Mac users are a drop in the bucket (about 3%) compared to all people who don't use IE (~15%.) Hell, there are at least as many Linux machines on the Net as Macs (according to w3c schools.) Macintoshes are not the center of the universe and on the tip of everybody's mind, so MS dropping IE support for Macs won't cause one iota of change in what web site designers think. But I do agree with the open standards bit as I am in the "doesn't use IE group" too.
I know it's hard not to these days - I consciously *make* myself browse conservative sites and read the stories, but the logic is so *skewed*, and if you make a comment on it - boom, you're banned as a troll.
Their logic is no more "skewed" than a liberal site's in all actuality. If it can be classified as an $IDEOLOGICAL site, then it's skewed. The liberal sites seem less skewed to you because you happen to agree with them.
I made (IIRC) three postings at Free Republic in a month. Banned. How is it *possible* to be a Troll with three posts?
Moderators want to keep the forums on-topic and not let them turn into flame fests. You are self-admittedly quite liberal and posting things like "George W. Bush looks like an ape and is dumber than one, and with him as their leader, no wonder Americans are fat, stupid louts." (not saying that you posted that- just an example) to a conservative site's forums do not help the discussion and will just get weeded out by the moderators. It would be the same as if you went to the AMDzone.com forums and posted that Intel's Core 2 Duo "was teh winnar and AMD should just close up shop now before they are really disgraced because Intel pwns them!!" the mods would ban you after about two of those posts.
It's a lot easier to read liberal press.
I don't think it's any easier or harder to. If you read a rag that's slanted too much one way or the other, it's hard to know what really went on as some minor things may be overblown and other major stories that make that ideology look bad will not be reported or spun to make the other one look bad. A slanted building can't stand up straight, and neither can a slanted person stand up straight intellectually.
They make stupid statements too but I have yet to get banned when I point that out.
If you agree with them, they can tell that and your posts will show that. People are much more likely to take criticism as constructive from people that they see as "with" them than "against" them. That is human nature and spans ALL ideologies.
Re:What will make KDE the perfect desktop...
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I totally agree- 512MB is the minimum for a 32-bit box and 1GB for a 64-bit box to have good performance. My boxes have twice that. I was more saying that you can have usable (i.e. not swapping too too much) performance on 256MB or so. And a lot of the lag in browsing directories is due to the HDD, not the RAM or CPU (unless you have VERY little RAM or a very slow chip that can't draw the window quickly.)
Is this just a Kubuntu bug or does it affect all KDE 3.5.4 packages? I run Gentoo and the ebuilds seem fine to me- so far...
Well, there is always TWM if KDE craps out:D Real men and women aren't afraid to use little more than a CLI.
Re:What will make KDE the perfect desktop...
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KDE 3.5.3 on a 32-bit machine with an average amount of startup and auto-startup services (nfs, samba, distcc client, ntp client, gkrellm2) the RAM usage is 85 MB. Granted that may be a bit much for somebody running a computer that can only take 64 or 128MB RAM, but you'd need to have a original Socket 7-era unit to be constrained by this as the Super 7s and Slot 1/Slot A machines generally take 256MB or more.And I'd be more worried about a Pentium 75 keeping up with running modern applications that I would about RAM usage. Basically a machine that old is going to run for a particular purpose only, such as a firewall/router (and do so headless with no X or KDE) or be used to run a particular legacy program that will not run on modern OSes for some reason.
If you are running such a machine as your primary box, you can easily find machines much more powerful (Pentium III/Athlon 700-1GHz or early P4s) just being trashed as newer units replace them. Pick one of those up for little to no money and then you can buy a little RAM and run KDE.For example, my university is ditching a lot of PIII/866 machines with 256 or 512MB RAM for roughly $50-75.
Re:What will make KDE the perfect desktop...
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KDE 3.5.4 Released
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In fact, you can see everything that the full-blown KDE would install by typing in "emerge -pv kde-meta." It's well north of 100 packages, and all you need to just run KDE apps is kdebase and kdelibs plus whatever KDE app you want (just emerge it by name.) I start off by installing kde-meta to get all of the KDE apps as individual packages and then uninstall what I do not want later by unmerging it by name. Works liks a charm and is easy, even if it does take a little longer to install and then remove. Note that you can't do this with the monolithic "kde" ebuild- the kde-meta one is what you want. And BTW, if the kde-meta seems slow, it's because each little app has to run./configure and unless you have confcache hitting well, it takes a bit longer to compile some smaller apps individually than as 30 at once whack.
