Screw the paranoia and extremist ideology... I WANT REMOTE MANAGEMENT, DAMMIT.
Maybe 15 years ago, x86 was the red-headed step child... the ONE hardware platform without out-of-band management built-in. Every other platform out there redirected the IO on boot-up to the first serial port, at least if it didn't detect a keyboard plugged-in. And you know what? You could configure every damn option the hardware had, at that first firmware command-prompt, over the serial port. Hell, I ran numerous servers that would never, ever get a video card plugged in...
After that, as x86 continued to grow in popularity, serial port management was added to higher-end, server-class hardware, and trickled down to most servers. But it was always implemented in the most horrible way possible, requiring the cooperation of the video chipset, and still missing many features. And worst of all, often missing the big ones, like having a BREAK signal sent over the serial port power-cycle the hardware, requiring managed PDUs, higher end servers, or more add-on hardware...
Today, it still hasn't damn well been sorted out. Want remote management? Buy a system-specific add-in card from the manufacturer! This is iLO with HP and DRAC with Dell systems. Then run a second set of ethernet switches to each and every system to handle those. And on top of that, better throw-in an IP KVM, too, because those add-in cards do occasionally stop responding all together.
The one sign of light in all of this has been open-source boot-loaders. Lilo, grub, boot0 (fbsd), biosboot (obsd), etc. All can be configured to hand-off full console access/control to the serial port immediately after they are loaded. Additionally, the long-overdue widespread adoption of PXE boot firmware on NICs has made it possible to boot to one of these loaders (usually grub) so the MBR doesn't even need to be there.
Yet, after all these years of this blindingly-obvious missing feature, I still find myself having to buy iLOs, DRACs, or high-end PDUs, just so I can be sure I'll be able to send the power-cycle signal the one time in a million I need it. Linux's magic-sysrq moves us yet a little closer to eliminating this nonsense, but yet we can't seem to ever get there. If nothing else, we still risk being at the mercy of those dammed CMOS checksum failures that dump un-desirable defaults on us.
I want openbios so that I can take any PC I run across (no matter how low-end) drop it in the data-center, plugged-in to power, network, and a terminal server, and know I'll never need to run back out to pull the power on the damn thing. It costs next to nothing to add these features. It was done, prolifically, with non-x86 hardware decades ago, and yet we can't seem to get it done, as everybody wants the extra money and lock-in of their proprietary add-on to do something so simple... and with that comes vast added complexity (setting-up serial-port loopback over ethernet to support my OOB management card? WTF?)
Seriously, it's long past due.
And before I ask for a pony, can we get some movement on developing a standard management interface for a post RS-232 world? I'm fine with the firmware stealing an ethernet port for the job, but do it in some very simple and standard way... no more eye-candy java applets required to manage hundreds of servers, okay? I know execs like the aesthetics of of it, but they also like it when a required feature for each and every server they buy will cost them $50 instead of $500.
I know, spend enough money on the server, and the price of the OOBM isn't significant... yet the overhead of managing them, in all their proprietary glory, is. And besides, I have a moral objection to expensive, complex solutions with features I don't need, and that don't entirely work, when a cheap and simple 100% solution was there before, and would be dammed-easy to put back.
Am I the only one bothered by the regression of OOBM?
XFCE is pretty damn nice, but too heavy for my liking.
Did you miss the mention of blackbox? Window managers hardly get lighter... and you wouldn't possibly be able to notice the difference if they did.
Personally, I think that tiling window managers, whilst looking difficult initially, are more efficient and simple to use.
Personally, I think tiling is a big waste of screen real-estate. Even in musca's example screen-shot, look at all the white-space, in both the browser and the terminal/source code window. I always set-up my apps so that I'll have a bit of overlap, with the asumption that there will always be some whitespace I can hide off-screen or under another window, somewhere.
Hint: Configure blackbox for "Smart Window Placement". It's not tiling by a long shot, but it'll try to fit everything on-screen efficiently, and it's a lot better than the nonsense GNOME/KDE do.
Your complaints are almost entirely directed at the desktop environments. While it's unfortunate that they've gotten so massively bloated (even while doing next to nothing more than they did when they were tiny and dead simple) you certainly aren't forced to use them on linux or elsewhere. Xfce4 has gained a surprisingly large following for simply being about as simple as KDE/GNOME 1.x. I'm a blackbox devotee myself (openbox v2 actually), but either way, you can spare yourself the complication and waste with minimal effort.
It would be great if there was an NX Client for Android, but none so far.
What we really need is a rootless X11 server for Android, then you can use all the nice android apps where available, but can run standard linux programs whenever there is a gap that you can't avoid (like nx client).
