The Xbox is a success, so they don't always fail to penetrate new markets.
Unless things have changed radically in the last few months the Xbox still hasn't repaid all the money invested and Microsoft will soon have to spend a ton of new money to build the next generation.
So I'd say you have a funny definition of 'success'.
You sound like a Redshat user. (or a windows troll). Only RH and derivatives don't upgrade.
I've never had a problem with minor version upgrades on CentOS. Only major versions need a reinstall and they happen every few years.
Debian and derivatives are the easiest things to upgrade in the world. And, they are clean and stable machines post upgrade.
I took one Ubuntu server through all the versions from 8.04 to 10.04 and reinstalling 10.04 from scratch was easier in the end than trying to fix up the various problems that left behind. I just upgraded my netbook from 11.10 to 12.04 and that was the worst Ubuntu upgrade experience yet; it did a half-hearted upgrade the first time, then I had to apt-get upgrade twice more before everything seems to have been upgraded to the correct version. There's stil one upgrade 'being held back' that I can't get it to install.
Suddenly the siren goes off telling you to take over.
You turn to the wheel. The computer shut down because something disastrous just happened. You have perhaps a few seconds to switch from 'talking to passenger' mode to 'I have to handle a disastrous situation mode that the computer can't deal with and I haven't looked at the road for an hour' mode.
Are you:
1. Instantly going to recognise the problem and masterfully steer the car out of it? 2. Fscked?
This is almost exactly the same behaviour that killed the people on AF447.
If ALL the cars were drivereless? Yes. The safe following distance for a driverless car is about 1 foot.
Oh, bullshit.
The Ferrari in front slams on its brakes, your Ford can't stop as fast. Your Ford crashes into the back of the Ferrari.
Your Ford slams on its brakes, the Ferrari behind hits a spot of oil, ice or other crap that causes the ABS to cut in. The Ferrari crashes into the back of your Ford.
You might as well say the safe following distance for two airliners with autopilots is six feet. In magical fantasy world that's true, but in the actual, real world where you have to deal with actual, real hazards it's more like several miles.
When I was on a business trip a couple of years ago, I used Google Maps to figure out how to get to my hotel. The direction at the end of the journey was to drive through the crash barrier at the side of the highway and fall thirty feet to the hotel parking lot below.
So poor maps and stupid routing software are other potential hazards for 'smart' cars.
You can get drunk and still get home (with your car) without getting arrested!
Uh, no.
Maybe in the distant future, but the existing cars still require a driver ready to take over when the computer screws up. Not only does that mean you can't get drunk, but it means that you'll probably get into a disastrous crash when the autopilot fails (see AF447).
I remember when flying cars were going to solve all our problems.
Back in the real world there are a few tests followed by hype followed by 'this invention will solve every problem we currently have!' followed by glowing endorsements of the first release followed by a huge collection of new problems discovered by the early adopters followed by a new technology that will 'solve every problem we have with the last new technology that turned out to be nowhere near as magical as predicted!'.
Yeah, these cars will be better in some circumstances but they'll be worse in others and they'll create new problems of their own. They certainly won't bring an end to insurance because they will hit things and they will crash and they will leave you with a huge payout to the victims if you're not insured.
A fashionable opinion on Slashdot, no doubt, but go back and actually try out an older piece of hardware. I bet it will seem absolutely bog-slow. I remember the days not so long ago when I would shut down everything to fire up a browser (Netscape), and really think hard before opening a new window (no tabs, of course).
I remember those days. It was 1996, when I had 4MB of RAM on my laptop and had to run both Apache and Netscape for web development. I was really glad when I managed to get another 4MB and eliminated the perpetual swapping.
Otherwise, unless you had an insanely low amount of RAM or were running Vista, I can't see why you'd have had that problem 'not so long ago'.
From the benchmarks I've seen on DDR3, the increased clock speed does seem to increase performance up to around 1.6GHz. What I haven't seen is a comparison between max clock speed on DDR2 and DDR3.
In linux it seems that file systems are not very resilient, and the least crash can corrupt your files. Is NTFS such a good well designed file system compared to linux file systems ?
I've never had corrupt files after a Unix crash; be it SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux or any of the other Unix variants I've used.
I've never had corrupt files after an XP crash, but I've often had scandisk delete files, including a multi-gigabyte game installer that I'd just downloaded before it crashed. It regularly deleted Firefox bookmarks before they switched from storing them in big HTML files.
The NTFS approach appears to be 'I'll guarantee file system consistency but won't guarantee any of your files are still there'. I'm sure you can find similar Linux filesystems, but the most common ones don't seem to have any problems.
Why not make the batteries replaceable? Just switch them as a gas station, simple.
