Having the logo on the CD is actually kind of important legally. When you buy a CD with the CD-Audio logo on it and it doesn't work in your particular CD player you can only take it back to the store or write a letter to the record company. They produced a red book compliant CD and the fact your particular CD player doesn't read it yet reads all others must be some fluke. No harm no foul. However if a record company sells you a CD that purports to be a CD-Audio disc yet doesn't comply with the specification all Cd players comply with and doesn't work in any CD players they will get fucked in court. Conducting business in bad faith is a surefire way to piss off a judge and get fined and have to pay out buckets of cash to everyone you sold defective products to. Compliance with an industry accepted standard is important in terms of liability. People aren't not going to buy a CD because it doesn't have the "Compact Disc" logo on it but if they do buy it and something is wrong with it a class action lawsuit would be pretty easy especially if you could prove more likely than not (all you need in a civil trial) a record company was hocing non-compliant CDs as compliant CDs and win a fat class action lawsuit. Imagine an album going triple platinum only to cost a record company three times the revenues in legal fees and penalties.
IIRC the CD-DA protection scheme takes advantages of differences between the CD-DA (Red Book) and CD-ROM (Yellow Book) specifications. The manufacturer fucks with the TOC (table of contents) on the disc to make it appear to a computer's CD-ROM as a data disc or not report correctly as an audio disc which for the most part keeps typical CD playback programs from functioning. If you've ever tried using an enhanced CD (Blue Book spec) CD with some software CD players you can't get to the audio track because the system refused to look at anything but the data session. The problem Philips has with the CD protection is messing with the TOC breaks the rules set in the red book specification. Another method used involved putting intentional errors on the audio tracks that under the red book spec a CD player skips over but a yellow book compliant CD-ROM will loop back trying to read the corrupted frame. Both of these schemes allow the CDs to be played on red book compatible CD players but cause problems when they're put in CD-ROM drives.
Extra bit depth in audio samples is good. There are a good number of instruments whose fidelity are just not done justice by a CD's 16 bits of depth. Alot of people probably would never miss it as they listen to shit music that gets screwed to hell by engineers attempting to make the music catchier on the radio. Seriously go listen to a local philharmonic orchestra playing a famous piece of music, then go pick up a CD of the same piece. If you can't tell the difference there is something wrong with your ears. As for the extra sampling frequency just because you can't hear it doesn't mean you aren't necessarily aware of it. James Boyk at Caltech wrote a paper basically saying that many musical instruments produce most of their accoustic energy at frequencies above 20khz and you can "hear" them without being conciously aware of them. It is also possible to get people to hear sounds above 20khz is enough power is applied to them. People hear different frequencies better than other frequencies thus seeming that some sounds are louder than others even when they have the same energy. This is why alot of modern music sounds better with Winamp plugins that pump the bass in the music, the lower frequencies don't need as much power to be heard loudly and thus adding bass gives the sound an extra bump in a person's perception. Proper engineering can easily make the most use out of the higher bit depth and increased sampling frequency of DVD-A. If you've bought a good quality DVD with DTS sound and have a DTS receiver you've heard 24-bit 96khz sound. At least that is what is on the disc (in compressed form) depending on your speakers you might not get much response above 20khz.
I didn't say he expressed anger about people making money off software. He and the FSF make it explicit that they are not against making money off software. I don't see how I in any way said something to the contrary. Secondly even if Microsoft changed the format of a.doc Stallman has no room to whine because the point of his movement is to make free implimentations of commercial software. If Microsoft changes their format, free software ought to change their filters to handle the new change in the format. That is my fucking point man, Stallman whines about Microsoft owning a format yet in his own diatribes he advocates free software replacing non free software. Sending an e-mail saying "I don't like Microsoft's secret format" doesn't replace or augment non-free software with free software. It is just whining. You might want to work on your reading comprehension before hitting the submit button.
What took this realization so long to form? For any software developer your target market always has areas that you can't get to. These areas are systems running an OS or a platform you don't or can't support. A write once run everywhere system effectively gets rid of unreachable markets. Hence the emergence of Java in the middleware scene. You can get your middleware apps, hardware, and app server all from different vendors as long as it is J2EE compliant. As the Java 2 VMs speed up you're going to see a good deal more end user apps available because the people making them are going to have a wide market they can sell to. Microsoft now wants to do the same thing just with a Microsoft label.
