I'm still trying to figure out what the heck AMD Live! is supposed to be good for, besides the marketing department. My bios settings even allow me to disable it, with no apparent detriment to my computing experience.
how many routers can run on USB's maximum 500mA though?
Very few, I'm sure, but I have a wireless access point (WL-330g) with rated input of 4V@1A that came with a USB power cord that works well. Granted, that's still only 4 watts max, still less than most routers want, but significantly more than the 500mA the USB port is rated for (if my AP is actually pulling full power, which it may not be; I've only used it for internet access).
I'd wager it could be done with some commodity routers and perhaps even some specialized hardware. The fit-pc, for example takes 5V and claims power usage in the 3-5W range. That should run well enough on a USB power supply (or even greener using flash in place of the hdd) and provide all the functionality you could want using linux or m0n0wall.
My former boss bought an Asus eee with linux on it for work. He couldn't get his program to install on it (and I guarantee he was trying to run the windows version, rather than the linux version of the program installer, even though he knew he was using a linux computer), so he installed XP. From a used XP disc that wouldn't then let him activate because it was a used XP disc.
Rather than place a 10-minute phone call to me to ask me how to install the program, he called MS's activation phone number and gave them his credit card number so he could keep his XP install. How long did that phone call take? And the install? And the updates? And booting the computer into XP every day for work and waiting for all the applications to load?
This guy spent time and money to avoid what can only be seen as the technically simpler solution because to do otherwise would have taken him out of his comfort zone. That eeepc was purchased for one reason only: to run that single program, and the program was available to run on windows xp or linux.
It's plain silly, but this is what so many people do in similar situations; this is how they actually think and solve problems.
A second example, a guy in another office (different employer) needed a new computer to replace his ailing XP machine. It was decided a Mac would suit the needs of the station and one was purchased. This guy was so frustrated by the fact that his new mac wouldn't run his calendar creator that he was ready to trade his new 20" imac for the XP celeron in the next office. I stepped in and with approved funds helped him purchase and install Parallels so he could install his calendar creator. Had he had access to an XP disc and the knowledge to run Boot Camp, I wouldn't have had the chance.
First of all, considering they ask for your email address so they can verify you, how exactly is it "unsubstantiated"?
Fair enough, substance is relative. I'm not Bruce, so I can't claim to know all his reasons, but left to guess I would say it's probably to empower him to credibly refute any possible claim that ballot-stuffing occurred, i.e., duplicate signatures. Do you not have more than 1 email address? If not, do you not know how to create one in 2 minutes? You may be above such things, but I assure you that a) many are not, and b) Bruce's opposition at the OSI will not hesitate to accuse you or any other signateur of it if he doesn't make the signing process fairly tight.
I don't see any explicit privacy assurances on the registration page; it should probably appear there (people familiar with Bruce's reputation take same as their assurance).
are you seriously claiming that it's impossible to have a log-in system that doesn't require cookies??!?!
No such claim appeared in my post, implied or otherwise.
I wouldn't wait at all. (I don't have Vista.) Three reasons:
1. The thrill. It's the same thrill I get opening email attachments from unrecognised senders, or reformatting my root partition at midnight when I know I have to get up early in the morning, and if something unexpected happens I'm going to have to stay up extra hours fixing it, then feeling suicidal the whole next day for no other reason than that I'm terribly sleep-deprived.
2. The opportunity to blame it all on MS if something goes wrong.
3. The joy of tinkering.
I worked for an ISP for a while that was reselling bandwidth at a ratio of approximately 30:1. In other words, selling 1mbps to their customers with a 3mbps uplink. We never saw that 3mbps peak out until we had about 90 customers online.
why do you need to save information to my computer just so that I can fill in a form?
Because you must be logged in to sign; an unsubstantiated signature isn't worth a hill of beans.
I also whitelist my cookie sites, but as some other user has kindly pointed out in his/her sig, cookies are a sometimes tool, and logins are actually one of those rare instances of a valid use, IMO.
We're talking about the nvidia-supplied driver installer here. Nvidia has packaged a nice neat exe file for windows users and a shell script for the linux kind.
