I have seen the version of Xandros linux on the ASUS eeePCs and it's excellent. Usable? It makes WinAnything look hard. Plus that system comes with a built-in video camera and wireless that actually work. Skype is fully functional - audio and video.
If you have WiFi, this thing IS your mobile video phone.
I hope the Acer model is at least as good.
Metering data is the norm for pricing in New Zealand. But throughput is excellent (My ISP is ORCON) and they don't seem to do much shaping....With metering, you do tend to get what you pay for....and that's pretty good almost all of the time. They have an incentive to keep the network fast and inviting. if you go over your cap, you pay $10 for each additional 5GB...If that gets too expensive, I could pay more as a base price to get a higher cap if I consistently exceed the level I'm paying for.
On my DSL my download speed is just under 4mbps and my upload speed is about 890kbps.
That's about as good as it gets in New Zealand. A small number of people are getting 24mbps as it rolls out....but I've heard it isn't very reliable and you can't go far on that 24mbps.....It runs out not far from your house....
What are we talking about here? Is the OS relevant? Of just the login or not aspect? Encryption on those removable memory SDs?
Maybe we should just buy those really cheap phones they hate to sell us......The ones that do voice and txt and not much else?
On my Windows Vista system, I was using Firefox to login to one Gmail account and Safari to login to another. It seemed to work fine, except the sound to the external headphone jack on my Acer laptop kept disappearing. It's a known "feature" on Acer laptops. To get it back, you put the laptop into sleep mode....leave it for at least 5 minutes...then touch a key to bring it back...and sound resumes. But using Safari sees me have to do this every time I use the laptop. Not using Safari means I may have to do it once every couple of months. Since I stopped using Safari a couple of weeks ago, I have not lost sound to my headphone jack.
I had come to the conclusion Safari wasn't as good as Firefox. But it is better than MS IE. To me, IE is unfriendly.
Not all members of the Cabinet will be involved in every decision. If they are, then something is seriously wrong. So the "17" isn't real. The number actually involved in any decision will be the executive set operating in that department: the relevant member of the Cabinet, plus anyone above or below who may need to be involved. Other silos won't necessarily be involved in the decision itself unless they are meshed in some way by the policy intended....and then need only look at the fallout for their area and not necessarily the big picture. The big picture will belong to the President and the relevant cabinet member. Team leaders....
A few years ago I bought two EA games that refused to play on any of my 6 PCs. Because I had bought them for my kids as Xmas presents more than 30 days prior to attempting to return them, the store refused to give ma refund. In New Zealand, these were over $100 each. Not trivial. (One was "Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup").
The EA web site simply told me to buy another CD drive. Hell, I only had 6 that didn't work with their game.
I have not bought an EA game since. No point wasting money on games you can't play from a vendor that doesn't care.
I remember the days when I used to buy CDs. I felt good about that even if 80% of the songs were not the ones I wanted.
These days, the RIAA has left such a sour feeling that I don't buy many if any CDs and I know I definitely do not ant to be ripped off by the various DRM schemes that take your money but eventually cut off you access to the music.
Vodafone in New Zealand has had mobile TV for most of a year for NZ$2.50 / week (US$1.90). OK, it's all sports, celeb gossip, cartoons, reality shows (MTV) and soft porn (Playboy). They dropped CNN - the only news channel - becasue no (but me, I guess) was watching.
I dropped the service. Nothing of interest there for me. But it's been around for a while now.
Excellent observation. Guys in jail don't get computers and they certainly don't get privacy like that. I worked in a prison for a year. The prisoner's legal papers were off-limits to us to read in full, but we could certainly flip through them looking for phone numbers or other things "of interest". It's actually possible to do that, too...scanning through for references to illegal drugs or threatened violence to others without actually comprehending the legal content. I didn't think it was possible until I found myself doing it. But that's a very thin layer of privacy....and a prisoner couldn't rely on it.
No worries. If the functionality you need wasn't there, that's fair enough. That wasn't the case for me, so I'm happy enough. It won't be for everyone, but over time as these things improve I think it will work for more and more people....then suddenly it will be the way everyone is doing it. Or they all move on having found something even better. That's how these things seem to go.:-)
Understood. None of that rationale makes it right or just.
Which is a shame. The propaganda says that is part of the goal the whole system works toward, while it is obvious that it doesn't actually do that.
So one must be careful to separate the reality from the propaganda and look at these institutions as they are and not the idealized version most often peddled.
