Windows (XP, at least) rolls around at 2099. I'm planning for the long term, and starting a company that fixes issues arising from the Y2K100 (TM) bug. Once I find a VC willing to wait for 92 years to see a profit, I'm so made.
Of course we didn't _say_ it was for porn, but if the managers and bean-counters ever knew that typical office users are still responsible roughly the same 1-5kByte/s bandwidth usage they were 10 years ago, before 100Mb ethernet they never would have given the rubber stamp of approval to upgrade.
The fact is, the only people to benefit from 100Mbit and now gigabit networking ARE the IT guys, who can stream all the porn they can handle between their segmented IT departments all day long.. so, 100Mbit IS for porn, you just haven't clued on yet..
When the casino takes every dollar some poor sucker has, it's fine. As soon as the casino loses a petty $500,000 (Surely not more than a days earnings for any sizeable casino), it's a crime..
Casino's (in theory) revolve around luck. In reality of course, they revolve around statistics and guaranteed winning odds. But if they actually revolved around luck like they should - people finding a way to exploit a fault in the system for a while is just _LUCK_, so the casino is just doing its job.
.. but where can I get this tiny Wiki collection? Will they be using this for their next version of Wikipedia-on-CD? Maybe we can get all of Wiki onto a two-DVD set, at ~1.3bit/character (minus images of course) - that would be quite cool.
uhuh.. what if I want to provide a full blown application suite? You are right, Linux can do all sorts of wonderful things like that (but then, so can Cygwin under win32.. if html2pdf doesn't exist in Cygwin yet, porting cannot be all that hard) so that point is slightly moot. I've also found that Python is fantastic tool for thousands of such odd-jobs like that, and Python is just as happy under Win32 as Linux.
The fact is that for large application development, Visual Studio IS a fantastic tool and I would use it before any other development environment I have experienced to date, for such a task. As for Windows being a closed platform, care to actually elaborate on how it is closed, and how this closed nature has a negative impact on daily productivity?
I appreciate Linux advocacy, I used to be a Linux advocate myself, and ran Linux exclusively for a long time, but the fact is that I am not going to be Pro-Linux just because it's cool. Windows does everything I want (which generally consists of watching the occasional movie, bit of music, web browsing and the odd bit of World of Warcraft). Linux does all of this as well, but just not quite as nicely, so why bother?
Perhaps I'm with the wrong crowd here, being Slashdot and all, but I'm starting to get bored with the whole "Support Linux because it's not Microsoft" rant - How about supporting the best tool for the job, no matter what that tool is? It's just a little bit more mature.
I was thinking about all of this just yesterday - At work I develop code almost entirely in Visual Studio (98, 2k3 and 2k5) with a little netbeans on the side when I have to deal with Java. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on the weekend (haven't used Linux in a while, thought I'd have another play). Now I have KDevelop, Eclipse, GCC+Vi, GDB, DDD, KDB, and about 15 other tools that all provide portions of what MS VS wraps up in one neat package, and none of them do it with half the quality. Eclipse is not bad, but 1. It's written in Java, and fairly slow, 2. Debugger integration was average at best and 3. The GUI is overly verbose, borders are too big etc. There are other issues but I guess most of them dissapear with prolonged usage (I'm still not 100% happy with Visual Studio, and I've used that for years).
My point is, Microsoft has made it MUCH easier for developers than Linux, at least for in-house software development. I must admit that there are some benefits to Open Source development tools for distributed development, but not all that many - Svn/Cvs are equally as usable under Windows (if not easier, with tortoisesvn/cvs), Cygwin covers a lot of gaps for GNU-Win32 development, etc.
I don't know if it's the amount of choice or what, and I must admit I haven't used KDevelop in a long time, it may be really awesome by now, but I really don't look forward to the day when M$ explodes and I am forced onto Linux/Mac OS X (I hear the Mac OS X IDE of choice is pretty nasty).
"The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere."
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL. You produce more pollution as a country than any other country in the world, and you produce (by a somewhat significant proportion) the most pollution per head. How you can be so naive as to sit there and even suggest any other country is "shitting into the atmosphere" is beyond me.
