I took delivery of an external 5400 RPM Western Digital from Staples for less than $60, tax and delivery included. So no, I won't go back to paying some of the prices I saw on new ache today even for five year warranty top-of-the-line 7200 RPM drives. I'll get an SSD for OS and apps and use my existing 6 TB to prices come down on 3+ terabyte drives.$250, even for top-of-the-line bare drive – no thanks.
"Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force behind the license "patch," which says "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
Might this be the first real life computer related utilization of the first two Laws of Robotics? So if I run the software and then cunningly do not use it when a while I mug someone, I am in violation of the EULA? It all sounds s-o-o politically correct. Perhaps they should insert in the EULA that only nice people can use the software.
A. I agree
B. We are both feeding the troll -- "I seriously don't understand the purpose of scientific research."
C. Build a man a fire, warm him for a night; light him on fire and warm him for life.
These kinds of stories are pretty much irrelevant to the disabled community. These kinds of breakthroughs are a dime a dozen and are reported on a weekly basis. The actual device, procedure, hypothetical breakthrough, etc., is actually 10 to 20 years out. And don't get me started on the rats.:-) If we all could utilize the constant stream of breakthroughs that rats enjoy everyone would be disease-free. I'm surprised there are any uncured rats left to experiment on. Remember the stair-climbing wheelchair built by the Segway guy? I have never seen one except on television. Have you?
My guess is that anyone who knows the difference between Blu-Ray and HDD also knows that two competing HD formats is a complete disaster for the consumer. Even if they do not now, they will when sales begin. I am completely flabbergasted that after the VHS/Betamax fiasco we are experiencing this again. I am not going to lay down $1000, let alone the evetual $100, for a Betamax. If I ever had any illusions rational self-interest could trump greed, I am now "cured." A pox on both their houses. There has to be a book in this and a measure of fault other than everyone involved.
PS: What I mean by the solution is obvious is that if literally millions of consumers can see it as plain as the nose in front of their face what the heck is going on with the main players involved.
I expected that some one would trot out that hoary old "bad news is better than no news" in the PR business. Whatever validity it has, there are certainly exceptions. Microsoft has to be one. I read a previous post by a Slashdot poster with a link to a Microsoft employee blog http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/vista-2007-fi re-leadership-now.html
I can't find the post right now for attribution, so if you posted this link, accept my apologies please. If you stop reading the Slashdot posts on this subject (Vista) and check out that link to the blog above, you'll find some real eye-opening stuff. I have been reading it for two hours and am not even halfway through. It is a pretty fascinating view from the inside.
It seems a very old paper documents were transferred to microfiche. At the time of the transfer, microfiche was probably "high-tech." Remember those spy movies where the secret plans were always stored on microfiche. This segment of the argument seems to be going in circles.
I have purchased more than $1000 worth of e-books during the last five years. I read them exclusively on my PC monitor. I am highly motivated because of a mobility impairment that makes reading e-books much easier than mass paperback and, to a lesser extent, hardcover. I would read more, but there are serious issues that need to be resolved. Here are some of the salient issues as I see them:
My reader of choice is Microsoft Reader. I won't extend the length of this post by discussing the pros and cons in of the different readers, but this choice will inform the discussion that follows.
E-books with no DRM are typically marketed as "multiformat books" in that you can download them in any format to match the reader that you have. They have no DRM whatsoever. The downside is that most books with no DRM are probably not the books that you want the most. I purchased most from the two largest vendors -- Amazon and Fictionwise. Nearly all of recently released titles by these vendors have extensive DRM. After you've choose a format you are stuck with it. If you buy a device and the device maker goes out of business then all of your books based on that device are essentially useless -- money down the drain. Not to mention the cost of the device itself, which can be substantial. In the beginning, vendors allowed you to re-download your book from your "bookshelf" in a different format -- no more.
