Frankly, the entire "minty-mint" collection mania is pathological. The perceived sale value boils down to "how much can I fleece a clueless schlub for?". And that's illogical.
That is what socialists call subjective valuation. It's a natural instinctive behavior for all mammals, and it's at the core of capitalism; capitalism wouldn't be what it is without it, concentration of wealth and all. Socialists identify it as a key ethical failing of all human economies, and set voluntary adoption of objective valuation of goods AND labor as a primary goal of a cooperative, rather than competitive, economic system. We haven't evolved to a point yet where a pure socialist economy is possible; Communism tried to use the government to create that economy through force, and that failed miserably. Our own (American) economy uses varying degrees of force and threat of force to impose socialistic controls and limits on our economy, with varying degrees of failure. It has to be collectively voluntary or it's hardly more ethical. We're not there yet.
This guy didn't pay through the nose for it, though, did he? I'm a geek, but I'm also a socialist: I would never have agreed to buy it if it was unfairly priced, no matter how much I wanted it. Sure, it takes some willpower, but it ain't that hard. If the "valuation" is clearly subjective and anything but objective, just vote with your dollar and walk away and wait for it to be offered for a fair price.
My point wasn't the cheapness, but rather the use of off-the-shelf components and a lack of proprietary crap that increases the cost to me, for instance the use of standard ATX cases and motherboards rather than some non-standard form factor that intentionally limits possible replacements and upgrades to just one source. In the case of eMachines, they may very well have used poor quality original components, but they were off-the-shelf components, meaning that you could easily get replacements and upgrades from numerous sources, not just eMachines.
Since Windows 2000 installed, XP will almost certainly also install; it may not run efficiently in the limit of 512MB, but it would install. I didn't reaffirm anything you said.
The "serious" BIOS revisions you mention aren't relevant. This system has an 800 MHz CPU, and the other issues don't affect the installation process. Since you're so fond of logic, I will remind you that one cannot logically infer the existence of unrelated serious issues from the mere existence of these.
Please quit. This is not a competition. There's nothing to win here.
You've put numerous words in my mouth that I never uttered. I never said that newer versions of Windows failed to install on this system. I don't have newer versions of Windows to even install. I also tried both older and the newest versions of Ubuntu; none of them worked.
I would also like to point out that older laptops often have very very poor support for newer OS variations.
You have this utterly backwards. It's exactly the opposite. The simple passage of time (and sufficient demand) ensures more compatibility, not less.
Ubuntu has had many years to perfect support for this very well-known series of laptops from a major supplier. If my experience is an indication, it has failed so, yes, that shakes my faith in it considerably.
I might just do that, if I could afford a new laptop. I only have this one because it was a hand-me-down.
OTOH, I have a decades-old hatred of brand-name computer systems, because I've seen ALL the proprietary lock-in stunts the manufacturers pull. I respect the "value added" when they mass-produce a cookie-cutter box for which they only have to do the configuration work once and then replicate that stable configuration ad infinitum; if they could add that value and stop there, that would be awesome... but they don't. The value removed by their proprietary stunts cancels out for me most of the value added by the mass production aspect.
If I were to buy a "brand name" box at all, it would be one of the least proprietary types, like the eMachines brand or similar, though even that brand and company is now owned by Gateway, IIRC.
Just in the last two days I've tried to install three versions of Ubuntu on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, and every attempt failed with a blank screen of death in the middle of the process. I tried 7.1, 8.04, and the latest nightly build (first two Desktop versions, the latter Alternate of course). This is an old laptop from 2001, a model 1805-S203, so there's no cutting-edge hardware that should be causing a problem, yet the installs failed spectacularly.
By contrast, BOTH Windows 2000 and MEPIS Linux version 7 were able to install.
I have to tell you, this has shaken my confidence in open source operating systems quite a bit.
But oddly, Microsoft HR Chief Mike Murray cited religious beliefs for his decision to contribute $100,000 to 'Yes On 8', surprising coming from the guy who had been charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint.
This is what we call cognitive dissonance... or disingenuity.
The guy's delusional in any case, first for thinking there's some supernatural omnipotent creature that would actually give a crap about the sexual habits of mere ants, and second for thinking that some shards of literature from over 2000 years ago could actually be at all descriptive of the motives of this alleged supernatural omnipotent creature.
This is precisely the sort of evolutionary cat-and-mouse game that is likely to lead to the first true artificial intelligence. It won't be some well-meaning altrustic researcher in some AI lab, it will evolve out of this cyber-warfare.
