If you have a less-fortunate family member or friend, it's also a good use. My sister, for example, is using a Tecra 8100 with a (I think) 500MHz P3. It does everything she might need it to do: internet browsing, email, and word processing. I recently fixed it up for her (broken hinge, OS reinstall, recelled the battery) so now it's better than new! And no cost to her, either.
True, you can fit a whole page on your widescreen, but you're in an even smaller minority than most people posting here--you have a 1920x1200 screen. Very, very few people have that high of a resolution. An overwhelming majority of widescreen laptops have 1280x800 or smaller screens. A few have 1440x900 (or thereabouts), but those are also quite rare.
I'm a little ambivalent about the glossy vs matte issue, but I have a bigger issue with notebook screens: It's either very hard or relatively expensive to get a laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio screen. Widescreens are good for two things: movies and (some) games. They're no good for web browsing or viewing documents. Anything less than 1920x1200 is too narrow to fit two windows comfortably side-by-side, and you sacrifice vertical resolution to get the widescreen.
Unfortunately, it seems that the manufacturers have decided that normal-aspect-ratio screens, along with docking connectors, Windows XP, and optical drive slots that can take a secondary battery, are a feature that only business users might need. Accordingly, those features are only available on the drastically-more-expensive business market laptops.
I wouldn't give a child a chainsaw or a gun without strict supervision, a few rules and an expectation that the child is responsible enough to handle it.
And I think that's appropriate. The problem arises when people in authority take away a parent's right to teach their kid to use a power tool or a gun altogether. It used to be "You're the parent. You decide when your kid's old enough to do X." Now it has become "We, the government, know better than you whether your child is old enough to do X." Of course, it's never stated in terms like that, but rather in terms of "To keep kids safe, they are not allowed to do X." Notice how parental and individual responsibility just evaporated?
Now, considering the general political leanings of the slashdot audience, this next part may get me creamed
Let's take it a step further. Once upon a time, it was "If you work hard and save your money, you can have a nice retirement." Then it was "We're going to take care of our poor retired people (by taxing working people)." Poof--there went a large measure of individual responsibility. We all know how the resulting system (Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid) has worked out: it's losing money rapidly, and in order to sustain it, taxes will have to be raised.
The problem comes down to this: the more the government (or any authority figure) takes responsibility for our well-being, the more we become reliant on that government or authority figure, and less responsible for ourselves. And this reliance comes at a price. In this case, the price is taxes. But in every case, there's an additional cost: our ability to take care of ourselves. We turn to the government for help when something goes wrong. We become victims, powerless to do anything for ourselves.
If you look at the political parties today, it's pretty easy to see which party (or parties) are encouraging further progress down the road to dependence. Government-mandated insurance, anyone?
The idea is that by over-protecting our children, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn for themselves, to learn to assess a situation and choose an appropriate course of action. In the long run, it actually hurts them, because they haven't had the chance to develop those skills.
I do a fair amount of travel for my job, and I can tell you that the customs and security folks have very little interest in looking for copied discs. They're more concerned about drugs, weapons, food, plants, animals, etc. I've carried copied discs with me many times with nary a second glance from the customs officials in several countries.
You're thinking about a physics-land purely resistive circuit, where we can arbitrarily control the resistance. Unfortunately, that's not quite the case with very-much-minified microprocessors. We can't arbitrarily force a couple hundred million transistors to use less current. And at the same time, transistors can be designed so that they don't require 1000V to operate.
Every transistor leaks current to some extent. And as those transistors get smaller, that amount of leakage likes to get bigger, because the "off" resistance of the transistor decreases. There has been an awful lot of research into how to reduce the leakage, with some remarkable successes, but the problem is becoming harder as the features shrink. So in order to limit the amount of leakage, the manufacturers are working to lower the voltage required for the transistors to operate. A lower voltage across that same off resistance means less current leaking (V=IR), and so less power is lost. The fact that the power is a function of the square of the voltage (or current) means that even a relatively small decrease in the voltage means a significant power savings.
