Then in all likelyhood, you'll be dissapointed. Bluray is fine and all, but that is not a title where you'll see any difference between HD-DVD and Bluray.
Fanboyism is great isn't it? Anybody who's spent even 5 minutes reading about both formats would find that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are almost identical in every respect, with the only substantial exception being the physical disc.
Laser Wavelength: 450 nm Video Codecs: MPEG 2, VC-1, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Lossy Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital (AC-3), Dolby Digital Plus, DTS Lossless Audio Codecs: PCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD.
I did co-mingle the 'mandatory' and 'optional' audio codecs, largely because few people care that DVDs have 'mandatory' and 'optional' audio codecs. It seems that HD-DVD has a few more mandatory audio codecs than Blu Ray (ie. the codecs are 'optional' on Blu Ray, rather than required)
Both are stored in 1080p, at the native frame rate of the source media (usually 24 fps for feature films). Both leave the details of how to display a 24 fps video on a 30 fps display to the player.
HD-DVD uses a menu system based on web technologies like XML, JavaScript, etc. Blu-Ray uses Java. I don't spend enough time in DVD menus to care.
Nobody will be able to tell the difference between a Blu-Ray and an HD-DVD disc side-by side. Many studios are supporting both-- and guess what? They start from the same source, are encoded with the same codecs (and indeed, the same software), using the same settings. They are decoded with the same codecs. There is literally no difference in the output.
A metaphor using compressed audio: If you encode an MP3 using LAME, and burn the MP3 to a CD, and copy it to a flash drive. Now play both using mpg123. Which sounds better? The CD or the flash drive?
It's fairly silly to decide to wait for a winner before buying. It makes about the same amount of sense as refusing to drink Evian or Dasani because you're not sure which will be around in 20 years. Just buy one and enjoy it. The smart movie studios will support both formats.
Every disc is an obsolete format eventually. I'm sure Sony & Toshiba will say that DVD is an obsolete format.
In '99, I recall more than a few tech magazine articles that predicted that DVD would replace CDs in *every* application where CD's were being used. This never happened.
If you have a hybrid player, why do you care what disc it comes on? The codecs are virtually identical (the only real difference being the default codecs for audio and video). Both can display all but the longest movies on one disc in 1080p. The only *real* difference when all is said and done is the physical disc (and the optics to read it; although the lasers are the same wavelength).
I really, truly do not believe either format will win over the other. Refusing to buy one, the other, or both because there is more than one option in the market is like a gamer refusing to buy a gaming PC, PlayStation, Xbox, or Wii because they don't play each other's games.
There's no reason the market can't support both being successful and widely deployed. The console video game, downloadable music, and downloadable video markets have shown quite well that it's more than possible for many incompatible formats to succeed commercially. Even Microsoft is breaking their own 'Plays For Sure' initiative with their own incompatible Zune.
Having competing (but incompatible) formats usually breeds fanboys. And what marketing executive doesn't like rabidly loyal consumers?
In other words: If you hold out for the 'winner' to appear before buying an HD disc player, you may be in for one long wait.
Frankly, it looks like these 'analysts' have only one common thread: Apple is making a big mistake.
The reasons keep changing, but apparently Apple is going to be crushed by . Sell your Apple stock before it's too late!
Considering the number of analysts who really don't get Apple, the article isn't much of a suprise.
The article even quotes an analyst who thinks Apple's next big thing is selling an Apple computer with Windows preloaded. Here's a hint: Apple is not out to become the next Dell. Apple has their own OS, and its users generally buy Apple to get that OS.
There have been rumors of an Apple phone (not a Motorola or other phone that uses iTunes) for years now. I have difficulty believing that the same company that changed its entire product line from PowerPC to Intel chips in just over a year would take several years to develop a telephone.
I don't mean to discount the complexity of modern phones, of course, but Apple has wireless technology in its Airport lineup, and has embedded experience from the iPod. They have the pieces.
Frankly, it just doesn't add up that Apple would try to enter an extremely competitive market where the margins are so thin.
Let's look at the history of the analyst's wisdom: 1.) Apple has to enter the mobile phone market, or it will be destroyed. (ie. smart phones will replace iPods, and Apple is going to get left behind) 2.) Apple is readying a phone, but it'll be late to market and Apple doesn't know what it's doing.
- Two (that I know of) phones that play iTunes are released; neither are from Apple. 3.) Admit reality, and recognize the faults with theory #1
- According to TFA, playing music isn't something most consumers care about in a phone. 4.) Find a new 'mistake' for Apple: That they must still be readying the iPhone, and it will be a colossal failure.
