The cost to dell may indeed be 30 dollars, but as such the selling price should come down more than 30.
No company trying to turn a profit sells its product at cost. Do you think the rest of the PC's components are being sold at Dell's cost? No way.
What happens with most manufacturers is that they price for retail at a desireable price above Bill of Materials. Let's say the entire BOM cost of an 800 dollar PC to Dell is 150 bucks. Dropping a 30 dollar fixed cost really helps their bottom line and should have a bigger impact to the consumer.
Could be out of date. I don't actually own a thumb drive, just like playing with numbers:)
If a reasonably priced one really can do a million writes these days I might just pick one up.
wikipedia says: "A typical flash memory unit wears out after 10,000 erase operations."
1 Gigabyte times 10K full writes =~ 10 Terabytes.
High speed USB 2.0 is supposed to be 480Mbits/second. Or 60MegaBytes/second
Not sure if you can write at full speed, but since you said there isn't enough bandwith:
You could transfer 1,892,160,000,000,000Bytes/year or approximately 180 times more bandwith than you'd need.
The much slower USB 1.1 specification would give you over 4 times the bandwith you'd need in a year for a 1GB USB thumbdrive.
Don't LTSP clients need at least a minimal local storage medium as well? If you cut out the software (OS plus applications), I don't think you can shave away more than $10 of the cost.
No hard drive required. The way the system works is by either PXE or etherboot(assuming the BIOS supports it). What happens is that when the machine boots up it makes a dhcp request and is told where to pull down a linux kernel. It does an NFS mount to the server and then starts a remote X session. All applications are run on the LTSP server. Very little CPU and RAM is required by the thin client.
I currenlty have an install with about 50 thin clients running on a dual 2.8 xeon. Works great. Thin clients with no moving parts would last for a long time and have zero maintenance.
Yoda taught Obi Wan how to commune with dead Jedi (aka Qui Gon) so he was his tutor, from a certain point of view.
HEHE. Wish I had the mod points for you.
Threepio was made from the spare parts of other machines so it's likely that Owen and Beru just used Occam's Razor to determine that Threepio couldn't be the same one from years before as he must have been destroyed. This one must be a different one with the same number.
Had always thought that droids kept unique numbers. At least per model. Even if not, they might have remebered R2.
What did get me was that Leia remembered her real mother ("She was beautiful, but very sad...") on Endor. Unless she was a *very* precocious at birth...
That bugged me a little, but padme was sad for a few seconds of Leia's lifetime anyway:)
I've been using the 6.5 java client on linux at work. Seems to work ok for me. The archiving performance is much improved over the win32 client. That thing used to sit there forever if I selected more than a hundred messages or so to archive.
Well they did manage to leave out the erasing of Owen and Beru's minds so that they didn't remeber C3PO. And Obi Wan's so that he would call Yoda his teacher instead of QuiGonn.
from that article: Unfortunately, across the Atlantic Ocean, European officials have often pursued even greater regulation of competitive markets under the antitrust banner. The European Union blocked the Sprint-MCI and General Motors-Honeywell mergers. Despite enormous competition in the market for media-playing software, the EU also has required Microsoft to distribute a version of Windows without its Media Player.
Micorosoft didn't do anything wrong here either, sniff sniff poor microsoft... whatever.
If we sold the game without support, that would be suicidal in terms of PR, etc (no matter how many of your friends would 'buy it anyway').
Depends on just how unsupported I guess.
Some games that do have linux clients simply have a section on their website's forum labeled "Linux Client" or some such. I typically find people in these forums pretty helpful as long and you specify your hardware and distro when asking a question.
The fact that there are many different distributions out there doesn't really matter for a library dependency perspective. Take any game from the last few years. Most of the install is game data and not libs. Just install the libs with the game. Loki setup will run on any distro regardless of which package manager the distor uses.
and having to reduce design decisions to the lowest common denominator amongst all platforms.
Do the nuances in DirectX versus OpenGL determine whether or not the game is great?
Does playability really change with the lowest common denominator?
The greatness of games hasn't increased proportionately with the revisions of proprietary APIs. Most platforms can put hardware accelerated pixels on the screen and make sounds.
I know I'll get modded troll for this, but I hate gamers that insist upon there being a Linux version. I can't think of a greater waste of game developer resources than providing a version of the game that runs on the same exact hardware but under a different OS. Yes, Linux is great and all, and we all want to see it become the next desktop platform, but is it too much to ask for you to either dual boot Windows or have a separate box for your Wintendo?
