In retrospect, I'm a little extra heated about this particular topic because I just see it happen so frequently. Its excruciatingly annoying, and also somewhat personal. I can't tell you how many times people have consulted me on what "Laptop" to buy that fits in their budget, only for me to ask them enough basic questions to determine that a desktop really is more appropriate. After my advice goes unheeded, and that person complains a year later about how their laptop's battery won't hold a charge because it's been left plugged in for a year straight, and they're running out of space on their miniscule HDD... You get the idea.
I attempted to clean up what I originally wrote to make it much more introspective, because I figured if I was going to attempt to pick an argument, I'd do it in a more... intellectual manner, but I hit "submit" a little too soon.
That said, the majority of people I meet or know with EEE PC's have them for totally the wrong reasons. Four people bought them because they apparently believe the hype. The other one only whips out his EEE (with handy USB-to-Serial adapter) when he needs to telnet a router.
Again, I see the market for the EEE misplaced. It's being touted as being "ultra-portable," but it also has a very ultra-small list of applications that it's better for than more traditional, proven devices.
I think there is a huge market for a device that sits somewhere between a fully functional (but small) laptop and a cell phone, but I guarantee that said device will boast the form factor of neither.
I needed a new computer after using the one my parents bought me a decade ago. So I bought a laptop. I promptly put it on my desk, plugged in a mouse, and have never moved it since!
It was an excellent purchasing decision on my part, seeing as how, for $2000, I got a monstrous 15 inch screen, a 2 GHz Dual Core processor, and 2 gigs of ram!
Nothing more than that is really necessary, even though for $2000 I could be sitting in front of dual 24" monitors, a quad core chip, 4 GB of RAM and terabytes of storage. Or maybe something with similar specifications, in a desktop form factor, and a much heavier wallet.
You have no idea how many times I hear the same idiotic story and the bullshit excuses that go along with it. I don't understand people justifying their moronic purchases by using the wrong tool for the wrong job, and I never will.
Let me see if I can put it in perspective for you. If you owned a box truck and a subcompact smart car, and were faced with the task of moving a house full of furniture, using that EEE every day in a fixed location is like strapping a couch to the top of your smart car after lugging it past the open rear door of your box truck.
Now, I have to ask, because maybe there's just "something" I don't get: What the fuck is that EEE doing on your desk, serving as your main computer, when a nonportable PC (like your Mac) is much more appropriate and functional? Is there ANY reason, other than "Zomg, It's so cute and portable," to pass up a much more functional, and frankly better in every way given the task, device for something so horribly inappropriate?
To quote Chris Rock:
You can drive a car with your feet if you want to; it don't mean its a good fucking idea!
On a side note, my friend sold his laptop and bought the first EEE because he said the enhanced portability would allow him to use it better and more often that what he had currently, even though I told him it was a waste of money.
Two months ago, he bought a 15-inch Compaq laptop that was on sale for the same price he got the EEE for. It's a much more appropriate machine.
They've compressed it to MPEG-1, transcoded it to FLV, added an Ebaumsworld.com watermark, transcoded it to WMV, added a break.com watermark, and then transcoded it back to FLV, cropped out the watermarks, posted it on youtube, and pressed it to 150 fully DRM compliant disks, for your viewing pleasure.
For an extra 15 dollars/disk, they'll even sync up the audio for you.
You'd need to keep stimulating your happy fun zone to just get to normal. And then you'd have to crank up the voltage/dosage. And crank it up some more. And then you wouldn't be able to crank it up any more without killing you.
I wasn't going for the extremes, but the point is still there. Also, I'm making the point that, were we progressed to the point where you could keep a brain alive in a jar, those obstacles would be overcome as well.
Of course, right now, as you point out, for those who don't value much else in life other than being [chemically] happy, you can always go get hopped up on drugs that, given an unlimited supply, actually make fatal dosages seem like a fantastic idea.
start the Net Doublecharge on bandwidth already paid for at the other ends
After all, we put up with it for text messages.... Why not Instant Messages! And Email! And movies! And Commercials... yes, I actually think they'd charge us to watch commercials because they won't differentiate different types of IP traffic unless it allows them to charge you more.
So what they are talking about is lots of fiber optic line that is not being used for one reason or another
The majority of dark fiber is owned by the Tier 1 ISP's, specifically, Level3. The fiber was laid by small independants during the.com bubble, and as those companies folded, telecoms bought it up for pennies on the dollar.
