Your lack of providing a viable alternative is equally duly noted. Here's a handful of useful features off the top of my head...
--batch Facebook photo uploads. --single-drag conversion/scaling/copying video files for playback on my Android phone, no matter what the source format. --batch recoding of video files between formats. --nonlinear video editing for those quick-and-dirty projects that don't necessarily require Adobe Premiere. --waveform editing with VST plugin support. --Lightscribe disc labeling. --MP3 ripping with Gracenote support. --DVD authoring, as elaborated upon in the GP post.
I can't give you the list from the parent, but here's an inexhaustive list for me personally:
--Nero 11 Mutimedia Suite. Yes, Nero has a Linux version, and there's K3B and similar burning solutions, but if you haven't seen the suite and EVERYTHNG it does, and tried to find me an equivalent list of tools, it'd be a hodgepodge at best.
--Mediashout. My laptop is used for some church events in order to do projection tasks. Mediashout plays anything Windows Media player will play, overlays song lyrics on top of motion backdrops, has dozens of versions of the Bible where any chapter/verse index is retrievable in seconds, and can play back DVD indexes on the secondary monitor. I've seen Opensong, and it gets the bare essentials down, but I've yet to see a Linux product that remotely parallels the capabilities of Mediashout (or Easyworship, or ProPresenter, or the dozen other applications of their kind).
--Serato. I've seen screengrabs of Mixx, and it looks pretty (an exception as I've perused Linux software), but my issues with Mixx were secondary. For those of you unfamiliar with Serato, it's a DJ performance application that integrates vinyl playback and MP3 catalogs. It does so using timecoded vinyl, which is essentially timestamps and a control tone pressed on a record. It then goes into a specialized audio I/O interface, and controls MP3 playback on a laptop. Mixx is supposed to do the same thing, but the problem is drivers. See, there are two reasons for having dedicated hardware for timecode. The first is admittedly a hardware dongle, but the second is that you NEED to have an extremely low latency when spinning vinyl. 8ms of latency when listening to music in Amarok is all well and good, but trying to beat juggle with it is like trying to code with both hands tied behind your back and typing with a toothpick in your teeth. I've tried my SL-3, my M-Audio Connectiv, and my old Stanton ScratchAmp. Admittedly it was about 2 years ago I did this, but I spent three hours trying to get an I/O interface to work under Linux, and Mixx wasn't having it. It's not necessarily a Mixx issue or a Serato issue, the bottom line is that, to my knowledge, there's no highly functional 2x2 low-latency I/O interface to work with a DJ timecode solution.
--Acronis True Image. Tell me about the 'dd' command you want. I'm sure it's wonderful, but Acronis still has some edge to it. First, there's virtually no need to read the fine manual; anyone with a brain stem can clone a hard disk. It allows for incremental backups, mounting images to pull out individual files, backing up to a network share (SMB/FTP), and dozens of other functions related to backup and disk imaging.
--Kristanix File Renamer Turbo. This one was actually a giveawayoftheday release that I liked so much I purchased out of principle. a simple yet powerful batch file renaming utility. Admittedly I don't use this one as often as some other titles on the list, but the breadth of abilities of this application I've yet to see matched in a linux program. I'm certain that there are CLI implementations of this, but another particularly awesome feature is being able to preview the changes before they're actually committed.
--ACID Music Studio/Sound Forge Audio Studio. Audacity is close, but there's a difference, and no, I don't mean vi/emacs difference, I mean vi/Notepad++ differences.
I'll end with the Adobe video production applications. KDenLive is nice, but it's not quite Adobe Premiere. Jahshakah is to the Premiere/Final Cut interface what Unity is to Gnome2. Cinelerra's "simple" multi-machine rendering looks awesome, but laying clips out on a timeline is still not as intuitive (and the bar for "intuitive" is pretty low when it comes to nonlinear editing). I'll give Blender credit for being a pretty worthy alternative to After Effects, so I'll fully admit that if I learned to use it a bit better I'd probably like it better. The biggest problem though is DVD authoring. Feel free to tell me that optical media is dead, but no bride I've ever m
There is no room in the market for Windows based tablets.
Also, there is a market for maybe six computers, and 640KBytes of RAM should be enough for anybody.
Yes, iOS and Android based tablets are sufficient for the overwhelming amount of consumer usage cases, but that doesn't mean that there is no room for a Windows tablet.
One thing that always irked me was the fact that there is no such thing as a true desktop replacement tablet. Overkill for OneNote, but I'm sure that I could find more than a few die-hard Mac-based graphic designers who would begrudgingly eyeball a Windows tablet if it had the guts to run Photoshop and drawing was possible on a 15" convertible screen. They'd be expensive no doubt, but consider that Wacom has an entire industry built around a stylus-based input peripheral. Half the graphic design majors I went to school with had one, and the other half did their best to bum one during final project week. Clearly it's not a machine that would appeal to everyone, but if IBM saw a market for a laptop with two screens and an integrated Wacom pen input, then I believe it's safe to say that more than a few people who make a lot more money than me saw a niche worth filling.
That's almost the point: Let Apple and Google duke it out for people who are happy with tablets that do Angry Birds and Facebook, because you're right - there's no room for Windows tablets there. Shipping yards, UPS drivers, lawyers, and graphic designers all represent sizeable niches that Apple doesn't appear to care to target, so a Windows based tablet that runs Windows applications and allows for pen-based input is HP's for the taking.
If the voice recognition system is anything like the ones I've dealt with, allow me to explain EXACTLY the issues that occur with such systems.