Jesus wouldn't approve of your attitude nor your belief. I hope you don't also consider yourself a devout Christian, because that would make your delusion quite complete.
Your approach to living is a relic of a distant past that doesn't work very well in the present, and won't work at all in the future. Assuming you have very many decades left to live, perhaps you'll yet learn.
There you go again, thinking those arbitrary intangible borders between nations actually have any rational meaning. They don't. Most often they were invented by those same "fat cats" whom we both despise. Guess who those borders benefit most? You haven't been thinking conspiratorially enough.
I think you misunderstand the significance of "outsourcing": outsourcing is a GOOD thing, hard as it may be for people to recognize it from a restricted vantage point. Outsourcing is money flowing to where the deepest economic low pressure zone is, trying to equalize the economic pressure (standard of living). Equalizing that pressure is something that MUST happen, not only within our own arbitrary borders but outside them as well. Economics doesn't respect those arbitrary borders any more than the climate does.
*knock, knock* Hello, capitalists of the world, can you hear us? This is your wake-up call; you get at least one of these every century, in the form, of deep recessions or depressions.
Even once a century never seems to be enough to make the lesson stick, does it? What makes you think we should be okay with knowing that you are padding your fatter wallets at our expense? What makes you think that we can actually afford it? What you're seeing now is economic proof of your miscalculation of how much injury you can cause us without dealing a mortal blow.
Perhaps - just perhaps, mind you - if you and so many others like you hadn't been sticking it to us for so long, we might now still have some of the resources (money) that you disproportionately took from us, and be able to keep spending modest amounts of it on computers and such. Instead, we now have to react disproportionately ourselves - stop buying luxuries - to recover from the injury done to us. We tried REALLY hard to ignore what was happening and keep spending like there was no tomorrow, but you just had to keep trying to raise margins, didn't you? The shit had to hit the fan eventually.
Recessions and depressions are an excessive backlash to excessive greed.
The trouble with blacklists is that the criteria are almost always emotional and subjective and rarely rational or objective. Since human emotional responses are never going to be precisely the same across the board, their resulting contents are a recipe for annoyance and worse. Why are they even still considered effective by anyone?
Warp 11 is a real Trek parody band that has been around for many years, so yes, that's a real song you can buy. They're based out of my current city of residence, Sacramento, California.
Having a venture capitalist in any appointed position in what is supposed to be a representative democracy does not strike me as very wise. Whose interests exactly do we expect such a person to represent? Certainly not mine nor those of any of my friends and family....
The legacy of the CueCat is that one sits in a drawer and another on my desk, hacked into a basic barcode reader with an on-off switch, to be used once in a great while for scanning "open source" UPCs into Google. That's not at all what they had in mind, and a whole lot less commercial.
Microsoft wants to reinvent this square wheel? I'm disappointed there won't be any free goodies to hack this time....
"Some self-selection in place"? That might qualify as the understatement of the year! I suspect that in the majority of people of whom they accuse this relationship, it simply isn't true. I'm not a professional researcher, but then I also don't have a dogmatic agenda that I am driven to justify like some of said researchers (either because they're being paid wads of cash or have a "cause"). Experiments and studies can be even more easily manipulated to produce a desired result than polls, because there are so many more variables involved. I haven't yet seen any experiments whose methods and results are convincing evidence of this alleged connection except to other pod-people in the choir.
I'll say it again, opinion or not: games do not make people more aggressive nor violent than they already are. They MIGHT feel the games legitimize their behavior and thus be more likely to indulge it, but the behavior is already present; that would be analogous to what happens when someone BELIEVES they've consumed alcohol and begins "acting drunk" based purely on that belief and the knowledge that society is tolerant of certain behaviors IF alcohol is believed responsible (the alcohol "excuses" the behavior). This effect has been demonstrated repeatedly with alcohol. That, however, is not at all the same as the claims being made here.
I'm fine with the basic concept here. I can accept that music isn't generally open source or FOSM. What I wanna know is: if I pay a dollar to buy a digital song, how much of that dollar actually finds its way into the wallet of the artist? If most of that dollar is going into the overly fat wallet of a middleman, I am NOT fine with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, the entire "minty-mint" collection mania is pathological. The perceived sale value boils down to "how much can I fleece a clueless schlub for?". And that's illogical.
