I don't think Linux improved market share because it got better in the last 5 years - in fact I think it got worse -, but because the competition, such as Vista, sucks so bad, and got far worse from what we had 5 years ago. We're witnessing not a competition in improvement, but a competition in who can deteriorate slower. In fact the correct strategy in such cases would be to not touch anything and stick with the best you got, unfortunately the underlying hardware platform improvements drag you into the new software crap by necessity, such as low power, something that's too grave a sacrifice not to have.
If it's more expensive to maintain a program than to create a new one, write a new one from scratch that does exactly the same thing. Hence writing a program is the most expensive part, unless you're not thinking outside of the box and you think you're stuck with what you got, and making the wrong decisions financial-wise.
I meant here that the "self interest" of the spirit is independent of the "self interest" of the body. Survival is a very complex thing when more than one individual is involved. As I mentioned, worker bees for example. Their spirit, or their "self interest drive" is not focused on preserving their own body, but their hive.
Btw, you can extend this beyond the very narrow yourself/body, to a spirit that labors in the interest of your spouse, your family, your relatives, your friends, your ethnic group, your nation, all humanity, all animal life, all eukaryote life (trying 2b funny here), all life. You are an animal too, and feel more compassion for another mammal hurting and bleeding than say a tree exuding some defensive wax. That's why we have animal torture laws, but we don't have plant torture laws.
Even though some people might be very attached to some flowers they are growing but not attached at all to some mosquitoes biting them. It's okay to mass destruct even mammals that are causing you damage, such as field mice via baits, or mosquitoes.
Or he just disappeared, stopped existing? Why is that so hard to imagine? Stopped existing as a complex functioning whole of its parts because the underlying structure disintegrated based on programming, it "died" to give way to the next generation?
But hey, you never know, just as there is a way to construct a thing that does certain things and stores certain things in memory, and replicate it on many platforms, (ex. a webpage or Firefox runs the same on Intel and Mac and Linux and other underlying hardware), maybe there is something in the background that copies all your life experiences, all your memories, and when you die, or more exactly your body disintegrates, but your "soul" lives on, when that something in the background transmutes it into Nirvana or Heaven or whatever, and your soul lives on. It's a little hard to imagine, but reality is stranger than friction, and you never know. I am not aware of having a "soul", I can say I have a spirit, a set of behaviors that are independent of my "body", I am not my body, but different from it, and sometimes may act in ways that I, whatever I may be, feel are "right" but not in the best interest of my "body." Such as a soldier or worker bee stinging may act in ways that are not in the best interest of their body, but are essential and are in the best interest of life, or a subgroup of life they are protecting.
Some of the genetic code plants haul around might be just garbage code commented out. Though it's somewhat energetically taxing to haul around a lot of garbage DNA and keep duplicating the unneeded sections, when energy is plenty and life is easy, there is no need to slim down.
Plants without brains and tools will never be able to build spaceships and live in outer space all by themselves, even if they adapt faster to a changing environment, there is only so much they can adapt without a brain, it's hard to see a plant mutating into something that builds a spaceship. Intelligence is kind of necessary for life as a whole ecosystem to survive, and the more intelligent a life form, the more its responsibility to protect all of life, and all of the ecosystem that it oversees. Somehow top predators like polar bears, wolf packs and lions seem to instinctually excersize "intelligent" deep judgement in their environment to make sure everything is in balance and harmonious. They seem happy when everything is right, and sometimes will excersize self restraint, and self reduction, in order for the whole to survive, when they could go ahead and care only for themselves and thereby destroy the whole including themselves with it. That's what you would call an ecosystem failure, the loss of balance due to a predator without self control abusing its power. That kind of nuance is hard to notice, but true survivalist ecosystems are filled with top predators which happen to be "caring", or act in ways as if they were "caring", whether it'd be out of pure free will or simply an artifact and a necessity.
As far as intelligent life goes, the breeding cycle is always going to be longer than for fast adapting plants because there is a considerable effort invested into training and teaching, transmitting an intelligent culture and rules that goes down the drain every time someone dies. Imagine if Newton, Faraday and Euler still lived today. Then again, I can imagine human life with a lifespan and breeding cycle of a few weeks, and really fast learning ability, while trees live for centuries. Imagine humans or intelligent lifeforms that go through K12 plus phd college in a matter of 3 days. Then they breed and die after a few weeks. Impossible?