The US Constitution has some serious flaws and they are long overdue for amending. Rather than being a short leash to ensure accountability, the two year term for the House has proven to be a recipe for pandering to wealthy interests to ensure funds for re-election.
Beyond the Constitution, freezing the House at 435 members since 1911 has been a really bad idea. The population of the US has grown almost 300% since then. There is an average 750,000 people in a district. The Rep is utterly inaccessible to the vest majority of their constituents. Back to the pandering to wealthy interests loop.
The President - all of them - have been allowed to get away with ignoring the Constitution and the law when it suits them. Bush's violations are merely the most flagrant and disrespectful in a long line of same from many Presidents.
The voting system is corrupt in too many places. Instead of one, national organisation operating a common system independent of local politics and politicians (as almost every democracy that actually works does), the US uses a patchwork quilt of corruptible voting systems. No other country uses touch screen voting with no audit trail and based on removable memory you can alter in laptop. India and Venezuela showed the world how to do this properly and the US claimed they had fiddled the results. If you looked at how they actually did it, you'd see the results can't be fiddled. But the lie was what mattered.
I pay attention an have done for years. Ideology aside, Bush and his entire crew are a criminal gang. I'd say the same thing about ANY administration that behaved as they have. Clinton committed murder when he sent cruise missiles into Baghdad in 1998 over fictional (French spy satellites saw no troops) Iraqi troop movements in the Saudi border....all to get the heat off over Lewinski. Clinton should have been impeached for that - not lying about a blowjob.
I can't agree. Google do most thing better than most other. I find myself using their services because they are the best I know of. They may not be the best of all services, but I don't have the time to test, in depth, all services.
Hypocrisy is the core of their thinking. They aren't ashamed of it. They say anything that needs to be said to get their way. They will end you and our kids to die to save their reputations. They are the lowest of the low - taking advantage of those who trusted them. They have even taken their lives.
Pigs.
Just one more ground for impeaching Bush & Cheney. They should have been removed from ofice 4 years ago for lying about WMD in Iraq....but better late than justice NEVER being seen. If they are both gone, they can't pardon themselves.
Then any benefit from sequestration is lost and you're just burning carbon. Vast areas would have to be given over to weeds and then industrially harvested. The fuel used to harvest it may equal the energy the area harvested produces. ow many litres of fuel would you need to harvest enough plants to generate just that amount, never mind a surplus? All that could be said for it is that it is renewable. Perhaps pointlessly so if it doesn't produce enough to generate a surplus.
I don't expect Gore to mount a global campaign on a bicycle wearing Hush Puppies. If he needs a jet and 5 cars to be effective, I have no issues with that.
As for population, I wondered if the reaction to suggesting people have fewer children in the future would be equated to Nazis and genicode and unfortunately, you won that prize.
People in wealthy countries are ALREADY having fewer children. If it were not for immigration, populations would already be falling. There is no need to do anything but let nature takes its course. We are already moving to "correct" our own over population. The 30 years of research on this globally show that once people are lifted from abject poverty, they - by choice - limit their productivity and populations bombs stop ticking.
No nazis. No genocide. Just happy people with the resources to ensure they two kids they have will survive so they don't have to have 6 to ensure two survive.
I agree completely. Biofuels aren't the answer to anything except inquiries into how to make food as expensive as oil and forests into watelands.
Gore is sincere and appropriate in being concerned about global warming. Biofuels was just one of the many "solutions" put forward. It had the backing of corporate anxious to make corn for SUVs in stead of cows....and make a LOT more money.
But the real answer is lower fuel consumption per capita now and fewer people later.
I think that ANY sort of "bio-fuel" is merely going to highlight how overly numerous we all are. People have been warning about the dangers of biofuels to food supplies and / or forest for years. The people not hearing these warnings either weren't paying attention yet or they didn't want to know the risks. The former is honest, the latter isn't.
"Cellulose" ethanal? From what? Trees? Good-bye forests. Sugar Cane? Good-bye food (again). There really is only one answer: use less fuel in the short term and have fewer people living on Earth in the longer term.
The desktop costs to much to win and generates too little revenue. MOre likely the future of the client is seen as being "thin" anyway. So why invest in the past?
