I actually work for an embedded systems company so.. I'm not a desktop home user at all (I run Windows anyway on my laptop:)
X isn't really essential unless you are desperate for a full, desktop "desktop". If you have a small system that is fairly low power and rather ridiculous performance (say, 400MHz in these days of 4GHz processors) then you need to cut back in places. If you just want to run web, email and do a little bit of word processing do you really need a full X to do it?
You do, because X provides all that right now, but it does mean that for a more memory-constrained system, you are running out of memory already.
Take something like the current crop of games consoles; they don't run X for their front ends, and in the example of the Wii, they have a competant (desktop-class!) web browser too. OLPC uses X, but wouldn't their WM and apps run just as well on an accelerated framebuffer without the X legacy (I see nothing in the OLPC specs that says it must act like a full Linux desktop, it is merely for ease and speed of development)
The interesting thing will be when some hardware arrives that does the job better than the OLPC and isn't shipped by an MIT charity project; since all of the OLPC software will be open source, there's no reason to ever really touch the OLPC - apart from today's unique use of the special LCD they have.
You could run Sugar and the rest of the software on a standard PC, or a small embedded board (why does it HAVE to be a laptop?) of any architecture, price scale, power consumption you like, and use any chipsets and support devices you like (does it have to be SD or a Marvell WiFi chip in the future?)
The INTERESTING bit will be; who will bother to keep these devices below $100? OLPC is already subsidised up to it's neck. Nobody will be able to justify a $400 laptop-per-child or a $200 computer-in-a-computer-lab-per-child given the insane pricing MIT have offered. Have they killed off their competitors by killing off their own market?
Not only are they rewriting stuff to reduce footprint they're using more and more system components that everyone has (DBUS) rather than KDE-specific things (DCOP for example). Qt4 definitely uses a lot less memory as a whole than Qt3 but it's not backwards compatible.
What you will see is KDE4 by default using a huge glob less of memory, but if you run an old KDE3 or Qt3 app, suddenly memory usage will kind of go up when the compatibility libraries load.. disk usage will go up too because of them. But in most systems, 90% of the time the CPU is fairly idle and memory usage is the most important performance factor; not just memory-limited systems, on huge multi-GB desktops too.
What I really want to see is KDE4 running on Qt4 directly on the Linux framebuffer; get rid of X. Then something like MythTV running on top of it; bringing requirements down by removing some of the extraneous cruft (X no longer has magic mouse and keyboard drivers since the USB HID system does most of the work, would be one example) is a good goal too and KDE4 is also doing some of that.
I'm not sure what direction GNOME is taking, but at least there is a lot less ability to do so with GTK; they pride compatibility without compatibility libraries, and new functionality comes with new applications and rewrites of applications which never made the grade (Ubuntu Edgy had a bunch of them) - it seems to be a more pronounced, feature-rich development cycle with less chances to sit down and optimize something old. Both environments seem to be focussing on simply PROVIDING user experience than optimizing it. However KDE has a lot more baggage; components like the browser, office suite are all part of the KDE offering, which GNOME doesn't have an encumberance on. Optimizing KDE gives more results for less work. Optimizing GNOME seems harder to justify considering very few things will benefit but the toolkit and desktop itself. Maybe I'm wrong though...:D
Medial, as in Median as in Average, does not mean average as in "day to day", it means the middle of a set of numbers. 10, 20, 30, 8, 45, 99, 10 - the median here is "8". How do you define "medial tasks"? The ones that sit in the middle of the work log?
The grammar police are right here. The word the guy was looking for was "menial". I don't agree with his derogatory comments on phrases like "safe haven" (haven has had it's definition expanded to mean other things than safety, so it's a distinguisher) but I do fully agree with these people who say that things are "medial tasks", "for all intensive purposes" and even stupid mistakes like "I could of done it better" which makes no sense (could've though if they had passed English), and crazy mispronounciations of cute British phrases bastardised by Americans..
Simply code up a web-based system which looks good in Links - since the Twibright build can do rudimentary Javascript and table and frame formatting, works over a serial terminal, you can solve it for ALL your customers at once with one unique solution. You can still code the back end in C/C++.
