I would say they'd also need a faster-drying ink, no? Or perhaps a heater on the output or something. I know whenever I print it takes a hell of a lot longer than half of a second for the ink to dry.
This article did one thing very well: it convinced me that the only way to get Linux to the masses is to have OEMs install it before they ship it to them. Windows installs can go wrong, and the only reason people don't complain about this is that 95% of the Windows user base has never installed Windows. They got it preloaded on their machine, and if it ever had to be reinstalled, they took it to a shop where professionals did that for them.
So, what I propose is that the Linux crowd needs to get behind making the application experience (as opposed to the install experience) as good as it can. That's what people care about. The OEMs will spend enough money to get Linux successfully installed on one machine, then they'll just ghost that drive and churn out clones. They'll never see the Linux install process again (until the next version, I suppose).
If we can get Linux pre-installed, and sold by a main OEM, it will finally take off.
Ground Rules for the Windows-Macintosh War
By DAVID POGUE
Ok - stopped reading already. It'd David f-ing Pogue. This guy's as much of a moron as John Dvorak. Try reading one of his gadget articles sometime -- you'll die from the smack to the forehead you give yourself.
Ok, so they say it looks exactly like concrete. Despite the fact that I don't think it matters what roads look like (as long as their not bright yellow, requiring new traffic markings), I really think looks matter even less in this case.
The real question is, how does it feel? What kind of texture does the outside of it have? Does it have some grit to it, or is it perfectly smooth? If the latter case, can a grit be ground into it, and will it hold that gritty shape? Smooth-surface roads are a Bad Thing (tm).
Yes, I know it says that they have already used it in roads, but both examples listed describe small patches of the stuff. Even further, in the replacement of the expansion joints on the bridge, this stuff is replacing steel, which is also slick. Even with the other road patch they talk about, in most places I've lived, that means that it probably replaced a large steel plate.
Just wondering. Maybe I need to go try to find the actual UofM site that describes it, rather than this news article.:P
I have all these people telling me that I must be doing something wrong but they all get real quiet when I ask them to make an ISO of their drive for me to use.
Woah - what is that comment supposed to mean? Are you saying that Windows and Mac folks will make you an ISA of their drive? Are you trying to say that the tools do not exist in Linux to do this? Are you trying to comment on the installability of the OS?
You're just kind of leaving the whole thing dangling, and while I'm sure most people assume you're trolling, I'd kind of like to know what you're trying to say.
Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.
The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Anyone else do the math? 1e4/2e7 = 5e-4. That's right people - 10,000 barrels of oil is 0.05% of our annual consumption. Go back and read that again - it's not 5%, it's 0.05%.
If you're going to pick a point to lobby on, this is not it. Try something like, "it will be easier on people's health to not have to change wake up time," or "we'll be more like the rest of the world without a change."
If you want to save barrels of oil, pressure automotive companies to get their acts together.
Did they really mean to have this name sound like "Kudzu"? You know - that vine that grows on the outside of many buildings, quietly destroying the walls. Seems like a reference I would have stayed away from in naming my developer site.
So I was sitting here thinking about how I like to fast forward through commercials, and use adblock, and such, when I had a strange thought. So, I thought I would play a little Devil's Advocate, and toss it out here for comment.
Think about how it is when you buy a magazine. The publication is chock full of advertisements. You can cut them out, but probably not without ruining at least one part of text. Fast forwarding a DVD is kind of like flipping past an ad page without reading it, but being as the technologies are different, I'm not quite sure how to compare them. So, what makes the magazine scenario different from the DVD one?
In addition to the comment above, I offer another idea that makes some bit of sense: What would it cost to buy the same magazine without advertisements? I'm thinking quite a bit more, and I doubt I would pay for a magazine that cost $20-$50 (depending on content, of course). There are conflicting ideas about what a DVD "actually" costs to make, but if you think about how it would probably cost more if there were no advertisements, I think you can kind of see why they make you watch those advertisements.
To me, it all boils down to the fact that a business is a business, and the only purpose of a business is to make money. If, in order to make money, a business has to agree that it will make a consumer watch someone else's add, then the business will do it in a heartbeat. It may suck for the user, but as long as they buy it anyway, it doesn't matter.
Anyway, just thoughts. Respond if you wish, but I'd rather hear interesting arguments than rehashed, tired quotes and flames.:)
A man driving a backroad across country came upon a cowboy out driving cattle. He stopped, got out, and said to the cowboy, "If I can tell you how many cattle you have, would you give me your smallest cow?" and indicated the animal he desired.
