They always try to include their Dell Jukebox software along with the sale of a PC. That competes with WMP. But I'm sure they've thought about it. Every time I clean up spyware off of someone's computer, I install Firefox.
Alright, I'm just some guy who fixes computers for friends occasionally, but I like statistics too. When my friends call me a geek for using Linux, I always retort "Guess when the last time I had a problem with spyware?"
I think Dell is going to do some small case studies of selling the average user a machine loaded with linux and see if it becomes cheaper to support them.
And you can play xbox games by just ripping them to the hard drive (which you can upgrade to hold a LOT of games. You can also play any NES, N64, Sega Genesis, and I'm sure several other console games. Few people know how amazing a modded xbox is. The only downside is you're taking revenue away from Microsoft.
Yeah, but the drug company profits are what pays for new drugs. The US charges other countries little compared to what we pay for the same drugs. It may not be completely fair, but the R&D money has to come from somewhere.
Alright. Good points and I respect your views. But when you keep saying "free" it confuses me. Aren't your income taxes much higher than in the US to pay for all of this? I think what the people of the US want is a system similar to Canada's that gets the same quality of health care through private health care providers at a cheaper rate. Cheaper by competition, of course.
Maybe it's just a difference between Canada and the US, but when the US tries to make huge government programs, the politicians end up screwing it up and it ends up costing us a lot more than it should.
That may still seem expensive to slashdotters who know the ins and outs of finding cheap hardware on the Internet, but this is the automotive industry. When purchasing a new car, an extra $500 may get you a decent audio system that would cost $300 at Best Buy. So considering their normal markup, this isn't a bad price for an unnecessary upgrade.
Privatization isn't inherently bad. The reasoning behind it is many companies will have to compete for government contracts. This goes along with capitalism that the best business will come out on top. I worked for the US government in an internship over the summer. I've worked for small businesses. Believe me, there is a difference! If you can't get fired for being lazy, why work?
However, like anything, privatization can be corrupted by people unwilling to play by the rules. That is bad and that should be fixed. However, saying that all privatization is evil Bush facsism, etc, means you are blaming all companies for the problems of one company and one administration.
Yeah, Halliburton getting billions for the Iraq reconstruction is bullshit. But I think the government taking over healthcare costing the taxpayers "more" billions would be just as bad. You have to take each example and judge it on it's own merits. Big government is bad and small government supporting big evil business is just as bad.
But you have to wait 30 days to get paid. By the time someone orders one, convinces their dumb ass generation pepsi friend to get one and waits the 30 days, they'll be out of business.
Then when the CEO and his son are begging for spare change, the kid can say "Dad, next time get me a fucking apple." $10 says he buys the kid an orange.
Damn, you beat me to it. XBMC is really good. The interface is very nice and you can configure it to play music from smb shares. I have it set up to play music off my laptop's external drive. It will also play divx movies and dvds, but that's not required for your parents I guess.
If you go this route, find slayer's xbox installer. It will reformat the new hard drive and set it up with new dashboard and xbox media player. Then just ftp into it and copy over xbox media center.
Installing a mod chip isn't difficult either. I'd get a xenium chip with the solderless install. Some people say that's a bad idea because it will come loose. I don't know about that, I've never had problems and I didn't risk making the xbox into a paperweight as with soldering.
Yeah, I think I call bs on this one too. A few years ago, my little brother and I were playing around with his paintball gun. I accidentally hit him on the side of his head. His first reaction was panic and so was mine. I ran towards him to see what happened. When I came over, he calmed down and realized it had just scared him.
So if this guy did fall down, maybe he just panicked like a little baby because even my little brother could stand a hit in the head.
BTW, I never pointed a paintball gun near anyone after that. I stick to trees off my deck at home where no person or animal can get hit.
I've seen less and less of the Daily Show. That used to be my favorite late night television show. It was smart, intelligent, and funny as all hell. But with the 2004 election coverage, it's just become a forum to make fun of republicans.
