Yeah, I thought Wozinak and his team created the process by which floppy read and write actions were controlled, and managed to do it considerably faster than anyone before them. They had a demonstration that consisted of images being read off a disk slideshow-fashion, and it was apparently fast enough to be really impressive. I know that technology was incorporated with the original Mac, so if it has stuck around till today, I'd say Woz had something to do with Macintosh.
You can put a better user interface on a device with a high-quality color display.
Not really. You say 'better user interface' but obviously haven't used these phones. On a 1-3" LCD, which is typical for phones, simpler is better. Monochrome displays are often very simple and straightforward. Most color phones I have seen try to cram little background images and such into the interface. I don't want that, because on such a small screen it distracts from the purpose.
I was pleased when I got a phone with a color display, until I realized the thing was absolutely useless in direct sunlight. Since I rather like being outside, that presents a bit of a problem. Sure, when it's dark the monochrome displays are a litte harder to read than the blind-your-nuts-off backlit color displays. However, here's my experience:
Backlit color LCD: -cluttered interface -far too bright in a darkened room/movie theater/whatever -totally useless in sunlight
Sidelit monochrome LCD: -simple interface -light is just bright enough to be useful, without functioning as a flashlight in a pinch -perfectly readable in sunlight
Your school obviously had a bigger budget than mine. We did use images. Our tech had a set of image CDs that he used to fix computers that were unusable. However, the building must have had hundreds of computers. These computers are used by careless, uninformed students and really would need reghosted every few weeks. Since for some reason our tech guy couldn't even keep up with hardware failures and broken print drivers on the teacher's computers, I find it unlikely he could have found the time to reimage several hundred computers at least once per month. Are you volunteering?
This seems like one of the topics which will always bring a bunch of paranoid nuts to the surface. Yeah, it's pretty likely that the algorithm will be cracked at some point or another. But we are pitting criminals against a department of engineers.
Yeah, chances are it will be broken. But not by very many people. Compare:
1) An extremely intelligent criminal group cracks the algorithm, gets a reader. They manage to configure their reader to have wireless networking abilities and get themselves set up with a bank so they appear legitimate. This way they can request and actually recieve money from your bank through your card (Their reader can't just magically take money from the card. Transactions like this are two banks communicating through information found on a card). They then walk around the local mall and get within 10cm of the pocket carrying the card for long enough to get a reading. The criminals are smart and don't want to get caught - any money taken will be in small enough amounts to be unnoticed. Chances are pretty good you will only get hit by their reader once, because conditions have to be just right - you have to be in the same place as the criminals and it has to be crowded enough that their actions go unnoticed. You lose $10.
2) You misplace your credit card. Perhaps you dropped it when you were paying for gas at the pump. It was cold and you had bulky gloves on. The card is found by Billy Bob, who then racks up thousands of dollars of purchases. You will probably get your money back, though it will depend somewhat on bank policy. The situation will place a large amount of stress on your life.
3) You make an online purchase. Whether through the spyware on your computer, an insecure connection, or a dishonest retailer, your number and information is taken. The thief then racks up thousands of dollars of purchases. You will probably get your money back, though it will depend somewhat on bank policy. The situation will place a large amount of stress on your life.
I really think that situations (2) and (3) are much more likely. Situation (3) might not be likely for the slashdot crowd, but in case you hadn't noticed, we are a huge minority in the world. So, hey. Be paranoid if you want. Get out the aluminum foil. But I'm afraid I can't stick my head quite far enough up there to see things your way.
The signature requirement is nonsense. Signatures have been proven very useless both here and here
Credit card signatures are worthless and completely ignored unless your purchase is for a significant amount of money, well into the thousands of dollars.
This works for some offices, but schools are also mentioned. Think about the high school you attended. Most of the students there have no respect for the computers, and a great number of them don't fully understand them. They will click OK on whatever pops up in IE, and it only takes a few of those to bring down the computer. And trying to avoid IE is nonsense. There is no way you will successfully convert 1500 students to an alternative browser unless you can completely lock off IE, and even then you will have to deal with complaints.
