Some of us Linux users aren't adverse to paying for products, you know - if Microsoft made Office for Linux, it would have been them who got my cash rather than CodeWeavers (yeah yeah, I like MSOffice - trolls telling me to switch to OOo will be ignored).
I understand the point about them wanting to concentrate on Windows, but remember Office is their bread and butter - charge marginally more for Office on Linux than Windows (on the grounds of, say, having to develop for Qt and GTK, for example) and they wouldn't lose too much through any businesses switching to Linux, and they'd gain the dollars of people like me who are home Linux users who happen to like MSOffice.
(P.S. if you don't think that's much of a chunk of cash, the home Linux market, remember that running Office on Linux is - probably, I'm just taking an educated guess here - CodeWeavers' bread and butter - a far smaller company, granted, but proof that there's a market for it)
It seems to me that the RIAA is only the enemy because they are the face of the body which has made it inconvenient to steal music
Lies.
I am one of the most anti-RIAA people you could find, I despise the whole concept of their business model, suing people for downloading music - especially children - for thousands of dollars, literally thousands of times the amount the person would have paid for the content had they bought it, while at the same time overpricing physical content (CDs, etc) and trying to force digital outlets (iTunes, for example) to do the same. Not to mention their attempts to 'sanitize' American radio (boy am I glad I dont live over there) so you can always find 500 different stations playing the same 10 pop tracks in rotation. That is why I hate the RIAA; they are destroying creativity and showing a complete lack of morals or decency. I understand their members have a responsibility to maximise profit for the shareholders, but if they win this case, how much are they going to get? a few thousand? What's that compared to the PR damage caused by suing a 14-year-old girl? If I was a shareholder in an RIAA member company I'd be screaming at them right now to stop making themselves out to be the Devil and go back to suing people who are at an age to know exactly what they're doing (yeah yeah, at 14 some kids do, some kids don't - but at 14 you *should* give them the benefit of the doubt, not sue them for thousands).
I don't hate the RIAA because they make it 'inconvenient to steal music', simply because I have no interest in 'stealing' (I dont care about the supposed definitions, semantics is an argument you can take up with some other poor Slashdotter) any of their music - it's crap, pure and simple, commercial crap. I'm a fan of European EBM, not a particularly profitable genre, especially not for American labels, and so even if I did download the content (I don't, I buy - the artists are generally part-time and need the support, and I feel good giving it if they deserve it) I could do so without RIAA interference - I don't think I've bought an RIAA-member-label CD in the past five years, let alone downloaded any of it.
If you like dark, gothic electronica or metal, try out European EBM - it's electronic stuff, but it's mostly RIAA-free, sounds good and is made by artists not looking for the current breakup-rock dollar, so, you know, you can tell one band from another:) - check out Wumpscut, Wolfsheim, Alec Empire, Panic DHH, VNV Nation and just check it out. There's really some untapped gems in there.
The RIAA members piss me off for a number of reasons,
- Their content is repetitive crud.
- They seem bent on spreading that content to drown out everything else in earshot.
- They overprice their content and try to force distributors to raise prices to increase their cut like record profits aren't good enough for them.
- They sue small children for thousands of dollars for stealing a few songs.
*Not* because they 'make it inconvenient to steal.
I have a new suing model for the RIAA, I wonder what they'd think;
I agree that people should be fined a few hundred dollars or 3 or 4 times the retail cost of what they downloaded, whichever is (get this) higher, but no more. This would hit the serious pirates (sharing thousands of songs/albums) hard and give the minor downloaders a smack on the wrist that, if they kept doing it week after week, would lead to serious expense and make it a lot cheaper for them to just buy the content.
Would they accept that? No, it's far too sensible:)
For example, we liked Batman Begins, so why did it get hit by the slump, too? And while Star Wars episode 6, err 3, was more critically acclaimed than the previous two, should it really have been the movie to not get hit by the slump, if quality is the reason for said slump?
Because it's not quality of *individual movies* that counts, it's quality *overall*. Yeah, Batman Begins was a good film, but all the films released around it were crap, and people had been trained to expect that all movies were crap - especially Batman ones - after the last two. Same with Star Wars; Yeah it might have been a good movie, but the thing is, when the previous two were crap, people are going to expect the third one to be crap - and again, all the other movies released at the time were crap.
There's the occasional gem in the huge pile of crap Hollywood is churning out, but people can't be bothered paying out for every single crap movie at the box office just to find the one shining gem of celluloid glory, and that's the reason for the slump. As the chances of any given movie you choose to see being a stinker go up, the people willing to take that chance goes down. That's the reason for the slump affecting even the occasional gem of a movie.
iPod Nano found to be as scratchable as all previous generations! President Bush will be addressing the nation on this crisis within the hour!
