Exactly. They took the simple concept of a shopping cart and couldn't even get it right. Think about when you go to a store that has shopping carts like a grocery store. You see an item on the shelves, you can look at it, examine it, compare it easily with competing products, know the exact price, and then you can decide to place it in the shopping cart.
Now lots of online stores that use this concept of a shopping cart get it all wrong. I've found myself adding products to the cart and going 5 steps into the order process just to see what the shipping was or to see if state tax was applicable.
The reason people are taking so long is lack of confidence. Good descriptions, large detailed pictures of the product, comparisons, and finally, exactly what it will cost. Customers don't want to get something from UPS in a week that is different from what they thought they were getting. That's why people essentially pay the risk insurance and order from places that do offer such information but at a higher price.
Sometimes I wonder if the people running these shops have ever purchased anything online. If they have, you'd think they'd have realized this by now.
I was thinking along similar lines. But they're doing all this work for no cash. Yeah, most distros are too, but it's still a good thing. I threw this on my little sisters computer so she'd have something to type papers on, use gaim, and surf the web. It works, and didn't cost much. And the computers old so it'd go to waste otherwise.
Glad to see someone around here knows what computer engineering really is. It's not programming or "software engineering". Programmers don't need to know to make a Bode plot or construct circuits. At my school, it's very similar to electrical engineering.
If you are interested in how the hardware works, CE is a good choice. If you are interested in computer science and want to be a programmer, do CS. If you are interested in computer science as a real discipline, look for a good school. If you want to be a server admin or run around getting people's mice to work, find a school that offers IT.
The retail price of most phones is a few hundred dollars. But the monthly payment offsets the cost, so you end up paying this over a year or two, depending on the contract. So this might come out to a few hundred dollars on top of the plan. Which is on target with an iPod.
It's over hyped by some of it's users. These people certainly don't reflect the majority. Gentoo is mostly for people who have fun and enjoy tweaking their system. The installation can take a few days, but it's not difficult if you do exactly what the manual says to do. That said, it doesn't take a genius to install the damn thing, just someone with a little basic knowledge and the ability to read a manual.
Anyway, the whole compile everything theme isn't regarded for it's speed, but for it's ease to customize packages with the USE flags. Again, that's really just more tweaking and playing around because it interests you, not because you're expecting a 50% increase because you told gcc to unroll some loop (-funroll loops) which creates larger binaries which may fill up your cache faster and slow the system down when the program actually runs.
So I guess for people put off by the lack of maturity of gentoo users, it's really just a few people who don't know much of what they're talking about. It's the people who answer many questions on the forums that really keep the distro going.
Why not simply throw in some screenshots to help show your point? I thought it looked alright, but it wasn't revolutionary. However, I'm not expecting one of these releases to look revolutionary. Let them tweak the inner workings and then work on the GUI theme.
This is probably just another case where some statistician takes a common problem, makes a few guesses, and comes up with some exorbenant figure to scare people into paying attention. You can support any point with statistics.
Think of this, when you are finished with a tube of toothpaste, there is still a little you can't squeeze out. I'm sure someone could add all that up and claim Americans are throwing out $100 million a year on toothpaste. You could say the same about a lot of products. But what's the point? If you can't do anything about it, why worry yourself over it?
So in this case, you can't eliminate all accounting mistakes and typos, but if some PHB needed to read this to question his spreadsheets, he's useless.
In high school, I worked at a video rental store. Rentals usually come out on a Tuesday and we usually received the tapes/dvds on the previous Friday. We needed this because it takes time to open all the boxes, put labels on them, file the tapes away, re-shrink wrap the cover box, and enter the information into the computer. But just like video game rentals, we couldn't put them out earlier than the release date.
I think this is how a lot of media and software dealers work. In an already cut throat industry as retail, it evens things out a little. Imagine if Blockbuster could leverage their power to release movies a week earlier than the small retailers?
Not for everything though. Maybe it follows that path for the parts people see on their desktop. Then again, that's more GNOME/KDE than Linux. However, for areas like security I think it's OSX/Linux --> Windows.
Since the heart of OSX is BSD, they don't have to keep ripping their system apart to search for major security issues because it's probably been done many times previously by others. And KDE is catching up to windows with respect to "plug it in and it works" with kioslaves. When I plugged in a firewire drive and saw the little icon on my desktop, my reaction was "finally!"
