It won't work for me; the PC that uses the TV as a monitor runs Linux. Besides, there is so much free and legal TV on the internet, why pay for the same thing?
Biggest pain would be using a keyboard and mouse
My keyboard sits on a shelf, I haven't touched it in months. In fact, the batteries are dead. There's very little that I can't do with a mouse on it (yay Linux!), and the mouse works well on the arm of the couch and takes less room than a remote.
Huh?? PCs were around before the IBM PC, although they were called "microcomputers" back then. The IBM PC was a hit because IBM designed and manufactured it, and the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". IBM pretty much wiped out every other microcomputer manufacturer except Apple after that, for almost ten years when Compaq cloned IBM's BIOS and produced a faster, more full-featured, cheaper PC that would run all the programs IBM's PC did.
IBM PCs never locked customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, and in fact there were a whole lot of companies selling memory, hard drives, video cards, etc. for it. These spare parts were always commodities, and as soon as Compaq came along you could put an IBM board into a Compaq and vice-versa with no problem whatever.
You're confusing their PCs with their mainframes, which do lock customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, but so did every other mainframe maker.
In short, you're 100% incorrect, kid. Ask your grandpa first next time.
I guess Alice was a thirteen year old, too. Come to think of it, looking at the linked transcript* again, they both sound like teenagers.
* Ten years ago I pitted my bot, Artificial Insanity (written in 1983 on a computer with 16k of memory) against Alice, an internet-based chatbot. The link it to my writeup of the conversation.
I have to agree about Customerspliotation and Blogosphere. The guy who coined "blogosphere" got what he deserved, last I heard he was homeless. Lets hope whatever dimwit coined customerspliotation comes to his senses, but I doubt it.
A pro photographer isn't going to do well with Linux at all, it isn't the OS for her. She'd be better off with a Mac.
But why would one NEED Word? I have yet to see a Word document that Oo wouldn't open easily and render well, despite MS's efforts to thwart them.
But one way or another, why should they run an OS that lacks they prefered applications
They shouldn't, but they are in the minority.
Linux has great browsers, but great applications are really far and few in between.
I can't agree; is there a Windows media player that will fetch the lyrics of a playing song and display them? If so I haven't found it.
If I were a professional photographer or gamer I'd have to put up with Windows idiosyncrasies, or more likely run dual-boot and boot into Linux when I needed that app that isn't available.
What got me to Linux and keeps me there is speed (Linux is way faster), not having to run AV (yes, small market share is one reason), not having to reboot every week and every time I want to install a program, not having to remember what I was working on when I restart it after deciding to shut down and then remember what the hell I was doing before shutting down (Linux comes up as it was when you shut it down unless you set it not to), not having to enter a password on startup and still having it protected by password, being able to network with my Wn7 Home OS without having to have an expensive copy of Win 7 Pro on the network, a file manager that isn't completely retarded, the absense of that damned registry, less memory requirements, fault-tolerance of hardware (Windows will choke on flaky hardware while Linux chugs merrily along), better media players (Winamp is OK but Windows' native player sucks donkey balls, Aramok and XMMS are excellent but won't run on Windows iinm), and most of all, having the computer act like I want it to act instead of how some damned stranger halfway across the continent wants it to act.
I saw this in the firehose and RTFA (yeah, I know, so sue me). It led me to look up the new mineral on wikipedia (not much there) and the Chinese God that it was named after. Interstingly, the Chinese genesis legend is incredibly similar to the Judeo-Christian/Muslim Genesis.
Odd how so many ancient religions world-wide from completely different and isolated parts of the world can be so similar. The Chinese legand even has counterparts in many native American religions.
I was just a little let down by the "new mineral" though, it's very similar and related to other minerals fairly common on earth. It's a form of titanium oxide, which is used in pigments and has been for a long time.
So same as today then? The phone company, which is the phones owner, gives a command and the phone obeys by turning in the carriers position.
Well, that's the thing, they sold it, I bought and paid for it, I own it. They may have pwned it, but I own it. It should listen to me, not the carrier (unless I tell it to listen to the carrier).
