Every semester, you pack all your stuff into the car to go to school. You carry your stuff up the stairs to the fourth floor. You place your computer on a small desk, perhaps 60x110 cm or a bit more than 2x3 feet. All your stuff must fit in a small room that you share with somebody you probably hate. Five months later, you carry your stuff down the stairs to your car again.
Not every student lives in a dormitory; in fact, over here in North Germany I'd say that the minority does (when excluding state-sponsored apartments). Those I know that do live in a dorm live there all the time, so there's no need to move the stuff once it's set up.
Probably there is no air conditioning to deal with the heat given off by a CRT.
True, there is no air conditioning because in Germany we use windows. Besides, the heat given off by a CRT is insignificant compared to that given off by the PC itself unless you built your system to be energy-efficient, which means it's more expensive which is a good disincentive.
If you are unlucky, you keep tripping a circuit breaker that was designed (40 years ago) to handle the load of a shaver and an alarm clock.
A running CRT uses ~70-100 watts. A running PC of non-obsolete specs uses at least three times as much.
The CRT's shadow mask or apreture grill gets misaligned from all those trips up and down the stairs, as well as from the occasional fistfight with your roommate or his drunken girlfriend.
LCDs break just as easily as CRTs do. Rooms contain many pointy objects and if, during the fistfights that apparently are commonplace in dorms in your country, someone accidentally/by purpose pushes one of them into the screen that causes a lot of dead pixels.
Sure, LCDs are smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient, but there's still the immensely high price - if you need anything beyond 1280x1024 LCDs are just not an option. And some people don't want to save for three months just to buy a 17" monitor.
It's a widely known fact that Canada is responsible for 50% of the HD DVD piracy.
Indeed! Out of the five HD-DVDs in circulation, three are illegal copies. Two were made in Canada and one in China, where people have met the booming HD-DVD market with irrational exuberance.
I guess annoying users by imposing a $1000,- tax per month on owning a computer is more effective. Then maybe the refridgerator will finally stay off of the net.
As well as kids, students and most home users. Problem solved. But then again, why not just disable internet access for home users?
Look at what works for Linux. OS X has a very similar userland (if one ignores Aqua) and there might be attacks that work on all versions of Apache/whatever. While OS X isn't binary-compatible with Linux many programs are source-compatible, so it might be possible that someone just recompiled a Linux attack program and uses it on OS X - or, if the programs are original, they should at least work similarly.
ICANN: "Hey China, we'll disconnect you!"
China: "Hey USA, we'll stop doing business with you if you cut us off!"
USA: "Wow, suddenly reducing the ICANN funding by 100% sounds like such a good idea!"
ICANN: "Okay, yeah, we got it. China can stay. Sheesh."
Or maybe it's the DLL - I'm currently fighting a client's ancient Windows 95 machine (don't ask!) that is locked in DLL hell with the oleaut32.dll crap...
Yeah! Shared libraries suck! Everything should be statically linked. That's also why I'm just performing an rm/usr/lib/*.so. It's bound to complete any seco%%%%%%%%%%NO CARRIER
CRT is where it's at as far as peformance, versaltility, sharpness, and clarity.
Plus, LCDs are hideously expensive if you don't have a well-paying job (hello, students!). For example, I need lots of screen real estate, so 1280x1024 aren't enough. 1440x1050 and up are generally what I like to work with. Since it's hard to get a TFT that has that native resolution my only choice would be to get one with 1600x1200, which means I have to fork over about 400 eurobucks for a low-end model. On the CRT side (where I also don't have to worry about response time) I spend 120 bucks for a low-end device and 400 for a premium one. The choice is pretty obvious when your disposable income is in the order of ~80 bucks/month.
