Mmmm, so far, we've learned about traditional desktop software that
1- we can't trust desktops for availability: my PC needed repair last fall. 2- we can't trust desktops to not lose our data (my hard drive crashed that one time) 3- we can't trust desktops with our confidentiality (some spyware dudes haxored me once)
What more is there to learn? Clearly desktops can never work as a business model.
"Gee, thanks, but it doesn't run the software I need for my classes. Can you return it, and I'll put the money towards a mac | linux | winbox ? Also, I need something with a bigger screen, and more storage. This doesn't cut it."
I can certainly grant that there's no web-based alternative for Mathematica or Photoshop yet, so that's certainly likely to be an issue for a small number of students. Techies aren't going to want them, naturally, but if you're a history student who needs to use Photoshop twice for his digital media studies class, there are still computer labs.
I guess I'm basing this more on my own anecdotal experience. I know tons of people with netbooks, and I can't remember ever seeing someone using an application that couldn't be done through the web.
You think ChromeOS is a bad idea, but porting a cell phone OS back to PC is an obvious success? Really?
I think you had a brain fart on that one. I'm saying it's a FAIL.
Somehow I missed a connection with this. How does Android make ChromeOS obsolete? You've argued (I think) that ChromeOS won't work because it offers too few of the features afforded by a full PC. How does Android, a cell phone OS that might find its way onto some palmtops, encroach on ChromeOS's market at all?
Alex: The answer is "Business".
Me: Who won't be using ChromeOS?
Hey businesses who moved all their internal apps to ASP.net years ago, here's a $200 client for all of those. You'll never have to roll out software to it. Enjoy.
"Here's a free linux DVD that converts your obsolete hardware to a thin client."... and...
"ChromeOS is missing the plugins and functionality I need!"
Most businesses don't ever consider Linux because it's not packaged as a single solution behind a unified brand. Managers barely know what Linux is, let alone the difference between Slackware and Fedora. They know Google's name, though, and if the see these things marketed as simple, it-just-works clients backed by a company they trust, they'll get considered and purchased.
Netbooks are already razor-thin in terms of profit margin. Manufacturers have to sell 100 (or more) netbooks to net the same profit Apple makes off of 1 laptop. Look at Apple's cash balance. they NET 10% profit on every sale. A $2000 laptop is $200.00 NET, after all expenses. Netbooks? $200, 5% gross margin. Say 2% net. That's $4.00. So, to compete, a netbook running ChromeOS has to be even cheaper, which means even lower margins. That $4.00 per unit becomes $2.00 - or even less, because at the lower end, even a small incremental cost will kill you. 1 warranty support call kills the profit from a dozen other sales. 1 return kills 100. What are you going to do - try to refurb an returned ChromeOS "appliance" - they're just too damn cheap to be worth the effort.
This one I really don't understand at all. This is the exact same argument that someone would have given three years ago about why current netbooks won't work as a business model and it's obviously been disproved by the booming netbook market. I doubt anyone at Asus gives a crap what Apple's margin is; they're too busy selling millions of EEE PC's to notice. If the units suddenly need $50 less in hardware and no one has to pay Microsoft for the OS, they'll just knock $75 off the sale price. The sky will not fall down.
Open source has nothing to do with ChromeOS being a FAIL. Both my desktop and laptop are linux boxes. I'm thinking that I really want a Droid for my next cell phone. But ChromeOS? There's no business case for it. Thin client? Sun already mined that with SunRay. Netbooks? The market is already saturated, with full-featured ones at the $250 pric
Alex: For $100, "specific segment of hardware that Google is aiming for". Me: Who are people too cheap to spend $200 on a netbook?.
Hey parents of new college freshmen, here's a $200 laptop that'll take notes in class, play movies and TV, do email, surf the web, and run both google's online office suite and Microsoft's so your kid can do homework. Oh, and it'll have a hundredth of the virus issues you other kid's HP laptop did. You're welcome.
Alex: The answer is "it obsoleted ChromeOS a year before ChromeOS was supposed to be delivered" Me: What is Droid?
You think ChromeOS is a bad idea, but porting a cell phone OS back to PC is an obvious success? Really?
Alex: The answer is "Business". Me: Who won't be using ChromeOS?
Hey businesses who moved all their internal apps to ASP.net years ago, here's a $200 client for all of those. You'll never have to roll out software to it. Enjoy.
