However if you spend all of your time looking for a form of life you can only have wild theories about you're going to miss all the mundane forms which is analguous to the life on Earth. There may be crazy and varied forms of life based on all sorts of things but there's no way to know of looking for them. Looking for carbon based life is much easier because we can look for anything remotely smiliar to our planet.
The silicon based life argument is betting a bit old. Silicon has similar properties to carbon but it forms very weak bonds and very short chains. The bonds silicon makes aren't going to stand up to much meaning you need extraordinarily extreme conditions for that type of life to survive but with those sort of extremes the sort of processes you could catalyze the formation of life are likely too extreme for said life to even form.
Bacteria surviving without water is a much more plausible and likely scenario. Bacteria can be found just about anywhere which is why is makes it a rather fruitless exercise to go hunting around for it. It probably abounds in the most likely and unlikely of places. Pointing out somewhere that can possibly support microbial life not needing water isn't as impressive as finding a place that could support multicellular life on a large scale. You could throw a space rock and hit a bunch of places that will support bacteria, not so with multicellular and more complex lifeforms which is what we're interested in.
I don't see how this is much of a suprise. Sun's got a vested interest in anything Unix or Unix-like. They also have a vested interest in promoting their supplimental products. If they can sell someone a bunch of Linux client systems that work with their server products that customer is going to be likely to pick up their server products as well. Microsoft is less interested in selling you a site license for Windows XP Pro than they are interested in selling you a support contract for XP Server and all associated programs. The same goes for Office, if Microsoft gets Office XP there's a good chance BackOffice will end up there as well.
Right now Sun has the 20% software to fill 80% of people's needs. When users don't have to administer it themselves, just run it, Linux is not a bad system at all to deal with. GNOME is a very good desktop environment and there are plenty of apps to substitute the collection you're going to find on the typical computer lab PC. StarOffice is not a competitor to Office XP in many respects but it does serve the needs of most general users. StarOffice in a school would work just fine in most cases.
I'm suprised they didn't try this any earlier really. They've had their Blade systems out for a while now without much fanfare. Ray systems are the same way, they've been available for a while and aside from the initial rumbling when they were introduced nothing particularly impressive has been announced regarding them. Sun has managed in the past to get their foot in the door of many college CS departments because of Java development packages. Maybe now they are trying to get their head in the door by showing off some of their other products.
I think the only way this will really succeed is if the systems are priced very attractively and no one else comes out with a better Linux offering. All Sun needs in this situation to fail miserably is to have IBM or HP spit out some cheapo box with Linux on it. If they're not interested Apple could drop the price of the eMac down to $799 or less. There's a bunch of schools jumping all over eMacs at $1000, lowering the price would only increase the demand. I think Sun's bad timing could make them the losers in the not-Microsoft PC market.
Just because the interface is attractive looking doesn't mean it has any attractive functionality. Who cares if it looks like Windows if developers don't have any consistancy in their apps? If all of the menus look like Windows but follow no standard convention what good is the software?
Traditionally UNIX apps have always had a dozen different conceptions of interfaces. Take ten command line apps with even a maginally similar function and none of them will use the same command flags or command format. Too many open source developers carry on this ridiculous tradition with their GUI apps leading to confusion and inefficiency. There's more to good GUI development than merely looking like Windows. Despite its problems at least apps on Windows act the same way.
Record companies exist to milk every ounce of talent out of people before casting them to the wayside. A one hit wonder is not a loss to a record company, a no hit wonder is. One hit wonders and megastar bands are both money makers. A record contract works like this:
Record company Scheiße Records sends out scouts to find up and coming bands. A scout comes back with this new find from Orange County in California. Scheiße writes up a contract that has several provisions in it. The first is the band signs over all rights to their music to Scheiße with royalties paid to them from distribution (record sales, radio airplay, miscellenous things with their band name on it they license to sell) in return. There's also a provision in there saying the band is contracted for X number of records which is usually an insanely large number all things considered. Then there are things like promotion of the record which entails tours and other such stuff.
The kicker is the small print, besides the record company owning your work and thus having you by the balls, they include what are called recoupables. The record company recoups all expenses involved in your contract. Everything from production cost of your CDs to the studio time of your recording sessions to your new guitar is taken out of your bottom line. The record company can't lose money on you even if you only have a single hit ever because everything they shell out comes back to them, usually with a bit of interest.
A record companies doesn't care if you don't have the talent to produce 6 albums. They usually set the number exceedingly high so a band faults on their contract bot having enough creative energy to produce that much work. Like I said, they don't lose money on one hit wonders. If you're that band you come out with the sore ass because your portion of the money made is being picked at by all the expenses you incurred. Poor music is just a result of a record exec needing a quick fix for a couple quarters so they can gouge radio stations and the CD buying public wanting their craptacular album. One hit wonders are all part of the scam in fact. Without them a record company would have lean periods between the Nivanas, Pearl Jams, and Aerosmiths rearing their musical heads.
That "Linux is about choice" argument is getting a little stale boys. Choice is having options available to you. The ability to use both KDE and GNOME apps on the same system is condusive to having choice. However if you're stuck with two incompatible systems how productive are you REALLY going to be when you use those systems to do more than tinker on them? Red Hat moving in this direction is forward thinking and in my opinion intelligent. Consistancy is important not just for novice computer users but experienced ones as well. Most experienced users of any type of computer commit certain actions to reflexive muscle memory, when two different programs act similarly that is one less set of motions to memorize or confuse when you're in a hurry.
