> The sad thing is, according to many Republicans today, reporting on ANY negative aspect > of Republican actions equates to Liberal fear mongering.
No, the objection was partly to making a big deal over a non-story. Political party mails out crap, film at 11. Just ain't a story. Not that I would stick that turd in my PC, even if I had a Windows box to stick it in, the sort of political hacks who make this stuff are normally technically incompetent. Who knows what sort of cybercooties I'd get from it. I'd lay one in five it will ship infected with a virus.
But my main objection was posting a link to a blog instead of primary source. Go read both and tell me the blog added any fact to the story. As for people babbling about it, well we got that here don't we? I like reading the slashdot hordes commentary on stories (hell, I even like the moonbats here, gotta taunt somebody right?). If I want to read the howling moonbats I go check in on DU or Dailykos to see what the Deaniacs are up to.
If slashdot is going to start linking to blogs commenting on other blogs (that MPR story read almost like a blog itself) they need to just turn slashdot into a blog and start a blogroll down the side and stuff. I know, they could complete the decline and startup their "Geeks in Space" net radio show again, except now of course it would be a podcast, because that is buzzword compatible.
> This means nothing. How many times has Slashdot linked to CNN, New York Times or USA Today > who've just copy-pasted a Reuters, Xinhuan or AP articles?
It means you don't understand how the world works. Al-Reuters, AP, etc are creatures of thier member publications. An AP story on the NYT website is a 'primary' source because the NYT (along with their other members) jointly fund AP or Reuters to feed them articles.
Compare to this one. Some moonbat blog posts a rant about a story he saw on MPR and slashdot links to his rant, which has zero news value, instead of linking to the primary source. A story on the NYT is also a primary source btw, even when the story came off a newswire. Because they are running the full story reported by someone with firsthand information (ok, except when the story launches another scandal about plagerism, faked reporting, etc) instead of slicing out a couple of quotes and then ranting about it. (except for the op-ed page, they are basically just bloggers who actually get paid to do it)
> So your $600 laptop comes with a SATA hard drive, gigabit Ethernet, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, > built-in 802.11g, and built-in firewire?
Can't really see what the advantage to the user is what connect the HDD has, no laptop drive can come close to soaking even ATA100 and that is going on five year old tech. But off the rack Dell will sell you a laptop with a P3M at 1.4, 512M shared memory and admittedly a smaller 40GB hdd for that same $599. You get a TFT display on a laptop. Oh, and act now and the will knock $100 off. The Dell doesn't appear to have Bluetooth either. They pitch it but the dropdown box doesn't actually have an option, typical broken webpage/database. With the extra hundred you can add it if you really need it.
Yes, Apple is getting pretty competitive, but they aren't ever going to be competing heavilly on price/performance ratio. The sell a premium brand experience and their most loyal customers would abandon them if they didn't charge more.
Good grief, can we whore some liberal blogs a little more? Why not just link to the original Minnesota Public Radio article? Public radio isn't frothing at the mouth liberal enough for Slashdot now?
As for the actual charge, there is not even close to enough facts on just how much disclosure the packaging/eula has so it is hard to say much. But I'd assume the CD will come in a envelope with the Republican Party's name splattered all over it and that it will be mailed to people registered (and therefore in their computers, you did know that your voter registration is a matter of public record, right?) Republicans. So who is behind it and who will be getting the information should be fairly easy to suss out. And anybody with half a clue (i.e. most Republicans) will know the answers to this 'survey' will be heading to party HQ and used to target more fundraising appeals to ya. Because if you have EVER donated to a political party or organization you know that fundraising is job one. If that CD doesn't include a postage paid return envelope and beg letter asking the reader to give till it hurts they need a new party chairman.
> I don't remember it ever being marketed or sold as a 'media center' system.
What other job would you propose for the thing? It is a low spec machine sold at a very premium pricepoint. It's one redeeming feature is that is small, quiet and almost looks like a piece of mainstream consumer electronics. Media center PC. Except the original lacked digital audio output making it all but useless for that role, a defect they have fixed for this new version.
Now we just need a Linux distro to run on it that has support for all of the hardware, video, audio, firewire, usb and the remote. Get that in place and it can become the preferred MythTV platform.
> Hence the added audio and video streaming from networked computers in frontrow.
Frontrow is a quicktime only joke. Where do I get content for that? And don't say iTunes store. Ditch the bundleware and the hardware is nice though, too bad they won't sell em naked. Paying the Apple tax is worse than paying the M$ tax in that it is a bigger percentage of the sticker price.
The new Mac Mini is ok. At least they finally fixed the fatal flaw of the original and got optical audio on the rear panel like they should have done first time. Whoever thought selling a 'media center' machine without digital audio should have been sacked.
Still way overpriced though. Yes it is tiny, but laptops face the same issues and you can buy a laptop with similar specs just about anywhere for the same prices Apple is getting for a mini. Seriously, go price a laptop with 1.5Ghz Mobile Pentium (about the same as the 'Core Solo') a puny (for a media center) 60G laptop hard drive, 512MB memory shared with a crap Intel integrated video and a DVD/CD-RW drive. Bet you don't have much trouble finding some for $599 and that gets you a head, while the mini is sold headless.
