God, I hope something like this replaces PowerPoint. As we all know, PowerPoint makes you stupid. It forces you either to dumb down your presentation to the intellectual complexity (and entertainment value) of an infomercial, or cram so much text onto your slides, most of which you will recite anyway, that you might as well just pass out reports in 3-ring binders.
That said, I think the most crippling thing about PowerPoint is its linearity. Not all presentations "want" to be laid out into a preset order of points. If a college professor or a businessperson gets asked a question during a presentation, all too often it is diverted by saying "well, that's coming up in a few slides", or the presentation is interrupted as tangential data is introduced.
Using voice recognition instead of click-through navigation opens up some great possibilities for non-linear presentations, though. Imagine that, instead of organizing your presentation into a linear timeline, you group slides and other media into "points", each of which represents a different idea relevant to your talk. You can arrange these points into a web, indicating what information depends on prior knowledge from other slides, etc. You then assosciate each point with an audio "cue", say a phrase like "projected profit margins" or "the three kingdoms period". You'll note that these phrases are things you're likely to naturally utter in your presentation anyway. This has the advantage of enabling you to speak totally naturally without interrupting your presentation. To avoid accidental jumping, we would have, say, a little translucent blue arrow fade into being every time a cue is recognized, disappearing a few seconds later. If you actually want to jump to a new point, it's just a quick click of a button when you see the blue arrow.
So, imagine you're giving a sales presentation to a group of executives. You notice this particular group is getting bored with your standard sales pitch. No problem, as you just drop a key phrase into your speech, and instantly change your presentation to include information you think will appeal to the business interests of your audience, or simply to their personality. Or, imagine a professor is giving a lecture on a peice of literature. A student asks a question about the author's background, and the professor can easily insert some information on their country, their historical circumstances, and their life.
Of course, organizing this type of presentation requires a greater investment in planning, and certainly requires a little more cognitive ability than your standard PowerPoint fare. However, those who work with these new presentation systems will be giving themselves an undeniable competitive advantage over presenters using linear methods. And those in the audience will be grateful, I'm sure.
Wow, AC. I do believe I mentioned Mach in my original post. Incidentally, I use GNU/Linux as my primary OS, not BSD. It's not trolling to suggest that Apple has benefitted from the work of others (and, of course, vice versa).
Yes, Darwin has SMP support that it inherited from the codebase of FreeBSD and Mach. And, to tell the truth, if you want a complete, modern *BSD system you might be better off with FreeBSD anyway (it has probably the most extensive ports collection, best SMP support, fastest scheduler, best desktop support, etc.). The reason for the "other" BSDs (OpenBSD and NetBSD) existing is to focus on goals that don't fit in with FreeBSD's general-purpose design or Apple's exclusive focus on the PowerPC desktop (i386 versions of Darwin notwithstanding). Specifically, OpenBSD is designed to be ultra-secure, while NetBSD's goal is to be portable across as many different architectures as possible. If OpenBSD gets a useful feature like SMP without sacrificing security, though, it's a *good thing* for people who deploy OpenBSD, as it gives them more hardware options in the future.
Authoring video DVDs on linux is more than a little difficult, these days. That said, with a little command line knowledge and some good old-fashioned ingenuity, you can accomplish much.
I found this article to be a good starting point. The beginning of the article assumes that you'll be working with a framegrabber and generating MJPEG video with appropriate resolution/framerate, etc. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world, so you'll actually need to transcode your videos into the MJPEG format before you do the MPEG2 encoding. I find that mencoder is usually the best way to accomplish this:
Note that the above command assumes you are making a DVD for NTSC (US/Canada/Japan) format. If you use PAL, you'll want 720:576 as your resolution and 25 fps as your framerate instead. If you're encoding from a film (24 fps) source, try applying the telecine filter, as well (add ",telecine" after the scale command, and set "-ofps 29.97). This method of framerate conversion is the standard for cinematic DVDs.
Now, I know you're asking, why not use mencoder to encode the MPEG2 stream directly and skip the middleman? Well, I've tried this, and it isn't possible for a couple of reasons. The first is bandwidth control. Although mencoder will accept a bitrate option for MPEG2 encoding, it is not conscious of the buffering assumptions of the DVD standard, and will produce streams that will encounter buffer underruns in hardware DVD players. The second problem is that an MPEG2 program stream for a DVD must contain empty navigation packets (these get filled in when you create the actual vobs), which mencoder won't create. C'est la vie.
It's worth noting that you can get at more advanced bitrate control options for libavcodec's MPEG2 encoder by using lavc's native transcoding application, ffmpeg. At least, theoretically you can. My version of ffmpeg 0.4.7 doesn't seem to include mpeg2 as a possible output format, even though it's accessible through mencoder. Go figure.
OK, let's move on to our friend mpeg2enc. The first thing you'll notice is that it's slow. Really slow. Especially compared to mencoder. You'll live, though. Take a nap or something. The instructions in the article will give you a stream that's perfectly fine for DVD encoding, but it's definitely worth looking at the manpage as well. One of the most important things you'll learn there is that mpeg2enc takes arguments for both aspect ratio and framerate of incoming movies. Add the option "-a n" to the command given in the article, substituting 2 for n if your video is in the 4:3 aspect ratio (regular TV), 3 if it is 16:9 (letterbox widescreen format, most movies), or 4 for 2.21:1 (cinemascope widescreen, movies shot in panoramic view). The "-F n" command specifies the framerate. IF you are using PAL or SECAM, always use 3. If you are using NTSC, always use 4. Anything else will make you cry. Finally, you can add the "-p" option if you have 24 fps input video that you intend for NTSC viewing, and you didn't already have mencoder apply telecine. I actually prefer to have mpeg2enc do telecine, as that way you are certain to avoid A/V sync problems.
Moving right along, the article tells you how to use the dvd authoring tools to eventually get an iso file ready to burn. It should be noted that the image you have ready won't have menus or other niceties. For sooth! Lucky for you, you actually can include these things, but it won't exactly be easy. Now that you know the basics of encoding for the DVD format, this guide can instruct you on how to add things like menus and whatnot. Anyway, once you get the iso file ready to go, I highly recommend you burn it with KDE's excellent K3B, unless you have an attachment to the command line too
In actuality, this should be from the "nihongo *o* amari hanashimasen" department. The particle "o" (the phonetic o, that is, historically it is the hiragana wo) is used in this case because nihongo (the Japanese language) is the object of the sentence. The particle wa (hiragana ha) is a suffix appended to the *subject* of the sentence, which in this case, it can be inferred, is the speaker (if we wanted to be more long-winded, we could say "Watashi wa nihongo o amari hanashimasen"). As it stands, the sentence says that the Japanese language doesn't talk much. While this is correct (languages themselves are, as far as I know, mute), I don't think it was the speaker's intention.;)
Not all religions consider man to be centrally important in the universe (in fact some, like Taoism and some forms of neo-Paganism, stress man's existence as a nondistinct part of the cohesive whole of nature). Furthermore, many practitioners of religions which do assign a special value to humanness or sentience understand that such value is entirely spiritual and not to be confused with any external physical value. Even members of western religions which feature an active creator God (Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, etc.) are often open to the possibility of even intelligent extraterrestrial life, as they see such beings as also being God's children. Theories as to the religious inclinations of such extraterrestrial beings abound (I heard from a Berkeley astronomer working on extrasolar planets that he had recieved a letter from the Vatican asking if he had any inkling as to the hypothetical religious beliefs of hypothetical aliens. He replied that his data was as yet insufficient for a meaningful answer). Even assuming that intelligent extraterrestrials do not possess practices akin to human religion, I'm sure some members of "missionary" faiths (i.e. some sects of Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Bhuddism) might believe that such beings would need to be exposed to the tenets of their religion and possibly converted. Less aggressive religious persons might find very interesting insights in the philosophical ideas of an alien race, even as people today can learn a great deal from other religions and cultures.