In many cases, the call starts with an uninterruptible intro statement that's slightly longer than some of the works of Shakespeare, to the point where the caller just puts the phone down, does their laundry, and comes back later. The first menu says "tell me what you're calling about. You can say anything from "problems with my widget" to "I have a billing question"". There is no guidance given as to what to say, so we humans make the mistake of actually taking to the computer like a person and summarizing exactly what we're calling about. The computer then makes a guess based on its transcription of the word "the", which of course has NOTHING to do with what we're actually calling about. The computer either gives no feedback as to what it heard, or it does...and tries to send us through yet another maze of menus, and repeats the process over again. For a customer who's either looking to cease their service or is frustrated with a purchase, this does the CSR's *no* favors by further exasperating customers. At this point, people tend to do one of two things: either they say "representative" repeatedly, or they say something like "schnitzelhaagen" so that the computer can't understand them and fails over to a human being. In the case of cell phone companies specifically, they tend to ask for billing credentials NOW, instead of at the outset of a call, and then proceeds to put me on hold for enough time to do another load of laundry. It's an added insult that after giving my account password and the computer green-lighting me that the CSR then asks for the exact same account information I've already given - either pass it along or don't ask on the call, but don't make me repeat myself. As a quick aside, the worst company in this regard is Napster. When I had questions, it would send me to an audio recording of various parts of The Fine Manual, as if I hadn't already read it. After burning through eight cellular minutes listening to troubleshooting steps I already knew, I remembered the magic words: "cancel my account". It was at THAT point that I actually got a person on the phone who could help troubleshoot my problem.
All of this goes back to the underlying problem: voice-based support lines are essentially DOS prompts without the keyboard. Siri seems to be different in that it can actually understand and interpret what the person means, but Siri has yet to be implemented into any 800-number support line I've called and still has her own limitations. If you're going to have a voice activated DOS prompt, don't tell callers that they can "say anything", because they can't. Give short, single-word commands, and not more than five per menu, and no more than two menus deep before you get to a person. If calls can't be sufficiently filtered into 25 possible routes, you may need to reconfigure who actually receives phone calls.
Siri gets a bit more grace from users because they know that there is an alternative, and because it's generally not problem based. Asking what the weather is like can get a free pass if they have to start the weather app instead. If someone is calling a support number, it means that they already have a problem and need a solution. When their focus is on that problem, you'll hear about a snowball fight in hell before anyone would opt into guessing commands on a command line in order to get their first problem fixed. The solution isn't much better - transcription accuracy may get better, but each person will uniquely describe the issue, so "accurate" and "meaningful to the computer" are two completely separate problems to solve. Thus, the better way is to have the people learn. Tell me: what does it say about a customer who can accurately navigate the support menu? Answer: it means that they've called WAY too many times before, which means that either they are really, REALLY dumb, or there's a legit issue with your pr
The hunched over 'nerd' writing a program for his calculator, is, at that very moment in time, acting upon a conscious choice to write a program for his calculator at the expense of being social. This is what's deemed 'nerdy' in the socially awkward sense of the term - the action upon the choice that was made.
The black guy is on a skateboard - that is *his* conscious choice. He does not fit the stereotype of having his pants hanging extremely low, nor that of holding a gun. In fact, the only conscious choice one could accuse the black guy of making is NOT dressing like the stereotype.
It is pre-judging to assume that an African American male will have a gun or have his pants on the ground due to the color of his skin. It is NOT prejudging to draw a conclusion from the visible actions taken upon a choice.
Re:Or like GE, or like a lot of other corporations
on
IRS Auditing Google
·
· Score: 1
Could Microsoft have clout with the IRS?
Given that every desktop and likely plenty of the servers at the IRS run Windows and Office, I'd love to watch them say "audit our books, and we'll revoke every license to every Microsoft product purchased by every arm of the federal, state, and local governments". Now *that* would be be a funny show to watch.
None of their most successful products were the first to the market. Being relatively late to market hasn't been a factor in Apple's success, because ultimately their formula tends to revolve around releasing technical products where the goal is releasing them sporting both physical dimensions and UIs that resonate with the majority, non-technical, non-Slashdot crowd with money in the bank. Luck played a part in it, but so did planning, engineering, and multiple trips back to the drawing board. I'm not an Apple fan by most metrics, but I do respect the fact that everyone I know either has an apple product, or wants one. You don't see that kind of pining for...basically anything else that plugs into a wall socket or USB port.
Game consoles might be an established 30 year old industry, but that doesn't mean that they can't bring something new to the table. For one, Apple can do what it's always done - leverage what people already have. Among the greatest selling points of the original iPhone that people forget was that it was essentially the first iPod Touch, which leveraged all the iTunes media people already had. The iPad leveraged all the iTunes media *and* all the apps people already had. If an iConsole can play iOS games, it's got years of purchased apps to work with. Additionally, Apple could make some sort of standardized controller mode, which would not only turn all the presently active iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads into control surfaces, it could breathe new life into the older models sitting in drawers collecting dust. All of that would, in turn, yield plenty of new game sales, which would open the door for more in-depth, $10 multiplayer games that would coexist with Angry Birds and Cut the Rope for use on the grocery line.
Apple sells a platform and an ecosystem, and I wouldn't put it past them to have a device with a screen that doesn't have the capacity to leverage iOS.
Microsoft has collected data that shows people are using the start menu less and less.
Microsoft is misunderstanding this data point. Just because people are using it less doesn't statistically say that it's less useful to them. It simply means that between the start menu, the quick launch/taskbar, and the desktop (barring people like me who use Stardock Objectdock, Launchy, or other third party add-ons), the start menu is the least used. However, it doesn't indicate how useful it is to them once it is opened. Also, Microsoft's stat gathering habits are opt-in, which usually precludes power users and corporate installations.
The best car analogy I could come up with is this: I live in New York, which means that we get decent amounts of snow each winter. if Volvo were to take usage statistics of my car in the summer and indicate that that the traction control was only enabled 30 trips out of the 1,000 or so trips I make with that car in a year, it doesn't indicate that traction control isn't valuable. I remember at least twice when the traction control saved me from an accident, so by any REAL metric it's incredibly useful, despite being a statistical anomaly.
i realize you were being rather sarcastic, but there's a difference between "There is an attack surface that, given enough time, a determined hacker can exploit" and "there's an exorbitantly easy exploit being built directly into the browser".
what I find to work is a combination of join.me and teamviewer. https://join.me/ is dead simple to get people to do "click the orange circle on the left...yes it to death until it gives you a nine digit number...what's the number...say 'yes' to let me remote control..." and then use that for userland stuff. One thing that join.me doesn't deal with well is UAC prompts - namely that it doesn't allow users to click on them, since it's sandboxed similar to the browser. If you're only going to hit one that isn't password protected, have the other side do it. Else, use the remote access credentials to set yourself up with teamviewer, then they don't have to read you credentials.
