Between being dropped, xrayed, beat on, slid, bumped, scratched, and the like, doe we need _more_ liquid than that which is normally spilled on a laptop to be present in it?
I'd like a nice cool-operating laptop, even if it is a little slower, as long as it has enough RAM, decent enough video, and good storage. Speed, as long as it's fast enough, isn't a major concern. The Athlon at home takes care of that. I want connectivity and portability.
If IBM still made the 240 series Thinkpad, I'd snap a newer one of those up in a heartbeat...
Violent video games, last time I looked, weren't terribly accurate as far as blood and guts and such went. Granted, it's been a year or so since I played a first-person shooter, but if memory serves, the blood flying across the screen had an almost comical effect, with more blood than would possibly come from one living thing. Quake was always amusing, not serious.
I know that they're going to blame the "violence that we expose our children to in video games" for these screwed up kids, but I don't buy it. If it wasn't video games, these kids would be into real guns in a much more serious way, or knives, or swords, or compound bows, or something. And, they'd probably be a helluva lot more dangerous, since they'd actually know how to wield these implements, rather than going through video game experiences.
If parents would raise their kids, rather than letting the TV, the computer, the entertainment system do it, maybe we'd have less problems.
We'll cast Hugo Weaving as SCO, Keanu Reeves as Tux, and Laurence Fishburne as IBM. Carrie-Anne Moss would make an excellent IBM, since IBM's products are fairly sleek and sexy right now, and I'd really like to get into IBM...
"As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries."
Yes, and now every idiot who went through business school wants to get in a piece of the action, despite frequent majoring in "Business" is more like highschool++ rather than serious post-secondary education for many. I'd have a lot more respect for "businessmen" if several of the small businesses that I've worked for didn't ignore their employees when it came time to make technical decisions, and would consider long term effects. These people even have a financial stake in what they're doing, compared to those that control other peoples' money, and they still are screwups. I don't see why we should let any company or business person patent a business plan, when they think that one good idea without heavy technical implementation should be something that they can solely profit on.
Besides, most of the actually successful business people that I have met don't feel a need to patent business ideas or processes. Of course, these generally are people who liked working in a field and started their own companies because of that, and knew the tech and work, not simply how a spreadsheet worked.
You're better off using mosix. It'll allow for more normal (ie, not beowulf specific) applications to thread across computers. I'd imagine that an open-mosix setup (like the ones using the knoppix boot CDs tailored to it) could probably make for a fairly powerful computing cluster very easily.
It really surprises me how many people think of the world's water simply as "The Ocean", like it's one homogeneous thing that has the same contents everywhere. I'd expect that it would be even more varied than surface life, since different pressures, temperatures, currents, light levels, seafloor materials, salinity, and other fluid contents would vary greatly from location to location, and since depth allows for many ranges of habitats (and life forms can float at a certain depth easier than they can equivalently in air) we'd have more to look at than we could possibly ever figure out entirely. I'd think that we'd be tripping over new life forms every time we looked anywhere intently or anywhere we hadn't gone before.
"I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP."
They're not trying to emulate the bloat of XP. Nowadays, the company leading GUI development is Apple. They were the first ones to build a well-honed mass-market GUI that has all of the bells and whistles, like anti-aliasing, on-the-fly graphics scaling, and the like. By description, a lot of what they have for just their UI is the same stuff that 3d first person shooters were touting as features, for a while. Microsoft has totally fallen behind, and colour changes to the GUI are a sad way to hide that.
"What are they smoking?"
I donno, but if allowed me to code stuff like this, I'd want some...
"The point of Linux is to be alternative."
Who ever told you that? I thought that the point of Linux was for hobbyists. People who wanted to dig around in the guts of their computer software from time to time, and who liked UN*X...
"And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point?"
