Right, so complain about getting a shitty monitor. Not because the advert says one thing while "technically" the monitor says another, even though no-one can tell one from the other.
Dude, it's quite easy to tell one from the other. Unless I suppose you have eye problem.
The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as dithering, which causes nearby pixels on the display to use slightly varying shades of colors that trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color even though it is not truly that color.
Isn't that going to get laughed right out of the courtroom? I mean sure that level of pedanticism is tolerated in some forums, but this is a court of law. Surely the judge is going to say a dignified version of "What the fuck are you on? Get the fuck out of here."
Imagine you're told your new expensive laptop, by *Apple* (a brand mostly known as going for component quality since designers work with it), will have have display quality like the second square.
But instead you see display quality like the first square.
If you think it's a laughing matter, I want to see you persuade those unfortunate Mac owners join the laugh.
What this confirms, is that OpenOffice is nice for casual use by amateur users. I really mean people who do a lot of content in Office though, and they would definitely go for Microsoft Office.
It can be comapred to Gimp vs Photoshop. If you want to adjust the levels and remove the red eye of a photo, Gimp's nice (hell, even Picassa is nice). If you want to make a button or background for your web page, then Gimp is again nice.
But if you do complex photo retouch, ton of design, every day, then Gimp is unbearable, and Photoshop is THE app to use (with some other bearable alternatives for limited work, such as Fireworks, Paintshop Pro and maybe a couple others).
Well...a couple hundred bucks for most home users is a lot just to do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Compare that to OpenOffice, which is free. That is a huge savings. [...] I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.
Free means cheap huh?
Anyway, you know, I like, and even use (sometimes) OpenOffice, but honestly, if you put it side by side with Office 12, it definitely looks cheap and worthless.
Just like GP said, alternative products need not just be free, they need to be at least as good as, if not better than Microsoft Office. Right now, for anyone who used Office 12 and OpenOffice extensively (i.e. me), the competition is far behind.
Also don't skew the numbers. "Hundreds of dollars" is what the full blown Office suite costs, which does a lot more than spreadsheets and word processing. You can get OEM license for MS Works (Excel + Word) with your PC for less than $70 bucks in most shops nowadays.
Now *this* is what word processing and spreadsheets with Office costs like. And all of a sudden, going for a bare bones open source version of Officeisn't so nice.
Topic: "Visualizing the Wikipedia power struggles"
Page, visualizing the power struggle: "Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."
I have ADD, and your posts just don't make any sense. Making non sequitur arguments is not a symptom of ADD. Do you even know what it is?
I have, and it's very sad that you don't take a joke at face value. The fact I said "ADD", as a part of the joke, doesn't mean I qualify people with ADD to be this or that. Just like if I say someone's an idiot, I don't qualify the medical condition, and what actual idiots behave like.
You need to relax, but, then again, maybe this is hard for people with ADD.
Building universal isn't twice the work. Most apps don't have any intrinsic byte-order dependencies, and very few people ever wrote CPU-specific code that depended on Alitvec (for example).
You can tell that to the Flash developers who worked their ass off to deliver the Intel version of Mac Flash quickly.
That little player has loads of ASM and SIMD instructions to be able to pull off what it does in this size and this speed.
Also you're not accurate about Altivec, multimedia apps like Photoshop make very good use of SIMD extensions, and interestingly enough, so do a big chunk of the audio instrument/processing apps.
And since the switch, Apple has not had the embarrasment of lower performing CPUs and long waits on CPU upgrades that IBM and Freescale saddled Apple with.
why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!
As a software developer why you should work twice more (OSX intel / OSX ppc) to produce a piece of software that will work on roughly 2-3 % of the desktop computers out there?
If Apple would keep randomly altering their hardware and require compatibility with a range of completely different architectures, in the end it'll completely alienate the developers. As Microsoft knows very well, developers, developers, developers are you best asset in this fight.
Furthermore, no, being Universal binary is not a requirement, and I know few companies which release only Intel versions of their Mac software (example: Adobe's Soundbooth)
Last month, Washington high school junior Sofia Rubenstein used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed her family's Verizon Wireless bill over $1,100. She and other teens are finding themselves in hot water after their families get blindsided with huge phone bills thanks to hefty a la carte text messaging charges.
