Anime on DVD is one of the best things since sliced bread. DVD is just suited for import titles of all kinds, you can have optional subtitles and different language dubs all on the same disc which means no more dubbed to watch subbed to collect videos anymore. DVDs also don't degrade after every time you watch it which means I don't need to buy new copies of my VHS collection every two years (I do alot of anime watchin'). Everything is now great, just kidding. Anime on DVD is fucking expensive. Of course DVD in general is expensive but Anime is expensive without a bunch of extra goodies on a disc. I was disappointed with the Ghost in the Shell disc, it had some production art and some interviews but I would have expected a bit better interaction with the disc a la Matrix or Austin Powers. Maybe with companies migrating entirely to DVD the sales of the DVDs won't need to carry the overhead from the VHS tapes and prices will drop a little. I want my Anime.
For a well designed program in Windows all it takes to have multiple versions of a libary is a simple edit of the registry. While Windows isn't perfect Linux isn't exactly the cream of the crop. I'm actually tired of messing with libaries just for shit to work. I think the idea purveyed with OS X on Mac is a good one (originally part of NeXT), libraries and apps stored in packages so that multiple binary versions can be stored in the same file. The best Window's program breaks few or no other apps, the worst Linux app will fuck up your system. It is all a matter of quality, not the inherent abilities of the operating system.
We can and We can cheaper. While some people may have the programming talent and free time to write an alternative to "expensive" software, the true motivation for open source is people being cheap. You're not interested in developing better software than what is commercially available, you're looking to develop and adequate replacement that is free.
Ever replace a library on accident or have the wrong permissions on a directory or file? Linux is quite easy to break. The kernel may still run and you might be able to log in remotely but most people don't have or don't know how to use such an ability. Windows can and is as stable as Linux as long as you properly manage it. If you are dumb enough to install libraries that break apps then you deserve the pain it causes. The registry can be your friend if you don't go and break it yourself. The stability of the system is up to the people programming the software you run, Microsoft isn't responsible for some idiot installing old easily broken DLLs.
The ability of the open sourced desktops and such things that live on top of X to compete with Windows has little to do with the quality of the development model and more to due with the fact that Windows spent a good portion of their GUI development period experiementing. Not only does Microsoft have the interface to worry about they have the entire graphics system to work on along with the kernel and underlying programs and code. Not only does Microsoft have more to do but the people writing GNOME and KDE have been living in the GUI world for years and have had the fortune to have learned from the mistakes of other GUI developers. You're dangerously short sighted and bordering on ignorance. Open or closed source, if programmers only have to worry about a small section of the overall product, they will produce a bit better of a product than people that don't have the luxury of focus. You also compare graphics libraries to overal ease of use. Widgets and text rendering have shit to do with the ease of a system. When someone can plug in a bit of hardware and run an installation program and have the OS see the hardware, it is then easy to use. When someone buys hardware and has to figure out which kernel module to load or how exactly to configure their product, then your system is not easy to use.
The second most predominate hinderance to productivity next to Minesweeper is the kludge the user experiences between the business end of the program and the interface with said program. Word 97 and 2000 have an amazing amount of features that if used correctly can make it into a very powerful tool for a business (I'm writing a macro which writes essays, convincing essays). The problem however is that most people never see these features unless they have an MOUS certification. This is a similar state to Linux, while it has thousands of features and can do all sorts of cool things, without years of experience or a huge amount of reading no one can use said features. This is ludicrous in both cases, the true power of any software is the ability of the user to access and use all of the features a programmer adds. The users as Lewis says, ought not be punished for using a particular piece of software. You make it sound like people who don't use Linux cannot think. You are quite the pompous ass to think the choice of your OS belies your intelligence. Users are who any successful software producer needs to cater to. The users shouldn't be punished and made to run through hoops to use Linux or Windows or any other OS. Apple realized this many years ago. When you buy an iMac you plug the power cable in and the keyboard and mouse and press the power button. From there everything is done for you with little or no intervention. Neanderthals in pre-history knew this also, you've got the business end of a tool and the interfact. There is the handle and blade of the axe, the blade is sharp and therefore with little more than instinct you can pick up an axe and use it. The GUI was originally meant to represent things users would recognize and understand, this should be taken to even higher levels as the level of sophistication of computers grows.