Looks the same? I haven't noticed that, unless you're talking about that new 'made to looks like XP' window manager, for hiding what you're doing to your boss. Takes the same amount of memory? Hardly. The Linux kernel will boot on four megabytes of memory, if you desire. I've seen modern X implementations run on 32MB fine, and advanced window managers running on 48MB as long as there's a decent graphics card in the system. Hardly the same requirements as Redmond demands. In fact, Linux, given a large amount of RAM, like the gig and a half in my workstation, runs better that anything Microsoft has ever done for memory management, due to smart memory caching and the like. Once applications are touched from the disk, they don't have to be fetched off of a platter again. Thus, the speed is improved greatly.
"I agree that this new CD-RW extension is crap, but I don't think DVD-writers are viable until there is one standard that everyone can read."
Was the 700MB CD-ROM crap? How about the occasional 750MB CD-ROM that you see? Are they crap too, simply because there are a few older drives that cannot seek that far on to the media? Remember, tweaks on technology extend its use, and I doubt that Plextor would have released this kind of thing with their drives if there weren't at least some other CDs that could use it, for it would be completely slitting their own throats. And, if other companies adopt a similar CD-writing format, we'll see a lot more new drives capable of reading this, too. I doubt it'll let you burn audio CDs this way, since those players won't read it, but for data, this could be extremely useful.
We are talking about pictures, which are a copyrightable item on their own. Because they are the whole work in themselves, not a part, that could significantly change things.
Remember, they're not forced to carry any of the products that they stock. It's their choice.
The amusing thing about the plastics mentioning is that it really has come true, as far as market penetration. Almost everything that we deal with is plastic, from the bulk of the styling panels on modern automobiles, to grocery bags, to computer parts. Almost every strap connector is made of plastic, and many ropes are plastic-impregnated for strength and longevity. We ship our food in plastic, we filter our water with it. We contain industrial fluids in it. It's everywhere. It's easy to find devices that are nearly 100% plastic, it's nearly impossible to find something with absolutely no plastic in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Buggles album "Age of Plastic" is fully appropriate by name. Certainly the method I use to play it is plastic...
eBay makes it clear who the seller of merchandise is, and also has clear-cut policies for reporting abuse, in theory.
Amazon.com is, well, Amazon.com. They don't seem to have much in the line of differentiation as to who one is doing business with. If Amazon.com is the group who receives my credit-card payment, then they are who I am effectively doing business with, especially if I can do many purchases from many different sources that Amazon.com uses without having to do a seperate transaction.
If Amazon.com has its way. Walmart could also be considered a "service provider", since they stock many, many products that are supplied by outside vendors but aren't their own. It's up to the retailer to determine what is legal to carry.
If it's not already illegal, this should be, especially if there is no notice of any particular size informing the user that the change is present. If a shopping cart is linked from the primary site, such that the users of the primary site must use the shopping cart, the terms of service should propagate with it too. This could set some interesting legal precedents if it's explored.
"Neither has Linux. It's had, what, 3 years of being slightly important so far? OS/2 had many more."
I'd put it at more like five years. Some of us have been using it for even longer than that. It might have had hobbyist roots, but once we started selling masquerading firewalls to people with dialup and early Cablemodem/DSL, inroads were made. Then, we started selling file servers, and then servers to replace Windows NT Server as a PDC, and so on, and so on...
This isn't to say that it was immediate, or that it was in chunks, but grassroots movements, which Linux started out as, don't jump out immediately. It is rare that I find anyone at all who hasn't at least heard of Linux. They may not know anything about it at all, but simply hearing the name has some recognition.
Of course, they got rid of OS/2 because it wasn't entirely their baby from the get-go, was too stable, and wouldn't have guaranteed the string of frustrated upgrades that users have been forced into buying.
The other interesting thing to note is that the first two cited "yay us!" entries are for types of technology, and the latter three, NT,.net, and Longhorn, are all marketing terms. So, rather than focus on saying things like 'improving video throughput', 'improving hardware abstraction', or 'developing more rhobust parallel computing', they are descending into marketing bull.
What's scariest is that since Bill is at the forefront (even if Ballmer is CEO) and has succumbed to this, it's further demonstrating Microsoft's continued rotting from the top; no signs of abetting it.
"If anyone thinks Linux will ever capture more than Apple's current market share you're kidding yourself."