There's also the important fact that GNOME and KDE are open source. I can fork both projects right now and do what I want with them. Anyone can which is the nature of the GPL. Whining because someone took your code and extended it makes the concept of open source seem a bit retarded doesn't it. People want source code for everything and it all ought to be open and free but as soon as someone changes something all hell and whining breaks loose. Red hat could have tried to contribute their changes back into both respective code trees but why should they wait? Should everyone stick with inferior kernel VM systems until they are officially included in the release tree? Come on.
So you've moved into a house tract or condo complex with fiber providing cable television, your telephone service, and internet connectivity. How much is it going to cost to make sure your telephone service meets the federal requirement for uptime?
The law says your primary telephone service needs to have a full time backup in times of emergency and otherwise shouldn't be going down like a drunken prom date. If you look up many fiber provider's terms of service you'll notice you HAVE to pay for supplimentary copper lines from a regular phone company to meet said requirements. Are these fiber lines going to have backup generators and all that redundant fanciness or will these home owners need trditional copper lines?
It is a bad idea because (in SJ's view) it is a market that will boom every couple of years and then drop out entirely unless you are putting oodles of cash behind it. Palm started off with a bang because they started small and made an organizer that could do more than just store information. Then the internet bubble expanded and several million Silicon Valley, Houston, Seattle, and New York business types picked them up to manage stuff. Once they had them though they didn't need new ones and that is where Palm is now. If you bought a Palm Vx you do not need an m500 unless you feel the need to waste money. It is a small easily saturated market.
There's also the issue of profitability. The Newton was one of Apple's least profitable products ever. Even if sales had been outrageous at the best of times for the Newton right before it was dropped the margins were horrible. Newton's were badass systems but expensive to produce due to their included functionality. Even if the PIE division had been spun off, which I wish would have happened, it might not even be around today. The ability to sell units doesn't mean much if you don't make any money off those sales.
The GameGear came out a bit behind the GameBoy and while the color screen was cool it never got as much play from me as my GB did. Even the original GB's batteries would last forever, Squints from Sandlot fooor-eh-ver and sticking them in the freezer for a little bit would make them go just a bit longer. The GG on the other hand went through batteries like they were going out of style. No amount of cooling said batteries was going to get them to eek out a little more game time. The drawback to the backlight was that the GG ran hot and sucked power. A heavy round of Columns would be over due to dead batteries far sooner than a heavy session of Tetris. The GG was cool no argument but it seriously let me down in times of gaming need.
YaST is a big front end for an RPM based distro. Shit dude mount a SuSE disc, it is loaded to the brim with RPMs and SRPMs what is so proprietary about that? Neither is rc.config a registry-like (sic) mechanism. I traded SuSE for Debian a while ago but I used it for a good couple years. While they might not be much better than RedHat in some ways they are certainly no worse. Lately they've shown a lot of initiative unifying their layout with other distros.
You don't need a full Firelight D.R.E.A.M implementation inside of an NLE but you do need the ability to adequately deal with audio tracks. You don't need to do ADR in the editing room but you do need the ability to manage the tracks coming out of ADR which this program does not allow for in any reasonable way. Audio management in low end video systems is piss poor and typically consists of a fade capability and maybe track placement. You need a bit more than that to work well with audio coming in from an outside source like keyframe synching. You're bringing up great examples that cost thousands of dollars, the market this program is intended for is not a high budget 35mm film but instead a small POS shot on a Sony HandiCam. Why bring up an Avid when talking about low end production?
That is a ridiculous fucking argument. Unless you're making silent films audio is a HUGE part of any NLE system. There needs to be sound effects and dialog and music in a film for anyone to be remotely interested in it. The audio editing in iMovie is little more than adding and removing tracks from the project. Premiere's audio editing (the last time I used it) was pretty much the same quality in terms of features for audio.
It would be stupid to include photo editing components int oa word processor, a video editing system however logically needs audio editing features in order to be fully functional. Why should you have to export your audio tracks into an external program in order to do scrubbing or effects editing? That is like Photoshop requiring you to export your alpha channels into an external program in order to edit them separately from your RGB channels. Audio is an integral part of the video experience yet is treated like a redheaded stepchild when it comes to NLE editors.
One option you could use it a sort of cheap-ass retina tracker. I'm seeing something like this:
A small IR laser and detector combo are mounted on an arm somewhere just above her normal field of vision. The IR laser is set to pulse in maybe 1/10th second internals. The reflection properties of her eyelids and sclera (the white part I believe) are going to be different from the pupil. Light at the right frequencies will bounce off the skin and sclera but pass through the pupil. A relatively simple logic chip can detect and count any changes in reflectivity.
The point of the device would be for her to star into the laser emitter (a very very very weak laser) for a number of seconds and an alarm buzzer would go off. It is something that will work light or dark and rely only on the movement of her eyes which as you said is about all the mobility she has right now. Staring at the little emitter for say 3 seconds would be enough to have the alarm sound until someone woke up and turned it off or checked to see what was the matter. As long as she can open her eyes and move them a little she would have the ability to signal for help. All these components could be purchased from Radio Shack. It is basically just a break-beam detection system with some subtle changes in functionality. You can learn just about everything you need to build such a system yourself from two books available at Radio Shack. THey're both Engineer's Mini Notebooks written by Forrest M. Mims III. The first is entitled "Electronic Sensor Circuits & Projects" and the second is "Timer, Op Amp & Optoelectronic Circuits & Projects".
In the Electronic Sensors books check out the pulsed beam projects on pages 132 and 133, they are in essence what I'm suggesting. In the Timer Op Amp book the dark activated alerter on page 65 would be another component in the system. The sensor housing could be attached to an arm held on her wheelchair or a headband or something so the sensor would remain pretty much out of her field of view but easy enough to focus on when she needed to. Even if this idea is retarded check out those two books from Radio Shack, they're easy as can be to understand and have a good number of projects you might be able to adapt in your own system or someone else's.
