in my job the poeple doing medical billing use software that requires all letter keypresses must be in caps also.
If the software needs all input to be made using capital letters, why can't it just make them capital using a simple filter!?! The users shouldn't be allowed to input invalid characters in the first place!
Pehaps, if there wasn't a CapsLock key, the programmers would be forced to properly check the input for this application.
It's more likely that the HD's they put into these laptops come pre-loaded with an Windows image, it's quicker than installing Windows on the machine after its build. After the machine is ready, probably they are tested using some standart built-in auto-test. So there is no way a Dell notebook will come out of the factory without Windows installed.
It's just industrial scale economics.
I also tryed to argue with them, without success... but in the end is easier to buy the notebook and wipe Windows out of it. Looking around, I've concluded that the price difference won't be that much if they didn't bundled Windows, around U$25,00 ~ 50,00 probably.
I have an account at this Brazilian bank called Itau, they have a pretty smart way to avoid keyloggers.
When you login on the website, you're propted with a DHTML panel, with five buttons like this:
[3 5] [9 6] [0 1] [2 7] [4 8]
And then you have to type your password using the mouse, so if your password is 12345 you'll have to enter the 3rd, 4th, 1st, 5th and 1st buttons. Each time you enter the site they present the numbers at a different order, so hackers can't use a mouse-logger either.
Pretty smart, works on Firefox and Linux, and don't require any special devices.
Games running under Wine on Linux usually have a better performance than running "native" on Windows. I don't know why it happens, pehaps the Wine folks just did a better implementation of the WindowsAPI, pehaps Linux just handles things better, or a combination of these... but Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, in my experience, runs much smoother under wine/cedega than on WindowsXP.
So, I won't be surprized if games using this technology actually perform better on the Mac than on Windows.
Also, this mithic "Linux OS" hurts the image of all distros... Because it's too hard, because nobody supports it, because it's not ready for the desktop, because it doesn't support hardware X, because it doesn't play DivX movies out of the box, etc...
When some clumsy, half baked, buggy distro get's a bad review the press don't say "Clumsy Distro X sucks", they say "Linux sucks", and this is just plain wrong!
People must understand that Linux is a kernel, and must understand that RedHat is not Debian that is not Suse that is not Ubuntu that is not Mandriva that is not... ad nauseum.
RedHat owns and funds several key technologies, like JBoss Application server, that are crucial for the enterprise. They got a lead on these technologies, and can offer better support and integration with their OS. Also, RedHat still has Oracle at their side.
Ubuntu may be a good choice for a small-to-medium business, and for desktops... but Governaments and big companies will go with RedHat.
One that was set on HARDWARE instead, a virtualization support at processor level?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't both Intel and AMD has develloped something (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderpool) that will make it possible to run unmodified guest OSes under the same supervisor? If so, why bother with a common interface to the Linux Kernel, if this interface won't be necessary?
It would be much better if they focused on supporting each other VM image format, so one could migrate a live Xen Domain to a VMWare server and vice-versa.
A small, cheap, rugged, wireless, linux-enabled laptop! Something I could use for web browsing, email, IM, chat and text-editing but also capable of running a ssh shell and a freeNX session! I don't know about you, but I think that the OLPC reached a nice balance between PDA and Notebook.
Oh, and probably it's powerfull enough to run Wesnoth, NetPanzer and a SNES emulator!
I was recently given an old Psion Revo, and I can tell you that it's quite capable of surfing the web, since you can use Opera 5 on it. Of course it has some glitches, but for reading Slashdot and searching something on Google it's ok.
IMHO, EPOC is a much more capable OS than PalmOS or WinCE. While not rock solid, it's pretty stable and has plenty of usefull features and applications. For those who may not know, EPOC is now called Symbian... and boy, I wish Nokia offered a Symbian-enabled version of the i770!
As a former Mac user, I can tell you that you probably did the right thing.
The first generation of Apple products generaly comes with some issues, so it's wiser to wait for the first revision. It happened with my iBook, first generation Snow, the maiboard fried on the first 2 weeks... and also, it was not "OSX ready", since it came with only 64MB, 8MB of video and a slow 66MHz bus... the first revision fixed all these issues.
