That's actually pretty interesting - As it says that about 50% of the users with the packages installed are using it.
Higher than I'd have imagined.
I very much doubt that 50% of Ubunto users actually use the so called cloud especially since the the report states 1 million users have subscribed. Basically that means only 2million people in the world are Ubunto users (what rubbish!). If you believe the shoddy reporting Journalists been saying for over 10 years, that is "Linux has only 1% of the PC market" then I suppose most ill informed people would believe that.
If you would like better statistics about PC Linux use try here. Simply put, there are between 10 and 20 million Fedora users world wide and I would assume there are between 3 and 6 Ubunto users for every Fedora user and I have not taken into account the other distros which could double or even triple that figure again. It must be noted that I am being extremely conservative in my figures which if you work it out results in active Linux PC usage between 50 and 100 million world wide which is much much more than the 1% we keep hearing from the media.
Getting back on topic for one million Ubunto users subscribing to the "cloud" I would assume only 1 in 40 would actually subscribe which is more in-line with what would be world wide usage of Ubunto. Stating 50% is definitely wrong. Of course with shoddy technical Journalism reporting today if you say something enough times then people will eventually believe you and this suits certain monopolies.
The HDMI royalty is $0.04 USD per device and has an annual fee of $10,000 for high-volume manufacturers. The Display port cable is royalty free however it appears that Display port cables are more expensive than the equivalent length HDMI cable by between 20% and 40% (do a price comparison if you don't believe me). Yes I am sure the HDMI consortium are ripping off the public:)
I was wondering about this too. Aren't HDMI to DVI cables pretty common? Why didn't this come up before?
The HDM spec supports audio as well (the 1.4 spec also supports Ethernet) while DVI only supports video. Still that normally is not an issue with PC graphics cards..
There are five HDMI types altogether (ie. A through E). In the majority of cases most people would only see the type A connector which is 19 pins, however what can be confusing are the specs which are 1 to 1.2a, 1.3 to 1.3c and 1.4 and 1.4a. Basically if you have a 1.0 to 1.2a spec you are ok on 720p but you may have trouble with 1080p. With the 1.3a on spec you should be fine with 1080p and even 1080p 3D (The first Playstation 3 had a 1.3a spec HDMI connector and works fine with 1080p 3D TV's).
The 1.4 spec has exactly the same basic spec as 1.3a to 1.3c but supports ethernet and 4k by 2k screen resolution (If these exist they won;t be cheap).
A simple guide to choosing HDMI cables for just about all HD TV's (includes 3D) is, if you have a 1.3a and above spec you should be ok although I would limit your cable length to between 1 and 3 meters. Most new HDMI cables are normally labelled as "HDMI high speed" (1.3a to 1.3c spec) or "HDMI high speed with ethernet" (1.4 and 1.4a spec). Paying more than $10 to $25 (US or Australian) for a 2 meter HDMI cable is wasting money because you won't see any difference in performance.
Not always so easy with netbooks, especially when the manufacturors haven't suppied the re-install OS.
In my experience you won't get a re-install disk with your shiny new PC (laptop desktop, netbook or whatever) although you do in the majority of cases get MS Windows (now MS Windows 7). When you fire up MS Windows for the first time you agree to "sell your soul" ^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H:) then after you finally fire up your OS you should be prompted to make a recovery DVD (only once mind you, you greedy bastard) which can take well over an hour and you have to hope that the disk does not get damaged over the life of the machine.
The first thing I did when I got my nice shiny laptop was to use "Clonezilla" to create an image of the disk to my backup disk and then installed Fedora on the machine. I have never looked back or even felt the need to re-install MS Windows 7 and I actually use my machine for my work as well as using it for home use.
My son's fiance put Fedora on her netbook and everything she wants to do actually works, although if you are an avid gamer you may have issues but who buys games for "Windows" for a netbook?
Apparently you've never worked in big IT, where software must be thoroughly tested before being rolled out.
Yes I have and still do work for Fortune 500 companies. As for testing software you have to be kidding, unless said company has access to the source and can control roll-outs which most can't, all the company can do is advise it's desktop staff not to upgrade for a few weeks. With regard to servers the IT department does have some control and possibly do some testing but in the majority of cases upgrades whether you are running Linux, MS Windows or Unix you still have to put some trust in the vendor since an upgrade may not be that simple to do.
