> There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
New computer math: learn to count to 3. Pascal programmers -- people, almost all of 'em -- easily write things like, VAR a: ARRAY[-128..127] OF REAL; Much harder to screw up array bounds when both lower and upper bounds are explicit, of any countable type and run-time checked.
Decoding an MP3/WMA/AAC file doesn't introduce distortion, but it exposes it. So when you play your purchased/rented/ripped music, there's a little distortion on top of it, ideally not too much. But when you take that now-distorted music and re-condense it to MP3/OGG/AAC/etc., you get original distortion plus more distortion. To avoid this, you need to rip it at a high bit rate, meaning that only half as much music fits on your portable player and it still sounds worse.
Plus which, this requires attention in real time, you have to type in ID tags if you want to know the title/album etc., and pretty soon you wonder whether your momma spent years of her life raising you in order for you waste 3 minutes so as to not spend $0.94 from some distributor and $0.05 on some artist you "like." (As in, "well, not really enough to send him a few pennies for his work.") That's $20/hour tops that your time and values are worth and is that who you are?
We jazz fans have it easier... many of the artists only sell their work thru their own sites, and none of the BS about the moneygrubbing RIAA applies. When you rip these tunes, you're plain & simple insisting that they play for you for free.
$2.99 for a bottle of a few dozen foam earplugs. Each pair is good for a couple of flights. The very small surcharge on a ticket is worth a lot.
Better yet, get some Etymotic 4P 'phones & plug 'em into an iPod full of your CD's.
I fly about weekly. Listening to favorite music at low volumes -- the roar of jets, as well as babies, etc., is blocked so effectively by these things -- makes for surprisingly relaxing travel. (Excellent hi fidelity, too.) Takes down the stress level a couple of notches. Read, snooze, whatever.
You might not like having to isolate yourself from fellow humans, but I don't get complaints about the ill effects because you choose not to.
Most of the time, people like perfect competition mainly because its [sic] the market with the lowest prices, not because of its efficiency to allocate resource...
Well, the two are one and the same: my resources, as well as society's, are directed to the products/services that make the people (at least those who care enuf to have accumulated with the most bux) happiest.
Doesn't do ME any good that Fry's sells $199 boxes, but what I think is basically junk provides good-enuf computing for millions. People don't want a DVD drive that will work under Vista without hours of driver hell, that's their business. They get it for $13 less than something that would be supported widely. Good for a ticket to MI/3 and a box of popcorn. Live it up!
I've always presumed that the "Nearest Netflix Facility" address means that the USPS routes it to... the nearest Netflix facility.
I often finish movies on the outbound leg of a biz trip. When I drop my DVD into the mail in downtown Minneapolis, methinks it goes to the Netflix sorting center that is supposedly an adjunct to the USPS facility @ MSP airport (despite receiving it in CA from the San Jose Netflix).
That would allow Netflix to have a hot movie spending as much time as possible in paying customers' hands.
Why is the obvious so difficult? All these islands of information!
Perhaps the OSes of the world could supply interfaces for synchronizing events, etc., so that updates migrate across in reasonable timeframes. (At least one, OS X provides an apparently little-used such API). But if there were a generally-accepted formulation, the plane tix I buy online would automatically (or as an option at Travelocity, NWA, etc.), show up in my calendars.
Frankly, I blame the PDA makers, especially Palm, who have coordination of info as their ONLY business, and yet have not evangelized easy transfer, preferring to lay off synchro onto each OS, telephone and manufacturer of other equipment. Practically guaranteed to drive their business into irrelevance. Which is exactly what seems to be happening.
All well & good for Google to play a bit well w/ others by using pre-existing interfaces, but synchro is many years away since so many other players have their own approaches.
The only real problem may be with the 3D card needed for the new gui.
I'll bet that the real fun comes when people buy these whizzy new boxen and realize a few months later that they won't play the encrypted HiDef (both standards) on their big-$$$ TV because the HiDef folks insist on an encrypted end-to-end chain, including the viewing device. Your current high-end video cards might do you exactly zero good if your goal is to surpass current DVD viewing quality. And you DID buy that 42" beauty that is compatible with the yet-to-be-finalized DRM standards, right?
