If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V.
Two mistakes here. First, you said it was a 9V AC adaptor so the DC peak is ~13V. Second, a voltage doubler before the rectifier is entirely possible.
A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms
It's not quite this simple with dynamic components (inductors/capacitors/coils). That's why speakers have 8 ohms impedance, not 8 ohms resistance.
1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak.
There's no need to go to all this effort. You already said the AC adaptor is 300mA at 9V. Sustainable power is therefore approximately 3W. Peak power is an unknown because the internal circuitry could easily store enough energy to give 100s of watts of power, even if only for a short time. Without opening the speaker boxes you can't make any judgement.
Tell us more about the "bleeding edge filesystems" before Unix that did have metadata and resource forks and "whizbang ideas". Can you give us the name of one of those filesystems?
Sure, TOPS-10 had versioning. That's a form of forks (albeit a primitive one).
Metadata can and are sent over the network. It's called HTTP for example. Or RFC 822. You know, "Subject", "Keywords", "References" etc... For HTTP: "Expires", "Content-Language", "Content-MD5" etc...
Sure, now why should this metadata be stored with the file? What does the Via: header have to do with files? What about the Server: header? Or the Date: header? Metadata is something that an application knows about (in this case, Apache) so it's something the application should embed. Most metadata has nothing to do with the file: in HTTP there is metadata for authentication and for caching and for proxying. The Application Knows Best. So why try and take this power away from the application and stick it in the filesystem?
I can't understand why I must wait only one second when doing a search on Google on the whole Internet, and I should wait minutes on my machine. I can't understand.
Because google is 1000s machines with all of the database content in RAM, and you have a pissy little PC scanning over a low-end hard disk?
Unix uses metadata. Last modification time. Owner. It's a poor man's metadata.
It's metadata for *files*. What you seem to want is metadata for applications, but you want to stick the code that manipulates application metadata inside the filesystem driver. Insanity! How is the kernel meant to best judge the needs of an application? No matter what tradeoffs the kernel makes for metadata - size, speed, number, whatever - it's going to be OK for some applications but downright useless for others.
If the metadata schema is fixed then it will never evolve to meet future applications. If the metadata schema can be user-defined then the filesystem becomes bloated and complex. If the metadata is limited to "extended attributes" (ala HPFS) then it's useless for storing large amounts of metadata. If the filesystem allows for "multiple streams" (ala HFS) then it needlessly complicates the processes of backing up or transmitting over the network: all Macintosh networking software needs builtin support for HQX to preserve forks. What a waste of effort!
Metadata really falls flat when you have many users on a system. Imagine when one user wants to assign the tag "red" to the attribute "iconcolor" and another user wants to use "blue". Great. Now we need 1 instance of metadata per file per user on the system. Look at the filesystem bloat grow!
Eventually all files are dumped to tape, or sent over the network, or pushed through a filter (I call it a "pipe"). Before this can happen they become streams of bytes. I call this a "bag of bytes". In Java it's called a "Serializable Object". The concept is the same. The most useful storage format for data is a continuous array of bytes. That's why UNIX files are "bags of bytes".
If the application needs metadata then the application can encode the metadata inside the file: the application knows best what is needed.
Let's choose power, as Unix did a long time ago.
UNIX threw away the complexities of Multics - the things that made Multics a hideous unworkable beast - and aimed for simplicity instead. 90% functionality for 10% of the work. Now you want to throw all that bloat back in there. Learn Your History.
Everthing is a file, says Unix.
But that was 30 years ago. Perhaps its time to extend the unix-doctrin: Everthing is a file and a directory.
And 30 years ago the bleeding-edge filesystems (non-UNIX) did have metadata and resource forks and other whizbang ideas. Guess what? They sucked. You can't pipe a multistream file. You can't send it over the network. You can't dump it to tape. First you have to convert your whiz-bang metadata enabled file into a "bag of bytes" file. This means you need to manually add an additional "convert to bag of bytes" step before you do anything unusual with a file.
UNIX removes the complexity by forcing the applications to save into the "bag of bytes" file format from the start. The metadata is still within the file, but the application put it there, and the application knows how to get it out.