Regardless of hardware platform, some people would rather not have windows installed at all. Nobody has to insist on the a port to Linux, but it doesn't hurt to ask. What's wrong with: "Hey, this game looks pretty cool. I'd love to buy a copy if its available for my operating system"
It likely won't make them a ton of profit supporting Linux, but who knows how much effort it would take these guys? If they plan on doing a Mac version(no idea in this case)the code may be somewhat portable.
I'd rather see the game developer focus more on making a quality game than have a lesser game that is cross-platform.
You are making a huge assumption in whether or not these are mutually exclusive.
Not to mention that the parsing is already done for you by the browser very quickly. You're just dealing with a newly retrieved Document Object Model that is painless to traverse in javascript. If bandwith is an issue, use a DTD/schema with small tags:)
Not according to several posters here.
Take a look at some threads further down, some people have used the site successfully after changing their browser's user-agent http header.
The website is too important to wait for a completely new application to be written.
"Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind."
What a lame ass excuse.
So what the hell are they waiting for now? Simply cut out the offending line of code that checks the user-agent string, and oh yeah, try testing the damn thing. No need to create a new application. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess honesty is kinda fuzzy here :)
The cost to dell may indeed be 30 dollars, but as such the selling price should come down more than 30.
No company trying to turn a profit sells its product at cost.
Do you think the rest of the PC's components are being sold at Dell's cost? No way.
What happens with most manufacturers is that they price for retail at a desireable price above Bill of Materials. Let's say the entire BOM cost of an 800 dollar PC to Dell is 150 bucks. Dropping a 30 dollar fixed cost really helps their bottom line and should have a bigger impact to the consumer.
>>I'm thinking network and printer drivers are going to be the gotchas
Pretty small gotchas these days. You'd be suprised how much thin client hardware is autodected under LTSP. It has come a very long way.
Could be out of date. I don't actually own a thumb drive, just like playing with numbers :)
If a reasonably priced one really can do a million writes these days I might just pick one up.
wikipedia says: "A typical flash memory unit wears out after 10,000 erase operations."
1 Gigabyte times 10K full writes =~ 10 Terabytes.
High speed USB 2.0 is supposed to be 480Mbits/second. Or 60MegaBytes/second
Not sure if you can write at full speed, but since you said there isn't enough bandwith:
You could transfer 1,892,160,000,000,000Bytes/year or approximately 180 times more bandwith than you'd need.
The much slower USB 1.1 specification would give you over 4 times the bandwith you'd need in a year for a 1GB USB thumbdrive.
Brand new. No refurbs.
And they usually come with a decent AMD chip these days.
Don't LTSP clients need at least a minimal local storage medium as well? If you cut out the software (OS plus applications), I don't think you can shave away more than $10 of the cost.
No hard drive required.
The way the system works is by either PXE or etherboot(assuming the BIOS supports it). What happens is that when the machine boots up it makes a dhcp request and is told where to pull down a linux kernel. It does an NFS mount to the server and then starts a remote X session. All applications are run on the LTSP server. Very little CPU and RAM is required by the thin client.
I currenlty have an install with about 50 thin clients running on a dual 2.8 xeon. Works great.
Thin clients with no moving parts would last for a long time and have zero maintenance.
Well that's a shame.
I would love to see how they could price it minus the hard drive and software.
It would be great to have it network boot to a Linux Terminal Server
Yoda taught Obi Wan how to commune with dead Jedi (aka Qui Gon) so he was his tutor, from a certain point of view.
:)
HEHE. Wish I had the mod points for you.
Threepio was made from the spare parts of other machines so it's likely that Owen and Beru just used Occam's Razor to determine that Threepio couldn't be the same one from years before as he must have been destroyed. This one must be a different one with the same number.
Had always thought that droids kept unique numbers. At least per model. Even if not, they might have remebered R2.
What did get me was that Leia remembered her real mother ("She was beautiful, but very sad...") on Endor. Unless she was a *very* precocious at birth...
That bugged me a little, but padme was sad for a few seconds of Leia's lifetime anyway
I've been using the 6.5 java client on linux at work.
Seems to work ok for me. The archiving performance is much improved over the win32 client. That thing used to sit there forever if I selected more than a hundred messages or so to archive.
