Though I will say that things can run well on older hardware depending on your task. If you can live without flash player, HD video, games, semantic desktops, etc, then a 700MHz Pentium III with 384 MB of RAM will run just fine. I have such a box, running Arch, that I use for IRC (irssi), occasional Web browsing (Midori), IM (Pidgin or Finch) and Email (mutt). I think it's using Openbox + fbpanel for a desktop. For me? For the task? it's fine. For Joe User? Surprisingly usable with lightweight GUI applications installed. It's not the prettiest girl at the prom, but it'll put out.
At the end of the day, it's not going to stream videos from YouTube (not very well anyway -- but I've never tried). But if a family member or friend needed ANY kind of computer for free? I could give it away and it would do the bare minimum.
A poster in a previous thread make an insightful counterpoint to your argument.
The TSA/DHS's job is not to protect the American people. If a terrorist wanted to kill hundreds of people, they'd just bomb the security checkpoints themselves. It's a huge bottleneck and they could kill way more people instead of bombing an individual plane.
Indeed, the TSA/DHS's real job is to protect our elected officials in Washington. Their real job is to prevent terrorists from taking over an aircraft and then flying it into the White House, Pentagon, Capitol Hill, or other politically/economically important landmarks.
Once again, Slashdot is the epitome of bad science reporting:)
The study shows that in a group of people ranging from 45 - 70, they found that cognitive decline was present in all of them. That means that cognitive decline begins AT LEAST at 45. TFA says "As early as 45", which is technically true but sort of dishonest IMHO, and the original paper doesn't make any such explicit conclusions.
Good deeds are good, but having bread on one's table is important, too. So, what's the pay?
I absolutely agree with you. I'm not suggesting that the guy become a full time free software dev. However, I'd argue that working on a FOSS project will look good on a resume AND improve his skills. I'm not so sure that there are many employers out there who are willing to let an older, semi-entry-level developer onto their team.
I wouldn't discount languages like C just yet. They're still hugely important in the kernel world, for example.
As far as newer languages go, there are a lot of F/OSS projects that could use another hand. Have a look at the Bugzilla for various projects and grab the latest source from svn/git/mercurial/whatever. Your skills as a programmer should transfer over to a new language relatively easily, and you'll have done a good deed.
Hey. I've got a brilliant Idea. Let's construct a thermonuclear fusion reactor at the center of the solar system. We will collect the radiation energy with photovoltaic cells pointed to the sky. As there are no moving parts, it wouldn't require much maintainence either. Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?
Where are you going to put said photovoltaic cells?
Photvoltaics have poor efficiency. I think I saw, maybe here on Slashdot, that the very best cells are 19.3% efficiency. Since you claim there are no moving parts, I suppose you're not going to try to mount them on some sort of Sun-tracking axis either.
The pollution argument is probably a moot point too. IIRC, the manufacturing process for photovoltaics is rather toxic.
What worries me most is that since a lot of xbox 360 games assume they are played on HDTVs, they have fonts far to small to be read easily on standard definition hardware. This move seems to be somewhat encouraging people to play on SDTV (most won't bother to check which cables are bundled with their console), despite it being really uncomfortable in any game with a significant amount of on-screen text...
QFT. I've got a couple of games in my library which are particularly bad offenders (Mass Effect, Army of Two, I'm looking at both of you). The situation is alleviated a bit by switching to component (I'm lucky enough to have an SDTV with component inputs), but small screen fonts + composite looks absolutely horrendous.
Playing those games with a composite connection was enough for me to turn off the 360 and turn on the Wii after about 15 minutes.
I'd like to know how many of these HD users are even configured correctly.
It seems like the vast majority of casual gamers that I know have never even managed to configure their consoles correctly for high definition anyway. For example, my cousin who had a 46" plasma TV with an Xbox 360 connected via composite and running non-widescreen.
Maybe console makers should provide an idiot-proof method of configuring the screen before they push HD so hard.
I completely agree. Our department uses it too, and it's total garbage. Its based on old-and-busted RHEL4, and doesn't have half of the packages we need anyway. I'd be much happier with something with a scientific repository tacked on. But nooo, we have to use it because it has SCIENCE built in!
