Actually no, XP license costs ASUS/Acer/HP only about $25 a pop.
The same XP software costs them 2 times as much if they install it on a slightly bigger laptop or a desktop.
Reason? Linux on netbooks scared the bejeesus out of Microsoft, they didn't want the Netbook market dominated by Linux. (BTW the whole thing caught MS completely by surprise)
So, even though most netbooks are probably gonna be sold with Windows on them in the future, we the consumers have the FOSS community to thank for saving us $$
Best game I ever played was X-com UFO defense, circa 1993. It featured 320x240 (256 color) VGA graphics and mono sound. I don't know how many people were on the development team or what the budget was, but I'll bet it's not a lot.
Gameplay is everything. None of the $25 million-budget modern games can touch the X-com in game quality and sheer fun IMO.
But I guess console games today do cost tens of millions of dollars to develop... if cheap iphone games are putting the big studios out of business, I don't mind. Lots of little guys putting out lots of little games = more chances for a true gem to come out, as opposed to fewer megaexpensive titles by a handful of big companies.
BTW X-com would probably work just fine on a iphone, which has twice the screen resolution of the original game (!)
When the politically correct newer versions of Trek came out, and changed the line "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - which was one of the greatest ever! - to a neutered, lame "no ONE has gone".... it pretty much jumped the shark.
You haven't tried Drupal, have you? After using Drupal for a while, Joomla is a pink fluffy teddy bear that wants to hug you and give you candy.
Coincidentally, Drupal is supposed to be the most powerful, with the most elegantly programmed backend and the steepest learning curve. Drupal users usually have nothing but contempt for Joomla, which they view as a easy-to-use noob's CMS with lots of pretty eye candy but lacking in "real" functionality.
Linux isn't the most popular computer OS, not even close, yet Slashdot has a huge hard-on for it, and I don't see many complaints. So how about a nice cup of STFU for you?
Is IE 7 really an improvement? If they're going to tell users to upgrade, why don't they encourage a standards-compliant browser?
from my (limited) point of view, yes IE7 is a big improvement over IE6.
First thing is, IE6 does not support transparent PNG, so all my fancy transparent-background 16bit color images have to be converted to 256color GIF just for IE6, which makes them look crappy.
I don't do anything fancy, just basic stuff like tables and floating divs in a separate css file. First I write the pages for Firefox, and when everything looks right, I switch over to IE7. Anything that comes out broken, I fix with the "!-- [if IE 7]" tag. Then after that I look in IE6 and use "[if IE 6]" for some more fixing.
IE7 isn't too bad, but IE6 is often quite horrible. Fixes required for IE6 are easily 2 to 3 times the amount required for IE7.
If I could drop IE6 support and limit IE support to 7, I'd be very happy.
parallax only works for stars very close (astronomically speaking) to us... few dozen light-years at most. Even then they have to use the whole width of earth's orbit around the sun, taken 6 months apart, to calculate the parallax.... closing your left eye then your right eye aint gonna cut it for measuring light-year distances:P
Redshift is how they measure galaxy distances, and by some process they determine that this gamma ray burst occurred in galaxy X, so that's how far they come up with the distance here. I think, I haven't RTFA:-/
I still wonder just how is it possible that Google is worth $100 trillion (or whatever their market cap is now)... it's a search engine that sells text ads on its website for crying out loud
but first "we as a society" should cover the fucked-up America with rainbows and unicorns! Spread love and harmony everywhere! Nobody will need to steal copper ever again!
"Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often."
Are you smoking crack? Or have you only been driving Maseratis for the past 20 years? Cars today are so much more reliable than 50 years ago it's not even funny. With many new cars today you could conceivably go 100,000 miles and not have to do a damn thing to the car except oil changes. My '01 Toyota Sienna has 75k miles on it, it never needed anything other than brake pad replacement and oil changes (and 1 set of tires - 50 years ago you'd be talking 10 tire/inner tube changes)
anyone remember the flood of meows, then later the completely unintelligible machine-generated spam ("sporgeries") that hit a.r.s. and other groups circa 1998?
At one point I saw 100 genuine posts and 5000 sporgeries... in a day.
No, I disagree. Just because Carl Sagan disagrees with something and finds it ridiculous does not mean it requires a much higher ("extraordinary") level of proof. It just requires the normal amount of proof like anything else.