I'd prefer to think along the lines of "why you can't get anybody at Apple to care." It doesn't affect Macs, after all.
Still, it does give food for thought. I can easily see it as an act of malice as much as a QA failure.
I recall a *brand new* Sandisk flash drive that loaded & installed its own software (including Skype, its own little menu system, utilities, etc.) onto my computer the moment I plugged it in.
How much would it be worth to a spammer/botnet group to infect the image that gets copied to all these devices? Enough to pay sufficiently large sums of money to subvert employees at the manufacturing plant?
It's still inexcusably sloppy of Apple, but my real concern isn't in the companies involved: It's that it will likely happen elsewhere as well. Flash drives, DVD's with 'extended' PC content... stuff like that.
Anywhere media with readable content is replicated can be a vector for viruses.
I agree completely. I work for a company whose method of Linux installation is frequently... boot CD, unpack tarball. It takes a bit of care to make sure you don't mangle the permissions & other metadata, but it's not that mystical.
The article also has outright falsehoods in it: For instance, ReiserFS can be configured to do data journaling (it just doesn't call it that), and has had this ability for quite some time now. And IIRC, ReiserFS4 can't be configured to disable data journaling.
It's odd how passionate people can get about their filesystem of choice. It's almost like the author has a bone to pick. When you have the opprotunity to power cycle 1,000 identical systems at the same time (just yank the power -- none of that graceful writing out buffers to disk crap), it's fairly easy to see patterns emerge. To be honest, I haven't seen ReiserFS to be more or less reliable than ext2/3.
If young people still consider it news, then things are in really bad shape.
Here's one rather good observation I've heard over & over: The Daily Show and Colbert Report at have the integrity to admit they make stuff up. Not so true with some in the press. I guess it's just easier to photoshop until you have a story to sell, than it is to tell a real story.
I recall hearing statements to the effect of 'yellow' journalism being dead; but apparently it's still a viable and healthy industry.
I can see it now: * Blinky new CPU: $1000.00 * Transparent heatsink made of Aluminum oxynitride: $5,000.00 * Being the 1337357 h4x0r in the whole basement: Priceless.
copying was quite efficient since there was a large class of slaves and copying of books was just as big an industry as today
This is wrong on so many levels. The last thing a slave owner wants is an educated slave. Educated slaves tend to either run off or kill their masters. It costs time and money to teach anybody to read and write. Guess what? Slaves weren't worth it. There was more than enough labor-intensive/dangerous work to throw slaves at (such as producing food).
Scribes were highly paid professionals, and had a social standing just below the aristocracy. Over time, their value diminished, but only after the advent of the printing press -- at which point the owner of the printing press were highly paid.
But, ignoring the wrongness of literate slaves: Even if you had literate slaves (which you didn't), having a large number of slaves copying books is not efficient. Efficiency is the amount of a resource expended to produce something. It required thousands of man-hours of work to create a single copy of one of the more popular books to duplicate (the Christian Bible is still the most popular book to print, for example) This process wasn't cheap -- Paper was very valuable stuff, ink isn't free, and even if you have slaves, you have to feed them or they starve to death; you have to shelter them or they run away. Food and shelter costs a lot of money. In most parts of the world, it's still the primary drain on a person's finances.
In other words, to copy books back then, it required lots of paper (mistakes are much more common when hand-copying), and even more importantly, it cost a great deal of food to have somebody (slave or free) to do the copying.
Early printing presses allowed thousands of copies to be made with the same amount of effort as one hand-copied book. This was a very drastic reduction in the cost to duplicate a book. It was still a human-powered process, and the primary cost (after paper, which was non-trivial) was to feed the man running the press. But that one man could do the work of thousands of scribes.
In other words, slave labor couldn't have made books more efficient to copy -- the same amount of effort is required whether it's a slave or a free man doing the copying. This means the efficiency is identical in either case.
As far as costs go -- slaves are cheaper; but slaves are not 'free' labor, and they never were. The only difference between the Romans and us is that we use mechanical slaves, where the Romans used human slaves. Our mechanical slaves aren't zero-cost, are they?
Well, after trying out the Vista beta, I've got to say Microsoft has a reason to be scared of... well, anybody with a decent compiler.
Creative has been trying to play hardball lately.
The Recording and Movie industry aren't happy with Apple's success.
Many in the free software crowd don't see Apple as much better than Microsoft.
I'm sure SCO wants a piece of the action for the Unix-derived OS X.