No one is really carrying the Darwin mirrors, Apple isn't threatening mirrors of an open codebase with legal issues. Too many programmers see Apple as passe and are reluctant to put it up on their file servers. Darwin was opened with the intent of developers getting better intrinsic knowlege of the new operating system and to foster non-Mac developers to get into the act. Windows 2000 development is moving rather slowly because in many ways its core is radically different than 98, people used to working with 98 need to relearn all their performance tricks. This is the same as the difference between OS 9 and X, you've got a radically different structure but instead of printing a plethora of reference books to teach people about the new core they are letting developers actually see and play with the core in order to see where it can go and what it can do.
No one is paying licensing fees for Linux Distros. They get their money by selling installation and system support for their products. If you indeed are literate, read the handbook of your local Linux distro. By buying it in a store you're entitled to X amount of customer service support. In many cases they outsource their customer service to a company that specializes in telephone support or they pay a few techs to do it. They are making alot more from support than they are spending. These companies also have large stock valuations and have a good deal of money backing them. Redhat didn't make a billion dollars last year, they sold a billion dollars worth of stock to investors.
Is it so hard for you to fucking understand that Macs are manufacturered by Apple and can have any fucking "Made by Apple" logos they want on them? You need to realize that without mass production you wouldn't have a computer to spew your ill-conceived notions from. By installing Linux on an IBM-PC you're not making a stand against some horrible evil empire, you're making a consumer choice. The anti-trust case against Microsoft is and was never about striking a blow for any cause. It was and is about preventing a single company to hedge all consumer choice in a market. If Microsoft built the computers its OS was installed on, there would be nothing anyone could say about it. They however only product software. They have been unfairly affecting other companies by threatening them with licensing changes and the like. You're not fighting for anyone's freedom here.
How can you say anything about old men posing as 13 year old boys when you have committed and admitted to commiting perjury? Smooth move buddy.
Then now and not quite later
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Movies Online?
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This article begs the question: "Would you rather pay five to ten dollars to see a movie on an enormous screen with completely surround sound or would you rather wait for a movie to download over your 56kbps modem connection to watch on a 17 inch CRT with only a single pair of speakers?" Such a question sounds and is pretty sardonic. There is a large physical difference between your monitor and a theater. I like made-for-internet movies, some of them are pretty damn good. They remind me in some ways of Clerks from the creative genius of Kevin Smith. No special effects, not high end post production, just a very interesting story and some important visuals. The key to Clerks is it was a good movie without a high special effects budget. Same with a few of the made-for-internet movies. Then there are movies like Phantom Menace which are specifically made to be seen in their full thousandxthousand film resolution and heard on an uber-surround sound system that lets you feel the vibrations from the pod racer engines. While I'd like TPM on video to watch it, I couldn't really experience it which it the point of making such visually impressive movies (no, I don't give a fuck about your opinion of the picture). To my point, some people are itching for internet everything. People as such probably don't have cars and are just embarrassed to ask mommy for a ride to and fro. I don't want internet everything. If the market for low budget films outstrips that of high budget films we aren't going to see high budget films because no one will make them. Sometimes I like to see something like Phantom Menace or The Matrix. Don't be a fucking fool either and claim that equipment to make professional quality special effects are now within people's budgets. Fuck that. The real awe of special effects is not the power of the equipment used it's the time and talent behind the technology. While there are plenty of people with alot of artistic talent that could go crazy with special effects it would require alot of time. While these same people believe you ought to do things just cuz, they don't realize that things cost money. Mommy and daddy still pay their bills. Until I have a house large enough to fit a 20' movie screen, I don't want movie theaters to go away. Home theater systems are and will continue to be very expensive and the cost of a single full system (including movies) cost way fucking more than all the movies you'll see in a lifetime unless you're a film critic or suffer a form of derrangement. If movie theaters disappeared tomorrow I'd need to spend beaucoup cash in order to watch movies with any level of visual impressiveness. Shoes for labour.
Thats pretty damn close to how both Quake 1 and 2 worked. The rendering wasn't server side but the positional information and the like was all done on the server with the clients just rendering and passing commands onto the server. This was one of the biggest lag problems because you needed a fat pipe to get all the frames in a timely fashion. You'll notice with Quake 3 you can have a high framerate with a horrible ping, this is because the networking dudes at id convinced John Carmack to forgo the dumb client system. Multiplayer is a big problem even when you have all the physics and mechanics handled by clients. It is really tough to battle orcs or frag bozos when they're hopping all over the place do to a 500ms ping.