Seriously, these things have scratched if you looked at them funny since the first generation regular iPod, it's what they do.
Move along people, nothing to see here.
Interesting Concept..
on
YahooTV
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This looks to be an interesting concept for Yahoo, and maybe an admission that they've lost the just-plain-search battle with Google (that said, I'm a big fan of http://search.yahoo.com/, Google-like interface with Yahoo's faster-updated index - and they don't seem to index half the link-farm 'blogs', not that I've seen how well the Google Blog Search will filter those out of the mainstream search engine) and are moving into being the web's first site-based multimedia provider - browse the index, click the show you want and watch it, full-screen streaming.
Yahoo has always been the type to move towards multimedia content such as this, with their emphasis on cramming everything into one page versus Google's 'just search, but if you poke around we do other things too' mentality. (not criticising either one, they both clearly work well as both have produced highly profitable companies) The bandwidth for doing something like a site supplying news broadcasts and other traditionally TV-based media - and have it watchable for most normal people - is almost here, and if Yahoo manages to get on the bandwagon early and build up their range between now and the time when Joe Average has the bandwidth to have good-quality full-screen video, they could get the jump on Google to provide, like Braun suggests, things like news broadcasts, and maybe sports shows and other TV shows besides - like the DRM'ed download system the BBC suggested for their site a while back, only with streaming video rather than downloading - a system that, with the proper protections, will be easier to swallow for the content providers - the media conglomerates - too.
Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems, said that the personal computer is increasingly becoming a relic. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones."
Through their mobile phones? How big are these mobile phones going to be, because I don't know about Schwartzy-boy here, but I really don't like reading my web content on a screen an inch or so across - I cant have the text the size I like and fit a reasonable amount of information on the screen at one time, it just doesn't work - I don't like having to scroll so much just to read a 160-character text message, God only knows what I'd have to do to read, say, this article through a mobile - I'd wear out whatever button passes for 'Down' on my mobile about halfway through.
As for web services becoming important, isn't this what networking and networked-computing based companies have been screaming about since the birth of the internet? It's never worked because people don't like the idea of entrusting important data to some anonymous server somewhere on the internet - I'm quite happy to leave email from my friends on GMail, as it's really no bother to me if Google suddenly goes under, I just won't be able to go on a nostalgia trip of reading conversations I had about that movie we watched two years ago while drunk out of our minds. That doesn't bother me. However, I would have an issue with entrusting Google (or any other online service, but Google seems most likely to trial a service like Mr. Schwartz is suggesting) with my financial accounts, legal documents and research papers - it's an entirely seperate situation, and it's the failure of people like Schwartz to see this - or the fact they seem to be blindly ignoring it - that means companies keep throwing millions of dollars at 'Networked Computing' and 'PC as a Portal' systems and always coming out on the other side a few million dollars lighter and absolutely no wiser.
People do not want this from their computers, they want it to act as something where they can store the data in their own home - think of it like a digital filing cabinet you can lock up and secure in the corner of your living room; a filing cabinet that you own, where you own what's on it, and you are personally responsible for it's safety rather than entrusting it to some corporate entity's maybe-temperamental servers. That's a function of the PC that 'Web Services' will never replace, and one of the main reasons thin-client systems, of any sort, will never take off outside the business world - doing work for my employer, all my work is for the company and thus I save it to the central server and after that it's their responsibility to look after it - if they trash their network that's their problem, not mine, and I've lost absolutely nothing. At home, I want to look after my own data, as if I put it all somewhere on the internet, I've lost absolutely everything..
his isn't just a geek thing, my mother pretty much has the same approach - it was her who coined the 'digital filing cabinet' paradigm to me. People just arent willing to extend that level of trust with important documents. The other issues - bandwidth, etc - have mostly been dealt with, but this one will always remain, as there is no solution that I can see that would appease people of this mindset - and there are a lot of them, there will always be a huge market for a 'digital filing cabinet' - that would still include moving them over to thin-clients of in any way making the PC a 'relic'.
I think Mr. Schwartz is just nervously, perhaps desperately, flinging out press releases in a bid to convince someone - anyone - to buy up SunRays and other networked-computing Sun equipment before they go belly-up. It's a shame, as I love Sun, I love their equipment, it was always closer to raw UNIX for me than Linux, and it felt good somehow to be using the OS that ran the biggest of th
Slashdot: Computer News for People New to Computers
Ever think there are different levels of geekdom? I'm a music geek first and foremost, and a computer geek second. I didn't know what Fink was, yet I've been a Linux user and casual Sourceforge browser for nearly 3 years and an OS X user for almost a year. I found this article useful even if you didnt, just for novelty value rather than anything else.
