I've done a lot of factory work. I've also done a lot of computer tech work and I've recently gone back to school to obtain a computer engineering degree. If you really think that what IT's do even remotely approaches what a factory worker does on a daily basis, your truly clueless.
That being said, I think anyone who doesn't negotiate some sort of compensation for time after 40 into their contract has cheated themselves. Whether that compensation takes the form of a hefty pay raise, bonuses, or their own parking spot is up to them.
"Mom and Pop" won't have to install 9 linux distros...or even one. In fact my mom and pop haven't ever in their entire lives installed any operating system. They wouldn't know a sound card from a video card. So it doesn't matter if only one out of every 10 sound cards support linux (note the order there, hardware vendors support an OS not the other way around), because it just means that the shiny new OEM box they buy with linux preinstalled won't have any of the non-working cards in them.
See, which particular brands of hardware are supported and which aren't won't make a damn bit of difference when it comes to putting linux on end users desktops. Because most end users don't give a damn either. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but this just isn't one of them. Those that have half a brain and wish to install linux on a system themselves check a product for compatability BEFORE making a purchase.
Complaining because of the hassles involved with installing Linux on hardware which doesn't support it is equivalent of bitching because Windows XP won't install on your ppc.......get a clue.
I believe that was a future prediction and probably quite an accurate one.
Quick question: Who do you believe has a better grip on market development?
A. A bunch of Mac lovers on Slashdot.
B. The single largest corporation in the world who's pooring millions of dollars into market analysis.
Ding! Ding! Ding! That's right! Microsoft hasn't been worried about any threats from the Mac arena for quite some time. If they were you'd be seeing a lot of Anti-Mac propaganda instead of it all being directed toward Linux.
Macs will always hold their core user base, but it just doesn't have much to offer the average user that other os's don't already provide... as far as the usability hype, I found no difference between Panther and Windows XP. And I'm not alone, 95% of computer users agree that OSX is not worth the cost and that's not going to change anytime soon, on the other hand Linux is becoming more and more appealing with every passing year
And on the side what kind of bastard child of unix can't handle NFS better a Microsoft product....sheesh. Putting linux on my mac was the best thing I ever did.
Unfortunately there isn't a patch available for the 5150 (what I have). It's good to hear that the 5100 now has a good DSDT available. Hopefully the 5150 won't be too far behind. (They are too different to just use the 5100). The gentoo post was very informative, but did not work for me either. I will do much more research before my next laptop.:)
Does your sister have full power management capabilities? I've been in contact with Dell engineers about this. It's a known problem. Some have been working in their spare time on it.
Depends on your definition of "works". Several of the Inspiron series have bad DSDT's that make any power management virtually impossible and the modems require an additional purchase of a proprietary driver from linuxant as do the Broadcom WIFI cards that come with Inspirons now. Of course, this isn't a Gentoo specific problem as they would exist on any distro. Unless something has changed in the last couple of weeks, the 5150 and 5100 series are effected by this.
Excellant demonstraion of lack of insight there.
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Since your mental prowess seems to be a bit hindered I'll try to spell some things out slowly for you.
Remember cassette tapes? I know it was a long time ago, but think hard. They used to be "the thing", than this wonderful new technology came out called "Compact Discs" which could be produced at half the cost with near perfect sound. Did the cost of an album go down? No, almost overnight it rose by almost 50% (cost of product transition we were told...only temprorary). Now here we are with a distribution method that virtually eliminates all costs of shipping AND manufacturing. Allows for mass copying (not illgal, think cost of burning 1,000,000 cd's as opposed to copying 1,000,000 mp3's) and they're jacking the price up AGAIN.
Since mathematics seems to be a bit of challenge for you let me break it down: 16 song album at Amazon-->approx. 13.49 = 0.84 per song..99 per song on iTunes = 18.81 for the same album.
Are you scratching your head yet idiot? Also when we take into account that the artist is only getting on average $1.00 per album the absurdity becomes more apparent.