They bought the fiber explicitly for the purpose of preventing competition from springing up, and, god forbid, offering broadband at a reasonable price. Now, they keep it dark so they can claim that their network capacity is near its limit and justify the incredibly draconian policy they have toward network growth.
Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot?
If a sizable portion of your direct competition's most enlightened (using that term loosely) users all congregated in one place for you to spread propaganda on them.... Wouldn't you?
Presumably, if this were a possibility, you'd also be able to stimulate the part of your brain that makes you so incredibly happy that you wouldn't care you were, well, just a brain.
Yes, and the bits will get from their fiber to the Internet via MAGIC.
No, no, they don't. Those bits would travel to the internet via Peering Agreements with Tier 1 ISP's. Bandwidth that is effectively paid for by the bit. Tier 1 ISP's don't pay eachother to swap data, because each considers traffic from the other to be just as important as its own.
Interestingly enough, if municipalities were to bond together to form a network large and important enough (maybe they could buy a couple/8's from Ford or whoever) to contain enough traffic to meet the absurd "settlement free" peering agreement requirements put forth by the cartel we know as Tier 1 ISP's... now that would be interesting.
FWIW, I've noticed effects more in line with what the GP says. I calculate my MPG every time I fill up, and it's usually around 22 (I drive one of these.) Over time, say 3 months, I noticed my gas mileage slip to about 19. A couple of my tires had slipped to 25ish PSI.
I let this happen about three times before I bought an electric air pump, and haven't had the problem since.
Most of the time, when the 'pipe' is not already full, you have 'excess' bandwidth available for texting.
The specs upon which cellular networks operate explicitly provision a small amount of bandwidth on the connection from the tower to the phone for sending text. This is the reason you can receive Caller ID info while a phone is ringing, and also why you can be notified of voicemail or send/receive SMS while on a voice call.
Also, "I reboot my computer... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running... He makes a very, very excellent point. Even if he knows the intricacies of the OS (which I honestly doubt he does, cause it's not his job anymore), why should he have to reboot? Why can't he download the Moviemaker app, run the installer, and have it take care of everything for him? Why can't he browse an incredibly well thought out directory of free Microsoft products, built right into Add/Remove Programs? Ubuntu's package manager sort of offers this functionality, but program names are very cryptic and there are multiple listings for the same application....
PC usability has a long way to go. Cause let's face it, the absolute easiest kind of software to install is Malware. If usability of PC's doesn't start to scale with functionality any time soon, we're going to see cell phones (with their ridiculous, invented on the spot surcharges) replace the desktop a whole lot sooner than you'd think.
I don't know anything about formation rates of the objects specified, but the posted argument does make sense given some assumptions. My assumption, chiefly though, is that the person making the argument knows what he's talking about. Take that with however much salt you desire.
I believe what he's saying is that IF the LHC can create these black holes, such black holes are already created naturally by cosmic rays.
At some point in these natural holes' lifetimes, they would encounter a neutron star. Neutron star would be consumed by black hole as fat kid consumes cake.
Due to the fact that the universe is full of neutron stars that are way too old to not have eventually been eaten by said theoretical, chance black hole encounters, he posits that it is not possible for such black holes to exist. Or, if they do exist, they are not capable of consuming neutron stars, let alone planets like Earth.
To sum it up, either the black holes won't be created by the LHC, or they simply won't do anything if they are. Similarly, either fat kids do not exist, or, the cake is a lie.
I'm sick of the bullshit 1984 argument against WGA. It has no foundation, and until someone can show me that MS is harvesting personal information with it, the only solid argument against WGA is that it interferes with piracy. It's not DRM, and it's not big brother. If you don't want it, use another OS.
the only useful xp is a corp edition (non activation), sp2, pre-WGA. all others are bolloxed-up. God forbid you actually purchase software.
(...SP2 with SP3 update still seems 'mostly safe' to use). Everyone knows that License key verification is hazardous to your health, and is known to cause death in basement dwellers.
I typed a very thorough response to what you said as to why I hate the game so much, and then I closed the tab due to a sudden outbreak of nooblet syndrome. I agree with you on the gameplay points you brought up; I did like those. However, many things were underutilized, or suffered from being horrible gameplay mechanics. For example, the suit was horribly underutilized, and the escort mission was incredibly annoying and stupid, among other things.