I dont know about India, but here at Brazil, the OLPC makes a lot of sense. We already have the infra-structre necessary to deploy the laptops, there are already national standarts on education, so we can provide the needed content and books on a digital format.
So, our educational system is organizated enought to embrace the OLPC, and adapt it to our needs. That is the beauty of this project, since its open everyone can modify it, adapt it to their needs. It isnt a "one size fits all" solution, its geared towards adaptation.
You say that Microsoft and others can offer a "fully functional" before MIT. Define "fully functional", what makes you think the OLPC isnt functional? What a "fully functional" laptop can offer that the OLPC cant?
B) It's almost useless unless you're a children, or a geek
Take a look at the machine specs... Sure, if it was an average laptop, able to run Windows, MSOffice and all sort pirated applications and games some people would buy it from the children, but given the laptop specs and software it seems very unlikely.
I recommend you to take a look at the OLPC site (http://www.laptop.org).
The project is amazing, it's not just about handling a laptop to a child... They're producing a collaborative environment called Sugar (using GTK, Gecko and Python), to help children share content. Also, they're working on educational content, and educational applications.
The mesh network idea is just incredible, it will make possible to the children create their own content, and share it with their colleages even where there's no access to the internet, since the wireless card keeps on running even when the laptop is on sleep state. It also make it possible to share internet access throght a large area, since every laptop act as a router.
It's really fantastic, and you can see that there is a real commitment behind this. And, since everything is OpenSource, YOU can help them! You can contribute wiht code, or content, or ideas!
It's not like Google has a plan to fool every driver into using his cellphone while driving. This way raising the number of car crashes... what will make the insurance companies go bankrupt... causing a collapse to the USA economy... what will bring the dollar value down, and will allow Google to buy the entire Country!!!
* you can build a simple radiator and expose it to wind, on a area protected from sunlight
* you can put it near your house's water pipes, so the running water would absorb the heat.
* or increase the temperature differential, put the engine on your rooftop, directly exposed to the sunlight, paint it black, etc... And the ambient temperature will be cool enought to make this engine work.
And to counter your argument: what happens in two years when ATI and NVidia decide your card is too old to support, and yet it still performs very well but you NEED the features in the latest kernel and latest x.org?
Well, it just happened. The last two iterations of the FGLRX driver broke my ATI Radeon 9200, and looking at the bugreports it looks like the entire R200 family is affected. When prompted for a solution, ATI said that R200 is no longer supported.
PHP has one great feature, it's dead simple to deploy it. Just enable mod-php on Apache and you're ready to go... Ruby and Python require more work, and they're not as avaliable as PHP.
I used to bash PHP, but today I consider it a usefull tool. It's dirty and simple, and you can quickly resolve many problems with it. But for big projects I still prefer the Java+Tomcat+Spring combo.
And also consider that many softwares over there are not prepared to take advantage of these extra core... Sure, you'll be able to run more applications at the same time without degradation.
This makes me wonder, will the developers adapt to this new reality. I mean, Intel and AMD can't give us more performance by raising the clock of their processors... so they started to put more cores on them. At one point developers will have to paralelize their code to be able to gain performance.
I don't know... from the sketches this dino doesn't look like a flyer, it's more like a glider. And it's "wings" actually are a membrane connecting it's rear members with the tail, forming a triangle... It has nothing to do with the delta wing configuration of modern jets.
Pehaps the article is trying to correlate this dino with jets just to gather some attention.
So sell me a notebook WITHOUT any OS pre-installed! Why should I be forced to pay for something I'll not use?
My problem isn't install Linux on the notebook, that I know how to do... My problem is how can I buy a piece of hardware without having to buy a Windows Licence too!
Dell, HP, Lenovo... All of them refuse to refund a returned Windows copy. Mind you that this kind of pratice goes aggainst the brasilian law, they can't force me to buy something that I don't want... In theory I could take this to the court, but its not worth the effort.
I would buy an Apple MacBook instead, but they cost almost 3x the price here at Brasil... A Dell is much cheper, because they have a assembly factory here and don't have to pay the abusive import taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
If the software needs all input to be made using capital letters, why can't it just make them capital using a simple filter!?! The users shouldn't be allowed to input invalid characters in the first place!