The UNIX people chose simplicity over complexity. History has shown that if people want metadata then they can implement it inside their applications (ID3 tags, TAR, GZIP headers). This is one of the many reasons why UNIX still survives: it dictates the means to store data, without enforcing a policy about what data is stored. Applications can then grow and evolve to include new-and-unthought-of metadata. This would not be possible if the UNIX filesystem had forced a restricted set of metadata onto everybody from the start.
People who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.
In the following process, where do I distribute a copy of the work?
I buy Celine's new CD (yeah right)
I make a backup copy to use in my car (personal use of a copy, perfectly legal)
I lend my CD to a friend (no copying occured, I distributed the original)
My friend makes a copy for his personal use (he didn't copy a copy, he copied the original. hence "for the private use of the person who makes the copy")
I get my original CD back.
At steps 3 and 5. At step 3 you gave the original to a friend. You no longer have the original so you have no rights to a copy. You have infringed by giving a copy to yourself. At step 5 your friend did the same mistake: he no longer has the rights to his copy once he gives you back the original.
You must possess the original if you intend to possess personal copies. If you don't possess the original then you can't possess any copies. You can distribute the original if and only if you destroy all copies first. You can't distribute copies at all: not even if you sell the copies plus originals in the same bundle.
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Internet's greatest impact has been on the the voice it gives the public. Business is just using it as a tool, people use it to invoke change in the systems that regulate their lives.
That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change?
And why isn't faster communications a clear social change? Would you have cried out "name one major social change as a result of telephones!" if you were around in the early 1900s?
Government services are increasingly online. The government is nothing more than the organised administrators of society. If the Internet is helping the government then it is directly helping society as well.
Linux is built by online communities that wouldn't exist without the Internet, and Linux is definitely helping poorer countries that wouldn't have had any options without free software. This is leading to real social changes by giving poor schools access to "expensive" software.
The physically disabled can work from home. Poorer countries with intelligent citizens can now compete directly with foreign superpowers.
The Internet is to the 21st century what the phone was to the 20th century. Initially only in the hands of the rich, then in the hands of the middle class, then in the hands of everybody and taken for granted. Sure, most of the improvements are evolutionary instead of revolutionary. The Internet has improved existing practises: there are Internet equivalents for postal mail, telephones, television, radio, and community halls. But isn't this enough? Isn't a gradual improvement enough to be called a "clear social change"? I say it is.
Apache+mod_proxy+mod_cache can also be an httpd
accelerator (aka reverse proxy) and I've had great
success with it. My original configuration used
Squid but several limitations with Squid forced me
to investigate the alternatives. I finally settled
on Apache and I've been very happy with it. Apache
also has better support for 301/302 rewriting (the
PassProxyReverse directive) than Squid, and this
was a deciding factor for me in dumping Squid and
going with Apache.
Re:wow... that popup question was worth the hype.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 2
3) why would i pay to view the content i provide??
You may provide the content, but you don't provide the servers or pay for the bandwidth.
Good for you... now please explain to my mom how to find all this software... ok, she read your post, now explain how to install all that software... tired yet? Do that for EVERY little piece of crap that MS bundles with their OS and people want, don't forget to teach your kids your trade because you aren't going to be done in this life time, there are a lot of people out there that don't want to understand how these magic boxes work.
You wouldn't have to. The vendor who sold you the PC could have done that for you.
For example, when you buy an IBM PC you get a whole bunch of third party software. My last IBM was bundled with fax software, virus scanners, Lotus Smartsuite, etc. Dell and Compaq do the same thing but they ship different fax software products and different virus scanners.
So when Netscape was still a viable option some of the vendors wanted to ship Netscape on their PCs. Microsoft bundled their browser - which at the time was worse than Netscape - and then Microsoft threatened the vendors that were still considering Netscape instead of IE.
Bundling a browser isn't the issue here - it may or may not be "innovative", and other desktops may or may not do the same - but bundling your browser and then threatening the vendors so that your competitor's product never has the chance to compete is ILLEGAL.
It's all fun and giggles to pretend that the judges are stupid, but the findings of the court were valid and intelligent.
Two CD standards became aa hugely popular format, Red Book and ISO-9660. Everything else ended in the dumpster.