Most of the Linux kids probably don't remember when you could get Windows NT for four ISAs. The problem was you could get Windows on an Alpha or PPC system but you couldn't find any software to run. The whole.NET initive if Microsoft learning from marketing mistakes of the past. Instead of getting the OS onto different platforms just get the API onto different platforms and then make a way for people to write the software once so they can run it anywhere. There's no need to patch software in order to localize it, you just run the code which is compiled on the fly and runs.
RMS really should put the GNU license on the weed he is smoking. Then everyone could freely examine, copy, and reidistribute it until their little hearts burst. Typical Stallman hypocracy. He gets mad someone would dare charge money for their software so he goes and makes his own versions to play with. The mantra of the FSF's mantra is "if there isn't a free version of what you need, make it and open the code". This would imply that noone ought ever bitch about having problems with anything ever because they shouldb e following the mantra of roll your own. Stallman can make all sorts of free stuff but is beleagured by files in.doc format? Shouldn't be he improving whatever software he has so it works with.doc files?
I also wonder how true this is considering Microsoft publishes books whose sole purpose is to describe and document Word and Excel file formats. Weird.
First let me say good work on sounding like a complete fucking idiot. Your points don't seem to make alot of sense. The guy says people call IBM and Sun when they want a real Unix solution, not someone like...VA Linux. Besides Caldera the only companies you pointed out were...imagine that big time Unix vendors. You should also see Linux compatibility in Solaris and AIX as an insult rather than a compliment to your zealotry. By adding Linux compatibility to big real Unicies both companies are allowing you to run hippie software on real powerful machines and a real powerful OS. Irix is alive and kicking and SGI doesn't look like they're abandoning it. When exactly did the movie effects industry switch to Linux? Seems like all the big computer effect houses like ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney all go for big workstations from SGI and Sun to do most of the real work. Ohhh wow you can run Renderman on Linux. Impressive.
Give you whiny Linux kids another ten years and you'll just be whiny Linux using adults. What is funny about Linux users is there are so few developers and so many users. A majority of Linux users will never ever contribute any code to any project ever. They will however complain about something that doesn't have the features they want or not all features work correctly. Yet when this feature lacking program is compared to a fully featured and robust closed source program they will hypocritically acclaim it as the best thing since sliced bread. Despite them never contributing code they think of themselves on par with open source developers who actually DO contribute code. Thus all open source software was produced by "the Linux community" and notby some dudes that are better programmers than all the other dudes. Recompiling your kernel != development.
All NASA had to do to hit a mirror on the moon with a laser was shoot it into a general area. Since they could stick a decent telescope on the ground the mirror wouldn't have to reflect ALL of the light produced by the laser on the ground. Therefore divergence wasn't a big problem seeing laser light reflected off the moon. It is mathematically solvable to stick a laser in orbit and shoot somebody on the ground but from an engineering standpoint it is unlikely to happen (at least from a geosynchronous orbit like he mentioned).
First you need a gigantic lasing chamber to produce alot of photons. You need enough so the energy at the focal point of the laser is high enough to actually do some samage and not just make somebody feel unseasonally warm. Then you need the best optics ever created in the history of mankind to keep the beam from diverging so much that it becomes an ineffective weapon. As for a power source you'd need a really really big solar panel or at the very least a fission reactor to produce enough energy to feed the lasing device. From a much lower orbit the mechanics become alot more feasible (making up for divergence from a 100 mile altitude or 22,000 mile altitude, take your pick) but pretty impractical for a tactical assault weapon. Shooting a small target whilst moving at hundreds of miles per hour from 100 miles (possibly more if you're firing at an angle) is pretty damn hard. I would bet by the time you had to worry about being shot from space by a laser wielding satillite you could beam up to it in your person space suit and kick the optics out of alignment.
If you want to learn Mac hardware grab an old Beige G3, a copy of Darwin, and a good book on Forth. You'll learn all about the fucking things. Why can't you buy a book to learn to administer Solaris or pick up an old Solaris 8 x86 CD and install that? I've got both Solaris 7 and 8 I got from the "free for developers" program. If you want to learn Sun hardware that good book on Forth ought to be included so you can learn your way around OF.