I certainly wouldn't mind to use DVI with CRTs - after all, that's what DVI-A/I are for.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, A. Einstein (Score: -1, Offtopic) Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, A. Einstein (Score: -1, Redundant) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, A. Sokal (Score: 5, Insightful)
Subscriptions? Dry up? Please. Without subscriptions to a number of journals no university worth its salt can do any proper teaching as that involves the students digging through papers, which happen to be found in these journals; open access isn't yet prevalent and old enough to be a useful replacement.
Unless people start releasing most of their stuff openly Elsevier, Springer and the rest of the bunch are only going to worry about which origami shapes you can fold out of an EUR500 bill.
Meanwhile the publishers first sell the paper version of the journal to universities and then raise the price because they now offer a digital version, as well.
If you tell them you only want the digital or paper version and not both, the price goes up, so you still pay for both even if you don't want to. Couple that with the prospect of heving the whole stuff DRMed so you can't even make copies for your course and you end up with something that makes the movie and music myrket look like heaven.
Seriously, I think that switching to open content would seriously improve the financial position of many universities (like mine where they're starting to shut down non-"excellence areas" because they want to streamline the uni).
True. The concept of nonlethal weapons has the problem that they never really are. You have to find some definition of "nonlethal" which you can live with
In case someone else reads Robert Jordan's Wheel of time series, the Aes Sedai have the same problem: They have sworn an unbreakable (because magically enforced) oath to never produce a weapon "with which one man can kill another". This would even rule out firewood, if you interpret "weapon" as anything which can be used to attack someone. Of course, one can apply a more loose interpretation, but we enter a real grey zone when we get to the point opf nonlethal weapons - people still could die from them, but they aren't supposed to kill. In theory you could really fuck with an AS' mind if you convinced her to construct a nonlethal weapon and then demonstrated its lethality...
i use teh linux cuz i r a 31337 h4xx0r0r & ur box will be 0wned by me cuz im so 1337 & all 1337 h4xx0r0rs use teh linux and teh intarnet runs on teh linux also
Linux does have some strong arguments. We can play the low price and high stability cards. The smart thing would be not to tout Linux as teh bestest system evar but instead as a reliable solution for people who know what they want (and who aren't afraid to do a bit of research before they buy things). Of course Linux doesn't fit everyone, but if you take some time you can (in most cases) get a system that does what you need, period.
Of course, OS X also has some leverage. We can point out that we had the sleekest UI and the hottest features lately - and Leopard looks like it's going to continue that trend. Also, Windows is easy because it's familiar; OS X is easy because it's easy. Plus, it comes with great-looking, silent hardware. Just don't overuse the buzzwords.
Yes, I used "we" for both OSes. I happen to like both.
Whatever you offload to your client is also something you don't have to worry about trusting. Everything a client does or provides is inherently unsafe and should always be checked for hacking attempts.
Offloading security to the client is like writing <? $result = mysql_query("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE username = '${_GET['username']}'"); ?> - asking for trouble.
As the rouge star passes closest to the Sun, it triggers an influx of[...]
...lipstick emmissions and mascara protuberances in what is known as a coronal makeup ejection (CME). This causes gothmagnetic storms, during which our planet goes through a goth phase and clothes mainly in black clouds, thus keeping sunlight from the planet's surface and everything becomes cold.
Note that life in the country isn't uniform. I live in a small town in North Germany that has access to a major railroad line running between Bremen and Hannover - and it's a ten minute walk to the station. I can reach Bremen in under an hour, Hannover in under two. It's great for when you need to buy something the local stores don't carry or when you want to attend concerts or events like the Cebit and it's much cheaper to have a flat/house here than in the big cities.
If you're looking for a place to live there are many things to consider. If the city itself is too expensive for you a nearby (semi-)rural town with a good railroad connection and a price reduction deal with the railroad company might do the trick.
However, having a car is still very convenient in this situation.
Actually, they don't really offer the source code, due to technical reasons. tar keeps quitting on them with a "Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive" message.