He leans to the left, and that's fine. I lean to the right, but certainly not an abortion clinic bombing bible thumper. But my complaint of the show is the humor now has the tone of
Jon: "republicans are dumb!" Crowd: "Hahaha woooo! yeaaahh! (clapping)"
The show has lost the intelligent humor it once did so well. I don't care that he's making fun of Bush, that's not the issue. The issue is that's they've gone from wit to republican bashing. Anyone can make fun of republicans and especially Bush, it's too easy. Though usually it's not based on fact, but liberal opinion.
I can't wait until after the elections when he can make fun of something else. Remember when they did the fake interview of Fabio? That was classic!
Exactly. Everytime Knoppix is mentioned as a Live CD 10 people come out and remind everyone there is a script that will install it to the hard drive. They say you'll have a great debian system.
Well, I've tried that a few times and my luck wasn't so great. It would install and I could boot, but apt wasn't working nicely at all. I think I ended up killing apt when I tried to do a simple update. Other programs didn't work as nicely as from the Live CD.
So yeah, Knoppix is great from a Live CD, but it has too many problems for every day use as a hard drive based distro. I think there are lots of other better choices for that.
Um??? The gentoo live CD is just to install gentoo. All it contains are portage files and source tarballs for installing software. There is even the minimal CD that only contains a working kernel and the least amount required to start the installation.
They called it a live CD, I guess, because you can boot into a console unlike some other distro's installations. But I don't think they intended for it to be used as a recovery for systems other than gentoo.
I've only used it as a recovery once when I compiled a kernel that wasn't configured properly and I over wrote the working kernel. However, I still had to mount all the partitions and chroot into my system from the live cd.
The Mozilla Firefox team was able to look at all the wrongdoings of Microsoft and avoid them from the ground up. Firefox is a great app and I use it everyday. I cringe when I have to use IE at school.
Microsoft could always ditch IE and use firefox code to develop their "new and secure" browser, but they've been pissing OSS for too long to take that route.
The browser wars are starting back up again. IE hasn't changed in years because it hasn't had to. Now everyone is screaming to use firefox over IE. This hurts Microsoft because they need to keep the image that they're the best of everything.
I hope firefox kills them in the browser wars. They have a better product. It was designed with usability and security in mind.
Well, yeah. That's the point I was trying to make. If you want a secure windows system, you better be prepared to patch go through a slew of other things. If you want a secure Linux system, you're maintainance will be less. Linux and the packages you use will always have problems, but the problems are a lot easier to manage than in windows.
Yeah that's a good point because it doesn't differentiate between installing a program that you want and spyware crap. I'm going to compile openoffice 1.1.3 tonight. I had to su into root, update portage, and emerge openoffice. It's become so easy at this point I don't think about it. But at the very least, it required the root password.
I used to think that. However I've gotten the feeling that a lot of people are using windows. Some use it at work because they have to. Some use it at home because they prefer it. Hey, I used to use it too. Windows XP if patched a lot, anti virus, firewall, using firefox, and ad-aware once a week will be relatively secure.
My friends (other engineering student geeks mind you) make fun of me for being such a linux geek. Using gentoo makes it even worse.
However, I see it as I have less work to do to maintain a healthy system. It took a little while to set up properly, but I feel it was worth the effort. I can keep my system packages and other software I use up to date very easily with portage.
My point to all that was windows can be a fine operating system if you maintain it a lot. That is why people here still use it, and these stories help them maintain it. That is why these stories are relevant to many people here.
Na, someone else was working on it. They gave him a computer with this OS on it. After playing around with it for a few minutes he shouted to Ballmer, "I WANT IT!"
Ballmer tried to explain that they couldn't just take it, but Gates didn't care.
But testing KDE and GNOME on other distros means you'll be using a desktop environment modified by the distributor. KDE on fedora looks different than on Suse or Mandrake. However, when you install a desktop environment on gentoo, it's just the way GNOME or KDE intended. And since they compiled it for Fedora anyway, not that much different from emerging. I'm not sure if that meant that they got a vanila gnome, but if they didn't then their review is not the fairest it could be.
This is really just a nitpick, but I think to review software like this, they should use stock versions because the distros do modify the look and feel to their content which some users don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
"Thank you, come again."
-Apu
Yeah you caught me, I didn't RTFA.
