Comment "you're being had" (Score 1, Informative) 1055
“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.” -- Michael Crichton
Comment Re:Devil's Advocate Time... (Score 1) 5
Good answer, thanks.
Comment Re:I can sympathize (Score 1) 5
Thanks for the sincere and possibly good advice. I guess it's one of those "life's not fair" situations that I just have to deal with. It's probably only a matter of time before he's promoted to boss.
Submission + - 125 Years of 0 0' 00" at Greenwich (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon "was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian." Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian was rejected / not voted on (as it was felt it was outside the purview of the conference).
Submission + - Sun Microsystems to cut 3,000 jobs (cnn.com)
afgun writes: Once great tech leader Sun will shed 3,000 jobs due to the delays in the Oracle acquisition; is this the first cry of the death-spiral?
Submission + - Windows 7 on Multicore: How Much Faster? (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock tests whether Windows 7's threading advances fulfill the promise of improved performance and energy reduction, running Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate against Viewperf and Cinebench benchmarks using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation, the price-performance winner of an earlier roundup of Nehalem-based workstations. 'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,' Binstock writes of the benchmarks, adding that the principal changes to Windows 7 multithreading consist of increased processor affinity, 'a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources,' permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors. 'Windows 7 performs several tricks to keep threads running on the same execution pipelines so that the underlying Nehalem processor can turn off transistors on lesser-used or inactive pipelines,' Binstock writes. 'The primary benefit of this feature is reduced energy consumption,' with Windows 7 requiring 17 percent less power to run than Windows XP or Vista, according to Binstock's benchmarks."
Submission + - Apple blurs the server line with Mac mini Server 1
Toe, The writes: "On Tuesday, Apple announced several new hardware offerings, including a new Mac mini, their (almost-literally) pint-sized desktop computer. In a bizarre twist, they are now also offering a Mac mini with Mac OS X Server bundled-in, along with a two hard drives somehow stuffed into the tiny package. Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a "server." However, with the robust capabilities of Snow Leopard Server (a true, if highly-GUI, UNIX server), it seems likely to find a niche in small businesses and even enthusiasts' homes. The almost completely guided setup process means that people can set up relatively sophisticated services without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing. What the results will be in terms of security, etc. will be... interesting."
Comment pity (Score 2, Interesting) 132
why do i feel more sorry for the pigs who catch it than the people?
Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 993
"A re-buy of Office for Mac starts at $150"
For my old Windows machine I spent $200 on the Windows home version Office (2002, I think?) because my wife insisted on having Excel (for basic household budgeting).
When I bought my Mac, I tried the pre-installed eval version of iWork '09 and got my wife to play with the Numbers spreadsheet and we have not looked back.
iWork makes Office look *decidedly* dated in most respects. And iWork '09 only costs $79.
Comment Re:Meh. (Score 2, Informative) 993
Me too. I bought a MacBook after Christmas, and since then I bought CSSEdit, Espresso, the recent MacHeist3 bundle, iWork, and I'm that close to buying OmniGraffle (except that one's a little too expensive and I'm getting by fine with the free eval version).
I can't remember the last time I actually *bought* software for my old Windows machine.
Mac OS X gets lots of press, but the people who build these great little software apps for Mac should get more praise.
Comment Re:Removing IE poses one very significant problem (Score 1) 827
Also, the point was a get multiple Windows vendors. To get two companies both developing and marketing Windows independently of each other. How much better could the product have been if this was going on for the past 10 years.
Comment Re:Removing IE poses one very significant problem (Score 1) 827
The first thing I do on a new Windows installation is open IE and download Firefox. How would I get Firefox without IE? That is truly marvelous insight!
Comment not relevant (Score 2, Insightful) 827
Surely this decision is about 10 years too late and such a change would no longer be relevant to the industry.
IE was a massive money pit for Microsoft, and its only purpose was to protect Windows as the dominant application platform. It worked.
But with the rise of Web 2.0 and hand helds like Blackberry and iPhone, Windows is no longer the dominant application platform -- no one is actually building applications for Windows anymore, as far as startups are concerned, it's a "dead" platform.
Therefore whether Windows ships with IE or not is now moot. No one (with the exception of Opera) is trying to make money that way anymore. That ship has sailed.
Comment i'd like to see... (Score 1) 641
I like the approach of casually rating the performance of common tasks (copying files, zipping files, installing Office, and so on).
But what I'd like to see is the tasks rated with the time it took, not just ranked 1, 2, 3. I mean, is the difference from #1 to #3 just a couple seconds, or it is minutes? 10 seconds versus 13 seconds to copy 100 megs is negligible, but if it's 10 seconds versus 110 seconds, then that's something care about!
Also, do all the tests on the same hardware. And so the tests for Mac Leopard and Snow Leopard too. NOW that would be a cool article!
Submission + - $1 US == $1 CAD (canoe.ca)
boxlight writes: "US dollar and Canadian dollar are now equal; on par for the first time since 1976.
This is actually bad for the profits of Canadian corporations that sell their products to the US for US dollars (Canada sells far more to the US that the US sells to Canada); but it's pretty cool from a perception level.
It also means us Canucks will get cheaper Macs as the Canadian prices get closer to US prices with every new release. ;)"
This is actually bad for the profits of Canadian corporations that sell their products to the US for US dollars (Canada sells far more to the US that the US sells to Canada); but it's pretty cool from a perception level.
It also means us Canucks will get cheaper Macs as the Canadian prices get closer to US prices with every new release.
Slashdot Top Deals
The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter Drucker