This is largely business as usual for any American company that can make a headline.
McDonalds is evil... Burger King is evil... Coca-Cola and Pepsi are evil. Farmers are evil, cattle ranchers are spawn of the devil... fill in the blank...
There's always going to be some schmuck who tries to hide her/his incompetence by blaming somebody else. It's been happening throught human history. It's poetic that history has shown that such behavior usually has the opposite of the intended effect. Nero blaming the Christians, Hitler blaming the Jews... just more blanks to fill in.
IMAP doesn't (by default) even download the message until you ask to read it; only the header is downloaded. (This is somewhat like NNTP; the only thing downloaded is the header.)
With IMAP, everything is (and more or less stays) on the server. Any IMAP-capable email client on any computer, running any OS should see the same view -- same folders, same contents, etc.
It's sorta like a web client in that there's only one place the mail is stored, and you can access it from any compliant web browser. Except web clients are... well, I shudder when I have to use one. IMAP lets you have a single world-view like a web mail client, but throws out the ugly side of web clients (speed, lack of flexibility, etc.)
You can even set up most IMAP clients to download the entire message for offline reading-- and when you re-connect to the server, the client updates itself to the server's view of the world (ie. deletes messages that were deleted on the server-- like messages you deleted on a different machine).
I've also been able to narrow it down to a particular mail server (other IMAP servers don't give me grief with Opera 9). I also know that the troublesome mail server doesn't have issues with Opera 8.5x or any other IMAP client I've tried (T-Bird, Mozilla mail, kMail, Evolution, Apple Mail, Outlook...)
Opera's email client is awseome in general (and is usually my primary email client) -- but there is one issue that I've found that they have yet to fix: IMAP mail...
It's a bit of a weird one: If you use a non-opera email client (with IMAP, at least -- I don't use POP), and that email client is the first to see a new message, there are a few issues. (Say, you use your 'company mandated' email client to get the mail at work, then Opera at home.)
Opera doesn't acknowledge the existence of emails that have been first detected with a non-opera browser. I noticed this because I kept looking for particular emails that had seemed to vanish on me. I finally noticed the problem -- Opera simply wasn't detecting the messages. They were sitting there in my inbox, but Opera coudln't see them.
Otherwise, I've been using the Opera 9 (beta) series, and I've been quite pleased.
You forgot high performance computing (ie supercomputing) environments, where electrical costs are measured in dollars per minute (and the job takes weeks).
There are plenty of cases where it is far more cost effective to pay somebody $10k/week to optimize the hell out of a piece of code, because a 1% optimization will save thousands of dollars over the course of a year. The market for supercomputing applications is growing substantially. It's quite frequently cheaper to prototype in a supercomputer than it is to do something 'in the real world.'
I always laugh when I see people point out benchmarks where Java is compared to C in terms of the Linpack benchmark -- entirely ignoring the fact that in both cases, the actual 'work' is being done in neither Java nor C, but in a BLAS library that is written in Fortran. It's hardly suprising they have similar speeds -- they're running the exact same routines, from the exact same Fortran library.
The thing I see is this: The market for interpreted languages is fairly static -- I remember playing simple games written in BASIC on my parent's Apple II. I recall word processors, education software, etc -- all written in interpreted languages.
The region of 'corner cases' where native-compiled code is substantially faster than interpreted languages hasn't changed significantly over my lifetime. High performance games were, are, and will remain native-compiled code for the forseeable future. The same applies to supercomputing. Embedded machines are also a bastion of native code -- simply because they are produced on a scale that favors code written natively-- the tradeoff being more expensive hardware, and the economics never work out such that software (including its one-time development cost) is cheaper than hardware.
There's nothing wrong with either; they are tools, to be used appropriately. Being a rabid fanboy (or hater) of either only proves one is willfully ignorant of reality. Fifteen years ago, an interpreted language kept many of the world's largest mainframes running -- it wasn't Java, it was BASIC (or one of quite a few other interpreted languages).
The languages used may have changed, but the amount of (and use cases for) interpreted vs. native code hasn't changed that much over the decades. Shiny-new Java didn't change it, neither did.Net. Nor will Ruby on Rails. It's the same old song, covered by some fresh new 'hip' band.
Don't think for a second that interpreted languages are taking over; or that they're losing ground. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I signed up for (and pay for) 1.5 Mbps DSL. I get 2.2 Mbps (measured). I can live with that...
My ISP was so good, in fact, that I had to call up tech support and ask them to throttle down my bandwidth from 3Mbps in order to increase reliability -- and they did it, no questions asked. I still have trouble believing it, all things considered.
