WP5.2 for DOS ran great on a 386 with a couple megs of RAM. That doesn't meet the needs or expectations of a student today. I fail to see how the increasing hardware demands of software makes me an asshole.
The software that we used in school isn't available any more. I can't get Becky any more (oops - looks like I can). Netscape 2.0 isn't going to cut it. Wordperfect 5 for DOS was great on memory use but I just can't use it any more.
Students need hardware just like everyone else. A decent CPU, a couple gigs of RAM (if you want the computer to last until the end of the year), that's the foundation. This box has neither but does come with a resource-hungry OS.
Yup, this machine was probably built for XP. And from your statement I'm guessing that your parents aren't doing anything on a computer that needs to be done. I know if my mom can't get her email or watch a flash video one day she just decides to do something else for a while.
A student, otoh, has work that needs to be done. And in a timely manner. And often using whatever wierd software the school/prof says they will. Things like "CPU" and "RAM" aren't bells or whistles. They're the basic needs for getting work done. The fact that a better CPU or more RAM also makes it possible to play a game doesn't mean that games are all a better machine is good for.
If you're that worried about your kids playing a game on the PC you buy them then you'd better remove all the other bells and whistles too... like Flash... and the web browser... and Java and the OS... because they can be used for entertainment too.
Funny but until I got a new desktop last year my main machine was a 1200MHz AMD Thunderbird I built back around 2000-2001. It ran XP for a few years but has had OpenSuse 10.1 on it since that came out. Now, with some upgrades, it's my myth frontend and runs some other server-type stuff for me. You definitely can get more longevity out of hardware with Linux (note I said "can" not "always do").
Ubuntu might work for a lot of students but definitely not all (just like there are people who can't figure out how to use MySpace or Google).
But "The fact that the OS needs 1 GB of memory to function" is a fact. I peeked & poked on my C128 and I've developed on PICs, Basic Stamps and even smaller stuff. Paperclip was great on my Commie but that doesn't mean I'm going to haul it out of the closet and hand it to my daughter when she goes back to school. Real students doing their homework need hardware that suits the work. Lamenting the wasted bits in Vista doesn't help their grades.
This is the exact logic I disagree with. Web browsing, email and word processing are easy to say but they all take substantial amounts of ram and cpu power. Then throw in the essential virus/malware scanner and firewall and you'll burn that one gig of ram in no time.
Look at the features of a modern web browser and it's no surprise that it sucks up 100+ MB of ram. Same goes for a word processor that's doing full-time spell checking and reformatting large documents. Then there's the OS updates. When an update is made it's not made for last year's bottom-of-the-barrel hardware like this pc, that code is written to target today's average cpu. So patches to the OS are made to run on hardware that's faster than what yours was the day it was new.
Now consider that students go to school for a reason (I'm thinking college/university here). They have specific applications they need to run for some classes. In engineering I had to do PSpice and Matlab and whatnot. People in social work and other fields have stats programs they run. I'm sure accountants, geologists and every other field have their specific apps. These aren't tweaked to run on low-end hardware.
Finally there's the distance courses. They often include video, audio and copious PDF files. Flash player, Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader are all getting fatter with each release.
I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.
With a 250 watt power supply, a gig of RAM and only 80 GB of hard drive it's probably going to leave a lot of students disappointed.
I don't know why everyone figures that just because students don't do weather simulations they can get by with just any junk hardware. The OS needs bags of RAM just to run right and OpenOffice (just like MS Office) needs ram and cpu power to do its work.
Looks like another case of Walmart putting the screws to a supplier to squeeze dollars out of a product. I'm just mostly anti-walmart, not completely. I don't like Dell much either, but I'd just as soon head over there for a back-to-school special then decrapify it.
More likely than anything, I'll just keep building my own.
Thanks for the insight. I really wish the summaries would link to project pages when they're available. I sure don't see a link to the project page from the article - and that's par for the course with news publications any more. I mean really, right under the spot with the reporter's email address would be a great place for it (besides the obvious spot somewhere within the body of TFA...)