Pehaps, if there wasn't a CapsLock key, the programmers would be forced to properly check the input for this application.
I don't that there is any contractual issues...
It's more likely that the HD's they put into these laptops come pre-loaded with an Windows image, it's quicker than installing Windows on the machine after its build. After the machine is ready, probably they are tested using some standart built-in auto-test. So there is no way a Dell notebook will come out of the factory without Windows installed.
It's just industrial scale economics.
I also tryed to argue with them, without success... but in the end is easier to buy the notebook and wipe Windows out of it. Looking around, I've concluded that the price difference won't be that much if they didn't bundled Windows, around U$25,00 ~ 50,00 probably.
So,
How hard will it be to teach them say "aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade"??
I have an account at this Brazilian bank called Itau, they have a pretty smart way to avoid keyloggers.
When you login on the website, you're propted with a DHTML panel, with five buttons like this:
[3 5] [9 6] [0 1] [2 7] [4 8]
And then you have to type your password using the mouse, so if your password is 12345 you'll have to enter the 3rd, 4th, 1st, 5th and 1st buttons. Each time you enter the site they present the numbers at a different order, so hackers can't use a mouse-logger either.
Pretty smart, works on Firefox and Linux, and don't require any special devices.
About performance,
Games running under Wine on Linux usually have a better performance than running "native" on Windows. I don't know why it happens, pehaps the Wine folks just did a better implementation of the WindowsAPI, pehaps Linux just handles things better, or a combination of these... but Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, in my experience, runs much smoother under wine/cedega than on WindowsXP.
So, I won't be surprized if games using this technology actually perform better on the Mac than on Windows.
Agreed,
Also, this mithic "Linux OS" hurts the image of all distros... Because it's too hard, because nobody supports it, because it's not ready for the desktop, because it doesn't support hardware X, because it doesn't play DivX movies out of the box, etc...
When some clumsy, half baked, buggy distro get's a bad review the press don't say "Clumsy Distro X sucks", they say "Linux sucks", and this is just plain wrong!
People must understand that Linux is a kernel, and must understand that RedHat is not Debian that is not Suse that is not Ubuntu that is not Mandriva that is not... ad nauseum.
apt-get install vim
Also,
RedHat owns and funds several key technologies, like JBoss Application server, that are crucial for the enterprise. They got a lead on these technologies, and can offer better support and integration with their OS. Also, RedHat still has Oracle at their side.
Ubuntu may be a good choice for a small-to-medium business, and for desktops... but Governaments and big companies will go with RedHat.
One that was set on HARDWARE instead, a virtualization support at processor level?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't both Intel and AMD has develloped something (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderpool) that will make it possible to run unmodified guest OSes under the same supervisor? If so, why bother with a common interface to the Linux Kernel, if this interface won't be necessary?
It would be much better if they focused on supporting each other VM image format, so one could migrate a live Xen Domain to a VMWare server and vice-versa.
Now, that's something I want!
A small, cheap, rugged, wireless, linux-enabled laptop! Something I could use for web browsing, email, IM, chat and text-editing but also capable of running a ssh shell and a freeNX session! I don't know about you, but I think that the OLPC reached a nice balance between PDA and Notebook.
Oh, and probably it's powerfull enough to run Wesnoth, NetPanzer and a SNES emulator!
Well,
I was recently given an old Psion Revo, and I can tell you that it's quite capable of surfing the web, since you can use Opera 5 on it. Of course it has some glitches, but for reading Slashdot and searching something on Google it's ok.
IMHO, EPOC is a much more capable OS than PalmOS or WinCE. While not rock solid, it's pretty stable and has plenty of usefull features and applications. For those who may not know, EPOC is now called Symbian... and boy, I wish Nokia offered a Symbian-enabled version of the i770!
As a former Mac user, I can tell you that you probably did the right thing.
The first generation of Apple products generaly comes with some issues, so it's wiser to wait for the first revision. It happened with my iBook, first generation Snow, the maiboard fried on the first 2 weeks... and also, it was not "OSX ready", since it came with only 64MB, 8MB of video and a slow 66MHz bus... the first revision fixed all these issues.
Im really sorry that you think like this.