Having said that, I'd being using linux exclusively on the desktop (as I did for 5 years) if Linux supported a good range of video cameras / devices AND included an editing application for composing videos that was akin to Windows Movie Maker....simple as that is. I have yet to see anything of that standard that doesn't segfault immediately. Cinelerra didn't segfault, but I couldn't see how to use it and there were no docs. What I did attempt screwed up the sound so badly amost immediately there was no point carrying on.
Blah blah.
So now I use Windows most of the time as my client. I'd like to buy an Apple when I get some spare cash. I have some Linux desktops here....but they can't do video so they get used as Internet access systems by the kids or whoever.
For what it's worth. Xandros 4.1 Professional is STILL one of the est Linux desktops out there despite being over 2 years old. Ubuntu is still trying to match it...but the move to the SMP kernel-only on Ubuntu renders it uninstallable on my systems due to my wifi cards having only Uni-kernel driver support.
Blah blah.
NVidia's top video adapters got so expensive where I live that they rivaled the cost of an entire new PC. If the CPU-GPU hybrids are "good enough", then there won't be much market left for a premium product.
Introduce data charging. People who want to download hundred of GBs of data can pay for it. If they only really do some e-mail and a bit of surfing....they will pay almost nothing.
In New Zealand, we have data charging. I pay for 15GB / month and an additional $10 for each extra 5GB. Performance is excellent. I get what I pay for.
In so far as the relationship is between the bank and the customer and the bank has NO control over the state of the customer's computer, the liability for client-side security faults can ONLY lie with the customer.
Having said that, the customer also has a relationship to the vendors who leave them exposed to any risk. An operating system that cannot safely be connected to the Internet without 3rd-party software being added should only be sold with that, and any other caveats, clearly stated or risk being sued for improperly representing their product as "fit for purpose" (Internet use) when it clearly isn't.
Carly won the infighting in the HP / Compaq merger. But since then she's shown she doesn't know how to run a company that makes stuff people want and happy they bought it where they did. Many CEOs don't "get" the customer thing. They are too far removed from the people who ultimately pay hard-earned cash for their stuff. Instead, they talk to the CFO every day for an hour and fly-by-spreadsheet and it measures the gap or not between performance and the quarterly targets. Driving by such indicators is like driving by the rear-vision mirror. You're looking back, not forward.
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I have seen the version of Xandros linux on the ASUS eeePCs and it's excellent. Usable? It makes WinAnything look hard. Plus that system comes with a built-in video camera and wireless that actually work. Skype is fully functional - audio and video. If you have WiFi, this thing IS your mobile video phone. I hope the Acer model is at least as good.
Metering data is the norm for pricing in New Zealand. But throughput is excellent (My ISP is ORCON) and they don't seem to do much shaping....With metering, you do tend to get what you pay for....and that's pretty good almost all of the time. They have an incentive to keep the network fast and inviting. if you go over your cap, you pay $10 for each additional 5GB...If that gets too expensive, I could pay more as a base price to get a higher cap if I consistently exceed the level I'm paying for. On my DSL my download speed is just under 4mbps and my upload speed is about 890kbps. That's about as good as it gets in New Zealand. A small number of people are getting 24mbps as it rolls out....but I've heard it isn't very reliable and you can't go far on that 24mbps.....It runs out not far from your house....
What are we talking about here? Is the OS relevant? Of just the login or not aspect? Encryption on those removable memory SDs? Maybe we should just buy those really cheap phones they hate to sell us......The ones that do voice and txt and not much else?
On my Windows Vista system, I was using Firefox to login to one Gmail account and Safari to login to another. It seemed to work fine, except the sound to the external headphone jack on my Acer laptop kept disappearing. It's a known "feature" on Acer laptops. To get it back, you put the laptop into sleep mode....leave it for at least 5 minutes...then touch a key to bring it back...and sound resumes. But using Safari sees me have to do this every time I use the laptop. Not using Safari means I may have to do it once every couple of months. Since I stopped using Safari a couple of weeks ago, I have not lost sound to my headphone jack. I had come to the conclusion Safari wasn't as good as Firefox. But it is better than MS IE. To me, IE is unfriendly.
Not all members of the Cabinet will be involved in every decision. If they are, then something is seriously wrong. So the "17" isn't real. The number actually involved in any decision will be the executive set operating in that department: the relevant member of the Cabinet, plus anyone above or below who may need to be involved. Other silos won't necessarily be involved in the decision itself unless they are meshed in some way by the policy intended....and then need only look at the fallout for their area and not necessarily the big picture. The big picture will belong to the President and the relevant cabinet member. Team leaders....
