real nast with as little as on "ok" which because so many win users are used to pressing "ok" without reading could really mess people up good.
What I don't understand is for all the effort I see many windows users put into ripping off the their OS then ripping off and warezing all the other little utilities they need to do anything beyond what Aunt Tillie does, why don't the realize that: IT WOULD BE EASIER TO DOWNLOAD ANY Linux distro (Slackware is clearly the best though:-) ) and learn to use it.
say that '[Open source] doesn't guarantee upward compatibility.'"
There is no guarantee in the propriatary world that there will be upward compatibility. The fact that you can migrate you data to the latest and greatest or God for bid an other vendors product is completly the will of the original vendor. Sure most of the time there is an upgrade path but if a product is discontinued their may not be. The data storage might be binary and it would be a massive under takeing to reverse engineer that data. Look at all the effort that it has taken to be able to import a word doc with reasonable accuracy for example. At least with OSS you can look at the source code to your old app and probably use the file/data access code from it in your new app or simply to create something new and simple that can convert using that old code to parse and writeout back out to some better know format. There are all sorts of very valid reasons why a closed source proprietary solution might be better, Gates needs to focus on those instead of spreading out right lies. The problem he has of course is the vast majority of those good reasons are decreasing in value to the average user as skilled people are becomeing more availible and the barries to entry on large scale information systems is shrinking daily.
After reading some comments most here seem not to understand the issue.
Stock options does not mean you are compensated with stock. That is a common practive but options mean you will be able to buy the stock for a certain price at a given time, not that you HAVE the stock now. So they have not given you anything other then an agreement to seel at a certain price if YOU DECIDE to buy at the time of the option. I had to take a number of accounting courses as part of my CS program let me assure you if a company pays you in stock it is expenses already.
The knee jerk response to this is the matching principle which says you expense things in the accounting period that the expense is incurred, that is not always when its paid. So you say there has been no *real* transaction yet so there is no expense. Then you simply account for it like any other stock sale when/ip the employee buys the stock.
The problem is the rest of the accounting assumes an arms-length transaction. That is to say it works on the principle that things will be bought and sold at the market value, because all parties are aiming for their best interest. If you have a stock option you might be buying that stock for a much lower cost then the market value at that time. That effectivly means it is *costing* the company to sell you that stock.
The argument then is offering a stock option is incuring an expense because if your estimations are correct you will be selling for less its worth, why would someone want a stock option to buy for more then its worth? we can also guess that if we are way wrong and our stock goes through the floor nobody will exercise the option either.
If you estimate wrong you just make an adjusting entry later. The way I see it is that it probably should be an expense because I think companies tend to issue stock options with little conscience thought about the impact down the road, and or operate like the mail-in rebate scheme and assume a large percentage will fail to make good on the options, so they are suckering new hires to some extent.
Seriously this is what internships are for. Maybe you can't get 3+ years experience but you certainly can gain lots of experience that you can truth fully list as independent items. Lots of IT companies are happy to take interns unpaid and often even paid, for the summer or part time durring the school year. The career services office or some of your profs SHOULD be able to hook you up. If they can't then your school has big problems. I know my school now requires an internship to get a degreen is CS or IS.
1. Fire the writers they cost money 2. Fire the actors they cost money 3. Find the worst examples of human trash on the street and tell them they *get* to be on TV. 4. Find some totaly impossible situation and place the jackasses in it. 5. Find some hack with a camera 6. Profit form a nation of Jackasses and trash.
I would also like to put in my full agreement. I grew up on TNG and have seen all of TOS thanks to my Dads tapes. DS9 is my favorite though. I think the acting was by far the best. Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor actually had very complex charaters and sold them to me. Calm Meeny(sp?) was good too but they never did enough with him. I enjoyed Terry Farell and late Nichole Deboer as well. The show had a neat epic like quality that the other shows lacked. The DS9 plot actually built and managed to keep the episodes descrete at the same time. Clearly DS9 had much better writing then the other shows.