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Currently I don't have a Floppy drive in my (home) PC, and since my hard-drive/WinXP died this morning and I plan on getting a WD Raptor SATA drive as my main hard-drive, this is a little bit tricky. I expect Vista will be more capable of using SATA interfaces, and perhaps even allow loading of extra drivers from CD/USB sticks, and I know Ubuntu supported both my SATA drives out of the box, but XP may cause problems.
Still, for the 1 in 10000 times I _need_ a floppy, I'd prefer not to have it for the other 9999 times when I accidentally click on the A:\ instead of C:\ in Explorer and have to wait for 15 seconds while it tries to figure out whether there is a disk in the drive.. God that gets annoying
Of course, this will just make them work harder to fix up the faults in the encryption software/hardware before they really start to mass-produce players / discs, so releasing a pirated movie this early will just make further piracy that little bit harder.
However, I really don't understand why the RIAA/MPAA bother at all - There are just to many people out there who find it _fun_ to spend their time cracking things simply because they can, and it is a great challenge to take on. It's not the money, it's not the legality, it's probably not even the fact that they want to rip the movie onto their hard-drive. It's the fact that when the RIAA says "You can't do this", their first thought is "Just watch me". No-one can compete with that, not even multi-billion dollar companies. And I love that fact:)
Also.. 20gb?! Somehow I enjoy the thought of piracy a lot less when everything I save in not buying movies, I spend in buying hard-drives / bandwidth!:)
This stuff would (perhaps) have been really neat 10-20 years ago. Now we really need to start thinking hard about saving power in every way possible way (Global warming and all that..), and creating a technology that is only ~40% efficient (last time I looked) is NOT the way to achieve that, even for small, low-power devices.
Great idea, don't even consider bringing it to mass-market, unless you're bringing fusion power as well.
Yeah, I noticed I got that one wrong after I posted, but/. doesn't let you reply for a few minutes, by which time I had moved onto combing through digg for more interesting stories
This just strikes me as too little too late, trying to make the PC visually appealing (as Apple did YEARS ago) because the fact is no-one cares about what OS is running any more, they just want it to all look good, on-screen and off.
Or is it just that Vista is so filled with eye-candy that they need something equally as over-bearing sitting beside the user so they take their eyes off the screen once in a while?
I guess I'm not most people. Processing power is great, and I'll be happy when I can have real-time photo-realistic rendered games playing from the palm of my hand, but I still think long battery life is key - hence it being _portable_. I guess my theory is, if I am near a powerpoint, I'm probably near a truly powerful desktop PC anyway. As for taking my life with me (the other reason for having a laptop I guess).. I have my work and home PCs set up the way I want them and the actual files I might want to share between them on a daily basis fit very snuggly in gmail and a USB key.
I will be looking again at laptops later this year. Dad has an NC6000 I believe (or used to have one, he might have moved on by now) and my impressions of that (and all his laptops) were that they were faaaar to big and ran faaaar to hot, for my likings.
I guess I didn't address heat in my parent post but, so - heat is not good and I would prefer to wait 20 seconds for my application to load, without getting 3rd degree burns on my legs, than a program that loads faster than I can call the paramedics.
I have to say, I'm completly on the side of "PCs are powerful enough already" - especially where Laptops are concerned. If I really wanted something that powerful, I'd just use my desktop - nothing is so important that it has to be processed on the spot, on a laptop instead of just waiting till I get home. I'm very happy that there is hope for a laptop running a full day on a single battery, in the next 1-2 years, I've been waiting for this news for a long time.
I guess it's just a waiting game now, until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life and a wide screen into something the size of my old Compaq Armada M300. That laptop is the perfect size/weight, it just sucks for battery life, and could use a lot more RAM.
Honestly, I like the idea of version-tracking, being able to back-track to a previous save with little hassle.
Those who are worried about the boss man finding something out about their work habits / quality or whatever either need to think about working harder (or at all) or finding a new job.
The only real problem(s) I see with this is disk usage both from storing version history (depends how intelligently they do differencing & how well they can compress diffs), perhaps performance (especially on large files) and the inability to fully delete a file (mainly because of excessive disk usage, but perhaps also for security reasons).
Overall, I like this.. Why am I always opposed to popular opinion?