Alex: They both don't let you run your apps your way. Me: How is a ChromeOS-based computer like a Tivo?
Open source operating system. What can't you do your way?
Alex: The answer is, "100 times as much." Me: How much more profit will Apple make off each computer it sells compared to vendors of ChromeOS-based computers.
Why can't people make money off of these machines? Hardware suddenly becomes unprofitable when you install ChromeOS on it?
ChromeOS bonus question, "We welcome our cloud-based data overlords", "In Soviet Russia, Chrome browses YOU" and "You can have my data when you pry it from my cold dead hands." Me: What were the three most popular ChromeOS privacy FAIL slogans?
Again, it's an open source OS. If you don't like Google's shit, point it somewhere else. What's the problem?
As in many other things relating to computers, Japan already has the lead in sexless, marginally employed men who live with their parents and play on the internet. They call them "herbivores."
I was playing some rinky-dink flash game on kongregate.com and all of the sudden a little DHTML window panned up from the bottom of the browser and said "Tower Defense has added a story to your Facebook profile."
At that point I had three questions:
1) What is a flash game site doing talking to Facebook? 2) How do you know what my Facebook ID is? 3) Where the fuck do you get off?
I had to go several menus deep in Facebook to figure out how to opt-out of this crap. I haven't been back to kongregate since. Absolute crap.
Re:I bought the dvd the day it came out
on
Futurama Returns!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"I was rather disappointed with it. It had some funny moments, for sure, but for the most part, we were bored."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. It seems like they were trying to hard with the writing, and adding too many subplots to a movie that already has some complicated time-travel stuff going on seemed like a mistake.
I would imagine the fact that they plan to cut each movie up into four discrete episodes in order to air them on Comedy Central is responsible for some of these issues. I wish they had either chosen to do them as episodes alone or as just a movie. It's too much to ask of your writers, otherwise.
This is no laughing matter, man. $5 Million bought a hell of a lot of 286's back then. Do you have any idea the size of the Wing Commander lan-party the children are missing out on right now?
"In order for the boot sector to be compromised [in x64 Vista], there must already have been a kernel-level compromise. Unsigned kernel-level code must have already run. Further compromising the boot sector would certainly be a way of maintaining control over the system, but that's not the hard part in a scenario like this."
That's mainly true if you're running Vista 100% of the time, right? In theory, if a hacker was trying to alter his own copy of Vista rather than create a virus (perhaps to foil DRM), could he not create some Linux LiveCD-based tool to do the job? Basically boot to the CD, have it load an OS, run the tool to alter the Boot Sector of the desired HDD, install the code in question and reboot into the newly-neutered Vista?
Or is there some kind of boot sector wizardry performed by Vista that I'm not aware of?
Yeah, tell me about it. There was this one dude that used to play Street Fighter II down at my local arcade. He was insanely and (I maintain) unfairly good, and I must have spent a couple hundred bucks in quarters trying to beat him. Eventually I just had to give up and have him cryogenically frozen.
One of these days I'll probably get nostalgic, thaw him out and give it another go.
"This site requires JavaScript to be enabled to work. I don't usually complain about that, but every other search engine (including Google) that I've ever used works just fine without it enabled."
The site is essentially a test harness for working on new UI ideas and techniques. Why in the world should they slow themselves down by catering to people who don't want any of the 2.0 stuff the site is engineered to develop?
What's next, you going to complain that it's not compatible with NCSA Mosaic? Just use the regular Google page, FFS.
It comes with an automatic download of Microsoft's "Genuine FUD Advantage" software.
Re:The main difference between them...
on
Unmaking Motorola's Q
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I have a Q and love it. It plays my episodes of Futurama without skipping and all of my various formats of music with the Core Pocket Media Player. It gets my email for me, streams internet radio stations, and has a very capable web browser (though I hope the minimo people get a compatible build out for the Q soon). I got a mini-SD card for it that holds 2GB of stuff for about $50.
I, personally, have no issue with battery life other than when I play movies and so forth all day. However, I expect that to drain the battery much faster than normal phone usage drains the average cell phone anyway.
I also don't know why you said the Q doesn't have push Email services. Mine pushes my gmail out to me just fine, and you can also set pocket outlook to poll your email accounts automatically every few minutes if you'd rather do it that way.