Does their old license prevent them from just continuing to use their old copies of windows 98?
Not at all. These schools could continue to use 95, 98, and 98se for as long as they want. The license allows it and the hardware they have will continue to run it.
However, licensing isn't the issue here - security is. Microsoft has cut support for these operating systems. They are quite vulnerable, and there are no security updates available. While the current releases, 2000 and XP, will continue to get security patches and updates, the people left running the old versions are alone.
This is the problem. Schools can't afford to buy new hardware to support XP, but as long as their computers are running outdated software, security vulnerabilities can cause them trouble.
Now all I'm missing is a decent motherboard that's not designed like a Pinto.
No, you're also missing comprehension of the post you are responding to. You are comparing AMD desktop CPUs to Intel desktop CPUs, while you are almost certainly responding to an article about a laptop.
A lot of Slashdot-type people prefer AMD chips to Intel. Intel has market saturation and is the brand most known to the masses, but AMD admittedly has extremely nice desktop chips. However, Intel did something spectacular with the Pentium M processors. They are inordinately powerful at a given clock speed, while maintaining about 1/4 the power consumption of desktop processors.
Where performance and price are the only issues, AMD has some excellent offerings. However, when you throw power consumption and therefore battery life in, AMD doesn't have anything remotely like the Pentium M.
At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address
And really, what's the big deal with this information being in a standardized format? Even if someone has a device to pull this information from your RFID-enabled ID card, they really don't have much. You said ID number, not Social Security Number. Your driver's license number is used for a great many things, and I don't see it as a huge security risk. Your name and birthday are not anything secure - one is your standard form of identification, which you would give to a stranger as an introduction, and the other is exchanged almost as a novelty. Your gender is no big deal, and in most cases is obvious even without stealing data from your card. Your photograph is also no big deal, as anyone close enough to grab information from your ID could just as easily create their own photograph of you. And finally, address. That's the only thing on there that has any real significance. Great, you'll get some more junk mail. I don't think this is a reason to get out the tin-foil hats just yet.
RFID isn't the terrible technology everyone makes it out to be. Sure, it's not as secure as a barcode, because the barcode can't be read without your approval. However, it also makes the card a whole lot harder to counterfeit. You might have a few more identity thefts, but you will have a lot less underage smoking and drinking. I live in a college town, and I know which of those issues would make a bigger difference in my life. It's not the identity theft.
My school issues RFID keycards. They are great - you can enter locked buildings without removing anything from your pockets. I found out a few months ago that they aren't just generic cards, they actually have your name and possibly some other information attached to them. Someone on our floor was stealing chairs from the lounge, and a quick glance at the records put a swift end to that. Seems to me the benefits far outweigh the barely tangible paranoid outlook on things.
That's exactly right. THIS IS News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. It was an entertaining thing to read, and I think Star Wars is sufficiently nerdy that we should be sitting here appreciating the article, not getting upset over it.
To those who disagree, I suggest you go find a sense of humor before you have a heart attack and die.
This is rather old news, but it is still an interesting concept. I mean, Microsoft is a big corporation and isn't known to do things out of good will. But I don't see what Microsoft stands to gain from doing this.
I suppose they do get to sue and potentially shut down people who have been hurting their sales by selling counterfeit copies at retail prices. It's beneficial in the long run.
My school has a very effective setup for controlling outbreaks. To start, the network is MAC filtered. Any time you connect to the network with an unlisted MAC address, your browser is redirected to a page containing the university Terms of Service for the network. You read this information, toss in your university ID and password and click I AGREE, and the program adds your MAC to the list.
As outlined in the TOS, there are no warnings. If your computer exibits any viral behavior, your network access is removed. Unless your virus was email-related, you still have access to the mail servers. When you try to use the internet again, you are once again taken to a limited page, which politely tells you that your computer appeared to be infected with a virus. You are given basic cleaning information, as well as the tech department phone number and email address in case you need help. They can also provide you with tools like AdAware, since you won't be able to download these yourself. Then, once you are confident your computer is clean, you call the tech department, and they run a quick check to see that your computer is no longer showing viral activity. At this point, your network access is returned.