Unless you are using Lynx from the live CD while installing, (or using the LiveCD installer) Gentoo must be already up and running on your box. Sure, the initial installation with all of KDE and whatnot can take a full day or two on a relatively slow box (PIII, Athlon Classisc/Tbird, Willy P4) but if it takes several days, you have to be running a Pentium 90 or something that has less power than your cell phone. But if you're posting, you're likely just doing updates and those generally take just a few minutes. I should know- both my machines run Gentoo.
There's no new article here at all. I know just about all of us hate the wiretapping, but this is just a political jab and not anything substantive. You should be more professional than that- repost this with at least an update of the AT&T v. EFF case or something...
The computer would turn into a glorified cable or satellite box- a device operating on a closed network that runs programs that the device manufacturer and/or network operators allow. It will be a subscription service and be expensive, just like cable and satellite. You may or may not even own the computer equipment anymore- it might be leased to you from the network operators like most cable/satellite equipment.
However, what will also happen is that there will be an underground or semi-underground network that resembles anything from a few local shares to a shadow of the Internet that we currently have. It will use older or TPM-disabled computers with OSes that do not require TPMs to operate. This can be anything from a little ad-hoc wireless network to a larger, area-wide regional networks over WiMax or similar technology. Also, people that use computers for real computing will also have stand-alone machines as in the old days.
1. You can disable the TPM in the BIOS or by physically removing the chip from the board.
There is no restriction (currently) forcing you to use a TPM. It is your choice as to whether it gets turned on or not. It is also your choice to buy a board without a TPM or to remove a TPM from a motherboard. It is not against the DMCA because refusing to use a TPM is akin to refusing to watch a DVD- you are simply not using the object that has DMCA-protected DRM in it. If the BIOS has no option to turn off the TPM, then removing the chip from the board is still allowed.
2. You can tell the software not to use the TPM.
There is also nothing in the DMCA that prohibits somebody from accessing a device that is DRM'ed. Think of sticking a DVD in your computer's DVD drive and then disabling the drive in software. However, if the OS does not allow the user to turn off the TPM, a program that fully disables the TPM in software should be legal also (turning off the DVD drive.)
3. You can run whatever software you want on your computer even if the TPM is on.
The TPM cannot currently prohibit the user from using programs that are not "trusted." What it WILL do is prevent access to files and parts of the system that require a "trusted" program to access. So in the worst case, you can install an "untrusted" program and run it but not be able to open some or any files currently on your computer and you may or may not be able to run "trusted" programs at the same time as "untrusted" ones. You surely cannot pass data between the two. Your computer can also deny network and other hardware access to the program- i.e. you may not be able to read anything from an optical drive or go online with an "untrusted" program.
4. You can run and boot your OS of choice with a TPM.
Prohibiting the running of certain OSes would generally fall under anti-competitive laws and thus not be implemented. Plus, if you removed or disabled the TPM in BIOS, there should be no reason that another OS would not boot. If the BIOS requires a TPM to boot and the TPM would block a certain OS from booting, that manufacturer can very well be liable for anti-competitive tactics. So this will never happen.
The gist of the TPM and the DMCA is that you can disable the TPM either in hardware or in software and use the computer however you wish. BUT, some things may not be accessible to you, such as video files, music, certain software programs, DVDs, or possibly the Internet (depends on if your ISP requires a "trusted connection.") Where the DMCA steps in is that you cannot circumvent the TPM or fake a TPM being active to access "trusted" files in "untrusted" ways. Yes, TCPA is awful and I'd go the "remove the chip with a soldering iron" route if a motherboard I purchased had a TPM, but the fact remains that you can operate without being under the jurisdiction of a TPM. You may just not be able to access everything that you can today if you run that way. But a stand-alone machine or a terminal on a LAN running an OS that does not require a TPM to run will still be possible.
Yes, that is unfortunately true and needs to be reversed as we really should be the networks' customers, not be the product that is delivered to the advertisers. That is yet another consequence and sign of of the media thinking that they are the only portal to us.
That is true, especially with over-the-air broadcasting. (How can they even try to bill for it?- wait, I don't think I want to know!!) But for cable and satellite, the customers ARE paying- and usually quite a bit- for the service. So they should be entitled to watch what they want to but also to not watch what they don't, and that includes everything from old reruns of Ellen to commercials.