Firefox for the desktop is just an application and if there is a problem it can be deleted easily. Worrying about the change to version numbering in Firefox is really being paranoid and IMHO stupid. if someone came to me stating that this is a problem I would politely tell them they have more to worry about using MS Windows than a web browser.
BTW I actually use my own personal laptop running Fedora 15 in the workplace and I don't have any problems working with people who are still locked into MS Windows. Upgrading to the latest release of Chrome or Firefox is not an issue with me. Also Fedora 15 to 16 when it comes out takes approx 1:30 hour to do a fresh install without destroying my data and I can continue to work if I wont while the OS gets the latest delta updates.
I actually use LibreOffice in my job and in the majority of cases it works really well although on occasion (ie..docx) the Writer does not display everything properly. I even tried to use my virtual machine with MS Office 2003 and could not read the.docx file properly. Thank goodness for Google docs which allows me to save as a pdf file.
You wouldn't believe how many systems I have worked on that have anti-virus installed that came with the system but hasn't been updated since the free trial expired. I really wish manufacturers would stop shipping systems with anti-virus software that is only good for 60 days. Almost nobody ever pays for the subscription after the trial expires.
Yes I would believe since the PC's I have brought came with the wonderful 60 day virus scanner trial. My latest laptop (HP dv7 i7) came with Windows 7 however I just blew it away and installed Fedora 14 (now 15) and I use this machine for home and corporate use.
Before people say that using a private machine in a corporate environment can aid in espionage I would answer yes it can, but unless the firm you work for provides a corporate machine you have no choice but to use your own. Anyway there are so many other devices (smart phones, usb sticks, portable disk drives...) that can better aid in corporate espionage.
Maybe people should have to register their PC before they connect it to the Internet?? Maybe people should have to get a license to use a PC on the Internet? It might reduce the carnage on our roads ^H^H^H^H^H^H^ Internet....
Excuse me while I press my brown uniform and shine my jackboots, the DRM people are making me work overtime again:)
Yes, because there's never a legitimate reason to send/receive executables. My university does this stripping crap and it's annoying as hell. They even yank out archive files. I eventually had to switch to Gmail from the university system, because I would send a colleague a zip file and they would email me back that I forgot to send an attachment (or vice-versa).
A better option than blindly modifying emails is to look for virus signatures in the files. At least that way, you're only eliminating the things that are known to be harmful.
Yes we do know that is a a problem but "think of the children":)
On a more serious note. The best way is to take off the.exe or.zip or.whatever and send the binary as a simple file or even enclose the binaries in an compressed archive and take off the extension so you can send it. The problem is the person who is going to receive the binary must know how to put it into a format that is usable and it is amazing the number of people who have no idea how to do this even when you explicitly tell them in the email.
Actually I use Gmail as my main mailer and can easily operate in Corporate environments. The only issue I have in the particular place I working at the moment is the firewall stops my Kmail client so I just use Web Gmail during the day and when I get home i transfer all mail to my local folders.
One thing I did neglect to mention is that it far easier to lockdown a BD disk than it is to lockdown a solid state disk and Nintendo as well as all other vendors wants to protect against piracy. Even in OEM quantities games on solid state disks (ie. cartages if you like) will still be more expensive than games on disk media such as Bluray or DVD and that will still be the case many years down the time track. I will concede that solid state disk could be a replacement for spinning disks on a console (you can do that now with the PS3) and that does make quite a good deal of sense since you would be able to dramatically improve the performance of a game (if that is necessary) that comes on either DVD or BD format. Even games using digital downloads can have dramatically improved performance when downloaded to a solid state disk however capacity and mean time between failure (spinning disk media is still more reliable) is going to be an issue.
As I have said before one of the big factors in choosing a high performance but smaller capacity solid state disk over a lower performance but much higher reliability and higher capacity spinning disk is price. I think it will still be many years before solid state disks can economically replace spinning disk media.
Note: Tests have been carried out with replacing the disk in the PS3 with a solid state disk and there was very little noticeable difference in performance although that would most likely be due to the game design.