There are no warnings. As soon as you cause a problem, the problem (you) is removed. Once you fix the problem, access is restored. I don't know their policy for repeat offenders, but I assume there is something.
First, they have stressed several times on the spreadfirefox website that they are counting only downloads. They aren't trying to pretend that these are usage statistics, they are simply counting the number of times the application has been downloaded. From what I remember of calculus, if you downloaded it 20 times in a row on one computer, that's 20 downloads.
Second, they have also stated that downloads initiated through the update widget at the top right corner don't count towards the stats. Your upgrades to 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 only counted if you downloaded them from the main page.
I'm imagining that the other rover is pretty far away and wouldn't get there for a year or so.
I'm pretty sure it would take even longer than that. The original plan stated that the rovers would travel 40 meters per day. This goal has been exceeded, but I don't know by how much. Even so, considering the varied terrain they would take, we could use that as a base figure. As I understand it, the rovers are over 10,000 km apart. This means that it would take one rover almost 700 earth years to reach the other. And this is assuming the rescue rover doesn't get stuck.
On top of that, these rovers have driven over very carefully chosen terrain. Small rocks, soft sand, and even a tiny incline would stop the rover in its tracks. Assuming there is a way to cross the whole planet while remaining on good terrain, it would take even longer. I'm pretty sure we would have colonies on Mars before we got the rovers in the same place.
And then, over this many years, you have to consider the expected lifetime of the rovers. They were only intended to operate for 90 days before the dust buildup on the solar panels rendered them helpless. We got lucky, and something is keeping them clean and operational, but I doubt we can depend on the same for the next thousand years.
Nevertheless, we have done very well. The rovers have given far more information than ever expected, and even losing one, we still have the other. I think the mission is a huge success. It also continues to be successful, and NASA seems to think the stuck rover is only temporarily inconvenienced. We will see in the coming weeks.
That's exactly right. I only care if they are using Internet Explorer and they expect me to maintain their computer. For other people, if they are having a problem with what they are using, then I will suggest they try out my solution. But if you aren't going to ask me to fix your computer for free, I don't really care what you use.
Well, if you're doing REAL image editing work you'll be using Photoshop anyway but for throwing something together for a presentation, Gimp will work.
Why does everyone demean The GIMP in this way? I have never found it lacking in power. Granted, sometimes it's a bit hard to find the option you want, nested as it is three context menus deep. Please name one thing that you can do in Photoshop that those of us who know how to use The GIMP can't do in it.
I'm with the parent poster. Shortly after I switched to Firefox, I also switched to Thunderbird and Sunbird (mail and calendar, respectively, for the uninitiated). Admittedly, Sunbird isn't quite ready for most users, though it's quite stable. But Thunderbird is impressive. It has Bayesian spam filtering, powerful message sorting rules, and easy-to-configure multiple POP accounts. It's a little harder to set up multiple SMTP accounts, but I can't compare that to Outlook because I haven't tried it in anything but Thunderbird. Then again, most people aren't going to be using multiple incoming accounts, let alone multiple outgoing.
I've never used Citrix, so don't know how heavy that is, but -- 165 megs for the OS, desktop, file browser, web browser and a terminal isn't exactly what I'd call svelte.
I wouldn't complain too much. Most Windows XP systems are using more than that at startup. I think mine uses about 180 right off the bat, and right now, running Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, the OpenOffice Quickstarter, and a few special drivers, it's using 241.
It's significant because it's not a Toshiba. I realize that you may have had a good time with your Toshiba drive, but that's not always the case. I had a Toshiba laptop hard drive fail on me a few months ago, and I did some Googling, and discovered that it's very common for Toshiba drives to fail after only a few (10) months of service.
However, this may not apply to their SATA offerings.
By the sound of it, you have been using a Mac since well before Windows 98.
Windows XP and I assume 2000 allows you to view image icons in this fashion. Windows 98 couldn't do anything more impressive than show a preview of the image in the bottom left corner of the explorer window.