We take you to the American family of Martha and John, and their beautiful daughter Sofia, conversing on family matter:
John: The bills are in. We have $1,100 wireless bill on Sophia's phone. Martha: That's most ungood, John, most ungood. Why would this be? John: It might very well be from the 6,807 SMS messages she sent through her phone, Martha. Martha: What could we possibly do, John? Sue Verizon for the unreasonable price? John: I'm afraid it's an open market, Martha. Martha: Petition to our government for cheaper SMS? John: Nope. Stop trying Martha. I know you'll proceed with increasingly weird suggestions, in an overly sarcastic tone. But I think we'll simply need to teach our kid to learn the consequences of their actions. Martha: Oh my.
It's really too bad the blogger is taking this so personally, continuing to blog about it, and cannot spell. None of these make him a sympathetic defendant... and if it eventually gets to court that's going to matter a good deal.
He's in Romania and they are in Atlanta. Where would the court possibly be? Neutral moon territory?
Furthermore, he seems pissed off, but that's his blog. Why are people expected to be all kind and diplomatic all of a sudden, when threatened with a random lawsuit. That's quite sad.
This is quite sad if he has to explain it. And those are the same companies that wine that Vista may make their products unnecessary, so how about leaving a hole here and there.
t's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with their property.
No, but as you see, the people (listeners), the other people (advertisers), are free to pull their support from that other other's people property, and thus in effect turn the property into nothing (since without listeners and advertisers, what's a radio's worth anyway).
Posting the official response to the allegations of Slashdot readers to the Chinese computer users, with simultaneous translation:
Wai Yu So Min (You are being unfair to us) Noroton Sucan Sum Tin Wong (The Norton Security Suite had a software fault) Yu Aru Dum Gai (You allegations make no sense) Lai Suns Wel (The software we use is not pirated)
Well, a "high end cellphone" costs from $49 (with contract!) to $499. This is 3x the price of a high-end cellphone.
It definitely is. But saying they initially promised a $100 price is also quite off. That positions it in the general market and it was never a general consumer peripheral. It's targeted for a tight niche.
Rather than having every key with an in-built display what would be more practical is leaving the alphanumeric keys as standard and just having the displays on the left block of special function keys and F1-F15. Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages I can't think of any reason re-programming the standard keys is useful and it must add stacks to the cost. I'd go for one at $200 odd if when I switched applications I could replace the function keys with alternative icons and alternative keystroke codes. No wonder the unit cost is so high though - they don't seem to be planning to manufacture many units so it seems to be aimed at people with a surplus of cash.
Many apps have too many shortcuts and people are too accustomed to their usual locations, but could benefit from the extra visual feedback (even if just to show their kb to their buddies).
There are A4 tablets out there for $100. Then why the hell is everybody spending $1000 on a Wacom? Me including? I'm not even rich, and I don't have $1000 I won't look back on.
Keyboards and pointing devices, next to monitors basically are our hands and eyes on the computer. You'd give anything for better hands and eyes, since it helps you so much.
The problem I see here with Optimus are two: first, nice, very visual and so on, but definitely not ergonomic. The ergonomics of this keyboard are the worse I've seen in a keyboard for the last 20 years.
And second, durability. I know that if I hammer my TFT, pixels ill start dieing soon and it worse things may happen. It'll be interesting to see how long the keys of Optimus last under normal daily usage pattern.
I was really excited about this keyboard back when they first announced it and they posited that it would cost approxmiately $100. Now that it's finally becoming a reality several years behind schedule, and is going to cost approximately $1500, I don't know how anybody can really still be looking foward to it.
You must be dreaming, they claimed since the very beginning that it'll cost around the price of a high-end cellphone.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, so complain about getting a shitty monitor. Not because the advert says one thing while "technically" the monitor says another, even though no-one can tell one from the other.
Dude, it's quite easy to tell one from the other. Unless I suppose you have eye problem.
The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as dithering, which causes nearby pixels on the display to use slightly varying shades of colors that trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color even though it is not truly that color.
Isn't that going to get laughed right out of the courtroom? I mean sure that level of pedanticism is tolerated in some forums, but this is a court of law. Surely the judge is going to say a dignified version of "What the fuck are you on? Get the fuck out of here."
Check this image:
squares
Imagine you're told your new expensive laptop, by *Apple* (a brand mostly known as going for component quality since designers work with it), will have have display quality like the second square.
But instead you see display quality like the first square.
If you think it's a laughing matter, I want to see you persuade those unfortunate Mac owners join the laugh.
What this confirms, is that OpenOffice is nice for casual use by amateur users. I really mean people who do a lot of content in Office though, and they would definitely go for Microsoft Office.
