and I believe he said the cost would be under $39 to the consumer
I call shenanigans.
There's no way you could get it for $39 unless it had like a 10GB hard drive. I mean, when you add the cost of the shipping from tiwan to here for something the size of a VCR/Tivo/DVDplayer-type stereo component, and to that add the cost of the circuit board, the dvd drive and laser, and a 40GB hard drive... there's no way it'd be less than $75 AT LEAST. And I only paid $99 for my 40GB Tivo, plus the monthly.
I know that others have already replied, but my two cents is: for starters, L170 (don't know how to do the pound symbol on my keyboard) is (as of 10AM 4/4/2006) $298.46. And you paid that two years ago - I'm talking in 1998-1999 when I worked in retail audio, a good MD player, especially a portable one, was $299-$349 (USD, in L that's L170 - L200, and in 1999 L's too - it's also 2,674.48 Sweedisk Kronor).
The media has come down in price, but they should have made it cheap to begin with when CD Recorders started to buzz in the computer world, and those first 128MB MP3 players came out. They kept prices high, which drove people to lower cost alternatives.
I thought in 1999, and I still maintain today, that a Minidisc MP3 player released in 2000 would have conquored the portable music world.
Betacam and Digital Betacam are used professionally... but sony has flopped (off the top of my head) Minidiscs, UMD, memory stick (sort of), and a load of other ideas.
I used to sell both computers and audio equipment, back in the 1998-2000 era, and it's astonishing to see what sony wasted. They of course couldn't jump on the standard flash memory bandwagon (compact flash or smart media, or later SD) - no, they had to invent their own thing, and of course it only worked with sony stuff. Stupid.
Minidiscs were a novelty, and were pretty cool for a while, but then... CD-R's and mp3 platers became cheap. Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25, or you can get something solid state for less than the price of a MD player? Even when a 512MB mp3 player cost $299, it was comparable to the high end MD player, in features and size. They should have LONG AGO made a minidisc MP3 player - the technology existed, and those disks hold about 480megs or so, not to mention $5 / 500MB is still a good price for media. But they didn't. Arrogance.
All the time, I see sony's marketing people put out all this shit which, in a perfect sony universe, would all interpolate, interact, and be amazing. But, in the real world, only a few people are going to buy all sony. They have yet to deal with that reality. People want their flash memory to be usable for their camera, mp3 player, and phone. They want their media to not be format locked.
It's just marketing stupidity and corporate hubris. Plain and simple. Develop good ideas, then drive them into the ground by making them proprietary.
Evolution happens via small steps. But, then, I don't pretend to understand how it works; she's the biologist in the family, I just pick up on stuff as she talks.
If you're talking polymorphic characteristics (in viruses or animals), the phrase you're looking for is Heterozygous Advantage. Yes, I do live with a woman who is going to vet school and who has a degree in animal science.
In computer terms, it's going to be hard for random code variations to produce a useful new code segment on their own, for exactly the reasons you describe - there needs to be "sex", or a merging of two codebases, in order to produce surrogate code.
In terms of animals, however, if I may step on my pro-evolution soapbox... This is what all those people at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis never talk about. The natural tendancy in animals (at least, and probably in other kingdoms) is for the offspring of a non-homogonous pairing to be *better* than either of the parents. No joke, this is the way it works. Not all the time, but more often than not.
For example, my wife is pretty firmly against the homogonization of the beef industry onto black angus for meat and holstein for milk. The reason being, if you breed nothing but black angus to black angus, you're going to get black angus, which is good, but it will never get better than its parents. If you're breeding black angus and charolais, however, the genetic tendancy is that the offspring most of the time will posess the best characteristics of both parents (breeding and birthing ease with black angus, better meat with charolais).
Movie theaters are going to have to come up with some sort of incentive. Like, pay $45, get two tickets, the DVD, a medium popcorn and 2 drinks, or something.