Just because you already knew how to do something, doesn't mean everybody does. If this was a PC World 'How to Switch on your Computer' article, you might have a case, but this is a site for all geeks, not just computer geeks; all reasonably smart people - people likely to enjoy this site - should know how to turn their computer on, but not all of them are going to know about something like this, which they might find useful for any number of reasons.
Rant over. I just don't like people who assume just because something is of no interest to them, or simple to them, that it's boring or obvious to everyone else.
I liked this article, it's something I might try out when I've got a few hours to spare. You can read something else if you want.
Thank you, slashdot, for enlightening me as to this smart bit of kit. Keep it up.
We are now going to configure your eyeball to withstand Taco's gaping anus. Pin your eyelids back, Clockwork Orange style, and squeeze the eyeball into his rectum. Careful not to lose it in there! Fink to use the unstable application builds, now these wont crash all the time or anything like that it means that we will have access to newer versions of the software we will be using , specifically KDE 3.4
Opera 8 (and previous versions for as long as I've been using it) identify as MSIE 6.0 by default - I've never had any compatibility issues with Opera, maybe you have yours configured to identify as something else?
If I remember rightly, for the GTA: London game, everything bar the engine was changed - missions, cars, maps, etc - are you seriously suggesting that unless you change the underlying game engine (or even use a completely different one) it's not a different game?
I'm an avid Rockstar entheusiast, I own every single GTA game that's been released and quite a bit of the rest of their catalogue too, and I really don't see your point - they dont just change the city, they change *the entire game* apart from the engine, something that most regular gamers don't really know or care much about.
Next thing, we'll be getting posts about UFOs, crop circles, and intelligent decesion-making from Bush.
Dude, why did you have to go and Bush-bash? It's off-topic, has no place outside of the Politics section and will, sadly, get you modded up to +5, Funny.
Your post was funny, but can people please stop with the insistance on anti-Bush daftness in every single damn story? Not singlng you out, this is a chronic problem. It has to stop. If you've read this far and aren't already reaching for the -1, Troll mod, I'm a Libertarian who was as mad as the best of you when Bush won a second term, I just think those that oppose his could present themselves better than through childish sniping in completely unrelated topics of conversation.
Because if Joe Blow goes round to his cousin John Doe's house to watch a game, and is looking to buy a new computer, is Joe going to be more or less interested in Apple if John tells him OS X has been nothing but trouble on his white-box x86.
Apple's whole philosophy is "it just works" - they want to be able to control the hardware so they can be 100% sure that all their boxes work as they should without having to support every piece of hardware under the sun, especially as this would mean running into the same problems with a lack of support or hardware specs from manufacturers that Linux has over the years.
To your average man-on-the-street, all computers are the same - Apples might come with shinier boxes, but a computer is a computer - and if he sees OS X running poorly on a white-box x86, he's going to assume it's the fault of the OS.
Apple don't want that. It damages their image.
You could argue that they could, quite easily, make more money selling OS X to all and sundry than they can by guarding their 5% of the market and locking the OS to the hardware, but that's just the Apple way, and they're being successful with it. Why should they change a profitable business structure?
I saw that headline and I thought the article was going to be about the recent iBook and Mini updates (can't really call them upgrades can we?). Imagine my disapointment.
The parent is not a troll, from the outside, the comment tacked on the end about political disaster was completely unwarranted and does indeed look like a knee-jerk reaction to everyone's favourite warmongers getting new terms in office, so I can quite understand the parent's annoyance at Slashdot (a site supposed to report the news and not bias it with it's personal opinions) taking a swipe at the UK government.
An uninformed person does not a troll make.
The problem with the British political system is that, while stable, every party looks pretty much like every other party, only with slightly different reasons to hate them - in other words, people do not vote for the best, they vote for the least worst. Allow me to indulge in a non-partizan rant about the major political forces in the UK, this should give anyone else confused like the parent a little help...
Labour
Led by Tony Blair, these are they guys in power right now - Labour, traditionally, is a socialist, left-leaning party, but under the leadership of Blair it has swung very much swung hard towards the right, and have done all the awful things you've heard about on/. before, like flooding the country with CCTV, planning ID cards, etc, while the police are wholly incapable of dealing with what are essentially groups of kids. Blair, if not the party as a whole, is now very unpopular with many people, largely due to the Iraq war and the ID cards debacle - most people would like to see Blair step down and Gordon Brown take the reins, with many members of the party itself voting against him on important issues. The party, however, remains in charge because last time the other major force in UK politics was in power, they made things even worse.
The Conservatives
In the last election, led by Michael Howard, but with him stepping down it looks like Kenneth Clarke may be replacing him sooner rather than later. In my opinion it's a bad idea for them to be considering placing another unpopular figure from the last Conservative government in charge, which proved a major negative point for them during the last election. More right-wing in terms of immigration (a sensitive issue in the run-up to the election and an even more sensitive one in light of the London bombings) and promising to pull troops out of Iraq, the major factor against them is the fact that when they were in power (when Margaret Thatcher and later John Major were leaders) they very nearly crippled the country with severe mismanagement. Arguably the largest factor in their election failure, in light of the unpopularity of Blair's government, was the spectre of those old governments in the form of Michael Howard, who was Home Secretary under the former Conservative rule.