No apologogy needed, I'm not exactly your average geezer;)
If I want access to Discovery, NatGeo or BBC documentaries and programmes I want those and nothing else.
And they're all on the internet, free and legal.
It would be better for everyone if I could pay and access the content directly [at a fair price].
Indeed. I bought the first 4 seasons of The Big Bang Theory on DVD; I torrented season 5 because it isn't for sale. I'll probably buy the DVDs when they come on sale, but then I could change my mind, too.
You dislike MS because their goal is to make software that is intuitive on and individual-based, even though the applications are widely distributed?
I dislike MS because whatever their goal, their software is far from intuitive and is NOT individual-based. "The Microsoft way or no way" isn't individual-based, it's "one size fits all" and the only size it fits is the lowest common denominator.
And they have made a lot of progress
I certainly haven't seen it with win 7. What progress? It is probably less fragile than Windows used to be, but they've gone competely backwards with the file manager, desktop search, and the control panel since XP (which was a vast improvement over 98).
Well you already have your answer, he is living the American way of life. The ability to do that was probably the reason he legally migrated here.
Which is completely beside the point. It doesn't matter if it's a 10th generation American or Saudi immigrant, if someone steals from you (whether or not such theft is legal) you're not going to have a very good opinion of him, and you're not going to speak favorably of him. I speak similarly about the fucking thieves that run the banking system, none of them are immigrants.
Speaking English is not a requirement at all to migrate to US.
No, but it's certainly required to actually have a life here, and if you don't speak English it's only natural to assume that you're either a tourist (quite all right) or and illegal (not all right at all). If the clerk in a convinience store tells you "No habla Englis" it's a damned good sign that he's not here legally (whether or not he is).
So? It's still a shortened url, completely unneeded at/. unless you're trying to trick someone into visiting somewhere they don't want to go -- especially something like goo.gl/maps or bi.ng/maps. If it wasn't some sort of scam or troll, it would simply be maps.google.com.
Give me one good reason why goo.gl would be legit?
However... what is harm? Do we mean just physical harm? Emotional harm? If a robot does a job that a human used to do, has he harmed that human? If he dispenses a drug to a human that has side effects, is that harm?
Why are you asking this on slashdot when you can simply read Asimov's books? He only wrote a few more than 500 of them, and only a dozen or two have robots. Your questions are all answered in I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots (later released as a single volume).
its unrealistically high level to be useful.
Well, they still haven't discovered positronics...
Forget "do no harm to any human". The robot should engender the trust of its authorized operator, and it should, to the best of its abilities, not betray that trust
I've seen that, but I don't think it's racism. When I've seen it, the hate comes from the immigrant selling his wares at triple the normal price because his customers have no other store and he acts like a total ass.
And it's annoying as hell when you go into a store and the clerk doesn't speak a word of English, but these folks aren't likely to be here legally. When I lived in Florida I was glad I knew Spanish, because there were far too many store clerks who couldn't speak the language of the country they were living in. Hell, I learned Thai when I went to Thailand, even though I was only there a year. It seems retarded to visit a country whose language you don't even speak a smattering of.
TFS: "speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons."
I'm not all that familiar with Apple, but KDE is head and shoulders above Windows 7 (I use them both). How are they "losing competetiveness" to MS? Win 98 and XP they had excellent search capabilities, now it's nearly useless. The interface for the Control Panel is a mess, and things that should be there (like shutting off "tap to click" on a laptop) aren't. When you shut off the computer, KDE comes back up just as you left it, with all the documents and browser tabs re-opened. That annoys me greatly every patch Tuesday when I'm working on a bunch of stuff and don't want the programs closed (KDE will come back as close as possible as it was even when the power goes out).
I don't have a clue what this guy's talking about, I guess I'll have to log on to his blog when I get home, because honestly, I don't get it.
As to the year of Linux on the desktop, that was 2002 for me. But I'd probably never done much more than fiddle with Linux had I not gotten so exasperated by MS's user-hostile "MS way or it can't be done". Windows' only advantage is it's prettier than KDE.
A single robot will keep on going, theoretically, whereas humanity will grow and change and adapt and evolve.