You can do it in Gnome as well. In Windows XP, as soon as you have more than one user, it'll go to the Welcome screen automatically on boot. Unless you (once again) set it to auto-login. So really, there's not as much difference as you may initially think--except that XP, by default, logs you in as an administrator-level user.
Ironically, as Vista adoption increases, I think this particular barrier will fall. People will get used to the system asking them to confirm actions. In Vista, they push a button. In Linux, you type the sudo password.
I agree with the summary--CD checks for exclusively-online games are pointless. Epic did it with UT2003/4, but after just a few months removed the CD check in a patch. For single-player games, I can understand it better. For me, a CD-check is far more preferable to some of the other (almost always ineffective) copy-preventing schemes out there. For example, I find Steam overly heavy-handed. Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game, but you can't sell the game to somebody without also giving them your Steam account. And the TOS specifically disallow that. For someone like me who would only use Steam because he has to, this is unacceptable, and squashed most of my interest in purchasing the Orange Box.
GP may not, but I can. I spent about half of last year in Chad for work. The situation there is similar to that described in the article--lots of people have cell phones, but nobody has electricity, running water, or sanitation systems. Nobody forced these people to get cell phones first. These people decided to spend their own hard-earned money in this manner. At some point in the future, I'm sure they'll get running water and electricity, but for now, this is what they've decided to do with their money.
It's capitalism at its finest--let the people decide for themselves what is most deserving of their money.
It's laughable how the auctions are being sold as a good way to raise funds for the government without impacting the taxpayer. Who doesn't use communications technology if not the taxpayer?
I think I understand your logic, but you're not taking it far enough. True, the money will come from Google, or Verizon, or whoever else ends up winning. And that company will pay for it out of the money they charge their customers. However, There's nothing that says that I must pay [auctionwinner] any money. If Google wins, I will not be forced to pay and use the service they might provide. I can decide to purchase it if I want to, but I don't have to.
There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago.
Why should this be an expectation? I would expect that a modern OS would use less CPU and RAM (due to optimization) than one released several years ago, unless it is providing significantly improved functionality. I think this is why people are so down on Vista. It asks for much more, but only gives marginally more, than XP.
All the shops sell computers with Vista pre-installed simply because that's what the OEMs offer. OEMs aren't forced into installing Vista on all machines they sell. But they are heavily encouraged by Microsoft to sell Vista on every machine, in the same way a small business may be encouraged by a couple heavies to buy "insurance" without getting a receipt.
On second thought, the OEMs probably like Vista because it makes them more money. Not because of any value Vista brings, but because the customer needs to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, and get a faster CPU, to make it run smoothly. Ever priced out memory upgrades from Dell or HP? The markup is ridiculous.
The same probably goes for the retailers--I know a few people who have had to upgrade the RAM on their computers. They take their computer to Best Buy or Circuit City, pay triple the cost of the RAM to get it installed, and go on their merry way. The retailers are making bank on this sort of business.
Unfortunately, the common-carrier laws only apply to phone conversations and not general internet traffic. AT&T have the legal right, AFAIK, to do whatever they want to the internet traffic. However, as the article points out, it's "in for a penny, in for a pound"--either they have to leave it all alone, or they'll be at the beck-and-call of every government institution and media content owner and filter everything.
If it absorbs EM radiation across a wide spectrum, I can see it being very quickly outlawed in many states, since the police radar/laser guns wouldn't be able to pick you up, right?
As another datapoint, ExxonMobil (#1 on the list by revenue) finally migrated to XP (from NT4) just two years ago, and rolled out SP2 just last year. If they continue the every-other-release pattern, they'll skip Vista altogether and wait until four years after Windows 7 is released before migrating.