If the RIAA were anything but a bunch of exploitation hungry vampires living off the talents of others, they'd drop the price half and raise the artist's cut by double. Then I'd say "Hey, those are some upright fella's!!"
I've said it a dozen times already, download everything you can and send the artist $.25 per song, (look out here comes some more math). That works out to $4.00 per 16 song album. 4x as much as they're currently getting. Maybe that way it'll put the RIAA out of business and "artists" will have to make it on their own merrits and not succeed by virtue of how well their agent is at convincing 10 year olds they're"Awsome!"
I'm doing the same thing you are with impoverished kids. We run fedora on most of our donated PC's. No they don't meet your "minimum" requirements, but that's my main point. The headache involved with hardware that out of date isn't worth it.
I don't think the kids I work with would have any harder of a time with a linux distro than with IRQ assignments on a buggy ass '95 or '98 install. 98 was a bad dream to most users only trumped my ME.
The reason you can't find an adequate linux gui dating back that far is simple. It doesn't exist. The linux kernel was only a twinkle in a College Sophomore's eyes in 1991. And mostly intended for production, not desktop at thatpoint. X? it was an admins interface for the most part. Nothing else. What your asking is that current coders "back-port" to older hardware and that's not going to happen. If you want a desktop linux distro you have to be talking about recent distros since that animal for the most part did_not_exist_than. You might as well be complaining that 98 is sluggish on 1980 computers and asking for someone to point out a single Microsoft gui OS that runs on that hardware....not going to happen.
Suggestion: dump the 50mhz computers, recycle them. Coordinate with your local Universities, businesses, and charities. Put adds in the paper in order to let the community know that that "old" pc in their closet could be worth a lot to a little kid. I think you'll find most of these will fall within the 200mhz+ range with 64mb of ram. That's my experience anyway. These machines most definately can run linux, if you so choose. Especially with a lightweight Desktop like XFCE4. My roommate uses XFCE4 and he's a complete computer illiterate.
I certainly see your point, but beg to differ in usability assessments
I'm often the target of more fanatical linux users because I do not think it is quite yet ready for the desktop en masse though it is reaching this critical point rapidly. As someone who most people consider a power user (I only consider myself literate, since that's all it really takes imho), I found OSX to be clunky and very counter productive and in many ways suffering from the same pitfalls as the Microsoft UI design. A perfect example would be NetInfo Manager. In order to add an NFS share it takes a series of navigational clicks through various gui windows after which entries in the manager tables must be made in two different places using obscure switches. Little explanation of the details are found in the Mac Help docs (another feature I found unimpressive). In contrast all of this can be accomplished in a single line typed into a console in linux. This is only one example that captures the Windows/OSX UI design of burying essential/important features deep w/n the OS and not providing easily accessible information on them. In addition even now with a unix based userspace macs did not play well with others on my network.
When this is coupled with the fact that there is not a single app on OSX that I cannot find an adequate alternative for my x86 linux boxen, and all I have is a very expensive, pretty OS that isn't ready for my desktop
*disclaimer* note that I did not say: "There is not a single app that you need, but can't find", but none I need, but can't find.,,,,but even this will change soon enough.
Interesting opinion. However, it's impossible to track the actual number of linux users by virtue that it can be downloaded for free. Even those of us who support our OO distro or software of choice often do so in the form of "donations" and not boxed purchases.
That being said, I have a slight tendancy to trust the opinions of those who have millions of dollars to spend analyzing the market for true potential rather than a slashdotter ranting about his OS of choice, throwing platitudes left and right.
Corel is about making money. If they thought there was a realistic chance of making money with the Mac market, they'd port in a second.
The only thing that will tell is time and if Mac users keep channting to themselves they're "the premium second place guy" one day there going to wake up and realize that they aren't. And that's the real key, Apple still has it's same base of loyal users it's had forever while Linux is growing in leaps and bounds each year. Money is to be made in growing markets not stagnate ones with relative market roles already established.
