"Installing a whole OS inside a VM" is not exactly difficult. I highly doubt you can find a significant number of Linux desktop users who would have trouble with the process. If getting work done is your real priority, then you will buy a Windows or Mac PC that is ready-to-go and you'll download Adobe cloud and that will be that. The idea that Photoshop on Linux would be trouble free is somewhat hilarious, given the number of variations that implies. It's like the same hardware mess as Windows with added OS variations. They'd probably need to pick a few stock distros and anything else would mean the usual dicking around.
I'm not exactly a Windows fan, only using it reluctantly - but it's hard for me to imagine a Linux user who uses it because they appreciate Linux's technical aspects but can also not figure out how to get Wine going. Or Windows in a VM.
Yeah, it's an asshole comment. But seriously, Photoshop is expensive software. Running Windows in a VM (or Linux in a VM on Windows) is hardly a huge ask once you are paying $$$ to Adobe. Where is this huge installed base of creative professionals with Linux desktops that Adobe is targeting? Maybe Chromebooks in the near future.
This is still true for the most part, except that you won't save that much (if any) money on the Lenovo products that are high-quality rather than crap. Even their ThinkPad line has lemons, so you need to do a little legwork before pulling the trigger.
(I've been a Mac fan for a long time, but recently needed to replace a very old one and had to bow out for this generation. I'm just not impressed with the current offerings, and I went with an HP Envy instead. It's not quite up to MacBook Pro build quality, but it's an ultraportable quad-core i7 for under $1000.)
Also, much like a diamond, RCC is a rather special material, it's not just a layer of carbonized material.
I didn't mean to imply that they could design fabric that could transform itself into RCC when carbonized - I was just using it as an example of how pure carbon makes a nice insulator with a practical example. RCC would be overkill anyway, as it's not important that the fabric be durable or reusable - just that it absorbs and dissipates a short burst of laser energy. In the worst case we are talking 500 watts for 2 seconds. That's 1000 Joules, which is less than the energy that a bulletproof vest needs to dissipate. It seems feasible, that's all.
Is the opponent not also logistically constrained? The idea that one side could fire lasers at will for an indefinite period of time while the other side does nothing in response except deploy countermeasures is a little strange.
Probably easier to design something ablative, or something that carbonizes when hit with the laser - essentially leaving behind a highly-heat resistant and insulating carbon layer. The black parts of the space shuttle were made by carbonizing resins (RCC panels). The result would be a ruined, brittle fabric - but it would protect one's skin from the laser.
I used an ambiguous, or perhaps wrong phrase in "false nostalgia". I didn't mean to imply that your memories are not real - I take your word when you say that you biked everywhere as a kid. I meant that people weren't so different back then and your situation was probably more unique than you think it was. Granted, sprawl is a lot worse than it was 30 years ago, safety is more important to people now (bike helmets? who needs em!), etc. But I don't think kids are inherently whimpier now or anything like that - that's what I meant by false nostalgia.
If that is what you got from my post, then I failed to communicate with you.
You made a point about how you could get anywhere on your bike as a kid. I countered with how this won't work for everyone. You countered with, no, it's because people have changed. I came back with a more specific example of how even in a relatively bike friendly location you may have need for a car as a teenager. I did mention false nostalgia, but that was not the main point of my post, and I'll try to be more concise in the future.
That's false nostalgia. I'm sure you can find examples of that if you are looking for it, but some places never were and will never be bike friendly. I grew up in a perfectly flat biking paradise, and I went everywhere on my bike until high school. In high school, my first school was 5 miles away on a dangerous causeway and my friends similarly placed. My second school was a 45 minute drive. Needless to say, biking went out the window when I turned 14, and it wasn't because I was spineless. Winter weather, summer weather, wet weather - all meant driving, even in the days of old. In a post-car-ownership world, those will be peak times and will cost more. I can say this with some confidence having lived in NYC and knowing when it is hard to get a cab.
I think that's a little extreme. I own my own house and my own cars, but I'm still dependent on the government to maintain the roads, provide my utilities, protect my property, etc. I'm really not living that differently than I would if I lived in an apartment. When I lived in NYC, I didn't feel less "free" by not having a car - I could simply rent one anytime I wanted to go anywhere. When the transit strike happened it was a pain in the ass, but we carpooled and took private transportation... no government bondage or anything like that. Certainly is was less debilitating than a power outage.
That's a good point - perhaps one of us could commute with ride-sharing and the other could get kid duty. A little more planning would be necessary (who is on kid duty today?), but it seems like a reasonable accomodation to save serious money.
Ah, parking. Parking could be a huge time sink depending on your job and home locations. I've cruised around San Francisco looking for parking near my girlfriend's apartment for easily 45 minutes. The parking garages downtown in some cities can be a few blocks away and expensive as hell.