Until then, tablets aren't a serious laptop competitor.
If you walked into a datacenter with a box full of dynamite, security would jump on you, make you throw away the box, give you a cart to stack your dynamite on instead, and send you on your merry way.
The flashpoint of cardboard is high enough that I don't think it will be a problem.
Kerosene is hard to ignite too, but I don't see anyone cooling their PCs with it... Cardboard is quite flammable, and what's more, it will act as fuel rather than barrier for any fires that should start.
Besides that, cardboard is larger, and provides very little structure... You'd be stacking cardboard boxes on metal shelves, anyhow, and would have poor ventilation to avoid weakening the box too much.
I think it is a fascinating idea for sellers of low end PCs (could be 10-15% cheaper without a case), and hobbists who might find these cases good enough for the odd project. Considering how often I use my towers as a footrest or table for heavier accessories, I probably won't get much mileage out of one. Personally, I'd find it much more interesting if someone invented a cheap collapsible case that could fold down flat for shipping and storage.
How do people this stupid have $200,000 to begin with?
Three possibilities come to mind...
1) He borrowed the majority of it from friends/family. I've heard such stories many times before.
2) He's 43, there's a decent chance his parents have passed away, and he just blew his entire inheritance, possibly plus his own money, possibly plus taking out a mortage...
3) You don't have to be bright to save money (though failing to do so is pretty stupid). At 43, he could have been earning a salary for 25 years. That's an average savings of $8,000/yr. Without a wife or kids to take care of, that's doable even on a working class wage, assuming you don't live in a massively high priced area.
Besides, what you call "not excessive" is probably massively expensive and wasteful, you just justify it to yourself because you see others who are worse. Consider that there are plenty of people living on minimum wage, and compare your lifestyle to theirs...
[...] douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
My pet peeve is that companies are terribly reluctant to promote anyone, internally. If you want to go from Tech Support to Technician, you probably have to change companies to do so. And not because one has much higher standards than the other, but just because they seem to assume the people they hire will be better than the people they have, even when they're promoting them to a higher job function than they've held in the past.
They also aren't fond on allowing anyone to expand into new areas. Expert in 4 out of 5 areas we wanted? Too bad, go somewhere else where #5 is involved, but even if you don't touch it, you can come back with it on your resume.
FYI, I'm not ranting about this from experience... I've always been in a good position, working in IT even before I started College and pretty easily moving onto the next thing. But I do unfortunately see too much of this zero-sum game, leading to high turnover and depressed wages in companies I've worked for, all because you have to be a virtual IT nomad to keep your career advancing, or else you get stuck with something you're overqualified for, and presumably bored with.
I do the same thing all the time. I was hired for my systems engineering knowledge. If you think i'm going to take out the trash, it probably isn't getting done.
Have you ever helped rack servers? Guess what, there's a lot of trash that needs to be taken out.
Unless you're in a huge company where everything you do is so routine, and happens with such a high volume that there are "server room trash removal" specialists, the job falls to whoever is nearby.
Some companies make every job extremely specialized. Others make them very generalized. One thing remains true with either... You are there to do whatever they need you to do. Sure, anything major should have been in the job description, but if your inability or unwillingness to do all the minor stuff is impacting your performance, or others, they SHOULD replace you with someone who better suits the job duties.
Using something other than ATRAC wouldn't have been "competing against itself" at all (you make be thinking of the lack of copy protection, ala SCMS), it would just have been offering an non-Sony-developed alternative (eg. MP3). They could easily have allowed MP3s to go on, without allowing them to be copied back off. It would have been stupid, but that apparently wasn't Sony's problem.
I really haven't figured out the root of Sony's problem. I think they're too big of a company to have just one...
With ATRAC you see them scared to death of paying out fees to license technology from others. But with their PCs, they keep going along with Windows, even though there was a time when they could have MADE some other OS (eg. Linux, MacOS) a viable competitor. Instead, they wouldn't even port their own software to other OSes, despite how much they HATED Microsoft.
Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.
The only real competitor to apple was rio. They could well have become the dominant platform, but it seems more likely the market would just have remained fragmented, until smartphone came along and made them obsolete.
Since I'm older than dirt, I also recall that the original Pentium 60 was nearly booed out of the marketplace. Hotter and more expensive than a DX4, without any real benefit to show for it unless you had a fetish for fast (and wrong) floating point math. There were howls of outrage at the unfathomable 30W TDP (IIRC, the figure doesn't come up in a quick Google). You needed a heat sink the size of your hand and maybe *gasp* even a fan.
