Honestly, if I were as into playing multiplayer games today as I was in college, I could see buying one of these (assuming I decided the price was reasonable). I used to have a lot of fun playing Age of Empires and other RTS games with friends on my (for the time) high-end Gateway laptop. It was cool because by carrying my laptop I brought my machine and display with me to the friends' house where there were three guys and three computers. If I hadn't been able to bring my machine, we couldn't have played and I wasn't interested in lugging a CRT and ATX case along.
That said, the price is pretty steep. I find myself wondering not "what's the use of this machine" but more "how can the target users afford it?"
from Microsoft or anyone else. I will either use OpenSource software that's free (as in beer) or in cases where I must have some functionality that's only offered in a proprietary package, I'll buy software outright. If the only way to get a particular bit of software is to rent it, I'll go without.
Lots of the software that I use on a daily basis hasn't been updated in years. This is especially true of expensive packages like FrameMaker (5.5.6), Illustrator (v 10) and other software I purchased for consulting work back in the day. I'm not dropping another $600 on FrameMaker for the minimal feature updates (although I hear 7.0 has multiple levels of undo:-> ) though I needed it enough in 2000 that I dropped the cash. (I don't do warez, so that's not an option)
I run Office 2000 (it came "free" with a PC) on my one Windows box, and don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. I certainly won't be paying Redmond a monthly rental fee to run an office suite. I allow Google to display ads, but I'm not paying Google any actual cash and I've pretty much trained myself so that I don't even see the ads anymore. Ballmer & company still don't get it.
I always thought it was a shame the the study carels in the college library had big Windows boxes taking up about 1/3 of the space under the desktop. It also seems like it would be a good bet for a library or other location where you want to provide Web access without the hassle of a full-blown PC.
I've refused to install programs that required me to install or upgrade the.NET framework. Why? Because I don't want another x00 MB of hd/memory taken up by something that Microsoft says is good for me. The machine that the software was going to be installed on had limited RAM and hd space and a relatively slow processor and I wasn't in a position to upgrade it. Throwing the.NET framework at an already overloaded system was out of the question. In fact, I decided to code my own version for this very reason.
You may think that the.NET framework is the best thing ever, but there are people out here in the real world that actually have reasons for not wanting to install it.
I always wonder what magical "hardware is no object" world a lot of slashdot posts come from. If there's a space-time portal over to your universe, let me know. For now, I have to live with the constraints that my current universe imposes.
That my folks bought me to encourage my interest in science. It came with about 50 small containers of chemicals (like spice jars), a couple dozen test tubes, assorted pH strips, and a booklet with instructions on performing some basic experiments. I had a lot of fun cooking up different concoctions, making terrible smells (my mom eventually banished its use to the garage), and so forth.
A few years later, digging through some older stuff in the garage, I came across the kit. I wanted to replenish some of the chemicals, but it turned out that the company that made the kit had gone out of business as some kid had managed to do something spectacularly destructive and sued the company out of existence.
There are probably numerous reasons that chemistry kits are no longer readily available. One is probably that there are fewer folks interested in science. My guess is that with our entertainment culture, kids don't need to be as inquisitive about the world around them, since they're getting most of their information on TV. Liability is another important reason. Another is likely that a lot of kids with an interest in science (rational explanations for how things work) now get into computers.
Fear of being charged with terrorism is just a convenient excuse for a much more troubling trend in society.
The amusing thing is that this tells you something about the average intelligence of MS users--they know that Windows products (created by Microsoft) are buggy and prone to spyware, viruses, and other threats, yet somehow believe the the same Microsoft who couldn't write a secure OS can somehow write software to "fix" the holes they couldn't be bothered to close when the OS shipped. Sheesh.
is complaining. While that's true of the entire universe of PayPal users, you'll find that people who have had a problem that they're tried to get help resolving almost universally think PayPal sucks.
The cool thing about being PayPal (currently under investigation by several State DAs) is that there's no way they can lose. If you're a seller and the buyer says you didn't ship the item, PayPal keeps the money (and the buyer is out product). If you're the buyer and you don't get a product you ordered, Paypal keeps the money and you're out your purchase. Frankly, having been on both sides of this, I can say that PayPal does, indeed, suck
The service fills in forms on spammers websites and submits it. This "corrupts" the data that the spammers are collecting by inserting hundreds of "opt out" submissions which makes finding the "valid" submissions (where stupid people responded to the spam looking to buy v1agr@) more difficult. There's nothing illegal (as far as I know) in using your own computer to fill out forms with bogus data.
