"Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine."
and:
"David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale [...] said his own family's computer became so badly infected that he bought a new one this week."
I could understand that your average computer user might throw away their computer after messing it up, but a guy with a Ph.D. in computer science and a professor of computer science at Yale? WTF?
Secondly, WTF is a computer scientist doing with a Dell computer, anyway?
Thirdly, WTF is a computer scientist doing running Windows?
Finally, the title of the article is "Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster."
Do you see anything wrong with that? Corrupted is a verb, corrupt is an adjective. Geez! That must have been John Markoff's doing:)
I believe that nothing is fundamentally wrong with Unix.
Unix is an operating system designed to work best for certain computing applications, and it works very well in that respect.
Unix is not meant to be an office desktop operating system, so any complaints about how it compares to Windows or OS X are irrelevant. Not all operating systems were created for, or are used for, the same reason.
In addition, I also believe that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Windows or OS X, either. They were all designed with different things in mind with varying priorities; and, for the most part, they all do well at what they were designed for.
Of course, all operating systems have bugs, glitches, various problems, and things that could be improved upon, but that does not make them wrong or broken.
If you have a pretty sticker on the front of your computer that says "Intel inside," "AMD Athlon XP," or whatever, and you can click a button corresponding to that, then you know enough to optimize your binaries;)
Just last weekend I set up distcc via cygwin on 3 PCs to help my Gentoo box compile. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to successfully compile the cross compiler under cygwin, so I used a pre-built version, available under the Gentoo forums thread linked below. It seems to work well so far, although the Windows boxes are definitely slower than equivalent Linux boxes. But as they are not my computers to begin with, I won't be complaining anytime soon;)
Gentoo has a HOWTO entitled: "HOWTO: Use a Windows box as a distcc server for linux."
What about those talking picture frames you can get at Radio Shack? Those should be pretty cheap. You could easily wire them up to an AC outlet (with a DC adapter) for constant power, a nice big play button and some cheap mono headphones. It should be easy enough to record from a CD player or computer on to one of those. The only problems would be the length of recording time and you might need to amplify the signal. This might be better suited for small sound clips rather than a few minutes of playback, but still a pretty cheap way to go about the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, WTF is a computer scientist doing with a Dell computer, anyway?
Thirdly, WTF is a computer scientist doing running Windows?
Finally, the title of the article is "Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster."
Do you see anything wrong with that? Corrupted is a verb, corrupt is an adjective. Geez! That must have been John Markoff's doing
I believe that nothing is fundamentally wrong with Unix. Unix is an operating system designed to work best for certain computing applications, and it works very well in that respect.
Unix is not meant to be an office desktop operating system, so any complaints about how it compares to Windows or OS X are irrelevant. Not all operating systems were created for, or are used for, the same reason.
In addition, I also believe that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Windows or OS X, either. They were all designed with different things in mind with varying priorities; and, for the most part, they all do well at what they were designed for. Of course, all operating systems have bugs, glitches, various problems, and things that could be improved upon, but that does not make them wrong or broken.
If you have a pretty sticker on the front of your computer that says "Intel inside," "AMD Athlon XP," or whatever, and you can click a button corresponding to that, then you know enough to optimize your binaries ;)
Just last weekend I set up distcc via cygwin on 3 PCs to help my Gentoo box compile. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to successfully compile the cross compiler under cygwin, so I used a pre-built version, available under the Gentoo forums thread linked below. It seems to work well so far, although the Windows boxes are definitely slower than equivalent Linux boxes. But as they are not my computers to begin with, I won't be complaining anytime soon ;)
Gentoo has a HOWTO entitled:
"HOWTO: Use a Windows box as a distcc server for linux."
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=66930
What about those talking picture frames you can get at Radio Shack? Those should be pretty cheap. You could easily wire them up to an AC outlet (with a DC adapter) for constant power, a nice big play button and some cheap mono headphones. It should be easy enough to record from a CD player or computer on to one of those. The only problems would be the length of recording time and you might need to amplify the signal. This might be better suited for small sound clips rather than a few minutes of playback, but still a pretty cheap way to go about the problem.