That is what socialists call subjective valuation. It's a natural instinctive behavior for all mammals, and it's at the core of capitalism; capitalism wouldn't be what it is without it, concentration of wealth and all. Socialists identify it as a key ethical failing of all human economies, and set voluntary adoption of objective valuation of goods AND labor as a primary goal of a cooperative, rather than competitive, economic system. We haven't evolved to a point yet where a pure socialist economy is possible; Communism tried to use the government to create that economy through force, and that failed miserably. Our own (American) economy uses varying degrees of force and threat of force to impose socialistic controls and limits on our economy, with varying degrees of failure. It has to be collectively voluntary or it's hardly more ethical. We're not there yet.
This guy didn't pay through the nose for it, though, did he? I'm a geek, but I'm also a socialist: I would never have agreed to buy it if it was unfairly priced, no matter how much I wanted it. Sure, it takes some willpower, but it ain't that hard. If the "valuation" is clearly subjective and anything but objective, just vote with your dollar and walk away and wait for it to be offered for a fair price.
Is that an example of syllabic simplification? And is this an example of alliteration?
... siphon out and cart off all the, ummm, residue that's left after the gasification. Can you say "shitty job"?
My point wasn't the cheapness, but rather the use of off-the-shelf components and a lack of proprietary crap that increases the cost to me, for instance the use of standard ATX cases and motherboards rather than some non-standard form factor that intentionally limits possible replacements and upgrades to just one source. In the case of eMachines, they may very well have used poor quality original components, but they were off-the-shelf components, meaning that you could easily get replacements and upgrades from numerous sources, not just eMachines.
Since Windows 2000 installed, XP will almost certainly also install; it may not run efficiently in the limit of 512MB, but it would install. I didn't reaffirm anything you said.
The "serious" BIOS revisions you mention aren't relevant. This system has an 800 MHz CPU, and the other issues don't affect the installation process. Since you're so fond of logic, I will remind you that one cannot logically infer the existence of unrelated serious issues from the mere existence of these.
Please quit. This is not a competition. There's nothing to win here.
You've put numerous words in my mouth that I never uttered. I never said that newer versions of Windows failed to install on this system. I don't have newer versions of Windows to even install. I also tried both older and the newest versions of Ubuntu; none of them worked.
You have this utterly backwards. It's exactly the opposite. The simple passage of time (and sufficient demand) ensures more compatibility, not less.
Ubuntu has had many years to perfect support for this very well-known series of laptops from a major supplier. If my experience is an indication, it has failed so, yes, that shakes my faith in it considerably.
I might just do that, if I could afford a new laptop. I only have this one because it was a hand-me-down.
OTOH, I have a decades-old hatred of brand-name computer systems, because I've seen ALL the proprietary lock-in stunts the manufacturers pull. I respect the "value added" when they mass-produce a cookie-cutter box for which they only have to do the configuration work once and then replicate that stable configuration ad infinitum; if they could add that value and stop there, that would be awesome... but they don't. The value removed by their proprietary stunts cancels out for me most of the value added by the mass production aspect.
If I were to buy a "brand name" box at all, it would be one of the least proprietary types, like the eMachines brand or similar, though even that brand and company is now owned by Gateway, IIRC.
Just in the last two days I've tried to install three versions of Ubuntu on a Toshiba Satellite laptop, and every attempt failed with a blank screen of death in the middle of the process. I tried 7.1, 8.04, and the latest nightly build (first two Desktop versions, the latter Alternate of course). This is an old laptop from 2001, a model 1805-S203, so there's no cutting-edge hardware that should be causing a problem, yet the installs failed spectacularly.
By contrast, BOTH Windows 2000 and MEPIS Linux version 7 were able to install.
I have to tell you, this has shaken my confidence in open source operating systems quite a bit.
This is what we call cognitive dissonance... or disingenuity.
The guy's delusional in any case, first for thinking there's some supernatural omnipotent creature that would actually give a crap about the sexual habits of mere ants, and second for thinking that some shards of literature from over 2000 years ago could actually be at all descriptive of the motives of this alleged supernatural omnipotent creature.
This is precisely the sort of evolutionary cat-and-mouse game that is likely to lead to the first true artificial intelligence. It won't be some well-meaning altrustic researcher in some AI lab, it will evolve out of this cyber-warfare.
Jesus wouldn't approve of your attitude nor your belief. I hope you don't also consider yourself a devout Christian, because that would make your delusion quite complete.