I think the reason they focus on big business is because big business constitutes a very large portion of Microsoft's (and many other companies') revenues. True, they don't define the entire market, but they certainly have a large effect. Take my company--one of the 5 biggest in the US. Windows XP hit the desktop users only two years ago, and the migration to SP2 happened only last year. If my company ever decides to migrate to Vista, it probably would not happen until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest. Also, keep in mind that the migration to XP came from NT4. So if we skip Vista and wait until four years after Windows 7 to migrate, that pushes that date way back.
We also have lots of suppliers. And since we won't be using Vista, all of our suppliers will have to provide us with software/hardware that we can use with XP. In other words, they have a disincentive to upgrade.
The incremental cost depends on what medium you're using to distribute the music. You're right, however, that even for CDs, the manufacturing and distribution costs are practically insignificant compared to the sales price, and as the number of copies increases, the shared cost of production approaches zero.
Music companies can artificially inflate the price of their CDs, however, because they have a monopoly on that specific work, granted by copyright. I think this is the "dictatorship" of which you were speaking.
On the other hand, having cheap storage on this scale also means that one of the largest barriers to HD-DVD/BluRay piracy will suddenly vaporize--everyone can have more than enough storage for all those pirated movies. Of course, the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...
There's one problem with that: in today's world, data has to flow back to headquarters. Take an oil production facility for example. The plant has to send back a daily report detailing exactly how much gas/oil/water/CO2/H2S/sand/whatever is produced. Gas turbines send data back to the manufacturer for performance evaluation, maintenance scheduling, and troubleshooting. Yes, someone could do it manually, but there are myriad other functions that require network connectivity beyond the control system.
It is. It has to be. It would be ideal if you could run isolated networks, but it's impractical. Let's say you run a facility with some gas turbine generators, as in this example. The generator package has to communicate with the control system. The control system has to communicate with the "business" network (for record-keeping, among other reasons), and the business network has to be connected to the internet. There are lots of things you can do to help secure the various levels of the network, e.g. firewalls, vLANs, packet filtering and inspection, intrusion detection and response, etc., but there still is a data path going all the way out from the lowest levels out to the "real world".
(Our company has also been working with Idaho National Labs on this exact issue, can you tell? The government is taking it pretty seriously)
There are a few problems. For example, there's a lot of old control gear out there, and if it talks ethernet, it assumes that anything it receives is legitimate. Also, the equipment involved is produced in small enough quantities that there can't be a great deal of effort expended on security features. It's not like Windows, where millions and millions of copies are sold, and lots of people actively look for holes.
Also, the spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed into new fuel, reducing the radioactive half-life to something on the order of 300 years. The US, however, has a ban on reprocessing because of proliferation concerns. As if anyone is going to try to steal it from us when they can just buy some from the Chinese or Iranians...
It'll take more than a single human error to cause a catastrophic meltdown. There are layers upon layers upon layers of safety equipment designed specifically to keep things safe. I was at a training seminar for my company a while ago, and they showed a diagram that showed no fewer than 12 layers of control, safety, and mitigation systems. Triple-redundant systems, independent control and safety systems, extremely-conservatively-designed equipment, etc. And that was for an [i]oil platform[/i]. It will be no worse for a nuclear facility.
It all comes down to economics. Wind and solar power have not yet reached the point where they are economically competitive with coal and nuclear. Right now, they're not, although there are many promising advancements in the realm of solar power.
As far as safety is concerned, it's important to keep in mind that Chernobyl was caused by bad design (since solved) and bad work practices (also since solve), and that the Three Mile Island meltdown actually wasn't as big of a deal as everyone thinks--everything stayed within the containment vessel, and only a small amount of contaminated vapor was released to the atmosphere after it was determined that it cause no environmental or health damage. A single case of cancer is all we have to show for it, and even that one case hasn't been conclusively linked to TMI.
The safety concerns people trot out again and again really aren't as valid as they once were.
