Every hack in the competition was created early, and it was allowed within the rules to do so.
This made all the sensationalist "MAC CRACKED IN SECONDS" news/blogspam all the more annoying, and the _real_ news all the more painful. The real news was that the Safari exploit that the one dude used to win the Macbook Air had been around since the competition the year prior, and that he chose to save his exploit for the next years competition, and it wasn't fixed before he was able to use it for the CanSecWest 12 months later.
So I was looking around after seeing this earlier to try and make sense of what older generation codenames match to the newer generation codenames, and found this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html (scroll down).
Basically it goes GTX > GTS > GT > GS > G
The old 9400/8400 line has become the 210/110 The old 9600/8600 line has become the 230/130 The old 9800/8800 GT/GS has become the 250/150 And The old 9800/8800 GTX/GTS has become the 280
There are a few other cards that fall in the middle of categories, but that seems to be the basic gist of it as far as I can tell.
No, its a bunch of rabid apple fanboys who want to piss away more money to apple, but can't stand the idea of paying AT&T a little extra cash for the contract they willingly accepted.
I'd be upset too, if I didn't know that apple released new products yearly with their masterplan of planned obsolescence.
"Hurr Durr Apple Fanboys suck lol." seems to be the fastest way to +5 insightful other than "Hurr Durr Linux rools GPLol."
The only thing more annoying on the internet than/b/tards and apple fanboys are the wannabe/b/tards and anti-apple zealots.
Though your dig against Apple for their slow to come Java updates is not unfounded, Apple won't be controlling OpenCL. You don't even need to read TFA or TFwiki, your parent poster says it.
OpenCL is like CUDA, but supposed to be more open along the lines of OpenGL, hence the name. The same guys who manage OpenGL (Khronos) manage OpenCL as well. You could probably use it to do graphics, but that would be stupid.
Apple may have started and pushed the standard, but they aren't in charge of it any longer.
Seriously, if they want an electronic voting platform that is bug free they can just tell everyone to bring in their #2 pencils and drag in the scantron machines from the local public schools.
When was the last time you heard about a student getting a 5000/100 because the scantron had a bug in the software. Pure incompetence (or worse) on the part of the voting machine companies.
It's a combination of persistence, random I/O and storage actually.
SSDs are good at the first two, but still have catching up to do on the latter (and price...), but as soon as a reasonably priced 1TB version comes out, that'll be a great boon...
Though I do agree that SSD's are definitely the next big thing when it comes to computer performance, there are a lot of things that need to happen before they become the definitive standard in storage. As you mention, the price/GB ratio needs to come down, but in addition to that:
- SATA 3 needs to come out. Though most SSD's don't exceed SATA 2 bus speeds, higher end SSD's like the OCZ Vertex or Intels X-25m hit 250MB/s sustained speeds. ONFi (open nand flash alliance? something like that) recently announced what is essentially the NAND 2.0 standard which doubles the speed of NAND modules, meaning next generation SSD's could easily hit sustained speeds of 500MB/s without any special tricks like internal raid. SSD's are already faster, but for better futureproof-ness and the ability to get the full potential out of SSD's, bus speeds need to increase quite a bit.
- TRIM needs to get at more OS's and SSD's support. SSD's write performance degrades with use due to a combination of the mechanics of NAND flash itself and common wear leveling algorithms. Essentially what happens is that when reading the flash blocks, all the SSD has to do is pass over and read the data. When writing though, if the block was previously written to the SSD has to erase the entire block clean and *then* write it. This is further exacerbated on MLC SSD's, where the individual transistors each store 2 bits, which on average doubles the write time with the benefit of double the space for the same price (instead of 0 or 1 like a SLC SSD, each one stores either 00, 01, 10, or 11). TRIM effectively eliminates a step from the write process on a previously used SSD by erasing blocks marked as free by the OS during an idle period, which means that write speeds degrade less over time.