Heaven forbid you need to learn to use a new operating system to get a job done. You can't just tell management they need to switch operating systems because all you know is OpenBSD, they'll can your ass and get somebody with real skills. I suggest Solaris Essencials and Advanced Solaris Administration as well as your favourite Forth book and some heavy fucking reading.
Just because someone would develop it doesn't mean anybody would use it. For every one person who wants some cohesion between all the different apps they use in Linux there's five who say they want it their way or no way. If you pool Linux users, some are using KDE, some use GNOME, others just use WindowMaker, some may just to twm or no GUI whatsoever. If you poll Windows users they're all using Explorer and Mac users are all using Finder. Some say the lack of choice is a detriment (these are the people who use one of the above mentioned graphical kits and will continue to use it no matter what).
Why would KDE and GNOME developers need to break X compatibility in the first place? Both toolkits are abstracted from X enough so that both toolkits are pretty portable and only use X on Linux because that is what everbody else uses and some apps talk directly to Motif or Xlib which some people feel they can't live without.
If you picked up thesignal somewhere it would be pretty easy to determine exactly where it came from. When you pick up a signal that has been traveling for trillions of miles it is little more than a point of EM radiation coming from a specific point. Once you have the LOS it has been traveling you can do a shift analysis ro figure our how far away the planet was that sent it. Then you turn your high powered telescope onto that point and blamo you see a little blue ball orbiting a slightly green star next to a trinary system in the middle of nowhere. That assumes of course they're in this galaxy, for most people outside our galaxy they'd be able to tell what galaxy the signal came from and hopefully from the content of the message figure out what sort of people sent it. Let's just hope the goats.cx trolls don't get ahold of a powerful transmitter or we're going to be paved over to make for an interstellar overpass.
Every time there is some issue like this someone generally regarded as a pundit steps up to tell why said issue either is a problem or a boon to humanity. I remember two years ago economists at big and famous business schools were explaining why the economy was going to support continuous growth for the next decade and how we were entering a bull market boom period. Funny looking back on that now.
Same goes for broadband. I don't think it is content that is keeping people from getting broadband rolled out. Shit I got broadband just because it was impractical reading slashdot at -1 whenever Windows or Linux is mentioned in a story. The fact I can now download decent looking Star Wars trailers and keep my systems up to date is just an added bonus. For some people it's games. A number of kids playing Q3A or Counter-Strike don't know what the fuck a ping means but they know when their ping is below 30ms they can kick the shit out of the other kids with a 100ms or higher ping. Non-tech savvy AOL users also know that with a cable modem they don't get hung up on and they can download all the shareware they want without having to wait for it. Their kids know they can log onto (insert P2P file sharing client here) and get all the new singles from (insert popular bandname here). Everybody knows that porn downloads better with broadband than with a modem. Ergo content is not the problem.
It costs alot of money for a cable company to add digital services to users, same for phone companies adding DSL service. It costs the companies alot more to make service available than what they charge users monthly. This used to work well with dial-up access because connections weren't persistant and unless you were selling business accounts you didn't have to promise anybody any particular amount of service. However moving this business model to persistant connections that can easily max out your trunk line's bandwidth makes for out of business cable and DSL providers. Saying anybody needs more content just leads to even more problems. As you add content to an already taxed infrastructure means the infrastructure only gets MORE taxed as users are added. The nothing on argument is just ridiculous. I think poor Lawrence just sees everything as a content problem nowadays. Broadband is an expensive proposition because it requires an overhaul of equipment and a more efficient business model and the companies providing it can't or at least don't rely on their traditional revenue model of advertising. Phone companies made the money back on residential lines by charging more for business services. Now however more residences are getting DSL and cable companies haven't been able to interupt data services to add advertising so both providers are losing money. Content shmontent, broadband or a lack thereof is about the mula.
PacBell did the same thing to me in my old apartment. I had to wait a month just to get my self install kit, then I had to wait another month for them to answer my calls because the DSL signal wasn't turned on for my apartment. Then two more months for them to figure out they screwed up my phone line (it was lovely getting a 24kbps connection all the time where I had been getting 48kbps regardless of whether or not I used the high pass filter on the line) and two months after that for them to stop billing me for DSL service that never worked. Then PacBell accused me of stealing the self install kit because they didn't realize they had gotten it back and it had been signed for by the warehouse manager. And that was how I spent my summer vacation.