Also, I don't have a problem with my unit locking up at all. I often have pocket IE, Outlook, and the media player all going at once, and they seem to get along just fine.
As far as I'm concerned, I got phone with a 400kb internet connection, push email, web browsing, internet streaming, video and music playback, plus whatever other little software I want to install for the cost of a $200 handset and a $50 card. So far it's working out to be a prety good deal.
BTW, check out Qusers.comfor more people with Q's. They can tell you the good (and bad) of their experience.
A good joke, though it's worth noting that the electrical battery (invented in modern times by good ol' Ben Franklin) was named after batteries of cannon. Perhaps Big Ben had even more foresight than we give him credit for.:)
"Bottom line, free speech doesn't give people the freedom to say "kill XXX". Not funny...
I'm sorry, but that's crap and there's plenty of prior art to prove it. America has long had a tradition of satire involving mock death threats. How many British viceroys and noblemen were burned or hung in effigy within our borders? And consider our European literary heritage - are we going to ban Johnathan Swift's A Modest Proposal just because he satirically suggests breeding the children of the poor to feed the rich?
If this kid was serious in trying incite violence, or he's got guns and a blueprint of the school under his bed, that's one thing and there are laws to cover it. But if he's joking, and it would seem almost certain that he is, he absolutely has the right to do it.
Having perused the posts that have been made so far, I'm a bit surprised that everyone is concentrating on the aerospace engineering aspects of the plane. To me, the more interesting facet of this is the idea of having a huge supersonic aircraft loaded with cruise missles and potentially nuclear weapons with no one in the cockpit.
I wish articles like this would focus more on the communications, AI, and general catasrophe-tolerance of the systems that go into a craft like this. There have to be some interesting discussions going on right now in a room somewhere underground about how to protect this thing from unauthorized access, what to do if communication goes out, etc.
Does this remind anyone of the Steven Wright line about rice?
"I'm going to court next week. I've been selected for jury duty. It's kind of an insane case -- 6000 ants dressed up as rice and robbed a Chinese restaurant. I don't think they did it."
I think the paradigm here is that you'd mail your member off to the service, they'd jerk it for you at their location (within 7-10 business days) and then mail it back to you.
Of course eventually all these businesses will be outsourced to India, and genital jetlag is not something to be taken lightly.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm, so far, we've learned about traditional desktop software that
1- we can't trust desktops for availability: my PC needed repair last fall.
2- we can't trust desktops to not lose our data (my hard drive crashed that one time)
3- we can't trust desktops with our confidentiality (some spyware dudes haxored me once)
What more is there to learn? Clearly desktops can never work as a business model.
"Gee, thanks, but it doesn't run the software I need for my classes. Can you return it, and I'll put the money towards a mac | linux | winbox ? Also, I need something with a bigger screen, and more storage. This doesn't cut it."
I can certainly grant that there's no web-based alternative for Mathematica or Photoshop yet, so that's certainly likely to be an issue for a small number of students. Techies aren't going to want them, naturally, but if you're a history student who needs to use Photoshop twice for his digital media studies class, there are still computer labs.
I guess I'm basing this more on my own anecdotal experience. I know tons of people with netbooks, and I can't remember ever seeing someone using an application that couldn't be done through the web.
Somehow I missed a connection with this. How does Android make ChromeOS obsolete? You've argued (I think) that ChromeOS won't work because it offers too few of the features afforded by a full PC. How does Android, a cell phone OS that might find its way onto some palmtops, encroach on ChromeOS's market at all?
"Here's a free linux DVD that converts your obsolete hardware to a thin client." ... and ...
"ChromeOS is missing the plugins and functionality I need!"
Most businesses don't ever consider Linux because it's not packaged as a single solution behind a unified brand. Managers barely know what Linux is, let alone the difference between Slackware and Fedora. They know Google's name, though, and if the see these things marketed as simple, it-just-works clients backed by a company they trust, they'll get considered and purchased.
This one I really don't understand at all. This is the exact same argument that someone would have given three years ago about why current netbooks won't work as a business model and it's obviously been disproved by the booming netbook market. I doubt anyone at Asus gives a crap what Apple's margin is; they're too busy selling millions of EEE PC's to notice. If the units suddenly need $50 less in hardware and no one has to pay Microsoft for the OS, they'll just knock $75 off the sale price. The sky will not fall down.