- Manufacturing processes need to mature, as well as firmwares, wear-leveling algorithms, and filesystems. Unlike platter hard drives SSD's don't have decades of optimization and experience, which means higher than acceptable failure rates, extra consumer knowledge required to properly install and maintain, OS tweaks needed to fully exploit the current capabilities of SSD's, and certain technologies just not being available yet (a recent ext4 v btrfs SSD comparison on phoronix showed that btrfs was much much slower than ext4 despite the potential for btrfs to be better optimized for SSD's).
My personal belief is that by the time SSD's are halfway done with all of the above (including price/GB), they will overtake traditional HDD's in the market. The advantages of SSD's are already here and apparent, they are just expensive and a relatively young technology with a few growing pains. By the time the growing pains are half resolved SSD's will be much superior in just about every way possible, and then they will really really take off.
Incorrect. Those are the sort of things that could get them in trouble once they already had a monopoly -- leveraging their music monopoly into a hardware monopoly. Having a monopoly in the first place isn't illegal; using your monopoly position to block potential competitors is.
Though this is true in the literal sense, most people associate the word monopoly not with a company that has a large marketshare but with a company that has antitrust violations, when in reality the two are different things, granted one usually follows the other.
Or in other words, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or company has enough marketshare or mindshare to manipulate the market itself.
Just as you say, the "monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and lack of viable substitute goods." part doesn't mean that a company with 50% marketshare, or even 100% marketshare automatically is a monopoly, nor does it mean that other companies being unable to enter the market because of a companies greater consumer mindshare automatically constitutes a monopoly.
For Apple's iPod/iTunes ecosystem to be considered a monopoly they would have to be doing things like offering discounts to vendors for not carrying other portable music players or making music bought from iTunes deliberately unplayable by other portable music players (Not an issue anymore, previously DRM was there due to labels and could be removed by burning and ripping the tracks back and forth to a CD, so maybe you could have made a case for this in the past, but now its not an issue), dictating pricing to the labels (which you may be able to argue that they have done this in the past by restricting prices to 99 cents, but amazon, napster, and all the other music sellers also have their price points set at 99 cents, as well as iTunes have variable pricing now anyways), or possibly by locking iTunes down to only provide syncing functionality to the iPod.
Since Apple has done none of those (yet), I think the internets are making a mountain out of a molehill. That being said, if I were Apple I _would_ lock out the Pre from imitating an iPod/iPhone, *with* the solution being that I make a simple open API for devices to sync with iTunes. Why? Apple prevents the potentially buggy workaround solutions to syncing with iTunes, and if all of the sudden 1 gillion mp3 players/phones come out with iTunes syncing support, iTunes becomes more of a standard for music/contact/calendar etc synchronization than it already is because of iPods, and its install base grows larger than it already is. Consumers can still then buy their music from other players, but given the chance to have the all in one solution of buying and syncing all your media and information from one source most people (or at least the non-technical masses) would probably stick with the integrated solution of the iTunes store. It would end up being a tie for Apple, more people use iTunes and the iTunes store at the expense of the iPod not being the only (sortof) hardware that can sync with iTunes, but for everyone else (the 3rd party vendors and the consumers), its a win/win situation.
With this "streaming" model, you don't even possess the copy.
You guys seem to be confused. Streaming music on the internet = Internet Radio
Most internet radio is free. Think Pandora or last.fm. It wasn't long ago that all Pandora users got an email encouraging them to call or email their various politicians* to lower the royalty rates on internet radio (they wern't making money since the rates were so high). This is an example of a music company actually doing a GOOD THING, believe it or not.
This has nothing more to do with ownership rights / drm than royalty rates on AM/FM radio stations does.
I was able to get a fully updated, SP3 XP unattended install with DriverPacks for everything in less than an hour my first time ever working with the programs.
Doing an attended install means no million restarts due to the install disk I have only being up to SP1, not having to mess around with drivers, and not having to mess with the activation key.