Still, once Linux gets up and running stable on em they would make really sweet MythTV frontends. And with the new Plextor USB capture having supported drivers you could even use it for a backend/frontend setup.
> Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China,
Stop reading Daily Kos a bit and rejoin the real fscking world, K? ICANN, along with the other alphabet soup organizations, have been working towards non-ascii domain names but it is a non-trivial problem if you want to keep any sort of interoperability. Seven bit ASCII is the only character set you can know with any level of certainty that every user can generate, so if you want a universal naming system it requires some thought.
> I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese > TLDs, they should have them.
The system is designed to allow exactly that. China has absolute control over the.cn top level domain. Explain how establishing a fork of.com and.net are a better solution. So no, they don't have a 'right' to as many TLDs as they would like.
If they want to treat their whole country like a NATted home network and make fakes ones that only work on their 'lan' then they are free to go for it, but don't expect them to work anywhere else. Once people understand that the line to sign up for one will be pretty short. Pretty much only party aparatchiks and government agencies will want one.
This is simply wrong. When Dell ships an OEM copy of Windows XP, part of the OEM contract states that Dell assumes all support responsibility. All. The current machines being shipped with Linux are bundling Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS with a three year support agreement. Not being privy to the deal between Red Hat and Dell it is impossible to say what the terms are, but I suspect Red Hat, not being a convicted monopolist, is having to do more than simply supply rolls of serial number stickers and cashing Dell's checks.
And it isn't like Dell supports Windows either, they walk you through running the restore program. While that crappy support probably won't fly with these higher dollar workstation customers, if they started selling desktop class machines it would.
> If this is not summarily dismissed for the crock it is, Whistleblowing in > this country will officially be dead, federal protections notwithstanding.
This sort of political illiteracy is going to do in our Republic. No, someone breaks the law the DA's duty is to file charges. Civil disobedience has an honored place in our nation's history but the whole point is that when you decide circumstances require you to break a law in service to some higher moral duty you have to be willing to suck it up and face the consequences.
Those consequences are being charged and standing trial. If a jury of your peers agree you were doing the right thing it is THEIR duty to ignore this modern practice where judges think they can give 'orders' a jury and to return a not guilty verdict. But the requirement to face a jury of your peers is vital to prevent every crackpot from deciding their alternate reality gives them a license to ignore the law. It is one of the key parts that makes us a nation of laws, not men. Breaking the law has to be a rare exception.
So yes, this guy needs to be charged. The reporters at the New York Times who published classified documents need to be charged. The prosecuters need to do their damndest to put them away because that is their role in our system. And if after hearing both sides the jury lets em walk then I have no objection.
I'm shocked that slashdot is linking to The Weekly Standard, the official journal of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. How are they supposed to give us our secret orders and talking points now that the socialist hordes of Slashdot have discovered them?
But seriously, ya guys should be reading them whether you agree or disagree with the policies they advocate because they are influencial in Republican politics. Much like I follow the NYT editorial page and the network tv sunday morning yak-yak shows, because they (and now daily kos) drive the Democrats' talking points and policy positions.
Now ontopic. Wow, they sound like they plan to actually deploy this stuff. Talk about kicking the tech advantage up a notch.
Got a question that the allofmp3 site doesn't answer, since a lot of users are probably in this thread... are the tracks they sell tagged? They list insertion of id3 tags as a feature of their Windows front end so it makes one wonder. If I have to tag everything manually it would certainly be a reason NOT to use them.
> my ears aren't going to get any better with age, and neither are yours.
No they won't. But assuming you don't destroy too much of your hearing while you are young and stupid, and assuming you don't zap yourself from the genepool.... someday, if you work at it really hard, you might gain some wisdom with age. And learn to appreciate music that isn't either delivered at or above the pain threshold or muzak all but ignored in the background. Then you will start hearing the defects in most mp3 tracks.
I can play most mp3 material on my PC speakers, but when I push em to the Myth box in the living room it is a different story. Dump one out an optical link to a midrange (consumer stuff, not Audiophile tube amps or crap like that) Sony receiver and playing spot the MP3 is dead simple.
True you can get the approx $80 WinXP Home bundled into the Dell for about the same price. But there are some downsides also.
1. P.O.S. onboard Intel video vs the Nvidia in the Ars machine.
2. P.O.S. system. Dells are plastic crap, even the power supply is non-standard. This doesn't matter to some, but to those who have been burned. Quality parts cost more but you get what you pay for. Ars wasn't claiming to be putting together the cheapest P.O.S. they could, that is what Dell is for.
3. Dell appears to be dumping their stock of 32bit CPUs. The machine Ars specced out was a futureproofed 64bit box.
4. That Dell only has a CD/RW instead of a DVD+-RW. Granted you can upgrade to a DVD writer and still beat $525.
5. The price for the Dell is a 'special offer' price instead of the normal $588. God I hate playing the rebate/special of the hour game, give me halfway repeatable pricing anyday.
6. Some of us like the idea of NOT buying Windows and actually NOT buying Windows. If you 'not' buy Windows from Dell you usually pay more, which means Bill is getting his money and you don't get anything.
I managed to beat Ars price just doing a quick & dirty test shopping run at newegg.com. I managed to get a flat panel in at $480 with subwoofer, a decent keyboard and an actual AMD approved power supply. I went embedded ATI instead of Nvidia, to each their own I guess.
