the average joe, the family man moe, and maybe designers - like graphics or eye candy. c'mon i am a designer myself - and i'd hate photoshop and other apps load with an animated hourglass, or something thats glitzy. surely there are people who want thier machines work in peace minus all the eye candy. yeah - if it helps the functionality fine. or else - i'd be happy to wrk with a 2-d interface. or even commandline. apple could afford the xtra glitz - 'cos they have a good card on board. i used my freinds' ibook, and with all its prowess was still sluggish with too much eye candy. the interface should be the last thing that impedes your work. i'd be happy using ANY amount of memory available to the applications rather than windows hogging half of it. windows is the cake, the apps are the icing - it should not try to be the icing.
i've had similar experiences. i would game on my new athlon xp - early days - the first one - 1500+ that was new and so was my enthusiasm - i'd show off the performance to people and play quake endlessly. sometimes i'd do 18 plus of gaming ina single day. after a few days of gaming - i used to download tons of mods and hundreds of levels, and withing days got a hang of it. like i wasnt a champ at fragging but i'd get headshots pretty often with the railguns. the shooting was dramatic. the mayhem continued. the neighbours would complain that my corner had become like a war scene. a couple of months later - my mum noticed stammering in my speech. i could not walk properly - like my walk was ungainly. maybe loss of sleep. my dreams were disturbed. my ears would ring. my reflexes were sharp - but i was sort of nerve wracked the entire day! before long i decided gaming was taking an immediate toll and i'd lose a few years of my life if i hadnt stopped here. it took me a while to recover from that madness!
18 for girls, 21 for boys, but thats for getting married. but for other purposes - its 18 - say voting rights, alcohol, driving license, and all kinds of other stuff.
Pacific tech, in thier site has volunteered to have this software on all machines/ PCs free - version1 or the earlier versions. They believe that educational software is best installed OEM/ in the factory along with the OS. i believe pacific T doesnt have a linux version, and that linux will be an ideal candidate for thier products and especially the fact that they will surely be recognised since they give the product away free. (nevermind that they are closed source). does linux have a similar sfware ?
I love the adblock extension, and i believe that there's a large portion of users who have average speeds for thier regular web surfing. I would love to see the big flash/jpeg/ gif - popup or webpage riddled with ads gone. the average size should be at best the 468*60( - somewhere around that figure). these days average ad sizes are way too big...and who says you cant make money with unobtrusive ads ? ask google.
the most frightful part about the whole thing is that india is about 10 times more industrialised than it was 20 years back! and more or less the same carelessness exists! Just because it is India, anyone can get away by bribing or slipping a wad of notes to any politician/ police etc. Just because it is India - there's an apparent lack of justice/ an air of carelessness. for example: a nike/ reebok/ *.popular american brand shoe will cost more or less the same in the indian streets. but the quality is quite different (nevermind even if its made in china!!!) its the QA thats non-existent - only now things have begun to change a wee bit. its the price that the indians have to pay for excess population - there's always someone who's willing to bear with anything without complaining! strange resilience to bear with impossible conditions. maybe because people always blame thier fate!!! thats the hard part to understand.
India, like Russia - builds rockets with shoestring budgets, as opposed to the average US ones - which cost way beyond. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/india-02i.html the difference is that while developing countries/ or financially contsrained countries go through extensive optimisation. several factors too exist which spirals the costs upwards: 1) US usually wants to dominate any sector it chooses - this will cost plenty. 2) bleeding edge technology involves taking huge risks, plenty of writeoff on obselete technology, and investment. 3) people in developing countries work for longer hours for cheaper wages - (which is why you can find plenty of indians in nasa! they prefer nasa for a better pay and recognition - unlike a scientist in india who is not financially rewarded as like in the US) 4) people are expendable in the lesser countries - so all those double check facilities that might be deployed by nasa might not be on an equal level in the financially constrained countries - at least not to that insane level of perfection carried out by nasa ( i could be wrong here) 5) this is the most significant - US were ahead in the game - and at one time - nasa was showered with so much money - * just to beat the russians*. after that they continued recieving money. while the rest of the industry were on diet - nasa enjoyed gobs of money to toy around ( not all of it went waste, a large percentage as in research for kevlar was useful)
i beieve, only some important technologies need to be patented, and defintely not toys or some smalltime shit. the argument to this might be where do we draw the line to see what is smalltime. whatever it is. currently the ptants help only the rich, the moneyed, the MNCs, the developed countries. thats it. given the way corporations like MS are aggressively patenting trivial subjects - I feel we have a long a protracted feud in a few years to come! and that time - it would be the frustration of people - there might be small colonies who would want themselves to be like the amish - just want to live in peace - and run a parallel world free of corporations and structures!