Where the fuck do you think ISPs get their portal information from? A majority of ISPs have homepages that just rip off larger portal sites like Yahoo. More ISPs doesn't make the internet any cheaper. For fuck sake man, in 1998 there were more fucking ISPs than you could shake a very large stick at and the price of internet service wasn't any cheaper. Let me give you a hint oh low rated one, ISPs need portals, portals like Yahoo and eBay are what spurn the fucking desire for people to use the web. No one gives a shit about sitting on the internet doing nothing. I don't pay for a cable modem to sit and gawk at it all fucking day. I want to visit websites using it. If I can't get to sites I want to visit because my ISP hasn't paid some tariff I drop the ISP. I have no brand loyalty to Earthlink nor Charter, in fact fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses.
I don't give a shit about Earthlink or Charter as much as I give a shit about whoever made the coaxial cable plugged into my modem. They are just wires connecting me from point A to point B. The only reason they get money from me is to connect me from point A to point B. Sites like eBay and Yahoo don't give a shit either, without those sites Earthlink and Charter can't attract users because there's no reason to use the web. The same goes for ANY internet service be it e-mail or instant messaging. If Earthlink says its users can't use AIM anymore because AOL doesn't pay their access fees, people stop using Earthlink and pick someone else. AOL isn't going to pay Earthlink a damn dime, neither is Yahoo or eBay. All the ability to charge tariffs like this does is fragment the web into haves and have-nots. Stick it on your turn table and spin it.
Large buttons are large targets and thus easy to hit with a mouse. Fitts' law being applied and all. Large buttons aren't Dublo Lego blocks meant for kiddies, they are obvious to the eye and easy to hit with the cursor with as little time as possible aiming. I have my cursor speeds set extraordinarily high to make up for the time lost clicking retardedly small buttons on my relatively high resolution screen. Large buttons don't make the users less intelligent, it shows the designers of the UI were indeed more intelligent.
You're kidding right? Do you think an portal site paying out dough to ISPs is not going to pass on the cost to its customers? Did you just get here on the slow boat or something?
If a portal like Yahoo had to pay money to reach their users they would just stop any and all free services. How the fuck are they supposed to be profitable with little to no revenues from advertisements, operational overhead, plus tariffs they'd have to pay to ISPs. Where in the positive cashflow in that situation? I'll give you a hint, there is none. ISPs aren't going to charge end users any less. The data capacity of the fiber in the US has risen emensely in the past seven years but the price of internet access has remained relatively fixed.
This is a stupid idea. Portals providing free services to users are not going to fork over money in order to access the ISP's users. If anything they will in return charge ISPs for their services going out to their network and the net change in cash will be 0. All charging tolls does is piss off users. Like the other poster said, people would switch to the one ISP that didn't block access. Likely portals would only allow access from the ISP that wasn't acting like an assclown anyways. If the one ISP charged too much thse customers would go to the next ISP that allowed access to anything and had low rates. You'll notice this pan has no steam behind it because there isn't universal support for the idea. Without a giant cartel of ISPs the plan has no way of working. In a service oriented business the cartel would last as long as it would take for a single upstart to allow free cheap access to everything.
I don't see the correlation, the DX9 compliant hardware needs to support pretty huge shader programs that can be executed in a single pass. This keeps up the fillrate at the price of fancy effects. You could easily render parts of FF:TSW in realtime on current video cards. The NV30 and R300 are capable of doing Renderman quality shaders in a single pass which is PDQ compared to general purpose processors chugging away at them. Programmable pixel shaders make the big difference with 3D graphics as they can pull some realistic looking shots out of an otherwise lifeless image. Compare the Quake 1 engine to the Doom 3 engine. Doom 3 is using current cards to the extent of their abilities and spitting out graphics that look like CG shots from feature films. The in games from D3 look like the cut scenes of FF7.
All of that clicking takes a fraction of the time typing out play/path/to/my/mp3 does. Unless you can type a hundred characters per second you're not going to be moving very quickly on the text prompt. It just took me about a second total to launch Winamp. It took another two seconds to browse to my They Might Be Giants directory and select all the songs in there to play. I type pretty quick but I'm not going to be able to move that quick through the command prompt. Your example also breaks down with the shortcut and the alias comparison. A desktop shortcut takes me a fraction of a second to double click. Done. It takes me a little longer than that to fire up a prompt and type techo1.
Up until the GF3 you couldn't find a consumer card with programmable pixel shaders. Without prescise programmable shading done in hardware a good deal of effects just aren't possible. Current GF cards only support 64-bit integer lighting calculations which works fine if you want simple lighting but for some realism, high prescision floating point shader math is required. DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 are both going to require floating point lighting calculations and thus hardware will need to support it as the R300 and NV30 do.
If you used every feature of the GF2 or 3 you could get some really nice looking graphics. Whether you would get them running fast enough to play a deathmatch style game is the important question though. Developers can't just make a game for the GF4 and say everyone else can upgrade or else. Even the folks at id develop with hardware in mind that ought to be mainstream when their products are released. Quake 3 ran fine on the TNT2 and the original GeForce 256. Doom 3 is designed around the GF2/3 line of cards and their features.
I've been using ibiblio for a long time, back long ago when it was still SunSITE and now I read through your feature articles which I think many times are top notch. One thing I have noticed about the entire project however is how much support you have from various organizations. That sort of baseline support coupled with the ideals of public domain and free as in speech information are what I think makes ibiblio so awesome. However it this leads to my mainquestion, how replicatable is the ibiblio project.
