Surely IBM will have more influence over future ISO decisions if it remains a member.
I don't believe that's true. IBM was a part of this OOXML process and yet it was, along with Sun, barred from the portuguese technical committee. This level of corruption doesn't leave fond memories of the whole process.
As a non-american not living in the US nor planning on doing it whose main language isn't english, I applaud your your ass-kicking reply. It sounded like that AC did in fact press 3. Kudos!
I feel for you, not only for your idiotic racism that clouds your judgement but also because here in Portugal for 40 euros I get an unlimited 30 Mbit/s connection.
Nonetheless I'm confident you will be able to yet again make up some nonsensical, baseless statement to try to play down the fact that the UK not only lags behind Portugal in internet connectivity but also is yet to decide if and how it will invest on the type of infrastructure that Portugal is already deploying.
Seriously? Quicktime? For god's sake, I would expect that an institution dedicated to higher education would understand the importance of using open standards.
Of course the professor won't allow your old version 11 book.
I don't get that. How exactly can a teacher allow or deny a certain book, not to mention a previous version of the official book? Even if that particular teacher is blessed with the intellect to constantly discover revolutionary new advances in his area of expertise and has the time and energy to totally overhaul the course's curriculum each semester along with writing a book for it, does that mean that everything that he wrote in the previous version of the book is complete nonsense? Or is he simply extorting his students? And even so, how exactly could he pass or fail any of his students for not purchasing his new book? Will he ask for the book's proof or purchase at the final exam? I don't get it.
And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source textbooks? Even though academics don't usually get paid particularly well for their writing, it's unlikely that many academics are going want to tackle something as big as a survey-level textbook for free (with the occasional exception like the professor in the article).
That, to me, sounds very odd. I'm currently taking up a bologna-process masters on structural engineering and throughout all my university life not only have all the courses adopted textbooks written by some professor or associate professor but they were also constantly updated and freely distributed as photocopies with the author's complete consent, which were sold by the school's student's association.
Recently things have started to change a bit as the textbooks started to be offered also as books (limited edition) and PDF download. That means that the textbooks continue to be very affordable (the downloads are free and a 300-page structural engineering textbook sold for about 8 euros worth of photocopies) and even the neatly-looking book version of the same textbook sold for about 14 euros.
Granted, some courses also recommend regular, "proprietary" books as the course's recommended reading. These are usually fundamental books like Timoshenko's and Beer & Johnson's works but they are usually considered dispensable, secondary readings.
So when I get to know cases where american student are extorted out of hundreds of dollars of their precious money every semester just to get their hands on a phew textbooks, including books on some topic that hasn't seen any development in the last century or so, I can't help to be a bit shocked.
Indeed this is great news. Nonetheless, there are multiple companies pushing products which are blessed with this chip and, although the support is obviously there, some of those companies don't even bother to cite linux as a supported OS. Therefore it would be nice if those who are in the market for one of these babies would spend their cash on the company that at least acknowledges that linux exist.
It took a bit of time because fascist regimes aren't accustomed to deal with outrageous complains about pollution hazards from overbearing, unpatriotic citizens.
Clearly yes. There are a lot of people out there who are very willing to spend large amounts of cold hard cash to outdo the joneses, even when their "one-up" doesn't make any sense at all. This product is intended to supply the e-penis market instead of any concrete technical need.
You have a misconception about what temperatures should be. They should be whatever the manufacturer rates the part at. Not all parts have problems with high temperatures. My 8800 runs at about 90C and has done so for a long time, still works great.
I see what you are trying to say. Nonetheless, you must have in mind that the graphics card isn't the only component of a PC. There are also a whole gob of components which may not have such a high thermal tolerance. So your graphics card may work well at very high temperatures but the heat it generates will affect all the other neighbouring components, which may end up killing them. Worse, those components may die a death that drags the entire computer down in flames.
Unfortunately I speak from experience, having seen my lappy die a painful death due to the graphics card breaking up due to the processor's overheating problem.
We already have systems with tens and and hundreds of cores. Those processors already go by the name of "graphics card" and those changes in languages and libraries go by the name of CUDA, C2M, brook+ and the like.