I don't thi9nk you hit the nail on the head with your third point, though the first two were pretty good. Say you have your own website hosted on your symmetric cable modem service. It becomes popular (to make it interesting lets say you have a streaming mp3 broadcast) and you're constantly hitting your upload cap of say 1mbps. That 30,40,50 dollars you're being charged for a 1mbps link is ALOT less than the actual cost of a 1mbps link to the internet. You're basically paying for a high speed link to your CO which may or may not give you that fast of a connection to the rest of the world. If you are getting 1mbps to the rest of the world you're costing the cable company a pretty penny in transfer fees from whoever they've leased their trunk line to the internet from. Unless they charge you for that extra cost (like hosting and colocation companies do for transfer rates in excess of a monthly quota) they're going to lose money and it becomes impossible for them NOT to cap your upstreamd bandwidth to something reasonable.
I think that Google's data transfer woes is a convincing example behind the argument of reading archived information after the medium becomes obsolete. Supposed Google or somebody else didn't decide to do this for another couple of years, they might not have even found equipment to read old tapes. There's alot of companies that spend beaucoup cash keeping their 20 year old equipment around just so they can keep a record of business transactions 20 years old.
Re:Another key feature: cost
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 4, Informative
Like I said to the other dude, how much did the iMac cost originally when it first came out in 98? It wasn'y 799$ that's for damn sure. They also still sell the fucking CRT iMac if you are so inclined to save a couple bucks when buying a Mac. I think the point the guy was trying to make is that Macs aren't the price monsters that PC users generally assume they are. A 1800$ iMac has a Superdrive in it and a flat panel monitor. That's about what you'd pay for a BTO Compaq or Sony with a regular DVD-R in it (the Superdrive being arguably more useful since it can pretty much burn anything). The iMac is also designed to be an all in one package, the consumer asks "Hey can I take some movies I shot and edit them together into something people want to watch easily?" and they get pointed to an iMac. Of course you can get a Dell with a flat screen for a thousand bucks but what exactly are you getting? A 1GHz Celeron and a cheapo flat panel and some crap software Dell got a sweet OEM deal on. I'd put the 700MHz G4 up against a 1GHz Celeron and I'd definitely put Apple's iSoftware up against whatever Dell was packaging.
Hmm Apple went public around what 1980? That's about 22 years or so and they were first formed in 1977? So I supposed they can last AT LEAST that long. And just to make you look extra retarded, Microsoft bought 150 million bucks worth of common stock which as you may or may not know has no voting power, 150 mil is pretty insignifigant for a company with an 8.2 billion dollar market cap in 2001. About a whole.01% of the cap or so. You, out of the gene pool!
Wait...how much did the original Bondi iMac cost when it was released? I've give you a hint, it wasn't 799$, 899$, or 999$. Also if you care to look at Apple's website they are still selling the 2001 iMacs for a while, most likely until all orders of them have been fulfilled. The CRT iMac WILL go the way of the beige G3 and All-in-one PowerMac but you'll still be able to pick them up used from plenty of places.
SSI my good friend. Save the HTML file as whatever sort of file your httpd will process server side includes (.shtml in my case). Then add a line a little like this:
<!--echo var="HTTP_REFERER"-->
And blamo you're all set. Note this is a CGI input variable as well.
Easy, solid state memory is still expensive when it comes to non-volatile memory. If I shell out beaucoup cash for a 5 megapixel camera, I don't want to shell out even more cash for a bunch of solid state memory that I have to swap out every couple shots. The reason I'm going digital is to escape some of the tedium of shooting with film right? For a MP3 player you're right but lots of memory in a compact space is usefor for more than just pira...playing music. It'd also be cool to have a high capacity small footprint drive in something like the Sony Picturebook where space and weight are an absolute premium.
How is it that some people (including you personally) has said for five years Apple needs to "do something to stay afloat" when they are possibly at this point the most popular they've ever been and show no signs of going out of business? People bought iMacs because you plugged it into the wall and were on the internet cruising your little heart out. Or because they just got a new DV camcorder and wanted to do more with it than use as a paperweight. Apple's been in business longer than nearly every PC manufacturer in the industry and is considered one of the top ten of all of the companies in the personal computer business. How is it they are somehow finacially unstable?