I think ibiblio HAS to be as large of a project as it is because it is one of so few projects of a similar nature. How unique is your organization's situation in terms of third party support? Not everyone can exactly plop down and decide to run a massive network dedicated to freedom of information and dissemination. Outside of university CS departments there's little support for the sort of information ibiblio propogates, I think the next largest group in that arena would be the OSDN network. A large part of any organization's focus and drive is going to be the people involved, obviously the people you have have working on your poject aren't replicatable but thereare like minded folk in the world. Besides the personal specifics of your group how replicatable is the ibiblio project? Is it something any dedicated group of individuals could accomplish if they set out to do it or did it require the right people at the right place at the right time with the Sun at a particular angle to happen?
You can have games whose graphics get confused with photos with DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards. Not only do they have to support floating point math of the pixel shaders but also need more pixel pipelines (8 is the minimum IIRC) and support larger shader code sizes. With the NV30 or R300 anyone utilizing half of their features is going to have damn good looking graphics. DX9 and OpenGL2.0 are also going to require support for FDRL (full dynamic range lighting) that is coupled with the floating point pixel shading. What makes shit look real when rendered by an engine like PRMan and Mental Ray are the shaders and lighting options. nVidia and ATi are adding support for Renderman and Mental Ray quality shaders in hardware.
Also it isn't usually feasible even with tons of processing power to add more triangles to a scene than you need. A super high quality picture of a maple tree could be easily done by making a rectangle with a transparency map, bump map, and texture map fitted on top of it. A single maple leaf object can have as many instances as you need and only require that one bit of memory space for the model and maps. Wait until Doom3 and UT2002 based games hit the shelves. AthlonXP 3000+s with their GF6Pt will be outputting shit that looks like FF:TSW in realtime. Aki won't need a billion vertexes, just some cool shader tricks and support for hardware transforms and patches.
The Quake3 boost from a GF2MX to GTS is pretty minimal, somewhere in the realm of 10-15fps with High Detail settings. I got the GTS for free in trade for a GF2MX I flashed to work on a PowerMac as there are no GTS drivers for MacOS. They retail for about $40 for a cheapass card to $60 for a fully featured one. Save up and get a GF3Ti or something, it has programmable pixel shaders and higher internal memory bandwidth which means an even better fillrate than the GTS.
It seems like the editors have a particular list of text strings they grep all incoming submissions for, apparently among these is AGP8x. This comparison is ridiculous even for Rob to point heedlessly to. The wbesite itself is Yet Another Anandtech/Tom's Hardware ripoff design with an article that reads like a SiS fanboy on crack.
The whining and crying about AGP 8x is a bit premature and the AGP 3.0 standard has been pretty much supplanted in usefulness by graphics card manufacturers. Having a dedicated high speed port for graphics hooked up to the northbridge is a good design idea. It frees the traditionally low bandwidth nb-sb connection from needing to carry lots of graphics data. The memory sharing available in AGP has become increasingly useless as worthwhile graphics cards have scads of local memory now. About the only thing an AGP apeture is good for is an i845G chipset board or some other cheap piece of shit HPaq sticks in their computers.
The AGP 2.0 spec isn't much of a bottleneck either. Case in point, replacing the TNT2 based video card in my dual P3 500 with a GF2GTS more than doubled the 3DMark2001 SE score from 926 to 2068. The board is an IWill DBD-100 with a 2x AGP port on it. The fillrate or poly rendering ability was not adversely affected by the AGP 2x port, the only thing keeping the 3DMark score down is the relatively slow processors (as 3DMark is single threaded) and the low FSB bandwidth.
The fillrate of an ATi R300 or nVidia NV30 isn't going to affected much by an AGP bandwidth on ONLY 1GB/s. Most cards based on these chips will end up having >100MB of on board memory. It won't be too terribly long before the video card in the PC has more and faster memory than the system's main memory. Even Doom3's 80MB of textures isn't going to really stress a 4x AGP card, it would take all of a seventh of a second to transfer all 80MB of textures. Maybe AGP 8x will be on my upgrade path when the load time of a game's textures take a perceptible amount of time to load into the video card's local memory.
Rob it isn't Microsoft's fucking fault your AGP card doesn't work properly, you're probably stuck with some old VA Lin^H^H^HSoftware POS box. My system doesn't have any problems running reliably under Windows XP and I don't think too many other people running Windows 2000 or XP are having too many problems either. When do we get to mod the editors as -1 Troll?
How would slashdot charge a Salon style subscription fee? They don't own the comments posted nor the stories posted unless they're articles written by one of the editors which rarely happens. No one is going to pay to read Jon fucking Katz.
Salon actually produced content which they owned and could charge money for. Unless Rob and crew hire active posters to say shit about the article and get them to sign over rights to the work they couldn't sell shit. The subscription system as is is more of a tip jar than true subscription. Rob hiring members is not very likely considering his low opinion of the comments on the site.
If VA was going to go Chapter 7 they'd unload OSDN on the first company that would have them. Even though Linux is 80% hype a big name would still loave to have OSDN in the fold. VA gets scads of free advertising and just plain mindshare by owning OSDN. Slashdot and the other "news" sites handle the Linux hype machine for the OSDN sites while the real work gets done in Development and Media sites with complimentary stuff being sold through ThinkGeek. Anyone with even a remote interest in Linux would want OSDN's portfolio. I don't see slashdot tanking any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
However if you spend all of your time looking for a form of life you can only have wild theories about you're going to miss all the mundane forms which is analguous to the life on Earth. There may be crazy and varied forms of life based on all sorts of things but there's no way to know of looking for them. Looking for carbon based life is much easier because we can look for anything remotely smiliar to our planet.