For most people on here, the issue isn't the existence of copyright - not even the summary states that. The issue is the fact that, in America and apparently the EU, most works copyrighted in our lifetimes will not enter the public domain until the overwhelming majority of us are dead. In America, the copyright laws have essentially ensured that the songs I hear on the radio today won't enter the public domain until my grandchildren are due for retirement.
Ideally, the working principle of copyrights should enable the author to recoup their time and monetary investments in a work, and then provide a platform upon which subsequent works can be based. If copyright worked the way it is supposed to, sampling in the style of Timbaland (roughly one old song sampled per new song) wouldn't be the norm; sampling as originally started with the Beastie Boys and De La Soul in the late 1980's and early 1990's would have continued throughout the decade (interesting article on sampling here: http://clearance13-8.com/AShortClearanceHistory.htm). That article discusses the fact that the budgets for sampling royalties for many of those records far exceeded the recording budgets, because everyone and their cousin wanted a slice of the album sales because a five second sample of a song recorded 30 years prior was being used.
The general consensus here, as much as I can group it together, is that copyright isn't *bad*, it's simply being abused. As a mobile DJ, my clients don't owe me money every time they watch their wedding video, nor would I expect them to. No one is saying that it's bad for your "nurtured stuff" to be protected and earn you a living. What is generally held with disdain is the fact that it's kept that way for decades past the point where the original work has earned the creators a profit, and THAT is what is being fought against.
Matthew 5:28. "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Hooray for thought crime.
Yes, but there is a difference between Christians following a moral code out of personal conviction and having the state government enforce it. I say this as one of the former, and realize that the particular case of TFA is a challenging situation in general - if a teen immediately deletes the image as a means of following the commitment to the former, would that then make him guilty to the latter?
As a final, slightly off-topic aside/rant, why is it that the general vibe I get from the Slashdot community is that all Christianity is akin to "the worst of Christianity"? Not all of us attend Westboro Baptist, y'know. Not all of us stand on street corners with bullhorns threatening fire and brimstone. Not all of us desire to politicize our faith or are trying to legislate morality (with the personal admitted exception of abortion; different DNA, different blood type, independent heartbeat, complete sets of organs doesn't make it fall under the same category of an appendectomy, though I'm mixed as to exactly what the ideal law *should* say). Not all of us aspire to be pastors so we can take up offerings to pay the insurance to our Mercedes (or support 'pastors' who do). There are those of us who pair prayer with action and actually help feed the poor and homeless, rather than just asking God for a miracle that doesn't involve our own actions. There are those of us who believe in ACTING like Christ first, THEN talking about Him. There are those of us who DO attempt to avoid looking upon a woman lustfully as to not objectify her in our own minds and thus treating her with a less than Christlike attitude (ask the best looking woman you know if they appreciate having a guy have an entire conversation with her chest, and whether she has more respect for a guy who maintains eye contact instead). There are those of us who AREN'T out to be judgmental, have respect for Muslims, homosexuals, and Atheists, rather than condemning them to hell as if we've got the power to do it.
I don't think the summary writer was referring to their new ability to run Windows in 2011. Instead, I believe the reference was to the fact that, at the time of release, Mac computers could "finally" support Windows, the "finally" implicitly describing the sentiment in 2006 when Boot Camp was first released.
Didn't HP have Splashtop for some time? Wasn't that essentially a super customized Xandros partition? I remember their 'Quickplay' from vintage 2005 was essentially enough Windows XP to allow PowerDVD to run, and coincidentally it tended to take longer to boot than just starting Windows...but Splashtop didn't completely suck.
Lacks Thunderbolt. Has no backlit keyboard. Conceded, though PCs are starting to get them.
Has no FireWire 800 But many are starting to ship with USB 3.0. My laptop does have a FW800 port, but for those that don't, it's trivial to get a FW800 Expresscard, a slot that the MBP doesn't have.
Has no multitouch trackpad. Synaptics has been doing multitouch trackpads for over a year now; all of the HP Envys have them, and again I'm certain that many others in the price range do. Personally I can't stand multitouch and disable it all, but I can def do that by choice.
128GB SSD instead of 256GB Out of the box, you're looking at the fact that that's what Lenovo offers. You value SSD drives, but I'm perfectly happy with spinning rust, and getting them aftermarket is invariably cheaper. I'll half concede this one, because Apple is about the only vendor who's got an economy of scale for SSD purchases.
Has a lower-res screen Again, this is Lenovo specific. 1920x1080 screens are incredibly common amongst laptops in the price range.
Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier. Admittedly I'm probably biased since my Origin EON17 is nearly 2 inches thick, so EVERYTHING is thinner than it, but this is only a selling point to people who value thin laptops, serving no other function. 10% heavier isn't a huge deal unless you're hiking.
Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector (how quaint). Knock VGA all you want, you'll find PLENTY more monitors that talk VGA than DisplayPort. Heck, if you walk into a board room with a DisplayPort, you're gonna need a VGA adapter anyway because you'll be hard pressed to find a projector that talks DisplayPort. Give me VGA any day.
Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive. This is also a good thing. The pop-out drives have no problem with odd-sized discs, and replacements can be had for $50 on eBay and pop out with two screws; the procedure takes less than five minutes even if you're not the least bit technical. Slot loading drives...not so much.
Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while the MBP has a separate analogue/digital line in/out ports. Handy, and conceded, but again USB/Expresscard slots can fill the gap for under $20 if it's really necessary...and to be honest, if you're going to need both external headphones and an external mic, you're probably better off using a separate audio interface anyway.
Doesn't have that aluminium case you thought was so important. Not the GP, but Thinkpads (by your own admission) do manage to use some pretty impressive plastic, since I've never seen a broken Thinkpad case.
As someone who has FINALLY gotten his FreeNAS to a point where I'm satisfied with its performance, I'd like to share a few pointers that may help you out...