If I buy a CD its for the music, not for any other multi-media crap on the disk. If I stick in my PC I simply will not even try to mount it even if it supposedly does have a data track. I'd love to see some viral DRM app install without even a mount. I'd actually be quite impressed if said viral DRM app managed to get installed on my Slackware Box period even if I did mount the disk, and no I rufuse to help it out by either working as root. Actally no matter what the band is if I suspected their CD did this kinda stuff I would NEVER buy it and would probably write the artist and the label if it was a group I cared about just to let them know they lost a customer because of how they treat their customers. I still expect to be treated well when I patronize a business and I expect them to understand that if they give me a hard time I WON'T be back even if I have to pay much more some place else for service/good foo. As far as this software goes though users should take steps. 1. Never put music disks purchase post 2002(t o be safe) into your PC when you are running as a user who is privilaged enough to install software, regardless of your OS, hopefully this will prevent it from being installed. 2. Run a firewall that filters outbound connections as well as inbound don't want any spy/drm wares calling home. 3. Make an attempt to use some other media player to play the vids or whatever is on the disk rather then any software from the disk, if its on the disk is probably spyware./me wonders what all would be needed to use wine in a chroot setup....
This should be modded up! People who buy into M$ pactches result in exploits argument miss the important point. Large high finace firms and governments spend a great deal of money to stay on top of flaws and patch imedialy or otherwise protect vulnerable systems. They do this becase they have more to loose then the average Luser. Still most of those guys are just regular mortals like you and me and don;t have the source to pour over. So they find out only when stuff is posted to places like bug track and Cern. If you kept this stuff secret like M$ wants, then yes very few jerks running XP home would be sploited and the script kiddies would be put outa bussiness. However when some black hat does find a bug he can use it and if he covers his tracks and picks his targets well, could get away with using it for years. Remember even if you do get rooted you might not beable to determine how and so it could happen again! This black hat and his circle of friends could steal all sorts of precious information. I am not talking just credit card numbers and stuff either I am talking like what if he hacks boeing and finds plans for jets and sells that info to terrorists or something. Publishing exploits ensures the most valuable information and systems get protected and thats important even if its at the expense of the Lusers out there with they new Dell.
Yes but you have to remember that it was built to do one specific thing. When you design something for a single use, you get to make all sorts of assumptions which will allow you to optimize very very much. My DVD recorder is probably hundreds of times slower then my Athlong 64 system yet no matter what software I use it records video smoother with fewer frame drops. On the PC something happens like it becomes neccecary to flush the disk buffer and it will drop a frame, its hardly perceptable but sometimes you can detect it. PCs are so universal that you get to make few if any assumptions and that means more processing time. I imagine if you tried to write software for this thing to say transcode mp3 files to odd or something riddiculus like that your PC would finish months before this machine does.
This gets back to my rant on providing more money for education. There IS NO LACK OF FUNDS for Education in the United States, there is a TOTAL lack of of responsibility for those funds. I vote down (and will continue to do so) every school levey and politian that would increase school taxes. I think public schools are one of the most important institution we have in this country though. The issue is I have been to school recently as a 20 something I can tell you that most of their budget is waste. Why in heavens name do we need video on demand huge writing labs of computers fast one with P4s for word processing? Not to mention new uniforms for the band every year or half of the other eqipment they buy and never use. The huge mulitmedia room my HS built that I saw when I went back to visit cost close to a million dollars and according to my younger sister has been used all of about once in two years. Its all over kill, schools are run by a bunch of know nothing administrators that think technology is going to solve all their education problems. Instead of spending money on hightech schools should spend money on text books, teachers, and the building(a confortable enviorment is importand for learning). This is not to say they should not have a well outfited computer lab to teach things like computer science . I won't support any money for schools untill I see it being spent on what matters though, teachers and books. In MN Ventera cut the budget drasticly at first school admins tried all sorts of scare tactics like claiming they could only afford to run schools four days a week and would have to cut every after school program and riddiculous claims like that. What really happend though is Jessy pushed the budget through and schools had to start to be responsible with the money, I don't see as much flasy new toys but overall the schools have not suffered. They simply buy books and teachers and maintain the buildings. It works good. Now idealy we could not cut school budgets and pay teachers more, that might result in better teachers, and again as a recent grad I learned more from teachers then and multimedia presentation tought me. A good lecurer with a chalk and a blackboard is far more valuable then some hack with power point.
First, makeing the claim that just because you have to use the console means its hard is FUD; I am so sick of that its not even funny. Seccond, if you purchased that $400 card and could not make it go on windows XP would you blame windows or the card? I bet you'd blame the card, that is a double standard. Its not fair to expect the Linux kernel to support every bleeding edge or obscure pice of crap because it happens to be in your box. Perhaps you should consider checking if something is supported before you buy it. Third, Its not hard just because you have to read the documentation, most third graders could read and understand a howto and likely even execute the instructions in it. Computers are complex systems and only a stuip person would expect everything to be perfectly intuitive. I have a universal remote , I had to read the instruction manual before I was able to program it for my TV and stero, but I did not cry and complain to slashdot that it was too hard.
