I know in some areas, this isn't as true, but in my area, at least, I can wander five or ten miles, and find at least one, and quite often more, unsecured wireless APs.
Why do we need 40 mile, line of sight, ~14.4 Kbit, again? The lowest speed that most wireless connections claim to stably connect at is 1 MBit...
[I base this not on wandering my immediate vicinity, incidentally, but sitting in a car driven by one of my mates, riding around the vast majority of the counties surrounding me. There were perhaps three or four times I saw no wireless APs...and at one point, as many as 21 simultaneously! 14.4 Kbit indeed...]
However, my experiences with OpenOffice have been negative...AbiWord as compared to the OO equivalent...but then, it does an entire suite of material is also impressive.
I admit, my comment was more than a little irreverent, and also a bit misinformed. Nevertheless, I must point out, the entire matter will depend on what licensing they use...as I said, a license incompatible with most OpenSource licenses.
1) Open Source
2) ????
3) Profit!
First Microsoft, now Sun. I never thought I'd see the day I had to compare Sun to Microsoft, in terms of gimmick...but it seems that I was wrong.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, incidentally. Unfortunately, most companies are too pigheaded to realize that, while open sourcing a project costs little and can reap great benefits, there's a difference between, let's say, a proprietary crap license that doesn't allow integration with other OSS, and a BSD or GPL variant.
Microsoft's stance on the GPL, for any who were unaware: "The GPL's viral nature poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization that derives its products from GPL source..."
- Craig Mundie,
"senior vice president of advanced strategies at Microsoft"
Source
As people become more accustomed to using computers, they become less patient.
As people become less patient, they become less likely to want to wait for the loading of such bandwidth intensive sites as, oh, say, Slashdot.
As people become less patient, they become more willing to pay for broadband, and be able to browse at speeds that will amaze them.
Also, file sizes have increased, and so gamers are increasing their pipes to compensate. For those of us, myself included, who have not seen the World of Warcraft beta...that's two gigabytes, downloaded over your internet connection.
Finally, I must point out...BitTorrent really became popular in 2003, as is evidenced by WoW using it as a distribution method.
Small wonder, then, that broadband is increasingly becoming a necessity.
No. That is proof that you are a disturbed individual, and need to seek therapy, possibly in the form of fighting crime while wearing spandex with a clichéd name.
But am I wrong in thinking that some craft which travel between the surface of Earth and some other body should be able to endure a few appropriately-scaled "dents"?
If the shuttles are meant to travel through the atmosphere a minimum of two times, and possibly more for a few, I should hope they can survive a little thing like a natural disaster.
After all, if the US space program can be destroyed by a little thing like a hurricane, I shudder to think what an extraterrestrial disaster would do to us.
You want us to pay $4200 for a system which, not only is overloaded with shiny blinkenlights, but is also overclocked, and so not guaranteed to be completely stable? And you expect us to run Windows on it!?
...the sad part is, people will buy it. People bought Windows ME, after all.
1) A lot of programs have terrible fonts if you don't take the time to set them up. If you're using a binary distro, such as RedHat or Debian, that's not the browser's fault, but the distro's.
If you're using Gentoo, toy with the make flags. Otherwise, build from source manually. =)
2) Konqueror is fast because it's not as compliant as Firefox. I've seen several sites display as crap in Konq, and run perfectly in Firefox. In addition, GMail doesn't support Konq yet because they don't see a need to, IMO [Firefox runs perfectly on any OS, and IE/Safari are the primary browsers of most users of the respective OSes, so why support Konqueror?].
3) That's your own problem, not Firefox's. I've never had that problem, and I've run Firefox on my Linux boxen for almost a year now...under whatever name it was at the time. =)
Slashdot Mirror
So first, I can't have sex, because there's no such thing as safe sex.
...and with that, I hide.
Now I can get a virus from downloading porn!?
Next you'll be telling me that I can't watch VHS tapes, because they'll inject malicious things into my proprietary bits.
I know in some areas, this isn't as true, but in my area, at least, I can wander five or ten miles, and find at least one, and quite often more, unsecured wireless APs.
Why do we need 40 mile, line of sight, ~14.4 Kbit, again? The lowest speed that most wireless connections claim to stably connect at is 1 MBit...