That won't happen as the Bells give too much money to the politicians. If the Feds wanted to stick it to the Bells, Net neutrality would not even be an issue anymore and they would have beat it into the Bells' thick, empty skulls that you can't do that on OUR lines, But that didn't happen, so I am sure that the Feds won't stick it to them.
It is the entire media industry's long-held view that they are The One And Only Way in putting information and entertainment in front of people and Their Will Must Be Done. They believe that the entire market is theirs just because and you should see only things exactly as they want you to. You've seen it from Hollywood and the recording studions in region coding, staggering DVD/VHS release times way behind theatrical showings, and the whole DRM and fighting the Internet. Television is no different- they did have the Betamax case and now since digital video recording yields perfect or near-perfect (and worlds better than tape) recordings of shows that can easily and routinely be recorded and ad-skipped, they are throwing a hissy fit. Technology has given the customers (yes, customers, we're not the slack-jawed guaranteed-market CONSUMERS they think and wish we are) the ability to modify things to our tastes. Why do you think the Net is so popular? It is because there is a lot more out there and we can influence and change it. It is time that the media realized that the viewers are customers and they're no longer the sole provider and WANT to make us watch their offerings, not try to force us to.
I totally agree with you (Gentoo 2006.0 on an Nforce 4 with a 6200TC PCIe GPU.) I certainly do recommend hardware that is also Linux compatible to my friends and acquaintances as even though they will be running Windows on it; giving companies that support Linux a bone is a good thing. Also, parts that have drivers in other OSes tend to be of better quality and more stable in Windows as there can't be a reliance on Windows code in the driver- i.e. it can't be a cheap win-peripheral or it won't work in any other OS worth a damn. Drivers for real hardware-controlled devices tend to be more stable and robust as there is far more independence on the host software to make the peripheral work.
No, Anonymous Coward, these are rules that should guide ANY vendor's development of ANY program (replace "Microsoft" with the name of any vendor if you please- MSFT was just the vendor in THIS STORY.) It is more or less of a "user's bill of rights" than anything. But if you like to be spied on by a company and various third parties, treated like a criminal when you back up a CD or reinstall your programs, and just generally get taken by your software vendors, feel free to criticize.
13. We will fully disclose our file formats so that greater interoperability with other platforms can be achieved- we will not "lock in" customers any longer. 14. We will not treat the user as a criminal. 15. We will fully respect the user's privacy. As such, we will install a working hosts file and NO Microsoft program can send any information back to us without explicitly stating what will be sent back, why, and who gets to see it. The Windows firewall will also be able to block all incoming and outgoing traffic, including traffic that reports to Microsoft. We will not put "backdoors" into our products. 16. We will fully respect the user's sovereignty over his or her own data. We will never allow the OS or any Microsoft programs to prevent people from accessing, modifying, or distributing data on their computers in whatever manner they wish to. 17. We are not the police. We cannot and will not attempt to stop users from doing any act on their computers that may violate any license, ordinance, or act in their particular region. It is the user's responsibility to comply with all local laws and regulations.
Gas of that octane here is getting up there in price, but your taxes are a *lot* higher. Regular in the U.S. is always 87 octane, mid-grade is usually 89 octane, sometimes 88 or 90 at some oddball stations, and premium is 91 or 93 octane. Right now in Columbia, Missouri (town of ~90,000 in central Missouri, home to the University of Missouri) 87 octane is $2.79/gallon, mid-grade is $2.79-$2.92/gallon (the 10% ethanol mid-grade is the same price as regular unleaded as there is a lot of ethanol produced here, and the no-alcohol mid-grade is ~$0.10/gal more than regular) and premium is $2.99-$3.02/gallon. Taxes are 38.7 cents/gallon total on gasoline and 41.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel, which is about $2.90/gallon right now. I have seen 100 octane "racing fuel" sold at some specialty stations and that stuff is about $4-5/gallon.
I am curious as to why the octane is so high on that fuel in Britain. The engines that you use are more or less the same ones we use here and most run fine on 87 octane. (Case in point: The Ford Focus is a popular car here and also supposed to be popular in Europe too, and both run with an identical 2.3L four that runs happily on 87 octane here, according to Ford.) The extra octane should allow your engines to run a much higher compression ratio and/or be supercharged or turbocharged without suffering detonation problems.
