Everyone's definition of "a decent laptop" is different. For me, this IS a decent laptop.. why should I spend $370 for what YOU consider a decent laptop when $299 will get me exactly what I want? I'm sure that Asus has done their market research, and they feel that enough people consider this to be a decent laptop that it's worth their time to put it together. My Dell Latitude D505 (which is small and light compared to most Dells or HPs, but still not what's considered a tiny laptop) is on its last legs, and this tiny cheapo laptop looks like it might fit the bill.
It just depends what you need. Asus considers this thing to be what some people need - and I can vouch that they're right for at least one person!
Oh yes, because clearly stealing music will "induce" the music industry to lower prices, and thus make even less profit, instead of raising prices to attempt to make up for some of the losses caused by peer to peer software.
Although the preceeding comments have been largely on the order of "duh,/. users knew this for years!", we need to make sure this oppurtunity doesn't go to waste. If you've known it for years, then make sure other people know it as well. This is a good oppurtunity to spread the word. As the issue gets more press, it's going to be important to make sure it's given the gravity that it deserves.
The conclusion of the experiment was NOT that "viscosity has nothing to do with swimming speed" but rather that within a certain tolerance of viscosity, the human form performs equally well. This just means that for certain viscosities, humans are able to provide enough force by the swimming motion to propel themselves forward.
TFA certainly does not say that viscosity doesn't matter. After all, we can't swim on concrete, nor through air, and common sense says that a bullet fired into mud will drastically slow down. The only point being made was that Newton was wrong and the swimming motion of humans compensates for various viscosities.
It would be interesting to see the experiment performed with various swimming animals to compare the efficiency and adaptability of their swimming to ours.
If google does indeed take over (or merge with) the mozilla team, is this a good thing? I'm a firm believer in firefox, and I'd hate to see it get overshadowed by some new suite of software. The reason for this is not that I hate google (I love the big G), but that companies are primarily driven by money (not necessarily a bad thing), and this drive can mean that they ditch projects if the money doesn't roll in. If firefox were to be incorporated into a Google project, and that project failed, mozilla's popularity would drop, as people would see it as a failed Google bastard child.
To me this rumor, if true, could damage the very industry Google wants to support. IMO, software that's community developed should stay as is, and corporately developed software should do the same. Open source is great, but I worry for the future of a user-developed application being forced into the mold of a money-making application..
In all seriousness though, how is this different from outsourcing tech jobs across the oceans? In either situation, the person willing to work for the lowest wage gets the job.
Jobs should be given according to the prospective's knowledge, experience, and willingness to put him/herself into the job. Ability to survive on a meager salary should have nothing to do with it.
Wages should be the reward for accepting a certain job. A job should never be the reward for accepting certain wages.
says free-software guru Eric Raymond. "Folks like me have an ingrained hatred for lawyers. But at that point hackers will lift IBM's lawyers on their shoulders."
they tend to be anti-corporate types
I would suggest that only a small number of the free software advocates are anti-corporation, anti-business, anti-everything-not-free. It may appear so when you look at Linux distros like Debian, who makes such a big deal out of the idea and purpose behind the software, but I believe that the average FLOSSer is just you're average joe. Well maybe not average...
From looking at the comments posted on slashdot, it seems that most of us are reasonable people, able to understand the benefits of an open market. The only thing is that we believe that free software can be part of this market. From TFA, you'd think we're all living in communes!
Therefore I don't find it that unbelievable that the OSS community would accept IBM as our knight. The only thing we object to is a company taking advantage of the freedoms that our software and the GPL provide. We don't hate the idea of a big company (after all, many of us get our paychecks from one!), we just don't like being abused by them.
On a slightly different tact, I would also suggest that Novell has been a strong defender, perhaps taking bigger risks than IBM. Novell is in direct competition with Microsoft, and has been so for years! And more to the point, they still pull a profit! IBM has a different focus than Microsoft, but Novell is right in the line of fire. Despite that, Novell manages to completely embrace SUSE and Ximian and turn it into a corporate backed project with a real future. Now there's a hero!
Either way, seeing the media begin to accept FLOSS as a viable business method is a good step. We've known it for years, and clearly some corporations (IBM, Novell) knew it as well. The only real hurdle left is the media and the public. When these are overcome, we'll start to see real competition between the proprietary and the open source camps.
From Wikipidia: "In this article and those related, the term spamming is used broadly to refer to all of these behaviors, regardless of medium and commercial intent."
Notice the regardless of medium.
Personally, I consider spam to be the automatic supply of unwanted information. For that reason I wouldn't consider mailing lists and telemarketers as spammers. You signed up for the mailing list and telemarketing is not an automatic process. Besides, telemarketing provides (provided) a lot of people with jobs (even if bad jobs, some people need the money more than the good job).
For instance:
You can be spammed with junk mail.
A channel can be spammed by bots.
You can be spammed with emails.