Discs aren't fast anymore. Solid state drives/cartridges are cheap now, and much much faster.
Err no. Solid state disk are not cheap when it come to comparing against a 25 GB or even 50 GB BD disk. Go and price a 16 GB flash rom against a 25 GB BD disk there is a huge difference in price. Even if you compare a solid state disk drive against a conventional disk drive the conventional drive wins in all factors (especially price per GB) except performance and in the case of a gaming machine is not that important.
If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.
Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.
The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick.
Not quite true. People normally have quite long lives if there is adequate clean water and the facilities to dispose of waste properly (this translate to good hygiene), of course a good medical service does go a long way in extending life but the first two are more important. Actually the industrial revolution lowered the average human life expectancy because of pandemics, excessive pollution and unsafe drinking water, but there were profits to make and who cares about the unwashed masses when you live comfortably. Fortunately in society today especially in first world counties there is nothing like a vote looser when your own middle class which normally can be very powerful is suffering health issues.
Actually the graph does not quite tell the whole truth since if you have say 100 people on the planet living to say 5000 years and the rest of the population only living to say 25 years (the graph) then the average age is still 25 years. Ok that was extreme but say you have a civilization that that has clean water and good sanitation and the average life expectancy was say 80 years but the rest of the known world had a life expectancy of say 25 years then the overall live expectancy of the world would still be about 25 years.
I don't run any anti virus software on my MS Win XP virtual machine. If anything goes wrong I can reinstall in about 10 minutes. Backups take about the same time, however I rarely use MS Windows since Fedora does everything I need and that includes my work environment. The predominate thing I use MS Windows for is iTunes since my wife has an iPhone and on occasion she wants a personalised ring tone. Even when I use my Virtual MS Windows I rarely use IE and if I do it is only to download tools that are Microsoft centric that are on rare occasions essential for my work
And please let it stay that way. I swear, if Linux ever changes the behavior of selecting+middle click I will switch to Windows. That feature alone is just so freaking awesome. For all the mouse-addicts, like me: just select a text, drag your mouse, middle click and you have copy&pasted it.
Actually Unix has had this on Graphical displays for over 30 years. Since Linux got a GUI the same method of copy and paste is also used (about 15 years). Actually double left mouse click selects a word and triple click selects a line although I rarely use the triple click.
Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. They really don't give you any more work space than having all your windows piled up on one desktop - specially if you've got a small screen
If you find multiple desktops a pain then don't use them. As for a virtual desktop that is bigger than your physical screen I think "fvwm" still supports that. Personally under KDE I have 4 multiple desktops and can add or subtract them in less than 3 seconds. I can even open up a multiple desktop view and slide any GUI applications between sessions. Forget which GUI app is in which desktop you can display all applications on the screen at once in a very logical way that makes selection easy, to do this I setup hot corners which takes less then a second to activate. Of course i can also setup "Cover Switch " that will give me a much more functional display (all apps or apps per desktop) than what MS Windows 7 offers. Don't like KDE then use Gnome or fvwm or some other session manager, after all it is your choice.
I actually use a 17 inch laptop and find I can actually have over 20 active GUI windows spread across 4 desktops and can easily manage them. I can connect my laptop to one or more monitors and have my display desktop session spread across screens. MS Windows can do this as well although natively it can't do multiple desktops. At least with Linux/Unix you can customise to what you like.
I definitely agree to your comments. It is very easy to configure "Dolphin" to something approaching Microsoft's file browser the question to ask is why? when you can customize it to something that is IMHO much more usable than the Microsoft offering. Of course as many have said before there are other ways of browsing under Linux if you wish, at least you have the choice.
Most people who use Microsoft's file browser for the first time initially see a huge (about a third) waste of space and have to configure the browser to something that is much more streamlined. Doing this can take quite some time and you either have to get that information from someone or read the help files (in Linux/Unix land "RTFM"). Using a Linux distribution is no different than using MS Windows, however it can take some time to get use too if you come from a MS Windows background.