One thing I *am* curious about, does Links support AJAX? I don't mean whizzy huge operating-system applications, just XMLHttpRequest and the ilk? Just the simple stuff, no graphics or so, just for form validation and background processing or so (it's very useful for status monitoring..)
Two reasons basically - Intel (and coincidentally Broadcom and Marvell) do make the more functional and high performing network chips in the industry, and they are really not that stoked about releasing driver and firmware source code which exposes the inner workings of these chipsets and IP cores.
It must be said that there is no choice on running an Intel graphics adapter if that is what is built into your device and there is no further expansion. A laptop for instance. This makes it "important" to Intel to eventually make their products more friendly in the open source world. However on a PC which has an integrated ethernet like Marvell Yukon or so, there is plenty of choice; plug in an ethernet expansion card or wireless adapter that DOES work, and you can still do what you wanted to do, even if you spent $4.50 extra on the motherboard for the privilege of said chipset in the first place.
Intel are (as in the article) working on such stuff, but Marvell and Broadcom do seem to outsource their driver writing sometimes and there are some legal hurdles on the original code, such that they cannot release anything. Intel have spent a couple of YEARS working on their open sourcing efforts. Companies like IBM release their firmware and so on after incredible, incredible delays (SLOF for the JS20 is a good example.. they released the Forth part and then 6 months later an open binary for the JS20 boot portion so you could change the IMPORTANT parts of it) so that the code they release is about as far from relevant as it can be, although this is mostly a function of doing it right, sometimes it is also a function of doing it in a way that does not kick sand in the face of another, in-house proprietary offering (for instance, if they did not want a free Linux to run on hardware they intended to sell a proprietary UNIX on as the prefered OS)
The other reason is especially for regulations on wireless frequencies. If Intel let anyone program their controller to operate on channel 13, THEY are responsible for the operation and illegal use of those frequencies in countries where they are not public access. While the guy running his laptop and WLAN on channel 13 will get the fine from the FCC in the US for example, the FCC or CE regulatory bodies may then turn around and refuse to certify their future hardware that so easily breaks their specification (part of the certification process is an assurance that it does not interfere with bands that are regulated). That would be bad as you simply can't sell equipment that generates RF without FCC or CE approval.
Trying to prove they have the ability to construct an intelligent response with good reasoning, basically.
"I want to build every PC personally and fuck Dell and all the bignames, they SUCK! And let's migrate to Linux.." for example doesn't go down well in corporate environments especially if you are going to be responsible for purchasing decisions, or general upkeep of an existing network with the users in mind.. expanding your job prospect beyond what they're hiring you for into 'PC builder and Linux migrator' in the rather OTT example here, may show ambition in some degree, but presumptuousness in others. They simply might not pick you if you don't fit the mindset. But if you give a slightly off-the-wall answer with good reasons, that's just as good as being short, sweet and dumb, but very correct.
One question they asked me at my first tech job interview;
If you were going to buy a PC, would you go for a big-name supplier like Dell, or a home-built system from a smaller shop?
The correct answer is any, or none! But you learn a lot from it. If they want a big supplier like Dell, you can ask them why; it's because of a large technical support base, corporate contracts and so on, and some guarantee of reliability (i.e. maybe the laptop battery would explode but they can do a recall).
If they say a small independant PC shop in the high street, you can ask why you eschewed the huge technical support. I said this one, because I really would.. personal service is always good. Walking into the store with your broken PC is a lot more friendly. You can have the guy at the independant store walk through what went wrong and it helps you learn why so you don't do it again. That, in my view, is better than Dell collect-and-return, where you just get back a working PC. But then I'm a tech; if you were a home user, you'd probably be better with Dell.
The next question is; Or wouldn't you build it yourself?
Build myself? I used to but I got bored of it. The cost; there is no way you can buy retail the same price as you get from a PC shop or even Dell. You may be able to build the exact machine you want, but you can do this by 'upgrading' a system that's been prebuilt for you. If you buy one with integrated graphics, but want an ATI Radeon X850 GTX-PO-ZZZZ-QUAK or so, buy one. At least the system would have been burned in for you, the components tested to some degree for compatibility and driver stability at either point. Being your own tech support is tedious. Do you really want to spend days of your own time troubleshooting and losing time you could be working or playing on the system?