Ugh
For what it's worth, my job (IT at a University) uses Dell machines exclusively and we've had fantastic support from them for replacement parts. To skip the script, we usually just tell the CSR that we've swapped the bad part with one from a working machine and that the machine works fine. At that point, the drone will go ahead and ship us a replacement and we ship the broken one back. Works out pretty well.
To be honest, I really felt like games like Everquest still embodied this sense of community. It was so often that people would get together in the popular zones and chat up a storm -- especially so in the trading hubs. Perhaps because the game was modeled off of popular MUDs at the time. I'm sure UO and others were much the same way.
As time went on, I certainly didn't feel this in Everquest II, or WoW, or WAR. Community is dead.
I didn't RTFA, but my question is, are power savings a real necessity? I'd imagine that the answer depends on the size of the server farm. If you only have a few servers, the additional savings from the lower power consumption may be peanuts to the raw processing power of another processor bought at a similar price. Then, when you take the obsolescence of the processors into consideration, the power savings may be even more negligible.
As the size of the farm scales, however, I'd hazard to guess that the power consumption differences would be far more noticable.
Wow, reading through that reminded me a whole lot of myself in highschool. I was classified early on as being "gifted" (IQ was/is supposedly in the 130s, IIRC). The educators tried sending me to special classes and whatnot, but it was pretty easy to see through their bullshit. The classes were nothing more than sitting on my ass and playing brain teaser games. I told my folks that I wanted out of it, and fortunately they were happy to oblige.
I received mostly poor grades in my freshman and sophmore years but still scored higher than the vast majority of my graduating class on the ACT. I went to vocational school for IT and had a lot of fun with national-level business/IT competitions (can't go wrong with free trips to California and Florida). Taking classes at community college makes up for the vocational school academics, which are clearly designed for people who are far more talented at working in a particular trade than sitting in a classroom.
That being said, I think vocational school was the best school I could've possibly went to. Most of the students at the JVS just wanted to learn a trade, be it IT, carpentry, child care, cosmetology, or whatever. There weren't any stupid social cliques and that was nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Bryan, I think I'll chose to leave it. Your past actions have sullied any interest I have in your crapware.
nah, I think I'm just going to tell him to eat a dick for his ransomware. Bryan, eat another dick for this guy too.
Bryan, just keep your software proprietary. No one gives a shit about it anyway.
You've tried pulling this shit before.
Bravo, Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that the geek crowd finds interesting. Is it useful? Nope. Is it cool and borderline bizarre? Yep!
Isn't KDE substantially more popular in Deutschland than anywhere else?
I mean, the KDE founder was given the German Federal Cross of Merit for pete's sake
Mod parent up.
Though I will say that things can run well on older hardware depending on your task. If you can live without flash player, HD video, games, semantic desktops, etc, then a 700MHz Pentium III with 384 MB of RAM will run just fine. I have such a box, running Arch, that I use for IRC (irssi), occasional Web browsing (Midori), IM (Pidgin or Finch) and Email (mutt). I think it's using Openbox + fbpanel for a desktop. For me? For the task? it's fine. For Joe User? Surprisingly usable with lightweight GUI applications installed. It's not the prettiest girl at the prom, but it'll put out.
At the end of the day, it's not going to stream videos from YouTube (not very well anyway -- but I've never tried). But if a family member or friend needed ANY kind of computer for free? I could give it away and it would do the bare minimum.
A poster in a previous thread make an insightful counterpoint to your argument.
The TSA/DHS's job is not to protect the American people. If a terrorist wanted to kill hundreds of people, they'd just bomb the security checkpoints themselves. It's a huge bottleneck and they could kill way more people instead of bombing an individual plane.
Indeed, the TSA/DHS's real job is to protect our elected officials in Washington. Their real job is to prevent terrorists from taking over an aircraft and then flying it into the White House, Pentagon, Capitol Hill, or other politically/economically important landmarks.
Well, you can be sure they're free of HIV -- No sex to transmit it to them!
