Anyone who dealt with business software knows what it is. Proprietary piece of code patched as hell to barely work (or appear to work), functioning just enough so it can be pitched to clueless CEO-s of various companies that have money to waste...
Unfortunately this is the case, and at the same time the e-mail protocol is simple, proven in time, open and the e-mail clients are used by millions of people world-wide and are simple, therefore reliable.
The cute little christian groups think that banning a dedicated porn domain will make it easier to ignore porn exists.
That's so naive I can't even begin to descrive how naive it is.
Life lesson: running away from an embarassing problem does not a problem resolve.
And also, what does porn consitute? Well how about making it constitute the most obvious types of explicit sex acts videos and images for starters that noone would confuse for "art"? It's a step in the right direction.
But noo, let's wait and DO NOTHING, until we can pinpoint the perfecto definition of porn! Great thinking, people..
First of all there's no infrastructure. There's a satelite dish attached to a UPS and a WiMax or alternative wifi technology spreading connectivity enough to power a small city from a single source.
The $100 laptops go further with p2p networking so you can deliver internet connectivity outside the hotspot.
This is the plan of Intel and MIT accordingly to deliver Internet in those areas. No single cable involved.
Second, come on, "competent teacher"? There are hardly any competent teachers in developed nations let alone non-developed ones. And any competent teacher will need to update himself from the Internet to stay current... So we're back to Internet connectivity.
"Seriously folks, stop the laptops-for-everyone circlejerk, and fix the real problems."
Do you expect Intel to work on fixing the polio vaccine and "stop the hysteria over genetically mofified foods"?
The people who work on these issues aren't just an entity called "folks", they are different organisations capable of addressing different issues. MIT and Intel are doing what they are specialised in: provide access to information, processing power.
Let's not nag them for doing what they can do, instead of what they can't.
"Quite frankly, people who keep pushing for computers to be put into 3rd world nations don't seem to actually visit the poorest (and hence the most populous parts) of those places."
Come on... all they need is a computer and a local Chrisitian church missionary base to teach them they are poor since they don't accept Christ. Right?... Right?
Black humor aside, computer *is* education. This is 2006, networking is not just for porn and chatting anymore, Internet is by far the fastest way to educate yourself on any kind of matter, and noone actually is claiming a computer will feed you or heal you, but it's still a critical component for getting the developing nation actually develop.
It would be nice if the $100 laptop could run Windows CE since it's closer to the most popular platform in the world (thus easing the porting of various educational tools and software), but then they wouldn't be $100...
In the web era I guess a capable web browser would do as well.
"Is it the same as the "XP-Compatible" 300 MHz Pentium 2 Processor with 128 MB ram? It will install, but not do much else?"
I've worked on refurbishing some old machines to run XP (SP2), and I'll have to tell you XP, IE/Firefox, Office 2003 runs pretty good on 300MHz Pentium 2 processors with 128 RAM.
"... if I created a piece of malicious code that just installs itself silently when inserting a CD via the auto run mechanism, you don't think there's an inherent design flaw in this scheme cause by the OS?"
Calling it "inherent design flaw" makes you sound so cool!:)
Well, noone forces people to run in admin mode, but they do, why? Because 3rd party software requires it. So Microsoft adressed that in Vista. Happy?
"First of all, you could make an argument that MS is at fault with the rootkit issue because of their own design decisions in the OS, and the complete failure to prevent these things from being so easily installed."
Actually rootkits originate from the Unix world, only later they were ported to Windows as an idea/technology.
Since your computer runs an OS, you can blame anything, anyhow at any time on the OS and therefore blaim Microsoft.
"It's very fashionable to mention how you'll be modded. A simple "I'm sure I'll get modded down but I don't care; I'll be a martyr for my views!" will usually get you a +4 or +5. I'll probably get modded a troll."
Though I didn't say "I'll be modded down but I don't care" I just said there are reasons to be modded up and down both based on trends:)
The result was predictable I was modded both up and down finishing where I started.