I'm currently using a Dell 5150. The 4150 that precded it worked great (all the powermanagement features, hardware, everything...100%). The 5150 has a buggy DSDT that causes acpi sleep events and cpu throttling not to work.
I've been eyeing the PowerMacs for a while now mainly due to the hardware support.....I just have one question. When the battery dies, do you have to throw it away and buy a new one?
Do you really think 'artists' like Christina Aguilera, Brittany Spears, or NSYNC would have gotten anywhere without a multi-billion dollar industry telling millions of kids how "super cool" they were in between Cheerio Ads on Saturday T.V.?
I love music, but I feel much of the popular music today neither demonstrates talent or uniqueness (case in point is the 'boy-band recipe for success....there's one every generation now). I encourage EVERYONE to use p2p and mail the artists $2 dollars for every album you download (2x the amount they would get otherwise). Hopefully this will eventually bankrupt the mega-advertising industry that that the RIAA really is. That way artists will again have to make it on their own merrit.
That it is illegal doesn't impress me, legality != morality!!
Patenting b-trees? Give me a fucking break! I mean why not patent gerund phrases in the english language because some of them are about apple products!
Besides b-trees are the basis of the NTFS design. If they pulled this off, wouldn't anyone storing music files on an NTFS partition be in violation of Apples "b-trees for music archiving design."
I know that's a stupid conclusion, but that's my point.....much of this patent frenzy is just plain stupid and it goes to show that Apple is every bit the unethical conglomorate that Microsoft is. ..just smaller. Mini-MS
Edit the default properties. You can pipe OpenOffice through any print daemon you want.....so if CUPS itself can print there is no reason OOo shouldn't print as well.
I'm currently attending college. I use Linux and opensoftware almost exclusively as does my girlfriend. The problem you had has to do with fonts which is easily remedied.
Rather than being a hinderance my use of open source software like LyX (LaTeX frontend) and pdf formats have been a big plus when it comes to professional looking lab reports and papers. I'm often complimented by professors and TA's.....little do many know how incredibly effortless they are to make while my friends are toiling away in Word formatting nitpickiness.:)
The fact that a *.doc was opened and the bullets didn't show seems about as insignificant as whether or not my work car is black or grey. The content was displayed fine and that's what counts. On those very, very rare occasions when you cannot view the content it only takes 30 seconds to export to pdf. I haven't run into a single professor/student who was unwilling to do so...and if I did, I would make sure they got nothing by LaTeX and sxw files from than on out. hehe
Unless your downloading your music than sending a couple of dollars to the Artists your just another p2p'r justifying his theft.
How many songs do you currently have on your hard drive? 500? 1000? 5000? At your suggested cost of $0.25 per song you'd owe $250/1000 songs.
I'm personally morally ambiguous towards p2p, but it does irk me when the justifications start flowing.....I'd have more respect for those that just come out and say "I don't care if it was.10 going straight to the artist, I'd still dowload it for free." At least than you'd have honesty if not integrity.
[disclaimer] If you are one of the moral few that actually DO care about the artists and ARE sending them compensation, than I beg your pardon.[/disclaimer]
The amazing thing is that you can even do a major kernel upgrade at all and still have most of your drivers/system still running fine. If you relate kernel upgrades to their proprietary equivalent (i.e. an operating system upgrade). You'd see that your complaint is specious. No one in a million years, even close to their right mind would get peeved at his windows 98 drivers not working in Windows XP, but you take a 6 year old linux kernel (2.2) whose modules won't compile against the current and this is indicative of retardedness? Please.
They don't work as well as the nvidia drivers...yet. I do notice a respectable gain in performance with each new release. Enough so that I beleive they are taking the development seriously. The Radeon 9000 is supported by ATI's drivers, I'm rather suprised the parent's card didn't work.
