they've all but said Windows 8.1 is the equivalent of service packs
"Service packs" usually don't end support for particular CPUs. Windows 8.1 requires CPU instructions that Windows 8 did not require. Replacing a CPU in a laptop just to run Windows 8.1 is usually impractical.
You can't see because your view is impeded by a massive army of streamers
If you mean people who play video games and stream them, streamers will themselves be impeded by the coming crackdown by video game publishers on streaming the publishers' copyrighted intellectual property. It's already started with Nintendo, Capcom, Sega, and Blizzard at various points.
Because the set of subsisting patents is so large that you can't prove a negative. It costs a substantial chunk of change to deploy set-top decoder hardware for a new data format. Once hardware implementing a decoder for an allegedly royalty-free format has been shipped out, patent holders can come out of the woodwork and claim that their patents apply to the new format. With a patented format, on the other hand, it's more efficient for a patent holder to just join the existing patent pool.
One solution that I favor is to take a page from AS/400, in a variation of that, in each library file, put a copy of the machine code, but also a copy of the abstract syntax tree, the last compilation phase.
You're thinking of distributing LLVM bitcode. Google was thinking of the same thing when designing PNaCl.
To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code.
If 1 part in 1000 runtime improvement is worth 1/7 of one machine's time, then you must be running a cluster of at least 142 identical servers.
That image is not accessible to blind people. Have you reported this inaccessible image to your local branch of Intel and to disability advocates? I wonder what they'll do if reminded of National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp.
Secondly "apps" are a PITA because they do not follow my forced display language.
Would you prefer that an app be made entirely unavailable for download if its (often small) developer has not yet translated the app to your "forced display language"?
Even if you do manage to buy a PC whose hardware Linux fully supports, the copy of Windows 7 that you buy to run work-necessary, Wine-incompatible applications in a virtual machine will still pull this shit and try to upgrade itself to Windows 10.
And don't take me wrong. I'm not saying it's not wrong but the average/. user most probably runs torrents, Netflix or some other form of high bandwidth software. Those 3GB of download are a drop in the bucket.
3GB, over a metered connection?
I think Ravaldy is trying to claim that the average Slashdot user is on a connection that is not metered so tightly that 3 GB would make a significant difference. It's only 1 percent of Comcast's monthly data allowance, for example. Cellular and satellite are metered far more tightly, but the consensus on Slashdot[1] appears to be that if the only Internet options are available to you are cellular and satellite, you ought to move within the service area of a less harshly metered option.
A tribe that suffers the loss of to many young women would be unable to propagate itself, efficiently.
At one child per year, a woman can give birth about twenty times. As the Duggars have demonstrated, a single woman can pump out well over a dozen children during her child-bearing years. So unless the tribe has lost 90 percent of its women, or the tribe's infant mortality is still high, it can rebound. Modern industrialized society has solved infant mortality for the most part. So what threat can cost it 90 percent of its women to the point where stranger danger hysteria is still justified?
The "ride-sharing" aspect is easiest to see with the UberPool service, in which drivers take passengers only near their ordinary commute to and from work.
Ostensibly to prevent malware from installing itself into the boot process as a hypervisor. Such bootkits date back to the days of booting from floppy disks, when they were called "boot sector viruses". The original idea was that you'd add the public key for whatever operating system you plan to run to a PC's UEFI settings.
UEFI Secure Boot can be deployed in two ways: open, where the owner of a machine can add new public keys or turn off Secure Boot entirely, or closed, where the owner of a machine can do neither of these things. Manufacturers of PCs and motherboards certified for Windows 8 (x86) or Windows 8 (x86-64) were required to include open Secure Boot, relegating closed Secure Boot to Windows RT. True, as of Windows 10, Microsoft began to allow PCs to ship with either open or closed Secure Boot. But in practice, what fraction of PCs are sold with closed Secure Boot?
Aren't you one of the same idiots who spouts off about how, "if kids are interested in programming, they'll find a way to learn?"
Sometimes I have taken one side, sometimes the other. It is not a fallacy to take one side in one debate and the other side in an unrelated debate, or even to present both sides of a single argument. Devil's advocacy, or arguing the opposing side regardless of the beliefs that one holds personally, prevents a debate from becoming an echo chamber. Sometimes a discussion is lacking in exploring the probable ramifications of entry barriers, such as this post by betterunixthanunix, and sometimes it's lacking in barrier-busting techniques, such as the "let 'em eat Raspberry Pi" that I've seen a lot of Slashdot users spout lately.
Either kids will find a way no matter what big, bad, evil nasty MICRO$UX does, or in 30 years, they'll be completely incapable of learning anything about computers. Which is it?