Perhaps, but that doesn't invalidate my point. Almost certainly most of the DVD formats will become casualties. We're already seeing the possible death of DVD-A (SACD has had better marketting and now carries more titles). The 3 recordable DVD formats look like they're about to be replaced with a 4th. Only 2 DVD formats seem to be surviving at all: DVD-UDF seems to be doing OK and DVD-V is hugely successful.
And just a minor correction. Playstation popularised the CD-XA format. With over 100 million Playstations I'm willing to bet there's more than 100 million CD-XA discs out there. PhotoCD is still hugely popular in the graphics industry. VideoCD is popular enough considering the niche market it aims at (I can buy VideoCD silvers at my local Target, for example). CD-DA (RedBook) and CD-Data (YellowBook) certainly dominate the CD formats, but they're not the only 2 that made any numbers.
Does the recent el-cheapo DVD player I bought play 2-layer disks?
ALL DVD-V (DVD Video) players must support RSDL discs. It's been part of the specification for a very long time.
Whether the general public understands the details is almost irrelevant. They almost certainly didn't understand the details behind the various CD formats - CD-DA, CD-i, CD-MO, CD-RW, CD Extra, VCD, CD Plus, CD-XA (1 and 2), CD-RFS, CD-UDF - but this didn't stop CD from becoming a hugely popular format. You probably don't know (or care) that your Playstation uses CD-XA while your discman uses CD-DA. You simply buy a Playstation CD for a Playstation and an Audio CD for your discman.
The public knows that "DVD players" will play their "DVDs" from BlockBuster. They don't know or care that it's DVD-V. They just know that "DVDs have movies on them". People interested in the more exotic formats (DVD-A, DVD-RAM) will learn what they need to know. The system will look like chaos to people who know the details, but the general public won't give a flying crap.
If Morpheus is ever shut down because of copyright violations, then maybe people will associate GPL and free software with distributing warez, mp3s, videos, etc... all these illegal things that Morpheus (and gnutella) let you do.
If Napster is ever shut down because of copyright violations, then maybe people will associate Windows and Microsoft with distributing wares, mp3s, videos, etc... all these illegal things that Napster (and Hotmail) let you do.
I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.
I'm getting fricking sick of this. It seems the only time I ever see "I'm gonna get modded down" or "I don't care what the moderators do to me, this needs to be said" taglines they are attached to a +4 or +5 posts. Why bother putting the damn tagline at the end at all? If you don't care about the karma, then don't make mention of the possibility of losing it. That the post gets moderated up proves that the tagline is false anyway.
Slashdot is being overrun by people who think "slashdot sucks" yet post daily, people who "don't care about karma" and whore it at every opportunity, and (my favourite) the people who proclaim that "slashdot is full of microsoft-bashers" and then proceed to use slashdot as a forum to tell everybody how great microsoft is.
If you have something to say then say it. Don't add meaningless jabs at "Slashdot mindthink" (a mythical nonsense) to otherwise meaningful posts.
Marxist? Religion? Limited? Extravagent? And what's with quotes like these...
... unlike you, I know that's *MY* perception
Attacking me won't make you look intelligent. It makes you look foolish.
Once again you've skirted around the argument instead of answering it. The argument has always been that giving up freedom will cost you a bundle in the long-term which will negate the short-term gains. You seem to feign surprise that this is the argument. You even dare to suggest that this is a new argument that was never mentioned before. You say:
Now you seem to be saying the price I'm paying is too high.
Read what I write, not what you imagine that I'm saying. You characterise me as a Marxist fool who never buys software. You suggest that I'd sellout king and country for "extravagences" like freedom. Whether you're lying or simply ignorant, I cannot tell. I wrote earlier:
I do buy some software. When there is a decision to be made then sometimes the proprietary software wins out.
... and...
Cost, quality, reliability and fitness for task are all important decisions when purchasing hardware and/or software.
... and...
On the list of "features to compare" the feature of freedom should be given a high weighting value. In the long-term the cost of freedom is greater than any minor increase in speed.
This was always the argument. It has always been there. You can feign surprise if you like, but the record is clear.