It can be comapred to Gimp vs Photoshop. If you want to adjust the levels and remove the red eye of a photo, Gimp's nice (hell, even Picassa is nice). If you want to make a button or background for your web page, then Gimp is again nice.
But if you do complex photo retouch, ton of design, every day, then Gimp is unbearable, and Photoshop is THE app to use (with some other bearable alternatives for limited work, such as Fireworks, Paintshop Pro and maybe a couple others).
Well...a couple hundred bucks for most home users is a lot just to do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Compare that to OpenOffice, which is free. That is a huge savings. [...] I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.
Free means cheap huh?
Anyway, you know, I like, and even use (sometimes) OpenOffice, but honestly, if you put it side by side with Office 12, it definitely looks cheap and worthless.
Just like GP said, alternative products need not just be free, they need to be at least as good as, if not better than Microsoft Office. Right now, for anyone who used Office 12 and OpenOffice extensively (i.e. me), the competition is far behind.
Also don't skew the numbers. "Hundreds of dollars" is what the full blown Office suite costs, which does a lot more than spreadsheets and word processing. You can get OEM license for MS Works (Excel + Word) with your PC for less than $70 bucks in most shops nowadays.
Now *this* is what word processing and spreadsheets with Office costs like. And all of a sudden, going for a bare bones open source version of Officeisn't so nice.
Topic: "Visualizing the Wikipedia power struggles"
Page, visualizing the power struggle: "Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."
R.I.P. Wikipedia lost the power struggle...
I have ADD, and your posts just don't make any sense. Making non sequitur arguments is not a symptom of ADD. Do you even know what it is?
I have, and it's very sad that you don't take a joke at face value. The fact I said "ADD", as a part of the joke, doesn't mean I qualify people with ADD to be this or that. Just like if I say someone's an idiot, I don't qualify the medical condition, and what actual idiots behave like.
You need to relax, but, then again, maybe this is hard for people with ADD.
PS: I have a form of ADD too. However, so what ?!
you'll just pull in all the SSE work you did from the Windows Flash runtime since it's the same chip and these are all not OS dependent.
The argument was about keeping PPC or not. So how do you pull that from SSE on Windows Flash?
Furthermore, if you're a startup, who writes version 1 of a software, where do you "pull" this from?
The accelerate framework is a toy, for serious work, you need to code it manually.
assuming that someone who misspells or types too fast has ADD
My post had nothing to do with a spelling error or fast typing. Maybe you have ADD too?
Apparently the guy who wrote the article had ADD or something.
So we start with the question: "Is there a dark side of your ISP switching to Google?"
And the problem is: "Your ISP mail locks you to your ISP"
So.. how is this problem related to Google at all? How were you less locked to your ISP when they used their own mail servers?
The mind baffles.
On the other hand, Gmail is free, people who have a clue wouldn't go for ISP mail if they can avoid the lock-in and go for a free gmail account.
Building universal isn't twice the work. Most apps don't have any intrinsic byte-order dependencies, and very few people ever wrote CPU-specific code that depended on Alitvec (for example).
You can tell that to the Flash developers who worked their ass off to deliver the Intel version of Mac Flash quickly.
That little player has loads of ASM and SIMD instructions to be able to pull off what it does in this size and this speed.
Also you're not accurate about Altivec, multimedia apps like Photoshop make very good use of SIMD extensions, and interestingly enough, so do a big chunk of the audio instrument/processing apps.
They apparently want to emphasize this chip's gonna make quite the power bills.
And since the switch, Apple has not had the embarrasment of lower performing CPUs and long waits on CPU upgrades that IBM and Freescale saddled Apple with.
Oh, embarrassment you call it. I didn't know producing ads where Pentium laptops are crushed with a steamrollr counts as embarassment.
That's why I don't like Apple quite much. They lie in your face, though apparently anyone with a clue sees the truth transparently.
why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!
As a software developer why you should work twice more (OSX intel / OSX ppc) to produce a piece of software that will work on roughly 2-3 % of the desktop computers out there?
If Apple would keep randomly altering their hardware and require compatibility with a range of completely different architectures, in the end it'll completely alienate the developers. As Microsoft knows very well, developers, developers, developers are you best asset in this fight.
Furthermore, no, being Universal binary is not a requirement, and I know few companies which release only Intel versions of their Mac software (example: Adobe's Soundbooth)
Last month, Washington high school junior Sofia Rubenstein used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed her family's Verizon Wireless bill over $1,100. She and other teens are finding themselves in hot water after their families get blindsided with huge phone bills thanks to hefty a la carte text messaging charges.