You need to remember that religion and science need not be antagonistic. I, for one, am a scientist and also a man of faith. I do not believe in the literal truth of any religious text, but I do believe that many different faiths around the world contain spiritual truth or "divine inspiration" if you will. I personally was raised in a (mainstream protestant) Christian environment and today choose to worship as a (Quaker) Christian, but I do not, by any means, believe that my religion has a monopoly on the truth.
I also believe that science is another powerful source for truth, and a unique one in that its claims can be tested, measured, and verified (unlike religion). Science has in the past disproven the very literal-minded interpretations of religious conservatives with regard to cosmology and biology, and it will likely continue to do so in the future. Keep in mind, however, that there are those of us who hold religious beliefs and also believe in the veracity of Evolution, the Big Bang theory, and even consider the prospect of extraterrestrial life likely. I recognize that science does not offer proof of my belief in a diety, or in a moral purpose for intelligent life, but I also know that science does not disprove these beliefs. I accept that, going on empirical evidence, Atheism is just as valid and just as likely a belief system as my own, and so I don't seek to disprove it. Saying that science disproves all religion, however, is just as ridiculous as the claims of so-called "creation scientists" who insist that scientific evidence proves that the Universe was created by God some ~6000 years ago, and thus that science disproves Atheism.
In the end, you'd do well to remember the scientific method. In order for a scientific hypothesis to be valid, it has to be falsifiable. A statement like "God created two human beings in Eden 6000 years ago, and the entire human race is decended from those two ancestors" is falsifiable, as we can find older and more varied human remains around the world. A statement like "God exists", however, is not falsifiable, and therefore is not testable by science. You can disprove certain ideas about God's interaction with human affairs, or you can disprove the literal correctness of certain creation accounts, but you can not disprove the existence of God (him|her|it)self. And, even if you could, many people would still choose to believe in God anyway, just as many people choose to believe in a literal creation now. As a scientist, I have
Actually, I learned to hack on a purple box once upon a time, and it sure wasn't made by Apple. And, even though systems like the Indy seem ancient now, old IRIX users will be glad to tell you that SGI figured out how to make UNIX sexy long before OS X came along.
Anyway, It's interesting that you mention the attitude of Mac users just now, because I just recently had a conversation with two friends who are proud Apple fans. They joked with eachother about how anti-establishment and rebellious they were. I then pointed out that, if anything, my OS (now Gentoo Linux) was the counterculture, revolutionary one. The Mac, I'd say, is now a very trendy, high-fashion platform (at least within my age demographic, that of the college student). Of course, its users take a certain pride in their small numbers. After all, if the Mac began to approach Windows' level of market share, they'd lose their fashionable elitism. My Mac user friends were actually inclined to agree with my analysis.
So, to summarize:
Windows = The Gap
Mac = Prada
Linux = Thrift Store (or, in my case...)
Gentoo = I sowed these myself.
You know, Zoom & Rotate aren't critical features in an interface. They're eye candy (well, I suppose they can be used in a useful way a la expose, but I digress). Anyway, if you'd payed attention when the XFree86 core team disbanded, you might have noticed that the gist of that decision was that release engineering would become more open and "developer cronyism" would be reduced. If anything, the decision makes it easier for experimental features from Xouvert and Freedesktops to get integrated back into XF86. In the meantime, features that are slightly more practical in a graphics framework (IE a good video API (xv), direct 3D rendering support (DRI), etc.) are in X, and they work without a hitch.
And as far as playing an mp3 and killing the mouse, that's absolute pure troll. I started using Linux in 1997 (having used Windows and some IRIX previously), and easily played mp3s in XMMS on a stock redhat install with no headaches.
And speaking of trolling, your desire to use longhorn astounds me. A good interface makes it easy to do what you want to do and then gets out of your way and lets you work. An everpresent media sidebar stealing my desktop space and giving me context-sensitive bullshit (Clippy 2, anyone) is not my idea of clueful. The rest of Longhorn's improvements are mostly an effort to catch up with Aqua, which I do not dispute is a fantastic GUI (there are some things I could take or leave aesthetically, but it IS immensely usable). You're right, Apple is likely to retain a substantial lead over Microsoft in UI design, but as a GNOME user you hopefully realize that the free desktop environments are already far more user-customizable than their commercial counterparts, at least every bit as usable as windows, and even damn pretty (did I mention I love the new Plastik theme in KDE 3.2?). My point is that Linux is a real and viable option on the desktop, and at this rate Microsoft may actually have to worry about losing a substantial number of users on the corporate desktop, and also in fields like education (where budgets are tight, minds are young and sharp, heterogenous networks are common, and Microsoft has been unable to squeeze at least one rival (Apple) out even after 25 years of trying).
Re:Personal Thoughts
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Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 2, Informative
A few notes:
1. KDE uses freetype to render fonts. You can use any truetype font you like, and they're beautifully anti-aliased. And, if you'd RTFA, you might notice that KDE 3.2 includes a new font manager to make font configuration even easier.
2. About X being 20 years old... yes, the framework is. UNIX is 34. GCC itself dates back to 1987. But you know what, I'm not running the original iteration of the X window system (nor are you, I hope, running Windows 1.0). Xft renders my fonts beautifully, and I've set KDE to use Xrender to draw transparencies. You might also note that zoom (a la Mac OS X) and rotate (a la fake Movie GUIs) are being coded into X as you troll. These are features that windows has yet to be clued in on.
3. I haven't personally experienced any of the theme-crashing bugs you claim, but even assuming you're right, I'll take KDE, which comes with Plastik, Keramik, and all the built-in QT themes out of the box over WinXP which lets me select from a whopping 3 color schemes and 2 widget styles.
Re:Personal Thoughts
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Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Lest we forget that Apple's Safari is based on Konqueror, eh? (entirely legally and within the terms of the LGPL, so more power to them). Anyway, I don't doubt that OS X is prettier and probably easier out of the box, but KDE excels over the Aqua interface when it comes to customizability.