It should be said there is not a single device made that is not supported by linux. Now before the onslaught comes let me clarify. ..There is not a single class of devices not supported by linux. Some particular manufacturers do not support their product so it does take a bit of forethought and planning (e.g. checking supported hardware lists). No, you can't just buy device and bank on the drivers being included on a shrinkwrapped CD in the box.
I'm happy to say that currently I have a fully working color scanner, 9500 pro w/ full hardware acceleration, iPod, CDRW/DVD player, sound cards, network cards (of course:)), ATA 100 expansion cards, digital camera, and other miscelaneous gadgets and hardware. I do know how the parent must feel though, when switching over from Windows I was burned several times by purchasing before planning. Now I've learned that 15 minutes of googling can save hours of migraines.
News update: AMD has sued Intel for it's use of the number "64" in describing its new architecture contending that it is now primarily associated with the "AMD64" line of processors.
I know you balked at basic programs like memtest86, but in my experience a copy of memtest86 for memory, prime95 for CPU, a copy of knoppix (or any livecd with lspci), maybe a graphic intensive program for video and a decent POST card are all you need. Oh and PSU tester as well. I can't count how many times problems have been traced back to a PSU that was going bad.
The more complicated the test the more likely that what's causing the errors is the test and not the hardware.
Implementation should be patented, not ideas. Any half-wit can dream and any "think-tank" can come up with scores of ideas to patent as "intellectual property", but it takes true innovation and talent to make it real.
The laws as they stand today ignore this distinction and, as such, directly inhibit the creativity they are designed to protect. If the mouse trap were invented today, the inventor would not only be able to patent his design but the very idea of "catching mice". Than the world would have had to wait 20 years before someone could propse a better way.
We are in the very first dawn hours of modern technology and though our ideas may seem extremely special to us today they'll be nothing but the the wheel of tomorrow.
"Expression and interpretation are impossible to obtain out of a computer (and always will be, i feel)."
"Imagine going to a concert where a guy is playing his keyboard on stage emulating the sound of a great symphony orchestra. I hope that music never reaches such a low.
IMHO that is a somewhat narrow minded view of musical experssion. Performances not unlike the one you speak of occur everyday and whether you particular care for the style, to say that artists like Moby or Amon Tobin lack "Expression" would not be very accurate.
Similar things were said about electric instruments when they first made their appearance and many a great classical genius was shunned by their contemporaries because they did not conform to current ideals of "musical expression". Electronica expands the number of ways in which an artist CAN express him/herself and this can be nothing but a good thing....we must step outside of the box and ask ourselves:
"What kind of "noise" would Beethoven be making were he born today?"
There is a very good chance it would not be classical.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done a lot of factory work. I've also done a lot of computer tech work and I've recently gone back to school to obtain a computer engineering degree. If you really think that what IT's do even remotely approaches what a factory worker does on a daily basis, your truly clueless.
That being said, I think anyone who doesn't negotiate some sort of compensation for time after 40 into their contract has cheated themselves. Whether that compensation takes the form of a hefty pay raise, bonuses, or their own parking spot is up to them.
"Mom and Pop" won't have to install 9 linux distros...or even one. In fact my mom and pop haven't ever in their entire lives installed any operating system. They wouldn't know a sound card from a video card. So it doesn't matter if only one out of every 10 sound cards support linux (note the order there, hardware vendors support an OS not the other way around), because it just means that the shiny new OEM box they buy with linux preinstalled won't have any of the non-working cards in them.
See, which particular brands of hardware are supported and which aren't won't make a damn bit of difference when it comes to putting linux on end users desktops. Because most end users don't give a damn either. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but this just isn't one of them. Those that have half a brain and wish to install linux on a system themselves check a product for compatability BEFORE making a purchase.
Complaining because of the hassles involved with installing Linux on hardware which doesn't support it is equivalent of bitching because Windows XP won't install on your ppc.......get a clue.
I believe that was a future prediction and probably quite an accurate one.
Quick question: Who do you believe has a better grip on market development?