Liberal Democrats
Led by Charles Kennedy, and could be summed up as 'lacking voice'. Their PR assault during the last election boiled down to, while the other two parties slogged it out over immigration, ID cards and the War in Iraq, the Lib Dem PR machine putting out a statement that Kennedy's wife had had a baby. Even in the UK of reality TV stars being involved in supposedly serious political debate and tabloid newspapers declaring they could decide the election simply by siding with one side or the other on election day, this didn't get them the votes they needed, falling far short of their target of overtaking the Conservatives as the 2nd-largest party in Britain. Very left-wing in their views, they are disliked by many for their open-doors views on immigration, which as I previously pointed out was a sensitive issue at the time of the election, with many Britons fearing being swamped by immigrants largely from Eastern Europe. This, combined with their status as perpetual also-rans in general elections for as long as I can remember pretty much scuppered their chances of winning this election.
British National Party
Led by Nick Griffin. A media campaign against the BNP by the BBC led to Griffin's arrest under religious hatred laws
Is this a jump to appease the version-number junkies? to jump 1/2 a version number closer to IE7 or Opera 8? What is this for, because regardless of how many bugfixes they've thrown in (yeah yeah, and changes, too) it wont warrant a leap to Firefox 1.5 - coming from a self-confessed version-number chaser (posting from a Deer Park Alpha nightly I downloaded hours ago) this just smacks of WinAmp's jump from 3 to 5 just to sound like they'd 'advanced'. What happened to the old system?
(*).*.* is for rewrites or when the software reaches a seriously major milestone.
*.(*).* is for major bugfixes and changes, like this release will have.
*.*.(*) is for minor bugfixes.
Now I understand the logic of PHBs preferring 'Firefox 1.5' to 'Firefox 1.1.34g' or whatever, but it's sad to see the the old system of version numbers for categorisation seems to have descended into a battle of "look, we have teh numborz!!!".
Why not just call it Firefox 9 and get one over on MS and Opera in the number stakes?
Dude, this isn't some guy's backroom server running a site about his k00l tr1kz, this is Archive.org, who, having taken upon themselves the job of hosting such a vast amount of information and media to thousands of people everyday, you would expect to be able to withstand a Slashdotting and not go down like a $2 hooker the way they have.
I've seen sites that have links to pages that show you how to draw and quarter a human body. Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal. Should those sites get dinged as well?
Unless you draw and quarter a major company's CEO with information you found on such a site, the politicians and courts really won't care about it. This is about money, not any moral 'right'.
we'd still see posts on slashdot justifying P2P piracy because we didn't get to pick out Natalie's outfit when she showed up at our parent's basement to deliver.
I think most Slashdotters would be happy with the choice if there was a 'Hot Grits' option in the 'Natalie's Outfit' drop-down box...
Just pray to all Heaven there wouldn't be a CowboyNeal option.
This is going to get modded troll, but there are places out there that aren't going to bend over and take it quite as much as Australia, which has a government with a recent history of being America's bitch, much to the anger of regular Aussies everywhere;)
Yeah, that's really where we want to head - execution for hackers because "businesses depend on their computers"? yeah, great idea, isn't the RIAA's argument that copyright infringement costs businesses money?
With the government in the pockets of big business, the last thing we want is some NYT Op-Ed shouting his mouth off about how people should be executed for crimes against corporations' bottom lines - who knows what ideas they'll get...
I've never seen the problem of clicking 'Start' to get to the 'Shutdown' option. Everyone I've explained it to seems to understand it perfectly - mothers, grandfathers, everyone. It's not a complex thing to grasp, and isn't at all confusing, really.
Now I know it's something of a Slashdot meme to make this joke about the 'Start' button in any thread vaguely related to Windows, but the sentence 'Start to shutdown' makes perfect sense to me, meaning 'begin the shutdown sequence' - thus the paradigm of 'Start > Shutdown' makes perfect sense as a functional equivalent - you have to Start the Shutdown routine, after all, and the logical place to start anything is the Start menu.
Is it really that hard of a thing to grasp? Are my barely-computer-literate relatives somehow more intuitive than other people's? I've got a hundred gripes with Microsoft, their software and their UI design, but this certainly isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course, why would they make MS for Linux?
Money.
Some of us Linux users aren't adverse to paying for products, you know - if Microsoft made Office for Linux, it would have been them who got my cash rather than CodeWeavers (yeah yeah, I like MSOffice - trolls telling me to switch to OOo will be ignored).