I dont know about India, but here at Brazil, the OLPC makes a lot of sense. We already have the infra-structre necessary to deploy the laptops, there are already national standarts on education, so we can provide the needed content and books on a digital format.
So, our educational system is organizated enought to embrace the OLPC, and adapt it to our needs. That is the beauty of this project, since its open everyone can modify it, adapt it to their needs. It isnt a "one size fits all" solution, its geared towards adaptation.
You say that Microsoft and others can offer a "fully functional" before MIT. Define "fully functional", what makes you think the OLPC isnt functional? What a "fully functional" laptop can offer that the OLPC cant?
And who would buy one from the Nigerian children?
If:
A) Every children got one for free at school
B) It's almost useless unless you're a children, or a geek
Take a look at the machine specs... Sure, if it was an average laptop, able to run Windows, MSOffice and all sort pirated applications and games some people would buy it from the children, but given the laptop specs and software it seems very unlikely.
I recommend you to take a look at the OLPC site (http://www.laptop.org).
The project is amazing, it's not just about handling a laptop to a child... They're producing a collaborative environment called Sugar (using GTK, Gecko and Python), to help children share content. Also, they're working on educational content, and educational applications.
The mesh network idea is just incredible, it will make possible to the children create their own content, and share it with their colleages even where there's no access to the internet, since the wireless card keeps on running even when the laptop is on sleep state. It also make it possible to share internet access throght a large area, since every laptop act as a router.
It's really fantastic, and you can see that there is a real commitment behind this. And, since everything is OpenSource, YOU can help them! You can contribute wiht code, or content, or ideas!
It's not like Google has a plan to fool every driver into using his cellphone while driving. This way raising the number of car crashes... what will make the insurance companies go bankrupt... causing a collapse to the USA economy ... what will bring the dollar value down, and will allow Google to buy the entire Country!!!
Hummm, Brain... what are we going to do tonight?
Well,
:-)
There is a lot of options:
* you can build a simple radiator and expose it to wind, on a area protected from sunlight
* you can put it near your house's water pipes, so the running water would absorb the heat.
* or increase the temperature differential, put the engine on your rooftop, directly exposed to the sunlight, paint it black, etc... And the ambient temperature will be cool enought to make this engine work.
* combine all the options above
This makes me wonder...
How much of this is due Cannonical/Ubuntu contributing back?
Well, it just happened. The last two iterations of the FGLRX driver broke my ATI Radeon 9200, and looking at the bugreports it looks like the entire R200 family is affected. When prompted for a solution, ATI said that R200 is no longer supported.
PHP has one great feature, it's dead simple to deploy it. Just enable mod-php on Apache and you're ready to go... Ruby and Python require more work, and they're not as avaliable as PHP.
I used to bash PHP, but today I consider it a usefull tool. It's dirty and simple, and you can quickly resolve many problems with it. But for big projects I still prefer the Java+Tomcat+Spring combo.
Consider for a moment, that Intel does provide usable OpenSource drivers for their Video Chipsets.
And also consider that many softwares over there are not prepared to take advantage of these extra core... Sure, you'll be able to run more applications at the same time without degradation.
This makes me wonder, will the developers adapt to this new reality. I mean, Intel and AMD can't give us more performance by raising the clock of their processors... so they started to put more cores on them. At one point developers will have to paralelize their code to be able to gain performance.
I don't know... from the sketches this dino doesn't look like a flyer, it's more like a glider. And it's "wings" actually are a membrane connecting it's rear members with the tail, forming a triangle... It has nothing to do with the delta wing configuration of modern jets.
Pehaps the article is trying to correlate this dino with jets just to gather some attention.
Fine,
So sell me a notebook WITHOUT any OS pre-installed! Why should I be forced to pay for something I'll not use?
My problem isn't install Linux on the notebook, that I know how to do... My problem is how can I buy a piece of hardware without having to buy a Windows Licence too!
No,
Dell, HP, Lenovo... All of them refuse to refund a returned Windows copy. Mind you that this kind of pratice goes aggainst the brasilian law, they can't force me to buy something that I don't want... In theory I could take this to the court, but its not worth the effort.
I would buy an Apple MacBook instead, but they cost almost 3x the price here at Brasil... A Dell is much cheper, because they have a assembly factory here and don't have to pay the abusive import taxes.