I can only speak for myself but I bought the original Sony eReader they were selling at Borders a few years ago for 300 bucks and have been gravely disappointed. The screen is great, it goes for weeks on a single charge, very easy on the eyes, almost as good as paper. There is only one problem. It flat stinks for pdf's. Straight up text files are great on it but the formatting of most pdf's makes them illegible when scaled to the eReader screen. There are 3 text sizes you can configure and none of them help. You also have the option of portrait or landscape mode. This also doesn't help. These days, all I've found it to be good for is to read the occasional novel that I, of course, have to convert to text from pdf. And even then, the paragraphs and punctuation gets screwed up. It was good enough to read Neuromancer though which has weird sentence structure anyway.
I'd also say that for reading something like an O'Reilly book, you couldn't choose a worse format than eink. What with the slow screen refresh, it's not like you can flip through the index then go to the page you need in anything like the time you can with a regular book. Although, I can say I've read many more O'Reilly books in pdf form than written. However, everyone of them have been courtesy of kpdf which is in my opinion the pdf viewer par excellence. I say this as I have the Linux Networking Cookbook in the background. Just my 2 cents.
I have a little elinks/rtorrent combo on a 600 MHz beater sitting in the corner of my room at the house that I SSH into when I'm on the road for my torrenting pleasures. I have one of those cellular modems from Verizon with the 5GB monthly limit so I can't do a whole lot of downloading with it.
Do you really think w3m is better than my personal text based browser of choice? I'd be curious as to the reasons why. Elinks is pretty feature filled, highly configurable, and is still lightening fast with the cellular connection.
I don't know what your problem with Puppy Linux is but it isn't much different than Xandros on the Eee. They both use a 2.6 kernel and they both use a lightweight window manager (IceWM for Xandros and JWM for Puppy). They can both run the same programs in the same way. It's more like the difference between Win2000 and XP not 95 and XP if you insist on dragging Windows into this. You must not know very much about Linux.
I'm in the US and have a PPC6700 (HTC Apache) from Sprint. I can use Bluetooth dial up networking to tether, share files with USB, wi-fi or bluetooth between my PC and the phone, I can use my own mp3's as ring tones, add and remove any app at will, etc. What feature am I missing out on here that I would be getting in the EU? I really am curious.
I definitely don't blame you. Which is why when I get a jones to watch Heroes or whatever through Netflix, I just hook the laptop to the set in the living room and click the little fullscreen button. I'm not saying that Netflix is something great or whatever, it's just that my girlfriend got a subscription and gave me the password so what the hell. Since I watch it in a virtual machine, I'm not limited by the 5 computer yearly maximum for the online player service that they don't really tell you about until you run up against it. But that's another story.
Exactly. I could use a picture of my desktop for a splash image on my Debian box while booting and get practically the same effect sans movable mouse cursor.
I know it's a shitty solution but, I just fire up a virtual machine to watch Netflix movies off of the website. After taking the year or so it takes to really learn how to use Linux properly, I could never go back to using Windows.
This is absolutely true. However, keep in mind, that first of all, it's generally set and forget. You click the boxes, hit apply, then walk away. When you get back all of your software is installed and ready to go. No, next, next, next, etc. like on Windows. There are exceptions, java, VirtualBox, and a few others come to mind where you actually have to do something during the install but not very many apps are like that. Also, on *nix with so many shared libraries, the downloads for a particular piece of software tends to be much smaller than for a comparable piece of software on Windows.
Yeah, but how long does it take to install all of the software and updated drivers for your various hardware including multiple reboots? And what about your favorite apps? How long does it take to install those what with swapping out the install CDs and such? Sticking in the Vista DVD and waiting the 20 or so minutes to get to a desktop is just the beginning.
On my Ubuntu box, I just install the OS pull up Add/Remove software, click a few boxes for the stuff I want, hit apply and I'm done.
Anybody who uses Linux on a regular basis I'm sure can identify with the groan inducing tediousness you prepare yourself to put up with when a friend or family member asks you to help them install Windows.
I'm thinking the copy would be like a son or daughter. If/when you die, the copy would inherit your belongings, etc. provided your will allows that. You would probably be held legally responsible for the copy until they had whatever it takes, money or a job or whatever, to survive in this hypothetical society. Of course, if the technology existed to do this, it would also exist to interface and extend the biological original, you, like Ghost in the Shell, for example, so it's not like the copy is going to be super advanced compared to you anyway. Seems fairly simple to me.
A fair question. However, it's only when thought through completely we come to realize how irrelevant and very human a question it actually is. As enlightened and removed from nature as we would like to think we are, we really are only the ongoing product of an evolutionary process that has taken millions of years to get us to the perceived status we are at right now. It really all boils down to the innate urge to propagate our genes as far and wide as possible. Why? Because in the beginning the proto-organisms that didn't have this "desire" died. What was left over are our very own ancestors. Thus, the will to solve problems, even the desire to live comes from this very simple entirely biological genesis. Extrapolating that to a machine is almost complete fantasy. An AI is about as likely to think like us as it is to think like one of a virtually limitless other types of ways.