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Having the logo on the CD is actually kind of important legally. When you buy a CD with the CD-Audio logo on it and it doesn't work in your particular CD player you can only take it back to the store or write a letter to the record company. They produced a red book compliant CD and the fact your particular CD player doesn't read it yet reads all others must be some fluke. No harm no foul. However if a record company sells you a CD that purports to be a CD-Audio disc yet doesn't comply with the specification all Cd players comply with and doesn't work in any CD players they will get fucked in court. Conducting business in bad faith is a surefire way to piss off a judge and get fined and have to pay out buckets of cash to everyone you sold defective products to. Compliance with an industry accepted standard is important in terms of liability. People aren't not going to buy a CD because it doesn't have the "Compact Disc" logo on it but if they do buy it and something is wrong with it a class action lawsuit would be pretty easy especially if you could prove more likely than not (all you need in a civil trial) a record company was hocing non-compliant CDs as compliant CDs and win a fat class action lawsuit. Imagine an album going triple platinum only to cost a record company three times the revenues in legal fees and penalties.
IIRC the CD-DA protection scheme takes advantages of differences between the CD-DA (Red Book) and CD-ROM (Yellow Book) specifications. The manufacturer fucks with the TOC (table of contents) on the disc to make it appear to a computer's CD-ROM as a data disc or not report correctly as an audio disc which for the most part keeps typical CD playback programs from functioning. If you've ever tried using an enhanced CD (Blue Book spec) CD with some software CD players you can't get to the audio track because the system refused to look at anything but the data session. The problem Philips has with the CD protection is messing with the TOC breaks the rules set in the red book specification. Another method used involved putting intentional errors on the audio tracks that under the red book spec a CD player skips over but a yellow book compliant CD-ROM will loop back trying to read the corrupted frame. Both of these schemes allow the CDs to be played on red book compatible CD players but cause problems when they're put in CD-ROM drives.
Extra bit depth in audio samples is good. There are a good number of instruments whose fidelity are just not done justice by a CD's 16 bits of depth. Alot of people probably would never miss it as they listen to shit music that gets screwed to hell by engineers attempting to make the music catchier on the radio. Seriously go listen to a local philharmonic orchestra playing a famous piece of music, then go pick up a CD of the same piece. If you can't tell the difference there is something wrong with your ears. As for the extra sampling frequency just because you can't hear it doesn't mean you aren't necessarily aware of it. James Boyk at Caltech wrote a paper basically saying that many musical instruments produce most of their accoustic energy at frequencies above 20khz and you can "hear" them without being conciously aware of them. It is also possible to get people to hear sounds above 20khz is enough power is applied to them. People hear different frequencies better than other frequencies thus seeming that some sounds are louder than others even when they have the same energy. This is why alot of modern music sounds better with Winamp plugins that pump the bass in the music, the lower frequencies don't need as much power to be heard loudly and thus adding bass gives the sound an extra bump in a person's perception. Proper engineering can easily make the most use out of the higher bit depth and increased sampling frequency of DVD-A. If you've bought a good quality DVD with DTS sound and have a DTS receiver you've heard 24-bit 96khz sound. At least that is what is on the disc (in compressed form) depending on your speakers you might not get much response above 20khz.
I didn't say he expressed anger about people making money off software. He and the FSF make it explicit that they are not against making money off software. I don't see how I in any way said something to the contrary. Secondly even if Microsoft changed the format of a .doc Stallman has no room to whine because the point of his movement is to make free implimentations of commercial software. If Microsoft changes their format, free software ought to change their filters to handle the new change in the format. That is my fucking point man, Stallman whines about Microsoft owning a format yet in his own diatribes he advocates free software replacing non free software. Sending an e-mail saying "I don't like Microsoft's secret format" doesn't replace or augment non-free software with free software. It is just whining. You might want to work on your reading comprehension before hitting the submit button.
What took this realization so long to form? For any software developer your target market always has areas that you can't get to. These areas are systems running an OS or a platform you don't or can't support. A write once run everywhere system effectively gets rid of unreachable markets. Hence the emergence of Java in the middleware scene. You can get your middleware apps, hardware, and app server all from different vendors as long as it is J2EE compliant. As the Java 2 VMs speed up you're going to see a good deal more end user apps available because the people making them are going to have a wide market they can sell to. Microsoft now wants to do the same thing just with a Microsoft label.
