Remember, failing to accept your valid, multi-hundred-dollar copy of Office because Microsoft can't produce a product we're willing to pay for is a feature, not a bug.
While I won't argue with the fact that FM waves do, in fact, have a much lower energy quotient per photon, I'm sitting very close to a transmitter. In fact, if I lean my chair back, I can touch the transmitter. Turning the lights off in this particular room does little good, as the energy from the transmitter will keep them lit. It's not quite as bright, but they're still probably at 75% brightness with the switch off.
You'll be hard pressed to convince me that sitting in here almost 50 hours a week isn't having some sort of effect on my body.
At the same time, like you said, our good buddy Sol provides us with a barrage of magnetic waves. We're used to that by now, and have likely adapted to it over the centuries. But, take that and add the four computers/monitors, plus the transmitter and some short-wave radios and I'm getting a higher dose than most people do; it's not like I'm just out in the open in the way of weaker waves, I'm literally inches from the source. I'm willing to bet that, over time, that adds up to something.
That lights-always-on thing is what bugs me, though. It's really creepy.
I'm pretty sure the thousands of hours I have in the data center and at the radio station inside their respective effective faraday cages have had much, much more effect on my little guys' triathalon abilities than using my cell phone has.
Nothing will fry your junk better than having huge EMF-emitting devices surrounding your crotchal region for eight hours a day, six days a week.
You know what bothers me about this? They've taken nearly every proposed feature out of Vista that we wanted or that was going to useful...or even new...leaving us forced to debate whether or not there's actually anything new in the only really new thing about it, Avalon.
And when we do have people talking about it they don't have any idea what they're talking about, discussing cutesy shit you can do with their uber-advanced API and not improvements that Microsoft has made to the ACTUAL GUI that will help me complete complex tasks easier, find that which I need faster, and just make my user experience more pleasant and efficient overall.
Features, you say? They're not features, they're bugs. Much in the way that spam is email, these bullshit "improvements" are actually just annoying eye-candy and a stop-gap measure to one-up the actually useful features that exist in other operating systems such as OSX and Linux. And no, I'm actually not a *nix fanboy despite my heavy use of it; I've been a Windows admin for a few years now. And I've been a user long enough to know that dancing icons and spinning buttons do nothing more than impress grandma for a few seconds and piss advanced users off.
Where's the real innovation? Where's the Microsoft that made Windows 3.11 and Windows 2000 (which, despite it's faults, was one hell of an OS)?
Dead, I say, choked by the left hand of greed and the right hand of stupidity.
Oh, I agree with you that it's just a number and it's both meaningless and an annoyance. I probably should have mentioned my personal lack of care about said number in my original post. Most people get their insanely high numbers by cheating in one way or another, and even if you've got a boosted number, so what? If it's a direct correlation to your GamerScore, then it mostly means you own more games than I do.
However, I do think that there's a huge contingent that can't live without that phallically-representative number and will be very displeased. There are a lot of camping n00bs in $FPS that will be pissy about not being able to brag to their friends about who's cheated enough to get their highest.
Some part of human nature demands that we know where we stand against, well, everyone else. We're built to be competitive; that's a part of our survival instinct. Not having a system-wide ranking system (or at least an achievement system, as the GamerScore could more accurately be called) I think will hurt the overall popularity of their Live counterpart and will leave the users with a segmented ranking system, just like the last generation, Live on the original Xbox, provided. That's not exactly a leg up on the competition.
Also, 12-year-olds everywhere won't have a number (read: ePenis) to brag about.
...and here I thought you were talking about a delicious new fried potato snack that has the Xbox360 logo on it.
Then again, I thought for years that Apple Chips should have the old Macintosh happy computer/person face logo on them...
Vista's minimum requirements (or anyone's for that matter) have little to do with this discussion simply because consumers who want to do leading-edge stuff like play BD and HD discs don't try to do it with decade-old hardware. I mean, sure, someone will give this a shot for giggles (or possibly bragging rights) but your technophile/videophile types are already all about new toys and will buy them to play their new discs.
The people that actually care are people like me who have a perfectly fine dual Xeon workstation that's a couple of years old at this point, yet, still does everything I need it to do and more. I'd love to watch movies in HD from a disc on a sexy monitor and what is an otherwise perfectly capable machine and I really don't feel like upgrading to Vista to do it, or if I do upgrade to Vista for software dev reasons, I sure as hell don't want to have to buy a new machine when mine will be good to rock for a few more years.