A few years ago I bought two EA games that refused to play on any of my 6 PCs. Because I had bought them for my kids as Xmas presents more than 30 days prior to attempting to return them, the store refused to give ma refund. In New Zealand, these were over $100 each. Not trivial. (One was "Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup"). The EA web site simply told me to buy another CD drive. Hell, I only had 6 that didn't work with their game. I have not bought an EA game since. No point wasting money on games you can't play from a vendor that doesn't care.
Just one more example of how Microsoft prevents choice and impedes competition. It's been over 20 years now this has been going on.
I remember the days when I used to buy CDs. I felt good about that even if 80% of the songs were not the ones I wanted. These days, the RIAA has left such a sour feeling that I don't buy many if any CDs and I know I definitely do not ant to be ripped off by the various DRM schemes that take your money but eventually cut off you access to the music.
Vodafone in New Zealand has had mobile TV for most of a year for NZ$2.50 / week (US$1.90). OK, it's all sports, celeb gossip, cartoons, reality shows (MTV) and soft porn (Playboy). They dropped CNN - the only news channel - becasue no (but me, I guess) was watching. I dropped the service. Nothing of interest there for me. But it's been around for a while now.
Excellent observation. Guys in jail don't get computers and they certainly don't get privacy like that. I worked in a prison for a year. The prisoner's legal papers were off-limits to us to read in full, but we could certainly flip through them looking for phone numbers or other things "of interest". It's actually possible to do that, too...scanning through for references to illegal drugs or threatened violence to others without actually comprehending the legal content. I didn't think it was possible until I found myself doing it. But that's a very thin layer of privacy....and a prisoner couldn't rely on it.
No worries. If the functionality you need wasn't there, that's fair enough. That wasn't the case for me, so I'm happy enough. It won't be for everyone, but over time as these things improve I think it will work for more and more people....then suddenly it will be the way everyone is doing it. Or they all move on having found something even better. That's how these things seem to go. :-)
Understood. None of that rationale makes it right or just. Which is a shame. The propaganda says that is part of the goal the whole system works toward, while it is obvious that it doesn't actually do that. So one must be careful to separate the reality from the propaganda and look at these institutions as they are and not the idealized version most often peddled. The US Constitution has some serious flaws and they are long overdue for amending. Rather than being a short leash to ensure accountability, the two year term for the House has proven to be a recipe for pandering to wealthy interests to ensure funds for re-election. Beyond the Constitution, freezing the House at 435 members since 1911 has been a really bad idea. The population of the US has grown almost 300% since then. There is an average 750,000 people in a district. The Rep is utterly inaccessible to the vest majority of their constituents. Back to the pandering to wealthy interests loop. The President - all of them - have been allowed to get away with ignoring the Constitution and the law when it suits them. Bush's violations are merely the most flagrant and disrespectful in a long line of same from many Presidents. The voting system is corrupt in too many places. Instead of one, national organisation operating a common system independent of local politics and politicians (as almost every democracy that actually works does), the US uses a patchwork quilt of corruptible voting systems. No other country uses touch screen voting with no audit trail and based on removable memory you can alter in laptop. India and Venezuela showed the world how to do this properly and the US claimed they had fiddled the results. If you looked at how they actually did it, you'd see the results can't be fiddled. But the lie was what mattered. I pay attention an have done for years. Ideology aside, Bush and his entire crew are a criminal gang. I'd say the same thing about ANY administration that behaved as they have. Clinton committed murder when he sent cruise missiles into Baghdad in 1998 over fictional (French spy satellites saw no troops) Iraqi troop movements in the Saudi border....all to get the heat off over Lewinski. Clinton should have been impeached for that - not lying about a blowjob.
I can't agree. Google do most thing better than most other. I find myself using their services because they are the best I know of. They may not be the best of all services, but I don't have the time to test, in depth, all services.
Hypocrisy is the core of their thinking. They aren't ashamed of it. They say anything that needs to be said to get their way. They will end you and our kids to die to save their reputations. They are the lowest of the low - taking advantage of those who trusted them. They have even taken their lives. Pigs.
Just one more ground for impeaching Bush & Cheney. They should have been removed from ofice 4 years ago for lying about WMD in Iraq....but better late than justice NEVER being seen. If they are both gone, they can't pardon themselves.