I think the critical difference is this: I don't get my service from the local telephone monopoly, or the local cable monopoly.
I went with EarthLink. It seems (where I live, at least) that EarthLink is more like a facilitator-- they hook customers with local ISP's (benefiting both the customer and ISP). The customer gets good service from a local ISP (in my case, steller service)
The ISP gets a pretty sweet deal too -- they don't have to pay for any advertising, and EarthLink does all the customer support and billing, leaving the ISP to keep the connection live; this means the ISP gets to focus on being an ISP, rather than a wearing customer service and billing center hats.
So it's no supprise this is getting protested as well. It's sad, really, because there are environmentalists that really care about the environment, and want to preserve it while also finding ways to give humans what they need, however they are vastly outnumbered by people who just feel like screaming about the cause du jour without really getting educated on the facts behind it.
Many a protest uses environmentalism as a reason to protest any sort of 'big' project, be it commercial, governmental, or scientific. Many an environmentalist is more concerned with stopping (or making life hard for) 'big business' or 'big government' than they are with the environment. (The whole tired 'too much power in too few hands' argument)
Many people apparently have difficulty believing that anybody can be more interested in being part of a great work than they are in wielding any sort of political or financial power.
Because the US wanted to build the IETR in Japan. The US has several of its own large fusion experiments in parallel with the IETR. (Important thing with IETR is the 'TR' for tokamak reactor; not everybody's convinced a Tokamak is the way to go.)
The US's National Ignition Facility (NIF), is quite different in its approach; it doesn't use a Tokamak at all, rather using lasers to fuse pellets of fuel, and it uses a 'combustion' cycle of sorts.
Basically, the US wants to be part of the IETR, but (along with most of the IETR participants) it doesn't want to focus on only one possible route to nuclear fusion. Discoveries that would have been missed had everybody focused solely on the IETR can still provide a benefit to mankind.
Ubuntu is the trendy distro fanboys are google-eyed over at the moment. SuSE and Fedora are sooo 2003. Ubuntu is still a new name, and therefore 'fresh.' Not to bash Ubuntu, but I'm just not impressed with it. APT? Debian's had it for years. Easy install? No corner on the market; Red Hat, SuSE have this base covered as well. And the install doesn't matter after the first 30 minutes. Features? It's the same software as every other distro on the planet. Minor patches that do nothing to actual functionality don't differentiate Ubuntu. Software Selection? Pretty much the same as everybody else. Performance? Guess what? Every distro uses GCC, and every distro uses nearly identical compiler flags. Net result: Nearly identical performance.
The stereotypical fanboy is the computing equivalent of a blowhard; lots of talk, very little walk. To a fanboy, whatever distro they have installed is obviously the best distro, and is therefore be the best choice for (insert company here). Any statement to the contrary is attacked rabidly, no matter what the actual facts are.
It's like watching NASCAR fans cheer for the same make of car they own. Except distro wars are even less interesting, since crashes are common in NASCAR.
It's spot on -- the whole 'missing link' thing is a bogus idea -- there aren't discrete steps from point a to point b. Sure, they've found something that fits in between point a and point b. Great; it's another data point. It's not like it was unexpected.
Downwind from what? Nearly all above-ground nuclear weapons testing was done in Nevada; You've got Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and (of course) Nevada in-between.
He's definitely not a cult figure, at least, that's for sure.
Some of us have only vaguely heard of JBoss. Even after looking it up, and finding (to no suprise) an endless stream of buzzwords, it seems that what JBoss is in a niche market.
If you're a web developer, it's probably got something to offer.
Look -- there are a lot of times when I really don't want to hear what is going on around me. Some of us aren't able to just ignore other people and go about our business while they chatter on about nothing. Lousy listening environment be damned, I do not want to listen to a snot-nosed princess whine about how one of her shoes is of a slightly different color than the other for 30 minutes during my morning commute.
If I'm going to listen to some pointless drivel in a lousy environment, it will be my pointless drivel. At least this way I don't want to claw out my eyes while observing other people (and hopefully returning the favor).
Slashdot Mirror
Then in all likelyhood, you'll be dissapointed. Bluray is fine and all, but that is not a title where you'll see any difference between HD-DVD and Bluray.
Fanboyism is great isn't it? Anybody who's spent even 5 minutes reading about both formats would find that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are almost identical in every respect, with the only substantial exception being the physical disc.
