There is a certain amount of logic to the idea that they should focus on X11. But the truth is that if Apple really wanted an Aqua version, there would be one. Apple has been known to be rather snobby, and they're probably suffering a bit from the NIH complex, because they're working on their own productivity suite.
It's kinda like expecting really good support from Apple for Mozilla when they'd rather push Safari.
They tout their low $499 price, but the base model looks woefully inadequate for modern computing tasks. In order to get it up to snuff, they'll nickle-and-dime you to death, and it won't be inexpensive anymore!
By the time you get everything in that you need, you're probably looking at closer to $1000. By that point, you could buy a PC that's twice as fast!
Still... I've always wanted to have a Mac. It really is a superior design with a superior OS and superior software. I was thinking of buying an iPaq, but now I'm thinking about buying this instead.
Among applications available for *nix, Mozilla is a paragon of quality and completeness. But there is one aspect in which it is a total embarrassment. It does not support X11 session management. Session management saves the state of your applications when you log out of X/KDE/GNOME and restores it when you log back in. Mozilla completely ignores this. It's crying shame.
I'm going to add my name to the list of many who say "only newegg". It's true. Their return policy is stellar, and it's a snap to return something under warranty on their web site. Sometime you pay a little more (although not much), but it's always worth it.
There is one exception. Newegg is a stickler to the rules for LCD monitors which say the monitor is not defective unless their is some minimum number of dead pixels. The best place to buy monitors is "MonitorsDirect" who will take a monitor for return within 30 days for any reason. (And I took advantage of that to return a monitor with a single dead subpixel!)
If you want to have free software, then you need to have hardware with open specs. As the leader of the Open Graphics Project, I can tell you that doing the work and finding the commitment of enough buyers isn't easy.
Ok, I'm sure I'm missing lots here, but one of the reasons we like silicon is because SiO2 is an insulator, it's a solid, and it's insoluable. We use SiO2 very heavily in CMOS electronics, upon which all of our "fast CPUs".
Well, I may be remembering this incorrectly, but I think one of the barriers for GaAs, besides being a more expensive material, is that when you oxidize GaAs, you get something which is water-soluable.
Kinda kills the idea of doing CMOS in GaAs which throws us back into the 70's when people still used TTL for VLSI.
Is it just me, or does this seem more like a patch than a real fix? Rather than realizing that the foam is problematic and designing something that won't come off, they resort to finding ways of preventing the old stuff from coming off. Well, if it works, great, but it just feels unsatisfying.
Perhaps this is just a case of extending the life of aging spacecraft a little longer for the least expense so that more funds can be routed towards newer technology that doesn't have the same inherent problems. (Perhaps different ones. *g*)
It hasn't been a 2D design since like a week after the project was announced.
Open Graphics Project to the rescue
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
THG kinda left out a something that's of particular interest to me which is the open graphics project. A graphics card producer is working with the open source community to develop a 3D graphics card to have open specs and therefore fully open source drivers.
I'm going to sound like a dork when I say this, but in many cases, the volunteers really ARE on the inside. In my case, I'm the leader of the Open Graphics project, and while there are certain aspects of the interaction between company and community will being hammered out, I know perfectly well that the project will go nowhere without the involvement of the community, because it's a project to meet THEIR needs. This means that they MUST have control. None of this "company knows best" crap (only I'm the one allowed to make that mistake *grin*).
Just as a side note, it's an interesting feeling being on both the inside and the outside of the project. To the community, I'm the insider who represents a company that is somewhat of a mystery because it's a newcomer to the community who hasn't proven its intentions. To the company, I'm the outsider who represents a community with an unusual, fickle, and conflicting set of requirements (because it's made of an incredible diversity of people).
But seriously, it's not fair to criticize them for what they are doing. For a very long time, user of open source software have whined and complained about the derth of open-spec hardware.
Here, a company has come along, offering to give the people what they have been asking for. You see a problem with that?
It's funny how people care more about who painted something than the actual content and form of the painting.
They make it out like this is something NEW...
on
Linux Kernel to Fork?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Forking the kernel is a normal part of the development process. It's happened numerous times before, and it's the usual way of making significant leaps in functionality.