On the topic nuclear waste, keep in mind that a coal-burning power plant produces more radioactive waste than an equivalent nuclear reactor, thanks to naturally occurring radioative material in the coal. And whereas nuclear power plants give you that radioactive waste in a nice contained package so you can easily isolate it somewhere, coal plants instead spew their radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
Oh, and don't forget all that carbon dioxide coming out of the coal-burning power plant as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a less-fortunate family member or friend, it's also a good use. My sister, for example, is using a Tecra 8100 with a (I think) 500MHz P3. It does everything she might need it to do: internet browsing, email, and word processing. I recently fixed it up for her (broken hinge, OS reinstall, recelled the battery) so now it's better than new! And no cost to her, either.
True, you can fit a whole page on your widescreen, but you're in an even smaller minority than most people posting here--you have a 1920x1200 screen. Very, very few people have that high of a resolution. An overwhelming majority of widescreen laptops have 1280x800 or smaller screens. A few have 1440x900 (or thereabouts), but those are also quite rare.
I'm a little ambivalent about the glossy vs matte issue, but I have a bigger issue with notebook screens: It's either very hard or relatively expensive to get a laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio screen. Widescreens are good for two things: movies and (some) games. They're no good for web browsing or viewing documents. Anything less than 1920x1200 is too narrow to fit two windows comfortably side-by-side, and you sacrifice vertical resolution to get the widescreen.
Unfortunately, it seems that the manufacturers have decided that normal-aspect-ratio screens, along with docking connectors, Windows XP, and optical drive slots that can take a secondary battery, are a feature that only business users might need. Accordingly, those features are only available on the drastically-more-expensive business market laptops.
Now, considering the general political leanings of the slashdot audience, this next part may get me creamed
Let's take it a step further. Once upon a time, it was "If you work hard and save your money, you can have a nice retirement." Then it was "We're going to take care of our poor retired people (by taxing working people)." Poof--there went a large measure of individual responsibility. We all know how the resulting system (Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid) has worked out: it's losing money rapidly, and in order to sustain it, taxes will have to be raised.
The problem comes down to this: the more the government (or any authority figure) takes responsibility for our well-being, the more we become reliant on that government or authority figure, and less responsible for ourselves. And this reliance comes at a price. In this case, the price is taxes. But in every case, there's an additional cost: our ability to take care of ourselves. We turn to the government for help when something goes wrong. We become victims, powerless to do anything for ourselves.
If you look at the political parties today, it's pretty easy to see which party (or parties) are encouraging further progress down the road to dependence. Government-mandated insurance, anyone?
I ran across a very insightful article a few years back, which is still just as true today:
A Nation of Wimps
The idea is that by over-protecting our children, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn for themselves, to learn to assess a situation and choose an appropriate course of action. In the long run, it actually hurts them, because they haven't had the chance to develop those skills.
I do a fair amount of travel for my job, and I can tell you that the customs and security folks have very little interest in looking for copied discs. They're more concerned about drugs, weapons, food, plants, animals, etc. I've carried copied discs with me many times with nary a second glance from the customs officials in several countries.
You're thinking about a physics-land purely resistive circuit, where we can arbitrarily control the resistance. Unfortunately, that's not quite the case with very-much-minified microprocessors. We can't arbitrarily force a couple hundred million transistors to use less current. And at the same time, transistors can be designed so that they don't require 1000V to operate.
Every transistor leaks current to some extent. And as those transistors get smaller, that amount of leakage likes to get bigger, because the "off" resistance of the transistor decreases. There has been an awful lot of research into how to reduce the leakage, with some remarkable successes, but the problem is becoming harder as the features shrink. So in order to limit the amount of leakage, the manufacturers are working to lower the voltage required for the transistors to operate. A lower voltage across that same off resistance means less current leaking (V=IR), and so less power is lost. The fact that the power is a function of the square of the voltage (or current) means that even a relatively small decrease in the voltage means a significant power savings.
You can do it in Gnome as well. In Windows XP, as soon as you have more than one user, it'll go to the Welcome screen automatically on boot. Unless you (once again) set it to auto-login. So really, there's not as much difference as you may initially think--except that XP, by default, logs you in as an administrator-level user.
