We have a propane heater. The truck comes around a could of times a year. However, for the most part, we use a catalytic wood burning 'franklin' stove which generates a lot of heat. Too much sometimes. It does not have 'all the comforts' of a traditional suburban home, but we are mostly just there on the weekends, although the previous owners lived there year round for over 20 years. You learn to be pretty careful about electricity. Our biggest problem isn't electricity though, it is water. We pump from a well to a tank above the house, and that requires 220V subermissible pumps, which in turn requires running the generator as our system won't produce 220V, and wouldn't do it for long even if it could. We simply don't have enough capacity.
No air conditioning, but good insulation and windows, and we are fortunate in that while it can get up to 110 during the day, the temperature usually drops 30-40 degrees F at night in the summer due to lack of cloud cover. Also, there is very little humidity in the summer.
There is something wrong with their system. I have an off grid house with a mere 6x75 watt panels and 4x6volt deep cycle batteries, and we could run a microwave off the inverter for a short while if we had to. Such a system today would cost lsubstantially less than $10K. My neighbor has 3.5KW of panels, runs a software development business out of his house, and has one of those electric/oil heaters to burn off excess electricity on really sunny days. They only run their generator on cloudy winter days.
It is Powerpoint that is the problem. I recently took an econimcs course where the instructor did about the first 2/3'rds of the lectures using the professionally prepared Powerpoint deck from the text book publisher, and then decided it wasn't working and did the last few lectures on the chalk board. The last few lectures were orders of magnitude better if for no otehr reason than the professor was much more engaged in the class. That isn't the first time I've noticed this. On the other hand, I have also taken a class where the Professor did an extraordinary job of integrating material from a computer presentation into his lecture, and that worked well. Butfor the most part, he wasn't using bullet points, but just pictures, video and audio clips. To the extent there was powerpoint, it was just to tie things in succession. HTML would have worked just as well.
Isn't this the same George Monbiot that 'proved' a few months back that global warming was a hoax? One can't help but wonder if Exxon/Mobil is the ultimate source of his 'data'. Not that I completely disagree with him; improving efficiency would be vastly more effective in the long wrong than trying to 'grow' our way out of global warming, but he sure does seem to have an inordinate love of petroleum.
Oh, yeah, that' right *it doesn't exist expect to protect Windows boxes*. You know, when reality is in total opposition to your theory and/or study, maybe there is something wrong with your methodology? Is it possible that you just aren't measuring the right things? Because if Symantec is right, they are missing a huge market opportunity. On the other hand, given AV companies history of alarmist headlines, perhaps they are trying to create a new market to replace the old one that Microsoft is eating for lunch?
Your solution isn't radically different than what Dell does now which is sell Linux configurations which are marginally different than nearly equivalent Windows models, except at a much higher price. I don't want to pay more for a Dell computer with no OS or Linux, I want to pay less. If Dell can't offer me a 'no OS' machine for a lower price than the same machine with Windows, I will continue to do what I do now; buy the parts from Newegg or my local computer shop and put them together myself. An independent Dell business unit that sold Linux boxes for a higher price than the Windows version would fail for the same reason that Dell doesn't make many Linux sales now. It would be cheaper to buy the Windows version of the box from 'real' Dell, and throw Windows away. It doesn't help the customer, so it won't help Dell either.
[I'm under the impression that it kind of sucks...]
You could have stopped there. Windows is just a bad implementation of VMS + Unix + DOS that, due to Microsoft's successful violation of anti-trust law, is pretty much the only operating system you can buy pre-installed on commodity hardware. Because of that successful illegal behaviour, all the corporate apps (and games) run on Windows, hence all the corporate users are on Windows, adn all the gamers are on Windows. Vista offers exactly nothing to those users. But if you buy a new computer, Vista is what you are going to get because Microsoft wants it that way. It isn't exactly a surprise that nobody is buying Vista 'upgrades'.
That was more or less my take as well; Vista is a huge improvement over XP, but in 19 months and 3 pages, he isn't able to come up with any real tangible reasons why, and certainly nothing quantifiable. One of the things he mentions as a plus, huge icons, is a minus for anybody that isn't running dual head, high res monitors like the author is. While most of the slashdot crowd probably have a similar set up, odds are the majority of current XP users do not. You also have to wonder about the objectivity of a journalist that states that if your favorite app doesn't run on Vista, it is the application vendors fault, not the fault of Vista. But binary compatibility with existing applications is the number one feature that keeps users on Windows in the first place. If the app you need doesn't run on Vista, it isn't a minor inconvenience, it is a show stopper.