"My smallest cow, you say? Well, why not, give me your estimate," replied the cowboy.
"Sir, you have exactly 400 head of cattle," the man said after some contemplation.
"Wow, that's exactly correct," said the cowboy surprised. So, the man walked over, picked up his prize and put it in his trunk. The cowboy, concerned for the animal, asked, "Now, if I can tell you your profession, would you let me win back the animal?"
The man, somewhat taken aback, agreed with a chuckle, "Sure."
"Sir, you are a consultant," said the cowboy without hesitation.
"Wow. That's pretty impressive. How did you know?"
"Well, you came out of nowhere telling me that you could give me an answer to a question I didn't ask for a price that was over the top," said the cowboy with a stern look. "Now give me back my dog."
Hmmm...I wonder how "big" one of these interconnects is. Currently chips have pins that are visible to the human eye, and even solderable by the human hand. If it were possible to have optical "pinouts" that were really small, you could decrease the size of a chip package/circuit board. Of course, I suppose there would still have to be pins for power, but ya' know.
And since an optical interconnect wouldn't need solder, these chips would need a completely different process for connection to a circuit board. No solder means that the chip could be affixed at a much lower temperature. Production lines already use machines to monitor circuit board assemblies to make sure all chips are lined up, but with optical interconnect, they'd probably have to be even more precise.
Actually, I remember when viruses used to do crazy things like actually overheat your processor by playing with the processor throttling. Then you were left with not only potentially corrupted data, but also broken hardware. At least we haven't seen any of those in a while.
I know I'm a bit late in the conversation, but anyway...
It's amazing that this story is up today, as I just spent the weekend loading Solaris 10 on my Ultra-60. It had been running Debian, but I thought it might be fun to run Sun's OS on Sun's hardware.:)
I have run Solaris 8 in the past. That just seemed like a bunch of junk to me. The main problem was that my main "unix" experience was Linux and IRIX. So, missing most of the commands and options I wanted, I was a bit dissapointed.
I'd just like to say, though, that it looks like Sun really has done quite a bit of work on this new version. The only reason it took me "all weekend" to install Solaris 10 was that the only SCSI CD-ROM drive I have is a 1x or 2x, and I can't trust my x86 box to stay up for longer than an hour any more (it's had a _rough_ life). The install process itself, though, is easy.
Once installed, I fiddled around a bit as root to make sure everything was working. I stuck with CDE for root loggin, just in case something was broken in JDS. CDE is exactly the same as it has always been, for those worried about it. I used the Sun Management Console to setup a new user - slick. The only thing I don't like about SMC is that it seems a bit lacking on features. What it has is good, but I think there could be a lot more in there.
With my normal user created, I logged in and setup JDS. I had been running Gnome in Debian, so I was pleased with how my desktop was setup. It runs very nicely. A bit of logging on to the web, and I had added Firefox. A bit more tooling around, and I had my printer working. It really does seem like Sun has gone to the trouble of making the things that people commonly do easy to do, or at least making them function like they would in other environments.
Now the only thing I'm missing is a way to move the data that I had in Linux over to the Solaris partition. Unfortunately I was using ext2/3 in Linux, so I can't mount it out of the box. I've found the LXRUN utils, but they say they're for x86. Probably a bit of hacking away at source code in my future. We'll see if that's even possible. If anyone here has a better idea - post it?
Next up for this machine: second processor and more RAM. Then maybe a SunPCi board... just because I can.:)
While this is definitely true with government budgets (spend them or lose them next year), there's a very simple reason they went with Corel: They already had it. Read the article a bit closer - Corel offered them $40/copy for _upgrades_.
Y'all seem surprised at this move, but IIRC many of the features that were new in Win95 were also back-ported to Win3.1. I know that for a long time I was able to run pretty much any Win95 app on Win3.1 after I installed the win32 dlls (complete with FreeCell as a demo).
On a bit of a smaller scale, I also remember most of the new 98 features being back-ported to 95. Most of the magazine articles at the time, in fact, were touting 98 as 95 with a bunch of patches.
I can't comment on 98 <->XP - I was a heavy linux user during that changeover.
Windows permits this using TweakUI. The option is "Activation follows mouse (X-Mouse)". As a Windows user, I tried this out and found it rather pointless (I usually only focus a window when I need to click on a button or something, and by doing that it naturally gets focus). But if you like it, you're definitely free to use it.