Laser Wavelength: 450 nm
Video Codecs: MPEG 2, VC-1, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
Lossy Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital (AC-3), Dolby Digital Plus, DTS
Lossless Audio Codecs: PCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD.
I did co-mingle the 'mandatory' and 'optional' audio codecs, largely because few people care that DVDs have 'mandatory' and 'optional' audio codecs. It seems that HD-DVD has a few more mandatory audio codecs than Blu Ray (ie. the codecs are 'optional' on Blu Ray, rather than required)
Both are stored in 1080p, at the native frame rate of the source media (usually 24 fps for feature films). Both leave the details of how to display a 24 fps video on a 30 fps display to the player.
HD-DVD uses a menu system based on web technologies like XML, JavaScript, etc. Blu-Ray uses Java. I don't spend enough time in DVD menus to care.
Nobody will be able to tell the difference between a Blu-Ray and an HD-DVD disc side-by side. Many studios are supporting both-- and guess what? They start from the same source, are encoded with the same codecs (and indeed, the same software), using the same settings. They are decoded with the same codecs. There is literally no difference in the output.
A metaphor using compressed audio: If you encode an MP3 using LAME, and burn the MP3 to a CD, and copy it to a flash drive. Now play both using mpg123. Which sounds better? The CD or the flash drive?
It's fairly silly to decide to wait for a winner before buying. It makes about the same amount of sense as refusing to drink Evian or Dasani because you're not sure which will be around in 20 years. Just buy one and enjoy it. The smart movie studios will support both formats.
Every disc is an obsolete format eventually. I'm sure Sony & Toshiba will say that DVD is an obsolete format.
In '99, I recall more than a few tech magazine articles that predicted that DVD would replace CDs in *every* application where CD's were being used. This never happened.
If you have a hybrid player, why do you care what disc it comes on? The codecs are virtually identical (the only real difference being the default codecs for audio and video). Both can display all but the longest movies on one disc in 1080p. The only *real* difference when all is said and done is the physical disc (and the optics to read it; although the lasers are the same wavelength).
I really, truly do not believe either format will win over the other. Refusing to buy one, the other, or both because there is more than one option in the market is like a gamer refusing to buy a gaming PC, PlayStation, Xbox, or Wii because they don't play each other's games.
There's no reason the market can't support both being successful and widely deployed. The console video game, downloadable music, and downloadable video markets have shown quite well that it's more than possible for many incompatible formats to succeed commercially. Even Microsoft is breaking their own 'Plays For Sure' initiative with their own incompatible Zune.
Having competing (but incompatible) formats usually breeds fanboys. And what marketing executive doesn't like rabidly loyal consumers?
In other words: If you hold out for the 'winner' to appear before buying an HD disc player, you may be in for one long wait.
Frankly, it looks like these 'analysts' have only one common thread: Apple is making a big mistake.
The reasons keep changing, but apparently Apple is going to be crushed by . Sell your Apple stock before it's too late!
Considering the number of analysts who really don't get Apple, the article isn't much of a suprise.
The article even quotes an analyst who thinks Apple's next big thing is selling an Apple computer with Windows preloaded. Here's a hint: Apple is not out to become the next Dell. Apple has their own OS, and its users generally buy Apple to get that OS.
There have been rumors of an Apple phone (not a Motorola or other phone that uses iTunes) for years now. I have difficulty believing that the same company that changed its entire product line from PowerPC to Intel chips in just over a year would take several years to develop a telephone.
I don't mean to discount the complexity of modern phones, of course, but Apple has wireless technology in its Airport lineup, and has embedded experience from the iPod. They have the pieces.
Frankly, it just doesn't add up that Apple would try to enter an extremely competitive market where the margins are so thin.
Let's look at the history of the analyst's wisdom:
1.) Apple has to enter the mobile phone market, or it will be destroyed. (ie. smart phones will replace iPods, and Apple is going to get left behind)
2.) Apple is readying a phone, but it'll be late to market and Apple doesn't know what it's doing.
- Two (that I know of) phones that play iTunes are released; neither are from Apple.
3.) Admit reality, and recognize the faults with theory #1
- According to TFA, playing music isn't something most consumers care about in a phone.
4.) Find a new 'mistake' for Apple: That they must still be readying the iPhone, and it will be a colossal failure.
I'd prefer to think along the lines of "why you can't get anybody at Apple to care." It doesn't affect Macs, after all.
Still, it does give food for thought. I can easily see it as an act of malice as much as a QA failure.
I recall a *brand new* Sandisk flash drive that loaded & installed its own software (including Skype, its own little menu system, utilities, etc.) onto my computer the moment I plugged it in.