These guys are making it out like some majorly new thing's going to happen that's going to change everything. Did everyone suddenly forget about how 2.4 forked to 2.5 which became 2.6? Give me a break.
I'm not sure you are in a position to judge whether or not the CEO of TiVo really deserves a salary that high.
$600,000 is drop in the bucket compared to their yearly revenue, and it's a small price to pay for someone whose job it is to keep a big company running smoothly.
Heh... it's a world of greedy companies and cheap-ass customers.
Reducing cost is VERY HARD TO DO. Trust me, I've been part of a company that's grown and then down-sized, and it's much easier to grow than to return to the size you once were.
When you grow, you develop infrastructure that's hard to tear down when you have to shrink. Companies very often make the wrong sacrifices because they always want to be optimistic about continuing as they have been or contining to grow "just around the corner".
I suppose you can't understand it unless you've been part of the process.
These days, companies are finding it harder and harder to stay in business. It's a bad economy. In a better economy, there would be more TiVo customers, and they would be able to make enough revenue, but unfortunately, every company, and TiVo is no exception, is finding it hard to make ends meet.
We're used to hearing about how greedy companies are. And there are plenty of them, with Microsoft being their poster-boy. But when you're a company with real competition, then you're walking a fine line between making enough income and selling at a competitive price. It's hard to balance. Apple is one of the few companies that seems to be able to charge a premium with impunity.
I'm not saying I know for SURE that TiVo is struggling financially, but given the statistics, they probably are. Making that assumption, they are faced with a choice between increasing what they charge customers or finding some OTHER way of increasing revenue. Selling banner ad space is just such an alternative.
Frankly, I suspect that most people would prefer to see an unintrusive banner appear when fast-forwarding than to have to pay a higher monthly fee.
When you fast-forward, the content isn't all that interesting anyhow. You're kinda watching it for visual cues to see when the ads are over so that you can then rewind slightly and continue watching your show.
As long as the banner ad doesn't intrude on that in a way which makes is difficult to see what you need to see, who cares?
Listen, TiVo needs to make money. They're a company selling a product. Everyone seems to forget that and whine when they don't give you everything for free. I applaud them for coming up with a way to sell ad space without interfering with normal use of the product.
What would you rather have, no fast-forward, forcing you to watch commercials, or a fast-forward with a small screen overlay that you only have to look at for as long as you are fast-forwarding?
Buy a legit copy of a program. Then get and actually USE a cracked copy.
Why? Because it's a lot less annoying not being required to insert the CD every time you want to use the program. Was what they did illegal? I think so. Although they had a licensed copy and used only one instance of the program at a time, they were probably in violation of some EULA which prohibits reverse engineering. Big whoop.
Then there are the people who started with a warez copy, used it for a while and then decided that they liked the program enough that it was worth buying, so they did.
Of course, both such groups are probably rare. Probably few people who have warez copies actually bother to pay for them.
Anyhow, my POINT about this person at Microsoft who used a pirated copy of SoundForge... I bet Microsoft has a site license for that program where they already paid Sony some gawd-awful amount in order to use as many copies as they want, and as a result, Sony doesn't give a rat's ass that MS used a pirated copy.
I realize our justice system all about law and completely devoid of ethics, but sometimes the jurys are allowed to inject some sanity. Spammers are FULLY AWARE that they're intruding on millions of people who won't want to be intruded upon. They shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But then the legal system responds to citizen unrest and develops laws which try to restrict what spammers can do.
NOW, the spammer is flagrantly violating both ethics and the law. They're filling your inbox with thousands of unwanted emails, stealing half the available handwidth in the fastest networks, and costing people inordinate amounts of money, just so the spammer can scam 0.01% of his email recipients. AND THEY KNOW IT.
I think people should be hanged for such flagrant disregard for everyone else on the planet. 9 years in prison? He got off light.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a certain amount of logic to the idea that they should focus on X11. But the truth is that if Apple really wanted an Aqua version, there would be one. Apple has been known to be rather snobby, and they're probably suffering a bit from the NIH complex, because they're working on their own productivity suite.