Now, if Longhorn is also going to display thumbnails, I imagine they will put an 'off' option in there. There are a lot of people who like image thumbnails but aren't going to be all that impressed with white icons with black lines of varying length running horizontally across them.
Your argument is highly unlikely. It's true that Mac OS has to support a wide range of devices. It has to support several Mac motherboards, many different PowerPC processors, a plethora of Mac add-on PCI cards, and a great many external devices that were either made by Apple or made to the same specifications as the apple devices (like USB keyboards/mice).
Compare this to Windows and Linux (heh, those two don't get grouped together very often). Both of these operating systems have to support several different architectures, as well as motherboards, cards, and various peripherals manufactured by thousands of companies, each with various standards of quality control and wildly different drivers.
Who do you really think has the worse job? Sure, most drivers are written for Windows. Then again, since the internals of Apple computers are incompatible with the internals of X86 computers, chances are pretty good if you are making hardware for a Mac, you will be writing drivers for a Mac. Since your product won't even work in a Windows computer, I have to wonder why you would bother writing drivers for it to do so.
Linux is most certainly a viable product and is becoming better everyday. I've used it for years and am at this very moment writing this reply using Suse 9.2.
I, too, use Linux. However, as someone earlier pointed out, you can't look at it as a product so much as a program. A product is something that is easily marketable. All the things you pointed out, I agree with - it's extremely usable, and far more powerful and flexible than Windows. However, it's not going to make the jump to a commercially viable product, because in order to be 'snapping at Microsoft's heels' you will have to get more than the geek population to use it. OSX has a loyal following and is by no means nipping at Microsoft's heels, because the user base is too small.
Firefox is a good example of this. It's done very well, for an opensource program, and has gained the acceptance of thousands of non-geek users. However, of the many people I have tried to convert to Firefox, I have failed almost as often as I have succeeded. There's no good basis for sticking with IE, because Firefox does all the same things but better. The only differences most people will notice are the name, the icon, and that Favorites has become Bookmarks. And yet they don't want to touch it. Now imagine trying to get these same people to learn a whole new set of programs that are all similar to the Windows equivalents, but have many small differences like those between IE and Firefox. It's not going to happen. You'd be amazingly lucky to get 10% of the population using it.
I think you're slightly mistaken. The article never said that Linux was not an operating system with widely varied talents. What it said was that there was no way Linux would ever make the jump to a complete platform, especially one that could be sold.
Linux isn't a viable product. It changes too often, and there are far too many versions. You pointed this out yourself. Can you imagine Windows ever being popular if there was a version for students, a version for corporate markets, a version for Grandma, and a version for average (stupid) users? It would never work. Windows is a commercial success for several reasons: -It's a monopoly, even though Linux and Mac OS exist -It comes bundled on a lot of systems, thereby saving the user the trouble of learning enough about their computer to install something by themselves -It Just Works. Almost all hardware manufacturers write device drivers with Windows in mind, and since Windows is so common, the proprietary software it uses is also widespread. This means that any hardware you toss in the system should Just Work. Any documents Mom sends you should Just Work.
Linux can do all these things, but sometimes it takes a bit of work. Linux isn't an all-in-one solution that Just Works. Instead, it's a fast-paced, rapidly changing way to get your computer to do the most possible. Most users don't care whether they can change their ethernet adapter's MAC address. They want to buy a computer, plug it in, and turn it on, and have everything work. If they need to install something new, they just double click the pretty picture, and then click OK a few times.
Linux is a long way from this type of usability, and given past experiences, it seems unlikely it will ever make the jump.
You also need to consider people like me - I will download the newest version of Firefox and toss it in my 'installs' folder along with the likes of Thunderbird and Sunbird. If any friends want to grab a copy, they can get it from me.
More importantly, current installs for the same programs get tossed on my USB key whenever I am going to fix someone's computer. It's more convenient for me to pull the installer off a drive than to download it, especially if I would be downloading through a badly infested, pre-SP2 Internet Explorer with popups all over the place.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought Wozinak and his team created the process by which floppy read and write actions were controlled, and managed to do it considerably faster than anyone before them. They had a demonstration that consisted of images being read off a disk slideshow-fashion, and it was apparently fast enough to be really impressive. I know that technology was incorporated with the original Mac, so if it has stuck around till today, I'd say Woz had something to do with Macintosh.