In a perfect world going here and expressing my personal opinion should cast me out if I'm against the flow, but.. well that's what we wanted, right, community based modding, that's what we got.
** User reads article title: "Sony More Trustworthy Than Microsoft" ** User happy level += 200 ** User sees he has 20 slash mod points ** User quickly scans the comments and mods down anyone who defends Microsoft ** User quickly scans the comments and mods up anyone who bashes Microsoft ** User feeling of accomplishment +=100 ** User gets bored and goes to check how the Fedora distro downloads are proceeding
We're talking trust here, not quality, bells and whistles.
If Sony's CEO says it's ok to have back door and resource eating spyware on your PC installed by music CD-s, since "you don't what it is therefore why care", they get A+.
Should I comment further at all?
Also, Microsoft will also get C or less, a trend started by tech geeks, Maccies and Linux fans, everyone loves to hate big corporations. A trend like this is hard to reverse even Microsoft turned perfect by tommorow. A bias is obvious even on this site.
I wonder now how I'll be modded. It's fashionable to rant on Sony for their rootkits, but totally uncool to defend Microsoft.
"He probably didn't know it because you obviously just made it up."
No I didn't just made it up, this is from the basics theory you learn in the business of branding and marketing, it's actually pretty interesting, there are studies about product categorisation and how people perceive brands, and how many brands in a certain category they can tell from their memory on the spot (the number is 7) and differentiation and so on.
When you read that you'll see it makes a perfect sense, and what Nintendo does suddenly falls perfectly in place.
"Translation: Nintendo knows that their specs can't hold a candle to the competition, so they make a point not to talk about it."
I'll let you know something you may not know. In every product category, there's always two top brands that fight about specs, speed and power. A third brand doesn't stand a chance to fight with those brands.
People buy stuff because it's the top brand, most ads, with most games, most popularity, most prestige.
Right now MS and SONY are on top of the consoles market. They are the big two brands. If Nintendo offered a product that is the same or even a bit better than what they offer, they still won't sell since they are brand three and seen as a lesser player by the consumers.
So let's see what the books say again... If you can't be brand one or two in product category X, differentiate, innovate and create a subcategory Y where you're brand number 1.
So, Nintendo doesn't compete with MS and SONY, they explore new technologies and markets and I try to be the top brand in their own niche. DS was an obvious step in that direction, and Revolution will be the culmination of that strategy.
You can nag about how stupid it is to support 10 year old games you may have, but many people don't have them, and certainly not on a single sweet console.
People who look for genuine entertainment don't look at specs, but value. "10 year old" is just a number, if the game is great, it doesn't matter how old it is.
One more point in case, by the way, have you noticed how ugly the graphics are in Katamary Damacy? I mean it looks like pre-PlayStation 1 right? But somehow this game is pretty popular.
"Except they don't. It'd be one thing if they had hardware capable of rendering hi-def graphics but restricted it to sd resolutions. But they didn't -- their graphics hardware is scaled back proportionally."
The PS3 and XBOX360 titles always render in highdef, this means even when you output on a TV you render at highdef and then downscale.
To get the highdef output adequate, you need better textures and a lot more polygons so it looks adequate on a higher resolution.
Then it gets downsampled and a lot of that detail is mostly lost for a regular TV.
Nintendo wanted highdef at once point, but they want cheap console "for the rest of us" a lot more, so their games are DESIGNED to run 480p.
At 480p, I suspect Revolution will be a match for XBOX360 and PS3, for the plain reason XBOX360 and PS4 has to work a lot harder to get that 480p image compared to what the Revolution does.
First of all: those numbers of course don't make sense, what's next, comparing CPU weights and color? Anyways.
Will Revolution be as powerful as XBOX360 and PS3, no, it can't handle highdef and this should tell a lot.