As far as I am concerned people who look down on on Linux or even Unix applications saying "It is not like Windows" really aught to grow up and remember that they still had to learn MS Windows initially since no one is born with the Microsoft gene.:)
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
Both processors for the PS3 and the XBox360 are stripped down and modified versions of the IBM 970 PowerPC. The PS3 uses one CPU (two threads) while the XBox 360 uses three CPU's (6 threads), however the PS3 also has eight SPEs on the chip, but only seven of them handle processing. So effectively the XBox 360 actually does use a very similar CPU as the PS3 but it does not use SPE's.
That's assuming that mobile phones don't become more powerful than consoles.
Not likely. Even assuming that is a possibility the only machines that would be under threat would be the handhelds and even this can be debated. The main problems with any portable device are it's screen size and it's controls, so when comparing a handheld against a console or PC with much, much larger screen size and extensive control's then there is no contest.
Compare say a mobile smartphone against handhelds such as the Nintendo and Sony offerings, again there is not that much of a contest since the handhelds have dedicated buttons (soft or hard) that are not on the screen which in itself is IMHO a pain since the screen eventually gets marked. This is not to say mobiles cannot be a gaming platform, they can, but their games are no way as sophisticated as those on a handheld or even a console or PC. Of course if you like games such as "Angry Birds" then a mobile smart phone is fine. I know you can get adventure games for the mobile smart phone but IMHO the controls sux. I have a HTC Desire HD and my wife has an iPhone 4 and I have yet to see a game for those machines that can compete with console, handheld.or even PC games.
But I hear people say, it may possibly plug your smartphone into a HD TV via (wired or wireless) and possibly add peripheral devices such as keyboard and mouse. Great, assuming this is done your mobile smartphone is now a console but you still won't be able the play more sophisticated games when the phone is disconnected from it's peripherals or HD screen unless the laws of physics suddenly allow you to put a 40" or bigger HDTV in your pocket. So in summing up, mobile smartphones, handhelds, consoles and PC's all offer different levels of gaming sophistication and to compare mobile games against console or PC games is just pointless.
I have to admit, I'm a little bit excited to see our country move forward with this.
However, I will maintain a healthy level of trepidation until it actually passes.
I agree, I am not holding my breath on this until the classification passes.
I found it rather stupid that video game classifications did not have the similar Video classifications, those being, G for "General Exhibition", PG "Parental Guidance", M, for "Mature Audiences"; and R18+ "Restricted to 18 and above". The highest Game classification is MA15+ which IMHO is stupid. For more details see here . The X18+ classification for film is interesting especially since kids can view pornography on-line.
Basically all these classifications still don't absolve parents from policing what their child can and cannot watch although reasonable ratings do help parents make informed decisions but unfortunately many parents appear to distance themselves from parenting preferring to let Government and so called moral groups dictate that.
I do run this on my Fedora 14 i7 laptop and don't have any issues with it, in fact XP on my machine boots in about 20 seconds although it still takes up to a minute before I can do anything. One really good feature of virtual MS Windows is the fact that I can recover in about 15 minutes so I don't care about virus protection although I am careful about which sites I connect to and because I am running a virtual machine there are very few sites need connect to, because I do all my web browsing on Firefox or Chrome (latest version) running under Linux.
In my case the only use for Win XP that I have found is to bring up the iTunes application for my wife's iPhone since Apple does not have a version for Linux (surprise, surprise). Fortunately I have an Android phone and so don't need the iTunes application so it is rare I need to virtual boot XP. Still when my wife wants to change some things on her iPhone I can boot in a separate session window or just switch to her account
In my professional capacity I only use OpenOffice for MS Office documents when collaborating with customers and I have never found a reason to use MS Windows other than those rare applications that are so locked to MS Windows. Before people say "Games" I don't play PC games although I do have a PS3 which I do play games on. Of course my counter to "Games" in a profession capacity is you must have a very understanding workplace:)
There are no innocents, only those who are apathetic. If you're still putting money into Sony's pockets after the crap they've pulled then you are part of the problem and deserve to suffer along with Sony.
Well said now start boycotting Microsoft and Nintendo as well for all the "crap" they have pulled as well:)
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That's actually pretty interesting - As it says that about 50% of the users with the packages installed are using it.
Higher than I'd have imagined.
