Mod parent up! Congratulations for being the first person to say something other than the same thought that immediately came to every reader's head after reading the teaser. Yes, very good, we all know that RAM is volatile, how hilariously ill-informed this judge is...
You actually thought about the implication for more than two seconds which probably puts you above most readers.
If you had RTFA you would know that he's a she, and maybe since you hadn't you shouldn't have assumed a gender. It kind of shows why there still really isn't equality when people have such ingrained notions of gender roles.
What part about PCs crashing is a lie? Assuming when they say PCs they mean PCs running Windows - since the average viewer would not know the difference - I think this is a fair and valid statement. Until I tried a Mac I didn't know using a computer could be so free of hangs, stalls, and crashes not to mention the annoying idiosyncracies you have to overcome to use a computer running XP.
Ummm... Have you ever used OSX? The majority of apps do not get "killed" when you press the close button on their window. Perhaps that's the behaviour you'd expect if you use windows, but most just continue to run with no window visible, all unsaved data still intact. The few exceptions are generally insignificant apps like System Preferences where having the app die when you close the window is not dangerous and is actually easier then remembering to quit. The remainder are just poorly programmed and are probably not conforming to human interface guidelines.
Of course your internet connection is _the_ slowest part of your home setup. It's not like this guy doesn't know how to compare specs, I'm sure he understands that pulling data off the average hardrive is orders of magnitude faster than the average DSL connection. It wasn't really necessary for 90% of the last posts to quote these specs on their respective home setups and use it as the premise to dismiss the whole article. All those who did post as such were allowing themselves to ignore what the author was actually trying to say. The article even provided an example, your computer would do a lot worse than Google would at crawling the internet, indexing the results and then providing query results in less than a second. That is the point. No you're never going to play Half-Life 2 over a so called internet OS. Your internet connection is still fast enough to allow for basic human interface stuff like mouse and keyboard, and as long as the video being displayed is not some FPS it is also probably adequate. Meanwhile some server farm could be doing a lot of the work for you.
It's probably never going to be a replacement for those of us who do gaming, or photo/video editing etc. But think of how many people you know who basically have a computer for email and IM. Pretty much any PC on market these days is overkill for these people, and it's definitely not worth paying for windows. Anyone can install some flavour of Linux and at least get a browser working, but a lot of the software they want is either unavailable or lacking in its Linux incarnation. So what if all you needed was that working browser.
To be quite honest, I've only ever listened to one Podcast consistently, the CBC Radio 3 podcast. It's a podcast of Canadian independent music. But this one podcast was enough to convince me of the value of podcasting, it's a shame there apparently aren't other podcasts out there with enough quality content to convince the rest of you. I generally don't listen to the radio, at least not for music because most of it is crap. This podcast allows me to hear good new music, legally.
I think just as in blogging podcasts with consistently quality content are useful. What sets podcasting apart is the medium, I'm not interested in listening to an audio transcription of what someone could otherwise place on a blog, especially for technical topics, but the ability to disseminate new independent music in a nearly ad free format is quite powerful. It's just a shame there isn't more quality content for what could bring an end to radio "playing what we want to hear".
I think this issue can really be thought of as a major gap in the whole open source model of software development. With the exception of a few companies, most of open source development is community driven while companies continue to produce closed source products. This is where the problem arises.
Software companies, like most other companies, have more than just an engineering department. There is HR, PR, and of course support. Because the goal of companies is to make profits, the purchasers of their products are usually their top priority. This usually means support for their products. We all know that this support is not always the greatest, but it is not often that I have had a tech support rep attempt to berate me over the phone, in fact they would never even direct me to RTFM even in its most polite form.
If the Linux community wishes to see its market share grow appreciably its members need to start thinking of the whole open source experience. In effect everyone involved in the community needs to see themselves as ambassadors for the whole community. Sure maybe 90% of the Linux community spends their working day in IT or writing code, but when it comes to acting as a community member you need to fill all those (positive) parts of the corporate model that are missing in the open source one.
I'm sure there are some who would prefer to keep Linux for themselves and people like themselves and if that's what they want they can continue to act like those described in the article. However for the rest of us the issue goes beyond basic decency in support forums, the Linux community needs to start providing more than just a product as-is but a whole experience and it needs to be much more positive and inviting one than it is now.
I think this article (and the researcher) missed the point of a far more profound, yet more far-off, use of GPS in earthquake detection. Spectrum recently ran a story describing how the GPS system among other things could sense impending earthquakes days, weeks, and even months in advance of an earthquake.
The basic concept is the cracking of rocks in the crust leading up to an earthquake frees electrons which rush downward creating positvely charged holes. These holes also appear at Earth's surface and attract electons out of the ionosphere. The phase difference of the two signals the GPS satelites transmit is affected by this change and the change from normal values can be detected.