Thing is, once you remove high-def support, you suddenly have a lot horsepower left to render great imagery on a 480p / 480i device. So we can't say that Revolution games will look worse than XBOX360 games on an NTSC/PAL TV which most people have out there.
But scrap even that.
Do you think Nintendo accidentally missed the fact their console is slower? And what means this for a game anyway? Does it mean worse gameplay or experience? Nintendo apparently is confident in their vision, enough so not to get into the dick length comparison game Sony and Microsoft are doing with their machine specs.
I mean, they support NES/SNES/Genesis titles for Christ's sake, were those games crappy? They look GREAT on a TV screen, and some titles have gameplay unparalled in modern titles.
Also it has enough power and innovation for great new content, what could a gamer want? Value and entertainment or silly spec numbers?
"They'd be foolish to drop OSX support, since that would alienate a pretty large percentage of their customers who may drift to another application (possibly even an Apple graphics suite) rather than switch to Windows."
You're right they won't do it since their only advantage is being available on many platforms (they try to fight Vista WinFX with Flash Player as a rich client on the pure base Flash runs everywhere, while WinFX is just Windows).
However not all companies base their strategy on becoming THE platform of all computers out there (like Autodesk, which only has Windows versions of most of its products).
"Mac users may want to be able to run Windows, but they'll be damned if they're going to be told they have to."
The only reason they're happy to run it is because they have to, it's not as if Windows has a whole lot to offer to its userbase without the huge amount of 3rd party software working on it (well ok WinFX is changing this but I mean XP and earlier). OS is just the means, not the target.
Apple used to have proprietary architecture for most of the hardware they build, or use high end standards not common among consumer desktop PC-s.
They used to use SCSI for hard drives, but switched to IDE when it became close enough, they also switched to Intel chips like any PC can have.
One of the selling points used to be it's "guaranteed multimedia experience", for few years already every PC motherboard has stereo ot 5.1 surround sound built-in on the the motherboard.
They used to push Firewire, while still claiming they are firmly behind the standard, but their latest iPods ditched the Firewire in favor of USB which is good enough and simpler to implement as electronics.
They use the same video cards, hard drives, monitors, processor, chips, interfaces and ports...
There are plenty of elite PC manifacturers that make slick designs such as the recently purchased by DELL, Alienware computers.
Now they joined BAPCo, to pull their latest ace: OSX, the only thing remaining that makes them unique. We'll see a lot of tests proving how superior OSX is compared to Windows in terms of speed and reliability.
They lied before when they claimed G5 is the fastest CPU on Earth, they lied when they said the Intel chips are 2x faster than the G5 (I mean they lied at least one of the times, right), they'll feel right at home.
"You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking."
If you found out that your pinkie blinks green when you face south, and stand on one leg while reciting Romeo and Juliet, would you abandon everything, call the labs and be a lab rat for the next couple of years?
We still live in a society where the individual human rights are valued, even if this is bad for the society overall.
Thing is we're not all the same. You can be very sensitive to this sort of fields, but the majority of people aren't. You're alergic to electricity:P
The problem with those kind of studies is they are always skewed since they aren't truly independent, they are caused/sponsored/driven either by people who want to prove the subject of study is bad or who want to prove it's not bad.
Long term effects are very hard to measure, I mean some people are still arguing if evolution exists, since despite the facts, unless you see immediate obvious results it's easy to twist the research data and claim whatever you feel like.
And of course noone I heard of, caught cancer by talking on a cell phone for a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Where people deemed their protection and strength more important than mobility. Maybe it really is.
Or maybe just those suits brought a lot of money for the guys developing them.
Anyone who dealt with business software knows what it is. Proprietary piece of code patched as hell to barely work (or appear to work), functioning just enough so it can be pitched to clueless CEO-s of various companies that have money to waste...
Unfortunately this is the case, and at the same time the e-mail protocol is simple, proven in time, open and the e-mail clients are used by millions of people world-wide and are simple, therefore reliable.