But how many people are going to switch? People will still use IE6 for a while forcing developers to keep the old hacks for a large percentage of their viewers.
If you're referring to the article blurb, the article says this is because they have no need for a newer computer.
If you're referring to the government in general that they don't have ultra-powerful computers, then it's because they don't need them. If Congress can allocate billions and billions to the war in Iraq, I think if there was a serious need for computing power then they'd have purchased it already.
First of all, if my employer says "That's great, but we use M$ Office..." I'd probably not want that job at McDonald's anyway.
Secondly, the interfaces and operations are so similar that if you're proficient in one office suite, you should be able to pick up the other one with no problem. I use Openoffice on my computer and Microsoft Office at school. I'm proficient on both because I learned how to use one of them and apply those skills for the other.
This guy isn't trolling. He's making a valid point. There is not an open source alternative for every commercial software package out there. And telling people to use open source at the expense of a good product because "open source is always better" is an irresponsible solution.
For some needs, the proprietary solution is the best for most people. For others, the open source is the best for most people. You have an weigh each application on it's own merits, not claim OSS is always going to be better. So if this guy needs to use a commercial program even if foo 0.00001Beta17 is available to do half the things he needs, but claims to be a replacement, then it's not going to be the best solution.
"ClearPlay and other similar services were sued by the movie studios, the Director's Guild of America and 13 individual directors for copyright violations and for altering their work. The technology companies filed a motion for summary judgment and were awaiting a ruling in the 10th District Court in Colorado."
Apparently, the government is already involved in this. Without the laws that Congress pushed in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue.
Exactly. And if you're a business, $100 to spend now is to save in productivity from bleeding edge distros or Windows. That's their market. The TCO savings from linux doesn't come from the cost of the software, but from increased productivity.
I'm not really sure where you're going with this. In the windows world, you have to know where the executable is to run it. In linux, you just open up a console or "run" dialog and type the name of the program. And any good package manager is going to take care of this for you. Who cares where the executable resides if the package manager is taking care of it? And a good package manager should also put the icon in the menu for you. Basically, this doesn't have much to do with GNU/Linux, but how your distro and the package manager deal with things.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but the processor industry hasn't been sitting on their asses for the past two years. They're reaching the limits of how much they can push silicon technology. Frequency isn't increasing on the same rate as it did in the 90s because new issues like leakage become a bigger issue as the transistors get smaller.
Even if you don't compile it and rely on your distro for it, don't they usually make everything that's not required for booting as a module? So if you don't have the hardware and you don't need the driver, the module is never loaded and you don't waste the memory.
I'm worried it will lead to higher prices though. Memory manufacturers might end up charging a premium for tested ram as untested ram becomes common. This may be beneficial for large outfits like Dell who might be able to save some money with an in house testing facility, but this might end up costing more for people building their own systems.
Think of it this way. If I want to build a system, I can get $100 of tested ram or $90 for untested ram. Now the $10 difference might sound good, but if it ends up being bad memory, I'd have to reship it back and I might end up paying more in shipping than if I simply got the $100 ram outright.
Again, I'm no economist and I might be dead wrong about this, but the hassle of buying untested ram might be more costly in the end for the small guys.
Gentoo has had a ximian openoffice in portage for a while. It uses the openoffice source with some added patches. I'm not sure how one would get this working without portage, but it may be a good starting point.
Keep in mind though, you need over 4gb of free disk space just to compile the darn thing. But I'll admit it looks nicer and integrates better into KDE.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I can imagine this scenario.
big company: "FBI guy, Asia doesn't give two shits about our copyright laws. do something about it!"
FBI: "alright, since we can't fly over there and catch people pirating your software, we'll catch the people here pirating their software. Then maybe they'll be obliged to do the same"
The only way you can prove that something doesn't happen is by showing examples of it happening. So you give some examples of people being executed in the past five years who were later proven innocent. And I'm not talking about evidence that may have prove them innocent. I'm talking about truly innocent people being executed.
But hell, even if you find some examples, it doesn't go against my original post that they should be locked up and the key thrown away
Slashdot Mirror
But it's only going to outperform in a situation that requires more memory. Having extra memory that goes unused doesn't make a difference.