Except that focus-follows-mouse is not a standard Windows ability, and therefore many programs malfunction when you turn it on. MSVC, for example, won't display certain dialogs (properties in resource edit mode) for some reason.
For more non-standard Windows setups that break programs, try moving your taskbar to the top of the screen. Many windows will open with their title bar under the taskbar.:P
Someone needs to go back to math class. The article actually says the batteries will have "three times the power" of today's batteries. That amounts to 200% more power, not 300% more.
Did I say anything about open source? No. The last time I checked, Pagemaker was very much not open source. I merely stated that one should use the correct tool for the job. You wouldn't use a hammer to make a nice, smooth cut in a piece of wood, would you?
Hey - is that a curved keyboard I see in the first picture? Might laptop makers actually be thinking about incorporating ergonomic keyboards into their design? This is the one thing I've really been waiting for. These new wide-screen laptops have an inch on either side of the keyboard that they just waste. Why not use that space to give me a split, ergonomic keyboard like I use with my desktop?:)
Ever try editing the field after you've screwed something up? Backspace doesn't exactly to what you'd like...neither do the arrow keys. Are you changing 118.153.0.19 to 118.152.0.19? After clicking in the 153 field, backspace the 3 and type the 2. Now your cursor is in the 0 field. Why? It's just moving stuff around a whole bunch for no reason.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what the above IP addresses relate to - I've never used them, they're just examples.
Require users to take explicit keying ("tabbing") action to move from one data entry field to the next; the computer should not provide such tabbing automatically.
If only M$ had been listening. I know I'm not the only one here who hates that damn auto-tabbing IP address entry box!
BTW, anyone interested should read M$'s HIG sometime. I hope they've started following it recently, because there were many sections I found where the HIG said one thing and their Office suite did something completely different.
Y'all are sick. Not because you dream video games, but because all of the stories here are about dreaming about video games. Have none of you ever played a game without a pc/console?
I can remember chess club back in high school. After the tournaments, we would be driving home on the van, and I would still be seeing how I could attack the person two benches ahead and one person over from me. I was not the only teammate who had this happen either.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say they'd also need a faster-drying ink, no? Or perhaps a heater on the output or something. I know whenever I print it takes a hell of a lot longer than half of a second for the ink to dry.
This article did one thing very well: it convinced me that the only way to get Linux to the masses is to have OEMs install it before they ship it to them. Windows installs can go wrong, and the only reason people don't complain about this is that 95% of the Windows user base has never installed Windows. They got it preloaded on their machine, and if it ever had to be reinstalled, they took it to a shop where professionals did that for them.
So, what I propose is that the Linux crowd needs to get behind making the application experience (as opposed to the install experience) as good as it can. That's what people care about. The OEMs will spend enough money to get Linux successfully installed on one machine, then they'll just ghost that drive and churn out clones. They'll never see the Linux install process again (until the next version, I suppose).
If we can get Linux pre-installed, and sold by a main OEM, it will finally take off.
Ground Rules for the Windows-Macintosh War By DAVID POGUE
Ok - stopped reading already. It'd David f-ing Pogue. This guy's as much of a moron as John Dvorak. Try reading one of his gadget articles sometime -- you'll die from the smack to the forehead you give yourself.
Ok, so they say it looks exactly like concrete. Despite the fact that I don't think it matters what roads look like (as long as their not bright yellow, requiring new traffic markings), I really think looks matter even less in this case.
:P
The real question is, how does it feel? What kind of texture does the outside of it have? Does it have some grit to it, or is it perfectly smooth? If the latter case, can a grit be ground into it, and will it hold that gritty shape? Smooth-surface roads are a Bad Thing (tm).
Yes, I know it says that they have already used it in roads, but both examples listed describe small patches of the stuff. Even further, in the replacement of the expansion joints on the bridge, this stuff is replacing steel, which is also slick. Even with the other road patch they talk about, in most places I've lived, that means that it probably replaced a large steel plate.
Just wondering. Maybe I need to go try to find the actual UofM site that describes it, rather than this news article.
Woah - what is that comment supposed to mean? Are you saying that Windows and Mac folks will make you an ISA of their drive? Are you trying to say that the tools do not exist in Linux to do this? Are you trying to comment on the installability of the OS?
You're just kind of leaving the whole thing dangling, and while I'm sure most people assume you're trolling, I'd kind of like to know what you're trying to say.
Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day. The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Anyone else do the math? 1e4/2e7 = 5e-4. That's right people - 10,000 barrels of oil is 0.05% of our annual consumption. Go back and read that again - it's not 5%, it's 0.05%.