I very much doubt that 50% of Ubunto users actually use the so called cloud especially since the the report states 1 million users have subscribed. Basically that means only 2million people in the world are Ubunto users (what rubbish!). If you believe the shoddy reporting Journalists been saying for over 10 years, that is "Linux has only 1% of the PC market" then I suppose most ill informed people would believe that.
If you would like better statistics about PC Linux use try here . Simply put, there are between 10 and 20 million Fedora users world wide and I would assume there are between 3 and 6 Ubunto users for every Fedora user and I have not taken into account the other distros which could double or even triple that figure again. It must be noted that I am being extremely conservative in my figures which if you work it out results in active Linux PC usage between 50 and 100 million world wide which is much much more than the 1% we keep hearing from the media.
Getting back on topic for one million Ubunto users subscribing to the "cloud" I would assume only 1 in 40 would actually subscribe which is more in-line with what would be world wide usage of Ubunto. Stating 50% is definitely wrong. Of course with shoddy technical Journalism reporting today if you say something enough times then people will eventually believe you and this suits certain monopolies.
The HDMI royalty is $0.04 USD per device and has an annual fee of $10,000 for high-volume manufacturers. The Display port cable is royalty free however it appears that Display port cables are more expensive than the equivalent length HDMI cable by between 20% and 40% (do a price comparison if you don't believe me). Yes I am sure the HDMI consortium are ripping off the public :)
I was wondering about this too. Aren't HDMI to DVI cables pretty common? Why didn't this come up before?
The HDM spec supports audio as well (the 1.4 spec also supports Ethernet) while DVI only supports video. Still that normally is not an issue with PC graphics cards..
There are five HDMI types altogether (ie. A through E). In the majority of cases most people would only see the type A connector which is 19 pins, however what can be confusing are the specs which are 1 to 1.2a, 1.3 to 1.3c and 1.4 and 1.4a. Basically if you have a 1.0 to 1.2a spec you are ok on 720p but you may have trouble with 1080p. With the 1.3a on spec you should be fine with 1080p and even 1080p 3D (The first Playstation 3 had a 1.3a spec HDMI connector and works fine with 1080p 3D TV's).
The 1.4 spec has exactly the same basic spec as 1.3a to 1.3c but supports ethernet and 4k by 2k screen resolution (If these exist they won;t be cheap).
A simple guide to choosing HDMI cables for just about all HD TV's (includes 3D) is, if you have a 1.3a and above spec you should be ok although I would limit your cable length to between 1 and 3 meters. Most new HDMI cables are normally labelled as "HDMI high speed" (1.3a to 1.3c spec) or "HDMI high speed with ethernet" (1.4 and 1.4a spec). Paying more than $10 to $25 (US or Australian) for a 2 meter HDMI cable is wasting money because you won't see any difference in performance.
Not always so easy with netbooks, especially when the manufacturors haven't suppied the re-install OS.
In my experience you won't get a re-install disk with your shiny new PC (laptop desktop, netbook or whatever) although you do in the majority of cases get MS Windows (now MS Windows 7). When you fire up MS Windows for the first time you agree to "sell your soul" ^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H :) then after you finally fire up your OS you should be prompted to make a recovery DVD (only once mind you, you greedy bastard) which can take well over an hour and you have to hope that the disk does not get damaged over the life of the machine.
The first thing I did when I got my nice shiny laptop was to use "Clonezilla" to create an image of the disk to my backup disk and then installed Fedora on the machine. I have never looked back or even felt the need to re-install MS Windows 7 and I actually use my machine for my work as well as using it for home use.
My son's fiance put Fedora on her netbook and everything she wants to do actually works, although if you are an avid gamer you may have issues but who buys games for "Windows" for a netbook?
Apparently you've never worked in big IT, where software must be thoroughly tested before being rolled out.
Yes I have and still do work for Fortune 500 companies. As for testing software you have to be kidding, unless said company has access to the source and can control roll-outs which most can't, all the company can do is advise it's desktop staff not to upgrade for a few weeks. With regard to servers the IT department does have some control and possibly do some testing but in the majority of cases upgrades whether you are running Linux, MS Windows or Unix you still have to put some trust in the vendor since an upgrade may not be that simple to do.
