Nah, you really only need one set of language files, your native language, or possibly two, but with a limited space drive you should be trying to save space any way you can.
Haha, good guess! Actually, believe it or not, I personally have seen one of these Dell netbooks running linux in the wild. That's the first time I saw someone other than myself running linux on a laptop. I got a chance to screw around with it some and as somebody else mentioned above, Dell messed up their Ubuntu install with about 400 MB or language files and other crap you don't need, which is especially weird since the thing only has a 4 GB hard drive. Other than that and the glossy screen, these netbooks aren't too bad looking. The hinge is pretty well designed and I don't mind the keyboard like the guys at laptopmag did.
I've tried pointing that out before, but you're probably wasting your breath. The tin-foil hat crowd here at slashdot seems to think that Apple is keeping all the juiciest enhancements for themselves. I know it's not true because I run Safari on my macs and have run some webkit browsers like midori on my linux machines, they're about as fast, certainly faster than firefox. I'd use midori as my full time browser, but it's not as full featured as firefox and is unstable (or was last version I downloaded, like 0.0.21 or so).
Mod parent up! Anyone who thinks that the NYT only is an AP feed site obviously doesn't read it. But I guess that from tjstork's typical "conservative" response that he'd consider the NYT to be part of the "liberal elite" and that fox news is the "real" news.
The NYT already tried this, failed and moved back to an ad-based free site. The bottom line is that few people want a subscription model for an on-line service and that pay as you go articles are too expensive (as we've already seen with the private publishers of scientific articles, who wants to pay $25 or more per article?).
P.S. you might want to amend your signature, the current situation is hardly Obama's fault: From the day Bush took office to the day he left office, the Dow dropped a net of 2,306 points, which is the worst performance of any president. You can check the facts here. What's also interesting is that the U.S. National debt nearly doubled under Bush. If that's what we can expect from a "fiscal conservative", maybe you should consider giving Obama a chance to un-fuck what's happened instead of practicing the usual brand of trolling and character assassination that the party of "family values" likes to use.
For me, I think the whole swapping battery thing is overblown. I'm typing this on a macbook pro that, when I bought it 3 years ago, I decided to do the pro-active thing and bought two batteries for the purpose of swapping them out. In that three years, I can count on one hand the number of occasions where I've been stuck without access to power and had to use my laptop for an extended period of time. It's just about as much trouble to find a power outlet and plug my laptop in as it is to shut it down and swap batteries. So, for my lifestyle and uses, I'm not crying any tears over the lack of a swappable battery, maybe you might, but this is not your laptop then. The fact that the battery is relatively easy to replace should it fail or if reaches its end of life is a relief (and ifixit rocks btw, I have repaied two old laptops using their instructions, I love it!).
If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.
And this is different from what Sun does with OpenOffice how? The guys over at NeoOffice wanted to start issuing patches to make a mac native version of OO.org but Sun refused to let them do it, preferring to wait five years and then do it themselves. They also rejected an excellent solver-like module in favor of keeping their own half-assed implemention. My point is that even the supposed supporters of open source do what you accuse Apple of doing.
As for the enhancements of webkit that apple is supposedly keeping for themselves, it smells too much like paranoia so I call bullshit: you need to prove that. I do remember some communications problems with Apple contributing code to khtml, but as far as I can tell now, that has been resolved (possibly by the introduction of webkit), and to my mind it was never established that the fault was entirely apple's and not the khtml team.
I know slashdot hivemind loves to hate apple and I myself am not a fan of this whole iphone lock-in crap (I won't buy one just because they make you sign a $70/mo. contract with AT&T & they won't let you officially tether it), but just to make this discussion a little more even-handed, I'll point out a couple of cases where Apple has "played nice" with open source.
Exhibit A: CUPS. Apple owns it. Nothing bad has happened. In fact it has worked so well that I've been using free gutenberg printer drivers for a laser printer that Apple stopped supporting in Leopard. Works fine. Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine. Exhibit C:Darwin is open source. That's right, the OS X operating system is open source and released by Apple. Granted, the window manager (quartz) is not, nor are a lot of the apps (like the Finder), but you can always use X11, which btw, apple provides also.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.