NASA would have plenty of money for science missions if they didn't need to spend most of their money on a welfare program for the aerospace industry. The first thing they need to do is pull the plug on the entire manned space program. If contracting out is the cheapest way to get a payload launched, that's what they should do. What NASA should be concentrating on is the missions and the payloads, not overpriced, under performing launch vehicles. The Space Shuttle was marvel of engineering of its time aas were the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and NASA should be proud of their achievements, but that time is passed.
Nothing to see here, move along. I'm typing this from a Linux desktop (laptop in docking station, actually). My desktop machine at home is a Linux box. GNOME works fine. KDE works fine. The other Linux desktop environments work fine. Linux on the desktop won't take off until you can buy a desktop machine from a major Windows OEM with either Linux preinstalled or no OS and the price of Windows deducted. There are no longer any technical or usability obstacles to Linux on the desktop. GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3.0 are already better desktop systems than MS Vista, and they will continue to get better at a faster pace. It is entirely a distribution and applications capture problem.
I guess it is as long as one doesn't mind false dichotomies. A computer without an operating system may not be useful, but where is it written that the *only* useful operating system is Microsoft Windows? Where is it written that consumers should not have the option of installing some other operating system? Where is it written that consumers must buy a new Microsoft operating system in addition to the one they already own? I mean, aside from Microsoft OEM licensing agreements. A more appropriate analogy would be cars and gasoline. A car isn't useful without fuel, and fuel isn't useful without a machine to put it in, but nobody would try to insist that if I buy a Ford, I also have to buy a lifetime supply of Chevron gasoline with it as opposed to any of a dozen other brands of gasoline. There are even more potential choices in operating systems than there are choices of gassoline, but according to HP, you can buy your HP machine with any operating system you want - as long as it is Windows. That's total BS.
Microsoft has been, and continues to be, a criminal operation. I wouldn't persoanlly care too much if they were only stealing other people's money, but it is darn near impossible to buy a desktop computer from a Microsoft OEM 'partner' without paying for a copy of Windows that you don't want, or need. I'll stop hating Microsoft when I can buy an HP, Dell, IBM, or Gateway desktop computer with no OS and the price of Windows deducted.
First and foremost, Microsoft is selling binary compatibility. If not for the virus problem, Microsoft would have to be considered the 5th or 6th best operating system available except for one thing; it runs all those existing Windows apps, and that is the only feature anybody really wants to buy from Microsoft. Any innovation which broke binary compatibility is therefore almost automatically ruled out, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The second problem is that the sort of innovations that Microsoft is most interested in are those that benefit Microsoft. How can we prevent cross platform interoperability? How can we keep users on the 'upgrade' treadmill even when there is nothing in it for them? How can we prevent users from making copies, even legitimate copies, of Microsoft software? How can we build a patent pool to protect us from patent trolls and threaten open source users? There are only so many hours in the day, and when you spend virtually all of them trying to figure out ways to screw your customers and your competitors, there isn't a heck of a lot of time left for real innovation.
once you count the infrastructure costs. I own an off-grid second home which is about 3000ft from the nearest power pole. The cost to extend the power to our house is estimated by PG&E at about $20/ft, so about $60,000 to get to our house, and that is *after* you have negotiated an easement over the neighboring properties. By contrasts, a complete off-grid systems run about $10000/KW, so you can have a nice 3KW system for about $30K, or 1/2 the price, and the 'generation' cost after that is the cost of replacing the lead/acid batteries, which, unfortunately, are still the best storage alternative. Yes, it only works in places where there is a lot of sunlight, and you still need a generator for night and winter months, and it helps a lot to have all florescent lights (which, fortunately has also improved dramatically). The fact of the matter is that once everything is factored in, solar already looks pretty good. If you factor in the cost of things like conquering oil producing states (as well as the cost of maintaining a military large enough to do so at any time), solar is an absolute bargain.
I mean, really, what good is this? I'm guessing the intent is to have third parties integrate with Office provide the same look and feel, but is a license agreement really needed for this? Couldn't they have just released the toolkit as part of MSDN? Most likely it is yet another attempt by MS to show the EU that they are committed to 'openness' without actually providing any kind of useful interoperability with potential competitors.
Afterall, you are talking about a political party that is down with torture, coerced confessions, extended imprisonment without charges and without access to counsel, and warrantless searches. After all that, we are supposed to get outraged about a violation of FCC regs?