I understand the point about them wanting to concentrate on Windows, but remember Office is their bread and butter - charge marginally more for Office on Linux than Windows (on the grounds of, say, having to develop for Qt and GTK, for example) and they wouldn't lose too much through any businesses switching to Linux, and they'd gain the dollars of people like me who are home Linux users who happen to like MSOffice.
(P.S. if you don't think that's much of a chunk of cash, the home Linux market, remember that running Office on Linux is - probably, I'm just taking an educated guess here - CodeWeavers' bread and butter - a far smaller company, granted, but proof that there's a market for it)
~ Matt
It seems to me that the RIAA is only the enemy because they are the face of the body which has made it inconvenient to steal music
:) - check out Wumpscut, Wolfsheim, Alec Empire, Panic DHH, VNV Nation and just check it out. There's really some untapped gems in there.
:)
Lies.
I am one of the most anti-RIAA people you could find, I despise the whole concept of their business model, suing people for downloading music - especially children - for thousands of dollars, literally thousands of times the amount the person would have paid for the content had they bought it, while at the same time overpricing physical content (CDs, etc) and trying to force digital outlets (iTunes, for example) to do the same. Not to mention their attempts to 'sanitize' American radio (boy am I glad I dont live over there) so you can always find 500 different stations playing the same 10 pop tracks in rotation. That is why I hate the RIAA; they are destroying creativity and showing a complete lack of morals or decency. I understand their members have a responsibility to maximise profit for the shareholders, but if they win this case, how much are they going to get? a few thousand? What's that compared to the PR damage caused by suing a 14-year-old girl? If I was a shareholder in an RIAA member company I'd be screaming at them right now to stop making themselves out to be the Devil and go back to suing people who are at an age to know exactly what they're doing (yeah yeah, at 14 some kids do, some kids don't - but at 14 you *should* give them the benefit of the doubt, not sue them for thousands).
I don't hate the RIAA because they make it 'inconvenient to steal music', simply because I have no interest in 'stealing' (I dont care about the supposed definitions, semantics is an argument you can take up with some other poor Slashdotter) any of their music - it's crap, pure and simple, commercial crap. I'm a fan of European EBM, not a particularly profitable genre, especially not for American labels, and so even if I did download the content (I don't, I buy - the artists are generally part-time and need the support, and I feel good giving it if they deserve it) I could do so without RIAA interference - I don't think I've bought an RIAA-member-label CD in the past five years, let alone downloaded any of it.
If you like dark, gothic electronica or metal, try out European EBM - it's electronic stuff, but it's mostly RIAA-free, sounds good and is made by artists not looking for the current breakup-rock dollar, so, you know, you can tell one band from another
The RIAA members piss me off for a number of reasons,
- Their content is repetitive crud.
- They seem bent on spreading that content to drown out everything else in earshot.
- They overprice their content and try to force distributors to raise prices to increase their cut like record profits aren't good enough for them.
- They sue small children for thousands of dollars for stealing a few songs.
*Not* because they 'make it inconvenient to steal.
I have a new suing model for the RIAA, I wonder what they'd think;
I agree that people should be fined a few hundred dollars or 3 or 4 times the retail cost of what they downloaded, whichever is (get this) higher, but no more. This would hit the serious pirates (sharing thousands of songs/albums) hard and give the minor downloaders a smack on the wrist that, if they kept doing it week after week, would lead to serious expense and make it a lot cheaper for them to just buy the content.
Would they accept that? No, it's far too sensible
For example, we liked Batman Begins, so why did it get hit by the slump, too? And while Star Wars episode 6, err 3, was more critically acclaimed than the previous two, should it really have been the movie to not get hit by the slump, if quality is the reason for said slump?
Because it's not quality of *individual movies* that counts, it's quality *overall*. Yeah, Batman Begins was a good film, but all the films released around it were crap, and people had been trained to expect that all movies were crap - especially Batman ones - after the last two. Same with Star Wars; Yeah it might have been a good movie, but the thing is, when the previous two were crap, people are going to expect the third one to be crap - and again, all the other movies released at the time were crap.
There's the occasional gem in the huge pile of crap Hollywood is churning out, but people can't be bothered paying out for every single crap movie at the box office just to find the one shining gem of celluloid glory, and that's the reason for the slump. As the chances of any given movie you choose to see being a stinker go up, the people willing to take that chance goes down. That's the reason for the slump affecting even the occasional gem of a movie.
iPod Nano found to be as scratchable as all previous generations! President Bush will be addressing the nation on this crisis within the hour!
Seriously, these things have scratched if you looked at them funny since the first generation regular iPod, it's what they do.
Move along people, nothing to see here.