Well, I'm not sure what you were doing, what distro you were using or what, but Adobe has ben one of the few mainstream proprietary companies who has actually been porting their software to linux. For instance, the native 64 bit version of flash runs only on linux, not mac os x or windows. I'm going to give you some credit and assume that you're not a complete idiot and suggest that your distro. was being overzealous and installing a "free as in speech" flash version and that your browser was using that instead of Adobe's. That's kind of irritating, but it's certainly not insurmountable, e.g., I watch hulu and youtube all the time on my machine, works great.
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.
Well... I see your anecdotal evidence and I'll up you one....
I recently bought a Blu-ray DVD player for my PC. I was building a new PC that had surround sound and figured I'd get with the latest format for everything So, I am learning about the PAIN and MISERY the DRM is on Blu-ray discs (I run linux), and the non-standard audio codecs they're using, and quite frankly, the OFFENSE TO GOD that constitutes HDCP. (Mods: this is not an overstatement! I wish it were...) Finally, given how expensive the damn discs are, I won't buy another one unless I have already seen the movie, through... you guessed it! Downloading. They have put such a high barrier to adoption on their new media format that I will not buy another disc until I can be damn sure that I really want that movie.
So... in my case, the only way the media will make a profit by getting me to buy any new content at all will be by allowing me to download the compressed version of the movie first without DRM, and yes for free. I can tell you that it has always been this way, myself, and my family members who download all buy more content because they download, not less. That's because they get exposed to more movies and shows and they want the high quality version of it.
Now, can you imagine the scale of someone having to do a national recount based on the fact that Gore's supposed "win of the popular vote" in 2000 was under the threshold to trip an automatic recount in every single state that has such a law?
You don't know that, it's never been tried. I actually believe that if the elections were standardized federally, we would have less issues with this because the backwater states like Florida would have a reasonable chance to have a decent election system that their own state government seems incapable of providing.
As far as #1 is concerned, the "union of self-sovereign states" was not "eroded away" in recent years, it was settled firmly during the Civil War when Lincoln brought back some of your supposedly self-sovereign states into the union by force, and dictated how they will treat their citizens. Lincoln is far from the only person who has done this, during the nullification crisis, Jackson told SC that he would put down any secession by force. Even fucking George Washington had to put down the rebellion of the whiskey rebellion in PA. I mean, you're not even arguing for the philosophy of the 20th century, you're back in the 19th century trying to decide if SC can secede or not, or even going back to the origin of our nation. Get over yourself, federal law trumps states law, that's the way it's always been and always will be.
Unfortunately, while Diane Feinstein is a great democrat in other areas, she is firmly on the side of copy protection, DRM, the RIAA, MPAA, and media distributors in general. This has nothing to do with the Democrat take over of congress, or going back on campaign promises, Diane Feinstein has always been this way. Even though I'm a hard-core democrat, I voted against her in the elections every time when I lived in California (I've vote instead for the Peace and Freedom party). Here's the form letter I got back in response to my letter I sent to her complaining about some new draconian copyright law:
Thank you for writing to me about music file-sharing. I
appreciate your thoughts on this important topic and welcome the
opportunity to respond.
I have always believed that the protection of intellectual
property rights is vital to a flourishing economy -- particularly in
California. As new technologies, such as P2P file sharing, have
developed over the past few years it has become increasingly
difficult to protect intellectual property from illegal copying and
distribution. I believe that we must work to prevent the creation of
digital copies of copyrighted works that can be illegally distributed
throughout the world.
The "Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004" (S
2560) is currently pending consideration in the Senate Judiciary
Committee, of which I am a member. I will certainly keep your
thoughts in mind should this legislation come up in the Committee.
