To build a machine with 16 GB of RAM requires a high-end server motherboard (e.g. a Xeon or Opteron one), and that can get very expensive very quickly. Besides, nobody needs 16 GB of RAM now and probably won't for a long time; it's only useful for server and research tasks that require huge amounts of data in memory at a time.
Under United States law, a radio station always has had the ability to play a specific song in exchange for money; however, this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime, and that play of the song should not be reported as a "spin". Some radio stations report spins of the newest and most popular songs to industry publications, which are then published. The number of times the songs are played can influence other stations around the country to play or pass on a particular song. On influential stations (and particularly on television) payola can become so commonplace that it becomes difficult for artists to get their records/videos played without offering some sort of payment.
Make sure to install the non-free media libraries (e.g. libxine-extracodecs, Adobe Flash 9 beta, libdvdcss2). Make sure they have main, universe, multiverse, and restricted all enabled in their sources.list. You might want to add the WINE repository (deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main) so they get the latest version of WINE (install that too).
If they use GNOME, I would still recommend installing Amarok [1.4.3] (deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-stable/ dapper main) for their music pleasure. Hell, you could install Amarok 1.4.4 which comes with a built-in music store (Magnatune).
In the case of whether to use GNOME or KDE, I recommend giving both LiveCDs to him/her to try and let them determine which one they like better; it's completely personal preference to non-geeks (us geeks seem to prefer KDE due to functionality and customisability, but others prefer GNOME for its simplicity as well) and geeks alike. I recommend KDE, but that's just my opinion (Kubuntu is a nice KDE distro; they provide backports for up to date KDE packages on kubuntu.org including KDE, KOffice, and Amarok).
That's funny because installing nvidia drivers in, for example, Ubuntu, is done for you when you install. The easy (CLI) way of activating this is editing/etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the line with "nv", and change that to "nvidia". There is also the nvidia-xconfig program that does this for you automatically. Then there's the nvidia-settings program for editing driver-specific crap as well.
In a modern Linux distro, it's even easier than that (just click here and there and you're done). Sorry, but this ain't the 1990's anymore; don't spread FUD about getting nVidia cards to work in Linux distros.
Read Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing award lecture (http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/) for an explanation of why this is inadequate.
I declare this a new branch of Godwin's Law: in any thread discussing the trustworthiness of software, the probability that someone will post that fucking article by Thompson about "trusting trust" (remember, this was a problem in only one cc app; gcc is bootstrapped by a simple assembly-coded C compiler that can be manually converted to binary to run as an executable if you don't trust assemblers for some reason) approaches 1 as the length of the thread approaches, oh, 100 replies.
Dude, the Linux kernel seems to change significantly between 2.6.x upgrades. Remember that the kernel is only 15 years old at this point as well, so 5 years is a third of its lifetime. It has changed significantly in 5 years. Hell, it's changed significantly in 5 months...
It's still a mess of hacks and workarounds, but hopefully web developers will start dropping support for IE6 and focus on up to date web browsers (and IE7).
... as every PC is rendered obsolete by "progress" within 3 years...
Now that's just plain FUD spread by the pre-built PC industry (or spread by its customers). If you built a top-of-the-line PC today (might cost a few thousand dollars though), it will be a great gaming rig for at least a year or two, a great general-use computer for a few years, and usable for several. Obsolescence doesn't mean you can't use it; people still buy vinyl records to listen to music, yet many would consider those to be obsolete to CDDA. Many people still record TV using VCRs; VCRs are obviously obsoleted by DVRs, TiVo, and HTPCs. People still use [highly dangerous internally] CRT monitors when superior LCDs exist at competitive prices. People still use incandescent light bulbs which have been severely obsoleted by LED bulbs. I could go on...
Maybe we don't have as many active users as we thought we did? A bunch of those few thousand people were probably slashdotters.
Then again, there probably are a lot of slashdotters who are under 18 or just can't even afford $300. Was this pledge US-specific? If so, there goes another large portion of slashdotters due to the international user-base we have here.
Maybe you're buying three laptops and two of them get donated?
If you're getting something back, it doesn't seem like it would be a donation.
I don't know about the charities you donate to, but a lot of charities give you "prizes" for contributing x amount of currency (e.g. T-Shirts, mugs, CDs, concert tickets, etc.).
OpenGL is only the graphics. There are great libraries like SDL (for input, 2d, sound) and OpenAL (sound). In fact, SDL practically is an all-in-one API for game programming (and many other media-based programs); you just need to use OpenGL for 3d graphics.
Besides, the only people that need to worry about these details typically are those who create the game engines (e.g. id, Unreal); other game developers use said engines which should be abstracting that sort of stuff in the first place.
I know you can plug a USB keyboard into the Xbox 360 and use it for the new Phantasy Star Online game (back when they had the beta test a couple weeks ago). It probably works for other things, but you can't use it as a controller for some reason.:(
Judging by the MySpace demographic, I'd have to say that you're going to the wrong site if you want to hear or share jazz or symphonic music.