A. A bunch of Mac lovers on Slashdot.
B. The single largest corporation in the world who's pooring millions of dollars into market analysis.
Ding! Ding! Ding! That's right! Microsoft hasn't been worried about any threats from the Mac arena for quite some time. If they were you'd be seeing a lot of Anti-Mac propaganda instead of it all being directed toward Linux.
Macs will always hold their core user base, but it just doesn't have much to offer the average user that other os's don't already provide... as far as the usability hype, I found no difference between Panther and Windows XP. And I'm not alone, 95% of computer users agree that OSX is not worth the cost and that's not going to change anytime soon, on the other hand Linux is becoming more and more appealing with every passing year
And on the side what kind of bastard child of unix can't handle NFS better a Microsoft product....sheesh. Putting linux on my mac was the best thing I ever did.
Unfortunately there isn't a patch available for the 5150 (what I have). It's good to hear that the 5100 now has a good DSDT available. Hopefully the 5150 won't be too far behind. (They are too different to just use the 5100). The gentoo post was very informative, but did not work for me either. I will do much more research before my next laptop. :)
Does your sister have full power management capabilities? I've been in contact with Dell engineers about this. It's a known problem. Some have been working in their spare time on it.
Depends on your definition of "works". Several of the Inspiron series have bad DSDT's that make any power management virtually impossible and the modems require an additional purchase of a proprietary driver from linuxant as do the Broadcom WIFI cards that come with Inspirons now. Of course, this isn't a Gentoo specific problem as they would exist on any distro. Unless something has changed in the last couple of weeks, the 5150 and 5100 series are effected by this.
Since your mental prowess seems to be a bit hindered I'll try to spell some things out slowly for you.
Remember cassette tapes? I know it was a long time ago, but think hard. They used to be "the thing", than this wonderful new technology came out called "Compact Discs" which could be produced at half the cost with near perfect sound. Did the cost of an album go down? No, almost overnight it rose by almost 50% (cost of product transition we were told...only temprorary). Now here we are with a distribution method that virtually eliminates all costs of shipping AND manufacturing. Allows for mass copying (not illgal, think cost of burning 1,000,000 cd's as opposed to copying 1,000,000 mp3's) and they're jacking the price up AGAIN.
Since mathematics seems to be a bit of challenge for you let me break it down: 16 song album at Amazon-->approx. 13.49 = 0.84 per song. .99 per song on iTunes = 18.81 for the same album.
Are you scratching your head yet idiot? Also when we take into account that the artist is only getting on average $1.00 per album the absurdity becomes more apparent.
If the RIAA were anything but a bunch of exploitation hungry vampires living off the talents of others, they'd drop the price half and raise the artist's cut by double. Then I'd say "Hey, those are some upright fella's!!"
I've said it a dozen times already, download everything you can and send the artist $.25 per song, (look out here comes some more math). That works out to $4.00 per 16 song album. 4x as much as they're currently getting. Maybe that way it'll put the RIAA out of business and "artists" will have to make it on their own merrits and not succeed by virtue of how well their agent is at convincing 10 year olds they're"Awsome!"
I don't think the kids I work with would have any harder of a time with a linux distro than with IRQ assignments on a buggy ass '95 or '98 install. 98 was a bad dream to most users only trumped my ME.
The reason you can't find an adequate linux gui dating back that far is simple. It doesn't exist. The linux kernel was only a twinkle in a College Sophomore's eyes in 1991. And mostly intended for production, not desktop at thatpoint. X? it was an admins interface for the most part. Nothing else. What your asking is that current coders "back-port" to older hardware and that's not going to happen. If you want a desktop linux distro you have to be talking about recent distros since that animal for the most part did_not_exist_than. You might as well be complaining that 98 is sluggish on 1980 computers and asking for someone to point out a single Microsoft gui OS that runs on that hardware....not going to happen.