Exactly. They took the simple concept of a shopping cart and couldn't even get it right. Think about when you go to a store that has shopping carts like a grocery store. You see an item on the shelves, you can look at it, examine it, compare it easily with competing products, know the exact price, and then you can decide to place it in the shopping cart.
Now lots of online stores that use this concept of a shopping cart get it all wrong. I've found myself adding products to the cart and going 5 steps into the order process just to see what the shipping was or to see if state tax was applicable.
The reason people are taking so long is lack of confidence. Good descriptions, large detailed pictures of the product, comparisons, and finally, exactly what it will cost. Customers don't want to get something from UPS in a week that is different from what they thought they were getting. That's why people essentially pay the risk insurance and order from places that do offer such information but at a higher price.
Sometimes I wonder if the people running these shops have ever purchased anything online. If they have, you'd think they'd have realized this by now.
I was thinking along similar lines. But they're doing all this work for no cash. Yeah, most distros are too, but it's still a good thing. I threw this on my little sisters computer so she'd have something to type papers on, use gaim, and surf the web. It works, and didn't cost much. And the computers old so it'd go to waste otherwise.
um...I think you were.
I was thinking about a hundred slashdotters screaming nothing is unhackable.
But are there good OSS programs to implement the Verilog or VHDL into a format that can be loaded onto the FPGA?
Glad to see someone around here knows what computer engineering really is. It's not programming or "software engineering". Programmers don't need to know to make a Bode plot or construct circuits. At my school, it's very similar to electrical engineering.
If you are interested in how the hardware works, CE is a good choice. If you are interested in computer science and want to be a programmer, do CS. If you are interested in computer science as a real discipline, look for a good school. If you want to be a server admin or run around getting people's mice to work, find a school that offers IT.
The retail price of most phones is a few hundred dollars. But the monthly payment offsets the cost, so you end up paying this over a year or two, depending on the contract. So this might come out to a few hundred dollars on top of the plan. Which is on target with an iPod.
It's over hyped by some of it's users. These people certainly don't reflect the majority. Gentoo is mostly for people who have fun and enjoy tweaking their system. The installation can take a few days, but it's not difficult if you do exactly what the manual says to do. That said, it doesn't take a genius to install the damn thing, just someone with a little basic knowledge and the ability to read a manual.
Anyway, the whole compile everything theme isn't regarded for it's speed, but for it's ease to customize packages with the USE flags. Again, that's really just more tweaking and playing around because it interests you, not because you're expecting a 50% increase because you told gcc to unroll some loop (-funroll loops) which creates larger binaries which may fill up your cache faster and slow the system down when the program actually runs.
So I guess for people put off by the lack of maturity of gentoo users, it's really just a few people who don't know much of what they're talking about. It's the people who answer many questions on the forums that really keep the distro going.
Why not simply throw in some screenshots to help show your point? I thought it looked alright, but it wasn't revolutionary. However, I'm not expecting one of these releases to look revolutionary. Let them tweak the inner workings and then work on the GUI theme.
This is probably just another case where some statistician takes a common problem, makes a few guesses, and comes up with some exorbenant figure to scare people into paying attention. You can support any point with statistics.
Think of this, when you are finished with a tube of toothpaste, there is still a little you can't squeeze out. I'm sure someone could add all that up and claim Americans are throwing out $100 million a year on toothpaste. You could say the same about a lot of products. But what's the point? If you can't do anything about it, why worry yourself over it?
So in this case, you can't eliminate all accounting mistakes and typos, but if some PHB needed to read this to question his spreadsheets, he's useless.
In high school, I worked at a video rental store. Rentals usually come out on a Tuesday and we usually received the tapes/dvds on the previous Friday. We needed this because it takes time to open all the boxes, put labels on them, file the tapes away, re-shrink wrap the cover box, and enter the information into the computer. But just like video game rentals, we couldn't put them out earlier than the release date.
I think this is how a lot of media and software dealers work. In an already cut throat industry as retail, it evens things out a little. Imagine if Blockbuster could leverage their power to release movies a week earlier than the small retailers?
Not for everything though. Maybe it follows that path for the parts people see on their desktop. Then again, that's more GNOME/KDE than Linux. However, for areas like security I think it's OSX/Linux --> Windows.