Firefox for the desktop is just an application and if there is a problem it can be deleted easily. Worrying about the change to version numbering in Firefox is really being paranoid and IMHO stupid. if someone came to me stating that this is a problem I would politely tell them they have more to worry about using MS Windows than a web browser.
BTW I actually use my own personal laptop running Fedora 15 in the workplace and I don't have any problems working with people who are still locked into MS Windows. Upgrading to the latest release of Chrome or Firefox is not an issue with me. Also Fedora 15 to 16 when it comes out takes approx 1:30 hour to do a fresh install without destroying my data and I can continue to work if I wont while the OS gets the latest delta updates.
Canada still uses paper notes?!
"The USA and many countries world wide still uses paper notes" - There that fixed it :)
I actually use LibreOffice in my job and in the majority of cases it works really well although on occasion (ie. .docx) the Writer does not display everything properly. I even tried to use my virtual machine with MS Office 2003 and could not read the .docx file properly. Thank goodness for Google docs which allows me to save as a pdf file.
You wouldn't believe how many systems I have worked on that have anti-virus installed that came with the system but hasn't been updated since the free trial expired. I really wish manufacturers would stop shipping systems with anti-virus software that is only good for 60 days. Almost nobody ever pays for the subscription after the trial expires.
Yes I would believe since the PC's I have brought came with the wonderful 60 day virus scanner trial. My latest laptop (HP dv7 i7) came with Windows 7 however I just blew it away and installed Fedora 14 (now 15) and I use this machine for home and corporate use.
...) that can better aid in corporate espionage.
Before people say that using a private machine in a corporate environment can aid in espionage I would answer yes it can, but unless the firm you work for provides a corporate machine you have no choice but to use your own. Anyway there are so many other devices (smart phones, usb sticks, portable disk drives
Maybe people should have to register their PC before they connect it to the Internet?? Maybe people should have to get a license to use a PC on the Internet? It might reduce the carnage on our roads ^H^H^H^H^H^H^ Internet....
Excuse me while I press my brown uniform and shine my jackboots, the DRM people are making me work overtime again :)
Yes, because there's never a legitimate reason to send/receive executables. My university does this stripping crap and it's annoying as hell. They even yank out archive files. I eventually had to switch to Gmail from the university system, because I would send a colleague a zip file and they would email me back that I forgot to send an attachment (or vice-versa).
A better option than blindly modifying emails is to look for virus signatures in the files. At least that way, you're only eliminating the things that are known to be harmful.
Yes we do know that is a a problem but "think of the children" :)
.exe or .zip or .whatever and send the binary as a simple file or even enclose the binaries in an compressed archive and take off the extension so you can send it. The problem is the person who is going to receive the binary must know how to put it into a format that is usable and it is amazing the number of people who have no idea how to do this even when you explicitly tell them in the email.
On a more serious note. The best way is to take off the
Actually I use Gmail as my main mailer and can easily operate in Corporate environments. The only issue I have in the particular place I working at the moment is the firewall stops my Kmail client so I just use Web Gmail during the day and when I get home i transfer all mail to my local folders.
One thing I did neglect to mention is that it far easier to lockdown a BD disk than it is to lockdown a solid state disk and Nintendo as well as all other vendors wants to protect against piracy. Even in OEM quantities games on solid state disks (ie. cartages if you like) will still be more expensive than games on disk media such as Bluray or DVD and that will still be the case many years down the time track. I will concede that solid state disk could be a replacement for spinning disks on a console (you can do that now with the PS3) and that does make quite a good deal of sense since you would be able to dramatically improve the performance of a game (if that is necessary) that comes on either DVD or BD format. Even games using digital downloads can have dramatically improved performance when downloaded to a solid state disk however capacity and mean time between failure (spinning disk media is still more reliable) is going to be an issue.
As I have said before one of the big factors in choosing a high performance but smaller capacity solid state disk over a lower performance but much higher reliability and higher capacity spinning disk is price. I think it will still be many years before solid state disks can economically replace spinning disk media.
Note: Tests have been carried out with replacing the disk in the PS3 with a solid state disk and there was very little noticeable difference in performance although that would most likely be due to the game design.
Discs aren't fast anymore. Solid state drives/cartridges are cheap now, and much much faster.