Humans as they are today may adapt slower biologically speaking because of a slower breeding cycle, but culturally, as a group, they may surpass plants in speed of adaptation. Just look at the industrial revolution. However humans breeding out of control and consuming all available resources without adapting to a long term sustainable way may cause their own demise. Spaceships, islands of existence for life, including plant life, not just humans, are like an absolute must anymore, before biotechnology really takes off. Biotech, the full understanding and control of what makes life, what makes all that ATGC tick, and finding Achilles heels of it, might create a complete extinction of life. We only have a single Biosphere right now, called planet Mutha Earf, and Biosphere2 was a failure of an experiment, and a business?(what's business got to do with it), because of inability to control oxygen levels in the atmosphere. It's important to create independent, unconnected ecosystems, simply for survival reasons. Don't keep all your eggs in the same basket, diversify your portfolio, genepool. Or else some simple bad luck event, such as an asteroid hitting the planet or a global nuclear war turns back the clock of evolution a couple million years. After a nuclear war It's gonna be a while before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans evolves into worms into fish into amphibians into dinosaurs into cats into people. If people really mess up, such as cooling the inner magma from liquid to solid state, and the Earth loses its magnetic shield then its protective atmosphere, then Earth may end up a place where even Deinococci cannot survive. Eventually our Sun will run out of fuel, even if we have a long time til it happens, there is only so many times the clock of evolution can turn back, with massive extinction events, and so many blind luck events for intelligent life to evolve, before there is no more time left, and no life at all. That's what you call a total failure of life. Some people don't car
Exorbitant now, but people who know how to squeeze money out of you, will eventually force feed you some charges, and you'll pay up for youtube or similar services, not because you want to, but because you don't have any other choice, or those choices are bleak. For instance, if you can only get a job by accessing a youtube video, but to access it you have to pay. Fair? Not really. But it's a great forcefeeding lowball moneymaker.
Tesla must have been on some shit. Like mushrooms or some other psychotic food additives. It would help creativity, but gets one a bit loony too. Like, he did not only dream of powering light bulbs from a few meters, but providing free electricity to all the farmers in the whole world from his towers on Long Island. That's kinda loony, don't you agree? It's like microwaving everyone in NY just so you can send a decent power output to Texas from Long Island?
Kubuntu is just a mess, I'm fed up with it.. but holy crap... I just found Puppy Linux.. geez.. talk about blazing speed that even Win95 don't have. The darn thing is under 100 MB, containing the latest seamonkey browser. And it's so user friendly. Speed, size, it beats even Win95 in every respect, and does it on modern hardware, with an OS with full Unix power. I'm in heaven.
I'm proud of my low power, low cost P4-M 1.8 GHz laptop, that has a 50 W power supply, so I know it must be using less power than 50 W. I use the laptop as a desktop. My old watercooled Athlon desktop box had a 300 W power supply, and when running too many harddrives, that wasn't enough juice. The biggest energy waster was an NVidia FX card. That desktop also took the electric bill high, and heated the room nicely in the winter, you could actually feel a couple degrees difference just from running the computer+ CRT monitor. By the way this laptop did come with Vista, and I set it up that I can still dual boot into it. But I just don't feel Vista is snappy enough for my needs, especially when you get the touch and feel of how snappy and blazing fast Windows 2000 runs, on the same hardware, it's like a drug, you gotta have it, and you hate using Vista. I used to run XP on this laptop, and still went back to Win2000, which is my favorite. My current dream-machine is a netbook, ASUS 1000HE, with 9 hrs battery life. Guess what - it also doesn't like running Vista, it prefers XP.
So the price you pay for running underpowered hardware is saving the environment, saving on your electric bill, and getting 9 hrs battery life, but you lose the heat-your-room in the winter effect. I don't need the newest stuff to work, as long as I can still surf the old sites on the net. I'm typing this in Konqueror/Kubuntu, and yahoo.com comes up really freaky with barely a few options in Konqueror, and Yahoo Mail also doesn't like to work if I want to compose a message, when only a few years ago yahoo, as the major site on the net, it still stuck to principles of google-like simplicity and oldstyle javascript compliance. Albeit Google maps doesn't work either in Konqueror, nor yahoo maps, but Mapquest does! It's sad to see how the internet standards are narrowing to very few options. Soon they will be pay only access, or at least very highly controlled, and the Internet will fall apart as we know it, with the population segregating into those with the mainstream who can afford the high tax of being online, and those who simply don't use the net, and if they do use it for anything, they suffer through it as if they used a lynx browser today.