You just have to ask questions that get a feel for if they understand how people buy, use and break systems. Knowing how to troubleshoot a bunch of simple Windows problems isn't the issue; giving them a PC to work on and see if they can handle it is a bad idea. What if the problem is something they know how to fix, easily, but they get stuck on other simple problems? You're testing competance on specific issues there, not general troubleshooting skills, or even common sense.
Why not go on Google and look for some of the more esoteric ones. I saw someone here said their interviewer made them play 20 questions.. that's a good test but it's a little offputting to some people. Groceries? Huh?
I remember a story about a guy who got taken out for a meal for his interview.. I think at Microsoft. The interview ended when he got his meal on the table and immediately put salt on it without even tasting if it needed it. That would be a bad trait.. if you consider for a moment how that kind of attitude affects the way he'd develop software. I have no idea if it's truly true or not, but it's a good example. Try things that bring out the applicant's general demeanour, see if they are friendly and helpful, or arrogant little pricks who just want to rattle through support cases.
There's no reason why Terra Soft couldn't put the nVidia binary DRM driver in the initrd and put it on the Cell YDL CD for X. YOU can't do it as a nobody without a license from nVidia, but we are talking about a professional Linux distributio[nr] here who obviously has some vested interest, support from Sony and IBM, to get this done.
Good luck getting it into Debian, of course, but also I reckon Gentoo is fairly immune as you would be leeching the drivers from a package repository/nVidia's homepage anyway.
Nintendo have taken profit drops (although never losses) from the N64 and Gamecube.
Where the Playstation and XBox have had long, fruitful lives right up until they were killed off by their next generation siblings (PS2 games still being released TODAY!) the Gamecube has pretty much not had a good game in 2 years, game store simply do not pay attention to it because of that, and it has been blamed for a poor quarter due to "low sales".
However you're right they never had a truly disasterous mainstream product apart from the VB. They lost a lot of faith from developers with the N64 but seem to have won them back with the Gamecube and providing the Wii with practically the same hardware (just faster and nicer!) and the innovative controller seems to have won some hearts and minds as well as pocketbooks. It would have been better for them if they didn't have to woo developers back (Xbox360 and PS3 development seems to be a dead cert requirement for all game studios except for Infogrames/Atari who have sworn off PS3 until the EU launch at least).
But yeah the point stands. Nintendo make a shitload of cash from everything they do. If it's not from their home consoles, it's from their portables. They have substantial funds in the bank and can do what they like. And if something starts to fail.. hey, you could always bring out Pokemon or a Mario or Zelda for it. Isn't that what was wrong with the VB? Red Alarm and Galactic Pinball and a bunch of Gameboy WarioLand ports didn't cut it:D
I don't think Apple has enough money to buy Nintendo anyway.
For the unsuccess of the N64, Gamecube, Virtual Boy and whatever other dumb mistakes they have made, Nintendo continue to make very very healthy profits each year (on par with what Apple make - they may have the iPod but Nintendo have the GBSP, DS, Zelda, Pokemon, Mario and every spin-off, and now the Wii) and I think it would be very, very difficult for Apple to stump up the cash for the real WORTH of the Nintendo brand, let alone the company, engineers (how much is Shigeru Miyamato worth alone?), entire product range and assets.
I really think an Apple iTMS channel on Wii would be a good idea though. It doesn't seem too difficult to organise; and if every Wii has 512MB of flash, you would need some place to offload those tunes and the photos you'd edit (did everyone see that photo edit app they demoed on the Wii site before launch? I can't find it anymore, help?!) and that would quite obviously be an iPod wouldn't it? It would look great in the cradle next to the Wii.
Surely MS would just look at XP Embedded, rather than reading the retail box system requirements of their current OS and saying "oh wait, it needs 1.5GB of disk space..."
Happens all the time. Download any DiskKeeper, Nero, Photoshop, PowerDVD torrent right now and they are bristling with spyware and malware.
Of course I have keys for them all but hell I am 5000 miles from my CDs and my laptop needed reinstalling. Finding the RIGHT one to download which doesn't have a hideous virus tagged into the MSI (it's too easy to do..) if not the crack tool, is pretty difficult.