Because it's a stupid idea for reasons we've covered numerous times before.
1. Either you need a standard battery which prevents auto manufacturers from building different vehicles with different batteries, or the replacement station needs to store all possible batteries. 2. If you get there with a flat battery and they're out then you're screwed. That's not a big deal for a car where you can drive on to the next gas station twenty miles down the road, but a big problem if your electric car only does eighty miles per charge anyway. 3. Replacing batteries that weigh several hundred pounds is far from a simple task. 4. No-one wants to pay $30k for a new car, then drive it into a replacement station where they'll hand over their brand new battery and have it replaced by one that's done 500,000 miles.
Suppose your liner sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1880 and everyone got in the life boats.
Then what?
You had no radio to contact any other ships, so you're just floating around in the water with very limited supplies and little chance of rescue. Unless you were lucky and some other ship saw you sink or saw any flares you were able to launch, the odds were that you would die a slow death waiting for help.
The Titanic was probably the first such sinking where there would have been a good chance of everyone surviving if they carried enough life boats. And people learned from that.
The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind, and consumers don't have the patience for trying to learn why compiling the latest Foo application produced some obscure error about C++ symbol availability... or worse.
Hands up all those consumers who compile programs on Linux rather than using yum or apt-get?
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
Yes, because using apt-get install or a GUI front-end is just so hard compared to running some weird Windows installer.
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No, they can't afford cars because the gas prices keep going up so much.
They could buy a Volt, and then they won't have to worry about gas prices.
And to add insult to injury they didn't even have the nice idea of implementing queues like most similar systems do..
Why should anyone ever have to queue to play a single player game?
The Xbox is a success, so they don't always fail to penetrate new markets.
Unless things have changed radically in the last few months the Xbox still hasn't repaid all the money invested and Microsoft will soon have to spend a ton of new money to build the next generation.
So I'd say you have a funny definition of 'success'.
Usually, once you launch an app in Unity, you right click on it's icon in the task bar and tell it to stick in the launcher.
Which is totally intuitive. Why the heck should I have to run an application in order to create an icon for it?
You sound like a Redshat user. (or a windows troll). Only RH and derivatives don't upgrade.
I've never had a problem with minor version upgrades on CentOS. Only major versions need a reinstall and they happen every few years.
Debian and derivatives are the easiest things to upgrade in the world. And, they are clean and stable machines post upgrade.
I took one Ubuntu server through all the versions from 8.04 to 10.04 and reinstalling 10.04 from scratch was easier in the end than trying to fix up the various problems that left behind. I just upgraded my netbook from 11.10 to 12.04 and that was the worst Ubuntu upgrade experience yet; it did a half-hearted upgrade the first time, then I had to apt-get upgrade twice more before everything seems to have been upgraded to the correct version. There's stil one upgrade 'being held back' that I can't get it to install.
Well he assumes it won't be a flying car.
You're driving along talking to your passenger.
Suddenly the siren goes off telling you to take over.
You turn to the wheel. The computer shut down because something disastrous just happened. You have perhaps a few seconds to switch from 'talking to passenger' mode to 'I have to handle a disastrous situation mode that the computer can't deal with and I haven't looked at the road for an hour' mode.
Are you:
1. Instantly going to recognise the problem and masterfully steer the car out of it?
2. Fscked?
This is almost exactly the same behaviour that killed the people on AF447.
If the car can recognize a loss of control due to a mechanical failure as quickly as a person can, it could warn other cars in time.
Your argument appears to be:
1. Driverless cars.
2. ? - Magic happens here
3. No accidents.
Good luck writing the magic that goes in the middle which handles all the difficult stuff
If ALL the cars were drivereless? Yes. The safe following distance for a driverless car is about 1 foot.
Oh, bullshit.
The Ferrari in front slams on its brakes, your Ford can't stop as fast. Your Ford crashes into the back of the Ferrari.
Your Ford slams on its brakes, the Ferrari behind hits a spot of oil, ice or other crap that causes the ABS to cut in. The Ferrari crashes into the back of your Ford.
You might as well say the safe following distance for two airliners with autopilots is six feet. In magical fantasy world that's true, but in the actual, real world where you have to deal with actual, real hazards it's more like several miles.
When I was on a business trip a couple of years ago, I used Google Maps to figure out how to get to my hotel. The direction at the end of the journey was to drive through the crash barrier at the side of the highway and fall thirty feet to the hotel parking lot below.
So poor maps and stupid routing software are other potential hazards for 'smart' cars.
If I wanted to wait for a vehicle to turn up every time I had to go somewhere I'd take a bus.
You can get drunk and still get home (with your car) without getting arrested!