They always try to include their Dell Jukebox software along with the sale of a PC. That competes with WMP. But I'm sure they've thought about it. Every time I clean up spyware off of someone's computer, I install Firefox.
Alright, I'm just some guy who fixes computers for friends occasionally, but I like statistics too. When my friends call me a geek for using Linux, I always retort "Guess when the last time I had a problem with spyware?"
I think Dell is going to do some small case studies of selling the average user a machine loaded with linux and see if it becomes cheaper to support them.
And you can play xbox games by just ripping them to the hard drive (which you can upgrade to hold a LOT of games. You can also play any NES, N64, Sega Genesis, and I'm sure several other console games. Few people know how amazing a modded xbox is. The only downside is you're taking revenue away from Microsoft.
Did I say downside?
Yeah, but the drug company profits are what pays for new drugs. The US charges other countries little compared to what we pay for the same drugs. It may not be completely fair, but the R&D money has to come from somewhere.
Alright. Good points and I respect your views. But when you keep saying "free" it confuses me. Aren't your income taxes much higher than in the US to pay for all of this? I think what the people of the US want is a system similar to Canada's that gets the same quality of health care through private health care providers at a cheaper rate. Cheaper by competition, of course.
Maybe it's just a difference between Canada and the US, but when the US tries to make huge government programs, the politicians end up screwing it up and it ends up costing us a lot more than it should.
That may still seem expensive to slashdotters who know the ins and outs of finding cheap hardware on the Internet, but this is the automotive industry. When purchasing a new car, an extra $500 may get you a decent audio system that would cost $300 at Best Buy. So considering their normal markup, this isn't a bad price for an unnecessary upgrade.
Privatization isn't inherently bad. The reasoning behind it is many companies will have to compete for government contracts. This goes along with capitalism that the best business will come out on top. I worked for the US government in an internship over the summer. I've worked for small businesses. Believe me, there is a difference! If you can't get fired for being lazy, why work?
However, like anything, privatization can be corrupted by people unwilling to play by the rules. That is bad and that should be fixed. However, saying that all privatization is evil Bush facsism, etc, means you are blaming all companies for the problems of one company and one administration.
Yeah, Halliburton getting billions for the Iraq reconstruction is bullshit. But I think the government taking over healthcare costing the taxpayers "more" billions would be just as bad. You have to take each example and judge it on it's own merits. Big government is bad and small government supporting big evil business is just as bad.
But you have to wait 30 days to get paid. By the time someone orders one, convinces their dumb ass generation pepsi friend to get one and waits the 30 days, they'll be out of business.
Then when the CEO and his son are begging for spare change, the kid can say "Dad, next time get me a fucking apple." $10 says he buys the kid an orange.
Damn, you beat me to it. XBMC is really good. The interface is very nice and you can configure it to play music from smb shares. I have it set up to play music off my laptop's external drive. It will also play divx movies and dvds, but that's not required for your parents I guess.
If you go this route, find slayer's xbox installer. It will reformat the new hard drive and set it up with new dashboard and xbox media player. Then just ftp into it and copy over xbox media center.
Installing a mod chip isn't difficult either. I'd get a xenium chip with the solderless install. Some people say that's a bad idea because it will come loose. I don't know about that, I've never had problems and I didn't risk making the xbox into a paperweight as with soldering.
Yeah, I think I call bs on this one too. A few years ago, my little brother and I were playing around with his paintball gun. I accidentally hit him on the side of his head. His first reaction was panic and so was mine. I ran towards him to see what happened. When I came over, he calmed down and realized it had just scared him.
So if this guy did fall down, maybe he just panicked like a little baby because even my little brother could stand a hit in the head.
BTW, I never pointed a paintball gun near anyone after that. I stick to trees off my deck at home where no person or animal can get hit.
I've seen less and less of the Daily Show. That used to be my favorite late night television show. It was smart, intelligent, and funny as all hell. But with the 2004 election coverage, it's just become a forum to make fun of republicans.
He leans to the left, and that's fine. I lean to the right, but certainly not an abortion clinic bombing bible thumper. But my complaint of the show is the humor now has the tone of
Jon: "republicans are dumb!"