Ultimately, the KDE folks (as well as pretty much every other group of designers) have learned a lot from the Mac, and meanwhile the Mac has benefitted from the interface innovations of others (HUGELY from NeXT, Jobs' other company, and also from KDE re: Safari). All I'm saying is that the Mac engineers might be impressed by a few things in KDE 3.2 (the Windows UI designers, on the other hand, need to come to grips with the fact that KDE is now and has been a better GUI than Windows).
Actually, you need to have ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" set in order to emerge masked ebuilds (which the KDE 3.2 packages currently are). You may just want to run emerge kde instead of emerge -u kde at that point, since having ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" set will cause portage to emerge newer (masked) versions of KDE dependencies as well, which will be time consuming and possibly cause instability.
Personal Thoughts
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Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A couple of days ago, I emerged KDE 3.2 on my Gentoo system. Aside from a wierd ALSA bug that I had to fix, the upgrade from 3.1.5 was pretty painless.
Anyway, my thoughts on the latest iteration of my chosen desktop. Let's just say that KDE 3.2 should raise eyebrows in Cupertino and soil pants in Redmond. There are numerous small eyecandy improvements, plus tons of little usability-enhancing features in common areas of the system (for example, Konqueror has a vastly improved file-manager sidebar that gives idiot-proof access to local partitions, printers, and even network shares). Some of the new applications debuting in this release are truly excellent, as well (like the slick iTunes-clone JuK or the lovely multiproticol IM client Kopete). Finally, some rather extensive optimizations seem to have taken place throughout the system, as KDE now seems more responsive than in the past (true, some of these optimizations are "cheating", like the option to keep an instance of Konqueror preloaded, but it's still a nice option to have).
Anyway, congrats to the KDE team on an excellent release, and thank you for proving once again that UNIX on the desktop isn't just a wild fantasy, it's a real-life joy.
Reading the article, I notice that the digital model starts off nude, then has clothes rendered onto it. In order for these photorealistic images of a person in new clothes to be generated, it would seem that the software requires a nude scan of said person. Of course, the person could be scanned while clothed, but you'd really just be rendering new clothes on top of the old ones (which, in the software, would take on the rigidity of flesh). It might be possible to design an algorithm to "strip" the scans, but the accuracy would be limited by the varying bagginess of whatever the person is wearing.
Naturally, privacy and convenience concerns arise when one is asked to submit to a nude, full-body digital scan in order to use the new fitting system. The store could keep scans on file, making this a one-time affair, but unless a secure crypto system (wherein only the customer possesses the key) is implemented, the potential for creepy abuse is enormous.
One solution I can think of, however, is to do the scan in a private booth while the customer is only wearing underwear (most undergarments being tight-fitting enough as to not affect the image of the clothing being worn). This is still more convenient than going through a stack of clothes to try on, as the user needs only "change" once. The model for the system could be deleted after use, or the customer could elect to store it on a USB memory stick they bring with them, updating it only occasionally as their physical appearance changes significantly (it could even be stored centrally if a department store chain, or better yet a consortium of them, decides to implement a truly secure system).
It's true that this system doesn't offer as good a "feel" for clothing as actually trying on outfits. For men or women on the go, however, it could drastically reduce time spent clothes shopping. Imagine browsing through the latest fashions at home, picking out a few you like, then heading to the Department store, where they have everything you picked out, in your size, ready for you to try on (and you'll still want to, if for no other reason than to gauge the comfort of the clothing and verify the program's accuracy). An hours-long shopping trip could be reduced to a managable 10-15 minutes.
Of course, my wardrobe consists mostly of items from Goodwill or Thinkgeek, so this is of little utility to me. Nonetheless, it has some potential to make life a lot more convenient for my girlfriend, my sister, etc.
I'd suggest this for high-speed Internet in AA. I regularly pull down 1 MByte/s on torrents.
In case you're averse to living around the likes of me, however, Comcast does offer cable modem service throughout the Ann Arbor area. As far as I know, their service does not require you to be a cable TV subscriber to sign up.
When I was beta testing TSO, I started to get a few ideas about what might be possible with this sort of game. Obviously, the sexual deviance mentioned in the article occured to me (not in any vivid detail, I assure you). I thought the more interesting possibilities lied in more normal, healthy human relationships, however. For example, I was then (and am still now) involved in a long-distance romantic relationship. I began to contemplate the idea of a virtual date with my girlfriend. We could eat out, go see a show, take a romantic walk in the park. Of course, it doesn't compare to any of these activities in real life, but a virtual date, or "proxy intimacy", as I'll call it, is light-years beyond AIM as a communication medium for lovers. Of course, for single sims, nothing says you can't meet someone actractive at the club and begin a whole online relationship (once again, much more interesting than the lurid creepiness of singles chatrooms).
Unfortunately, my dreams for this sort of interaction never panned out. TSO, while trumpeted as being freeform and open-ended in the extreme, wound up digging itself into a rut pretty quickly. Some of its problems lie in the fact that it ranks users on ladders, and introduces systems of competition which are entirely artificial to a game which attempts to emulate "real life". Case in point: statistics on the richest and most popular sims. In the former case, you have a bunch of hyper-capitalists trying to outpace eachother in the generation of a hyperinflating virtual currency (more on the economic problems in TSO later). In the latter, you see an even more bizarre and surreal sort of competition, wherein online characters do whatever they can to get a "friend" designation from other players and then, for the most part, ignore those characters (what an odd definition of friendship).
Another difficulty is introduced in the zoning system used for property. On a basic level, there is none. This sounds good enough, as it should theoretically enable the construction of any sort of enterprise. The unfortunate result of this, however, is that most places just look more or less like houses. There's no concept of shared or leased property, either, as every property has a distinct owner or owners (thus, there are no apartment buildings, no malls, no office parks, nothing). And, although the game lays out properties with physical locations on a map of your chosen city, these locations have no real meaning whatsoever. Properties are not connected to adjacent properties in any special way, and thus the concept of a neighborhood is utterly nonexistent (the lack of anything approximating geography in-game is a very significant barrier to the formation of actual communities). Travelling anywhere in the game is a point-and-click affair, so there's nothing like walking down the street to the drugstore, or taking the subway cross-town to the nightclub. Similarly, you can't walk over to Bob's for the barbeque.