Finally a really good article about holograms in general and holographic storage specifically. Most people are not really aware how close many companies are to production of holographic storage. While magnetic hard drives are getting really dense they are still overly mechanical which adds greatly to their price. A holographic drive that would fit into a 3.5" internal bay could hold easily more than 100GB of data and have few or no moving parts. This means a greater mean time between failure and much less power consumed by the system (so we can power our GeForce 7s and Voodoo 9s). Besides desktop and server storage you could have a shitload of information encoded into a small plastic chip on a driver's license or credit card. The next generation of smart cards could carry user preferences for various computers, personal files, and cryptographic signatures. On top of that you can stick holographic drives in TiVo like toys or portable MP3 players. A single memory card the size of a sony memory stick (which is some of the best looking portable media ever) could hold a week's worth of music or an entire HDTV quality movie. How about a Palm XV with a gig of storage, that would be something to show off at an office party. Wow, I seem to have wet myself.
Access times all depend on the sort of retrieval you're going to use. One system proposes using sound waves to cause different oscilations in the crystal letting to hit it at different angles with a reference beam. Instead of holographic storage replacing RAM I think we'll see it start replacing magnetic storage. Once refined the components to read and write a holographic cube would cost about as much as a good CD-ROM drive with the cubes not costing too much because they can be easily mass produced. With 10GB per cubic centimeter it isn't hard to imagine larger crystals holding 100GB or more.
Even with a 140G CD you're still bounce by DMA data transfer rates. I read about this company years ago but am not much impressed by their public information. Their CFM disk looks alot like a glass master disk. Holographic storage has taken many forms in the past ten years, mostly due to the fact that many of the crystals originally used would only work at sub-zero temperatures (thats Celcius boys and girls) and would degrade very quickly. Your CFMD for the most part looks like a bunch of bunk. Even if it proves feasible which I highly doubt, the cost of a single drive would be extraordinary, just look at what happened with DVD-RAM when it first came out. So 600$ for a new drive and however many dollars for a disk which would be lucky to have the write speed of a CD-R or I can go with a couple 75GB hard drives that have a much higher data transfer rate.
Learn to read. You fucking dunderheads. The article is about companies and schools blocking access to Napster or trying to save their bandwidth for something that is important. I go to a JC that has two T1's hooked up to the main campus. If you've ever used a T1 all by yourself you might think it is a rather fast little connection. Spread said connection out over an entire campus and you've got the slowest piece of shit ever. My schools is one of those that can't afford to have a bunch of neanderthals running Napster on lab computers. A semester or two ago one of our projects required we get some code from the teacher's webserver at another school. We only had three computers active yet had lots of trouble connecting to the server, then when we finally did get through we were getting a 1.5k download and the.tar was 3 megs. It turns out a bunch of people over in the lab were downloading MP3s and a couple were playing Quake2. Was it the end of the Internet? No but it sure did prove a point. People in the labs wasting money by chatting and downloading MP3s are something that definitely needs to stop. Not all schools can afford an OC-192, neither can busineses. Many businesses have ISDN's that while fairly speedy are charged by the byte for transfers. If you're playing a game or using Napster, not only are you wasting time but you're costing the company money. I'm all for bringing a Zip disk with your favorite MP3s and listening to them while you work. Don't get your fucking panties in a bunch when someone tells you how to use something they own or are paying for.
Why should things be posted anonymously? Thats not freedom, thats avoiding responsibility. You just don't want someone to give you shit for posting something on a public forum that people don't agree with. Most slashdot users don't, we all use handles and rarely if ever put personal information in our profile. HavenCo is a load of bullshit, they are no more free and independant as anyone else, your data is still traveling over wires that you don't own. They still have an IP, even with no governmental restrictions they can be completely blocked from the rest of the world. If you've got something worthwhile to say, own up to it you pussy.