It's kinda like expecting really good support from Apple for Mozilla when they'd rather push Safari.
They tout their low $499 price, but the base model looks woefully inadequate for modern computing tasks. In order to get it up to snuff, they'll nickle-and-dime you to death, and it won't be inexpensive anymore!
By the time you get everything in that you need, you're probably looking at closer to $1000. By that point, you could buy a PC that's twice as fast!
Still... I've always wanted to have a Mac. It really is a superior design with a superior OS and superior software. I was thinking of buying an iPaq, but now I'm thinking about buying this instead.
Well, you know, you can always disable it if it's there. You cannot, however, enable it if it's not there.
Among applications available for *nix, Mozilla is a paragon of quality and completeness. But there is one aspect in which it is a total embarrassment. It does not support X11 session management. Session management saves the state of your applications when you log out of X/KDE/GNOME and restores it when you log back in. Mozilla completely ignores this. It's crying shame.
A picture of a bone.
Get it? Bonehead?
*sigh* My most humble apologies.
I'm going to add my name to the list of many who say "only newegg". It's true. Their return policy is stellar, and it's a snap to return something under warranty on their web site. Sometime you pay a little more (although not much), but it's always worth it.
There is one exception. Newegg is a stickler to the rules for LCD monitors which say the monitor is not defective unless their is some minimum number of dead pixels. The best place to buy monitors is "MonitorsDirect" who will take a monitor for return within 30 days for any reason. (And I took advantage of that to return a monitor with a single dead subpixel!)
If you want to have free software, then you need to have hardware with open specs. As the leader of the Open Graphics Project, I can tell you that doing the work and finding the commitment of enough buyers isn't easy.
Ok, I'm sure I'm missing lots here, but one of the reasons we like silicon is because SiO2 is an insulator, it's a solid, and it's insoluable. We use SiO2 very heavily in CMOS electronics, upon which all of our "fast CPUs".
Well, I may be remembering this incorrectly, but I think one of the barriers for GaAs, besides being a more expensive material, is that when you oxidize GaAs, you get something which is water-soluable.
Kinda kills the idea of doing CMOS in GaAs which throws us back into the 70's when people still used TTL for VLSI.
Is it just me, or does this seem more like a patch than a real fix? Rather than realizing that the foam is problematic and designing something that won't come off, they resort to finding ways of preventing the old stuff from coming off. Well, if it works, great, but it just feels unsatisfying.
Perhaps this is just a case of extending the life of aging spacecraft a little longer for the least expense so that more funds can be routed towards newer technology that doesn't have the same inherent problems. (Perhaps different ones. *g*)
It hasn't been a 2D design since like a week after the project was announced.
Check out the mailing list.
Only Sun thinks Solaris is "in the running". To everyone else, it's one of those dead OS's like HPUX, Tru64, AIX, or IRIX.
(BTW, I know that those are all still modern UNIXes, but they're seriously on the decline--just like Solaris.)
I'm going to sound like a dork when I say this, but in many cases, the volunteers really ARE on the inside. In my case, I'm the leader of the Open Graphics project, and while there are certain aspects of the interaction between company and community will being hammered out, I know perfectly well that the project will go nowhere without the involvement of the community, because it's a project to meet THEIR needs. This means that they MUST have control. None of this "company knows best" crap (only I'm the one allowed to make that mistake *grin*).
Just as a side note, it's an interesting feeling being on both the inside and the outside of the project. To the community, I'm the insider who represents a company that is somewhat of a mystery because it's a newcomer to the community who hasn't proven its intentions. To the company, I'm the outsider who represents a community with an unusual, fickle, and conflicting set of requirements (because it's made of an incredible diversity of people).
I can see people buying it for the amusement value... but would they actually EAT it?
Do we need standards that pertain to quality or standards that themselves have quality? :)
Very funny.
But seriously, it's not fair to criticize them for what they are doing. For a very long time, user of open source software have whined and complained about the derth of open-spec hardware.
Here, a company has come along, offering to give the people what they have been asking for. You see a problem with that?