"simply because the learning curve is too high. Hell, telephones intimidate them."
So your solution is give them some food and water and leave them be afraid of telephones.
But the actual solution is to educate kids to use computers so we don't have that sorry picture, this is the very reason this program exists.
Once the kids know how to use a computer, a whole new universe opens in front of them.
The cute little christian groups think that banning a dedicated porn domain will make it easier to ignore porn exists.
That's so naive I can't even begin to descrive how naive it is.
Life lesson: running away from an embarassing problem does not a problem resolve.
And also, what does porn consitute? Well how about making it constitute the most obvious types of explicit sex acts videos and images for starters that noone would confuse for "art"? It's a step in the right direction.
But noo, let's wait and DO NOTHING, until we can pinpoint the perfecto definition of porn! Great thinking, people..
First of all there's no infrastructure. There's a satelite dish attached to a UPS and a WiMax or alternative wifi technology spreading connectivity enough to power a small city from a single source.
The $100 laptops go further with p2p networking so you can deliver internet connectivity outside the hotspot.
This is the plan of Intel and MIT accordingly to deliver Internet in those areas. No single cable involved.
Second, come on, "competent teacher"? There are hardly any competent teachers in developed nations let alone non-developed ones. And any competent teacher will need to update himself from the Internet to stay current... So we're back to Internet connectivity.
"Seriously folks, stop the laptops-for-everyone circlejerk, and fix the real problems."
Do you expect Intel to work on fixing the polio vaccine and "stop the hysteria over genetically mofified foods"?
The people who work on these issues aren't just an entity called "folks", they are different organisations capable of addressing different issues. MIT and Intel are doing what they are specialised in: provide access to information, processing power.
Let's not nag them for doing what they can do, instead of what they can't.
"Quite frankly, people who keep pushing for computers to be put into 3rd world nations don't seem to actually visit the poorest (and hence the most populous parts) of those places."
... Right?
Come on... all they need is a computer and a local Chrisitian church missionary base to teach them they are poor since they don't accept Christ. Right?
Black humor aside, computer *is* education. This is 2006, networking is not just for porn and chatting anymore, Internet is by far the fastest way to educate yourself on any kind of matter, and noone actually is claiming a computer will feed you or heal you, but it's still a critical component for getting the developing nation actually develop.
It would be nice if the $100 laptop could run Windows CE since it's closer to the most popular platform in the world (thus easing the porting of various educational tools and software), but then they wouldn't be $100...
In the web era I guess a capable web browser would do as well.
"Is it the same as the "XP-Compatible" 300 MHz Pentium 2 Processor with 128 MB ram? It will install, but not do much else?"
I've worked on refurbishing some old machines to run XP (SP2), and I'll have to tell you XP, IE/Firefox, Office 2003 runs pretty good on 300MHz Pentium 2 processors with 128 RAM.
.. is just once a year, because I can hardly take more caps-only text with tons of exclamation marks and smilies.
"you say addressed as if it is past tense..
so where can I pick up a copy of this "Vista" of which you speak?"
Oh I'm sorry if software companies without present and working time machines are not up to your taste, you'll have to wait.
"... if I created a piece of malicious code that just installs itself silently when inserting a CD via the auto run mechanism, you don't think there's an inherent design flaw in this scheme cause by the OS?"
:)
Calling it "inherent design flaw" makes you sound so cool!
Well, noone forces people to run in admin mode, but they do, why? Because 3rd party software requires it.
So Microsoft adressed that in Vista. Happy?
"First of all, you could make an argument that MS is at fault with the rootkit issue because of their own design decisions in the OS, and the complete failure to prevent these things from being so easily installed."
Actually rootkits originate from the Unix world, only later they were ported to Windows as an idea/technology.
Since your computer runs an OS, you can blame anything, anyhow at any time on the OS and therefore blaim Microsoft.
It's so easy right?