"Though I don't disagree that Microsoft would love to get into the OS rental market, I don't think this statement has much to go on." - What is Office Live about then? I close my eyes and use my imagination to picture a world where you can no longer install software on your computer, but you must go online, log on to the cloud, and request a yearly renewal license you cannot afford to type up a document - even a few lines you used to be able to do in Notepad -, or generate any kind of digital content. In fact if you're caught running any kind of software generating any kind of savable output "off the cloud", you will be jailed for violating intellectual property and licensing laws. And you thought the DMCA and EULA's are not very kind to end users. You ain't seen nothing yet. In fact oldstyle paper and pen methods of recording information will be outlawed, deemed too wasteful of trees and natural resources, and too inhumane and degrading to the users, just how outhouses are slowly outlawed because they do not live up to a minimum level of luxury established by building code authorities. If you're caught recording information that's non digital you will be punished. If you're caught recording information with a suspended recording license, it's a mandatory 6 months jail. Until your license can be renewed, you will only be allowed to listen and watch, but not create/write, such as you can into this slashdot textbox. Especially if a jury of twelve reasonably reasonable people deems you too pesky and too much of a public nuisance, for writing stuff such as I'm doing right now. 1st amendment? What 1st amendment? Something was lost during the translation to Spanish, with the terms with double meaning subject to an official interpretation. You will be put into therapy for your own good, because we care about you. And if that doesn't work, then on drugs, and if that doesn't work, then a simple drug overdose accident solves the problem the "public" has with you. Underground people will resort to working out secret methods of recording information, such as patterns of footsteps in a muddy ground. Mr. Officer, I was simply walking around, I didn't mean to record anything. The officer: I'd even believe that if the pattern you walked didn't decipher to "Give me liberty or give me death" through my cameraphone's barcode interpreter via UUIMFC (United Underground International Mudwalkers Freedom Codec.) Such rampant civil disobedience of the law shall not be tolerated. You think I'm crazy? Come back and read this in 2020 or 2080, and see what kind of world you live in then.
I saw DOS on a checkout line computer the other day. I forget if it was Walmart's, Aldi's, Marc's or Dave's. I wondered why on Earth these people don't upgrade their checkout line computers to Vista or OS X? Hello! Is this the 21st century or what? It's crazy that even today some people be forced to toil away at a computer that lacks even a basic GUI! It's a total disrespect and disregard of the employees and their feelings. What is next? Punchcards? Punchcards while wearing cuffs, shackles and gagballs? That's what DOS is like! Give me freedom! Give me Vista!
Dewd, don't you know that the only reason we're in a recession is because people haven't realized that we're stepping right into an information economy, and the old jobs we had no longer matter as jobs, and everyone should get busy toiling away with information economy things? People simply need to wake up, and realize their potential, and the success that's been waiting for them all this time. Have you thought about becoming a musician yet and selling your songs? You're telling me you're not a musician? How about poetry? Programming? Because that's gonna be your only way to put bread on the table, whether you like it or not. In fact, to get it through that thick skull of yours, we're gonna put shackles on you, tie you up in chains and whip you until you beg enough enough, I give in, and you start creating some wonderful music. Or poetry. Forget your old job and open your inner eyes to a brightly colored new world!
I don't think MS wants to ever give up the idea of windows update/service model with daily patches, where there is a glimpse of a possibility of eventually sending you a monthly bill, as an intellectual property "rental fee". Getting people used to auto updates, even in linux, is about this idea of getting people used to monthly charges over software. An absolutely secure OS would also eliminate the need for virus scanners, and the yearly/monthly subscription fees associated with getting updated virus signature files. Software is a business to them first and foremost, not an art, and they don't care about doing things right and just if that interferes with their ability to make money. You will never get an absolutely secure OS from a company like MS, when such a thing automatically kills dead any future possibility of monthly charges. Security scares are a great way to nudge people into obeying some centralized high command.
If it weren't for linux giving away a free server withing the OS to the masses, you'd still have a very expensive server capable professional/corporate multiuser NT OS and small businness/home desktop user WinME descendant OS, simply because of licensing model / money making possibility issues. You can only charge more for the better model if it's actually better, so you have to create the not so good stuff that you want to ask less for. However as competition intensifies, the low priced crap such as WinME disappears from the market, because you have a hard enough time retaining customers even if you give them the best stuff you have. Then you're stuck in the pricing dilemma of how to ask different prices for pretty much the same thing, as in XP's Home vs. Pro versions weren't much different, compared to Win95/NT4, or WinME/Win2K. But, with diligent effort, the crap reappeared in the marketplace, both with Linux and Windows, so once again you can release something new, and charge extra for it, because it's "better" than the old stuff or the competition. It's a very hard way to make money, because you have to wait all these enormously long years before you can finally eliminate the old stuff that people love, and got used to, and make them use the new but crappy stuff by force, so come next year you can tell the truth when you say "Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, because I've got something better for you."