If I'm remembering correctly, Linux already has more market share than Apple does.
Besides, it's a chicken-in-the-egg problem. If vendors don't support a product that competes with the dominant product, then the competitive product has a harder time growing. By the same token, the vendors use the excuse that it's not widely used as a reason for why they don't support it, yet if they did support it, they'd have 1) an exclusive relationship with those who use the product, and 2) they'd help the product be more widely supported in general, since people would be more inclined to jump on the bandwagon.
Nvidia has a binary-only driver that works, Matrox does too, to a lesser extent (I'm still pestering them about getting a good 3d accelerated X server for the Parhelia). These companies see significantly more linux purchases for brand new hardware than others do, because the cards can be made to work. I don't know how much of their business it is, but they'll have repeat customers, which alone is very important.
It sucks when a vendor won't consider supporting their products in OSes that don't have massive market share, but it sucks worse when they stop supporting them after they've started. Many people using Linux don't have nearly as many choices for hardware as it would seem initially.
As a group, people should email or write to ATI and ask for drivers. If they've already written them, it shouldn't be too much trouble to get them to post them again. If they still decide not to provide support, we just stop using their products.
I know that the ATI Radeons are the new hotness of the video scene. Remember though, Number9, Rendition, 3dFX, and many others have held that title, only to be almost completely out of business by now (or completely, in some cases).
I don't doubt that Microsoft is bad, I haven't run one of their OSes in about three years. I was trying to make a financial connection more than anything else, since fiscally, companies mentioned as supporting Java aren't terribly large compared to the original likes of HP and Dell, previously mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
"Note: I'm flaming, but not at you personally."
Woah, I thought that the Internet was supposed to be relatively anonymous... I don't need to know your sexual orientation.
Between being dropped, xrayed, beat on, slid, bumped, scratched, and the like, doe we need _more_ liquid than that which is normally spilled on a laptop to be present in it?
I'd like a nice cool-operating laptop, even if it is a little slower, as long as it has enough RAM, decent enough video, and good storage. Speed, as long as it's fast enough, isn't a major concern. The Athlon at home takes care of that. I want connectivity and portability.
If IBM still made the 240 series Thinkpad, I'd snap a newer one of those up in a heartbeat...
What the hell?
Violent video games, last time I looked, weren't terribly accurate as far as blood and guts and such went. Granted, it's been a year or so since I played a first-person shooter, but if memory serves, the blood flying across the screen had an almost comical effect, with more blood than would possibly come from one living thing. Quake was always amusing, not serious.
I know that they're going to blame the "violence that we expose our children to in video games" for these screwed up kids, but I don't buy it. If it wasn't video games, these kids would be into real guns in a much more serious way, or knives, or swords, or compound bows, or something. And, they'd probably be a helluva lot more dangerous, since they'd actually know how to wield these implements, rather than going through video game experiences.
If parents would raise their kids, rather than letting the TV, the computer, the entertainment system do it, maybe we'd have less problems.
Wow. I so totally screwed that up. Fishburne was supposed to be the FSF... Carrie Anne Moss would be good as IBM.
And in the words of Agent Smith, "Dammit."
We'll cast Hugo Weaving as SCO, Keanu Reeves as Tux, and Laurence Fishburne as IBM. Carrie-Anne Moss would make an excellent IBM, since IBM's products are fairly sleek and sexy right now, and I'd really like to get into IBM...
"As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries."
Yes, and now every idiot who went through business school wants to get in a piece of the action, despite frequent majoring in "Business" is more like highschool++ rather than serious post-secondary education for many. I'd have a lot more respect for "businessmen" if several of the small businesses that I've worked for didn't ignore their employees when it came time to make technical decisions, and would consider long term effects. These people even have a financial stake in what they're doing, compared to those that control other peoples' money, and they still are screwups. I don't see why we should let any company or business person patent a business plan, when they think that one good idea without heavy technical implementation should be something that they can solely profit on.
Besides, most of the actually successful business people that I have met don't feel a need to patent business ideas or processes. Of course, these generally are people who liked working in a field and started their own companies because of that, and knew the tech and work, not simply how a spreadsheet worked.