Suggestion: dump the 50mhz computers, recycle them. Coordinate with your local Universities, businesses, and charities. Put adds in the paper in order to let the community know that that "old" pc in their closet could be worth a lot to a little kid. I think you'll find most of these will fall within the 200mhz+ range with 64mb of ram. That's my experience anyway. These machines most definately can run linux, if you so choose. Especially with a lightweight Desktop like XFCE4. My roommate uses XFCE4 and he's a complete computer illiterate.
I certainly see your point, but beg to differ in usability assessments
I'm often the target of more fanatical linux users because I do not think it is quite yet ready for the desktop en masse though it is reaching this critical point rapidly. As someone who most people consider a power user (I only consider myself literate, since that's all it really takes imho), I found OSX to be clunky and very counter productive and in many ways suffering from the same pitfalls as the Microsoft UI design. A perfect example would be NetInfo Manager. In order to add an NFS share it takes a series of navigational clicks through various gui windows after which entries in the manager tables must be made in two different places using obscure switches. Little explanation of the details are found in the Mac Help docs (another feature I found unimpressive). In contrast all of this can be accomplished in a single line typed into a console in linux. This is only one example that captures the Windows/OSX UI design of burying essential/important features deep w/n the OS and not providing easily accessible information on them. In addition even now with a unix based userspace macs did not play well with others on my network.
When this is coupled with the fact that there is not a single app on OSX that I cannot find an adequate alternative for my x86 linux boxen, and all I have is a very expensive, pretty OS that isn't ready for my desktop
*disclaimer* note that I did not say: "There is not a single app that you need, but can't find", but none I need, but can't find.,,,,but even this will change soon enough.
Interesting opinion. However, it's impossible to track the actual number of linux users by virtue that it can be downloaded for free. Even those of us who support our OO distro or software of choice often do so in the form of "donations" and not boxed purchases.
That being said, I have a slight tendancy to trust the opinions of those who have millions of dollars to spend analyzing the market for true potential rather than a slashdotter ranting about his OS of choice, throwing platitudes left and right.
Corel is about making money. If they thought there was a realistic chance of making money with the Mac market, they'd port in a second.
The only thing that will tell is time and if Mac users keep channting to themselves they're "the premium second place guy" one day there going to wake up and realize that they aren't. And that's the real key, Apple still has it's same base of loyal users it's had forever while Linux is growing in leaps and bounds each year. Money is to be made in growing markets not stagnate ones with relative market roles already established.
I'm currently using a Dell 5150. The 4150 that precded it worked great (all the powermanagement features, hardware, everything...100%). The 5150 has a buggy DSDT that causes acpi sleep events and cpu throttling not to work.
I've been eyeing the PowerMacs for a while now mainly due to the hardware support.....I just have one question. When the battery dies, do you have to throw it away and buy a new one?
Ummmmm, one word: Advertising
Do you really think 'artists' like Christina Aguilera, Brittany Spears, or NSYNC would have gotten anywhere without a multi-billion dollar industry telling millions of kids how "super cool" they were in between Cheerio Ads on Saturday T.V.?
I love music, but I feel much of the popular music today neither demonstrates talent or uniqueness (case in point is the 'boy-band recipe for success....there's one every generation now). I encourage EVERYONE to use p2p and mail the artists $2 dollars for every album you download (2x the amount they would get otherwise). Hopefully this will eventually bankrupt the mega-advertising industry that that the RIAA really is. That way artists will again have to make it on their own merrit.
That it is illegal doesn't impress me, legality != morality!!
Math, please. Without it your claim is as empty as the original.
Patenting b-trees? Give me a fucking break! I mean why not patent gerund phrases in the english language because some of them are about apple products!
Besides b-trees are the basis of the NTFS design. If they pulled this off, wouldn't anyone storing music files on an NTFS partition be in violation of Apples "b-trees for music archiving design."
