Granted, power generation techniques haven't changed much in the last 40 years or so... The method by which we turn the turbines has seen innovation but the fact remains we still are making big magnetic feilds to induce current in wire coils. This doesnt bug me. It is easy and efficient.
What bugs me is that battery and/or portable power technology has not yet reached anywhere close to a pinnicle in terms of storage or efficiency. They inted to put a Lithium battery in this beast and have it run for two weeks? Great. Waste a bunch of engineering time so you can BEND A CIRCA 1999 BATTERY INTO A DONUT SHAPE?
What about zinc/air batteries? What about fuel cells? Recharging, please! If this thing requires so little power what about solar? I haven't used a tiny, cheap four funciton calculator that needed batteries in about 6 or 7 years!
These people are just making noise with buzzwords to sell their design services. There is little vision (as far as technology goes) apparent in their work.
The old (E)IDE/ATA vs. SCSI flamewar again. I can't believe it! All I have to say is BAH
Each have their own applications.
As far as new equipment goes, SCSI is FAR more expensive. Yes I know you can buy old 9GB SCSI drives for peanuts and hook them up in a RAID and beat the pants off of any IDE out there. What about new systems? What if you dont have space or cooling for 8 cheap scsi drives?
What about devices such as the TiVo that demand 30 gigs of storage in a single drive (not to mention the other electronics) to make a profit at $500? Try doing that, SCSI!
After this, it may sound like I'm pro-IDE but really I prefer SCSI. But I'm not a bigot either and like to give IDE its fair due.
I am quite impressed with ATA/100. I set up a RAID-0 with the HPT370+Raid ATA/100 controller which came built into my new Abit mobo and two Maxtor 20.5GB ATA/100 Drives with 4M cache each. There is one drive per chain per channel. Ive got 41GB of storage now and I'm getting burst transfers from cache of 170-180MB/s! (In other words, my max transfer is better than Ultra160 SCSI) Also, I will never need to add extra drives etc in this particular system, so SCSI doesnt have it on me there. To top it all off, all the files on this system that are getting shuffled around are in the neighborhood of 100K. It's all run through the cache. SCSI would have cost me an extra $1000 to get the same performance. That's all there is to it.
Dear slashdot,
Why do we have to do your job for you?
Just post a link to the Open Inventor FAQ rather than getting every/. user and his dog to rehash the damn thing here.
Don't you people get paid for this?
GoRK
I have a set of the old Lego Dacta system with the computer interface. It used a language called LEGO TC LOGO under DOS. It uses a proprietary LEGO 8 bit ISA Interface card. Is there any information on making this beast work in Linux? LOGO/DOS only has so much extensibility!
John
What would really be neat is if some company devised a plan and started production of solar cells using free energy solutions such as solar-heat to power their machinery.. then it wouldn't matter so much that solar cells were inefficient because they are still better/easier for small applications.
How come some fucking idiot always posts this comment whenever slashdot links to a newswire story using some site (usually yahoo or excite) as the gateway? How come a bunch of fucking morons always mod it up?
Yahoo does not run the story. Yahoo does not claim that it is news. That's why it's served from biz.yahoo.com (the Newswire gateway), marked "Press Release, Source: Adobe Systems Incorporated" and tagged with the Canada Newswire graphic. This is so painfully obvious when you actually take the time to open your eyes and READ.
Yahoo didn't write the story. Adobe did. You want the news story? Wait till you get the WSJ blurb in *tomorrows* paper. Want to start talking about it now? Read the newswire Adobe propaganda - the only thing available at the present time. Obviously you have no clue how the media works. Slashdot feeds you something a little bit uncut and all you can do is complain? I thought most of you people were supposed to be a cut above the rest?
I own several copies of NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP for Intel and have found them fun platforms to tinker with although I have never had a reson to use it seriously.
When I first saw/ran Rhapsody Alpha 1 or whatever it was over 2 years ago, I was pretty startled to see that it WAS OpenSTEP. The installer worked and looked exactly the same and supported exactly the same hardware on the X86 side as the release of OpenSTEP 4.2.