> Is every Mac user an automatic member of the Church of Jobs?
From the limited sample I have met personally, yes. Online you expect the crazies to dominate, but since the pattern also holds with offline my best guess would be at least 50% and probably 75% of Apple owners are currently affected by Steve's reality distortion field, some more strongly than others.
It is why I think Apple is doomed longterm. Because the users subconsciously believe it and they are closest to the situation. For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion. However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms. We saw it on the Amiga, OS/2, Be and for a decade or more among the Mac faithful. Of course obituaries on Apple have been standard fare for longer than BSD is dying trolls on Slashdot so they ain't exactly in a hurry to die or anything...:) But so long as the users act as a besieged minority who believe in the bones their day is soon to pass so I am forced to conclude they will eventually be proven right even if it has to be a self fulfilling prophecy.
> You just admitted to using Linux. Should I piegonhole you and start making assumptions > about your position with regards to code licensing?
That would be a fairly safe bet. You won't find many who have been running Linux for a decade who haven't become at least 75% RMS pure. Me I'm probably more like 85%. I will still use a closed program if nothing else is available for the task. I keep trying to use the Free ATI driver and keep going back to the closed one after a couple of crashes or wildly inaccurate rendering bugs.
And apparently you won't find many who have owned a Mac for more than a couple of years who haven't join the Cult of Mac.
> No, NextStep 3.0 on Intel was about as Windows-dependent or -based as x86 Linux is.
Dig some more. Unless I have started going senile or something there was also a period when Next Inc was making most of their income selling Next like toolkits to Windows developers.
> No way. I switched to PPC to get OS X, and when I replace my current Mac I'll go to x86 for OS X.
And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC. And when he announces OS XI you will be stunned and dismayed for a day or two and then be out on the online fora hailing it as the smartest thing since the last thing Steve did.
> Your argument is that they will have to move OSes because of hardware support?
No, my argument is that it will creep up on folks when they start dual booting. And eventually many will start asking why they have such a small list of supported hardware when OS X is running on their 'PC'. The trick is when they realize that what they have IS just a PC running OS X & Vista, and one side doesn't support all of their hardware.
Listen dude, I have been running Linux as my primary OS for over a decade, I know the feeling of looking over the fence wistfully at the happy folk capturing video (hell, how about just playing video much of the time), printing on cheap winprinters, etc. I know the annoyance of keeping a Win98 partition on my laptop because BellSouth won't let me past 1st level tech support until I have connected their supplied USB DSL modem to a Windows PC and confirmed a problem still exists.
> They would have to rip out the Windows GUI and put in the OS X GUI. That means that > they would only be using the NT kernel.
You don't understand Windows NT's internals. They wouldn't be ripping out anything. It would simply be a matter of writing a new subsystem. If they did a proper job of it they would be able to let most binaries run unmodified without any sort of emulation penalty.
The reason they picked mach/Darwin was they needed an OS for PPC they could get NextStep up and running on quickly. It needed to be a modern OS with memory management and preemptive multitasking. By a coincidence Next's original machines ran something very similar. But now they are on Intel and there are other choices open to them. Linux or the other BSD based systems have better hardware compatibility but not as good as NT. Once you understand Apple does not care about the underlying OS it makes perfect sense.
And then factor in that a WinMac ends the game and other 3rd party app problem. So long as they can hold the line on their OS components running only on their branded PCs they have only upside.
They will wait a couple of years but they will do it. They have to let the faithful get past the PPC/Intel switch and rebuild their blind faith a bit.
> They don't have to switch to Windows to gain Windows apps, though.
Correct, that is a bonus though. The switch will be for device support.
But as for Wine, it is not a real option. Much as I like the idea of Wine, the reality is that in a decade they have yet to get more than a sampling of Win32 apps running (limping is usually a more apt description) and the Win32 API goes 'legacy' later this year. I'm afraid Wine is going to be like DosEMU, it will finally get finished long after most people have stopped caring. Seriously, Dosemu finally went 1.0, Redhat included it in a release.... and the next release marked it deprecated. Nobody cared about DOS by the time they finished it and nobody will care about Win32 by the time Wine hits 1.0. If Apple were to announce Windows support based on Wine everyone would laugh... exactly as we all did at Lindows in their early hype days.
Ok, this one was a false alarm. Tomorrow it won't be. I laughed as much as the next slashdot reader when Dvorak made his silly prediction of Apple on Windows but after thinking about it I think he was probably right.
Think it through folks, there isn't anything in a Macintel that won't be in every Dell this time next year. EFI is the future, we all know BIOS is on the way out and the machines that ship with Vista will most likely be EFI with EPT instead of traditional partition tables. They will also very likely be totally legacy free, USB keyboard/mouse, only SATA drives, etc. In other words, almost identical to the current crop of Apple hardware. We already know Apple hardware will run Vista and it already runs Linux.
If you think Apple is going to have a hard time justifying the premium on their hardware you are right. But the bigger problem is going to be finding a response to customers who begin to dual boot their Macintel to gain access to all of the cheap hardware on the shelves at Walmart or online at Newegg. It is device support that is going to force the issue.
