In a world with Linux, Solaris, OS X (a BSD, sorta), a zillion types of Windows, QNX, etc... why do we need so many BSDs?
Funny that you mention Linux in there... as if there AREN'T hundreds of different and somewhat incompatible Linux distros. Why do we need so many of them? If we all would just settle on Slackware, the ONE TRUE DISTRO, everything would be perfect.
Diversity is a powerful part of the FOSS model, however it can also dilute things by spreading resources to thin.
I don't think so at all. First, similarities between the BSDs mean many developers contribute to several different projects. It also means work done on one is rather easy to port to another. If more distros can bring in just a few more developers, then the net result is a positive.
Besides, OSS is pretty well self-regulating. When developers find that the OS they're working on is getting behind the times, either they port the relevant code from another, or they jump ship to one that actually does what they need. Many different OSS projects have been abandoned, consolidated, or had branches die and developers return.
Sometimes one size doesn't fit all, and a fork can have benefits for both.
Why would I buy a next-gen player to play my old DVDs?
Because you can buy highdef DVDs in the future, instead of more standard DVDs. There is absolutely no reason you need to re-buy the DVDs you already have.
and the quality difference from DVDs -> HD-DVD/Blu-ray isn't as great (certainly not as much as VHS -> DVD),
Completely, totally, factually, WRONG.
VHS to DVD was a 3X improvement at BEST... DVD to hi-def (1080) is a 6X improvement.
most of those cheapo printers usually only come with half-capacity ink cartridges
True, BUT...
I'd still happily get the nearly-free replacement printer, because it will surely cut into HP's profit, rather than increasing their profit. Yes, I'm just vindictive that way.
It's the price we pay for the system of "innoccent until proven guilty", and, at least in my view, is a fair one.
Funny, we have the same system here (in fact, I do believe we essentially invented it), and have no such limitation.
On minor trials, jurors are simply ordered not to expose themselves to any press on the subject, and in major trials the jurors are sequestered. Significant inconvience for an occasional unlucky 12 people, but no necessary restrictions on the press.
If they have the technical capability to follow the laws of a certain region, then they should.
Exactly. My town has a local ordinance whereby every sentence must have the word "radish" in it. Please update all your websites to comply, or expect a hefty fine.
I'm surprised this is being labelled censorship by some people -- it's complying with the law and ensuring that a very important trail isn't jeopordised.
Umm, there's nothing about that which precludes this from being censorship, you know.
One of the wonderful things about the internet was supposed to be how it put everyone on an equal footing. Instead, we have everyone using geoip to restrict themselves to local laws.
I wouldn't call it censorship, but it's certainly an uncomfortable step in that general direction.
unless you want to be hauled up in front of the judge and asked for the evidence you apparently have that he definitely did it, saying that he did is libellous.
As it is in the US, too.
Read the story a little more closely, and you'll see this is about FACTS which aren't allowed to be published in Britan. "prejudicial information" is not libel.
Now that you know, try arguing that supressing facts, and freedom of the press, makes the UK better than the US, and try again.
Same with lead, a 50lb hunk of lead is harmless, unless you drop it on your toe.
Actually, no. Lead is absorbed through the skin. If you're often handling this 50lb hunk of lead, you WILL get sick from it. Many people have died in the past from working with (moving) objects that were coated with lead.
Occasional handling of bare lead certainly isn't a problem, though.
The reverse is true in cold climates... The excess heat from an incandesent bulb serves to heat your house, there by lowering your gas/electricity/heating oil/etc. costs
Umm... no. Heating your house with resistive electricity (ie. not counting heatpumps) is FAR more expensive than heating with gas or heating oil. The little bit of heat you get from those bulbs, won't even be noticable as a savings on gas/oil, and even if you do notice, it will certainly be FAR SMALLER than the savings on your electric bill.
[LEDs] use 1/30th the power of a regular light bulb, vs. 1/4 with a CFL.
NO! WRONG! That ThinkGeek page says 1/30th, because they're also MUCH DIMMER than the incandesent bulbs they are comparing with.
That 1/4th figure for CFLs, however, is for equivalent brightness.
LEDs are really only useful for flashlights and perhaps car lights... Portable applications where you really can't practically use CFLs for one reason or another.
Only thing really holding it back right now is price and the fact they wouldnt sell many to repeat customers with an 11 year always on lifespan, lol.
...and the fact that those are basically night-light bulbs. Scale them up (or buy several) to compete with your 60 watt bulbs, and you'll be distinctly disappointed with the higher power consumption compared with CFLs.
90% of the energy output of a incandescant bulb is heat.
And where does the other 10% go?
