So in the same day we have a High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment used by NASA to power an extraterrestrial vehicle yet no time for "science projects" in the government.
But I guess since the HiRISE isn't being used on Earth that their may not necessarily be a disparity here after all. Either that or there's an ostensible difference between "project" and "experiment" that I'm missing.
Although I applaud their effort to showcase less prominent linux software, they could have worked off of an existing linux software database: gentoo-portage.com. It doesn't have the "package-a-day" feature, but it does have short descriptions for each package and uses a wiki-style CMS in that it allows users to upload screenshots related to a given application. Also, the gentoo package repository is more diverse than that of debian's (owing to its package management system being source-based), so I'm sure most of the debian packages are already there.
Ultimately, I feel this serves its function well as a feature that sheds light on the more obscure, but not necessarily less useful, programs.
Unfortunately, the "he must be compensating for something" argument doesn't apply here (in fact, it would apply in the complete opposite situation), otherwise I'd have been all over that.
I suppose I'll have to go with a firm, yet warranted, "you know what they say about guys that write small operating systems..."
I think you're missing the point, though. If you really wanted a "green" PC, you wouldn't waste energy on unnecessary graphics processing at all, especially for something that's used as often as the OS GUI, regardless of whether it takes place at the CPU or GPU level. I'm not saying you shouldn't use a GUI at all, because that would defeat the purpose of trying to find a nice compromise between usability and minimizing power consumption.
I believe that if you really cared about making the "green" PC, a very relevant optimization would probably be "upgrading" to XP or *nix. Using Vista in any power-saving scenario seems akin to using deodorant to smell good but not showering.
Man, this is awesome. If only other kernels had developed some way utilizing the full amount of physical memory for caching purposes nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it could also "swap" the cached portions of memory out to free up space as needed.
Maybe one day we can expect modern operating systems to have had these features for a while and not require a change of pants whenever they are implemented. But then, I guess people will always be excited by the incorporation of old features into modern operating systems if their expectations are kept low.
After reading just the title of TFA, I chuckled because I was actually seeing the opposite trend occurring: as people become more dependent on computers to perform their tasks and are lulled into a sense of comfort, they focus less and less about what actually happens and instead just care that it gets done. This is the trend I've seen in my particular industry, at least. Much of the code I have to write is there to accommodate for those that may need help to get through the application.
The breed to which the parent is referring is always worse to have to deal with than those that don't know what they're doing, anyway. Curiosity is great if you're working on your own equipment, but combine that with enterprise-level necessities (uptime, redundancy, etc.) and unchecked hubris and you've got an implosion just waiting to happen. At least with the tech-illiterate, they don't fiddle around with something enough to break it, and certainly don't ask for any unwarranted superuser privileges.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any printer drivers. The rest of the stuff seems fairly straight-forward to get, but printer drivers I think have been the bane of everyone's upgrade experience since Windows 98 or earlier. Thank goodness for hplip. However, that won't help me much when I start getting friends and family asking me to upgrade their computers to Vista despite all my year-old warnings. That'll be my cue to sit back smugly and laugh at them.
In any event, I'm sure there are many that will find this aggregation useful.
Sorry to beat a dead horse but maybe we should stop putting the responsibility of what children see on the government, the networks, the cable companies, or even the hardware manufacturers. Parents complain to the FCC whenever they think that their child may have viewed something offensive on television, but the corporations shouldn't be responsible for playing the parent.
The onus is and has always been on the parents to ensure that what their children view is appropriate, and this varies by culture. For example, Europeans tend to have a much more liberal view of nudity than we do here in the US.
Placing the blame elsewhere is just a form of scapegoating, akin to blaming a school because a child fell off the monkeybars instead of whoever was supposed to be watching.
I've been using nspluginwrapper in my 64-bit firefox (compiled, using gentoo) for months now and, the first release notwithstanding, it has been completely stable. I suggest you give it a shot. It even enables your current 32-bit plugins for you on install (at least on gentoo)!
Unfortunately, having worked in a biomedical research lab, government funding is crucial in keeping that research going. Sure, you can refuse it but that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. I've seen many brilliant researchers with very promising research topics run out of the facility because of lack of funding, and it's surely one of the most, if not the most, crucial aspects to running a lab.