I choose C: your post implies a false dichotomy. Children of wealthier parents are more likely to find a way.
To a farmhouse that has electric power but the only Internet options are sat and cell, both harshly capped. It doesn't take a lot of All in the Family reruns to exhaust the typical monthly data allowance on sat or cell.
Who would make a piece of hardware with no support for any other media software?
CableLabs, a consortium of the cable TV industry, controls which software is approved to decrypt subscription television signals. In theory, any program can be used so long as it passes a certification process that it meets CableLabs' requirements for digital restrictions management compliance and robustness. But among television recording applications for PC, the only certified application I know of is Windows Media Center.
Switch to GNU/Linux, and you can still play games in Steam for Linux. Buy a Mac, and you can still play games in Steam for OS X. Not all games for Windows are available for GNU/Linux or OS X, but games that aren't are also likely to be ported to PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4.
Why nag me when the thing says Windows 10 won't even work?!
It's nagging you to buy a new GPU. Microsoft gets a cut because the GPU manufacturer paid for certification. That's also why one of the options, if I remember correctly, is "Explore new PCs with Windows 10". Microsoft gets a cut of those too.
If you don't want the compromise, run your own build of Linux you compiled yourself.
In theory, I agree with you. In practice, not all computer hardware that one already owns is compatible with Linux, X11, CUPS, SANE, or other hardware-facing parts of the GNU/Linux system. One can build a desktop computer compatible with GNU/Linux by choosing all components carefully. But a lot of people need to use a laptop computer for some reason, such as making productive use of time as a transit passenger commuting to and from one's day job. As I understand it, it's impractical to build a laptop yourself if you're unsatisfied with the limited selection sold by System76.
Slashdot Mirror
they've all but said Windows 8.1 is the equivalent of service packs
"Service packs" usually don't end support for particular CPUs. Windows 8.1 requires CPU instructions that Windows 8 did not require. Replacing a CPU in a laptop just to run Windows 8.1 is usually impractical.
You can't see because your view is impeded by a massive army of streamers
If you mean people who play video games and stream them, streamers will themselves be impeded by the coming crackdown by video game publishers on streaming the publishers' copyrighted intellectual property. It's already started with Nintendo, Capcom, Sega, and Blizzard at various points.
Develop a widget to plug in between an HDMI cable and your TV that adds random noise.
I don't see how that would conform to the compliance and robustness requirements of HDCP. Nor do I see a market for HDCP-incompatible gear.
Because the set of subsisting patents is so large that you can't prove a negative. It costs a substantial chunk of change to deploy set-top decoder hardware for a new data format. Once hardware implementing a decoder for an allegedly royalty-free format has been shipped out, patent holders can come out of the woodwork and claim that their patents apply to the new format. With a patented format, on the other hand, it's more efficient for a patent holder to just join the existing patent pool.
One solution that I favor is to take a page from AS/400, in a variation of that, in each library file, put a copy of the machine code, but also a copy of the abstract syntax tree, the last compilation phase.
You're thinking of distributing LLVM bitcode. Google was thinking of the same thing when designing PNaCl.
To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code.
If 1 part in 1000 runtime improvement is worth 1/7 of one machine's time, then you must be running a cluster of at least 142 identical servers.
As soon as I see the words "rolling release", I swicth to another piece of software.
Let me guess: you didn't understand Katamari Damacy.
That image is not accessible to blind people. Have you reported this inaccessible image to your local branch of Intel and to disability advocates? I wonder what they'll do if reminded of National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp.
Secondly "apps" are a PITA because they do not follow my forced display language.
Would you prefer that an app be made entirely unavailable for download if its (often small) developer has not yet translated the app to your "forced display language"?
Even if you do manage to buy a PC whose hardware Linux fully supports, the copy of Windows 7 that you buy to run work-necessary, Wine-incompatible applications in a virtual machine will still pull this shit and try to upgrade itself to Windows 10.
And don't take me wrong. I'm not saying it's not wrong but the average /. user most probably runs torrents, Netflix or some other form of high bandwidth software. Those 3GB of download are a drop in the bucket.
3GB, over a metered connection?
I think Ravaldy is trying to claim that the average Slashdot user is on a connection that is not metered so tightly that 3 GB would make a significant difference. It's only 1 percent of Comcast's monthly data allowance, for example. Cellular and satellite are metered far more tightly, but the consensus on Slashdot[1] appears to be that if the only Internet options are available to you are cellular and satellite, you ought to move within the service area of a less harshly metered option.