[Our intention behind the original terms was genuinely geared toward combating piracy;]
If the only concern was preventing piracy, there wouldn't be any restrictions on what user that bought pre-built machines could do with their bought and paid for copy of Windows Vista either; if you bought a copy ofVista, and want to junk or upgrade your old machine and install that same copy of Vista on it, you should be able to. You paid for a license. The license terms were, and are, genuinely geared towards making sure that customers buy extra copies of Windows they neither need or want.
Not that I care all that much. If MS wants me to install a copy of Vista, they are going to have to pay me to do it. A lot. Mircosoft operating systems come with a huge amount of negative value built in.
How about giving us in the US and EU the choice of buying 'Vista Starter' edition so we are out less money when we throw it away and install linux (or BSD, or OpenSolaris) instead? OR better yet, the choice of buying a desktop PC from a major Microsoft OEM with no operating system at all and the price of Windows deducted? That would be real choice. If Google is really concerned that Microsoft is going to play dirty tricks with search in order to steer users away from Google properties to Microsoft properties (and they will), the only real solution is for Google to do their own desktop Linux distro, give it away for free, and make it so good that MS OEM's will willingly put it on desktop machines that they can sell for less money that the Windows equivalent. They have plenty of money, they can't afford not to.
And then Google can play their own dirty tricks.
Even at Microsoft it isn't possible that a bug that requires a complete reinstall could remain undiscovered until the week before FCS. I don't doubt that there are thousands of bugs, many of them serious, but this just isn't plausible.
It was SNL, but I'm pretty much he same way. I'm never going to go 3 blade because of that commercial. The only reason the shaver companies are on the multi-blade thing is that they can keep generating new patents to keep nobrand blades off their handles, because it is all about selling the blades.
and ever worse license terms for the poor victim that this stuff gets foisted off on. But let's be realistic, the MS PR machine has to get people to gush over Vista, and every other new release even if, for the most part, it is just a bug fix release. There just isn't any compelling reason to move from XP to Vista, even less reason to go from Linux or MacOS to Vista, so the Microsoft PR machine has to invent some. For this release, since everything else pretty much got dropped, they need to hype the whizzy, but mostly pointless use of 3D effects. Big whoop.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a propane heater. The truck comes around a could of times a year. However, for the most part, we use a catalytic wood burning 'franklin' stove which generates a lot of heat. Too much sometimes. It does not have 'all the comforts' of a traditional suburban home, but we are mostly just there on the weekends, although the previous owners lived there year round for over 20 years. You learn to be pretty careful about electricity. Our biggest problem isn't electricity though, it is water. We pump from a well to a tank above the house, and that requires 220V subermissible pumps, which in turn requires running the generator as our system won't produce 220V, and wouldn't do it for long even if it could. We simply don't have enough capacity.
No air conditioning, but good insulation and windows, and we are fortunate in that while it can get up to 110 during the day, the temperature usually drops 30-40 degrees F at night in the summer due to lack of cloud cover. Also, there is very little humidity in the summer.
I heard that the virus had already infected BOTH IPods that are running Linux.
There is something wrong with their system. I have an off grid house with a mere 6x75 watt panels and 4x6volt deep cycle batteries, and we could run a microwave off the inverter for a short while if we had to. Such a system today would cost lsubstantially less than $10K. My neighbor has 3.5KW of panels, runs a software development business out of his house, and has one of those electric/oil heaters to burn off excess electricity on really sunny days. They only run their generator on cloudy winter days.
It is Powerpoint that is the problem. I recently took an econimcs course where the instructor did about the first 2/3'rds of the lectures using the professionally prepared Powerpoint deck from the text book publisher, and then decided it wasn't working and did the last few lectures on the chalk board. The last few lectures were orders of magnitude better if for no otehr reason than the professor was much more engaged in the class. That isn't the first time I've noticed this. On the other hand, I have also taken a class where the Professor did an extraordinary job of integrating material from a computer presentation into his lecture, and that worked well. Butfor the most part, he wasn't using bullet points, but just pictures, video and audio clips. To the extent there was powerpoint, it was just to tie things in succession. HTML would have worked just as well.
Isn't this the same George Monbiot that 'proved' a few months back that global warming was a hoax? One can't help but wonder if Exxon/Mobil is the ultimate source of his 'data'. Not that I completely disagree with him; improving efficiency would be vastly more effective in the long wrong than trying to 'grow' our way out of global warming, but he sure does seem to have an inordinate love of petroleum.