Refusing to apply on principle is not anything any sane scientist would do. Government-based funding is already difficult to obtain, especially without the proper connections, but not applying in the first place is completely impractical. Even if a lab ran solely on non-Windows based computers, dropping $200 on an old Windows-based PC just for this function would be a no-brainer.
And yes, I think this is a lousy idea on the part of a government that has already concluded that Microsoft has a monopoly. *golfclap*
That aluminum-covered wallet gives me an idea: why don't I just cover my passport in aluminum foil? It's safe, doesn't entail any permanent changes to the passport (such as breaking the chip), and it'll match perfectly with my tinfoil hat! Brilliant!
If this is true, Microsoft is making a huge mistake offering no less than *six* different versions of Windows Vista. That is actually about the number of popular Linux distros tarketing the desktop.
Except that the differences in the different versions of Vista are minimal compared to those between various Linux distributions. The Vista editions are ranked, too, such that that the more you pay for the more features you're given -- while all the software is handled identically and there really isn't much of a difference ostensibly to the end user. Between distributions (let's assume for the sake of argument that they're free, although there are some that aren't), the differences lie in preferences -- desktop environment, package management system, themes, default installed software, etc.
Saying that the different editions of Vista offer a real "choice" to the user is undermining the meaning of choice. "Choice" in this case really comes down to how much money you want to fork over.
One of the big boys is going to come a 'callin: MS, Apple, or IBM. Good-bye "Reiser FS", hello "insert MarketingSpeak here" (I'm thinking someting inoffensive and corporate, like "YouFS" or "MSRULZ4VR").
If Apple bought it, it would most certainly be called iFS.
It's both, see the other comment above this. And also, because it's a pseudo-initialism, it doesn't actually stand for anything, which is a requisite for an acronym. If you really wanna get specific, it's an orphan acronym.
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So in the same day we have a High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment used by NASA to power an extraterrestrial vehicle yet no time for "science projects" in the government.
But I guess since the HiRISE isn't being used on Earth that their may not necessarily be a disparity here after all. Either that or there's an ostensible difference between "project" and "experiment" that I'm missing.
My head hurts.
Although I applaud their effort to showcase less prominent linux software, they could have worked off of an existing linux software database: gentoo-portage.com. It doesn't have the "package-a-day" feature, but it does have short descriptions for each package and uses a wiki-style CMS in that it allows users to upload screenshots related to a given application. Also, the gentoo package repository is more diverse than that of debian's (owing to its package management system being source-based), so I'm sure most of the debian packages are already there.
Ultimately, I feel this serves its function well as a feature that sheds light on the more obscure, but not necessarily less useful, programs.
Unfortunately, the "he must be compensating for something" argument doesn't apply here (in fact, it would apply in the complete opposite situation), otherwise I'd have been all over that.
I suppose I'll have to go with a firm, yet warranted, "you know what they say about guys that write small operating systems..."
I'll be here all night, folks.
I think you're missing the point, though. If you really wanted a "green" PC, you wouldn't waste energy on unnecessary graphics processing at all, especially for something that's used as often as the OS GUI, regardless of whether it takes place at the CPU or GPU level. I'm not saying you shouldn't use a GUI at all, because that would defeat the purpose of trying to find a nice compromise between usability and minimizing power consumption.
I believe that if you really cared about making the "green" PC, a very relevant optimization would probably be "upgrading" to XP or *nix. Using Vista in any power-saving scenario seems akin to using deodorant to smell good but not showering.
Man, this is awesome. If only other kernels had developed some way utilizing the full amount of physical memory for caching purposes nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it could also "swap" the cached portions of memory out to free up space as needed.
Maybe one day we can expect modern operating systems to have had these features for a while and not require a change of pants whenever they are implemented. But then, I guess people will always be excited by the incorporation of old features into modern operating systems if their expectations are kept low.
Clearly Microsoft is trying scare tactics with Vista sales floundering and piracy apparently not an adequate scapegoat.
As for Novell, I'm not really sure what to take from this because despite its "alliance" with Microsoft, it's still trying to take something from it.
See this article for more.
After reading just the title of TFA, I chuckled because I was actually seeing the opposite trend occurring: as people become more dependent on computers to perform their tasks and are lulled into a sense of comfort, they focus less and less about what actually happens and instead just care that it gets done. This is the trend I've seen in my particular industry, at least. Much of the code I have to write is there to accommodate for those that may need help to get through the application.