He said that he did not want to run an x86 chip on his computer. It was "too bad for him" because a non-x86 desktops and workstations are getting increasingly harder to get and he will certainly need to upgrade sometime in the future as we all will need to, and probably have little choice but to go to an x86 chip. Apple is also not going to support PowerPC forever, so I bet that will at least nudge him to get a new computer when the support stops for PPC.
I have limited experience with OS X on the desktop. I used to use System 6 and OS 7 machines all the time when I was younger, but after that, Apple seemed to go into its doldrums and I saw few to no Apples around until the G4 line and OS X came out. I use Linux on the desktop and use it at work (I had to build a computer there to do that on and administer it all myself, but they gave me the funds and the permission to if it would make me more productive- and it did:D ) OS X is much more a "clicky" GUI than KDE is and I am much more a keyboard-and-text fan, but I get around okay in it anyway, especially with there being an xterm that has some of the same functionality out of the box as a Linux terminal does. I do not like Windows at all at work as the computers are about 2 years old and have to be loaded up to the gills with anti-*ware programs to not get infected with crud, so they are slower than frozen molasses. Excel cannot handle the data sets that I get and use, and Word's table functionality sucks compared to OpenOffice Writer's. There is also no real MS Office answer to OO Draw, unless you count PowerPoint, but that is not a drawing program and the IT guys "only" bought MS Office Std. so there is no Visio. However, the IT guys pretty much will not install anything (such as R or OpenOffice) that isn't vendor-supported and cost a large sum for licenses but is a needed tool for the job. At least in Macs I can double-click a.dmg image and run an app from my USB stick as a user in most cases.
Too bad for you that Apple is moving to x86. Looks like you're going to have to move to a flavor of UNIX or Linux on an IBM Power-based server, HP PA-RISC workstation, Sun or Fujitsu SPARC server, an Itanium server, or run one of those 1 GHz PowerPC 7447-based Pegasos desktops. Or you could possibly hack an old PDA to run Linux on its ARM9-based chip, and the best ones are 624 MHz XScales. So the bottom line is that x86 is very dominant in the personal computing and workstation/smaller server segment. You only see non-x86 chips anymore in embedded devices and in larger servers or some more esoteric workstations, such as the PA-RISC. I do not know why you dis x86 so much- sure, it's kind of a hack with CISC x86 instructions mixed with RISC-like vector ops in the SSE instructions feeding a RISC backend. But the hack seems to work pretty well as tests have shown that the fastest PPC 970 "G5" CPUs are not quite as fast as the AMD Opterons and the Power4s are FAR slower. The Sun UltraSPARC T1 generally also falls behind the Opterons and some Xeons too. (Source: Anandtech and Tom's Hardware Guide.) Itanics have decent FP performance but it is VERY brutal on the compiler to do branch prediction to run worth a darn as the chip has no out-of-order execution. So is the Cell, which nobody actually sells yet.
Hong Kong had only been capitalist since 1841 because Britain owned them up until 1999. And there is a HUGE difference between "overtly" and "at all." And anyway, who's going to tell Beijing to play by its rules? Nobody in China will, that's for sure!
This is *China.* They have been indoctrinating people and telling them ratting to The Party on their neighbors is grand since 1949. This is nothing new.
Computer software of a similar vintage will all run pretty much the same if set up similarly (i.e. something like SuSE 10 with a full KDE or GNOME desktop vs. XP SP2.) I had both Linux and Windows XP on this laptop for a couple of years and SuSE with a full KDE DE seemed maybe a little faster than XP. However, I suspect the "it runs better" came from Linux handling heavier multitasking better than the XP does- you can switch between open programs without 5 seconds to redraw the screens and such. But for general use with a load 3, they perform rather similarly. Linux also tends to use less RAM than Windows of the same vintage and setup- my laptop now runs Gentoo 2006.0 and the full KDE DE, and it uses about 90MB RAM at idle, and Windows takes up roughly 170 MB, more like 280 with the antivirus and antispyware apps loaded in the background.
Also, one can slim down Linux a lot by running a very minimal DE or just using the CLI, which is not an option on later Windows versions. However then Linux running TWM or FVWM is not exactly the same functionality as Windows XP or a Linux with a full GNOME or KDE DE either and it really isn't an apples-to-apples comparison anymore. It would be like comparing Windows CE's RAM usage to a 4-way 64-bit Linux server's RAM usage. But that option to cut stuff out is there and has been taken advantage of, although the advantage is more a reduction in hard drive space usage (KDE, Gnome aren't little) than RAM usage.