The few hundred frog subscribers don't have the horsepower to shut down a Web server anyway. They just make the results of spamming much more difficult to sort through.
I did this about 10 years ago, and I've never looked back. You can't imagine how much time you would have for other pursuits if you stopped wasting time in front of the box. With the time I've saved, I've: spent countless hours engaged in interesting conversation with my wife, read 100s of books, gone biking regularly, built a MAME cabinet, remodeled my house, learned Linux, and enjoyed time with my daughter.
ESX is an OS in itself, not derived from Linux. However, ESX includes a "Linux-compatibility layer" that provides compatibility with Linux on some level (drivers, for instance). The console OS is a linux derivative I believe, but the COS is just an interface to the ESX Server OS.
This is part of the advantage/disadvantage of OSS
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It seems to me that there are two differing views of OSS. When a developer says "they fix bugs and add requested features because they want their software to be useful" a user agrees, then complains when bugs aren't fixed or features added, and then in turn the developers complain about the complaints--because open source developers and users aren't even talking the same language.
When developers say "I want the software to be useful" what they are really saying is "I want this to be useful to me." It's not a "screw-the-user" attitude (although sometimes it comes across that way) because a large number of the developers working on OSS projects just don't care about anyone else's problems. I don't mean that in a bad way--they aren't obligated to care, because they're (mostly) doing the work for themselves.
Unfortunately, this isn't always made clear to users. Sometime projects are talked-up by developers on the basis of what they do and users think "Hey, that's cool, I'd like to try it out" without hearing (or thinking about) the fact that what they are really doing is using something that wasn't designed for them to use. Linux is like this (or used to be) where developers were saying "This OS is great. The software for it rocks" and then end users tried it out and started complaining "Hey, it won't play my MP3s" or "Hey, I don't want to edit image files from the command line." In some cases, these features (MP3s and image editing) were implemented by other developers who cared. But it doesn't seem to me that there are many developers who really care about "users" in the sense of "Joe sixpack"
That's not wrong. It just leads to misunderstandings, because developers are thinking "I like how this works and any end users are other developers like me" and end users are thinking "This doesn't work how I expected, and the developers have the same expectations as I do"
then there's a lot more wrong at MS than even slashdotters might normally predict.
Hopefully the support people aren't tracking your call using yellow stickies on the cube wall to remind them "Call Joe, re: code" Usually there's something more sophisticated than that for tracking support. Either there's an automated system for handling this, or at the very least the ticket should be coming up as unresolved. Saying "hey, anyone might forget" is a little silly
I get so tired of hearing MS fanboys running around yelling "it is too stable! is too, is too, is too!"
Quoting myself here:
I have four boxes here in my office, a six-month-old, high-end Dell Windows box, my Powerbook, a Dell 2800 running VMware ESX Server, and a Dell 2800 running Ubuntu (crazy, I know, but the 2800 was what was available).
* My servers only reboot when I need to document startup behavior. Since I'm doing work that involves explaining how to build drivers for ESX, which includes info on installing and starting ESX, that means an occasional reboot. Initiated by me. At this time, (after about six months) neither server has required a restart for any other reason.
* My Powerbook has been rebooted three times since I bought it. Each time was after installing a system update for OSX.
* The Windows XP box I reboot at least once a week. Sometimes this is because of an update. Usually it's because a progam locks up and refuses to be killed, and no, the Task Manager can't kill it either (sometime the application refuses to quit, sometime it's the process). When that happens, the only way to get the application to restart is to reboot, and since I can't do my job without email and publishing applications, I have to reboot. While this is obviously caused by the application, the OS should be able to kill any userland program completely.
Windows XP may have eliminated the BSOD that we all love to mock, but "stable" it isn't, IME.
What's going to happen with the A380 is the same thing that always happens with new passenger jets: it'll be shown and sold with "generous legroom, fully-reclining seats, and a lounge" and in a year or two the airlines will have "increased their efficiency" by adding sixteen rows of seats, reducing the leg room to 12" per row and replacing the "lounge" with more first-class seats.
Riding the A380 is going to be like riding the train in India, you'll just get to your destination faster.