Open source has nothing to do with ChromeOS being a FAIL. Both my desktop and laptop are linux boxes. I'm thinking that I really want a Droid for my next cell phone. But ChromeOS? There's no business case for it. Thin client? Sun already mined that with SunRay. Netbooks? The market is already saturated, with full-featured ones at the $250 pric
I'm surprised this got modded up so much.
Alex: For $100, "specific segment of hardware that Google is aiming for".
Me: Who are people too cheap to spend $200 on a netbook?.
Hey parents of new college freshmen, here's a $200 laptop that'll take notes in class, play movies and TV, do email, surf the web, and run both google's online office suite and Microsoft's so your kid can do homework. Oh, and it'll have a hundredth of the virus issues you other kid's HP laptop did. You're welcome.
Alex: The answer is "it obsoleted ChromeOS a year before ChromeOS was supposed to be delivered"
Me: What is Droid?
You think ChromeOS is a bad idea, but porting a cell phone OS back to PC is an obvious success? Really?
Alex: The answer is "Business".
Me: Who won't be using ChromeOS?
Hey businesses who moved all their internal apps to ASP.net years ago, here's a $200 client for all of those. You'll never have to roll out software to it. Enjoy.
Alex: They both don't let you run your apps your way.
Me: How is a ChromeOS-based computer like a Tivo?
Open source operating system. What can't you do your way?
Alex: The answer is, "100 times as much."
Me: How much more profit will Apple make off each computer it sells compared to vendors of ChromeOS-based computers.
Why can't people make money off of these machines? Hardware suddenly becomes unprofitable when you install ChromeOS on it?
ChromeOS bonus question, "We welcome our cloud-based data overlords", "In Soviet Russia, Chrome browses YOU" and "You can have my data when you pry it from my cold dead hands."
Me: What were the three most popular ChromeOS privacy FAIL slogans?
Again, it's an open source OS. If you don't like Google's shit, point it somewhere else. What's the problem?
As in many other things relating to computers, Japan already has the lead in sexless, marginally employed men who live with their parents and play on the internet. They call them "herbivores."
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56Q0C220090727?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=10522
I was playing some rinky-dink flash game on kongregate.com and all of the sudden a little DHTML window panned up from the bottom of the browser and said "Tower Defense has added a story to your Facebook profile."
At that point I had three questions:
1) What is a flash game site doing talking to Facebook?
2) How do you know what my Facebook ID is?
3) Where the fuck do you get off?
I had to go several menus deep in Facebook to figure out how to opt-out of this crap. I haven't been back to kongregate since. Absolute crap.
"I was rather disappointed with it. It had some funny moments, for sure, but for the most part, we were bored."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. It seems like they were trying to hard with the writing, and adding too many subplots to a movie that already has some complicated time-travel stuff going on seemed like a mistake.
I would imagine the fact that they plan to cut each movie up into four discrete episodes in order to air them on Comedy Central is responsible for some of these issues. I wish they had either chosen to do them as episodes alone or as just a movie. It's too much to ask of your writers, otherwise.
This is no laughing matter, man. $5 Million bought a hell of a lot of 286's back then. Do you have any idea the size of the Wing Commander lan-party the children are missing out on right now?
Shameful.
I get my weapons from allofrifle.com
They say it's totally legal
"You mispelled 'Pwned'."
...and you misspelled "misspelled." :)
/English geek
"In order for the boot sector to be compromised [in x64 Vista], there must already have been a kernel-level compromise. Unsigned kernel-level code must have already run. Further compromising the boot sector would certainly be a way of maintaining control over the system, but that's not the hard part in a scenario like this."
That's mainly true if you're running Vista 100% of the time, right? In theory, if a hacker was trying to alter his own copy of Vista rather than create a virus (perhaps to foil DRM), could he not create some Linux LiveCD-based tool to do the job? Basically boot to the CD, have it load an OS, run the tool to alter the Boot Sector of the desired HDD, install the code in question and reboot into the newly-neutered Vista?
Or is there some kind of boot sector wizardry performed by Vista that I'm not aware of?
Yeah, tell me about it. There was this one dude that used to play Street Fighter II down at my local arcade. He was insanely and (I maintain) unfairly good, and I must have spent a couple hundred bucks in quarters trying to beat him. Eventually I just had to give up and have him cryogenically frozen.
