For one thing, memory usage detectors are notoriously inaccurate. For a second, unused memory is wasted memory. A good operating system will not leave loads of memory untouched. What good will that do? What a good operating system will do is use your memory most effectively so when higher priority applications need to run, they can, but when they don't more trivial things can be put in memory such as disk cache.
Good product? Good marketing.
on
iPod Mini Sells Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Whenever an item sells out, you have to wonder, was it a good product? or just good marketing? By orchestrating insufficient supplies, many news sources,./ and USA today at least, are reporting the fact. That's free advertising for Apple, the kind traditional ads cannot buy. So when huge stockpiles of the things mysteriously turn up next week, we will all be more likely to pick them up because: 1. They are percieved as rare. 2. They are percieved as desired. Perception is reality and marketers really know how to pull our consumer strings.
They may not do anything now, but it seems a great opportunity for emotive computing. Emotive computing tries to tailor the behavior of the system to the emotions of the user. If a computer detects many, random, frustrated key presses or an automatic phone system detects angry yells, it will respond accordingly by asking if the user wants to abort the current program or dropping the angry caller into discussion with a real person(tm). As pedestrians press the button more feverishly, they become more likely to jaywalk, causing risk to themselves and others. It would be in the best interest of safety to increase the priority of the pedestrian walk signal at that point.
Thanks. You have seriously just convinced me not to get an Nforce chipset.
It seems they might as well release Linux drivers, a representative from Microsoft recently told me most driver authors figure out how to do things in Linux and then port the drivers to Windows because it's easier that way.
License issues aside, I love CDE. I think it's a far more intuitive in organization and interface than Gnome or KDE. These two suffer from trying to duplicate the MS desktop, which is only intuitive to most because it has been force-fed to them for years. A prime example is the Gnome/KDE equivalent of that accursed start button. *grinds teeth* The start button serves only as a marketing tool to make computers look like simple one-button machines that any idiot can use. *whew!*
My first exposure to *nix was a Solaris machine and the CDE really opened my eyes to the different possabilities available outside of the wintel world. I'm disappointed that Sun, along with the rest of the world, seems to be abandoning it.
It seems many people are anxious to criticize and gloss over what they think solutions to these problems are, when in fact, they don't bother with the mundane details that are, in their minds, certain to be trivial. Intuitive development! What a fabulous idea! All this time we've intentionally been doing everything ass-backwards just for jollies. Say, why not just make a computer that understands speech and does what you tell it to? That's it, all our problems are solved. Now those idiot software engineers can finally do things the right way.
Trademarks are more than just the use of a word. It is the association of that word with a particular type of product. If you wanted to create a softdrink called Apple Cola, Apple would have little case in Prosecuting you unless you tried to make it look like their logos or somesuch. The fact that Lindows is an OS, as is the product it's clearly a play off of is its damning feature, not the word itself. Still, they might be able to convince a judge it relates to a windowing system with Linux rather than a Windows clone. This is their only recourse as there is no way they can classify their product as of a different type than Windows.
Mind you, this is not to say I am on Microsoft's side in this issue. I think the X Windowing system predating Windows on top of the fact that any windowing system clearly uses windows making any brand catering to that fact a logical choice and, therefore, not clearly springing from another brand that made a similar choice.
The funny thing is, I doubt strongly that Lindows would still be around if it weren't for this suite. It's a rather unremarkable and expensive distribution. I'd say this case is the best thing that could have happened to it. There is no such thing as bad publicity, particularly in a case like this where Lindows looks like the underdog and thus, is the recipient of public sympathy.
netscape -> mozilla -> phoenix -> firebird -> firefox
And people say open source software is too confusing to use.
I was hoping they might call it Firecat for which they might have renamed the email client to match and then it would have been Thundercat.
Re:Actually, from the link listed...
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 1
No, the hardcover edition is out, but the paperback is still available at bn and at amazon.
The crusoe processor from Transmeta did just that. Intels own chips do some form of conversion from x86 CISC into RISC microcode though to a lesser degree than the Transmeta chips. They have to perform such conversions in order to keep up with the RISCs.
The x86 is terrible. It sprung from a chip designed for calculators and still carries all of the baggage from that origin. This is why the Athlon64 is so distressing. Sure it's a more convenient transistion and I'm all for dethroning Intel, but it maintains that horrible x86 garbage. "When you make a car, you don't want to get rid of the steering wheel" they argue. The fact is, the x86 is not a car, it's a boat that has been retrofitted with wheels and an engine, but still sports a useless sail and rudder. The Itanium, for all its faults, gave the promise of doing away with this CISC crap for good.
True enough. Perhaps I'm overly-pessimistic. There are those whom I have urged not to open attachments time and time again who persist to do it. For such, I have given up all hope of ever educating to be intelligent netizens. They would fall for this ruse in a second.
Rather than criticize, maybe I ought to have said that it would have been admirable if Google had noted this and made some effort to avoid it.
I'm waiting to see how long it will take for a virus to be socially engineered around this:
Congratulations! A friend of yours has invited you to join Orkut. Just open the following executable to install the Orkut browser and join the dynamic online community of thousands.