"It's very fashionable to mention how you'll be modded. A simple "I'm sure I'll get modded down but I don't care; I'll be a martyr for my views!" will usually get you a +4 or +5. I'll probably get modded a troll."
:)
Though I didn't say "I'll be modded down but I don't care" I just said there are reasons to be modded up and down both based on trends
The result was predictable I was modded both up and down finishing where I started.
In a perfect world going here and expressing my personal opinion should cast me out if I'm against the flow, but.. well that's what we wanted, right, community based modding, that's what we got.
** User reads article title: "Sony More Trustworthy Than Microsoft"
** User happy level += 200
** User sees he has 20 slash mod points
** User quickly scans the comments and mods down anyone who defends Microsoft
** User quickly scans the comments and mods up anyone who bashes Microsoft
** User feeling of accomplishment +=100
** User gets bored and goes to check how the Fedora distro downloads are proceeding
Logged by GeekMind Reader DEMO
We're talking trust here, not quality, bells and whistles.
If Sony's CEO says it's ok to have back door and resource eating spyware on your PC installed by music CD-s, since "you don't what it is therefore why care", they get A+.
Should I comment further at all?
Also, Microsoft will also get C or less, a trend started by tech geeks, Maccies and Linux fans, everyone loves to hate big corporations. A trend like this is hard to reverse even Microsoft turned perfect by tommorow. A bias is obvious even on this site.
I wonder now how I'll be modded. It's fashionable to rant on Sony for their rootkits, but totally uncool to defend Microsoft.
"A suicide is not a light subject to be throwing it around like it's some joke..."
It's a game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(game)
"He probably didn't know it because you obviously just made it up."
No I didn't just made it up, this is from the basics theory you learn in the business of branding and marketing, it's actually pretty interesting, there are studies about product categorisation and how people perceive brands, and how many brands in a certain category they can tell from their memory on the spot (the number is 7) and differentiation and so on.
When you read that you'll see it makes a perfect sense, and what Nintendo does suddenly falls perfectly in place.
"Translation: Nintendo knows that their specs can't hold a candle to the competition, so they make a point not to talk about it."
I'll let you know something you may not know. In every product category, there's always two top brands that fight about specs, speed and power. A third brand doesn't stand a chance to fight with those brands.
People buy stuff because it's the top brand, most ads, with most games, most popularity, most prestige.
Right now MS and SONY are on top of the consoles market. They are the big two brands. If Nintendo offered a product that is the same or even a bit better than what they offer, they still won't sell since they are brand three and seen as a lesser player by the consumers.
So let's see what the books say again... If you can't be brand one or two in product category X, differentiate, innovate and create a subcategory Y where you're brand number 1.
So, Nintendo doesn't compete with MS and SONY, they explore new technologies and markets and I try to be the top brand in their own niche. DS was an obvious step in that direction, and Revolution will be the culmination of that strategy.
You can nag about how stupid it is to support 10 year old games you may have, but many people don't have them, and certainly not on a single sweet console.
People who look for genuine entertainment don't look at specs, but value. "10 year old" is just a number, if the game is great, it doesn't matter how old it is.
One more point in case, by the way, have you noticed how ugly the graphics are in Katamary Damacy? I mean it looks like pre-PlayStation 1 right? But somehow this game is pretty popular.
SPECS DO NOT MATTER.
"Except they don't. It'd be one thing if they had hardware capable of rendering hi-def graphics but restricted it to sd resolutions. But they didn't -- their graphics hardware is scaled back proportionally."
The PS3 and XBOX360 titles always render in highdef, this means even when you output on a TV you render at highdef and then downscale.
To get the highdef output adequate, you need better textures and a lot more polygons so it looks adequate on a higher resolution.
Then it gets downsampled and a lot of that detail is mostly lost for a regular TV.
Nintendo wanted highdef at once point, but they want cheap console "for the rest of us" a lot more, so their games are DESIGNED to run 480p.