Point is though, after I played that game, I regretted wasting my time on Crysis... and that's coming from someone who saw Alexander in the theater. And that movie, though a waste of time, did have a nude Rosario Dawson and *was* comically bad near the end.
Currently, the only argument for people to keep using Windows is that Wine can't handle EVERY SINGLE Windows application. Don't forget, some people actually like Windows as a Desktop/Server OS, and it's not because they haven't "experienced the glory of Linux" or some other epiphany. Granted, I don't think anyone likes licensing it, but that's a totally different story.
I'm trying to think of a gorgeous game that sucked... Your short term memory must be failing you as well, because you mentioned Crysis not two paragraphs ago.
But whether most people are saying "I heard it in the marketplace", "I read it in the newspaper", or "I googled it" doesn't much matter.
I've had a problem with this for a long time... Newspapers and Magazines, and to an extent, even hearsay, have a very distinct quality that Google doesn't have. Google isn't a tool to disseminate information, nor is it a place to begin learning about the vast wealth of knowledge available on the internet. You see, pointing people who've never used the internet directly at the Google home page and saying "Discover, child!" doesn't work because you already have to know what you're looking for in order to find anything with the damned search engine.
The problem is that using Google makes you in no way informed, and worse yet, a large amount of people don't actually know how to search for what they really need to find (e.g. searching "a headlight for my car" as opposed to "1995 Grand Am Headlight"). Google doesn't teach you anything, it just makes you believe that you don't actually need to know anything, the same way math students constantly argue that ownership of a calculator negates their need for an understanding of the formulae they're using at the time.
I could go on, but while Google is a valuable tool, a tool is nothing if you don't know how to use it. If you want to learn on the internet, go somewhere with valuable information, like a news site or Wikipedia. Not a place where, god help them, ignorant people always click on the "sponsored link" without realizing they're walking into a sales pitch for the "BEST HEADLIGHT BRAND/REPLACEMENT SERVICE EVAR" instead of a place to learn how to find one and fix it themselves.
Yeah, let us blame Microsoft for all the crappy windows drivers out there instead of the hardware manufacturers. I'm going to go a step further and blame the shitty motherboard.
Slashdot Mirror
In retrospect, I'm a little extra heated about this particular topic because I just see it happen so frequently. Its excruciatingly annoying, and also somewhat personal. I can't tell you how many times people have consulted me on what "Laptop" to buy that fits in their budget, only for me to ask them enough basic questions to determine that a desktop really is more appropriate. After my advice goes unheeded, and that person complains a year later about how their laptop's battery won't hold a charge because it's been left plugged in for a year straight, and they're running out of space on their miniscule HDD... You get the idea.
I attempted to clean up what I originally wrote to make it much more introspective, because I figured if I was going to attempt to pick an argument, I'd do it in a more... intellectual manner, but I hit "submit" a little too soon.
That said, the majority of people I meet or know with EEE PC's have them for totally the wrong reasons. Four people bought them because they apparently believe the hype. The other one only whips out his EEE (with handy USB-to-Serial adapter) when he needs to telnet a router.
Again, I see the market for the EEE misplaced. It's being touted as being "ultra-portable," but it also has a very ultra-small list of applications that it's better for than more traditional, proven devices.
I think there is a huge market for a device that sits somewhere between a fully functional (but small) laptop and a cell phone, but I guarantee that said device will boast the form factor of neither.
I needed a new computer after using the one my parents bought me a decade ago. So I bought a laptop. I promptly put it on my desk, plugged in a mouse, and have never moved it since!
It was an excellent purchasing decision on my part, seeing as how, for $2000, I got a monstrous 15 inch screen, a 2 GHz Dual Core processor, and 2 gigs of ram!
Nothing more than that is really necessary, even though for $2000 I could be sitting in front of dual 24" monitors, a quad core chip, 4 GB of RAM and terabytes of storage. Or maybe something with similar specifications, in a desktop form factor, and a much heavier wallet.
You have no idea how many times I hear the same idiotic story and the bullshit excuses that go along with it. I don't understand people justifying their moronic purchases by using the wrong tool for the wrong job, and I never will.