the funny thing is that it took years (6, infact)for the mainstream cameras to develop the regular point and click digital cameras. but the newer phone cameras are there within a year, if I am not wrong! well, must be an awful feeling in the gut for the guys who spent a bomb on that *latest* cameraphone with a 1.3 *megapixel* camera!
speaking of 7 megpixel cameras - wonder where will they find the space to fill in all those photos ? an average 7 megapixel photo will be at least 4-8 mb! and with current memory rates - is quite expensive to lug a 7MP cameraphone! here are a few links that show the megapixel stuff for the un-initiated: http://www.megapixel.net/cgi-bin/fs _loader.pl?p=ht tp%3A//www.megapixel.net/html/articles/article-meg apixels.html http://www.photo.net/equipment/digit al/basics/ http://www.pixagogo.com/tutorials/digi talphotograp hy/Tutorials.aspx?p=MegaPixelsResolution
i bet the camera phone wouldnt have the features that regular point and click has. here's a link to the samsung 5 MP camera: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0410/0410200 1samsung_ schs250.asp
but what really matters is the sensor sizes on the camera. if you take your time to check this it would be well worth it! http://www.photo.net/equipment/digital/sensor size/
a camera is not always abt MP its the same argument as in computers - again - Mhz doesnt always matter. AMD beat intel hollow with thier lower clocked CPUs. the quality of pixels matters. (although having more pixels does help.) the camera is always a package - lens, cmos, sfware. i wonder if the cell phone companies will leave us with a phone-camera or will they end up with a camera-phone! time will tell!
small asian companies are better off with linux, (with violating patents) than pirated windows, and ballmer trying to squeeze thier b***s for the same and trying to extract desperate pennies out of them! its here that intel and the rest of the guys can score - cheap linux for people who dont have the money - or dont want to pay money - or who dont care about paying - so linux fits in perfectly here. the only thing he has to pay for is the linux personnel who installs stuff. so if he wants frequent upgrades - the linux personnel benefits - most likely he wouldnt want one - so either ways people benefit. and there's a jobmarket at the low end for the guys who learn linux - this is quite easy and plenty of people already can handle most base installations as easily as windows. so i do belive there is a genuine case say in the next year or so - to go full fledged with linux. there's more than enough applications that the small businesses need. and everything for free - without violating any laws. ballmer says the governments are losing money by the way of taxes - but hey the government need not worry about foreign exchange going out of the country - tons of it - more than what they get by the way of taxes - so what peanuts profit does the government make by the way of taxes that he - ballmer's - talking about ? (well, not exactly talking , he was more than threatening people). thats good in a way. he's waking up people to the realities.
one thing striking about google is thier objectivity. every technology has been about bringing the results to the fore. no nonsense. be it email, search, ads, catalog search, picture search, news. i use each of these services almost every single day, and some of it several times a day. and they do it all free- now thats one hell of a company. microsoft does a remarkable job of thier offering - but they are always mired in controversy in more than one ways. dubious methods, and always biased. not that thats bad( i do not want to judge them there, the record speaks volumes) - but there are better ways to do it than that. thats what seperates google from microsoft.
there's plenty of piracy of linux going on for eg - anything that has been sold for a fee - * suse linux * codeweaver's crossover office * linspire... plenty more.
but i'd rather see linux being pirated then see windowze stuff. any increase in os flavours is good. let there be 2 dominant OSes at least. well, the ball is rolling, and ballmer can do all he tries, linux has reached too far a stage for Ms to be wished away now
... but is this enough ? right now patents are nothing but clout of the mighty. anyone small is bought outright! fairplay doesnt stand a chance. so much for the patents protecting the rights !
luckily this comes a little too late - online music is finally catching up. so, i suppose this woouldnt be much of a concern - as in, if it were to be released abt 4 years back, when the music industry/RIA were gung-ho abt not allowing the additional copies for safety/backup.