Err no. Solid state disk are not cheap when it come to comparing against a 25 GB or even 50 GB BD disk. Go and price a 16 GB flash rom against a 25 GB BD disk there is a huge difference in price. Even if you compare a solid state disk drive against a conventional disk drive the conventional drive wins in all factors (especially price per GB) except performance and in the case of a gaming machine is not that important.
If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.
Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.
The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick.
Not quite true. People normally have quite long lives if there is adequate clean water and the facilities to dispose of waste properly (this translate to good hygiene), of course a good medical service does go a long way in extending life but the first two are more important. Actually the industrial revolution lowered the average human life expectancy because of pandemics, excessive pollution and unsafe drinking water, but there were profits to make and who cares about the unwashed masses when you live comfortably. Fortunately in society today especially in first world counties there is nothing like a vote looser when your own middle class which normally can be very powerful is suffering health issues.
Actually the graph does not quite tell the whole truth since if you have say 100 people on the planet living to say 5000 years and the rest of the population only living to say 25 years (the graph) then the average age is still 25 years. Ok that was extreme but say you have a civilization that that has clean water and good sanitation and the average life expectancy was say 80 years but the rest of the known world had a life expectancy of say 25 years then the overall live expectancy of the world would still be about 25 years.
Emulators are only used to play pirated games
Citation needed.
echo "Emulators are only used to play pirated games"| sed -e s,only,mainly,
:)
That should have fixed it.
I don't run any anti virus software on my MS Win XP virtual machine. If anything goes wrong I can reinstall in about 10 minutes. Backups take about the same time, however I rarely use MS Windows since Fedora does everything I need and that includes my work environment. The predominate thing I use MS Windows for is iTunes since my wife has an iPhone and on occasion she wants a personalised ring tone. Even when I use my Virtual MS Windows I rarely use IE and if I do it is only to download tools that are Microsoft centric that are on rare occasions essential for my work
And please let it stay that way. I swear, if Linux ever changes the behavior of selecting+middle click I will switch to Windows. That feature alone is just so freaking awesome. For all the mouse-addicts, like me: just select a text, drag your mouse, middle click and you have copy&pasted it.
Actually Unix has had this on Graphical displays for over 30 years. Since Linux got a GUI the same method of copy and paste is also used (about 15 years). Actually double left mouse click selects a word and triple click selects a line although I rarely use the triple click.
Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. They really don't give you any more work space than having all your windows piled up on one desktop - specially if you've got a small screen
If you find multiple desktops a pain then don't use them. As for a virtual desktop that is bigger than your physical screen I think "fvwm" still supports that. Personally under KDE I have 4 multiple desktops and can add or subtract them in less than 3 seconds. I can even open up a multiple desktop view and slide any GUI applications between sessions. Forget which GUI app is in which desktop you can display all applications on the screen at once in a very logical way that makes selection easy, to do this I setup hot corners which takes less then a second to activate. Of course i can also setup "Cover Switch " that will give me a much more functional display (all apps or apps per desktop) than what MS Windows 7 offers. Don't like KDE then use Gnome or fvwm or some other session manager, after all it is your choice.
I actually use a 17 inch laptop and find I can actually have over 20 active GUI windows spread across 4 desktops and can easily manage them. I can connect my laptop to one or more monitors and have my display desktop session spread across screens. MS Windows can do this as well although natively it can't do multiple desktops. At least with Linux/Unix you can customise to what you like.
I definitely agree to your comments. It is very easy to configure "Dolphin" to something approaching Microsoft's file browser the question to ask is why? when you can customize it to something that is IMHO much more usable than the Microsoft offering. Of course as many have said before there are other ways of browsing under Linux if you wish, at least you have the choice.
:)
Most people who use Microsoft's file browser for the first time initially see a huge (about a third) waste of space and have to configure the browser to something that is much more streamlined. Doing this can take quite some time and you either have to get that information from someone or read the help files (in Linux/Unix land "RTFM"). Using a Linux distribution is no different than using MS Windows, however it can take some time to get use too if you come from a MS Windows background.
As far as I am concerned people who look down on on Linux or even Unix applications saying "It is not like Windows" really aught to grow up and remember that they still had to learn MS Windows initially since no one is born with the Microsoft gene.