The last robot in the galaxy was R. Daneel Olivaw, who was 20,000 years old when Hari Seldon developed psychohistory, and lived only another 500 years before he was no longer repairable. I'm guessing there isn't much evolution in humans in 20k years (at least, in the Asimov universe, despite the fact that he was a biochemist).
Bluetooth was very useful on my last two phones. It was the easiest way to send photos and home movies and backups of the address book and sound recordings to the computer, since neither phone had wifi. It works fine for those purposes, the dongle I had to get for the PC was worth the $20.
I'm sending a bluetooth dongle to my daughter for her computer, since her iPhone has wifi but it can't be used for sharing files with her computer (had a conversation with her about that the other night, she has no internet access except for the phone and I suggested tethering via wifi. It won't work, according to her).
Why would RIAA do that? They love people creating the stuff, as long as they get a cut of the action.
That's the problem in a nutshell; nobody needs the RIAA to record and album any more, nor to popularize it. That's why the RIAA was always against CD burners and file sharing sites; they are used by RIAA labels' competetion, the indies.
When my daughter was a teenager (she's 25 now), she bought very little RIAA fare, instead going for indie stuff and even local bands (she was into ska and punk, like her friends).
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison.
I seeded the book I wrote, BT is the only place it's available (unless I email it to you). I also share a few Linux distros, Star Wreck, and movies that the makers want shared.
I've never encountered a legit use for it.
That's because you're a fucking dumbass with a two digit IQ who doesn't belong her. Now go away, MAFIAA shill.
Wrong. Two examples of species that have destroyed their own habitats are the Snow Goose and Whitetail Deer of Kaibab National Park. A third was the first primitive early species, which destroyed the entire Earth's ecology by producing the deadly chemical "oxygen."
I'm still trying to get the Second Law. Do what the $#! I told you, you stupid !@#$!
You misunderstand computers (yes, a smartphone is just a computer with a radio). Computers never do what you want them to, they do what you tell them to -- which isn't always what you want them to.
Of course, that doesn't stop Microsoft from trying (and failing miserably) to write their OSes and apps to do what you want instead of what you tell them (the main reason I dislike MS software).
I've been sampling vinyl for years, and burning it to CD (and then ripping those CDs to ogg). There are a whole lot of albums that sound WAY better in vinyl format, mostly because of the compression but partly because of CD's limitations (and the sound engineers' limitations).
It's ironic, because CDs have a greater dynamic range than LP, but LPs usually have more dynamics, as well as a better frequency response (this is usually due to the engineer overcompensating as well as viny's superior response). Led Zeppellin's Presence not only has a greater dynamic range on LP, it has a greater range of frequencies, and the CD ironically has far less bass. I attribute this to the fact (ok, speculation) that while most Zeppelin LPs had two dozen engineers working on it, when they remastered it thay got one kid straight out of college.
Of course, when you take the analog master and digitize it, you're going to get the worst of both worlds. Rather than remastering the old analog recordings, I'd like to see them take the master tape that fed the vinyl cutter, run it through an RIAA equalizer (every stereo with a phono output has one) and simply sample the result.
I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly
Well, CDs have no noise and a better dynamic range, but try to discern the difference between a 15kHz sine wave and a 15kHz sawtooth wave with only three samples per crest. It's mathematically impossible (Nyquist's "perfect" only works with infinite samples, not unlike Sheldon's hypothetical spherical cow).
Of course, I even sample the ones that have been chewed up badly, not wanting to give those RIAA rat bastards any more of my hard earned cash to replace them).
Driving isn't a right, it's a privelege. Of course, I'm of the opinion that internet access shouldn't be a right, either. Food and health care? Of course. But internet? One can survive quite easily without the internet, but not without food or health care.
Slashdot Mirror
Also on a more serious note: Netflix
It won't work for me; the PC that uses the TV as a monitor runs Linux. Besides, there is so much free and legal TV on the internet, why pay for the same thing?
Biggest pain would be using a keyboard and mouse
My keyboard sits on a shelf, I haven't touched it in months. In fact, the batteries are dead. There's very little that I can't do with a mouse on it (yay Linux!), and the mouse works well on the arm of the couch and takes less room than a remote.