Sadly, this was the first of only two alpha releases of OS/X for Intel before the project was shifted entirely to the PPC. Very dissapointing. Perhaps it's still secretly lurking behind the scenes at apple with the System7/X86 port.
Granted, probalby almost all of the NeXT code has all been replaced by apple's own Darwin (BSD), etc. but the point is that OS/X has taken a very very very strong influence from NeXT as far as producing a UN*X based system with a very good GUI, etc etc.
He's talking about a freaking creek running through your backyard! If you live on a steep hillside (let's say northern New Mexico around Carson National Forest for a good example) and you have this little stream that comes tumbling down the mountain on your property, what you do is this:
Build a pipe that can carry the water from the high point to the low point (4 inch PVC is usually quite sufficient); build a small pond at the top fed by the stream and drained by the pipe; then put a turbine at the bottom of the pipe and discharge the water into the stream bed. In good locations you only have to interrupt the flow of water for a couple hours while your little pond fills up and you remove a whole 75 feet of streambed.
These are feeder streams; not creeks; not rivers. There are no fish. A bear can walk another 50 feet to drink water with no problems and if you're worried about harming a bunch of algae - well I dont know what to say to you. Obviously you are extremely mixed up.
> a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
OK. Solar cells; yes. Solar power; no.
Solar cells are not currently designed to be used in power plants or anything of that nature because usually the cost of production does not justify the profit that one can make selling the electricity. You're part correct in that "it takes more energy to make them blah blah blah" which is not entirely true; but disregarding that whole statement let me ask you this:
Have you ever seen a solar power plant?
Barring a couple exceptions they don't use solar cells. They use semi-parabolic reflector arrays (not even mirrors really) that work kind of like a huge fresnel mirror to reflect sunlight up onto a gigantic black obelisk-looking tower that has pipes running through it. The reflectors are all on gimbals so they can move through the day to continue to reflect light onto this tower correctly. The thing gets HOT. Water is pumped through the pipes to make steam which drives turbines. It's the same electricity generation process as nuclear, coal/oil, and geothermal plants all use.
Diss on solar cells all you want - they really are kind of a black thorn in the side of environmentalists; but please do not rip on solar power.
I wish I'd have seen this when it was fresh. Perhaps my comments could have made it to the top.
The person who submitted this to slashdot is *obviously* not a MS beta tester, or else he would have known the answer to his own gripe. Thus he probably has "secured" his copy illegally and even though it IS microsoft, I don't think he has any room to gripe.
1) WinME is the (purportedly) final step towards bringing consumer windows (3.1/95/98) into sync with the NT kernel (3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000) With this comes the obvious (and necessary) absolution of the GUI as essentially an application on top of DOS. DOS applications run in VM's just like in NT and OS/2.
2) The filesystem is the same FAT32 we've always had access to. If you boot to DOS (more on this later) you will have access to all the files. WinME *DOES NOT BREAK* the vfat or usmsdos filesystem drivers!!!!
3) WinME uses the NT Bootloader *WHICH CAN BOOT DOS, LINUX, AND BEOS FROM NATIVE PARTITIONS!!!!!* or it can boot seperate windows/dos versions from the same partition. Seen the 98/2000 dual boot configs? How about a 98/ME/2000/Linux running all off of one VFAT partition. It's not that difficult!
I cant honestly believe that this thing was posted (boy there is always someone to make that same complaint every article isnt there?). Windows was never supposed to BE dos. Ever. Now that they've finally seperated the two, complaining "I can't boot DOS!!!" is totally idiodic and stupid. It's not the same OS, for god's sake. If you want to boot DOS, install DOS!
I should also note that there *is* a recovery command prompt in WinME (It's also there in Win2K) where you can boot up to a 32bit command prompt and run Win32 CLI binaries without having to fire up a GUI. This is the same interface that Embedded NT and Embedded Windows2000 use when you don't need/use GUI support.