Typically there is an activation process which ties the particular e-book that have purchased to one or more devices -- a limited number depending upon the particular DRM system of the format. The obvious purpose of this is to prevent you distributing the book to others for free. The editor of Baen books points out the folly of this -- most authors would very much like to have their books distributed so that their "fan base" can increase. A practical example of this folly as I see it looks like this: You just downloaded the third book in a three book series by your favorite author, Peter F. Hamilton. How many people do you know that are waiting with baited breath for a free copy of that volume from you. You could believe you are a white hat kind of guy (information wants to be free) and post it to a web site that collects bootleg copies of books. However, many people have a "relationship" with their favorite author, may understand the precarious economics (i.e., financial rewards, or lack thereof) of authors not on the New York Times top 10 bestseller list and would voluntarily refrain from doing something like this -- either posting or downloading instead of buying.
Regarding hardware, I have yet to see a dedicated device was sufficient resolution, backlighting or reflective properties close enough to a PC monitor or paper, light weight, long battery life, at least five is diagonal screen, etc., for under my price point of $200. Since most of the readers are Windows-based, except for maybe Adobe Reader, the device would require at least a thin Windows OS. While Palm is ubiquitous, I haven't seen the reader by it which meets these specifications. I seem to remember it was on shaky ground for a while. Personally I would not be comfortable with spending a lot of money on e-books in that particular format. I am sure others have different opinions. The actual point I'm getting at here is that a number of physical devices have come and gone leading to purchasers with orphaned books.
The DRM on books is outrageously restrictive. When reading at a PC you cannot copy even a couple words to paste into Google. Nor can use the read aloud features of Microsoft Reader I have posted on this extensively elsewhere on Slashdot, but briefly, all of the blind people who could benefit from the wide dissemination of e-books without any extra modification (large type, Braille, speech translation) is callously eliminated. I know from law school that blind people can listen to enormous amounts of oral text at high-speed with pitch control. The text to
This comment is so totally right on. I am running its (MS) beta homepage portal on its beta Internet Explorer 8 (or 7 -- there's no help/about) browser with Slashdot as some of my portal/homepage content. In any event, it said "put your Hotmail account here" (just like you can do with Gmail on your Google home page). I don't have a Hotmail account, but I do have an MSN account -- same thing. That reminded me that I had to send some mail from it, or are least check it, or lose it and then lose my Microsoft reader, it's 200+ books, and my Microsoft passport (what about the times you don't care what the war, you just want the nail). I go to my MSN/Hotmail account and see an invite for their beta live mail. So I set it all up and low and behold it sort of works but when you go into the calendar there is no way out -- browser crashes. No big deal, the browser crashes very often and gives a memory error on every exit. Now for the punchline to this whole story -- I did all this before the first "MS Live Mail is live" entry in Slashdot! I could have been a contender. Oh yeah, I did want to repeat that when Microsoft says beta it most definitely means Means beta, warts and all. When Google goes beta it is basically a finished product with the beta tacked on to limit early adoption in favor of widespread later adoption because it's so cool, hard to get, and everybody wants it. There are a couple of exceptions for Microsoft -- their spyware software and there OneCare security suite. I think they want this crap to work kind of like ordinary software because it plan on selling it. There brings up another sore point. I was at Fry's Electronics today and I saw a copy of Windows Pro four $299. Spend $300 for for a professional OS, and then pay a subscription fee for additional software to keep it secure! I don't think so.
You must have went to high school a long time ago. More seriously though, I believe that actually most schools, nonprofits, etc., have PCs that at least meet the following specifications that I pretty much chose at random because they provide an idea as to what is necessary to run an older Windows OS. All the ones (older Windows OS's) mentioned will perform e-mail functions without much difficulty. (Granted, I recognize that Microsoft, in that era, seriously understated the minimum requirements for their OS's -- but nevertheless, they are in the ballpark.)
System Requirements*
The following are the minimum system requirements to install and run Microsoft NetMeeting.
* 90 megahertz (MHz) Pentium processor
* 16 megabytes (MB) of RAM for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me
* 24 megabytes (MB) of RAM for Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0 (Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 or later is required to enable sharing programs on Windows NT.)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later
* 28,800 bps or faster modem, integrated services digital network (ISDN), or local area network (LAN) connection (a fast Internet connection works best).