The silicon based life argument is betting a bit old. Silicon has similar properties to carbon but it forms very weak bonds and very short chains. The bonds silicon makes aren't going to stand up to much meaning you need extraordinarily extreme conditions for that type of life to survive but with those sort of extremes the sort of processes you could catalyze the formation of life are likely too extreme for said life to even form.
Bacteria surviving without water is a much more plausible and likely scenario. Bacteria can be found just about anywhere which is why is makes it a rather fruitless exercise to go hunting around for it. It probably abounds in the most likely and unlikely of places. Pointing out somewhere that can possibly support microbial life not needing water isn't as impressive as finding a place that could support multicellular life on a large scale. You could throw a space rock and hit a bunch of places that will support bacteria, not so with multicellular and more complex lifeforms which is what we're interested in.
I don't see how this is much of a suprise. Sun's got a vested interest in anything Unix or Unix-like. They also have a vested interest in promoting their supplimental products. If they can sell someone a bunch of Linux client systems that work with their server products that customer is going to be likely to pick up their server products as well. Microsoft is less interested in selling you a site license for Windows XP Pro than they are interested in selling you a support contract for XP Server and all associated programs. The same goes for Office, if Microsoft gets Office XP there's a good chance BackOffice will end up there as well.
Right now Sun has the 20% software to fill 80% of people's needs. When users don't have to administer it themselves, just run it, Linux is not a bad system at all to deal with. GNOME is a very good desktop environment and there are plenty of apps to substitute the collection you're going to find on the typical computer lab PC. StarOffice is not a competitor to Office XP in many respects but it does serve the needs of most general users. StarOffice in a school would work just fine in most cases.
I'm suprised they didn't try this any earlier really. They've had their Blade systems out for a while now without much fanfare. Ray systems are the same way, they've been available for a while and aside from the initial rumbling when they were introduced nothing particularly impressive has been announced regarding them. Sun has managed in the past to get their foot in the door of many college CS departments because of Java development packages. Maybe now they are trying to get their head in the door by showing off some of their other products.
I think the only way this will really succeed is if the systems are priced very attractively and no one else comes out with a better Linux offering. All Sun needs in this situation to fail miserably is to have IBM or HP spit out some cheapo box with Linux on it. If they're not interested Apple could drop the price of the eMac down to $799 or less. There's a bunch of schools jumping all over eMacs at $1000, lowering the price would only increase the demand. I think Sun's bad timing could make them the losers in the not-Microsoft PC market.
Just because the interface is attractive looking doesn't mean it has any attractive functionality. Who cares if it looks like Windows if developers don't have any consistancy in their apps? If all of the menus look like Windows but follow no standard convention what good is the software?
Traditionally UNIX apps have always had a dozen different conceptions of interfaces. Take ten command line apps with even a maginally similar function and none of them will use the same command flags or command format. Too many open source developers carry on this ridiculous tradition with their GUI apps leading to confusion and inefficiency. There's more to good GUI development than merely looking like Windows. Despite its problems at least apps on Windows act the same way.
Record companies exist to milk every ounce of talent out of people before casting them to the wayside. A one hit wonder is not a loss to a record company, a no hit wonder is. One hit wonders and megastar bands are both money makers. A record contract works like this:
Record company Scheiße Records sends out scouts to find up and coming bands. A scout comes back with this new find from Orange County in California. Scheiße writes up a contract that has several provisions in it. The first is the band signs over all rights to their music to Scheiße with royalties paid to them from distribution (record sales, radio airplay, miscellenous things with their band name on it they license to sell) in return. There's also a provision in there saying the band is contracted for X number of records which is usually an insanely large number all things considered. Then there are things like promotion of the record which entails tours and other such stuff.
The kicker is the small print, besides the record company owning your work and thus having you by the balls, they include what are called recoupables. The record company recoups all expenses involved in your contract. Everything from production cost of your CDs to the studio time of your recording sessions to your new guitar is taken out of your bottom line. The record company can't lose money on you even if you only have a single hit ever because everything they shell out comes back to them, usually with a bit of interest.
A record companies doesn't care if you don't have the talent to produce 6 albums. They usually set the number exceedingly high so a band faults on their contract bot having enough creative energy to produce that much work. Like I said, they don't lose money on one hit wonders. If you're that band you come out with the sore ass because your portion of the money made is being picked at by all the expenses you incurred. Poor music is just a result of a record exec needing a quick fix for a couple quarters so they can gouge radio stations and the CD buying public wanting their craptacular album. One hit wonders are all part of the scam in fact. Without them a record company would have lean periods between the Nivanas, Pearl Jams, and Aerosmiths rearing their musical heads.
That "Linux is about choice" argument is getting a little stale boys. Choice is having options available to you. The ability to use both KDE and GNOME apps on the same system is condusive to having choice. However if you're stuck with two incompatible systems how productive are you REALLY going to be when you use those systems to do more than tinker on them? Red Hat moving in this direction is forward thinking and in my opinion intelligent. Consistancy is important not just for novice computer users but experienced ones as well. Most experienced users of any type of computer commit certain actions to reflexive muscle memory, when two different programs act similarly that is one less set of motions to memorize or confuse when you're in a hurry.
