The real reason behind these new passports is probably to get people through immigration controls as rapidly as possible. Even a savings of a few seconds, will make the lines move more rapidly.
Brilliant! It's a huge step towards a totalitarian police state, but we can save a few seconds per person in the passport line! I suppose hiring more people is out of the question.
Yeah, it's not like anybody has ever tried to blow up people in France, Spain, Nigeria, Iraq, blah blah blah. All they ever target are Americans, how foolish of me to forget.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is this just a wild-ass guess? As a Mac developer, I'd love to have something resembling real statistics on relative piracy rates.
Never is a long time. Saying, "until they have some new lower-power and cooler G5 chip" is kind of pointless, as they'll have that by Christmas. Improvements are always being made. Once enough are made, we'll have a PowerBook G5. The question is not if, it's when.
Here we have an incredibly insecure electronics device. It listens on a common EM frequency band and willingly turns itself off whenever a sequence of simple codes is received. When someone finally exploits this gaping security hole, aren't we supposed to blame the people who made the security hole? After all, problems in Windows are Microsoft's fault. Why is this the fault of the device's creator, and not the fault of the TV manufacturers?
I don't need an econ lesson from you. I took econ from this guy and I think he taught me pretty well. And yes, I know the definition of profit.
If you took economics from a Presidential advisor, why are you making statements like, "Your reasoning about 'tens of thousands of dollars' looks pretty silly when you consider that they have $4 billion in the bank. They spend a lot of money on design and adding another pointing device would be a drop in the bucket."?
Regarding the usability of trackpoints, I don't personally know anyone who likes them. I'm far from a laptop hardware expert, but when I look at them in stores, the trackpoints seem to be relegated to the craptastic bottom-of-the-barrel models. A trackpoint is basically a really tiny joystick; moving a cursor around the screen with a joystick went out of style in the 80s.
Again, pleasing everyone is irrelevant when you can please "everyone - 3" and save a dollar per machine in the process.
That's a bad policy when BT is still niche and you're trying to make a living from it. If you're involved in making money from your work, it's best to just plunk down the cash for a host that can handle the bandwidth. You have to spend money to make money.
That is ridiculous reasoning. Assume some feature costs X dollars, and will earn the company Y dollars in extra profits. If X is greater than Y, the feature will not be implemented. It doesn't matter how insignificant X is compared to the company's total profits, revenue, or available cash.
Most people absolutely hate trackpoints. There appear to be a couple of slashdot readers who prefer them, but I would be shocked if the cost of adding them to the iBook would be made up by the number of people who would switch because of it.
Offering both is not a solution. For one, it would raise the price of the product. While it may only be a few dollars, take a few dollars, multiply by hundreds of thousands of units shipped per quarter, and you need to have a very nice justification for that move. For another, it would annoy a lot of people, probably more people than it would attract; that little nub won't just go away if you ignore it. Lastly, it would play havoc with the laptop's design; there's already basically zero space between the keys and the screen. Having a trackpoint nub sticking up above the keys is only going to make things worse in the thickness department.
Ironically, gross margins on Apple products are so low for resellers that there's virtually no room to squeeze prices anyways on most of them.
It's actually not that ironic. As I understand it, Apple has this policy as a way to protect their independent dealers. When margins are already so thin, the independents would be quickly driven out of business by larger resellers, as the resellers would be able to cut their margins closer to the bone. Since the margins are so thin to begin with, the smaller dealers wouldn't survive.
There is no reason for Apple to spend the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to engineer an optional trackpoint into the iBook just so they could offer it as a $20 option to the three people on the planet who actually prefer them to trackpads.
The hilarious thing is that Apple absolutely forbids its resellers from selling below the price they set. That's why you never see any resellers with big sales. They all have prices that are at most $3 or $4 less than Apple's official prices, because that's as low as Apple will allow them to go. So this "price matching" thing is just a feel-good thing that won't actually be used for anything.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Here's what I understand so far:
There were only two types of video cards in existence. In order to use two monitors, you had to buy one of each type. You couldn't buy two of one, or two of the other.
When you got this set up, then you could only use both monitors simultaneously with programs that understood multimonitor setups.
Is that accurate? You haven't contradicted what I said. The situation I describe is much less convenient than a modern Windows setup (to say nothing of a modern Mac setup).
Having to buy the right kind of video cards, and then only being able to use your setup with certain programs, is not done "just as easily as the current Windows version", where you basically plug and go, and it works with any windowed app.