True, some aspects of the Finder are lacking (also, it does weird things when you move a directory to somewhere where there's already a directory of the same name). However, I haven't had much trouble with Spotlight yet - except for its indexer turning on when I need resources (and that also happens with updatedb and Windows' indexer). And, yes, there should be an option to turn off.DS_STORE/per-file settings on a per-subtree basis.
However, those bad habits, while annoying, don't get in my way much.
I also grew up with the old stuff - I went from MS-DOS 5 through every incarnation of Windows (including the OSR versions) except for ME and the Home versions of 2k and XP. Being a gamersince the days of HIMEM.SYS of course I knew how to tweak the system and I developed an interest in what one can do with it. I developed into kind of a power user until I decided it wasn't really worth bothering anymore. (However, the first TCPA/Longhorn news were what actually made me jump ship.)
While I welcome many of the changes (Memory protection! Easy networking! DirectX improved gaming, although in retrospect it would've been better if they'd made it an open standard.), some have come to bite me more than once - for example the Registry or XP's notion of being "helpful" when what I need the least is help, for example while I'm currently playing a game. Also, I've seen the system become more and more convoluted, with settings being buried in illogical places or even in undocumented Registry values. (My latest gripe is the inability to specifically set permitted monitor resolutions/frequencies without modifying the GPU driver. Windows won't believe that my monitor just doesn't do things like 800x600@250 Hz.)
When I have to fix problems on a Windows computer I often end up cursing whoever designed (the UI|the file system layout|$HELPFUL_FEATURE) as the system sometimes still manages to confound me even though I have spent more than a decade with it. Windows isn't that easy to learn, actually, because it's not very intuitive. The basics of the WIMP interface are easy to learn, but they apply to all major desktop OSes. The things that make Windows Windows aren't intuitive to a computer-illiterate person; "regular people" just find them intuitive because it's hard to not learn them.
Windows continues being the predominant OS mainly because it's ubiquitous. People don't have to explicitly learn it because when they learn to use a computer they most probably learn it on a Win box. Hardware support is better because the manufacturers support the most ubiquitous platform the most. Ditto for software.
Now, I don't want people to flock to Linux en masse. Different OSes have different audiences. However, Linux does have one advantage over Windows: Once you have a basic understanding of how things work it becomes more predictable than Windows; also, the configuration files everything revolves around are documented, which is a good thing. When you need to reconfigure something not entirely common, Linux makes it comparatively easy. That's one of my biggest gripes with Windows: It's hard to predict where a specific setting could be if it's not one of the basic ones. This has increased over time.
Actually, the reasons for switching from Windows to Linux I see most often are a) Windows broke again and the user doesn't want to put up with it anymore and b) the user got annoyed by the way Windows conducts itself and decides to search for greener pastures.
Windows' design is great for people who don't want to think about system internals, but people who know what they do and want but are kept from doing it because Microsoft didn't intend for people to act that way can develop a thorough dislike for the OS.
Of course they want psychopaths. People who are completely ruthless generate more revenue, which is the sole measure of a corporation's performance. If you make less money you're less desirable - and ethics will bring you into that situation as you refrain from doing profitable but unethical things. Being a sociopath is an important soft skill for upper management. The "weak" are quickly rooted out; it's survival of the fittest at its best.
As long as there are no incentives besides profit for a corp this won't change. Since our whole society is built around the concept "money = good" I doubt that we'd see less antisocial corporations without a paradigm shift in the society.
The parent is right; corps are subject to the law and thus to the morals contained within them. If they weren't the USA might as well rename themselves "UCAS"...
Corporations do not lay golden eggs, they just steal every bodies else's nest eggs. From failed pension fund, to failed investment funds and failed banks, the consumers goes broke while the corporate executives and corporate directors walk away with millions.
See? Aggregation of capital. Corporations do a mighty fine job in aggregating capital at no personal risk for the people in whose pocket the capital gets aggregated...
Slashdot Mirror
Every semester, you pack all your stuff into the car to go to school. You carry your stuff up the stairs to the fourth floor. You place your computer on a small desk, perhaps 60x110 cm or a bit more than 2x3 feet. All your stuff must fit in a small room that you share with somebody you probably hate. Five months later, you carry your stuff down the stairs to your car again.