You can put a better user interface on a device with a high-quality color display.
Not really. You say 'better user interface' but obviously haven't used these phones. On a 1-3" LCD, which is typical for phones, simpler is better. Monochrome displays are often very simple and straightforward. Most color phones I have seen try to cram little background images and such into the interface. I don't want that, because on such a small screen it distracts from the purpose.
I was pleased when I got a phone with a color display, until I realized the thing was absolutely useless in direct sunlight. Since I rather like being outside, that presents a bit of a problem. Sure, when it's dark the monochrome displays are a litte harder to read than the blind-your-nuts-off backlit color displays. However, here's my experience:
Backlit color LCD:
-cluttered interface
-far too bright in a darkened room/movie theater/whatever
-totally useless in sunlight
Sidelit monochrome LCD:
-simple interface
-light is just bright enough to be useful, without functioning as a flashlight in a pinch
-perfectly readable in sunlight
Your school obviously had a bigger budget than mine. We did use images. Our tech had a set of image CDs that he used to fix computers that were unusable. However, the building must have had hundreds of computers. These computers are used by careless, uninformed students and really would need reghosted every few weeks. Since for some reason our tech guy couldn't even keep up with hardware failures and broken print drivers on the teacher's computers, I find it unlikely he could have found the time to reimage several hundred computers at least once per month. Are you volunteering?
This seems like one of the topics which will always bring a bunch of paranoid nuts to the surface. Yeah, it's pretty likely that the algorithm will be cracked at some point or another. But we are pitting criminals against a department of engineers.
Yeah, chances are it will be broken. But not by very many people. Compare:
1) An extremely intelligent criminal group cracks the algorithm, gets a reader. They manage to configure their reader to have wireless networking abilities and get themselves set up with a bank so they appear legitimate. This way they can request and actually recieve money from your bank through your card (Their reader can't just magically take money from the card. Transactions like this are two banks communicating through information found on a card). They then walk around the local mall and get within 10cm of the pocket carrying the card for long enough to get a reading. The criminals are smart and don't want to get caught - any money taken will be in small enough amounts to be unnoticed. Chances are pretty good you will only get hit by their reader once, because conditions have to be just right - you have to be in the same place as the criminals and it has to be crowded enough that their actions go unnoticed. You lose $10.
2) You misplace your credit card. Perhaps you dropped it when you were paying for gas at the pump. It was cold and you had bulky gloves on. The card is found by Billy Bob, who then racks up thousands of dollars of purchases. You will probably get your money back, though it will depend somewhat on bank policy. The situation will place a large amount of stress on your life.
3) You make an online purchase. Whether through the spyware on your computer, an insecure connection, or a dishonest retailer, your number and information is taken. The thief then racks up thousands of dollars of purchases. You will probably get your money back, though it will depend somewhat on bank policy. The situation will place a large amount of stress on your life.
I really think that situations (2) and (3) are much more likely. Situation (3) might not be likely for the slashdot crowd, but in case you hadn't noticed, we are a huge minority in the world. So, hey. Be paranoid if you want. Get out the aluminum foil. But I'm afraid I can't stick my head quite far enough up there to see things your way.
The signature requirement is nonsense. Signatures have been proven very useless both here and here
Credit card signatures are worthless and completely ignored unless your purchase is for a significant amount of money, well into the thousands of dollars.
This works for some offices, but schools are also mentioned. Think about the high school you attended. Most of the students there have no respect for the computers, and a great number of them don't fully understand them. They will click OK on whatever pops up in IE, and it only takes a few of those to bring down the computer. And trying to avoid IE is nonsense. There is no way you will successfully convert 1500 students to an alternative browser unless you can completely lock off IE, and even then you will have to deal with complaints.
Does their old license prevent them from just
continuing to use their old copies of windows 98?