You are, like most people, and nearly everybody in Congress, confusing the idea of secrecy with the idea of security. A properly secure system is one with the absolute minimum of secrets needed to secure it. Secrets are too fragile; once you lose one, you can never get it back. Modern cryptosystems are a perfect example of good security. Almost everything is open; the algorithm is open, the implementation is open, the protocol is open, the key generation method is open. The only thing that's secret is the actual key itself, which is only a few hundred or thousand bits of information.
Making every government operation secret will not make us safer. A terrorist organization will be able to find out as much as it wants about our power, water, and transportation infrastructure, whether we let them have it or not.
Our government is trying to keep everything from the public view, despite the fact that it's ineffective. This might be because they're stupid, which is highly plausible. It might be because they're trying to give the appearance of helping, which is also highly plausible. Lastly, it might be because they've seized on this golden opportunity to expand government power and secrecy with the support of the public. This one is sure to be popular among the tin-foil-hat crowd.
You aren't accounting for spikes in the normal load, though. Given that they release one episode per week at the exact same time every week, during the season, I'd be really shocked if those hits were anywhere close to being evenly spread out. Also, I would be shocked if more than maybe 10% of those slashdot hits went as far as downloading the movie itself.
The server was still pumping out 30k/sec to me by the time my download finished, so I think they did ok.
It seems to be a strange but common slashdot fallacy to assume that slashdot has more traffic than almost anybody else. The RvB FAQ claims half a million downloads a week during the active season. IIRC a typical slashdotting sends a few tens of thousands of hits, and a small proportion of that will be people who are both prepared to download a 50MB movie and weren't going to do so anyway. It'll barely be noticeable, if that FAQ entry is true.
Given that they sell DVDs and appear to have no day job, I would guess that they make a living from it and are doing so legally. It's possible that they have permission from Microsoft to use Halo in their production; all of this "you can't use/copy/distribute" is always only if you don't have permission.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you were doing so well. Then I got to the end, and read this:
Not surprisingly it was written by a Jew.
Ah well, I guess we can't expect claimed anti-racists to really live up to it, can we?
Automator is just a friendly GUI on top of AppleScript, which has been around since System 7.
I have not RTFA, but it seems to me that having people double-check things qualifies as acknowledging human error and designing around it.
No.
Next question.
The real reason behind these new passports is probably to get people through immigration controls as rapidly as possible. Even a savings of a few seconds, will make the lines move more rapidly.
Brilliant! It's a huge step towards a totalitarian police state, but we can save a few seconds per person in the passport line! I suppose hiring more people is out of the question.
Yeah, it's not like anybody has ever tried to blow up people in France, Spain, Nigeria, Iraq, blah blah blah. All they ever target are Americans, how foolish of me to forget.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is this just a wild-ass guess? As a Mac developer, I'd love to have something resembling real statistics on relative piracy rates.
Never is a long time. Saying, "until they have some new lower-power and cooler G5 chip" is kind of pointless, as they'll have that by Christmas. Improvements are always being made. Once enough are made, we'll have a PowerBook G5. The question is not if, it's when.
Here we have an incredibly insecure electronics device. It listens on a common EM frequency band and willingly turns itself off whenever a sequence of simple codes is received. When someone finally exploits this gaping security hole, aren't we supposed to blame the people who made the security hole? After all, problems in Windows are Microsoft's fault. Why is this the fault of the device's creator, and not the fault of the TV manufacturers?
I don't need an econ lesson from you. I took econ from this guy and I think he taught me pretty well. And yes, I know the definition of profit.
If you took economics from a Presidential advisor, why are you making statements like, "Your reasoning about 'tens of thousands of dollars' looks pretty silly when you consider that they have $4 billion in the bank. They spend a lot of money on design and adding another pointing device would be a drop in the bucket."?
Regarding the usability of trackpoints, I don't personally know anyone who likes them. I'm far from a laptop hardware expert, but when I look at them in stores, the trackpoints seem to be relegated to the craptastic bottom-of-the-barrel models. A trackpoint is basically a really tiny joystick; moving a cursor around the screen with a joystick went out of style in the 80s.
Again, pleasing everyone is irrelevant when you can please "everyone - 3" and save a dollar per machine in the process.
That's a bad policy when BT is still niche and you're trying to make a living from it. If you're involved in making money from your work, it's best to just plunk down the cash for a host that can handle the bandwidth. You have to spend money to make money.
That is ridiculous reasoning. Assume some feature costs X dollars, and will earn the company Y dollars in extra profits. If X is greater than Y, the feature will not be implemented. It doesn't matter how insignificant X is compared to the company's total profits, revenue, or available cash.