To be sure, people do hold many social events in the game world, but conducting them with friends (in the traditional sense, no the wierd in-game definition) can be difficult. There is very little consistency to online relationships, as the only people you're likely to run into with any frequency in a particular establishment (without having made prior plans) are the owners. Locations are no help, due to the fact that each is a node unto itself (I actually never met any of my neighbors in Alphaville. I doubt many people have). The chance of repeatedly encountering someone by chance then becomes exceedingly small. This, I think, contributes to some of the romantic and sexual wierdness of the game. In TSO, you can't see that cute girl at the Deli a few times during lunch and then work up the nerve to strike up a conversation with her. Better ask if she wants to do the make out action now while you can! Now, if TSO behaved like a more realistic analogue of life, there wouldn't be such a market for prostitution in the gameworld, as people would probably be dating and even
Actually, this probably isn't as difficult as it seems. GCC compiles ObjC (in point of fact, Apple uses GCC to compile OS X), and Cocoa is just Apple's implementation of the OpenSTEP API which was originally laid out back in the NeXT days (it's actually pretty remarkable how similar it is, just move the application's menus from the corner of the screen to a bar across the top and pretty things up and you've got yourself a brand new NeXT). Anyway, GnuSTEP is another OpenSTEP compatible environment, and I suspect that the Cocoa interface wouldn't take too much work to port over.
Interesting that one of Microsoft's top examples is a comparison of TCO between wintel servers and an IBM z-series (formerly known as s/390) mainframe running SUSE. Of COURSE mainframes cost ass-loads of money, and people who buy IBM mainframes are more likely to be using them for their reliability than flat-out performance per dollar. Let's see a comparison between Win2K3 and Linux on the same Intel boxen, guys.
The GTA series is obviously a gritty, crime-themed bunch of computer games. I'd be interested as to whether the NY Post (mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch, the upstanding champion of media integrity and wholesome entertainment) thinks that the Godfather films ought to be banned outright. After all, they're violent, and even contain some very racist dialogue in a scene involving a potential drug deal.
My bet is that most reasonable people (a category which excludes the staff of the New York Post, unfortunately) wouldn't say we should expunge one of our nation's classic cinematic masterpeices from the record just because it deals in some very dark and violent themes. Of course, parents have a right and, I think we can agree in this case a responsibility, to sheild their children from very violent entertainment until they see fit, but people need to face facts: we're never going to have a G-rated society. People know that in GTA, you play a bad guy, and they know that bad guys do bad things. Playing Vice City didn't make me want to go out and kill any Haitians (I imagine that might distress my Haitian friends and, incidently, the out-of-context quote refers to a pitched battle between rival Haitian and Cuban gangs), it didn't make me want to deal cocaine, and it only gave me a slight desire to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Anyone who is young or stupid enough to have a video game seriously wound their moral sensibilities has parents for a reason. And as for those teenagers who took potshots at passing vehicles, supposedly in imitation of the game, does anyone really think that they didn't possess some violent and dangerous tendencies to begin with? If they'd never set eyes on a PS2, would we have never heard of their exploits? My hunch is no.
Sorry, New York Post, but I think that most people are just too smart to give in to your impulse to crush the competition when it comes to glorifying mass murder. It's just a game, get over it.
I liken his use of open relays to trespassing in someone else's warehouse and setting up a meth lab. Sure, he'd like to just run the lab out of his basement, but the gosh-darn neighbors might complain. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I just thought I'd write in with my personal experience with another MP3 device, the ArchosJukebox Studio 20. Now, don't think I'm trolling on an "Apple Sucks, Archos Rocks" trip, because I'm not. If I had the money, I'd definitely get myself an iPod, as the on-device interface thoroughly kicks the ass of my 2-line text display (although much love goes out to the hackers at Rockbox for making the Jukebox orders of magnitude more elegant and usable), and a firewire connection is certainly prefferable to USB 1.1 (and it is my understanding that both devices are now supported in Linux, so there you go).
With all of that said, I have to say that Archos' support has been first class. I'll be honest, I used to charge my Jukebox in a rather precarious position. It was prone to getting its cord yanked, and thus falling several feet to the floor. Amazingly, the unit survived this punishment many times. After about 18 months, however (interesting timeframe, eh?), the hard drive began failing. Bad sectors and the like. I called up Archos, who were content with nothing more than my confirmation page from Thinkgeek as a reciept, and gladly replaced my harddrive (for all I know they sent me a new unit, actually) for FREE. Since that time (which was the summer before last), I've continued using the Jukebox with no ill effects (although I learned my lesson to be more gentle with it).
Well, everyone hates SCO, and I can't say that they didn't have it coming, but... unfortunately, this is just the sort of thing that SCO's legal/media thugs will use as ammunition ("see, we TOLD you they didn't have any respect for the law or the business world, just look what they did to our website!")
Of course, it's utter bullshit to pin this sort of childish prank on the OSS/free software community, but SCO seems to love utter bullshit.
OK, no way, ever, under any circumstances, will your 500 MHz K6-2 beat a system whose bus is faster than the CPU. And, as far as never using more than 1 GHz, well, perhaps you won't just doing word processing and web surfing, but you also have to accept the fact that a lot of people do very CPU-intensive things with their PCs these days (I encode a lot of videos, do a good bit of gaming, and compile gobs and gobs of source code since I run Gentoo), and I'm quite glad that my proc is a Barton and not my old P3.
That said, you've got a point about throughput. Keeping the processor busy is key to maximizing performance, which is one of the reasons the Athlons (with their bigger cache) easily trounce the higher-clocked Celerons. Incidentally, this is also why Intel was able to quickly cover their asses with the P4 extreme-edition (timed to coincide exactly with the release of the Athlon FX): all they did was take a stock P4-c and slap a couple of megs of L3 cache on it and viola, they have a contender (don't be too impressed, though. The P4 EE may hold its own against the AthlonFX on 32-bit apps, but the ability to process 64-bit instructions means massive improvements for multimedia down the line).
Anyway, though, fast disks, a fast bus, and lots of ram are certainly important considerations in reducing the overall latency for the processor. You've forgotten a couple of things, though. First is memory latency. You want your DDR ram clocked as high as possible with timings as good as possible. Chances are that the tradeoff of more RAM for faster RAM will be worth it, except in a few specialized scenarios. I myself got 512M of DDR400 RAM that hits 2-3-2 CAS timings instead of a gig of generic DDR266, and I must say that I'm very pleased with the results (even kicking the RAM clock up to 400MHz from the original bus speed gave me double-digit improvements in XviD encoding framerate). If you're a gamer, you also want to invest in a good graphics card, and a motherboard that does 8X AGP. My home-built Barton with a Radeon 9700 Pro easily outrenders my friend's brand new 3.2 GHz Dell P4 (with a gig of RAM) simply because my graphics card is doing all the heavy lifting, and it's getting textures sent to it on a fast 8X connection (his machine has stock Intel graphics running on 4X, I think). That said, the Radeon 9700 Pro (especially when I bought it) isn't really a budget component, but an investment in a very reasonably priced 9500 or 9600 will make a huge difference in games and pack a hell of a lot more punch than an extra few hundred MHz.
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God, I hope something like this replaces PowerPoint. As we all know, PowerPoint makes you stupid. It forces you either to dumb down your presentation to the intellectual complexity (and entertainment value) of an infomercial, or cram so much text onto your slides, most of which you will recite anyway, that you might as well just pass out reports in 3-ring binders.