I know that's a stupid conclusion, but that's my point.....much of this patent frenzy is just plain stupid and it goes to show that Apple is every bit the unethical conglomorate that Microsoft is. . .just smaller. Mini-MS
Edit the default properties. You can pipe OpenOffice through any print daemon you want.....so if CUPS itself can print there is no reason OOo shouldn't print as well.
The fact that a *.doc was opened and the bullets didn't show seems about as insignificant as whether or not my work car is black or grey. The content was displayed fine and that's what counts. On those very, very rare occasions when you cannot view the content it only takes 30 seconds to export to pdf. I haven't run into a single professor/student who was unwilling to do so...and if I did, I would make sure they got nothing by LaTeX and sxw files from than on out. hehe
I did 2 quick searches and found artists that I've had trouble finding at other online stores.....not bad. Thx
How many songs do you currently have on your hard drive? 500? 1000? 5000? At your suggested cost of $0.25 per song you'd owe $250/1000 songs.
I'm personally morally ambiguous towards p2p, but it does irk me when the justifications start flowing.....I'd have more respect for those that just come out and say "I don't care if it was .10 going straight to the artist, I'd still dowload it for free." At least than you'd have honesty if not integrity.
[disclaimer] If you are one of the moral few that actually DO care about the artists and ARE sending them compensation, than I beg your pardon.[/disclaimer]
[OT] Kimdaba! Nice. Exactly what I needed and couldn't find anywhere......how much does it cost again? And could you point me to the original? [/OT]
The amazing thing is that you can even do a major kernel upgrade at all and still have most of your drivers/system still running fine. If you relate kernel upgrades to their proprietary equivalent (i.e. an operating system upgrade). You'd see that your complaint is specious. No one in a million years, even close to their right mind would get peeved at his windows 98 drivers not working in Windows XP, but you take a 6 year old linux kernel (2.2) whose modules won't compile against the current and this is indicative of retardedness? Please.
It should be said there is not a single device made that is not supported by linux. Now before the onslaught comes let me clarify. . .There is not a single class of devices not supported by linux. Some particular manufacturers do not support their product so it does take a bit of forethought and planning (e.g. checking supported hardware lists). No, you can't just buy device and bank on the drivers being included on a shrinkwrapped CD in the box.
I'm happy to say that currently I have a fully working color scanner, 9500 pro w/ full hardware acceleration, iPod, CDRW/DVD player, sound cards, network cards (of course :)), ATA 100 expansion cards, digital camera, and other miscelaneous gadgets and hardware. I do know how the parent must feel though, when switching over from Windows I was burned several times by purchasing before planning. Now I've learned that 15 minutes of googling can save hours of migraines.
News update: AMD has sued Intel for it's use of the number "64" in describing its new architecture contending that it is now primarily associated with the "AMD64" line of processors.
The more complicated the test the more likely that what's causing the errors is the test and not the hardware.
The laws as they stand today ignore this distinction and, as such, directly inhibit the creativity they are designed to protect. If the mouse trap were invented today, the inventor would not only be able to patent his design but the very idea of "catching mice". Than the world would have had to wait 20 years before someone could propse a better way.
We are in the very first dawn hours of modern technology and though our ideas may seem extremely special to us today they'll be nothing but the the wheel of tomorrow.
"Expression and interpretation are impossible to obtain out of a computer (and always will be, i feel)."
"Imagine going to a concert where a guy is playing his keyboard on stage emulating the sound of a great symphony orchestra. I hope that music never reaches such a low.
IMHO that is a somewhat narrow minded view of musical experssion. Performances not unlike the one you speak of occur everyday and whether you particular care for the style, to say that artists like Moby or Amon Tobin lack "Expression" would not be very accurate.
Similar things were said about electric instruments when they first made their appearance and many a great classical genius was shunned by their contemporaries because they did not conform to current ideals of "musical expression". Electronica expands the number of ways in which an artist CAN express him/herself and this can be nothing but a good thing....we must step outside of the box and ask ourselves:
"What kind of "noise" would Beethoven be making were he born today?"
There is a very good chance it would not be classical.