Or lower their ticket prices. They raise the food prices, and then no one buys food, so they raise their ticket prices, so no one goes to see the movie at all. Then they wonder what happened. No one wants to pay $12 for a movie ticket, and $6 for popcorn and $3 for a drink. That's absurd. Especially when you add in the additional ticket for the wife at $12, another $3 for another drink (16 oz), and then $20 for a babysitter. Screw that. That's $56 for a night out to see a movie. That can buy the DVD and a year's supply of microwave popcorn.
See, I'm in the market for a new TV (my wife and I have a 20" weee tv now, so anything is an upgrade). I look at the stores, and everyone says HD is affordable... but then, I see a nice 36" tube TV for $300. I haven't seen an HDTV bigger than 24 or so inches for less than $1000... maybe I haven't looked in a long time, but, the fact is me and a whole bunch of other americans aren't going to shell out $1500 for a TV.
Different architectures. If someone gave you 2 computers to review, and one had a Pentium-M 1.4Ghz and a Cyrix 2.0 Ghz, which one is faster? Or, what about an AMD K6-2 450 vs a Pentium III 450 Mhz? They have the same capabilities, right?
The article spits out megahertzes and whatits, but doesn't mention any benchmarks or anything like that, which are the true measure of the capabilities of the system.
Man, that would be hot. A NWN/Bioware/Baulder's gate inspired MMO, crossed with an ever-evolving world like EVE... Piracy, intrigue, wealth hoarding, alliances, all player controlled, but in a medieval universe.
Let me know when that's done, so i can drop out of life.
But to bring up the same points I posted about previously when Theo was trying to extort money by holding a gun to the head of the cute little OpenSSH puppy... I'm not treating him like an employee.
I don't use OpenBSD. I actually have used it in the past, and to be honest, I find the OS as a whole to be convoluted, illogical, and pretentious (and this from someone who doesn't mind Solaris). So, I don't give a rat's ass about OpenBSD. What I am sick of is people saying "But but but but OpenBSD contributed OpenSSH, which you use", and trying to guilt trip me into giving money based on that. Eat me. Someone would have written an open source SSH server eventually anyway, and OpenSSH is built on code that's older than OpenBSD. I'm greatful for it's existance, but I'm not going to donate money to OpenBSD because they wrote OpenSSH.
It's my money; Theo released the code under the BSD license. I don't expect anything from Theo, I appreciate what he's done, but the guy is a cock. OpenSSH is just a tool to me, it's not a life changing expierence, and if RHEL or whatever shipped with a different SSH server, I wouldn't give a goddamn - I just expect it to work. It's a means to an end, not a religion. And I'm not treating him like an employee. I don't appreciate a guilt trip is all.
If I walked into JC Penny's and went to use the restroom, I wouldn't be very receptive to some manager dude standing right outside the stall, telling me how he PERSONALLY designed and built the restroom, and the store lets me use it for free, and how everyone who takes a shit on his property is a "thankless dog", and how I don't have to donate, but that I should. Fuck him.
I did not decide that OpenSSH should become a critical part of the internet, or that it should become a virtual monopoly. We made it free. Again, the community decided to make it Internet infrastructure.
Now you want to tell us that because the Internet community made decisions like these, that we should be held responsible. That we have to follow YOUR procedures. That we have to answer to YOU.
What if we ignore your procedures? What if we say no? What will you do then? Continue to verbally attack us? To what end? To show that you are thankless dogs?
And they wonder why they don't get any support.
Bravo; you've made the most secure operating system available today. But, then, you have this firmly held belief that the rest of the world owes you something? That you're gracing the rest of the world with your glorious presence and regal software? That attitude is not welcome here.
This issue isn't complicated to solve. When you leave your comments Threaded, slashcode displays some random crap comments for no other reason. Try this: set your comments to "Nested" and "Oldest First", and set your threshold to "+3". It's slashdot nirvana.