[I base this not on wandering my immediate vicinity, incidentally, but sitting in a car driven by one of my mates, riding around the vast majority of the counties surrounding me. There were perhaps three or four times I saw no wireless APs...and at one point, as many as 21 simultaneously! 14.4 Kbit indeed...]
Granted.
However, my experiences with OpenOffice have been negative...AbiWord as compared to the OO equivalent...but then, it does an entire suite of material is also impressive.
I admit, my comment was more than a little irreverent, and also a bit misinformed. Nevertheless, I must point out, the entire matter will depend on what licensing they use...as I said, a license incompatible with most OpenSource licenses.
1) Open Source 2) ???? 3) Profit! First Microsoft, now Sun. I never thought I'd see the day I had to compare Sun to Microsoft, in terms of gimmick...but it seems that I was wrong. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, incidentally. Unfortunately, most companies are too pigheaded to realize that, while open sourcing a project costs little and can reap great benefits, there's a difference between, let's say, a proprietary crap license that doesn't allow integration with other OSS, and a BSD or GPL variant. Microsoft's stance on the GPL, for any who were unaware: "The GPL's viral nature poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization that derives its products from GPL source..." - Craig Mundie, "senior vice president of advanced strategies at Microsoft" Source
As people become more accustomed to using computers, they become less patient.
As people become less patient, they become less likely to want to wait for the loading of such bandwidth intensive sites as, oh, say, Slashdot.
As people become less patient, they become more willing to pay for broadband, and be able to browse at speeds that will amaze them.
Also, file sizes have increased, and so gamers are increasing their pipes to compensate. For those of us, myself included, who have not seen the World of Warcraft beta...that's two gigabytes, downloaded over your internet connection.
Finally, I must point out...BitTorrent really became popular in 2003, as is evidenced by WoW using it as a distribution method.
Small wonder, then, that broadband is increasingly becoming a necessity.
Yes. Yes they do.
Go compare RedHat to Gentoo to Knoppix to Mandrake.
No, no. I don't pay for porn. I'm not stupid.
Next you'll be telling me I'm a Windows user. =P
Now, instead of only worrying that we'll get crappy porn, we have to worry about having our money stolen, and NOT getting crappy porn!
Just find A) a broken cheap NES on eBay or locally, or B) a cheap NES extension cord.
Hack it apart, pull out the NES controller in port.
Throw the USB device on the end.
No. No it does not.
Read StepMania's compatibility list.
I have personal proof of this, as I spent nigh-two hours trying to get it to do so on one occasion.
No. That is proof that you are a disturbed individual, and need to seek therapy, possibly in the form of fighting crime while wearing spandex with a clichéd name.
Indeed.
But am I wrong in thinking that some craft which travel between the surface of Earth and some other body should be able to endure a few appropriately-scaled "dents"?
Indeed...
But by the same token, something which can enter the atmosphere at a decent rate of speed should be able to withstand at least a mild impact.
If they can't, then we have a few problems to resolve before attempting to make space travel a bit more commonplace, now don't we?
If the shuttles are meant to travel through the atmosphere a minimum of two times, and possibly more for a few, I should hope they can survive a little thing like a natural disaster. After all, if the US space program can be destroyed by a little thing like a hurricane, I shudder to think what an extraterrestrial disaster would do to us.
You want us to pay $4200 for a system which, not only is overloaded with shiny blinkenlights, but is also overclocked, and so not guaranteed to be completely stable? And you expect us to run Windows on it!?
...the sad part is, people will buy it. People bought Windows ME, after all.
1) A lot of programs have terrible fonts if you don't take the time to set them up. If you're using a binary distro, such as RedHat or Debian, that's not the browser's fault, but the distro's. If you're using Gentoo, toy with the make flags. Otherwise, build from source manually. =) 2) Konqueror is fast because it's not as compliant as Firefox. I've seen several sites display as crap in Konq, and run perfectly in Firefox. In addition, GMail doesn't support Konq yet because they don't see a need to, IMO [Firefox runs perfectly on any OS, and IE/Safari are the primary browsers of most users of the respective OSes, so why support Konqueror?]. 3) That's your own problem, not Firefox's. I've never had that problem, and I've run Firefox on my Linux boxen for almost a year now...under whatever name it was at the time. =)
You can observe realtime audio and video over a 14K connection... Just find someone to stream you a 2x2 video stream and a VBR MP3. =)