Carrying that logic further, does it mean that anything that fits well with Carl Sagan's view of the world requires less proof than other things? Or perhaps no proof at all?
"To me, the biggest problem is abolutely no fallback to non-javascript browsers. I'm not so much worried about users, but search engine bots won't be able to spider me and drive traffic to me."
So if you use the tool Google recommends to create your website, Google won't index it properly and you will fall off Google rankings?!?
if instead of buying ATI, the dude spent the money on R&D and actually coming out with products that can compete with Intel CoreDuo, he might not be resigning...
"The Stealth Bomber's mission is to deliver nuke bombs inside Soviet territory. It's not really that good at anything else. Though it does get used for other missions, since the US needs to justify spending $2.2 BILLION on each one."
It's quite good at dropping large bombloads on places, other than Soviet Union, that are defended by SAMs and radar-guided AAA, and avoid getting shot down.
No other aircraft in the world can do this. F-117 can do the "avoid getting shot down" part, but not the large bombload part.
Anyway, that's just anecdotal evidence and it's too easy to fall into flamebait territory. I was in Germany last week and people were quite nice (but the food was awful as always).
Italian restaurants are everywhere in Germany... the Germans seem to prefer Italian to their own food... so you can always just chow down on pasta =P
It does? I'm a native speaker of German, and I can't say it's very logical. Parts of it are, yes, but it's nowhere near mathematical. And it's a really tough language to learn as a second language because of all those things you have to know (the grammatical sex of every noun, the many irregular verbs, etc.).
The der die oder das was a pain for me in high school >.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no, XP license costs ASUS/Acer/HP only about $25 a pop.
The same XP software costs them 2 times as much if they install it on a slightly bigger laptop or a desktop.
Reason? Linux on netbooks scared the bejeesus out of Microsoft, they didn't want the Netbook market dominated by Linux. (BTW the whole thing caught MS completely by surprise)
So, even though most netbooks are probably gonna be sold with Windows on them in the future, we the consumers have the FOSS community to thank for saving us $$
Best game I ever played was X-com UFO defense, circa 1993. It featured 320x240 (256 color) VGA graphics and mono sound. I don't know how many people were on the development team or what the budget was, but I'll bet it's not a lot.
Gameplay is everything. None of the $25 million-budget modern games can touch the X-com in game quality and sheer fun IMO.
But I guess console games today do cost tens of millions of dollars to develop... if cheap iphone games are putting the big studios out of business, I don't mind. Lots of little guys putting out lots of little games = more chances for a true gem to come out, as opposed to fewer megaexpensive titles by a handful of big companies.
BTW X-com would probably work just fine on a iphone, which has twice the screen resolution of the original game (!)
CYA = cover your ass
in case some of our international readers missed it ;)
Apple has the Mac guy
Microsoft has Jerry Seinfeld
Linux has.... this guy?
When the politically correct newer versions of Trek came out, and changed the line "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - which was one of the greatest ever! - to a neutered, lame "no ONE has gone".... it pretty much jumped the shark.
You haven't tried Drupal, have you? After using Drupal for a while, Joomla is a pink fluffy teddy bear that wants to hug you and give you candy.
Coincidentally, Drupal is supposed to be the most powerful, with the most elegantly programmed backend and the steepest learning curve. Drupal users usually have nothing but contempt for Joomla, which they view as a easy-to-use noob's CMS with lots of pretty eye candy but lacking in "real" functionality.
because none of the businesses I see have adopted 2008 server.
Very few have any Vista desktops either.
you sir, have never experienced the joy of Fahrvegnugen I see.
because joomla is the most popular web cms?
Linux isn't the most popular computer OS, not even close, yet Slashdot has a huge hard-on for it, and I don't see many complaints. So how about a nice cup of STFU for you?
Is IE 7 really an improvement? If they're going to tell users to upgrade, why don't they encourage a standards-compliant browser?
from my (limited) point of view, yes IE7 is a big improvement over IE6.
First thing is, IE6 does not support transparent PNG, so all my fancy transparent-background 16bit color images have to be converted to 256color GIF just for IE6, which makes them look crappy.
