False. Yes, there are MANY PCs that come preinstalled with Windows, or are MS OEMs, but there have been PCs sold as complete systems without MS being installed. (Didn't WalMart try this a couple years back?)
Grandparent's just rounding up. The fact that the evidence you present to refute him is just shy of anecdotal ("Didn't my uncle once know a guy whose third cousin owned a parrot that he got from an old lady who bought a PC without Windows preinstalled?") is a sign of just how ubiquitous Windows preinstalls are.
Way to not link to the LJ in the summary. Sure, it's there in the book review, but this is slashdot, dammit: if we don't read the articles, we certainly shouldn't have to read the book reviews.
To partially counteract the bloat, try Adobe Reader Speed-Up. I've just started using it a couple of weeks ago, but it's pretty nice.
Disclaimer: it did refuse to open one PDF (specifically this[PDF warning--duh]) complaining about missing plugins, but I put exactly zero effort into fixing this (and you can allegedly get it to work on something like this with minimal effort).
Unfortunately, someone had told me the surprise ending years earlier, and I remembered it before it was revealed in the story.
Using the word "surprise" loosely... I don't especially want to turn this into a discussion of the merits of "Ender's Game" (you can search Slashdot for that), but I thought I'd throw out a dissenting vote since there's so much gushing over it.
I was only surprised by the ending because it was so obvious, I honestly couldn't believe that Card chose to take that plot "twist". By the time I was a few dozen pages from the end, I was thinking "He wouldn't...", but he did. Bleh. Add to that that Ender's whole struggle just didn't resonate with me (it takes a lot to really convey that the whole weight of the world is riding on someone's shoulders, and I think Card does a mediocre job at best), and I wasn't impressed.
I dunno. Maybe I should have read it as an ansgty teen or something.
I like my ring-tones to actually sound like some sort of ringing.
Right on. Although, a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting around in a student lounge with some of my friends when out of the blue, we hear a modem trying to establish a connection. Turns out the phone of some guy in the lounge was ringing.
The SF Bay Area is not built like the New York or Boston metropolitan areas, so we can't have the same sort of system, but BART is mediocre at best. I don't know whom they bribed to win the transportation award the other year, but that doesn't change anything. In addition to parent's gripes, I'll add inflexible pricing: there is something like a 2% senior discount, children under three weeks of age are free, and everybody else pays full price. Okay, maybe that's exaggerating. But there are no passes available at all for "volume" riders, like practically all other transportation systems have. You can buy a $48 ticket (i.e., good for $48 worth of rides--pricing is station-to-station) for $45 or something like that, but that's about it.
A good use would be a games machine. Since I can do pretty much everything else more easily by booting into GNU/Linux, Windows is mostly around to play games (I'm not much of a gamer, but I like slowly plodding through the classics in my free time). If you're running full-screen anyway, you won't even see the ads except when starting up. At least I hope you wouldn't--God forbid they put in ads that overlay on full-screen apps...
Nice try, but it was "uptimes orders of magnitudes higher," not "uptimes orders of magnitudes higher than the order of magnitude of that uptime". Orders of magnitude higher than 9 is 900+, not 100+.
After being burned to a crisp by the dragon in King's Quest, you were told something about how by venturing too close to the dragon's flame, you made an ash out of yourself.
What exactly do you mean by "Ubuntu--why?"? I tried it recently and, besides having to admit to people that I was running an OS named Hoary Hedgehog, I was very impressed. I never was that interested, actually, but I used the live CD for recovery when Windows trashed the partition table on my first drive during a reinstall, and I really liked it. For some reason, the actual install has issues with my NIC that the live CD didn't have (awaiting forums feedback on that), but overall, I think it provides a very nice, friendly UI without dumbing things down like it seems it might.
First of all, it's tldp.*org*. Second of all, many, many HOWTOs are absurdly out of date. Sure, there is good stuff there, but, for example, a search for dual-boot first turns up results on how to dual boot Linux with Win95/98/ME, complete with instructions for the complicated partitioning needed to get around LBA boot limitations (presented not as "oh, and this is what you need to do *if* you happen to have a bajillion-year-old machine," but as "oh, and this is what you need to do because it's a limitation of *all* current hardware"). The FreeBSD Handbook, also constantly lauded, has the same issues. Both the Handbook and the HOWTOs are inconsistent and outdated. They're both very helpful when they *are* up-to-date, but it's hard to trust documentation that is that spotty... I'm not just trolling--I realize the difficulty in maintaining docs (heck, I'd rather code, too), but it's something that makes *nix systems less approachable.
Okay, for whatever reason, a full install of Ubuntu (as opposed to the liveCD) does not understand my network card. In addition, it had some problems with my CD drive, a fairly popular Plextor model (whereas, again, the liveCD had no issues). This is rather troubling if the liveCD is supposed to give an impression of the full install...