If I wanted to go even further I could have set it up to autoinstall Firefox, Foxit Reader, and OpenOffice by doing a browse and finding the installers for each.
Now of course this preparation work is extra when compared to say, Linux or OS X, but any slashdotter worth his salt with a Windows install can make a slipstreamed disk that does an unattended install without any particular headaches, and the end result is a XP or Vista (if your using vLite) disk that is actually easier to install than Linux or OS X.
This is correct, I don't know what the process is on a windows computer, but setting up multiple instances of WoW in a single directory on a Mac is as simple as:
1. going into the WoW application folder 2. selecting the game icon (not the launcher) 3. hitting cmd+d or right clicking and selecting "duplicate"
Doing so will make a copy of the app with a new name ("world of warcraft" becomes "world of warcraft copy" etc) that uses the same directory.
Then you just download Clonekeys, which is mindbogglingly easy to set up, get your/follow macros set up, and your ready to multi box as many instances as your computer can handle.
Replicators as in StarTrek, not Replicators as in StarGate. Because in America, I totally need another way to get junk food conveniently without moving from my couch.
Not gonna lie, I read the title of this in my RSS feed and figured it was some easter egg from the new Star Trek movie.
Its not really ironic, its just one of the few places where there are groups of people with the exact same mindset and who have dedicated their lives to the same exact thing.
Not surprising then that they reach similar consensus about various issues, as they don't really think for themselves, they just interpret whatever religious text they use and give it their best shot.
That one puts Firefox 3.0.10 right around where Opera 9.64 is, and Firefox 3.5 right around where Safari 3.2.2 is. Chrome live, Chrome beta, and Safari 4 beta trounce all of the rest.
Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.
Let me correct that above statement for you.
1. Having discovered a few simple free tools like CCleaner and JKDefrag that I run on a regular basis, I have Windows XP machines that were built by me more than 18 months ago that I use daily, install and deinstall games and software on but have not suffered any noticeable slowdown. Yes, I prefer Linux but I must say that for an inherently flawed OS by design, XP has finally dispelled the "rebuild every 6 months" Windows myth for me.
2. I use "emerge" not "sudo apt-get" as a Gentoo, not Ubuntu, user. However, just like Apple designs its Macs with great care and attention, using only specific manufacturers of chipsets for graphics, network cards, etc., I too select my PC hardware for Linux machines with equal care. Ultimately, what that means is that every Linux box I build has kernel support for all of the hardware without any need to download or install external drivers - the only exception to that is if I'm building a Linux desktop machine, in which case I will "emerge nvidia-drivers" or "emerge ati-drivers" to support 3D acceleration on the appropriate graphics card inside the machine. Incidentally, the only reason I need to do that is because the graphics cards manufacturers refuse to publish their specifications openly meaning that an accelerated driver cannot be directly incorporated directly into the Linux kernel.
@1: I don't care what extra steps you have to take to keep whatever OS you use working properly. The fact is, I don't have to take them. It doesn't matter if they are free or easy or FOSS, its time I don't have to waste, period.
@2: I apologize if I have insulted your delicate sensibilities by implying you apt-get. But the point stands, as emerge is effectively the same as apt-get, which is effectively the same as rpm, which is effectively the same as yum, which is effectively the same as pacman, ad infinitum. A package manager by any other name is still a package manager. And frankly, time spent checking to make sure a potential GPU, CPU, mobo, monitor, printer, wifi chipset, or whatever works with my particular kernel/xorg configuration does not appeal to me. I would rather buy a computer that doesn't require any finagling just to make sure it works.
It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.
In that case, you have just confirmed my suspicions - namely that some Apple users are stupid enough to believe that they don't need to perform basic security & administration tasks on their machines, meaning that if and when Mac malware starts appearing in any great volume, they will almost certainly get it on their machines.