I think you're mostly confusing the PPro (i686) for the Pentium (i585).
The Pentium did have an uphill battle in the market against AMD's impressive 486 DX4s. But the history of AMD vs Intel with few exceptions has always been that AMD chips do better in integer performance (which is important for most apps) while Intel's chips tend to be notably superior for floating point math (important for most multimedia). This was true of the Pentium vs AMD's DX4s, and was true of the PPro, with the additional drawback that Microsoft lied to Intel and promised Win95 would be all 32-bit, when it was mostly 16-bit, leaving the PPro's 32-bit tuned performance largely unutilized in the desktop. Of course, in the end Intel has gotten a lot out of that PPro, with Xeon current chips being a direct descendant of it, and most desktop/laptop chips tracing their heritage back a few generations to it as well.
More to the point, PPro chips were HUGE and power hungry, needing the ginormous heatsink and fan. Pentiums were small, and needed only a tiny heatsink and junky 40mm fan. In fact I recall an incident where a 133MHz Pentium MMX was running for some time after the heatsink fell of, and other than a careless tech burning his hand, there weren't any problems.
Pentium 60 was 11.9W MAX (14.6W TDP) PPro 150 was 29.2W MAX (23W TDP).
There are no profitable desktop Linux desktop publishers. That is not a workable long term situation.
Fedora seems to be quite profitable for Red Hat. Not directly, of course, but it provides a QA test bed for their commercial enterprise product, and draws in a lot of free labor from the community, and has directly contributed to Red Hat becoming the defacto standard.
Why do giants like Intel and AMD continue throwing money into improving what will always suck?
Because they want to run Windows apps.
Not so much. x86 may have a challenger for the desktop, but it looks completely unapproachable in the server space. X86-64 took off in the server space. Sun was selling Opterons with Linux. The top500 is packed with x86-64s. Etc.
The original 8088 instruction set is crap, but it has improved since. X64 is perfectly fine. And make no mistake, many x64 chips are running 32 bit code, because an in-house app that cost many millions to develop simply isn't worth rewriting, and the overhead of emulation is undesirable, and a negative selling point.
But more important than 8088 instructions, is RISC versus CISC. Time has shown that CISC chips like x86 just have so much room for expansion that they can easily maintain backwards compatibilty for decades, while adding every new feature under the sun, no problem. RISC chips weren't so lucky, and their former benefits, became a liability. And losing backwards compatibilty wouldn't affect Windows users that much, but corporate servers... it would be a blood-bath.
Nobody Cares about Linux for enterprise platforms,
You got it completely backwards. A vastly more accurate description would be "nobody cares about proprietary platforms."
Linux support for most achitectures out there is pretty good. And in the past, Linux vendors supported many more platforms than they do now. Interest in Linux never declined... what happened is twofold.
1) AMD outflanked them all, and put together a spectacular 64-bit architecture, with a great implementation, and great backwards compatibilty.
2) Clustering solutions (software & off-the-shelf interconnects) have improved dramatically, and put clusters of commodity servers in the same class as mainframes. The lower cost, then, lead to a rapid usurping of the former leaders.
You need only take a look at the top500 list to see this fact. Linux is taking over, clusters are taking over, and x86-64 is taking over. Nobody cares about Linux on enterprise hardware because it's blindingly clear to all that enterprise hardware is dying, and nobody wants to jump into that sinking ship, unless they have expensive legacy apps, and Linux is too new to have much legacy, anyhow.
The typical response is people can just barely tell that there is a difference between bitrates, but they are unable to accurately pick the HIGHER bitrate one.
You need to stop reading stupid, half-assed tests some guy put together in his basement.
Real audio test, performed by professionals as part of the early theoretical basis behind lossy audio coding (see Perpceptual Entropy) and later the MPEG audio codec development process, have shown quite conclusively what bitrates are needed, and which are excessive. I'm talking BS.1116 (http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1116-1-199710-I/e) not crap like MUSHRA, which is only meaningful for low bitrate encoding that can't ever be made to sound good. The question of what bitrates are needed has been a known quantity for 30 years.
The short answer is quite simple... Frequency domain codecs (MP3, ogg Vorbis, AAC, etc.) will NEVER be able to provide output that is indistinguishable from the original. Its theoretically impossible for them to avoid artifacts like pre-echo, accurately reproduce fast percussive events (cymbals are a great example), and many others.