Now you can choose to ignore the argument. You can scoff that I'm just a nutter that never pays for software. You can call me "Marxist" and "Religious" if that makes you feel better. I pointed out that there is a very real cost - sometimes even a monetary cost - in giving up long-term freedom for short-term gain. You choose to wallow in your own self-gratification and pretend that this is nonsense and attack me for going down an uncomfortable (for you) line of thought. Fine. Your loss. Enjoy your shiny toys.
Direct3D and OpenGL have nothing to do with 48 hour rendering times for a single still frame.
Interactive subjective performance of a single Windows application has nothing to do with the relative merits of OpenGL vs Direct3D.
In fact, you should have easily spotted that Microsoft's destruction of your freedom for 3D APIs has directly led to OpenGL no longer being a viable option. You should be hopping mad. Instead you've fooled yourself into thinking you have freedom of choice.
Freedom is not about being able to choose how you waste time. Freedom is about being able to do what you want without being controlled by somebody else. Choosing Direct3D might be more convenient but it does not increase your freedom.
My argument was that giving up freedom will cost you more in the long-term. You haven't argued against this. Instead you've rambled off into a discussion of how your way of wasting time is different to my way of wasting time. You don't know what freedom is and you haven't understood my argument.
Minor short-term gain, huge long-term loss. This is the argument. Please argue against it, not around it.
In this case, instead of paying with your pocket book, you pay with your pocket watch.
This is the same false thinking that leads people to buy faster computers because "3x faster means 3x as productive!". It's a lie. People are slow. Computers are fast. Software needs to be fast enough, and no faster. This applies to desktop applications just as much as server applications.
For all the increases in computing power and speed, is the NT fileserver with 1Gbps fibre any more productive than the Netware server with 10Mbps ethernet? It should be clear that the increases in speed have not led to productivity increases nor cost reductions. The real cost reductions would have been achieved if the Novell server had been replaced with Linux + Samba in the first place. That would have broken the hapless administrator out of the proprietary lock-in that both Novell and Microsoft are trying to achieve. The minor decrease in functionality/quality at the time would have been long-term offset by the huge increase in freedom. That's a freedom that the administrator would have forever.
The same argument applies here for Direct3D vs OpenGL. The short-term benefit of increased speed with Direct3D in low-importance applications(ie, games only) is long-term offset by the huge increase in freedom for developers and users with OpenGL. On the list of "features to compare" the feature of freedom should be given a high weighting value. In the long-term the cost of freedom is greater than any minor increase in speed.
While your "freedom" might be the only quality you care for
It isn't. Cost, quality, reliability and fitness for task are all important decisions when purchasing hardware and/or software. The cost of freedom is not equal to the cost of money.
as you don't buy all the software.
I'm sure you don't either, but I do buy some software. When there is a decision to be made then sometimes the proprietary software wins out. In the case of Direct3D vs OpenGL the cost of freedom greatly outweighs the minor advantages of 5% greater speed for a video game (the only 3D field where Direct3D has any true relevance).
OpenGL on Windows does not support multiple monitors (or, I should say multiple video cards). Some drivers do relatively well here, but the WGL layer binding OpenGL to windows is severly crippled, and some dual monitor machines will blue screen just by trying to initialize OpenGL on a single monitor. D3D (since version 5) has no problems with multiple monitors.
You probably understand this point, but your post might confuse others. OpenGL itself doesn't care about the windowing environment. It doesn't know about monitors or windows. The deficiency with multiple monitors is with WGL, not with OpenGL. Other environments won't have any trouble with OpenGL on multiple monitors (eg, X11 + GLX).
D3D requires more code: Possibly true, but not for window initialization,
Once again, OpenGL doesn't do any window initialisation at all.
As far as I'm concerned the arguments about speed and features are irrelevant. The only argument that matters is "Direct3D is a proprietary Windows API and OpenGL is not". I use GCC despite it being a slower compiler. I use XFree86 despite it being a slower windowing system. I use Mozilla despite it being a slower browser. Freedom is more important than speed.
But since my moderation and meta moderation privs were removed since i moderated a post I found intresting.. to be intresting. (The great slashdot troll investigation). About 500 people lost their moderation ability at that time. What a nice brave new world.
Boo fucking hoo.
The advance is. I can now say what I truely feel and not care about karma.. because this place is a joke.:)
This is crazy. It's like asking coca cola to realease their recipe.