I actually laughed at this. Just as you really don't need to do any basic security and administration tasks on a Linux machine because there is no malware for the platform besides the ever so rare trojan, you really don't need to do any basic security and administration
I was making a statement that choosing Apple is an easy way to make a political anti-Microsoft statement without the need to read manuals and bone up on other alternatives - like, say, Linux or BSD.
Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.
It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.
Let me also add that mac's aren't perfect, and probably no system ever was (in b4 beos/amiga) or will be. Its just currently better than all the alternatives at what I use my computer for.
Your concept of a smartphone is that of companies like Blackberry and Palm's 24 months ago.
Apple saw a market for a consumer smartphone and exploited the fuck out of it. Now all the traditional business smartphone companies are trying to catch up.
The decision to approve the app had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it was a high-profile app. They didn't reconsider just because Trent Reznor, with his celebrity status, bitched and complained and tried to Streisand the rejection.
So, not an high-profile app, but an high-profile submitter? Sorry, but the point remains, if Trent Reznor had not been involved, raising the profile of the app, it would not have been approved.
Thank god Apple had the wisdom to make themselves the gatekeeper of all iPhone apps. Who knows what kind of damage may have been done if the NIN app had been approved without this charade. Thanks, Apple, for keeping iPhone users all over the world safe.
There have been a whole lot of apps that were rejected at first and approved later without the help of Reznor. The most notable of which (or at least the ones I can think of off the top of my head) are all the fart apps.
Though it's likely that Reznor's fame is what caused the double take, I'm pretty sure Apple really doesn't care how famous you are as to whether your app gets approved or not.
Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
For a long time Apple was rumored to have a possible foray into the console market, and that they were developing a "next gen gaming system" or something like that.
They were, just not in the form everyone was thinking. Instead of a console they came out with the iPhone and iTouch.
Since then they have acquired PAsemi, snatched up graphics people from ATI and IBM, and have otherwise been building up a set of high class graphical engineers. Apple has experience designing an ARM chip (an ARM6 I believe), now they are building up a group of pros to design a mobile GPU / ARM based SoC for use on their third or fourth generation multi-touch handhelds. Now all we need is a quality backend to the 3g networks and a GPS chip that doesn't kill the phone in 4 hours and we'll have a platform to last 4-6 years given incremental updates.
What I would like to see is a laptop with whatever the most powerful ARM processor is, a power efficient discrete GPU (ala the iPhone/iTouch), a 120 gig OCZ vertex, a 10" OLED screen, and a built in 3G dongle, all running on the recently ported to ARM Ubuntu 9.04.
Something that I can use as a "real" laptop, not one of those tiny 4" abominations with squeezed keyboard thats hard for anyone but children to type on. However I don't want it to be my workhorse machine. I can build a desktop for 1k with enough processing power to hack the matrix. I can build a laptop for 3k that would be roughly equal. I don't want that. I want something that will last 300+ hours asleep and get 24 hours of web browsing out in the middle of nowhere (assuming I have a cell signal). I want something I can keep a bunch of movies or tv seasons and my music library on, not something with an anemic SDHC card that I have to switch out everytime I want to watch something new. Something I can play simple games on for the duration of my 12 hour flight to wherever without having to plug myself in the whole time.
THAT i would LOVE to drop 1k++ on. Netbooks/notebooks now can have that in processing power but are not nearly there in power efficiency. Realize the ARM/power efficiency revolution is coming in relation to MID's, gimme some quality linux ARM ports, and enjoy watching me stumble over myself while I throw money at your products.
Slashdot Mirror
Every hack in the competition was created early, and it was allowed within the rules to do so.
This made all the sensationalist "MAC CRACKED IN SECONDS" news/blogspam all the more annoying, and the _real_ news all the more painful. The real news was that the Safari exploit that the one dude used to win the Macbook Air had been around since the competition the year prior, and that he chose to save his exploit for the next years competition, and it wasn't fixed before he was able to use it for the CanSecWest 12 months later.
So I was looking around after seeing this earlier to try and make sense of what older generation codenames match to the newer generation codenames, and found this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html (scroll down).