Of course, this ain't MicroSoft's issue. But mightn't it be the unmentioned reason why MS is delaying the consumer versions (only) of Vista -- they reasonably don't want to get associated with a major consumer purchase that was obsolete out of the box (not just deprecated).
Maybe the fact that it will be sold thru word-of-mouth and other channels where the audio freaks won't see it and laugh their fool heads off it. Or the fact that it will be "reviewed" by ignoramuses who think they're writing English when they spout total garbage such as, "events where you cannot lack not having the Everglide s-500" or regurgitate meaningless marketing BS such as "This membrane is said to be by the company, faster... optimized for millisecond feedback..." In fact: any crappy speaker that can barely reproduce ordinary speech has sub-millisecond response; this has no meaning whatsoever.
Except for the meta-meaning: this product is made for a sub-genre to which I don't belong, and aren't interested in coming out into the light of day. (In response to all of you who made fun of my iPod, call it, gaming fanboys, who would buy anything if it came from Gaming Inc.). And the fact that the post is on Slashdot conveys better to me that I look skeptically at any claims to audio intelligence.
If you really want near-instantaneous responsiveness, go for Etymotics or other in-ear plugs that put the driver another 1/2" closer to your eardrum: that'll shave another.04 millisecond off the audio lag time. Thanks to Everglide, we now know that real pro gamers get their edge from millisecond audio feedback, a previously unknown edge. As a side effect, the Etymotics, Shures et al. can also make beautiful and even loud music.
Everglide should stick to making sex lubricants.
Slander! [was Re: If you replace enough files...]
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
I suppose if one is a relativist, they might ask, "Ethics? By whose standards?"
Please don't confuse us moral relativists with thieves. Your argument (and I don't even quibble with your conclusions) employs lots of "man is the measure of all things" arguments. I'm a believer (natch) that moving towards what feels like the lesser of two evils puts you on the path to Nirvana (at least, MOST of the time).
Unlike radios, VCRs, etc., a CRT display encounters a fair thermal shock when switching from OFF to ON. Standby keeps a trickle warmth, allowing for BOTH faster ON and longer life. This is probably a good tradeoff Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)-wise, assuming that a TV is switched on once or twice a day on average.
Laser printers have a similar need to warm up the fuser prior to outputting paper. Standby mode, with a (probably, primitive) prediction of when you'll use it next, allows a good tradeoff of availability vs energy use. Smarter standby would be better, but turning it hard off means that you're spending some time serving your appliances -- preparing its bath, so to speak -- rather than the other way 'round.
I leave the question of the social value of watching TV to others.
You can lease the X86 developer's box from Apple, or you can shell out $500 for a Mac mini, and use the no-charge developer tools.
Unless you're a very fast learner, you'll spend a fair amount of time learning Apple's tools, frameworks, etc., that will be virtually identical on the X86 and PPC platforms. That is, identical except for whatever weird bugs are in these initial developer boxes. Unless your time or the potential app isn't worth much, the $500 won't be a major factor in your choice of developing for OSX.
The developer boxes are for people with major products on Apple, who need to ensure that they have dual binary apps on store shelves the day that Apple ships the customer X86 boxes. Somebody who's "interested" in getting into OSX can spare themselves a lot of rough edges.
Once you have a working app on the PPC box, you can shell out for whatever Apple has available on X86 (or borrow some time on one from a developer acquaintance), and port your code. You'll minimize your effort to grok Apple's bleeding-edge stuff, because the developer boxes will be better by the time you are ready to port. If Apple is even halfway telling the truth, you'll just flip the "dual binary" switch and your will be good to go.
You can then sell the mini box for at least a few pennies. Not a very expensive learning experience.
... heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at.