You can't be spammed over the phone unless a recording is calling you.
You can be spammed in the grocery store (oh wait, that's different...)
Of course, this is just my personal way of looking at it, so what do I know?
I'm not really surprised that he was beaten. I would think that after 75 games of jeapardy with nothing but wins (not even really any close calls) one would get tired of it. I mean think of it, if they had taped them day after day in a row, it would still have been over two straight months of taping! Even an uber-nerd can only take so much geekiness.
It seems to me that he wasn't so much "beat" as he was "leaving while it still was fun".
Oh yes, because opengl in OSX doesn't use up all a low end mac's memory or anything. If Longhorn is going to go for the whole "devote the systems memory to good looks" style, no wonder it requires 1GB ram!
As a poor college student, ram is hard to come by. I don't want my desktop using it all to generate spiffy little icon effects. And seeing as Microsoft isn't going to ship multiple desktops, I hope Longhorn keeps the graphics simple for us poor kids.
I've been a college student for a whopping 5 days now (whoopee!) and I have a few words of advice:
Know you're floormates. After a few days you'll get the feel of who you can trust and who you can't. There isn't allways the need to lock up everything you own and bolt the door if all your neighbors are around with their doors open. I mean come on, you're in college, not prison. Just use your head and lock up when you'll be gone for a class or lunch or something.
Know you're roommate. Similar reasons as above. It's best to get any possible problems out of the way. Find out if he smokes, if he drinks, all the basic lifestyle stuff, and find out a way to work together. Very important: come up with a system for keys. I suggest always keeping your key with you, and making sure your roommate does the same. That way when you do lock up, you won't need to worry if the other guy can get back in.
Know yourself. Know what you'll need and what you won't. You will need MUCH less than you think you need (at least tech wise), so plan accordingly. Sure you can't imagine life without all four of your desktops and your laptop, but in reality, how often will you be able to use them? When it comes down to it, college takes up A LOT of time. Tehre's a reason why you're living there, and it's not to give you any freedom! College (at least for freshmen) takes time, and is not conducive to lots of tech toys.
Well, I hope that helped a bit.
Just for those who don't feel like reading through the article and associated forum:
An apple fanboy created this photo with some ingenuity and photoshop and posted it as if it came from a third party.
If you view the photo's blue channel only, you can see the following image
Notice the words "fake fake fake" in the corner. Later on the forum Philbot (who was caught as the purpotrator of another hoax last year) admitted the deed.
Oh those crazy apple geeks...
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone's definition of "a decent laptop" is different. For me, this IS a decent laptop.. why should I spend $370 for what YOU consider a decent laptop when $299 will get me exactly what I want? I'm sure that Asus has done their market research, and they feel that enough people consider this to be a decent laptop that it's worth their time to put it together. My Dell Latitude D505 (which is small and light compared to most Dells or HPs, but still not what's considered a tiny laptop) is on its last legs, and this tiny cheapo laptop looks like it might fit the bill.
It just depends what you need. Asus considers this thing to be what some people need - and I can vouch that they're right for at least one person!
Oh yes, because clearly stealing music will "induce" the music industry to lower prices, and thus make even less profit, instead of raising prices to attempt to make up for some of the losses caused by peer to peer software.
Although the preceeding comments have been largely on the order of "duh, /. users knew this for years!", we need to make sure this oppurtunity doesn't go to waste. If you've known it for years, then make sure other people know it as well. This is a good oppurtunity to spread the word. As the issue gets more press, it's going to be important to make sure it's given the gravity that it deserves.
The conclusion of the experiment was NOT that "viscosity has nothing to do with swimming speed" but rather that within a certain tolerance of viscosity, the human form performs equally well. This just means that for certain viscosities, humans are able to provide enough force by the swimming motion to propel themselves forward.
TFA certainly does not say that viscosity doesn't matter. After all, we can't swim on concrete, nor through air, and common sense says that a bullet fired into mud will drastically slow down. The only point being made was that Newton was wrong and the swimming motion of humans compensates for various viscosities.
It would be interesting to see the experiment performed with various swimming animals to compare the efficiency and adaptability of their swimming to ours.
If google does indeed take over (or merge with) the mozilla team, is this a good thing? I'm a firm believer in firefox, and I'd hate to see it get overshadowed by some new suite of software. The reason for this is not that I hate google (I love the big G), but that companies are primarily driven by money (not necessarily a bad thing), and this drive can mean that they ditch projects if the money doesn't roll in. If firefox were to be incorporated into a Google project, and that project failed, mozilla's popularity would drop, as people would see it as a failed Google bastard child.
To me this rumor, if true, could damage the very industry Google wants to support. IMO, software that's community developed should stay as is, and corporately developed software should do the same. Open source is great, but I worry for the future of a user-developed application being forced into the mold of a money-making application..
In all seriousness though, how is this different from outsourcing tech jobs across the oceans? In either situation, the person willing to work for the lowest wage gets the job.