The handful of times I've used Uber to get for work the waiting time wasn't a big problem. As I ate my breakfast I checked out the wait times and they were around, for example, 10 minutes, so I scheduled it 10 minutes before I wanted to walk out the door. Same thing on the way home - I just called it to roughly coincide with my normal leaving time at work.
But yeah, you have a great point - it's the same mode of transport so how could it be faster? Maybe they are including time paying bills, taking it in for maintenance and repairs, etc.?
It's true that in NYC you can go pretty much anywhere using public transit - but it's not necessarily a quick trip. If you need a cross town bus or something like that, you might as well walk. It's the only place I've lived where 3 miles == 45 minutes. In NYC you need to make the same calculation that you do everywhere else, trading cost and neighborhood for commute times. You could easily get a place in Philly on one of the subway or commuter rail lines and live without a car, but you'd need to think about transportation as you were apartment/job hunting. Same as in NYC. DC and Boston also have a lot of carless residents using public transit. Anywhere that people actually live near the downtown rather than it being a dead commercial-only center. So yeah, NYC has more options, but it is expensive as hell for most of the good ones and you still need to be strategic about where you live and work unless you really love sitting on a handful of trains and/or busses for an hour or so.
Well, for you the calculation is quite simple. For others, it's not so simple. For instance, most of my usage is at peak commuting hours - an Uber currently costs me around $10-12 each way. 5 days a week 48 weeks per year this is around $8000. My van cost around $27000 and I'll get at least 10 years out of it, so my annualized capital cost is around $3000 (including interest payments). Annual maintenance averages around $1000 or less per year. Fuel costs are under $2000 per year. Insurance is another $1500. So for just my commute I'd be looking at almost break-even: $8000 vs around $7500.
BUT, I have kids. They need to be ferried to sports, before-school activities, certain friends' houses, etc. The kids blow the calculations out of the water. Kids are expensive. Then add in weekend travel and shopping/grocery trips and it isn't even close.
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"Installing a whole OS inside a VM" is not exactly difficult. I highly doubt you can find a significant number of Linux desktop users who would have trouble with the process. If getting work done is your real priority, then you will buy a Windows or Mac PC that is ready-to-go and you'll download Adobe cloud and that will be that. The idea that Photoshop on Linux would be trouble free is somewhat hilarious, given the number of variations that implies. It's like the same hardware mess as Windows with added OS variations. They'd probably need to pick a few stock distros and anything else would mean the usual dicking around.
I'm not exactly a Windows fan, only using it reluctantly - but it's hard for me to imagine a Linux user who uses it because they appreciate Linux's technical aspects but can also not figure out how to get Wine going. Or Windows in a VM.
Brand new hip things also won't run Linux very well.
It's $10 a month. For any professional that's not even an hour's worth of pay.
And Windows is super-pricey?
Yeah, it's an asshole comment. But seriously, Photoshop is expensive software. Running Windows in a VM (or Linux in a VM on Windows) is hardly a huge ask once you are paying $$$ to Adobe. Where is this huge installed base of creative professionals with Linux desktops that Adobe is targeting? Maybe Chromebooks in the near future.
I know the main reason I run a free OS is so that I can take advantage of all of the proprietary software.
This is still true for the most part, except that you won't save that much (if any) money on the Lenovo products that are high-quality rather than crap. Even their ThinkPad line has lemons, so you need to do a little legwork before pulling the trigger.
(I've been a Mac fan for a long time, but recently needed to replace a very old one and had to bow out for this generation. I'm just not impressed with the current offerings, and I went with an HP Envy instead. It's not quite up to MacBook Pro build quality, but it's an ultraportable quad-core i7 for under $1000.)
Also, much like a diamond, RCC is a rather special material, it's not just a layer of carbonized material.
I didn't mean to imply that they could design fabric that could transform itself into RCC when carbonized - I was just using it as an example of how pure carbon makes a nice insulator with a practical example. RCC would be overkill anyway, as it's not important that the fabric be durable or reusable - just that it absorbs and dissipates a short burst of laser energy. In the worst case we are talking 500 watts for 2 seconds. That's 1000 Joules, which is less than the energy that a bulletproof vest needs to dissipate. It seems feasible, that's all.
Never apologize for being geeky on Slashdot! :)
Is the opponent not also logistically constrained? The idea that one side could fire lasers at will for an indefinite period of time while the other side does nothing in response except deploy countermeasures is a little strange.
Probably easier to design something ablative, or something that carbonizes when hit with the laser - essentially leaving behind a highly-heat resistant and insulating carbon layer. The black parts of the space shuttle were made by carbonizing resins (RCC panels). The result would be a ruined, brittle fabric - but it would protect one's skin from the laser.