[1] See comments by sglewis100, AC, AC, AC, Zero__Kelvin, allquixotic, AC, Bengie, Bengie again, and FlyHelicopters.
As a European, I find living 30 miles from the school your kids go to be totally batshit crazy.
How does parents' relocation for a job work in Europe?
not where you buy something and then when you get home, you find a piece of paper that says you didn't buy it anyway.
The U.S. Supreme Court also upheld EULAs.
A tribe that suffers the loss of to many young women would be unable to propagate itself, efficiently.
At one child per year, a woman can give birth about twenty times. As the Duggars have demonstrated, a single woman can pump out well over a dozen children during her child-bearing years. So unless the tribe has lost 90 percent of its women, or the tribe's infant mortality is still high, it can rebound. Modern industrialized society has solved infant mortality for the most part. So what threat can cost it 90 percent of its women to the point where stranger danger hysteria is still justified?
The "ride-sharing" aspect is easiest to see with the UberPool service, in which drivers take passengers only near their ordinary commute to and from work.
The Supreme Court of the United States upheld binding arbitration clauses in CompuCredit v. Greenwood and DirecTV v. Imburgia.
Ostensibly to prevent malware from installing itself into the boot process as a hypervisor. Such bootkits date back to the days of booting from floppy disks, when they were called "boot sector viruses". The original idea was that you'd add the public key for whatever operating system you plan to run to a PC's UEFI settings.
UEFI Secure Boot can be deployed in two ways: open, where the owner of a machine can add new public keys or turn off Secure Boot entirely, or closed, where the owner of a machine can do neither of these things. Manufacturers of PCs and motherboards certified for Windows 8 (x86) or Windows 8 (x86-64) were required to include open Secure Boot, relegating closed Secure Boot to Windows RT. True, as of Windows 10, Microsoft began to allow PCs to ship with either open or closed Secure Boot. But in practice, what fraction of PCs are sold with closed Secure Boot?
Aren't you one of the same idiots who spouts off about how, "if kids are interested in programming, they'll find a way to learn?"
Sometimes I have taken one side, sometimes the other. It is not a fallacy to take one side in one debate and the other side in an unrelated debate, or even to present both sides of a single argument. Devil's advocacy, or arguing the opposing side regardless of the beliefs that one holds personally, prevents a debate from becoming an echo chamber. Sometimes a discussion is lacking in exploring the probable ramifications of entry barriers, such as this post by betterunixthanunix, and sometimes it's lacking in barrier-busting techniques, such as the "let 'em eat Raspberry Pi" that I've seen a lot of Slashdot users spout lately.
Either kids will find a way no matter what big, bad, evil nasty MICRO$UX does, or in 30 years, they'll be completely incapable of learning anything about computers. Which is it?
I choose C: your post implies a false dichotomy. Children of wealthier parents are more likely to find a way.
To a farmhouse that has electric power but the only Internet options are sat and cell, both harshly capped. It doesn't take a lot of All in the Family reruns to exhaust the typical monthly data allowance on sat or cell.
Who would make a piece of hardware with no support for any other media software?
CableLabs, a consortium of the cable TV industry, controls which software is approved to decrypt subscription television signals. In theory, any program can be used so long as it passes a certification process that it meets CableLabs' requirements for digital restrictions management compliance and robustness. But among television recording applications for PC, the only certified application I know of is Windows Media Center.
What's the price for "Want to wipe it and put on Debian"?
Switch to GNU/Linux, and you can still play games in Steam for Linux. Buy a Mac, and you can still play games in Steam for OS X. Not all games for Windows are available for GNU/Linux or OS X, but games that aren't are also likely to be ported to PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4.
Failing that, we now have class actions here [in Great Britain]
Do you also have "class actions are forbidden; use individual arbitration instead" clauses in End User Licence Agreements?
Why nag me when the thing says Windows 10 won't even work?!
It's nagging you to buy a new GPU. Microsoft gets a cut because the GPU manufacturer paid for certification. That's also why one of the options, if I remember correctly, is "Explore new PCs with Windows 10". Microsoft gets a cut of those too.
If you don't want the compromise, run your own build of Linux you compiled yourself.
In theory, I agree with you. In practice, not all computer hardware that one already owns is compatible with Linux, X11, CUPS, SANE, or other hardware-facing parts of the GNU/Linux system. One can build a desktop computer compatible with GNU/Linux by choosing all components carefully. But a lot of people need to use a laptop computer for some reason, such as making productive use of time as a transit passenger commuting to and from one's day job. As I understand it, it's impractical to build a laptop yourself if you're unsatisfied with the limited selection sold by System76.