Basically it goes GTX > GTS > GT > GS > G
The old 9400/8400 line has become the 210/110
The old 9600/8600 line has become the 230/130
The old 9800/8800 GT/GS has become the 250/150
And The old 9800/8800 GTX/GTS has become the 280
There are a few other cards that fall in the middle of categories, but that seems to be the basic gist of it as far as I can tell.
Heres another useful resource for comparing mobile gpu's: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html
Bunch of crybabies.
No, its a bunch of rabid apple fanboys who want to piss away more money to apple, but can't stand the idea of paying AT&T a little extra cash for the contract they willingly accepted.
I'd be upset too, if I didn't know that apple released new products yearly with their masterplan of planned obsolescence.
"Hurr Durr Apple Fanboys suck lol." seems to be the fastest way to +5 insightful other than "Hurr Durr Linux rools GPLol."
The only thing more annoying on the internet than /b/tards and apple fanboys are the wannabe /b/tards and anti-apple zealots.
The $99 iPhone becomes a high margin product once you include a percentage of the subscription costs.
Though your dig against Apple for their slow to come Java updates is not unfounded, Apple won't be controlling OpenCL. You don't even need to read TFA or TFwiki, your parent poster says it.
OpenCL is like CUDA, but supposed to be more open along the lines of OpenGL, hence the name. The same guys who manage OpenGL (Khronos) manage OpenCL as well. You could probably use it to do graphics, but that would be stupid.
Apple may have started and pushed the standard, but they aren't in charge of it any longer.
Seriously, if they want an electronic voting platform that is bug free they can just tell everyone to bring in their #2 pencils and drag in the scantron machines from the local public schools.
When was the last time you heard about a student getting a 5000/100 because the scantron had a bug in the software. Pure incompetence (or worse) on the part of the voting machine companies.
It's a combination of persistence, random I/O and storage actually.
SSDs are good at the first two, but still have catching up to do on the latter (and price...), but as soon as a reasonably priced 1TB version comes out, that'll be a great boon...
Though I do agree that SSD's are definitely the next big thing when it comes to computer performance, there are a lot of things that need to happen before they become the definitive standard in storage. As you mention, the price/GB ratio needs to come down, but in addition to that:
- SATA 3 needs to come out. Though most SSD's don't exceed SATA 2 bus speeds, higher end SSD's like the OCZ Vertex or Intels X-25m hit 250MB/s sustained speeds. ONFi (open nand flash alliance? something like that) recently announced what is essentially the NAND 2.0 standard which doubles the speed of NAND modules, meaning next generation SSD's could easily hit sustained speeds of 500MB/s without any special tricks like internal raid. SSD's are already faster, but for better futureproof-ness and the ability to get the full potential out of SSD's, bus speeds need to increase quite a bit.
- TRIM needs to get at more OS's and SSD's support. SSD's write performance degrades with use due to a combination of the mechanics of NAND flash itself and common wear leveling algorithms. Essentially what happens is that when reading the flash blocks, all the SSD has to do is pass over and read the data. When writing though, if the block was previously written to the SSD has to erase the entire block clean and *then* write it. This is further exacerbated on MLC SSD's, where the individual transistors each store 2 bits, which on average doubles the write time with the benefit of double the space for the same price (instead of 0 or 1 like a SLC SSD, each one stores either 00, 01, 10, or 11). TRIM effectively eliminates a step from the write process on a previously used SSD by erasing blocks marked as free by the OS during an idle period, which means that write speeds degrade less over time.
- Manufacturing processes need to mature, as well as firmwares, wear-leveling algorithms, and filesystems. Unlike platter hard drives SSD's don't have decades of optimization and experience, which means higher than acceptable failure rates, extra consumer knowledge required to properly install and maintain, OS tweaks needed to fully exploit the current capabilities of SSD's, and certain technologies just not being available yet (a recent ext4 v btrfs SSD comparison on phoronix showed that btrfs was much much slower than ext4 despite the potential for btrfs to be better optimized for SSD's).