its people like RIAA who have created the whole "business" and "business projections" in the first place. sample this - they hire an artist for one his numbers. pay him pittance. modify the same tune to suit all the modes of delivery - FM, TV, Ringtones, CDs, LPs, AD Jingles, Movie tracks,...whatever. the artist get a pittance anyways. but this way the RIAA has projected a business of say a billion plus dollars in revenue worldwide. now, its the RIAA who has claimed this profit all along. why project the profit/ loss in the first palce. you project something as great potential, and then cash in on the percieved loss. by the way RIAA projects things - they discount many factors, consumer boredom, changing habits, and lets face it less value for actual music itself. there was a time when the artist had talents which we re rare, and hence people paid for it. now anyone could do that in a garage - just plain anyone. so why pay for something thats actually doesnt cost anything ?
yes, i have been going through this. i am a designer, and i tried my best to get my buddies to get to use linux. creatives sometimes are too stuck with the IE/ windows.so i introduced mozilla/ phoenix back then - they got hooked to the tabbed browsing + they developed for mozilla, and anything that was developed on mozilla was bound to show alright on IE - 2 birds in one stone. next i asked them to use openoffice with the pdf creator on the fly - that worked like magic too. by then they got used to mozilla mail, so they migrated to thunderbird - because of the excellent spam filters, and the works - the xtensions and stuff. yahoopops worked like magic. i showed them 7zip, was a moderate success there.showed them gimp2. then there was no asking, they started using linux boxes in the office for a preview. kde 3.2 was a hit. nicely polished. and i had mine tuned to look like a mac, plus i had umicons - set of icons - in one of my accounts on the box. that was a clincher - i am amazed - i never spoke a word to them abt promotion - just the hassle free nature, and what they'd gain just to have a heterogenous work environment! thats what they did - they learnt another OS and the works. and now they're happy having dual boots. that i feel is as much one could hope - FOSS having a foothold in every home, office etc.
...osrm study cites the risk being mostly in areas such as sendmail, samba, and linux. is the dektop safe as yet? is there any potential timebomb ticking in linux, that might make linux redundant when MS opens its arsenel ? i am mighty curious to know.
absolutely, abt time we did that. remember recently there was an article talking abt how MS has abt 50 servers running linux, and some of thier own private droids and hired ones (ex-IBM) guys to write a load of bull against linux. and make it sound exciting too. time we did something. i am sure/.tters would come out with a cartload of facts...
At a recent gathering of venture capitalists Ballmer went so far as to suggest Microsoft might own intellectual property in Linux and assured the audience that Microsoft would pursue any violation of its own patents. Before he spoke, a fire alarm went off. "It was eerily symbolic," says a venture capitalist in attendance. "We all scattered."Microsoft denies this, and says it will not litigate.
that's the scary part. i am sure this is by far the most convincing attempt, and what microsoft believes needs to be done to get at linux. in another section taylor mentions "linux is going to be around forever", and that would mean, every other compititor around doesnt matter.
methinks, its equally important for everyone in the open source to start an anti-FUD, cleaning up missions to check if the shoelaces are untied. groklaw's already begun it...but i'm afraid that's not enough to stop the economic might of the MS.
Since the Open source is really open, with no one to defend it. everyone;s taking a shot at it. raise hackles, make money. corporates, no matter what they come in ONE flavour!!! its up to the community distributed all over to make it tick. open source to me looks more like a gentle giant in the making, with evryone tugging at it to further thier own causes. in the end, they meet the same fate as in sco. do good they survive. do bad, be ready for a slow exit.
t'was a cinch downloading the entire browser in the case of firefox. but i do agree, the problem with MS is much more serious, they have many more issues to handle- since the browser sits tightly intergrated with the OS there might be host of problems, and the patched approach it has to be. thier footprint for the IE 6 was large above 20 MB - i guess with many other bits and pieces.
lols. yeah.. i like the idea. its bit like in vietnam. they dont have no road rules there, no transport ministry. aint it cool ? you can mow down the unfriendly neighbour and nobody will bat an eyelid. carmageddon will be another game that bites the dust!