The alternative is temporal domain codecs. While they can't perform as well at low bitrates, these have the properties needed to encode audio so that it is indistinguishable from the original, when used at an appropriate bitrate. Temporal domain codecs are less prolific, but include good old MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2) and the very impressive MUSEPACK audio codec. MP2, even in it's primitive earliest incarnations, was extensively tested, and proven indistinguishable to the uncompressed original at a bitrate of 256 kbps. With newer and better encoders like TwoLame, I'd bet that mark is considerably lower, probably 192 kbps or so. MUSEPACK is vastly more advanced, and does even better. Don't go thinking you can get perfect sounding MPCs at 128 Kbps, though. There is a theoretical minimum, and perceptual entropy puts that at 172 kbps, though that's for the most challenging material. I have no problem encoding to MPC with the standard preset and trusting that if it's only using 160 kbps, that's simply because that's all it needs for flawless reproduction.
Still, its important to note that all those who claim transparent CD quality audio at 128 kbps are shiftless lyings morons, and doubly so because they're always referring to a frequency domain codec of some sort (usually an AAC variant). They almost always justify it by testing on easy audio passages (not something challenging like applause) and using the completely unsuitable MUSHRA test I already mentioned.
The upshot of all this? Tell AOL to add MPC support to their upcomming WinAmp for Android. And people who encode their MP3s at 384 kbps are doubly idiotic, and provably so. Also, the money out there is always set up to fool you. There's no money in simple answers we've had for 30 years.
WPAD, UPNP, and Shatter attacks. End of story. Microsoft happily releases patch after patch to hide the most apparent symptoms, but the disease continues merrily along.
It's not a question of security, it's a matter of privacy. Americans have a substantial aversion to their government tracking them. Social security numbers are used for authentication simply because they always were private. When introduced, there had to be numerous guarantees that it would only be used for income tax purposes, and you could not be compelled to disclose it for any other reason. Sadly, there isn't any enforcement of this restriction, so it's not true for practical purposes, unless you're willing to start a lawsuit every time you are asked for it.
You honestly think you can store all of that in a studio apartment?
You aren't going to have a family of 4 in a studio apartment, so YES. Studio apartments have closets, lots of shelf space, etc. And if they don't have enough, put up your own. Unless you're 10' tall, you probably don't need that open ceiling space. And how often do you stand up on your desk or bed? Room for more shelves. Ask any New Yorker... You can squeeze a hell of a lot more than you ever thought possible, into a tiny amount of space.
I'll concede that studio apartment life is miserable, but you can definitely squeeze a hell of a lot in if you can't afford anything better. The big drawback with any lack of space is that it's several times more work to do anything... You're constantly painting yourself into a corner, so to speak, and have to go through everything in reverse, repeatedly, to get your walkways back.
A 2 week supply of water.
Even studio apartments have water heaters. That's a pretty big tank of water you can draw from. And as an added bonus, all the fools with a tankless unit take the Darwinian way out.
You'll be a sad panda when you find your 5 gallon buckets are 5 gallon blocks of ice.
Not a pleasant thought, but your water needs are greatly reduced by cold weather, so as long as you aren't already dying of hypothermia, you'll be able to melt enough to get what you need.
And if you're talking "can't open the door because of the snow", don't tell me "just do it outside in the snow".
Ok. If you've got a 10' snow drift against your door, do it INSIDE, in the snow. Open door or window, dig out a nice round hole, insert waste, close window.
Your own home.
Actually, the compact apartment is not just survivable, but beneficial. Your body (and any thing else still generating heat) can do a lot more in 500 square feet than it can in 2,000. All the stuff stacked against every open wall and blocking the windows becomes added insulation. Sure, you can close up one room in your house, but it almost certainly doesn't have insulation in interior walls, while a studio apartment is insulated all around.
even with the best of insulation. It takes a lot of calories to do that kind of thing, and you have to be able to USE those calories, which an old person may well not be acclimatized to.
People forget what calories are. They are, rather literally, a measure of how much heat a piece of food will put out when it is burned.
If worse comes to worse, burning small amounts of material indoors can generate the heat you need to stay alive. You should, of course, ventilate the building so all the oxygen isn't sucked out of the room. When it's actually a matter of survival, rather than how comfortable you are in the bad days, there's plenty of desperate options available to you.
Actually, with a 911 call, you can, and odds are good it'll go through. The first thing a cell phone does when it sees the magic 911 is to crank-up the power output to the absolute max, and basically remove all other restrictions as well.
Be patient. PCs didn't become completely standard when ATX was widely available... They became standard when mini ATX was widely available, and just as cheap as ATX.
Laptops also need to shrink until a common form factor that is small enough for all is as cheap as a larger form. Then economies of scale really kick in.