Luckily Windows Live OneCare actually worked and caught them all for me.
The German Wikipedia, although totalling less articles, seems to be hundreds of times more accurate, informative and useful on many articles I've read lately (the AJAX article is a good example).
Does this mean the English wikipedia is sanitized and modified to remove all that sensitive information? Is the DoHS or GCHQ actively removing aspects of technical articles so we don't turn into a nation or two of hackers and bomb-builders?:D
Come on this is just bullshit. An Encyclopedia is meant to be comprehensive, sure, but whining about how "different" the information is, is just not relevant. Some people don't care about the information they get; a lot of information is also culture-specific (the German Wikipedia articles on things that are fundamentally German are a lot more comprehensive than the exact same English articles, but I hardly think that means that we are being denied information about Germany)
Well, I don't need to choose; I'm a UK Citizen so my healthcare is free (or at least, I pay my Class 4 National Insurance contributions, as I am technically self-employed too). While in the US my healthcare is company-provided and there is only one.
However I am not going to refuse either just because the NHS is badly run or I don't like the way the broker in the US is operating.
I would rather just GET the damn thing, throw the money out of the window, and feel really glad when I break my leg and can get the x-rays, cast and aftercare without having to scrape together thousands and thousands of dollars in an emergency. Moralising about it is just a waste of time.
Okay, so yeah, read the fine print, make a decent decision about the cover, but let's not go on about "deception, fraud and general run-around". Two people on two newspapers had a lawsuit, that is far far from "it is going to happen to you!!!!". You take your risk like everything.
The same bullshit goes on about PayPal. They have millions of users and customers, but when a fraction of a percent make a loud noise, suddenly PayPal is untrustworthy, and when it is bought by eBay, they are somehow even worse. I don't get it. I have used PayPal the same way a lot of these noise-makers have and not had my account locked. I know a couple people who have had - but they freely admit they were doing some fairly roundabout and high-value transactions, and after a short review their accounts were unlocked because nothing was wrong there. It's inconvenient but what the hell isn't these days?
The guy should be asking the insurance companies what cover they provide, and not a bunch of geeks who should be "reviewing" insurance companies. My point with the PayPal thing is, that you can't just get reviews on things like this, some people have trouble, some people don't, asking who did and who didn't doesn't give you a FULL view of the company, especially when the reviewers are vociferous geeks.
That's what insurance companies *DO*. No amount of choosing and asking on Slashdot will make it better.
For all you know he could sign up with the Organic Granola Hippy Health Insurance Company, and 2 years down the line despite glowing reviews and lots of buzzwords, he'll get fucked over. Then he'll blame Slashdot!
Deception, fraud and general run-around is what he is complaining about.
Fuck that. Just get the plan that has the BEST COVER for the LEAST MONEY. The LA Times is not a bad review of an insurance company. He is just going about it the wrong way.
You have read some news in some newspaper about some shady goings on at every insurance company?
Oh My God.
Who cares? Just pick the one that gives you the BEST HEALTH INSURANCE PLAN for the LEAST MONEY. Why does that have to be so difficult? Ask your doctor which one he would choose, and just go with it.
They already sell (on plenty of ISPs, Speakeasy pops to mind) gamer ADSL packages now which decent low-latency servers for a bunch of games.
Paying your extra dollars a month gets you a better experience. We ALREADY experience the effect that a lack of Net Neutrality would get us, which is a-la-carte bandwidth options from our ISP depending on what services we want to provide. ISPs already kill off bandwidth to newsgroups (but not for their OWN news servers which you may have to pay extra for), throttle P2P or kick people off their connection for any number of reasons.
Basically if they bring in the laws that kill net neutrality, nothing will change whatsoever. If they don't bring in those laws, nothing will change whatsoever....
Slashdot Mirror
I actually work for an embedded systems company so.. I'm not a desktop home user at all (I run Windows anyway on my laptop :)
X isn't really essential unless you are desperate for a full, desktop "desktop". If you have a small system that is fairly low power and rather ridiculous performance (say, 400MHz in these days of 4GHz processors) then you need to cut back in places. If you just want to run web, email and do a little bit of word processing do you really need a full X to do it?
You do, because X provides all that right now, but it does mean that for a more memory-constrained system, you are running out of memory already.
