Not even that much. It seems to me he's just added an automatic backing store to a RAM disk. That's convenient, but doesn't seem very revolutionary. You can already have 90% of that functionality with about 20 minutes of initial setup and a couple of shell scripts.
Besides that, isn't there already a buffer cache for disk IO? Why not modify it to achieve the same thing?
You're point? There's no stopping people planning to be actively malicious. Why bother with exotic protection mechanisms when 99.9% of casual users would be stopped by Torx screws, and the malicious users will be douche bags anyway?
Do you know what the sites are doing to make them misbehave in Opera? Is it a Windows thing? I've heard many people make the claims that you have, but it's honestly always been my experience that Opera worked as well as or better than Firefox in every single case. Maybe all the sites are using something I had turned off and wouldn't notice? Maybe the problem doesn't show up on Linux?
Even now, after switching to Konqueror, I still use Opera as my "Go to" when a site doesn't like Konqueror (very rare, but happens), and I have no problems.
I'm not trying to say you're lying. I believe you really have problems with some sites. I'm just curious what those problems may be.
If I've read correctly, the bug only occurs when old kernels (without this newest little patch) are compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3.
How likely is it that a person who compiles their own kernels with brand new versions of GCC won't be running the newest kernel that has this patch? How likely is it they won't be able to backport this patch if they're can't fully upgrade the kernel? How many people will say "Time to compile my old, stable, trusted kernel, with this brand spanking new, relatively untrusted compiler"?
I'm not saying those people don't exist, but they're a very tiny subset of an already very tiny set of Linux users.
You do realize that Opera works wonderfully on PCs with specs even lower than that, right? Guess it doesn't help you much now, but you should be kicking yourself for the past.
I'm also annoyed (as I always am with things like this) that they are going to destroy the drives as opposed to Zeroing them out and selling them second hand.
Two things to consider:
By the time most government hardware gets destroyed, it's already obsolete. My guess is most of the drives they're destroying are well under a gig. Who would buy a used 256 MB flash drive?
Destroying the drives is harder to fuck up. I don't know what information they're storing about people, but I'd rather it not be accidently released. It's pretty easy to see which drive hasn't been smashed to bits with a hammer, not so much which drive has been properly zeroed and formatted.
Agreed, so far. But, by the same token, the 'the market' is also free to set its end of the 'price point.' But in the current (possibly outdated) model of this market if seller-A wants 10 bucks, the market only has a buy or not buy choice. No actual freedom, no determination of price point as function of supply and demand.
The price is determined when nobody buys the product for $10, and the seller lowers the price or goes out of business. The choice to buy or not buy is your freedom.
Potential buyers, are prevented from participating, AT ALL, in this type of closed market unless they meet an arbitrarily set price. So, what to do? If there is no 'auction' available, no supply/demand rationality, then anyone who wants to participate is screwed unless they acquiesce.
So, you're saying people who haven't earned anything should be given stuff "just because"? There's a word for that...
One doesn't have to fall back to 'information wants to be free' mode, in order to understand that the market, one way or the other, will set the 'price' based on supply and demand.
You're horribly confused. In one paragraph you're advocating extreme communism, and in the next you're saying you support supply and demand. They're more or less mutually exclusive positions.
It's a simple case of the monopolists versus classical free market forces. This is not new, at all. It's a war. And it revolves around the poles of Greed and Desire. Many artists know that when their fans download bootlegs of shows, or 'snipe' a few tracks from a weak album, the same desire is going to express itself in financially rewarding terms, from the artists' point of view, when conditions/products/perceived values alter. That's how free markets function.
But the other poster's point is that anybody who's willing to open the device and make a modification already knows they're in unsupported waters. Making it difficult just wastes everyone's time.
So while illegal copying can be seen as a negative, it largely isn't.
I'm not disagreeing with that. But the key term there is "illegal". People who make illegal copies are criminals, so why all the surprise when they get treated like it?
The "solution" isn't copying music with reckless abandon, it's getting the law changed.
Damn right. And while we're at it, we should abolish those pesky laws against stealing. I know a Ferrari isn't exactly like music, but god damn it, I really want one. And since we're randomly changing laws for our own benefit, why not?.
How come if you come to my house and I put on a CD you're allowed to hear the music, but GOD FORBID you hear the music by any other means including internet radio which now has to pay god knows how many million dollars for "rights".
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
The "cost" of distributing "n" copies of music is now almost ZERO. Why do you insist people still have to pay $15-$20 for a "CD" or $.99 for a "song"? Middlemen add nothing to economies. They are parasites pure and simple.