That said, I think the most crippling thing about PowerPoint is its linearity. Not all presentations "want" to be laid out into a preset order of points. If a college professor or a businessperson gets asked a question during a presentation, all too often it is diverted by saying "well, that's coming up in a few slides", or the presentation is interrupted as tangential data is introduced.
Using voice recognition instead of click-through navigation opens up some great possibilities for non-linear presentations, though. Imagine that, instead of organizing your presentation into a linear timeline, you group slides and other media into "points", each of which represents a different idea relevant to your talk. You can arrange these points into a web, indicating what information depends on prior knowledge from other slides, etc. You then assosciate each point with an audio "cue", say a phrase like "projected profit margins" or "the three kingdoms period". You'll note that these phrases are things you're likely to naturally utter in your presentation anyway. This has the advantage of enabling you to speak totally naturally without interrupting your presentation. To avoid accidental jumping, we would have, say, a little translucent blue arrow fade into being every time a cue is recognized, disappearing a few seconds later. If you actually want to jump to a new point, it's just a quick click of a button when you see the blue arrow.
So, imagine you're giving a sales presentation to a group of executives. You notice this particular group is getting bored with your standard sales pitch. No problem, as you just drop a key phrase into your speech, and instantly change your presentation to include information you think will appeal to the business interests of your audience, or simply to their personality. Or, imagine a professor is giving a lecture on a peice of literature. A student asks a question about the author's background, and the professor can easily insert some information on their country, their historical circumstances, and their life.
Of course, organizing this type of presentation requires a greater investment in planning, and certainly requires a little more cognitive ability than your standard PowerPoint fare. However, those who work with these new presentation systems will be giving themselves an undeniable competitive advantage over presenters using linear methods. And those in the audience will be grateful, I'm sure.
Wow, AC. I do believe I mentioned Mach in my original post. Incidentally, I use GNU/Linux as my primary OS, not BSD. It's not trolling to suggest that Apple has benefitted from the work of others (and, of course, vice versa).
Yes, Darwin has SMP support that it inherited from the codebase of FreeBSD and Mach. And, to tell the truth, if you want a complete, modern *BSD system you might be better off with FreeBSD anyway (it has probably the most extensive ports collection, best SMP support, fastest scheduler, best desktop support, etc.). The reason for the "other" BSDs (OpenBSD and NetBSD) existing is to focus on goals that don't fit in with FreeBSD's general-purpose design or Apple's exclusive focus on the PowerPC desktop (i386 versions of Darwin notwithstanding). Specifically, OpenBSD is designed to be ultra-secure, while NetBSD's goal is to be portable across as many different architectures as possible. If OpenBSD gets a useful feature like SMP without sacrificing security, though, it's a *good thing* for people who deploy OpenBSD, as it gives them more hardware options in the future.
From the article:
Samus is a girl, dumbass.
Authoring video DVDs on linux is more than a little difficult, these days. That said, with a little command line knowledge and some good old-fashioned ingenuity, you can accomplish much.
I found this article to be a good starting point. The beginning of the article assumes that you'll be working with a framegrabber and generating MJPEG video with appropriate resolution/framerate, etc. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world, so you'll actually need to transcode your videos into the MJPEG format before you do the MPEG2 encoding. I find that mencoder is usually the best way to accomplish this:
Note that the above command assumes you are making a DVD for NTSC (US/Canada/Japan) format. If you use PAL, you'll want 720:576 as your resolution and 25 fps as your framerate instead. If you're encoding from a film (24 fps) source, try applying the telecine filter, as well (add ",telecine" after the scale command, and set "-ofps 29.97). This method of framerate conversion is the standard for cinematic DVDs.
Now, I know you're asking, why not use mencoder to encode the MPEG2 stream directly and skip the middleman? Well, I've tried this, and it isn't possible for a couple of reasons. The first is bandwidth control. Although mencoder will accept a bitrate option for MPEG2 encoding, it is not conscious of the buffering assumptions of the DVD standard, and will produce streams that will encounter buffer underruns in hardware DVD players. The second problem is that an MPEG2 program stream for a DVD must contain empty navigation packets (these get filled in when you create the actual vobs), which mencoder won't create. C'est la vie.
It's worth noting that you can get at more advanced bitrate control options for libavcodec's MPEG2 encoder by using lavc's native transcoding application, ffmpeg. At least, theoretically you can. My version of ffmpeg 0.4.7 doesn't seem to include mpeg2 as a possible output format, even though it's accessible through mencoder. Go figure.
OK, let's move on to our friend mpeg2enc. The first thing you'll notice is that it's slow. Really slow. Especially compared to mencoder. You'll live, though. Take a nap or something. The instructions in the article will give you a stream that's perfectly fine for DVD encoding, but it's definitely worth looking at the manpage as well. One of the most important things you'll learn there is that mpeg2enc takes arguments for both aspect ratio and framerate of incoming movies. Add the option "-a n" to the command given in the article, substituting 2 for n if your video is in the 4:3 aspect ratio (regular TV), 3 if it is 16:9 (letterbox widescreen format, most movies), or 4 for 2.21:1 (cinemascope widescreen, movies shot in panoramic view). The "-F n" command specifies the framerate. IF you are using PAL or SECAM, always use 3. If you are using NTSC, always use 4. Anything else will make you cry. Finally, you can add the "-p" option if you have 24 fps input video that you intend for NTSC viewing, and you didn't already have mencoder apply telecine. I actually prefer to have mpeg2enc do telecine, as that way you are certain to avoid A/V sync problems.
Moving right along, the article tells you how to use the dvd authoring tools to eventually get an iso file ready to burn. It should be noted that the image you have ready won't have menus or other niceties. For sooth! Lucky for you, you actually can include these things, but it won't exactly be easy. Now that you know the basics of encoding for the DVD format, this guide can instruct you on how to add things like menus and whatnot. Anyway, once you get the iso file ready to go, I highly recommend you burn it with KDE's excellent K3B, unless you have an attachment to the command line too
In actuality, this should be from the "nihongo *o* amari hanashimasen" department. The particle "o" (the phonetic o, that is, historically it is the hiragana wo) is used in this case because nihongo (the Japanese language) is the object of the sentence. The particle wa (hiragana ha) is a suffix appended to the *subject* of the sentence, which in this case, it can be inferred, is the speaker (if we wanted to be more long-winded, we could say "Watashi wa nihongo o amari hanashimasen"). As it stands, the sentence says that the Japanese language doesn't talk much. While this is correct (languages themselves are, as far as I know, mute), I don't think it was the speaker's intention. ;)
Not all religions consider man to be centrally important in the universe (in fact some, like Taoism and some forms of neo-Paganism, stress man's existence as a nondistinct part of the cohesive whole of nature). Furthermore, many practitioners of religions which do assign a special value to humanness or sentience understand that such value is entirely spiritual and not to be confused with any external physical value. Even members of western religions which feature an active creator God (Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, etc.) are often open to the possibility of even intelligent extraterrestrial life, as they see such beings as also being God's children. Theories as to the religious inclinations of such extraterrestrial beings abound (I heard from a Berkeley astronomer working on extrasolar planets that he had recieved a letter from the Vatican asking if he had any inkling as to the hypothetical religious beliefs of hypothetical aliens. He replied that his data was as yet insufficient for a meaningful answer). Even assuming that intelligent extraterrestrials do not possess practices akin to human religion, I'm sure some members of "missionary" faiths (i.e. some sects of Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Bhuddism) might believe that such beings would need to be exposed to the tenets of their religion and possibly converted. Less aggressive religious persons might find very interesting insights in the philosophical ideas of an alien race, even as people today can learn a great deal from other religions and cultures.