Why does this old wives tale keep getting repeated? How can people possibly think that the Coca-Cola recipe is a secret?
There must be 100s of producers for the raw ingredients. It wouldn't take a genius to stand outside the syrup mixing plant and count the number of trucks entering the building. Then you have 100s of workers doing the actual mixing: none of them are going to be paid enough to keep their mouths shut. Then you have the Health Authority who will demand copies of the recipe to ensure there is no danger to the public.
Do people think that the owners of Coca-Cola nip into the local corner shop, buy a magic ingredient that they hide in a brown paper bag, then under cover of darkness they slip into the mixing plant and add it to the BILLIONS of litres of syrup produced each year? Don't be foolish. There is no secret. Coca-Cola is dominant because they use patents and trademarks and brand loyalty and strong distribution channels.
My strong belief is that the best "predictions"
occur when you find something in use today - only
too expensive for the home user - and "predict" it
will be ubiquitous within a few years. So here are
my completely predictable predictions.
Stereo equipment will start to offer Ethernet
ports and "integration with your home computer".
Initially this will be limited to song selections
via Windows-only software.
Affordable SANs will become popular. Initially
this will occur within school/university labs but
the gear will spread into "tech homes" as well.
The word processor will become "that thing you
get for free with your computer" thanks to efforts
from Sun and OpenOffice, similar to what currently
occurs with web browsers and media players.
People will get sick of managing hundreds of
incompatible devices; stereo, computer, MP3 player,
discman, mobile phone, PDA, etc. Vendors will form
large alliances to offer an
integrated system.
Notice how all of my predictions sort-of exist
already. This is what makes predictions so easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Two mistakes here. First, you said it was a 9V AC adaptor so the DC peak is ~13V. Second, a voltage doubler before the rectifier is entirely possible.
It's not quite this simple with dynamic components (inductors/capacitors/coils). That's why speakers have 8 ohms impedance, not 8 ohms resistance.
There's no need to go to all this effort. You already said the AC adaptor is 300mA at 9V. Sustainable power is therefore approximately 3W. Peak power is an unknown because the internal circuitry could easily store enough energy to give 100s of watts of power, even if only for a short time. Without opening the speaker boxes you can't make any judgement.
I think "many environmentalists" are not nearly as stupid as you seem to think they are.
Sure, TOPS-10 had versioning. That's a form of forks (albeit a primitive one).
Sure, now why should this metadata be stored with the file? What does the Via: header have to do with files? What about the Server: header? Or the Date: header? Metadata is something that an application knows about (in this case, Apache) so it's something the application should embed. Most metadata has nothing to do with the file: in HTTP there is metadata for authentication and for caching and for proxying. The Application Knows Best. So why try and take this power away from the application and stick it in the filesystem?
Because google is 1000s machines with all of the database content in RAM, and you have a pissy little PC scanning over a low-end hard disk?
It's metadata for *files*. What you seem to want is metadata for applications, but you want to stick the code that manipulates application metadata inside the filesystem driver. Insanity! How is the kernel meant to best judge the needs of an application? No matter what tradeoffs the kernel makes for metadata - size, speed, number, whatever - it's going to be OK for some applications but downright useless for others.
If the metadata schema is fixed then it will never evolve to meet future applications. If the metadata schema can be user-defined then the filesystem becomes bloated and complex. If the metadata is limited to "extended attributes" (ala HPFS) then it's useless for storing large amounts of metadata. If the filesystem allows for "multiple streams" (ala HFS) then it needlessly complicates the processes of backing up or transmitting over the network: all Macintosh networking software needs builtin support for HQX to preserve forks. What a waste of effort!
Metadata really falls flat when you have many users on a system. Imagine when one user wants to assign the tag "red" to the attribute "iconcolor" and another user wants to use "blue". Great. Now we need 1 instance of metadata per file per user on the system. Look at the filesystem bloat grow!
Eventually all files are dumped to tape, or sent over the network, or pushed through a filter (I call it a "pipe"). Before this can happen they become streams of bytes. I call this a "bag of bytes". In Java it's called a "Serializable Object". The concept is the same. The most useful storage format for data is a continuous array of bytes. That's why UNIX files are "bags of bytes".