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it.
I don't understand the lawsuit - if they would've informed themselves, they wouldn't have had the problem. And the machines CAN run Windows Vista - all the editions. Just Aero and Moviemaker won't work without a proper graphic card, but that's not much of a problem.
The point of the lawsuit is that if a product has a sticker saying "Vista Capable", then that should be all the research necessary.
Not running "Aero" is actually a pretty big problem. For most people the only noticeable change in Vista is the new pretty GUI. I know there's supposedly other new features, but that's the only one that sticks out to most people. So when it's not there...
If people would just "inform themselves", there would be no spam, no malware, no viruses, no security problems,... Obviously that's not going to happen. It's hard enough for the average idiot to buy computer hardware without Microsoft lying to them.
Weird coincidence. I wrote a Tic Tac Toe program in assembly the other day with the goal of making it fit in the 512 bytes of a floppy disk bootsector.
Right now two players take turns placing either 'X' or 'O', but I have about 40 bytes left to make the computer play.
I'm not sure it would "muddy the copyright waters." If the video had Air Force employees acting, their performances were public domain. And the contractor took those public domain performances, arranged them and added stuff to create a copyrighted video. That copyrighted video was subsequently sold to the Air Force and had its copyright transfered over to them.
Read the Wikipedia entry the OP posted. It says: "The federal government can hold copyrights to works when they are transferred to it, as can happen with work produced by contractors."
The Air Force almost certainly paid a contractor to make the video. Thus (assuming Wikipedia is correct) they could legally own the copyright.
I don't really think desktop software makers should be held to the same standards.
Look at the software that runs in airplanes, nuclear reactors, automobiles and other "critical" systems. In those situations, 99.9% uptime just won't cut it, and the software is designed and built to reflect that. The catch is that it's really expensive and really difficult to write. But the requirements dictate that very high uptime is absolutely required, so it's worth the cost.
The software running on your PC just isn't that important. It's certainly possible to create a desktop OS with 99.999% uptime, but it would cost a fortune. Are you willing to pay $2000 for a version of Windows that won't crash, given that you can reboot once a week and probably achieve the same thing? I'm certainly not, and I doubt many other people would either.
I don't know about Word 2007, but Word 2003 isn't too bad on long documents. We have a lot of documentation at work with some files having well over 500 pages, and my only annoyance (other than it's Word and I'm using Windows;-) is that it displays the first few pages, but waits till you start scrolling to finish loading the document. The "Page x/y" indicator, at least, doesn't get filled in till you scroll to the bottom.
Of course, the work machine has 4 gigs of RAM and a dual core processor, so it'd be pretty sad if it wasn't reasonably fast.
At some point, people will buy Vista because that's all Microsoft will sell. Don't kid yourself. They didn't spend billions of dollars and the better part of a decade working on Vista for nothing.
The real question isn't "Vista or XP?" It's "Windows or something else?" If the answer is Windows, "XP or Vista" is just a technicality.
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Sounds like a great application for RFID.
Huh? All I found was a dozen copies of the article.
Not even that much. It seems to me he's just added an automatic backing store to a RAM disk. That's convenient, but doesn't seem very revolutionary. You can already have 90% of that functionality with about 20 minutes of initial setup and a couple of shell scripts.
Besides that, isn't there already a buffer cache for disk IO? Why not modify it to achieve the same thing?
You're point? There's no stopping people planning to be actively malicious. Why bother with exotic protection mechanisms when 99.9% of casual users would be stopped by Torx screws, and the malicious users will be douche bags anyway?
Do you know what the sites are doing to make them misbehave in Opera? Is it a Windows thing? I've heard many people make the claims that you have, but it's honestly always been my experience that Opera worked as well as or better than Firefox in every single case. Maybe all the sites are using something I had turned off and wouldn't notice? Maybe the problem doesn't show up on Linux?
Even now, after switching to Konqueror, I still use Opera as my "Go to" when a site doesn't like Konqueror (very rare, but happens), and I have no problems.
I'm not trying to say you're lying. I believe you really have problems with some sites. I'm just curious what those problems may be.
If I've read correctly, the bug only occurs when old kernels (without this newest little patch) are compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3.
How likely is it that a person who compiles their own kernels with brand new versions of GCC won't be running the newest kernel that has this patch? How likely is it they won't be able to backport this patch if they're can't fully upgrade the kernel? How many people will say "Time to compile my old, stable, trusted kernel, with this brand spanking new, relatively untrusted compiler"?