You need to remember that religion and science need not be antagonistic. I, for one, am a scientist and also a man of faith. I do not believe in the literal truth of any religious text, but I do believe that many different faiths around the world contain spiritual truth or "divine inspiration" if you will. I personally was raised in a (mainstream protestant) Christian environment and today choose to worship as a (Quaker) Christian, but I do not, by any means, believe that my religion has a monopoly on the truth.
I also believe that science is another powerful source for truth, and a unique one in that its claims can be tested, measured, and verified (unlike religion). Science has in the past disproven the very literal-minded interpretations of religious conservatives with regard to cosmology and biology, and it will likely continue to do so in the future. Keep in mind, however, that there are those of us who hold religious beliefs and also believe in the veracity of Evolution, the Big Bang theory, and even consider the prospect of extraterrestrial life likely. I recognize that science does not offer proof of my belief in a diety, or in a moral purpose for intelligent life, but I also know that science does not disprove these beliefs. I accept that, going on empirical evidence, Atheism is just as valid and just as likely a belief system as my own, and so I don't seek to disprove it. Saying that science disproves all religion, however, is just as ridiculous as the claims of so-called "creation scientists" who insist that scientific evidence proves that the Universe was created by God some ~6000 years ago, and thus that science disproves Atheism.
In the end, you'd do well to remember the scientific method. In order for a scientific hypothesis to be valid, it has to be falsifiable. A statement like "God created two human beings in Eden 6000 years ago, and the entire human race is decended from those two ancestors" is falsifiable, as we can find older and more varied human remains around the world. A statement like "God exists", however, is not falsifiable, and therefore is not testable by science. You can disprove certain ideas about God's interaction with human affairs, or you can disprove the literal correctness of certain creation accounts, but you can not disprove the existence of God (him|her|it)self. And, even if you could, many people would still choose to believe in God anyway, just as many people choose to believe in a literal creation now. As a scientist, I have
I mean, not any geek could hack on a purple box.
Actually, I learned to hack on a purple box once upon a time, and it sure wasn't made by Apple. And, even though systems like the Indy seem ancient now, old IRIX users will be glad to tell you that SGI figured out how to make UNIX sexy long before OS X came along.
Anyway, It's interesting that you mention the attitude of Mac users just now, because I just recently had a conversation with two friends who are proud Apple fans. They joked with eachother about how anti-establishment and rebellious they were. I then pointed out that, if anything, my OS (now Gentoo Linux) was the counterculture, revolutionary one. The Mac, I'd say, is now a very trendy, high-fashion platform (at least within my age demographic, that of the college student). Of course, its users take a certain pride in their small numbers. After all, if the Mac began to approach Windows' level of market share, they'd lose their fashionable elitism. My Mac user friends were actually inclined to agree with my analysis.
So, to summarize:
Windows = The Gap
Mac = Prada
Linux = Thrift Store (or, in my case...)
Gentoo = I sowed these myself.
You know, Zoom & Rotate aren't critical features in an interface. They're eye candy (well, I suppose they can be used in a useful way a la expose, but I digress). Anyway, if you'd payed attention when the XFree86 core team disbanded, you might have noticed that the gist of that decision was that release engineering would become more open and "developer cronyism" would be reduced. If anything, the decision makes it easier for experimental features from Xouvert and Freedesktops to get integrated back into XF86. In the meantime, features that are slightly more practical in a graphics framework (IE a good video API (xv), direct 3D rendering support (DRI), etc.) are in X, and they work without a hitch.
And as far as playing an mp3 and killing the mouse, that's absolute pure troll. I started using Linux in 1997 (having used Windows and some IRIX previously), and easily played mp3s in XMMS on a stock redhat install with no headaches.
And speaking of trolling, your desire to use longhorn astounds me. A good interface makes it easy to do what you want to do and then gets out of your way and lets you work. An everpresent media sidebar stealing my desktop space and giving me context-sensitive bullshit (Clippy 2, anyone) is not my idea of clueful. The rest of Longhorn's improvements are mostly an effort to catch up with Aqua, which I do not dispute is a fantastic GUI (there are some things I could take or leave aesthetically, but it IS immensely usable). You're right, Apple is likely to retain a substantial lead over Microsoft in UI design, but as a GNOME user you hopefully realize that the free desktop environments are already far more user-customizable than their commercial counterparts, at least every bit as usable as windows, and even damn pretty (did I mention I love the new Plastik theme in KDE 3.2?). My point is that Linux is a real and viable option on the desktop, and at this rate Microsoft may actually have to worry about losing a substantial number of users on the corporate desktop, and also in fields like education (where budgets are tight, minds are young and sharp, heterogenous networks are common, and Microsoft has been unable to squeeze at least one rival (Apple) out even after 25 years of trying).
A few notes:
1. KDE uses freetype to render fonts. You can use any truetype font you like, and they're beautifully anti-aliased. And, if you'd RTFA, you might notice that KDE 3.2 includes a new font manager to make font configuration even easier.
2. About X being 20 years old... yes, the framework is. UNIX is 34. GCC itself dates back to 1987. But you know what, I'm not running the original iteration of the X window system (nor are you, I hope, running Windows 1.0). Xft renders my fonts beautifully, and I've set KDE to use Xrender to draw transparencies. You might also note that zoom (a la Mac OS X) and rotate (a la fake Movie GUIs) are being coded into X as you troll. These are features that windows has yet to be clued in on.
3. I haven't personally experienced any of the theme-crashing bugs you claim, but even assuming you're right, I'll take KDE, which comes with Plastik, Keramik, and all the built-in QT themes out of the box over WinXP which lets me select from a whopping 3 color schemes and 2 widget styles.
Lest we forget that Apple's Safari is based on Konqueror, eh? (entirely legally and within the terms of the LGPL, so more power to them). Anyway, I don't doubt that OS X is prettier and probably easier out of the box, but KDE excels over the Aqua interface when it comes to customizability.