SuSE Linux as of 6.4 (I don't remember if it was available in 6.3) offers the use of ReiserFS as your primary FS on all your partitions except/boot because LILO has some problems with it. SuSE's kernel modifications are very good and I reallyu enjoy the use of a journalling FS, it is something Linux as a desktop OS really needs. But the fact SuSE has to offer it as an extra is something we're seeing alot more of. Things the kernel dudes don't like need to be hacked by distros and inserted into said distro. This causes a rift between Linux as an OS and a distro as an OS. Most of you are surfing around on some company's distro and you for sure know people who believe Redhat and Linux are synonyms. The whole development for Linux is going to fork, there will be the canonized kernel and "official" shit from the kernel dudes and there will be highly patched kernels released by distro companies. The GPL allows for you to change the entire kernel structure as long as you provide the source to it. If one distro becomes large enough they can decide to build an incompatible kernel that will only run Redhat or insertyourdistrohere software. We already see incompatibilities between different kernels, what the fuck are we going to do when one kernel build doesn't work with another?
The problem with Win95 and 98 was that they run apps in a virtual machine; there is an 8, 16, and 32 bit VM that is launched when an 8, 16, or 32 bit program is launched. DOS apps are each run in their own separate VM which means they won't kill other DOS apps (usually). The main stability problem is in the 16 bit arena. All 16 bit processes are run in one large memory space and cooperativly multi-tasked. This means a fault is one 16 bit app (library, extension, ect) will take out all of the 16 bit apps. Things arent really run in a layered fashion, 16 bit resources are just managed in one big heap on top of the process scheduler which make it seem like you're working through layers. Unix also has a process scheduler which does the same thing as the one in Windows, it is the basis of multi-tasking and premptive multitasking. The ability ro run KDE apps in GNOME has nothing at all to do with the system's scheduling and process handling, it has to do with the libraries that are available. As long as a program can access the libraries it needs it can run since both GNOME and KDE are running on top of X.
Do you have the faintest clue why it is not feasible to port Mac OS over to x86 hardware? If you can put Unix and user friendly on the same box then you're going to rush boxes out the door. The problem here is that Apple produces their software and hardware and therefore don't need to worry much about third party driver support with their hardware. When you port OS X over to Intel hardware you're got people wanting to stick it on their 400$ chump change PC with parts that have absolutely no drivers for the new OS. If you've ever tried getting X to work on a POS cheap PC you're really out of luck. Since hardware vendors are reluctant to spend the money to produce Linux drivers, why the fuck would they produce OS X drivers? I don't think GNU Beta home brew drivers are going to fly with the ease of use crowd.
Many of Apple's customers are ones that have been customers for many years, there are plenty of these customers along with brand new ones that just want something to get on the internet. If you've been using Photoshop or Premiere for years on the Mac and knows all the ins and out and shortcuts to get things done quickly, why would you want to switch to a different OS? That is why people go from their trust 7100 and 9600's to the G4 Macs. They want to use the same software, they just want it to run a bit faster.
root access to install software? Why the fuck does my PDA need file permissions? Instead of a full blown multi-user OS you could always just have password protection in the main interface. On a PDA it is rather stupid to have a full directory tree when you've only got two things on the system, applications and user files. I don't want to type in a password to install tetris on my PDA. You may have time to waste but the rest of us don't.
Man I have always wanted a multi-user OS with a virtual file system on a handheld device. Not only is multiple users of a single handheld device not very viable (if you're so poor that your family shares a handheld maybe you ought to buy food rather than a PDA) but it adds excess code to what should otherwise be a very compact kernel. What I would like to see is a GNU real-time OS to be developed for handhelds. Maybe a real-time kernel and major system controls is under 100k of memory? Then maybe another 200k for a GUI. Hey wow, then not only do you have a GNU handheld OS but you could port it to such things as point-of-sale devices and other such things.
If you went to the site to check out the screenshots you'd see their PDA version of GNOME looks only mildly like our old friend on the desktop. The pastel finish to everything and the nice 3D-ness has been carried over but not many actual widgets which was the major failing of WinCE. About a month ago or so there was a story about KDE running out of a console with no abstraction though X. A similar concept can be used with a PDA, all the graphics are just output to the console framebuffer. A program like Finder (on Mac) or Explorer would be responsible for such things as program switching and display management. There's really no need for a networked GUI on a PDA. There's no use for a multi-user operating system on it either.
I don't work for Intel. I do however think people are fucking idiots for believing marketing department hype. If you're going to make statements about Brand X being better than Brand Y then you really ought to have some sort of viable litmus test to really prove that. Otherwise you're just another statistic believing the shit released from marketoids.