. Apple knows that, for the present at any rate, they have the install base sufficient to drive people to develop platform specific applications for them.
Yes, we know how very well that strategy played out for Apple in the past, when they were the leaders and competing with cheaper but open and standard alternatives...
But hey, it's not like they're in imminent danger of Steve Jobs leaving the company... oh.
It certainly sounds an awful lot like history repeating.
You should ask Alcoa what they think of your idea...
Sure, you could bulldoze the country, and make it a major energy supplier to the world (though many others are in contention, too) but the icelandic people have said no to much smaller projects before, and its likely they wouldn't stand for wholesale destruction of their country to achieve that status.
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Screw the paranoia and extremist ideology... I WANT REMOTE MANAGEMENT, DAMMIT.
Maybe 15 years ago, x86 was the red-headed step child... the ONE hardware platform without out-of-band management built-in. Every other platform out there redirected the IO on boot-up to the first serial port, at least if it didn't detect a keyboard plugged-in. And you know what? You could configure every damn option the hardware had, at that first firmware command-prompt, over the serial port. Hell, I ran numerous servers that would never, ever get a video card plugged in...
After that, as x86 continued to grow in popularity, serial port management was added to higher-end, server-class hardware, and trickled down to most servers. But it was always implemented in the most horrible way possible, requiring the cooperation of the video chipset, and still missing many features. And worst of all, often missing the big ones, like having a BREAK signal sent over the serial port power-cycle the hardware, requiring managed PDUs, higher end servers, or more add-on hardware...
Today, it still hasn't damn well been sorted out. Want remote management? Buy a system-specific add-in card from the manufacturer! This is iLO with HP and DRAC with Dell systems. Then run a second set of ethernet switches to each and every system to handle those. And on top of that, better throw-in an IP KVM, too, because those add-in cards do occasionally stop responding all together.
The one sign of light in all of this has been open-source boot-loaders. Lilo, grub, boot0 (fbsd), biosboot (obsd), etc. All can be configured to hand-off full console access/control to the serial port immediately after they are loaded. Additionally, the long-overdue widespread adoption of PXE boot firmware on NICs has made it possible to boot to one of these loaders (usually grub) so the MBR doesn't even need to be there.
Yet, after all these years of this blindingly-obvious missing feature, I still find myself having to buy iLOs, DRACs, or high-end PDUs, just so I can be sure I'll be able to send the power-cycle signal the one time in a million I need it. Linux's magic-sysrq moves us yet a little closer to eliminating this nonsense, but yet we can't seem to ever get there. If nothing else, we still risk being at the mercy of those dammed CMOS checksum failures that dump un-desirable defaults on us.
I want openbios so that I can take any PC I run across (no matter how low-end) drop it in the data-center, plugged-in to power, network, and a terminal server, and know I'll never need to run back out to pull the power on the damn thing. It costs next to nothing to add these features. It was done, prolifically, with non-x86 hardware decades ago, and yet we can't seem to get it done, as everybody wants the extra money and lock-in of their proprietary add-on to do something so simple... and with that comes vast added complexity (setting-up serial-port loopback over ethernet to support my OOB management card? WTF?)
Seriously, it's long past due.
And before I ask for a pony, can we get some movement on developing a standard management interface for a post RS-232 world? I'm fine with the firmware stealing an ethernet port for the job, but do it in some very simple and standard way... no more eye-candy java applets required to manage hundreds of servers, okay? I know execs like the aesthetics of of it, but they also like it when a required feature for each and every server they buy will cost them $50 instead of $500.
I know, spend enough money on the server, and the price of the OOBM isn't significant... yet the overhead of managing them, in all their proprietary glory, is. And besides, I have a moral objection to expensive, complex solutions with features I don't need, and that don't entirely work, when a cheap and simple 100% solution was there before, and would be dammed-easy to put back.
Am I the only one bothered by the regression of OOBM?
Did you miss the mention of blackbox? Window managers hardly get lighter... and you wouldn't possibly be able to notice the difference if they did.
Personally, I think tiling is a big waste of screen real-estate. Even in musca's example screen-shot, look at all the white-space, in both the browser and the terminal/source code window. I always set-up my apps so that I'll have a bit of overlap, with the asumption that there will always be some whitespace I can hide off-screen or under another window, somewhere.
Hint: Configure blackbox for "Smart Window Placement". It's not tiling by a long shot, but it'll try to fit everything on-screen efficiently, and it's a lot better than the nonsense GNOME/KDE do.