One of these days I'll probably get nostalgic, thaw him out and give it another go.
"This site requires JavaScript to be enabled to work. I don't usually complain about that, but every other search engine (including Google) that I've ever used works just fine without it enabled."
The site is essentially a test harness for working on new UI ideas and techniques. Why in the world should they slow themselves down by catering to people who don't want any of the 2.0 stuff the site is engineered to develop?
What's next, you going to complain that it's not compatible with NCSA Mosaic? Just use the regular Google page, FFS.
It comes with an automatic download of Microsoft's "Genuine FUD Advantage" software.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I have a Q and love it. It plays my episodes of Futurama without skipping and all of my various formats of music with the Core Pocket Media Player. It gets my email for me, streams internet radio stations, and has a very capable web browser (though I hope the minimo people get a compatible build out for the Q soon). I got a mini-SD card for it that holds 2GB of stuff for about $50.
I, personally, have no issue with battery life other than when I play movies and so forth all day. However, I expect that to drain the battery much faster than normal phone usage drains the average cell phone anyway.
I also don't know why you said the Q doesn't have push Email services. Mine pushes my gmail out to me just fine, and you can also set pocket outlook to poll your email accounts automatically every few minutes if you'd rather do it that way.
Also, I don't have a problem with my unit locking up at all. I often have pocket IE, Outlook, and the media player all going at once, and they seem to get along just fine.
As far as I'm concerned, I got phone with a 400kb internet connection, push email, web browsing, internet streaming, video and music playback, plus whatever other little software I want to install for the cost of a $200 handset and a $50 card. So far it's working out to be a prety good deal.
BTW, check out Qusers.comfor more people with Q's. They can tell you the good (and bad) of their experience.
A good joke, though it's worth noting that the electrical battery (invented in modern times by good ol' Ben Franklin) was named after batteries of cannon. Perhaps Big Ben had even more foresight than we give him credit for. :)
"Bottom line, free speech doesn't give people the freedom to say "kill XXX". Not funny...
I'm sorry, but that's crap and there's plenty of prior art to prove it. America has long had a tradition of satire involving mock death threats. How many British viceroys and noblemen were burned or hung in effigy within our borders? And consider our European literary heritage - are we going to ban Johnathan Swift's A Modest Proposal just because he satirically suggests breeding the children of the poor to feed the rich?
If this kid was serious in trying incite violence, or he's got guns and a blueprint of the school under his bed, that's one thing and there are laws to cover it. But if he's joking, and it would seem almost certain that he is, he absolutely has the right to do it.
"Our replacement plan covers any manufacturing defect, of course, but you're required to bring the broken item back to the store."
Having perused the posts that have been made so far, I'm a bit surprised that everyone is concentrating on the aerospace engineering aspects of the plane. To me, the more interesting facet of this is the idea of having a huge supersonic aircraft loaded with cruise missles and potentially nuclear weapons with no one in the cockpit.
I wish articles like this would focus more on the communications, AI, and general catasrophe-tolerance of the systems that go into a craft like this. There have to be some interesting discussions going on right now in a room somewhere underground about how to protect this thing from unauthorized access, what to do if communication goes out, etc.
Does this remind anyone of the Steven Wright line about rice?
"I'm going to court next week. I've been selected for jury duty. It's kind of an insane case -- 6000 ants dressed up as rice and robbed a Chinese restaurant. I don't think they did it."
No ants involved this time around, but still...
I, for one, welcome our sentient grain overlords.
"You've got Phone Call!!"
Based on this article from earlier today, I would think it'd be more like "You've Got Wiretap!"
I hear they have one of these for people who want to be surgeons already set up in Slovakia.
Yet another device my ex-girlfriend can claim she'd need to find my unit.
Thanks a lot, march of scientific progress...
After years of exhaustive, painstaking, and expensive study, our government has finally devised a method to buy something that's free.
I hope it at least comes with a $600 wrench or something...
I think the paradigm here is that you'd mail your member off to the service, they'd jerk it for you at their location (within 7-10 business days) and then mail it back to you.
Of course eventually all these businesses will be outsourced to India, and genital jetlag is not something to be taken lightly.
> they've rolled a car over it without any ill effects
So what did the I-pod select then? "Under pressure"? Something from the Crash Test Dummies?
Clearly nothing from the Beastie Boys.