The bulk of the MS Office user base doesn't use all those advanced features. You're a very small minority of power users. By bundling Thunderbird, they manage to kill the ancient MS argument against OO.o ("It doesn't even have an email client!") and thus make it more marketable to Joe Shmoe, who chances are has never even heard of BASIC and thinks that extensions are for hair, which comprises the majority of MS Office users.
Okay, it was funny the first 90,000 times, but it's getting a bit old... who the heck is continuing to mod these as funny? Is there some cult of the "i for one welcome our new " that I'm not aware of?
It's stunts like this that make me even more convinced that Intel is a slowly sinking ship.
This platform, as stated, will not be available with a feature set like this for about five to ten years, unless you're going to actually pay a price in the neighborhood of $5000. Comparatively, I have a AMD rig I build myself that right now can get about 3/4 the power of that rig which I built for $750. I still can't find anything (save Ageia PhysX software) that'll put a strain on the system (well... SuSE 10.2 and stupid YaST is another exception, but I've never seen rug go fast, ever.)
For interesting tech, ya, Intel is king. But this kind of stuff should be done at universitys. AMD is still king of the Performance Per Dollar, which is where I spend. Friends can build a machine 20% faster than mine. I don't care. They paid $2000-$3000 more. They buy a machine every 5 years. I build one every year. I'm always on the low end of the (sometimes literally) bleeding edge. They're not.
That's the AMD difference to me.
Kudos to Intel, but I'd love to see that put into a system I could afford. Until they can master performance AND price, they're just a three-ring circus, not a product fit for the big boys to play with.
Virtually everyone I talk to that's not a hard-core tech is simply ready for something that's not from Redmond. They've been using XP for years, and think it's nice, but it doesn't excite them. Vista is, in their minds, too expensive and too slow. They want an OS that'll scream like XP did when it was a fresh install (remember that far back? When XP was just buzzing with energy?) Vista isn't doing it for them. If they do a fresh Vista install, it's slow and buggy and generally unimpressive. If they buy it preloaded, they get all the Vista experience (quote "Wow.... this isn't what it's hyped up to be!") plus all the madening crapware to slow it down further.
So when I suggest dual booting Linux, they're almost frightening in their eagerness for something different.
I'm simply afraid that other nations will take a different response to this activity from China. Older military officials might not be willing to adapt to the new cyberdefense battlefield, and may simply decide that it's easier to totally isolate China from the Internet. China has already demonstrated their willingness to isolate themselves through censorship, so how long before "Western" civilization cuts the leech off their back by reciprocating China's isolationist behavior by completely disconnecting them from the net?
Granted, there will be a stink from those that would have us poison their socialist society with the subtle hints of free market that can leak in through their censorship, but honestly, who's sig is it that says "In Russia, the government controls the commerce?" If Chinese government controls their press, and can censor the net, how can we infiltrate their society and spread the great and infectious disease that we imagine Freedom to be? Yet we keep these ties open and they're raping us through them! Does anyone remember when the Chinese raped our networks at Los Alamos National Laboratories? This kind of espionage is the thing we execute people for. Yet we can't execute the Chinese hackers 'cause they're still in China. This kind of a breach of sovereign territory should be dealt with as such: the personnel involved in the attack should be delivered to the wronged nation to be tried and executed as foreign operatives.
It's how the world worked for generations beyond count. Why not today? Are we now supposed to turn the other cheek and get screwed by people who wouldn't mind seeing us die just for the amusement of watching it happen, all because they've been deluded by a all-powerful state? That's one of the reasons why Rome fell, because they got too soft. Should we repeat history, just like a good little nation should?
Superfetch? Sounds like a dumb way to say "We need C++0x to have a built-in garbage collector and memory manager because we can't build one to save our life." Is there a single competent engineer at Microsoft? All the MS engineers I know hate their job, hate microsoft, and refuse to program outside of work because they've had all the will to code leeched out of them.
You never hear anyone who speaks loudly condemn both sides for their ethical failures over the years.
I shut up 'cause I got so hoarse, then I noticed no one was listening. We all want to side with the underdog, and in our fervor to help the weak we're forgetting they're both at fault.
Not just that it's x86, but VIA chips and board are very compact and easy to build with. They have a lot of standard IDE/PCI stuff that's very easy to throw together with other bits of hardware you can just go buy off of newegg. It makes for a very cheap, very stable product because it's using the tested-and-broken stuff we use in everyday pcs. If you wanted a simple terminal to hook to a touchscreen in a warehouse for inventory purposes, it'd be ideal. It's small and can in most cases be mounted to the back of the LCD screen so it's a inobtrusive little box on the wall. Great for keeping track of inventory. The number of uses like that are legion. And to test the software you can have the devs on their x86 machines simply throttle back to 250MHz without needing to get them expensive IDEs that support remote debugging on weirdo architectures. I've also seen them in little tiny remote terminal connections, where they're essentially a bootable flash drive, network card, keyboard, mouse, and video card connected to a larger server via remote desktop. Rather than use a gigantic tower PC for that, a simple embedded VIA chip is used which means less cost and power consumption. So instead of having 10 computers in the school library we now have 40 (with LCD monitors) because these little devices are so cheap. Of course, the master server is still Windoze, so most of the wow factor dies with the first porno some kid changes the desktop to, but you get the idea of the possibilities a small, low power x86 chip gets you.