If you're going to pick a point to lobby on, this is not it. Try something like, "it will be easier on people's health to not have to change wake up time," or "we'll be more like the rest of the world without a change."
If you want to save barrels of oil, pressure automotive companies to get their acts together.
Did they really mean to have this name sound like "Kudzu"? You know - that vine that grows on the outside of many buildings, quietly destroying the walls. Seems like a reference I would have stayed away from in naming my developer site.
So I was sitting here thinking about how I like to fast forward through commercials, and use adblock, and such, when I had a strange thought. So, I thought I would play a little Devil's Advocate, and toss it out here for comment.
:)
Think about how it is when you buy a magazine. The publication is chock full of advertisements. You can cut them out, but probably not without ruining at least one part of text. Fast forwarding a DVD is kind of like flipping past an ad page without reading it, but being as the technologies are different, I'm not quite sure how to compare them. So, what makes the magazine scenario different from the DVD one?
In addition to the comment above, I offer another idea that makes some bit of sense: What would it cost to buy the same magazine without advertisements? I'm thinking quite a bit more, and I doubt I would pay for a magazine that cost $20-$50 (depending on content, of course). There are conflicting ideas about what a DVD "actually" costs to make, but if you think about how it would probably cost more if there were no advertisements, I think you can kind of see why they make you watch those advertisements.
To me, it all boils down to the fact that a business is a business, and the only purpose of a business is to make money. If, in order to make money, a business has to agree that it will make a consumer watch someone else's add, then the business will do it in a heartbeat. It may suck for the user, but as long as they buy it anyway, it doesn't matter.
Anyway, just thoughts. Respond if you wish, but I'd rather hear interesting arguments than rehashed, tired quotes and flames.
Dude - lay down and wave! Then you'll end up as ~2 blurry flecks, not just one! ;)
A man driving a backroad across country came upon a cowboy out driving cattle. He stopped, got out, and said to the cowboy, "If I can tell you how many cattle you have, would you give me your smallest cow?" and indicated the animal he desired.
:(
"My smallest cow, you say? Well, why not, give me your estimate," replied the cowboy.
"Sir, you have exactly 400 head of cattle," the man said after some contemplation.
"Wow, that's exactly correct," said the cowboy surprised. So, the man walked over, picked up his prize and put it in his trunk. The cowboy, concerned for the animal, asked, "Now, if I can tell you your profession, would you let me win back the animal?"
The man, somewhat taken aback, agreed with a chuckle, "Sure."
"Sir, you are a consultant," said the cowboy without hesitation.
"Wow. That's pretty impressive. How did you know?"
"Well, you came out of nowhere telling me that you could give me an answer to a question I didn't ask for a price that was over the top," said the cowboy with a stern look. "Now give me back my dog."
--Wish I knew who to attribute this to
Hmmm...I wonder how "big" one of these interconnects is. Currently chips have pins that are visible to the human eye, and even solderable by the human hand. If it were possible to have optical "pinouts" that were really small, you could decrease the size of a chip package/circuit board. Of course, I suppose there would still have to be pins for power, but ya' know.
And since an optical interconnect wouldn't need solder, these chips would need a completely different process for connection to a circuit board. No solder means that the chip could be affixed at a much lower temperature. Production lines already use machines to monitor circuit board assemblies to make sure all chips are lined up, but with optical interconnect, they'd probably have to be even more precise.
I'm so glad that other people consider AIM a virus too! :)
Actually, I remember when viruses used to do crazy things like actually overheat your processor by playing with the processor throttling. Then you were left with not only potentially corrupted data, but also broken hardware. At least we haven't seen any of those in a while.
I know I'm a bit late in the conversation, but anyway...
It's amazing that this story is up today, as I just spent the weekend loading Solaris 10 on my Ultra-60. It had been running Debian, but I thought it might be fun to run Sun's OS on Sun's hardware. :)
I have run Solaris 8 in the past. That just seemed like a bunch of junk to me. The main problem was that my main "unix" experience was Linux and IRIX. So, missing most of the commands and options I wanted, I was a bit dissapointed.
I'd just like to say, though, that it looks like Sun really has done quite a bit of work on this new version. The only reason it took me "all weekend" to install Solaris 10 was that the only SCSI CD-ROM drive I have is a 1x or 2x, and I can't trust my x86 box to stay up for longer than an hour any more (it's had a _rough_ life). The install process itself, though, is easy.