At 480p, I suspect Revolution will be a match for XBOX360 and PS3, for the plain reason XBOX360 and PS4 has to work a lot harder to get that 480p image compared to what the Revolution does.
First of all: those numbers of course don't make sense, what's next, comparing CPU weights and color?
Anyways.
Will Revolution be as powerful as XBOX360 and PS3, no, it can't handle highdef and this should tell a lot.
Thing is, once you remove high-def support, you suddenly have a lot horsepower left to render great imagery on a 480p / 480i device. So we can't say that Revolution games will look worse than XBOX360 games on an NTSC/PAL TV which most people have out there.
But scrap even that.
Do you think Nintendo accidentally missed the fact their console is slower? And what means this for a game anyway? Does it mean worse gameplay or experience? Nintendo apparently is confident in their vision, enough so not to get into the dick length comparison game Sony and Microsoft are doing with their machine specs.
I mean, they support NES/SNES/Genesis titles for Christ's sake, were those games crappy? They look GREAT on a TV screen, and some titles have gameplay unparalled in modern titles.
Also it has enough power and innovation for great new content, what could a gamer want? Value and entertainment or silly spec numbers?
"And (3) Microsoft."
You may notice I was talking about Apple *exclusive* development.
"They'd be foolish to drop OSX support, since that would alienate a pretty large percentage of their customers who may drift to another application (possibly even an Apple graphics suite) rather than switch to Windows."
You're right they won't do it since their only advantage is being available on many platforms (they try to fight Vista WinFX with Flash Player as a rich client on the pure base Flash runs everywhere, while WinFX is just Windows).
However not all companies base their strategy on becoming THE platform of all computers out there (like Autodesk, which only has Windows versions of most of its products).
"Mac users may want to be able to run Windows, but they'll be damned if they're going to be told they have to."
The only reason they're happy to run it is because they have to, it's not as if Windows has a whole lot to offer to its userbase without the huge amount of 3rd party software working on it (well ok WinFX is changing this but I mean XP and earlier). OS is just the means, not the target.
Apple used to have proprietary architecture for most of the hardware they build, or use high end standards not common among consumer desktop PC-s.
They used to use SCSI for hard drives, but switched to IDE when it became close enough, they also switched to Intel chips like any PC can have.
One of the selling points used to be it's "guaranteed multimedia experience", for few years already every PC motherboard has stereo ot 5.1 surround sound built-in on the the motherboard.
They used to push Firewire, while still claiming they are firmly behind the standard, but their latest iPods ditched the Firewire in favor of USB which is good enough and simpler to implement as electronics.
They use the same video cards, hard drives, monitors, processor, chips, interfaces and ports...
There are plenty of elite PC manifacturers that make slick designs such as the recently purchased by DELL, Alienware computers.
Now they joined BAPCo, to pull their latest ace: OSX, the only thing remaining that makes them unique.
We'll see a lot of tests proving how superior OSX is compared to Windows in terms of speed and reliability.
They lied before when they claimed G5 is the fastest CPU on Earth, they lied when they said the Intel chips are 2x faster than the G5 (I mean they lied at least one of the times, right), they'll feel right at home.
"You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking."
If you found out that your pinkie blinks green when you face south, and stand on one leg while reciting Romeo and Juliet, would you abandon everything, call the labs and be a lab rat for the next couple of years?
We still live in a society where the individual human rights are valued, even if this is bad for the society overall.
Thing is we're not all the same. You can be very sensitive to this sort of fields, but the majority of people aren't. You're alergic to electricity :P
The problem with those kind of studies is they are always skewed since they aren't truly independent, they are caused/sponsored/driven either by people who want to prove the subject of study is bad or who want to prove it's not bad.
Long term effects are very hard to measure, I mean some people are still arguing if evolution exists, since despite the facts, unless you see immediate obvious results it's easy to twist the research data and claim whatever you feel like.
And of course noone I heard of, caught cancer by talking on a cell phone for a day.