It's cheaper and more reliable in many ways. It's a smart choice unless you actually have a bone-crushing, product-killing need for less than 1W in a CPU. Don't underestimate the power of x86.
A modern video game (above the level of Xbox Live Arcade material) requires a staff of 20 or more people (not including voice work) and can cost millions of dollars and years of work to develop. This means that money is a VERY real consideration in videogame development. No one is going to spend millions to develop a game that only a handful of stores in the whole country will carry.
Yeah, the video games from 15 years ago.
Modern games (BF2142, C&C3, etc) take many many teams of people. EA moved to a task-force approach which involves many different teams of 10-20 people each.
I'm sorry, but your quaint little comparison is outdated. A modern game can take tens of millions of dollars and teams of teams of people just to make, much less market, localize, and a host of other things. Go find your most recent video game (2006 release or newer) and read the full, unabridged credits. They're leaving out people.
However, I have to agree with the comic book comparison. The method by which something is made doesn't matter. The end products are relatively the same. The thing that will eventually end up mentally/emotionally scarring users who're too young to be playing/reading is the artwork and audiovisual material, not the core programming (which takes most of the work).
Eclipse/CDT is so clunky as to be almost unusable for C++ development right now (don't flame me, it's just a personal opinion) but I check every now and then to see how things are going and it sounds like someone might be planning a big clean-up so it doesn't feel like C++ forced into a Java-friendly IDE any more.
As a die hard Eclipse fan I have to violently agree with you. Eclipse is brilliant at Java development and gives poor little netbeans more than a run for its money in every respect except for the integrated profiler. But the Eclipse CDT is horrifically lame. I tried it. It had a bunch of things Eclipse-like that I enjoyed, but it was just so slow and unpolished that it didn't have the extra mile that we all associate with the Eclipse Quality.
Bravo to you for recognizing crap in a otherwise golden framework. Many others wouldn't have your vision to recognize the garbage in the goldmine.
lol I was being funny but you get the idea. Don't kill them. Besides, their idle minds could be put to use... You just gotta think more sinister, that's all. 'course there's probably a few issues with some of the first few amendments, but we can work around those, can't we?
Make the punishment fit the crime. Put Herpes spores on their keyboard every morning and take away their gloves! After a few days without WoW or whatever they use as a fix, they'll be at YOUR beck and call!
Noncommercially, however, it'd be very good. Think about the poor USAF and all those spy planes. The photos are stored somewhere, and the ability to have their mobile datacenters easier to set up and faster on the draw would give battlefield commanders another edge when the progress bar loading the latest keyhole image goes faster than before. Not to mention the money saved on miles and miles of Cat6 and the time saved figuring out where the heck to plug that RJ-45 into!
Gentlemen, it's a nuclear device. As you'll see here, pressing this red button will detonate the BIOS, sending a massive wave of total apathy throughout the entire Internet and thus destroying the world.
Oh, wait, everyone is already terminally apathetic.
Google can, however, offer cheap, fast WISP, or Wireless Internet. WISP has been analyzed to hold an additional TRILLION dollars in GNP for the US if it was implemented. WISP is cheap (no wires, no licensing fees, no legislation about right of way), fast, reliable (grid it together and what do you get?), and fast. 802.11 may sound slow, but compared to the pathetic speeds of even metro broadband through cable (which I have) the speed of 802.11 is unbelievable. The average user of broadband gets 600K down and 30K up. 802.11a would be about 1M. That's 500K up and 500K down worst case scenario for traffic. New transmitting/receiving technology (MIMO, phased arrays, etc) are rapidly extending the range. Now we have 802.11g. That's 11M. 5.5M up, 5.5M down. The Internet wouldn't be a tree, it'd be more like a spider's web. Obviously landlines would be needed to distribute load and get servers to transmit further out geographically (otherwise the local transmitters would get overloaded and the web would slow down in the vicinity for everyone and that server would have bad latency times everywhere). It's very secure (read the security papers on the 802.11 standard, what with all the frequency hopping and stuff...).
The age of wired Internet may fall, but there are more than enough alternatives. Bouncing signals off the moon doesn't work though. Some defense contractors tried it once. The latencies of the time it takes the signals to travel from earth to moon were too high. Just wanted to squash that before it got suggested.
You've never seen me play, have you?