The part of all this that will really piss me off is when they (the MPAA, et al) lock OSS developers out of this and when the OSS developers do start producing software, suing them into submission. I crave movies in high-def from convenient discs, but I want them my way on my system. Isn't this how Betamax died, by leaving out a huge portion of the market and not listening to consumer desires/demands?
As for your ideas about Vista's min reqs...have you actually seen Vista run on a machine with those specs? Honestly, it doesn't even run at a suitable gait on the aforementioned Xeon box with a Gig of RAM and a ton of hard drive space. It's a fat OS, bloated more than my girlfriend on her period, stripped of all truly 'upgrade'-quality features (like WinFS) and now they're requiring me to get new hardware, too? Screw that...if I get new hardware I'm putting something on it that actually makes good use of it.
I guess that means I'll just have to hold out until this is solid in a Linux distro (hint, hint, SuSe).
They're just being kind enough to make sure we read it. It's early, so my vision is still blurry and the coffee hasn't soaked in yet. Wouldn't want to miss a story just because it wasn't on there two or more times.
I've used both Knoppix, as said above, and it's a full-featured distro with KDE3 and the works, but I've also recently stumbled upon LNX-BBC, a distro that works off of a business card CD. Pretty handy for keeping in your pocket or wallet because it's so small. It's not so much GUI-based, but if you're comfortable with the command line (and for what you're doing, you most likely are), it's a wonderful tool. And, it's being updated literally every night. I'd give it a try.
There's a huge list of CD-based distros here: http://lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#cd
Put a placard on the door reading, "Manhatten Project", after the nuclear weapons programme, and name the servers after nuclear weapons, which could be descriptive, too. Fat man, little boy, then newer weapons: Trident, etc.
Or, go total geek and name them after Quake III characters. Lucy, Sarge, Doom, Xaero, etc. There should be plenty of them to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, failing to accept your valid, multi-hundred-dollar copy of Office because Microsoft can't produce a product we're willing to pay for is a feature, not a bug.
Be prepared for a reinstall.
While I won't argue with the fact that FM waves do, in fact, have a much lower energy quotient per photon, I'm sitting very close to a transmitter. In fact, if I lean my chair back, I can touch the transmitter. Turning the lights off in this particular room does little good, as the energy from the transmitter will keep them lit. It's not quite as bright, but they're still probably at 75% brightness with the switch off.
You'll be hard pressed to convince me that sitting in here almost 50 hours a week isn't having some sort of effect on my body.
At the same time, like you said, our good buddy Sol provides us with a barrage of magnetic waves. We're used to that by now, and have likely adapted to it over the centuries. But, take that and add the four computers/monitors, plus the transmitter and some short-wave radios and I'm getting a higher dose than most people do; it's not like I'm just out in the open in the way of weaker waves, I'm literally inches from the source. I'm willing to bet that, over time, that adds up to something.
That lights-always-on thing is what bugs me, though. It's really creepy.
I'm pretty sure the thousands of hours I have in the data center and at the radio station inside their respective effective faraday cages have had much, much more effect on my little guys' triathalon abilities than using my cell phone has.
Nothing will fry your junk better than having huge EMF-emitting devices surrounding your crotchal region for eight hours a day, six days a week.
You know what bothers me about this? They've taken nearly every proposed feature out of Vista that we wanted or that was going to useful...or even new...leaving us forced to debate whether or not there's actually anything new in the only really new thing about it, Avalon.
And when we do have people talking about it they don't have any idea what they're talking about, discussing cutesy shit you can do with their uber-advanced API and not improvements that Microsoft has made to the ACTUAL GUI that will help me complete complex tasks easier, find that which I need faster, and just make my user experience more pleasant and efficient overall.
Features, you say? They're not features, they're bugs. Much in the way that spam is email, these bullshit "improvements" are actually just annoying eye-candy and a stop-gap measure to one-up the actually useful features that exist in other operating systems such as OSX and Linux. And no, I'm actually not a *nix fanboy despite my heavy use of it; I've been a Windows admin for a few years now. And I've been a user long enough to know that dancing icons and spinning buttons do nothing more than impress grandma for a few seconds and piss advanced users off.