Even with CFLs, 100% of the electricity is turned into heat (eventually)**, it's just that they can generate as much LIGHT as incandescants, with 1/4th the input power (so 1/4th as much heat, but still as much light).
**Actually that's over simplifying. CFLs use simple switching power supplies, with a low Power Factor (~0.4), which means more load per-watt on the utility grid than fully-resistive load (PF 1.0).
Thank you for consuming more than your share. The rest of us apprciate it.
Capitalism isn't about embarassing others into doing what you want them to.
If he consumes more, he has to pay more to do it. Part of his money will go into developing cleaner energy sources, and basically helping to solve the problem you're so worried about.
If electricity doesn't work on standard economic theory, it shouldn't be sold as it is.
I read some, "They whine and buzz" - might have been older versions.
No, that's just the cheaper ones. To be specific, I've seen the problem (or rather heard it) in the CFs sold by Harbor Freight. Although, it's generally only noticable if you're sitting nearby. Better ones obviously don't have the same problem.
I remember "The Matrix" pretty much hovered around $9.99 ever since it came out. You used to have to pay $25 or more for a VHS tape,
I've NEVER seen a $25 VHS tape in stores, and I don't remember seeing a single $10 DVD until nearly 2 years after The Matrix was released, and that was some lowsy movie which happened to bomb, and they wanted to get rid of.
I get the feeling your memory is exactly backwards. Either that or CC was doing something crazy with pricing to try hard to push DVD/DIVX.
and most DVD afficienado's already have a very large collection of discs at this point.
Plain and simple FUD. HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play all your current DVDs just fine. Implying that you have to go rebuy your collection is unbelivably stupid.
I think society as a whole is suffering technology burnout.
And the whole basis for this belief of yours is...?
$500 for an HD-DVD player isn't much higher than a simple progressive-scan DVD player, and you get the added benefit of being able to play HD discs in the future, if you like.
And in the end, the added quality just doesn't change my life. Cool, yes, impressive with computer generated films, of course, but worth the price, the loss of control and the hassle? No way.
You could have said the same things about DVDs as well. They weren't cheap, they have CSS DRM which took years to crack (which didn't slow sales), etc.
DVD is perfectly good enough for me, thank you very much.
half the power budget is the motherboard, so an 8 drive chassis would result in a 25% reduction in power for larger installations.
They could also have used lower-power CPUs in each. But low power is never an exclusive proposition, otherwise you'd just turn everything off... They clearly wanted more performance per-drive than 8 drives on a single 1GHz VIA C3 processor (which is comparable to Intel/AMD chips of half the MHz) could muster.
If all I wanted was 4 drives why would I care? Why would I want a 1U rack? Why wouldn't I just stick them in my PC?
Possibly because of the (2) 500GB hard drives, and (2) DVD/CD ROM/RW drives you ALSO want, that are currently in your PC.
Windows, at least, is a massive bitch when you try to use more than one controller.
Slashdot Mirror
You can say it all you want, but it won't make it true.
Yes, DVDs fix that by introducing aliasing on the edges instead, macroblock artifacts, chroma sub-sampling, etc.
Only an ignorant fool who has never seen an HDTV picture would make such a claim.
There's nobody with more than 2 brain cells that has made the claim you can't tell the difference.
Funny that you mention Linux in there... as if there AREN'T hundreds of different and somewhat incompatible Linux distros. Why do we need so many of them? If we all would just settle on Slackware, the ONE TRUE DISTRO, everything would be perfect.
I don't think so at all. First, similarities between the BSDs mean many developers contribute to several different projects. It also means work done on one is rather easy to port to another. If more distros can bring in just a few more developers, then the net result is a positive.
Besides, OSS is pretty well self-regulating. When developers find that the OS they're working on is getting behind the times, either they port the relevant code from another, or they jump ship to one that actually does what they need. Many different OSS projects have been abandoned, consolidated, or had branches die and developers return.
Sometimes one size doesn't fit all, and a fork can have benefits for both.
Beta != VHS
Because you can buy highdef DVDs in the future, instead of more standard DVDs. There is absolutely no reason you need to re-buy the DVDs you already have.
Completely, totally, factually, WRONG.
VHS to DVD was a 3X improvement at BEST... DVD to hi-def (1080) is a 6X improvement.
True, BUT...
I'd still happily get the nearly-free replacement printer, because it will surely cut into HP's profit, rather than increasing their profit. Yes, I'm just vindictive that way.
Funny, we have the same system here (in fact, I do believe we essentially invented it), and have no such limitation.