Notice how on a fundamental level, humans think mostly the same. Survival, comfort, sexual satisfaction, family, etc. It's because we are in a sense programmed that way by our genes. A self-deterministic AI will have to be programmed too at least enough to achieve the ability to develop sentience. Program it to want to survive and take over the world and "Kill All Humans" as Bender would say and it will. Otherwise it won't. In short, turn off the Terminator movies and the naive authors and think about this a bit.
Contrary to most of the opinions expressed below, defining the Singularity in the context of this discussion is very simple. The eventual Singularity is coincidental to one thing: strong Artificial Intelligence. If and when a machine gains sentience and the intellectual capacity of a human brain, by definition, it will be many times smarter due to the inherent speed of electronics over neurons. At that point, the computer will be able to design its own successor, ad infinitum. These machines will, if cooperative (and we'd better hope it is), handily answer all of our questions, even the ones we don't know to ask yet. When this happens, predictive ability breaks down. How can you predict what you have no hope of understanding. It is like a flatworm comprehending opera. Thus, the Singularity.
If someone talks to a "technical support" help line, they should just shut up and do what support say, if they know it all then the why the heck did they call in the first place?
While I agree with the first part of that, and I do realize you are probably being rhetorical and not necessarily commentating on every conceivable situation, I would say the typical caller you are talking about assumes that the problem is something beyond their control such as malfunctioning hardware or something upstream somewhere at the service or good provider which even if they did know it all, they would still need to call.
I specifically mentioned the Workstation version of vmware not Server. Two completely different products of which one has rpm, etc. and the other does not. Guess which is which.
Yeah, actually, I've used thousands of deb packages. The Google Earth binary was not one of them. It was still super easy to install. Most Linux binaries that you download are anything but easy. That was the point. We should be able to download a binary that isn't a pre-rolled deb or rpm or whatever package and install it as easily as this was.
I have to say, this was one of the easiest installs of a random program on Linux I have ever seen. I just downloaded the one file, GoogleEarthLinux.bin, opened a terminal, did a chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin, typed./GoogleEarthLinux.bin and hit next, next, next and was done.
Seriously, all Linux program installations should be this easy. Oh, and the program is great.
I just use XP in a virtual machine on my Ubuntu box to sync my Windows Mobile phone. Works great for that and the other three apps I use that don't have a good *nix analog. For the curious, those are, Microsoft Streets and Trips, the closest thing being GPSDrive (maybe in 5 years), Endicia, and a proprietary app I use to organize my online selling.
But anyway, after really learning how to use Linux and getting used to all the power and customization options it gives me, you couldn't pay me to go back to Windows or OSX. And for that matter, I'd rather use Windows in a virtual machine anyway. It's easier to administrate that way and if it takes a shit, it doesn't bring the whole computer down. Not to mention the fact that virtual machines have made tremendous strides in speed and usability of late. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seamless in Ubuntu. You full screen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
That's cool, I wasn't really trying to be a dick. And, if I may be so bold as to offer a tip, "no one" is always two words though "noone" is a common misspelling even amongst native speakers.
Yeah, because it makes so much sense to base your currency on some arbitrary type of metal. Remember the most recent instance of complete economic breakdown in America? Post-Katrina New Orleans ring a bell? I guess they were all running around in there exchanging goods and services with "dabloons". Right.
If you want to base your currency on a particular type of metal, might I suggest lead. Because when the economic shit really hits the fan, that's going to be the only real medium of exchange.
Now see, this is the kind of stuff I just don't understand. If you are going to look at child porn or whatever, why not take the simple steps to protect yourself.
How hard is it to slipstream a Knoppix CD with truecrypt and all of your codecs, open the case of your laptop and disconnect the hard drive (just in case), pull the battery out of your laptop so you can just pull the plug and have instant off, find a hotspot to download your porn at, boot up on the Knoppix CD, create an encrypted truecrypt volume in RAM to download your child porn directly into, download the porn, dismount the truecrypt volume, insert a USB flash drive to copy the truecrypt volume to, then just hit the power button?
Now you have covered your bases and have no record of the password anywhere, not even mistakenly written to a swap file, and if you want to view your porn, you just boot up on the live CD again and copy the truecrypt volume from the flash drive into RAM, disconnect the flash drive (again, just in case), view your porn all completely in RAM and when you're done, just pull the plug and poof, all evidence gone.
I don't understand why people can't just take simple precautions.
Yeah, I finally did that. I actually discovered the BIOS update after slipstreaming my new XP install disk after finding the drivers on that site I mentioned.