If the application needs metadata then the application can encode the metadata inside the file: the application knows best what is needed.
UNIX threw away the complexities of Multics - the things that made Multics a hideous unworkable beast - and aimed for simplicity instead. 90% functionality for 10% of the work. Now you want to throw all that bloat back in there. Learn Your History.
Sure it will: man xauth.
And 30 years ago the bleeding-edge filesystems (non-UNIX) did have metadata and resource forks and other whizbang ideas. Guess what? They sucked. You can't pipe a multistream file. You can't send it over the network. You can't dump it to tape. First you have to convert your whiz-bang metadata enabled file into a "bag of bytes" file. This means you need to manually add an additional "convert to bag of bytes" step before you do anything unusual with a file. UNIX removes the complexity by forcing the applications to save into the "bag of bytes" file format from the start. The metadata is still within the file, but the application put it there, and the application knows how to get it out.
The UNIX people chose simplicity over complexity. History has shown that if people want metadata then they can implement it inside their applications (ID3 tags, TAR, GZIP headers). This is one of the many reasons why UNIX still survives: it dictates the means to store data, without enforcing a policy about what data is stored. Applications can then grow and evolve to include new-and-unthought-of metadata. This would not be possible if the UNIX filesystem had forced a restricted set of metadata onto everybody from the start.
People who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.
At steps 3 and 5. At step 3 you gave the original to a friend. You no longer have the original so you have no rights to a copy. You have infringed by giving a copy to yourself. At step 5 your friend did the same mistake: he no longer has the rights to his copy once he gives you back the original.
You must possess the original if you intend to possess personal copies. If you don't possess the original then you can't possess any copies. You can distribute the original if and only if you destroy all copies first. You can't distribute copies at all: not even if you sell the copies plus originals in the same bundle.
And why isn't faster communications a clear social change? Would you have cried out "name one major social change as a result of telephones!" if you were around in the early 1900s?
These days I can bank online, buy food online, pay rent online, communicate in almost-real-time with overseas relatives, find communities in my local area with similar hobbies/interests, or buy and sell things with people I've never met. How is this anything other than a social change?
Government services are increasingly online. The government is nothing more than the organised administrators of society. If the Internet is helping the government then it is directly helping society as well.
Linux is built by online communities that wouldn't exist without the Internet, and Linux is definitely helping poorer countries that wouldn't have had any options without free software. This is leading to real social changes by giving poor schools access to "expensive" software.
The physically disabled can work from home. Poorer countries with intelligent citizens can now compete directly with foreign superpowers.
The Internet is to the 21st century what the phone was to the 20th century. Initially only in the hands of the rich, then in the hands of the middle class, then in the hands of everybody and taken for granted. Sure, most of the improvements are evolutionary instead of revolutionary. The Internet has improved existing practises: there are Internet equivalents for postal mail, telephones, television, radio, and community halls. But isn't this enough? Isn't a gradual improvement enough to be called a "clear social change"? I say it is.
Apache+mod_proxy+mod_cache can also be an httpd accelerator (aka reverse proxy) and I've had great success with it. My original configuration used Squid but several limitations with Squid forced me to investigate the alternatives. I finally settled on Apache and I've been very happy with it. Apache also has better support for 301/302 rewriting (the PassProxyReverse directive) than Squid, and this was a deciding factor for me in dumping Squid and going with Apache.
You may provide the content, but you don't provide the servers or pay for the bandwidth.
You wouldn't have to. The vendor who sold you the PC could have done that for you.
For example, when you buy an IBM PC you get a whole bunch of third party software. My last IBM was bundled with fax software, virus scanners, Lotus Smartsuite, etc. Dell and Compaq do the same thing but they ship different fax software products and different virus scanners.
So when Netscape was still a viable option some of the vendors wanted to ship Netscape on their PCs. Microsoft bundled their browser - which at the time was worse than Netscape - and then Microsoft threatened the vendors that were still considering Netscape instead of IE.
Bundling a browser isn't the issue here - it may or may not be "innovative", and other desktops may or may not do the same - but bundling your browser and then threatening the vendors so that your competitor's product never has the chance to compete is ILLEGAL.