I like using Win2000 because it runs faster than XP or Vista on my 512MB low power Celeron M laptop. No I don't want more RAM because that would consume that much more time to hibernate every time I turn it on/off. Vista is unbearably slow, a problem that might be fixed with extra RAM, but I had XP on it for a few months, and the annoyances add up, even XP I don't like, let alone Vista. You can call me one incredibly sensitive to minor details customer. To me even XP is more bloated and slower than Win2k. I'm hanging on to Win2K as long as I can. Heck, if Win95 still ran today, on this very laptop, with USB/Bluetooth/Sata support updates, I'd even use that happily, because to me even Win2k likes to waste a lot of time, compared to Win95. But it's tolerable due to the extra stability, I feel like I'm getting something in return for sacrificing speed, which is not the case with XP or Vista.
And by that he means the "slash dot effect" - anybody dare post screen shots, the server hosting them is gonna get smacked by 2 million denial of service attack looking requests per minute to serve those images. The server will choke under the weight of so much work and come to a screeching halt. So what's the point of posting screen shots in the first place? Or do you happen to have some ultrafast servers with unlimited bandwidth accounts that you're trying to test?
I used to use linux, and now I use good old Windows 2000 instead. It's pretty fast, not encumbered with DRM, and most of your free alternative software like Firefox runs on it.
Why would you beowulf virtualized things? Beowulf unites into one what virtualization split into many. Might as well eliminate the overhead and just design something that runs as one, without having to unite up the split parts.
They did not actually encode any information. They played a game of roll two dice and if I look at one, if I measure one, I can tell what the other must be. But I can't force the other to be anything I want, because I can't force the one I look at to be what I want, the measurement outcome, the result of "looking" is up to chance, so I can't store and encode arbitrary information as I need to. I can tell what's in the black box, but that's it.
I went and read the article. What they did, or more exactly tried to do, was save a "quantum information", clone an "unmolested qubit." I don't really get quantum information yet. So I went to read some wikipedia pages. Read up on qubit, which is either molested 0 or 1, or unmolested superposition state of 0 and 1. I find out that, with a few exceptions, most quantum computing results are probabilistic, that is, the answer has a high probability of being right, and the probability can be increased by repeating the operations. There is also a no cloning theorem, where an unmolested qubit cannot be cloned into a "separable state." Entangled systems are possible, but "no well-defined state can be attributed to a subsystem of an entangled state". So basically, entangled measurements destroy the superposed unmolested qubit itself that has been "cloned" or "teleported" onto the other atom, because once the superposition collapses here, and you have a definite answer over there, you no longer have an unmolested superposition of states over there either. Once you know this one, the answer on the other one is a definite 0 or 1. It's like when two atoms are quantum entangled, molesting one is automatically molesting the other out of a quantum superposition state into a classical defined state, destroying the information qubit. Quantum qubits cannot be copied or cloned into a separable state. No such thing as a 80 megaqubit quantum harddisk. Where does that leave quantum computing. Somebody enlighten me there, because to me it seems like complete bs.
I could tell back in 2005 March-May when I was looking for a good medium to replace VB6 to bangup a db interface, I could tell way back then that KDE4 was going to be a disaster. Why? Because qt finally had a windows open source version, Qt4! But if you installed it and tried it, it was slow as dotnet and java. Yuck. Too much marketroid abstraction bs and not enough bare to the metal keep it simple raw performance. Qt3 is C++, somewhat easier programming than C, especially less verbose than Win32 API C, where simply reading through all the letters gets me mentally worn out. By the way I have the same gripe with dotnet compared to classic VB, too verbse, too many letters get me tired, while Perl is the other extreme, not enough letters get me tired. So anyway, Qt3 was C++, somewhat more structured and less verbose than C, and still maintained relatively decent speed, comparable to classic VB. But Qt4 is a disaster, comparable to java in bloat and speed. Who's in charge over there at Trolltech? I think they've been recently sold. Anyway, that's the price KDE pays for depending on something that someone else controls. Even gcc has issues recently, compared to the 2.95 version, and even Linus seems unaware of that. Linux used to be rock stable with years of uptime. Now they have a bloated kernel and mysterious crashing issues. Is this what we call progress? I wanna go back to the days when computing was fun. Maybe Linus needs to make that Usenet post again: Do you pine for the days, when men were men and wrote their own drivers, instead of relying on what someone else controls? You know, these days even if Qt is opensource, if Trolltech keeps releasing newer versions that are more bloated and slower, nobody is going to stick to the old ones. Open source alone is not enough, if there is a standards organization driving the development into crap. My favorite Acrobat reader has been Adobe's 5, not 6, 7, 8 or 9, because of speed and bloat issues. But taxforms sooner or later complain that you can't use Acrobat 5 no more.