In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. Remember that NextStep was ported to Windows once already and that NT based systems are a small sorta microkernel with one or more subsystems sitting atop it. Win32 and now Vista's stuff are but two which have existed. There was a POSIX one and an OS/2 compatibility one also in the past. Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX and NextStep and that will be OS XI. It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.
Why don't we ignore the moonbat ravings on boingboing and follow the link to the original story from Australia. The worst appears to be this passage:
: Some photos feature prisoners in sexually humiliating acts that are deemed too graphic : to be shown on the program, he said. : : Video footage apparently shows one prisoner abusing himself by bashing his own head : against a wall, while other photographs appear to show corpses.
Doesn't sound like we are raping the innocent, hooking people's nuts to wall outlets or anything in Saddam's league. The worst there is not stopping somebody from trying to bash his own brains out.
What rock have you been hiding under dude? Slashdot has been a socialist hangout since I started reading it (see my UID for an idea of how long ago that was). Taco & Co had their young skulls full of mush filled with the stuff at University and like all young liberals/marxists politicize almost everything. One hopes they, like many of their ilk, grow out of it.
It has really been bad since 2001, with a daily '10 minute hate' posted daily. This article is obviously today's.
But taking talking points from Al Jezeera is one of their lower points I'll admit.
> Certainly we're not doing as much of it as Saddam did -- not quite -- but we are, in fact, > using his old torture facilities for exactly the same purposes as he used them.
Sorry moonbat, I can't let that one pass unchallenged.
Ok, so as the one making such an insane proposition would you mind providing links to reputable accounts (and I'll even include the NYT as reputable for this limited purpose) of anything close to the horror of torture Saddam's gang committed?
Those silly twits at Abu Garaib[sp] weren't even in the same league with Saddam. Show me the links to where they brought in suspects womenfolk and raped them in front of them until they confessed. Show me accounts where people were maimed and killed. Show me where even rogue US forces in Iraq hooked people's nuts up to high voltage.
> Which is, "I think it's okay to steal something if someone won't sell it to me.
It is a bit if a grey area I'll admit. But Copyright is only intended to act as an incentive to authors to create, not to give them absolute control, and I have a hard time imagining the Founding fathers writing the Copyright clause imagining it would someday be widely used to NOT sell works. George Lucas holds the Copyright on his work, giving him the exclusive right to reproduce and publicly perform said works. But I really can't see how his refusal to sell copies of Star Wars, or Disney abusing Copyright to make Song of the South disappear down the memory hole, etc. advance progress in the sciences and useful arts. So until Congress gets their act together and fixes Copyright I ain't going to lose much sleep at direct action to address obvious lapses regarding the growing problem of orphaned and deliberatly supressed works.
> Just for the sake of argument, do you believe the same holds true for "larger" software purchases, where you and a > sales rep might spend a couple months negotiating a software contract for $30M? That is, after that negotiation, do > you hold that copyright is the only legally binding entity in-force?
No, if you sign a real contract presale or as the act of sale it is binding upon both parties. Contract law 101.
> Or is the key difference that you've signed the contract before receipt of said software? And then how does the > "agree or return for a full refund" concept come into play?
It is the changing the terms after the sale that voids it. There is a reason that when you shop the bounty of goods at your friendly neighborhood Walmart that you never ponder the terms of sale on the varied good you pile into your cart. It is because the Uniform Commercial Code set down precise meaning to words like "sale".
But the kicker is that even though a EULA is almost totally one sided, you only get to see it after the sale, etc. the ONE thing they agree to do in it, return your money if you do not agree, they refuse to honor. Show me a software retailer without a sign saying "All sales final" or perhaps "Opened Software may only be exchanged for the same title." So any implied contract is broken irreparably.
No, if they really want software to be licensed and not sold they need to either change the Uniform Commercial Code, and UCITA was exactly that and went down in flames, or put a legally binding contract on the box and insist retailers present it to customers at point of sale and both sign it.
> I believe that, if a company (or a single person) produces something, they should have complete and total control > over what conditions it is sold under.
I won't call you names because the media industry has spent decades and billions indoctrinating you to think that way. But here is a newsflash for you. Intellectual Property is a myth. An author does not "own" their book, at least not in the US. Our form of government permits Congress to grant Copyrights and Patents (read: government granted artificial restrictions on free trade) to authors and inventors for a limited period of time, but ONLY "to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences." And it explicitly says "MAY" to boot. So were Congress to decide they no longer served the stated purpose they could simply do away with them and it would be 100% moral AND legal. (They couldn't invalidate any Copyright or Patent already in effect due to the prohibition of ex post facto laws.)
If the creator 'owned' the rights like real property rights the could not be taken, but they are merely an artificial monopoly grant from the government and it is free to stop handing them out. And those limited exclusive rights granted under Copyright are the SOLE EXTENT of their rights. Current copyright law already violates the 'limited times' restriction by extending over a century from first expression since 99 years is legally 'perpuitity.' Nothing in our Constituition empowered Congress to pass the DMCA for example, which is why in several other posts I assert it is our civic responsibility to violate it publicly as an act of civil disobedience. And nothing permits laws making shrink wrap EULAs enforceable. Reproduction adn public performance are the only acts regulated by Copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
> The sad thing is, according to many Republicans today, reporting on ANY negative aspect
> of Republican actions equates to Liberal fear mongering.