If you have extensive data sets of tests, together with a variety of major architectural features (GHz, FSB speed, L2 Cache, RAM size, disk speeds,...) then you can compare each of the test sets with features, letting you know how much the feature contributes to the type of work that is critical path for your applications.
For example, compilations often cut sharply into programming productivity, and so are very expensive in wasting user time. Typically, they depend as much on good disk I/O as they do CPU speed. But headline CPU speed (or maybe, is usually the attribute chosen.
Deconstructing speeds can give you better insight into getting the best performance for your application mix. By homogenizing the non-CPU info, this test makes it impossible to determine critical paths besides the CPU.
If you DID get such a set of runs, the comparison is OLS regression... best done with time as the objective, and features converted into some unit that approximates, "how long will a chunk of productive work be tied up in this part of the chain?"
I think this is right on target, but there are some other wrinkles...
With Apple having nearly 100% market share, there's NO incentive for anybody else to open another music store and collect 9 cents times the 38 albums they'd sell. If everybody's price rises to $1.39 and the stores can have a 25 cent margin, then other companies might compete with iTMS. Obviously Apple doesn't want this, while the RIAA does -- so that it can sell music to those people who buy non-iPod players. (Right now, people who buy other MP3 players are pretty starved for "legal distribution" support, meaning that they probably rip off music rather than buy it.)
If Apple gets much bigger (and by selling multiple millions of iPods a year, it looks like a pretty sure bet), the RIAA goes from holding all the cards as a near-monopoly, to being vendors to a true monopoly. While IANAL, the RIAA sounds dangerously close to sharing negotiating strategies through the press, which is cartel-type price collusion -- illegal as hell. They must be at least a little desperate to allow the press to report how they're talking among themselves in conferences about how they're trying to raise prices.
Personally, I can deal with the idea of some tracks at 79, some at 99 and some at 1.29 -- the "complexity" argument is BS -- Job's cover for his real rationale. Variable pricing might even be good for me, because I mostly buy stuff from the back catalog that logically would command lower prices. But Jobs is reasonably (from his perspective) trying to protect the low-price, low margin deals that drive the majority of sales. Making it hard to buy music online EXCEPT thru iTMS means that iPods are the only sensible player. Profit!!! for Apple.
While I'm not a great fan of the RIAA, I'd ask/.ers to realize that it's not just the accident of who got into the music biz that they're acting so aggressively against our short-term interets. It's because they have grown up in a world where that was the meal ticket to success; if they weren't predatory they didn't survive. The industry actually DOES perform a function for artists by promoting them to radio stations (sometimes illegally, thru payola)), record stores and customers (thru big ads in magazines, deals w/ movie studios, etc....). Otherwise, why would any artist sign? So what we're seeing is comparable to Detroit in the 70's: their oligopoly is falling apart; niche artists increasingly have alternate venues (lots of jazz artists are selling exclusively thru "personal" web sites). The RIAA is fighting for its life, because they don't want anybody else pre-empting the "Here's the next great artist" thing.
And the conclusion? Apple has equal incentive to charge more -- "whatever the traffic will bear -- when they are in control; their history is rife with it. No surprise. It's not because Jobs is a jerk (it doesn't matter whether he is, or isn't), but because it's Econ 101 and Jobs is trying to run a business that has a responsibility to its shareholders who put up the grubstake, to make money.
MS is obliged to its shareholders to act in the way that makes the most money for them. The only time management should hold back is when they worry that everybody else will take their marbles and go home, causing MS shareholders to make less money. To understand this announcement, hop in the WayBack machine & watch All the President's Men. Follow the money.
MS has (legitimate) interest in selling its intellectual property, expanding the market for MS PC technologies, gaining competitive advantage in having "the best" DVD format on its game player, etc. All they have to do is determine what combination of features maximizes their various divisions' total profits, time their announcement for best possible "they're a distant second" leapfrogging, and ONLY THEN get some decent PR type to choose the senior engineer to put their best foot forward. That's what they've just done.