Once again, Slashdot is the epitome of bad science reporting :)
The study shows that in a group of people ranging from 45 - 70, they found that cognitive decline was present in all of them. That means that cognitive decline begins AT LEAST at 45. TFA says "As early as 45", which is technically true but sort of dishonest IMHO, and the original paper doesn't make any such explicit conclusions.
Sigh.
Good deeds are good, but having bread on one's table is important, too. So, what's the pay?
I absolutely agree with you. I'm not suggesting that the guy become a full time free software dev. However, I'd argue that working on a FOSS project will look good on a resume AND improve his skills. I'm not so sure that there are many employers out there who are willing to let an older, semi-entry-level developer onto their team.
I wouldn't discount languages like C just yet. They're still hugely important in the kernel world, for example.
As far as newer languages go, there are a lot of F/OSS projects that could use another hand. Have a look at the Bugzilla for various projects and grab the latest source from svn/git/mercurial/whatever. Your skills as a programmer should transfer over to a new language relatively easily, and you'll have done a good deed.
I want one that looks like my mother!
FTFY.
I think a pizza analogy would be more appropriate.
Where are you going to put said photovoltaic cells?
Photvoltaics have poor efficiency. I think I saw, maybe here on Slashdot, that the very best cells are 19.3% efficiency. Since you claim there are no moving parts, I suppose you're not going to try to mount them on some sort of Sun-tracking axis either.
The pollution argument is probably a moot point too. IIRC, the manufacturing process for photovoltaics is rather toxic.
Actually it probably wasn't a good idea to mention that the Wiki is served off a SheevaPlug :P
Oh well, at least Slashdot will give the little bugger a good work out.
QFT. I've got a couple of games in my library which are particularly bad offenders (Mass Effect, Army of Two, I'm looking at both of you). The situation is alleviated a bit by switching to component (I'm lucky enough to have an SDTV with component inputs), but small screen fonts + composite looks absolutely horrendous.
Playing those games with a composite connection was enough for me to turn off the 360 and turn on the Wii after about 15 minutes.
I'd like to know how many of these HD users are even configured correctly.
It seems like the vast majority of casual gamers that I know have never even managed to configure their consoles correctly for high definition anyway. For example, my cousin who had a 46" plasma TV with an Xbox 360 connected via composite and running non-widescreen.
Maybe console makers should provide an idiot-proof method of configuring the screen before they push HD so hard.
I completely agree. Our department uses it too, and it's total garbage. Its based on old-and-busted RHEL4, and doesn't have half of the packages we need anyway. I'd be much happier with something with a scientific repository tacked on. But nooo, we have to use it because it has SCIENCE built in! Ugh
Seconded. I had a damn similar experience. Mod parent up.
For what it's worth, my job (IT at a University) uses Dell machines exclusively and we've had fantastic support from them for replacement parts. To skip the script, we usually just tell the CSR that we've swapped the bad part with one from a working machine and that the machine works fine. At that point, the drone will go ahead and ship us a replacement and we ship the broken one back. Works out pretty well.
To be honest, I really felt like games like Everquest still embodied this sense of community. It was so often that people would get together in the popular zones and chat up a storm -- especially so in the trading hubs. Perhaps because the game was modeled off of popular MUDs at the time. I'm sure UO and others were much the same way.
As time went on, I certainly didn't feel this in Everquest II, or WoW, or WAR. Community is dead.
As the size of the farm scales, however, I'd hazard to guess that the power consumption differences would be far more noticable.
I received mostly poor grades in my freshman and sophmore years but still scored higher than the vast majority of my graduating class on the ACT. I went to vocational school for IT and had a lot of fun with national-level business/IT competitions (can't go wrong with free trips to California and Florida). Taking classes at community college makes up for the vocational school academics, which are clearly designed for people who are far more talented at working in a particular trade than sitting in a classroom.
That being said, I think vocational school was the best school I could've possibly went to. Most of the students at the JVS just wanted to learn a trade, be it IT, carpentry, child care, cosmetology, or whatever. There weren't any stupid social cliques and that was nice.
For me:
Many, if not all, are a PITA to get running under Linux.