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I don't think Linux improved market share because it got better in the last 5 years - in fact I think it got worse -, but because the competition, such as Vista, sucks so bad, and got far worse from what we had 5 years ago. We're witnessing not a competition in improvement, but a competition in who can deteriorate slower. In fact the correct strategy in such cases would be to not touch anything and stick with the best you got, unfortunately the underlying hardware platform improvements drag you into the new software crap by necessity, such as low power, something that's too grave a sacrifice not to have.
If it's more expensive to maintain a program than to create a new one, write a new one from scratch that does exactly the same thing. Hence writing a program is the most expensive part, unless you're not thinking outside of the box and you think you're stuck with what you got, and making the wrong decisions financial-wise.
I meant here that the "self interest" of the spirit is independent of the "self interest" of the body. Survival is a very complex thing when more than one individual is involved. As I mentioned, worker bees for example. Their spirit, or their "self interest drive" is not focused on preserving their own body, but their hive. Btw, you can extend this beyond the very narrow yourself/body, to a spirit that labors in the interest of your spouse, your family, your relatives, your friends, your ethnic group, your nation, all humanity, all animal life, all eukaryote life (trying 2b funny here), all life. You are an animal too, and feel more compassion for another mammal hurting and bleeding than say a tree exuding some defensive wax. That's why we have animal torture laws, but we don't have plant torture laws. Even though some people might be very attached to some flowers they are growing but not attached at all to some mosquitoes biting them. It's okay to mass destruct even mammals that are causing you damage, such as field mice via baits, or mosquitoes.
Oh what a feelin!
Once written, software is dirt cheap. Writing it is the only thing that really costs money.
Or he just disappeared, stopped existing? Why is that so hard to imagine? Stopped existing as a complex functioning whole of its parts because the underlying structure disintegrated based on programming, it "died" to give way to the next generation? But hey, you never know, just as there is a way to construct a thing that does certain things and stores certain things in memory, and replicate it on many platforms, (ex. a webpage or Firefox runs the same on Intel and Mac and Linux and other underlying hardware), maybe there is something in the background that copies all your life experiences, all your memories, and when you die, or more exactly your body disintegrates, but your "soul" lives on, when that something in the background transmutes it into Nirvana or Heaven or whatever, and your soul lives on. It's a little hard to imagine, but reality is stranger than friction, and you never know. I am not aware of having a "soul", I can say I have a spirit, a set of behaviors that are independent of my "body", I am not my body, but different from it, and sometimes may act in ways that I, whatever I may be, feel are "right" but not in the best interest of my "body." Such as a soldier or worker bee stinging may act in ways that are not in the best interest of their body, but are essential and are in the best interest of life, or a subgroup of life they are protecting.
Some of the genetic code plants haul around might be just garbage code commented out. Though it's somewhat energetically taxing to haul around a lot of garbage DNA and keep duplicating the unneeded sections, when energy is plenty and life is easy, there is no need to slim down.
Plants without brains and tools will never be able to build spaceships and live in outer space all by themselves, even if they adapt faster to a changing environment, there is only so much they can adapt without a brain, it's hard to see a plant mutating into something that builds a spaceship. Intelligence is kind of necessary for life as a whole ecosystem to survive, and the more intelligent a life form, the more its responsibility to protect all of life, and all of the ecosystem that it oversees. Somehow top predators like polar bears, wolf packs and lions seem to instinctually excersize "intelligent" deep judgement in their environment to make sure everything is in balance and harmonious. They seem happy when everything is right, and sometimes will excersize self restraint, and self reduction, in order for the whole to survive, when they could go ahead and care only for themselves and thereby destroy the whole including themselves with it. That's what you would call an ecosystem failure, the loss of balance due to a predator without self control abusing its power. That kind of nuance is hard to notice, but true survivalist ecosystems are filled with top predators which happen to be "caring", or act in ways as if they were "caring", whether it'd be out of pure free will or simply an artifact and a necessity. As far as intelligent life goes, the breeding cycle is always going to be longer than for fast adapting plants because there is a considerable effort invested into training and teaching, transmitting an intelligent culture and rules that goes down the drain every time someone dies. Imagine if Newton, Faraday and Euler still lived today. Then again, I can imagine human life with a lifespan and breeding cycle of a few weeks, and really fast learning ability, while trees live for centuries. Imagine humans or intelligent lifeforms that go through K12 plus phd college in a matter of 3 days. Then they breed and die after a few weeks. Impossible?