Once installed, I fiddled around a bit as root to make sure everything was working. I stuck with CDE for root loggin, just in case something was broken in JDS. CDE is exactly the same as it has always been, for those worried about it. I used the Sun Management Console to setup a new user - slick. The only thing I don't like about SMC is that it seems a bit lacking on features. What it has is good, but I think there could be a lot more in there.
With my normal user created, I logged in and setup JDS. I had been running Gnome in Debian, so I was pleased with how my desktop was setup. It runs very nicely. A bit of logging on to the web, and I had added Firefox. A bit more tooling around, and I had my printer working. It really does seem like Sun has gone to the trouble of making the things that people commonly do easy to do, or at least making them function like they would in other environments.
Now the only thing I'm missing is a way to move the data that I had in Linux over to the Solaris partition. Unfortunately I was using ext2/3 in Linux, so I can't mount it out of the box. I've found the LXRUN utils, but they say they're for x86. Probably a bit of hacking away at source code in my future. We'll see if that's even possible. If anyone here has a better idea - post it?
Next up for this machine: second processor and more RAM. Then maybe a SunPCi board ... just because I can. :)
While this is definitely true with government budgets (spend them or lose them next year), there's a very simple reason they went with Corel: They already had it. Read the article a bit closer - Corel offered them $40/copy for _upgrades_.
Y'all seem surprised at this move, but IIRC many of the features that were new in Win95 were also back-ported to Win3.1. I know that for a long time I was able to run pretty much any Win95 app on Win3.1 after I installed the win32 dlls (complete with FreeCell as a demo).
On a bit of a smaller scale, I also remember most of the new 98 features being back-ported to 95. Most of the magazine articles at the time, in fact, were touting 98 as 95 with a bunch of patches.
I can't comment on 98 <->XP - I was a heavy linux user during that changeover.
Windows permits this using TweakUI. The option is "Activation follows mouse (X-Mouse)". As a Windows user, I tried this out and found it rather pointless (I usually only focus a window when I need to click on a button or something, and by doing that it naturally gets focus). But if you like it, you're definitely free to use it.
Except that focus-follows-mouse is not a standard Windows ability, and therefore many programs malfunction when you turn it on. MSVC, for example, won't display certain dialogs (properties in resource edit mode) for some reason.
For more non-standard Windows setups that break programs, try moving your taskbar to the top of the screen. Many windows will open with their title bar under the taskbar. :P
Someone needs to go back to math class. The article actually says the batteries will have "three times the power" of today's batteries. That amounts to 200% more power, not 300% more.
Did I say anything about open source? No. The last time I checked, Pagemaker was very much not open source. I merely stated that one should use the correct tool for the job. You wouldn't use a hammer to make a nice, smooth cut in a piece of wood, would you?
You shouldn't be using a word processor for layout anyway. Try a type setter like latex, or a document production tool like Pagemaker.
Hey - is that a curved keyboard I see in the first picture? Might laptop makers actually be thinking about incorporating ergonomic keyboards into their design? This is the one thing I've really been waiting for. These new wide-screen laptops have an inch on either side of the keyboard that they just waste. Why not use that space to give me a split, ergonomic keyboard like I use with my desktop? :)
*actually* fax my ass! Who first...? :)
Ever try editing the field after you've screwed something up? Backspace doesn't exactly to what you'd like...neither do the arrow keys. Are you changing 118.153.0.19 to 118.152.0.19? After clicking in the 153 field, backspace the 3 and type the 2. Now your cursor is in the 0 field. Why? It's just moving stuff around a whole bunch for no reason.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what the above IP addresses relate to - I've never used them, they're just examples.
1.4.15 Explicit Tabbing to Data Fields
Require users to take explicit keying ("tabbing") action to move from one data entry field to the next; the computer should not provide such tabbing automatically.
If only M$ had been listening. I know I'm not the only one here who hates that damn auto-tabbing IP address entry box!
BTW, anyone interested should read M$'s HIG sometime. I hope they've started following it recently, because there were many sections I found where the HIG said one thing and their Office suite did something completely different.
Also, read Apple's HIG, Gnome's HIG, KDE's HIG... Subtle differences, interesting things.
Y'all are sick. Not because you dream video games, but because all of the stories here are about dreaming about video games. Have none of you ever played a game without a pc/console?
I can remember chess club back in high school. After the tournaments, we would be driving home on the van, and I would still be seeing how I could attack the person two benches ahead and one person over from me. I was not the only teammate who had this happen either.
Go play a "real" game.