The only thing new that Intel brought to the table with this press release is the attempt to fool us into believe that there is nothing of the kind available and that Intel is somehow innovating in some aspect or another.
Face it: the age of the "CPU is the computing muscle" is long gone.
To put it bluntly, your mobile communications' market isn't free. The companies serving that market don't feel the need to compete with each other in any way perhaps besides area coverage. Their clients' business is always a given as they are unable take it elsewhere (no alternatives) and are happily shelving away more and more money to get the exact same service.
So, if they have a captive audience and there is no other actor in the stage, what else forces them to put on whatever show they wish?
Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.
Your comment is a bit silly, to say the least. After all, in order to try to prove that all F/LOSS is somehow inferior to all commercial software, you picked up the GIMP and Pidgin, which are two of the most god-awful UI examples there is. Nonetheless, you failed to cite what the commercial counterparts are. In fact, if you compare Pidgin, which is a god-awful mess, to MSN Messenger, the "commercial counterpart" isn't exactly great either. Not by a long shot.
If that wasn't enough, you try to use Blender as an example of how F/LOSS is somehow always inferior. Well, that is a stupid example due to Blender's origins as a closed-source, proprietary, commercial product which only ended up being liberated by pure luck. And yet, there are quite a few users swearing by Blender's UI. You see, just because it is different to all that crap you got used to it doesn't mean it's bad.
But the biggest issue you chose to ignore is that F/LOSS presents us with quite a lot of examples of superb usability when compared to proprietary, closed-source, commercial counterparts. For example, both GNOME and KDE are leaps and bounds above and beyond any desktop environment that Microsoft has been pushing for the last two decades, not only in UI design but also in technical prowess.
Although an ATM does indeed demand more hardware and more engineering due to the particular task that it intends to fulfill (dispense the exact amount of money, continually exchange information with a central server, work 24/7, exposed to the elements, resist vandalism, etc...) that is absolutely no excuse for it to be more robust than a simple, straight to the point vote counting machine. In fact, it proves the exact opposite. An ATM has multiple subsystems which must work perfectly 24/7 and must be flawlessly integrated and a voting machine includes only a very restricted subset of those very same systems. So how come a less complex system that needs to perform an incredibly simple task ends up being less engineered and more prone to failure? There is absolutely no excuse.
Tell that to Asus, where their M2NPV-MX motherboard, which sports a AM2 socket, does not support any phenom chip whatsoever, even in their currently beta BIOS updates.
We didn't know it at the time but XP pre-SP2 sucked. When Vista reaches SP2 it'll probably be decent (from an average persons point of view - for me it already works absolutely fine).
How much of your perception of "working fine" has to do with the fixes brought by Windows XP's SP2 and how much it has to do with being forced to deal with it for about 4 years?
One thing is the damn thing being usable. Another entirely different thing is forced accommodation.
You got to tell me where can I buy such a cheap laptop here in Europe. At this very moment the cheapest laptop that is available to me is one of those cheap grey line laptop which is selling for 435 euros, which is considerably more than 350 dollars.
No. The whole point of the eee pc was that it was a tiny 300 euro laptop that was announced in an era where the cheapest laptops you could buy cost around twice as much. Moreover, it was announced in an era where the hardware industry was still shoving the idea that systems like the eee pc were ultra-specialized hardware that could only be bought for a huge premium.
Onboard audio steals system RAM for its buffers rather than having its own memory, which can lead to sound dropouts with multiple simultaneous voices, and even cause stuttering and FPS loss.
Have you noticed that nowadays a 1GB DIMM costs less than 30 euros, which is less than 25% of your lower-end "good" gaming sound card? Moreover, if you have enough disposable income to the point of believing that it's acceptable to spend over 100 euros for a soundcard then it is safe to say that you also find it reasonable to dump that kind of cash on other components. That means that your gaming rig is already far beyond average and your game play isn't affected by minor FPS drops due to onboard sound.
Let's face it: this "we need high end audio equipment to play games" deal comes right out of the audiophile playbook. Purchasing high end audio for gaming doesn't make absolutely any sense, technical or economical, it doesn't bring any added value and the need for it is nothing but a myth perpetuated by gut feelings and exaggerations.