Not at all. These schools could continue to use 95, 98, and 98se for as long as they want. The license allows it and the hardware they have will continue to run it.
However, licensing isn't the issue here - security is. Microsoft has cut support for these operating systems. They are quite vulnerable, and there are no security updates available. While the current releases, 2000 and XP, will continue to get security patches and updates, the people left running the old versions are alone.
This is the problem. Schools can't afford to buy new hardware to support XP, but as long as their computers are running outdated software, security vulnerabilities can cause them trouble.
Now all I'm missing is a decent motherboard that's not designed like a Pinto.
No, you're also missing comprehension of the post you are responding to. You are comparing AMD desktop CPUs to Intel desktop CPUs, while you are almost certainly responding to an article about a laptop.
A lot of Slashdot-type people prefer AMD chips to Intel. Intel has market saturation and is the brand most known to the masses, but AMD admittedly has extremely nice desktop chips. However, Intel did something spectacular with the Pentium M processors. They are inordinately powerful at a given clock speed, while maintaining about 1/4 the power consumption of desktop processors.
Where performance and price are the only issues, AMD has some excellent offerings. However, when you throw power consumption and therefore battery life in, AMD doesn't have anything remotely like the Pentium M.
At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address
And really, what's the big deal with this information being in a standardized format? Even if someone has a device to pull this information from your RFID-enabled ID card, they really don't have much. You said ID number, not Social Security Number. Your driver's license number is used for a great many things, and I don't see it as a huge security risk. Your name and birthday are not anything secure - one is your standard form of identification, which you would give to a stranger as an introduction, and the other is exchanged almost as a novelty. Your gender is no big deal, and in most cases is obvious even without stealing data from your card. Your photograph is also no big deal, as anyone close enough to grab information from your ID could just as easily create their own photograph of you. And finally, address. That's the only thing on there that has any real significance. Great, you'll get some more junk mail. I don't think this is a reason to get out the tin-foil hats just yet.
RFID isn't the terrible technology everyone makes it out to be. Sure, it's not as secure as a barcode, because the barcode can't be read without your approval. However, it also makes the card a whole lot harder to counterfeit. You might have a few more identity thefts, but you will have a lot less underage smoking and drinking. I live in a college town, and I know which of those issues would make a bigger difference in my life. It's not the identity theft.
My school issues RFID keycards. They are great - you can enter locked buildings without removing anything from your pockets. I found out a few months ago that they aren't just generic cards, they actually have your name and possibly some other information attached to them. Someone on our floor was stealing chairs from the lounge, and a quick glance at the records put a swift end to that. Seems to me the benefits far outweigh the barely tangible paranoid outlook on things.
That's exactly right. THIS IS News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. It was an entertaining thing to read, and I think Star Wars is sufficiently nerdy that we should be sitting here appreciating the article, not getting upset over it.
To those who disagree, I suggest you go find a sense of humor before you have a heart attack and die.
This is rather old news, but it is still an interesting concept. I mean, Microsoft is a big corporation and isn't known to do things out of good will. But I don't see what Microsoft stands to gain from doing this.
I suppose they do get to sue and potentially shut down people who have been hurting their sales by selling counterfeit copies at retail prices. It's beneficial in the long run.
Indeed.
My school has a very effective setup for controlling outbreaks. To start, the network is MAC filtered. Any time you connect to the network with an unlisted MAC address, your browser is redirected to a page containing the university Terms of Service for the network. You read this information, toss in your university ID and password and click I AGREE, and the program adds your MAC to the list.
As outlined in the TOS, there are no warnings. If your computer exibits any viral behavior, your network access is removed. Unless your virus was email-related, you still have access to the mail servers. When you try to use the internet again, you are once again taken to a limited page, which politely tells you that your computer appeared to be infected with a virus. You are given basic cleaning information, as well as the tech department phone number and email address in case you need help. They can also provide you with tools like AdAware, since you won't be able to download these yourself. Then, once you are confident your computer is clean, you call the tech department, and they run a quick check to see that your computer is no longer showing viral activity. At this point, your network access is returned.