I'm not saying those people don't exist, but they're a very tiny subset of an already very tiny set of Linux users.
If I haven't done anything wrong, why are they wasting their time spying on me?
You do realize that Opera works wonderfully on PCs with specs even lower than that, right? Guess it doesn't help you much now, but you should be kicking yourself for the past.
Two things to consider:
Wow, you fail economics, hard.
The price is determined when nobody buys the product for $10, and the seller lowers the price or goes out of business. The choice to buy or not buy is your freedom.
So, you're saying people who haven't earned anything should be given stuff "just because"? There's a word for that...
You're horribly confused. In one paragraph you're advocating extreme communism, and in the next you're saying you support supply and demand. They're more or less mutually exclusive positions.
lolwut?
But the other poster's point is that anybody who's willing to open the device and make a modification already knows they're in unsupported waters. Making it difficult just wastes everyone's time.
It took 2 minutes with Google to find these:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/religion_vs_iq.html
http://hypnosis.home.netcom.com/iq_vs_religiosity.htm
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/intelligence.html
I didn't see anything supporting the opposite conclusion.
Sorry, that argument doesn't work. It just moves the stupid over a little bit. 60% were too stupid to even go vote.
Oh, and despite the alarmist news media, "election fraud" is hardly a rampant problem.
I'm not disagreeing with that. But the key term there is "illegal". People who make illegal copies are criminals, so why all the surprise when they get treated like it?
The "solution" isn't copying music with reckless abandon, it's getting the law changed.
Damn right. And while we're at it, we should abolish those pesky laws against stealing. I know a Ferrari isn't exactly like music, but god damn it, I really want one. And since we're randomly changing laws for our own benefit, why not?.
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it.
The point of the lawsuit is that if a product has a sticker saying "Vista Capable", then that should be all the research necessary.
Not running "Aero" is actually a pretty big problem. For most people the only noticeable change in Vista is the new pretty GUI. I know there's supposedly other new features, but that's the only one that sticks out to most people. So when it's not there...
If people would just "inform themselves", there would be no spam, no malware, no viruses, no security problems, ... Obviously that's not going to happen. It's hard enough for the average idiot to buy computer hardware without Microsoft lying to them.
Weird coincidence. I wrote a Tic Tac Toe program in assembly the other day with the goal of making it fit in the 512 bytes of a floppy disk bootsector.
Right now two players take turns placing either 'X' or 'O', but I have about 40 bytes left to make the computer play.
Fun stuff.
I'm not sure it would "muddy the copyright waters." If the video had Air Force employees acting, their performances were public domain. And the contractor took those public domain performances, arranged them and added stuff to create a copyrighted video. That copyrighted video was subsequently sold to the Air Force and had its copyright transfered over to them.
Read the Wikipedia entry the OP posted. It says: "The federal government can hold copyrights to works when they are transferred to it, as can happen with work produced by contractors."
The Air Force almost certainly paid a contractor to make the video. Thus (assuming Wikipedia is correct) they could legally own the copyright.
Why convert to PDF?
I don't really think desktop software makers should be held to the same standards.
Look at the software that runs in airplanes, nuclear reactors, automobiles and other "critical" systems. In those situations, 99.9% uptime just won't cut it, and the software is designed and built to reflect that. The catch is that it's really expensive and really difficult to write. But the requirements dictate that very high uptime is absolutely required, so it's worth the cost.
The software running on your PC just isn't that important. It's certainly possible to create a desktop OS with 99.999% uptime, but it would cost a fortune. Are you willing to pay $2000 for a version of Windows that won't crash, given that you can reboot once a week and probably achieve the same thing? I'm certainly not, and I doubt many other people would either.
Math can't be patented for the same reason things like gravity can't be patented.
I don't know about Word 2007, but Word 2003 isn't too bad on long documents. We have a lot of documentation at work with some files having well over 500 pages, and my only annoyance (other than it's Word and I'm using Windows ;-) is that it displays the first few pages, but waits till you start scrolling to finish loading the document. The "Page x/y" indicator, at least, doesn't get filled in till you scroll to the bottom.
Of course, the work machine has 4 gigs of RAM and a dual core processor, so it'd be pretty sad if it wasn't reasonably fast.
I wouldn't count on it.
At some point, people will buy Vista because that's all Microsoft will sell. Don't kid yourself. They didn't spend billions of dollars and the better part of a decade working on Vista for nothing.
The real question isn't "Vista or XP?" It's "Windows or something else?" If the answer is Windows, "XP or Vista" is just a technicality.