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Mac users are a drop in the bucket (about 3%) compared to all people who don't use IE (~15%.) Hell, there are at least as many Linux machines on the Net as Macs (according to w3c schools.) Macintoshes are not the center of the universe and on the tip of everybody's mind, so MS dropping IE support for Macs won't cause one iota of change in what web site designers think. But I do agree with the open standards bit as I am in the "doesn't use IE group" too.
Their logic is no more "skewed" than a liberal site's in all actuality. If it can be classified as an $IDEOLOGICAL site, then it's skewed. The liberal sites seem less skewed to you because you happen to agree with them.
Moderators want to keep the forums on-topic and not let them turn into flame fests. You are self-admittedly quite liberal and posting things like "George W. Bush looks like an ape and is dumber than one, and with him as their leader, no wonder Americans are fat, stupid louts." (not saying that you posted that- just an example) to a conservative site's forums do not help the discussion and will just get weeded out by the moderators. It would be the same as if you went to the AMDzone.com forums and posted that Intel's Core 2 Duo "was teh winnar and AMD should just close up shop now before they are really disgraced because Intel pwns them!!" the mods would ban you after about two of those posts.
I don't think it's any easier or harder to. If you read a rag that's slanted too much one way or the other, it's hard to know what really went on as some minor things may be overblown and other major stories that make that ideology look bad will not be reported or spun to make the other one look bad. A slanted building can't stand up straight, and neither can a slanted person stand up straight intellectually.
If you agree with them, they can tell that and your posts will show that. People are much more likely to take criticism as constructive from people that they see as "with" them than "against" them. That is human nature and spans ALL ideologies.
Not if it had the FDIV bug, it couldn't!
I totally agree- 512MB is the minimum for a 32-bit box and 1GB for a 64-bit box to have good performance. My boxes have twice that. I was more saying that you can have usable (i.e. not swapping too too much) performance on 256MB or so. And a lot of the lag in browsing directories is due to the HDD, not the RAM or CPU (unless you have VERY little RAM or a very slow chip that can't draw the window quickly.)
Is this just a Kubuntu bug or does it affect all KDE 3.5.4 packages? I run Gentoo and the ebuilds seem fine to me- so far...
:D Real men and women aren't afraid to use little more than a CLI.
Well, there is always TWM if KDE craps out
KDE 3.5.3 on a 32-bit machine with an average amount of startup and auto-startup services (nfs, samba, distcc client, ntp client, gkrellm2) the RAM usage is 85 MB. Granted that may be a bit much for somebody running a computer that can only take 64 or 128MB RAM, but you'd need to have a original Socket 7-era unit to be constrained by this as the Super 7s and Slot 1/Slot A machines generally take 256MB or more.And I'd be more worried about a Pentium 75 keeping up with running modern applications that I would about RAM usage. Basically a machine that old is going to run for a particular purpose only, such as a firewall/router (and do so headless with no X or KDE) or be used to run a particular legacy program that will not run on modern OSes for some reason.
If you are running such a machine as your primary box, you can easily find machines much more powerful (Pentium III/Athlon 700-1GHz or early P4s) just being trashed as newer units replace them. Pick one of those up for little to no money and then you can buy a little RAM and run KDE.For example, my university is ditching a lot of PIII/866 machines with 256 or 512MB RAM for roughly $50-75.
In fact, you can see everything that the full-blown KDE would install by typing in "emerge -pv kde-meta." It's well north of 100 packages, and all you need to just run KDE apps is kdebase and kdelibs plus whatever KDE app you want (just emerge it by name.) I start off by installing kde-meta to get all of the KDE apps as individual packages and then uninstall what I do not want later by unmerging it by name. Works liks a charm and is easy, even if it does take a little longer to install and then remove. Note that you can't do this with the monolithic "kde" ebuild- the kde-meta one is what you want. And BTW, if the kde-meta seems slow, it's because each little app has to run ./configure and unless you have confcache hitting well, it takes a bit longer to compile some smaller apps individually than as 30 at once whack.