Huh?? PCs were around before the IBM PC, although they were called "microcomputers" back then. The IBM PC was a hit because IBM designed and manufactured it, and the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". IBM pretty much wiped out every other microcomputer manufacturer except Apple after that, for almost ten years when Compaq cloned IBM's BIOS and produced a faster, more full-featured, cheaper PC that would run all the programs IBM's PC did.
IBM PCs never locked customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, and in fact there were a whole lot of companies selling memory, hard drives, video cards, etc. for it. These spare parts were always commodities, and as soon as Compaq came along you could put an IBM board into a Compaq and vice-versa with no problem whatever.
You're confusing their PCs with their mainframes, which do lock customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, but so did every other mainframe maker.
In short, you're 100% incorrect, kid. Ask your grandpa first next time.
13 year olds don't spell that well.
I guess Alice was a thirteen year old, too. Come to think of it, looking at the linked transcript* again, they both sound like teenagers.
* Ten years ago I pitted my bot, Artificial Insanity (written in 1983 on a computer with 16k of memory) against Alice, an internet-based chatbot. The link it to my writeup of the conversation.
Customerspliotation? Are you fucking kidding me? Blogosphere was bad enough.
You'd hate my stratodoober then!
I have to agree about Customerspliotation and Blogosphere. The guy who coined "blogosphere" got what he deserved, last I heard he was homeless. Lets hope whatever dimwit coined customerspliotation comes to his senses, but I doubt it.
A pro photographer isn't going to do well with Linux at all, it isn't the OS for her. She'd be better off with a Mac.
But why would one NEED Word? I have yet to see a Word document that Oo wouldn't open easily and render well, despite MS's efforts to thwart them.
But one way or another, why should they run an OS that lacks they prefered applications
They shouldn't, but they are in the minority.
Linux has great browsers, but great applications are really far and few in between.
I can't agree; is there a Windows media player that will fetch the lyrics of a playing song and display them? If so I haven't found it.
If I were a professional photographer or gamer I'd have to put up with Windows idiosyncrasies, or more likely run dual-boot and boot into Linux when I needed that app that isn't available.
What got me to Linux and keeps me there is speed (Linux is way faster), not having to run AV (yes, small market share is one reason), not having to reboot every week and every time I want to install a program, not having to remember what I was working on when I restart it after deciding to shut down and then remember what the hell I was doing before shutting down (Linux comes up as it was when you shut it down unless you set it not to), not having to enter a password on startup and still having it protected by password, being able to network with my Wn7 Home OS without having to have an expensive copy of Win 7 Pro on the network, a file manager that isn't completely retarded, the absense of that damned registry, less memory requirements, fault-tolerance of hardware (Windows will choke on flaky hardware while Linux chugs merrily along), better media players (Winamp is OK but Windows' native player sucks donkey balls, Aramok and XMMS are excellent but won't run on Windows iinm), and most of all, having the computer act like I want it to act instead of how some damned stranger halfway across the continent wants it to act.
The Panguin... half man... half penguin
Already here... don't pacemakers run Linux?
I saw this in the firehose and RTFA (yeah, I know, so sue me). It led me to look up the new mineral on wikipedia (not much there) and the Chinese God that it was named after. Interstingly, the Chinese genesis legend is incredibly similar to the Judeo-Christian/Muslim Genesis.
Odd how so many ancient religions world-wide from completely different and isolated parts of the world can be so similar. The Chinese legand even has counterparts in many native American religions.
I was just a little let down by the "new mineral" though, it's very similar and related to other minerals fairly common on earth. It's a form of titanium oxide, which is used in pigments and has been for a long time.
So same as today then? The phone company, which is the phones owner, gives a command and the phone obeys by turning in the carriers position.
Well, that's the thing, they sold it, I bought and paid for it, I own it. They may have pwned it, but I own it. It should listen to me, not the carrier (unless I tell it to listen to the carrier).
No apologogy needed, I'm not exactly your average geezer ;)
If I want access to Discovery, NatGeo or BBC documentaries and programmes I want those and nothing else.