The truth is there is nothing in your post that was hard, just examples of YOU BEING LAZY POINT BY POINT.
"Being a minor and having no job, I really had no choice but to pirate Microsoft Office and Windows. Sure, I could have used some open source office productivity suite, but that is just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with considering Office only took 30 minutes to download and install."
You realize that what you just said translates into, "Sure I could do it myself or get a job and then pay someone to do it for me but why when I can just steal it."
Sorry Pal you're a looser and a theif and you belong in prision.
The most common thread here is that games are over priced for what you get. Yet people are saying like $50 is two much for 5 hours of game play. That is only $10 for entertainment. Try doing much better then that at a proffessional sports game or even the movie thearter. Maybe the best ratio you get there is $5/hour but most likely if you're sitting where you can actually see or going to a facility where you want to spend two hours in its closer to $10.
The realeative price of games does not seem to change that much either, but we know the costs have gone up. I was paying just as much for my NES games as I pay now for stuff on GC, but with NES Nintendo never had to higher voice actors, artists and modles, which is what most people expect today. So really in a certain sense the price of games is actually falling. Now lots of poeple argue that half the games that come out are crap and that might be true but the same holds for yesterday's games. People think back on the classics and go "Oh those were all so good" but that is because they have forgotten the bad ones. There were lots of really terrible NES and Atari games same for archade.
I think all this piracy has more to do with greede and lack of scruples then most people here care to admit. If you don't like the commercial software modle, like I don't use open source. I have very little PC software that is not FOSS and what is not I have paid for it. I have lots of FOSS games that I really enjoy and I thank the authors very much. Still I recognize that FOSS will never produce certain types of software, one of which is games with voice actors, live models, and highly technical artwork. Sometimes you do see the art work Tux Racer is a good example. When I want those games I go out and by the GC version and enjoy it, but that is pretty rare might be 2-3 games per year. The rest of my games time is spent with FOSS. $150 is not too much to spend per year on games, add $10-20 and you can rent things form the video store and try before you buy at least in the console world. You pirates need to just admit you're greedy and that you want something for nothing.
These game makers are going to cut out huge percentages of their markets by makeing games political but, the market of Linux users is not big enough to make ports. Market share must not be important to theme. Either that or they don't realize that I am not going to by their new super FPS if its got Kerry poasters on all its virtual walls.
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What does it matter if we don't develop single unit supercomputers. Clearly in a free market if these thing had value they would be persued. There is not predetory tax laws on supercomputer, or any other regulations on domestic use. The only reason development has slowed is there is not much market for the beasts.
There are many reasons for that too, for one other then in stealer, neculear, mathematic, and bio research feilds few industries need more computing power then can be had off the shelf any day of the week. That was not true yesterday it took all sorts of custom hardware to make CGI happen in films that can be done now in my basement in resonable time frames. So no more super computer market there the ROI is gone I am sure this plays out in all sorts of other engineering feilds as well.
Many places where you do need super computing power can be done with clusterd systems that are cheap to build and cheap to maintain.
At least people in the pure science and research fields have learned to be better thinkers and programers, they found ways to do things in parallel that were traditionally serial. Things that still are serial can be made to work on a cluster, sure it might take longer then a single computer considered to be equal FLOPSwise but considering I could either spend all the money I saved makeing my cluster bigger and more powerful so I can get back to equal time or on other profitable efforts while I wait there is again no ROI.
It so happens that may of the most interestin questions in math, physics and computer science such as quatum theory need massive amounts of parallel work, rather then serial so that works better on a cluster anyway.
If there is a real reason to do it people will build supercomputer, because there is nothing stopping them other then economics. No need to fear Supercomputers are not going away. Everyone else that needs that kinda proc-ing power will settle for clusters, as well they should. This is just another largly obsolete industry wanting someone to bail them out because they have failed to adapt to a changing market. If they are going to die we should let them, just like we should let the Universitys adapt or die, and the RIAA needs to adapt or die, we need to stop proping up obsolete undustries so new ones can replace them!