~GoRK
At one point after the DOOM source code was released, somenoe made patches to run DOOM multheaded. One monitor was your regular view, one was 90% left and one was 90% right. Setup like this:
| O |
_
It used three computers and a network game to do this. If you played it cooperative it was like the normal game with the extra views. If you played it deathmatch, you could only have two people in the game (one person on a single screen and one person on 3) - the maximum 4 players.
I cant seem to find the info or the patches, but they are out there somewhere. My friends and I ran it once. Does anyone know if and where these might still be lurking around?
Redhat ships with some ludicrous number of packages that do everything from running the OS (kernel packages) to OMFG playing games! and SOFTWARE THAT IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT
71 bugtraq announcements in all that hubub? I think that's a testament to greatness there. I would also imagine that a number of the bugs counted as "linux" (and probably added to the redhat total #) were for development kernels and stuff that doesn't even affect "stable" code.
Just because RedHat issues a security alert doesnt mean that it's redhat's fault for distributing an (optional) aplication with it's OS!
If so then everytime I find a bug in a microsoft or third party software program that microsoft endorses for its OS then i should count it as a microsoft windows bug and put it on MS's damn total.
How many core OS security problems in windows vs in the linux kernel? Way way more!
Still taking some kind of statistic from bugtraq is really pointless. Why dont i just go post all the shitty vulnerabilities in that really crappy release of apple system 7.something that totally sucked and call it the worst os ever?
Maybe i should add to the total by posting random windows bugs to bugtraq... like
"Tampered registry settings allow users to cheat in Microsoft Hearts! Your network play may be compromised!"
I am his linux friend and I'm not so biased that I can't "see the forest for the trees," so to speak. I have windows computers, linux computers, macintosh computers, and various other unixen from time to time.
I can do of that stuff you say I can't do on Windows while drinking root bear through my nose and whistling dixie. All of it. Installable filesystems, multiple sessions, multiuser environments, multiple users simeotaneously, multiple versions of IE, even shell replacements - basally the equivalent of WM's on Win32 simply because it's structured differently than X. If you want to know how do do any of it (which is all really quite irrelevant in the real world anyway) then just e-mail me and I'll tell you how.
Why do I know this stuff? Know thy competition. My suggestion to you is to go out and read the Linux-Advocacy-HOWTO... available whereever the LDP is sold!
I clicked on this article to flame about the 'wished i could participate bullshit.' Thank you for already doing it.
What if the headline came along "koules ported to MS windows -- Wow finally I can participate in this great network game!"
The response would be somewhat different - something to the effect of "why didnt you just get linux?"
What is especially ironic is how CT was spooging over the Diablo II release for *ahem* windows. I am seriously starting to question/.'s honesty in its bias. I've always enjoyed slashdot because of this small journalistic bias but to *LIE* is a bit stupid. If CT has never played Alpha Centauri then how would he know it was so great? Reviews? Talk about bias!
And where do you think they got the list of all their viewer's phone numbers?
You guessed it. Calling the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" 1-800 number! Did you know that you can't block your phone number being relayed to a Toll-Free, 900, or 977 number?
I bet they sell this list to their advertisers too.
If you're not using TrueType fonts in X by now and haven't at the very least downloaded the free Microsoft "Web Fonts" library, then I must say stop complaining. Even/. here lists the fonts for itself as "arial, helvetica" with no mention of sans-serif.
Truetype is a very good technology (as is most of the stuff that M$ has ripped from other companies). It is way faster for display purposes than PostScript and of course it is better than raster fonts.
Install freetype and an x font server and get with the fscking program.
Bingo. As far as DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM go, it's going to be a LOOONG time before you can put your videos on one of these things and have it play in your consumer-electronics-esque dvd player. In fact, most DVD-ROM drives for the computer won't even read these! Type 1 DVD-RAM won't even come out of the caddy even if you did have a dvd rom to read them! You can buy an Orb drive for 200 bucks with a MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH (I can't stress this enough) faster WRITE TIME and a LOWER COST PER MEGABYTE than even this rewritable DVD crap that's hitting the stores now.