[orkutinstaller.exe]
Why not? No one who hasn't been invited knows how the invitations are supposed to go. It was a bit careless of google not to consider this.
I was a TA for a C programming class just last semester. With all the programs I had to grade, it was unrealistic for me to be able to detect cheating without help. I submitted papers to the free-as-in-beer MOSS program at UC Berkeley. The system doesn't require students to hand assignments in through it and merely shows you the closest matches and lets you draw your own conclusions. It's an impressive piece of work and it doesn't make anyone any money by my use of it.
To my extreme dismay, the system brought up submissions by two students that grew progressively more similar as the semester progressed until it became obvious they were not original. Possibly the hardest thing I have ever done was to report these students to the professor. They admitted to it and both failed the class as a result. It still pains me to think that I had a part in causing them so much grief, but I still believe I did the right thing. If nothing is done to prevent this, it betrays the students who work hard to produce their own work. The value of a degree goes down as well as the integrity of the institution if anyone with money to buy assignments or skilled friends can do just as well as those who learn these skills on their own.
Still, I'm glad I got a research position this semester where I will not have to play such a disciplinary role.
I only take one major exception to the claim of the story that expose is "the biggest graphical breakthrough that operating systems have achieved in years" I don't deny it's a nice feature. That's why it's been so nice that Enlightenment has had it for several years now.
Gator has become a hiss and a byword on the net even among the less informed. If by some freakish twist of our theoretical right to free speech allows corporations to lie to us under "commercial speech" but prohibits the wary from warning of serious danger, so be it. Just call it gatorware. That name can't be disputed and, given their nefarious history, stings just as badly.
Not to disparage the importance of AI and the significant advances it has brought to the world, but the likelihood of this happening is very slim. Many people are content to believe that computers will one day have emotions, will and creativity because Hollywood and rich interpretation makes it seem immenant. Rich interpretation is ascribing undue intelligence to the actions of a child, or, in this case, a machine. I once fell into this same trap. Since then, years of studying computers, have taught me one indeniable fact: computers do what you tell them to and nothing more. Should you program a computer with the will to live, it will express it as you have instructed it to, but it will never develop it on its own. Computers can have no emotions, no preferences, nor creativity. The idea that they can has made lots of money both in Hollywood and for starry-eyed researchers, but artificial intelligence is just that: artificial.
This is just another case of an American corporation discouraging independent economic development. Whenever you see an American corporation mention "world markets," without exception, what they mean is American corporations exploiting the economies of other countries for their own gain.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, memory usage detectors are notoriously inaccurate.
For a second, unused memory is wasted memory. A good operating system will not leave loads of memory untouched. What good will that do? What a good operating system will do is use your memory most effectively so when higher priority applications need to run, they can, but when they don't more trivial things can be put in memory such as disk cache.
Whenever an item sells out, you have to wonder, was it a good product? or just good marketing? By orchestrating insufficient supplies, many news sources, ./ and USA today at least, are reporting the fact. That's free advertising for Apple, the kind traditional ads cannot buy. So when huge stockpiles of the things mysteriously turn up next week, we will all be more likely to pick them up because:
1. They are percieved as rare.
2. They are percieved as desired.
Perception is reality and marketers really know how to pull our consumer strings.
They may not do anything now, but it seems a great opportunity for emotive computing. Emotive computing tries to tailor the behavior of the system to the emotions of the user. If a computer detects many, random, frustrated key presses or an automatic phone system detects angry yells, it will respond accordingly by asking if the user wants to abort the current program or dropping the angry caller into discussion with a real person(tm). As pedestrians press the button more feverishly, they become more likely to jaywalk, causing risk to themselves and others. It would be in the best interest of safety to increase the priority of the pedestrian walk signal at that point.
Thanks. You have seriously just convinced me not to get an Nforce chipset.
It seems they might as well release Linux drivers, a representative from Microsoft recently told me most driver authors figure out how to do things in Linux and then port the drivers to Windows because it's easier that way.
License issues aside, I love CDE. I think it's a far more intuitive in organization and interface than Gnome or KDE. These two suffer from trying to duplicate the MS desktop, which is only intuitive to most because it has been force-fed to them for years. A prime example is the Gnome/KDE equivalent of that accursed start button. *grinds teeth* The start button serves only as a marketing tool to make computers look like simple one-button machines that any idiot can use. *whew!*
My first exposure to *nix was a Solaris machine and the CDE really opened my eyes to the different possabilities available outside of the wintel world. I'm disappointed that Sun, along with the rest of the world, seems to be abandoning it.
It seems many people are anxious to criticize and gloss over what they think solutions to these problems are, when in fact, they don't bother with the mundane details that are, in their minds, certain to be trivial.
Intuitive development! What a fabulous idea! All this time we've intentionally been doing everything ass-backwards just for jollies. Say, why not just make a computer that understands speech and does what you tell it to? That's it, all our problems are solved. Now those idiot software engineers can finally do things the right way.