Slashdot Mirror
the average joe, the family man moe, and maybe designers - like graphics or eye candy. c'mon i am a designer myself - and i'd hate photoshop and other apps load with an animated hourglass, or something thats glitzy. surely there are people who want thier machines work in peace minus all the eye candy. yeah - if it helps the functionality fine. or else - i'd be happy to wrk with a 2-d interface. or even commandline. apple could afford the xtra glitz - 'cos they have a good card on board. i used my freinds' ibook, and with all its prowess was still sluggish with too much eye candy. the interface should be the last thing that impedes your work. i'd be happy using ANY amount of memory available to the applications rather than windows hogging half of it. windows is the cake, the apps are the icing - it should not try to be the icing.
i've had similar experiences. i would game on my new athlon xp - early days - the first one - 1500+ that was new and so was my enthusiasm - i'd show off the performance to people and play quake endlessly. sometimes i'd do 18 plus of gaming ina single day. after a few days of gaming - i used to download tons of mods and hundreds of levels, and withing days got a hang of it. like i wasnt a champ at fragging but i'd get headshots pretty often with the railguns. the shooting was dramatic. the mayhem continued. the neighbours would complain that my corner had become like a war scene. a couple of months later - my mum noticed stammering in my speech. i could not walk properly - like my walk was ungainly. maybe loss of sleep. my dreams were disturbed. my ears would ring. my reflexes were sharp - but i was sort of nerve wracked the entire day! before long i decided gaming was taking an immediate toll and i'd lose a few years of my life if i hadnt stopped here. it took me a while to recover from that madness!
18 for girls, 21 for boys, but thats for getting married. but for other purposes - its 18 - say voting rights, alcohol, driving license, and all kinds of other stuff.
Pacific tech, in thier site has volunteered to have this software on all machines/ PCs free - version1 or the earlier versions. They believe that educational software is best installed OEM/ in the factory along with the OS. i believe pacific T doesnt have a linux version, and that linux will be an ideal candidate for thier products and especially the fact that they will surely be recognised since they give the product away free. (nevermind that they are closed source). does linux have a similar sfware ?
I love the adblock extension, and i believe that there's a large portion of users who have average speeds for thier regular web surfing. I would love to see the big flash/jpeg/ gif - popup or webpage riddled with ads gone. the average size should be at best the 468*60( - somewhere around that figure). these days average ad sizes are way too big...and who says you cant make money with unobtrusive ads ? ask google.
the most frightful part about the whole thing is that india is about 10 times more industrialised than it was 20 years back! and more or less the same carelessness exists! Just because it is India, anyone can get away by bribing or slipping a wad of notes to any politician/ police etc. Just because it is India - there's an apparent lack of justice/ an air of carelessness.
for example: a nike/ reebok/ *.popular american brand shoe will cost more or less the same in the indian streets. but the quality is quite different (nevermind even if its made in china!!!) its the QA thats non-existent - only now things have begun to change a wee bit. its the price that the indians have to pay for excess population - there's always someone who's willing to bear with anything without complaining! strange resilience to bear with impossible conditions. maybe because people always blame thier fate!!! thats the hard part to understand.
India, like Russia - builds rockets with shoestring budgets, as opposed to the average US ones - which cost way beyond.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/india-02i.html
the difference is that while developing countries/ or financially contsrained countries go through extensive optimisation. several factors too exist which spirals the costs upwards:
1) US usually wants to dominate any sector it chooses - this will cost plenty.
2) bleeding edge technology involves taking huge risks, plenty of writeoff on obselete technology, and investment.
3) people in developing countries work for longer hours for cheaper wages - (which is why you can find plenty of indians in nasa! they prefer nasa for a better pay and recognition - unlike a scientist in india who is not financially rewarded as like in the US)
4) people are expendable in the lesser countries - so all those double check facilities that might be deployed by nasa might not be on an equal level in the financially constrained countries - at least not to that insane level of perfection carried out by nasa ( i could be wrong here)
5) this is the most significant - US were ahead in the game - and at one time - nasa was showered with so much money - * just to beat the russians*. after that they continued recieving money. while the rest of the industry were on diet - nasa enjoyed gobs of money to toy around ( not all of it went waste, a large percentage as in research for kevlar was useful)
i beieve, only some important technologies need to be patented, and defintely not toys or some smalltime shit. the argument to this might be where do we draw the line to see what is smalltime. whatever it is. currently the ptants help only the rich, the moneyed, the MNCs, the developed countries. thats it. given the way corporations like MS are aggressively patenting trivial subjects - I feel we have a long a protracted feud in a few years to come! and that time - it would be the frustration of people - there might be small colonies who would want themselves to be like the amish - just want to live in peace - and run a parallel world free of corporations and structures!