Before I took the plunge and wiped all MS off of my laptop in favor Ubuntu (and I couldn't be happier I might add), I had the same issue of not being able to find the XP drivers for my Acer 5620 laptop that I bought from best buy. I finally, after about a week of searching, hit up on the European site which had everything I needed. Also, when I first bought the computer, the BIOS it had didn't have the ability to emulate IDE or whatever on the SATA drives so XP couldn't even see them to do the install. An update to the latest BIOS fixed that.
Basically, it was practically unusable with Vista, pretty good with XP, and I've fallen in love with Linux on it. Especially multi-tasking. People can say whatever they want about KDE or Gnome being slow. And yeah, if you have any even slightly older hardware running either of those two DE's on default settings then, yes, it will seem a bit sluggish until you reign the eye candy in a bit. But, as one that keeps a large number of programs and virtual desktops, etc. going simultaneously, nothing can touch *nix for multi-tasking. It's just so smooth, it's utterly amazing. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that I make extensive use of virtual machines. VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seemless. You fullscreen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
And that's my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling. I haven't had my coffee yet. Going now.
I run Puppy 3.0.1 on a laptop with a 600 MHz Celeron and 128MB of RAM. It flies. It is literally probably the fastest computer I have ever seen in front of my face. The laptop I'm typing this on right now has a Core 2 Duo and 2 Gigs of RAM with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and the Celeron smokes it.
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I'd also say that for reading something like an O'Reilly book, you couldn't choose a worse format than eink. What with the slow screen refresh, it's not like you can flip through the index then go to the page you need in anything like the time you can with a regular book. Although, I can say I've read many more O'Reilly books in pdf form than written. However, everyone of them have been courtesy of kpdf which is in my opinion the pdf viewer par excellence. I say this as I have the Linux Networking Cookbook in the background. Just my 2 cents.
Do you really think w3m is better than my personal text based browser of choice? I'd be curious as to the reasons why. Elinks is pretty feature filled, highly configurable, and is still lightening fast with the cellular connection.
I don't know what your problem with Puppy Linux is but it isn't much different than Xandros on the Eee. They both use a 2.6 kernel and they both use a lightweight window manager (IceWM for Xandros and JWM for Puppy). They can both run the same programs in the same way. It's more like the difference between Win2000 and XP not 95 and XP if you insist on dragging Windows into this. You must not know very much about Linux.
I'm in the US and have a PPC6700 (HTC Apache) from Sprint. I can use Bluetooth dial up networking to tether, share files with USB, wi-fi or bluetooth between my PC and the phone, I can use my own mp3's as ring tones, add and remove any app at will, etc. What feature am I missing out on here that I would be getting in the EU? I really am curious.
I definitely don't blame you. Which is why when I get a jones to watch Heroes or whatever through Netflix, I just hook the laptop to the set in the living room and click the little fullscreen button. I'm not saying that Netflix is something great or whatever, it's just that my girlfriend got a subscription and gave me the password so what the hell. Since I watch it in a virtual machine, I'm not limited by the 5 computer yearly maximum for the online player service that they don't really tell you about until you run up against it. But that's another story.
Exactly. I could use a picture of my desktop for a splash image on my Debian box while booting and get practically the same effect sans movable mouse cursor.
I know it's a shitty solution but, I just fire up a virtual machine to watch Netflix movies off of the website. After taking the year or so it takes to really learn how to use Linux properly, I could never go back to using Windows.
This is absolutely true. However, keep in mind, that first of all, it's generally set and forget. You click the boxes, hit apply, then walk away. When you get back all of your software is installed and ready to go. No, next, next, next, etc. like on Windows. There are exceptions, java, VirtualBox, and a few others come to mind where you actually have to do something during the install but not very many apps are like that. Also, on *nix with so many shared libraries, the downloads for a particular piece of software tends to be much smaller than for a comparable piece of software on Windows.
On my Ubuntu box, I just install the OS pull up Add/Remove software, click a few boxes for the stuff I want, hit apply and I'm done.
Anybody who uses Linux on a regular basis I'm sure can identify with the groan inducing tediousness you prepare yourself to put up with when a friend or family member asks you to help them install Windows.
I'm thinking the copy would be like a son or daughter. If/when you die, the copy would inherit your belongings, etc. provided your will allows that. You would probably be held legally responsible for the copy until they had whatever it takes, money or a job or whatever, to survive in this hypothetical society. Of course, if the technology existed to do this, it would also exist to interface and extend the biological original, you, like Ghost in the Shell, for example, so it's not like the copy is going to be super advanced compared to you anyway. Seems fairly simple to me.