Take something like the current crop of games consoles; they don't run X for their front ends, and in the example of the Wii, they have a competant (desktop-class!) web browser too. OLPC uses X, but wouldn't their WM and apps run just as well on an accelerated framebuffer without the X legacy (I see nothing in the OLPC specs that says it must act like a full Linux desktop, it is merely for ease and speed of development)
The interesting thing will be when some hardware arrives that does the job better than the OLPC and isn't shipped by an MIT charity project; since all of the OLPC software will be open source, there's no reason to ever really touch the OLPC - apart from today's unique use of the special LCD they have.
You could run Sugar and the rest of the software on a standard PC, or a small embedded board (why does it HAVE to be a laptop?) of any architecture, price scale, power consumption you like, and use any chipsets and support devices you like (does it have to be SD or a Marvell WiFi chip in the future?)
The INTERESTING bit will be; who will bother to keep these devices below $100? OLPC is already subsidised up to it's neck. Nobody will be able to justify a $400 laptop-per-child or a $200 computer-in-a-computer-lab-per-child given the insane pricing MIT have offered. Have they killed off their competitors by killing off their own market?
Not only are they rewriting stuff to reduce footprint they're using more and more system components that everyone has (DBUS) rather than KDE-specific things (DCOP for example). Qt4 definitely uses a lot less memory as a whole than Qt3 but it's not backwards compatible.
:D
What you will see is KDE4 by default using a huge glob less of memory, but if you run an old KDE3 or Qt3 app, suddenly memory usage will kind of go up when the compatibility libraries load.. disk usage will go up too because of them. But in most systems, 90% of the time the CPU is fairly idle and memory usage is the most important performance factor; not just memory-limited systems, on huge multi-GB desktops too.
What I really want to see is KDE4 running on Qt4 directly on the Linux framebuffer; get rid of X. Then something like MythTV running on top of it; bringing requirements down by removing some of the extraneous cruft (X no longer has magic mouse and keyboard drivers since the USB HID system does most of the work, would be one example) is a good goal too and KDE4 is also doing some of that.
I'm not sure what direction GNOME is taking, but at least there is a lot less ability to do so with GTK; they pride compatibility without compatibility libraries, and new functionality comes with new applications and rewrites of applications which never made the grade (Ubuntu Edgy had a bunch of them) - it seems to be a more pronounced, feature-rich development cycle with less chances to sit down and optimize something old. Both environments seem to be focussing on simply PROVIDING user experience than optimizing it. However KDE has a lot more baggage; components like the browser, office suite are all part of the KDE offering, which GNOME doesn't have an encumberance on. Optimizing KDE gives more results for less work. Optimizing GNOME seems harder to justify considering very few things will benefit but the toolkit and desktop itself. Maybe I'm wrong though...
I'm an idiot, with my entire college time spent doing statistics, I should have sorted the numbers into order before picking the middle one.
HOWEVER point remains!
Medial, as in Median as in Average, does not mean average as in "day to day", it means the middle of a set of numbers. 10, 20, 30, 8, 45, 99, 10 - the median here is "8". How do you define "medial tasks"? The ones that sit in the middle of the work log?
The grammar police are right here. The word the guy was looking for was "menial". I don't agree with his derogatory comments on phrases like "safe haven" (haven has had it's definition expanded to mean other things than safety, so it's a distinguisher) but I do fully agree with these people who say that things are "medial tasks", "for all intensive purposes" and even stupid mistakes like "I could of done it better" which makes no sense (could've though if they had passed English), and crazy mispronounciations of cute British phrases bastardised by Americans..
Simply code up a web-based system which looks good in Links - since the Twibright build can do rudimentary Javascript and table and frame formatting, works over a serial terminal, you can solve it for ALL your customers at once with one unique solution. You can still code the back end in C/C++.
One thing I *am* curious about, does Links support AJAX? I don't mean whizzy huge operating-system applications, just XMLHttpRequest and the ilk? Just the simple stuff, no graphics or so, just for form validation and background processing or so (it's very useful for status monitoring..)
Because TicketMaster has a ready-made infrastructure for selling tickets.
Then choose a different laptop!