Most people absolutely hate trackpoints. There appear to be a couple of slashdot readers who prefer them, but I would be shocked if the cost of adding them to the iBook would be made up by the number of people who would switch because of it.
Offering both is not a solution. For one, it would raise the price of the product. While it may only be a few dollars, take a few dollars, multiply by hundreds of thousands of units shipped per quarter, and you need to have a very nice justification for that move. For another, it would annoy a lot of people, probably more people than it would attract; that little nub won't just go away if you ignore it. Lastly, it would play havoc with the laptop's design; there's already basically zero space between the keys and the screen. Having a trackpoint nub sticking up above the keys is only going to make things worse in the thickness department.
Ironically, gross margins on Apple products are so low for resellers that there's virtually no room to squeeze prices anyways on most of them.
It's actually not that ironic. As I understand it, Apple has this policy as a way to protect their independent dealers. When margins are already so thin, the independents would be quickly driven out of business by larger resellers, as the resellers would be able to cut their margins closer to the bone. Since the margins are so thin to begin with, the smaller dealers wouldn't survive.
There is no reason for Apple to spend the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to engineer an optional trackpoint into the iBook just so they could offer it as a $20 option to the three people on the planet who actually prefer them to trackpads.
The hilarious thing is that Apple absolutely forbids its resellers from selling below the price they set. That's why you never see any resellers with big sales. They all have prices that are at most $3 or $4 less than Apple's official prices, because that's as low as Apple will allow them to go. So this "price matching" thing is just a feel-good thing that won't actually be used for anything.
So, you're saying a $2000 PC laptop would wipe the floor with a $1000 Mac laptop? Color me surprised.
On my UNIX box (Mac OS X), OpenStep looks absolutely fantastic. It's generally acknowledged to be the best-looking GUI out there.
GNUStep may have a crappy look, but that's hardly inherent to the APIs. I'm sure fixing this problem wouldn't hurt adoption, though.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Here's what I understand so far:
There were only two types of video cards in existence. In order to use two monitors, you had to buy one of each type. You couldn't buy two of one, or two of the other.
When you got this set up, then you could only use both monitors simultaneously with programs that understood multimonitor setups.
Is that accurate? You haven't contradicted what I said. The situation I describe is much less convenient than a modern Windows setup (to say nothing of a modern Mac setup).
Having to buy the right kind of video cards, and then only being able to use your setup with certain programs, is not done "just as easily as the current Windows version", where you basically plug and go, and it works with any windowed app.
You are, like most people, and nearly everybody in Congress, confusing the idea of secrecy with the idea of security. A properly secure system is one with the absolute minimum of secrets needed to secure it. Secrets are too fragile; once you lose one, you can never get it back. Modern cryptosystems are a perfect example of good security. Almost everything is open; the algorithm is open, the implementation is open, the protocol is open, the key generation method is open. The only thing that's secret is the actual key itself, which is only a few hundred or thousand bits of information.
Making every government operation secret will not make us safer. A terrorist organization will be able to find out as much as it wants about our power, water, and transportation infrastructure, whether we let them have it or not.
Our government is trying to keep everything from the public view, despite the fact that it's ineffective. This might be because they're stupid, which is highly plausible. It might be because they're trying to give the appearance of helping, which is also highly plausible. Lastly, it might be because they've seized on this golden opportunity to expand government power and secrecy with the support of the public. This one is sure to be popular among the tin-foil-hat crowd.
NPR also offers Real streams, which tend to be more non-Windows friendly. Here's the one for this show:
t e=30-Sep-2004&segNum=1&NPRMediaPref=RM
http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.html?prgCode=FA&showDa
Most populous state, yes, richest state, yes, but I think you'll find that the title of "largest state" goes to Alaska.
You aren't accounting for spikes in the normal load, though. Given that they release one episode per week at the exact same time every week, during the season, I'd be really shocked if those hits were anywhere close to being evenly spread out. Also, I would be shocked if more than maybe 10% of those slashdot hits went as far as downloading the movie itself.
The server was still pumping out 30k/sec to me by the time my download finished, so I think they did ok.
It seems to be a strange but common slashdot fallacy to assume that slashdot has more traffic than almost anybody else. The RvB FAQ claims half a million downloads a week during the active season. IIRC a typical slashdotting sends a few tens of thousands of hits, and a small proportion of that will be people who are both prepared to download a 50MB movie and weren't going to do so anyway. It'll barely be noticeable, if that FAQ entry is true.
Given that they sell DVDs and appear to have no day job, I would guess that they make a living from it and are doing so legally. It's possible that they have permission from Microsoft to use Halo in their production; all of this "you can't use/copy/distribute" is always only if you don't have permission.