How much would it be worth to a spammer/botnet group to infect the image that gets copied to all these devices? Enough to pay sufficiently large sums of money to subvert employees at the manufacturing plant?
It's still inexcusably sloppy of Apple, but my real concern isn't in the companies involved: It's that it will likely happen elsewhere as well. Flash drives, DVD's with 'extended' PC content... stuff like that.
Anywhere media with readable content is replicated can be a vector for viruses.
You realize that the virus does nothing on a Mac, right? To a mac, it's just a file.
To Windows, it's a virus.
I agree completely. I work for a company whose method of Linux installation is frequently... boot CD, unpack tarball. It takes a bit of care to make sure you don't mangle the permissions & other metadata, but it's not that mystical.
The article also has outright falsehoods in it: For instance, ReiserFS can be configured to do data journaling (it just doesn't call it that), and has had this ability for quite some time now. And IIRC, ReiserFS4 can't be configured to disable data journaling.
It's odd how passionate people can get about their filesystem of choice. It's almost like the author has a bone to pick. When you have the opprotunity to power cycle 1,000 identical systems at the same time (just yank the power -- none of that graceful writing out buffers to disk crap), it's fairly easy to see patterns emerge. To be honest, I haven't seen ReiserFS to be more or less reliable than ext2/3.
Where they point the gun is fairly boring. It's what they do with the trigger that's interesting.
What's the secret of comedy?
Timing
If young people still consider it news, then things are in really bad shape.
Here's one rather good observation I've heard over & over: The Daily Show and Colbert Report at have the integrity to admit they make stuff up. Not so true with some in the press. I guess it's just easier to photoshop until you have a story to sell, than it is to tell a real story.
I recall hearing statements to the effect of 'yellow' journalism being dead; but apparently it's still a viable and healthy industry.
I can see it now:
* Blinky new CPU: $1000.00
* Transparent heatsink made of Aluminum oxynitride: $5,000.00
* Being the 1337357 h4x0r in the whole basement: Priceless.
copying was quite efficient since there was a large class of slaves and copying of books was just as big an industry as today
This is wrong on so many levels. The last thing a slave owner wants is an educated slave. Educated slaves tend to either run off or kill their masters. It costs time and money to teach anybody to read and write. Guess what? Slaves weren't worth it. There was more than enough labor-intensive/dangerous work to throw slaves at (such as producing food).
Scribes were highly paid professionals, and had a social standing just below the aristocracy. Over time, their value diminished, but only after the advent of the printing press -- at which point the owner of the printing press were highly paid.
But, ignoring the wrongness of literate slaves:
Even if you had literate slaves (which you didn't), having a large number of slaves copying books is not efficient. Efficiency is the amount of a resource expended to produce something. It required thousands of man-hours of work to create a single copy of one of the more popular books to duplicate (the Christian Bible is still the most popular book to print, for example) This process wasn't cheap -- Paper was very valuable stuff, ink isn't free, and even if you have slaves, you have to feed them or they starve to death; you have to shelter them or they run away. Food and shelter costs a lot of money. In most parts of the world, it's still the primary drain on a person's finances.
In other words, to copy books back then, it required lots of paper (mistakes are much more common when hand-copying), and even more importantly, it cost a great deal of food to have somebody (slave or free) to do the copying.
Early printing presses allowed thousands of copies to be made with the same amount of effort as one hand-copied book. This was a very drastic reduction in the cost to duplicate a book. It was still a human-powered process, and the primary cost (after paper, which was non-trivial) was to feed the man running the press. But that one man could do the work of thousands of scribes.
In other words, slave labor couldn't have made books more efficient to copy -- the same amount of effort is required whether it's a slave or a free man doing the copying. This means the efficiency is identical in either case.
As far as costs go -- slaves are cheaper; but slaves are not 'free' labor, and they never were. The only difference between the Romans and us is that we use mechanical slaves, where the Romans used human slaves. Our mechanical slaves aren't zero-cost, are they?
Well, after trying out the Vista beta, I've got to say Microsoft has a reason to be scared of... well, anybody with a decent compiler.
Creative has been trying to play hardball lately.
The Recording and Movie industry aren't happy with Apple's success.
Many in the free software crowd don't see Apple as much better than Microsoft.
I'm sure SCO wants a piece of the action for the Unix-derived OS X.
This is largely business as usual for any American company that can make a headline.
McDonalds is evil... Burger King is evil... Coca-Cola and Pepsi are evil. Farmers are evil, cattle ranchers are spawn of the devil... fill in the blank...