The Democratic part gave up being about the people along time ago. The DNC is not the party of FDR or even Jimmy Carter anymore although he is to stupid to see it. Farther the Republican part spent many years being run by assoholes and steered far from its roots as well. It was not untill the eighties where forward thinking men like Ronald Regan and Gorge H. Bush restored some of the real original direction of the GOPs historic great leaders like Lincoln and made it about personal responsibility and freedome to choose, then house republicans perverted that vision again durring the Clinton years. The Jury is still out on Gorge W. Bush, Its hard to tell when he has been forced into so many reactionary dicisions due to terror attacks and war. Still I will vote for him and have higher hopes he will someday respect my liberty and me as a person being capable of takeing care of myself and demanding my responsiblity. Kerry wants you to be dependant, he and his croneys want to stay in power by takeing yours away, he wants to decide how to spend the wealth you create. Bush wants to be powerful too but I think he would rather be a despit then playing on your fears a(') la Kerry. The Truth is we need to kickout most of Congress and I can't name a single senator I approve of its time to elect some turly independant conservatives or perhaps libraterians who will turely represent the people and protect the American ideal which really is Libraterian by todats standards. I want people who will take there direction from our preamble.
:-).
Current the Republicans are bad but the Dems are worse. I know its cool to hate rebublicans but if you do then you had better hate the democrats as well unless you reall do whish you could have lived in soviate Russia. Where politicans vote on you
The space program such as it is; is a huge waste of resources. That is not to say that a space program is a waste of resources just the one we have, the same is true for education.
Its a good solution to the problem of DVDs being two layers of plastic can being damaged when flexed. Sure you can avoid it by using sleves instead of center button cases(which most if not all movies are shipped in oddly enough) but there is little you can do other then use care when it comes to the slimline drive in your notebook. Also caddys were only irritating because it was an extra step if they were put into the case like a floopy disk or a minidisk then it would be a non-issue. You easily keep the package then enough that you could still use pages.
I would like to add to my own coment. I would have perfered the blue-ray camp win this as at least the technical specs look more like they can be implemented in the OSS world more quickly as its still a form of mpeg 2, it would be just a matter of optimizing playback software for the new data rates and image sizes rather then knock-out a new codec implementation entirely even if it does borrow a great deal from Divix. Lets remember though long before blue-ray mpeg2 disks would have gotten out the door Sony and their gang would have cooked some DRM like system up for it even it was weak like CSS, they were by no streach of the imagination going to allow it to be as open as it might seem at the moment in final release. So its probably a steeper hill vs. steep hill situation and if M$ wins things are really not much worse.
Good, Sony is by far the only mega corp that really compeetes with M$ in the evil DRM/vendor lockin space. If the 800 pound gorillas want to step all over each others best laid plans well thats about as good as us little guys can hope for these days.
Back in the day I cheered the PC and its big distributers Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq. The were bring computers to the masses and on the cheap compared to Apple. I also cheered the PC because it was the comparatively open platform that people could really put their hands on and learn something. Now Dell/MicyShaft have closed the PC as much as the MAC for most people. Few even consider opening the thing themselves and Windows has been made so arbitrailly complex and deliberatly obfusticated you can't really even play with the software anymore. Naturally you can't get anything buy Winders from the major vendors at least not on a cheap box, because they are in bed with M$, worse yet if you do install any other OS you totally forefit any right to tech support, sure its a non-issue for us slashdoters but its scary for many people.
10 years ago I cheered that the old gaurd Apple was being crushed by that little upstart Microsoft with their supper flexible dos platform. I would have been happy to see them beaten compleetly to death by M$ now not so much. Microsoft has such a dominance with a product they took in a horrid direction which I now feel only contempt for. They have more abusive business practices then Apple or even IBM ever did. Their monoculture has devistated the industry in countless ways. Its really sad to see any of the other players hurt now.
Ok, your makeing my point exactly. YOU have gone through the trouble of pirating windows for them. There are the characteristic aunt Tille users. They don't want to do anything XP pro does not do right out of the box. If they did they'd be at the level of pirating XP themselves. As soon as they reach that level of comfort and knowleage with the PC it really would be easier to install a Linux Distro. They aint there yet so they should stick with what they know. Its also ok if they don't ever want to get there.
