Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Actually, the real reason that sunlight does make you feel better than artifical light is that there's tons more of it. Even on a overcast day, the sky has several thousand lux. Compare that to what you get when you turn on all the lights in your room...
About a year ago, I rebuild my home server. That's the machine working as dialin-router, file- and printserver and a few other jobs, and has always been under my desk in my living room.
If you have your computer in a room you live in, do it! It is amazing how much more enjoyable the room is without the constant noise.
What I did:
Buy a fanless power supply - the big difference
Buy a special silent CPU fan. Considerable difference
What I didn't do:
Reduce hdd noise
Add noise-covers to the case or anything of that kind
In the end, the hard drives were the only source of hearable noise in the system, and only if they were actually working. On idle, you would have to get close and listen carefully to hear them running. I'm sure with some casing and/or special drives you could get that noise eliminated as well.
It's worth it. You will never notice until the constant noise is gone, but once that happened, you'll be happy that it did.
Re:apple need to bump up the entry level spec
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 1
Apple should be pushing the minimal spec upwards, not stripping everything off so that it can get it's headlines saying *Mac's are now affordable*
True, but not for all. Airport, for example, is something that not everyone wants, likewise for bluetooth. If I can save $50 by leaving out a feature that I'd never use anyways - hey that's a good thing, isn't it?
The minimum spec should be able to run all the bundled software well and be useful for baseline activities, and then you can add more if you need it.
I'll be happy if they up the RAM some and maybe the disk size, but I start being not so sure with the drive, and airport/bluetooth, etc. should remain options.
I don't know what I find more frightening - the thought that a company like M$ isn't doing such basic steps, or the thought that they did do them, and went ahead anyways...
You're right, but I'm not so sure about resolution anymore.
My main machine is a notebook from last year, so it's got some trouble running, say GTA in > 1024x768. However, the card has AA on-board so I gave it a try. And tell you what, GTA looks better in 800x600 with AA on than it does in 1024x768 with AA off.
Console games look great for the resolutions they offer. There's a lot you can do that doesn't rely on upping the pixel count.
It's the natural reaction. When the government or whoever else claims the monopoly on force can't defend the people anymore, they take up the weapons themselves.
Governments the world over have made it very clear that they don't intend to pursue this problem seriously. We know who the spammers are, and yet they still run around free man. It doesn't get more clearer than that.
Is he seriously suggesting that 10 years ago no one had ever heard of a buffer overrun?
He's not that far away. Aleph1's famous article was from 1996 and is one of the first publications that got mainstream attention.
It begins with "Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited." - so saying this was unknown in 1995 is not quite true, but it certainly was a fairly new and not entirely well understood problem.
A. "Taylor: Well, first you have to define "people"... And what is open source? It is interesting in how you define it..."
Standard lawyer-weasel words. Gates used the same kind of escape routes during his trial hearings.
It does give one important piece of information away, though: The guy was seriously briefed. He's not speaking his mind, he has been told exactly what to say, what not to say, and where to evade the question.
It ends up taking at least an hour to set up most pieces of software that isn't prepackaged.
Have you ever installed something that didn't come with one of the windos equivalents of.deb - Installshield,.msi, etc. ?
And no, unzipping and running in place doesn't count, you can easily do that on Linux as well.
If you want to compare, compare likes. If you complain about the troubles of installation of non-packaged software, don't compare it to running an windos installer.
You and I are in a minority here. I even leave my company mobile at work when I leave. AFAIK I'm the only one in my company doing that.
For most people, however, the lines between work and private life have started to blur. Mail from both worlds is mixing, as are phone calls. On-call duty is expanding constantly, and even people not explicitly on duty are often called on their private mobiles to answer work questions.
Speaking from a social viewpoint, I personally think its a dangerous escalation. If the authorities start firing this at people then it can surely only be a matter of time until they start firing back.
Mod parent up. That's the point. Shooting at people with stun guns and CS gas causes them to throw stones at you (not to take sides, it also works the other way round: If you start throwing stones, don't be surprised if a CS grenade comes back). So why should this be any different? It will be a shock and probably disperse the crowd the first few times around. After that, it'll incite violent reactions. Since it is a most natural reaction to eliminate the source of your pain, I wouldn't want to be the cop who's holding the gun.
Me, I would prefer my kid watch a porn flick any day rather than "Natural Born Killers"
Seriously, I would advise you to not let your kids watch porn. Not because there's flesh visible, I couldn't care less and I am honestly convinced that kids do not get damaged in the least by watching sex. But porn creates a false impression of how sex works, and kids raised on porn will go into their first personal sexual encounters with that wrong picture.
My suggestion for parents would be to show the kids some excerpts while explaining how it all works. Porn makes good picture material if you choose the right scenes ("now as you can see here...").