And they're all on the internet, free and legal.
It would be better for everyone if I could pay and access the content directly [at a fair price].
Indeed. I bought the first 4 seasons of The Big Bang Theory on DVD; I torrented season 5 because it isn't for sale. I'll probably buy the DVDs when they come on sale, but then I could change my mind, too.
You dislike MS because their goal is to make software that is intuitive on and individual-based, even though the applications are widely distributed?
I dislike MS because whatever their goal, their software is far from intuitive and is NOT individual-based. "The Microsoft way or no way" isn't individual-based, it's "one size fits all" and the only size it fits is the lowest common denominator.
And they have made a lot of progress
I certainly haven't seen it with win 7. What progress? It is probably less fragile than Windows used to be, but they've gone competely backwards with the file manager, desktop search, and the control panel since XP (which was a vast improvement over 98).
Well you already have your answer, he is living the American way of life. The ability to do that was probably the reason he legally migrated here.
Which is completely beside the point. It doesn't matter if it's a 10th generation American or Saudi immigrant, if someone steals from you (whether or not such theft is legal) you're not going to have a very good opinion of him, and you're not going to speak favorably of him. I speak similarly about the fucking thieves that run the banking system, none of them are immigrants.
Speaking English is not a requirement at all to migrate to US.
No, but it's certainly required to actually have a life here, and if you don't speak English it's only natural to assume that you're either a tourist (quite all right) or and illegal (not all right at all). If the clerk in a convinience store tells you "No habla Englis" it's a damned good sign that he's not here legally (whether or not he is).
We're talking about perception here.
So? It's still a shortened url, completely unneeded at /. unless you're trying to trick someone into visiting somewhere they don't want to go -- especially something like goo.gl/maps or bi.ng/maps. If it wasn't some sort of scam or troll, it would simply be maps.google.com.
Give me one good reason why goo.gl would be legit?
You can live without a thyroid; my grandmother had hers removed at age 40 and lived another 60 years afterward.
However... what is harm? Do we mean just physical harm? Emotional harm? If a robot does a job that a human used to do, has he harmed that human? If he dispenses a drug to a human that has side effects, is that harm?
Why are you asking this on slashdot when you can simply read Asimov's books? He only wrote a few more than 500 of them, and only a dozen or two have robots. Your questions are all answered in I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots (later released as a single volume).
its unrealistically high level to be useful.
Well, they still haven't discovered positronics...
Forget "do no harm to any human". The robot should engender the trust of its authorized operator, and it should, to the best of its abilities, not betray that trust
I said the same thing in an earlier comment.
I've seen that, but I don't think it's racism. When I've seen it, the hate comes from the immigrant selling his wares at triple the normal price because his customers have no other store and he acts like a total ass.
And it's annoying as hell when you go into a store and the clerk doesn't speak a word of English, but these folks aren't likely to be here legally. When I lived in Florida I was glad I knew Spanish, because there were far too many store clerks who couldn't speak the language of the country they were living in. Hell, I learned Thai when I went to Thailand, even though I was only there a year. It seems retarded to visit a country whose language you don't even speak a smattering of.
TFS: "speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons."
I'm not all that familiar with Apple, but KDE is head and shoulders above Windows 7 (I use them both). How are they "losing competetiveness" to MS? Win 98 and XP they had excellent search capabilities, now it's nearly useless. The interface for the Control Panel is a mess, and things that should be there (like shutting off "tap to click" on a laptop) aren't. When you shut off the computer, KDE comes back up just as you left it, with all the documents and browser tabs re-opened. That annoys me greatly every patch Tuesday when I'm working on a bunch of stuff and don't want the programs closed (KDE will come back as close as possible as it was even when the power goes out).
I don't have a clue what this guy's talking about, I guess I'll have to log on to his blog when I get home, because honestly, I don't get it.
As to the year of Linux on the desktop, that was 2002 for me. But I'd probably never done much more than fiddle with Linux had I not gotten so exasperated by MS's user-hostile "MS way or it can't be done". Windows' only advantage is it's prettier than KDE.