This format is 99% likely NOT TO BE backward compatible. Your AudioCD player, PSX, Dreamcast, (insert your own consumer device here) will NOT be able to read these discs.
The format is a nice idea and will probably make a pretty good showing. To the people griping about "well we already have DVD-RW DVD-RAM et al." remember that this format isn't designed to replace DVD. DVD requires not only a different disc format but also a different redbook/orangebook/whitebook spec. The 1.3GB CD's will be different media but still work with normal CD-style stuff (e.g. CDDA) which you can't do with DVD.
I really hate this whole idea though and I wish they would have spent all that money on figuring out how to maximize the storage capacity of existing CD equipment (Like the new 99 minute! CDR's coming out soon - these use the thinner spiral of 80Min CD's along with a better and more reliable method of manufacturing the disc which allows for the media to be overburned reliably to 99 minutes.)
Consumer CDROM readers and many commercial players already have accurate enough laser assemblies and motors that by virtue of tweaking the firmware, you could easily handle thinner track width and/or smaller pits/lands on a disc.
Which is another interesting point. After sony introduces this format, It's likely that we'll see a plethora of firmware upgrades to every CDROM reader under the sun to support this stuff and the format will take off and soar.
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the book "Idoru" by William Gibson if you have not.
~GoRK
Why so much noise?
Didn't you get your cheque from Intel to be mum about this?
Granted, power generation techniques haven't changed much in the last 40 years or so... The method by which we turn the turbines has seen innovation but the fact remains we still are making big magnetic feilds to induce current in wire coils. This doesnt bug me. It is easy and efficient.
What bugs me is that battery and/or portable power technology has not yet reached anywhere close to a pinnicle in terms of storage or efficiency. They inted to put a Lithium battery in this beast and have it run for two weeks? Great. Waste a bunch of engineering time so you can BEND A CIRCA 1999 BATTERY INTO A DONUT SHAPE?
What about zinc/air batteries? What about fuel cells? Recharging, please! If this thing requires so little power what about solar? I haven't used a tiny, cheap four funciton calculator that needed batteries in about 6 or 7 years!
These people are just making noise with buzzwords to sell their design services. There is little vision (as far as technology goes) apparent in their work.
~GoRK
The old (E)IDE/ATA vs. SCSI flamewar again. I can't believe it! All I have to say is BAH
Each have their own applications.
As far as new equipment goes, SCSI is FAR more expensive. Yes I know you can buy old 9GB SCSI drives for peanuts and hook them up in a RAID and beat the pants off of any IDE out there. What about new systems? What if you dont have space or cooling for 8 cheap scsi drives?
What about devices such as the TiVo that demand 30 gigs of storage in a single drive (not to mention the other electronics) to make a profit at $500? Try doing that, SCSI!
After this, it may sound like I'm pro-IDE but really I prefer SCSI. But I'm not a bigot either and like to give IDE its fair due.
I am quite impressed with ATA/100. I set up a RAID-0 with the HPT370+Raid ATA/100 controller which came built into my new Abit mobo and two Maxtor 20.5GB ATA/100 Drives with 4M cache each. There is one drive per chain per channel. Ive got 41GB of storage now and I'm getting burst transfers from cache of 170-180MB/s! (In other words, my max transfer is better than Ultra160 SCSI) Also, I will never need to add extra drives etc in this particular system, so SCSI doesnt have it on me there. To top it all off, all the files on this system that are getting shuffled around are in the neighborhood of 100K. It's all run through the cache. SCSI would have cost me an extra $1000 to get the same performance. That's all there is to it.
~GoRK
I am a psycho! :-) You hit the nail on the head, man. Thankfully, I can also be heard around here (sometimes)
Dear slashdot, Why do we have to do your job for you? Just post a link to the Open Inventor FAQ rather than getting every /. user and his dog to rehash the damn thing here.