Linux users, meanwhile, and thanks to great developers and package maintainers, have the luxury of choosing to use aforementioned installer from nvidia or the one that comes nicely packaged with his distro. In the case of Ubuntu, one need only respond to the notification balloon on his desktop which prompts him to install the nvidia driver with a click of the mouse.
Want Windows to check for updated hardware drivers for you the very moment you log in? Good luck.
I need to be productive and I need a working system. End of story.
Many people will sympathise with your frustration of hardware not working properly/having full support in non-Windows systems. Many of us, however, balk at your solution, which in my view, represents a compromise on so many levels.
You see, if I'm looking at purchasing a laptop with Broadcom wireless and I happen to know that Broadcom Don't Work That Great(TM) in linux, then rather than switch to an OS that is in my eyes inferior, insulting, buggy and patronising, not to mention the fruit of a hostile predatory monopolist, I'll just find another laptop, one that has good open hardware. They abound, at least in this market.
Now you may accuse me of being political, bigotted, or evangelist, but I've used every significant version of Windows since 3.11 for Workgroups frankly they all grate my nerves.
And I'm done screwing away hours just to get this soundcard or that wireless or video hardware to work. Yeah, most people here will agree with you, but choosing Vista over Ubuntu when there are perfectly good hardware options out there is, in my view, shooting yourself in the foot, putting the cart before the horse, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I'll donate my money to hunger relief, thank you. Dvorak (and countless other critics, no doubt) rants that $200 would be better spent on rice. So I'm reading his article and thinking, ok, how much rice has Mr. Dvorak shipped over to hungry mouths in Africa or Alabama?
There is no shortage of critics and nay-sayers in this world who are content to sit back and poo-poo others' efforts. Let Mr. Dvorak contribute half the hours Mr. Negroponte has spent helping the less fortunate and then pontificate to the rest of the world on the subject.
This is not a food/education dichotomy that Dvorak is forwarding in this piece, regardless of what he might want his readers to believe. It's a criticism/education dichotomy.
If John C. Dvorak or anybody else wants to criticise OLPC or any other organism for their efforts to help the less fortunate, let his criticism start with the sentence "I donated my money to hunger relief, thank you.
And shall we not forget the Find function that invariably returns "text not found" as I'm staring right at said text in the page. Ridiculous.
Parenthetically, my boss just loves the "Big e" and feels that clicking on the page, going into the Edit menu, clicking on "Select All", then doing his search is a perfectly normal way to do business on the web. Much better than just starting to type and having the highlighted text appear instantly in front of you, à la Firefox, indeed.
Microsoft is collecting and storing users' word associations
So essentially this is a phishing site, and they're telling you that up front. Of course MS is aware that if you take a sample 1000 people who have fallen for a phishing scam in the past and send them to this inkblot password site with a disclosure that their password will be recorded, 1000 of these will go ahead and use it anyway. It's a great way to do as the criminals do, and through a simple legal disclosure it's no longer a crime.
Respond with "butterfly" and share your password with half the english-speaking planet.
db
Re:Any suggestions to slashdotproof it?
on
OOXML's 662 Resolutions
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· Score: 3, Informative
Since it sounds like bandwidth isn't your problem, you can start by optimising your filesystem mount options for speed, particularly the partition carrying your log files, as these will be writing like crazy right now. For example, in/etc/fstab, for xfs use "noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8". For reiserfs, "noatime,notail". Do mount -a to effect the changes right away.
I'm sure MS is working on their version of MSOO (Microsoft Office Online)
And I'm sure Mr. Bhatia is counting on MS "working on" this new free office suite in the same way they "worked on" their new free email offering about ten or twelve years ago, to the tune of another $400 million or so in his pocket.
Have you seen the Live Documents site? I assume that some of that $400 million for Hotmail was spent on legal consultation for this Live Documents baby. I'm no lawyer, and I certainly wouldn't be throwing around registered trademarks without some seriously qualified legal advice the way it's happening on this site. Add to this the claim (to be seen) that Live Documents will mimic the MS Office interface and it's clear that Mr. Bhatia is desperately waving his arms in the general direction of MS and saying either (a)"Hey, screw you and your $400 office suite", or (b)"Hey, look, I just saved you a lot of work designing your online office suite". Or possibly (c)both.