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Surely IBM will have more influence over future ISO decisions if it remains a member.
I don't believe that's true. IBM was a part of this OOXML process and yet it was, along with Sun, barred from the portuguese technical committee. This level of corruption doesn't leave fond memories of the whole process.
As a non-american not living in the US nor planning on doing it whose main language isn't english, I applaud your your ass-kicking reply. It sounded like that AC did in fact press 3. Kudos!
Tell that to William Shatner.
I feel for you, not only for your idiotic racism that clouds your judgement but also because here in Portugal for 40 euros I get an unlimited 30 Mbit/s connection.
Nonetheless I'm confident you will be able to yet again make up some nonsensical, baseless statement to try to play down the fact that the UK not only lags behind Portugal in internet connectivity but also is yet to decide if and how it will invest on the type of infrastructure that Portugal is already deploying.
Seriously? Quicktime? For god's sake, I would expect that an institution dedicated to higher education would understand the importance of using open standards.
As Portugal is already ahead of the UK in any broadband ranking and is already deploying a nation-wide fiber optic network that will offer 100Mbit/s connectivity in any domestic connection then maybe, just maybe, you could not only get your facts straight but also avoid sounding like an idiot with all those racist remarks.
By the way, I'm Portuguese and I already pay 19 euros a month for an unlimited, 8Mbit/s connection.
Thankfully we have the noexec mounting option available.
I don't get that. How exactly can a teacher allow or deny a certain book, not to mention a previous version of the official book? Even if that particular teacher is blessed with the intellect to constantly discover revolutionary new advances in his area of expertise and has the time and energy to totally overhaul the course's curriculum each semester along with writing a book for it, does that mean that everything that he wrote in the previous version of the book is complete nonsense? Or is he simply extorting his students? And even so, how exactly could he pass or fail any of his students for not purchasing his new book? Will he ask for the book's proof or purchase at the final exam? I don't get it.
That, to me, sounds very odd. I'm currently taking up a bologna-process masters on structural engineering and throughout all my university life not only have all the courses adopted textbooks written by some professor or associate professor but they were also constantly updated and freely distributed as photocopies with the author's complete consent, which were sold by the school's student's association.
Recently things have started to change a bit as the textbooks started to be offered also as books (limited edition) and PDF download. That means that the textbooks continue to be very affordable (the downloads are free and a 300-page structural engineering textbook sold for about 8 euros worth of photocopies) and even the neatly-looking book version of the same textbook sold for about 14 euros.
Granted, some courses also recommend regular, "proprietary" books as the course's recommended reading. These are usually fundamental books like Timoshenko's and Beer & Johnson's works but they are usually considered dispensable, secondary readings.
So when I get to know cases where american student are extorted out of hundreds of dollars of their precious money every semester just to get their hands on a phew textbooks, including books on some topic that hasn't seen any development in the last century or so, I can't help to be a bit shocked.
Indeed this is great news. Nonetheless, there are multiple companies pushing products which are blessed with this chip and, although the support is obviously there, some of those companies don't even bother to cite linux as a supported OS. Therefore it would be nice if those who are in the market for one of these babies would spend their cash on the company that at least acknowledges that linux exist.
It took a bit of time because fascist regimes aren't accustomed to deal with outrageous complains about pollution hazards from overbearing, unpatriotic citizens.
Clearly yes. There are a lot of people out there who are very willing to spend large amounts of cold hard cash to outdo the joneses, even when their "one-up" doesn't make any sense at all. This product is intended to supply the e-penis market instead of any concrete technical need.
I see what you are trying to say. Nonetheless, you must have in mind that the graphics card isn't the only component of a PC. There are also a whole gob of components which may not have such a high thermal tolerance. So your graphics card may work well at very high temperatures but the heat it generates will affect all the other neighbouring components, which may end up killing them. Worse, those components may die a death that drags the entire computer down in flames.
Unfortunately I speak from experience, having seen my lappy die a painful death due to the graphics card breaking up due to the processor's overheating problem.
Is the state of the art really changing that fast or is it all a problem of "buzzword turbulence", if you will?
We already have systems with tens and and hundreds of cores. Those processors already go by the name of "graphics card" and those changes in languages and libraries go by the name of CUDA, C2M, brook+ and the like.