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Anime on DVD is one of the best things since sliced bread. DVD is just suited for import titles of all kinds, you can have optional subtitles and different language dubs all on the same disc which means no more dubbed to watch subbed to collect videos anymore. DVDs also don't degrade after every time you watch it which means I don't need to buy new copies of my VHS collection every two years (I do alot of anime watchin'). Everything is now great, just kidding. Anime on DVD is fucking expensive. Of course DVD in general is expensive but Anime is expensive without a bunch of extra goodies on a disc. I was disappointed with the Ghost in the Shell disc, it had some production art and some interviews but I would have expected a bit better interaction with the disc a la Matrix or Austin Powers. Maybe with companies migrating entirely to DVD the sales of the DVDs won't need to carry the overhead from the VHS tapes and prices will drop a little. I want my Anime.
For a well designed program in Windows all it takes to have multiple versions of a libary is a simple edit of the registry. While Windows isn't perfect Linux isn't exactly the cream of the crop. I'm actually tired of messing with libaries just for shit to work. I think the idea purveyed with OS X on Mac is a good one (originally part of NeXT), libraries and apps stored in packages so that multiple binary versions can be stored in the same file. The best Window's program breaks few or no other apps, the worst Linux app will fuck up your system. It is all a matter of quality, not the inherent abilities of the operating system.
We can and We can cheaper. While some people may have the programming talent and free time to write an alternative to "expensive" software, the true motivation for open source is people being cheap. You're not interested in developing better software than what is commercially available, you're looking to develop and adequate replacement that is free.
Ever replace a library on accident or have the wrong permissions on a directory or file? Linux is quite easy to break. The kernel may still run and you might be able to log in remotely but most people don't have or don't know how to use such an ability. Windows can and is as stable as Linux as long as you properly manage it. If you are dumb enough to install libraries that break apps then you deserve the pain it causes. The registry can be your friend if you don't go and break it yourself. The stability of the system is up to the people programming the software you run, Microsoft isn't responsible for some idiot installing old easily broken DLLs.
The ability of the open sourced desktops and such things that live on top of X to compete with Windows has little to do with the quality of the development model and more to due with the fact that Windows spent a good portion of their GUI development period experiementing. Not only does Microsoft have the interface to worry about they have the entire graphics system to work on along with the kernel and underlying programs and code. Not only does Microsoft have more to do but the people writing GNOME and KDE have been living in the GUI world for years and have had the fortune to have learned from the mistakes of other GUI developers. You're dangerously short sighted and bordering on ignorance. Open or closed source, if programmers only have to worry about a small section of the overall product, they will produce a bit better of a product than people that don't have the luxury of focus. You also compare graphics libraries to overal ease of use. Widgets and text rendering have shit to do with the ease of a system. When someone can plug in a bit of hardware and run an installation program and have the OS see the hardware, it is then easy to use. When someone buys hardware and has to figure out which kernel module to load or how exactly to configure their product, then your system is not easy to use.
The second most predominate hinderance to productivity next to Minesweeper is the kludge the user experiences between the business end of the program and the interface with said program. Word 97 and 2000 have an amazing amount of features that if used correctly can make it into a very powerful tool for a business (I'm writing a macro which writes essays, convincing essays). The problem however is that most people never see these features unless they have an MOUS certification. This is a similar state to Linux, while it has thousands of features and can do all sorts of cool things, without years of experience or a huge amount of reading no one can use said features. This is ludicrous in both cases, the true power of any software is the ability of the user to access and use all of the features a programmer adds. The users as Lewis says, ought not be punished for using a particular piece of software. You make it sound like people who don't use Linux cannot think. You are quite the pompous ass to think the choice of your OS belies your intelligence. Users are who any successful software producer needs to cater to. The users shouldn't be punished and made to run through hoops to use Linux or Windows or any other OS. Apple realized this many years ago. When you buy an iMac you plug the power cable in and the keyboard and mouse and press the power button. From there everything is done for you with little or no intervention. Neanderthals in pre-history knew this also, you've got the business end of a tool and the interfact. There is the handle and blade of the axe, the blade is sharp and therefore with little more than instinct you can pick up an axe and use it. The GUI was originally meant to represent things users would recognize and understand, this should be taken to even higher levels as the level of sophistication of computers grows.
