The only reason why Theocracies on the middle east exist is that the USA needs them so they can pump out the resources of the country without having to care for the general population. They would not be able to do that with a democracy.
So in a way, you are right. The root cause is oil.
They know that it is impossible to stop people from getting to it. But they also know that if they manage to reduce the amount of people that uses P2P down from what it is now (my guess is 80%~90%) to something like below 20%, then they will be able to say that this people are criminals.
Right now, they should send to jail the whole country.
"no need to disassemble the BIOS, your time is worth more than that"
Well, thanks to his dissasembling of the BIOS, you all know that you want to avoid Foxconn products in the future like the plague. That surely is worth something.
Well, as you increase the level of intelligence meeded to go through the CAPTCHA, you start to leave humans out. And this only gets worst as CAPTCHA breakers get better and better, so in that sense, the CAPTCHA is broken, and also in that sense, we have artificial intelligence that is at least as good as the worst humans.
Well I think the point they make is that with this kind of mathematical tools running against this huge sets of data, you get models out that you couldn't have thought of about. This is real AI. During the last days we had entries here on Slashdot about how AI is not advancing, but this kind of thing is very advanced AI and it is new.
I'll explain myself. The biggest job that a brain does (lets not consider a human brain so we don't get into the consciousness/mind type of conversation) is to find statistical correlations from the input data and extracting models from this correlations that can be used to predict the future. This is exactly what this tools are doing.
Before this tools, by looking at the data you would go: mmmm, this is interesting, lets check it out. That is, you would come up with a model and try to find out if it predicts the data. Then we started to use computers to check our models, and from what this WTFey article says, it is the computer the one coming out with the model now, starting from raw data.
Bring forward in time one of those Acheans to our world and ask him what he sees. He will talk about a golden age of culture and science and health and physical comfort. He won't understand what goes around him most of the time. This is what the singularities you mention brought to this world. The same probably goes for whatever is there lying in the future for us.... may be traumatic, but it will take us forward into an amazing world.
So what about shipping a huge monster machine in every respect except the hard drive? it can be upgraded later on. This would make for really cheap licenses on expensive machines.
Every time people talks about Linux on the desktop, they talk about applications, but as you point on your post, the real problem is drivers. The applications are there for many users, but the drivers aren't. Until Linux market share goes up a bit more (something that is only a mater of time), we are still getting sub par drivers (the problem used to be that we didn't get drivers at all), and this is the biggest drawback for any non power user. Troubleshooting drivers forces you to move to the command line, something most people just won't do.
Probably, the way things are going, the governments will require that any suite they use will understand both of the ISO formats, ODF and OOXML. As soon as this happens and OpenOffice (or whatever other open source office suite you choose) implements filters for OOXML, the format lock in advantage from M$ Office will be lost.
I don't know where did you get that from, but I am Spanish, living and working in Spain as a software engineer, and that is not the case.
Entry level salaries are low, far too low, but that is not due to any law. It is due to a high number of qualified people looking for jobs on an obsolete economy based on construction work and tourism.
"A deeper point is this: do we really want to live in a world where lies and deception are regarded as the norm, and where all opinions are automatically worthless simply by virtue of their being opinions?"
It is not only that. What stands out the most is what Microsoft has decided to call this: "Get the facts". They are trying to pass it as facts, when they are, at best, opinions. At worst, marketing rethoric. It has the smell of the ministry of truth all around it.
I am a very long time KDE user, and I expected 4.0 to be a great desktop, but it turned out to be a alpha so I kept using the old 3.x series.
The scope of 4.0 was quite big, so understood the problems and I hoped for 4.1 to be a stable release.
Reading the dot news on kde.org I found that the have gone back and rewritten a lot of plasma again. This means that it will need a new period of stabilization again.
I just hope that this time they don't release before it is ready. It would be a huge blow to the project's reputation. 3.5 is excellent, so we can keep using it until they are really ready with the new version. No hurry.