This looks to be an interesting concept for Yahoo, and maybe an admission that they've lost the just-plain-search battle with Google (that said, I'm a big fan of http://search.yahoo.com/, Google-like interface with Yahoo's faster-updated index - and they don't seem to index half the link-farm 'blogs', not that I've seen how well the Google Blog Search will filter those out of the mainstream search engine) and are moving into being the web's first site-based multimedia provider - browse the index, click the show you want and watch it, full-screen streaming.
Yahoo has always been the type to move towards multimedia content such as this, with their emphasis on cramming everything into one page versus Google's 'just search, but if you poke around we do other things too' mentality. (not criticising either one, they both clearly work well as both have produced highly profitable companies) The bandwidth for doing something like a site supplying news broadcasts and other traditionally TV-based media - and have it watchable for most normal people - is almost here, and if Yahoo manages to get on the bandwagon early and build up their range between now and the time when Joe Average has the bandwidth to have good-quality full-screen video, they could get the jump on Google to provide, like Braun suggests, things like news broadcasts, and maybe sports shows and other TV shows besides - like the DRM'ed download system the BBC suggested for their site a while back, only with streaming video rather than downloading - a system that, with the proper protections, will be easier to swallow for the content providers - the media conglomerates - too.
This could be very interesting.
Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems, said that the personal computer is increasingly becoming a relic. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their mobile phones."
Through their mobile phones? How big are these mobile phones going to be, because I don't know about Schwartzy-boy here, but I really don't like reading my web content on a screen an inch or so across - I cant have the text the size I like and fit a reasonable amount of information on the screen at one time, it just doesn't work - I don't like having to scroll so much just to read a 160-character text message, God only knows what I'd have to do to read, say, this article through a mobile - I'd wear out whatever button passes for 'Down' on my mobile about halfway through.
As for web services becoming important, isn't this what networking and networked-computing based companies have been screaming about since the birth of the internet? It's never worked because people don't like the idea of entrusting important data to some anonymous server somewhere on the internet - I'm quite happy to leave email from my friends on GMail, as it's really no bother to me if Google suddenly goes under, I just won't be able to go on a nostalgia trip of reading conversations I had about that movie we watched two years ago while drunk out of our minds. That doesn't bother me. However, I would have an issue with entrusting Google (or any other online service, but Google seems most likely to trial a service like Mr. Schwartz is suggesting) with my financial accounts, legal documents and research papers - it's an entirely seperate situation, and it's the failure of people like Schwartz to see this - or the fact they seem to be blindly ignoring it - that means companies keep throwing millions of dollars at 'Networked Computing' and 'PC as a Portal' systems and always coming out on the other side a few million dollars lighter and absolutely no wiser.
People do not want this from their computers, they want it to act as something where they can store the data in their own home - think of it like a digital filing cabinet you can lock up and secure in the corner of your living room; a filing cabinet that you own, where you own what's on it, and you are personally responsible for it's safety rather than entrusting it to some corporate entity's maybe-temperamental servers. That's a function of the PC that 'Web Services' will never replace, and one of the main reasons thin-client systems, of any sort, will never take off outside the business world - doing work for my employer, all my work is for the company and thus I save it to the central server and after that it's their responsibility to look after it - if they trash their network that's their problem, not mine, and I've lost absolutely nothing. At home, I want to look after my own data, as if I put it all somewhere on the internet, I've lost absolutely everything..
his isn't just a geek thing, my mother pretty much has the same approach - it was her who coined the 'digital filing cabinet' paradigm to me. People just arent willing to extend that level of trust with important documents. The other issues - bandwidth, etc - have mostly been dealt with, but this one will always remain, as there is no solution that I can see that would appease people of this mindset - and there are a lot of them, there will always be a huge market for a 'digital filing cabinet' - that would still include moving them over to thin-clients of in any way making the PC a 'relic'.
I think Mr. Schwartz is just nervously, perhaps desperately, flinging out press releases in a bid to convince someone - anyone - to buy up SunRays and other networked-computing Sun equipment before they go belly-up. It's a shame, as I love Sun, I love their equipment, it was always closer to raw UNIX for me than Linux, and it felt good somehow to be using the OS that ran the biggest of th
Slashdot: Computer News for People New to Computers
Ever think there are different levels of geekdom? I'm a music geek first and foremost, and a computer geek second. I didn't know what Fink was, yet I've been a Linux user and casual Sourceforge browser for nearly 3 years and an OS X user for almost a year. I found this article useful even if you didnt, just for novelty value rather than anything else.
Just because you already knew how to do something, doesn't mean everybody does. If this was a PC World 'How to Switch on your Computer' article, you might have a case, but this is a site for all geeks, not just computer geeks; all reasonably smart people - people likely to enjoy this site - should know how to turn their computer on, but not all of them are going to know about something like this, which they might find useful for any number of reasons.
