software was just pure crap the customers loved the product
You call a thoroughly tested piece of software loved by its customers crap?
Do you work at Microsoft where buggy, hated sofware is called high quality?
if you don't know what your representative stands for, then you have no business electing them to represent you
I for one, want a representative that sets his/her owns views and beliefs aside and represents mine. A representative has no business standing up for his own beliefs while he is representing.
This should be clarified that human evolution is slow compared to human lifetimes. Many bacteria and single celled organisms are observed to evolve in a course of hours.
Some creatures are observed to evolve in a course of weeks. For non-believers in evolution, I offer an example. In the south-east US there is a hug problem with cockroaches. You can go and buy a bug spray that will wipe them out. However, in a course of a few weeks you will notice that spray that used to kill the bugs if they got near it becomes completely in-effective even when sprayed directly on the bug. (funny how so many people in the south don't believe in evolution yet, observe it in their daily lives...)
Other, species are observed to evolve over a course of a few years. Especially in areas where we (humans) have changed the local environment. Some examples are round-up resistent coca plants, much to the dismay of the DEA. Also, changes have been observed in birds, fish, and small mammals in areas where forest has been replaced with farms or urban development.
I agree with you that we really don't know how we humans are changing because the speed of evolution tends to be pretty relative to the species undergoing it. And even though we have removed natural selection, there are still people born with mutations, and they continue to have children (for better or worse). These genes are mixing into the gene pool.
Humans evolution is now at a really interesting state. We are one of the few species where the vast majority of the population have the opportunity to reproduce, and the vast majority of our offspring live to do the same. Combine this with ongoing mutations where those with both beneficial and harmful changes survive and reproduce. I don't think anyone can imagine the direction our species will go.
Geniuses, autistics, athlethes and diabetics are surviving and reproducing. We may have some interesting times ahead
when I was in parochial school, the left hand was referred to as the devils hand. Left hander were slapped with rulers until they learned to start using their right hands. Maybe logitech is trying to appeal to the religious right. Wonder if they ship a driver so it can be used with the Jesux OS.
How about a mouse that can drive itself? When it senses the battery is low, it could drive itself to a charging cradle. When charged up, it could return to its last location. THAT would be cool AND useful. IMHO
Most desktop users are better off with wired versions because lots of hassle goes away
I beg to disagree.
When I have my feet up on the desk, its convient to have a wireless keyboard in my lap. When the 3 yr old comes to visit, I can just place it on the bookshelf temporarily. A cable would seriously cramp my style
Seems in days of old chemists got ammonia by extracing it from urine. So, now you'll be able to fuel up your car by eating lots of protein, drinking lots of water, and mounting a toilet to your car.
By running a meaningless story today, eveyone can complain about a dupe when the real one comes out thus, preventing any meaninful discussion of the implementation details.
I remember seeing that on some show (Discovery channel maybe?) where this guys went out to live with the tribe. It looked like the animals didn't really suffer, and they are able to bleed them every few weeks. Not too bad when you think that the blood will have lots of protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Also, you don't have to worry about how to preserve it and keep it sanitary. Its my understanding that its hard to refridgerate meat in tribal Africa.
Interesting how you changed my snide remark to torque of peta types into a meaningful discussion
Imagine, we don't have to kill cows anymore. We can just amputate the part we want to eat, and have it grow back. Fillet minion for the masses. You could raise a sheep, and have a leg a month. mmm.....
Seattle was rasied as well. In many places the second floor simply became the first floor while the first floor ended up being underground. There's even a small tourist business around giving tours of the accessible parts. http://www.undergroundtour.com/
I'll give the simple math answer. Generally, we say a companies value should be about 10x its annual revenue. So, with Vonage having 800,000 subscribers (FTA) at about $30/month (based on my bill) we get $24,000,000/month or $288,000,000/year. This would indicate that their value should get up to over 2.88 billion dollars. Now, take their really low operating overhead and add the tech dotcom bubble effect, they'll probably end up worth 100 times that;)
to over come the free price tag on Linux. Sun will now start offering $100 per work station for every instalation of the free solaris operating system. You can get an extra $50 by installing Java too.