Ultimately, the KDE folks (as well as pretty much every other group of designers) have learned a lot from the Mac, and meanwhile the Mac has benefitted from the interface innovations of others (HUGELY from NeXT, Jobs' other company, and also from KDE re: Safari). All I'm saying is that the Mac engineers might be impressed by a few things in KDE 3.2 (the Windows UI designers, on the other hand, need to come to grips with the fact that KDE is now and has been a better GUI than Windows).
Actually, you need to have ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" set in order to emerge masked ebuilds (which the KDE 3.2 packages currently are). You may just want to run emerge kde instead of emerge -u kde at that point, since having ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" set will cause portage to emerge newer (masked) versions of KDE dependencies as well, which will be time consuming and possibly cause instability.
A couple of days ago, I emerged KDE 3.2 on my Gentoo system. Aside from a wierd ALSA bug that I had to fix, the upgrade from 3.1.5 was pretty painless.
Anyway, my thoughts on the latest iteration of my chosen desktop. Let's just say that KDE 3.2 should raise eyebrows in Cupertino and soil pants in Redmond. There are numerous small eyecandy improvements, plus tons of little usability-enhancing features in common areas of the system (for example, Konqueror has a vastly improved file-manager sidebar that gives idiot-proof access to local partitions, printers, and even network shares). Some of the new applications debuting in this release are truly excellent, as well (like the slick iTunes-clone JuK or the lovely multiproticol IM client Kopete). Finally, some rather extensive optimizations seem to have taken place throughout the system, as KDE now seems more responsive than in the past (true, some of these optimizations are "cheating", like the option to keep an instance of Konqueror preloaded, but it's still a nice option to have).
Anyway, congrats to the KDE team on an excellent release, and thank you for proving once again that UNIX on the desktop isn't just a wild fantasy, it's a real-life joy.
Reading the article, I notice that the digital model starts off nude, then has clothes rendered onto it. In order for these photorealistic images of a person in new clothes to be generated, it would seem that the software requires a nude scan of said person. Of course, the person could be scanned while clothed, but you'd really just be rendering new clothes on top of the old ones (which, in the software, would take on the rigidity of flesh). It might be possible to design an algorithm to "strip" the scans, but the accuracy would be limited by the varying bagginess of whatever the person is wearing.
Naturally, privacy and convenience concerns arise when one is asked to submit to a nude, full-body digital scan in order to use the new fitting system. The store could keep scans on file, making this a one-time affair, but unless a secure crypto system (wherein only the customer possesses the key) is implemented, the potential for creepy abuse is enormous.
One solution I can think of, however, is to do the scan in a private booth while the customer is only wearing underwear (most undergarments being tight-fitting enough as to not affect the image of the clothing being worn). This is still more convenient than going through a stack of clothes to try on, as the user needs only "change" once. The model for the system could be deleted after use, or the customer could elect to store it on a USB memory stick they bring with them, updating it only occasionally as their physical appearance changes significantly (it could even be stored centrally if a department store chain, or better yet a consortium of them, decides to implement a truly secure system).
It's true that this system doesn't offer as good a "feel" for clothing as actually trying on outfits. For men or women on the go, however, it could drastically reduce time spent clothes shopping. Imagine browsing through the latest fashions at home, picking out a few you like, then heading to the Department store, where they have everything you picked out, in your size, ready for you to try on (and you'll still want to, if for no other reason than to gauge the comfort of the clothing and verify the program's accuracy). An hours-long shopping trip could be reduced to a managable 10-15 minutes.
Of course, my wardrobe consists mostly of items from Goodwill or Thinkgeek, so this is of little utility to me. Nonetheless, it has some potential to make life a lot more convenient for my girlfriend, my sister, etc.
I'd suggest this for high-speed Internet in AA. I regularly pull down 1 MByte/s on torrents.
In case you're averse to living around the likes of me, however, Comcast does offer cable modem service throughout the Ann Arbor area. As far as I know, their service does not require you to be a cable TV subscriber to sign up.
A hammer isn't the right tool for every job as much as you'd like it to be.
Ah, but can't a Hammer also execute 32-bit code natively? ;)
When I was beta testing TSO, I started to get a few ideas about what might be possible with this sort of game. Obviously, the sexual deviance mentioned in the article occured to me (not in any vivid detail, I assure you). I thought the more interesting possibilities lied in more normal, healthy human relationships, however. For example, I was then (and am still now) involved in a long-distance romantic relationship. I began to contemplate the idea of a virtual date with my girlfriend. We could eat out, go see a show, take a romantic walk in the park. Of course, it doesn't compare to any of these activities in real life, but a virtual date, or "proxy intimacy", as I'll call it, is light-years beyond AIM as a communication medium for lovers. Of course, for single sims, nothing says you can't meet someone actractive at the club and begin a whole online relationship (once again, much more interesting than the lurid creepiness of singles chatrooms).
Unfortunately, my dreams for this sort of interaction never panned out. TSO, while trumpeted as being freeform and open-ended in the extreme, wound up digging itself into a rut pretty quickly. Some of its problems lie in the fact that it ranks users on ladders, and introduces systems of competition which are entirely artificial to a game which attempts to emulate "real life". Case in point: statistics on the richest and most popular sims. In the former case, you have a bunch of hyper-capitalists trying to outpace eachother in the generation of a hyperinflating virtual currency (more on the economic problems in TSO later). In the latter, you see an even more bizarre and surreal sort of competition, wherein online characters do whatever they can to get a "friend" designation from other players and then, for the most part, ignore those characters (what an odd definition of friendship).
Another difficulty is introduced in the zoning system used for property. On a basic level, there is none. This sounds good enough, as it should theoretically enable the construction of any sort of enterprise. The unfortunate result of this, however, is that most places just look more or less like houses. There's no concept of shared or leased property, either, as every property has a distinct owner or owners (thus, there are no apartment buildings, no malls, no office parks, nothing). And, although the game lays out properties with physical locations on a map of your chosen city, these locations have no real meaning whatsoever. Properties are not connected to adjacent properties in any special way, and thus the concept of a neighborhood is utterly nonexistent (the lack of anything approximating geography in-game is a very significant barrier to the formation of actual communities). Travelling anywhere in the game is a point-and-click affair, so there's nothing like walking down the street to the drugstore, or taking the subway cross-town to the nightclub. Similarly, you can't walk over to Bob's for the barbeque.