It's all fun and giggles to pretend that the judges are stupid, but the findings of the court were valid and intelligent.
Perhaps, but that doesn't invalidate my point. Almost certainly most of the DVD formats will become casualties. We're already seeing the possible death of DVD-A (SACD has had better marketting and now carries more titles). The 3 recordable DVD formats look like they're about to be replaced with a 4th. Only 2 DVD formats seem to be surviving at all: DVD-UDF seems to be doing OK and DVD-V is hugely successful.
And just a minor correction. Playstation popularised the CD-XA format. With over 100 million Playstations I'm willing to bet there's more than 100 million CD-XA discs out there. PhotoCD is still hugely popular in the graphics industry. VideoCD is popular enough considering the niche market it aims at (I can buy VideoCD silvers at my local Target, for example). CD-DA (RedBook) and CD-Data (YellowBook) certainly dominate the CD formats, but they're not the only 2 that made any numbers.
Yes, they do.
Your lack of understanding explains why the judge did not seek out your counsel.
ALL DVD-V (DVD Video) players must support RSDL discs. It's been part of the specification for a very long time.
Whether the general public understands the details is almost irrelevant. They almost certainly didn't understand the details behind the various CD formats - CD-DA, CD-i, CD-MO, CD-RW, CD Extra, VCD, CD Plus, CD-XA (1 and 2), CD-RFS, CD-UDF - but this didn't stop CD from becoming a hugely popular format. You probably don't know (or care) that your Playstation uses CD-XA while your discman uses CD-DA. You simply buy a Playstation CD for a Playstation and an Audio CD for your discman.
The public knows that "DVD players" will play their "DVDs" from BlockBuster. They don't know or care that it's DVD-V. They just know that "DVDs have movies on them". People interested in the more exotic formats (DVD-A, DVD-RAM) will learn what they need to know. The system will look like chaos to people who know the details, but the general public won't give a flying crap.
If Napster is ever shut down because of copyright violations, then maybe people will associate Windows and Microsoft with distributing wares, mp3s, videos, etc... all these illegal things that Napster (and Hotmail) let you do.
In what way?
I'm getting fricking sick of this. It seems the only time I ever see "I'm gonna get modded down" or "I don't care what the moderators do to me, this needs to be said" taglines they are attached to a +4 or +5 posts. Why bother putting the damn tagline at the end at all? If you don't care about the karma, then don't make mention of the possibility of losing it. That the post gets moderated up proves that the tagline is false anyway.
Slashdot is being overrun by people who think "slashdot sucks" yet post daily, people who "don't care about karma" and whore it at every opportunity, and (my favourite) the people who proclaim that "slashdot is full of microsoft-bashers" and then proceed to use slashdot as a forum to tell everybody how great microsoft is.
If you have something to say then say it. Don't add meaningless jabs at "Slashdot mindthink" (a mythical nonsense) to otherwise meaningful posts.
Marxist? Religion? Limited? Extravagent? And what's with quotes like these...
Attacking me won't make you look intelligent. It makes you look foolish.
Once again you've skirted around the argument instead of answering it. The argument has always been that giving up freedom will cost you a bundle in the long-term which will negate the short-term gains. You seem to feign surprise that this is the argument. You even dare to suggest that this is a new argument that was never mentioned before. You say:
Read what I write, not what you imagine that I'm saying. You characterise me as a Marxist fool who never buys software. You suggest that I'd sellout king and country for "extravagences" like freedom. Whether you're lying or simply ignorant, I cannot tell. I wrote earlier:
... and...
... and...
This was always the argument. It has always been there. You can feign surprise if you like, but the record is clear.
Now you can choose to ignore the argument. You can scoff that I'm just a nutter that never pays for software. You can call me "Marxist" and "Religious" if that makes you feel better. I pointed out that there is a very real cost - sometimes even a monetary cost - in giving up long-term freedom for short-term gain. You choose to wallow in your own self-gratification and pretend that this is nonsense and attack me for going down an uncomfortable (for you) line of thought. Fine. Your loss. Enjoy your shiny toys.
Direct3D and OpenGL have nothing to do with 48 hour rendering times for a single still frame.