Ironically, as Vista adoption increases, I think this particular barrier will fall. People will get used to the system asking them to confirm actions. In Vista, they push a button. In Linux, you type the sudo password.
I agree with the summary--CD checks for exclusively-online games are pointless. Epic did it with UT2003/4, but after just a few months removed the CD check in a patch. For single-player games, I can understand it better. For me, a CD-check is far more preferable to some of the other (almost always ineffective) copy-preventing schemes out there. For example, I find Steam overly heavy-handed. Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game, but you can't sell the game to somebody without also giving them your Steam account. And the TOS specifically disallow that. For someone like me who would only use Steam because he has to, this is unacceptable, and squashed most of my interest in purchasing the Orange Box.
GP may not, but I can. I spent about half of last year in Chad for work. The situation there is similar to that described in the article--lots of people have cell phones, but nobody has electricity, running water, or sanitation systems. Nobody forced these people to get cell phones first. These people decided to spend their own hard-earned money in this manner. At some point in the future, I'm sure they'll get running water and electricity, but for now, this is what they've decided to do with their money.
It's capitalism at its finest--let the people decide for themselves what is most deserving of their money.
It's laughable how the auctions are being sold as a good way to raise funds for the government without impacting the taxpayer. Who doesn't use communications technology if not the taxpayer?
I think I understand your logic, but you're not taking it far enough. True, the money will come from Google, or Verizon, or whoever else ends up winning. And that company will pay for it out of the money they charge their customers. However, There's nothing that says that I must pay [auctionwinner] any money. If Google wins, I will not be forced to pay and use the service they might provide. I can decide to purchase it if I want to, but I don't have to.
There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago.
Why should this be an expectation? I would expect that a modern OS would use less CPU and RAM (due to optimization) than one released several years ago, unless it is providing significantly improved functionality. I think this is why people are so down on Vista. It asks for much more, but only gives marginally more, than XP.
All the shops sell computers with Vista pre-installed simply because that's what the OEMs offer. OEMs aren't forced into installing Vista on all machines they sell. But they are heavily encouraged by Microsoft to sell Vista on every machine, in the same way a small business may be encouraged by a couple heavies to buy "insurance" without getting a receipt.
On second thought, the OEMs probably like Vista because it makes them more money. Not because of any value Vista brings, but because the customer needs to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, and get a faster CPU, to make it run smoothly. Ever priced out memory upgrades from Dell or HP? The markup is ridiculous.
The same probably goes for the retailers--I know a few people who have had to upgrade the RAM on their computers. They take their computer to Best Buy or Circuit City, pay triple the cost of the RAM to get it installed, and go on their merry way. The retailers are making bank on this sort of business.
Unfortunately, the common-carrier laws only apply to phone conversations and not general internet traffic. AT&T have the legal right, AFAIK, to do whatever they want to the internet traffic. However, as the article points out, it's "in for a penny, in for a pound"--either they have to leave it all alone, or they'll be at the beck-and-call of every government institution and media content owner and filter everything.
If it absorbs EM radiation across a wide spectrum, I can see it being very quickly outlawed in many states, since the police radar/laser guns wouldn't be able to pick you up, right?
As another datapoint, ExxonMobil (#1 on the list by revenue) finally migrated to XP (from NT4) just two years ago, and rolled out SP2 just last year. If they continue the every-other-release pattern, they'll skip Vista altogether and wait until four years after Windows 7 is released before migrating.
I think the reason they focus on big business is because big business constitutes a very large portion of Microsoft's (and many other companies') revenues. True, they don't define the entire market, but they certainly have a large effect. Take my company--one of the 5 biggest in the US. Windows XP hit the desktop users only two years ago, and the migration to SP2 happened only last year. If my company ever decides to migrate to Vista, it probably would not happen until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest. Also, keep in mind that the migration to XP came from NT4. So if we skip Vista and wait until four years after Windows 7 to migrate, that pushes that date way back.