Now you should NOT BE HELPING THEM STEAL. Just because something is made by people you don't like and they charge to much for it does not give you the right to RIP them off to help your friends out. You should tell them look I would love to help you with your computer. You can buy a copy of windows or I can install a linux distro for you and point you at the documentation but I won't break the law. That is not being a jerk that is being a responsible citizen who respects the law and is avoiding exposing himself and friends/family to unneccecary liability. Its then there decision wether they buy Windows so you can help them, let you give them Linux and show them what they can read to learn or head off on their own.
This is an interesting point. I think I only paid a few hundred bucks for my TI99/4A with memory expansion floppy controller and a diskdrive. In all aspects other then raw number cruching which NOBODY did on pc sized systems back then it functionally blew the doors of PCs of its day. It had an 80x24 screen mode and it was 8-bit color I think. It also had a crude DPS that was way better then the PC speaker. The applications availible were much better then any of my 8086 friends had to work will too. I honestly don't know why the PC won out. AMIGA, or TI should have won out.
I am not sure that analogy makes since. We are already talking very custom computer hardware, here. That hardware no doubt required a great deal of engineering and for what that probably cost you are not going to waste that hardware running something generic designed to support similar but not exactly your system. You will probably pay some software engineers to develop a framework for supporting like hadware that you and others can benifet from in the future when you build the next supercomputer, and write more custome modular pices of OS level code to extract the max benifet of that custom hardware you just built.
So really we are already talking about a major inhouse development type project here. Its not an important cost center in the investment at this point to bring the talent on board to work out these "hacks" so if they can take a chasis like Linux and make it out perform *NIX or whatever else then thats exactly what someone makeing such a large investment in supercomputing is going to do.
I would say for the most part your right, I can think of only a couple of things that would be real nasty to do on a winbox without any arguments or user input however there are many things that could be real nast with as little as on "ok" which because so many win users are used to pressing "ok" without reading could really mess people up good.
What I don't understand is for all the effort I see many windows users put into ripping off the their OS then ripping off and warezing all the other little utilities they need to do anything beyond what Aunt Tillie does, why don't the realize that: :-) ) and learn to use it.
IT WOULD BE EASIER TO DOWNLOAD ANY Linux distro (Slackware is clearly the best though
say that '[Open source] doesn't guarantee upward compatibility.'"
There is no guarantee in the propriatary world that there will be upward compatibility. The fact that you can migrate you data to the latest and greatest or God for bid an other vendors product is completly the will of the original vendor. Sure most of the time there is an upgrade path but if a product is discontinued their may not be. The data storage might be binary and it would be a massive under takeing to reverse engineer that data. Look at all the effort that it has taken to be able to import a word doc with reasonable accuracy for example. At least with OSS you can look at the source code to your old app and probably use the file/data access code from it in your new app or simply to create something new and simple that can convert using that old code to parse and writeout back out to some better know format. There are all sorts of very valid reasons why a closed source proprietary solution might be better, Gates needs to focus on those instead of spreading out right lies. The problem he has of course is the vast majority of those good reasons are decreasing in value to the average user as skilled people are becomeing more availible and the barries to entry on large scale information systems is shrinking daily.
After reading some comments most here seem not to understand the issue.
Stock options does not mean you are compensated with stock. That is a common practive but options mean you will be able to buy the stock for a certain price at a given time, not that you HAVE the stock now. So they have not given you anything other then an agreement to seel at a certain price if YOU DECIDE to buy at the time of the option. I had to take a number of accounting courses as part of my CS program let me assure you if a company pays you in stock it is expenses already.
The knee jerk response to this is the matching principle which says you expense things in the accounting period that the expense is incurred, that is not always when its paid. So you say there has been no *real* transaction yet so there is no expense. Then you simply account for it like any other stock sale when/ip the employee buys the stock.
The problem is the rest of the accounting assumes an arms-length transaction. That is to say it works on the principle that things will be bought and sold at the market value, because all parties are aiming for their best interest. If you have a stock option you might be buying that stock for a much lower cost then the market value at that time. That effectivly means it is *costing* the company to sell you that stock.
The argument then is offering a stock option is incuring an expense because if your estimations are correct you will be selling for less its worth, why would someone want a stock option to buy for more then its worth? we can also guess that if we are way wrong and our stock goes through the floor nobody will exercise the option either.
If you estimate wrong you just make an adjusting entry later. The way I see it is that it probably should be an expense because I think companies tend to issue stock options with little conscience thought about the impact down the road, and or operate like the mail-in rebate scheme and assume a large percentage will fail to make good on the options, so they are suckering new hires to some extent.