Your complaints are almost entirely directed at the desktop environments. While it's unfortunate that they've gotten so massively bloated (even while doing next to nothing more than they did when they were tiny and dead simple) you certainly aren't forced to use them on linux or elsewhere. Xfce4 has gained a surprisingly large following for simply being about as simple as KDE/GNOME 1.x. I'm a blackbox devotee myself (openbox v2 actually), but either way, you can spare yourself the complication and waste with minimal effort.
It would be great if there was an NX Client for Android, but none so far.
What we really need is a rootless X11 server for Android, then you can use all the nice android apps where available, but can run standard linux programs whenever there is a gap that you can't avoid (like nx client).
Until then, tablets aren't a serious laptop competitor.
Ha!
If you walked into a datacenter with a box full of dynamite, security would jump on you, make you throw away the box, give you a cart to stack your dynamite on instead, and send you on your merry way.
Kerosene is hard to ignite too, but I don't see anyone cooling their PCs with it... Cardboard is quite flammable, and what's more, it will act as fuel rather than barrier for any fires that should start.
Besides that, cardboard is larger, and provides very little structure... You'd be stacking cardboard boxes on metal shelves, anyhow, and would have poor ventilation to avoid weakening the box too much.
I think it is a fascinating idea for sellers of low end PCs (could be 10-15% cheaper without a case), and hobbists who might find these cases good enough for the odd project. Considering how often I use my towers as a footrest or table for heavier accessories, I probably won't get much mileage out of one. Personally, I'd find it much more interesting if someone invented a cheap collapsible case that could fold down flat for shipping and storage.
Three possibilities come to mind...
1) He borrowed the majority of it from friends/family. I've heard such stories many times before.
2) He's 43, there's a decent chance his parents have passed away, and he just blew his entire inheritance, possibly plus his own money, possibly plus taking out a mortage...
3) You don't have to be bright to save money (though failing to do so is pretty stupid). At 43, he could have been earning a salary for 25 years. That's an average savings of $8,000/yr. Without a wife or kids to take care of, that's doable even on a working class wage, assuming you don't live in a massively high priced area.
Besides, what you call "not excessive" is probably massively expensive and wasteful, you just justify it to yourself because you see others who are worse. Consider that there are plenty of people living on minimum wage, and compare your lifestyle to theirs...
My pet peeve is that companies are terribly reluctant to promote anyone, internally. If you want to go from Tech Support to Technician, you probably have to change companies to do so. And not because one has much higher standards than the other, but just because they seem to assume the people they hire will be better than the people they have, even when they're promoting them to a higher job function than they've held in the past.
They also aren't fond on allowing anyone to expand into new areas. Expert in 4 out of 5 areas we wanted? Too bad, go somewhere else where #5 is involved, but even if you don't touch it, you can come back with it on your resume.
FYI, I'm not ranting about this from experience... I've always been in a good position, working in IT even before I started College and pretty easily moving onto the next thing. But I do unfortunately see too much of this zero-sum game, leading to high turnover and depressed wages in companies I've worked for, all because you have to be a virtual IT nomad to keep your career advancing, or else you get stuck with something you're overqualified for, and presumably bored with.
Have you ever helped rack servers? Guess what, there's a lot of trash that needs to be taken out.
Unless you're in a huge company where everything you do is so routine, and happens with such a high volume that there are "server room trash removal" specialists, the job falls to whoever is nearby.
Some companies make every job extremely specialized. Others make them very generalized. One thing remains true with either... You are there to do whatever they need you to do. Sure, anything major should have been in the job description, but if your inability or unwillingness to do all the minor stuff is impacting your performance, or others, they SHOULD replace you with someone who better suits the job duties.
Using something other than ATRAC wouldn't have been "competing against itself" at all (you make be thinking of the lack of copy protection, ala SCMS), it would just have been offering an non-Sony-developed alternative (eg. MP3). They could easily have allowed MP3s to go on, without allowing them to be copied back off. It would have been stupid, but that apparently wasn't Sony's problem.
I really haven't figured out the root of Sony's problem. I think they're too big of a company to have just one...
With ATRAC you see them scared to death of paying out fees to license technology from others. But with their PCs, they keep going along with Windows, even though there was a time when they could have MADE some other OS (eg. Linux, MacOS) a viable competitor. Instead, they wouldn't even port their own software to other OSes, despite how much they HATED Microsoft.
No. NeXT is unbelievably lucky that Be Inc. was asking too much for Apple to buy them. Otherwise, it would have gone quite differently.
Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.
The only real competitor to apple was rio. They could well have become the dominant platform, but it seems more likely the market would just have remained fragmented, until smartphone came along and made them obsolete.