Let me see if I can put it in perspective for you. If you owned a box truck and a subcompact smart car, and were faced with the task of moving a house full of furniture, using that EEE every day in a fixed location is like strapping a couch to the top of your smart car after lugging it past the open rear door of your box truck.
Now, I have to ask, because maybe there's just "something" I don't get: What the fuck is that EEE doing on your desk, serving as your main computer, when a nonportable PC (like your Mac) is much more appropriate and functional? Is there ANY reason, other than "Zomg, It's so cute and portable," to pass up a much more functional, and frankly better in every way given the task, device for something so horribly inappropriate?
To quote Chris Rock:
You can drive a car with your feet if you want to; it don't mean its a good fucking idea!
On a side note, my friend sold his laptop and bought the first EEE because he said the enhanced portability would allow him to use it better and more often that what he had currently, even though I told him it was a waste of money.
Two months ago, he bought a 15-inch Compaq laptop that was on sale for the same price he got the EEE for. It's a much more appropriate machine.
They've compressed it to MPEG-1, transcoded it to FLV, added an Ebaumsworld.com watermark, transcoded it to WMV, added a break.com watermark, and then transcoded it back to FLV, cropped out the watermarks, posted it on youtube, and pressed it to 150 fully DRM compliant disks, for your viewing pleasure.
For an extra 15 dollars/disk, they'll even sync up the audio for you.
Very true.
However, I dare say that appalls us simply because we know the difference. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss.
It's not to say that I'm one for such an artificial, ignorant lifestyle, but ironically, it would probably be very fulfilling.
You'd need to keep stimulating your happy fun zone to just get to normal. And then you'd have to crank up the voltage/dosage. And crank it up some more. And then you wouldn't be able to crank it up any more without killing you.
I wasn't going for the extremes, but the point is still there. Also, I'm making the point that, were we progressed to the point where you could keep a brain alive in a jar, those obstacles would be overcome as well.
Of course, right now, as you point out, for those who don't value much else in life other than being [chemically] happy, you can always go get hopped up on drugs that, given an unlimited supply, actually make fatal dosages seem like a fantastic idea.
start the Net Doublecharge on bandwidth already paid for at the other ends
After all, we put up with it for text messages.... Why not Instant Messages! And Email! And movies! And Commercials... yes, I actually think they'd charge us to watch commercials because they won't differentiate different types of IP traffic unless it allows them to charge you more.
So what they are talking about is lots of fiber optic line that is not being used for one reason or another
The majority of dark fiber is owned by the Tier 1 ISP's, specifically, Level3. The fiber was laid by small independants during the .com bubble, and as those companies folded, telecoms bought it up for pennies on the dollar.
They bought the fiber explicitly for the purpose of preventing competition from springing up, and, god forbid, offering broadband at a reasonable price. Now, they keep it dark so they can claim that their network capacity is near its limit and justify the incredibly draconian policy they have toward network growth.
Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot?
If a sizable portion of your direct competition's most enlightened (using that term loosely) users all congregated in one place for you to spread propaganda on them.... Wouldn't you?
You'd be so bored you'd want to die.
Presumably, if this were a possibility, you'd also be able to stimulate the part of your brain that makes you so incredibly happy that you wouldn't care you were, well, just a brain.
Read up on The Hedonistic Imperative, just in case you don't understand.
Yes, and the bits will get from their fiber to the Internet via MAGIC.
No, no, they don't. Those bits would travel to the internet via Peering Agreements with Tier 1 ISP's. Bandwidth that is effectively paid for by the bit. Tier 1 ISP's don't pay eachother to swap data, because each considers traffic from the other to be just as important as its own.
/8's from Ford or whoever) to contain enough traffic to meet the absurd "settlement free" peering agreement requirements put forth by the cartel we know as Tier 1 ISP's... now that would be interesting.
Interestingly enough, if municipalities were to bond together to form a network large and important enough (maybe they could buy a couple
FWIW, I've noticed effects more in line with what the GP says. I calculate my MPG every time I fill up, and it's usually around 22 (I drive one of these.) Over time, say 3 months, I noticed my gas mileage slip to about 19. A couple of my tires had slipped to 25ish PSI.
I let this happen about three times before I bought an electric air pump, and haven't had the problem since.
Most of the time, when the 'pipe' is not already full, you have 'excess' bandwidth available for texting.