In more recent news, the offer was overwhelmingly rejected. Admins found that due to the arduous installation process, that they would be making less than half of minimum wage.
Oh, but he couldn't even detect a NIC without the manual editing of conf files, and wasn't really unique or remarkable in any discernable way.
More than editing a config file. He had to get the driver source from a third party, compile it, and then edit the config files.
Looks like Solaris10 sucks almost as bad as HPUX.
I think your comment is pretty insightful however, I think there may be problems.
The low-end cheap machines (ie windows) operate at such low profit margins its not to practical to try to jump in.
The high-end integrated market (owned by Mac) is pretty small, and most of those types of users are hard to switch.
Add to this, from the article, that the Solaris desktop is about a lightyear behind the average Linux distro in functionality, ease of use, usability, and in supported devices. These things will make it slow going on the cheap boxes and a hard sell on the premium. They may get a market for special purpose computers.
Now, if Sun were to focus their efforts where they excel, *servers*, then they may have a chance. The robustness of Solaris, can mean reduced downtime. Now if they could build some good configuration tools, they could argue lower TCO as well.
just my 2 cents
Aren't we talking about the company that sued e-Machines because they started selling *Windows PC's* in candy colors? the company that sues its customers for talking about how much they love them? "fan" sites? over itunes.co.uk? the guys who do fan like themes/skins for various applications?
a google search on "apple sues" returns numerous results. Apple even sued Steve Jobs. It looks like this company has more lawyers than developers. I agree with you, if this turns out to be true, it'll definitely be just deserts.
I think the biggest thing preventing getting plants to grow is a lack of atmospheric nitrogen. Normally, bacteria in the soil take nitrogen from the air and convert it into forms that plants can use. Without nitrogen, no plants will be growing there. This element is an essential part of amino acids and proteins to sustain the plants as well as the animal consumers of the plants (us). Now, since nitrogen is a very common element, I'm sure there is some there awaiting discovery in various compounds, but I seem to remember the atmosphere is mostly CO2.
Guess we'll be carrying water and amonium nitrate with us.
What? with all those buttons it would be too confusing... it might encourage developer to build for more than one button... it would violate some esoteric design esthetics...
I think one of the problems MS and other comapnies have is, they are trying to provide the "one size fits all" type of solution. They try to do research into what they think prople need and build accordingly. OSS, generally starts off by someone trying to solve a specific problem for their own needs. They decide to share their solution. People with similar needs modify it to meet their needs, and share their solutions. People with different needs choose a different option. I tend to think the large collection of OSS as a large library of custom code that evoles to be more generic over time. Proprietary software tends to start over-generic, and then evolves to handle more specific cases through patches and plugins. The result of this is, the OSS tends to increase in quality over time, and the proprietary code gets more spaghetti-ized over time. (These are just generalizations and don't hold true in all cases; just most cases) What to choose? It depends on your needs and what's available to most closely meet them.
a ragtag bunch of criminals who want to spread their message
This must not be working very well.
I haven't seen anything saying what their message is. We hear Bush and Blair saying their message is "freedom, bad" but, that doesn't seem likely.
Some people say their message is stop supporting Israel from suppressing the Palestinians. But, again, the actions of these groups doesn't appear to be helping that cause.
Just what is their message anyway?
I agree with you. Perhaps its his distro. Me, I'm lazy and use Mandrake(Mandriva, stupid new name). I'd say 95% of my hardware required little or no configuration. NVidia card with NVidia drivers, auto-magic. I just picked my preferred resolution from the dialog (does that count as configuration?).
HP Printer, I plugged it in and the printer wizard launched automatically. 60 seconds later I was printing a test page. No reboot needed. Windows, need instal disks, windows doesn't like those, download from HP, run, configure, reboot, print test page, 5-10 minutes.
Sony digital camera, plugged it in, and instantly a dialog opened up to download the photos; time, less than a second. No drivers, config or anything. Windows, install software, reboot; time 5 minutes. Toshiba digital camera, same experience.
USB drive, first time, plugged it in, a drive icon popped up on my desktop; time, 1-2 seconds. First time in windows, starts installing drivers, reboots, drive shows up in "My Computer"; time 5 minutes.