Blame /. Articles have become so prolific and quality so rare that it's no longer worthwhile to read most of it.
I think you're mostly confusing the PPro (i686) for the Pentium (i585).
The Pentium did have an uphill battle in the market against AMD's impressive 486 DX4s. But the history of AMD vs Intel with few exceptions has always been that AMD chips do better in integer performance (which is important for most apps) while Intel's chips tend to be notably superior for floating point math (important for most multimedia). This was true of the Pentium vs AMD's DX4s, and was true of the PPro, with the additional drawback that Microsoft lied to Intel and promised Win95 would be all 32-bit, when it was mostly 16-bit, leaving the PPro's 32-bit tuned performance largely unutilized in the desktop. Of course, in the end Intel has gotten a lot out of that PPro, with Xeon current chips being a direct descendant of it, and most desktop/laptop chips tracing their heritage back a few generations to it as well.
More to the point, PPro chips were HUGE and power hungry, needing the ginormous heatsink and fan. Pentiums were small, and needed only a tiny heatsink and junky 40mm fan. In fact I recall an incident where a 133MHz Pentium MMX was running for some time after the heatsink fell of, and other than a careless tech burning his hand, there weren't any problems.
Pentium 60 was 11.9W MAX (14.6W TDP)
PPro 150 was 29.2W MAX (23W TDP).
http://mysite.verizon.net/pchardwarelinks/elec_pentium.htm#intel
Fedora seems to be quite profitable for Red Hat. Not directly, of course, but it provides a QA test bed for their commercial enterprise product, and draws in a lot of free labor from the community, and has directly contributed to Red Hat becoming the defacto standard.
Not so much. x86 may have a challenger for the desktop, but it looks completely unapproachable in the server space. X86-64 took off in the server space. Sun was selling Opterons with Linux. The top500 is packed with x86-64s. Etc.
The original 8088 instruction set is crap, but it has improved since. X64 is perfectly fine. And make no mistake, many x64 chips are running 32 bit code, because an in-house app that cost many millions to develop simply isn't worth rewriting, and the overhead of emulation is undesirable, and a negative selling point.
But more important than 8088 instructions, is RISC versus CISC. Time has shown that CISC chips like x86 just have so much room for expansion that they can easily maintain backwards compatibilty for decades, while adding every new feature under the sun, no problem. RISC chips weren't so lucky, and their former benefits, became a liability. And losing backwards compatibilty wouldn't affect Windows users that much, but corporate servers... it would be a blood-bath.
You got it completely backwards. A vastly more accurate description would be "nobody cares about proprietary platforms."
Linux support for most achitectures out there is pretty good. And in the past, Linux vendors supported many more platforms than they do now. Interest in Linux never declined... what happened is twofold.
1) AMD outflanked them all, and put together a spectacular 64-bit architecture, with a great implementation, and great backwards compatibilty.
2) Clustering solutions (software & off-the-shelf interconnects) have improved dramatically, and put clusters of commodity servers in the same class as mainframes. The lower cost, then, lead to a rapid usurping of the former leaders.
You need only take a look at the top500 list to see this fact. Linux is taking over, clusters are taking over, and x86-64 is taking over. Nobody cares about Linux on enterprise hardware because it's blindingly clear to all that enterprise hardware is dying, and nobody wants to jump into that sinking ship, unless they have expensive legacy apps, and Linux is too new to have much legacy, anyhow.
See http://sourceforge.net/projects/kernelex/
You need to stop reading stupid, half-assed tests some guy put together in his basement.
Real audio test, performed by professionals as part of the early theoretical basis behind lossy audio coding (see Perpceptual Entropy) and later the MPEG audio codec development process, have shown quite conclusively what bitrates are needed, and which are excessive. I'm talking BS.1116 (http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1116-1-199710-I/e) not crap like MUSHRA, which is only meaningful for low bitrate encoding that can't ever be made to sound good. The question of what bitrates are needed has been a known quantity for 30 years.
The short answer is quite simple... Frequency domain codecs (MP3, ogg Vorbis, AAC, etc.) will NEVER be able to provide output that is indistinguishable from the original. Its theoretically impossible for them to avoid artifacts like pre-echo, accurately reproduce fast percussive events (cymbals are a great example), and many others.