yeah - sorry abt that, will do it for sure the next time!
the funny thing is that it took years (6, infact)for the mainstream cameras to develop the regular point and click digital cameras. but the newer phone cameras are there within a year, if I am not wrong! well, must be an awful feeling in the gut for the guys who spent a bomb on that *latest* cameraphone with a 1.3 *megapixel* camera!
s _loader.pl?p=ht tp%3A//www.megapixel.net/html/articles/article-meg apixels.htmlt al/basics/i talphotograp hy/Tutorials.aspx?p=MegaPixelsResolution
0 1samsung_ schs250.asp
r size/
speaking of 7 megpixel cameras - wonder where will they find the space to fill in all those photos ? an average 7 megapixel photo will be at least 4-8 mb! and with current memory rates - is quite expensive to lug a 7MP cameraphone! here are a few links that show the megapixel stuff for the un-initiated:
http://www.megapixel.net/cgi-bin/f
http://www.photo.net/equipment/digi
http://www.pixagogo.com/tutorials/dig
i bet the camera phone wouldnt have the features that regular point and click has. here's a link to the samsung 5 MP camera:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0410/041020
but what really matters is the sensor sizes on the camera. if you take your time to check this it would be well worth it!
http://www.photo.net/equipment/digital/senso
a camera is not always abt MP its the same argument as in computers - again - Mhz doesnt always matter. AMD beat intel hollow with thier lower clocked CPUs. the quality of pixels matters. (although having more pixels does help.) the camera is always a package - lens, cmos, sfware. i wonder if the cell phone companies will leave us with a phone-camera or will they end up with a camera-phone! time will tell!
small asian companies are better off with linux, (with violating patents) than pirated windows, and ballmer trying to squeeze thier b***s for the same and trying to extract desperate pennies out of them! its here that intel and the rest of the guys can score - cheap linux for people who dont have the money - or dont want to pay money - or who dont care about paying - so linux fits in perfectly here. the only thing he has to pay for is the linux personnel who installs stuff. so if he wants frequent upgrades - the linux personnel benefits - most likely he wouldnt want one - so either ways people benefit. and there's a jobmarket at the low end for the guys who learn linux - this is quite easy and plenty of people already can handle most base installations as easily as windows. so i do belive there is a genuine case say in the next year or so - to go full fledged with linux. there's more than enough applications that the small businesses need. and everything for free - without violating any laws. ballmer says the governments are losing money by the way of taxes - but hey the government need not worry about foreign exchange going out of the country - tons of it - more than what they get by the way of taxes - so what peanuts profit does the government make by the way of taxes that he - ballmer's - talking about ? (well, not exactly talking , he was more than threatening people). thats good in a way. he's waking up people to the realities.
one thing striking about google is thier objectivity. every technology has been about bringing the results to the fore. no nonsense. be it email, search, ads, catalog search, picture search, news. i use each of these services almost every single day, and some of it several times a day. and they do it all free- now thats one hell of a company. microsoft does a remarkable job of thier offering - but they are always mired in controversy in more than one ways. dubious methods, and always biased. not that thats bad( i do not want to judge them there, the record speaks volumes) - but there are better ways to do it than that. thats what seperates google from microsoft.
there's plenty of piracy of linux going on for eg - anything that has been sold for a fee - ... plenty more.