Humans as they are today may adapt slower biologically speaking because of a slower breeding cycle, but culturally, as a group, they may surpass plants in speed of adaptation. Just look at the industrial revolution. However humans breeding out of control and consuming all available resources without adapting to a long term sustainable way may cause their own demise. Spaceships, islands of existence for life, including plant life, not just humans, are like an absolute must anymore, before biotechnology really takes off. Biotech, the full understanding and control of what makes life, what makes all that ATGC tick, and finding Achilles heels of it, might create a complete extinction of life. We only have a single Biosphere right now, called planet Mutha Earf, and Biosphere2 was a failure of an experiment, and a business?(what's business got to do with it), because of inability to control oxygen levels in the atmosphere. It's important to create independent, unconnected ecosystems, simply for survival reasons. Don't keep all your eggs in the same basket, diversify your portfolio, genepool. Or else some simple bad luck event, such as an asteroid hitting the planet or a global nuclear war turns back the clock of evolution a couple million years. After a nuclear war It's gonna be a while before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans evolves into worms into fish into amphibians into dinosaurs into cats into people. If people really mess up, such as cooling the inner magma from liquid to solid state, and the Earth loses its magnetic shield then its protective atmosphere, then Earth may end up a place where even Deinococci cannot survive. Eventually our Sun will run out of fuel, even if we have a long time til it happens, there is only so many times the clock of evolution can turn back, with massive extinction events, and so many blind luck events for intelligent life to evolve, before there is no more time left, and no life at all. That's what you call a total failure of life. Some people don't car
My mother runs Linux.
Exorbitant now, but people who know how to squeeze money out of you, will eventually force feed you some charges, and you'll pay up for youtube or similar services, not because you want to, but because you don't have any other choice, or those choices are bleak. For instance, if you can only get a job by accessing a youtube video, but to access it you have to pay. Fair? Not really. But it's a great forcefeeding lowball moneymaker.
Tesla must have been on some shit. Like mushrooms or some other psychotic food additives. It would help creativity, but gets one a bit loony too. Like, he did not only dream of powering light bulbs from a few meters, but providing free electricity to all the farmers in the whole world from his towers on Long Island. That's kinda loony, don't you agree? It's like microwaving everyone in NY just so you can send a decent power output to Texas from Long Island?
Kubuntu is just a mess, I'm fed up with it.. but holy crap... I just found Puppy Linux.. geez.. talk about blazing speed that even Win95 don't have. The darn thing is under 100 MB, containing the latest seamonkey browser. And it's so user friendly. Speed, size, it beats even Win95 in every respect, and does it on modern hardware, with an OS with full Unix power. I'm in heaven.
I'm proud of my low power, low cost P4-M 1.8 GHz laptop, that has a 50 W power supply, so I know it must be using less power than 50 W. I use the laptop as a desktop. My old watercooled Athlon desktop box had a 300 W power supply, and when running too many harddrives, that wasn't enough juice. The biggest energy waster was an NVidia FX card. That desktop also took the electric bill high, and heated the room nicely in the winter, you could actually feel a couple degrees difference just from running the computer+ CRT monitor. By the way this laptop did come with Vista, and I set it up that I can still dual boot into it. But I just don't feel Vista is snappy enough for my needs, especially when you get the touch and feel of how snappy and blazing fast Windows 2000 runs, on the same hardware, it's like a drug, you gotta have it, and you hate using Vista. I used to run XP on this laptop, and still went back to Win2000, which is my favorite. My current dream-machine is a netbook, ASUS 1000HE, with 9 hrs battery life. Guess what - it also doesn't like running Vista, it prefers XP.
So the price you pay for running underpowered hardware is saving the environment, saving on your electric bill, and getting 9 hrs battery life, but you lose the heat-your-room in the winter effect. I don't need the newest stuff to work, as long as I can still surf the old sites on the net. I'm typing this in Konqueror/Kubuntu, and yahoo.com comes up really freaky with barely a few options in Konqueror, and Yahoo Mail also doesn't like to work if I want to compose a message, when only a few years ago yahoo, as the major site on the net, it still stuck to principles of google-like simplicity and oldstyle javascript compliance. Albeit Google maps doesn't work either in Konqueror, nor yahoo maps, but Mapquest does! It's sad to see how the internet standards are narrowing to very few options. Soon they will be pay only access, or at least very highly controlled, and the Internet will fall apart as we know it, with the population segregating into those with the mainstream who can afford the high tax of being online, and those who simply don't use the net, and if they do use it for anything, they suffer through it as if they used a lynx browser today.