There's also the important fact that GNOME and KDE are open source. I can fork both projects right now and do what I want with them. Anyone can which is the nature of the GPL. Whining because someone took your code and extended it makes the concept of open source seem a bit retarded doesn't it. People want source code for everything and it all ought to be open and free but as soon as someone changes something all hell and whining breaks loose. Red hat could have tried to contribute their changes back into both respective code trees but why should they wait? Should everyone stick with inferior kernel VM systems until they are officially included in the release tree? Come on.
I hope you get modded up +1 Funny. You're twenty pounds of funny in a five pound sack.
So you've moved into a house tract or condo complex with fiber providing cable television, your telephone service, and internet connectivity. How much is it going to cost to make sure your telephone service meets the federal requirement for uptime?
The law says your primary telephone service needs to have a full time backup in times of emergency and otherwise shouldn't be going down like a drunken prom date. If you look up many fiber provider's terms of service you'll notice you HAVE to pay for supplimentary copper lines from a regular phone company to meet said requirements. Are these fiber lines going to have backup generators and all that redundant fanciness or will these home owners need trditional copper lines?
It is a bad idea because (in SJ's view) it is a market that will boom every couple of years and then drop out entirely unless you are putting oodles of cash behind it. Palm started off with a bang because they started small and made an organizer that could do more than just store information. Then the internet bubble expanded and several million Silicon Valley, Houston, Seattle, and New York business types picked them up to manage stuff. Once they had them though they didn't need new ones and that is where Palm is now. If you bought a Palm Vx you do not need an m500 unless you feel the need to waste money. It is a small easily saturated market.
There's also the issue of profitability. The Newton was one of Apple's least profitable products ever. Even if sales had been outrageous at the best of times for the Newton right before it was dropped the margins were horrible. Newton's were badass systems but expensive to produce due to their included functionality. Even if the PIE division had been spun off, which I wish would have happened, it might not even be around today. The ability to sell units doesn't mean much if you don't make any money off those sales.
The GameGear came out a bit behind the GameBoy and while the color screen was cool it never got as much play from me as my GB did. Even the original GB's batteries would last forever, Squints from Sandlot fooor-eh-ver and sticking them in the freezer for a little bit would make them go just a bit longer. The GG on the other hand went through batteries like they were going out of style. No amount of cooling said batteries was going to get them to eek out a little more game time. The drawback to the backlight was that the GG ran hot and sucked power. A heavy round of Columns would be over due to dead batteries far sooner than a heavy session of Tetris. The GG was cool no argument but it seriously let me down in times of gaming need.
YaST is a big front end for an RPM based distro. Shit dude mount a SuSE disc, it is loaded to the brim with RPMs and SRPMs what is so proprietary about that? Neither is rc.config a registry-like (sic) mechanism. I traded SuSE for Debian a while ago but I used it for a good couple years. While they might not be much better than RedHat in some ways they are certainly no worse. Lately they've shown a lot of initiative unifying their layout with other distros.
You don't need a full Firelight D.R.E.A.M implementation inside of an NLE but you do need the ability to adequately deal with audio tracks. You don't need to do ADR in the editing room but you do need the ability to manage the tracks coming out of ADR which this program does not allow for in any reasonable way. Audio management in low end video systems is piss poor and typically consists of a fade capability and maybe track placement. You need a bit more than that to work well with audio coming in from an outside source like keyframe synching. You're bringing up great examples that cost thousands of dollars, the market this program is intended for is not a high budget 35mm film but instead a small POS shot on a Sony HandiCam. Why bring up an Avid when talking about low end production?
That is a ridiculous fucking argument. Unless you're making silent films audio is a HUGE part of any NLE system. There needs to be sound effects and dialog and music in a film for anyone to be remotely interested in it. The audio editing in iMovie is little more than adding and removing tracks from the project. Premiere's audio editing (the last time I used it) was pretty much the same quality in terms of features for audio.
It would be stupid to include photo editing components int oa word processor, a video editing system however logically needs audio editing features in order to be fully functional. Why should you have to export your audio tracks into an external program in order to do scrubbing or effects editing? That is like Photoshop requiring you to export your alpha channels into an external program in order to edit them separately from your RGB channels. Audio is an integral part of the video experience yet is treated like a redheaded stepchild when it comes to NLE editors.
One option you could use it a sort of cheap-ass retina tracker. I'm seeing something like this:
A small IR laser and detector combo are mounted on an arm somewhere just above her normal field of vision. The IR laser is set to pulse in maybe 1/10th second internals. The reflection properties of her eyelids and sclera (the white part I believe) are going to be different from the pupil. Light at the right frequencies will bounce off the skin and sclera but pass through the pupil. A relatively simple logic chip can detect and count any changes in reflectivity.
The point of the device would be for her to star into the laser emitter (a very very very weak laser) for a number of seconds and an alarm buzzer would go off. It is something that will work light or dark and rely only on the movement of her eyes which as you said is about all the mobility she has right now. Staring at the little emitter for say 3 seconds would be enough to have the alarm sound until someone woke up and turned it off or checked to see what was the matter. As long as she can open her eyes and move them a little she would have the ability to signal for help. All these components could be purchased from Radio Shack. It is basically just a break-beam detection system with some subtle changes in functionality. You can learn just about everything you need to build such a system yourself from two books available at Radio Shack. THey're both Engineer's Mini Notebooks written by Forrest M. Mims III. The first is entitled "Electronic Sensor Circuits & Projects" and the second is "Timer, Op Amp & Optoelectronic Circuits & Projects".