Seriously this is what internships are for. Maybe you can't get 3+ years experience but you certainly can gain lots of experience that you can truth fully list as independent items. Lots of IT companies are happy to take interns unpaid and often even paid, for the summer or part time durring the school year. The career services office or some of your profs SHOULD be able to hook you up. If they can't then your school has big problems. I know my school now requires an internship to get a degreen is CS or IS.
No, yea its a great plan really!
1. Fire the writers they cost money
2. Fire the actors they cost money
3. Find the worst examples of human trash on the street and tell them they *get* to be on TV.
4. Find some totaly impossible situation and place the jackasses in it.
5. Find some hack with a camera
6. Profit form a nation of Jackasses and trash.
I would also like to put in my full agreement. I grew up on TNG and have seen all of TOS thanks to my Dads tapes. DS9 is my favorite though. I think the acting was by far the best. Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor actually had very complex charaters and sold them to me. Calm Meeny(sp?) was good too but they never did enough with him. I enjoyed Terry Farell and late Nichole Deboer as well. The show had a neat epic like quality that the other shows lacked. The DS9 plot actually built and managed to keep the episodes descrete at the same time. Clearly DS9 had much better writing then the other shows.
If I buy a CD its for the music, not for any other multi-media crap on the disk. If I stick in my PC I simply will not even try to mount it even if it supposedly does have a data track. I'd love to see some viral DRM app install without even a mount. I'd actually be quite impressed if said viral DRM app managed to get installed on my Slackware Box period even if I did mount the disk, and no I rufuse to help it out by either working as root. Actally no matter what the band is if I suspected their CD did this kinda stuff I would NEVER buy it and would probably write the artist and the label if it was a group I cared about just to let them know they lost a customer because of how they treat their customers. I still expect to be treated well when I patronize a business and I expect them to understand that if they give me a hard time I WON'T be back even if I have to pay much more some place else for service/good foo. As far as this software goes though users should take steps. 1. Never put music disks purchase post 2002(t o be safe) into your PC when you are running as a user who is privilaged enough to install software, regardless of your OS, hopefully this will prevent it from being installed. 2. Run a firewall that filters outbound connections as well as inbound don't want any spy/drm wares calling home. 3. Make an attempt to use some other media player to play the vids or whatever is on the disk rather then any software from the disk, if its on the disk is probably spyware. /me wonders what all would be needed to use wine in a chroot setup....
This should be modded up! People who buy into M$ pactches result in exploits argument miss the important point. Large high finace firms and governments spend a great deal of money to stay on top of flaws and patch imedialy or otherwise protect vulnerable systems. They do this becase they have more to loose then the average Luser. Still most of those guys are just regular mortals like you and me and don;t have the source to pour over. So they find out only when stuff is posted to places like bug track and Cern. If you kept this stuff secret like M$ wants, then yes very few jerks running XP home would be sploited and the script kiddies would be put outa bussiness. However when some black hat does find a bug he can use it and if he covers his tracks and picks his targets well, could get away with using it for years. Remember even if you do get rooted you might not beable to determine how and so it could happen again! This black hat and his circle of friends could steal all sorts of precious information. I am not talking just credit card numbers and stuff either I am talking like what if he hacks boeing and finds plans for jets and sells that info to terrorists or something. Publishing exploits ensures the most valuable information and systems get protected and thats important even if its at the expense of the Lusers out there with they new Dell.
Yes but you have to remember that it was built to do one specific thing. When you design something for a single use, you get to make all sorts of assumptions which will allow you to optimize very very much. My DVD recorder is probably hundreds of times slower then my Athlong 64 system yet no matter what software I use it records video smoother with fewer frame drops. On the PC something happens like it becomes neccecary to flush the disk buffer and it will drop a frame, its hardly perceptable but sometimes you can detect it. PCs are so universal that you get to make few if any assumptions and that means more processing time. I imagine if you tried to write software for this thing to say transcode mp3 files to odd or something riddiculus like that your PC would finish months before this machine does.