.NET initive if Microsoft learning from marketing mistakes of the past. Instead of getting the OS onto different platforms just get the API onto different platforms and then make a way for people to write the software once so they can run it anywhere. There's no need to patch software in order to localize it, you just run the code which is compiled on the fly and runs.
Most of the Linux kids probably don't remember when you could get Windows NT for four ISAs. The problem was you could get Windows on an Alpha or PPC system but you couldn't find any software to run. The whole
RMS really should put the GNU license on the weed he is smoking. Then everyone could freely examine, copy, and reidistribute it until their little hearts burst. Typical Stallman hypocracy. He gets mad someone would dare charge money for their software so he goes and makes his own versions to play with. The mantra of the FSF's mantra is "if there isn't a free version of what you need, make it and open the code". This would imply that noone ought ever bitch about having problems with anything ever because they shouldb e following the mantra of roll your own. Stallman can make all sorts of free stuff but is beleagured by files in .doc format? Shouldn't be he improving whatever software he has so it works with .doc files?
I also wonder how true this is considering Microsoft publishes books whose sole purpose is to describe and document Word and Excel file formats. Weird.
First let me say good work on sounding like a complete fucking idiot. Your points don't seem to make alot of sense. The guy says people call IBM and Sun when they want a real Unix solution, not someone like...VA Linux. Besides Caldera the only companies you pointed out were...imagine that big time Unix vendors. You should also see Linux compatibility in Solaris and AIX as an insult rather than a compliment to your zealotry. By adding Linux compatibility to big real Unicies both companies are allowing you to run hippie software on real powerful machines and a real powerful OS. Irix is alive and kicking and SGI doesn't look like they're abandoning it. When exactly did the movie effects industry switch to Linux? Seems like all the big computer effect houses like ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney all go for big workstations from SGI and Sun to do most of the real work. Ohhh wow you can run Renderman on Linux. Impressive.
Give you whiny Linux kids another ten years and you'll just be whiny Linux using adults. What is funny about Linux users is there are so few developers and so many users. A majority of Linux users will never ever contribute any code to any project ever. They will however complain about something that doesn't have the features they want or not all features work correctly. Yet when this feature lacking program is compared to a fully featured and robust closed source program they will hypocritically acclaim it as the best thing since sliced bread. Despite them never contributing code they think of themselves on par with open source developers who actually DO contribute code. Thus all open source software was produced by "the Linux community" and notby some dudes that are better programmers than all the other dudes. Recompiling your kernel != development.
All NASA had to do to hit a mirror on the moon with a laser was shoot it into a general area. Since they could stick a decent telescope on the ground the mirror wouldn't have to reflect ALL of the light produced by the laser on the ground. Therefore divergence wasn't a big problem seeing laser light reflected off the moon. It is mathematically solvable to stick a laser in orbit and shoot somebody on the ground but from an engineering standpoint it is unlikely to happen (at least from a geosynchronous orbit like he mentioned).
First you need a gigantic lasing chamber to produce alot of photons. You need enough so the energy at the focal point of the laser is high enough to actually do some samage and not just make somebody feel unseasonally warm. Then you need the best optics ever created in the history of mankind to keep the beam from diverging so much that it becomes an ineffective weapon. As for a power source you'd need a really really big solar panel or at the very least a fission reactor to produce enough energy to feed the lasing device. From a much lower orbit the mechanics become alot more feasible (making up for divergence from a 100 mile altitude or 22,000 mile altitude, take your pick) but pretty impractical for a tactical assault weapon. Shooting a small target whilst moving at hundreds of miles per hour from 100 miles (possibly more if you're firing at an angle) is pretty damn hard. I would bet by the time you had to worry about being shot from space by a laser wielding satillite you could beam up to it in your person space suit and kick the optics out of alignment.
If you want to learn Mac hardware grab an old Beige G3, a copy of Darwin, and a good book on Forth. You'll learn all about the fucking things. Why can't you buy a book to learn to administer Solaris or pick up an old Solaris 8 x86 CD and install that? I've got both Solaris 7 and 8 I got from the "free for developers" program. If you want to learn Sun hardware that good book on Forth ought to be included so you can learn your way around OF.
Heaven forbid you need to learn to use a new operating system to get a job done. You can't just tell management they need to switch operating systems because all you know is OpenBSD, they'll can your ass and get somebody with real skills. I suggest Solaris Essencials and Advanced Solaris Administration as well as your favourite Forth book and some heavy fucking reading.
