After G4 bought TechTV and killed the screensavers (as in ruined it, I didn't know they had actually cancelled it in the end, nor did I know about the StarTrek and Man Show stuff) I cancelled my satellite, sold off my hacked Tivo (at a loss) and quit watching TV altogether. I'm much happier buying Lost a season at a time for the same as I used to pay for a month of TV.
Personally I'd love to have 8 cores. I have a dual processor G5 at home now, and if I could get an 8 core x86 mac I might actually spend some time to edit video footage I've taken but haven't had the patience to finish off properly.
Windows comes with video editing tools, as does MacOS, but not so many people use them yet because it takes so bloody long to do....hence the mystifying introduction of DVD burning video cameras to the consumer market. The video quality is inferior and gets worse if you decide to edit later, but people don't care and are willing to pay 2-3x the cost of a similar tape based camera because it goes to DVD instantly, rather than taking over night to encode properly.
How many photoshop filters have you had to wait 10seconds to a minute for?...on a small image like a photo. What if you want those effects done on something bigger like a poster? there is always room for more processing power.
Mind you if your most demanding task is MS Word (and you aren't sending bulk mail) what we had last year ought to last for 10 years or more. (or until the dust bunnies kill it by cloging your fans)
I don't know about the rest of the world, but for me the difference in Joel vs. Mike isn't any percieved better writing in one vs the other, but rather that Joel just delived the lines better than Mike did.
Mind you I like both of them, I just thought Joel was more fun.
That is an artifact of taking a photo of a screen (The SSTV images) as opposed to a screen capture (the TV images). Look at any tech site and you'll find that photos of a computer screen vs screencaptures there also suffer from similar problems.
In order to not get scan lines in your photo you have to set your shutter speed to less than the scan rate (1/10th of a second on the SSTV monitor) which is really long in film speed terms, thus any bright part of the screen is over exposed, but in the more neutral gray areas you can definitely see a lot more detail than in the TV images that were broadcast.
Have you never heard of Pulver Communications? Free World Dialup (free VOIP service)? VON (Voice on the Net) conferences? VON Magazine? You haven't been paying much attention to VoIP have you?
Look beyond Skype, look at SIP and Asterisk. You'll start seeing his name everywhere.
If you look carefully at MS Licenses for Windows Server 2003, you can have more windows "servers" for less $$ using virtualization.
Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Each software license allows you to run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS environment and up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server.
SQL Server 2005 (licensed Server/CAL) Workgroup Edition, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition Each software license allows you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual OS environment on a particular server at a time.
So, if your alternative was seperate hardware with seperate licenses to maintain a dedicated OS environment for troublesome applications... then VMWare is taking away some sales from MS products other than MS Virtual Server
I worked for a small (and I mean small) cable co for 3 years, and really this arguement is OLD and certainly outdated for most cable systems I've seen. Any semi-modern cable system (I'd say pretty much all but the most run down rural systems) is built in such a way that the bottle neck in the cable system is NOT the "shared line in the neighborhood" but rather the same spot it's at in the DSL systems, at the Headend/CO.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the capabilities of a cable modem system to actually provide the data rates they advertise is more likely limited where all the fibres come back together at the routers and several channels of data sqeeze into a 100MB or Gigabit Ethernet connection then get further squeezed onto an already overloaded pipe out of the building with traffic from several other routers.
I bought the "Shared line" thing orignially but there is no reason that that should be the bottleneck, it's relatively cheap to allocate another channel for data and increase the bandwidth to a given neighborhood, but it all still has to come back to the office and get shuffled into the mix of traffic from OTHER neighborhoods....and then it leaves the company's network and all bets are off because that pipe is almost surely overloaded.
Best thing we ever did for our network when i was working there was to make an agreement with Akamai. That went a long way to proving it wasn't at the street level that the speed issues occur, it in our case was at the pipe connecting us to the next neighbouring ISP.
I only wish they'd have let us share MRTG graphs of the traffic loads at various routers, it would have at least helped to get the customers complaining about the RIGHT problems with their connection.
Mind you as someone else said about DSL, in Cable environmental problems are generally the issue if the problem is way out at the street level. It's usually a bad drop (wire from street to house) or internal wiring that causes the issue. The RF network at the street only goes a few blocks before it jumps onto fibre in most cable systems, and if the fibre's out you'll know it because no one in the neighborhood will have internet OR TV.
And yes, he seems to have no idea how DHCP really works. Even if your lease is expired you will get the same IP address unless the pool has been exausted and your address re-used. I see that as an extremly unlikely thing to happen because it would mean, as you say, that your pool is smaller than your installed base. If you pool is smaller then you will start having issues because x number of customers will always be without a connection because they can't get an address.