The only thing new that Intel brought to the table with this press release is the attempt to fool us into believe that there is nothing of the kind available and that Intel is somehow innovating in some aspect or another.
Face it: the age of the "CPU is the computing muscle" is long gone.
To put it bluntly, your mobile communications' market isn't free. The companies serving that market don't feel the need to compete with each other in any way perhaps besides area coverage. Their clients' business is always a given as they are unable take it elsewhere (no alternatives) and are happily shelving away more and more money to get the exact same service.
So, if they have a captive audience and there is no other actor in the stage, what else forces them to put on whatever show they wish?
Not quite. This decision will only hinder US internet businesses. The rest of the world will keep on ticking as nothing has happened.
I'm no linguist but the notion of anything that resembles a Tera binary byte doesn't compute all that well.
Your comment is a bit silly, to say the least. After all, in order to try to prove that all F/LOSS is somehow inferior to all commercial software, you picked up the GIMP and Pidgin, which are two of the most god-awful UI examples there is. Nonetheless, you failed to cite what the commercial counterparts are. In fact, if you compare Pidgin, which is a god-awful mess, to MSN Messenger, the "commercial counterpart" isn't exactly great either. Not by a long shot.
If that wasn't enough, you try to use Blender as an example of how F/LOSS is somehow always inferior. Well, that is a stupid example due to Blender's origins as a closed-source, proprietary, commercial product which only ended up being liberated by pure luck. And yet, there are quite a few users swearing by Blender's UI. You see, just because it is different to all that crap you got used to it doesn't mean it's bad.
But the biggest issue you chose to ignore is that F/LOSS presents us with quite a lot of examples of superb usability when compared to proprietary, closed-source, commercial counterparts. For example, both GNOME and KDE are leaps and bounds above and beyond any desktop environment that Microsoft has been pushing for the last two decades, not only in UI design but also in technical prowess.
So care to rethink your silly argument?
Although an ATM does indeed demand more hardware and more engineering due to the particular task that it intends to fulfill (dispense the exact amount of money, continually exchange information with a central server, work 24/7, exposed to the elements, resist vandalism, etc...) that is absolutely no excuse for it to be more robust than a simple, straight to the point vote counting machine. In fact, it proves the exact opposite. An ATM has multiple subsystems which must work perfectly 24/7 and must be flawlessly integrated and a voting machine includes only a very restricted subset of those very same systems. So how come a less complex system that needs to perform an incredibly simple task ends up being less engineered and more prone to failure? There is absolutely no excuse.
Tell that to Asus, where their M2NPV-MX motherboard, which sports a AM2 socket, does not support any phenom chip whatsoever, even in their currently beta BIOS updates.
How much of your perception of "working fine" has to do with the fixes brought by Windows XP's SP2 and how much it has to do with being forced to deal with it for about 4 years?
One thing is the damn thing being usable. Another entirely different thing is forced accommodation.
You got to tell me where can I buy such a cheap laptop here in Europe. At this very moment the cheapest laptop that is available to me is one of those cheap grey line laptop which is selling for 435 euros, which is considerably more than 350 dollars.
No. The whole point of the eee pc was that it was a tiny 300 euro laptop that was announced in an era where the cheapest laptops you could buy cost around twice as much. Moreover, it was announced in an era where the hardware industry was still shoving the idea that systems like the eee pc were ultra-specialized hardware that could only be bought for a huge premium.
Have you noticed that nowadays a 1GB DIMM costs less than 30 euros, which is less than 25% of your lower-end "good" gaming sound card? Moreover, if you have enough disposable income to the point of believing that it's acceptable to spend over 100 euros for a soundcard then it is safe to say that you also find it reasonable to dump that kind of cash on other components. That means that your gaming rig is already far beyond average and your game play isn't affected by minor FPS drops due to onboard sound.
Let's face it: this "we need high end audio equipment to play games" deal comes right out of the audiophile playbook. Purchasing high end audio for gaming doesn't make absolutely any sense, technical or economical, it doesn't bring any added value and the need for it is nothing but a myth perpetuated by gut feelings and exaggerations.