1.) get a good SATA/SAS controller. I don't care how many SATA ports your motherboard has. Ignore that entirely and get a good PCI-Express SATA controller. the one that was recommended to me - and that ultimately solved my problem - was an IBM BR10i that was force-flashed the LSI IT firmware, along with a pair of SAS-SATA breakout cables. There are some other excellent SATA cards running around, but you won't do much better for a card that costs $42 from Sears and another $22 for the breakout cables from Monoprice. Whether you go that route or for another card, don't get one of the el cheapo PCI port multiplier controllers. Get a good one. 1a.) Get a good motherboard that has enough PCI-Express lanes to handle both your NIC and your SATA card under full load. The lower end mobos tend to share the lanes a bit too much which can turn into a bottleneck very easily. 2.) While I agree with the hesitance on the 3TByte drives, there are other reasons why going smaller is desirable. Namely the fact that swapping out a defective drive will take less time to go through the resilvering process if it requires less data to be written. My FreeNAS build uses 500GByte drives; while that might be a bit small for your needs, i think the 1TByte drives have reached a pretty good point of reliability, though you may get stuck with using the 2TByte drives if you need 16TBytes of storage in any rationally sized case. 3.) Check out NexentaStor as well and see if it fits your needs a bit better. Its single largest caveat is that it doesn't fare too well when installed on a USB flash drive; you'll need it stored on a real hard disk to work right. Second to that is that the Community Edition is limited to 18TBytes of storage, after that you need to get their commercial offerings. However, it does support RAIDz2 and the deduplication features of ZFS better than FreeNAS does, and assigning permissions is better handled than FreeNAS as well. 4.) Get at least 4GB of RAM, 8GB if you can afford it. while purpose-built appliances tend to do well with lesser amounts of RAM, ZFS gobbles it up quite well as to proivde good caching and fast write speeds under heavy compression algorithms. Feed the beast.
Try Opera. Seriously, they seem to be doing alright with not participating in the version number pissing match, they're fast, and they've got a lot of functionality built right in.
but Groupon's biggest issue is the fact that it's very difficult to differentiate itself. Yes, they were the first one to achieve any critical mass as to what they do. However, it doesn't really require any kind of exclusivity - very few people subscribe to multiple cable companies or cellular carriers, whereas it's much easier to subscribe to 3 or 4 Groupon clones. The kind of people who regularly use the service also likely use a few others, which means that Groupon's success hinges upon which companies are willing to do business with them as opposed to the clones. Similarly, Groupon users are only as loyal as long as Groupon can have better deals than everyone else, on products people want.
tl;dr: Groupon is in the business of selling bargains to bargain hunters, which means that loyalty rarely factors into the equation; the lack of loyal customers in a market with a low barrier to entry doesn't bode well for an IPO.
I have one of those lying around, too. Awesome machine. I don't have the Blu-Ray option, but I do have the SLI and the Ageia PhysX card in it. What amazes me about that thing is how quiet it is, even under super heavy loads.
Yeah, that is so last century. You've heard of the internet, right? Think of it as one big LAN....
Yes, but there are some of us out there who would rather have the added benefit of being able to crack open a case of Wild Cherry Pepsi and tortilla chips, fire up a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004/UT3/Counterstrike/HL2:DM/CoD4/Starcraft, and enjoy social interaction with our friends without having issues with ping times. Seriously, my friends and I have one every so often; it's a LOT of fun. You should try it sometime.
The Seagate Momentus XT drives are all 7200RPM. Western Digital Scorpio drives are 7200RPM, and the OEM Toshiba drive that came in my Dell XPS M1730 was 7200RPM. In most cases, you can get them for not that much more than the 5400RPM drives. However, many laptops don't come with them by default (unless they're higher end like this Razer machine or an Alienware or the high end MBP's) because the difference in battery life is generally more visible than the difference in I/O between the two technologies.
There was a Slashdot comment many years ago that had a great analogy to answer this question...
If you were to play The Sims, and one day they became sentient and said "The concept of a Programmer is ridiculous! who programmed the programmer?!?", we'd sit back and have a good laugh, for what applies inside the computer does not necessarily apply outside of it. Our means of coming into existence are beyond the understanding of The Sims, for they can only relate to data on a hard disk or in RAM. They have no concept as to how the computer came into existence, or the idea of a world which is not comprised of binary code. That doesn't make you or I any less real.
Quite bluntly, and what would probably come across as a cop out, is this: we're confined to our understanding of this universe. A Deity outside the confines of this universe, who has taken it upon Himself to create the universe as we understand it, is no more confined by these rules than we are of the rules that dictate the world in which the Sims live. However, if the observable universe is all that exists, and there is no "higher level" analogous to "meatspace" in relation to the world of The Sims, then the laws of the universe must either always apply, or come full circle to the 'selective application of the rules' that the GGP was saying causes the entire belief system to be called into question. At the very least, your question implies its counter: If causality does not apply to the origins of the universe, than under what conditions does causality not apply?
Thanks for the rational response; there are precious few on this thread.
That said, my question rephrased to accommodate your answer, would be this: According to a quick Google search, apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes and humans have 23. I'm completely down with the concept of natural selection; giraffes with longer necks can reach higher branches in a drought, making longer necked giraffes more likely to survive and reproduce. However, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a documented case of there being a "partial chromosome". Gradually going from 24 pairs of chromosomes to 23 doesn't seem like the kind of evolution that can happen over long spans of time. My back-of-the-Genetics-For-Dummies-book understanding is that if a chromosome doesn't sufficiently match up to pair with the other side of the DNA strand, it throws what's loosely equivalent to a hash fail on a bittorrent download. If this is the case, then a 47.8 chromosome ape wouldn't work too well, and thus couldn't devolve into a 47.6 over time to eventually settle down to a 46 chromosome human. If *that* is the case, then a large group of apes who have been in fairly decent lockstep with natural selection thus far (i.e. ideal for further evolution into human beings) couldn't gradually turn into humans at that level. At some point, they'd have had to shed the chromosome entirely, and have either done so such that there would have been either a 47 chromosome ape-human hybrid (which again would throw a "hash fail"), or two apes would have had to drop the chromosome entirely at the same point, and they themselves would have reproduced as a result of the 'sudden shift'. That kind of sudden change happening twice in the same group in a way that still provides a working means of reproduction again starts seeming like an extremely improbable event.
Slashdot Mirror
Your lack of providing a viable alternative is equally duly noted. Here's a handful of useful features off the top of my head...