For whatever reason, Nested does what you'd think it should do. Top level posts are all the way on the left of the screen; direct replies are underneath. Setting your threshold to +3 has the following benifit: Before the karma counter ran on the Bill and Ted system, it was a simple number between whatever and 50 (I don't remember if it went below zero, but I think it did). If your karma was 25 or more, you got a karma bonus to your posts, i.e. posts you made were at +2 starting, rather than +1. Unfortunately, this is still in effect, and almost everyone has enough karma to post at +2, or at least enough people that there's lots of noise in with the signal. So, by narrowing your comment display to +3, you only see comments that *someone* has modded up.
So, that's "only comments that have been modded up" coupled with "a proper nesting system" and "not random crap". And if you want to see the rest of the comments, just click the "X replies beneath your current threshold" link to display them. Try it; you'll never go back.
Heh, even easier than that. I have most of my media on that machine (since it's the only one in the house that stays on all the time - trying to save electricity). Whenever I need more space, I just add external USB drives (there's currently 2 of them). This whole setup is near my wife's iguana's cage, so there's a little waterfall in it which tends to white-noise out the sound of the hard drives.
So, what does the machine run?
Windows XP.
It's easy, and my wife can use it. Whenever we want to watch something, we navigate to it, double click, and it opens in VLC Media Player. Double click sends it fullscreen.
To listen to music, we use Winamp.
I try to keep it as simple as possible. Adding another MCE or Myth type meta-layer between the user and the data to me seems to complicate things.
I gave up on Windows Media Center because of stability issues, as well as usability (what do you mean, the only way to sort my mp3s is either alphabetically or with ID3 tags!?! Sort them by directory! That's why I put them in genre/artist/album/ directory structure and named them artist-album-##-songtitle!!) It was a neat idea, but just poorly executed. Myth TV does some things better and a lot of things worse.
Then, I got tivo, and I saw the light. No joke; if you don't have tivo, it will change your life. And I'm not affiliated with them in any way other than I own one.
So now I have a simple computer that's quiet and quasi-powerful attached to my receiver. Whenever I want to watch downloaded TV / listen to music, I flip over to "VCR" on my receiver (don't have one of those, tossed it when i got tivo), and then I use a wireless mouse to pick what i want to watch, and double click it. It's not complicated, and a gyroscopic mouse-remote would make it even better.
That computer yes does have to be maintained; but it never contacts the internet aside from AVGFree updates and windows updates; so it never gets infected, and the hardware has proven to be quite reliable.
This is a fallacy, and one that Linus himself debunks in his auto-biography.
A monolithic program may look more complex and harder to maintain and secure (and I'll admit, I hate sendmail), having a HUNDRED binaries as part of this program would add an order of magnitude of complexity that is entirely unnecesary.
Think: While it is true that a singular, small program which does one task is simpler than a monolithic giant, the program (as a whole, encompassing all the small parts) will still need to do all the same stuff a monolithic program has to do, except now it has to deal with message passing between small binary executables, queueing or drop files, and a number of other issues where security is a concern.
It's not as simple as taking parts out of the whole design and implementing them independantly; adding "parts" to the "whole" creates issues which do not exist in the monolithic.
qmail is able to do this fairly well, but it only has about 4 or 5 executables, IIRC, and it is compiled very carefully against bernsteins' special stdio and other library files that he's hardened.
There have been many more acts of violence committed by environmental groups for their cause. Yet noone is charging Greenpeace and PETA with RICO suits. Not to mention unions, who have a history of being linked with violence and ironically the mob.
No thanks, grandparent, we were talking about Whacko religious nuts who picket abortion clinics and call people who visit them "whores" and worse.
Slashdot Mirror
and I believe he said the cost would be under $39 to the consumer
I call shenanigans.
There's no way you could get it for $39 unless it had like a 10GB hard drive. I mean, when you add the cost of the shipping from tiwan to here for something the size of a VCR/Tivo/DVDplayer-type stereo component, and to that add the cost of the circuit board, the dvd drive and laser, and a 40GB hard drive... there's no way it'd be less than $75 AT LEAST. And I only paid $99 for my 40GB Tivo, plus the monthly.