It's funny how people care more about who painted something than the actual content and form of the painting.
Forking the kernel is a normal part of the development process. It's happened numerous times before, and it's the usual way of making significant leaps in functionality.
These guys are making it out like some majorly new thing's going to happen that's going to change everything. Did everyone suddenly forget about how 2.4 forked to 2.5 which became 2.6? Give me a break.
I'm not sure you are in a position to judge whether or not the CEO of TiVo really deserves a salary that high.
$600,000 is drop in the bucket compared to their yearly revenue, and it's a small price to pay for someone whose job it is to keep a big company running smoothly.
Heh... it's a world of greedy companies and cheap-ass customers.
Reducing cost is VERY HARD TO DO. Trust me, I've been part of a company that's grown and then down-sized, and it's much easier to grow than to return to the size you once were.
When you grow, you develop infrastructure that's hard to tear down when you have to shrink. Companies very often make the wrong sacrifices because they always want to be optimistic about continuing as they have been or contining to grow "just around the corner".
I suppose you can't understand it unless you've been part of the process.
These days, companies are finding it harder and harder to stay in business. It's a bad economy. In a better economy, there would be more TiVo customers, and they would be able to make enough revenue, but unfortunately, every company, and TiVo is no exception, is finding it hard to make ends meet.
We're used to hearing about how greedy companies are. And there are plenty of them, with Microsoft being their poster-boy. But when you're a company with real competition, then you're walking a fine line between making enough income and selling at a competitive price. It's hard to balance. Apple is one of the few companies that seems to be able to charge a premium with impunity.
I'm not saying I know for SURE that TiVo is struggling financially, but given the statistics, they probably are. Making that assumption, they are faced with a choice between increasing what they charge customers or finding some OTHER way of increasing revenue. Selling banner ad space is just such an alternative.
Frankly, I suspect that most people would prefer to see an unintrusive banner appear when fast-forwarding than to have to pay a higher monthly fee.
When you fast-forward, the content isn't all that interesting anyhow. You're kinda watching it for visual cues to see when the ads are over so that you can then rewind slightly and continue watching your show.
As long as the banner ad doesn't intrude on that in a way which makes is difficult to see what you need to see, who cares?
Listen, TiVo needs to make money. They're a company selling a product. Everyone seems to forget that and whine when they don't give you everything for free. I applaud them for coming up with a way to sell ad space without interfering with normal use of the product.
What would you rather have, no fast-forward, forcing you to watch commercials, or a fast-forward with a small screen overlay that you only have to look at for as long as you are fast-forwarding?
Wasn't there a legendary lost early American colony too?
I've known people to do this a lot:
Buy a legit copy of a program. Then get and actually USE a cracked copy.
Why? Because it's a lot less annoying not being required to insert the CD every time you want to use the program. Was what they did illegal? I think so. Although they had a licensed copy and used only one instance of the program at a time, they were probably in violation of some EULA which prohibits reverse engineering. Big whoop.
Then there are the people who started with a warez copy, used it for a while and then decided that they liked the program enough that it was worth buying, so they did.
Of course, both such groups are probably rare. Probably few people who have warez copies actually bother to pay for them.
Anyhow, my POINT about this person at Microsoft who used a pirated copy of SoundForge... I bet Microsoft has a site license for that program where they already paid Sony some gawd-awful amount in order to use as many copies as they want, and as a result, Sony doesn't give a rat's ass that MS used a pirated copy.
I realize our justice system all about law and completely devoid of ethics, but sometimes the jurys are allowed to inject some sanity. Spammers are FULLY AWARE that they're intruding on millions of people who won't want to be intruded upon. They shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But then the legal system responds to citizen unrest and develops laws which try to restrict what spammers can do.
NOW, the spammer is flagrantly violating both ethics and the law. They're filling your inbox with thousands of unwanted emails, stealing half the available handwidth in the fastest networks, and costing people inordinate amounts of money, just so the spammer can scam 0.01% of his email recipients. AND THEY KNOW IT.
I think people should be hanged for such flagrant disregard for everyone else on the planet. 9 years in prison? He got off light.