Unless you are using Lynx from the live CD while installing, (or using the LiveCD installer) Gentoo must be already up and running on your box. Sure, the initial installation with all of KDE and whatnot can take a full day or two on a relatively slow box (PIII, Athlon Classisc/Tbird, Willy P4) but if it takes several days, you have to be running a Pentium 90 or something that has less power than your cell phone. But if you're posting, you're likely just doing updates and those generally take just a few minutes. I should know- both my machines run Gentoo.
There's no new article here at all. I know just about all of us hate the wiretapping, but this is just a political jab and not anything substantive. You should be more professional than that- repost this with at least an update of the AT&T v. EFF case or something...
Yeah, unfortunately. Your choices are to either play with the new crappy rules or not play at all...
The computer would turn into a glorified cable or satellite box- a device operating on a closed network that runs programs that the device manufacturer and/or network operators allow. It will be a subscription service and be expensive, just like cable and satellite. You may or may not even own the computer equipment anymore- it might be leased to you from the network operators like most cable/satellite equipment.
However, what will also happen is that there will be an underground or semi-underground network that resembles anything from a few local shares to a shadow of the Internet that we currently have. It will use older or TPM-disabled computers with OSes that do not require TPMs to operate. This can be anything from a little ad-hoc wireless network to a larger, area-wide regional networks over WiMax or similar technology. Also, people that use computers for real computing will also have stand-alone machines as in the old days.
What the DMCA allows you to do with a TPM:
1. You can disable the TPM in the BIOS or by physically removing the chip from the board.
There is no restriction (currently) forcing you to use a TPM. It is your choice as to whether it gets turned on or not. It is also your choice to buy a board without a TPM or to remove a TPM from a motherboard. It is not against the DMCA because refusing to use a TPM is akin to refusing to watch a DVD- you are simply not using the object that has DMCA-protected DRM in it. If the BIOS has no option to turn off the TPM, then removing the chip from the board is still allowed.
2. You can tell the software not to use the TPM.
There is also nothing in the DMCA that prohibits somebody from accessing a device that is DRM'ed. Think of sticking a DVD in your computer's DVD drive and then disabling the drive in software. However, if the OS does not allow the user to turn off the TPM, a program that fully disables the TPM in software should be legal also (turning off the DVD drive.)
3. You can run whatever software you want on your computer even if the TPM is on.
The TPM cannot currently prohibit the user from using programs that are not "trusted." What it WILL do is prevent access to files and parts of the system that require a "trusted" program to access. So in the worst case, you can install an "untrusted" program and run it but not be able to open some or any files currently on your computer and you may or may not be able to run "trusted" programs at the same time as "untrusted" ones. You surely cannot pass data between the two. Your computer can also deny network and other hardware access to the program- i.e. you may not be able to read anything from an optical drive or go online with an "untrusted" program.
4. You can run and boot your OS of choice with a TPM.
Prohibiting the running of certain OSes would generally fall under anti-competitive laws and thus not be implemented. Plus, if you removed or disabled the TPM in BIOS, there should be no reason that another OS would not boot. If the BIOS requires a TPM to boot and the TPM would block a certain OS from booting, that manufacturer can very well be liable for anti-competitive tactics. So this will never happen.
The gist of the TPM and the DMCA is that you can disable the TPM either in hardware or in software and use the computer however you wish. BUT, some things may not be accessible to you, such as video files, music, certain software programs, DVDs, or possibly the Internet (depends on if your ISP requires a "trusted connection.") Where the DMCA steps in is that you cannot circumvent the TPM or fake a TPM being active to access "trusted" files in "untrusted" ways. Yes, TCPA is awful and I'd go the "remove the chip with a soldering iron" route if a motherboard I purchased had a TPM, but the fact remains that you can operate without being under the jurisdiction of a TPM. You may just not be able to access everything that you can today if you run that way. But a stand-alone machine or a terminal on a LAN running an OS that does not require a TPM to run will still be possible.
Yes, that is unfortunately true and needs to be reversed as we really should be the networks' customers, not be the product that is delivered to the advertisers. That is yet another consequence and sign of of the media thinking that they are the only portal to us.
That is true, especially with over-the-air broadcasting. (How can they even try to bill for it?- wait, I don't think I want to know!!) But for cable and satellite, the customers ARE paying- and usually quite a bit- for the service. So they should be entitled to watch what they want to but also to not watch what they don't, and that includes everything from old reruns of Ellen to commercials.