Sony admits to a massive strategic blunder? Nintendo retreats from their "casual=king" position?
Did Microsoft just "win" this generation?
No one has won this generation. It's not over yet.
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
Both processors for the PS3 and the XBox360 are stripped down and modified versions of the IBM 970 PowerPC. The PS3 uses one CPU (two threads) while the XBox 360 uses three CPU's (6 threads), however the PS3 also has eight SPEs on the chip, but only seven of them handle processing. So effectively the XBox 360 actually does use a very similar CPU as the PS3 but it does not use SPE's.
That's assuming that mobile phones don't become more powerful than consoles.
Not likely. Even assuming that is a possibility the only machines that would be under threat would be the handhelds and even this can be debated. The main problems with any portable device are it's screen size and it's controls, so when comparing a handheld against a console or PC with much, much larger screen size and extensive control's then there is no contest.
Compare say a mobile smartphone against handhelds such as the Nintendo and Sony offerings, again there is not that much of a contest since the handhelds have dedicated buttons (soft or hard) that are not on the screen which in itself is IMHO a pain since the screen eventually gets marked. This is not to say mobiles cannot be a gaming platform, they can, but their games are no way as sophisticated as those on a handheld or even a console or PC. Of course if you like games such as "Angry Birds" then a mobile smart phone is fine. I know you can get adventure games for the mobile smart phone but IMHO the controls sux. I have a HTC Desire HD and my wife has an iPhone 4 and I have yet to see a game for those machines that can compete with console, handheld.or even PC games.
But I hear people say, it may possibly plug your smartphone into a HD TV via (wired or wireless) and possibly add peripheral devices such as keyboard and mouse. Great, assuming this is done your mobile smartphone is now a console but you still won't be able the play more sophisticated games when the phone is disconnected from it's peripherals or HD screen unless the laws of physics suddenly allow you to put a 40" or bigger HDTV in your pocket. So in summing up, mobile smartphones, handhelds, consoles and PC's all offer different levels of gaming sophistication and to compare mobile games against console or PC games is just pointless.
I have to admit, I'm a little bit excited to see our country move forward with this. However, I will maintain a healthy level of trepidation until it actually passes.
I agree, I am not holding my breath on this until the classification passes.
I found it rather stupid that video game classifications did not have the similar Video classifications, those being, G for "General Exhibition", PG "Parental Guidance", M, for "Mature Audiences"; and R18+ "Restricted to 18 and above". The highest Game classification is MA15+ which IMHO is stupid. For more details see here . The X18+ classification for film is interesting especially since kids can view pornography on-line.
Basically all these classifications still don't absolve parents from policing what their child can and cannot watch although reasonable ratings do help parents make informed decisions but unfortunately many parents appear to distance themselves from parenting preferring to let Government and so called moral groups dictate that.
Linux PC running Virtual Box --> Windows XP
I do run this on my Fedora 14 i7 laptop and don't have any issues with it, in fact XP on my machine boots in about 20 seconds although it still takes up to a minute before I can do anything. One really good feature of virtual MS Windows is the fact that I can recover in about 15 minutes so I don't care about virus protection although I am careful about which sites I connect to and because I am running a virtual machine there are very few sites need connect to, because I do all my web browsing on Firefox or Chrome (latest version) running under Linux.
:)
In my case the only use for Win XP that I have found is to bring up the iTunes application for my wife's iPhone since Apple does not have a version for Linux (surprise, surprise). Fortunately I have an Android phone and so don't need the iTunes application so it is rare I need to virtual boot XP. Still when my wife wants to change some things on her iPhone I can boot in a separate session window or just switch to her account
In my professional capacity I only use OpenOffice for MS Office documents when collaborating with customers and I have never found a reason to use MS Windows other than those rare applications that are so locked to MS Windows. Before people say "Games" I don't play PC games although I do have a PS3 which I do play games on. Of course my counter to "Games" in a profession capacity is you must have a very understanding workplace
There are no innocents, only those who are apathetic. If you're still putting money into Sony's pockets after the crap they've pulled then you are part of the problem and deserve to suffer along with Sony.
Well said now start boycotting Microsoft and Nintendo as well for all the "crap" they have pulled as well :)