CD Burner, no config needed on linux. Works out of the box. K3B auto detected it, I can actually use the computer WHILE burning CDs and not get coasters. On windows, install software that sucks, reboot, shutdown all apps and errant processes to burn, get coasters 30% of time.
$15 webcam from CVS pharmacy. Linux, NFG. Windows, install, reboot.
Not of the above required opening a text editor. But, to be honest, it has more to do with the distro than *pure* linux. I care less. I'm sure Windows has some good qualities however, in my *personal* experience, Linux gives *me* a better user experience.
Some other bonuses. My wife can open a new session leaving my desktop alone. She can have her desktop in Spanish while I have mine in english. Config for Spansih desktop, 30 seconds. I don't know how to do this in Windows. I can update my computer while I am using it. I can update an application while using it. I don't need to reboot after updates, installing software, or installing hardware and drivers. My computer doesn't freeze up while performing IO. I can make it the way *I* like it. I can customize KDE (or Gnome) to have features from Windows, Macs, and other OSs that I like, and to NOT have the things I don't like. I can have features that aren't even available for a Windows or Mac box. I can customize the system around me. I can make it conform to me instead of conforming to it. Sure linux sucks but, for me, it sucks a lot than than the alternatives. OTOH, this doesn't mean everybody should use it. People just need to decide for themselves what they want and what meets their needs. I've even heard that some people prefer a mouse with one button.
another way to skin that cat
Alt-F2 and type xkill in the run dialog.
Many distros even map ctl-alt-esc to launch xkill.
and there's always the last resort to restart a dead X session ctrl-alt-backspace
I normally use Linux but had to pull up to a doze box to verify some things.
Can you please clarify?
I'm not seeing where the OS requires the right button, anywhere. In fact, I can't see where it requires a mouse (nice for 508 compliance). The right button does enhance the experience (but this seems true on any OS).
Minesweep, no right button needed. Using the wrong button is a different issue though.
There are no high end graphics apps or CAD programs on this box but, I'll take your word for it.
Aside from my ability to assign useful features to the right mouse button, it also means Windows absolutely sucks to use standard software with a touch screen, or alternate interface
Well, Windows generally sucks on any interface. But, to offer a counter point. All those tablet PC users seem to be pretty content with the touch interface.
I'm just not buying the force a developer to 'develop to one button' argument because Macs still support the context menu (and have for quite some time). A developer can still write apps that depend on the context menu on a Mac, just like any other OS, just as easily (actually easier because of the nice api), using the API provided by Apple. Whether you get it by click and hold, control key click, select and hit the context menu key, or right click just seems beside the point.
Ha Ha your second button is useless in 90% of applications
What applications are these where the right button is useless?
The reason for this is to force developers to do the right thing with their UI designs
Apple still supports a context menu (you just get there differently), so how is that forcing developers to do anything? Why do developers need forcing to make apps not depend on the context menu? What apps on what operating system do you see a dependence on the right button or context menu? I can only name one, the Gimp. Please name another, I haven't seen anyone do it (I'm sure there are more guilty parties). This argument is a lame horse. Forcing developers to not do something they already do not do.
BTW, where does Apple say they are doing it to force the developers? That wouldn't be a very friendly thing to do.
I keep seeing these same reasons that apple does what they do here:
o Two buttons are too confusing
o Its designed for Grandma
o They are forcing the developers to do...
I think these reasons are wrong (I've never seen Apple offer these reasons). Being unfriendly to developers and insulting the intelligence of your users will cause your platform to be rejected.
Perhaps, its because Apple is a very style oriented company. They put a huge effort in how things look. They also like to keep things behaving the same way. The switch to BSD was probably not hard for their average user because things worked pretty much the same (on the surface). Their users were probably content with the mouse so they followed the golden rule of business, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (notice the new mouse is an option, not standard equipment).
The Mac is not really a bad OS. All operating systems suck in their own special way.
Slashdot Mirror
software was just pure crap
the customers loved the product
You call a thoroughly tested piece of software loved by its customers crap?