We also have lots of suppliers. And since we won't be using Vista, all of our suppliers will have to provide us with software/hardware that we can use with XP. In other words, they have a disincentive to upgrade.
The incremental cost depends on what medium you're using to distribute the music. You're right, however, that even for CDs, the manufacturing and distribution costs are practically insignificant compared to the sales price, and as the number of copies increases, the shared cost of production approaches zero.
Music companies can artificially inflate the price of their CDs, however, because they have a monopoly on that specific work, granted by copyright. I think this is the "dictatorship" of which you were speaking.
On the other hand, having cheap storage on this scale also means that one of the largest barriers to HD-DVD/BluRay piracy will suddenly vaporize--everyone can have more than enough storage for all those pirated movies. Of course, the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...
There's one problem with that: in today's world, data has to flow back to headquarters. Take an oil production facility for example. The plant has to send back a daily report detailing exactly how much gas/oil/water/CO2/H2S/sand/whatever is produced. Gas turbines send data back to the manufacturer for performance evaluation, maintenance scheduling, and troubleshooting. Yes, someone could do it manually, but there are myriad other functions that require network connectivity beyond the control system.
It is. It has to be. It would be ideal if you could run isolated networks, but it's impractical. Let's say you run a facility with some gas turbine generators, as in this example. The generator package has to communicate with the control system. The control system has to communicate with the "business" network (for record-keeping, among other reasons), and the business network has to be connected to the internet. There are lots of things you can do to help secure the various levels of the network, e.g. firewalls, vLANs, packet filtering and inspection, intrusion detection and response, etc., but there still is a data path going all the way out from the lowest levels out to the "real world".
(Our company has also been working with Idaho National Labs on this exact issue, can you tell? The government is taking it pretty seriously)
There are a few problems. For example, there's a lot of old control gear out there, and if it talks ethernet, it assumes that anything it receives is legitimate. Also, the equipment involved is produced in small enough quantities that there can't be a great deal of effort expended on security features. It's not like Windows, where millions and millions of copies are sold, and lots of people actively look for holes.
Not only that, but reprocessing can remove 97% of the radioactive material and reduce the half-life to something around 300 years.
Also, the spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed into new fuel, reducing the radioactive half-life to something on the order of 300 years. The US, however, has a ban on reprocessing because of proliferation concerns. As if anyone is going to try to steal it from us when they can just buy some from the Chinese or Iranians...
It'll take more than a single human error to cause a catastrophic meltdown. There are layers upon layers upon layers of safety equipment designed specifically to keep things safe. I was at a training seminar for my company a while ago, and they showed a diagram that showed no fewer than 12 layers of control, safety, and mitigation systems. Triple-redundant systems, independent control and safety systems, extremely-conservatively-designed equipment, etc. And that was for an [i]oil platform[/i]. It will be no worse for a nuclear facility.
It all comes down to economics. Wind and solar power have not yet reached the point where they are economically competitive with coal and nuclear. Right now, they're not, although there are many promising advancements in the realm of solar power.
As far as safety is concerned, it's important to keep in mind that Chernobyl was caused by bad design (since solved) and bad work practices (also since solve), and that the Three Mile Island meltdown actually wasn't as big of a deal as everyone thinks--everything stayed within the containment vessel, and only a small amount of contaminated vapor was released to the atmosphere after it was determined that it cause no environmental or health damage. A single case of cancer is all we have to show for it, and even that one case hasn't been conclusively linked to TMI.
The safety concerns people trot out again and again really aren't as valid as they once were.
On the topic nuclear waste, keep in mind that a coal-burning power plant produces more radioactive waste than an equivalent nuclear reactor, thanks to naturally occurring radioative material in the coal. And whereas nuclear power plants give you that radioactive waste in a nice contained package so you can easily isolate it somewhere, coal plants instead spew their radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
Oh, and don't forget all that carbon dioxide coming out of the coal-burning power plant as well.