The great thing about Linux and these compatibility lists is you can find out ahead of time and pick the one that works for you.
No.
Two reasons basically - Intel (and coincidentally Broadcom and Marvell) do make the more functional and high performing network chips in the industry, and they are really not that stoked about releasing driver and firmware source code which exposes the inner workings of these chipsets and IP cores.
It must be said that there is no choice on running an Intel graphics adapter if that is what is built into your device and there is no further expansion. A laptop for instance. This makes it "important" to Intel to eventually make their products more friendly in the open source world. However on a PC which has an integrated ethernet like Marvell Yukon or so, there is plenty of choice; plug in an ethernet expansion card or wireless adapter that DOES work, and you can still do what you wanted to do, even if you spent $4.50 extra on the motherboard for the privilege of said chipset in the first place.
Intel are (as in the article) working on such stuff, but Marvell and Broadcom do seem to outsource their driver writing sometimes and there are some legal hurdles on the original code, such that they cannot release anything. Intel have spent a couple of YEARS working on their open sourcing efforts. Companies like IBM release their firmware and so on after incredible, incredible delays (SLOF for the JS20 is a good example.. they released the Forth part and then 6 months later an open binary for the JS20 boot portion so you could change the IMPORTANT parts of it) so that the code they release is about as far from relevant as it can be, although this is mostly a function of doing it right, sometimes it is also a function of doing it in a way that does not kick sand in the face of another, in-house proprietary offering (for instance, if they did not want a free Linux to run on hardware they intended to sell a proprietary UNIX on as the prefered OS)
The other reason is especially for regulations on wireless frequencies. If Intel let anyone program their controller to operate on channel 13, THEY are responsible for the operation and illegal use of those frequencies in countries where they are not public access. While the guy running his laptop and WLAN on channel 13 will get the fine from the FCC in the US for example, the FCC or CE regulatory bodies may then turn around and refuse to certify their future hardware that so easily breaks their specification (part of the certification process is an assurance that it does not interfere with bands that are regulated). That would be bad as you simply can't sell equipment that generates RF without FCC or CE approval.
Trying to prove they have the ability to construct an intelligent response with good reasoning, basically.
"I want to build every PC personally and fuck Dell and all the bignames, they SUCK! And let's migrate to Linux.." for example doesn't go down well in corporate environments especially if you are going to be responsible for purchasing decisions, or general upkeep of an existing network with the users in mind.. expanding your job prospect beyond what they're hiring you for into 'PC builder and Linux migrator' in the rather OTT example here, may show ambition in some degree, but presumptuousness in others. They simply might not pick you if you don't fit the mindset. But if you give a slightly off-the-wall answer with good reasons, that's just as good as being short, sweet and dumb, but very correct.
One question they asked me at my first tech job interview;
If you were going to buy a PC, would you go for a big-name supplier like Dell, or a home-built system from a smaller shop?
The correct answer is any, or none! But you learn a lot from it. If they want a big supplier like Dell, you can ask them why; it's because of a large technical support base, corporate contracts and so on, and some guarantee of reliability (i.e. maybe the laptop battery would explode but they can do a recall).
If they say a small independant PC shop in the high street, you can ask why you eschewed the huge technical support. I said this one, because I really would.. personal service is always good. Walking into the store with your broken PC is a lot more friendly. You can have the guy at the independant store walk through what went wrong and it helps you learn why so you don't do it again. That, in my view, is better than Dell collect-and-return, where you just get back a working PC. But then I'm a tech; if you were a home user, you'd probably be better with Dell.
The next question is; Or wouldn't you build it yourself?
Build myself? I used to but I got bored of it. The cost; there is no way you can buy retail the same price as you get from a PC shop or even Dell. You may be able to build the exact machine you want, but you can do this by 'upgrading' a system that's been prebuilt for you. If you buy one with integrated graphics, but want an ATI Radeon X850 GTX-PO-ZZZZ-QUAK or so, buy one. At least the system would have been burned in for you, the components tested to some degree for compatibility and driver stability at either point. Being your own tech support is tedious. Do you really want to spend days of your own time troubleshooting and losing time you could be working or playing on the system?