"Though I don't disagree that Microsoft would love to get into the OS rental market, I don't think this statement has much to go on." - What is Office Live about then? I close my eyes and use my imagination to picture a world where you can no longer install software on your computer, but you must go online, log on to the cloud, and request a yearly renewal license you cannot afford to type up a document - even a few lines you used to be able to do in Notepad -, or generate any kind of digital content. In fact if you're caught running any kind of software generating any kind of savable output "off the cloud", you will be jailed for violating intellectual property and licensing laws. And you thought the DMCA and EULA's are not very kind to end users. You ain't seen nothing yet. In fact oldstyle paper and pen methods of recording information will be outlawed, deemed too wasteful of trees and natural resources, and too inhumane and degrading to the users, just how outhouses are slowly outlawed because they do not live up to a minimum level of luxury established by building code authorities. If you're caught recording information that's non digital you will be punished. If you're caught recording information with a suspended recording license, it's a mandatory 6 months jail. Until your license can be renewed, you will only be allowed to listen and watch, but not create/write, such as you can into this slashdot textbox. Especially if a jury of twelve reasonably reasonable people deems you too pesky and too much of a public nuisance, for writing stuff such as I'm doing right now. 1st amendment? What 1st amendment? Something was lost during the translation to Spanish, with the terms with double meaning subject to an official interpretation. You will be put into therapy for your own good, because we care about you. And if that doesn't work, then on drugs, and if that doesn't work, then a simple drug overdose accident solves the problem the "public" has with you. Underground people will resort to working out secret methods of recording information, such as patterns of footsteps in a muddy ground. Mr. Officer, I was simply walking around, I didn't mean to record anything. The officer: I'd even believe that if the pattern you walked didn't decipher to "Give me liberty or give me death" through my cameraphone's barcode interpreter via UUIMFC (United Underground International Mudwalkers Freedom Codec.) Such rampant civil disobedience of the law shall not be tolerated. You think I'm crazy? Come back and read this in 2020 or 2080, and see what kind of world you live in then.
I saw DOS on a checkout line computer the other day. I forget if it was Walmart's, Aldi's, Marc's or Dave's. I wondered why on Earth these people don't upgrade their checkout line computers to Vista or OS X? Hello! Is this the 21st century or what? It's crazy that even today some people be forced to toil away at a computer that lacks even a basic GUI! It's a total disrespect and disregard of the employees and their feelings. What is next? Punchcards? Punchcards while wearing cuffs, shackles and gagballs? That's what DOS is like! Give me freedom! Give me Vista!
Dewd, don't you know that the only reason we're in a recession is because people haven't realized that we're stepping right into an information economy, and the old jobs we had no longer matter as jobs, and everyone should get busy toiling away with information economy things? People simply need to wake up, and realize their potential, and the success that's been waiting for them all this time. Have you thought about becoming a musician yet and selling your songs? You're telling me you're not a musician? How about poetry? Programming? Because that's gonna be your only way to put bread on the table, whether you like it or not. In fact, to get it through that thick skull of yours, we're gonna put shackles on you, tie you up in chains and whip you until you beg enough enough, I give in, and you start creating some wonderful music. Or poetry. Forget your old job and open your inner eyes to a brightly colored new world!
Expect gas prices to skyrocket if I move to the country.
I don't think MS wants to ever give up the idea of windows update/service model with daily patches, where there is a glimpse of a possibility of eventually sending you a monthly bill, as an intellectual property "rental fee". Getting people used to auto updates, even in linux, is about this idea of getting people used to monthly charges over software. An absolutely secure OS would also eliminate the need for virus scanners, and the yearly/monthly subscription fees associated with getting updated virus signature files. Software is a business to them first and foremost, not an art, and they don't care about doing things right and just if that interferes with their ability to make money. You will never get an absolutely secure OS from a company like MS, when such a thing automatically kills dead any future possibility of monthly charges. Security scares are a great way to nudge people into obeying some centralized high command.
If it weren't for linux giving away a free server withing the OS to the masses, you'd still have a very expensive server capable professional/corporate multiuser NT OS and small businness/home desktop user WinME descendant OS, simply because of licensing model / money making possibility issues. You can only charge more for the better model if it's actually better, so you have to create the not so good stuff that you want to ask less for. However as competition intensifies, the low priced crap such as WinME disappears from the market, because you have a hard enough time retaining customers even if you give them the best stuff you have. Then you're stuck in the pricing dilemma of how to ask different prices for pretty much the same thing, as in XP's Home vs. Pro versions weren't much different, compared to Win95/NT4, or WinME/Win2K. But, with diligent effort, the crap reappeared in the marketplace, both with Linux and Windows, so once again you can release something new, and charge extra for it, because it's "better" than the old stuff or the competition. It's a very hard way to make money, because you have to wait all these enormously long years before you can finally eliminate the old stuff that people love, and got used to, and make them use the new but crappy stuff by force, so come next year you can tell the truth when you say "Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, because I've got something better for you."