Jobs should be given according to the prospective's knowledge, experience, and willingness to put him/herself into the job. Ability to survive on a meager salary should have nothing to do with it.
Wages should be the reward for accepting a certain job. A job should never be the reward for accepting certain wages.
says free-software guru Eric Raymond. "Folks like me have an ingrained hatred for lawyers. But at that point hackers will lift IBM's lawyers on their shoulders."
they tend to be anti-corporate types
I would suggest that only a small number of the free software advocates are anti-corporation, anti-business, anti-everything-not-free. It may appear so when you look at Linux distros like Debian, who makes such a big deal out of the idea and purpose behind the software, but I believe that the average FLOSSer is just you're average joe. Well maybe not average...
From looking at the comments posted on slashdot, it seems that most of us are reasonable people, able to understand the benefits of an open market. The only thing is that we believe that free software can be part of this market. From TFA, you'd think we're all living in communes!
Therefore I don't find it that unbelievable that the OSS community would accept IBM as our knight. The only thing we object to is a company taking advantage of the freedoms that our software and the GPL provide. We don't hate the idea of a big company (after all, many of us get our paychecks from one!), we just don't like being abused by them.
On a slightly different tact, I would also suggest that Novell has been a strong defender, perhaps taking bigger risks than IBM. Novell is in direct competition with Microsoft, and has been so for years! And more to the point, they still pull a profit! IBM has a different focus than Microsoft, but Novell is right in the line of fire. Despite that, Novell manages to completely embrace SUSE and Ximian and turn it into a corporate backed project with a real future. Now there's a hero!
Either way, seeing the media begin to accept FLOSS as a viable business method is a good step. We've known it for years, and clearly some corporations (IBM, Novell) knew it as well. The only real hurdle left is the media and the public. When these are overcome, we'll start to see real competition between the proprietary and the open source camps.
From Wikipidia: "In this article and those related, the term spamming is used broadly to refer to all of these behaviors, regardless of medium and commercial intent."
Notice the regardless of medium.Personally, I consider spam to be the automatic supply of unwanted information. For that reason I wouldn't consider mailing lists and telemarketers as spammers. You signed up for the mailing list and telemarketing is not an automatic process. Besides, telemarketing provides (provided) a lot of people with jobs (even if bad jobs, some people need the money more than the good job).
For instance: You can be spammed with junk mail. A channel can be spammed by bots. You can be spammed with emails. You can't be spammed over the phone unless a recording is calling you. You can be spammed in the grocery store (oh wait, that's different...)
Of course, this is just my personal way of looking at it, so what do I know?I'm not really surprised that he was beaten. I would think that after 75 games of jeapardy with nothing but wins (not even really any close calls) one would get tired of it. I mean think of it, if they had taped them day after day in a row, it would still have been over two straight months of taping! Even an uber-nerd can only take so much geekiness.
It seems to me that he wasn't so much "beat" as he was "leaving while it still was fun".
Oh yes, because opengl in OSX doesn't use up all a low end mac's memory or anything. If Longhorn is going to go for the whole "devote the systems memory to good looks" style, no wonder it requires 1GB ram!
As a poor college student, ram is hard to come by. I don't want my desktop using it all to generate spiffy little icon effects. And seeing as Microsoft isn't going to ship multiple desktops, I hope Longhorn keeps the graphics simple for us poor kids.
Know you're floormates. After a few days you'll get the feel of who you can trust and who you can't. There isn't allways the need to lock up everything you own and bolt the door if all your neighbors are around with their doors open. I mean come on, you're in college, not prison. Just use your head and lock up when you'll be gone for a class or lunch or something.
Know you're roommate. Similar reasons as above. It's best to get any possible problems out of the way. Find out if he smokes, if he drinks, all the basic lifestyle stuff, and find out a way to work together. Very important: come up with a system for keys. I suggest always keeping your key with you, and making sure your roommate does the same. That way when you do lock up, you won't need to worry if the other guy can get back in.
Know yourself. Know what you'll need and what you won't. You will need MUCH less than you think you need (at least tech wise), so plan accordingly. Sure you can't imagine life without all four of your desktops and your laptop, but in reality, how often will you be able to use them? When it comes down to it, college takes up A LOT of time. Tehre's a reason why you're living there, and it's not to give you any freedom! College (at least for freshmen) takes time, and is not conducive to lots of tech toys. Well, I hope that helped a bit.
Just for those who don't feel like reading through the article and associated forum: An apple fanboy created this photo with some ingenuity and photoshop and posted it as if it came from a third party. If you view the photo's blue channel only, you can see the following image Notice the words "fake fake fake" in the corner. Later on the forum Philbot (who was caught as the purpotrator of another hoax last year) admitted the deed. Oh those crazy apple geeks...
Hmm, a guy named Page discussing the foundation of a nanotech lab... Nah, I'm sure it's fine...