There are no warnings. As soon as you cause a problem, the problem (you) is removed. Once you fix the problem, access is restored. I don't know their policy for repeat offenders, but I assume there is something.
First, they have stressed several times on the spreadfirefox website that they are counting only downloads. They aren't trying to pretend that these are usage statistics, they are simply counting the number of times the application has been downloaded. From what I remember of calculus, if you downloaded it 20 times in a row on one computer, that's 20 downloads.
Second, they have also stated that downloads initiated through the update widget at the top right corner don't count towards the stats. Your upgrades to 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 only counted if you downloaded them from the main page.
I'm imagining that the other rover is pretty far away and wouldn't get there for a year or so.
I'm pretty sure it would take even longer than that. The original plan stated that the rovers would travel 40 meters per day. This goal has been exceeded, but I don't know by how much. Even so, considering the varied terrain they would take, we could use that as a base figure. As I understand it, the rovers are over 10,000 km apart. This means that it would take one rover almost 700 earth years to reach the other. And this is assuming the rescue rover doesn't get stuck.
On top of that, these rovers have driven over very carefully chosen terrain. Small rocks, soft sand, and even a tiny incline would stop the rover in its tracks. Assuming there is a way to cross the whole planet while remaining on good terrain, it would take even longer. I'm pretty sure we would have colonies on Mars before we got the rovers in the same place.
And then, over this many years, you have to consider the expected lifetime of the rovers. They were only intended to operate for 90 days before the dust buildup on the solar panels rendered them helpless. We got lucky, and something is keeping them clean and operational, but I doubt we can depend on the same for the next thousand years.
Nevertheless, we have done very well. The rovers have given far more information than ever expected, and even losing one, we still have the other. I think the mission is a huge success. It also continues to be successful, and NASA seems to think the stuck rover is only temporarily inconvenienced. We will see in the coming weeks.
I don't see how it was such a bad comment. It may have been slightly trollish, but it was certainly more mature than your post.
That's exactly right. I only care if they are using Internet Explorer and they expect me to maintain their computer. For other people, if they are having a problem with what they are using, then I will suggest they try out my solution. But if you aren't going to ask me to fix your computer for free, I don't really care what you use.
Well, if you're doing REAL image editing work you'll be using Photoshop anyway but for throwing something together for a presentation, Gimp will work.
Why does everyone demean The GIMP in this way? I have never found it lacking in power. Granted, sometimes it's a bit hard to find the option you want, nested as it is three context menus deep. Please name one thing that you can do in Photoshop that those of us who know how to use The GIMP can't do in it.
I'm with the parent poster. Shortly after I switched to Firefox, I also switched to Thunderbird and Sunbird (mail and calendar, respectively, for the uninitiated). Admittedly, Sunbird isn't quite ready for most users, though it's quite stable. But Thunderbird is impressive. It has Bayesian spam filtering, powerful message sorting rules, and easy-to-configure multiple POP accounts. It's a little harder to set up multiple SMTP accounts, but I can't compare that to Outlook because I haven't tried it in anything but Thunderbird. Then again, most people aren't going to be using multiple incoming accounts, let alone multiple outgoing.
I've never used Citrix, so don't know how heavy that is, but -- 165 megs for the OS, desktop, file browser, web browser and a terminal isn't exactly what I'd call svelte.
I wouldn't complain too much. Most Windows XP systems are using more than that at startup. I think mine uses about 180 right off the bat, and right now, running Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, the OpenOffice Quickstarter, and a few special drivers, it's using 241.
It's significant because it's not a Toshiba. I realize that you may have had a good time with your Toshiba drive, but that's not always the case. I had a Toshiba laptop hard drive fail on me a few months ago, and I did some Googling, and discovered that it's very common for Toshiba drives to fail after only a few (10) months of service.
However, this may not apply to their SATA offerings.
By the sound of it, you have been using a Mac since well before Windows 98.
Windows XP and I assume 2000 allows you to view image icons in this fashion. Windows 98 couldn't do anything more impressive than show a preview of the image in the bottom left corner of the explorer window.