But you seem to forget that that is why Cable has "static" addresses and DSL doesn't (most of the time) Cable uses DHCP DSL usually uses PPPoE with a rotating pool of addresses. Most of the time on PPPoE unless you choose your ISP wisely, or they charge you extra for the Static Address feature you WILL get a new address every time....and yes it is because they have a larger user base than the size of the pool.
If they had added a UMD slot to the PS3 they could have kept it alive, even if the PS3 UMD slot only played movies not PSP games. They chose not to do that and so now they have to live with that choice. I was ready to buy into UMD as a portable movie/game format until they announced that PS3 would NOT have a slot.
When asked the big question "What kind of computer should I buy" I'll give my fair and honest opinion based on the person's uses. Often my recommendation is a Mac Mini for simplicity's sake, but almost no one buys a Mac based on my recommendation. Not even design people. The acttraction of the $300 Staples special HP machine is too strong, but when they spend the next 3 months bitching about how their new computer doesn't work properly I just shake my head and try to help them out where I can. (I am a network analyst, but sometimes users do things to windows PCs that I can't even imagine how they got it messed up so badly.
When asked to help someone with Linux I usually give them one of the Live CDs to play around with (warning them that it'll be slow running from the CD) and offer to help install it on the hard drive when they are ready. A few have taken me up on it, but it seems they all eventually go back to windows, not because Linux couldn't do waht they wanted just because that's what they are used to and they are willing to put up with it's problems if it means not having to learn anything new.
*shrug* I don't bother to try and convert anyone, from what I've seen people are generally too stubborn.
I'm certianly glad I haven't had to use windows in a long time. I like my Mac and Linux machines and I wouldn't trade em for the nicest Dell. (and I LIKE Dell) Sure I wish I could get more games on the Mac, but I have a PS2 and a gamecube, and I'd rather buy an Xbox than a videocard just for games. (actually the Xbox can't offer me much that I'd be willing to spend the $$ for it.. there's only Fable and from what I hear it was over-hyped... as for the 360 I have yet to see a game I'd be willing to rent let alone buy)
I've tried many times to get people to use encryption, usually they just complain about it and never use it for more than a day.:(
Maybe I'll try again with certificates rather than PGP next time, at least then it's supposed to be pretty much transparent once the certs are installed...
Luckily I've never really spent enough time in MMORPGs since the original Asheron's Call Beta to go beyond lvl 10, but I almost never look at the chat stuff on my screen unless I'm actively working in a group. I mean Why would I care who's spamming the town? or whatever?
I think that the only reason I never got kicked from FFXI was because I was too low level for anyone to care. I often left my character running off in some direction un attended while I raided the fridge. ony to come back to him bouncing repeatedly off a cliff wall.
I think some sort of teleport ability would have been nice to have as there were some long stretches of wilderness to wander through when I got to about lvl 5 before I could find something worth fighting.
Take another look at PERL, start with a book not someone's code, PERL isn't about one-liners, that's just what some folks think is fun. (I don't get it actually)
Perl has some very nice features in it for generating nicely formatted output with very little programming work. (Hence it's name Practical Extraction and Report Language)
I said it's un ethical to just create another download site that's pay rather than link to a site that gives it away for free.
I'm with you on charging for burning to CD-ROM for people who don't have fast internet I have sold and do currently sell CD-ROMs of Linux distros, I just don't think it'd be right to set up a paypal shopping cart on my website to allow access to download something that people could download from the original site for free.
Because selling someone something that they can get for free rather than telling them where to go for the free handout isjust taking advantage of the person's ignorance for your own personal gain. I think you'll find that under most people's views of ethics this is considered wrong.
It's not really like taking a gift from your aunt (who would likely not give that to everyone, and that has a much higher value than free to most of the world who don't recieve gifts from your aunt), and much more like going to a food bank to get a basket of food and setting up a table in the market down the street to sell off the stuff you picked up at the food bank.
eg. offering paid downloads of OSS with no additional support or anything is wrong
offering paid downloads with additional support is OK
offering paid copies on CD-ROM media when it is only offered free by download is OK
The reason I feel this is so is you are selling your services, not really the software.
I may be biased though, I've often sold Linux distros and other OSS on Ebay for people who didn't have the time or ability to download it (either because I got into the queue early in a new release, and getting it by mail is faster than waiting for FTP server loads to go down or torrents to be setup or because they were on dial up and didn't have a month to download 4 CDs worth of Fedora)
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Can someone explain to me why I need a P4 or Althon 64 with a 256MB 3d card to use a NIC with a built-in QOS engine?
After G4 bought TechTV and killed the screensavers (as in ruined it, I didn't know they had actually cancelled it in the end, nor did I know about the StarTrek and Man Show stuff) I cancelled my satellite, sold off my hacked Tivo (at a loss) and quit watching TV altogether. I'm much happier buying Lost a season at a time for the same as I used to pay for a month of TV.