Rant over. I just don't like people who assume just because something is of no interest to them, or simple to them, that it's boring or obvious to everyone else.
I liked this article, it's something I might try out when I've got a few hours to spare. You can read something else if you want.
Thank you, slashdot, for enlightening me as to this smart bit of kit. Keep it up.
We are now going to configure your eyeball to withstand Taco's gaping anus. Pin your eyelids back, Clockwork Orange style, and squeeze the eyeball into his rectum. Careful not to lose it in there! Fink to use the unstable application builds, now these wont crash all the time or anything like that it means that we will have access to newer versions of the software we will be using , specifically KDE 3.4
And others. Parent is a troll.
Opera 8 (and previous versions for as long as I've been using it) identify as MSIE 6.0 by default - I've never had any compatibility issues with Opera, maybe you have yours configured to identify as something else?
If I remember rightly, for the GTA: London game, everything bar the engine was changed - missions, cars, maps, etc - are you seriously suggesting that unless you change the underlying game engine (or even use a completely different one) it's not a different game?
I'm an avid Rockstar entheusiast, I own every single GTA game that's been released and quite a bit of the rest of their catalogue too, and I really don't see your point - they dont just change the city, they change *the entire game* apart from the engine, something that most regular gamers don't really know or care much about.
Cliche? I'm more worried about at which point they'll become self-aware! (I kid, I kid...)
Next thing, we'll be getting posts about UFOs, crop circles, and intelligent decesion-making from Bush.
Dude, why did you have to go and Bush-bash? It's off-topic, has no place outside of the Politics section and will, sadly, get you modded up to +5, Funny.
Your post was funny, but can people please stop with the insistance on anti-Bush daftness in every single damn story? Not singlng you out, this is a chronic problem. It has to stop. If you've read this far and aren't already reaching for the -1, Troll mod, I'm a Libertarian who was as mad as the best of you when Bush won a second term, I just think those that oppose his could present themselves better than through childish sniping in completely unrelated topics of conversation.
There, now you can mod me.
Because if Joe Blow goes round to his cousin John Doe's house to watch a game, and is looking to buy a new computer, is Joe going to be more or less interested in Apple if John tells him OS X has been nothing but trouble on his white-box x86.
Apple's whole philosophy is "it just works" - they want to be able to control the hardware so they can be 100% sure that all their boxes work as they should without having to support every piece of hardware under the sun, especially as this would mean running into the same problems with a lack of support or hardware specs from manufacturers that Linux has over the years.
To your average man-on-the-street, all computers are the same - Apples might come with shinier boxes, but a computer is a computer - and if he sees OS X running poorly on a white-box x86, he's going to assume it's the fault of the OS.
Apple don't want that. It damages their image.
You could argue that they could, quite easily, make more money selling OS X to all and sundry than they can by guarding their 5% of the market and locking the OS to the hardware, but that's just the Apple way, and they're being successful with it. Why should they change a profitable business structure?
Anyone know where the "-1, Really Didn't Want to Know" mod has got to?
I saw that headline and I thought the article was going to be about the recent iBook and Mini updates (can't really call them upgrades can we?). Imagine my disapointment.
...colossal?
The parent is not a troll, from the outside, the comment tacked on the end about political disaster was completely unwarranted and does indeed look like a knee-jerk reaction to everyone's favourite warmongers getting new terms in office, so I can quite understand the parent's annoyance at Slashdot (a site supposed to report the news and not bias it with it's personal opinions) taking a swipe at the UK government.
/. before, like flooding the country with CCTV, planning ID cards, etc, while the police are wholly incapable of dealing with what are essentially groups of kids. Blair, if not the party as a whole, is now very unpopular with many people, largely due to the Iraq war and the ID cards debacle - most people would like to see Blair step down and Gordon Brown take the reins, with many members of the party itself voting against him on important issues. The party, however, remains in charge because last time the other major force in UK politics was in power, they made things even worse.
An uninformed person does not a troll make.
The problem with the British political system is that, while stable, every party looks pretty much like every other party, only with slightly different reasons to hate them - in other words, people do not vote for the best, they vote for the least worst. Allow me to indulge in a non-partizan rant about the major political forces in the UK, this should give anyone else confused like the parent a little help...
Labour Led by Tony Blair, these are they guys in power right now - Labour, traditionally, is a socialist, left-leaning party, but under the leadership of Blair it has swung very much swung hard towards the right, and have done all the awful things you've heard about on
The Conservatives In the last election, led by Michael Howard, but with him stepping down it looks like Kenneth Clarke may be replacing him sooner rather than later. In my opinion it's a bad idea for them to be considering placing another unpopular figure from the last Conservative government in charge, which proved a major negative point for them during the last election. More right-wing in terms of immigration (a sensitive issue in the run-up to the election and an even more sensitive one in light of the London bombings) and promising to pull troops out of Iraq, the major factor against them is the fact that when they were in power (when Margaret Thatcher and later John Major were leaders) they very nearly crippled the country with severe mismanagement. Arguably the largest factor in their election failure, in light of the unpopularity of Blair's government, was the spectre of those old governments in the form of Michael Howard, who was Home Secretary under the former Conservative rule.