The thing is, as a novice *nix user who is very interested in learning more, I find this approach very limiting. Sure, it'll give you info on commands, but it won't tell you anything about how the system is organized. For example, my system has a nic that's unsupported by the default kernel. There is an open source driver available, but I was only able to get an old version to work by following a step-by-step guide that had you type in commands verbatim (using backticks where necessary), explaining very little of what was actually going on. The newer version doesn't work if I just follow the same steps. The forums have not been of much help. Learning enough to do this by manning would take ages.
*nix has a weird learning curve. At first, the CLI-centered approach is intimidating. Then you learn the FHS (or BSD's hier); some basic commands like man, apropos, ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, and eventually find, grep, and a couple of other things; and it's not so scary. Then you try to figure out how to add a kernel module, and you either have people hold your hand through it without actually teaching you anything, or you have to try to dig this out from man and co. yourself.
I've found it very difficult to get beyond knowing the basics to actually being comfortable with the system. It doesn't sound like this book would help much...
I'm not sure I'd generalize that, though. Here is Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 5.04 live CD, Win2k SP4 (okay, so XP would probably do better but I see no reason to upgrade), and FreeBSD 6.0 on my hardware (June-ish, though the network card is about a year older and the soundcard another three) out of the box:
Win2k: video in 16 colors, no sound, no network card Debian: full video, misbehaving sound, no network card Ubuntu: full video, full sound, full network FreeBSD: full video, no sound, no network
I got the network to work on Debian (and the driver looks like it's FreeBSD-ported as well) after some wrangling, but out-of-the-box performance is important as a first impression. And I was impressed with Ubuntu.
Not free, but if you want to support good shareware, try n-Track Studio. It's more focused on the recording thing (n-Track as in an extension of a Four-track), but it does have MIDI functionality. For a ~$50 program, it stands up to the big boys (Cubase & Co.) remarkably well. It has more than enough power and features for most people not doing anything professional. Best of all, it's not crippled in any artificial way (number of tracks, effects, etc. is limited only by your hardware), and the author is awesome. I lost my registration key in a hard drive crash last summer, and e-mailed him. Even though it'd been a couple of years since I registered, he sent me the registration code in just a couple of days.
(My deepest apologies, but I can't pass up the opportunity)
I think the submission only makes such a big deal out of it because it must have been really tough to develop this while fighting off dingos and kangaroos and crocodiles and throwing boomerangs around and playing didgeridoos.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just go nuts? Put RAID1 on top of RAID5. (i.e., two RAID5 arrays, both getting the same writes). Or heck, RAID5 on top of RAID5. Wheee!
Grandparent's just rounding up. The fact that the evidence you present to refute him is just shy of anecdotal ("Didn't my uncle once know a guy whose third cousin owned a parrot that he got from an old lady who bought a PC without Windows preinstalled?") is a sign of just how ubiquitous Windows preinstalls are.
Way to not link to the LJ in the summary. Sure, it's there in the book review, but this is slashdot, dammit: if we don't read the articles, we certainly shouldn't have to read the book reviews.
More amusingly, after 18 months, the instructions will be on how to generate the trivial empty document in each format.
To partially counteract the bloat, try Adobe Reader Speed-Up. I've just started using it a couple of weeks ago, but it's pretty nice.
Disclaimer: it did refuse to open one PDF (specifically this[PDF warning--duh]) complaining about missing plugins, but I put exactly zero effort into fixing this (and you can allegedly get it to work on something like this with minimal effort).
Does this include questions modded 'Funny'?
Using the word "surprise" loosely... I don't especially want to turn this into a discussion of the merits of "Ender's Game" (you can search Slashdot for that), but I thought I'd throw out a dissenting vote since there's so much gushing over it.
I was only surprised by the ending because it was so obvious, I honestly couldn't believe that Card chose to take that plot "twist". By the time I was a few dozen pages from the end, I was thinking "He wouldn't...", but he did. Bleh. Add to that that Ender's whole struggle just didn't resonate with me (it takes a lot to really convey that the whole weight of the world is riding on someone's shoulders, and I think Card does a mediocre job at best), and I wasn't impressed.
I dunno. Maybe I should have read it as an ansgty teen or something.
Right on. Although, a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting around in a student lounge with some of my friends when out of the blue, we hear a modem trying to establish a connection. Turns out the phone of some guy in the lounge was ringing.
Best. Ringtone. Ever.
Not really an option for students, unfortunately...
Ripped right off of "Wizards" (although, granted, "Wizards" may have ripped that off of something else)...
The SF Bay Area is not built like the New York or Boston metropolitan areas, so we can't have the same sort of system, but BART is mediocre at best. I don't know whom they bribed to win the transportation award the other year, but that doesn't change anything. In addition to parent's gripes, I'll add inflexible pricing: there is something like a 2% senior discount, children under three weeks of age are free, and everybody else pays full price. Okay, maybe that's exaggerating. But there are no passes available at all for "volume" riders, like practically all other transportation systems have. You can buy a $48 ticket (i.e., good for $48 worth of rides--pricing is station-to-station) for $45 or something like that, but that's about it.