Well they did manage to leave out the erasing of Owen and Beru's minds so that they didn't remeber C3PO.
And Obi Wan's so that he would call Yoda his teacher instead of QuiGonn.
It could have been dragged out much longer.
What became of the relic?
I read a few books after that one and never did hear of anything happening with it. Though it was a few years ago.
from that article:
Unfortunately, across the Atlantic Ocean, European officials have often pursued even greater regulation of competitive markets under the antitrust banner. The European Union blocked the Sprint-MCI and General Motors-Honeywell mergers. Despite enormous competition in the market for media-playing software, the EU also has required Microsoft to distribute a version of Windows without its Media Player.
Micorosoft didn't do anything wrong here either, sniff sniff poor microsoft... whatever.
Prendegast is scum. No two ways about it.
But hey, there I go refusing to look at things in the same short-sighted way as the reporter...
:)
Hey now, calling him a reporter is an insult to reporters...
Well, I'm not a reporter, but if I was I'd be insulted
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
Can't anyone compete on writing applications that output these formats?
If we sold the game without support, that would be suicidal in terms of PR, etc (no matter how many of your friends would 'buy it anyway').
Depends on just how unsupported I guess.
Some games that do have linux clients simply have a section on their website's forum labeled "Linux Client" or some such.
I typically find people in these forums pretty helpful as long and you specify your hardware and distro when asking a question.
The fact that there are many different distributions out there doesn't really matter for a library dependency perspective.
Take any game from the last few years. Most of the install is game data and not libs. Just install the libs with the game.
Loki setup will run on any distro regardless of which package manager the distor uses.
and having to reduce design decisions to the lowest common denominator amongst all platforms.
Do the nuances in DirectX versus OpenGL determine whether or not the game is great?
Does playability really change with the lowest common denominator?
The greatness of games hasn't increased proportionately with the revisions of proprietary APIs. Most platforms can put hardware accelerated pixels on the screen and make sounds.
I know I'll get modded troll for this, but I hate gamers that insist upon there being a Linux version. I can't think of a greater waste of game developer resources than providing a version of the game that runs on the same exact hardware but under a different OS. Yes, Linux is great and all, and we all want to see it become the next desktop platform, but is it too much to ask for you to either dual boot Windows or have a separate box for your Wintendo?
Regardless of hardware platform, some people would rather not have windows installed at all.
Nobody has to insist on the a port to Linux, but it doesn't hurt to ask.
What's wrong with: "Hey, this game looks pretty cool. I'd love to buy a copy if its available for my operating system"
It likely won't make them a ton of profit supporting Linux, but who knows how much effort it would take these guys?
If they plan on doing a Mac version(no idea in this case)the code may be somewhat portable.
I'd rather see the game developer focus more on making a quality game than have a lesser game that is cross-platform.
You are making a huge assumption in whether or not these are mutually exclusive.
Mod up!
Hopefully a linux question will get through to these guys or Sid.
Mod up!
Maybe a linux question will get asked this time. We kinda got stiffed on the world of warcraft Q&A session.
Not to mention that the parsing is already done for you by the browser very quickly. :)
You're just dealing with a newly retrieved Document Object Model that is painless to traverse in javascript.
If bandwith is an issue, use a DTD/schema with small tags
What's wrong with phpeclipse ? It's based on the excellent eclipse webtools project.
Seems to do everything I'd expect a PHP IDE to do.
I've even used it on the natively compiled eclipse that comes with fedora core 4
The point is, stop suggesting the supposedly "ideal" scenario that no one will ever be able to obtain.
Because everyone is using a collection of software comprised of 95% home grown Delphi apps?
So you're stuck with windows. Fine.
Some people aren't, and the suggestion of using Linux is legitimate.
Let's worry about keeping Billy the marketing Intern from bringing Klez onto our network first, and THEN worry about changing the world later...
You worry about your network. No need to try discourage others willing to try to change things now.
Not according to several posters here.
Take a look at some threads further down, some people have used the site successfully after changing their browser's user-agent http header.
The website is too important to wait for a completely new application to be written.
"Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind."
What a lame ass excuse.
So what the hell are they waiting for now? Simply cut out the offending line of code that checks the user-agent string, and oh yeah, try testing the damn thing. No need to create a new application.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I think its fine but only if it used in addition to written homework.
As far a real world application, isn't that what the word problems are for?