Notice how on a fundamental level, humans think mostly the same. Survival, comfort, sexual satisfaction, family, etc. It's because we are in a sense programmed that way by our genes. A self-deterministic AI will have to be programmed too at least enough to achieve the ability to develop sentience. Program it to want to survive and take over the world and "Kill All Humans" as Bender would say and it will. Otherwise it won't. In short, turn off the Terminator movies and the naive authors and think about this a bit.
Contrary to most of the opinions expressed below, defining the Singularity in the context of this discussion is very simple. The eventual Singularity is coincidental to one thing: strong Artificial Intelligence. If and when a machine gains sentience and the intellectual capacity of a human brain, by definition, it will be many times smarter due to the inherent speed of electronics over neurons. At that point, the computer will be able to design its own successor, ad infinitum. These machines will, if cooperative (and we'd better hope it is), handily answer all of our questions, even the ones we don't know to ask yet. When this happens, predictive ability breaks down. How can you predict what you have no hope of understanding. It is like a flatworm comprehending opera. Thus, the Singularity.
While I agree with the first part of that, and I do realize you are probably being rhetorical and not necessarily commentating on every conceivable situation, I would say the typical caller you are talking about assumes that the problem is something beyond their control such as malfunctioning hardware or something upstream somewhere at the service or good provider which even if they did know it all, they would still need to call.
I specifically mentioned the Workstation version of vmware not Server. Two completely different products of which one has rpm, etc. and the other does not. Guess which is which.
How many native distribution packages of VMWare Workstation do you know of? And that's just one example. There are many more.
Yeah, actually, I've used thousands of deb packages. The Google Earth binary was not one of them. It was still super easy to install. Most Linux binaries that you download are anything but easy. That was the point. We should be able to download a binary that isn't a pre-rolled deb or rpm or whatever package and install it as easily as this was.
Seriously, all Linux program installations should be this easy. Oh, and the program is great.
But anyway, after really learning how to use Linux and getting used to all the power and customization options it gives me, you couldn't pay me to go back to Windows or OSX. And for that matter, I'd rather use Windows in a virtual machine anyway. It's easier to administrate that way and if it takes a shit, it doesn't bring the whole computer down. Not to mention the fact that virtual machines have made tremendous strides in speed and usability of late. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seamless in Ubuntu. You full screen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
That's cool, I wasn't really trying to be a dick. And, if I may be so bold as to offer a tip, "no one" is always two words though "noone" is a common misspelling even amongst native speakers.
If you want to base your currency on a particular type of metal, might I suggest lead. Because when the economic shit really hits the fan, that's going to be the only real medium of exchange.
How hard is it to slipstream a Knoppix CD with truecrypt and all of your codecs, open the case of your laptop and disconnect the hard drive (just in case), pull the battery out of your laptop so you can just pull the plug and have instant off, find a hotspot to download your porn at, boot up on the Knoppix CD, create an encrypted truecrypt volume in RAM to download your child porn directly into, download the porn, dismount the truecrypt volume, insert a USB flash drive to copy the truecrypt volume to, then just hit the power button?
Now you have covered your bases and have no record of the password anywhere, not even mistakenly written to a swap file, and if you want to view your porn, you just boot up on the live CD again and copy the truecrypt volume from the flash drive into RAM, disconnect the flash drive (again, just in case), view your porn all completely in RAM and when you're done, just pull the plug and poof, all evidence gone.
I don't understand why people can't just take simple precautions.
Yeah, I finally did that. I actually discovered the BIOS update after slipstreaming my new XP install disk after finding the drivers on that site I mentioned.
Says you. I just open a terminal and type "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" to fulfill my need for the new shiny. Works every time.
Basically, it was practically unusable with Vista, pretty good with XP, and I've fallen in love with Linux on it. Especially multi-tasking. People can say whatever they want about KDE or Gnome being slow. And yeah, if you have any even slightly older hardware running either of those two DE's on default settings then, yes, it will seem a bit sluggish until you reign the eye candy in a bit. But, as one that keeps a large number of programs and virtual desktops, etc. going simultaneously, nothing can touch *nix for multi-tasking. It's just so smooth, it's utterly amazing. Since I've gotten going here and all, I'll also mention that I make extensive use of virtual machines. VMware never ran so smoothly on XP or Win2K for that matter. It feels seemless. You fullscreen your VM and put it into exclusive mode and you will forget that you aren't on the bare metal. With Windows there was always some little stutter or jerky mouse, or something that broke you out of the moment and reminded you that you were in a VM. Linux really is amazing. I can't speak for the BSD's since I don't have any experience but if they're anything like as good as Linux, Microsoft has something very serious to worry about in the long term.
And that's my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling. I haven't had my coffee yet. Going now.
I run Puppy 3.0.1 on a laptop with a 600 MHz Celeron and 128MB of RAM. It flies. It is literally probably the fastest computer I have ever seen in front of my face. The laptop I'm typing this on right now has a Core 2 Duo and 2 Gigs of RAM with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and the Celeron smokes it.