~Will
A-MEN, mr jardinians! I'd kill a man over my Tivo, if it came to it.
~Will
I consider SD to be the heir to Smart Media. I mean, look at 'em:
I know that others have already replied, but my two cents is: for starters, L170 (don't know how to do the pound symbol on my keyboard) is (as of 10AM 4/4/2006) $298.46. And you paid that two years ago - I'm talking in 1998-1999 when I worked in retail audio, a good MD player, especially a portable one, was $299-$349 (USD, in L that's L170 - L200, and in 1999 L's too - it's also 2,674.48 Sweedisk Kronor).
The media has come down in price, but they should have made it cheap to begin with when CD Recorders started to buzz in the computer world, and those first 128MB MP3 players came out. They kept prices high, which drove people to lower cost alternatives.
I thought in 1999, and I still maintain today, that a Minidisc MP3 player released in 2000 would have conquored the portable music world.
~Will
Betacam and Digital Betacam are used professionally... but sony has flopped (off the top of my head) Minidiscs, UMD, memory stick (sort of), and a load of other ideas.
I used to sell both computers and audio equipment, back in the 1998-2000 era, and it's astonishing to see what sony wasted. They of course couldn't jump on the standard flash memory bandwagon (compact flash or smart media, or later SD) - no, they had to invent their own thing, and of course it only worked with sony stuff. Stupid.
Minidiscs were a novelty, and were pretty cool for a while, but then... CD-R's and mp3 platers became cheap. Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25, or you can get something solid state for less than the price of a MD player? Even when a 512MB mp3 player cost $299, it was comparable to the high end MD player, in features and size. They should have LONG AGO made a minidisc MP3 player - the technology existed, and those disks hold about 480megs or so, not to mention $5 / 500MB is still a good price for media. But they didn't. Arrogance.
All the time, I see sony's marketing people put out all this shit which, in a perfect sony universe, would all interpolate, interact, and be amazing. But, in the real world, only a few people are going to buy all sony. They have yet to deal with that reality. People want their flash memory to be usable for their camera, mp3 player, and phone. They want their media to not be format locked.
It's just marketing stupidity and corporate hubris. Plain and simple. Develop good ideas, then drive them into the ground by making them proprietary.
~Will
And make the "origional piece" link go somewhere, rather than just be green text.
~W
~Will
Google Image search for "old fasioned adult porn"...
~W
Evolution happens via small steps. But, then, I don't pretend to understand how it works; she's the biologist in the family, I just pick up on stuff as she talks.
~W
If you're talking polymorphic characteristics (in viruses or animals), the phrase you're looking for is Heterozygous Advantage. Yes, I do live with a woman who is going to vet school and who has a degree in animal science.
In computer terms, it's going to be hard for random code variations to produce a useful new code segment on their own, for exactly the reasons you describe - there needs to be "sex", or a merging of two codebases, in order to produce surrogate code.
In terms of animals, however, if I may step on my pro-evolution soapbox... This is what all those people at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis never talk about. The natural tendancy in animals (at least, and probably in other kingdoms) is for the offspring of a non-homogonous pairing to be *better* than either of the parents. No joke, this is the way it works. Not all the time, but more often than not.
For example, my wife is pretty firmly against the homogonization of the beef industry onto black angus for meat and holstein for milk. The reason being, if you breed nothing but black angus to black angus, you're going to get black angus, which is good, but it will never get better than its parents. If you're breeding black angus and charolais, however, the genetic tendancy is that the offspring most of the time will posess the best characteristics of both parents (breeding and birthing ease with black angus, better meat with charolais).
Anyway, I have to go fix a dead UPS.
~Will
Movie theaters are going to have to come up with some sort of incentive. Like, pay $45, get two tickets, the DVD, a medium popcorn and 2 drinks, or something.