* 4 MB of free hard disk space (an additional 10 MB is needed during installation only to accommodate the initial setup files).
* Sound card with microphone and speakers (required for audio support).
To use the data, audio, and video features of NetMeeting, your computer must meet the following hardware requirements:
* For Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me, a Pentium 90 processor with 16 MB of RAM (a Pentium 133 processor or better with at least 16 MB of RAM is recommended).
* For Windows NT, a Pentium 90 processor with 24 MB of RAM (a Pentium 133 processor or better with at least 32 MB of RAM is recommended).
* 4 MB of free hard disk space (an additional 10 MB is needed during installation only to accommodate the initial setup files).
* 56,000 bps or faster modem, ISDN, or LAN connection.
* Sound card with microphone and speakers (sound card required for both audio and video support).
* Video capture card or camera that provides a Video for Windows capture driver (required for video support).
*Source: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting/System Requirements/default.ASP
The point of all this is that I do not believe that PCs with insufficient hardware specifications to run Windows 98 are much in use in this country. Consequently, underpowered PCs in need of an alternative (read in Linux) operating system adequate just for e-mail purposes are neither prevalent nor needed. Anecdotally, my mother is neither affluent nor technically savvy. She does uses an *old* PC that her children bought her that came preinstalled with Windows 98. It has since been upgraded with some additional RAM. She uses a cut-rate ISP -- Juno (that she is quite satisfied with) -- and as far as I can tell only uses the machine for e-mail. For her purposes, it is vastly overpowered. Over a period of five years there is probably $600 into it. Nobody in our family can think of a reason to upgrade it any further.
I would like to have your description of a PC that cannot check e-mail because it is too underpowered to run any version of Windows/e-mail implementation, but an unsophisticated person with such a PC would benefit from a thin Linux installation on it. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but absolutely no one, except for perhaps a child geek, chooses Linux as their first OS. You are simply wrong when you say that you can just install Debian Linux and "tweak it a bit" and train a novice user. That is just complete Linux-will-save-the-world fantasy.
"I think it's far more likely that more and more users will refuse to upgrade as they find Linux working on their old hardware." This is so extremely unlikely I will not argue the point. If anyone cares enough to reply with any supporting evidence whatsoever, I will be happy to d
If you're running a old 486, you are a personal computer hobbyist. Who cares if you are running some arcane Linux distro or Dr. DOS? It is a very narrow issue vis-à-vis the wider computing community and I am ROTFL at the whole idea of anyone having a sufficient stake in this to be arguing the point. Now whether or not the Ubuntu distribution is appropriate for my Athlon 64 box with six external USB devices including a USB wireless headset/microphone or perhaps some of the distribution, for a first-time Linux user, is a serious question deserving some serious thought (at least from my perspective).:-D
I have seen these comments about the "external" carbon costs of nuclear power plants -- the claims are never supported. The last claim I read, a published letter in New Scientist magazine, put the number at so many hundreds of millions of pounds of CO2 per day which, when annualized and matched against total output of the United States, exceeded that total output.
Imagine a server farm with a little hot water heater on each CPU like a watercooled box. One may as well claim that the failure to recapture the amount of heat loss by men pissing in the toilet is a national disgrace.
I did. Lost everything -- just an XBL binding error messaage. All my extentions. All my Adblock info. Passwords. Bookmarks. Gone forever -- the support board said it was probably my fault -- old theme for new release, and showed how to create a clean profile...w/ nothing. Dusted off Opera, d/l Ver 8, and started its steep learning curve. Open source sucks...they are elitist and out-do MS in blaming the user. If you try to use more than a couple of their 'hundreds' of themes you get compatibiliy problems. Most of them are alpha anyway, written for the authors only. "Open in IE" is the most usefull. Freaking "Pinstripe" theme...disgusted.