And power to him. As was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, MS helped lay the legal foundation for the borrowed interface; let them lie in the bed they've made.
Personally I have no love for Google's version of the online office. I've used their spreadsheets for collaboration and found them painfully slow and inferior to the good old-fashioned local office suite. I'll try Live Documents just out of curiosity, but even if it's quick and great and functional, unless it's functional beyond my wildest dreams I just don't see any compelling reason to trust my files with a third party. And don't talk to me about the money I can save in licensing fees -- most slashdotters already have some great workaround to that problem already figured out.
http://k12ltsp.org/ that has been around and available for years? It's based on Fedora but everything is there for a standard office environment.
This looks pretty much identical to what Edubuntu does for you. I run Edubuntu at home for the simple reason that I like sitting down in front of $RANDOM_AVAILABLE_COMPUTER and being right at home.
Don't kid yourself. NASA has already proven the ability to "hear" what you're not saying, just through collecting nerve impulses in the vicinity of your throat. Add to that information about heart and respiration rate, skin temperature, and loads of other biometric data, and yes, a well-equipped government agency will be able to form a fairly accurate picture of what you're thinking.
I suspect the next ten years will be a little about refining the process of synthesising the gleaned biometric data and a lot about improving remote/covert collection.
Go ahead and debate the reliability of conclusions drawn from biometric data, but if it's already admissible in court then you can be very sure that this kind of data is "legal tender" (paradoxical use intended) in the law enforcement grey market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm filing this one with Intel's VIIV and VPro.
db
I'd wager it could be done with some commodity routers and perhaps even some specialized hardware. The fit-pc, for example takes 5V and claims power usage in the 3-5W range. That should run well enough on a USB power supply (or even greener using flash in place of the hdd) and provide all the functionality you could want using linux or m0n0wall.
db
db
Rather than place a 10-minute phone call to me to ask me how to install the program, he called MS's activation phone number and gave them his credit card number so he could keep his XP install. How long did that phone call take? And the install? And the updates? And booting the computer into XP every day for work and waiting for all the applications to load?
This guy spent time and money to avoid what can only be seen as the technically simpler solution because to do otherwise would have taken him out of his comfort zone. That eeepc was purchased for one reason only: to run that single program, and the program was available to run on windows xp or linux.
It's plain silly, but this is what so many people do in similar situations; this is how they actually think and solve problems.
A second example, a guy in another office (different employer) needed a new computer to replace his ailing XP machine. It was decided a Mac would suit the needs of the station and one was purchased. This guy was so frustrated by the fact that his new mac wouldn't run his calendar creator that he was ready to trade his new 20" imac for the XP celeron in the next office. I stepped in and with approved funds helped him purchase and install Parallels so he could install his calendar creator. Had he had access to an XP disc and the knowledge to run Boot Camp, I wouldn't have had the chance.
db
Sorry if I'm not overly impressed.
db
I don't see any explicit privacy assurances on the registration page; it should probably appear there (people familiar with Bruce's reputation take same as their assurance).
No such claim appeared in my post, implied or otherwise.db
1. The thrill. It's the same thrill I get opening email attachments from unrecognised senders, or reformatting my root partition at midnight when I know I have to get up early in the morning, and if something unexpected happens I'm going to have to stay up extra hours fixing it, then feeling suicidal the whole next day for no other reason than that I'm terribly sleep-deprived.
2. The opportunity to blame it all on MS if something goes wrong.
3. The joy of tinkering.
db
I worked for an ISP for a while that was reselling bandwidth at a ratio of approximately 30:1. In other words, selling 1mbps to their customers with a 3mbps uplink. We never saw that 3mbps peak out until we had about 90 customers online.
db
db
Because you must be logged in to sign; an unsubstantiated signature isn't worth a hill of beans.