Again, thank you for writing. Should you have any further
comments or questions, please feel free to contact my Washington,
D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
There you have it, she's pretty much in the media content protection camp as far as she can go and she's always been that way. Meh... I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the senator who draws her financial support from Hollywood would be interested in "protecting" copyright. It doesn't mean I like it any more and I do wish she would go away.
[Personal Rapid Transit] systems are supposed to combine the convenience and privacy of automobiles with the environmental benefits of mass transit.
I was under the impression these things never caught on was because they did the opposite of the above claim: they combine the environmental detriments of personal automobile use with the inconvenience and delay of mass transit.
The reason I say this is that if you have to build one car per person and maintain the cars and the system for the cars, that's a huge environmental impact. Even if the cars are "green" and run on lead-acid batteries, there's still a lot of resources that go into building them and you lose all the energy efficiency of moving large numbers of people at one time. For inconvenience of mass transit, having your own personal automobile is convenient, if wasteful. You can take it anywhere you like at any time you like and can maintain it as much as you wish, with a public transit system that you must give up, but in sharing your transit device, you are consuming less resources per capita.
Mod the parent up. In the gush of "Psystar wins a round!" exclamations, the GP and TFS seem to have forgotten that their initial counter-suit based on anti-trust claims was thrown out. This is just the judge saying, "well okay, you can try plan B if you like." At best, this is a neutral result for Psystar, not a victory. The real test of whether what they are doing is illegal or not is the outcome of Apple's original suit, not Psystar's counter-suit.
This is precisely what we want to see. Hardware manufacturers using the openness and customizability of Linux and free software to ensure not only that their software and their hardware play nice but to give the device a look and feel that is distinct and tailored to the device. I think we can all agree that Apple owes at least part of its success to a relatively seamless and user-friendly interface between hardware and software. Linux and open source software should allow the same thing but any hardware manufacturer could do it rather than just Apple. If they had put windows on it, this netbook would act more or less like every other windows laptop out there, just less powerful. Instead, they have something that is actually exciting.
Ahh okay, I misunderstood your intent. I agree though, we the people need to push Obama and not let him get away with this FISA crap or saving bankers who lost billions or dollars. If we don't, it'll just be "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
I've been trying to figure out how to tell people that Obama is a man who happens to be black, and because of this hysteria, he has arguably been given far more trust than any president should be given.
The rest of your post I more or less agreed with, but I differ with you on this comment. Were you asleep during the last 8 years? Or did you just fail to notice that the majority of American people trusted George Bush Jr. to invade a country on completely false pretenses. Moreover, often those that questioned that line were denounced as traitors. Not just the government, we the people allowed this. I'd say the American people trusting Obama has nothing to do with the color of his skin, it has to do with that the American people are gullible, they treat every president that way at first.
Something that I thought was interesting from the article that didn't make it into the summary was this quote:
Even if Mr. Jobs does not get personally involved in future negotiations, music executives still fear dealing with Apple. One chit the company holds is the power of the iTunes home page, where it promotes music. They also say that the entire Apple staff, including Eddie Cue, the vice president in charge of iTunes who handles the relationships with the record labels, do their best to follow Mr. Jobs's style in their own negotiating.
Apparently, the people at Apple have been making sure that Apple will maintain the same culture without Mr. Jobs. Could be good, but without a single egomanical guy in charge, maybe there will be a lot of discord? Too many cooks and spoil the broth? Time will tell.
I think they must just like to pretend that their revenue stream isn't tied to one product. If they have "six different versions" of one of your flagship products, maybe they can fool themselves into thinking they're more diversified. Alternately, maybe it's because they don't want to burden joe six-pack and jane grandmother with any "power-user" features confuse and befuddle them. Or maybe this is done at some marketing droid's insistence to make him- or herself feel like they're making a contribution to the company, I don't know.
What if you want one that somebody spent a lot of time and money on making a consistent look and feel? Don't mistake me, I run Debian myself, but if I wanted to set someone up who isn't a computer enthusiast, I'd probably go with something that has a more polished or unified look like gOS or Ubuntu. That's the point I was trying to make with this comment: that there is no distro that satisfies everyone's needs so there's no use pretending that there could be, but I was modded troll as you can see.