Or lower their ticket prices. They raise the food prices, and then no one buys food, so they raise their ticket prices, so no one goes to see the movie at all. Then they wonder what happened. No one wants to pay $12 for a movie ticket, and $6 for popcorn and $3 for a drink. That's absurd. Especially when you add in the additional ticket for the wife at $12, another $3 for another drink (16 oz), and then $20 for a babysitter. Screw that. That's $56 for a night out to see a movie. That can buy the DVD and a year's supply of microwave popcorn.
~W
~Will
What's the cheapest HDVT?
See, I'm in the market for a new TV (my wife and I have a 20" weee tv now, so anything is an upgrade). I look at the stores, and everyone says HD is affordable... but then, I see a nice 36" tube TV for $300. I haven't seen an HDTV bigger than 24 or so inches for less than $1000... maybe I haven't looked in a long time, but, the fact is me and a whole bunch of other americans aren't going to shell out $1500 for a TV.
~W
Speaking of B'ding B'ding, you have seen this right? http://www.ebaumsworld.com/marioguitar.html
Check out the coin noises.
I mean, why are those numbers complete crap?
All due respect, apples and bowling balls, Tony.
Different architectures. If someone gave you 2 computers to review, and one had a Pentium-M 1.4Ghz and a Cyrix 2.0 Ghz, which one is faster? Or, what about an AMD K6-2 450 vs a Pentium III 450 Mhz? They have the same capabilities, right?
The article spits out megahertzes and whatits, but doesn't mention any benchmarks or anything like that, which are the true measure of the capabilities of the system.
~Will
Man, that would be hot. A NWN/Bioware/Baulder's gate inspired MMO, crossed with an ever-evolving world like EVE... Piracy, intrigue, wealth hoarding, alliances, all player controlled, but in a medieval universe.
Let me know when that's done, so i can drop out of life.
~W
But to bring up the same points I posted about previously when Theo was trying to extort money by holding a gun to the head of the cute little OpenSSH puppy... I'm not treating him like an employee.
I don't use OpenBSD. I actually have used it in the past, and to be honest, I find the OS as a whole to be convoluted, illogical, and pretentious (and this from someone who doesn't mind Solaris). So, I don't give a rat's ass about OpenBSD. What I am sick of is people saying "But but but but OpenBSD contributed OpenSSH, which you use", and trying to guilt trip me into giving money based on that. Eat me. Someone would have written an open source SSH server eventually anyway, and OpenSSH is built on code that's older than OpenBSD. I'm greatful for it's existance, but I'm not going to donate money to OpenBSD because they wrote OpenSSH.
It's my money; Theo released the code under the BSD license. I don't expect anything from Theo, I appreciate what he's done, but the guy is a cock. OpenSSH is just a tool to me, it's not a life changing expierence, and if RHEL or whatever shipped with a different SSH server, I wouldn't give a goddamn - I just expect it to work. It's a means to an end, not a religion. And I'm not treating him like an employee. I don't appreciate a guilt trip is all.
If I walked into JC Penny's and went to use the restroom, I wouldn't be very receptive to some manager dude standing right outside the stall, telling me how he PERSONALLY designed and built the restroom, and the store lets me use it for free, and how everyone who takes a shit on his property is a "thankless dog", and how I don't have to donate, but that I should. Fuck him.
~Will
From the link you provided:
And they wonder why they don't get any support.
Bravo; you've made the most secure operating system available today. But, then, you have this firmly held belief that the rest of the world owes you something? That you're gracing the rest of the world with your glorious presence and regal software? That attitude is not welcome here.
~Will
This issue isn't complicated to solve. When you leave your comments Threaded, slashcode displays some random crap comments for no other reason. Try this: set your comments to "Nested" and "Oldest First", and set your threshold to "+3". It's slashdot nirvana.