I suppose the same could be said for TiVo. Until they started controlling your ability to skip commercials. Funny but when there's competition, the closed commercial options all have great features. It's when the competition goes away that they stop needing to listen to what the users want.
Um, right-click the misspelled word for suggestions. But the fact that it's there and you don't use it (regardless of whether it works or not) is just the kind of bloat issue this article touches on. Interesting little meta-something there. It's a feature that's always running and consuming CPU cycles but, at least in your case, the effort is a waste since there's another app that you've got repeating the work.
I've done nearly the same thing but with an NFS mount instead of an FTP server and it is much faster than optical drives. (It was also a suse install but same idea I think.)
A massively multiplayer game needs to have numbers of players that are... massive. So dislodging WoW from the lead spot takes a lot more than just a great game, you have to reach those players. If there are 8 million subscribers on WoW then how many more are out there to be reached? The $15 or so per month doesn't sound like a lot to most of us, but that's on top of having broadband available, having a decent computer an having the leisure time to spend on a game. The claim that they're making Conan "for adults" sounds fine on paper but other adults think it's odd that I have the time to commit to World of Warcraft. Finding the millions of adults interested in spending the time and money on an immersive game is a huge challenge. It's a lot harder to do than getting people to read the original stories.
I wonder how the numbers of players they need compares to the readership for the works they're based on.
I think I'll go home and cry for a bit. I mean, I try to be positive. I don't want to be a bitter old man. But really, the board wants to be more evil? Could it at least be a big shareholder who's voice matters that's putting this out there? Can I have a happy moment?
Good stuff, really does look like a "Do No Evil" attempt on the part of someone in there.
The second line is "Whereas, the rapid provision of full and uncensored information through the Internet has become a major industry in the United States, and one of its major exports", but since all the rest of it really does sound like they're trying to do the morally right thing, I'm willing to say that line is there to get the vote of the pure capitalists.
There's also reference to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights - rather than just a US-centric view.
Whereas, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to "receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers"
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights pretty clearly agrees with that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
So every once in a while Google regains a little bit of my trust.
That's the problem with building more closed systems: the BBC has to see your request to make that happen. Using open protocols or at least published APIs allow anyone interested enough to create that interface for you. For your Apple TV there are a limited number of ways for you to get what you want and I think they involve Apple and BBC deciding there's an audience that's worth serving.
It's still tied by DRM to the one platform so I don't give it high chances for success. I guess they have a lot of money to keep it afloat it if flounders for a while then catches on (I'm trying to avoid CmdrTaco's fate with the iPod prediction here).
But is there no MythTV or Tivo-type solution available in the Britain? I mean it's publicly funded so shouldn't people get more control over what they've paid for?
That quote sounded very strange to me. Could someone please explain what it could mean? Is it about spyware that hijacks your browser when you're not online? Or is it about users browsing pages offline? The former could be a problem (though it doesn't make me lose sleep) but the latter... well the idea that someone would raise that as a security concern worries me.
The intangible gnome may be something ephemeral that comes in to my possession (in the sense that it is under my control) but if the analogy is to stocks, then wouldn't it make sense to be taxed when I cash out? I mean gains in the stock market aren't taxed until the stocks are exchanged for money and a capital gain is realized.
The funny part really comes later in the discussion when people agree with the concept seemingly based on the idea that anything which causes joy should result in negative consequences.
Because the first phrasing sounds like the OS is at fault when we all know it's up to a software vendor (especially one who likes to claim their software is "ubiquitous") to write the code to work on the OS. Think about it from a marketing perspective, if you had money on the line you'd want to say it the latter way.
I can't be the only one who despises the use of Flash on these video sites. Apart from the fact that my primary OS doesn't support Flash, I hate Flash players out of principle. There are such better, more universal video formats out there, I just can't understand why the hell these sites convert the videos to such a crap format.
Minor correction: Flash doesn't support your primary OS.