The breed to which the parent is referring is always worse to have to deal with than those that don't know what they're doing, anyway. Curiosity is great if you're working on your own equipment, but combine that with enterprise-level necessities (uptime, redundancy, etc.) and unchecked hubris and you've got an implosion just waiting to happen. At least with the tech-illiterate, they don't fiddle around with something enough to break it, and certainly don't ask for any unwarranted superuser privileges.
This is great news! I'll be sure to put it on pre-order in 2009.
Or I could wait for some 12-year old in Russia to offer to sell it to me. I hear it comes with some pills to increase my m4nh00|).
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any printer drivers. The rest of the stuff seems fairly straight-forward to get, but printer drivers I think have been the bane of everyone's upgrade experience since Windows 98 or earlier. Thank goodness for hplip. However, that won't help me much when I start getting friends and family asking me to upgrade their computers to Vista despite all my year-old warnings. That'll be my cue to sit back smugly and laugh at them.
In any event, I'm sure there are many that will find this aggregation useful.
Sorry to beat a dead horse but maybe we should stop putting the responsibility of what children see on the government, the networks, the cable companies, or even the hardware manufacturers. Parents complain to the FCC whenever they think that their child may have viewed something offensive on television, but the corporations shouldn't be responsible for playing the parent.
The onus is and has always been on the parents to ensure that what their children view is appropriate, and this varies by culture. For example, Europeans tend to have a much more liberal view of nudity than we do here in the US.
Placing the blame elsewhere is just a form of scapegoating, akin to blaming a school because a child fell off the monkeybars instead of whoever was supposed to be watching.
/endrant
However, I don't trust boxes. The first box I opened had Justin Timberlake inside I'm still paying child support to the second box.
No pun intended?
Uh oh...
Better start masturbating before they get the rest of our eyes...
Great, we just got Mini-me to stop humping the laser. Now we have to get him off the rail gun, too?
I'm gonna need some crackers...
I've been using nspluginwrapper in my 64-bit firefox (compiled, using gentoo) for months now and, the first release notwithstanding, it has been completely stable. I suggest you give it a shot. It even enables your current 32-bit plugins for you on install (at least on gentoo)!
Unfortunately, having worked in a biomedical research lab, government funding is crucial in keeping that research going. Sure, you can refuse it but that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. I've seen many brilliant researchers with very promising research topics run out of the facility because of lack of funding, and it's surely one of the most, if not the most, crucial aspects to running a lab.
Refusing to apply on principle is not anything any sane scientist would do. Government-based funding is already difficult to obtain, especially without the proper connections, but not applying in the first place is completely impractical. Even if a lab ran solely on non-Windows based computers, dropping $200 on an old Windows-based PC just for this function would be a no-brainer.
And yes, I think this is a lousy idea on the part of a government that has already concluded that Microsoft has a monopoly.
*golfclap*
Conversely, although my work isn't all too exciting (standard web application development), one of the main reasons I stay is because of my boss.
We already have robots in our internet tubes! Sometimes, though, it's not for the best, damn googlebot!
That aluminum-covered wallet gives me an idea: why don't I just cover my passport in aluminum foil? It's safe, doesn't entail any permanent changes to the passport (such as breaking the chip), and it'll match perfectly with my tinfoil hat! Brilliant!
(BTW, that's not sarcasm)
Except that the differences in the different versions of Vista are minimal compared to those between various Linux distributions. The Vista editions are ranked, too, such that that the more you pay for the more features you're given -- while all the software is handled identically and there really isn't much of a difference ostensibly to the end user. Between distributions (let's assume for the sake of argument that they're free, although there are some that aren't), the differences lie in preferences -- desktop environment, package management system, themes, default installed software, etc.
Saying that the different editions of Vista offer a real "choice" to the user is undermining the meaning of choice. "Choice" in this case really comes down to how much money you want to fork over.
...or iFS, but that would probably bring a lawsuit from Apple or Linksys (although most likely the former)...
If Apple bought it, it would most certainly be called iFS.
IBM already has a filesystem, so maybe IFS?.
And no one cares about Microsoft.
There's a kick to the face that totally caught me off-guard (my apologies for the redundancy, but I believe it was necessary).
If I had modpoints, you'd get +1 insightful.
It's both, see the other comment above this. And also, because it's a pseudo-initialism, it doesn't actually stand for anything, which is a requisite for an acronym. If you really wanna get specific, it's an orphan acronym.