Yeah, no shit. You're telling me I need to run Ubuntu or RedHat or something even if I want something else? What if I have a web and e-mail machine and want to run something flashy, but kind of lightweight? I'd use gOS. For a work machine, I might consider SUSE or Redhat (suse is even supported by our IT staff). My heart however, lies in screwing around so what if I want to run Debian, Slackware or Gentoo on my home machine? What if I'm chinese and want a chinese distro? Run Red Flag.
No way, you one distro., one desktop, one window manager, one office suite people go take a long walk off a short pier. I like my diversity and I like using the proper tool for the job. You can have my $FAVORITE_DISTRO when you pry it from my cold, dead hard drive. Give me $FAVORITE_DISTRO or give me death!
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Nah, you really only need one set of language files, your native language, or possibly two, but with a limited space drive you should be trying to save space any way you can.
Haha, good guess! Actually, believe it or not, I personally have seen one of these Dell netbooks running linux in the wild. That's the first time I saw someone other than myself running linux on a laptop. I got a chance to screw around with it some and as somebody else mentioned above, Dell messed up their Ubuntu install with about 400 MB or language files and other crap you don't need, which is especially weird since the thing only has a 4 GB hard drive. Other than that and the glossy screen, these netbooks aren't too bad looking. The hinge is pretty well designed and I don't mind the keyboard like the guys at laptopmag did.
I've tried pointing that out before, but you're probably wasting your breath. The tin-foil hat crowd here at slashdot seems to think that Apple is keeping all the juiciest enhancements for themselves. I know it's not true because I run Safari on my macs and have run some webkit browsers like midori on my linux machines, they're about as fast, certainly faster than firefox. I'd use midori as my full time browser, but it's not as full featured as firefox and is unstable (or was last version I downloaded, like 0.0.21 or so).
Mod parent up! Anyone who thinks that the NYT only is an AP feed site obviously doesn't read it. But I guess that from tjstork's typical "conservative" response that he'd consider the NYT to be part of the "liberal elite" and that fox news is the "real" news.
The NYT already tried this, failed and moved back to an ad-based free site. The bottom line is that few people want a subscription model for an on-line service and that pay as you go articles are too expensive (as we've already seen with the private publishers of scientific articles, who wants to pay $25 or more per article?).
P.S. you might want to amend your signature, the current situation is hardly Obama's fault: From the day Bush took office to the day he left office, the Dow dropped a net of 2,306 points, which is the worst performance of any president. You can check the facts here. What's also interesting is that the U.S. National debt nearly doubled under Bush. If that's what we can expect from a "fiscal conservative", maybe you should consider giving Obama a chance to un-fuck what's happened instead of practicing the usual brand of trolling and character assassination that the party of "family values" likes to use.
For me, I think the whole swapping battery thing is overblown. I'm typing this on a macbook pro that, when I bought it 3 years ago, I decided to do the pro-active thing and bought two batteries for the purpose of swapping them out. In that three years, I can count on one hand the number of occasions where I've been stuck without access to power and had to use my laptop for an extended period of time. It's just about as much trouble to find a power outlet and plug my laptop in as it is to shut it down and swap batteries. So, for my lifestyle and uses, I'm not crying any tears over the lack of a swappable battery, maybe you might, but this is not your laptop then. The fact that the battery is relatively easy to replace should it fail or if reaches its end of life is a relief (and ifixit rocks btw, I have repaied two old laptops using their instructions, I love it!).
If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.
And this is different from what Sun does with OpenOffice how? The guys over at NeoOffice wanted to start issuing patches to make a mac native version of OO.org but Sun refused to let them do it, preferring to wait five years and then do it themselves. They also rejected an excellent solver-like module in favor of keeping their own half-assed implemention. My point is that even the supposed supporters of open source do what you accuse Apple of doing.