But, why is it so important for women to be using Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian or FOSS in general? I'm all for helping people find nice, free alternatives to , but maybe it's not necessary to push Linux on every unsuspecting, dis-interested user, regardless of their denomination...
Is microsoft trying to make it their line of business to announce that open source software CAN work with windows, only 2-4 years after EVERYONE in the IT industry realized that this was already the case?
Personally, I've been using almost exclusively open-source programs on top of windows for the last 3-4 years - if it's worth using, it'll be ported to Windows. I must admit I discovered most of these brilliant programs first when using Linux, but when I have to use Windows (sadly, very often with all these damn proprietory office formats) I make sure every program I put on the PC is freeware or open source.
I don't think Microsoft has to worry about alienating open source users as much these days - first, they are trying to push their own open-source initiative and secondly I think most techies have realized that MS has lost their total market domination and will bend to the will of the user when pushed.
I was really hoping for something more exciting from google, when they announced that they'd be producing something for the open source community. Sourceforge has the occasional problem (CVS stats has been broken for how long now?), but basically it a fantastic site for open source, and easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish.
I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good:)). However, I just cannot see that they can bring any miraculous innovation to the table as far as hosting/supporting OSS projects goes - between forums, IRC and email, collaboration over OSS projects is already working perfectly and as I see it, that is all that google could help with - they can't really step in and do the actual development work required to create every Open source project out there.
Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.
For the last couple of years, I have stumbled upon OpenDarwin once every 2-3 months and thought I'd really love to install and use it at some point. However, I always looked at the hardware support list and decided it probably wasn't ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows (XP, at least) rolls around at 2099. I'm planning for the long term, and starting a company that fixes issues arising from the Y2K100 (TM) bug. Once I find a VC willing to wait for 92 years to see a profit, I'm so made.
Of course we didn't _say_ it was for porn, but if the managers and bean-counters ever knew that typical office users are still responsible roughly the same 1-5kByte/s bandwidth usage they were 10 years ago, before 100Mb ethernet they never would have given the rubber stamp of approval to upgrade.
The fact is, the only people to benefit from 100Mbit and now gigabit networking ARE the IT guys, who can stream all the porn they can handle between their segmented IT departments all day long.. so, 100Mbit IS for porn, you just haven't clued on yet..
When the casino takes every dollar some poor sucker has, it's fine. As soon as the casino loses a petty $500,000 (Surely not more than a days earnings for any sizeable casino), it's a crime..
Casino's (in theory) revolve around luck. In reality of course, they revolve around statistics and guaranteed winning odds. But if they actually revolved around luck like they should - people finding a way to exploit a fault in the system for a while is just _LUCK_, so the casino is just doing its job.
.. but where can I get this tiny Wiki collection? Will they be using this for their next version of Wikipedia-on-CD? Maybe we can get all of Wiki onto a two-DVD set, at ~1.3bit/character (minus images of course) - that would be quite cool.
uhuh.. what if I want to provide a full blown application suite? You are right, Linux can do all sorts of wonderful things like that (but then, so can Cygwin under win32.. if html2pdf doesn't exist in Cygwin yet, porting cannot be all that hard) so that point is slightly moot. I've also found that Python is fantastic tool for thousands of such odd-jobs like that, and Python is just as happy under Win32 as Linux.
The fact is that for large application development, Visual Studio IS a fantastic tool and I would use it before any other development environment I have experienced to date, for such a task. As for Windows being a closed platform, care to actually elaborate on how it is closed, and how this closed nature has a negative impact on daily productivity?
I appreciate Linux advocacy, I used to be a Linux advocate myself, and ran Linux exclusively for a long time, but the fact is that I am not going to be Pro-Linux just because it's cool. Windows does everything I want (which generally consists of watching the occasional movie, bit of music, web browsing and the odd bit of World of Warcraft). Linux does all of this as well, but just not quite as nicely, so why bother?
Perhaps I'm with the wrong crowd here, being Slashdot and all, but I'm starting to get bored with the whole "Support Linux because it's not Microsoft" rant - How about supporting the best tool for the job, no matter what that tool is? It's just a little bit more mature.