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WP5.2 for DOS ran great on a 386 with a couple megs of RAM. That doesn't meet the needs or expectations of a student today. I fail to see how the increasing hardware demands of software makes me an asshole.
Where did I say that most consumers should build their own? I said "I" would. And I said that students would be poorly served to get this computer.
And my abacus only had nine beads...
The software that we used in school isn't available any more. I can't get Becky any more (oops - looks like I can). Netscape 2.0 isn't going to cut it. Wordperfect 5 for DOS was great on memory use but I just can't use it any more.
Students need hardware just like everyone else. A decent CPU, a couple gigs of RAM (if you want the computer to last until the end of the year), that's the foundation. This box has neither but does come with a resource-hungry OS.
Yup, this machine was probably built for XP. And from your statement I'm guessing that your parents aren't doing anything on a computer that needs to be done. I know if my mom can't get her email or watch a flash video one day she just decides to do something else for a while.
A student, otoh, has work that needs to be done. And in a timely manner. And often using whatever wierd software the school/prof says they will. Things like "CPU" and "RAM" aren't bells or whistles. They're the basic needs for getting work done. The fact that a better CPU or more RAM also makes it possible to play a game doesn't mean that games are all a better machine is good for.
If you're that worried about your kids playing a game on the PC you buy them then you'd better remove all the other bells and whistles too... like Flash... and the web browser... and Java and the OS... because they can be used for entertainment too.
Funny but until I got a new desktop last year my main machine was a 1200MHz AMD Thunderbird I built back around 2000-2001. It ran XP for a few years but has had OpenSuse 10.1 on it since that came out. Now, with some upgrades, it's my myth frontend and runs some other server-type stuff for me. You definitely can get more longevity out of hardware with Linux (note I said "can" not "always do").
Ubuntu might work for a lot of students but definitely not all (just like there are people who can't figure out how to use MySpace or Google).
But "The fact that the OS needs 1 GB of memory to function" is a fact. I peeked & poked on my C128 and I've developed on PICs, Basic Stamps and even smaller stuff. Paperclip was great on my Commie but that doesn't mean I'm going to haul it out of the closet and hand it to my daughter when she goes back to school. Real students doing their homework need hardware that suits the work. Lamenting the wasted bits in Vista doesn't help their grades.
This is the exact logic I disagree with. Web browsing, email and word processing are easy to say but they all take substantial amounts of ram and cpu power. Then throw in the essential virus/malware scanner and firewall and you'll burn that one gig of ram in no time.
Look at the features of a modern web browser and it's no surprise that it sucks up 100+ MB of ram. Same goes for a word processor that's doing full-time spell checking and reformatting large documents. Then there's the OS updates. When an update is made it's not made for last year's bottom-of-the-barrel hardware like this pc, that code is written to target today's average cpu. So patches to the OS are made to run on hardware that's faster than what yours was the day it was new.
Now consider that students go to school for a reason (I'm thinking college/university here). They have specific applications they need to run for some classes. In engineering I had to do PSpice and Matlab and whatnot. People in social work and other fields have stats programs they run. I'm sure accountants, geologists and every other field have their specific apps. These aren't tweaked to run on low-end hardware.
Finally there's the distance courses. They often include video, audio and copious PDF files. Flash player, Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader are all getting fatter with each release.
I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.
With a 250 watt power supply, a gig of RAM and only 80 GB of hard drive it's probably going to leave a lot of students disappointed. I don't know why everyone figures that just because students don't do weather simulations they can get by with just any junk hardware. The OS needs bags of RAM just to run right and OpenOffice (just like MS Office) needs ram and cpu power to do its work. Looks like another case of Walmart putting the screws to a supplier to squeeze dollars out of a product. I'm just mostly anti-walmart, not completely. I don't like Dell much either, but I'd just as soon head over there for a back-to-school special then decrapify it. More likely than anything, I'll just keep building my own.
Thanks for the insight. I really wish the summaries would link to project pages when they're available. I sure don't see a link to the project page from the article - and that's par for the course with news publications any more. I mean really, right under the spot with the reporter's email address would be a great place for it (besides the obvious spot somewhere within the body of TFA...)