Do you work at Microsoft where buggy, hated sofware is called high quality?
if you don't know what your representative stands for, then you have no business electing them to represent you
I for one, want a representative that sets his/her owns views and beliefs aside and represents mine. A representative has no business standing up for his own beliefs while he is representing.
evolution is _slow_ compared to human lifetimes
This should be clarified that human evolution is slow compared to human lifetimes. Many bacteria and single celled organisms are observed to evolve in a course of hours.
Some creatures are observed to evolve in a course of weeks. For non-believers in evolution, I offer an example. In the south-east US there is a hug problem with cockroaches. You can go and buy a bug spray that will wipe them out. However, in a course of a few weeks you will notice that spray that used to kill the bugs if they got near it becomes completely in-effective even when sprayed directly on the bug. (funny how so many people in the south don't believe in evolution yet, observe it in their daily lives...)
Other, species are observed to evolve over a course of a few years. Especially in areas where we (humans) have changed the local environment. Some examples are round-up resistent coca plants, much to the dismay of the DEA. Also, changes have been observed in birds, fish, and small mammals in areas where forest has been replaced with farms or urban development.
I agree with you that we really don't know how we humans are changing because the speed of evolution tends to be pretty relative to the species undergoing it. And even though we have removed natural selection, there are still people born with mutations, and they continue to have children (for better or worse). These genes are mixing into the gene pool.
Humans evolution is now at a really interesting state. We are one of the few species where the vast majority of the population have the opportunity to reproduce, and the vast majority of our offspring live to do the same. Combine this with ongoing mutations where those with both beneficial and harmful changes survive and reproduce. I don't think anyone can imagine the direction our species will go.
Geniuses, autistics, athlethes and diabetics are surviving and reproducing. We may have some interesting times ahead
when I was in parochial school, the left hand was referred to as the devils hand. Left hander were slapped with rulers until they learned to start using their right hands.
Maybe logitech is trying to appeal to the religious right.
Wonder if they ship a driver so it can be used with the Jesux OS.
How about a mouse that can drive itself?
When it senses the battery is low, it could drive itself to a charging cradle. When charged up, it could return to its last location.
THAT would be cool AND useful. IMHO
Most desktop users are better off with wired versions because lots of hassle goes away
I beg to disagree.
When I have my feet up on the desk, its convient to have a wireless keyboard in my lap. When the 3 yr old comes to visit, I can just place it on the bookshelf temporarily. A cable would seriously cramp my style
Seems in days of old chemists got ammonia by extracing it from urine.
So, now you'll be able to fuel up your car by eating lots of protein, drinking lots of water, and mounting a toilet to your car.
"The future is disgusting" - Fry
By running a meaningless story today, eveyone can complain about a dupe when the real one comes out thus, preventing any meaninful discussion of the implementation details.
I remember seeing that on some show (Discovery channel maybe?) where this guys went out to live with the tribe.
It looked like the animals didn't really suffer, and they are able to bleed them every few weeks.
Not too bad when you think that the blood will have lots of protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Also, you don't have to worry about how to preserve it and keep it sanitary. Its my understanding that its hard to refridgerate meat in tribal Africa.
Interesting how you changed my snide remark to torque of peta types into a meaningful discussion
Imagine, we don't have to kill cows anymore.
We can just amputate the part we want to eat, and have it grow back. Fillet minion for the masses.
You could raise a sheep, and have a leg a month.
mmm.....
Seattle was rasied as well.
In many places the second floor simply became the first floor while the first floor ended up being underground.
There's even a small tourist business around giving tours of the accessible parts.
http://www.undergroundtour.com/
Don't forget, without oil where will we get our precious plastic?
I'll give the simple math answer. ;)
Generally, we say a companies value should be about 10x its annual revenue.
So, with Vonage having 800,000 subscribers (FTA) at about $30/month (based on my bill) we get $24,000,000/month or $288,000,000/year.
This would indicate that their value should get up to over 2.88 billion dollars.
Now, take their really low operating overhead and add the tech dotcom bubble effect, they'll probably end up worth 100 times that
to over come the free price tag on Linux. Sun will now start offering $100 per work station for every instalation of the free solaris operating system. You can get an extra $50 by installing Java too.