--batch Facebook photo uploads.
--single-drag conversion/scaling/copying video files for playback on my Android phone, no matter what the source format.
--batch recoding of video files between formats.
--nonlinear video editing for those quick-and-dirty projects that don't necessarily require Adobe Premiere.
--waveform editing with VST plugin support.
--Lightscribe disc labeling.
--MP3 ripping with Gracenote support.
--DVD authoring, as elaborated upon in the GP post.
I can't give you the list from the parent, but here's an inexhaustive list for me personally:
--Nero 11 Mutimedia Suite. Yes, Nero has a Linux version, and there's K3B and similar burning solutions, but if you haven't seen the suite and EVERYTHNG it does, and tried to find me an equivalent list of tools, it'd be a hodgepodge at best.
--Mediashout. My laptop is used for some church events in order to do projection tasks. Mediashout plays anything Windows Media player will play, overlays song lyrics on top of motion backdrops, has dozens of versions of the Bible where any chapter/verse index is retrievable in seconds, and can play back DVD indexes on the secondary monitor. I've seen Opensong, and it gets the bare essentials down, but I've yet to see a Linux product that remotely parallels the capabilities of Mediashout (or Easyworship, or ProPresenter, or the dozen other applications of their kind).
--Serato. I've seen screengrabs of Mixx, and it looks pretty (an exception as I've perused Linux software), but my issues with Mixx were secondary. For those of you unfamiliar with Serato, it's a DJ performance application that integrates vinyl playback and MP3 catalogs. It does so using timecoded vinyl, which is essentially timestamps and a control tone pressed on a record. It then goes into a specialized audio I/O interface, and controls MP3 playback on a laptop. Mixx is supposed to do the same thing, but the problem is drivers. See, there are two reasons for having dedicated hardware for timecode. The first is admittedly a hardware dongle, but the second is that you NEED to have an extremely low latency when spinning vinyl. 8ms of latency when listening to music in Amarok is all well and good, but trying to beat juggle with it is like trying to code with both hands tied behind your back and typing with a toothpick in your teeth. I've tried my SL-3, my M-Audio Connectiv, and my old Stanton ScratchAmp. Admittedly it was about 2 years ago I did this, but I spent three hours trying to get an I/O interface to work under Linux, and Mixx wasn't having it. It's not necessarily a Mixx issue or a Serato issue, the bottom line is that, to my knowledge, there's no highly functional 2x2 low-latency I/O interface to work with a DJ timecode solution.
--Acronis True Image. Tell me about the 'dd' command you want. I'm sure it's wonderful, but Acronis still has some edge to it. First, there's virtually no need to read the fine manual; anyone with a brain stem can clone a hard disk. It allows for incremental backups, mounting images to pull out individual files, backing up to a network share (SMB/FTP), and dozens of other functions related to backup and disk imaging.
--Kristanix File Renamer Turbo. This one was actually a giveawayoftheday release that I liked so much I purchased out of principle. a simple yet powerful batch file renaming utility. Admittedly I don't use this one as often as some other titles on the list, but the breadth of abilities of this application I've yet to see matched in a linux program. I'm certain that there are CLI implementations of this, but another particularly awesome feature is being able to preview the changes before they're actually committed.
--ACID Music Studio/Sound Forge Audio Studio. Audacity is close, but there's a difference, and no, I don't mean vi/emacs difference, I mean vi/Notepad++ differences.
I'll end with the Adobe video production applications. KDenLive is nice, but it's not quite Adobe Premiere. Jahshakah is to the Premiere/Final Cut interface what Unity is to Gnome2. Cinelerra's "simple" multi-machine rendering looks awesome, but laying clips out on a timeline is still not as intuitive (and the bar for "intuitive" is pretty low when it comes to nonlinear editing). I'll give Blender credit for being a pretty worthy alternative to After Effects, so I'll fully admit that if I learned to use it a bit better I'd probably like it better. The biggest problem though is DVD authoring. Feel free to tell me that optical media is dead, but no bride I've ever m
There is no room in the market for Windows based tablets.
Also, there is a market for maybe six computers, and 640KBytes of RAM should be enough for anybody.
Yes, iOS and Android based tablets are sufficient for the overwhelming amount of consumer usage cases, but that doesn't mean that there is no room for a Windows tablet.
One thing that always irked me was the fact that there is no such thing as a true desktop replacement tablet. Overkill for OneNote, but I'm sure that I could find more than a few die-hard Mac-based graphic designers who would begrudgingly eyeball a Windows tablet if it had the guts to run Photoshop and drawing was possible on a 15" convertible screen. They'd be expensive no doubt, but consider that Wacom has an entire industry built around a stylus-based input peripheral. Half the graphic design majors I went to school with had one, and the other half did their best to bum one during final project week. Clearly it's not a machine that would appeal to everyone, but if IBM saw a market for a laptop with two screens and an integrated Wacom pen input, then I believe it's safe to say that more than a few people who make a lot more money than me saw a niche worth filling.
That's almost the point: Let Apple and Google duke it out for people who are happy with tablets that do Angry Birds and Facebook, because you're right - there's no room for Windows tablets there. Shipping yards, UPS drivers, lawyers, and graphic designers all represent sizeable niches that Apple doesn't appear to care to target, so a Windows based tablet that runs Windows applications and allows for pen-based input is HP's for the taking.
If the voice recognition system is anything like the ones I've dealt with, allow me to explain EXACTLY the issues that occur with such systems.
In many cases, the call starts with an uninterruptible intro statement that's slightly longer than some of the works of Shakespeare, to the point where the caller just puts the phone down, does their laundry, and comes back later.
The first menu says "tell me what you're calling about. You can say anything from "problems with my widget" to "I have a billing question"". There is no guidance given as to what to say, so we humans make the mistake of actually taking to the computer like a person and summarizing exactly what we're calling about.
The computer then makes a guess based on its transcription of the word "the", which of course has NOTHING to do with what we're actually calling about.
The computer either gives no feedback as to what it heard, or it does...and tries to send us through yet another maze of menus, and repeats the process over again. For a customer who's either looking to cease their service or is frustrated with a purchase, this does the CSR's *no* favors by further exasperating customers.