It's a Calvin and Hobbes reference, as are the replies.
Well, to clarify my clarification... :)
I used an ambiguous, or perhaps wrong phrase in "false nostalgia". I didn't mean to imply that your memories are not real - I take your word when you say that you biked everywhere as a kid. I meant that people weren't so different back then and your situation was probably more unique than you think it was. Granted, sprawl is a lot worse than it was 30 years ago, safety is more important to people now (bike helmets? who needs em!), etc. But I don't think kids are inherently whimpier now or anything like that - that's what I meant by false nostalgia.
Thanks for the discussion and kind words.
If that is what you got from my post, then I failed to communicate with you.
You made a point about how you could get anywhere on your bike as a kid. I countered with how this won't work for everyone. You countered with, no, it's because people have changed. I came back with a more specific example of how even in a relatively bike friendly location you may have need for a car as a teenager. I did mention false nostalgia, but that was not the main point of my post, and I'll try to be more concise in the future.
Exactly my point.
That's false nostalgia. I'm sure you can find examples of that if you are looking for it, but some places never were and will never be bike friendly. I grew up in a perfectly flat biking paradise, and I went everywhere on my bike until high school. In high school, my first school was 5 miles away on a dangerous causeway and my friends similarly placed. My second school was a 45 minute drive. Needless to say, biking went out the window when I turned 14, and it wasn't because I was spineless. Winter weather, summer weather, wet weather - all meant driving, even in the days of old. In a post-car-ownership world, those will be peak times and will cost more. I can say this with some confidence having lived in NYC and knowing when it is hard to get a cab.
LOL, but old nerds - avoided by the fairer sex in youth - become a valuable marriage commodity. Girlfriend is now Wife.
Lucky you. Not everyone lives in the worlds most bikeable town with perfect year-round weather and safety.
I think that's a little extreme. I own my own house and my own cars, but I'm still dependent on the government to maintain the roads, provide my utilities, protect my property, etc. I'm really not living that differently than I would if I lived in an apartment. When I lived in NYC, I didn't feel less "free" by not having a car - I could simply rent one anytime I wanted to go anywhere. When the transit strike happened it was a pain in the ass, but we carpooled and took private transportation... no government bondage or anything like that. Certainly is was less debilitating than a power outage.
That's a good point - perhaps one of us could commute with ride-sharing and the other could get kid duty. A little more planning would be necessary (who is on kid duty today?), but it seems like a reasonable accomodation to save serious money.
Ah, parking. Parking could be a huge time sink depending on your job and home locations. I've cruised around San Francisco looking for parking near my girlfriend's apartment for easily 45 minutes. The parking garages downtown in some cities can be a few blocks away and expensive as hell.
The handful of times I've used Uber to get for work the waiting time wasn't a big problem. As I ate my breakfast I checked out the wait times and they were around, for example, 10 minutes, so I scheduled it 10 minutes before I wanted to walk out the door. Same thing on the way home - I just called it to roughly coincide with my normal leaving time at work.
But yeah, you have a great point - it's the same mode of transport so how could it be faster? Maybe they are including time paying bills, taking it in for maintenance and repairs, etc.?
It's true that in NYC you can go pretty much anywhere using public transit - but it's not necessarily a quick trip. If you need a cross town bus or something like that, you might as well walk. It's the only place I've lived where 3 miles == 45 minutes. In NYC you need to make the same calculation that you do everywhere else, trading cost and neighborhood for commute times. You could easily get a place in Philly on one of the subway or commuter rail lines and live without a car, but you'd need to think about transportation as you were apartment/job hunting. Same as in NYC. DC and Boston also have a lot of carless residents using public transit. Anywhere that people actually live near the downtown rather than it being a dead commercial-only center. So yeah, NYC has more options, but it is expensive as hell for most of the good ones and you still need to be strategic about where you live and work unless you really love sitting on a handful of trains and/or busses for an hour or so.
Well, for you the calculation is quite simple. For others, it's not so simple. For instance, most of my usage is at peak commuting hours - an Uber currently costs me around $10-12 each way. 5 days a week 48 weeks per year this is around $8000. My van cost around $27000 and I'll get at least 10 years out of it, so my annualized capital cost is around $3000 (including interest payments). Annual maintenance averages around $1000 or less per year. Fuel costs are under $2000 per year. Insurance is another $1500. So for just my commute I'd be looking at almost break-even: $8000 vs around $7500.
BUT, I have kids. They need to be ferried to sports, before-school activities, certain friends' houses, etc. The kids blow the calculations out of the water. Kids are expensive. Then add in weekend travel and shopping/grocery trips and it isn't even close.
It's not unreleased. IMDB Is your friend. It's a crappy direct-to-Bluray movie from last November.
Yeah, I'll be more judgy of those people once there is an actual cure :)