Slashdot Mirror
I took delivery of an external 5400 RPM Western Digital from Staples for less than $60, tax and delivery included. So no, I won't go back to paying some of the prices I saw on new ache today even for five year warranty top-of-the-line 7200 RPM drives. I'll get an SSD for OS and apps and use my existing 6 TB to prices come down on 3+ terabyte drives.$250, even for top-of-the-line bare drive – no thanks.
"Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force behind the license "patch," which says "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed." Might this be the first real life computer related utilization of the first two Laws of Robotics? So if I run the software and then cunningly do not use it when a while I mug someone, I am in violation of the EULA? It all sounds s-o-o politically correct. Perhaps they should insert in the EULA that only nice people can use the software.
The "killer" OS -- just when I thought I had seen everything in anti-Microsoft hyperbole.
A. I agree B. We are both feeding the troll -- "I seriously don't understand the purpose of scientific research." C. Build a man a fire, warm him for a night; light him on fire and warm him for life.
These kinds of stories are pretty much irrelevant to the disabled community. These kinds of breakthroughs are a dime a dozen and are reported on a weekly basis. The actual device, procedure, hypothetical breakthrough, etc., is actually 10 to 20 years out. And don't get me started on the rats. :-) If we all could utilize the constant stream of breakthroughs that rats enjoy everyone would be disease-free. I'm surprised there are any uncured rats left to experiment on. Remember the stair-climbing wheelchair built by the Segway guy? I have never seen one except on television. Have you?
My guess is that anyone who knows the difference between Blu-Ray and HDD also knows that two competing HD formats is a complete disaster for the consumer. Even if they do not now, they will when sales begin. I am completely flabbergasted that after the VHS/Betamax fiasco we are experiencing this again. I am not going to lay down $1000, let alone the evetual $100, for a Betamax. If I ever had any illusions rational self-interest could trump greed, I am now "cured." A pox on both their houses. There has to be a book in this and a measure of fault other than everyone involved. PS: What I mean by the solution is obvious is that if literally millions of consumers can see it as plain as the nose in front of their face what the heck is going on with the main players involved.
I expected that some one would trot out that hoary old "bad news is better than no news" in the PR business. Whatever validity it has, there are certainly exceptions. Microsoft has to be one. I read a previous post by a Slashdot poster with a link to a Microsoft employee blog http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/vista-2007-fi re-leadership-now.html
I can't find the post right now for attribution, so if you posted this link, accept my apologies please. If you stop reading the Slashdot posts on this subject (Vista) and check out that link to the blog above, you'll find some real eye-opening stuff. I have been reading it for two hours and am not even halfway through. It is a pretty fascinating view from the inside.
Can you dropsend.com me a distro. Thanks in advance. Gene ;) genepgatyahoo.com
Like this is good PR?
It seems a very old paper documents were transferred to microfiche. At the time of the transfer, microfiche was probably "high-tech." Remember those spy movies where the secret plans were always stored on microfiche. This segment of the argument seems to be going in circles.
I have purchased more than $1000 worth of e-books during the last five years. I read them exclusively on my PC monitor. I am highly motivated because of a mobility impairment that makes reading e-books much easier than mass paperback and, to a lesser extent, hardcover. I would read more, but there are serious issues that need to be resolved. Here are some of the salient issues as I see them:
My reader of choice is Microsoft Reader. I won't extend the length of this post by discussing the pros and cons in of the different readers, but this choice will inform the discussion that follows.
E-books with no DRM are typically marketed as "multiformat books" in that you can download them in any format to match the reader that you have. They have no DRM whatsoever. The downside is that most books with no DRM are probably not the books that you want the most. I purchased most from the two largest vendors -- Amazon and Fictionwise. Nearly all of recently released titles by these vendors have extensive DRM. After you've choose a format you are stuck with it. If you buy a device and the device maker goes out of business then all of your books based on that device are essentially useless -- money down the drain. Not to mention the cost of the device itself, which can be substantial. In the beginning, vendors allowed you to re-download your book from your "bookshelf" in a different format -- no more.