Not every student lives in a dormitory; in fact, over here in North Germany I'd say that the minority does (when excluding state-sponsored apartments). Those I know that do live in a dorm live there all the time, so there's no need to move the stuff once it's set up.
Probably there is no air conditioning to deal with the heat given off by a CRT.
True, there is no air conditioning because in Germany we use windows. Besides, the heat given off by a CRT is insignificant compared to that given off by the PC itself unless you built your system to be energy-efficient, which means it's more expensive which is a good disincentive.
If you are unlucky, you keep tripping a circuit breaker that was designed (40 years ago) to handle the load of a shaver and an alarm clock.
A running CRT uses ~70-100 watts. A running PC of non-obsolete specs uses at least three times as much.
The CRT's shadow mask or apreture grill gets misaligned from all those trips up and down the stairs, as well as from the occasional fistfight with your roommate or his drunken girlfriend.
LCDs break just as easily as CRTs do. Rooms contain many pointy objects and if, during the fistfights that apparently are commonplace in dorms in your country, someone accidentally/by purpose pushes one of them into the screen that causes a lot of dead pixels.
Sure, LCDs are smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient, but there's still the immensely high price - if you need anything beyond 1280x1024 LCDs are just not an option. And some people don't want to save for three months just to buy a 17" monitor.
It's a widely known fact that Canada is responsible for 50% of the HD DVD piracy.
Indeed! Out of the five HD-DVDs in circulation, three are illegal copies. Two were made in Canada and one in China, where people have met the booming HD-DVD market with irrational exuberance.
I guess annoying users by imposing a $1000,- tax per month on owning a computer is more effective. Then maybe the refridgerator will finally stay off of the net.
As well as kids, students and most home users. Problem solved. But then again, why not just disable internet access for home users?
Look at what works for Linux. OS X has a very similar userland (if one ignores Aqua) and there might be attacks that work on all versions of Apache/whatever. While OS X isn't binary-compatible with Linux many programs are source-compatible, so it might be possible that someone just recompiled a Linux attack program and uses it on OS X - or, if the programs are original, they should at least work similarly.
ICANN: "Hey China, we'll disconnect you!"
China: "Hey USA, we'll stop doing business with you if you cut us off!"
USA: "Wow, suddenly reducing the ICANN funding by 100% sounds like such a good idea!"
ICANN: "Okay, yeah, we got it. China can stay. Sheesh."
The other ISPs are caught by the "dynamic host" blocklists.
Or maybe it's the DLL - I'm currently fighting a client's ancient Windows 95 machine (don't ask!) that is locked in DLL hell with the oleaut32.dll crap...
/usr/lib/*.so. It's bound to complete any seco%%%%%%%%%%NO CARRIER
Yeah! Shared libraries suck! Everything should be statically linked. That's also why I'm just performing an rm
CRT is where it's at as far as peformance, versaltility, sharpness, and clarity.
Plus, LCDs are hideously expensive if you don't have a well-paying job (hello, students!). For example, I need lots of screen real estate, so 1280x1024 aren't enough. 1440x1050 and up are generally what I like to work with. Since it's hard to get a TFT that has that native resolution my only choice would be to get one with 1600x1200, which means I have to fork over about 400 eurobucks for a low-end model. On the CRT side (where I also don't have to worry about response time) I spend 120 bucks for a low-end device and 400 for a premium one. The choice is pretty obvious when your disposable income is in the order of ~80 bucks/month.
I certainly wouldn't mind to use DVI with CRTs - after all, that's what DVI-A/I are for.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, A. Einstein (Score: -1, Offtopic)
Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, A. Einstein (Score: -1, Redundant)
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, A. Sokal (Score: 5, Insightful)
Subscriptions? Dry up? Please. Without subscriptions to a number of journals no university worth its salt can do any proper teaching as that involves the students digging through papers, which happen to be found in these journals; open access isn't yet prevalent and old enough to be a useful replacement.