I suppose the same could be said for TiVo. Until they started controlling your ability to skip commercials. Funny but when there's competition, the closed commercial options all have great features. It's when the competition goes away that they stop needing to listen to what the users want.
Um, right-click the misspelled word for suggestions. But the fact that it's there and you don't use it (regardless of whether it works or not) is just the kind of bloat issue this article touches on. Interesting little meta-something there. It's a feature that's always running and consuming CPU cycles but, at least in your case, the effort is a waste since there's another app that you've got repeating the work.
I've done nearly the same thing but with an NFS mount instead of an FTP server and it is much faster than optical drives. (It was also a suse install but same idea I think.)
Yeah, saw that after posting. I should have rtfa (and latfp) first.
The quarter is the fourth one down on this page.
Um, no, Tim Horton's is not the mint.
:)
I think that might be where I got my first one as well though
A massively multiplayer game needs to have numbers of players that are... massive. So dislodging WoW from the lead spot takes a lot more than just a great game, you have to reach those players. If there are 8 million subscribers on WoW then how many more are out there to be reached? The $15 or so per month doesn't sound like a lot to most of us, but that's on top of having broadband available, having a decent computer an having the leisure time to spend on a game. The claim that they're making Conan "for adults" sounds fine on paper but other adults think it's odd that I have the time to commit to World of Warcraft. Finding the millions of adults interested in spending the time and money on an immersive game is a huge challenge. It's a lot harder to do than getting people to read the original stories.
I wonder how the numbers of players they need compares to the readership for the works they're based on.
I think I'll go home and cry for a bit. I mean, I try to be positive. I don't want to be a bitter old man. But really, the board wants to be more evil? Could it at least be a big shareholder who's voice matters that's putting this out there? Can I have a happy moment?
The second line is "Whereas, the rapid provision of full and uncensored information through the Internet has become a major industry in the United States, and one of its major exports", but since all the rest of it really does sound like they're trying to do the morally right thing, I'm willing to say that line is there to get the vote of the pure capitalists.
There's also reference to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights - rather than just a US-centric view. Whereas, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to "receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers"
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights pretty clearly agrees with that: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
So every once in a while Google regains a little bit of my trust.
If you're right then I'd be happy to be corrected - I'm feeling exceptionally bitter, even for a Monday morning.
That's the problem with building more closed systems: the BBC has to see your request to make that happen. Using open protocols or at least published APIs allow anyone interested enough to create that interface for you. For your Apple TV there are a limited number of ways for you to get what you want and I think they involve Apple and BBC deciding there's an audience that's worth serving.
Best of luck.
It's still tied by DRM to the one platform so I don't give it high chances for success. I guess they have a lot of money to keep it afloat it if flounders for a while then catches on (I'm trying to avoid CmdrTaco's fate with the iPod prediction here).
But is there no MythTV or Tivo-type solution available in the Britain? I mean it's publicly funded so shouldn't people get more control over what they've paid for?
That quote sounded very strange to me. Could someone please explain what it could mean? Is it about spyware that hijacks your browser when you're not online? Or is it about users browsing pages offline? The former could be a problem (though it doesn't make me lose sleep) but the latter... well the idea that someone would raise that as a security concern worries me.
The intangible gnome may be something ephemeral that comes in to my possession (in the sense that it is under my control) but if the analogy is to stocks, then wouldn't it make sense to be taxed when I cash out? I mean gains in the stock market aren't taxed until the stocks are exchanged for money and a capital gain is realized. The funny part really comes later in the discussion when people agree with the concept seemingly based on the idea that anything which causes joy should result in negative consequences.
Because the first phrasing sounds like the OS is at fault when we all know it's up to a software vendor (especially one who likes to claim their software is "ubiquitous") to write the code to work on the OS. Think about it from a marketing perspective, if you had money on the line you'd want to say it the latter way.
Minor correction: Flash doesn't support your primary OS.
Carry on.