To be sure, people do hold many social events in the game world, but conducting them with friends (in the traditional sense, no the wierd in-game definition) can be difficult. There is very little consistency to online relationships, as the only people you're likely to run into with any frequency in a particular establishment (without having made prior plans) are the owners. Locations are no help, due to the fact that each is a node unto itself (I actually never met any of my neighbors in Alphaville. I doubt many people have). The chance of repeatedly encountering someone by chance then becomes exceedingly small. This, I think, contributes to some of the romantic and sexual wierdness of the game. In TSO, you can't see that cute girl at the Deli a few times during lunch and then work up the nerve to strike up a conversation with her. Better ask if she wants to do the make out action now while you can! Now, if TSO behaved like a more realistic analogue of life, there wouldn't be such a market for prostitution in the gameworld, as people would probably be dating and even
Actually, this probably isn't as difficult as it seems. GCC compiles ObjC (in point of fact, Apple uses GCC to compile OS X), and Cocoa is just Apple's implementation of the OpenSTEP API which was originally laid out back in the NeXT days (it's actually pretty remarkable how similar it is, just move the application's menus from the corner of the screen to a bar across the top and pretty things up and you've got yourself a brand new NeXT). Anyway, GnuSTEP is another OpenSTEP compatible environment, and I suspect that the Cocoa interface wouldn't take too much work to port over.
Interesting that one of Microsoft's top examples is a comparison of TCO between wintel servers and an IBM z-series (formerly known as s/390) mainframe running SUSE. Of COURSE mainframes cost ass-loads of money, and people who buy IBM mainframes are more likely to be using them for their reliability than flat-out performance per dollar. Let's see a comparison between Win2K3 and Linux on the same Intel boxen, guys.
The GTA series is obviously a gritty, crime-themed bunch of computer games. I'd be interested as to whether the NY Post (mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch, the upstanding champion of media integrity and wholesome entertainment) thinks that the Godfather films ought to be banned outright. After all, they're violent, and even contain some very racist dialogue in a scene involving a potential drug deal.
My bet is that most reasonable people (a category which excludes the staff of the New York Post, unfortunately) wouldn't say we should expunge one of our nation's classic cinematic masterpeices from the record just because it deals in some very dark and violent themes. Of course, parents have a right and, I think we can agree in this case a responsibility, to sheild their children from very violent entertainment until they see fit, but people need to face facts: we're never going to have a G-rated society. People know that in GTA, you play a bad guy, and they know that bad guys do bad things. Playing Vice City didn't make me want to go out and kill any Haitians (I imagine that might distress my Haitian friends and, incidently, the out-of-context quote refers to a pitched battle between rival Haitian and Cuban gangs), it didn't make me want to deal cocaine, and it only gave me a slight desire to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Anyone who is young or stupid enough to have a video game seriously wound their moral sensibilities has parents for a reason. And as for those teenagers who took potshots at passing vehicles, supposedly in imitation of the game, does anyone really think that they didn't possess some violent and dangerous tendencies to begin with? If they'd never set eyes on a PS2, would we have never heard of their exploits? My hunch is no.
Sorry, New York Post, but I think that most people are just too smart to give in to your impulse to crush the competition when it comes to glorifying mass murder. It's just a game, get over it.
I liken his use of open relays to trespassing in someone else's warehouse and setting up a meth lab. Sure, he'd like to just run the lab out of his basement, but the gosh-darn neighbors might complain. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I just thought I'd write in with my personal experience with another MP3 device, the Archos Jukebox Studio 20. Now, don't think I'm trolling on an "Apple Sucks, Archos Rocks" trip, because I'm not. If I had the money, I'd definitely get myself an iPod, as the on-device interface thoroughly kicks the ass of my 2-line text display (although much love goes out to the hackers at Rockbox for making the Jukebox orders of magnitude more elegant and usable), and a firewire connection is certainly prefferable to USB 1.1 (and it is my understanding that both devices are now supported in Linux, so there you go).
With all of that said, I have to say that Archos' support has been first class. I'll be honest, I used to charge my Jukebox in a rather precarious position. It was prone to getting its cord yanked, and thus falling several feet to the floor. Amazingly, the unit survived this punishment many times. After about 18 months, however (interesting timeframe, eh?), the hard drive began failing. Bad sectors and the like. I called up Archos, who were content with nothing more than my confirmation page from Thinkgeek as a reciept, and gladly replaced my harddrive (for all I know they sent me a new unit, actually) for FREE. Since that time (which was the summer before last), I've continued using the Jukebox with no ill effects (although I learned my lesson to be more gentle with it).
Caffiene and Alcohol, eh?
Sorry, buy I have trouble believing that'll beat my legendary combination of Nyquil and Dayquil. Go ahead, give it a shot.
**** Spoiler Alert ****
You see new colors and understand Taco's spelling.
Well, everyone hates SCO, and I can't say that they didn't have it coming, but... unfortunately, this is just the sort of thing that SCO's legal/media thugs will use as ammunition ("see, we TOLD you they didn't have any respect for the law or the business world, just look what they did to our website!")
Of course, it's utter bullshit to pin this sort of childish prank on the OSS/free software community, but SCO seems to love utter bullshit.
OK, no way, ever, under any circumstances, will your 500 MHz K6-2 beat a system whose bus is faster than the CPU. And, as far as never using more than 1 GHz, well, perhaps you won't just doing word processing and web surfing, but you also have to accept the fact that a lot of people do very CPU-intensive things with their PCs these days (I encode a lot of videos, do a good bit of gaming, and compile gobs and gobs of source code since I run Gentoo), and I'm quite glad that my proc is a Barton and not my old P3.
That said, you've got a point about throughput. Keeping the processor busy is key to maximizing performance, which is one of the reasons the Athlons (with their bigger cache) easily trounce the higher-clocked Celerons. Incidentally, this is also why Intel was able to quickly cover their asses with the P4 extreme-edition (timed to coincide exactly with the release of the Athlon FX): all they did was take a stock P4-c and slap a couple of megs of L3 cache on it and viola, they have a contender (don't be too impressed, though. The P4 EE may hold its own against the AthlonFX on 32-bit apps, but the ability to process 64-bit instructions means massive improvements for multimedia down the line).
Anyway, though, fast disks, a fast bus, and lots of ram are certainly important considerations in reducing the overall latency for the processor. You've forgotten a couple of things, though. First is memory latency. You want your DDR ram clocked as high as possible with timings as good as possible. Chances are that the tradeoff of more RAM for faster RAM will be worth it, except in a few specialized scenarios. I myself got 512M of DDR400 RAM that hits 2-3-2 CAS timings instead of a gig of generic DDR266, and I must say that I'm very pleased with the results (even kicking the RAM clock up to 400MHz from the original bus speed gave me double-digit improvements in XviD encoding framerate). If you're a gamer, you also want to invest in a good graphics card, and a motherboard that does 8X AGP. My home-built Barton with a Radeon 9700 Pro easily outrenders my friend's brand new 3.2 GHz Dell P4 (with a gig of RAM) simply because my graphics card is doing all the heavy lifting, and it's getting textures sent to it on a fast 8X connection (his machine has stock Intel graphics running on 4X, I think). That said, the Radeon 9700 Pro (especially when I bought it) isn't really a budget component, but an investment in a very reasonably priced 9500 or 9600 will make a huge difference in games and pack a hell of a lot more punch than an extra few hundred MHz.