When you're driving down the road and you get hungry, how do you know there's a BurgerBell on the corner if not for the sign (which is clearly advertising)? What about things you don't know exist, or things that are new? How do you know to "go out and seek" a cool gadget if you've never heard of it before? Or never knew that it was possible to do what that tool does?
I'm NOT arguing that spam or junk mail is Ok. I'm just trying to point out that not all advertising is bad. Intrusive advertising like telemarketing, spam, and junk mail is annoying (and I work hard not to purchase items advertised in one of these ways) but I'm not bothered by advertising in general.
and mailing list owners) only one should have any say in whether spam filters are too strict or not. I'll give you two guesses, and to make it easier I'll tell you up front: it ain't marketers or mailing lists.
Of course, I don't always follow things closely, though I do read the flyers the city sends out. I wonder what areas this covers? I'm just about two blocks from (old) downtown...
Not necessarily Wi-Fi based. Netzero and others did dial-up where the cost was initally supposed to be covered by ads.
I agree though, this is probably the first (or near-first) Wi-Fi project that they're expecting to pay for with advertising. It feels a little too much like a dot-bomb startup idea to me. All the "Web 2.0" hype has me wondering if failing to learn from history is one of those permanent human flaws.
If money was the sovereign cure for lackluster product, MS would have produced the world's most amazing software instead of the steaming pile of code that is MS Office, Windows, etc.
Wow dude, you had me in hysterics there... Seriously, coffee out the nose hillarity. Thanks for the laugh
Building your own box (by which psuedo-geeks mean "assembling six pre-built components into a working PC") makes one sooo technically superior. I mean, you probably have to have like what, a post-grad education to correctly install the MB and insert the PCI cards, right? Those PCs are just so complicated these days.
I used to build my own PCs... about 10 years ago. Then I grew up, got a life, and stopped spending my personal time fritzing around with hardware. I may work in the software industry, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my free time doing IT work. Give me a Mac any day.
Slashdot Mirror
Had to be said, karma be damned
Honestly, if I were as into playing multiplayer games today as I was in college, I could see buying one of these (assuming I decided the price was reasonable). I used to have a lot of fun playing Age of Empires and other RTS games with friends on my (for the time) high-end Gateway laptop. It was cool because by carrying my laptop I brought my machine and display with me to the friends' house where there were three guys and three computers. If I hadn't been able to bring my machine, we couldn't have played and I wasn't interested in lugging a CRT and ATX case along.
That said, the price is pretty steep. I find myself wondering not "what's the use of this machine" but more "how can the target users afford it?"
from Microsoft or anyone else. I will either use OpenSource software that's free (as in beer) or in cases where I must have some functionality that's only offered in a proprietary package, I'll buy software outright. If the only way to get a particular bit of software is to rent it, I'll go without.
:-> ) though I needed it enough in 2000 that I dropped the cash. (I don't do warez, so that's not an option)
Lots of the software that I use on a daily basis hasn't been updated in years. This is especially true of expensive packages like FrameMaker (5.5.6), Illustrator (v 10) and other software I purchased for consulting work back in the day. I'm not dropping another $600 on FrameMaker for the minimal feature updates (although I hear 7.0 has multiple levels of undo
I run Office 2000 (it came "free" with a PC) on my one Windows box, and don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. I certainly won't be paying Redmond a monthly rental fee to run an office suite. I allow Google to display ads, but I'm not paying Google any actual cash and I've pretty much trained myself so that I don't even see the ads anymore. Ballmer & company still don't get it.
I always thought it was a shame the the study carels in the college library had big Windows boxes taking up about 1/3 of the space under the desktop. It also seems like it would be a good bet for a library or other location where you want to provide Web access without the hassle of a full-blown PC.
I agree though that the price is a little steep.
Seriously -- think how the quality of users/poster would improve if we replaced captchas with some sort of basic test.
:-)
Maybe like the one they give as an entrance exam for the Marines:
The door is:
A) Open
B) Closed
C) Not enough information
Hey, as an ex-Army guy, I'm allowed to give those gyrenes a hard time
I've refused to install programs that required me to install or upgrade the .NET framework. Why? Because I don't want another x00 MB of hd/memory taken up by something that Microsoft says is good for me. The machine that the software was going to be installed on had limited RAM and hd space and a relatively slow processor and I wasn't in a position to upgrade it. Throwing the .NET framework at an already overloaded system was out of the question. In fact, I decided to code my own version for this very reason.