In more recent news, the offer was overwhelmingly rejected. Admins found that due to the arduous installation process, that they would be making less than half of minimum wage.
Oh, but he couldn't even detect a NIC without the manual editing of conf files, and wasn't really unique or remarkable in any discernable way.
More than editing a config file. He had to get the driver source from a third party, compile it, and then edit the config files.
Looks like Solaris10 sucks almost as bad as HPUX.
I think your comment is pretty insightful however, I think there may be problems. The low-end cheap machines (ie windows) operate at such low profit margins its not to practical to try to jump in. The high-end integrated market (owned by Mac) is pretty small, and most of those types of users are hard to switch. Add to this, from the article, that the Solaris desktop is about a lightyear behind the average Linux distro in functionality, ease of use, usability, and in supported devices. These things will make it slow going on the cheap boxes and a hard sell on the premium. They may get a market for special purpose computers. Now, if Sun were to focus their efforts where they excel, *servers*, then they may have a chance. The robustness of Solaris, can mean reduced downtime. Now if they could build some good configuration tools, they could argue lower TCO as well. just my 2 cents
Aren't we talking about the company that sued e-Machines because they started selling *Windows PC's* in candy colors?
the company that sues
its customers for talking about how much they love them?
"fan" sites?
over itunes.co.uk?
the guys who do fan like themes/skins for various applications?
a google search on "apple sues" returns numerous results. Apple even sued Steve Jobs.
It looks like this company has more lawyers than developers.
I agree with you, if this turns out to be true, it'll definitely be just deserts.
I think the biggest thing preventing getting plants to grow is a lack of atmospheric nitrogen.
Normally, bacteria in the soil take nitrogen from the air and convert it into forms that plants can use. Without nitrogen, no plants will be growing there. This element is an essential part of amino acids and proteins to sustain the plants as well as the animal consumers of the plants (us).
Now, since nitrogen is a very common element, I'm sure there is some there awaiting discovery in various compounds, but I seem to remember the atmosphere is mostly CO2.
Guess we'll be carrying water and amonium nitrate with us.
What?
with all those buttons it would be too confusing...
it might encourage developer to build for more than one button...
it would violate some esoteric design esthetics...
I think one of the problems MS and other comapnies have is, they are trying to provide the "one size fits all" type of solution. They try to do research into what they think prople need and build accordingly.
OSS, generally starts off by someone trying to solve a specific problem for their own needs. They decide to share their solution. People with similar needs modify it to meet their needs, and share their solutions. People with different needs choose a different option.
I tend to think the large collection of OSS as a large library of custom code that evoles to be more generic over time. Proprietary software tends to start over-generic, and then evolves to handle more specific cases through patches and plugins.
The result of this is, the OSS tends to increase in quality over time, and the proprietary code gets more spaghetti-ized over time.
(These are just generalizations and don't hold true in all cases; just most cases)
What to choose? It depends on your needs and what's available to most closely meet them.
a ragtag bunch of criminals who want to spread their message
This must not be working very well.
I haven't seen anything saying what their message is. We hear Bush and Blair saying their message is "freedom, bad" but, that doesn't seem likely.
Some people say their message is stop supporting Israel from suppressing the Palestinians. But, again, the actions of these groups doesn't appear to be helping that cause.
Just what is their message anyway?
I agree with you.
Perhaps its his distro. Me, I'm lazy and use Mandrake(Mandriva, stupid new name).
I'd say 95% of my hardware required little or no configuration.
NVidia card with NVidia drivers, auto-magic. I just picked my preferred resolution from the dialog (does that count as configuration?).
HP Printer, I plugged it in and the printer wizard launched automatically. 60 seconds later I was printing a test page. No reboot needed.
Windows, need instal disks, windows doesn't like those, download from HP, run, configure, reboot, print test page, 5-10 minutes.
Sony digital camera, plugged it in, and instantly a dialog opened up to download the photos; time, less than a second. No drivers, config or anything. Windows, install software, reboot; time 5 minutes.
Toshiba digital camera, same experience.