My personal belief is that by the time SSD's are halfway done with all of the above (including price/GB), they will overtake traditional HDD's in the market. The advantages of SSD's are already here and apparent, they are just expensive and a relatively young technology with a few growing pains. By the time the growing pains are half resolved SSD's will be much superior in just about every way possible, and then they will really really take off.
Incorrect. Those are the sort of things that could get them in trouble once they already had a monopoly -- leveraging their music monopoly into a hardware monopoly. Having a monopoly in the first place isn't illegal; using your monopoly position to block potential competitors is.
Though this is true in the literal sense, most people associate the word monopoly not with a company that has a large marketshare but with a company that has antitrust violations, when in reality the two are different things, granted one usually follows the other.
Or in other words, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or company has enough marketshare or mindshare to manipulate the market itself.
Just as you say, the "monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and lack of viable substitute goods." part doesn't mean that a company with 50% marketshare, or even 100% marketshare automatically is a monopoly, nor does it mean that other companies being unable to enter the market because of a companies greater consumer mindshare automatically constitutes a monopoly.
For Apple's iPod/iTunes ecosystem to be considered a monopoly they would have to be doing things like offering discounts to vendors for not carrying other portable music players or making music bought from iTunes deliberately unplayable by other portable music players (Not an issue anymore, previously DRM was there due to labels and could be removed by burning and ripping the tracks back and forth to a CD, so maybe you could have made a case for this in the past, but now its not an issue), dictating pricing to the labels (which you may be able to argue that they have done this in the past by restricting prices to 99 cents, but amazon, napster, and all the other music sellers also have their price points set at 99 cents, as well as iTunes have variable pricing now anyways), or possibly by locking iTunes down to only provide syncing functionality to the iPod.
Since Apple has done none of those (yet), I think the internets are making a mountain out of a molehill. That being said, if I were Apple I _would_ lock out the Pre from imitating an iPod/iPhone, *with* the solution being that I make a simple open API for devices to sync with iTunes. Why? Apple prevents the potentially buggy workaround solutions to syncing with iTunes, and if all of the sudden 1 gillion mp3 players/phones come out with iTunes syncing support, iTunes becomes more of a standard for music/contact/calendar etc synchronization than it already is because of iPods, and its install base grows larger than it already is. Consumers can still then buy their music from other players, but given the chance to have the all in one solution of buying and syncing all your media and information from one source most people (or at least the non-technical masses) would probably stick with the integrated solution of the iTunes store. It would end up being a tie for Apple, more people use iTunes and the iTunes store at the expense of the iPod not being the only (sortof) hardware that can sync with iTunes, but for everyone else (the 3rd party vendors and the consumers), its a win/win situation.
With this "streaming" model, you don't even possess the copy.
You guys seem to be confused. Streaming music on the internet = Internet Radio
Most internet radio is free. Think Pandora or last.fm. It wasn't long ago that all Pandora users got an email encouraging them to call or email their various politicians* to lower the royalty rates on internet radio (they wern't making money since the rates were so high). This is an example of a music company actually doing a GOOD THING, believe it or not.
This has nothing more to do with ownership rights / drm than royalty rates on AM/FM radio stations does.
* See: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2007/03/riaas_new_royal.html
Now we just need to invent immortal elephants and we've got the universe in our grasp.
It depends on who's doing the slipstream.
I was able to get a fully updated, SP3 XP unattended install with DriverPacks for everything in less than an hour my first time ever working with the programs.
Doing an attended install means no million restarts due to the install disk I have only being up to SP1, not having to mess around with drivers, and not having to mess with the activation key.
If I wanted to go even further I could have set it up to autoinstall Firefox, Foxit Reader, and OpenOffice by doing a browse and finding the installers for each.