At this point, people tend to do one of two things: either they say "representative" repeatedly, or they say something like "schnitzelhaagen" so that the computer can't understand them and fails over to a human being.
In the case of cell phone companies specifically, they tend to ask for billing credentials NOW, instead of at the outset of a call, and then proceeds to put me on hold for enough time to do another load of laundry. It's an added insult that after giving my account password and the computer green-lighting me that the CSR then asks for the exact same account information I've already given - either pass it along or don't ask on the call, but don't make me repeat myself.
As a quick aside, the worst company in this regard is Napster. When I had questions, it would send me to an audio recording of various parts of The Fine Manual, as if I hadn't already read it. After burning through eight cellular minutes listening to troubleshooting steps I already knew, I remembered the magic words: "cancel my account". It was at THAT point that I actually got a person on the phone who could help troubleshoot my problem.
All of this goes back to the underlying problem: voice-based support lines are essentially DOS prompts without the keyboard. Siri seems to be different in that it can actually understand and interpret what the person means, but Siri has yet to be implemented into any 800-number support line I've called and still has her own limitations. If you're going to have a voice activated DOS prompt, don't tell callers that they can "say anything", because they can't. Give short, single-word commands, and not more than five per menu, and no more than two menus deep before you get to a person. If calls can't be sufficiently filtered into 25 possible routes, you may need to reconfigure who actually receives phone calls.
Siri gets a bit more grace from users because they know that there is an alternative, and because it's generally not problem based. Asking what the weather is like can get a free pass if they have to start the weather app instead. If someone is calling a support number, it means that they already have a problem and need a solution. When their focus is on that problem, you'll hear about a snowball fight in hell before anyone would opt into guessing commands on a command line in order to get their first problem fixed. The solution isn't much better - transcription accuracy may get better, but each person will uniquely describe the issue, so "accurate" and "meaningful to the computer" are two completely separate problems to solve. Thus, the better way is to have the people learn. Tell me: what does it say about a customer who can accurately navigate the support menu? Answer: it means that they've called WAY too many times before, which means that either they are really, REALLY dumb, or there's a legit issue with your pr
...you missed the night-and-day difference.
The hunched over 'nerd' writing a program for his calculator, is, at that very moment in time, acting upon a conscious choice to write a program for his calculator at the expense of being social. This is what's deemed 'nerdy' in the socially awkward sense of the term - the action upon the choice that was made.
The black guy is on a skateboard - that is *his* conscious choice. He does not fit the stereotype of having his pants hanging extremely low, nor that of holding a gun. In fact, the only conscious choice one could accuse the black guy of making is NOT dressing like the stereotype.
It is pre-judging to assume that an African American male will have a gun or have his pants on the ground due to the color of his skin. It is NOT prejudging to draw a conclusion from the visible actions taken upon a choice.
Could Microsoft have clout with the IRS?
Given that every desktop and likely plenty of the servers at the IRS run Windows and Office, I'd love to watch them say "audit our books, and we'll revoke every license to every Microsoft product purchased by every arm of the federal, state, and local governments". Now *that* would be be a funny show to watch.
You're missing a few things.
None of their most successful products were the first to the market. Being relatively late to market hasn't been a factor in Apple's success, because ultimately their formula tends to revolve around releasing technical products where the goal is releasing them sporting both physical dimensions and UIs that resonate with the majority, non-technical, non-Slashdot crowd with money in the bank. Luck played a part in it, but so did planning, engineering, and multiple trips back to the drawing board. I'm not an Apple fan by most metrics, but I do respect the fact that everyone I know either has an apple product, or wants one. You don't see that kind of pining for...basically anything else that plugs into a wall socket or USB port.
Game consoles might be an established 30 year old industry, but that doesn't mean that they can't bring something new to the table. For one, Apple can do what it's always done - leverage what people already have. Among the greatest selling points of the original iPhone that people forget was that it was essentially the first iPod Touch, which leveraged all the iTunes media people already had. The iPad leveraged all the iTunes media *and* all the apps people already had. If an iConsole can play iOS games, it's got years of purchased apps to work with. Additionally, Apple could make some sort of standardized controller mode, which would not only turn all the presently active iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads into control surfaces, it could breathe new life into the older models sitting in drawers collecting dust. All of that would, in turn, yield plenty of new game sales, which would open the door for more in-depth, $10 multiplayer games that would coexist with Angry Birds and Cut the Rope for use on the grocery line.
Apple sells a platform and an ecosystem, and I wouldn't put it past them to have a device with a screen that doesn't have the capacity to leverage iOS.
Apple's already going all pear shaped.
iCarly predicted this years ago.
Microsoft has collected data that shows people are using the start menu less and less.
Microsoft is misunderstanding this data point. Just because people are using it less doesn't statistically say that it's less useful to them. It simply means that between the start menu, the quick launch/taskbar, and the desktop (barring people like me who use Stardock Objectdock, Launchy, or other third party add-ons), the start menu is the least used. However, it doesn't indicate how useful it is to them once it is opened. Also, Microsoft's stat gathering habits are opt-in, which usually precludes power users and corporate installations.
The best car analogy I could come up with is this: I live in New York, which means that we get decent amounts of snow each winter. if Volvo were to take usage statistics of my car in the summer and indicate that that the traction control was only enabled 30 trips out of the 1,000 or so trips I make with that car in a year, it doesn't indicate that traction control isn't valuable. I remember at least twice when the traction control saved me from an accident, so by any REAL metric it's incredibly useful, despite being a statistical anomaly.
i realize you were being rather sarcastic, but there's a difference between "There is an attack surface that, given enough time, a determined hacker can exploit" and "there's an exorbitantly easy exploit being built directly into the browser".
what I find to work is a combination of join.me and teamviewer. https://join.me/ is dead simple to get people to do "click the orange circle on the left...yes it to death until it gives you a nine digit number...what's the number...say 'yes' to let me remote control..." and then use that for userland stuff. One thing that join.me doesn't deal with well is UAC prompts - namely that it doesn't allow users to click on them, since it's sandboxed similar to the browser. If you're only going to hit one that isn't password protected, have the other side do it. Else, use the remote access credentials to set yourself up with teamviewer, then they don't have to read you credentials.