Crowd: "Hahaha woooo! yeaaahh! (clapping)"
The show has lost the intelligent humor it once did so well. I don't care that he's making fun of Bush, that's not the issue. The issue is that's they've gone from wit to republican bashing. Anyone can make fun of republicans and especially Bush, it's too easy. Though usually it's not based on fact, but liberal opinion.
I can't wait until after the elections when he can make fun of something else. Remember when they did the fake interview of Fabio? That was classic!
Exactly. Everytime Knoppix is mentioned as a Live CD 10 people come out and remind everyone there is a script that will install it to the hard drive. They say you'll have a great debian system.
Well, I've tried that a few times and my luck wasn't so great. It would install and I could boot, but apt wasn't working nicely at all. I think I ended up killing apt when I tried to do a simple update. Other programs didn't work as nicely as from the Live CD.
So yeah, Knoppix is great from a Live CD, but it has too many problems for every day use as a hard drive based distro. I think there are lots of other better choices for that.
Um??? The gentoo live CD is just to install gentoo. All it contains are portage files and source tarballs for installing software. There is even the minimal CD that only contains a working kernel and the least amount required to start the installation.
They called it a live CD, I guess, because you can boot into a console unlike some other distro's installations. But I don't think they intended for it to be used as a recovery for systems other than gentoo.
I've only used it as a recovery once when I compiled a kernel that wasn't configured properly and I over wrote the working kernel. However, I still had to mount all the partitions and chroot into my system from the live cd.
Or if Gates said the Lisa was good enough
I know! That word is spreading like a bunch of virii.
The Mozilla Firefox team was able to look at all the wrongdoings of Microsoft and avoid them from the ground up. Firefox is a great app and I use it everyday. I cringe when I have to use IE at school.
Microsoft could always ditch IE and use firefox code to develop their "new and secure" browser, but they've been pissing OSS for too long to take that route.
The browser wars are starting back up again. IE hasn't changed in years because it hasn't had to. Now everyone is screaming to use firefox over IE. This hurts Microsoft because they need to keep the image that they're the best of everything.
I hope firefox kills them in the browser wars. They have a better product. It was designed with usability and security in mind.
Well, yeah. That's the point I was trying to make. If you want a secure windows system, you better be prepared to patch go through a slew of other things. If you want a secure Linux system, you're maintainance will be less. Linux and the packages you use will always have problems, but the problems are a lot easier to manage than in windows.
Mod +/- 1 drunk?
Yeah that's a good point because it doesn't differentiate between installing a program that you want and spyware crap. I'm going to compile openoffice 1.1.3 tonight. I had to su into root, update portage, and emerge openoffice. It's become so easy at this point I don't think about it. But at the very least, it required the root password.
I used to think that. However I've gotten the feeling that a lot of people are using windows. Some use it at work because they have to. Some use it at home because they prefer it. Hey, I used to use it too. Windows XP if patched a lot, anti virus, firewall, using firefox, and ad-aware once a week will be relatively secure.
My friends (other engineering student geeks mind you) make fun of me for being such a linux geek. Using gentoo makes it even worse.
However, I see it as I have less work to do to maintain a healthy system. It took a little while to set up properly, but I feel it was worth the effort. I can keep my system packages and other software I use up to date very easily with portage.
My point to all that was windows can be a fine operating system if you maintain it a lot. That is why people here still use it, and these stories help them maintain it. That is why these stories are relevant to many people here.
Na, someone else was working on it. They gave him a computer with this OS on it. After playing around with it for a few minutes he shouted to Ballmer, "I WANT IT!"
Ballmer tried to explain that they couldn't just take it, but Gates didn't care.
But testing KDE and GNOME on other distros means you'll be using a desktop environment modified by the distributor. KDE on fedora looks different than on Suse or Mandrake. However, when you install a desktop environment on gentoo, it's just the way GNOME or KDE intended. And since they compiled it for Fedora anyway, not that much different from emerging. I'm not sure if that meant that they got a vanila gnome, but if they didn't then their review is not the fairest it could be.
This is really just a nitpick, but I think to review software like this, they should use stock versions because the distros do modify the look and feel to their content which some users don't like.
"I diddn't bother making an adapter out of an Extension cord"
;)
He also diddn't bother to run spell check