There's always going to be some schmuck who tries to hide her/his incompetence by blaming somebody else. It's been happening throught human history. It's poetic that history has shown that such behavior usually has the opposite of the intended effect. Nero blaming the Christians, Hitler blaming the Jews... just more blanks to fill in.
You're thinking of POP. My post specified IMAP.
... well, I shudder when I have to use one. IMAP lets you have a single world-view like a web mail client, but throws out the ugly side of web clients (speed, lack of flexibility, etc.)
IMAP doesn't (by default) even download the message until you ask to read it; only the header is downloaded. (This is somewhat like NNTP; the only thing downloaded is the header.)
With IMAP, everything is (and more or less stays) on the server. Any IMAP-capable email client on any computer, running any OS should see the same view -- same folders, same contents, etc.
It's sorta like a web client in that there's only one place the mail is stored, and you can access it from any compliant web browser. Except web clients are
You can even set up most IMAP clients to download the entire message for offline reading-- and when you re-connect to the server, the client updates itself to the server's view of the world (ie. deletes messages that were deleted on the server-- like messages you deleted on a different machine).
I've also been able to narrow it down to a particular mail server (other IMAP servers don't give me grief with Opera 9). I also know that the troublesome mail server doesn't have issues with Opera 8.5x or any other IMAP client I've tried (T-Bird, Mozilla mail, kMail, Evolution, Apple Mail, Outlook...)
Opera's email client is awseome in general (and is usually my primary email client) -- but there is one issue that I've found that they have yet to fix: IMAP mail...
It's a bit of a weird one: If you use a non-opera email client (with IMAP, at least -- I don't use POP), and that email client is the first to see a new message, there are a few issues. (Say, you use your 'company mandated' email client to get the mail at work, then Opera at home.)
Opera doesn't acknowledge the existence of emails that have been first detected with a non-opera browser. I noticed this because I kept looking for particular emails that had seemed to vanish on me. I finally noticed the problem -- Opera simply wasn't detecting the messages. They were sitting there in my inbox, but Opera coudln't see them.
Otherwise, I've been using the Opera 9 (beta) series, and I've been quite pleased.
You forgot high performance computing (ie supercomputing) environments, where electrical costs are measured in dollars per minute (and the job takes weeks).
.Net. Nor will Ruby on Rails. It's the same old song, covered by some fresh new 'hip' band.
There are plenty of cases where it is far more cost effective to pay somebody $10k/week to optimize the hell out of a piece of code, because a 1% optimization will save thousands of dollars over the course of a year. The market for supercomputing applications is growing substantially. It's quite frequently cheaper to prototype in a supercomputer than it is to do something 'in the real world.'
I always laugh when I see people point out benchmarks where Java is compared to C in terms of the Linpack benchmark -- entirely ignoring the fact that in both cases, the actual 'work' is being done in neither Java nor C, but in a BLAS library that is written in Fortran. It's hardly suprising they have similar speeds -- they're running the exact same routines, from the exact same Fortran library.
The thing I see is this: The market for interpreted languages is fairly static -- I remember playing simple games written in BASIC on my parent's Apple II. I recall word processors, education software, etc -- all written in interpreted languages.
The region of 'corner cases' where native-compiled code is substantially faster than interpreted languages hasn't changed significantly over my lifetime. High performance games were, are, and will remain native-compiled code for the forseeable future. The same applies to supercomputing. Embedded machines are also a bastion of native code -- simply because they are produced on a scale that favors code written natively-- the tradeoff being more expensive hardware, and the economics never work out such that software (including its one-time development cost) is cheaper than hardware.
There's nothing wrong with either; they are tools, to be used appropriately. Being a rabid fanboy (or hater) of either only proves one is willfully ignorant of reality. Fifteen years ago, an interpreted language kept many of the world's largest mainframes running -- it wasn't Java, it was BASIC (or one of quite a few other interpreted languages).
The languages used may have changed, but the amount of (and use cases for) interpreted vs. native code hasn't changed that much over the decades. Shiny-new Java didn't change it, neither did
Don't think for a second that interpreted languages are taking over; or that they're losing ground. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I signed up for (and pay for) 1.5 Mbps DSL. I get 2.2 Mbps (measured). I can live with that...
My ISP was so good, in fact, that I had to call up tech support and ask them to throttle down my bandwidth from 3Mbps in order to increase reliability -- and they did it, no questions asked. I still have trouble believing it, all things considered.