That won't happen as the Bells give too much money to the politicians. If the Feds wanted to stick it to the Bells, Net neutrality would not even be an issue anymore and they would have beat it into the Bells' thick, empty skulls that you can't do that on OUR lines, But that didn't happen, so I am sure that the Feds won't stick it to them.
It is the entire media industry's long-held view that they are The One And Only Way in putting information and entertainment in front of people and Their Will Must Be Done. They believe that the entire market is theirs just because and you should see only things exactly as they want you to. You've seen it from Hollywood and the recording studions in region coding, staggering DVD/VHS release times way behind theatrical showings, and the whole DRM and fighting the Internet. Television is no different- they did have the Betamax case and now since digital video recording yields perfect or near-perfect (and worlds better than tape) recordings of shows that can easily and routinely be recorded and ad-skipped, they are throwing a hissy fit. Technology has given the customers (yes, customers, we're not the slack-jawed guaranteed-market CONSUMERS they think and wish we are) the ability to modify things to our tastes. Why do you think the Net is so popular? It is because there is a lot more out there and we can influence and change it. It is time that the media realized that the viewers are customers and they're no longer the sole provider and WANT to make us watch their offerings, not try to force us to.
I totally agree with you (Gentoo 2006.0 on an Nforce 4 with a 6200TC PCIe GPU.) I certainly do recommend hardware that is also Linux compatible to my friends and acquaintances as even though they will be running Windows on it; giving companies that support Linux a bone is a good thing. Also, parts that have drivers in other OSes tend to be of better quality and more stable in Windows as there can't be a reliance on Windows code in the driver- i.e. it can't be a cheap win-peripheral or it won't work in any other OS worth a damn. Drivers for real hardware-controlled devices tend to be more stable and robust as there is far more independence on the host software to make the peripheral work.
No, Anonymous Coward, these are rules that should guide ANY vendor's development of ANY program (replace "Microsoft" with the name of any vendor if you please- MSFT was just the vendor in THIS STORY.) It is more or less of a "user's bill of rights" than anything. But if you like to be spied on by a company and various third parties, treated like a criminal when you back up a CD or reinstall your programs, and just generally get taken by your software vendors, feel free to criticize.
13. We will fully disclose our file formats so that greater interoperability with other platforms can be achieved- we will not "lock in" customers any longer.
14. We will not treat the user as a criminal.
15. We will fully respect the user's privacy. As such, we will install a working hosts file and NO Microsoft program can send any information back to us without explicitly stating what will be sent back, why, and who gets to see it. The Windows firewall will also be able to block all incoming and outgoing traffic, including traffic that reports to Microsoft. We will not put "backdoors" into our products.
16. We will fully respect the user's sovereignty over his or her own data. We will never allow the OS or any Microsoft programs to prevent people from accessing, modifying, or distributing data on their computers in whatever manner they wish to.
17. We are not the police. We cannot and will not attempt to stop users from doing any act on their computers that may violate any license, ordinance, or act in their particular region. It is the user's responsibility to comply with all local laws and regulations.
Gas of that octane here is getting up there in price, but your taxes are a *lot* higher. Regular in the U.S. is always 87 octane, mid-grade is usually 89 octane, sometimes 88 or 90 at some oddball stations, and premium is 91 or 93 octane. Right now in Columbia, Missouri (town of ~90,000 in central Missouri, home to the University of Missouri) 87 octane is $2.79/gallon, mid-grade is $2.79-$2.92/gallon (the 10% ethanol mid-grade is the same price as regular unleaded as there is a lot of ethanol produced here, and the no-alcohol mid-grade is ~$0.10/gal more than regular) and premium is $2.99-$3.02/gallon. Taxes are 38.7 cents/gallon total on gasoline and 41.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel, which is about $2.90/gallon right now. I have seen 100 octane "racing fuel" sold at some specialty stations and that stuff is about $4-5/gallon.
I am curious as to why the octane is so high on that fuel in Britain. The engines that you use are more or less the same ones we use here and most run fine on 87 octane. (Case in point: The Ford Focus is a popular car here and also supposed to be popular in Europe too, and both run with an identical 2.3L four that runs happily on 87 octane here, according to Ford.) The extra octane should allow your engines to run a much higher compression ratio and/or be supercharged or turbocharged without suffering detonation problems.