You just have to ask questions that get a feel for if they understand how people buy, use and break systems. Knowing how to troubleshoot a bunch of simple Windows problems isn't the issue; giving them a PC to work on and see if they can handle it is a bad idea. What if the problem is something they know how to fix, easily, but they get stuck on other simple problems? You're testing competance on specific issues there, not general troubleshooting skills, or even common sense.
Why not go on Google and look for some of the more esoteric ones. I saw someone here said their interviewer made them play 20 questions.. that's a good test but it's a little offputting to some people. Groceries? Huh?
I remember a story about a guy who got taken out for a meal for his interview.. I think at Microsoft. The interview ended when he got his meal on the table and immediately put salt on it without even tasting if it needed it. That would be a bad trait.. if you consider for a moment how that kind of attitude affects the way he'd develop software. I have no idea if it's truly true or not, but it's a good example. Try things that bring out the applicant's general demeanour, see if they are friendly and helpful, or arrogant little pricks who just want to rattle through support cases.
Ah but it's not gonna be in any Debian LiveCD, it's never going to ship on the Debian Installer kernel..
Installing it from the non-free repository (it's just a metapackage too!) isn't exactly the same as INCLUSION.
There's no reason why Terra Soft couldn't put the nVidia binary DRM driver in the initrd and put it on the Cell YDL CD for X. YOU can't do it as a nobody without a license from nVidia, but we are talking about a professional Linux distributio[nr] here who obviously has some vested interest, support from Sony and IBM, to get this done.
Good luck getting it into Debian, of course, but also I reckon Gentoo is fairly immune as you would be leeching the drivers from a package repository/nVidia's homepage anyway.
Nintendo have taken profit drops (although never losses) from the N64 and Gamecube.
:D
Where the Playstation and XBox have had long, fruitful lives right up until they were killed off by their next generation siblings (PS2 games still being released TODAY!) the Gamecube has pretty much not had a good game in 2 years, game store simply do not pay attention to it because of that, and it has been blamed for a poor quarter due to "low sales".
However you're right they never had a truly disasterous mainstream product apart from the VB. They lost a lot of faith from developers with the N64 but seem to have won them back with the Gamecube and providing the Wii with practically the same hardware (just faster and nicer!) and the innovative controller seems to have won some hearts and minds as well as pocketbooks. It would have been better for them if they didn't have to woo developers back (Xbox360 and PS3 development seems to be a dead cert requirement for all game studios except for Infogrames/Atari who have sworn off PS3 until the EU launch at least).
But yeah the point stands. Nintendo make a shitload of cash from everything they do. If it's not from their home consoles, it's from their portables. They have substantial funds in the bank and can do what they like. And if something starts to fail.. hey, you could always bring out Pokemon or a Mario or Zelda for it. Isn't that what was wrong with the VB? Red Alarm and Galactic Pinball and a bunch of Gameboy WarioLand ports didn't cut it
I don't think Apple has enough money to buy Nintendo anyway.
For the unsuccess of the N64, Gamecube, Virtual Boy and whatever other dumb mistakes they have made, Nintendo continue to make very very healthy profits each year (on par with what Apple make - they may have the iPod but Nintendo have the GBSP, DS, Zelda, Pokemon, Mario and every spin-off, and now the Wii) and I think it would be very, very difficult for Apple to stump up the cash for the real WORTH of the Nintendo brand, let alone the company, engineers (how much is Shigeru Miyamato worth alone?), entire product range and assets.
I really think an Apple iTMS channel on Wii would be a good idea though. It doesn't seem too difficult to organise; and if every Wii has 512MB of flash, you would need some place to offload those tunes and the photos you'd edit (did everyone see that photo edit app they demoed on the Wii site before launch? I can't find it anymore, help?!) and that would quite obviously be an iPod wouldn't it? It would look great in the cradle next to the Wii.
Surely MS would just look at XP Embedded, rather than reading the retail box system requirements of their current OS and saying "oh wait, it needs 1.5GB of disk space..."
d ed/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/windowsxpembed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Embedded
32MB of RAM, 32MB of storage space on CompactFlash is all it "needs", and a ~200MHz processor.
Running it on the OLPC would be a breeze.
Happens all the time. Download any DiskKeeper, Nero, Photoshop, PowerDVD torrent right now and they are bristling with spyware and malware.