The alternative is temporal domain codecs. While they can't perform as well at low bitrates, these have the properties needed to encode audio so that it is indistinguishable from the original, when used at an appropriate bitrate. Temporal domain codecs are less prolific, but include good old MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2) and the very impressive MUSEPACK audio codec. MP2, even in it's primitive earliest incarnations, was extensively tested, and proven indistinguishable to the uncompressed original at a bitrate of 256 kbps. With newer and better encoders like TwoLame, I'd bet that mark is considerably lower, probably 192 kbps or so. MUSEPACK is vastly more advanced, and does even better. Don't go thinking you can get perfect sounding MPCs at 128 Kbps, though. There is a theoretical minimum, and perceptual entropy puts that at 172 kbps, though that's for the most challenging material. I have no problem encoding to MPC with the standard preset and trusting that if it's only using 160 kbps, that's simply because that's all it needs for flawless reproduction.
Still, its important to note that all those who claim transparent CD quality audio at 128 kbps are shiftless lyings morons, and doubly so because they're always referring to a frequency domain codec of some sort (usually an AAC variant). They almost always justify it by testing on easy audio passages (not something challenging like applause) and using the completely unsuitable MUSHRA test I already mentioned.
The upshot of all this? Tell AOL to add MPC support to their upcomming WinAmp for Android. And people who encode their MP3s at 384 kbps are doubly idiotic, and provably so. Also, the money out there is always set up to fool you. There's no money in simple answers we've had for 30 years.
Yes, windows is fundamentally insecure.
WPAD, UPNP, and Shatter attacks. End of story. Microsoft happily releases patch after patch to hide the most apparent symptoms, but the disease continues merrily along.
It's not a question of security, it's a matter of privacy. Americans have a substantial aversion to their government tracking them. Social security numbers are used for authentication simply because they always were private. When introduced, there had to be numerous guarantees that it would only be used for income tax purposes, and you could not be compelled to disclose it for any other reason. Sadly, there isn't any enforcement of this restriction, so it's not true for practical purposes, unless you're willing to start a lawsuit every time you are asked for it.
You aren't going to have a family of 4 in a studio apartment, so YES. Studio apartments have closets, lots of shelf space, etc. And if they don't have enough, put up your own. Unless you're 10' tall, you probably don't need that open ceiling space. And how often do you stand up on your desk or bed? Room for more shelves. Ask any New Yorker... You can squeeze a hell of a lot more than you ever thought possible, into a tiny amount of space.
I'll concede that studio apartment life is miserable, but you can definitely squeeze a hell of a lot in if you can't afford anything better. The big drawback with any lack of space is that it's several times more work to do anything... You're constantly painting yourself into a corner, so to speak, and have to go through everything in reverse, repeatedly, to get your walkways back.
Even studio apartments have water heaters. That's a pretty big tank of water you can draw from. And as an added bonus, all the fools with a tankless unit take the Darwinian way out.
Not a pleasant thought, but your water needs are greatly reduced by cold weather, so as long as you aren't already dying of hypothermia, you'll be able to melt enough to get what you need.
Ok. If you've got a 10' snow drift against your door, do it INSIDE, in the snow. Open door or window, dig out a nice round hole, insert waste, close window.
Actually, the compact apartment is not just survivable, but beneficial. Your body (and any thing else still generating heat) can do a lot more in 500 square feet than it can in 2,000. All the stuff stacked against every open wall and blocking the windows becomes added insulation. Sure, you can close up one room in your house, but it almost certainly doesn't have insulation in interior walls, while a studio apartment is insulated all around.
People forget what calories are. They are, rather literally, a measure of how much heat a piece of food will put out when it is burned.
If worse comes to worse, burning small amounts of material indoors can generate the heat you need to stay alive. You should, of course, ventilate the building so all the oxygen isn't sucked out of the room. When it's actually a matter of survival, rather than how comfortable you are in the bad days, there's plenty of desperate options available to you.
Actually, with a 911 call, you can, and odds are good it'll go through. The first thing a cell phone does when it sees the magic 911 is to crank-up the power output to the absolute max, and basically remove all other restrictions as well.
BTW, why no love for Sprint?
Be patient. PCs didn't become completely standard when ATX was widely available... They became standard when mini ATX was widely available, and just as cheap as ATX.
Laptops also need to shrink until a common form factor that is small enough for all is as cheap as a larger form. Then economies of scale really kick in.
Yes, we know how very well that strategy played out for Apple in the past, when they were the leaders and competing with cheaper but open and standard alternatives...
But hey, it's not like they're in imminent danger of Steve Jobs leaving the company... oh.
It certainly sounds an awful lot like history repeating.
You should ask Alcoa what they think of your idea...
Sure, you could bulldoze the country, and make it a major energy supplier to the world (though many others are in contention, too) but the icelandic people have said no to much smaller projects before, and its likely they wouldn't stand for wholesale destruction of their country to achieve that status.