At least MySpace doesn't recompress your audio files you upload so that you can encode at a better bitrate for jazz or classical music to get the same quality as ~128k pop/rock/whatever.
In that case, MPlayer takes the cake with its usage of right/left arrows, up/down arrows, and page up/down for skipping 10 seconds, 1 minute (or something like that), and 10 minutes respectively.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this guy, it's called the occiputal bun.
Oh, and what's up with nobody replying to each other in this story?
It's too bad that Java is going to be freed under the GPL, eh? Otherwise, your argument might have held water.
To build a machine with 16 GB of RAM requires a high-end server motherboard (e.g. a Xeon or Opteron one), and that can get very expensive very quickly. Besides, nobody needs 16 GB of RAM now and probably won't for a long time; it's only useful for server and research tasks that require huge amounts of data in memory at a time.
Make sure to install the non-free media libraries (e.g. libxine-extracodecs, Adobe Flash 9 beta, libdvdcss2). Make sure they have main, universe, multiverse, and restricted all enabled in their sources.list. You might want to add the WINE repository (deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main) so they get the latest version of WINE (install that too).
If they use GNOME, I would still recommend installing Amarok [1.4.3] (deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-stable/ dapper main) for their music pleasure. Hell, you could install Amarok 1.4.4 which comes with a built-in music store (Magnatune).
In the case of whether to use GNOME or KDE, I recommend giving both LiveCDs to him/her to try and let them determine which one they like better; it's completely personal preference to non-geeks (us geeks seem to prefer KDE due to functionality and customisability, but others prefer GNOME for its simplicity as well) and geeks alike. I recommend KDE, but that's just my opinion (Kubuntu is a nice KDE distro; they provide backports for up to date KDE packages on kubuntu.org including KDE, KOffice, and Amarok).
That's funny because installing nvidia drivers in, for example, Ubuntu, is done for you when you install. The easy (CLI) way of activating this is editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the line with "nv", and change that to "nvidia". There is also the nvidia-xconfig program that does this for you automatically. Then there's the nvidia-settings program for editing driver-specific crap as well.
In a modern Linux distro, it's even easier than that (just click here and there and you're done). Sorry, but this ain't the 1990's anymore; don't spread FUD about getting nVidia cards to work in Linux distros.
Bose makes TVs? ;p
I think he's referring to the huge amount of games for Xbox 360 that are single player or online multiplayer only.
Dude, the Linux kernel seems to change significantly between 2.6.x upgrades. Remember that the kernel is only 15 years old at this point as well, so 5 years is a third of its lifetime. It has changed significantly in 5 years. Hell, it's changed significantly in 5 months...
Oooh, how many lines of Perl can you write a Bayesian filter in? :P
It's still a mess of hacks and workarounds, but hopefully web developers will start dropping support for IE6 and focus on up to date web browsers (and IE7).
Godaddy switched from Apache to IIS, so all their parked domains were using IIS all of a sudden.
typedef int64_t time_t;
Hmm, that should work fine.
They should have gone to the Stephen and Melinda Gates Foundation! :P
Maybe we don't have as many active users as we thought we did? A bunch of those few thousand people were probably slashdotters.
Then again, there probably are a lot of slashdotters who are under 18 or just can't even afford $300. Was this pledge US-specific? If so, there goes another large portion of slashdotters due to the international user-base we have here.
I don't know about the charities you donate to, but a lot of charities give you "prizes" for contributing x amount of currency (e.g. T-Shirts, mugs, CDs, concert tickets, etc.).
I'm pretty sure a lot of the target countries have electricity...
Just because they're third-world doesn't mean they're living in the stone age.
Most people seem to like either Ruby [on Rails] or Python (Django seems to be a good MVC framework, but there are more).
OpenGL is only the graphics. There are great libraries like SDL (for input, 2d, sound) and OpenAL (sound). In fact, SDL practically is an all-in-one API for game programming (and many other media-based programs); you just need to use OpenGL for 3d graphics.
Besides, the only people that need to worry about these details typically are those who create the game engines (e.g. id, Unreal); other game developers use said engines which should be abstracting that sort of stuff in the first place.
I know you can plug a USB keyboard into the Xbox 360 and use it for the new Phantasy Star Online game (back when they had the beta test a couple weeks ago). It probably works for other things, but you can't use it as a controller for some reason. :(
Judging by the MySpace demographic, I'd have to say that you're going to the wrong site if you want to hear or share jazz or symphonic music.
At least MySpace doesn't recompress your audio files you upload so that you can encode at a better bitrate for jazz or classical music to get the same quality as ~128k pop/rock/whatever.
In that case, MPlayer takes the cake with its usage of right/left arrows, up/down arrows, and page up/down for skipping 10 seconds, 1 minute (or something like that), and 10 minutes respectively.