The specs upon which cellular networks operate explicitly provision a small amount of bandwidth on the connection from the tower to the phone for sending text. This is the reason you can receive Caller ID info while a phone is ringing, and also why you can be notified of voicemail or send/receive SMS while on a voice call.
PC usability has a long way to go. Cause let's face it, the absolute easiest kind of software to install is Malware. If usability of PC's doesn't start to scale with functionality any time soon, we're going to see cell phones (with their ridiculous, invented on the spot surcharges) replace the desktop a whole lot sooner than you'd think.
Nope. The robotic rednecks with laser shotguns should take care of that.
I don't know anything about formation rates of the objects specified, but the posted argument does make sense given some assumptions. My assumption, chiefly though, is that the person making the argument knows what he's talking about. Take that with however much salt you desire.
I believe what he's saying is that IF the LHC can create these black holes, such black holes are already created naturally by cosmic rays.
At some point in these natural holes' lifetimes, they would encounter a neutron star. Neutron star would be consumed by black hole as fat kid consumes cake.
Due to the fact that the universe is full of neutron stars that are way too old to not have eventually been eaten by said theoretical, chance black hole encounters, he posits that it is not possible for such black holes to exist. Or, if they do exist, they are not capable of consuming neutron stars, let alone planets like Earth.
To sum it up, either the black holes won't be created by the LHC, or they simply won't do anything if they are. Similarly, either fat kids do not exist, or, the cake is a lie.
How else do you suggest Microsoft combats piracy?
I'm sick of the bullshit 1984 argument against WGA. It has no foundation, and until someone can show me that MS is harvesting personal information with it, the only solid argument against WGA is that it interferes with piracy. It's not DRM, and it's not big brother. If you don't want it, use another OS.
(...SP2 with SP3 update still seems 'mostly safe' to use). Everyone knows that License key verification is hazardous to your health, and is known to cause death in basement dwellers.
I typed a very thorough response to what you said as to why I hate the game so much, and then I closed the tab due to a sudden outbreak of nooblet syndrome. I agree with you on the gameplay points you brought up; I did like those. However, many things were underutilized, or suffered from being horrible gameplay mechanics. For example, the suit was horribly underutilized, and the escort mission was incredibly annoying and stupid, among other things.
Point is though, after I played that game, I regretted wasting my time on Crysis... and that's coming from someone who saw Alexander in the theater. And that movie, though a waste of time, did have a nude Rosario Dawson and *was* comically bad near the end.
Don't forget, some people actually like Windows as a Desktop/Server OS, and it's not because they haven't "experienced the glory of Linux" or some other epiphany. Granted, I don't think anyone likes licensing it, but that's a totally different story.
Your short term memory must be failing you as well, because you mentioned Crysis not two paragraphs ago.
I've had a problem with this for a long time... Newspapers and Magazines, and to an extent, even hearsay, have a very distinct quality that Google doesn't have. Google isn't a tool to disseminate information, nor is it a place to begin learning about the vast wealth of knowledge available on the internet. You see, pointing people who've never used the internet directly at the Google home page and saying "Discover, child!" doesn't work because you already have to know what you're looking for in order to find anything with the damned search engine.
The problem is that using Google makes you in no way informed, and worse yet, a large amount of people don't actually know how to search for what they really need to find (e.g. searching "a headlight for my car" as opposed to "1995 Grand Am Headlight"). Google doesn't teach you anything, it just makes you believe that you don't actually need to know anything, the same way math students constantly argue that ownership of a calculator negates their need for an understanding of the formulae they're using at the time.
I could go on, but while Google is a valuable tool, a tool is nothing if you don't know how to use it. If you want to learn on the internet, go somewhere with valuable information, like a news site or Wikipedia. Not a place where, god help them, ignorant people always click on the "sponsored link" without realizing they're walking into a sales pitch for the "BEST HEADLIGHT BRAND/REPLACEMENT SERVICE EVAR" instead of a place to learn how to find one and fix it themselves.
If you weren't totally and utterly correct, I'd be really pissed off for getting Rick Rolled, yet again. Instead, I find myself a little depressed.
Now *that* is funny. Got any links?
Also, couldn't you use multiple cameras spaced slightly apart to determine if the face presented to you is actually being seen in three dimensions?
I'm going to go a step further and blame the shitty motherboard.