USB drive, first time, plugged it in, a drive icon popped up on my desktop; time, 1-2 seconds. First time in windows, starts installing drivers, reboots, drive shows up in "My Computer"; time 5 minutes.
CD Burner, no config needed on linux. Works out of the box. K3B auto detected it, I can actually use the computer WHILE burning CDs and not get coasters. On windows, install software that sucks, reboot, shutdown all apps and errant processes to burn, get coasters 30% of time.
$15 webcam from CVS pharmacy. Linux, NFG. Windows, install, reboot.
Not of the above required opening a text editor. But, to be honest, it has more to do with the distro than *pure* linux. I care less.
I'm sure Windows has some good qualities however, in my *personal* experience, Linux gives *me* a better user experience.
Some other bonuses. My wife can open a new session leaving my desktop alone. She can have her desktop in Spanish while I have mine in english. Config for Spansih desktop, 30 seconds. I don't know how to do this in Windows.
I can update my computer while I am using it. I can update an application while using it. I don't need to reboot after updates, installing software, or installing hardware and drivers. My computer doesn't freeze up while performing IO. I can make it the way *I* like it.
I can customize KDE (or Gnome) to have features from Windows, Macs, and other OSs that I like, and to NOT have the things I don't like. I can have features that aren't even available for a Windows or Mac box. I can customize the system around me. I can make it conform to me instead of conforming to it. Sure linux sucks but, for me, it sucks a lot than than the alternatives.
OTOH, this doesn't mean everybody should use it. People just need to decide for themselves what they want and what meets their needs. I've even heard that some people prefer a mouse with one button.
another way to skin that cat Alt-F2 and type xkill in the run dialog. Many distros even map ctl-alt-esc to launch xkill. and there's always the last resort to restart a dead X session ctrl-alt-backspace
I normally use Linux but had to pull up to a doze box to verify some things.
Can you please clarify?
I'm not seeing where the OS requires the right button, anywhere. In fact, I can't see where it requires a mouse (nice for 508 compliance). The right button does enhance the experience (but this seems true on any OS).
Minesweep, no right button needed. Using the wrong button is a different issue though.
There are no high end graphics apps or CAD programs on this box but, I'll take your word for it.
Aside from my ability to assign useful features to the right mouse button, it also means Windows absolutely sucks to use standard software with a touch screen, or alternate interface
Well, Windows generally sucks on any interface. But, to offer a counter point. All those tablet PC users seem to be pretty content with the touch interface.
I'm just not buying the force a developer to 'develop to one button' argument because Macs still support the context menu (and have for quite some time). A developer can still write apps that depend on the context menu on a Mac, just like any other OS, just as easily (actually easier because of the nice api), using the API provided by Apple. Whether you get it by click and hold, control key click, select and hit the context menu key, or right click just seems beside the point.
Ha Ha your second button is useless in 90% of applications
...
What applications are these where the right button is useless?
The reason for this is to force developers to do the right thing with their UI designs
Apple still supports a context menu (you just get there differently), so how is that forcing developers to do anything? Why do developers need forcing to make apps not depend on the context menu? What apps on what operating system do you see a dependence on the right button or context menu? I can only name one, the Gimp. Please name another, I haven't seen anyone do it (I'm sure there are more guilty parties). This argument is a lame horse. Forcing developers to not do something they already do not do.
BTW, where does Apple say they are doing it to force the developers? That wouldn't be a very friendly thing to do.
I keep seeing these same reasons that apple does what they do here:
o Two buttons are too confusing
o Its designed for Grandma
o They are forcing the developers to do
I think these reasons are wrong (I've never seen Apple offer these reasons). Being unfriendly to developers and insulting the intelligence of your users will cause your platform to be rejected.
Perhaps, its because Apple is a very style oriented company. They put a huge effort in how things look. They also like to keep things behaving the same way. The switch to BSD was probably not hard for their average user because things worked pretty much the same (on the surface). Their users were probably content with the mouse so they followed the golden rule of business, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (notice the new mouse is an option, not standard equipment).
The Mac is not really a bad OS. All operating systems suck in their own special way.