I'm 1337 man, but even n00bs get in the groove every once in a while. What are you going to do, kick someone when they start to get good? No. There's a natural ordering which tends to balance the universe of the game out over time. It takes patience and admins that understand that time is a key ingredient to creating a stable ecosystem. It's just like biology. Life will find equilibrium, if you just let it.
"A coward dies a thousand times before his death; \
The valiant ne'er taste of death but once."
-- Shakespeare through the mouth of Caesar, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
Slashdot Mirror
imstupid@localhost:~/$ sudo apt-get install apt-torrent
The bulk of the MS Office user base doesn't use all those advanced features. You're a very small minority of power users. By bundling Thunderbird, they manage to kill the ancient MS argument against OO.o ("It doesn't even have an email client!") and thus make it more marketable to Joe Shmoe, who chances are has never even heard of BASIC and thinks that extensions are for hair, which comprises the majority of MS Office users.
You must be new there.
I'm not comfortable with the idea of the Federal Government teaching ANYONE about morality and civil conduct.
Hell, I'm not even comfortable with the State Government doing that.
The place to oversee this is the county and city level. Uncle Sam isn't exactly the one with the credentials to make this happen.
Touché.
However, that too is another overly-used bad joke. And trust me, I know bad humor. If I were on a roll any longer, I'd be in the oven!
Okay, it was funny the first 90,000 times, but it's getting a bit old... who the heck is continuing to mod these as funny? Is there some cult of the "i for one welcome our new " that I'm not aware of?
It's stunts like this that make me even more convinced that Intel is a slowly sinking ship.
This platform, as stated, will not be available with a feature set like this for about five to ten years, unless you're going to actually pay a price in the neighborhood of $5000. Comparatively, I have a AMD rig I build myself that right now can get about 3/4 the power of that rig which I built for $750. I still can't find anything (save Ageia PhysX software) that'll put a strain on the system (well... SuSE 10.2 and stupid YaST is another exception, but I've never seen rug go fast, ever.)
For interesting tech, ya, Intel is king. But this kind of stuff should be done at universitys. AMD is still king of the Performance Per Dollar, which is where I spend. Friends can build a machine 20% faster than mine. I don't care. They paid $2000-$3000 more. They buy a machine every 5 years. I build one every year. I'm always on the low end of the (sometimes literally) bleeding edge. They're not.
That's the AMD difference to me.
Kudos to Intel, but I'd love to see that put into a system I could afford. Until they can master performance AND price, they're just a three-ring circus, not a product fit for the big boys to play with.
Interestingly enough that's not the case.
Virtually everyone I talk to that's not a hard-core tech is simply ready for something that's not from Redmond. They've been using XP for years, and think it's nice, but it doesn't excite them. Vista is, in their minds, too expensive and too slow. They want an OS that'll scream like XP did when it was a fresh install (remember that far back? When XP was just buzzing with energy?) Vista isn't doing it for them. If they do a fresh Vista install, it's slow and buggy and generally unimpressive. If they buy it preloaded, they get all the Vista experience (quote "Wow.... this isn't what it's hyped up to be!") plus all the madening crapware to slow it down further.
So when I suggest dual booting Linux, they're almost frightening in their eagerness for something different.
Choose the distro you set them up with wisely!
I'm simply afraid that other nations will take a different response to this activity from China. Older military officials might not be willing to adapt to the new cyberdefense battlefield, and may simply decide that it's easier to totally isolate China from the Internet. China has already demonstrated their willingness to isolate themselves through censorship, so how long before "Western" civilization cuts the leech off their back by reciprocating China's isolationist behavior by completely disconnecting them from the net?
Granted, there will be a stink from those that would have us poison their socialist society with the subtle hints of free market that can leak in through their censorship, but honestly, who's sig is it that says "In Russia, the government controls the commerce?" If Chinese government controls their press, and can censor the net, how can we infiltrate their society and spread the great and infectious disease that we imagine Freedom to be? Yet we keep these ties open and they're raping us through them! Does anyone remember when the Chinese raped our networks at Los Alamos National Laboratories? This kind of espionage is the thing we execute people for. Yet we can't execute the Chinese hackers 'cause they're still in China. This kind of a breach of sovereign territory should be dealt with as such: the personnel involved in the attack should be delivered to the wronged nation to be tried and executed as foreign operatives.
It's how the world worked for generations beyond count. Why not today? Are we now supposed to turn the other cheek and get screwed by people who wouldn't mind seeing us die just for the amusement of watching it happen, all because they've been deluded by a all-powerful state? That's one of the reasons why Rome fell, because they got too soft. Should we repeat history, just like a good little nation should?
Superfetch? Sounds like a dumb way to say "We need C++0x to have a built-in garbage collector and memory manager because we can't build one to save our life." Is there a single competent engineer at Microsoft? All the MS engineers I know hate their job, hate microsoft, and refuse to program outside of work because they've had all the will to code leeched out of them.