Don't you people get paid for this?
GoRK
I have a set of the old Lego Dacta system with the computer interface. It used a language called LEGO TC LOGO under DOS. It uses a proprietary LEGO 8 bit ISA Interface card. Is there any information on making this beast work in Linux? LOGO/DOS only has so much extensibility! John
I have already ordered two of the new Dual G4's.
But I still wanted to see OS/X make it to X86.
It is useless to fight the PC/Mac war with me, wee man. I frolick between multiple platforms like a fucking whore on Saturday Night!
What would really be neat is if some company devised a plan and started production of solar cells using free energy solutions such as solar-heat to power their machinery.. then it wouldn't matter so much that solar cells were inefficient because they are still better/easier for small applications.
How come some fucking idiot always posts this comment whenever slashdot links to a newswire story using some site (usually yahoo or excite) as the gateway? How come a bunch of fucking morons always mod it up?
Yahoo does not run the story. Yahoo does not claim that it is news. That's why it's served from biz.yahoo.com (the Newswire gateway), marked "Press Release, Source: Adobe Systems Incorporated" and tagged with the Canada Newswire graphic. This is so painfully obvious when you actually take the time to open your eyes and READ.
Yahoo didn't write the story. Adobe did. You want the news story? Wait till you get the WSJ blurb in *tomorrows* paper. Want to start talking about it now? Read the newswire Adobe propaganda - the only thing available at the present time. Obviously you have no clue how the media works. Slashdot feeds you something a little bit uncut and all you can do is complain? I thought most of you people were supposed to be a cut above the rest?
~GoRK
> ... to suddenly announce that caffeine and sugar combine to form toxins that eat your brain...
Good thing I take my coffee black.
I own several copies of NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP for Intel and have found them fun platforms to tinker with although I have never had a reson to use it seriously.
When I first saw/ran Rhapsody Alpha 1 or whatever it was over 2 years ago, I was pretty startled to see that it WAS OpenSTEP. The installer worked and looked exactly the same and supported exactly the same hardware on the X86 side as the release of OpenSTEP 4.2.
Sadly, this was the first of only two alpha releases of OS/X for Intel before the project was shifted entirely to the PPC. Very dissapointing. Perhaps it's still secretly lurking behind the scenes at apple with the System7/X86 port.
Granted, probalby almost all of the NeXT code has all been replaced by apple's own Darwin (BSD), etc. but the point is that OS/X has taken a very very very strong influence from NeXT as far as producing a UN*X based system with a very good GUI, etc etc.
~GoRK
He's talking about a freaking creek running through your backyard! If you live on a steep hillside (let's say northern New Mexico around Carson National Forest for a good example) and you have this little stream that comes tumbling down the mountain on your property, what you do is this:
Build a pipe that can carry the water from the high point to the low point (4 inch PVC is usually quite sufficient); build a small pond at the top fed by the stream and drained by the pipe; then put a turbine at the bottom of the pipe and discharge the water into the stream bed. In good locations you only have to interrupt the flow of water for a couple hours while your little pond fills up and you remove a whole 75 feet of streambed.
These are feeder streams; not creeks; not rivers. There are no fish. A bear can walk another 50 feet to drink water with no problems and if you're worried about harming a bunch of algae - well I dont know what to say to you. Obviously you are extremely mixed up.
MICRO-HYDRO not the Hoover Dam
~GoRK
> a solar cell today still takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce in its usable life.
OK. Solar cells; yes. Solar power; no.
Solar cells are not currently designed to be used in power plants or anything of that nature because usually the cost of production does not justify the profit that one can make selling the electricity. You're part correct in that "it takes more energy to make them blah blah blah" which is not entirely true; but disregarding that whole statement let me ask you this:
Have you ever seen a solar power plant?