No, the objection was partly to making a big deal over a non-story. Political party mails out crap, film at 11. Just ain't a story. Not that I would stick that turd in my PC, even if I had a Windows box to stick it in, the sort of political hacks who make this stuff are normally technically incompetent. Who knows what sort of cybercooties I'd get from it. I'd lay one in five it will ship infected with a virus.
But my main objection was posting a link to a blog instead of primary source. Go read both and tell me the blog added any fact to the story. As for people babbling about it, well we got that here don't we? I like reading the slashdot hordes commentary on stories (hell, I even like the moonbats here, gotta taunt somebody right?). If I want to read the howling moonbats I go check in on DU or Dailykos to see what the Deaniacs are up to.
If slashdot is going to start linking to blogs commenting on other blogs (that MPR story read almost like a blog itself) they need to just turn slashdot into a blog and start a blogroll down the side and stuff. I know, they could complete the decline and startup their "Geeks in Space" net radio show again, except now of course it would be a podcast, because that is buzzword compatible.
> This means nothing. How many times has Slashdot linked to CNN, New York Times or USA Today
> who've just copy-pasted a Reuters, Xinhuan or AP articles?
It means you don't understand how the world works. Al-Reuters, AP, etc are creatures of thier member publications. An AP story on the NYT website is a 'primary' source because the NYT (along with their other members) jointly fund AP or Reuters to feed them articles.
Compare to this one. Some moonbat blog posts a rant about a story he saw on MPR and slashdot links to his rant, which has zero news value, instead of linking to the primary source. A story on the NYT is also a primary source btw, even when the story came off a newswire. Because they are running the full story reported by someone with firsthand information (ok, except when the story launches another scandal about plagerism, faked reporting, etc) instead of slicing out a couple of quotes and then ranting about it. (except for the op-ed page, they are basically just bloggers who actually get paid to do it)
> So your $600 laptop comes with a SATA hard drive, gigabit Ethernet, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive,
> built-in 802.11g, and built-in firewire?
Can't really see what the advantage to the user is what connect the HDD has, no laptop drive can come close to soaking even ATA100 and that is going on five year old tech. But off the rack Dell will sell you a laptop with a P3M at 1.4, 512M shared memory and admittedly a smaller 40GB hdd for that same $599. You get a TFT display on a laptop. Oh, and act now and the will knock $100 off. The Dell doesn't appear to have Bluetooth either. They pitch it but the dropdown box doesn't actually have an option, typical broken webpage/database. With the extra hundred you can add it if you really need it.
Yes, Apple is getting pretty competitive, but they aren't ever going to be competing heavilly on price/performance ratio. The sell a premium brand experience and their most loyal customers would abandon them if they didn't charge more.
Good grief, can we whore some liberal blogs a little more? Why not just link to the original Minnesota Public Radio article? Public radio isn't frothing at the mouth liberal enough for Slashdot now?
As for the actual charge, there is not even close to enough facts on just how much disclosure the packaging/eula has so it is hard to say much. But I'd assume the CD will come in a envelope with the Republican Party's name splattered all over it and that it will be mailed to people registered (and therefore in their computers, you did know that your voter registration is a matter of public record, right?) Republicans. So who is behind it and who will be getting the information should be fairly easy to suss out. And anybody with half a clue (i.e. most Republicans) will know the answers to this 'survey' will be heading to party HQ and used to target more fundraising appeals to ya. Because if you have EVER donated to a political party or organization you know that fundraising is job one. If that CD doesn't include a postage paid return envelope and beg letter asking the reader to give till it hurts they need a new party chairman.
> I don't remember it ever being marketed or sold as a 'media center' system.
What other job would you propose for the thing? It is a low spec machine sold at a very premium pricepoint. It's one redeeming feature is that is small, quiet and almost looks like a piece of mainstream consumer electronics. Media center PC. Except the original lacked digital audio output making it all but useless for that role, a defect they have fixed for this new version.
Now we just need a Linux distro to run on it that has support for all of the hardware, video, audio, firewire, usb and the remote. Get that in place and it can become the preferred MythTV platform.
> Hence the added audio and video streaming from networked computers in frontrow.
Frontrow is a quicktime only joke. Where do I get content for that? And don't say iTunes store. Ditch the bundleware and the hardware is nice though, too bad they won't sell em naked. Paying the Apple tax is worse than paying the M$ tax in that it is a bigger percentage of the sticker price.
The new Mac Mini is ok. At least they finally fixed the fatal flaw of the original and got optical audio on the rear panel like they should have done first time. Whoever thought selling a 'media center' machine without digital audio should have been sacked.
Still way overpriced though. Yes it is tiny, but laptops face the same issues and you can buy a laptop with similar specs just about anywhere for the same prices Apple is getting for a mini. Seriously, go price a laptop with 1.5Ghz Mobile Pentium (about the same as the 'Core Solo') a puny (for a media center) 60G laptop hard drive, 512MB memory shared with a crap Intel integrated video and a DVD/CD-RW drive. Bet you don't have much trouble finding some for $599 and that gets you a head, while the mini is sold headless.
Still, once Linux gets up and running stable on em they would make really sweet MythTV frontends. And with the new Plextor USB capture having supported drivers you could even use it for a backend/frontend setup.
> Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China,
.cn top level domain. Explain how establishing a fork of .com and .net are a better solution. So no, they don't have a 'right' to as many TLDs as they would like.
Stop reading Daily Kos a bit and rejoin the real fscking world, K? ICANN, along with the other alphabet soup organizations, have been working towards non-ascii domain names but it is a non-trivial problem if you want to keep any sort of interoperability. Seven bit ASCII is the only character set you can know with any level of certainty that every user can generate, so if you want a universal naming system it requires some thought.
> I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese
> TLDs, they should have them.
The system is designed to allow exactly that. China has absolute control over the
If they want to treat their whole country like a NATted home network and make fakes ones that only work on their 'lan' then they are free to go for it, but don't expect them to work anywhere else. Once people understand that the line to sign up for one will be pretty short. Pretty much only party aparatchiks and government agencies will want one.
> Support will be an absolute nightmare.
This is simply wrong. When Dell ships an OEM copy of Windows XP, part of the OEM contract states that Dell assumes all support responsibility. All. The current machines being shipped with Linux are bundling Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS with a three year support agreement. Not being privy to the deal between Red Hat and Dell it is impossible to say what the terms are, but I suspect Red Hat, not being a convicted monopolist, is having to do more than simply supply rolls of serial number stickers and cashing Dell's checks.
And it isn't like Dell supports Windows either, they walk you through running the restore program. While that crappy support probably won't fly with these higher dollar workstation customers, if they started selling desktop class machines it would.
> If this is not summarily dismissed for the crock it is, Whistleblowing in
> this country will officially be dead, federal protections notwithstanding.
This sort of political illiteracy is going to do in our Republic. No, someone breaks the law the DA's duty is to file charges. Civil disobedience has an honored place in our nation's history but the whole point is that when you decide circumstances require you to break a law in service to some higher moral duty you have to be willing to suck it up and face the consequences.
Those consequences are being charged and standing trial. If a jury of your peers agree you were doing the right thing it is THEIR duty to ignore this modern practice where judges think they can give 'orders' a jury and to return a not guilty verdict. But the requirement to face a jury of your peers is vital to prevent every crackpot from deciding their alternate reality gives them a license to ignore the law. It is one of the key parts that makes us a nation of laws, not men. Breaking the law has to be a rare exception.
So yes, this guy needs to be charged. The reporters at the New York Times who published classified documents need to be charged. The prosecuters need to do their damndest to put them away because that is their role in our system. And if after hearing both sides the jury lets em walk then I have no objection.
Exactly why RMS no longer endorses their use. Because this particular license is about as 'Free' as a download of Internet Explorer.
I'm shocked that slashdot is linking to The Weekly Standard, the official journal of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. How are they supposed to give us our secret orders and talking points now that the socialist hordes of Slashdot have discovered them?
But seriously, ya guys should be reading them whether you agree or disagree with the policies they advocate because they are influencial in Republican politics. Much like I follow the NYT editorial page and the network tv sunday morning yak-yak shows, because they (and now daily kos) drive the Democrats' talking points and policy positions.
Now ontopic. Wow, they sound like they plan to actually deploy this stuff. Talk about kicking the tech advantage up a notch.
Got a question that the allofmp3 site doesn't answer, since a lot of users are probably in this thread... are the tracks they sell tagged? They list insertion of id3 tags as a feature of their Windows front end so it makes one wonder. If I have to tag everything manually it would certainly be a reason NOT to use them.
> my ears aren't going to get any better with age, and neither are yours.
No they won't. But assuming you don't destroy too much of your hearing while you are young and stupid, and assuming you don't zap yourself from the genepool.... someday, if you work at it really hard, you might gain some wisdom with age. And learn to appreciate music that isn't either delivered at or above the pain threshold or muzak all but ignored in the background. Then you will start hearing the defects in most mp3 tracks.
I can play most mp3 material on my PC speakers, but when I push em to the Myth box in the living room it is a different story. Dump one out an optical link to a midrange (consumer stuff, not Audiophile tube amps or crap like that) Sony receiver and playing spot the MP3 is dead simple.
True you can get the approx $80 WinXP Home bundled into the Dell for about the same price. But there are some downsides also.
1. P.O.S. onboard Intel video vs the Nvidia in the Ars machine.
2. P.O.S. system. Dells are plastic crap, even the power supply is non-standard. This doesn't matter to some, but to those who have been burned. Quality parts cost more but you get what you pay for. Ars wasn't claiming to be putting together the cheapest P.O.S. they could, that is what Dell is for.
3. Dell appears to be dumping their stock of 32bit CPUs. The machine Ars specced out was a futureproofed 64bit box.
4. That Dell only has a CD/RW instead of a DVD+-RW. Granted you can upgrade to a DVD writer and still beat $525.
5. The price for the Dell is a 'special offer' price instead of the normal $588. God I hate playing the rebate/special of the hour game, give me halfway repeatable pricing anyday.
6. Some of us like the idea of NOT buying Windows and actually NOT buying Windows. If you 'not' buy Windows from Dell you usually pay more, which means Bill is getting his money and you don't get anything.
I managed to beat Ars price just doing a quick & dirty test shopping run at newegg.com. I managed to get a flat panel in at $480 with subwoofer, a decent keyboard and an actual AMD approved power supply. I went embedded ATI instead of Nvidia, to each their own I guess.