Oh, yeah, that' right *it doesn't exist expect to protect Windows boxes*. You know, when reality is in total opposition to your theory and/or study, maybe there is something wrong with your methodology? Is it possible that you just aren't measuring the right things? Because if Symantec is right, they are missing a huge market opportunity. On the other hand, given AV companies history of alarmist headlines, perhaps they are trying to create a new market to replace the old one that Microsoft is eating for lunch?
Then they can use any email program they like.
Your solution isn't radically different than what Dell does now which is sell Linux configurations which are marginally different than nearly equivalent Windows models, except at a much higher price. I don't want to pay more for a Dell computer with no OS or Linux, I want to pay less. If Dell can't offer me a 'no OS' machine for a lower price than the same machine with Windows, I will continue to do what I do now; buy the parts from Newegg or my local computer shop and put them together myself. An independent Dell business unit that sold Linux boxes for a higher price than the Windows version would fail for the same reason that Dell doesn't make many Linux sales now. It would be cheaper to buy the Windows version of the box from 'real' Dell, and throw Windows away. It doesn't help the customer, so it won't help Dell either.
[I'm under the impression that it kind of sucks ...]
You could have stopped there. Windows is just a bad implementation of VMS + Unix + DOS that, due to Microsoft's successful violation of anti-trust law, is pretty much the only operating system you can buy pre-installed on commodity hardware. Because of that successful illegal behaviour, all the corporate apps (and games) run on Windows, hence all the corporate users are on Windows, adn all the gamers are on Windows. Vista offers exactly nothing to those users. But if you buy a new computer, Vista is what you are going to get because Microsoft wants it that way. It isn't exactly a surprise that nobody is buying Vista 'upgrades'.
That was more or less my take as well; Vista is a huge improvement over XP, but in 19 months and 3 pages, he isn't able to come up with any real tangible reasons why, and certainly nothing quantifiable. One of the things he mentions as a plus, huge icons, is a minus for anybody that isn't running dual head, high res monitors like the author is. While most of the slashdot crowd probably have a similar set up, odds are the majority of current XP users do not. You also have to wonder about the objectivity of a journalist that states that if your favorite app doesn't run on Vista, it is the application vendors fault, not the fault of Vista. But binary compatibility with existing applications is the number one feature that keeps users on Windows in the first place. If the app you need doesn't run on Vista, it isn't a minor inconvenience, it is a show stopper.
ESR thinks what he has to say is important, and has persuaded some journalists and bloggers that he is important as well.
NASA would have plenty of money for science missions if they didn't need to spend most of their money on a welfare program for the aerospace industry. The first thing they need to do is pull the plug on the entire manned space program. If contracting out is the cheapest way to get a payload launched, that's what they should do. What NASA should be concentrating on is the missions and the payloads, not overpriced, under performing launch vehicles. The Space Shuttle was marvel of engineering of its time aas were the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and NASA should be proud of their achievements, but that time is passed.
Nothing to see here, move along. I'm typing this from a Linux desktop (laptop in docking station, actually). My desktop machine at home is a Linux box. GNOME works fine. KDE works fine. The other Linux desktop environments work fine. Linux on the desktop won't take off until you can buy a desktop machine from a major Windows OEM with either Linux preinstalled or no OS and the price of Windows deducted. There are no longer any technical or usability obstacles to Linux on the desktop. GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3.0 are already better desktop systems than MS Vista, and they will continue to get better at a faster pace. It is entirely a distribution and applications capture problem.
I guess it is as long as one doesn't mind false dichotomies. A computer without an operating system may not be useful, but where is it written that the *only* useful operating system is Microsoft Windows? Where is it written that consumers should not have the option of installing some other operating system? Where is it written that consumers must buy a new Microsoft operating system in addition to the one they already own? I mean, aside from Microsoft OEM licensing agreements. A more appropriate analogy would be cars and gasoline. A car isn't useful without fuel, and fuel isn't useful without a machine to put it in, but nobody would try to insist that if I buy a Ford, I also have to buy a lifetime supply of Chevron gasoline with it as opposed to any of a dozen other brands of gasoline. There are even more potential choices in operating systems than there are choices of gassoline, but according to HP, you can buy your HP machine with any operating system you want - as long as it is Windows. That's total BS.
Microsoft has been, and continues to be, a criminal operation. I wouldn't persoanlly care too much if they were only stealing other people's money, but it is darn near impossible to buy a desktop computer from a Microsoft OEM 'partner' without paying for a copy of Windows that you don't want, or need. I'll stop hating Microsoft when I can buy an HP, Dell, IBM, or Gateway desktop computer with no OS and the price of Windows deducted.