No one is really carrying the Darwin mirrors, Apple isn't threatening mirrors of an open codebase with legal issues. Too many programmers see Apple as passe and are reluctant to put it up on their file servers. Darwin was opened with the intent of developers getting better intrinsic knowlege of the new operating system and to foster non-Mac developers to get into the act. Windows 2000 development is moving rather slowly because in many ways its core is radically different than 98, people used to working with 98 need to relearn all their performance tricks. This is the same as the difference between OS 9 and X, you've got a radically different structure but instead of printing a plethora of reference books to teach people about the new core they are letting developers actually see and play with the core in order to see where it can go and what it can do.
No one is paying licensing fees for Linux Distros. They get their money by selling installation and system support for their products. If you indeed are literate, read the handbook of your local Linux distro. By buying it in a store you're entitled to X amount of customer service support. In many cases they outsource their customer service to a company that specializes in telephone support or they pay a few techs to do it. They are making alot more from support than they are spending. These companies also have large stock valuations and have a good deal of money backing them. Redhat didn't make a billion dollars last year, they sold a billion dollars worth of stock to investors.
Is it so hard for you to fucking understand that Macs are manufacturered by Apple and can have any fucking "Made by Apple" logos they want on them? You need to realize that without mass production you wouldn't have a computer to spew your ill-conceived notions from. By installing Linux on an IBM-PC you're not making a stand against some horrible evil empire, you're making a consumer choice. The anti-trust case against Microsoft is and was never about striking a blow for any cause. It was and is about preventing a single company to hedge all consumer choice in a market. If Microsoft built the computers its OS was installed on, there would be nothing anyone could say about it. They however only product software. They have been unfairly affecting other companies by threatening them with licensing changes and the like. You're not fighting for anyone's freedom here.
How can you say anything about old men posing as 13 year old boys when you have committed and admitted to commiting perjury? Smooth move buddy.
This article begs the question: "Would you rather pay five to ten dollars to see a movie on an enormous screen with completely surround sound or would you rather wait for a movie to download over your 56kbps modem connection to watch on a 17 inch CRT with only a single pair of speakers?"
Such a question sounds and is pretty sardonic. There is a large physical difference between your monitor and a theater. I like made-for-internet movies, some of them are pretty damn good. They remind me in some ways of Clerks from the creative genius of Kevin Smith. No special effects, not high end post production, just a very interesting story and some important visuals. The key to Clerks is it was a good movie without a high special effects budget. Same with a few of the made-for-internet movies. Then there are movies like Phantom Menace which are specifically made to be seen in their full thousandxthousand film resolution and heard on an uber-surround sound system that lets you feel the vibrations from the pod racer engines. While I'd like TPM on video to watch it, I couldn't really experience it which it the point of making such visually impressive movies (no, I don't give a fuck about your opinion of the picture).
To my point, some people are itching for internet everything. People as such probably don't have cars and are just embarrassed to ask mommy for a ride to and fro. I don't want internet everything. If the market for low budget films outstrips that of high budget films we aren't going to see high budget films because no one will make them. Sometimes I like to see something like Phantom Menace or The Matrix. Don't be a fucking fool either and claim that equipment to make professional quality special effects are now within people's budgets. Fuck that. The real awe of special effects is not the power of the equipment used it's the time and talent behind the technology. While there are plenty of people with alot of artistic talent that could go crazy with special effects it would require alot of time. While these same people believe you ought to do things just cuz, they don't realize that things cost money. Mommy and daddy still pay their bills.
Until I have a house large enough to fit a 20' movie screen, I don't want movie theaters to go away. Home theater systems are and will continue to be very expensive and the cost of a single full system (including movies) cost way fucking more than all the movies you'll see in a lifetime unless you're a film critic or suffer a form of derrangement. If movie theaters disappeared tomorrow I'd need to spend beaucoup cash in order to watch movies with any level of visual impressiveness. Shoes for labour.
Thats pretty damn close to how both Quake 1 and 2 worked. The rendering wasn't server side but the positional information and the like was all done on the server with the clients just rendering and passing commands onto the server. This was one of the biggest lag problems because you needed a fat pipe to get all the frames in a timely fashion. You'll notice with Quake 3 you can have a high framerate with a horrible ping, this is because the networking dudes at id convinced John Carmack to forgo the dumb client system. Multiplayer is a big problem even when you have all the physics and mechanics handled by clients. It is really tough to battle orcs or frag bozos when they're hopping all over the place do to a 500ms ping.