As for the enhancements of webkit that apple is supposedly keeping for themselves, it smells too much like paranoia so I call bullshit: you need to prove that. I do remember some communications problems with Apple contributing code to khtml, but as far as I can tell now, that has been resolved (possibly by the introduction of webkit), and to my mind it was never established that the fault was entirely apple's and not the khtml team.
I know slashdot hivemind loves to hate apple and I myself am not a fan of this whole iphone lock-in crap (I won't buy one just because they make you sign a $70/mo. contract with AT&T & they won't let you officially tether it), but just to make this discussion a little more even-handed, I'll point out a couple of cases where Apple has "played nice" with open source.
Exhibit A: CUPS. Apple owns it. Nothing bad has happened. In fact it has worked so well that I've been using free gutenberg printer drivers for a laser printer that Apple stopped supporting in Leopard. Works fine.
Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.
Exhibit C: Darwin is open source. That's right, the OS X operating system is open source and released by Apple. Granted, the window manager (quartz) is not, nor are a lot of the apps (like the Finder), but you can always use X11, which btw, apple provides also.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.
Well, I'm not sure what you were doing, what distro you were using or what, but Adobe has ben one of the few mainstream proprietary companies who has actually been porting their software to linux. For instance, the native 64 bit version of flash runs only on linux, not mac os x or windows. I'm going to give you some credit and assume that you're not a complete idiot and suggest that your distro. was being overzealous and installing a "free as in speech" flash version and that your browser was using that instead of Adobe's. That's kind of irritating, but it's certainly not insurmountable, e.g., I watch hulu and youtube all the time on my machine, works great.
Well... I see your anecdotal evidence and I'll up you one....
I recently bought a Blu-ray DVD player for my PC. I was building a new PC that had surround sound and figured I'd get with the latest format for everything So, I am learning about the PAIN and MISERY the DRM is on Blu-ray discs (I run linux), and the non-standard audio codecs they're using, and quite frankly, the OFFENSE TO GOD that constitutes HDCP. (Mods: this is not an overstatement! I wish it were...) Finally, given how expensive the damn discs are, I won't buy another one unless I have already seen the movie, through... you guessed it! Downloading. They have put such a high barrier to adoption on their new media format that I will not buy another disc until I can be damn sure that I really want that movie.
So... in my case, the only way the media will make a profit by getting me to buy any new content at all will be by allowing me to download the compressed version of the movie first without DRM, and yes for free. I can tell you that it has always been this way, myself, and my family members who download all buy more content because they download, not less. That's because they get exposed to more movies and shows and they want the high quality version of it.
I'm pretty skeptical myself. Why would anybody want to go into a store like that?
"Hey guys, want to head over to the mall and check out the new version of Office?"
"Awesome! Let's go!"
No. The above conversation will not happen with any great frequency because Microsoft is just not sexy, they are utilitarian and mundane.
You don't know that, it's never been tried. I actually believe that if the elections were standardized federally, we would have less issues with this because the backwater states like Florida would have a reasonable chance to have a decent election system that their own state government seems incapable of providing.
As far as #1 is concerned, the "union of self-sovereign states" was not "eroded away" in recent years, it was settled firmly during the Civil War when Lincoln brought back some of your supposedly self-sovereign states into the union by force, and dictated how they will treat their citizens. Lincoln is far from the only person who has done this, during the nullification crisis, Jackson told SC that he would put down any secession by force. Even fucking George Washington had to put down the rebellion of the whiskey rebellion in PA. I mean, you're not even arguing for the philosophy of the 20th century, you're back in the 19th century trying to decide if SC can secede or not, or even going back to the origin of our nation. Get over yourself, federal law trumps states law, that's the way it's always been and always will be.
There you have it, she's pretty much in the media content protection camp as far as she can go and she's always been that way. Meh... I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the senator who draws her financial support from Hollywood would be interested in "protecting" copyright. It doesn't mean I like it any more and I do wish she would go away.
I was under the impression these things never caught on was because they did the opposite of the above claim: they combine the environmental detriments of personal automobile use with the inconvenience and delay of mass transit.