First and foremost, Microsoft is selling binary compatibility. If not for the virus problem, Microsoft would have to be considered the 5th or 6th best operating system available except for one thing; it runs all those existing Windows apps, and that is the only feature anybody really wants to buy from Microsoft. Any innovation which broke binary compatibility is therefore almost automatically ruled out, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The second problem is that the sort of innovations that Microsoft is most interested in are those that benefit Microsoft. How can we prevent cross platform interoperability? How can we keep users on the 'upgrade' treadmill even when there is nothing in it for them? How can we prevent users from making copies, even legitimate copies, of Microsoft software? How can we build a patent pool to protect us from patent trolls and threaten open source users? There are only so many hours in the day, and when you spend virtually all of them trying to figure out ways to screw your customers and your competitors, there isn't a heck of a lot of time left for real innovation.
once you count the infrastructure costs. I own an off-grid second home which is about 3000ft from the nearest power pole. The cost to extend the power to our house is estimated by PG&E at about $20/ft, so about $60,000 to get to our house, and that is *after* you have negotiated an easement over the neighboring properties. By contrasts, a complete off-grid systems run about $10000/KW, so you can have a nice 3KW system for about $30K, or 1/2 the price, and the 'generation' cost after that is the cost of replacing the lead/acid batteries, which, unfortunately, are still the best storage alternative. Yes, it only works in places where there is a lot of sunlight, and you still need a generator for night and winter months, and it helps a lot to have all florescent lights (which, fortunately has also improved dramatically). The fact of the matter is that once everything is factored in, solar already looks pretty good. If you factor in the cost of things like conquering oil producing states (as well as the cost of maintaining a military large enough to do so at any time), solar is an absolute bargain.
I mean, really, what good is this? I'm guessing the intent is to have third parties integrate with Office provide the same look and feel, but is a license agreement really needed for this? Couldn't they have just released the toolkit as part of MSDN? Most likely it is yet another attempt by MS to show the EU that they are committed to 'openness' without actually providing any kind of useful interoperability with potential competitors.
Afterall, you are talking about a political party that is down with torture, coerced confessions, extended imprisonment without charges and without access to counsel, and warrantless searches. After all that, we are supposed to get outraged about a violation of FCC regs?
[Our intention behind the original terms was genuinely geared toward combating piracy;]
If the only concern was preventing piracy, there wouldn't be any restrictions on what user that bought pre-built machines could do with their bought and paid for copy of Windows Vista either; if you bought a copy ofVista, and want to junk or upgrade your old machine and install that same copy of Vista on it, you should be able to. You paid for a license. The license terms were, and are, genuinely geared towards making sure that customers buy extra copies of Windows they neither need or want.
Not that I care all that much. If MS wants me to install a copy of Vista, they are going to have to pay me to do it. A lot. Mircosoft operating systems come with a huge amount of negative value built in.
How about giving us in the US and EU the choice of buying 'Vista Starter' edition so we are out less money when we throw it away and install linux (or BSD, or OpenSolaris) instead? OR better yet, the choice of buying a desktop PC from a major Microsoft OEM with no operating system at all and the price of Windows deducted? That would be real choice. If Google is really concerned that Microsoft is going to play dirty tricks with search in order to steer users away from Google properties to Microsoft properties (and they will), the only real solution is for Google to do their own desktop Linux distro, give it away for free, and make it so good that MS OEM's will willingly put it on desktop machines that they can sell for less money that the Windows equivalent. They have plenty of money, they can't afford not to. And then Google can play their own dirty tricks.
Even at Microsoft it isn't possible that a bug that requires a complete reinstall could remain undiscovered until the week before FCS. I don't doubt that there are thousands of bugs, many of them serious, but this just isn't plausible.
It was SNL, but I'm pretty much he same way. I'm never going to go 3 blade because of that commercial. The only reason the shaver companies are on the multi-blade thing is that they can keep generating new patents to keep nobrand blades off their handles, because it is all about selling the blades.
and ever worse license terms for the poor victim that this stuff gets foisted off on. But let's be realistic, the MS PR machine has to get people to gush over Vista, and every other new release even if, for the most part, it is just a bug fix release. There just isn't any compelling reason to move from XP to Vista, even less reason to go from Linux or MacOS to Vista, so the Microsoft PR machine has to invent some. For this release, since everything else pretty much got dropped, they need to hype the whizzy, but mostly pointless use of 3D effects. Big whoop.