Personally I'd love to have 8 cores. I have a dual processor G5 at home now, and if I could get an 8 core x86 mac I might actually spend some time to edit video footage I've taken but haven't had the patience to finish off properly.
...hence the mystifying introduction of DVD burning video cameras to the consumer market. The video quality is inferior and gets worse if you decide to edit later, but people don't care and are willing to pay 2-3x the cost of a similar tape based camera because it goes to DVD instantly, rather than taking over night to encode properly.
...on a small image like a photo. What if you want those effects done on something bigger like a poster? there is always room for more processing power.
Windows comes with video editing tools, as does MacOS, but not so many people use them yet because it takes so bloody long to do.
How many photoshop filters have you had to wait 10seconds to a minute for?
Mind you if your most demanding task is MS Word (and you aren't sending bulk mail) what we had last year ought to last for 10 years or more. (or until the dust bunnies kill it by cloging your fans)
I don't know about the rest of the world, but for me the difference in Joel vs. Mike isn't any percieved better writing in one vs the other, but rather that Joel just delived the lines better than Mike did.
Mind you I like both of them, I just thought Joel was more fun.
That is an artifact of taking a photo of a screen (The SSTV images) as opposed to a screen capture (the TV images).
Look at any tech site and you'll find that photos of a computer screen vs screencaptures there also suffer from similar problems.
In order to not get scan lines in your photo you have to set your shutter speed to less than the scan rate (1/10th of a second on the SSTV monitor) which is really long in film speed terms, thus any bright part of the screen is over exposed, but in the more neutral gray areas you can definitely see a lot more detail than in the TV images that were broadcast.
No no, He meant censer, as in incense burner. The moon smells really nice now.
Have you never heard of Pulver Communications? Free World Dialup (free VOIP service)? VON (Voice on the Net) conferences? VON Magazine? You haven't been paying much attention to VoIP have you?
Look beyond Skype, look at SIP and Asterisk. You'll start seeing his name everywhere.
So, if your alternative was seperate hardware with seperate licenses to maintain a dedicated OS environment for troublesome applications... then VMWare is taking away some sales from MS products other than MS Virtual Server
I worked for a small (and I mean small) cable co for 3 years, and really this arguement is OLD and certainly outdated for most cable systems I've seen. Any semi-modern cable system (I'd say pretty much all but the most run down rural systems) is built in such a way that the bottle neck in the cable system is NOT the "shared line in the neighborhood" but rather the same spot it's at in the DSL systems, at the Headend/CO.
...and then it leaves the company's network and all bets are off because that pipe is almost surely overloaded.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the capabilities of a cable modem system to actually provide the data rates they advertise is more likely limited where all the fibres come back together at the routers and several channels of data sqeeze into a 100MB or Gigabit Ethernet connection then get further squeezed onto an already overloaded pipe out of the building with traffic from several other routers.
I bought the "Shared line" thing orignially but there is no reason that that should be the bottleneck, it's relatively cheap to allocate another channel for data and increase the bandwidth to a given neighborhood, but it all still has to come back to the office and get shuffled into the mix of traffic from OTHER neighborhoods.
Best thing we ever did for our network when i was working there was to make an agreement with Akamai. That went a long way to proving it wasn't at the street level that the speed issues occur, it in our case was at the pipe connecting us to the next neighbouring ISP.
I only wish they'd have let us share MRTG graphs of the traffic loads at various routers, it would have at least helped to get the customers complaining about the RIGHT problems with their connection.
Mind you as someone else said about DSL, in Cable environmental problems are generally the issue if the problem is way out at the street level. It's usually a bad drop (wire from street to house) or internal wiring that causes the issue. The RF network at the street only goes a few blocks before it jumps onto fibre in most cable systems, and if the fibre's out you'll know it because no one in the neighborhood will have internet OR TV.
You don't need US visas to overfly US airspace.
...there's no telling what the policy will be next week though.
Slight amendment...
You CURRENTLY don't need US visas to overfly US airspace.
And yes, he seems to have no idea how DHCP really works. Even if your lease is expired you will get the same IP address unless the pool has been exausted and your address re-used. I see that as an extremly unlikely thing to happen because it would mean, as you say, that your pool is smaller than your installed base. If you pool is smaller then you will start having issues because x number of customers will always be without a connection because they can't get an address.
...and yes it is because they have a larger user base than the size of the pool.
But you seem to forget that that is why Cable has "static" addresses and DSL doesn't (most of the time) Cable uses DHCP DSL usually uses PPPoE with a rotating pool of addresses. Most of the time on PPPoE unless you choose your ISP wisely, or they charge you extra for the Static Address feature you WILL get a new address every time.