I was thinking about all of this just yesterday - At work I develop code almost entirely in Visual Studio (98, 2k3 and 2k5) with a little netbeans on the side when I have to deal with Java. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on the weekend (haven't used Linux in a while, thought I'd have another play). Now I have KDevelop, Eclipse, GCC+Vi, GDB, DDD, KDB, and about 15 other tools that all provide portions of what MS VS wraps up in one neat package, and none of them do it with half the quality. Eclipse is not bad, but 1. It's written in Java, and fairly slow, 2. Debugger integration was average at best and 3. The GUI is overly verbose, borders are too big etc. There are other issues but I guess most of them dissapear with prolonged usage (I'm still not 100% happy with Visual Studio, and I've used that for years).
My point is, Microsoft has made it MUCH easier for developers than Linux, at least for in-house software development. I must admit that there are some benefits to Open Source development tools for distributed development, but not all that many - Svn/Cvs are equally as usable under Windows (if not easier, with tortoisesvn/cvs), Cygwin covers a lot of gaps for GNU-Win32 development, etc.
I don't know if it's the amount of choice or what, and I must admit I haven't used KDevelop in a long time, it may be really awesome by now, but I really don't look forward to the day when M$ explodes and I am forced onto Linux/Mac OS X (I hear the Mac OS X IDE of choice is pretty nasty).
"The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere."
I'm sorry, but I can't let this one fly. America is the worst polluter in the world, not just per capita, but OVER-ALL. You produce more pollution as a country than any other country in the world, and you produce (by a somewhat significant proportion) the most pollution per head. How you can be so naive as to sit there and even suggest any other country is "shitting into the atmosphere" is beyond me.
You sir, are a dick.
I no did homework four school and me smart today
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Currently I don't have a Floppy drive in my (home) PC, and since my hard-drive/WinXP died this morning and I plan on getting a WD Raptor SATA drive as my main hard-drive, this is a little bit tricky. I expect Vista will be more capable of using SATA interfaces, and perhaps even allow loading of extra drivers from CD/USB sticks, and I know Ubuntu supported both my SATA drives out of the box, but XP may cause problems.
Still, for the 1 in 10000 times I _need_ a floppy, I'd prefer not to have it for the other 9999 times when I accidentally click on the A:\ instead of C:\ in Explorer and have to wait for 15 seconds while it tries to figure out whether there is a disk in the drive.. God that gets annoying
Of course, this will just make them work harder to fix up the faults in the encryption software/hardware before they really start to mass-produce players / discs, so releasing a pirated movie this early will just make further piracy that little bit harder.
:)
:)
However, I really don't understand why the RIAA/MPAA bother at all - There are just to many people out there who find it _fun_ to spend their time cracking things simply because they can, and it is a great challenge to take on. It's not the money, it's not the legality, it's probably not even the fact that they want to rip the movie onto their hard-drive. It's the fact that when the RIAA says "You can't do this", their first thought is "Just watch me". No-one can compete with that, not even multi-billion dollar companies. And I love that fact
Also.. 20gb?! Somehow I enjoy the thought of piracy a lot less when everything I save in not buying movies, I spend in buying hard-drives / bandwidth!
This stuff would (perhaps) have been really neat 10-20 years ago. Now we really need to start thinking hard about saving power in every way possible way (Global warming and all that..), and creating a technology that is only ~40% efficient (last time I looked) is NOT the way to achieve that, even for small, low-power devices.
Great idea, don't even consider bringing it to mass-market, unless you're bringing fusion power as well.
Yeah, I noticed I got that one wrong after I posted, but /. doesn't let you reply for a few minutes, by which time I had moved onto combing through digg for more interesting stories
I was just thinking tonight about how my memory of Pi is dwindling away over time.. I used to remember over 100 digits, now..
5 105 is about all I can manage..
:P
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939938
At this rate I'll be at 3.1 by the time I turn 60
This just strikes me as too little too late, trying to make the PC visually appealing (as Apple did YEARS ago) because the fact is no-one cares about what OS is running any more, they just want it to all look good, on-screen and off.
Or is it just that Vista is so filled with eye-candy that they need something equally as over-bearing sitting beside the user so they take their eyes off the screen once in a while?