Of course I have keys for them all but hell I am 5000 miles from my CDs and my laptop needed reinstalling. Finding the RIGHT one to download which doesn't have a hideous virus tagged into the MSI (it's too easy to do..) if not the crack tool, is pretty difficult.
Luckily Windows Live OneCare actually worked and caught them all for me.
The German Wikipedia, although totalling less articles, seems to be hundreds of times more accurate, informative and useful on many articles I've read lately (the AJAX article is a good example).
:D
Does this mean the English wikipedia is sanitized and modified to remove all that sensitive information? Is the DoHS or GCHQ actively removing aspects of technical articles so we don't turn into a nation or two of hackers and bomb-builders?
Come on this is just bullshit. An Encyclopedia is meant to be comprehensive, sure, but whining about how "different" the information is, is just not relevant. Some people don't care about the information they get; a lot of information is also culture-specific (the German Wikipedia articles on things that are fundamentally German are a lot more comprehensive than the exact same English articles, but I hardly think that means that we are being denied information about Germany)
Well, I don't need to choose; I'm a UK Citizen so my healthcare is free (or at least, I pay my Class 4 National Insurance contributions, as I am technically self-employed too). While in the US my healthcare is company-provided and there is only one.
However I am not going to refuse either just because the NHS is badly run or I don't like the way the broker in the US is operating.
I would rather just GET the damn thing, throw the money out of the window, and feel really glad when I break my leg and can get the x-rays, cast and aftercare without having to scrape together thousands and thousands of dollars in an emergency. Moralising about it is just a waste of time.
Okay, so yeah, read the fine print, make a decent decision about the cover, but let's not go on about "deception, fraud and general run-around". Two people on two newspapers had a lawsuit, that is far far from "it is going to happen to you!!!!". You take your risk like everything.
The same bullshit goes on about PayPal. They have millions of users and customers, but when a fraction of a percent make a loud noise, suddenly PayPal is untrustworthy, and when it is bought by eBay, they are somehow even worse. I don't get it. I have used PayPal the same way a lot of these noise-makers have and not had my account locked. I know a couple people who have had - but they freely admit they were doing some fairly roundabout and high-value transactions, and after a short review their accounts were unlocked because nothing was wrong there. It's inconvenient but what the hell isn't these days?
The guy should be asking the insurance companies what cover they provide, and not a bunch of geeks who should be "reviewing" insurance companies. My point with the PayPal thing is, that you can't just get reviews on things like this, some people have trouble, some people don't, asking who did and who didn't doesn't give you a FULL view of the company, especially when the reviewers are vociferous geeks.
That's what insurance companies *DO*. No amount of choosing and asking on Slashdot will make it better.
For all you know he could sign up with the Organic Granola Hippy Health Insurance Company, and 2 years down the line despite glowing reviews and lots of buzzwords, he'll get fucked over. Then he'll blame Slashdot!
Read his post first then my reply.
Deception, fraud and general run-around is what he is complaining about.
Fuck that. Just get the plan that has the BEST COVER for the LEAST MONEY. The LA Times is not a bad review of an insurance company. He is just going about it the wrong way.
Who cares?
Does he want health insurance or not?
Just get one that is cheap for you and has the cover you want, and don't think about it anymore.
You have read some news in some newspaper about some shady goings on at every insurance company?
Oh My God.
Who cares? Just pick the one that gives you the BEST HEALTH INSURANCE PLAN for the LEAST MONEY. Why does that have to be so difficult? Ask your doctor which one he would choose, and just go with it.
They already sell (on plenty of ISPs, Speakeasy pops to mind) gamer ADSL packages now which decent low-latency servers for a bunch of games.
Paying your extra dollars a month gets you a better experience. We ALREADY experience the effect
that a lack of Net Neutrality would get us, which is a-la-carte bandwidth options from our ISP
depending on what services we want to provide. ISPs already kill off bandwidth to newsgroups (but
not for their OWN news servers which you may have to pay extra for), throttle P2P or kick people off
their connection for any number of reasons.
Basically if they bring in the laws that kill net neutrality, nothing will change whatsoever. If
they don't bring in those laws, nothing will change whatsoever....
.. one moon circles