We take you to the American family of Martha and John, and their beautiful daughter Sofia, conversing on family matter:
John: The bills are in. We have $1,100 wireless bill on Sophia's phone.
Martha: That's most ungood, John, most ungood. Why would this be?
John: It might very well be from the 6,807 SMS messages she sent through her phone, Martha.
Martha: What could we possibly do, John? Sue Verizon for the unreasonable price?
John: I'm afraid it's an open market, Martha.
Martha: Petition to our government for cheaper SMS?
John: Nope. Stop trying Martha. I know you'll proceed with increasingly weird suggestions, in an overly sarcastic tone. But I think we'll simply need to teach our kid to learn the consequences of their actions.
Martha: Oh my.
It's really too bad the blogger is taking this so personally, continuing to blog about it, and cannot spell. None of these make him a sympathetic defendant... and if it eventually gets to court that's going to matter a good deal.
He's in Romania and they are in Atlanta. Where would the court possibly be? Neutral moon territory?
Furthermore, he seems pissed off, but that's his blog. Why are people expected to be all kind and diplomatic all of a sudden, when threatened with a random lawsuit. That's quite sad.
Today we'll learn how to spell the word "whine", with our special guest, SUV4X4!
Not "Wingh",
Not "Wine",
It is spelled "Whine".
I thank you for your time.
Stop wining, AC.
He also explains ways to opt-out
This is quite sad if he has to explain it. And those are the same companies that wine that Vista may make their products unnecessary, so how about leaving a hole here and there.
t's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with their property.
No, but as you see, the people (listeners), the other people (advertisers), are free to pull their support from that other other's people property, and thus in effect turn the property into nothing (since without listeners and advertisers, what's a radio's worth anyway).
I do it. They got what they deserved.
Posting the official response to the allegations of Slashdot readers to the Chinese computer users, with simultaneous translation:
Wai Yu So Min (You are being unfair to us)
Noroton Sucan Sum Tin Wong (The Norton Security Suite had a software fault)
Yu Aru Dum Gai (You allegations make no sense)
Lai Suns Wel (The software we use is not pirated)
I'm looking for $100000 too. By plain logic I should do twice better. I have charts to prove it :P
:( ?
Where did you guys all go
$180 for two years [...] As of this writing microsoft.ms is available.
All right, a trademark infringement suit from Microsoft for just $180! Who'd miss the opportunity!
Well, a "high end cellphone" costs from $49 (with contract!) to $499. This is 3x the price of a high-end cellphone.
It definitely is. But saying they initially promised a $100 price is also quite off. That positions it in the general market and it was never a general consumer peripheral. It's targeted for a tight niche.
Rather than having every key with an in-built display what would be more practical is leaving the alphanumeric keys as standard and just having the displays on the left block of special function keys and F1-F15. Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages I can't think of any reason re-programming the standard keys is useful and it must add stacks to the cost. I'd go for one at $200 odd if when I switched applications I could replace the function keys with alternative icons and alternative keystroke codes. No wonder the unit cost is so high though - they don't seem to be planning to manufacture many units so it seems to be aimed at people with a surplus of cash.
Many apps have too many shortcuts and people are too accustomed to their usual locations, but could benefit from the extra visual feedback (even if just to show their kb to their buddies).
There are A4 tablets out there for $100. Then why the hell is everybody spending $1000 on a Wacom? Me including? I'm not even rich, and I don't have $1000 I won't look back on.
Keyboards and pointing devices, next to monitors basically are our hands and eyes on the computer. You'd give anything for better hands and eyes, since it helps you so much.
The problem I see here with Optimus are two: first, nice, very visual and so on, but definitely not ergonomic. The ergonomics of this keyboard are the worse I've seen in a keyboard for the last 20 years.
And second, durability. I know that if I hammer my TFT, pixels ill start dieing soon and it worse things may happen. It'll be interesting to see how long the keys of Optimus last under normal daily usage pattern.
At that price, I'd expect to get the Optimus *Prime* keyboard, and it better transform into the leader of the Autobots, too!
You have it. All Optimus models so far are like this: Optimus 101, Optimus 103, Optimus 113.
All of those are prime numbers, and I doubt it's coincidental.
I was really excited about this keyboard back when they first announced it and they posited that it would cost approxmiately $100. Now that it's finally becoming a reality several years behind schedule, and is going to cost approximately $1500, I don't know how anybody can really still be looking foward to it.
You must be dreaming, they claimed since the very beginning that it'll cost around the price of a high-end cellphone.