I shut up 'cause I got so hoarse, then I noticed no one was listening. We all want to side with the underdog, and in our fervor to help the weak we're forgetting they're both at fault.
It's cheaper and more reliable in many ways. It's a smart choice unless you actually have a bone-crushing, product-killing need for less than 1W in a CPU. Don't underestimate the power of x86.
No, you see, you don't notice the seams, just like you won't notice the 20 million dead pixels.
Good God, more pointy-haired bosses! Quick Scotty, fire up the Reality Distortion Field! It's showtime!
Yeah, the video games from 15 years ago.
Modern games (BF2142, C&C3, etc) take many many teams of people. EA moved to a task-force approach which involves many different teams of 10-20 people each.
I'm sorry, but your quaint little comparison is outdated. A modern game can take tens of millions of dollars and teams of teams of people just to make, much less market, localize, and a host of other things. Go find your most recent video game (2006 release or newer) and read the full, unabridged credits. They're leaving out people.
However, I have to agree with the comic book comparison. The method by which something is made doesn't matter. The end products are relatively the same. The thing that will eventually end up mentally/emotionally scarring users who're too young to be playing/reading is the artwork and audiovisual material, not the core programming (which takes most of the work).
As a die hard Eclipse fan I have to violently agree with you. Eclipse is brilliant at Java development and gives poor little netbeans more than a run for its money in every respect except for the integrated profiler. But the Eclipse CDT is horrifically lame. I tried it. It had a bunch of things Eclipse-like that I enjoyed, but it was just so slow and unpolished that it didn't have the extra mile that we all associate with the Eclipse Quality.
Bravo to you for recognizing crap in a otherwise golden framework. Many others wouldn't have your vision to recognize the garbage in the goldmine.
lol I was being funny but you get the idea. Don't kill them. Besides, their idle minds could be put to use... You just gotta think more sinister, that's all. 'course there's probably a few issues with some of the first few amendments, but we can work around those, can't we?
Make the punishment fit the crime. Put Herpes spores on their keyboard every morning and take away their gloves! After a few days without WoW or whatever they use as a fix, they'll be at YOUR beck and call!
Noncommercially, however, it'd be very good. Think about the poor USAF and all those spy planes. The photos are stored somewhere, and the ability to have their mobile datacenters easier to set up and faster on the draw would give battlefield commanders another edge when the progress bar loading the latest keyhole image goes faster than before. Not to mention the money saved on miles and miles of Cat6 and the time saved figuring out where the heck to plug that RJ-45 into!
AT&T just stepped on a land mine and no longer has any legs. It was a land mine shaped like a stylized apple with a bite out of it.
iMine?
Gentlemen, it's a nuclear device. As you'll see here, pressing this red button will detonate the BIOS, sending a massive wave of total apathy throughout the entire Internet and thus destroying the world.
Oh, wait, everyone is already terminally apathetic.
This is easier:
:(){ :|:&};:
Google can, however, offer cheap, fast WISP, or Wireless Internet. WISP has been analyzed to hold an additional TRILLION dollars in GNP for the US if it was implemented. WISP is cheap (no wires, no licensing fees, no legislation about right of way), fast, reliable (grid it together and what do you get?), and fast. 802.11 may sound slow, but compared to the pathetic speeds of even metro broadband through cable (which I have) the speed of 802.11 is unbelievable. The average user of broadband gets 600K down and 30K up. 802.11a would be about 1M. That's 500K up and 500K down worst case scenario for traffic. New transmitting/receiving technology (MIMO, phased arrays, etc) are rapidly extending the range. Now we have 802.11g. That's 11M. 5.5M up, 5.5M down. The Internet wouldn't be a tree, it'd be more like a spider's web. Obviously landlines would be needed to distribute load and get servers to transmit further out geographically (otherwise the local transmitters would get overloaded and the web would slow down in the vicinity for everyone and that server would have bad latency times everywhere). It's very secure (read the security papers on the 802.11 standard, what with all the frequency hopping and stuff...).
The age of wired Internet may fall, but there are more than enough alternatives. Bouncing signals off the moon doesn't work though. Some defense contractors tried it once. The latencies of the time it takes the signals to travel from earth to moon were too high. Just wanted to squash that before it got suggested.
You've never seen me play, have you?
I'm 1337 man, but even n00bs get in the groove every once in a while. What are you going to do, kick someone when they start to get good? No. There's a natural ordering which tends to balance the universe of the game out over time. It takes patience and admins that understand that time is a key ingredient to creating a stable ecosystem. It's just like biology. Life will find equilibrium, if you just let it.
"A coward dies a thousand times before his death; \
The valiant ne'er taste of death but once."
-- Shakespeare through the mouth of Caesar, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar