Yes, i know a lot of fairly competent people that have been effected by the marketing strategy of the BSA and RIAA.They now think that anything free is somehow illegal or filled with viruses. For many the entire concept of giving away ones work is completely foreign to them.
I believe one of the failures of opensource or free software in general is the fact that programmer nerds completely ignore the fact that marketing is necessary. You can still pull off a successful marketing campaign with effectively zero dollars. This is what non-profits that operate on donations do to stay in operation. Similar concepts can be applied to free software, but everyone likes to think of marketing as an evil corporate-only tool. It is a tool available to everyone and even an individual with zero budget can still have an effective marketing strategy.
For the people that still don't get it that means if you want this year to be the year of the linux desktop, you need to understand a few things. One of those things is that the target market for the "linux desktop" are computer users of all ages who don't care about free software principles or even much about software cost. In fact there are tons of ways in which this target market differs. They may not even use 99% of the internet except email, yahoo, and youtube. They may be slow learners. But as you zero on in a more specific target market that is smaller, you will find more effective strategies at marketing towards that group. If you go broad and target everyone, you may have very few effective strategies because a larger group has fewer common traits to zero in on.
I honestly think linux is a better alternative for businesses rather than a home desktop user. Think about it: if a business switches to a linux desktop the business will finance the training involved in getting users trained as well as distributing (installing) the system for each employee. With a home user you have to do both of those things for them. Therefore an easier way to get awareness is to slip in from the business-use side (don't forget businesses like to pay $ for support) and once a significant number of fortune 500 companies are using linux as a desktop and successfully showing some benefits, you will get your tipping point. Other businesses will likely copy the successful linux deployment. More workers will get trained. More people will get hands on experience with a "linux desktop". That translates into more people ripe and ready to use linux at home.
Finally free software nerds and companies that want to sell support contracts but keep the software free are doing an amazingly bad job of it. Here's what they do: "we give you the free software and we'll charge you support annually!" So in the consumer's mind they are paying for support for a product that they are getting for free. Meanwhile look at cell phone service providers: "we give you this phone worth $300 for free if you sign a 2 year contract!" In the consumer's mind now they're getting a discount on a product up front and all they have to do is stick with the plan for 2 years. They're still giving the product for free but they're selling millions of service contracts! Markup or put a (fake) value on the software in terms of dollars and rephrase the "selling" line. In fact stop calling your software "free" software because most people don't understand what your definition of "free" means (nor do they care). Call it "open" software but don't define open. Come up with a fancy chart and pricing scheme comparing the up-front cost of vista to the annual support cost of "open software". So for example if you want to charge $20 annually per an individual home user, and vista premium costs $120 retail. You say "If you switch today, for $120, you can buy 6 years of support with open software and at the end of that we'll give you the next version of the OS (worth $100) for free!"
cars, to a large portion of the population, are freedom.
If freedom means paying say $15,000 or getting a loan to finance it, fuel the car, maintain it, and pay other fees (insurance, registration, etc) then that isn't freedom. That's just shifting the management and responsibility of assets from an organization to the individual.
Freedom to go where you want, when you want. Freedom to live where you want. Freedom to just say "fuck it" one day and go on a road trip.
I have 2 legs, I can still go where I want without a car. Sure, the car makes it easier as long as there is a road. But I could easily walk, ride a bicycle, take a cab, or use other transportation means to get there. The car just happens to be the most versatile in today's world. By no means does it make the car necessary.
But if you compare the car to a well designed transportation system like that of Japan or Europe, I say they have better options than we do in the US. If I want to go to Vegas I have to drive myself for hours on a boring and dull length of desert freeway to get there. If a Japanese person wants to go from Tokyo to Osaka, not only do they have the option of driving, but they can also get on the next bullet train there. If I had a choice between car or bullet train to vegas, I would take the train any day because I don't have to worry about driving my broke drunk ass back. But I don't. So here in the US we have one choice: drive your car. In other countries with decent public transportation they have two choices: drive or use public transit. (You could also add an additional option to both sides which is take an airplane but we all know how stupid it is to take an airplane these days in the US.)
Freedom from the clock- I don't have to leave the bar with my friends to make that last 10:30 pm bus, I can stay til closing time (assume I'm sober for this one).
And if you aren't sober you're stuck car or not. What happened to your freedom there? Oh yeah, you have to abide by all those pesky driving laws. No drinking while driving. No doing anything except driving while driving. In certain states no talking on the cell phone while driving without a hands-free headset. If you have a disability (ie vision) you're supposed to report it. No modifying your car outside of government regulations. No speeding. Etc.
If the last bus is 10:30pm, then that just means the public transportation system could be better. Even if there was no public transit, I'm sure a cab would be willing to take you back as well (for a price of course).
The people will never give up their cars. Don't bother trying to make us- we won't.
You won't. I certainly would stop driving and get rid of my car if I could. Stop dragging people like me along with your bullshit ideals. There are people that do genuinely like to drive. But there are also lots of people who actually don't like to drive and only do it out of necessity. In the most of the US we have no other option except to drive.
On the other side, there are many good reasons against owning a car:
Owning a car means purchasing and maintaining an expensive asset that depreciates over time: $10,000 or more new.
Most people don't have $10,000 or $20,000 sitting around so they need to get a loan. That just increases the expense due to interest payments and loan fees.
Driving requires a driver's license. For people (children) under the legal age of driving, this is a huge obstacle.
Dealing with traffic.
Lost time during long commutes. Technically, you can't do anything other than listen to the radio while driving. If you are a passenger of a car or some other transportation, you can sleep, read, and do something productive.
Safety. Cars have probably the worst safety records as far as transportation goes. I suppose motorcycles might be higher but I would still group riding a motorcycle with the drivi
I'm not the original poster but I'll answer your question.
Most people pick degrees or majors based on more factors than what they want to do in the future. One factor is Return on Investment (ROI). Most engineering degrees usually carry a good ROI at the bachelor level. Even if you do not apply the engineering degree, it is still useful to "show off" and use to get into something law school.
Another factor is most people don't know what they want to do until they get their feet wet and most people entering college either didn't have the experience or didn't have the opportunities. So they pick whatever sounds interesting. Many of these people might be forced to drop in the "weeder" classes, but some are actually pretty smart or industrious and finish anyway.
Finally you will also have people that get into engineering, and are satisfied with the academics, but when they get to the industry, they realize they do not like the job the degree is best suited for. At this point most people either change career paths or seek alternate degrees. That's because the job environment is much different compared to the school environment. In school you just have to get to the end of the class and it is done. At work it is basically an endless treadmill of the same stuff over and over again. It takes a great passion for the job or a high level of tolerance to stay with it.
So in short most people don't know what they want to do until they've already invested years in their education and work experience. But you can't just sit around and do nothing, so you pick something and see what that path is like.
In my experience DD-WRT QoS features don't work in the latest release. You're better off buying a tomato compatible router and flashing it with that firmware. The other option is OpenWRT but after reading the installation guides it doesn't seem so easy to get working.
Here's the actual document I found by Googling "Comes v Microsoft", and following a link on the top of the Groklaw page for the case. The Groklaw page has an incomplete set of exhibits, but if you follow the link at the top of the page you can get everything.
Slashdot linked to the wrong source. I saw this on reddit yesterday which linked to a better source here and a PDF of the actual document from which it was taken here. The seattlepi author states that this is from leaked documents in the anti-trust lawsuits where the company was forced to turn over (and make public) internal documents. The listed text in the blogs is just one of the emails in the PDF document.
Now being slashdot the moderation is totally biased. It is clear everyone that "claimed" this to be fake simply didn't do their homework (like carefully RTFA or in this case the blog spam) and instead went for the cheap MS flamebait karma.
The failure in logic is also horrible. Bill Gates doesn't sound like the kind of guy that would write this therefore it is false!/sarcasm. Why would Bill Gates release such an email to the public while he was trying to market a product? Do companies go around expressing their own dissatisfaction in their own dog food? Sure if you want to piss off your shareholders and give your competitors a marketing edge to drive you into the ground. If Microsoft purposely released an email like this, it would just give companies like Apple legitimate marketing material to use against Microsoft. That is suicide. Microsoft would probably have never released this email if they had the choice. It is just that they were lucky enough it wasn't dug up until 4 years later. (Which makes sense. It probably would never have been dug up because slashdot has proven that people don't RTFA.)
But never mind, continue along with your MS bashing. There's no way Gates has an ounce of integrity or usefulness to the software world.
The American Dream is overrated because the "advertised" American dream is not necessary. If the standard to "achieving" the American dream is to own a house with an ample lot size, a nice car or three, and enough cash to throw parties every weekend or whatever other activity you find fun, well I say that's just the TV and popular culture brainwashing you.
You can be perfectly happy and successful living in a town house without a yard and an econobox car. Almost every form of entertainment or activity is still accessible without the McMansion or the SUV. The only lacking thing is the increased expenses and the ability to flex your debt-inflated-penis with your shiny SUV and spinners.
I'm probably in the same boat as you. I make more than my parents yet I can't afford a house near work. I can afford a 2 bedroom condo though. And after thinking, I would be plenty happy with condo as long as I was single. I'd still be happy with it if I was married. The only time it would start to feel cramped is if I wanted to have a family. But by then, I would probably be married and I figure a 3 bedroom town house would suffice. The only thing I really get with a bigger house is bragging rights and a whole lot more maintenance. For example if there was a yard I'd have to pay for a gardener or do it myself. If there were extra rooms I'd have to clean yet another room. I don't need that. A 2 bedroom condo with a decent kitchen, living room, and a few complex facilities (pool/patio) is plenty to keep me happy.
Houses (with full yards, extra rooms, and large garages) only make sense in rural areas. In places like suburbs they're just a luxury and bragging rights.
Even better, high oil prices are actually making people think about public transportation again. For the financially savvy, that is awesome news. It would be great to be able to live in the U.S. without a car. I would be proud to dump the 2nd most expensive household asset that depreciates in value significantly.
Well you can probably leave the comment in although what tends to happen is a maintainer will come in and fix the code and ignore the comment so now you have a comment and code that do not match (which one was right to begin with?).
The other problem with your loop is you use the infamous one letter variables i and j. Ok, I can get by with i for for loops (take that English grammar parsers!). But the j can cause other problems because maintainers have to understand that j is some sort of bound and figure out what it really means. Therefore a more useful comment would have been loops from 0 to (whatever j means) or better getting rid of 'j' all together. The complexity will only grow when you start embedding more for loops within this ones if it was ever needed (now what do you use? k,l? m,n?).
Too many comments can be ignored, too few can give you heartburn.
In my experience trying to maintain and write maintainable PERL code (it is very hard btw) comments have had very limited success. Sometimes they just double the effort to maintain the code (but this can be true of any documentation). So you have to choose your comments just as wisely as the choice of code you write. Because of this, I write code that I hope will be readable and maintainable. Sometimes that's not always the case but you will almost always more often be updating code than writing new code. So it is in your best interest to write the more maintainable code that to write fully commented code. It isn't easy, in fact it only makes the problem of programming one degree harder.
Now what is immensely useful is either a well defined design/interface specification (specified inputs, outputs, and expected behavior or results) or automated test cases. Both of these tell you immediately how the code should operate without you reading. You can accomplish the same thing with inline comments, but it is much harder to make readable.
But that's a lot of work and most people don't like writing documentation. So for those of you that do like to keep your heads in your code, my challenge to you is to write easily readable code without inline comments. You can have a comment at the top of a function or block describing what is to happen. But other than that, the code must explain what it does while doing what it should be explaining. The first hint is to wisely choose your variable and function names. This is harder than it sounds because on both ends of the spectrum (not verbose enough, too verbose) can hurt the readability of your code. The trick is to find the sweet spot that gives the reader what they need to know, without the details that may not matter.
Example:
for (unsigned int index = 0; index < length; ++index)
We could have easily written:
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < j; ++i)
or
for (unsigned int list_index = 0; list_index < list_length; ++list_index)
But the problem with these are for the first it gives us no additional information and we have to read the rest of the code to figure out what the variables i and j are for. For the second example it gives us too much information and can cause other code to be unreadable. So in the second case if we had an array called "list" then we would have to write "list[list_index]" which is not very readable.
So I'm not saying you should never write comments, but that comments have limits in usefulness and that the readability of the code can be greatly increased before commenting. Everyone thinks differently so taking a stance of "I'm going to write code that most people can understand" will dramatically change how you write your own code including comments. We already know that everyone can write code to "do something" but what is really important is to write code that not only "does something" but also clearly explains what it is trying to do as well.
I think you missed the main issue that deals with web marketing--a topic that most geeks on slashdot are not familiar with. The problem with Yahoo siding with Google is that it helps establish Google as the king of search and online advertising. All three services (Google, Yahoo, MSN) make a huge chunk if their revenue through online advertising and marketing services. Since Google will now have it's hands toying around with Yahoo, Google could just slowly eat away at Yahoo's margins or eventually buy them out. That would leave the last significant competitor as MSN which isn't even much of a competitor. The end result is basically a Google monopoly on web marketing until the next big disruptive marketing tech comes along.
Google's online marketing market share is already so significant that most web marketing firms won't even touch Yahoo or MSN networks because the effort is simply not worth the return. But now you say if I go through Google I'll also get a piece of Yahoo? Big win for Google.
In this situation, I think Yahoo honestly had a choice between two devils with different faces. They may have royally pissed off their shareholders with shrugging off MS, but they may keep their company alive for a little longer.
As far as my own opinion, I'm split. On one side as a consumer, I think there needs to be more web marketing competitors to compete with Google in order to maintain a healthy market. On the other hand I am a Google shareholder. I suppose in this case I win (and lose) either way.
For end user usability, one of the nicest features about ZFS is that things like fstab go away. On a freebsd box with ZFS, I setup a raidz pool across 4 disks. One of my controllers was giving me issues so I tried flipping around the disks in the various serial ata ports I had across 3 different serial ata controllers. ZFS comes back and detects the array correctly regardless of how the OS assigns the device names. Normally you would cause serious headache if you swapped around the drives.
There are still many corporate environments where you are forced to work with a remote unix server but through something like Exceed or Xming (an xserver running on a client machine). You could easily say, "well just ssh in and use the command line" but that doesn't always work since there are still some big engineering tools that run on *nix and need an X interface.
Now if you're only talking consumer desktops then yes, the network capabilities of X are overrated.
I drive a 25MPG car because I have a few kids, one of which is 6', and 20 stone.
I'm tired of this "I need to drive the kids to school" mentality. I grew up in the 80s and 90s as a kid and I got to school either on my own feet or on a bus. Is there a reason why parents feel they need to drive their kid to school? Your kid is taller than me, surely he is capable of taking a bus and/or walking. In high school it took me 30 minutes to walk casually from home to school. My parents said if I wanted a ride then I better get a ride from a neighbor but they weren't going out of their way to be in front of school ready to pick me at at 2pm or drop me off at 7:30am so they could get stuck in rush hour traffic.
What i NEED is an additional vehicle. A commuter only vehicle.
No you don't. You (and everyone else working 5 days a week) just need to move yourself and maybe a bag or briefcase to work and back. If we had decent public transportation systems in the states, you wouldn't even need to own a commuter car. But you can thank GM and big oil for killing off our electric streetcar and train systems we had in the 1920s, and brainwashing everyone with auto marketing for the last century.
So now you might "need" a car simply because the alternatives aren't available. The reality is we shouldn't "need" cars. They are a giant financial investment that depreciates over time. We need efficient transportation--which doesn't have to be road/auto based. There's nothing more inefficient than millions of individuals each driving 1-ton chunks of metal everyday when all they are carrying are themselves between the same two points 5 days a week.
Way back I bike commuted to high school school and one day on the way home I ran into the side of a minivan. It was my fault and partially my bike's (the bicycle brakes were really lousy) but I successfully did not damage the minivan and or myself and put most of the impact into the front wheel. The front wheel was totally bent out of shape.
Just before the impact I decided I would turn the handle bars at the last second so I would hit the minivan with my side rather than my head. It worked perfectly as my arm and should went into the minivan first rather than my face. On the way down I was tangled with my bike so I didn't hit the asphalt.
Since they will be limited to one class or a subset of classes you will always have one class which is "overpowered".
Yeah but I think anyone looking for PvP (more clearly 1v1 free for all) will either end up being too abusive (everyone is my enemy) or too hard to balance. It starts to get interesting when you change the dynamics from 1v1 to say... 2v2 or 5v5, or 100v100.
I can't say much about the games described but I have experience of playing daoc for a few years. Daoc never implemented a good and balanced PvP system (everyone can be your enemy) but did implement probably the most successful "RvR" system. RvR is basically "team" based in the sense that people from your own realm can't kill you. In the early days of the game, people obviously translated this to "everyone in my realm is my ally" but that eventually broke down as there was nothing preventing someone in your realm from purposely not helping you. While it sounds like this was a bad thing, I actually think this was good because it brought about a secondary genre that still hasn't been mastered by any MMO I've seen today. You could say WoW has an RvR system but there are only 2 sides where daoc had 3. Because there were 3 sides when you got into an RvR zone it had some of the tension of a free-for-all style PvP (there were a few instances of 3-way battles) but not too much to overload you.
Eventually this RvR system evolved into 4 main types of RvR styles: zerg vs zerg, 8v8 (max group size was 8 players), small group, and solo. Soloing is obviously closes to plain PvP and had very obvious imbalances, but players still liked it because some players purposely chose characters that could be effective soloing. Small group worked pretty well because it prevented groups and zergs from rolling you, but gave you the benefits of being able to handle more situations than you would solo with a bit of the group dynamics (working together). There were still imbalances in small group; you had to carefully choose the classes to be most effective but there were still a few combinations you could use to do it with different strengths.
8v8 was basically tight group vs group combat. Still some imbalance here (or a lot depending on what patch in the game you played) but later when classic servers were reintroduced, the groups were fairly balanced for periods of times. Playing 8v8 was more like playing a sports team where the entire team had to cooperate with a strategy in order to be effective. Eventually though some players were better than others and could pull a group to victory (kinda like a top-pick athlete) or even worse, some of the best players would group up to form an all-star group.
Finally there was zerg vs zerg which was kinda fun for newbies, but loses its flare as you get more experienced. This is your 50v50 or 100v100 battles. The problem with these is the numbers are rarely balanced so one team (with the most people) just rolls everyone else. There's very little organization and players rarely cooperate well in this setting.
The funny thing is the other forms of RvR (other than 1v1 and zerg vs zerg) didn't evolve until after people got fed up with population imbalances or zerg camping (in the old days there was a gate and if the zerg camped your gate it meant no RvR for you). So people put together "16mans" and later "8mans" to overcome getting rolled by zergs. 8 mans were basically fine tuned groups to include all the necessary abilities within a group and mobility to keep the group faster than the zerg. Later when these 8 mans realized that they could actually handle smaller zergs of unorganized players roughly double their size they started to get popular. This became a little addictive as it was basically the closest you could get to one of those action flicks where the protagonist and his buddies mop the floor with 100s of nobodies. There was a lot of video footage of it and people quickly started forming their own elite groups to get a piece of it. But as the groups grew, they s
Ubuntu netbook remix or whatever it is called is going to address this by providing a new interface designed for small screens. Ars has a bunch of screenshots and more information. The solution isn't perfect but is in a step in the right direction.
This (good interface real estate usage) is one area that I have to give credit to Apple for doing very well. Apple interfaces are very clean and for the most part a good use of screen real estate (minimal window border, fewer menus and toolbars). Gnome tends to be a little on the fat side with buttons, menus, and toolbars but hopefully that will start changing with this new market. I do wish that application developers would stop using the default "file" menus as a crutch to stuff things into or stuffing toolbars with buttons all over the place (gimp, open office, old versions of ms office, many IDEs). On small screens that becomes especially annoying since there is no more room to grow the windows.
A lot of people are buying the linux version for the larger SSD and installing Windows xp themselves.
I've tried the default Xandros linux and it didn't cut it for me. For browsing the net and doing simple things like reading a document it is fine. It will even read your usb thumb drives and other things without issues. But it is hard to customize and does not like you going about installing your own software. I expect that Ubuntu for netbooks will be much easier to customize and will likely be a real replacement for the large laptop or desktop.
It is only standard if you agree to buying a locked phone tied to a cellular service provider. There's nothing stopping you from buying a compatible cell phone and walking into a store to get service for it. The only reason people choose the contract is because they perceive the initial costs as lower when in fact the costs over the lifetime of the quality of service received may be higher.
My big issue with contracts is that if the service becomes crappy or it is fairly obvious they are screwing me over, I don't have the option of leaving them. The contract locks me to their service and guarantees that I will be paying for the service for the next 1 to 2 years regardless of the quality of service. When you are not on a contract, you have negotiating power on a monthly basis because you can threaten to leave their service if it is not adequate for your needs.
I believe this is a good reason for why cell phone service and cell phone features have been very poor in the US--because the American consumers will easily sign the dotted line without realizing that they are giving up a huge amount of their negotiation power. That allows the cellular networks to sit on older technology for as long as possible when they are certain they will have a guaranteed revenue stream for the next 1 to 2 years.
My celeron based eee 900 requires about 15 watts to idle with the screen still on. Perhaps we could put generators with pedals under everyone's cubicle desk and have them power their own computers? Not only would we be green, but we'd also solve America's obesity problem!
The model you selected comes with Vista Basic preloaded. Microsoft considers this license equivalent or less than XP home. XP Professional is considered equivalent in value to Vista Business. In fact, if you purchase a retail Vista Business license, you legally have downgrade rights to XP Professional. Of course if you purchase XP pro, you do not have upgrade rights to Vista Business.
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Yes, i know a lot of fairly competent people that have been effected by the marketing strategy of the BSA and RIAA.They now think that anything free is somehow illegal or filled with viruses. For many the entire concept of giving away ones work is completely foreign to them.
I believe one of the failures of opensource or free software in general is the fact that programmer nerds completely ignore the fact that marketing is necessary. You can still pull off a successful marketing campaign with effectively zero dollars. This is what non-profits that operate on donations do to stay in operation. Similar concepts can be applied to free software, but everyone likes to think of marketing as an evil corporate-only tool. It is a tool available to everyone and even an individual with zero budget can still have an effective marketing strategy.
For the people that still don't get it that means if you want this year to be the year of the linux desktop, you need to understand a few things. One of those things is that the target market for the "linux desktop" are computer users of all ages who don't care about free software principles or even much about software cost. In fact there are tons of ways in which this target market differs. They may not even use 99% of the internet except email, yahoo, and youtube. They may be slow learners. But as you zero on in a more specific target market that is smaller, you will find more effective strategies at marketing towards that group. If you go broad and target everyone, you may have very few effective strategies because a larger group has fewer common traits to zero in on.
I honestly think linux is a better alternative for businesses rather than a home desktop user. Think about it: if a business switches to a linux desktop the business will finance the training involved in getting users trained as well as distributing (installing) the system for each employee. With a home user you have to do both of those things for them. Therefore an easier way to get awareness is to slip in from the business-use side (don't forget businesses like to pay $ for support) and once a significant number of fortune 500 companies are using linux as a desktop and successfully showing some benefits, you will get your tipping point. Other businesses will likely copy the successful linux deployment. More workers will get trained. More people will get hands on experience with a "linux desktop". That translates into more people ripe and ready to use linux at home.
Finally free software nerds and companies that want to sell support contracts but keep the software free are doing an amazingly bad job of it. Here's what they do: "we give you the free software and we'll charge you support annually!" So in the consumer's mind they are paying for support for a product that they are getting for free. Meanwhile look at cell phone service providers: "we give you this phone worth $300 for free if you sign a 2 year contract!" In the consumer's mind now they're getting a discount on a product up front and all they have to do is stick with the plan for 2 years. They're still giving the product for free but they're selling millions of service contracts! Markup or put a (fake) value on the software in terms of dollars and rephrase the "selling" line. In fact stop calling your software "free" software because most people don't understand what your definition of "free" means (nor do they care). Call it "open" software but don't define open. Come up with a fancy chart and pricing scheme comparing the up-front cost of vista to the annual support cost of "open software". So for example if you want to charge $20 annually per an individual home user, and vista premium costs $120 retail. You say "If you switch today, for $120, you can buy 6 years of support with open software and at the end of that we'll give you the next version of the OS (worth $100) for free!"
cars, to a large portion of the population, are freedom.
If freedom means paying say $15,000 or getting a loan to finance it, fuel the car, maintain it, and pay other fees (insurance, registration, etc) then that isn't freedom. That's just shifting the management and responsibility of assets from an organization to the individual.
Freedom to go where you want, when you want. Freedom to live where you want. Freedom to just say "fuck it" one day and go on a road trip.
I have 2 legs, I can still go where I want without a car. Sure, the car makes it easier as long as there is a road. But I could easily walk, ride a bicycle, take a cab, or use other transportation means to get there. The car just happens to be the most versatile in today's world. By no means does it make the car necessary.
But if you compare the car to a well designed transportation system like that of Japan or Europe, I say they have better options than we do in the US. If I want to go to Vegas I have to drive myself for hours on a boring and dull length of desert freeway to get there. If a Japanese person wants to go from Tokyo to Osaka, not only do they have the option of driving, but they can also get on the next bullet train there. If I had a choice between car or bullet train to vegas, I would take the train any day because I don't have to worry about driving my broke drunk ass back. But I don't. So here in the US we have one choice: drive your car. In other countries with decent public transportation they have two choices: drive or use public transit. (You could also add an additional option to both sides which is take an airplane but we all know how stupid it is to take an airplane these days in the US.)
Freedom from the clock- I don't have to leave the bar with my friends to make that last 10:30 pm bus, I can stay til closing time (assume I'm sober for this one).
And if you aren't sober you're stuck car or not. What happened to your freedom there? Oh yeah, you have to abide by all those pesky driving laws. No drinking while driving. No doing anything except driving while driving. In certain states no talking on the cell phone while driving without a hands-free headset. If you have a disability (ie vision) you're supposed to report it. No modifying your car outside of government regulations. No speeding. Etc.
If the last bus is 10:30pm, then that just means the public transportation system could be better. Even if there was no public transit, I'm sure a cab would be willing to take you back as well (for a price of course).
The people will never give up their cars. Don't bother trying to make us- we won't.
You won't. I certainly would stop driving and get rid of my car if I could. Stop dragging people like me along with your bullshit ideals. There are people that do genuinely like to drive. But there are also lots of people who actually don't like to drive and only do it out of necessity. In the most of the US we have no other option except to drive.
On the other side, there are many good reasons against owning a car:
Somebody needs to be able to talk with the Indians on a level deeper than "Hello, nice to meet you. This is a pen", so I get promoted.
Hajimemashite. Kore wa pen desu. Oh wait, wrong language. Never mind...
I'm not the original poster but I'll answer your question.
Most people pick degrees or majors based on more factors than what they want to do in the future. One factor is Return on Investment (ROI). Most engineering degrees usually carry a good ROI at the bachelor level. Even if you do not apply the engineering degree, it is still useful to "show off" and use to get into something law school.
Another factor is most people don't know what they want to do until they get their feet wet and most people entering college either didn't have the experience or didn't have the opportunities. So they pick whatever sounds interesting. Many of these people might be forced to drop in the "weeder" classes, but some are actually pretty smart or industrious and finish anyway.
Finally you will also have people that get into engineering, and are satisfied with the academics, but when they get to the industry, they realize they do not like the job the degree is best suited for. At this point most people either change career paths or seek alternate degrees. That's because the job environment is much different compared to the school environment. In school you just have to get to the end of the class and it is done. At work it is basically an endless treadmill of the same stuff over and over again. It takes a great passion for the job or a high level of tolerance to stay with it.
So in short most people don't know what they want to do until they've already invested years in their education and work experience. But you can't just sit around and do nothing, so you pick something and see what that path is like.
What's an etceta? Or did you mean et cetera?
In my experience DD-WRT QoS features don't work in the latest release. You're better off buying a tomato compatible router and flashing it with that firmware. The other option is OpenWRT but after reading the installation guides it doesn't seem so easy to get working.
Here's the actual document I found by Googling "Comes v Microsoft", and following a link on the top of the Groklaw page for the case. The Groklaw page has an incomplete set of exhibits, but if you follow the link at the top of the page you can get everything.
Slashdot linked to the wrong source. I saw this on reddit yesterday which linked to a better source here and a PDF of the actual document from which it was taken here. The seattlepi author states that this is from leaked documents in the anti-trust lawsuits where the company was forced to turn over (and make public) internal documents. The listed text in the blogs is just one of the emails in the PDF document.
Now being slashdot the moderation is totally biased. It is clear everyone that "claimed" this to be fake simply didn't do their homework (like carefully RTFA or in this case the blog spam) and instead went for the cheap MS flamebait karma.
The failure in logic is also horrible. Bill Gates doesn't sound like the kind of guy that would write this therefore it is false! /sarcasm. Why would Bill Gates release such an email to the public while he was trying to market a product? Do companies go around expressing their own dissatisfaction in their own dog food? Sure if you want to piss off your shareholders and give your competitors a marketing edge to drive you into the ground. If Microsoft purposely released an email like this, it would just give companies like Apple legitimate marketing material to use against Microsoft. That is suicide. Microsoft would probably have never released this email if they had the choice. It is just that they were lucky enough it wasn't dug up until 4 years later. (Which makes sense. It probably would never have been dug up because slashdot has proven that people don't RTFA.)
But never mind, continue along with your MS bashing. There's no way Gates has an ounce of integrity or usefulness to the software world.
The American Dream is overrated because the "advertised" American dream is not necessary. If the standard to "achieving" the American dream is to own a house with an ample lot size, a nice car or three, and enough cash to throw parties every weekend or whatever other activity you find fun, well I say that's just the TV and popular culture brainwashing you.
You can be perfectly happy and successful living in a town house without a yard and an econobox car. Almost every form of entertainment or activity is still accessible without the McMansion or the SUV. The only lacking thing is the increased expenses and the ability to flex your debt-inflated-penis with your shiny SUV and spinners.
I'm probably in the same boat as you. I make more than my parents yet I can't afford a house near work. I can afford a 2 bedroom condo though. And after thinking, I would be plenty happy with condo as long as I was single. I'd still be happy with it if I was married. The only time it would start to feel cramped is if I wanted to have a family. But by then, I would probably be married and I figure a 3 bedroom town house would suffice. The only thing I really get with a bigger house is bragging rights and a whole lot more maintenance. For example if there was a yard I'd have to pay for a gardener or do it myself. If there were extra rooms I'd have to clean yet another room. I don't need that. A 2 bedroom condo with a decent kitchen, living room, and a few complex facilities (pool/patio) is plenty to keep me happy.
Houses (with full yards, extra rooms, and large garages) only make sense in rural areas. In places like suburbs they're just a luxury and bragging rights.
Even better, high oil prices are actually making people think about public transportation again. For the financially savvy, that is awesome news. It would be great to be able to live in the U.S. without a car. I would be proud to dump the 2nd most expensive household asset that depreciates in value significantly.
It's simple: while you're here posting on slashdot, his psychopath friend is hooking up with chicks in a bar!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take some of my own advice and head down to a known location that chicks tend to go to. BRB!
Well you can probably leave the comment in although what tends to happen is a maintainer will come in and fix the code and ignore the comment so now you have a comment and code that do not match (which one was right to begin with?).
The other problem with your loop is you use the infamous one letter variables i and j. Ok, I can get by with i for for loops (take that English grammar parsers!). But the j can cause other problems because maintainers have to understand that j is some sort of bound and figure out what it really means. Therefore a more useful comment would have been loops from 0 to (whatever j means) or better getting rid of 'j' all together. The complexity will only grow when you start embedding more for loops within this ones if it was ever needed (now what do you use? k,l? m,n?).
Too many comments can be ignored, too few can give you heartburn.In my experience trying to maintain and write maintainable PERL code (it is very hard btw) comments have had very limited success. Sometimes they just double the effort to maintain the code (but this can be true of any documentation). So you have to choose your comments just as wisely as the choice of code you write. Because of this, I write code that I hope will be readable and maintainable. Sometimes that's not always the case but you will almost always more often be updating code than writing new code. So it is in your best interest to write the more maintainable code that to write fully commented code. It isn't easy, in fact it only makes the problem of programming one degree harder.
Now what is immensely useful is either a well defined design/interface specification (specified inputs, outputs, and expected behavior or results) or automated test cases. Both of these tell you immediately how the code should operate without you reading. You can accomplish the same thing with inline comments, but it is much harder to make readable.
But that's a lot of work and most people don't like writing documentation. So for those of you that do like to keep your heads in your code, my challenge to you is to write easily readable code without inline comments. You can have a comment at the top of a function or block describing what is to happen. But other than that, the code must explain what it does while doing what it should be explaining. The first hint is to wisely choose your variable and function names. This is harder than it sounds because on both ends of the spectrum (not verbose enough, too verbose) can hurt the readability of your code. The trick is to find the sweet spot that gives the reader what they need to know, without the details that may not matter.
Example:
We could have easily written:
orBut the problem with these are for the first it gives us no additional information and we have to read the rest of the code to figure out what the variables i and j are for. For the second example it gives us too much information and can cause other code to be unreadable. So in the second case if we had an array called "list" then we would have to write "list[list_index]" which is not very readable.
So I'm not saying you should never write comments, but that comments have limits in usefulness and that the readability of the code can be greatly increased before commenting. Everyone thinks differently so taking a stance of "I'm going to write code that most people can understand" will dramatically change how you write your own code including comments. We already know that everyone can write code to "do something" but what is really important is to write code that not only "does something" but also clearly explains what it is trying to do as well.
I think you missed the main issue that deals with web marketing--a topic that most geeks on slashdot are not familiar with. The problem with Yahoo siding with Google is that it helps establish Google as the king of search and online advertising. All three services (Google, Yahoo, MSN) make a huge chunk if their revenue through online advertising and marketing services. Since Google will now have it's hands toying around with Yahoo, Google could just slowly eat away at Yahoo's margins or eventually buy them out. That would leave the last significant competitor as MSN which isn't even much of a competitor. The end result is basically a Google monopoly on web marketing until the next big disruptive marketing tech comes along.
Google's online marketing market share is already so significant that most web marketing firms won't even touch Yahoo or MSN networks because the effort is simply not worth the return. But now you say if I go through Google I'll also get a piece of Yahoo? Big win for Google.
In this situation, I think Yahoo honestly had a choice between two devils with different faces. They may have royally pissed off their shareholders with shrugging off MS, but they may keep their company alive for a little longer.
As far as my own opinion, I'm split. On one side as a consumer, I think there needs to be more web marketing competitors to compete with Google in order to maintain a healthy market. On the other hand I am a Google shareholder. I suppose in this case I win (and lose) either way.
For end user usability, one of the nicest features about ZFS is that things like fstab go away. On a freebsd box with ZFS, I setup a raidz pool across 4 disks. One of my controllers was giving me issues so I tried flipping around the disks in the various serial ata ports I had across 3 different serial ata controllers. ZFS comes back and detects the array correctly regardless of how the OS assigns the device names. Normally you would cause serious headache if you swapped around the drives.
There are still many corporate environments where you are forced to work with a remote unix server but through something like Exceed or Xming (an xserver running on a client machine). You could easily say, "well just ssh in and use the command line" but that doesn't always work since there are still some big engineering tools that run on *nix and need an X interface.
Now if you're only talking consumer desktops then yes, the network capabilities of X are overrated.
I'm tired of this "I need to drive the kids to school" mentality. I grew up in the 80s and 90s as a kid and I got to school either on my own feet or on a bus. Is there a reason why parents feel they need to drive their kid to school? Your kid is taller than me, surely he is capable of taking a bus and/or walking. In high school it took me 30 minutes to walk casually from home to school. My parents said if I wanted a ride then I better get a ride from a neighbor but they weren't going out of their way to be in front of school ready to pick me at at 2pm or drop me off at 7:30am so they could get stuck in rush hour traffic.
What i NEED is an additional vehicle. A commuter only vehicle.No you don't. You (and everyone else working 5 days a week) just need to move yourself and maybe a bag or briefcase to work and back. If we had decent public transportation systems in the states, you wouldn't even need to own a commuter car. But you can thank GM and big oil for killing off our electric streetcar and train systems we had in the 1920s, and brainwashing everyone with auto marketing for the last century.
So now you might "need" a car simply because the alternatives aren't available. The reality is we shouldn't "need" cars. They are a giant financial investment that depreciates over time. We need efficient transportation--which doesn't have to be road/auto based. There's nothing more inefficient than millions of individuals each driving 1-ton chunks of metal everyday when all they are carrying are themselves between the same two points 5 days a week.
Way back I bike commuted to high school school and one day on the way home I ran into the side of a minivan. It was my fault and partially my bike's (the bicycle brakes were really lousy) but I successfully did not damage the minivan and or myself and put most of the impact into the front wheel. The front wheel was totally bent out of shape.
Just before the impact I decided I would turn the handle bars at the last second so I would hit the minivan with my side rather than my head. It worked perfectly as my arm and should went into the minivan first rather than my face. On the way down I was tangled with my bike so I didn't hit the asphalt.
Since they will be limited to one class or a subset of classes you will always have one class which is "overpowered".
Yeah but I think anyone looking for PvP (more clearly 1v1 free for all) will either end up being too abusive (everyone is my enemy) or too hard to balance. It starts to get interesting when you change the dynamics from 1v1 to say... 2v2 or 5v5, or 100v100.
I can't say much about the games described but I have experience of playing daoc for a few years. Daoc never implemented a good and balanced PvP system (everyone can be your enemy) but did implement probably the most successful "RvR" system. RvR is basically "team" based in the sense that people from your own realm can't kill you. In the early days of the game, people obviously translated this to "everyone in my realm is my ally" but that eventually broke down as there was nothing preventing someone in your realm from purposely not helping you. While it sounds like this was a bad thing, I actually think this was good because it brought about a secondary genre that still hasn't been mastered by any MMO I've seen today. You could say WoW has an RvR system but there are only 2 sides where daoc had 3. Because there were 3 sides when you got into an RvR zone it had some of the tension of a free-for-all style PvP (there were a few instances of 3-way battles) but not too much to overload you.
Eventually this RvR system evolved into 4 main types of RvR styles: zerg vs zerg, 8v8 (max group size was 8 players), small group, and solo. Soloing is obviously closes to plain PvP and had very obvious imbalances, but players still liked it because some players purposely chose characters that could be effective soloing. Small group worked pretty well because it prevented groups and zergs from rolling you, but gave you the benefits of being able to handle more situations than you would solo with a bit of the group dynamics (working together). There were still imbalances in small group; you had to carefully choose the classes to be most effective but there were still a few combinations you could use to do it with different strengths.
8v8 was basically tight group vs group combat. Still some imbalance here (or a lot depending on what patch in the game you played) but later when classic servers were reintroduced, the groups were fairly balanced for periods of times. Playing 8v8 was more like playing a sports team where the entire team had to cooperate with a strategy in order to be effective. Eventually though some players were better than others and could pull a group to victory (kinda like a top-pick athlete) or even worse, some of the best players would group up to form an all-star group.
Finally there was zerg vs zerg which was kinda fun for newbies, but loses its flare as you get more experienced. This is your 50v50 or 100v100 battles. The problem with these is the numbers are rarely balanced so one team (with the most people) just rolls everyone else. There's very little organization and players rarely cooperate well in this setting.
The funny thing is the other forms of RvR (other than 1v1 and zerg vs zerg) didn't evolve until after people got fed up with population imbalances or zerg camping (in the old days there was a gate and if the zerg camped your gate it meant no RvR for you). So people put together "16mans" and later "8mans" to overcome getting rolled by zergs. 8 mans were basically fine tuned groups to include all the necessary abilities within a group and mobility to keep the group faster than the zerg. Later when these 8 mans realized that they could actually handle smaller zergs of unorganized players roughly double their size they started to get popular. This became a little addictive as it was basically the closest you could get to one of those action flicks where the protagonist and his buddies mop the floor with 100s of nobodies. There was a lot of video footage of it and people quickly started forming their own elite groups to get a piece of it. But as the groups grew, they s
Ubuntu netbook remix or whatever it is called is going to address this by providing a new interface designed for small screens. Ars has a bunch of screenshots and more information. The solution isn't perfect but is in a step in the right direction.
This (good interface real estate usage) is one area that I have to give credit to Apple for doing very well. Apple interfaces are very clean and for the most part a good use of screen real estate (minimal window border, fewer menus and toolbars). Gnome tends to be a little on the fat side with buttons, menus, and toolbars but hopefully that will start changing with this new market. I do wish that application developers would stop using the default "file" menus as a crutch to stuff things into or stuffing toolbars with buttons all over the place (gimp, open office, old versions of ms office, many IDEs). On small screens that becomes especially annoying since there is no more room to grow the windows.
A lot of people are buying the linux version for the larger SSD and installing Windows xp themselves.
I've tried the default Xandros linux and it didn't cut it for me. For browsing the net and doing simple things like reading a document it is fine. It will even read your usb thumb drives and other things without issues. But it is hard to customize and does not like you going about installing your own software. I expect that Ubuntu for netbooks will be much easier to customize and will likely be a real replacement for the large laptop or desktop.
It is only standard if you agree to buying a locked phone tied to a cellular service provider. There's nothing stopping you from buying a compatible cell phone and walking into a store to get service for it. The only reason people choose the contract is because they perceive the initial costs as lower when in fact the costs over the lifetime of the quality of service received may be higher.
My big issue with contracts is that if the service becomes crappy or it is fairly obvious they are screwing me over, I don't have the option of leaving them. The contract locks me to their service and guarantees that I will be paying for the service for the next 1 to 2 years regardless of the quality of service. When you are not on a contract, you have negotiating power on a monthly basis because you can threaten to leave their service if it is not adequate for your needs.
I believe this is a good reason for why cell phone service and cell phone features have been very poor in the US--because the American consumers will easily sign the dotted line without realizing that they are giving up a huge amount of their negotiation power. That allows the cellular networks to sit on older technology for as long as possible when they are certain they will have a guaranteed revenue stream for the next 1 to 2 years.
My celeron based eee 900 requires about 15 watts to idle with the screen still on. Perhaps we could put generators with pedals under everyone's cubicle desk and have them power their own computers? Not only would we be green, but we'd also solve America's obesity problem!
For certain values of "people" right?
I hate driving. I had half a year of orange county (los angeles area) rush hour traffic and that was enough for me. No more driving if I can avoid it.
The general population (the opposite of the slashdot demographic) loves flash. It is the "ooo shiny" effect of marketing.
The model you selected comes with Vista Basic preloaded. Microsoft considers this license equivalent or less than XP home. XP Professional is considered equivalent in value to Vista Business. In fact, if you purchase a retail Vista Business license, you legally have downgrade rights to XP Professional. Of course if you purchase XP pro, you do not have upgrade rights to Vista Business.