Now of course this preparation work is extra when compared to say, Linux or OS X, but any slashdotter worth his salt with a Windows install can make a slipstreamed disk that does an unattended install without any particular headaches, and the end result is a XP or Vista (if your using vLite) disk that is actually easier to install than Linux or OS X.
This is correct, I don't know what the process is on a windows computer, but setting up multiple instances of WoW in a single directory on a Mac is as simple as:
1. going into the WoW application folder
2. selecting the game icon (not the launcher)
3. hitting cmd+d or right clicking and selecting "duplicate"
Doing so will make a copy of the app with a new name ("world of warcraft" becomes "world of warcraft copy" etc) that uses the same directory.
Then you just download Clonekeys, which is mindbogglingly easy to set up, get your /follow macros set up, and your ready to multi box as many instances as your computer can handle.
Replicators as in StarTrek, not Replicators as in StarGate. Because in America, I totally need another way to get junk food conveniently without moving from my couch.
Not gonna lie, I read the title of this in my RSS feed and figured it was some easter egg from the new Star Trek movie.
The Axis of Evil? Oh noes!
Its not really ironic, its just one of the few places where there are groups of people with the exact same mindset and who have dedicated their lives to the same exact thing.
Not surprising then that they reach similar consensus about various issues, as they don't really think for themselves, they just interpret whatever religious text they use and give it their best shot.
It appears you and anyone who modded you read only one of TFA's.
http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics.action
That one puts Firefox 3.0.10 right around where Opera 9.64 is, and Firefox 3.5 right around where Safari 3.2.2 is. Chrome live, Chrome beta, and Safari 4 beta trounce all of the rest.
Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.
Let me correct that above statement for you.
1. Having discovered a few simple free tools like CCleaner and JKDefrag that I run on a regular basis, I have Windows XP machines that were built by me more than 18 months ago that I use daily, install and deinstall games and software on but have not suffered any noticeable slowdown. Yes, I prefer Linux but I must say that for an inherently flawed OS by design, XP has finally dispelled the "rebuild every 6 months" Windows myth for me.
2. I use "emerge" not "sudo apt-get" as a Gentoo, not Ubuntu, user. However, just like Apple designs its Macs with great care and attention, using only specific manufacturers of chipsets for graphics, network cards, etc., I too select my PC hardware for Linux machines with equal care. Ultimately, what that means is that every Linux box I build has kernel support for all of the hardware without any need to download or install external drivers - the only exception to that is if I'm building a Linux desktop machine, in which case I will "emerge nvidia-drivers" or "emerge ati-drivers" to support 3D acceleration on the appropriate graphics card inside the machine. Incidentally, the only reason I need to do that is because the graphics cards manufacturers refuse to publish their specifications openly meaning that an accelerated driver cannot be directly incorporated directly into the Linux kernel.
@1: I don't care what extra steps you have to take to keep whatever OS you use working properly. The fact is, I don't have to take them. It doesn't matter if they are free or easy or FOSS, its time I don't have to waste, period.
@2: I apologize if I have insulted your delicate sensibilities by implying you apt-get. But the point stands, as emerge is effectively the same as apt-get, which is effectively the same as rpm, which is effectively the same as yum, which is effectively the same as pacman, ad infinitum. A package manager by any other name is still a package manager. And frankly, time spent checking to make sure a potential GPU, CPU, mobo, monitor, printer, wifi chipset, or whatever works with my particular kernel/xorg configuration does not appeal to me. I would rather buy a computer that doesn't require any finagling just to make sure it works.
Also, since you don't seem to get the reference:
- http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_904_intel&num=1
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4
It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.
In that case, you have just confirmed my suspicions - namely that some Apple users are stupid enough to believe that they don't need to perform basic security & administration tasks on their machines, meaning that if and when Mac malware starts appearing in any great volume, they will almost certainly get it on their machines.
I actually laughed at this. Just as you really don't need to do any basic security and administration tasks on a Linux machine because there is no malware for the platform besides the ever so rare trojan, you really don't need to do any basic security and administration
I was not criticizing your right to choose.