For whatever reason, Nested does what you'd think it should do. Top level posts are all the way on the left of the screen; direct replies are underneath. Setting your threshold to +3 has the following benifit: Before the karma counter ran on the Bill and Ted system, it was a simple number between whatever and 50 (I don't remember if it went below zero, but I think it did). If your karma was 25 or more, you got a karma bonus to your posts, i.e. posts you made were at +2 starting, rather than +1. Unfortunately, this is still in effect, and almost everyone has enough karma to post at +2, or at least enough people that there's lots of noise in with the signal. So, by narrowing your comment display to +3, you only see comments that *someone* has modded up.
So, that's "only comments that have been modded up" coupled with "a proper nesting system" and "not random crap". And if you want to see the rest of the comments, just click the "X replies beneath your current threshold" link to display them. Try it; you'll never go back.
~Will
And if you caught that as a futurama reference, you get a cookie. Bender / Flexo / Fry, etc.
Well, not that shocked.
Heh, even easier than that. I have most of my media on that machine (since it's the only one in the house that stays on all the time - trying to save electricity). Whenever I need more space, I just add external USB drives (there's currently 2 of them). This whole setup is near my wife's iguana's cage, so there's a little waterfall in it which tends to white-noise out the sound of the hard drives.
So, what does the machine run?
Windows XP.
It's easy, and my wife can use it. Whenever we want to watch something, we navigate to it, double click, and it opens in VLC Media Player. Double click sends it fullscreen.
To listen to music, we use Winamp.
I try to keep it as simple as possible. Adding another MCE or Myth type meta-layer between the user and the data to me seems to complicate things.
~W
I gave up on Windows Media Center because of stability issues, as well as usability (what do you mean, the only way to sort my mp3s is either alphabetically or with ID3 tags!?! Sort them by directory! That's why I put them in genre/artist/album/ directory structure and named them artist-album-##-songtitle!!) It was a neat idea, but just poorly executed. Myth TV does some things better and a lot of things worse.
Then, I got tivo, and I saw the light. No joke; if you don't have tivo, it will change your life. And I'm not affiliated with them in any way other than I own one.
So now I have a simple computer that's quiet and quasi-powerful attached to my receiver. Whenever I want to watch downloaded TV / listen to music, I flip over to "VCR" on my receiver (don't have one of those, tossed it when i got tivo), and then I use a wireless mouse to pick what i want to watch, and double click it. It's not complicated, and a gyroscopic mouse-remote would make it even better.
That computer yes does have to be maintained; but it never contacts the internet aside from AVGFree updates and windows updates; so it never gets infected, and the hardware has proven to be quite reliable.
~W
This is a fallacy, and one that Linus himself debunks in his auto-biography.
A monolithic program may look more complex and harder to maintain and secure (and I'll admit, I hate sendmail), having a HUNDRED binaries as part of this program would add an order of magnitude of complexity that is entirely unnecesary.
Think: While it is true that a singular, small program which does one task is simpler than a monolithic giant, the program (as a whole, encompassing all the small parts) will still need to do all the same stuff a monolithic program has to do, except now it has to deal with message passing between small binary executables, queueing or drop files, and a number of other issues where security is a concern.
It's not as simple as taking parts out of the whole design and implementing them independantly; adding "parts" to the "whole" creates issues which do not exist in the monolithic.
qmail is able to do this fairly well, but it only has about 4 or 5 executables, IIRC, and it is compiled very carefully against bernsteins' special stdio and other library files that he's hardened.
See also: Linux Kernel vs. Hurd or Minix.
~Will
Godwin explodes. Details at 11.
~W
See also: Red Herring.
There have been many more acts of violence committed by environmental groups for their cause. Yet noone is charging Greenpeace and PETA with RICO suits. Not to mention unions, who have a history of being linked with violence and ironically the mob.
No thanks, grandparent, we were talking about Whacko religious nuts who picket abortion clinics and call people who visit them "whores" and worse.
~W