Now, if Longhorn is also going to display thumbnails, I imagine they will put an 'off' option in there. There are a lot of people who like image thumbnails but aren't going to be all that impressed with white icons with black lines of varying length running horizontally across them.
Your argument is highly unlikely. It's true that Mac OS has to support a wide range of devices. It has to support several Mac motherboards, many different PowerPC processors, a plethora of Mac add-on PCI cards, and a great many external devices that were either made by Apple or made to the same specifications as the apple devices (like USB keyboards/mice).
Compare this to Windows and Linux (heh, those two don't get grouped together very often). Both of these operating systems have to support several different architectures, as well as motherboards, cards, and various peripherals manufactured by thousands of companies, each with various standards of quality control and wildly different drivers.
Who do you really think has the worse job? Sure, most drivers are written for Windows. Then again, since the internals of Apple computers are incompatible with the internals of X86 computers, chances are pretty good if you are making hardware for a Mac, you will be writing drivers for a Mac. Since your product won't even work in a Windows computer, I have to wonder why you would bother writing drivers for it to do so.
Linux is most certainly a viable product and is becoming better everyday. I've used it for years and am at this very moment writing this reply using Suse 9.2.
I, too, use Linux. However, as someone earlier pointed out, you can't look at it as a product so much as a program. A product is something that is easily marketable. All the things you pointed out, I agree with - it's extremely usable, and far more powerful and flexible than Windows. However, it's not going to make the jump to a commercially viable product, because in order to be 'snapping at Microsoft's heels' you will have to get more than the geek population to use it. OSX has a loyal following and is by no means nipping at Microsoft's heels, because the user base is too small.
Firefox is a good example of this. It's done very well, for an opensource program, and has gained the acceptance of thousands of non-geek users. However, of the many people I have tried to convert to Firefox, I have failed almost as often as I have succeeded. There's no good basis for sticking with IE, because Firefox does all the same things but better. The only differences most people will notice are the name, the icon, and that Favorites has become Bookmarks. And yet they don't want to touch it. Now imagine trying to get these same people to learn a whole new set of programs that are all similar to the Windows equivalents, but have many small differences like those between IE and Firefox. It's not going to happen. You'd be amazingly lucky to get 10% of the population using it.
I think you're slightly mistaken. The article never said that Linux was not an operating system with widely varied talents. What it said was that there was no way Linux would ever make the jump to a complete platform, especially one that could be sold.
Linux isn't a viable product. It changes too often, and there are far too many versions. You pointed this out yourself. Can you imagine Windows ever being popular if there was a version for students, a version for corporate markets, a version for Grandma, and a version for average (stupid) users? It would never work. Windows is a commercial success for several reasons:
-It's a monopoly, even though Linux and Mac OS exist
-It comes bundled on a lot of systems, thereby saving the user the trouble of learning enough about their computer to install something by themselves
-It Just Works. Almost all hardware manufacturers write device drivers with Windows in mind, and since Windows is so common, the proprietary software it uses is also widespread. This means that any hardware you toss in the system should Just Work. Any documents Mom sends you should Just Work.
Linux can do all these things, but sometimes it takes a bit of work. Linux isn't an all-in-one solution that Just Works. Instead, it's a fast-paced, rapidly changing way to get your computer to do the most possible. Most users don't care whether they can change their ethernet adapter's MAC address. They want to buy a computer, plug it in, and turn it on, and have everything work. If they need to install something new, they just double click the pretty picture, and then click OK a few times.
Linux is a long way from this type of usability, and given past experiences, it seems unlikely it will ever make the jump.
You also need to consider people like me - I will download the newest version of Firefox and toss it in my 'installs' folder along with the likes of Thunderbird and Sunbird. If any friends want to grab a copy, they can get it from me.
More importantly, current installs for the same programs get tossed on my USB key whenever I am going to fix someone's computer. It's more convenient for me to pull the installer off a drive than to download it, especially if I would be downloading through a badly infested, pre-SP2 Internet Explorer with popups all over the place.