I don't do anything fancy, just basic stuff like tables and floating divs in a separate css file. First I write the pages for Firefox, and when everything looks right, I switch over to IE7. Anything that comes out broken, I fix with the "!-- [if IE 7]" tag. Then after that I look in IE6 and use "[if IE 6]" for some more fixing.
IE7 isn't too bad, but IE6 is often quite horrible. Fixes required for IE6 are easily 2 to 3 times the amount required for IE7.
If I could drop IE6 support and limit IE support to 7, I'd be very happy.
parallax only works for stars very close (astronomically speaking) to us... few dozen light-years at most. Even then they have to use the whole width of earth's orbit around the sun, taken 6 months apart, to calculate the parallax.... closing your left eye then your right eye aint gonna cut it for measuring light-year distances :P
Redshift is how they measure galaxy distances, and by some process they determine that this gamma ray burst occurred in galaxy X, so that's how far they come up with the distance here. I think, I haven't RTFA :-/
I still wonder just how is it possible that Google is worth $100 trillion (or whatever their market cap is now)... it's a search engine that sells text ads on its website for crying out loud
I also love my logitech optical mouse. But the Microsoft mouse I have at work is also very good, I have no complaints.
It's really the no-name cheapo brands that I refuse to use... they just never feel very accurate.
but first "we as a society" should cover the fucked-up America with rainbows and unicorns! Spread love and harmony everywhere! Nobody will need to steal copper ever again!
Oo let's not forget FLOWERS. Gotta have those.
"Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often."
Are you smoking crack? Or have you only been driving Maseratis for the past 20 years? Cars today are so much more reliable than 50 years ago it's not even funny. With many new cars today you could conceivably go 100,000 miles and not have to do a damn thing to the car except oil changes. My '01 Toyota Sienna has 75k miles on it, it never needed anything other than brake pad replacement and oil changes (and 1 set of tires - 50 years ago you'd be talking 10 tire/inner tube changes)
are you kidding me? Japanese have some of the horriblest English translation ever.
All your base are belong to us, white man!
"Are they innovating in the field of rocket science or are they just re-implementing the best of 1950s & '60s technology?"
who the hell cares if they're reimplementing 1940s V2 technology, they're BUILDING stuff and they're GETTING INTO SPACE cheaply using their own money.
Let NASA do all the innovating with its huge government budget and army of employees and continue to innovate those $1 billion-each shuttle launches.
anyone remember the flood of meows, then later the completely unintelligible machine-generated spam ("sporgeries") that hit a.r.s. and other groups circa 1998?
At one point I saw 100 genuine posts and 5000 sporgeries... in a day.
No, I disagree. Just because Carl Sagan disagrees with something and finds it ridiculous does not mean it requires a much higher ("extraordinary") level of proof. It just requires the normal amount of proof like anything else.
Carrying that logic further, does it mean that anything that fits well with Carl Sagan's view of the world requires less proof than other things? Or perhaps no proof at all?
"apple: are you trying to dislodge MS as the most hated computer company around? keep it up, mate"
Steve Jobs' evilness > billgates' evilness
"To me, the biggest problem is abolutely no fallback to non-javascript browsers. I'm not so much worried about users, but search engine bots won't be able to spider me and drive traffic to me."
So if you use the tool Google recommends to create your website, Google won't index it properly and you will fall off Google rankings?!?
if instead of buying ATI, the dude spent the money on R&D and actually coming out with products that can compete with Intel CoreDuo, he might not be resigning...
"The Stealth Bomber's mission is to deliver nuke bombs inside Soviet territory. It's not really that good at anything else. Though it does get used for other missions, since the US needs to justify spending $2.2 BILLION on each one."
It's quite good at dropping large bombloads on places, other than Soviet Union, that are defended by SAMs and radar-guided AAA, and avoid getting shot down.
No other aircraft in the world can do this. F-117 can do the "avoid getting shot down" part, but not the large bombload part.
Anyway, that's just anecdotal evidence and it's too easy to fall into flamebait territory. I was in Germany last week and people were quite nice (but the food was awful as always).
Italian restaurants are everywhere in Germany... the Germans seem to prefer Italian to their own food... so you can always just chow down on pasta =P
The der die oder das was a pain for me in high school >.
I still remember Das Boot but that's about it...