I like using Win2000 because it runs faster than XP or Vista on my 512MB low power Celeron M laptop. No I don't want more RAM because that would consume that much more time to hibernate every time I turn it on/off. Vista is unbearably slow, a problem that might be fixed with extra RAM, but I had XP on it for a few months, and the annoyances add up, even XP I don't like, let alone Vista. You can call me one incredibly sensitive to minor details customer. To me even XP is more bloated and slower than Win2k. I'm hanging on to Win2K as long as I can. Heck, if Win95 still ran today, on this very laptop, with USB/Bluetooth/Sata support updates, I'd even use that happily, because to me even Win2k likes to waste a lot of time, compared to Win95. But it's tolerable due to the extra stability, I feel like I'm getting something in return for sacrificing speed, which is not the case with XP or Vista.
And by that he means the "slash dot effect" - anybody dare post screen shots, the server hosting them is gonna get smacked by 2 million denial of service attack looking requests per minute to serve those images. The server will choke under the weight of so much work and come to a screeching halt. So what's the point of posting screen shots in the first place? Or do you happen to have some ultrafast servers with unlimited bandwidth accounts that you're trying to test?
I used to use linux, and now I use good old Windows 2000 instead. It's pretty fast, not encumbered with DRM, and most of your free alternative software like Firefox runs on it.
Why would you beowulf virtualized things? Beowulf unites into one what virtualization split into many. Might as well eliminate the overhead and just design something that runs as one, without having to unite up the split parts.
They did not actually encode any information. They played a game of roll two dice and if I look at one, if I measure one, I can tell what the other must be. But I can't force the other to be anything I want, because I can't force the one I look at to be what I want, the measurement outcome, the result of "looking" is up to chance, so I can't store and encode arbitrary information as I need to. I can tell what's in the black box, but that's it.
I went and read the article. What they did, or more exactly tried to do, was save a "quantum information", clone an "unmolested qubit." I don't really get quantum information yet. So I went to read some wikipedia pages. Read up on qubit, which is either molested 0 or 1, or unmolested superposition state of 0 and 1. I find out that, with a few exceptions, most quantum computing results are probabilistic, that is, the answer has a high probability of being right, and the probability can be increased by repeating the operations. There is also a no cloning theorem, where an unmolested qubit cannot be cloned into a "separable state." Entangled systems are possible, but "no well-defined state can be attributed to a subsystem of an entangled state". So basically, entangled measurements destroy the superposed unmolested qubit itself that has been "cloned" or "teleported" onto the other atom, because once the superposition collapses here, and you have a definite answer over there, you no longer have an unmolested superposition of states over there either. Once you know this one, the answer on the other one is a definite 0 or 1. It's like when two atoms are quantum entangled, molesting one is automatically molesting the other out of a quantum superposition state into a classical defined state, destroying the information qubit. Quantum qubits cannot be copied or cloned into a separable state. No such thing as a 80 megaqubit quantum harddisk. Where does that leave quantum computing. Somebody enlighten me there, because to me it seems like complete bs.
I could tell back in 2005 March-May when I was looking for a good medium to replace VB6 to bangup a db interface, I could tell way back then that KDE4 was going to be a disaster. Why? Because qt finally had a windows open source version, Qt4! But if you installed it and tried it, it was slow as dotnet and java. Yuck. Too much marketroid abstraction bs and not enough bare to the metal keep it simple raw performance. Qt3 is C++, somewhat easier programming than C, especially less verbose than Win32 API C, where simply reading through all the letters gets me mentally worn out. By the way I have the same gripe with dotnet compared to classic VB, too verbse, too many letters get me tired, while Perl is the other extreme, not enough letters get me tired. So anyway, Qt3 was C++, somewhat more structured and less verbose than C, and still maintained relatively decent speed, comparable to classic VB. But Qt4 is a disaster, comparable to java in bloat and speed. Who's in charge over there at Trolltech? I think they've been recently sold. Anyway, that's the price KDE pays for depending on something that someone else controls. Even gcc has issues recently, compared to the 2.95 version, and even Linus seems unaware of that. Linux used to be rock stable with years of uptime. Now they have a bloated kernel and mysterious crashing issues. Is this what we call progress? I wanna go back to the days when computing was fun. Maybe Linus needs to make that Usenet post again: Do you pine for the days, when men were men and wrote their own drivers, instead of relying on what someone else controls? You know, these days even if Qt is opensource, if Trolltech keeps releasing newer versions that are more bloated and slower, nobody is going to stick to the old ones. Open source alone is not enough, if there is a standards organization driving the development into crap. My favorite Acrobat reader has been Adobe's 5, not 6, 7, 8 or 9, because of speed and bloat issues. But taxforms sooner or later complain that you can't use Acrobat 5 no more.