* suse linux
* codeweaver's crossover office
* linspire
but i'd rather see linux being pirated then see windowze stuff. any increase in os flavours is good. let there be 2 dominant OSes at least. well, the ball is rolling, and ballmer can do all he tries, linux has reached too far a stage for Ms to be wished away now
... but is this enough ? right now patents are nothing but clout of the mighty. anyone small is bought outright! fairplay doesnt stand a chance. so much for the patents protecting the rights !
luckily this comes a little too late - online music is finally catching up. so, i suppose this woouldnt be much of a concern - as in, if it were to be released abt 4 years back, when the music industry/RIA were gung-ho abt not allowing the additional copies for safety/backup.
its people like RIAA who have created the whole "business" and "business projections" in the first place. sample this - they hire an artist for one his numbers. pay him pittance. modify the same tune to suit all the modes of delivery - FM, TV, Ringtones, CDs, LPs, AD Jingles, Movie tracks, ...whatever. the artist get a pittance anyways. but this way the RIAA has projected a business of say a billion plus dollars in revenue worldwide. now, its the RIAA who has claimed this profit all along. why project the profit/ loss in the first palce. you project something as great potential, and then cash in on the percieved loss. by the way RIAA projects things - they discount many factors, consumer boredom, changing habits, and lets face it less value for actual music itself. there was a time when the artist had talents which we re rare, and hence people paid for it. now anyone could do that in a garage - just plain anyone. so why pay for something thats actually doesnt cost anything ?
yes, i have been going through this. i am a designer, and i tried my best to get my buddies to get to use linux. creatives sometimes are too stuck with the IE/ windows.so i introduced mozilla/ phoenix back then - they got hooked to the tabbed browsing + they developed for mozilla, and anything that was developed on mozilla was bound to show alright on IE - 2 birds in one stone. next i asked them to use openoffice with the pdf creator on the fly - that worked like magic too. by then they got used to mozilla mail, so they migrated to thunderbird - because of the excellent spam filters, and the works - the xtensions and stuff. yahoopops worked like magic. i showed them 7zip, was a moderate success there.showed them gimp2. then there was no asking, they started using linux boxes in the office for a preview. kde 3.2 was a hit. nicely polished. and i had mine tuned to look like a mac, plus i had umicons - set of icons - in one of my accounts on the box. that was a clincher - i am amazed - i never spoke a word to them abt promotion - just the hassle free nature, and what they'd gain just to have a heterogenous work environment! thats what they did - they learnt another OS and the works. and now they're happy having dual boots. that i feel is as much one could hope - FOSS having a foothold in every home, office etc.
yeah, students are usually stone broke by month end! the 5$ subscription is seriously good. for a change, its not the RIAA creating the ruckus!
...osrm study cites the risk being mostly in areas such as sendmail, samba, and linux. is the dektop safe as yet? is there any potential timebomb ticking in linux, that might make linux redundant when MS opens its arsenel ? i am mighty curious to know.
prior art.
absolutely, abt time we did that. remember recently there was an article talking abt how MS has abt 50 servers running linux, and some of thier own private droids and hired ones (ex-IBM) guys to write a load of bull against linux. and make it sound exciting too. time we did something. i am sure /.tters would come out with a cartload of facts...
At a recent gathering of venture capitalists Ballmer went so far as to suggest Microsoft might own intellectual property in Linux and assured the audience that Microsoft would pursue any violation of its own patents. Before he spoke, a fire alarm went off. "It was eerily symbolic," says a venture capitalist in attendance. "We all scattered."Microsoft denies this, and says it will not litigate.
that's the scary part. i am sure this is by far the most convincing attempt, and what microsoft believes needs to be done to get at linux. in another section taylor mentions "linux is going to be around forever", and that would mean, every other compititor around doesnt matter.
methinks, its equally important for everyone in the open source to start an anti-FUD, cleaning up missions to check if the shoelaces are untied. groklaw's already begun it...but i'm afraid that's not enough to stop the economic might of the MS.
Since the Open source is really open, with no one to defend it. everyone;s taking a shot at it. raise hackles, make money. corporates, no matter what they come in ONE flavour!!! its up to the community distributed all over to make it tick. open source to me looks more like a gentle giant in the making, with evryone tugging at it to further thier own causes. in the end, they meet the same fate as in sco. do good they survive. do bad, be ready for a slow exit.
t'was a cinch downloading the entire browser in the case of firefox. but i do agree, the problem with MS is much more serious, they have many more issues to handle- since the browser sits tightly intergrated with the OS there might be host of problems, and the patched approach it has to be. thier footprint for the IE 6 was large above 20 MB - i guess with many other bits and pieces.
lols. yeah.. i like the idea. its bit like in vietnam. they dont have no road rules there, no transport ministry. aint it cool ? you can mow down the unfriendly neighbour and nobody will bat an eyelid. carmageddon will be another game that bites the dust!