For most people on here, the issue isn't the existence of copyright - not even the summary states that. The issue is the fact that, in America and apparently the EU, most works copyrighted in our lifetimes will not enter the public domain until the overwhelming majority of us are dead. In America, the copyright laws have essentially ensured that the songs I hear on the radio today won't enter the public domain until my grandchildren are due for retirement.
Ideally, the working principle of copyrights should enable the author to recoup their time and monetary investments in a work, and then provide a platform upon which subsequent works can be based. If copyright worked the way it is supposed to, sampling in the style of Timbaland (roughly one old song sampled per new song) wouldn't be the norm; sampling as originally started with the Beastie Boys and De La Soul in the late 1980's and early 1990's would have continued throughout the decade (interesting article on sampling here: http://clearance13-8.com/AShortClearanceHistory.htm). That article discusses the fact that the budgets for sampling royalties for many of those records far exceeded the recording budgets, because everyone and their cousin wanted a slice of the album sales because a five second sample of a song recorded 30 years prior was being used.
The general consensus here, as much as I can group it together, is that copyright isn't *bad*, it's simply being abused. As a mobile DJ, my clients don't owe me money every time they watch their wedding video, nor would I expect them to. No one is saying that it's bad for your "nurtured stuff" to be protected and earn you a living. What is generally held with disdain is the fact that it's kept that way for decades past the point where the original work has earned the creators a profit, and THAT is what is being fought against.
A nice church going, active father... I can only imagine what he's teaching his kids.
Do as I say, not as I do?
Matthew 5:28. "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Hooray for thought crime.
Yes, but there is a difference between Christians following a moral code out of personal conviction and having the state government enforce it. I say this as one of the former, and realize that the particular case of TFA is a challenging situation in general - if a teen immediately deletes the image as a means of following the commitment to the former, would that then make him guilty to the latter?
As a final, slightly off-topic aside/rant, why is it that the general vibe I get from the Slashdot community is that all Christianity is akin to "the worst of Christianity"? Not all of us attend Westboro Baptist, y'know. Not all of us stand on street corners with bullhorns threatening fire and brimstone. Not all of us desire to politicize our faith or are trying to legislate morality (with the personal admitted exception of abortion; different DNA, different blood type, independent heartbeat, complete sets of organs doesn't make it fall under the same category of an appendectomy, though I'm mixed as to exactly what the ideal law *should* say). Not all of us aspire to be pastors so we can take up offerings to pay the insurance to our Mercedes (or support 'pastors' who do). There are those of us who pair prayer with action and actually help feed the poor and homeless, rather than just asking God for a miracle that doesn't involve our own actions. There are those of us who believe in ACTING like Christ first, THEN talking about Him. There are those of us who DO attempt to avoid looking upon a woman lustfully as to not objectify her in our own minds and thus treating her with a less than Christlike attitude (ask the best looking woman you know if they appreciate having a guy have an entire conversation with her chest, and whether she has more respect for a guy who maintains eye contact instead). There are those of us who AREN'T out to be judgmental, have respect for Muslims, homosexuals, and Atheists, rather than condemning them to hell as if we've got the power to do it.
Just sayin'.
Manual mod +1 pedantic.
I don't think the summary writer was referring to their new ability to run Windows in 2011. Instead, I believe the reference was to the fact that, at the time of release, Mac computers could "finally" support Windows, the "finally" implicitly describing the sentiment in 2006 when Boot Camp was first released.
Didn't HP have Splashtop for some time? Wasn't that essentially a super customized Xandros partition? I remember their 'Quickplay' from vintage 2005 was essentially enough Windows XP to allow PowerDVD to run, and coincidentally it tended to take longer to boot than just starting Windows...but Splashtop didn't completely suck.
Lacks Thunderbolt.
Has no backlit keyboard.
Conceded, though PCs are starting to get them.
Has no FireWire 800
But many are starting to ship with USB 3.0. My laptop does have a FW800 port, but for those that don't, it's trivial to get a FW800 Expresscard, a slot that the MBP doesn't have.
Has no multitouch trackpad.
Synaptics has been doing multitouch trackpads for over a year now; all of the HP Envys have them, and again I'm certain that many others in the price range do. Personally I can't stand multitouch and disable it all, but I can def do that by choice.
128GB SSD instead of 256GB
Out of the box, you're looking at the fact that that's what Lenovo offers. You value SSD drives, but I'm perfectly happy with spinning rust, and getting them aftermarket is invariably cheaper. I'll half concede this one, because Apple is about the only vendor who's got an economy of scale for SSD purchases.
Has a lower-res screen
Again, this is Lenovo specific. 1920x1080 screens are incredibly common amongst laptops in the price range.
Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier.
Admittedly I'm probably biased since my Origin EON17 is nearly 2 inches thick, so EVERYTHING is thinner than it, but this is only a selling point to people who value thin laptops, serving no other function. 10% heavier isn't a huge deal unless you're hiking.
Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector (how quaint).
Knock VGA all you want, you'll find PLENTY more monitors that talk VGA than DisplayPort. Heck, if you walk into a board room with a DisplayPort, you're gonna need a VGA adapter anyway because you'll be hard pressed to find a projector that talks DisplayPort. Give me VGA any day.
Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive.
This is also a good thing. The pop-out drives have no problem with odd-sized discs, and replacements can be had for $50 on eBay and pop out with two screws; the procedure takes less than five minutes even if you're not the least bit technical. Slot loading drives...not so much.
Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while the MBP has a separate analogue/digital line in/out ports.
Handy, and conceded, but again USB/Expresscard slots can fill the gap for under $20 if it's really necessary...and to be honest, if you're going to need both external headphones and an external mic, you're probably better off using a separate audio interface anyway.
Doesn't have that aluminium case you thought was so important.
Not the GP, but Thinkpads (by your own admission) do manage to use some pretty impressive plastic, since I've never seen a broken Thinkpad case.
As someone who has FINALLY gotten his FreeNAS to a point where I'm satisfied with its performance, I'd like to share a few pointers that may help you out...