> Is every Mac user an automatic member of the Church of Jobs?
:) But so long as the users act as a besieged minority who believe in the bones their day is soon to pass so I am forced to conclude they will eventually be proven right even if it has to be a self fulfilling prophecy.
From the limited sample I have met personally, yes. Online you expect the crazies to dominate, but since the pattern also holds with offline my best guess would be at least 50% and probably 75% of Apple owners are currently affected by Steve's reality distortion field, some more strongly than others.
It is why I think Apple is doomed longterm. Because the users subconsciously believe it and they are closest to the situation. For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion. However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms. We saw it on the Amiga, OS/2, Be and for a decade or more among the Mac faithful. Of course obituaries on Apple have been standard fare for longer than BSD is dying trolls on Slashdot so they ain't exactly in a hurry to die or anything...
> You just admitted to using Linux. Should I piegonhole you and start making assumptions
> about your position with regards to code licensing?
That would be a fairly safe bet. You won't find many who have been running Linux for a decade who haven't become at least 75% RMS pure. Me I'm probably more like 85%. I will still use a closed program if nothing else is available for the task. I keep trying to use the Free ATI driver and keep going back to the closed one after a couple of crashes or wildly inaccurate rendering bugs.
And apparently you won't find many who have owned a Mac for more than a couple of years who haven't join the Cult of Mac.
> No, NextStep 3.0 on Intel was about as Windows-dependent or -based as x86 Linux is.
Dig some more. Unless I have started going senile or something there was also a period when Next Inc was making most of their income selling Next like toolkits to Windows developers.
> No way. I switched to PPC to get OS X, and when I replace my current Mac I'll go to x86 for OS X.
And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC. And when he announces OS XI you will be stunned and dismayed for a day or two and then be out on the online fora hailing it as the smartest thing since the last thing Steve did.
> Your argument is that they will have to move OSes because of hardware support?
No, my argument is that it will creep up on folks when they start dual booting. And eventually many will start asking why they have such a small list of supported hardware when OS X is running on their 'PC'. The trick is when they realize that what they have IS just a PC running OS X & Vista, and one side doesn't support all of their hardware.
Listen dude, I have been running Linux as my primary OS for over a decade, I know the feeling of looking over the fence wistfully at the happy folk capturing video (hell, how about just playing video much of the time), printing on cheap winprinters, etc. I know the annoyance of keeping a Win98 partition on my laptop because BellSouth won't let me past 1st level tech support until I have connected their supplied USB DSL modem to a Windows PC and confirmed a problem still exists.
> They would have to rip out the Windows GUI and put in the OS X GUI. That means that
> they would only be using the NT kernel.
You don't understand Windows NT's internals. They wouldn't be ripping out anything. It would simply be a matter of writing a new subsystem. If they did a proper job of it they would be able to let most binaries run unmodified without any sort of emulation penalty.
The reason they picked mach/Darwin was they needed an OS for PPC they could get NextStep up and running on quickly. It needed to be a modern OS with memory management and preemptive multitasking. By a coincidence Next's original machines ran something very similar. But now they are on Intel and there are other choices open to them. Linux or the other BSD based systems have better hardware compatibility but not as good as NT. Once you understand Apple does not care about the underlying OS it makes perfect sense.
And then factor in that a WinMac ends the game and other 3rd party app problem. So long as they can hold the line on their OS components running only on their branded PCs they have only upside.
They will wait a couple of years but they will do it. They have to let the faithful get past the PPC/Intel switch and rebuild their blind faith a bit.
> They don't have to switch to Windows to gain Windows apps, though.
Correct, that is a bonus though. The switch will be for device support.
But as for Wine, it is not a real option. Much as I like the idea of Wine, the reality is that in a decade they have yet to get more than a sampling of Win32 apps running (limping is usually a more apt description) and the Win32 API goes 'legacy' later this year. I'm afraid Wine is going to be like DosEMU, it will finally get finished long after most people have stopped caring. Seriously, Dosemu finally went 1.0, Redhat included it in a release.... and the next release marked it deprecated. Nobody cared about DOS by the time they finished it and nobody will care about Win32 by the time Wine hits 1.0. If Apple were to announce Windows support based on Wine everyone would laugh... exactly as we all did at Lindows in their early hype days.
Ok, this one was a false alarm. Tomorrow it won't be. I laughed as much as the next slashdot reader when Dvorak made his silly prediction of Apple on Windows but after thinking about it I think he was probably right.
Think it through folks, there isn't anything in a Macintel that won't be in every Dell this time next year. EFI is the future, we all know BIOS is on the way out and the machines that ship with Vista will most likely be EFI with EPT instead of traditional partition tables. They will also very likely be totally legacy free, USB keyboard/mouse, only SATA drives, etc. In other words, almost identical to the current crop of Apple hardware. We already know Apple hardware will run Vista and it already runs Linux.
If you think Apple is going to have a hard time justifying the premium on their hardware you are right. But the bigger problem is going to be finding a response to customers who begin to dual boot their Macintel to gain access to all of the cheap hardware on the shelves at Walmart or online at Newegg. It is device support that is going to force the issue.