In the Electronic Sensors books check out the pulsed beam projects on pages 132 and 133, they are in essence what I'm suggesting. In the Timer Op Amp book the dark activated alerter on page 65 would be another component in the system. The sensor housing could be attached to an arm held on her wheelchair or a headband or something so the sensor would remain pretty much out of her field of view but easy enough to focus on when she needed to. Even if this idea is retarded check out those two books from Radio Shack, they're easy as can be to understand and have a good number of projects you might be able to adapt in your own system or someone else's.
Where the fuck do you think ISPs get their portal information from? A majority of ISPs have homepages that just rip off larger portal sites like Yahoo. More ISPs doesn't make the internet any cheaper. For fuck sake man, in 1998 there were more fucking ISPs than you could shake a very large stick at and the price of internet service wasn't any cheaper. Let me give you a hint oh low rated one, ISPs need portals, portals like Yahoo and eBay are what spurn the fucking desire for people to use the web. No one gives a shit about sitting on the internet doing nothing. I don't pay for a cable modem to sit and gawk at it all fucking day. I want to visit websites using it. If I can't get to sites I want to visit because my ISP hasn't paid some tariff I drop the ISP. I have no brand loyalty to Earthlink nor Charter, in fact fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses.
I don't give a shit about Earthlink or Charter as much as I give a shit about whoever made the coaxial cable plugged into my modem. They are just wires connecting me from point A to point B. The only reason they get money from me is to connect me from point A to point B. Sites like eBay and Yahoo don't give a shit either, without those sites Earthlink and Charter can't attract users because there's no reason to use the web. The same goes for ANY internet service be it e-mail or instant messaging. If Earthlink says its users can't use AIM anymore because AOL doesn't pay their access fees, people stop using Earthlink and pick someone else. AOL isn't going to pay Earthlink a damn dime, neither is Yahoo or eBay. All the ability to charge tariffs like this does is fragment the web into haves and have-nots. Stick it on your turn table and spin it.
Large buttons are large targets and thus easy to hit with a mouse. Fitts' law being applied and all. Large buttons aren't Dublo Lego blocks meant for kiddies, they are obvious to the eye and easy to hit with the cursor with as little time as possible aiming. I have my cursor speeds set extraordinarily high to make up for the time lost clicking retardedly small buttons on my relatively high resolution screen. Large buttons don't make the users less intelligent, it shows the designers of the UI were indeed more intelligent.
You're kidding right? Do you think an portal site paying out dough to ISPs is not going to pass on the cost to its customers? Did you just get here on the slow boat or something?
If a portal like Yahoo had to pay money to reach their users they would just stop any and all free services. How the fuck are they supposed to be profitable with little to no revenues from advertisements, operational overhead, plus tariffs they'd have to pay to ISPs. Where in the positive cashflow in that situation? I'll give you a hint, there is none. ISPs aren't going to charge end users any less. The data capacity of the fiber in the US has risen emensely in the past seven years but the price of internet access has remained relatively fixed.
This is a stupid idea. Portals providing free services to users are not going to fork over money in order to access the ISP's users. If anything they will in return charge ISPs for their services going out to their network and the net change in cash will be 0. All charging tolls does is piss off users. Like the other poster said, people would switch to the one ISP that didn't block access. Likely portals would only allow access from the ISP that wasn't acting like an assclown anyways. If the one ISP charged too much thse customers would go to the next ISP that allowed access to anything and had low rates. You'll notice this pan has no steam behind it because there isn't universal support for the idea. Without a giant cartel of ISPs the plan has no way of working. In a service oriented business the cartel would last as long as it would take for a single upstart to allow free cheap access to everything.
I don't see the correlation, the DX9 compliant hardware needs to support pretty huge shader programs that can be executed in a single pass. This keeps up the fillrate at the price of fancy effects. You could easily render parts of FF:TSW in realtime on current video cards. The NV30 and R300 are capable of doing Renderman quality shaders in a single pass which is PDQ compared to general purpose processors chugging away at them. Programmable pixel shaders make the big difference with 3D graphics as they can pull some realistic looking shots out of an otherwise lifeless image. Compare the Quake 1 engine to the Doom 3 engine. Doom 3 is using current cards to the extent of their abilities and spitting out graphics that look like CG shots from feature films. The in games from D3 look like the cut scenes of FF7.
All of that clicking takes a fraction of the time typing out play /path/to/my/mp3 does. Unless you can type a hundred characters per second you're not going to be moving very quickly on the text prompt. It just took me about a second total to launch Winamp. It took another two seconds to browse to my They Might Be Giants directory and select all the songs in there to play. I type pretty quick but I'm not going to be able to move that quick through the command prompt. Your example also breaks down with the shortcut and the alias comparison. A desktop shortcut takes me a fraction of a second to double click. Done. It takes me a little longer than that to fire up a prompt and type techo1.
Up until the GF3 you couldn't find a consumer card with programmable pixel shaders. Without prescise programmable shading done in hardware a good deal of effects just aren't possible. Current GF cards only support 64-bit integer lighting calculations which works fine if you want simple lighting but for some realism, high prescision floating point shader math is required. DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 are both going to require floating point lighting calculations and thus hardware will need to support it as the R300 and NV30 do.
If you used every feature of the GF2 or 3 you could get some really nice looking graphics. Whether you would get them running fast enough to play a deathmatch style game is the important question though. Developers can't just make a game for the GF4 and say everyone else can upgrade or else. Even the folks at id develop with hardware in mind that ought to be mainstream when their products are released. Quake 3 ran fine on the TNT2 and the original GeForce 256. Doom 3 is designed around the GF2/3 line of cards and their features.