Your approach to living is a relic of a distant past that doesn't work very well in the present, and won't work at all in the future. Assuming you have very many decades left to live, perhaps you'll yet learn.
There you go again, thinking those arbitrary intangible borders between nations actually have any rational meaning. They don't. Most often they were invented by those same "fat cats" whom we both despise. Guess who those borders benefit most? You haven't been thinking conspiratorially enough.
Wait... what? She was tricked into buying an already registered domain?
(You decide: is TFA's title careless, or is naming a software product after an Internet hostname careless?)
Thanks for the ad hominem. Did you learn that in school, or were you self-taught?
I think you misunderstand the significance of "outsourcing": outsourcing is a GOOD thing, hard as it may be for people to recognize it from a restricted vantage point. Outsourcing is money flowing to where the deepest economic low pressure zone is, trying to equalize the economic pressure (standard of living). Equalizing that pressure is something that MUST happen, not only within our own arbitrary borders but outside them as well. Economics doesn't respect those arbitrary borders any more than the climate does.
*knock, knock* Hello, capitalists of the world, can you hear us? This is your wake-up call; you get at least one of these every century, in the form, of deep recessions or depressions.
Even once a century never seems to be enough to make the lesson stick, does it? What makes you think we should be okay with knowing that you are padding your fatter wallets at our expense? What makes you think that we can actually afford it? What you're seeing now is economic proof of your miscalculation of how much injury you can cause us without dealing a mortal blow.
Perhaps - just perhaps, mind you - if you and so many others like you hadn't been sticking it to us for so long, we might now still have some of the resources (money) that you disproportionately took from us, and be able to keep spending modest amounts of it on computers and such. Instead, we now have to react disproportionately ourselves - stop buying luxuries - to recover from the injury done to us. We tried REALLY hard to ignore what was happening and keep spending like there was no tomorrow, but you just had to keep trying to raise margins, didn't you? The shit had to hit the fan eventually.
Recessions and depressions are an excessive backlash to excessive greed.
Is the Slashdot article photo of the real subject? If so, I think we know what the problem is....
The trouble with blacklists is that the criteria are almost always emotional and subjective and rarely rational or objective. Since human emotional responses are never going to be precisely the same across the board, their resulting contents are a recipe for annoyance and worse. Why are they even still considered effective by anyone?
Warp 11 is a real Trek parody band that has been around for many years, so yes, that's a real song you can buy. They're based out of my current city of residence, Sacramento, California.
I meant to title that "Venture capitalists in the henhouse". Ooops.
Having a venture capitalist in any appointed position in what is supposed to be a representative democracy does not strike me as very wise. Whose interests exactly do we expect such a person to represent? Certainly not mine nor those of any of my friends and family....
When will they learn...?
The legacy of the CueCat is that one sits in a drawer and another on my desk, hacked into a basic barcode reader with an on-off switch, to be used once in a great while for scanning "open source" UPCs into Google. That's not at all what they had in mind, and a whole lot less commercial.
Microsoft wants to reinvent this square wheel? I'm disappointed there won't be any free goodies to hack this time....
"Some self-selection in place"? That might qualify as the understatement of the year! I suspect that in the majority of people of whom they accuse this relationship, it simply isn't true. I'm not a professional researcher, but then I also don't have a dogmatic agenda that I am driven to justify like some of said researchers (either because they're being paid wads of cash or have a "cause"). Experiments and studies can be even more easily manipulated to produce a desired result than polls, because there are so many more variables involved. I haven't yet seen any experiments whose methods and results are convincing evidence of this alleged connection except to other pod-people in the choir.
I'll say it again, opinion or not: games do not make people more aggressive nor violent than they already are. They MIGHT feel the games legitimize their behavior and thus be more likely to indulge it, but the behavior is already present; that would be analogous to what happens when someone BELIEVES they've consumed alcohol and begins "acting drunk" based purely on that belief and the knowledge that society is tolerant of certain behaviors IF alcohol is believed responsible (the alcohol "excuses" the behavior). This effect has been demonstrated repeatedly with alcohol. That, however, is not at all the same as the claims being made here.
I'm fine with the basic concept here. I can accept that music isn't generally open source or FOSM. What I wanna know is: if I pay a dollar to buy a digital song, how much of that dollar actually finds its way into the wallet of the artist? If most of that dollar is going into the overly fat wallet of a middleman, I am NOT fine with that.