Barring a couple exceptions they don't use solar cells. They use semi-parabolic reflector arrays (not even mirrors really) that work kind of like a huge fresnel mirror to reflect sunlight up onto a gigantic black obelisk-looking tower that has pipes running through it. The reflectors are all on gimbals so they can move through the day to continue to reflect light onto this tower correctly. The thing gets HOT. Water is pumped through the pipes to make steam which drives turbines. It's the same electricity generation process as nuclear, coal/oil, and geothermal plants all use.
Diss on solar cells all you want - they really are kind of a black thorn in the side of environmentalists; but please do not rip on solar power.
~GoRK
There is a tweak to enable tab completion in cmd.exe too. There is also popup command histories and everything. If you want to know more, email me.
~GoRK
I wish I'd have seen this when it was fresh. Perhaps my comments could have made it to the top. The person who submitted this to slashdot is *obviously* not a MS beta tester, or else he would have known the answer to his own gripe. Thus he probably has "secured" his copy illegally and even though it IS microsoft, I don't think he has any room to gripe. 1) WinME is the (purportedly) final step towards bringing consumer windows (3.1/95/98) into sync with the NT kernel (3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000) With this comes the obvious (and necessary) absolution of the GUI as essentially an application on top of DOS. DOS applications run in VM's just like in NT and OS/2. 2) The filesystem is the same FAT32 we've always had access to. If you boot to DOS (more on this later) you will have access to all the files. WinME *DOES NOT BREAK* the vfat or usmsdos filesystem drivers!!!! 3) WinME uses the NT Bootloader *WHICH CAN BOOT DOS, LINUX, AND BEOS FROM NATIVE PARTITIONS!!!!!* or it can boot seperate windows/dos versions from the same partition. Seen the 98/2000 dual boot configs? How about a 98/ME/2000/Linux running all off of one VFAT partition. It's not that difficult! I cant honestly believe that this thing was posted (boy there is always someone to make that same complaint every article isnt there?). Windows was never supposed to BE dos. Ever. Now that they've finally seperated the two, complaining "I can't boot DOS!!!" is totally idiodic and stupid. It's not the same OS, for god's sake. If you want to boot DOS, install DOS! I should also note that there *is* a recovery command prompt in WinME (It's also there in Win2K) where you can boot up to a 32bit command prompt and run Win32 CLI binaries without having to fire up a GUI. This is the same interface that Embedded NT and Embedded Windows2000 use when you don't need/use GUI support. ~GoRK
Well, couldn't they just tap the cable co's telcom-based uplink based on the laws?
At one point after the DOOM source code was released, somenoe made patches to run DOOM multheaded. One monitor was your regular view, one was 90% left and one was 90% right. Setup like this:
| O |
_
It used three computers and a network game to do this. If you played it cooperative it was like the normal game with the extra views. If you played it deathmatch, you could only have two people in the game (one person on a single screen and one person on 3) - the maximum 4 players.
I cant seem to find the info or the patches, but they are out there somewhere. My friends and I ran it once. Does anyone know if and where these might still be lurking around?
~GoRK
I'm glad that someone figured that out.
Redhat ships with some ludicrous number of packages that do everything from running the OS (kernel packages) to OMFG playing games! and SOFTWARE THAT IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT
71 bugtraq announcements in all that hubub? I think that's a testament to greatness there. I would also imagine that a number of the bugs counted as "linux" (and probably added to the redhat total #) were for development kernels and stuff that doesn't even affect "stable" code.
Just because RedHat issues a security alert doesnt mean that it's redhat's fault for distributing an (optional) aplication with it's OS!
If so then everytime I find a bug in a microsoft or third party software program that microsoft endorses for its OS then i should count it as a microsoft windows bug and put it on MS's damn total.
How many core OS security problems in windows vs in the linux kernel? Way way more!
Still taking some kind of statistic from bugtraq is really pointless. Why dont i just go post all the shitty vulnerabilities in that really crappy release of apple system 7.something that totally sucked and call it the worst os ever?