He said that he did not want to run an x86 chip on his computer. It was "too bad for him" because a non-x86 desktops and workstations are getting increasingly harder to get and he will certainly need to upgrade sometime in the future as we all will need to, and probably have little choice but to go to an x86 chip. Apple is also not going to support PowerPC forever, so I bet that will at least nudge him to get a new computer when the support stops for PPC.
:D ) OS X is much more a "clicky" GUI than KDE is and I am much more a keyboard-and-text fan, but I get around okay in it anyway, especially with there being an xterm that has some of the same functionality out of the box as a Linux terminal does. I do not like Windows at all at work as the computers are about 2 years old and have to be loaded up to the gills with anti-*ware programs to not get infected with crud, so they are slower than frozen molasses. Excel cannot handle the data sets that I get and use, and Word's table functionality sucks compared to OpenOffice Writer's. There is also no real MS Office answer to OO Draw, unless you count PowerPoint, but that is not a drawing program and the IT guys "only" bought MS Office Std. so there is no Visio. However, the IT guys pretty much will not install anything (such as R or OpenOffice) that isn't vendor-supported and cost a large sum for licenses but is a needed tool for the job. At least in Macs I can double-click a .dmg image and run an app from my USB stick as a user in most cases.
I have limited experience with OS X on the desktop. I used to use System 6 and OS 7 machines all the time when I was younger, but after that, Apple seemed to go into its doldrums and I saw few to no Apples around until the G4 line and OS X came out. I use Linux on the desktop and use it at work (I had to build a computer there to do that on and administer it all myself, but they gave me the funds and the permission to if it would make me more productive- and it did
Too bad for you that Apple is moving to x86. Looks like you're going to have to move to a flavor of UNIX or Linux on an IBM Power-based server, HP PA-RISC workstation, Sun or Fujitsu SPARC server, an Itanium server, or run one of those 1 GHz PowerPC 7447-based Pegasos desktops. Or you could possibly hack an old PDA to run Linux on its ARM9-based chip, and the best ones are 624 MHz XScales. So the bottom line is that x86 is very dominant in the personal computing and workstation/smaller server segment. You only see non-x86 chips anymore in embedded devices and in larger servers or some more esoteric workstations, such as the PA-RISC. I do not know why you dis x86 so much- sure, it's kind of a hack with CISC x86 instructions mixed with RISC-like vector ops in the SSE instructions feeding a RISC backend. But the hack seems to work pretty well as tests have shown that the fastest PPC 970 "G5" CPUs are not quite as fast as the AMD Opterons and the Power4s are FAR slower. The Sun UltraSPARC T1 generally also falls behind the Opterons and some Xeons too. (Source: Anandtech and Tom's Hardware Guide.) Itanics have decent FP performance but it is VERY brutal on the compiler to do branch prediction to run worth a darn as the chip has no out-of-order execution. So is the Cell, which nobody actually sells yet.
Hong Kong had only been capitalist since 1841 because Britain owned them up until 1999. And there is a HUGE difference between "overtly" and "at all." And anyway, who's going to tell Beijing to play by its rules? Nobody in China will, that's for sure!
This is *China.* They have been indoctrinating people and telling them ratting to The Party on their neighbors is grand since 1949. This is nothing new.
Computer software of a similar vintage will all run pretty much the same if set up similarly (i.e. something like SuSE 10 with a full KDE or GNOME desktop vs. XP SP2.) I had both Linux and Windows XP on this laptop for a couple of years and SuSE with a full KDE DE seemed maybe a little faster than XP. However, I suspect the "it runs better" came from Linux handling heavier multitasking better than the XP does- you can switch between open programs without 5 seconds to redraw the screens and such. But for general use with a load 3, they perform rather similarly. Linux also tends to use less RAM than Windows of the same vintage and setup- my laptop now runs Gentoo 2006.0 and the full KDE DE, and it uses about 90MB RAM at idle, and Windows takes up roughly 170 MB, more like 280 with the antivirus and antispyware apps loaded in the background.
Also, one can slim down Linux a lot by running a very minimal DE or just using the CLI, which is not an option on later Windows versions. However then Linux running TWM or FVWM is not exactly the same functionality as Windows XP or a Linux with a full GNOME or KDE DE either and it really isn't an apples-to-apples comparison anymore. It would be like comparing Windows CE's RAM usage to a 4-way 64-bit Linux server's RAM usage. But that option to cut stuff out is there and has been taken advantage of, although the advantage is more a reduction in hard drive space usage (KDE, Gnome aren't little) than RAM usage.