Trademarks are more than just the use of a word. It is the association of that word with a particular type of product. If you wanted to create a softdrink called Apple Cola, Apple would have little case in Prosecuting you unless you tried to make it look like their logos or somesuch. The fact that Lindows is an OS, as is the product it's clearly a play off of is its damning feature, not the word itself. Still, they might be able to convince a judge it relates to a windowing system with Linux rather than a Windows clone. This is their only recourse as there is no way they can classify their product as of a different type than Windows.
Mind you, this is not to say I am on Microsoft's side in this issue. I think the X Windowing system predating Windows on top of the fact that any windowing system clearly uses windows making any brand catering to that fact a logical choice and, therefore, not clearly springing from another brand that made a similar choice.
The funny thing is, I doubt strongly that Lindows would still be around if it weren't for this suite. It's a rather unremarkable and expensive distribution. I'd say this case is the best thing that could have happened to it. There is no such thing as bad publicity, particularly in a case like this where Lindows looks like the underdog and thus, is the recipient of public sympathy.
netscape -> mozilla -> phoenix -> firebird -> firefox
And people say open source software is too confusing to use.
I was hoping they might call it Firecat for which they might have renamed the email client to match and then it would have been Thundercat.
No, the hardcover edition is out, but the paperback is still available at bn and at amazon.
Cheers
The crusoe processor from Transmeta did just that. Intels own chips do some form of conversion from x86 CISC into RISC microcode though to a lesser degree than the Transmeta chips. They have to perform such conversions in order to keep up with the RISCs.
The x86 is terrible. It sprung from a chip designed for calculators and still carries all of the baggage from that origin. This is why the Athlon64 is so distressing. Sure it's a more convenient transistion and I'm all for dethroning Intel, but it maintains that horrible x86 garbage. "When you make a car, you don't want to get rid of the steering wheel" they argue. The fact is, the x86 is not a car, it's a boat that has been retrofitted with wheels and an engine, but still sports a useless sail and rudder. The Itanium, for all its faults, gave the promise of doing away with this CISC crap for good.
True enough. Perhaps I'm overly-pessimistic. There are those whom I have urged not to open attachments time and time again who persist to do it. For such, I have given up all hope of ever educating to be intelligent netizens. They would fall for this ruse in a second.
Rather than criticize, maybe I ought to have said that it would have been admirable if Google had noted this and made some effort to avoid it.
I'm waiting to see how long it will take for a virus to be socially engineered around this:
Congratulations! A friend of yours has invited you to join Orkut. Just open the following executable to install the Orkut browser and join the dynamic online community of thousands.
[orkutinstaller.exe]
Why not? No one who hasn't been invited knows how the invitations are supposed to go. It was a bit careless of google not to consider this.
I was a TA for a C programming class just last semester. With all the programs I had to grade, it was unrealistic for me to be able to detect cheating without help. I submitted papers to the free-as-in-beer MOSS program at UC Berkeley. The system doesn't require students to hand assignments in through it and merely shows you the closest matches and lets you draw your own conclusions. It's an impressive piece of work and it doesn't make anyone any money by my use of it.
To my extreme dismay, the system brought up submissions by two students that grew progressively more similar as the semester progressed until it became obvious they were not original. Possibly the hardest thing I have ever done was to report these students to the professor. They admitted to it and both failed the class as a result. It still pains me to think that I had a part in causing them so much grief, but I still believe I did the right thing. If nothing is done to prevent this, it betrays the students who work hard to produce their own work. The value of a degree goes down as well as the integrity of the institution if anyone with money to buy assignments or skilled friends can do just as well as those who learn these skills on their own.
Still, I'm glad I got a research position this semester where I will not have to play such a disciplinary role.
Can't wait to see if this will be the first case of slashdotting a phone call.
To hear the SCO call:
"Please join us by dialing: 1.800.289.0436 -or- 1.913.981.5507 Confirmation Code: 510065"
11:00 AM Eastern Time Monday
I only take one major exception to the claim of the story that expose is "the biggest graphical breakthrough that operating systems have achieved in years" I don't deny it's a nice feature. That's why it's been so nice that Enlightenment has had it for several years now.
Gator has become a hiss and a byword on the net even among the less informed. If by some freakish twist of our theoretical right to free speech allows corporations to lie to us under "commercial speech" but prohibits the wary from warning of serious danger, so be it. Just call it gatorware. That name can't be disputed and, given their nefarious history, stings just as badly.
Not to disparage the importance of AI and the significant advances it has brought to the world, but the likelihood of this happening is very slim. Many people are content to believe that computers will one day have emotions, will and creativity because Hollywood and rich interpretation makes it seem immenant. Rich interpretation is ascribing undue intelligence to the actions of a child, or, in this case, a machine. I once fell into this same trap. Since then, years of studying computers, have taught me one indeniable fact: computers do what you tell them to and nothing more. Should you program a computer with the will to live, it will express it as you have instructed it to, but it will never develop it on its own. Computers can have no emotions, no preferences, nor creativity. The idea that they can has made lots of money both in Hollywood and for starry-eyed researchers, but artificial intelligence is just that: artificial.
This is just another case of an American corporation discouraging independent economic development. Whenever you see an American corporation mention "world markets," without exception, what they mean is American corporations exploiting the economies of other countries for their own gain.
greplaw shares your skepticism.