1.) get a good SATA/SAS controller. I don't care how many SATA ports your motherboard has. Ignore that entirely and get a good PCI-Express SATA controller. the one that was recommended to me - and that ultimately solved my problem - was an IBM BR10i that was force-flashed the LSI IT firmware, along with a pair of SAS-SATA breakout cables. There are some other excellent SATA cards running around, but you won't do much better for a card that costs $42 from Sears and another $22 for the breakout cables from Monoprice. Whether you go that route or for another card, don't get one of the el cheapo PCI port multiplier controllers. Get a good one.
1a.) Get a good motherboard that has enough PCI-Express lanes to handle both your NIC and your SATA card under full load. The lower end mobos tend to share the lanes a bit too much which can turn into a bottleneck very easily.
2.) While I agree with the hesitance on the 3TByte drives, there are other reasons why going smaller is desirable. Namely the fact that swapping out a defective drive will take less time to go through the resilvering process if it requires less data to be written. My FreeNAS build uses 500GByte drives; while that might be a bit small for your needs, i think the 1TByte drives have reached a pretty good point of reliability, though you may get stuck with using the 2TByte drives if you need 16TBytes of storage in any rationally sized case.
3.) Check out NexentaStor as well and see if it fits your needs a bit better. Its single largest caveat is that it doesn't fare too well when installed on a USB flash drive; you'll need it stored on a real hard disk to work right. Second to that is that the Community Edition is limited to 18TBytes of storage, after that you need to get their commercial offerings. However, it does support RAIDz2 and the deduplication features of ZFS better than FreeNAS does, and assigning permissions is better handled than FreeNAS as well.
4.) Get at least 4GB of RAM, 8GB if you can afford it. while purpose-built appliances tend to do well with lesser amounts of RAM, ZFS gobbles it up quite well as to proivde good caching and fast write speeds under heavy compression algorithms. Feed the beast.
Best of luck!
Try Opera. Seriously, they seem to be doing alright with not participating in the version number pissing match, they're fast, and they've got a lot of functionality built right in.
but Groupon's biggest issue is the fact that it's very difficult to differentiate itself. Yes, they were the first one to achieve any critical mass as to what they do. However, it doesn't really require any kind of exclusivity - very few people subscribe to multiple cable companies or cellular carriers, whereas it's much easier to subscribe to 3 or 4 Groupon clones. The kind of people who regularly use the service also likely use a few others, which means that Groupon's success hinges upon which companies are willing to do business with them as opposed to the clones. Similarly, Groupon users are only as loyal as long as Groupon can have better deals than everyone else, on products people want.
tl;dr: Groupon is in the business of selling bargains to bargain hunters, which means that loyalty rarely factors into the equation; the lack of loyal customers in a market with a low barrier to entry doesn't bode well for an IPO.
I have one of those lying around, too. Awesome machine. I don't have the Blu-Ray option, but I do have the SLI and the Ageia PhysX card in it. What amazes me about that thing is how quiet it is, even under super heavy loads.
Yeah, that is so last century. You've heard of the internet, right? Think of it as one big LAN....
Yes, but there are some of us out there who would rather have the added benefit of being able to crack open a case of Wild Cherry Pepsi and tortilla chips, fire up a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004/UT3/Counterstrike/HL2:DM/CoD4/Starcraft, and enjoy social interaction with our friends without having issues with ping times. Seriously, my friends and I have one every so often; it's a LOT of fun. You should try it sometime.
The Seagate Momentus XT drives are all 7200RPM. Western Digital Scorpio drives are 7200RPM, and the OEM Toshiba drive that came in my Dell XPS M1730 was 7200RPM. In most cases, you can get them for not that much more than the 5400RPM drives. However, many laptops don't come with them by default (unless they're higher end like this Razer machine or an Alienware or the high end MBP's) because the difference in battery life is generally more visible than the difference in I/O between the two technologies.
There was a Slashdot comment many years ago that had a great analogy to answer this question...
If you were to play The Sims, and one day they became sentient and said "The concept of a Programmer is ridiculous! who programmed the programmer?!?", we'd sit back and have a good laugh, for what applies inside the computer does not necessarily apply outside of it. Our means of coming into existence are beyond the understanding of The Sims, for they can only relate to data on a hard disk or in RAM. They have no concept as to how the computer came into existence, or the idea of a world which is not comprised of binary code. That doesn't make you or I any less real.
Quite bluntly, and what would probably come across as a cop out, is this: we're confined to our understanding of this universe. A Deity outside the confines of this universe, who has taken it upon Himself to create the universe as we understand it, is no more confined by these rules than we are of the rules that dictate the world in which the Sims live. However, if the observable universe is all that exists, and there is no "higher level" analogous to "meatspace" in relation to the world of The Sims, then the laws of the universe must either always apply, or come full circle to the 'selective application of the rules' that the GGP was saying causes the entire belief system to be called into question. At the very least, your question implies its counter: If causality does not apply to the origins of the universe, than under what conditions does causality not apply?
Thanks for the rational response; there are precious few on this thread.
That said, my question rephrased to accommodate your answer, would be this: According to a quick Google search, apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes and humans have 23. I'm completely down with the concept of natural selection; giraffes with longer necks can reach higher branches in a drought, making longer necked giraffes more likely to survive and reproduce. However, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a documented case of there being a "partial chromosome". Gradually going from 24 pairs of chromosomes to 23 doesn't seem like the kind of evolution that can happen over long spans of time. My back-of-the-Genetics-For-Dummies-book understanding is that if a chromosome doesn't sufficiently match up to pair with the other side of the DNA strand, it throws what's loosely equivalent to a hash fail on a bittorrent download. If this is the case, then a 47.8 chromosome ape wouldn't work too well, and thus couldn't devolve into a 47.6 over time to eventually settle down to a 46 chromosome human. If *that* is the case, then a large group of apes who have been in fairly decent lockstep with natural selection thus far (i.e. ideal for further evolution into human beings) couldn't gradually turn into humans at that level. At some point, they'd have had to shed the chromosome entirely, and have either done so such that there would have been either a 47 chromosome ape-human hybrid (which again would throw a "hash fail"), or two apes would have had to drop the chromosome entirely at the same point, and they themselves would have reproduced as a result of the 'sudden shift'. That kind of sudden change happening twice in the same group in a way that still provides a working means of reproduction again starts seeming like an extremely improbable event.