Typically there is an activation process which ties the particular e-book that have purchased to one or more devices -- a limited number depending upon the particular DRM system of the format. The obvious purpose of this is to prevent you distributing the book to others for free. The editor of Baen books points out the folly of this -- most authors would very much like to have their books distributed so that their "fan base" can increase. A practical example of this folly as I see it looks like this: You just downloaded the third book in a three book series by your favorite author, Peter F. Hamilton. How many people do you know that are waiting with baited breath for a free copy of that volume from you. You could believe you are a white hat kind of guy (information wants to be free) and post it to a web site that collects bootleg copies of books. However, many people have a "relationship" with their favorite author, may understand the precarious economics (i.e., financial rewards, or lack thereof) of authors not on the New York Times top 10 bestseller list and would voluntarily refrain from doing something like this -- either posting or downloading instead of buying.
Regarding hardware, I have yet to see a dedicated device was sufficient resolution, backlighting or reflective properties close enough to a PC monitor or paper, light weight, long battery life, at least five is diagonal screen, etc., for under my price point of $200. Since most of the readers are Windows-based, except for maybe Adobe Reader, the device would require at least a thin Windows OS. While Palm is ubiquitous, I haven't seen the reader by it which meets these specifications. I seem to remember it was on shaky ground for a while. Personally I would not be comfortable with spending a lot of money on e-books in that particular format. I am sure others have different opinions. The actual point I'm getting at here is that a number of physical devices have come and gone leading to purchasers with orphaned books.
The DRM on books is outrageously restrictive. When reading at a PC you cannot copy even a couple words to paste into Google. Nor can use the read aloud features of Microsoft Reader I have posted on this extensively elsewhere on Slashdot, but briefly, all of the blind people who could benefit from the wide dissemination of e-books without any extra modification (large type, Braille, speech translation) is callously eliminated. I know from law school that blind people can listen to enormous amounts of oral text at high-speed with pitch control. The text to
This comment is so totally right on. I am running its (MS) beta homepage portal on its beta Internet Explorer 8 (or 7 -- there's no help/about) browser with Slashdot as some of my portal/homepage content. In any event, it said "put your Hotmail account here" (just like you can do with Gmail on your Google home page). I don't have a Hotmail account, but I do have an MSN account -- same thing. That reminded me that I had to send some mail from it, or are least check it, or lose it and then lose my Microsoft reader, it's 200+ books, and my Microsoft passport (what about the times you don't care what the war, you just want the nail). I go to my MSN/Hotmail account and see an invite for their beta live mail. So I set it all up and low and behold it sort of works but when you go into the calendar there is no way out -- browser crashes. No big deal, the browser crashes very often and gives a memory error on every exit. Now for the punchline to this whole story -- I did all this before the first "MS Live Mail is live" entry in Slashdot! I could have been a contender. Oh yeah, I did want to repeat that when Microsoft says beta it most definitely means Means beta, warts and all. When Google goes beta it is basically a finished product with the beta tacked on to limit early adoption in favor of widespread later adoption because it's so cool, hard to get, and everybody wants it. There are a couple of exceptions for Microsoft -- their spyware software and there OneCare security suite. I think they want this crap to work kind of like ordinary software because it plan on selling it. There brings up another sore point. I was at Fry's Electronics today and I saw a copy of Windows Pro four $299. Spend $300 for for a professional OS, and then pay a subscription fee for additional software to keep it secure! I don't think so.