I also whitelist my cookie sites, but as some other user has kindly pointed out in his/her sig, cookies are a sometimes tool, and logins are actually one of those rare instances of a valid use, IMO.
db
Linux users, meanwhile, and thanks to great developers and package maintainers, have the luxury of choosing to use aforementioned installer from nvidia or the one that comes nicely packaged with his distro. In the case of Ubuntu, one need only respond to the notification balloon on his desktop which prompts him to install the nvidia driver with a click of the mouse.
Want Windows to check for updated hardware drivers for you the very moment you log in? Good luck.
db
You see, if I'm looking at purchasing a laptop with Broadcom wireless and I happen to know that Broadcom Don't Work That Great(TM) in linux, then rather than switch to an OS that is in my eyes inferior, insulting, buggy and patronising, not to mention the fruit of a hostile predatory monopolist, I'll just find another laptop, one that has good open hardware. They abound, at least in this market.
Now you may accuse me of being political, bigotted, or evangelist, but I've used every significant version of Windows since 3.11 for Workgroups frankly they all grate my nerves.
And I'm done screwing away hours just to get this soundcard or that wireless or video hardware to work. Yeah, most people here will agree with you, but choosing Vista over Ubuntu when there are perfectly good hardware options out there is, in my view, shooting yourself in the foot, putting the cart before the horse, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
db
db
There is no shortage of critics and nay-sayers in this world who are content to sit back and poo-poo others' efforts. Let Mr. Dvorak contribute half the hours Mr. Negroponte has spent helping the less fortunate and then pontificate to the rest of the world on the subject.
This is not a food/education dichotomy that Dvorak is forwarding in this piece, regardless of what he might want his readers to believe. It's a criticism/education dichotomy.
If John C. Dvorak or anybody else wants to criticise OLPC or any other organism for their efforts to help the less fortunate, let his criticism start with the sentence "I donated my money to hunger relief, thank you.
db
db
Parenthetically, my boss just loves the "Big e" and feels that clicking on the page, going into the Edit menu, clicking on "Select All", then doing his search is a perfectly normal way to do business on the web. Much better than just starting to type and having the highlighted text appear instantly in front of you, à la Firefox, indeed.
db
db
db
Just my 2 cents.
db
db
Have you seen the Live Documents site? I assume that some of that $400 million for Hotmail was spent on legal consultation for this Live Documents baby. I'm no lawyer, and I certainly wouldn't be throwing around registered trademarks without some seriously qualified legal advice the way it's happening on this site. Add to this the claim (to be seen) that Live Documents will mimic the MS Office interface and it's clear that Mr. Bhatia is desperately waving his arms in the general direction of MS and saying either (a)"Hey, screw you and your $400 office suite", or (b)"Hey, look, I just saved you a lot of work designing your online office suite". Or possibly (c)both.
And power to him. As was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, MS helped lay the legal foundation for the borrowed interface; let them lie in the bed they've made.
Personally I have no love for Google's version of the online office. I've used their spreadsheets for collaboration and found them painfully slow and inferior to the good old-fashioned local office suite. I'll try Live Documents just out of curiosity, but even if it's quick and great and functional, unless it's functional beyond my wildest dreams I just don't see any compelling reason to trust my files with a third party. And don't talk to me about the money I can save in licensing fees -- most slashdotters already have some great workaround to that problem already figured out.
db
MS's OS numbering scheme is senseless.
Therefore, MS's OS numbering scheme was written by children.
I know, logically this conclusion is invalid, however I think it's a step closer to the truth than what the parent was suggesting.
db
This looks pretty much identical to what Edubuntu does for you. I run Edubuntu at home for the simple reason that I like sitting down in front of $RANDOM_AVAILABLE_COMPUTER and being right at home.
db
I suspect the next ten years will be a little about refining the process of synthesising the gleaned biometric data and a lot about improving remote/covert collection.
Go ahead and debate the reliability of conclusions drawn from biometric data, but if it's already admissible in court then you can be very sure that this kind of data is "legal tender" (paradoxical use intended) in the law enforcement grey market.
db