Then any benefit from sequestration is lost and you're just burning carbon. Vast areas would have to be given over to weeds and then industrially harvested. The fuel used to harvest it may equal the energy the area harvested produces. ow many litres of fuel would you need to harvest enough plants to generate just that amount, never mind a surplus? All that could be said for it is that it is renewable. Perhaps pointlessly so if it doesn't produce enough to generate a surplus.
I don't expect Gore to mount a global campaign on a bicycle wearing Hush Puppies. If he needs a jet and 5 cars to be effective, I have no issues with that. As for population, I wondered if the reaction to suggesting people have fewer children in the future would be equated to Nazis and genicode and unfortunately, you won that prize. People in wealthy countries are ALREADY having fewer children. If it were not for immigration, populations would already be falling. There is no need to do anything but let nature takes its course. We are already moving to "correct" our own over population. The 30 years of research on this globally show that once people are lifted from abject poverty, they - by choice - limit their productivity and populations bombs stop ticking. No nazis. No genocide. Just happy people with the resources to ensure they two kids they have will survive so they don't have to have 6 to ensure two survive.
I agree completely. Biofuels aren't the answer to anything except inquiries into how to make food as expensive as oil and forests into watelands. Gore is sincere and appropriate in being concerned about global warming. Biofuels was just one of the many "solutions" put forward. It had the backing of corporate anxious to make corn for SUVs in stead of cows....and make a LOT more money. But the real answer is lower fuel consumption per capita now and fewer people later.
I think that ANY sort of "bio-fuel" is merely going to highlight how overly numerous we all are. People have been warning about the dangers of biofuels to food supplies and / or forest for years. The people not hearing these warnings either weren't paying attention yet or they didn't want to know the risks. The former is honest, the latter isn't. "Cellulose" ethanal? From what? Trees? Good-bye forests. Sugar Cane? Good-bye food (again). There really is only one answer: use less fuel in the short term and have fewer people living on Earth in the longer term.
Did he write that or is that just some journo's way of describing him?
The desktop costs to much to win and generates too little revenue. MOre likely the future of the client is seen as being "thin" anyway. So why invest in the past? Having said that, I'd being using linux exclusively on the desktop (as I did for 5 years) if Linux supported a good range of video cameras / devices AND included an editing application for composing videos that was akin to Windows Movie Maker....simple as that is. I have yet to see anything of that standard that doesn't segfault immediately. Cinelerra didn't segfault, but I couldn't see how to use it and there were no docs. What I did attempt screwed up the sound so badly amost immediately there was no point carrying on. Blah blah. So now I use Windows most of the time as my client. I'd like to buy an Apple when I get some spare cash. I have some Linux desktops here....but they can't do video so they get used as Internet access systems by the kids or whoever. For what it's worth. Xandros 4.1 Professional is STILL one of the est Linux desktops out there despite being over 2 years old. Ubuntu is still trying to match it...but the move to the SMP kernel-only on Ubuntu renders it uninstallable on my systems due to my wifi cards having only Uni-kernel driver support. Blah blah.
NVidia's top video adapters got so expensive where I live that they rivaled the cost of an entire new PC. If the CPU-GPU hybrids are "good enough", then there won't be much market left for a premium product.
Introduce data charging. People who want to download hundred of GBs of data can pay for it. If they only really do some e-mail and a bit of surfing....they will pay almost nothing. In New Zealand, we have data charging. I pay for 15GB / month and an additional $10 for each extra 5GB. Performance is excellent. I get what I pay for.
In so far as the relationship is between the bank and the customer and the bank has NO control over the state of the customer's computer, the liability for client-side security faults can ONLY lie with the customer. Having said that, the customer also has a relationship to the vendors who leave them exposed to any risk. An operating system that cannot safely be connected to the Internet without 3rd-party software being added should only be sold with that, and any other caveats, clearly stated or risk being sued for improperly representing their product as "fit for purpose" (Internet use) when it clearly isn't.
Carly won the infighting in the HP / Compaq merger. But since then she's shown she doesn't know how to run a company that makes stuff people want and happy they bought it where they did. Many CEOs don't "get" the customer thing. They are too far removed from the people who ultimately pay hard-earned cash for their stuff. Instead, they talk to the CFO every day for an hour and fly-by-spreadsheet and it measures the gap or not between performance and the quarterly targets. Driving by such indicators is like driving by the rear-vision mirror. You're looking back, not forward.