The reason I say this is that if you have to build one car per person and maintain the cars and the system for the cars, that's a huge environmental impact. Even if the cars are "green" and run on lead-acid batteries, there's still a lot of resources that go into building them and you lose all the energy efficiency of moving large numbers of people at one time. For inconvenience of mass transit, having your own personal automobile is convenient, if wasteful. You can take it anywhere you like at any time you like and can maintain it as much as you wish, with a public transit system that you must give up, but in sharing your transit device, you are consuming less resources per capita.
Mod the parent up. In the gush of "Psystar wins a round!" exclamations, the GP and TFS seem to have forgotten that their initial counter-suit based on anti-trust claims was thrown out. This is just the judge saying, "well okay, you can try plan B if you like." At best, this is a neutral result for Psystar, not a victory. The real test of whether what they are doing is illegal or not is the outcome of Apple's original suit, not Psystar's counter-suit.
This is precisely what we want to see. Hardware manufacturers using the openness and customizability of Linux and free software to ensure not only that their software and their hardware play nice but to give the device a look and feel that is distinct and tailored to the device. I think we can all agree that Apple owes at least part of its success to a relatively seamless and user-friendly interface between hardware and software. Linux and open source software should allow the same thing but any hardware manufacturer could do it rather than just Apple. If they had put windows on it, this netbook would act more or less like every other windows laptop out there, just less powerful. Instead, they have something that is actually exciting.
It's no problem. We'll just refer to it by an initialism, "SOS".
oh wait....
Ahh okay, I misunderstood your intent. I agree though, we the people need to push Obama and not let him get away with this FISA crap or saving bankers who lost billions or dollars. If we don't, it'll just be "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
The rest of your post I more or less agreed with, but I differ with you on this comment. Were you asleep during the last 8 years? Or did you just fail to notice that the majority of American people trusted George Bush Jr. to invade a country on completely false pretenses. Moreover, often those that questioned that line were denounced as traitors. Not just the government, we the people allowed this. I'd say the American people trusting Obama has nothing to do with the color of his skin, it has to do with that the American people are gullible, they treat every president that way at first.
Apparently, the people at Apple have been making sure that Apple will maintain the same culture without Mr. Jobs. Could be good, but without a single egomanical guy in charge, maybe there will be a lot of discord? Too many cooks and spoil the broth? Time will tell.
I think they must just like to pretend that their revenue stream isn't tied to one product. If they have "six different versions" of one of your flagship products, maybe they can fool themselves into thinking they're more diversified. Alternately, maybe it's because they don't want to burden joe six-pack and jane grandmother with any "power-user" features confuse and befuddle them. Or maybe this is done at some marketing droid's insistence to make him- or herself feel like they're making a contribution to the company, I don't know.
To reuse a meme from a few weeks ago.... "Well, I think you know the answer to that."
What if you want one that somebody spent a lot of time and money on making a consistent look and feel? Don't mistake me, I run Debian myself, but if I wanted to set someone up who isn't a computer enthusiast, I'd probably go with something that has a more polished or unified look like gOS or Ubuntu. That's the point I was trying to make with this comment: that there is no distro that satisfies everyone's needs so there's no use pretending that there could be, but I was modded troll as you can see.
Yeah, no shit. You're telling me I need to run Ubuntu or RedHat or something even if I want something else? What if I have a web and e-mail machine and want to run something flashy, but kind of lightweight? I'd use gOS. For a work machine, I might consider SUSE or Redhat (suse is even supported by our IT staff). My heart however, lies in screwing around so what if I want to run Debian, Slackware or Gentoo on my home machine? What if I'm chinese and want a chinese distro? Run Red Flag.
No way, you one distro., one desktop, one window manager, one office suite people go take a long walk off a short pier. I like my diversity and I like using the proper tool for the job. You can have my $FAVORITE_DISTRO when you pry it from my cold, dead hard drive. Give me $FAVORITE_DISTRO or give me death!