I think the critical difference is this: I don't get my service from the local telephone monopoly, or the local cable monopoly.
I went with EarthLink. It seems (where I live, at least) that EarthLink is more like a facilitator-- they hook customers with local ISP's (benefiting both the customer and ISP). The customer gets good service from a local ISP (in my case, steller service)
The ISP gets a pretty sweet deal too -- they don't have to pay for any advertising, and EarthLink does all the customer support and billing, leaving the ISP to keep the connection live; this means the ISP gets to focus on being an ISP, rather than a wearing customer service and billing center hats.
the problem is that corruption tends to feed on itself.
Integrity tends to feed on itself as well.
So it's no supprise this is getting protested as well. It's sad, really, because there are environmentalists that really care about the environment, and want to preserve it while also finding ways to give humans what they need, however they are vastly outnumbered by people who just feel like screaming about the cause du jour without really getting educated on the facts behind it.
Many a protest uses environmentalism as a reason to protest any sort of 'big' project, be it commercial, governmental, or scientific. Many an environmentalist is more concerned with stopping (or making life hard for) 'big business' or 'big government' than they are with the environment. (The whole tired 'too much power in too few hands' argument)
Many people apparently have difficulty believing that anybody can be more interested in being part of a great work than they are in wielding any sort of political or financial power.
Because the US wanted to build the IETR in Japan. The US has several of its own large fusion experiments in parallel with the IETR. (Important thing with IETR is the 'TR' for tokamak reactor; not everybody's convinced a Tokamak is the way to go.)
The US's National Ignition Facility (NIF), is quite different in its approach; it doesn't use a Tokamak at all, rather using lasers to fuse pellets of fuel, and it uses a 'combustion' cycle of sorts.
Basically, the US wants to be part of the IETR, but (along with most of the IETR participants) it doesn't want to focus on only one possible route to nuclear fusion. Discoveries that would have been missed had everybody focused solely on the IETR can still provide a benefit to mankind.
Maybe, but will it kill you fast enough that you don't care?
Why Unbuntu
Fanboys.
Ubuntu is the trendy distro fanboys are google-eyed over at the moment. SuSE and Fedora are sooo 2003. Ubuntu is still a new name, and therefore 'fresh.' Not to bash Ubuntu, but I'm just not impressed with it. APT? Debian's had it for years. Easy install? No corner on the market; Red Hat, SuSE have this base covered as well. And the install doesn't matter after the first 30 minutes. Features? It's the same software as every other distro on the planet. Minor patches that do nothing to actual functionality don't differentiate Ubuntu. Software Selection? Pretty much the same as everybody else. Performance? Guess what? Every distro uses GCC, and every distro uses nearly identical compiler flags. Net result: Nearly identical performance.
The stereotypical fanboy is the computing equivalent of a blowhard; lots of talk, very little walk. To a fanboy, whatever distro they have installed is obviously the best distro, and is therefore be the best choice for (insert company here). Any statement to the contrary is attacked rabidly, no matter what the actual facts are.
It's like watching NASCAR fans cheer for the same make of car they own. Except distro wars are even less interesting, since crashes are common in NASCAR.
As far as I've been able to tell, nothing does the group scheduling other than Exchange in any decent form.
Exchange doesn't do it so great either.
But, ever hear of Novell Groupwise? It's the feature-by-feature competitor to Exchange
You know, I'd mod this up...
It's spot on -- the whole 'missing link' thing is a bogus idea -- there aren't discrete steps from point a to point b. Sure, they've found something that fits in between point a and point b. Great; it's another data point. It's not like it was unexpected.
Downwind from what? Nearly all above-ground nuclear weapons testing was done in Nevada; You've got Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and (of course) Nevada in-between.
(This is really a question: What am I missing?)
He's definitely not a cult figure, at least, that's for sure.
Some of us have only vaguely heard of JBoss. Even after looking it up, and finding (to no suprise) an endless stream of buzzwords, it seems that what JBoss is in a niche market.
If you're a web developer, it's probably got something to offer.
Otherwise, it's only earned a yawn.
Look -- there are a lot of times when I really don't want to hear what is going on around me. Some of us aren't able to just ignore other people and go about our business while they chatter on about nothing. Lousy listening environment be damned, I do not want to listen to a snot-nosed princess whine about how one of her shoes is of a slightly different color than the other for 30 minutes during my morning commute.
If I'm going to listen to some pointless drivel in a lousy environment, it will be my pointless drivel. At least this way I don't want to claw out my eyes while observing other people (and hopefully returning the favor).