This doesn't look some random words from a random executive. It looks more like they have found the right time to dump an uncomfortable business partner (Microsoft) when it is weakest. It is in the best interest of the big hardware manufacturers not to be controlled by the 300 pounds gorilla. If they get Linux desktops rolling, they will be able to get a bigger margin on sales and/or bigger market share just by dropping the M$ tax. And they will be more in control.
Now, if that is their goal, they'll find ways to get their providers to help.
Easy, virus and malware. You can say that linux is not attacked because it is not mainstream as much as you want, but the fact is that there are no virus or malware for linux on the wild.
Not having to reinstall the machine every six months is a very important advantage.
Then we have the licensing costs of windows and applications.
Then we have the fact that you can't get Windows XP anymore and you will be bringing to his knees any computer that runs Vista. On the other hand, Linux is quite happy with older computers.
Well, not really. I don't compile things myself, it is the compiler doing it. My father used to compile things himself from source, he worked with punch cards and had no compiler.
Where I spent most of my Gentoo maintenance time is configuring the different applications to suit my needs.
Also regular linux users that do not have time for tinkering.
I run a Gentoo workstation for work, where I set up things exactly the way I want them, but this is quite time consuming.
I also have a "media center" type box with ubuntu that the family uses to get and display multimedia content. This box is almost maintenance free, no virus, no problems. A Windows machine would have given me a lot more work and it would have turned me into a pirate:-)
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The only reason why Theocracies on the middle east exist is that the USA needs them so they can pump out the resources of the country without having to care for the general population. They would not be able to do that with a democracy.
So in a way, you are right. The root cause is oil.
"Just having multiple groups working on the same problems, each trying out different solutions, is helping innovation."
Agreed, and guys, please remember this when then next kde/gnome or ubuntu/debian/... flamewar starts.
Vista's performance is "porcine" enough by itself, but combined with the new and "improved" IE, you will start thinking about yourself as a swineherd
They know that it is impossible to stop people from getting to it. But they also know that if they manage to reduce the amount of people that uses P2P down from what it is now (my guess is 80%~90%) to something like below 20%, then they will be able to say that this people are criminals.
Right now, they should send to jail the whole country.
"no need to disassemble the BIOS, your time is worth more than that"
Well, thanks to his dissasembling of the BIOS, you all know that you want to avoid Foxconn products in the future like the plague. That surely is worth something.
Well, as you increase the level of intelligence meeded to go through the CAPTCHA, you start to leave humans out. And this only gets worst as CAPTCHA breakers get better and better, so in that sense, the CAPTCHA is broken, and also in that sense, we have artificial intelligence that is at least as good as the worst humans.
Well I think the point they make is that with this kind of mathematical tools running against this huge sets of data, you get models out that you couldn't have thought of about. This is real AI. During the last days we had entries here on Slashdot about how AI is not advancing, but this kind of thing is very advanced AI and it is new.
I'll explain myself. The biggest job that a brain does (lets not consider a human brain so we don't get into the consciousness/mind type of conversation) is to find statistical correlations from the input data and extracting models from this correlations that can be used to predict the future. This is exactly what this tools are doing.
Before this tools, by looking at the data you would go: mmmm, this is interesting, lets check it out. That is, you would come up with a model and try to find out if it predicts the data. Then we started to use computers to check our models, and from what this WTFey article says, it is the computer the one coming out with the model now, starting from raw data.
One day Google's supercomputer will wake up to consciousness and we will all be his slaves.
It is video recognition software used to implement a controler, so you could eventually play wii type games.
Bring forward in time one of those Acheans to our world and ask him what he sees. He will talk about a golden age of culture and science and health and physical comfort. He won't understand what goes around him most of the time. This is what the singularities you mention brought to this world. The same probably goes for whatever is there lying in the future for us.... may be traumatic, but it will take us forward into an amazing world.
Sounds like too much, with typical numbers around 60 watts per processor this days.