Maybe this guy's fishing for a job at MS?
I agree, I've always said that hip-hop is 21st century disco (even if hip hop did start in the 1970s but was underground for two decades).
A single robot will keep on going, theoretically, whereas humanity will grow and change and adapt and evolve.
The last robot in the galaxy was R. Daneel Olivaw, who was 20,000 years old when Hari Seldon developed psychohistory, and lived only another 500 years before he was no longer repairable. I'm guessing there isn't much evolution in humans in 20k years (at least, in the Asimov universe, despite the fact that he was a biochemist).
See Foundation and Earth.
Bluetooth was very useful on my last two phones. It was the easiest way to send photos and home movies and backups of the address book and sound recordings to the computer, since neither phone had wifi. It works fine for those purposes, the dongle I had to get for the PC was worth the $20.
I'm sending a bluetooth dongle to my daughter for her computer, since her iPhone has wifi but it can't be used for sharing files with her computer (had a conversation with her about that the other night, she has no internet access except for the phone and I suggested tethering via wifi. It won't work, according to her).
Why would RIAA do that? They love people creating the stuff, as long as they get a cut of the action.
That's the problem in a nutshell; nobody needs the RIAA to record and album any more, nor to popularize it. That's why the RIAA was always against CD burners and file sharing sites; they are used by RIAA labels' competetion, the indies.
When my daughter was a teenager (she's 25 now), she bought very little RIAA fare, instead going for indie stuff and even local bands (she was into ska and punk, like her friends).
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison.
I seeded the book I wrote, BT is the only place it's available (unless I email it to you). I also share a few Linux distros, Star Wreck, and movies that the makers want shared.
I've never encountered a legit use for it.
That's because you're a fucking dumbass with a two digit IQ who doesn't belong her. Now go away, MAFIAA shill.
Yes, but that requires something no hip-hop band has ever had -- musical talent.
Wrong. Two examples of species that have destroyed their own habitats are the Snow Goose and Whitetail Deer of Kaibab National Park. A third was the first primitive early species, which destroyed the entire Earth's ecology by producing the deadly chemical "oxygen."
I'm still trying to get the Second Law.
Do what the $#! I told you, you stupid !@#$!
You misunderstand computers (yes, a smartphone is just a computer with a radio). Computers never do what you want them to, they do what you tell them to -- which isn't always what you want them to.
Of course, that doesn't stop Microsoft from trying (and failing miserably) to write their OSes and apps to do what you want instead of what you tell them (the main reason I dislike MS software).
I've been sampling vinyl for years, and burning it to CD (and then ripping those CDs to ogg). There are a whole lot of albums that sound WAY better in vinyl format, mostly because of the compression but partly because of CD's limitations (and the sound engineers' limitations).
It's ironic, because CDs have a greater dynamic range than LP, but LPs usually have more dynamics, as well as a better frequency response (this is usually due to the engineer overcompensating as well as viny's superior response). Led Zeppellin's Presence not only has a greater dynamic range on LP, it has a greater range of frequencies, and the CD ironically has far less bass. I attribute this to the fact (ok, speculation) that while most Zeppelin LPs had two dozen engineers working on it, when they remastered it thay got one kid straight out of college.
Of course, when you take the analog master and digitize it, you're going to get the worst of both worlds. Rather than remastering the old analog recordings, I'd like to see them take the master tape that fed the vinyl cutter, run it through an RIAA equalizer (every stereo with a phono output has one) and simply sample the result.
I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly
Well, CDs have no noise and a better dynamic range, but try to discern the difference between a 15kHz sine wave and a 15kHz sawtooth wave with only three samples per crest. It's mathematically impossible (Nyquist's "perfect" only works with infinite samples, not unlike Sheldon's hypothetical spherical cow).
Of course, I even sample the ones that have been chewed up badly, not wanting to give those RIAA rat bastards any more of my hard earned cash to replace them).
Driving isn't a right, it's a privelege. Of course, I'm of the opinion that internet access shouldn't be a right, either. Food and health care? Of course. But internet? One can survive quite easily without the internet, but not without food or health care.