Just because someone would develop it doesn't mean anybody would use it. For every one person who wants some cohesion between all the different apps they use in Linux there's five who say they want it their way or no way. If you pool Linux users, some are using KDE, some use GNOME, others just use WindowMaker, some may just to twm or no GUI whatsoever. If you poll Windows users they're all using Explorer and Mac users are all using Finder. Some say the lack of choice is a detriment (these are the people who use one of the above mentioned graphical kits and will continue to use it no matter what).
Why would KDE and GNOME developers need to break X compatibility in the first place? Both toolkits are abstracted from X enough so that both toolkits are pretty portable and only use X on Linux because that is what everbody else uses and some apps talk directly to Motif or Xlib which some people feel they can't live without.
If you picked up thesignal somewhere it would be pretty easy to determine exactly where it came from. When you pick up a signal that has been traveling for trillions of miles it is little more than a point of EM radiation coming from a specific point. Once you have the LOS it has been traveling you can do a shift analysis ro figure our how far away the planet was that sent it. Then you turn your high powered telescope onto that point and blamo you see a little blue ball orbiting a slightly green star next to a trinary system in the middle of nowhere. That assumes of course they're in this galaxy, for most people outside our galaxy they'd be able to tell what galaxy the signal came from and hopefully from the content of the message figure out what sort of people sent it. Let's just hope the goats.cx trolls don't get ahold of a powerful transmitter or we're going to be paved over to make for an interstellar overpass.
Every time there is some issue like this someone generally regarded as a pundit steps up to tell why said issue either is a problem or a boon to humanity. I remember two years ago economists at big and famous business schools were explaining why the economy was going to support continuous growth for the next decade and how we were entering a bull market boom period. Funny looking back on that now.
Same goes for broadband. I don't think it is content that is keeping people from getting broadband rolled out. Shit I got broadband just because it was impractical reading slashdot at -1 whenever Windows or Linux is mentioned in a story. The fact I can now download decent looking Star Wars trailers and keep my systems up to date is just an added bonus. For some people it's games. A number of kids playing Q3A or Counter-Strike don't know what the fuck a ping means but they know when their ping is below 30ms they can kick the shit out of the other kids with a 100ms or higher ping. Non-tech savvy AOL users also know that with a cable modem they don't get hung up on and they can download all the shareware they want without having to wait for it. Their kids know they can log onto (insert P2P file sharing client here) and get all the new singles from (insert popular bandname here). Everybody knows that porn downloads better with broadband than with a modem. Ergo content is not the problem.
It costs alot of money for a cable company to add digital services to users, same for phone companies adding DSL service. It costs the companies alot more to make service available than what they charge users monthly. This used to work well with dial-up access because connections weren't persistant and unless you were selling business accounts you didn't have to promise anybody any particular amount of service. However moving this business model to persistant connections that can easily max out your trunk line's bandwidth makes for out of business cable and DSL providers. Saying anybody needs more content just leads to even more problems. As you add content to an already taxed infrastructure means the infrastructure only gets MORE taxed as users are added. The nothing on argument is just ridiculous. I think poor Lawrence just sees everything as a content problem nowadays. Broadband is an expensive proposition because it requires an overhaul of equipment and a more efficient business model and the companies providing it can't or at least don't rely on their traditional revenue model of advertising. Phone companies made the money back on residential lines by charging more for business services. Now however more residences are getting DSL and cable companies haven't been able to interupt data services to add advertising so both providers are losing money. Content shmontent, broadband or a lack thereof is about the mula.
PacBell did the same thing to me in my old apartment. I had to wait a month just to get my self install kit, then I had to wait another month for them to answer my calls because the DSL signal wasn't turned on for my apartment. Then two more months for them to figure out they screwed up my phone line (it was lovely getting a 24kbps connection all the time where I had been getting 48kbps regardless of whether or not I used the high pass filter on the line) and two months after that for them to stop billing me for DSL service that never worked. Then PacBell accused me of stealing the self install kit because they didn't realize they had gotten it back and it had been signed for by the warehouse manager. And that was how I spent my summer vacation.
If you were a hax0r elite wouldn't you compile your kernel once a week instead of download ISOs?