I would put the operating systems, binaries and configuration files on the SSD.
But most of what makes up the volume on current computers (log files, backups, video/audio) can be committed to a regular hard drive.
So what about shipping a huge monster machine in every respect except the hard drive? it can be upgraded later on. This would make for really cheap licenses on expensive machines.
Every time people talks about Linux on the desktop, they talk about applications, but as you point on your post, the real problem is drivers. The applications are there for many users, but the drivers aren't. Until Linux market share goes up a bit more (something that is only a mater of time), we are still getting sub par drivers (the problem used to be that we didn't get drivers at all), and this is the biggest drawback for any non power user. Troubleshooting drivers forces you to move to the command line, something most people just won't do.
Agreed,
Probably, the way things are going, the governments will require that any suite they use will understand both of the ISO formats, ODF and OOXML. As soon as this happens and OpenOffice (or whatever other open source office suite you choose) implements filters for OOXML, the format lock in advantage from M$ Office will be lost.
I don't know where did you get that from, but I am Spanish, living and working in Spain as a software engineer, and that is not the case.
Entry level salaries are low, far too low, but that is not due to any law. It is due to a high number of qualified people looking for jobs on an obsolete economy based on construction work and tourism.
"A deeper point is this: do we really want to live in a world where lies and deception are regarded as the norm, and where all opinions are automatically worthless simply by virtue of their being opinions?"
It is not only that. What stands out the most is what Microsoft has decided to call this: "Get the facts". They are trying to pass it as facts, when they are, at best, opinions. At worst, marketing rethoric. It has the smell of the ministry of truth all around it.
I am a very long time KDE user, and I expected 4.0 to be a great desktop, but it turned out to be a alpha so I kept using the old 3.x series.
The scope of 4.0 was quite big, so understood the problems and I hoped for 4.1 to be a stable release.
Reading the dot news on kde.org I found that the have gone back and rewritten a lot of plasma again. This means that it will need a new period of stabilization again.
I just hope that this time they don't release before it is ready. It would be a huge blow to the project's reputation. 3.5 is excellent, so we can keep using it until they are really ready with the new version. No hurry.
This doesn't look some random words from a random executive. It looks more like they have found the right time to dump an uncomfortable business partner (Microsoft) when it is weakest. It is in the best interest of the big hardware manufacturers not to be controlled by the 300 pounds gorilla. If they get Linux desktops rolling, they will be able to get a bigger margin on sales and/or bigger market share just by dropping the M$ tax. And they will be more in control.
Now, if that is their goal, they'll find ways to get their providers to help.
Maybe it has to do with the average quality of windows sysadmins and programmers. You can do us all a favor and whack their heads.
But, with 500,000 websites hacked, you have a lot of whacking to do...
Apple is getting the high margin users that want a good desktop experience, and Linux is getting more and more users that need good value deals.
Microsoft is in the middle, giving up market share on both sides.
Mmmmm, I thought I had already killed that one...
Easy, virus and malware. You can say that linux is not attacked because it is not mainstream as much as you want, but the fact is that there are no virus or malware for linux on the wild.
Not having to reinstall the machine every six months is a very important advantage.
Then we have the licensing costs of windows and applications.
Then we have the fact that you can't get Windows XP anymore and you will be bringing to his knees any computer that runs Vista. On the other hand, Linux is quite happy with older computers.
enough?
There are more...
Well, not really. I don't compile things myself, it is the compiler doing it. My father used to compile things himself from source, he worked with punch cards and had no compiler.
Where I spent most of my Gentoo maintenance time is configuring the different applications to suit my needs.
Also regular linux users that do not have time for tinkering.
:-)
I run a Gentoo workstation for work, where I set up things exactly the way I want them, but this is quite time consuming.
I also have a "media center" type box with ubuntu that the family uses to get and display multimedia content. This box is almost maintenance free, no virus, no problems. A Windows machine would have given me a lot more work and it would have turned me into a pirate