In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. Remember that NextStep was ported to Windows once already and that NT based systems are a small sorta microkernel with one or more subsystems sitting atop it. Win32 and now Vista's stuff are but two which have existed. There was a POSIX one and an OS/2 compatibility one also in the past. Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX and NextStep and that will be OS XI. It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.
> The new Abu Ghraib pictures.
> And yes, it is as bad as anything Sadaam did.
Why don't we ignore the moonbat ravings on boingboing and follow the link to the original story from Australia. The worst appears to be this passage:
: Some photos feature prisoners in sexually humiliating acts that are deemed too graphic
: to be shown on the program, he said.
:
: Video footage apparently shows one prisoner abusing himself by bashing his own head
: against a wall, while other photographs appear to show corpses.
Doesn't sound like we are raping the innocent, hooking people's nuts to wall outlets or anything in Saddam's league. The worst there is not stopping somebody from trying to bash his own brains out.
What rock have you been hiding under dude? Slashdot has been a socialist hangout since I started reading it (see my UID for an idea of how long ago that was). Taco & Co had their young skulls full of mush filled with the stuff at University and like all young liberals/marxists politicize almost everything. One hopes they, like many of their ilk, grow out of it.
It has really been bad since 2001, with a daily '10 minute hate' posted daily. This article is obviously today's.
But taking talking points from Al Jezeera is one of their lower points I'll admit.
> Certainly we're not doing as much of it as Saddam did -- not quite -- but we are, in fact,
> using his old torture facilities for exactly the same purposes as he used them.
Sorry moonbat, I can't let that one pass unchallenged.
Ok, so as the one making such an insane proposition would you mind providing links to reputable accounts (and I'll even include the NYT as reputable for this limited purpose) of anything close to the horror of torture Saddam's gang committed?
Those silly twits at Abu Garaib[sp] weren't even in the same league with Saddam. Show me the links to where they brought in suspects womenfolk and raped them in front of them until they confessed. Show me accounts where people were maimed and killed. Show me where even rogue US forces in Iraq hooked people's nuts up to high voltage.
> Which is, "I think it's okay to steal something if someone won't sell it to me.
It is a bit if a grey area I'll admit. But Copyright is only intended to act as an incentive to authors to create, not to give them absolute control, and I have a hard time imagining the Founding fathers writing the Copyright clause imagining it would someday be widely used to NOT sell works. George Lucas holds the Copyright on his work, giving him the exclusive right to reproduce and publicly perform said works. But I really can't see how his refusal to sell copies of Star Wars, or Disney abusing Copyright to make Song of the South disappear down the memory hole, etc. advance progress in the sciences and useful arts. So until Congress gets their act together and fixes Copyright I ain't going to lose much sleep at direct action to address obvious lapses regarding the growing problem of orphaned and deliberatly supressed works.
> Just for the sake of argument, do you believe the same holds true for "larger" software purchases, where you and a
> sales rep might spend a couple months negotiating a software contract for $30M? That is, after that negotiation, do
> you hold that copyright is the only legally binding entity in-force?
No, if you sign a real contract presale or as the act of sale it is binding upon both parties. Contract law 101.
> Or is the key difference that you've signed the contract before receipt of said software? And then how does the
> "agree or return for a full refund" concept come into play?
It is the changing the terms after the sale that voids it. There is a reason that when you shop the bounty of goods at your friendly neighborhood Walmart that you never ponder the terms of sale on the varied good you pile into your cart. It is because the Uniform Commercial Code set down precise meaning to words like "sale".
But the kicker is that even though a EULA is almost totally one sided, you only get to see it after the sale, etc. the ONE thing they agree to do in it, return your money if you do not agree, they refuse to honor. Show me a software retailer without a sign saying "All sales final" or perhaps "Opened Software may only be exchanged for the same title." So any implied contract is broken irreparably.
No, if they really want software to be licensed and not sold they need to either change the Uniform Commercial Code, and UCITA was exactly that and went down in flames, or put a legally binding contract on the box and insist retailers present it to customers at point of sale and both sign it.
> I believe that, if a company (or a single person) produces something, they should have complete and total control
> over what conditions it is sold under.
I won't call you names because the media industry has spent decades and billions indoctrinating you to think that way. But here is a newsflash for you. Intellectual Property is a myth. An author does not "own" their book, at least not in the US. Our form of government permits Congress to grant Copyrights and Patents (read: government granted artificial restrictions on free trade) to authors and inventors for a limited period of time, but ONLY "to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences." And it explicitly says "MAY" to boot. So were Congress to decide they no longer served the stated purpose they could simply do away with them and it would be 100% moral AND legal. (They couldn't invalidate any Copyright or Patent already in effect due to the prohibition of ex post facto laws.)
If the creator 'owned' the rights like real property rights the could not be taken, but they are merely an artificial monopoly grant from the government and it is free to stop handing them out. And those limited exclusive rights granted under Copyright are the SOLE EXTENT of their rights. Current copyright law already violates the 'limited times' restriction by extending over a century from first expression since 99 years is legally 'perpuitity.' Nothing in our Constituition empowered Congress to pass the DMCA for example, which is why in several other posts I assert it is our civic responsibility to violate it publicly as an act of civil disobedience. And nothing permits laws making shrink wrap EULAs enforceable. Reproduction adn public performance are the only acts regulated by Copyright.