I don't thi9nk you hit the nail on the head with your third point, though the first two were pretty good. Say you have your own website hosted on your symmetric cable modem service. It becomes popular (to make it interesting lets say you have a streaming mp3 broadcast) and you're constantly hitting your upload cap of say 1mbps. That 30,40,50 dollars you're being charged for a 1mbps link is ALOT less than the actual cost of a 1mbps link to the internet. You're basically paying for a high speed link to your CO which may or may not give you that fast of a connection to the rest of the world. If you are getting 1mbps to the rest of the world you're costing the cable company a pretty penny in transfer fees from whoever they've leased their trunk line to the internet from. Unless they charge you for that extra cost (like hosting and colocation companies do for transfer rates in excess of a monthly quota) they're going to lose money and it becomes impossible for them NOT to cap your upstreamd bandwidth to something reasonable.
Whoops. Note to self: your position at NASA will be secured if you keep making decimal point errors.
I think that Google's data transfer woes is a convincing example behind the argument of reading archived information after the medium becomes obsolete. Supposed Google or somebody else didn't decide to do this for another couple of years, they might not have even found equipment to read old tapes. There's alot of companies that spend beaucoup cash keeping their 20 year old equipment around just so they can keep a record of business transactions 20 years old.
Like I said to the other dude, how much did the iMac cost originally when it first came out in 98? It wasn'y 799$ that's for damn sure. They also still sell the fucking CRT iMac if you are so inclined to save a couple bucks when buying a Mac. I think the point the guy was trying to make is that Macs aren't the price monsters that PC users generally assume they are. A 1800$ iMac has a Superdrive in it and a flat panel monitor. That's about what you'd pay for a BTO Compaq or Sony with a regular DVD-R in it (the Superdrive being arguably more useful since it can pretty much burn anything). The iMac is also designed to be an all in one package, the consumer asks "Hey can I take some movies I shot and edit them together into something people want to watch easily?" and they get pointed to an iMac. Of course you can get a Dell with a flat screen for a thousand bucks but what exactly are you getting? A 1GHz Celeron and a cheapo flat panel and some crap software Dell got a sweet OEM deal on. I'd put the 700MHz G4 up against a 1GHz Celeron and I'd definitely put Apple's iSoftware up against whatever Dell was packaging.
Ever stick an 8cm CD in a slot loading drive?
Hmm Apple went public around what 1980? That's about 22 years or so and they were first formed in 1977? So I supposed they can last AT LEAST that long. And just to make you look extra retarded, Microsoft bought 150 million bucks worth of common stock which as you may or may not know has no voting power, 150 mil is pretty insignifigant for a company with an 8.2 billion dollar market cap in 2001. About a whole .01% of the cap or so. You, out of the gene pool!
Wait...how much did the original Bondi iMac cost when it was released? I've give you a hint, it wasn't 799$, 899$, or 999$. Also if you care to look at Apple's website they are still selling the 2001 iMacs for a while, most likely until all orders of them have been fulfilled. The CRT iMac WILL go the way of the beige G3 and All-in-one PowerMac but you'll still be able to pick them up used from plenty of places.
Score: -1 Offtopic
SSI my good friend. Save the HTML file as whatever sort of file your httpd will process server side includes (.shtml in my case). Then add a line a little like this:
<!--echo var="HTTP_REFERER"-->
And blamo you're all set. Note this is a CGI input variable as well.
Easy, solid state memory is still expensive when it comes to non-volatile memory. If I shell out beaucoup cash for a 5 megapixel camera, I don't want to shell out even more cash for a bunch of solid state memory that I have to swap out every couple shots. The reason I'm going digital is to escape some of the tedium of shooting with film right? For a MP3 player you're right but lots of memory in a compact space is usefor for more than just pira...playing music. It'd also be cool to have a high capacity small footprint drive in something like the Sony Picturebook where space and weight are an absolute premium.
How is it that some people (including you personally) has said for five years Apple needs to "do something to stay afloat" when they are possibly at this point the most popular they've ever been and show no signs of going out of business? People bought iMacs because you plugged it into the wall and were on the internet cruising your little heart out. Or because they just got a new DV camcorder and wanted to do more with it than use as a paperweight. Apple's been in business longer than nearly every PC manufacturer in the industry and is considered one of the top ten of all of the companies in the personal computer business. How is it they are somehow finacially unstable?