Liberal Democrats Led by Charles Kennedy, and could be summed up as 'lacking voice'. Their PR assault during the last election boiled down to, while the other two parties slogged it out over immigration, ID cards and the War in Iraq, the Lib Dem PR machine putting out a statement that Kennedy's wife had had a baby. Even in the UK of reality TV stars being involved in supposedly serious political debate and tabloid newspapers declaring they could decide the election simply by siding with one side or the other on election day, this didn't get them the votes they needed, falling far short of their target of overtaking the Conservatives as the 2nd-largest party in Britain. Very left-wing in their views, they are disliked by many for their open-doors views on immigration, which as I previously pointed out was a sensitive issue at the time of the election, with many Britons fearing being swamped by immigrants largely from Eastern Europe. This, combined with their status as perpetual also-rans in general elections for as long as I can remember pretty much scuppered their chances of winning this election.
British National Party Led by Nick Griffin. A media campaign against the BNP by the BBC led to Griffin's arrest under religious hatred laws
Don't say that! you'll confuse the lil Neocons!
Playing the Almighty off against big business?
Their brains will implode!
Is this a jump to appease the version-number junkies? to jump 1/2 a version number closer to IE7 or Opera 8? What is this for, because regardless of how many bugfixes they've thrown in (yeah yeah, and changes, too) it wont warrant a leap to Firefox 1.5 - coming from a self-confessed version-number chaser (posting from a Deer Park Alpha nightly I downloaded hours ago) this just smacks of WinAmp's jump from 3 to 5 just to sound like they'd 'advanced'. What happened to the old system?
(*).*.* is for rewrites or when the software reaches a seriously major milestone.
*.(*).* is for major bugfixes and changes, like this release will have.
*.*.(*) is for minor bugfixes.
Now I understand the logic of PHBs preferring 'Firefox 1.5' to 'Firefox 1.1.34g' or whatever, but it's sad to see the the old system of version numbers for categorisation seems to have descended into a battle of "look, we have teh numborz!!!". Why not just call it Firefox 9 and get one over on MS and Opera in the number stakes?
Dude, this isn't some guy's backroom server running a site about his k00l tr1kz, this is Archive.org, who, having taken upon themselves the job of hosting such a vast amount of information and media to thousands of people everyday, you would expect to be able to withstand a Slashdotting and not go down like a $2 hooker the way they have.
I've seen sites that have links to pages that show you how to draw and quarter a human body. Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal. Should those sites get dinged as well?
Unless you draw and quarter a major company's CEO with information you found on such a site, the politicians and courts really won't care about it. This is about money, not any moral 'right'.
we'd still see posts on slashdot justifying P2P piracy because we didn't get to pick out Natalie's outfit when she showed up at our parent's basement to deliver.
I think most Slashdotters would be happy with the choice if there was a 'Hot Grits' option in the 'Natalie's Outfit' drop-down box...
Just pray to all Heaven there wouldn't be a CowboyNeal option.
This is going to get modded troll, but there are places out there that aren't going to bend over and take it quite as much as Australia, which has a government with a recent history of being America's bitch, much to the anger of regular Aussies everywhere ;)
Yeah, that's really where we want to head - execution for hackers because "businesses depend on their computers"? yeah, great idea, isn't the RIAA's argument that copyright infringement costs businesses money?
With the government in the pockets of big business, the last thing we want is some NYT Op-Ed shouting his mouth off about how people should be executed for crimes against corporations' bottom lines - who knows what ideas they'll get...
I've never seen the problem of clicking 'Start' to get to the 'Shutdown' option. Everyone I've explained it to seems to understand it perfectly - mothers, grandfathers, everyone. It's not a complex thing to grasp, and isn't at all confusing, really.
Now I know it's something of a Slashdot meme to make this joke about the 'Start' button in any thread vaguely related to Windows, but the sentence 'Start to shutdown' makes perfect sense to me, meaning 'begin the shutdown sequence' - thus the paradigm of 'Start > Shutdown' makes perfect sense as a functional equivalent - you have to Start the Shutdown routine, after all, and the logical place to start anything is the Start menu.
Is it really that hard of a thing to grasp? Are my barely-computer-literate relatives somehow more intuitive than other people's? I've got a hundred gripes with Microsoft, their software and their UI design, but this certainly isn't one of them.
It's an arms race
Pun intended?
I'll get my coat...