Then again, I don't have kids so it's easier for me to say that.:)
Is it national "more headlines for the Gates boy" month or is it just the sommer?
I mean really, this one is the most ridiculous one. Gates repeats what pretty much everyone who wrote about the topic for the past two years has said, including the China reference (minus the actual numbers, such as IT students, which are frightening), and it makes/.?
Well, that's exactly what Joe Average will get when he buys a new $399 system from Dell.
Except that he won't buy a new monitor or speaker system, and that's what counts.
Protected content will be sold only through these systems, and the market share will automatically increase as part of the natural upgrade cycle.
If that were true, we'd be seing the effect already. The technology has been there for a while.
What is really happening is that bad copy protection is getting accepted, and that's what frightens me. Audio CDs, for example. Their protection sucks and is easily broken, but what I don't see and would like to is that people refuse to buy them.
Yeah, I haven't seen at least a dozen or so different portable DVD players over at Best Buy.
So have I. What I have not seen, however, is anyone actually buying them. I'm sure they sell, but for all I know, they aren't selling in volume.
For the notebooks - I do watch DVDs on mine, when I am somewhere where there is no other way. But it's a side-effect, not a purpose, and I would never buy anything with an even smaller screen.
Sorry, it's not a trend, it's a fringe market. It exists and there'll be enough business for several companies to survive, but it will not ever even compare to the iPod market.
The iPod works because the walkman already established that listening to music via headphones is cool.
No such equivalent exists in the movie world. On the contrary, the current trend is more towards home theatre systems. Initial attempts at mobility were aborted, because watching some half-assed hollywood crap on a tiny screen just sucks badly. On a big screen, you can at least enjoy the special effects.
Asked about his wealth he said once you reach a certin level, more money doesn't matter. Things only get so good and once you can afford the best that's it. In other words food only gets so good, cars only get so good, clothes can only be made so good and once you afford the best more money after that doesn't buy you anything better then what you can already afford.
There are days I've pondered what that would be like.
And how much money that is. Specifically: How many people could live on Gates' comfort level if it were split up between them? And how far are we away from giving everyone that standard of living?
He's talking himself into obsolence anyways. A year ago, I'd have said "fuck gates", but it's not even important anymore.
See, he's just talking big. Whatever scheme he comes up with will most likely suck, and the users, used to simplicity, will just ignore it and use something else. If some DRM scheme gets inbetween them and the music or videos they want, there are plenty of magazines out there telling them exactly how to use emule, bittorrent, or whatever the hype will be in 2012, when Longhorn and it's built-in DRM finally hit the market.
Users are becoming a market force, and if they don't like DRM, it will fall flat. The music industry doesn't control half as much as they like. The mainstream is all theirs, but there's so much music out there, if Britney isn't available, there's 500 others who are just as good. It's not the same with movies, but there are already a ton of good indy movies, and besides you still have the cinemas where screeners are made to be posted online.
Gates is, once again, clawing at an emerging market he missed, hoping that with strong words and another vaporware announcement, he can stop the world moving for long enough so he can still hop aboard.
It's just that it ain't 1995 anymore, and even grandma down the street isn't so sure that Gates is a visionary anymore. Lots of people still look at him, but few stop for him anymore.
ICANN is suffering from learning disability. Their last offers -.name,.biz,.info,.pro, etc. - were... uh... let's say "not exactly very successful".
Now they do more of the same, as if it would make a difference, which it won't. But it's a typical sign of an institution going downhill if it can't adapt anymore and doesn't learn from past mistakes.
My bet: Five years from now, ICANN will be either gone, or so unimportant that it could just as well go away because nobody would notice anyways.
Post a balanced few, get insulted. Ironically, in your rage and stupidity, you overlooked that I started with "we", which happens to be 2nd person plural, i.e. includes me. I would've used "you" if I had wanted to exclude myself.
When you've mastered basic grammar, rephrase your argument and I will honour it with a real reply.
While we all complain about human rights in China, let's not forget that they also managed to eliminate hunger and bring a 3rd world country up to speed in record time.
Freedom of speech and freedom from hunger are two different goals that do not always match. The chinese have made a decision that a meal every day is more important right now than an uncensored newspaper to go with it. Unless you have been a starving freedom fighter for a while, I'd suggest some caution and serious thinking before crying wolf.
Please do develope the ability to read more than the first sentence of the post you are replying to. I made a point that "Linux" is not easily defined, especially not for a 5-minute-demo that, according to context, would be a demo of the UI more than of the OS. If you demo KDE or Gnome, you don't demo Linux, because it could in fact be *BSD running underneath and you'd never know the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Actually, the real reason that sunlight does make you feel better than artifical light is that there's tons more of it. Even on a overcast day, the sky has several thousand lux. Compare that to what you get when you turn on all the lights in your room...