On minor trials, jurors are simply ordered not to expose themselves to any press on the subject, and in major trials the jurors are sequestered. Significant inconvience for an occasional unlucky 12 people, but no necessary restrictions on the press.
Exactly. My town has a local ordinance whereby every sentence must have the word "radish" in it. Please update all your websites to comply, or expect a hefty fine.
Umm, there's nothing about that which precludes this from being censorship, you know.
One of the wonderful things about the internet was supposed to be how it put everyone on an equal footing. Instead, we have everyone using geoip to restrict themselves to local laws.
I wouldn't call it censorship, but it's certainly an uncomfortable step in that general direction.
As it is in the US, too.
Read the story a little more closely, and you'll see this is about FACTS which aren't allowed to be published in Britan. "prejudicial information" is not libel.
Now that you know, try arguing that supressing facts, and freedom of the press, makes the UK better than the US, and try again.
As have many Americans.
And behind in dental and faucet technology...
Actually, no. Lead is absorbed through the skin. If you're often handling this 50lb hunk of lead, you WILL get sick from it. Many people have died in the past from working with (moving) objects that were coated with lead.
Occasional handling of bare lead certainly isn't a problem, though.
Every one that has ever had a headache.
They may not know the term "color tempurature" as such, but they know their (cheap) CFLs are "brighter", "painful", "blue", et al.
Umm... no. Heating your house with resistive electricity (ie. not counting heatpumps) is FAR more expensive than heating with gas or heating oil. The little bit of heat you get from those bulbs, won't even be noticable as a savings on gas/oil, and even if you do notice, it will certainly be FAR SMALLER than the savings on your electric bill.
NO! WRONG! That ThinkGeek page says 1/30th, because they're also MUCH DIMMER than the incandesent bulbs they are comparing with.
That 1/4th figure for CFLs, however, is for equivalent brightness.
LEDs are really only useful for flashlights and perhaps car lights... Portable applications where you really can't practically use CFLs for one reason or another.
And where does the other 10% go?
Even with CFLs, 100% of the electricity is turned into heat (eventually)**, it's just that they can generate as much LIGHT as incandescants, with 1/4th the input power (so 1/4th as much heat, but still as much light).
**Actually that's over simplifying. CFLs use simple switching power supplies, with a low Power Factor (~0.4), which means more load per-watt on the utility grid than fully-resistive load (PF 1.0).
Capitalism isn't about embarassing others into doing what you want them to.
If he consumes more, he has to pay more to do it. Part of his money will go into developing cleaner energy sources, and basically helping to solve the problem you're so worried about.
If electricity doesn't work on standard economic theory, it shouldn't be sold as it is.
No, that's just the cheaper ones. To be specific, I've seen the problem (or rather heard it) in the CFs sold by Harbor Freight. Although, it's generally only noticable if you're sitting nearby. Better ones obviously don't have the same problem.
I've NEVER seen a $25 VHS tape in stores, and I don't remember seeing a single $10 DVD until nearly 2 years after The Matrix was released, and that was some lowsy movie which happened to bomb, and they wanted to get rid of.
I get the feeling your memory is exactly backwards. Either that or CC was doing something crazy with pricing to try hard to push DVD/DIVX.
Plain and simple FUD. HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play all your current DVDs just fine. Implying that you have to go rebuy your collection is unbelivably stupid.
And the whole basis for this belief of yours is...?
$500 for an HD-DVD player isn't much higher than a simple progressive-scan DVD player, and you get the added benefit of being able to play HD discs in the future, if you like.
You could have said the same things about DVDs as well. They weren't cheap, they have CSS DRM which took years to crack (which didn't slow sales), etc.
VHS is perfectly good enough for me.
There's a huge difference between "CAN" and "DOES".
The GP made no indication either way. Unless you're claiming to be the AC in question...
Rub your feet on a carpet for a few minutes, then tell me how reliable tapes are, versus removable hard drives.
Bah! XFS maxes out at 8,000+ Petabytes. Not as much as ZFS, but... umm... let me know when you need more than that, and I'll buy you a cookie.
Yes. I live in a rent-controlled Mini-ITX case in New York for 6 months... My friends were jealous when they visited.
What's more, the heat always works, unlike their crappy non-Mini-ITX apartments.
They could also have used lower-power CPUs in each. But low power is never an exclusive proposition, otherwise you'd just turn everything off... They clearly wanted more performance per-drive than 8 drives on a single 1GHz VIA C3 processor (which is comparable to Intel/AMD chips of half the MHz) could muster.
Possibly because of the (2) 500GB hard drives, and (2) DVD/CD ROM/RW drives you ALSO want, that are currently in your PC.
Windows, at least, is a massive bitch when you try to use more than one controller.