I was making a statement that choosing Apple is an easy way to make a political anti-Microsoft statement without the need to read manuals and bone up on other alternatives - like, say, Linux or BSD.
Maybe that says something about the platforms that you cite, rather than that the users need to be part of an elitist club. People use Mac because its fast, easy to use, the hardware is nice, and it doesn't get shitty over time unlike windows, AND I don't need to know how to sudo apt-get an old graphics driver because of all the regressions in my new one like ubuntu.
It just works. I know how to manage a windows computer without it getting all virus ridden and slow over time, and I know how to keep wifi/audio/video running on linux through updates and upgrades. I just don't want to. That's why I use a mac.
Let me also add that mac's aren't perfect, and probably no system ever was (in b4 beos/amiga) or will be. Its just currently better than all the alternatives at what I use my computer for.
Your concept of a smartphone is that of companies like Blackberry and Palm's 24 months ago.
Apple saw a market for a consumer smartphone and exploited the fuck out of it. Now all the traditional business smartphone companies are trying to catch up.
So, not an high-profile app, but an high-profile submitter? Sorry, but the point remains, if Trent Reznor had not been involved, raising the profile of the app, it would not have been approved.
Thank god Apple had the wisdom to make themselves the gatekeeper of all iPhone apps. Who knows what kind of damage may have been done if the NIN app had been approved without this charade. Thanks, Apple, for keeping iPhone users all over the world safe.
There have been a whole lot of apps that were rejected at first and approved later without the help of Reznor. The most notable of which (or at least the ones I can think of off the top of my head) are all the fart apps.
Though it's likely that Reznor's fame is what caused the double take, I'm pretty sure Apple really doesn't care how famous you are as to whether your app gets approved or not.
Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
For a long time Apple was rumored to have a possible foray into the console market, and that they were developing a "next gen gaming system" or something like that.
They were, just not in the form everyone was thinking. Instead of a console they came out with the iPhone and iTouch.
Since then they have acquired PAsemi, snatched up graphics people from ATI and IBM, and have otherwise been building up a set of high class graphical engineers. Apple has experience designing an ARM chip (an ARM6 I believe), now they are building up a group of pros to design a mobile GPU / ARM based SoC for use on their third or fourth generation multi-touch handhelds. Now all we need is a quality backend to the 3g networks and a GPS chip that doesn't kill the phone in 4 hours and we'll have a platform to last 4-6 years given incremental updates.
how does a drain laugh?
The Palm Pre needs to come out first for that particular plan to work.
... nor of a notebook.
What I would like to see is a laptop with whatever the most powerful ARM processor is, a power efficient discrete GPU (ala the iPhone/iTouch), a 120 gig OCZ vertex, a 10" OLED screen, and a built in 3G dongle, all running on the recently ported to ARM Ubuntu 9.04.
Something that I can use as a "real" laptop, not one of those tiny 4" abominations with squeezed keyboard thats hard for anyone but children to type on. However I don't want it to be my workhorse machine. I can build a desktop for 1k with enough processing power to hack the matrix. I can build a laptop for 3k that would be roughly equal. I don't want that. I want something that will last 300+ hours asleep and get 24 hours of web browsing out in the middle of nowhere (assuming I have a cell signal). I want something I can keep a bunch of movies or tv seasons and my music library on, not something with an anemic SDHC card that I have to switch out everytime I want to watch something new. Something I can play simple games on for the duration of my 12 hour flight to wherever without having to plug myself in the whole time.
THAT i would LOVE to drop 1k++ on. Netbooks/notebooks now can have that in processing power but are not nearly there in power efficiency. Realize the ARM/power efficiency revolution is coming in relation to MID's, gimme some quality linux ARM ports, and enjoy watching me stumble over myself while I throw money at your products.
Or any of the Fable 2 minigames that came out before the games release.