You're better off using mosix. It'll allow for more normal (ie, not beowulf specific) applications to thread across computers. I'd imagine that an open-mosix setup (like the ones using the knoppix boot CDs tailored to it) could probably make for a fairly powerful computing cluster very easily.
"SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors"
SCO will be all over your ass now!
Interesting character types they have these days. Almost as interesting as the Halfling Barbarian that the rules allow for in D&D 3...
It really surprises me how many people think of the world's water simply as "The Ocean", like it's one homogeneous thing that has the same contents everywhere. I'd expect that it would be even more varied than surface life, since different pressures, temperatures, currents, light levels, seafloor materials, salinity, and other fluid contents would vary greatly from location to location, and since depth allows for many ranges of habitats (and life forms can float at a certain depth easier than they can equivalently in air) we'd have more to look at than we could possibly ever figure out entirely. I'd think that we'd be tripping over new life forms every time we looked anywhere intently or anywhere we hadn't gone before.
"I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP."
They're not trying to emulate the bloat of XP. Nowadays, the company leading GUI development is Apple. They were the first ones to build a well-honed mass-market GUI that has all of the bells and whistles, like anti-aliasing, on-the-fly graphics scaling, and the like. By description, a lot of what they have for just their UI is the same stuff that 3d first person shooters were touting as features, for a while. Microsoft has totally fallen behind, and colour changes to the GUI are a sad way to hide that.
"What are they smoking?"
I donno, but if allowed me to code stuff like this, I'd want some...
"The point of Linux is to be alternative."
Who ever told you that? I thought that the point of Linux was for hobbyists. People who wanted to dig around in the guts of their computer software from time to time, and who liked UN*X...
"And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point?"
Looks the same? I haven't noticed that, unless you're talking about that new 'made to looks like XP' window manager, for hiding what you're doing to your boss. Takes the same amount of memory? Hardly. The Linux kernel will boot on four megabytes of memory, if you desire. I've seen modern X implementations run on 32MB fine, and advanced window managers running on 48MB as long as there's a decent graphics card in the system. Hardly the same requirements as Redmond demands. In fact, Linux, given a large amount of RAM, like the gig and a half in my workstation, runs better that anything Microsoft has ever done for memory management, due to smart memory caching and the like. Once applications are touched from the disk, they don't have to be fetched off of a platter again. Thus, the speed is improved greatly.
"Arg."
No comment...
"I agree that this new CD-RW extension is crap, but I don't think DVD-writers are viable until there is one standard that everyone can read."
Was the 700MB CD-ROM crap? How about the occasional 750MB CD-ROM that you see? Are they crap too, simply because there are a few older drives that cannot seek that far on to the media? Remember, tweaks on technology extend its use, and I doubt that Plextor would have released this kind of thing with their drives if there weren't at least some other CDs that could use it, for it would be completely slitting their own throats. And, if other companies adopt a similar CD-writing format, we'll see a lot more new drives capable of reading this, too. I doubt it'll let you burn audio CDs this way, since those players won't read it, but for data, this could be extremely useful.
Pictures...
We are talking about pictures, which are a copyrightable item on their own. Because they are the whole work in themselves, not a part, that could significantly change things.
Remember, they're not forced to carry any of the products that they stock. It's their choice.
"Yeah, people too, especially Hollywood stars. :)"
Is that personality or chest augmentation content? Or a combination of multimples therein?
The amusing thing about the plastics mentioning is that it really has come true, as far as market penetration. Almost everything that we deal with is plastic, from the bulk of the styling panels on modern automobiles, to grocery bags, to computer parts. Almost every strap connector is made of plastic, and many ropes are plastic-impregnated for strength and longevity. We ship our food in plastic, we filter our water with it. We contain industrial fluids in it. It's everywhere. It's easy to find devices that are nearly 100% plastic, it's nearly impossible to find something with absolutely no plastic in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Buggles album "Age of Plastic" is fully appropriate by name. Certainly the method I use to play it is plastic...
eBay makes it clear who the seller of merchandise is, and also has clear-cut policies for reporting abuse, in theory.