I usually go during a touchdown dance or just after a kick off.
So, Walmart is to blame for the crap that game producers have been shoveling in our direction?
I thought it was just a lack of creativity.
Boo Walmart! Boo!
Show me a computer that connects to the net that doesn't have a telnet client.
I know there are a few, but for every one of those there's probably at least one whithout web access, or with web access too resricted to use gmail.
If they had added a UMD slot to the PS3 they could have kept it alive, even if the PS3 UMD slot only played movies not PSP games.
They chose not to do that and so now they have to live with that choice.
I was ready to buy into UMD as a portable movie/game format until they announced that PS3 would NOT have a slot.
When asked the big question "What kind of computer should I buy" I'll give my fair and honest opinion based on the person's uses. Often my recommendation is a Mac Mini for simplicity's sake, but almost no one buys a Mac based on my recommendation. Not even design people. The acttraction of the $300 Staples special HP machine is too strong, but when they spend the next 3 months bitching about how their new computer doesn't work properly I just shake my head and try to help them out where I can. (I am a network analyst, but sometimes users do things to windows PCs that I can't even imagine how they got it messed up so badly.
When asked to help someone with Linux I usually give them one of the Live CDs to play around with (warning them that it'll be slow running from the CD) and offer to help install it on the hard drive when they are ready. A few have taken me up on it, but it seems they all eventually go back to windows, not because Linux couldn't do waht they wanted just because that's what they are used to and they are willing to put up with it's problems if it means not having to learn anything new.
*shrug* I don't bother to try and convert anyone, from what I've seen people are generally too stubborn.
I'm certianly glad I haven't had to use windows in a long time. I like my Mac and Linux machines and I wouldn't trade em for the nicest Dell. (and I LIKE Dell) Sure I wish I could get more games on the Mac, but I have a PS2 and a gamecube, and I'd rather buy an Xbox than a videocard just for games. (actually the Xbox can't offer me much that I'd be willing to spend the $$ for it.. there's only Fable and from what I hear it was over-hyped... as for the 360 I have yet to see a game I'd be willing to rent let alone buy)
but at leasst the $3.50 latte isn't instant crap.
Any chance of getting one of these for a Mac G5??
I've tried many times to get people to use encryption, usually they just complain about it and never use it for more than a day. :(
Maybe I'll try again with certificates rather than PGP next time, at least then it's supposed to be pretty much transparent once the certs are installed...
Luckily I've never really spent enough time in MMORPGs since the original Asheron's Call Beta to go beyond lvl 10, but I almost never look at the chat stuff on my screen unless I'm actively working in a group. I mean Why would I care who's spamming the town? or whatever?
I think that the only reason I never got kicked from FFXI was because I was too low level for anyone to care. I often left my character running off in some direction un attended while I raided the fridge. ony to come back to him bouncing repeatedly off a cliff wall.
I think some sort of teleport ability would have been nice to have as there were some long stretches of wilderness to wander through when I got to about lvl 5 before I could find something worth fighting.
Perl is great for a quick, unreadable script
Take another look at PERL, start with a book not someone's code, PERL isn't about one-liners, that's just what some folks think is fun.
(I don't get it actually)
Perl has some very nice features in it for generating nicely formatted output with very little programming work. (Hence it's name Practical Extraction and Report Language)
I think you skipped over my original post
I said it's un ethical to just create another download site that's pay rather than link to a site that gives it away for free.
I'm with you on charging for burning to CD-ROM for people who don't have fast internet I have sold and do currently sell CD-ROMs of Linux distros, I just don't think it'd be right to set up a paypal shopping cart on my website to allow access to download something that people could download from the original site for free.
Because selling someone something that they can get for free rather than telling them where to go for the free handout isjust taking advantage of the person's ignorance for your own personal gain. I think you'll find that under most people's views of ethics this is considered wrong.
It's not really like taking a gift from your aunt (who would likely not give that to everyone, and that has a much higher value than free to most of the world who don't recieve gifts from your aunt), and much more like going to a food bank to get a basket of food and setting up a table in the market down the street to sell off the stuff you picked up at the food bank.
Agreed, unless you add value to it.
eg. offering paid downloads of OSS with no additional support or anything is wrong
offering paid downloads with additional support is OK
offering paid copies on CD-ROM media when it is only offered free by download is OK
The reason I feel this is so is you are selling your services, not really the software.
I may be biased though, I've often sold Linux distros and other OSS on Ebay for people who didn't have the time or ability to download it (either because I got into the queue early in a new release, and getting it by mail is faster than waiting for FTP server loads to go down or torrents to be setup or because they were on dial up and didn't have a month to download 4 CDs worth of Fedora)
I like this idea, if for no other reason than it means my ipod will finally be able to synch with more than one computer.