Finally a really good article about holograms in general and holographic storage specifically. Most people are not really aware how close many companies are to production of holographic storage. While magnetic hard drives are getting really dense they are still overly mechanical which adds greatly to their price. A holographic drive that would fit into a 3.5" internal bay could hold easily more than 100GB of data and have few or no moving parts. This means a greater mean time between failure and much less power consumed by the system (so we can power our GeForce 7s and Voodoo 9s). Besides desktop and server storage you could have a shitload of information encoded into a small plastic chip on a driver's license or credit card. The next generation of smart cards could carry user preferences for various computers, personal files, and cryptographic signatures. On top of that you can stick holographic drives in TiVo like toys or portable MP3 players. A single memory card the size of a sony memory stick (which is some of the best looking portable media ever) could hold a week's worth of music or an entire HDTV quality movie. How about a Palm XV with a gig of storage, that would be something to show off at an office party. Wow, I seem to have wet myself.
Access times all depend on the sort of retrieval you're going to use. One system proposes using sound waves to cause different oscilations in the crystal letting to hit it at different angles with a reference beam. Instead of holographic storage replacing RAM I think we'll see it start replacing magnetic storage. Once refined the components to read and write a holographic cube would cost about as much as a good CD-ROM drive with the cubes not costing too much because they can be easily mass produced. With 10GB per cubic centimeter it isn't hard to imagine larger crystals holding 100GB or more.
Even with a 140G CD you're still bounce by DMA data transfer rates. I read about this company years ago but am not much impressed by their public information. Their CFM disk looks alot like a glass master disk. Holographic storage has taken many forms in the past ten years, mostly due to the fact that many of the crystals originally used would only work at sub-zero temperatures (thats Celcius boys and girls) and would degrade very quickly. Your CFMD for the most part looks like a bunch of bunk. Even if it proves feasible which I highly doubt, the cost of a single drive would be extraordinary, just look at what happened with DVD-RAM when it first came out. So 600$ for a new drive and however many dollars for a disk which would be lucky to have the write speed of a CD-R or I can go with a couple 75GB hard drives that have a much higher data transfer rate.
Learn to read. You fucking dunderheads. The article is about companies and schools blocking access to Napster or trying to save their bandwidth for something that is important. I go to a JC that has two T1's hooked up to the main campus. If you've ever used a T1 all by yourself you might think it is a rather fast little connection. Spread said connection out over an entire campus and you've got the slowest piece of shit ever. My schools is one of those that can't afford to have a bunch of neanderthals running Napster on lab computers. A semester or two ago one of our projects required we get some code from the teacher's webserver at another school. We only had three computers active yet had lots of trouble connecting to the server, then when we finally did get through we were getting a 1.5k download and the .tar was 3 megs. It turns out a bunch of people over in the lab were downloading MP3s and a couple were playing Quake2. Was it the end of the Internet? No but it sure did prove a point. People in the labs wasting money by chatting and downloading MP3s are something that definitely needs to stop. Not all schools can afford an OC-192, neither can busineses. Many businesses have ISDN's that while fairly speedy are charged by the byte for transfers. If you're playing a game or using Napster, not only are you wasting time but you're costing the company money. I'm all for bringing a Zip disk with your favorite MP3s and listening to them while you work. Don't get your fucking panties in a bunch when someone tells you how to use something they own or are paying for.
Why should things be posted anonymously? Thats not freedom, thats avoiding responsibility. You just don't want someone to give you shit for posting something on a public forum that people don't agree with. Most slashdot users don't, we all use handles and rarely if ever put personal information in our profile. HavenCo is a load of bullshit, they are no more free and independant as anyone else, your data is still traveling over wires that you don't own. They still have an IP, even with no governmental restrictions they can be completely blocked from the rest of the world. If you've got something worthwhile to say, own up to it you pussy.
