Posts by Stomfi

As Gates strides into the future, we wallow in the past

Re: sheeple

If you step back in time for a moment and switch on your unbiased point of view you could look at what was happening to desktop computer development before the IBM PC arrived on the scene as an intelligent office terminal.

The machines we had can be compared with todays offerings as they were just as powerful, had just as good GUI WIMP interfaces, had 19" colour screens, had optical 3 button mice, did sound and video just as well, had Ethernet LANs and were connected to the old Internet. The SGI Indy is a good example.

Invented in 1974, by 1984 these GUI systems were considered a step along the way to a more user friendly system, and the plan was to build inexpensive human interfaces that had interactive voice, 3D and writing recognition, and peer to peer Nationally and Internationally interconnected grids of 256bit machines for computing by 1995.

Unfortunately for the industry Microsoft brought out Flight Simulator for the IBM PC and the wants of all the millions of uninformed users channeled the available development money back into systems that were already out of date at the time.

Just think, if Bill Gates hadn't dominated computing, we would have the industry plan by 1995, and what marvels would we have had today.

You can turn off your unbiased view point now. Hope you still think Bill is a great guy.

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

High IQ is not a prerequisite for leaders

Obviously our academic leaders need a higher IQ to get the job.

If leaders in all walks of life had to pass an IQ test to get the job, we would have more free thinkers being educated and employed in decision making. This in turn would lead to more free thinking, higher IQs and less reliance on using God as an excuse for policies.

The average IQ voters would be better off, as their representatives would only be able to come from a pool of intelligent persons, not those that put on a popular act like today's reps.

The average IQ consumer would be better off, as business leaders would have to compete more intelligently as their competition would be more intelligent, which would result in better products and services.

The average IQ religious follower would be better off, as leaders would have to make life on earth better for their believers.

All in all, even if high IQ persons did not believe in God or even have to say they did like our secular leader have to in today's world, life for the rest of us would be markedly better as a larger pool of higher IQs would increase the average to the point where all forms of advertising and propaganda would have to appeal more to a person's intellect and less to their emotion.

Ubuntu man says Microsoft's about to 'swallow a hand-grenade'

Another 1928

The throw away at the end should be of great importance to all who watch our current economy.

A technological revolution that started 30 or so years before and brought forth the small personal engine and other such delights, caused a paradigm shift in how food was produced, how goods were produced, how money was made, how work was done, how workers were trained or retrained, how people were entertained and how they were kept healthy.

New ways of doing all these things put control and capital into the pockets of new players, while changes in processes made existing workers poorer or redundant, enhanced health practices and more available food through mechanisation, created population growth. Demand for food outstripped supply causing inflation. Housing became less affordable, superannuation lost adequate value, the new rich got richer and the others poorer.

Old players tried to stave off losses by investing in new ideas, and the stock market started a pattern of rises and falls until 1929 when it crashed.

Today we are 30 years into another technological revolution, and all the events preceding the '29 crash are repeating. No wonder Shuttleworth wants to bring one of the significant pointers to your attention. If there is a crash, the winners for the next generation will be the ones whose products are really cheap, like those of Linux vendors.

MiYahoo's future rests with open source and courage

Another Possibility

Balmer could have another purchase up his sleeve. He has been cogitating this deal for as long as the one he did with Novell.

If he buys Yahoo, he could justify buying Novell for the server software and interoperability expertise and by porting his Office cash cow to run exclusively under SUSE, he effectively negates the effects of migration to other Linux servers systems running Open Office and ODF.

Ubuntu's latest OS not so Gutsy

No Network = not a computer

"A computer is a network device 1st, 2nd, and 3rd" 80s Atari quote.

I upgraded i386 Feisty with 1853 packages including lots of development libraries over a 256K DSL link. It took 12 hours total here in Oz and works fine on my buggy nForce 4 AMD 64 platform. Most other distros lock the screen unless I use the vesa video driver, whereas Ubuntu with the restricted nVidia video driver is great.

My dmesg says "eth0 No Ipv6 routers installed", so I expect I got a fix.