Unless people start releasing most of their stuff openly Elsevier, Springer and the rest of the bunch are only going to worry about which origami shapes you can fold out of an EUR500 bill.
Meanwhile the publishers first sell the paper version of the journal to universities and then raise the price because they now offer a digital version, as well.
If you tell them you only want the digital or paper version and not both, the price goes up, so you still pay for both even if you don't want to. Couple that with the prospect of heving the whole stuff DRMed so you can't even make copies for your course and you end up with something that makes the movie and music myrket look like heaven.
Seriously, I think that switching to open content would seriously improve the financial position of many universities (like mine where they're starting to shut down non-"excellence areas" because they want to streamline the uni).
True. The concept of nonlethal weapons has the problem that they never really are. You have to find some definition of "nonlethal" which you can live with
In case someone else reads Robert Jordan's Wheel of time series, the Aes Sedai have the same problem: They have sworn an unbreakable (because magically enforced) oath to never produce a weapon "with which one man can kill another". This would even rule out firewood, if you interpret "weapon" as anything which can be used to attack someone. Of course, one can apply a more loose interpretation, but we enter a real grey zone when we get to the point opf nonlethal weapons - people still could die from them, but they aren't supposed to kill. In theory you could really fuck with an AS' mind if you convinced her to construct a nonlethal weapon and then demonstrated its lethality...
i use teh linux cuz i r a 31337 h4xx0r0r & ur box will be 0wned by me cuz im so 1337 & all 1337 h4xx0r0rs use teh linux and teh intarnet runs on teh linux also
See you in the studio!
Linux does have some strong arguments. We can play the low price and high stability cards. The smart thing would be not to tout Linux as teh bestest system evar but instead as a reliable solution for people who know what they want (and who aren't afraid to do a bit of research before they buy things). Of course Linux doesn't fit everyone, but if you take some time you can (in most cases) get a system that does what you need, period.
Of course, OS X also has some leverage. We can point out that we had the sleekest UI and the hottest features lately - and Leopard looks like it's going to continue that trend. Also, Windows is easy because it's familiar; OS X is easy because it's easy. Plus, it comes with great-looking, silent hardware. Just don't overuse the buzzwords.
Yes, I used "we" for both OSes. I happen to like both.
Whatever you offload to your client is also something you don't have to worry about trusting. Everything a client does or provides is inherently unsafe and should always be checked for hacking attempts.
Offloading security to the client is like writing <? $result = mysql_query("DELETE FROM `users` WHERE username = '${_GET['username']}'"); ?> - asking for trouble.
As the rouge star passes closest to the Sun, it triggers an influx of[...]
...lipstick emmissions and mascara protuberances in what is known as a coronal makeup ejection (CME). This causes gothmagnetic storms, during which our planet goes through a goth phase and clothes mainly in black clouds, thus keeping sunlight from the planet's surface and everything becomes cold.
Note that life in the country isn't uniform. I live in a small town in North Germany that has access to a major railroad line running between Bremen and Hannover - and it's a ten minute walk to the station. I can reach Bremen in under an hour, Hannover in under two. It's great for when you need to buy something the local stores don't carry or when you want to attend concerts or events like the Cebit and it's much cheaper to have a flat/house here than in the big cities.
If you're looking for a place to live there are many things to consider. If the city itself is too expensive for you a nearby (semi-)rural town with a good railroad connection and a price reduction deal with the railroad company might do the trick.
However, having a car is still very convenient in this situation.
However, note that thin != healthy. And especially thin != fit. If you don't keep your body in shape it will break down sooner.
Actually, they don't really offer the source code, due to technical reasons. tar keeps quitting on them with a "Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive" message.