.NET framework is the best thing ever, but there are people out here in the real world that actually have reasons for not wanting to install it.
You may think that the
I always wonder what magical "hardware is no object" world a lot of slashdot posts come from. If there's a space-time portal over to your universe, let me know. For now, I have to live with the constraints that my current universe imposes.
That my folks bought me to encourage my interest in science. It came with about 50 small containers of chemicals (like spice jars), a couple dozen test tubes, assorted pH strips, and a booklet with instructions on performing some basic experiments. I had a lot of fun cooking up different concoctions, making terrible smells (my mom eventually banished its use to the garage), and so forth.
A few years later, digging through some older stuff in the garage, I came across the kit. I wanted to replenish some of the chemicals, but it turned out that the company that made the kit had gone out of business as some kid had managed to do something spectacularly destructive and sued the company out of existence.
There are probably numerous reasons that chemistry kits are no longer readily available. One is probably that there are fewer folks interested in science. My guess is that with our entertainment culture, kids don't need to be as inquisitive about the world around them, since they're getting most of their information on TV. Liability is another important reason. Another is likely that a lot of kids with an interest in science (rational explanations for how things work) now get into computers.
Fear of being charged with terrorism is just a convenient excuse for a much more troubling trend in society.
You don't pay the wolves to guard the sheep!
The amusing thing is that this tells you something about the average intelligence of MS users--they know that Windows products (created by Microsoft) are buggy and prone to spyware, viruses, and other threats, yet somehow believe the the same Microsoft who couldn't write a secure OS can somehow write software to "fix" the holes they couldn't be bothered to close when the OS shipped. Sheesh.
is complaining. While that's true of the entire universe of PayPal users, you'll find that people who have had a problem that they're tried to get help resolving almost universally think PayPal sucks.
The cool thing about being PayPal (currently under investigation by several State DAs) is that there's no way they can lose. If you're a seller and the buyer says you didn't ship the item, PayPal keeps the money (and the buyer is out product). If you're the buyer and you don't get a product you ordered, Paypal keeps the money and you're out your purchase. Frankly, having been on both sides of this, I can say that PayPal does, indeed, suck
The service fills in forms on spammers websites and submits it. This "corrupts" the data that the spammers are collecting by inserting hundreds of "opt out" submissions which makes finding the "valid" submissions (where stupid people responded to the spam looking to buy v1agr@) more difficult. There's nothing illegal (as far as I know) in using your own computer to fill out forms with bogus data.
The few hundred frog subscribers don't have the horsepower to shut down a Web server anyway. They just make the results of spamming much more difficult to sort through.
I did this about 10 years ago, and I've never looked back. You can't imagine how much time you would have for other pursuits if you stopped wasting time in front of the box. With the time I've saved, I've: spent countless hours engaged in interesting conversation with my wife, read 100s of books, gone biking regularly, built a MAME cabinet, remodeled my house, learned Linux, and enjoyed time with my daughter.
ESX is an OS in itself, not derived from Linux. However, ESX includes a "Linux-compatibility layer" that provides compatibility with Linux on some level (drivers, for instance). The console OS is a linux derivative I believe, but the COS is just an interface to the ESX Server OS.
It seems to me that there are two differing views of OSS. When a developer says "they fix bugs and add requested features because they want their software to be useful" a user agrees, then complains when bugs aren't fixed or features added, and then in turn the developers complain about the complaints--because open source developers and users aren't even talking the same language.
When developers say "I want the software to be useful" what they are really saying is "I want this to be useful to me." It's not a "screw-the-user" attitude (although sometimes it comes across that way) because a large number of the developers working on OSS projects just don't care about anyone else's problems. I don't mean that in a bad way--they aren't obligated to care, because they're (mostly) doing the work for themselves.
Unfortunately, this isn't always made clear to users. Sometime projects are talked-up by developers on the basis of what they do and users think "Hey, that's cool, I'd like to try it out" without hearing (or thinking about) the fact that what they are really doing is using something that wasn't designed for them to use. Linux is like this (or used to be) where developers were saying "This OS is great. The software for it rocks" and then end users tried it out and started complaining "Hey, it won't play my MP3s" or "Hey, I don't want to edit image files from the command line." In some cases, these features (MP3s and image editing) were implemented by other developers who cared. But it doesn't seem to me that there are many developers who really care about "users" in the sense of "Joe sixpack"
That's not wrong. It just leads to misunderstandings, because developers are thinking "I like how this works and any end users are other developers like me" and end users are thinking "This doesn't work how I expected, and the developers have the same expectations as I do"
then there's a lot more wrong at MS than even slashdotters might normally predict.