A good use would be a games machine. Since I can do pretty much everything else more easily by booting into GNU/Linux, Windows is mostly around to play games (I'm not much of a gamer, but I like slowly plodding through the classics in my free time). If you're running full-screen anyway, you won't even see the ads except when starting up. At least I hope you wouldn't--God forbid they put in ads that overlay on full-screen apps...
...I find this highly offensive!
You don't have to log in? Dude, that's leaving your toaster wide open to a local root exploit.
Nice try, but it was "uptimes orders of magnitudes higher," not "uptimes orders of magnitudes higher than the order of magnitude of that uptime". Orders of magnitude higher than 9 is 900+, not 100+.
The one where they didn't change a single line?
After being burned to a crisp by the dragon in King's Quest, you were told something about how by venturing too close to the dragon's flame, you made an ash out of yourself.
What exactly do you mean by "Ubuntu--why?"? I tried it recently and, besides having to admit to people that I was running an OS named Hoary Hedgehog, I was very impressed. I never was that interested, actually, but I used the live CD for recovery when Windows trashed the partition table on my first drive during a reinstall, and I really liked it. For some reason, the actual install has issues with my NIC that the live CD didn't have (awaiting forums feedback on that), but overall, I think it provides a very nice, friendly UI without dumbing things down like it seems it might.
My team is using it in a software engineering class project at Cal. It's incredibly straightforward and well put together.
First of all, it's tldp.*org*. Second of all, many, many HOWTOs are absurdly out of date. Sure, there is good stuff there, but, for example, a search for dual-boot first turns up results on how to dual boot Linux with Win95/98/ME, complete with instructions for the complicated partitioning needed to get around LBA boot limitations (presented not as "oh, and this is what you need to do *if* you happen to have a bajillion-year-old machine," but as "oh, and this is what you need to do because it's a limitation of *all* current hardware"). The FreeBSD Handbook, also constantly lauded, has the same issues. Both the Handbook and the HOWTOs are inconsistent and outdated. They're both very helpful when they *are* up-to-date, but it's hard to trust documentation that is that spotty... I'm not just trolling--I realize the difficulty in maintaining docs (heck, I'd rather code, too), but it's something that makes *nix systems less approachable.
Okay, for whatever reason, a full install of Ubuntu (as opposed to the liveCD) does not understand my network card. In addition, it had some problems with my CD drive, a fairly popular Plextor model (whereas, again, the liveCD had no issues). This is rather troubling if the liveCD is supposed to give an impression of the full install...
The thing is, as a novice *nix user who is very interested in learning more, I find this approach very limiting. Sure, it'll give you info on commands, but it won't tell you anything about how the system is organized. For example, my system has a nic that's unsupported by the default kernel. There is an open source driver available, but I was only able to get an old version to work by following a step-by-step guide that had you type in commands verbatim (using backticks where necessary), explaining very little of what was actually going on. The newer version doesn't work if I just follow the same steps. The forums have not been of much help. Learning enough to do this by manning would take ages.
*nix has a weird learning curve. At first, the CLI-centered approach is intimidating. Then you learn the FHS (or BSD's hier); some basic commands like man, apropos, ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, and eventually find, grep, and a couple of other things; and it's not so scary. Then you try to figure out how to add a kernel module, and you either have people hold your hand through it without actually teaching you anything, or you have to try to dig this out from man and co. yourself.
I've found it very difficult to get beyond knowing the basics to actually being comfortable with the system. It doesn't sound like this book would help much...
I'm not sure I'd generalize that, though. Here is Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 5.04 live CD, Win2k SP4 (okay, so XP would probably do better but I see no reason to upgrade), and FreeBSD 6.0 on my hardware (June-ish, though the network card is about a year older and the soundcard another three) out of the box:
Win2k: video in 16 colors, no sound, no network card
Debian: full video, misbehaving sound, no network card
Ubuntu: full video, full sound, full network
FreeBSD: full video, no sound, no network
I got the network to work on Debian (and the driver looks like it's FreeBSD-ported as well) after some wrangling, but out-of-the-box performance is important as a first impression. And I was impressed with Ubuntu.
Not free, but if you want to support good shareware, try n-Track Studio. It's more focused on the recording thing (n-Track as in an extension of a Four-track), but it does have MIDI functionality. For a ~$50 program, it stands up to the big boys (Cubase & Co.) remarkably well. It has more than enough power and features for most people not doing anything professional. Best of all, it's not crippled in any artificial way (number of tracks, effects, etc. is limited only by your hardware), and the author is awesome. I lost my registration key in a hard drive crash last summer, and e-mailed him. Even though it'd been a couple of years since I registered, he sent me the registration code in just a couple of days.
(My deepest apologies, but I can't pass up the opportunity)
I think the submission only makes such a big deal out of it because it must have been really tough to develop this while fighting off dingos and kangaroos and crocodiles and throwing boomerangs around and playing didgeridoos.