Interactive subjective performance of a single Windows application has nothing to do with the relative merits of OpenGL vs Direct3D.
In fact, you should have easily spotted that Microsoft's destruction of your freedom for 3D APIs has directly led to OpenGL no longer being a viable option. You should be hopping mad. Instead you've fooled yourself into thinking you have freedom of choice.
Freedom is not about being able to choose how you waste time. Freedom is about being able to do what you want without being controlled by somebody else. Choosing Direct3D might be more convenient but it does not increase your freedom.
My argument was that giving up freedom will cost you more in the long-term. You haven't argued against this. Instead you've rambled off into a discussion of how your way of wasting time is different to my way of wasting time. You don't know what freedom is and you haven't understood my argument.
Minor short-term gain, huge long-term loss. This is the argument. Please argue against it, not around it.
This is the same false thinking that leads people to buy faster computers because "3x faster means 3x as productive!". It's a lie. People are slow. Computers are fast. Software needs to be fast enough, and no faster. This applies to desktop applications just as much as server applications.
For all the increases in computing power and speed, is the NT fileserver with 1Gbps fibre any more productive than the Netware server with 10Mbps ethernet? It should be clear that the increases in speed have not led to productivity increases nor cost reductions. The real cost reductions would have been achieved if the Novell server had been replaced with Linux + Samba in the first place. That would have broken the hapless administrator out of the proprietary lock-in that both Novell and Microsoft are trying to achieve. The minor decrease in functionality/quality at the time would have been long-term offset by the huge increase in freedom. That's a freedom that the administrator would have forever.
The same argument applies here for Direct3D vs OpenGL. The short-term benefit of increased speed with Direct3D in low-importance applications(ie, games only) is long-term offset by the huge increase in freedom for developers and users with OpenGL. On the list of "features to compare" the feature of freedom should be given a high weighting value. In the long-term the cost of freedom is greater than any minor increase in speed.
It isn't. Cost, quality, reliability and fitness for task are all important decisions when purchasing hardware and/or software. The cost of freedom is not equal to the cost of money.
I'm sure you don't either, but I do buy some software. When there is a decision to be made then sometimes the proprietary software wins out. In the case of Direct3D vs OpenGL the cost of freedom greatly outweighs the minor advantages of 5% greater speed for a video game (the only 3D field where Direct3D has any true relevance).
You probably understand this point, but your post might confuse others. OpenGL itself doesn't care about the windowing environment. It doesn't know about monitors or windows. The deficiency with multiple monitors is with WGL, not with OpenGL. Other environments won't have any trouble with OpenGL on multiple monitors (eg, X11 + GLX).
Once again, OpenGL doesn't do any window initialisation at all.
As far as I'm concerned the arguments about speed and features are irrelevant. The only argument that matters is "Direct3D is a proprietary Windows API and OpenGL is not". I use GCC despite it being a slower compiler. I use XFree86 despite it being a slower windowing system. I use Mozilla despite it being a slower browser. Freedom is more important than speed.
Boo fucking hoo.
You care enough to whinge about it.
Why does this old wives tale keep getting repeated? How can people possibly think that the Coca-Cola recipe is a secret?
There must be 100s of producers for the raw ingredients. It wouldn't take a genius to stand outside the syrup mixing plant and count the number of trucks entering the building. Then you have 100s of workers doing the actual mixing: none of them are going to be paid enough to keep their mouths shut. Then you have the Health Authority who will demand copies of the recipe to ensure there is no danger to the public.
Do people think that the owners of Coca-Cola nip into the local corner shop, buy a magic ingredient that they hide in a brown paper bag, then under cover of darkness they slip into the mixing plant and add it to the BILLIONS of litres of syrup produced each year? Don't be foolish. There is no secret. Coca-Cola is dominant because they use patents and trademarks and brand loyalty and strong distribution channels.
I would wash my hands.
English? Hatred for whining?!?
The Australian slang for Englishman is "whinging Pom". There's more whine in England than in all the cellars of France.
My strong belief is that the best "predictions" occur when you find something in use today - only too expensive for the home user - and "predict" it will be ubiquitous within a few years. So here are my completely predictable predictions.
Notice how all of my predictions sort-of exist already. This is what makes predictions so easy.