Hopefully the support people aren't tracking your call using yellow stickies on the cube wall to remind them "Call Joe, re: code" Usually there's something more sophisticated than that for tracking support. Either there's an automated system for handling this, or at the very least the ticket should be coming up as unresolved. Saying "hey, anyone might forget" is a little silly
But they lost their focus. The AV definition files are pushing 15MB, the new spyware tool isn't great, and their anti-spam offering is terrible.
Try AVG.
I get so tired of hearing MS fanboys running around yelling "it is too stable! is too, is too, is too!"
Quoting myself here:
I have four boxes here in my office, a six-month-old, high-end Dell Windows box, my Powerbook, a Dell 2800 running VMware ESX Server, and a Dell 2800 running Ubuntu (crazy, I know, but the 2800 was what was available).
* My servers only reboot when I need to document startup behavior. Since I'm doing work that involves explaining how to build drivers for ESX, which includes info on installing and starting ESX, that means an occasional reboot. Initiated by me. At this time, (after about six months) neither server has required a restart for any other reason.
* My Powerbook has been rebooted three times since I bought it. Each time was after installing a system update for OSX.
* The Windows XP box I reboot at least once a week. Sometimes this is because of an update. Usually it's because a progam locks up and refuses to be killed, and no, the Task Manager can't kill it either (sometime the application refuses to quit, sometime it's the process). When that happens, the only way to get the application to restart is to reboot, and since I can't do my job without email and publishing applications, I have to reboot. While this is obviously caused by the application, the OS should be able to kill any userland program completely.
Windows XP may have eliminated the BSOD that we all love to mock, but "stable" it isn't, IME.
Ha!
What's going to happen with the A380 is the same thing that always happens with new passenger jets: it'll be shown and sold with "generous legroom, fully-reclining seats, and a lounge" and in a year or two the airlines will have "increased their efficiency" by adding sixteen rows of seats, reducing the leg room to 12" per row and replacing the "lounge" with more first-class seats.
Riding the A380 is going to be like riding the train in India, you'll just get to your destination faster.
When you're driving down the road and you get hungry, how do you know there's a BurgerBell on the corner if not for the sign (which is clearly advertising)? What about things you don't know exist, or things that are new? How do you know to "go out and seek" a cool gadget if you've never heard of it before? Or never knew that it was possible to do what that tool does?
I'm NOT arguing that spam or junk mail is Ok. I'm just trying to point out that not all advertising is bad. Intrusive advertising like telemarketing, spam, and junk mail is annoying (and I work hard not to purchase items advertised in one of these ways) but I'm not bothered by advertising in general.
and mailing list owners) only one should have any say in whether spam filters are too strict or not. I'll give you two guesses, and to make it easier I'll tell you up front: it ain't marketers or mailing lists.
Of course, I don't always follow things closely, though I do read the flyers the city sends out. I wonder what areas this covers? I'm just about two blocks from (old) downtown...
For anyone that overlooked it in the parent: "postur[ing] about science" indeed
Win Borg
Not necessarily Wi-Fi based. Netzero and others did dial-up where the cost was initally supposed to be covered by ads.
I agree though, this is probably the first (or near-first) Wi-Fi project that they're expecting to pay for with advertising. It feels a little too much like a dot-bomb startup idea to me. All the "Web 2.0" hype has me wondering if failing to learn from history is one of those permanent human flaws.
Sheesh.
If money was the sovereign cure for lackluster product, MS would have produced the world's most amazing software instead of the steaming pile of code that is MS Office, Windows, etc.
Wow dude, you had me in hysterics there... Seriously, coffee out the nose hillarity. Thanks for the laugh
Building your own box (by which psuedo-geeks mean "assembling six pre-built components into a working PC") makes one sooo technically superior. I mean, you probably have to have like what, a post-grad education to correctly install the MB and insert the PCI cards, right? Those PCs are just so complicated these days.
I used to build my own PCs... about 10 years ago. Then I grew up, got a life, and stopped spending my personal time fritzing around with hardware. I may work in the software industry, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my free time doing IT work. Give me a Mac any day.