Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Same problmes as the iPad, expect more so (Score 1) 401

Too heavy, too short battery life, and not as readable as a dedicated eBook reader for reading, not powerful enough, screen too small to be a decent laptop, and not as portable as a 3G cell phone if all you need to do is get directions or something. The problem with all the 'touch pad' like products is that they fill a much needed gap in the computer products. landscape.

Comment Horribly misleading title - it shot down a UAV (Score 1) 627

An Unmanned areal vehicle. This much closer to wood model than it is to something like, say, a Cessna 154. They aren't armored, they fly really, really slow, and they are built to be ultra light so they can fly a long time. It is totally unsurprising that a relatively low powered laser could shoot down a UAV.

Comment Prices seem high to me (Score 1) 821

I bought a copy of Vista 64 for my last build to run legacy software, roughly translated 'games', and it doesn't run a lot of them. I would have preferred to run 32 bit XP, but it wouldn't install. I'm doing everything I need to do on Linux these days, so I can't see ever buying another copy of Windows. At those prices, it is a very poor value proposition.

Comment Re:Cost will fall flat... (Score 1) 461

I personally find getting anything done on Windows vastly more time consuming than on Linux, and that's even after you have installed cygwin and everything else you need to get it up to the 'barely adequate' state. Microsoft really doesn't what OSS to compete on 'value' because by any reasonable standard of 'value', Microsoft products lose. FWIW, I typically get 2 or 3 times as much real, productive work done as most of the rest of the folks at my shop, and it isn't because I'm a super genius or anything. It's just that everybody else is stuck with the 'corporate standard' desktop (ie Windows) and spend most of their time pushing that rock uphill.

Comment RTFA - horribly misleading (Score 1) 873

Net neutrality is the idea that all packets on the net are treated at the same priority. Feinstein's amendment apparently is intended to allow ISP's to block traffic that teh MPAA or RIAA claim is copyright infringement. It is still a bad idea, but has nothing to do with net neutrality. FWIW, in nothern califronia, Feinstein is generally considered to be a Democrat in name only. She has been solidly pro-war, pro-torture, and pro copyright holders for quite some time.

Comment Re:Usability is a matter of opinion (Score 1) 690

That's more or less my feeling as well. Of course, Matthew Paul Thomas misses the forest for the trees; free software has usability problems for roughly the same reasons as proprietary software has usability problems. One size doesn't fit all, and the more optional features there are, the less well it works for the people that only really needed size 'medium'. IMHO, Fedora is now much more 'usable' than Windows, and has been for quite a while. For example, Nautilus does things 'out of the box' that requires 2 or 3 additional 'add ons' on Windows and most of those are free software too.

Slashdot Top Deals

In practice, failures in system development, like unemployment in Russia, happens a lot despite official propaganda to the contrary. -- Paul Licker

Working...