Since the heart of OSX is BSD, they don't have to keep ripping their system apart to search for major security issues because it's probably been done many times previously by others. And KDE is catching up to windows with respect to "plug it in and it works" with kioslaves. When I plugged in a firewire drive and saw the little icon on my desktop, my reaction was "finally!"
But how many people are going to switch? People will still use IE6 for a while forcing developers to keep the old hacks for a large percentage of their viewers.
If you're referring to the article blurb, the article says this is because they have no need for a newer computer.
If you're referring to the government in general that they don't have ultra-powerful computers, then it's because they don't need them. If Congress can allocate billions and billions to the war in Iraq, I think if there was a serious need for computing power then they'd have purchased it already.
First of all, if my employer says "That's great, but we use M$ Office..." I'd probably not want that job at McDonald's anyway.
Secondly, the interfaces and operations are so similar that if you're proficient in one office suite, you should be able to pick up the other one with no problem. I use Openoffice on my computer and Microsoft Office at school. I'm proficient on both because I learned how to use one of them and apply those skills for the other.
This guy isn't trolling. He's making a valid point. There is not an open source alternative for every commercial software package out there. And telling people to use open source at the expense of a good product because "open source is always better" is an irresponsible solution.
For some needs, the proprietary solution is the best for most people. For others, the open source is the best for most people. You have an weigh each application on it's own merits, not claim OSS is always going to be better. So if this guy needs to use a commercial program even if foo 0.00001Beta17 is available to do half the things he needs, but claims to be a replacement, then it's not going to be the best solution.
Well, FTFA:
"ClearPlay and other similar services were sued by the movie studios, the Director's Guild of America and 13 individual directors for copyright violations and for altering their work. The technology companies filed a motion for summary judgment and were awaiting a ruling in the 10th District Court in Colorado."
Apparently, the government is already involved in this. Without the laws that Congress pushed in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue.
Exactly. And if you're a business, $100 to spend now is to save in productivity from bleeding edge distros or Windows. That's their market. The TCO savings from linux doesn't come from the cost of the software, but from increased productivity.
I'm not really sure where you're going with this. In the windows world, you have to know where the executable is to run it. In linux, you just open up a console or "run" dialog and type the name of the program. And any good package manager is going to take care of this for you. Who cares where the executable resides if the package manager is taking care of it? And a good package manager should also put the icon in the menu for you. Basically, this doesn't have much to do with GNU/Linux, but how your distro and the package manager deal with things.
Alright, I've said package manager enough.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but the processor industry hasn't been sitting on their asses for the past two years. They're reaching the limits of how much they can push silicon technology. Frequency isn't increasing on the same rate as it did in the 90s because new issues like leakage become a bigger issue as the transistors get smaller.
Even if you don't compile it and rely on your distro for it, don't they usually make everything that's not required for booting as a module? So if you don't have the hardware and you don't need the driver, the module is never loaded and you don't waste the memory.
I'm worried it will lead to higher prices though. Memory manufacturers might end up charging a premium for tested ram as untested ram becomes common. This may be beneficial for large outfits like Dell who might be able to save some money with an in house testing facility, but this might end up costing more for people building their own systems.
Think of it this way. If I want to build a system, I can get $100 of tested ram or $90 for untested ram. Now the $10 difference might sound good, but if it ends up being bad memory, I'd have to reship it back and I might end up paying more in shipping than if I simply got the $100 ram outright.
Again, I'm no economist and I might be dead wrong about this, but the hassle of buying untested ram might be more costly in the end for the small guys.
Gentoo has had a ximian openoffice in portage for a while. It uses the openoffice source with some added patches. I'm not sure how one would get this working without portage, but it may be a good starting point.
Keep in mind though, you need over 4gb of free disk space just to compile the darn thing. But I'll admit it looks nicer and integrates better into KDE.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I can imagine this scenario.
big company: "FBI guy, Asia doesn't give two shits about our copyright laws. do something about it!"
FBI: "alright, since we can't fly over there and catch people pirating your software, we'll catch the people here pirating their software. Then maybe they'll be obliged to do the same"
The only way you can prove that something doesn't happen is by showing examples of it happening. So you give some examples of people being executed in the past five years who were later proven innocent. And I'm not talking about evidence that may have prove them innocent. I'm talking about truly innocent people being executed.
But hell, even if you find some examples, it doesn't go against my original post that they should be locked up and the key thrown away