Amazon.com is, well, Amazon.com. They don't seem to have much in the line of differentiation as to who one is doing business with. If Amazon.com is the group who receives my credit-card payment, then they are who I am effectively doing business with, especially if I can do many purchases from many different sources that Amazon.com uses without having to do a seperate transaction.
If Amazon.com has its way. Walmart could also be considered a "service provider", since they stock many, many products that are supplied by outside vendors but aren't their own. It's up to the retailer to determine what is legal to carry.
If it's not already illegal, this should be, especially if there is no notice of any particular size informing the user that the change is present. If a shopping cart is linked from the primary site, such that the users of the primary site must use the shopping cart, the terms of service should propagate with it too. This could set some interesting legal precedents if it's explored.
"Neither has Linux. It's had, what, 3 years of being slightly important so far? OS/2 had many more."
I'd put it at more like five years. Some of us have been using it for even longer than that. It might have had hobbyist roots, but once we started selling masquerading firewalls to people with dialup and early Cablemodem/DSL, inroads were made. Then, we started selling file servers, and then servers to replace Windows NT Server as a PDC, and so on, and so on...
This isn't to say that it was immediate, or that it was in chunks, but grassroots movements, which Linux started out as, don't jump out immediately. It is rare that I find anyone at all who hasn't at least heard of Linux. They may not know anything about it at all, but simply hearing the name has some recognition.
Of course, they got rid of OS/2 because it wasn't entirely their baby from the get-go, was too stable, and wouldn't have guaranteed the string of frustrated upgrades that users have been forced into buying.
The other interesting thing to note is that the first two cited "yay us!" entries are for types of technology, and the latter three, NT, .net, and Longhorn, are all marketing terms. So, rather than focus on saying things like 'improving video throughput', 'improving hardware abstraction', or 'developing more rhobust parallel computing', they are descending into marketing bull.
What's scariest is that since Bill is at the forefront (even if Ballmer is CEO) and has succumbed to this, it's further demonstrating Microsoft's continued rotting from the top; no signs of abetting it.
"If anyone thinks Linux will ever capture more than Apple's current market share you're kidding yourself."
If I'm remembering correctly, Linux already has more market share than Apple does.
Besides, it's a chicken-in-the-egg problem. If vendors don't support a product that competes with the dominant product, then the competitive product has a harder time growing. By the same token, the vendors use the excuse that it's not widely used as a reason for why they don't support it, yet if they did support it, they'd have 1) an exclusive relationship with those who use the product, and 2) they'd help the product be more widely supported in general, since people would be more inclined to jump on the bandwagon.
Nvidia has a binary-only driver that works, Matrox does too, to a lesser extent (I'm still pestering them about getting a good 3d accelerated X server for the Parhelia). These companies see significantly more linux purchases for brand new hardware than others do, because the cards can be made to work. I don't know how much of their business it is, but they'll have repeat customers, which alone is very important.
It sucks when a vendor won't consider supporting their products in OSes that don't have massive market share, but it sucks worse when they stop supporting them after they've started. Many people using Linux don't have nearly as many choices for hardware as it would seem initially.
As a group, people should email or write to ATI and ask for drivers. If they've already written them, it shouldn't be too much trouble to get them to post them again. If they still decide not to provide support, we just stop using their products.
I know that the ATI Radeons are the new hotness of the video scene. Remember though, Number9, Rendition, 3dFX, and many others have held that title, only to be almost completely out of business by now (or completely, in some cases).
I don't doubt that Microsoft is bad, I haven't run one of their OSes in about three years. I was trying to make a financial connection more than anything else, since fiscally, companies mentioned as supporting Java aren't terribly large compared to the original likes of HP and Dell, previously mentioned.
"Apple, Red Hat and Lindows have also agreed to include Sun's Java."
That's like a couple of blue-collar labourers and a street bum giving their opinions on the G8 summit, right?
You forgot:
Apple R0xx0rs!
Apple Sucks!
Kde!
Gnome!
Amigas aren't dead!