This is still a long way off, and the use of GPS to measure this phenomena is only one and definitely not the best. But it sounds better than the couple hours mentioned in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up! Congratulations for being the first person to say something other than the same thought that immediately came to every reader's head after reading the teaser. Yes, very good, we all know that RAM is volatile, how hilariously ill-informed this judge is... You actually thought about the implication for more than two seconds which probably puts you above most readers.
If you had RTFA you would know that he's a she, and maybe since you hadn't you shouldn't have assumed a gender. It kind of shows why there still really isn't equality when people have such ingrained notions of gender roles.
Who the fuck tagged this slownewsday! Somebody who doesn't care because Americans are already accustom to all legislation being made this way?
What part about PCs crashing is a lie? Assuming when they say PCs they mean PCs running Windows - since the average viewer would not know the difference - I think this is a fair and valid statement. Until I tried a Mac I didn't know using a computer could be so free of hangs, stalls, and crashes not to mention the annoying idiosyncracies you have to overcome to use a computer running XP.
Ummm... Have you ever used OSX? The majority of apps do not get "killed" when you press the close button on their window. Perhaps that's the behaviour you'd expect if you use windows, but most just continue to run with no window visible, all unsaved data still intact. The few exceptions are generally insignificant apps like System Preferences where having the app die when you close the window is not dangerous and is actually easier then remembering to quit. The remainder are just poorly programmed and are probably not conforming to human interface guidelines.
It's probably never going to be a replacement for those of us who do gaming, or photo/video editing etc. But think of how many people you know who basically have a computer for email and IM. Pretty much any PC on market these days is overkill for these people, and it's definitely not worth paying for windows. Anyone can install some flavour of Linux and at least get a browser working, but a lot of the software they want is either unavailable or lacking in its Linux incarnation. So what if all you needed was that working browser.
Did anyone even RTFA, the article itself admits that this technology would not work against SLR cameras. So there's no point speculating about it.
To be quite honest, I've only ever listened to one Podcast consistently, the CBC Radio 3 podcast. It's a podcast of Canadian independent music. But this one podcast was enough to convince me of the value of podcasting, it's a shame there apparently aren't other podcasts out there with enough quality content to convince the rest of you. I generally don't listen to the radio, at least not for music because most of it is crap. This podcast allows me to hear good new music, legally.
I think just as in blogging podcasts with consistently quality content are useful. What sets podcasting apart is the medium, I'm not interested in listening to an audio transcription of what someone could otherwise place on a blog, especially for technical topics, but the ability to disseminate new independent music in a nearly ad free format is quite powerful. It's just a shame there isn't more quality content for what could bring an end to radio "playing what we want to hear".
Maybe we just need to produce a lot of pins with a catchy slogan like "The net wants to be neutral".
Software companies, like most other companies, have more than just an engineering department. There is HR, PR, and of course support. Because the goal of companies is to make profits, the purchasers of their products are usually their top priority. This usually means support for their products. We all know that this support is not always the greatest, but it is not often that I have had a tech support rep attempt to berate me over the phone, in fact they would never even direct me to RTFM even in its most polite form.
If the Linux community wishes to see its market share grow appreciably its members need to start thinking of the whole open source experience. In effect everyone involved in the community needs to see themselves as ambassadors for the whole community. Sure maybe 90% of the Linux community spends their working day in IT or writing code, but when it comes to acting as a community member you need to fill all those (positive) parts of the corporate model that are missing in the open source one.
I'm sure there are some who would prefer to keep Linux for themselves and people like themselves and if that's what they want they can continue to act like those described in the article. However for the rest of us the issue goes beyond basic decency in support forums, the Linux community needs to start providing more than just a product as-is but a whole experience and it needs to be much more positive and inviting one than it is now.
I think this article (and the researcher) missed the point of a far more profound, yet more far-off, use of GPS in earthquake detection. Spectrum recently ran a story describing how the GPS system among other things could sense impending earthquakes days, weeks, and even months in advance of an earthquake. The basic concept is the cracking of rocks in the crust leading up to an earthquake frees electrons which rush downward creating positvely charged holes. These holes also appear at Earth's surface and attract electons out of the ionosphere. The phase difference of the two signals the GPS satelites transmit is affected by this change and the change from normal values can be detected. This is still a long way off, and the use of GPS to measure this phenomena is only one and definitely not the best. But it sounds better than the couple hours mentioned in the article.
Next week Firefox users at MIT will be drawing an enlarged version out of chalk of one of their heads in the main quad.
I was kind of wondering what kind of expression engineers make the world was anyways, everyone knows it's engineers rule the world.