Uh, no.
Maybe in the distant future, but the existing cars still require a driver ready to take over when the computer screws up. Not only does that mean you can't get drunk, but it means that you'll probably get into a disastrous crash when the autopilot fails (see AF447).
I remember when flying cars were going to solve all our problems.
Back in the real world there are a few tests followed by hype followed by 'this invention will solve every problem we currently have!' followed by glowing endorsements of the first release followed by a huge collection of new problems discovered by the early adopters followed by a new technology that will 'solve every problem we have with the last new technology that turned out to be nowhere near as magical as predicted!'.
Yeah, these cars will be better in some circumstances but they'll be worse in others and they'll create new problems of their own. They certainly won't bring an end to insurance because they will hit things and they will crash and they will leave you with a huge payout to the victims if you're not insured.
I really don't see them passing on their incidental footage to anyone else, such as Homeland Security, local law enforcement, etc.
Indeed not. When their face recognition tells them that there's a 90% change that you're Wanted Terrorist #1 they'll just launch a missile at you.
A fashionable opinion on Slashdot, no doubt, but go back and actually try out an older piece of hardware. I bet it will seem absolutely bog-slow. I remember the days not so long ago when I would shut down everything to fire up a browser (Netscape), and really think hard before opening a new window (no tabs, of course).
I remember those days. It was 1996, when I had 4MB of RAM on my laptop and had to run both Apache and Netscape for web development. I was really glad when I managed to get another 4MB and eliminated the perpetual swapping.
Otherwise, unless you had an insanely low amount of RAM or were running Vista, I can't see why you'd have had that problem 'not so long ago'.
From the benchmarks I've seen on DDR3, the increased clock speed does seem to increase performance up to around 1.6GHz. What I haven't seen is a comparison between max clock speed on DDR2 and DDR3.
I wonder who's going to be immortalised as the first person to be killed by a computer-controlled car?
So does zfs do checksumming of all files?
Yes. All filesystem blocks, I believe.
In linux it seems that file systems are not very resilient, and the least crash can corrupt your files.
Is NTFS such a good well designed file system compared to linux file systems ?
I've never had corrupt files after a Unix crash; be it SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux or any of the other Unix variants I've used.
I've never had corrupt files after an XP crash, but I've often had scandisk delete files, including a multi-gigabyte game installer that I'd just downloaded before it crashed. It regularly deleted Firefox bookmarks before they switched from storing them in big HTML files.
The NTFS approach appears to be 'I'll guarantee file system consistency but won't guarantee any of your files are still there'. I'm sure you can find similar Linux filesystems, but the most common ones don't seem to have any problems.
If you really are dying, you're probably not going to be able to send text messages very well.
Getting it wrong one time in ten doesn't sound terribly good to me.
Why not make the batteries replaceable? Just switch them as a gas station, simple.
Because it's a stupid idea for reasons we've covered numerous times before.
1. Either you need a standard battery which prevents auto manufacturers from building different vehicles with different batteries, or the replacement station needs to store all possible batteries.
2. If you get there with a flat battery and they're out then you're screwed. That's not a big deal for a car where you can drive on to the next gas station twenty miles down the road, but a big problem if your electric car only does eighty miles per charge anyway.
3. Replacing batteries that weigh several hundred pounds is far from a simple task.
4. No-one wants to pay $30k for a new car, then drive it into a replacement station where they'll hand over their brand new battery and have it replaced by one that's done 500,000 miles.
etc, etc, etc.
Suppose your liner sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1880 and everyone got in the life boats.
Then what?
You had no radio to contact any other ships, so you're just floating around in the water with very limited supplies and little chance of rescue. Unless you were lucky and some other ship saw you sink or saw any flares you were able to launch, the odds were that you would die a slow death waiting for help.
The Titanic was probably the first such sinking where there would have been a good chance of everyone surviving if they carried enough life boats. And people learned from that.
....confusing, non-intuitive, and not compatible with most all games and apps.
Fortunately you don't have to run Gnome 3 or Unity if you don't want to; you can install Linux Mint and use MATE instead.
The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind, and consumers don't have the patience for trying to learn why compiling the latest Foo application produced some obscure error about C++ symbol availability... or worse.
Hands up all those consumers who compile programs on Linux rather than using yum or apt-get?
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
Yes, because using apt-get install or a GUI front-end is just so hard compared to running some weird Windows installer.
As long as they accept they face the same dangers of any other cruise ship, I assume it will have similar or better success.
Similar or better than the Titanic I shouldn't be hard to do.
Or did you mean that cruise ship lying on its side that I saw out of the window of the plane I flew to Italy on recently?