You must have went to high school a long time ago. More seriously though, I believe that actually most schools, nonprofits, etc., have PCs that at least meet the following specifications that I pretty much chose at random because they provide an idea as to what is necessary to run an older Windows OS. All the ones (older Windows OS's) mentioned will perform e-mail functions without much difficulty. (Granted, I recognize that Microsoft, in that era, seriously understated the minimum requirements for their OS's -- but nevertheless, they are in the ballpark.) System Requirements* The following are the minimum system requirements to install and run Microsoft NetMeeting. * 90 megahertz (MHz) Pentium processor * 16 megabytes (MB) of RAM for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me * 24 megabytes (MB) of RAM for Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0 (Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 or later is required to enable sharing programs on Windows NT.) * Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later * 28,800 bps or faster modem, integrated services digital network (ISDN), or local area network (LAN) connection (a fast Internet connection works best). * 4 MB of free hard disk space (an additional 10 MB is needed during installation only to accommodate the initial setup files). * Sound card with microphone and speakers (required for audio support). To use the data, audio, and video features of NetMeeting, your computer must meet the following hardware requirements: * For Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me, a Pentium 90 processor with 16 MB of RAM (a Pentium 133 processor or better with at least 16 MB of RAM is recommended). * For Windows NT, a Pentium 90 processor with 24 MB of RAM (a Pentium 133 processor or better with at least 32 MB of RAM is recommended). * 4 MB of free hard disk space (an additional 10 MB is needed during installation only to accommodate the initial setup files). * 56,000 bps or faster modem, ISDN, or LAN connection. * Sound card with microphone and speakers (sound card required for both audio and video support). * Video capture card or camera that provides a Video for Windows capture driver (required for video support). *Source: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting/System Requirements/default.ASP The point of all this is that I do not believe that PCs with insufficient hardware specifications to run Windows 98 are much in use in this country. Consequently, underpowered PCs in need of an alternative (read in Linux) operating system adequate just for e-mail purposes are neither prevalent nor needed. Anecdotally, my mother is neither affluent nor technically savvy. She does uses an *old* PC that her children bought her that came preinstalled with Windows 98. It has since been upgraded with some additional RAM. She uses a cut-rate ISP -- Juno (that she is quite satisfied with) -- and as far as I can tell only uses the machine for e-mail. For her purposes, it is vastly overpowered. Over a period of five years there is probably $600 into it. Nobody in our family can think of a reason to upgrade it any further. I would like to have your description of a PC that cannot check e-mail because it is too underpowered to run any version of Windows/e-mail implementation, but an unsophisticated person with such a PC would benefit from a thin Linux installation on it. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but absolutely no one, except for perhaps a child geek, chooses Linux as their first OS. You are simply wrong when you say that you can just install Debian Linux and "tweak it a bit" and train a novice user. That is just complete Linux-will-save-the-world fantasy. "I think it's far more likely that more and more users will refuse to upgrade as they find Linux working on their old hardware." This is so extremely unlikely I will not argue the point. If anyone cares enough to reply with any supporting evidence whatsoever, I will be happy to d
If you're running a old 486, you are a personal computer hobbyist. Who cares if you are running some arcane Linux distro or Dr. DOS? It is a very narrow issue vis-à-vis the wider computing community and I am ROTFL at the whole idea of anyone having a sufficient stake in this to be arguing the point. Now whether or not the Ubuntu distribution is appropriate for my Athlon 64 box with six external USB devices including a USB wireless headset/microphone or perhaps some of the distribution, for a first-time Linux user, is a serious question deserving some serious thought (at least from my perspective). :-D
1st post. ROTFLMAO, serious LOL
I have seen these comments about the "external" carbon costs of nuclear power plants -- the claims are never supported. The last claim I read, a published letter in New Scientist magazine, put the number at so many hundreds of millions of pounds of CO2 per day which, when annualized and matched against total output of the United States, exceeded that total output. Imagine a server farm with a little hot water heater on each CPU like a watercooled box. One may as well claim that the failure to recapture the amount of heat loss by men pissing in the toilet is a national disgrace.
I did. Lost everything -- just an XBL binding error messaage. All my extentions. All my Adblock info. Passwords. Bookmarks. Gone forever -- the support board said it was probably my fault -- old theme for new release, and showed how to create a clean profile...w/ nothing. Dusted off Opera, d/l Ver 8, and started its steep learning curve. Open source sucks...they are elitist and out-do MS in blaming the user. If you try to use more than a couple of their 'hundreds' of themes you get compatibiliy problems. Most of them are alpha anyway, written for the authors only. "Open in IE" is the most usefull. Freaking "Pinstripe" theme...disgusted.