So.. was Ted Stevens one of those "experts" they're talking about?
I guess I'm not most people. Processing power is great, and I'll be happy when I can have real-time photo-realistic rendered games playing from the palm of my hand, but I still think long battery life is key - hence it being _portable_. I guess my theory is, if I am near a powerpoint, I'm probably near a truly powerful desktop PC anyway. As for taking my life with me (the other reason for having a laptop I guess).. I have my work and home PCs set up the way I want them and the actual files I might want to share between them on a daily basis fit very snuggly in gmail and a USB key.
I will be looking again at laptops later this year. Dad has an NC6000 I believe (or used to have one, he might have moved on by now) and my impressions of that (and all his laptops) were that they were faaaar to big and ran faaaar to hot, for my likings.
I guess I didn't address heat in my parent post but, so - heat is not good and I would prefer to wait 20 seconds for my application to load, without getting 3rd degree burns on my legs, than a program that loads faster than I can call the paramedics.
Anyone see the Ubuntu -> Vista upgrade path?
I have to say, I'm completly on the side of "PCs are powerful enough already" - especially where Laptops are concerned. If I really wanted something that powerful, I'd just use my desktop - nothing is so important that it has to be processed on the spot, on a laptop instead of just waiting till I get home. I'm very happy that there is hope for a laptop running a full day on a single battery, in the next 1-2 years, I've been waiting for this news for a long time.
I guess it's just a waiting game now, until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life and a wide screen into something the size of my old Compaq Armada M300. That laptop is the perfect size/weight, it just sucks for battery life, and could use a lot more RAM.
Ohh well, fingers crossed.
So when can I get this on my PC? I'd probably buy Quake 5 if the people looked completely real - Awesome way to do a tech demonstration..
Honestly, I like the idea of version-tracking, being able to back-track to a previous save with little hassle.
Those who are worried about the boss man finding something out about their work habits / quality or whatever either need to think about working harder (or at all) or finding a new job.
The only real problem(s) I see with this is disk usage both from storing version history (depends how intelligently they do differencing & how well they can compress diffs), perhaps performance (especially on large files) and the inability to fully delete a file (mainly because of excessive disk usage, but perhaps also for security reasons).
Overall, I like this.. Why am I always opposed to popular opinion?
But, why is it so important for women to be using Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian or FOSS in general? I'm all for helping people find nice, free alternatives to , but maybe it's not necessary to push Linux on every unsuspecting, dis-interested user, regardless of their denomination...
Or did I just miss the entire motto of Slashdot?
Is microsoft trying to make it their line of business to announce that open source software CAN work with windows, only 2-4 years after EVERYONE in the IT industry realized that this was already the case?
Personally, I've been using almost exclusively open-source programs on top of windows for the last 3-4 years - if it's worth using, it'll be ported to Windows. I must admit I discovered most of these brilliant programs first when using Linux, but when I have to use Windows (sadly, very often with all these damn proprietory office formats) I make sure every program I put on the PC is freeware or open source.
I don't think Microsoft has to worry about alienating open source users as much these days - first, they are trying to push their own open-source initiative and secondly I think most techies have realized that MS has lost their total market domination and will bend to the will of the user when pushed.
...
Well anyway, I'm all for adopting IPv6, just the rest of the world doesn't seem that keen.
Also, you should probably get some treatment or medication, you seem to be a little over-agressive. Or a lot.
I was really hoping for something more exciting from google, when they announced that they'd be producing something for the open source community. Sourceforge has the occasional problem (CVS stats has been broken for how long now?), but basically it a fantastic site for open source, and easily provides all the services that any OSS project of any size needs in order to function and flourish.
:)). However, I just cannot see that they can bring any miraculous innovation to the table as far as hosting/supporting OSS projects goes - between forums, IRC and email, collaboration over OSS projects is already working perfectly and as I see it, that is all that google could help with - they can't really step in and do the actual development work required to create every Open source project out there.
I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good
Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.
For the last couple of years, I have stumbled upon OpenDarwin once every 2-3 months and thought I'd really love to install and use it at some point. However, I always looked at the hardware support list and decided it probably wasn't ready.
But there was always the dream..
And now it's gone..