I've been using ibiblio for a long time, back long ago when it was still SunSITE and now I read through your feature articles which I think many times are top notch. One thing I have noticed about the entire project however is how much support you have from various organizations. That sort of baseline support coupled with the ideals of public domain and free as in speech information are what I think makes ibiblio so awesome. However it this leads to my mainquestion, how replicatable is the ibiblio project.
I think ibiblio HAS to be as large of a project as it is because it is one of so few projects of a similar nature. How unique is your organization's situation in terms of third party support? Not everyone can exactly plop down and decide to run a massive network dedicated to freedom of information and dissemination. Outside of university CS departments there's little support for the sort of information ibiblio propogates, I think the next largest group in that arena would be the OSDN network. A large part of any organization's focus and drive is going to be the people involved, obviously the people you have have working on your poject aren't replicatable but thereare like minded folk in the world. Besides the personal specifics of your group how replicatable is the ibiblio project? Is it something any dedicated group of individuals could accomplish if they set out to do it or did it require the right people at the right place at the right time with the Sun at a particular angle to happen?
You can have games whose graphics get confused with photos with DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards. Not only do they have to support floating point math of the pixel shaders but also need more pixel pipelines (8 is the minimum IIRC) and support larger shader code sizes. With the NV30 or R300 anyone utilizing half of their features is going to have damn good looking graphics. DX9 and OpenGL2.0 are also going to require support for FDRL (full dynamic range lighting) that is coupled with the floating point pixel shading. What makes shit look real when rendered by an engine like PRMan and Mental Ray are the shaders and lighting options. nVidia and ATi are adding support for Renderman and Mental Ray quality shaders in hardware.
Also it isn't usually feasible even with tons of processing power to add more triangles to a scene than you need. A super high quality picture of a maple tree could be easily done by making a rectangle with a transparency map, bump map, and texture map fitted on top of it. A single maple leaf object can have as many instances as you need and only require that one bit of memory space for the model and maps. Wait until Doom3 and UT2002 based games hit the shelves. AthlonXP 3000+s with their GF6Pt will be outputting shit that looks like FF:TSW in realtime. Aki won't need a billion vertexes, just some cool shader tricks and support for hardware transforms and patches.
The Quake3 boost from a GF2MX to GTS is pretty minimal, somewhere in the realm of 10-15fps with High Detail settings. I got the GTS for free in trade for a GF2MX I flashed to work on a PowerMac as there are no GTS drivers for MacOS. They retail for about $40 for a cheapass card to $60 for a fully featured one. Save up and get a GF3Ti or something, it has programmable pixel shaders and higher internal memory bandwidth which means an even better fillrate than the GTS.
It seems like the editors have a particular list of text strings they grep all incoming submissions for, apparently among these is AGP8x. This comparison is ridiculous even for Rob to point heedlessly to. The wbesite itself is Yet Another Anandtech/Tom's Hardware ripoff design with an article that reads like a SiS fanboy on crack.
The whining and crying about AGP 8x is a bit premature and the AGP 3.0 standard has been pretty much supplanted in usefulness by graphics card manufacturers. Having a dedicated high speed port for graphics hooked up to the northbridge is a good design idea. It frees the traditionally low bandwidth nb-sb connection from needing to carry lots of graphics data. The memory sharing available in AGP has become increasingly useless as worthwhile graphics cards have scads of local memory now. About the only thing an AGP apeture is good for is an i845G chipset board or some other cheap piece of shit HPaq sticks in their computers.
The AGP 2.0 spec isn't much of a bottleneck either. Case in point, replacing the TNT2 based video card in my dual P3 500 with a GF2GTS more than doubled the 3DMark2001 SE score from 926 to 2068. The board is an IWill DBD-100 with a 2x AGP port on it. The fillrate or poly rendering ability was not adversely affected by the AGP 2x port, the only thing keeping the 3DMark score down is the relatively slow processors (as 3DMark is single threaded) and the low FSB bandwidth.
The fillrate of an ATi R300 or nVidia NV30 isn't going to affected much by an AGP bandwidth on ONLY 1GB/s. Most cards based on these chips will end up having >100MB of on board memory. It won't be too terribly long before the video card in the PC has more and faster memory than the system's main memory. Even Doom3's 80MB of textures isn't going to really stress a 4x AGP card, it would take all of a seventh of a second to transfer all 80MB of textures. Maybe AGP 8x will be on my upgrade path when the load time of a game's textures take a perceptible amount of time to load into the video card's local memory.
Rob it isn't Microsoft's fucking fault your AGP card doesn't work properly, you're probably stuck with some old VA Lin^H^H^HSoftware POS box. My system doesn't have any problems running reliably under Windows XP and I don't think too many other people running Windows 2000 or XP are having too many problems either. When do we get to mod the editors as -1 Troll?
How would slashdot charge a Salon style subscription fee? They don't own the comments posted nor the stories posted unless they're articles written by one of the editors which rarely happens. No one is going to pay to read Jon fucking Katz.
Salon actually produced content which they owned and could charge money for. Unless Rob and crew hire active posters to say shit about the article and get them to sign over rights to the work they couldn't sell shit. The subscription system as is is more of a tip jar than true subscription. Rob hiring members is not very likely considering his low opinion of the comments on the site.
If VA was going to go Chapter 7 they'd unload OSDN on the first company that would have them. Even though Linux is 80% hype a big name would still loave to have OSDN in the fold. VA gets scads of free advertising and just plain mindshare by owning OSDN. Slashdot and the other "news" sites handle the Linux hype machine for the OSDN sites while the real work gets done in Development and Media sites with complimentary stuff being sold through ThinkGeek. Anyone with even a remote interest in Linux would want OSDN's portfolio. I don't see slashdot tanking any time soon.