SuSE Linux as of 6.4 (I don't remember if it was available in 6.3) offers the use of ReiserFS as your primary FS on all your partitions except /boot because LILO has some problems with it. SuSE's kernel modifications are very good and I reallyu enjoy the use of a journalling FS, it is something Linux as a desktop OS really needs. But the fact SuSE has to offer it as an extra is something we're seeing alot more of. Things the kernel dudes don't like need to be hacked by distros and inserted into said distro. This causes a rift between Linux as an OS and a distro as an OS. Most of you are surfing around on some company's distro and you for sure know people who believe Redhat and Linux are synonyms. The whole development for Linux is going to fork, there will be the canonized kernel and "official" shit from the kernel dudes and there will be highly patched kernels released by distro companies. The GPL allows for you to change the entire kernel structure as long as you provide the source to it. If one distro becomes large enough they can decide to build an incompatible kernel that will only run Redhat or insertyourdistrohere software. We already see incompatibilities between different kernels, what the fuck are we going to do when one kernel build doesn't work with another?
The problem with Win95 and 98 was that they run apps in a virtual machine; there is an 8, 16, and 32 bit VM that is launched when an 8, 16, or 32 bit program is launched. DOS apps are each run in their own separate VM which means they won't kill other DOS apps (usually). The main stability problem is in the 16 bit arena. All 16 bit processes are run in one large memory space and cooperativly multi-tasked. This means a fault is one 16 bit app (library, extension, ect) will take out all of the 16 bit apps. Things arent really run in a layered fashion, 16 bit resources are just managed in one big heap on top of the process scheduler which make it seem like you're working through layers. Unix also has a process scheduler which does the same thing as the one in Windows, it is the basis of multi-tasking and premptive multitasking. The ability ro run KDE apps in GNOME has nothing at all to do with the system's scheduling and process handling, it has to do with the libraries that are available. As long as a program can access the libraries it needs it can run since both GNOME and KDE are running on top of X.
Do you have the faintest clue why it is not feasible to port Mac OS over to x86 hardware? If you can put Unix and user friendly on the same box then you're going to rush boxes out the door. The problem here is that Apple produces their software and hardware and therefore don't need to worry much about third party driver support with their hardware. When you port OS X over to Intel hardware you're got people wanting to stick it on their 400$ chump change PC with parts that have absolutely no drivers for the new OS. If you've ever tried getting X to work on a POS cheap PC you're really out of luck. Since hardware vendors are reluctant to spend the money to produce Linux drivers, why the fuck would they produce OS X drivers? I don't think GNU Beta home brew drivers are going to fly with the ease of use crowd.
Many of Apple's customers are ones that have been customers for many years, there are plenty of these customers along with brand new ones that just want something to get on the internet. If you've been using Photoshop or Premiere for years on the Mac and knows all the ins and out and shortcuts to get things done quickly, why would you want to switch to a different OS? That is why people go from their trust 7100 and 9600's to the G4 Macs. They want to use the same software, they just want it to run a bit faster.
root access to install software? Why the fuck does my PDA need file permissions? Instead of a full blown multi-user OS you could always just have password protection in the main interface. On a PDA it is rather stupid to have a full directory tree when you've only got two things on the system, applications and user files. I don't want to type in a password to install tetris on my PDA. You may have time to waste but the rest of us don't.
Man I have always wanted a multi-user OS with a virtual file system on a handheld device. Not only is multiple users of a single handheld device not very viable (if you're so poor that your family shares a handheld maybe you ought to buy food rather than a PDA) but it adds excess code to what should otherwise be a very compact kernel. What I would like to see is a GNU real-time OS to be developed for handhelds. Maybe a real-time kernel and major system controls is under 100k of memory? Then maybe another 200k for a GUI. Hey wow, then not only do you have a GNU handheld OS but you could port it to such things as point-of-sale devices and other such things.
If you went to the site to check out the screenshots you'd see their PDA version of GNOME looks only mildly like our old friend on the desktop. The pastel finish to everything and the nice 3D-ness has been carried over but not many actual widgets which was the major failing of WinCE. About a month ago or so there was a story about KDE running out of a console with no abstraction though X. A similar concept can be used with a PDA, all the graphics are just output to the console framebuffer. A program like Finder (on Mac) or Explorer would be responsible for such things as program switching and display management. There's really no need for a networked GUI on a PDA. There's no use for a multi-user operating system on it either.
I don't work for Intel. I do however think people are fucking idiots for believing marketing department hype. If you're going to make statements about Brand X being better than Brand Y then you really ought to have some sort of viable litmus test to really prove that. Otherwise you're just another statistic believing the shit released from marketoids.