Could someone please just shoot everyone who votes "yes" on that? The IQ of your government would double within minutes.
It was rated M already. At 17, a large part of these teenagers will have had sex, and those who didn't have seen their fair share of porn.
Then again, senators apparently live in some weird kind of alternate reality anyways.
If you have your computer in a room you live in, do it! It is amazing how much more enjoyable the room is without the constant noise.
What I did:
What I didn't do:
In the end, the hard drives were the only source of hearable noise in the system, and only if they were actually working. On idle, you would have to get close and listen carefully to hear them running. I'm sure with some casing and/or special drives you could get that noise eliminated as well.
It's worth it. You will never notice until the constant noise is gone, but once that happened, you'll be happy that it did.
Apple should be pushing the minimal spec upwards, not stripping everything off so that it can get it's headlines saying *Mac's are now affordable*
True, but not for all. Airport, for example, is something that not everyone wants, likewise for bluetooth. If I can save $50 by leaving out a feature that I'd never use anyways - hey that's a good thing, isn't it?
The minimum spec should be able to run all the bundled software well and be useful for baseline activities, and then you can add more if you need it.
I'll be happy if they up the RAM some and maybe the disk size, but I start being not so sure with the drive, and airport/bluetooth, etc. should remain options.
I don't know what I find more frightening - the thought that a company like M$ isn't doing such basic steps, or the thought that they did do them, and went ahead anyways...
You're right, but I'm not so sure about resolution anymore.
My main machine is a notebook from last year, so it's got some trouble running, say GTA in > 1024x768.
However, the card has AA on-board so I gave it a try. And tell you what, GTA looks better in 800x600 with AA on than it does in 1024x768 with AA off.
Console games look great for the resolutions they offer. There's a lot you can do that doesn't rely on upping the pixel count.
It's the natural reaction. When the government or whoever else claims the monopoly on force can't defend the people anymore, they take up the weapons themselves.
Governments the world over have made it very clear that they don't intend to pursue this problem seriously. We know who the spammers are, and yet they still run around free man. It doesn't get more clearer than that.
Is he seriously suggesting that 10 years ago no one had ever heard of a buffer overrun?
He's not that far away. Aleph1's famous article was from 1996 and is one of the first publications that got mainstream attention.
It begins with "Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited." - so saying this was unknown in 1995 is not quite true, but it certainly was a fairly new and not entirely well understood problem.
A. "Taylor: Well, first you have to define "people"... And what is open source? It is interesting in how you define it..."
Standard lawyer-weasel words. Gates used the same kind of escape routes during his trial hearings.
It does give one important piece of information away, though: The guy was seriously briefed. He's not speaking his mind, he has been told exactly what to say, what not to say, and where to evade the question.
It ends up taking at least an hour to set up most pieces of software that isn't prepackaged.
.deb - Installshield, .msi, etc. ?
Have you ever installed something that didn't come with one of the windos equivalents of
And no, unzipping and running in place doesn't count, you can easily do that on Linux as well.
If you want to compare, compare likes. If you complain about the troubles of installation of non-packaged software, don't compare it to running an windos installer.
You and I are in a minority here. I even leave my company mobile at work when I leave. AFAIK I'm the only one in my company doing that.
For most people, however, the lines between work and private life have started to blur. Mail from both worlds is mixing, as are phone calls. On-call duty is expanding constantly, and even people not explicitly on duty are often called on their private mobiles to answer work questions.
Speaking from a social viewpoint, I personally think its a dangerous escalation. If the authorities start firing this at people then it can surely only be a matter of time until they start firing back.
Mod parent up. That's the point. Shooting at people with stun guns and CS gas causes them to throw stones at you (not to take sides, it also works the other way round: If you start throwing stones, don't be surprised if a CS grenade comes back).
So why should this be any different? It will be a shock and probably disperse the crowd the first few times around. After that, it'll incite violent reactions. Since it is a most natural reaction to eliminate the source of your pain, I wouldn't want to be the cop who's holding the gun.
Mod parent up. +5 isn't enough for that. Truth in one line. Brilliant, just brilliant.
It ain't time. Read again. The main difference appears to be "graphic sexual content" (while M only has "sexual content") and "nudity".
So M means the text "and then he put his throbbing wand of magic into her wet hole" while AO means the same thing in pictures.
Me, I would prefer my kid watch a porn flick any day rather than "Natural Born Killers"
:)
Seriously, I would advise you to not let your kids watch porn. Not because there's flesh visible, I couldn't care less and I am honestly convinced that kids do not get damaged in the least by watching sex. But porn creates a false impression of how sex works, and kids raised on porn will go into their first personal sexual encounters with that wrong picture.
My suggestion for parents would be to show the kids some excerpts while explaining how it all works. Porn makes good picture material if you choose the right scenes ("now as you can see here...").