True, some aspects of the Finder are lacking (also, it does weird things when you move a directory to somewhere where there's already a directory of the same name). However, I haven't had much trouble with Spotlight yet - except for its indexer turning on when I need resources (and that also happens with updatedb and Windows' indexer). And, yes, there should be an option to turn off .DS_STORE/per-file settings on a per-subtree basis.
However, those bad habits, while annoying, don't get in my way much.
I also grew up with the old stuff - I went from MS-DOS 5 through every incarnation of Windows (including the OSR versions) except for ME and the Home versions of 2k and XP. Being a gamersince the days of HIMEM.SYS of course I knew how to tweak the system and I developed an interest in what one can do with it. I developed into kind of a power user until I decided it wasn't really worth bothering anymore. (However, the first TCPA/Longhorn news were what actually made me jump ship.)
While I welcome many of the changes (Memory protection! Easy networking! DirectX improved gaming, although in retrospect it would've been better if they'd made it an open standard.), some have come to bite me more than once - for example the Registry or XP's notion of being "helpful" when what I need the least is help, for example while I'm currently playing a game. Also, I've seen the system become more and more convoluted, with settings being buried in illogical places or even in undocumented Registry values. (My latest gripe is the inability to specifically set permitted monitor resolutions/frequencies without modifying the GPU driver. Windows won't believe that my monitor just doesn't do things like 800x600@250 Hz.)
When I have to fix problems on a Windows computer I often end up cursing whoever designed (the UI|the file system layout|$HELPFUL_FEATURE) as the system sometimes still manages to confound me even though I have spent more than a decade with it. Windows isn't that easy to learn, actually, because it's not very intuitive. The basics of the WIMP interface are easy to learn, but they apply to all major desktop OSes. The things that make Windows Windows aren't intuitive to a computer-illiterate person; "regular people" just find them intuitive because it's hard to not learn them.
Windows continues being the predominant OS mainly because it's ubiquitous. People don't have to explicitly learn it because when they learn to use a computer they most probably learn it on a Win box. Hardware support is better because the manufacturers support the most ubiquitous platform the most. Ditto for software.
Now, I don't want people to flock to Linux en masse. Different OSes have different audiences. However, Linux does have one advantage over Windows: Once you have a basic understanding of how things work it becomes more predictable than Windows; also, the configuration files everything revolves around are documented, which is a good thing. When you need to reconfigure something not entirely common, Linux makes it comparatively easy. That's one of my biggest gripes with Windows: It's hard to predict where a specific setting could be if it's not one of the basic ones. This has increased over time.
Actually, the reasons for switching from Windows to Linux I see most often are a) Windows broke again and the user doesn't want to put up with it anymore and b) the user got annoyed by the way Windows conducts itself and decides to search for greener pastures.
Windows' design is great for people who don't want to think about system internals, but people who know what they do and want but are kept from doing it because Microsoft didn't intend for people to act that way can develop a thorough dislike for the OS.
Of course they want psychopaths. People who are completely ruthless generate more revenue, which is the sole measure of a corporation's performance. If you make less money you're less desirable - and ethics will bring you into that situation as you refrain from doing profitable but unethical things. Being a sociopath is an important soft skill for upper management. The "weak" are quickly rooted out; it's survival of the fittest at its best.
As long as there are no incentives besides profit for a corp this won't change. Since our whole society is built around the concept "money = good" I doubt that we'd see less antisocial corporations without a paradigm shift in the society.
I'm curious...what has happened to whistleblower's careers after they blew the whistle?
Actually, that's an awesome topic to write a book about.
The parent is right; corps are subject to the law and thus to the morals contained within them. If they weren't the USA might as well rename themselves "UCAS"...
Corporations do not lay golden eggs, they just steal every bodies else's nest eggs. From failed pension fund, to failed investment funds and failed banks, the consumers goes broke while the corporate executives and corporate directors walk away with millions.
See? Aggregation of capital. Corporations do a mighty fine job in aggregating capital at no personal risk for the people in whose pocket the capital gets aggregated...