This gets back to my rant on providing more money for education. There IS NO LACK OF FUNDS for Education in the United States, there is a TOTAL lack of of responsibility for those funds. I vote down (and will continue to do so) every school levey and politian that would increase school taxes. I think public schools are one of the most important institution we have in this country though. The issue is I have been to school recently as a 20 something I can tell you that most of their budget is waste. Why in heavens name do we need video on demand huge writing labs of computers fast one with P4s for word processing? Not to mention new uniforms for the band every year or half of the other eqipment they buy and never use. The huge mulitmedia room my HS built that I saw when I went back to visit cost close to a million dollars and according to my younger sister has been used all of about once in two years. Its all over kill, schools are run by a bunch of know nothing administrators that think technology is going to solve all their education problems. Instead of spending money on hightech schools should spend money on text books, teachers, and the building(a confortable enviorment is importand for learning). This is not to say they should not have a well outfited computer lab to teach things like computer science . I won't support any money for schools untill I see it being spent on what matters though, teachers and books. In MN Ventera cut the budget drasticly at first school admins tried all sorts of scare tactics like claiming they could only afford to run schools four days a week and would have to cut every after school program and riddiculous claims like that. What really happend though is Jessy pushed the budget through and schools had to start to be responsible with the money, I don't see as much flasy new toys but overall the schools have not suffered. They simply buy books and teachers and maintain the buildings. It works good. Now idealy we could not cut school budgets and pay teachers more, that might result in better teachers, and again as a recent grad I learned more from teachers then and multimedia presentation tought me. A good lecurer with a chalk and a blackboard is far more valuable then some hack with power point.
First, makeing the claim that just because you have to use the console means its hard is FUD; I am so sick of that its not even funny. Seccond, if you purchased that $400 card and could not make it go on windows XP would you blame windows or the card? I bet you'd blame the card, that is a double standard. Its not fair to expect the Linux kernel to support every bleeding edge or obscure pice of crap because it happens to be in your box. Perhaps you should consider checking if something is supported before you buy it. Third, Its not hard just because you have to read the documentation, most third graders could read and understand a howto and likely even execute the instructions in it. Computers are complex systems and only a stuip person would expect everything to be perfectly intuitive. I have a universal remote , I had to read the instruction manual before I was able to program it for my TV and stero, but I did not cry and complain to slashdot that it was too hard.
The truth is there is nothing in your post that was hard, just examples of YOU BEING LAZY POINT BY POINT.
"Being a minor and having no job, I really had no choice but to pirate Microsoft Office and Windows. Sure, I could have used some open source office productivity suite, but that is just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with considering Office only took 30 minutes to download and install."
You realize that what you just said translates into, "Sure I could do it myself or get a job and then pay someone to do it for me but why when I can just steal it."
Sorry Pal you're a looser and a theif and you belong in prision.
The most common thread here is that games are over priced for what you get. Yet people are saying like $50 is two much for 5 hours of game play. That is only $10 for entertainment. Try doing much better then that at a proffessional sports game or even the movie thearter. Maybe the best ratio you get there is $5/hour but most likely if you're sitting where you can actually see or going to a facility where you want to spend two hours in its closer to $10.
The realeative price of games does not seem to change that much either, but we know the costs have gone up. I was paying just as much for my NES games as I pay now for stuff on GC, but with NES Nintendo never had to higher voice actors, artists and modles, which is what most people expect today. So really in a certain sense the price of games is actually falling. Now lots of poeple argue that half the games that come out are crap and that might be true but the same holds for yesterday's games. People think back on the classics and go "Oh those were all so good" but that is because they have forgotten the bad ones. There were lots of really terrible NES and Atari games same for archade.
I think all this piracy has more to do with greede and lack of scruples then most people here care to admit. If you don't like the commercial software modle, like I don't use open source. I have very little PC software that is not FOSS and what is not I have paid for it. I have lots of FOSS games that I really enjoy and I thank the authors very much. Still I recognize that FOSS will never produce certain types of software, one of which is games with voice actors, live models, and highly technical artwork. Sometimes you do see the art work Tux Racer is a good example. When I want those games I go out and by the GC version and enjoy it, but that is pretty rare might be 2-3 games per year. The rest of my games time is spent with FOSS. $150 is not too much to spend per year on games, add $10-20 and you can rent things form the video store and try before you buy at least in the console world. You pirates need to just admit you're greedy and that you want something for nothing.
These game makers are going to cut out huge percentages of their markets by makeing games political but, the market of Linux users is not big enough to make ports. Market share must not be important to theme. Either that or they don't realize that I am not going to by their new super FPS if its got Kerry poasters on all its virtual walls.