Then again, I don't have kids so it's easier for me to say that.
Is it national "more headlines for the Gates boy" month or is it just the sommer?
/.?
I mean really, this one is the most ridiculous one. Gates repeats what pretty much everyone who wrote about the topic for the past two years has said, including the China reference (minus the actual numbers, such as IT students, which are frightening), and it makes
Time to update my filter settings.
Well, that's exactly what Joe Average will get when he buys a new $399 system from Dell.
Except that he won't buy a new monitor or speaker system, and that's what counts.
Protected content will be sold only through these systems, and the market share will automatically increase as part of the natural upgrade cycle.
If that were true, we'd be seing the effect already. The technology has been there for a while.
What is really happening is that bad copy protection is getting accepted, and that's what frightens me. Audio CDs, for example. Their protection sucks and is easily broken, but what I don't see and would like to is that people refuse to buy them.
Yeah, I haven't seen at least a dozen or so different portable DVD players over at Best Buy.
So have I. What I have not seen, however, is anyone actually buying them. I'm sure they sell, but for all I know, they aren't selling in volume.
For the notebooks - I do watch DVDs on mine, when I am somewhere where there is no other way. But it's a side-effect, not a purpose, and I would never buy anything with an even smaller screen.
Sorry, it's not a trend, it's a fringe market. It exists and there'll be enough business for several companies to survive, but it will not ever even compare to the iPod market.
The iPod equivalent for movies is a laptop.
Only for freaks.
The iPod works because the walkman already established that listening to music via headphones is cool.
No such equivalent exists in the movie world. On the contrary, the current trend is more towards home theatre systems. Initial attempts at mobility were aborted, because watching some half-assed hollywood crap on a tiny screen just sucks badly. On a big screen, you can at least enjoy the special effects.
Asked about his wealth he said once you reach a certin level, more money doesn't matter. Things only get so good and once you can afford the best that's it. In other words food only gets so good, cars only get so good, clothes can only be made so good and once you afford the best more money after that doesn't buy you anything better then what you can already afford.
There are days I've pondered what that would be like.
And how much money that is. Specifically: How many people could live on Gates' comfort level if it were split up between them? And how far are we away from giving everyone that standard of living?
He's talking himself into obsolence anyways. A year ago, I'd have said "fuck gates", but it's not even important anymore.
See, he's just talking big. Whatever scheme he comes up with will most likely suck, and the users, used to simplicity, will just ignore it and use something else. If some DRM scheme gets inbetween them and the music or videos they want, there are plenty of magazines out there telling them exactly how to use emule, bittorrent, or whatever the hype will be in 2012, when Longhorn and it's built-in DRM finally hit the market.
Users are becoming a market force, and if they don't like DRM, it will fall flat. The music industry doesn't control half as much as they like. The mainstream is all theirs, but there's so much music out there, if Britney isn't available, there's 500 others who are just as good.
It's not the same with movies, but there are already a ton of good indy movies, and besides you still have the cinemas where screeners are made to be posted online.
Gates is, once again, clawing at an emerging market he missed, hoping that with strong words and another vaporware announcement, he can stop the world moving for long enough so he can still hop aboard.
It's just that it ain't 1995 anymore, and even grandma down the street isn't so sure that Gates is a visionary anymore. Lots of people still look at him, but few stop for him anymore.
ICANN is suffering from learning disability. Their last offers - .name, .biz, .info, .pro, etc. - were... uh... let's say "not exactly very successful".
Now they do more of the same, as if it would make a difference, which it won't. But it's a typical sign of an institution going downhill if it can't adapt anymore and doesn't learn from past mistakes.
My bet: Five years from now, ICANN will be either gone, or so unimportant that it could just as well go away because nobody would notice anyways.
you fucking commie bastards
Post a balanced few, get insulted. Ironically, in your rage and stupidity, you overlooked that I started with "we", which happens to be 2nd person plural, i.e. includes me. I would've used "you" if I had wanted to exclude myself.
When you've mastered basic grammar, rephrase your argument and I will honour it with a real reply.
While we all complain about human rights in China, let's not forget that they also managed to eliminate hunger and bring a 3rd world country up to speed in record time.
Freedom of speech and freedom from hunger are two different goals that do not always match. The chinese have made a decision that a meal every day is more important right now than an uncensored newspaper to go with it. Unless you have been a starving freedom fighter for a while, I'd suggest some caution and serious thinking before crying wolf.
Against Linux, of course
Please do develope the ability to read more than the first sentence of the post you are replying to. I made a point that "Linux" is not easily defined, especially not for a 5-minute-demo that, according to context, would be a demo of the UI more than of the OS. If you demo KDE or Gnome, you don't demo Linux, because it could in fact be *BSD running underneath and you'd never know the difference.