Maybe i should add to the total by posting random windows bugs to bugtraq... like
"Tampered registry settings allow users to cheat in Microsoft Hearts! Your network play may be compromised!"
~GoRK
Dear AC,
... available whereever the LDP is sold!
I am his linux friend and I'm not so biased that I can't "see the forest for the trees," so to speak. I have windows computers, linux computers, macintosh computers, and various other unixen from time to time.
I can do of that stuff you say I can't do on Windows while drinking root bear through my nose and whistling dixie. All of it. Installable filesystems, multiple sessions, multiuser environments, multiple users simeotaneously, multiple versions of IE, even shell replacements - basally the equivalent of WM's on Win32 simply because it's structured differently than X. If you want to know how do do any of it (which is all really quite irrelevant in the real world anyway) then just e-mail me and I'll tell you how.
Why do I know this stuff? Know thy competition. My suggestion to you is to go out and read the Linux-Advocacy-HOWTO
~GoRK
I clicked on this article to flame about the 'wished i could participate bullshit.' Thank you for already doing it.
/.'s honesty in its bias. I've always enjoyed slashdot because of this small journalistic bias but to *LIE* is a bit stupid. If CT has never played Alpha Centauri then how would he know it was so great? Reviews? Talk about bias!
What if the headline came along "koules ported to MS windows -- Wow finally I can participate in this great network game!"
The response would be somewhat different - something to the effect of "why didnt you just get linux?"
What is especially ironic is how CT was spooging over the Diablo II release for *ahem* windows. I am seriously starting to question
~GoRK
And where do you think they got the list of all their viewer's phone numbers?
You guessed it. Calling the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" 1-800 number! Did you know that you can't block your phone number being relayed to a Toll-Free, 900, or 977 number?
I bet they sell this list to their advertisers too.
~GoRK
If you're not using TrueType fonts in X by now and haven't at the very least downloaded the free Microsoft "Web Fonts" library, then I must say stop complaining. Even /. here lists the fonts for itself as "arial, helvetica" with no mention of sans-serif.
Truetype is a very good technology (as is most of the stuff that M$ has ripped from other companies). It is way faster for display purposes than PostScript and of course it is better than raster fonts.
Install freetype and an x font server and get with the fscking program.
Bingo. As far as DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM go, it's going to be a LOOONG time before you can put your videos on one of these things and have it play in your consumer-electronics-esque dvd player. In fact, most DVD-ROM drives for the computer won't even read these! Type 1 DVD-RAM won't even come out of the caddy even if you did have a dvd rom to read them! You can buy an Orb drive for 200 bucks with a MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH (I can't stress this enough) faster WRITE TIME and a LOWER COST PER MEGABYTE than even this rewritable DVD crap that's hitting the stores now.
Take heed.
This format is 99% likely NOT TO BE backward compatible. Your AudioCD player, PSX, Dreamcast, (insert your own consumer device here) will NOT be able to read these discs.
The format is a nice idea and will probably make a pretty good showing. To the people griping about "well we already have DVD-RW DVD-RAM et al." remember that this format isn't designed to replace DVD. DVD requires not only a different disc format but also a different redbook/orangebook/whitebook spec. The 1.3GB CD's will be different media but still work with normal CD-style stuff (e.g. CDDA) which you can't do with DVD.
I really hate this whole idea though and I wish they would have spent all that money on figuring out how to maximize the storage capacity of existing CD equipment (Like the new 99 minute! CDR's coming out soon - these use the thinner spiral of 80Min CD's along with a better and more reliable method of manufacturing the disc which allows for the media to be overburned reliably to 99 minutes.)
Consumer CDROM readers and many commercial players already have accurate enough laser assemblies and motors that by virtue of tweaking the firmware, you could easily handle thinner track width and/or smaller pits/lands on a disc.
Which is another interesting point. After sony introduces this format, It's likely that we'll see a plethora of firmware upgrades to every CDROM reader under the sun to support this stuff and the format will take off and soar.
We'll have to wait and see.
~GoRK