Where's the real innovation? Where's the Microsoft that made Windows 3.11 and Windows 2000 (which, despite it's faults, was one hell of an OS)?
Dead, I say, choked by the left hand of greed and the right hand of stupidity.
Oh, I agree with you that it's just a number and it's both meaningless and an annoyance. I probably should have mentioned my personal lack of care about said number in my original post. Most people get their insanely high numbers by cheating in one way or another, and even if you've got a boosted number, so what? If it's a direct correlation to your GamerScore, then it mostly means you own more games than I do.
However, I do think that there's a huge contingent that can't live without that phallically-representative number and will be very displeased. There are a lot of camping n00bs in $FPS that will be pissy about not being able to brag to their friends about who's cheated enough to get their highest.
Some part of human nature demands that we know where we stand against, well, everyone else. We're built to be competitive; that's a part of our survival instinct. Not having a system-wide ranking system (or at least an achievement system, as the GamerScore could more accurately be called) I think will hurt the overall popularity of their Live counterpart and will leave the users with a segmented ranking system, just like the last generation, Live on the original Xbox, provided. That's not exactly a leg up on the competition. Also, 12-year-olds everywhere won't have a number (read: ePenis) to brag about.
...and here I thought you were talking about a delicious new fried potato snack that has the Xbox360 logo on it. Then again, I thought for years that Apple Chips should have the old Macintosh happy computer/person face logo on them...
Oh, there we go. Sorry about that. In other news the Prime Minister of Sweden visited Washington today and my tiny little nipples went to France.
Vista's minimum requirements (or anyone's for that matter) have little to do with this discussion simply because consumers who want to do leading-edge stuff like play BD and HD discs don't try to do it with decade-old hardware. I mean, sure, someone will give this a shot for giggles (or possibly bragging rights) but your technophile/videophile types are already all about new toys and will buy them to play their new discs.
The people that actually care are people like me who have a perfectly fine dual Xeon workstation that's a couple of years old at this point, yet, still does everything I need it to do and more. I'd love to watch movies in HD from a disc on a sexy monitor and what is an otherwise perfectly capable machine and I really don't feel like upgrading to Vista to do it, or if I do upgrade to Vista for software dev reasons, I sure as hell don't want to have to buy a new machine when mine will be good to rock for a few more years.
The part of all this that will really piss me off is when they (the MPAA, et al) lock OSS developers out of this and when the OSS developers do start producing software, suing them into submission. I crave movies in high-def from convenient discs, but I want them my way on my system. Isn't this how Betamax died, by leaving out a huge portion of the market and not listening to consumer desires/demands?
As for your ideas about Vista's min reqs...have you actually seen Vista run on a machine with those specs? Honestly, it doesn't even run at a suitable gait on the aforementioned Xeon box with a Gig of RAM and a ton of hard drive space. It's a fat OS, bloated more than my girlfriend on her period, stripped of all truly 'upgrade'-quality features (like WinFS) and now they're requiring me to get new hardware, too? Screw that...if I get new hardware I'm putting something on it that actually makes good use of it.
I guess that means I'll just have to hold out until this is solid in a Linux distro (hint, hint, SuSe).
They're just being kind enough to make sure we read it. It's early, so my vision is still blurry and the coffee hasn't soaked in yet. Wouldn't want to miss a story just because it wasn't on there two or more times.
I've used both Knoppix, as said above, and it's a full-featured distro with KDE3 and the works, but I've also recently stumbled upon LNX-BBC, a distro that works off of a business card CD. Pretty handy for keeping in your pocket or wallet because it's so small. It's not so much GUI-based, but if you're comfortable with the command line (and for what you're doing, you most likely are), it's a wonderful tool. And, it's being updated literally every night. I'd give it a try. There's a huge list of CD-based distros here: http://lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#cd
Put a placard on the door reading, "Manhatten Project", after the nuclear weapons programme, and name the servers after nuclear weapons, which could be descriptive, too. Fat man, little boy, then newer weapons: Trident, etc. Or, go total geek and name them after Quake III characters. Lucy, Sarge, Doom, Xaero, etc. There should be plenty of them to work with.