Not that the arguments are false; they sound reasonable enough. (If they didn't, they wouldn't have been made.) It's just that they are so (expectedly) lopsided. They make it seem a huge deal that they've got double-sided disks in pre-production at 20% more storage than the 1G Blu-Ray, and will lock in at 40% less storage than the Blu-Ray pre-production "totally unproven" technology. It's just that nobody should make decisions by listening to only one competitor's argument.
The last of 471 words in TFA: NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for three years.
Not exactly "Comet to Hit Earth in 10 Hours, Wiping Out All Life," is it? Couple of engineers develop a proof of concept and their firms' PHBs insist on the obligatory "can't cause harm" statement. I guess newspaper sellers in Tokyo can breathe a little easier.
Apple also attempts to dumb down (simplify) the disk allocation issue regards space for music vs pictures. If you have more music than the nano holds, AND you want album art (well, it's nice), you have to choose. The interface raises an issue that Mr. Mossberg attempted to put to rest.
Theoretically, this should allow reduction in price in ALL markets.
Not, because US phones don't sell very well unless they have all the extra goodies (cameras, PIMs, mini-browsers,...) bundled in. US and other first-world consumers are -- big duh -- less price sensitive than other countries' consumers, who have much lower disposable income. Better to say that this phone marks progress in value-engineering standard features, in a way that MIGHT apply to the more full-featured phones that we like.
Side note: D'ya spoze that people in other countries whine about the price and capability of their tiny marvels the way Americans do?
The biggest gotcha with Rosetta is that it will not translate opcodes for G4 or G5 processors.
Don'cha think that developers would only bother to put in G4 or G5 dependencies if the extra performance were worth precluding sales go the base of G3's? That stuff doesn't want to run in emulation, anyway -- if a real G3 isn't good enough, an emulated one certainly isn't.
These developers seem most likely to be enthusiastic about squeezing every drop of juice out of the Intel boxes. Who's heard any of them announce that they're opting out of selling to the bleeding edge?
wireless internet access for individuals doesn't provide any obvious economic benefits that would increase the taxable base.
This is such a cramped standard for judgement as to be useless.
Suppose (at an admitted extreme) a municipality figured out how to provide free transportation service at a cost to the city of $1/month per person. As a side effect, more than 5% adoption rate would cut down air pollution, congestion, etc. But -- because of network effects -- it couldn't be done piecemeal. All or nothing.
This would save many residents hundreds, or even many thousands of dollars per month. You'd think it'd make people want to move to the city, or perhaps just enjoy a higher standard of living from living in Enlightenedville.
But Noooooo... sorry, it doesn't increase the tax base, and, in fact, could substantially cut retail sales of autos, gas and insurance in the area. So tax rates might have to go up on other locally-taxed items, even tho total taxes fell with the purchase of uneconomical cars and etc. Certainly, those with a pathological aversion to public transit or others not close to the new lines would be unhappy.
Snide cheapshots at putting used car salesmen to honest work aside, this hypothetical example is a clear win for any burg that could pull it off. The only difference between this and the free WiFi is one of extent, not structure. So, why not evaluate "free" WiFi in terms of whether the city could provide a greater benefit than cost?
I seem to recall a large fraction of US internet users are already high-speed, and they would theoretically be willing to convert for $0.01 per month lower cost to them (or if the reliability/service were better than the DSL or cable providers). The dial-up contingent apparently haven't decided that DSL or cable is worth $44.95/month, but presumably would be willing to be taxed more than the $20/month that they spend on AOL, MSN or whoever, to cover the snappier response. Finally, there's the non-internet contingent who presumably don't want to pay anything for their personal benefit, but might like the idea of their kids getting access in libraries, neighbors who have service, etc. I'll take a guess that these are NOT the ones who would bear much in the way of taxes to provide internet, as long as it wasn't financed by a big increase in sales taxes.
There are just some areas where the free market isn't, and network services such as water, last mile telephone and electricity are the historical examples, due to high infra-structure costs that are geographical in nature. Seems like last-mile internet access is the same thing to me. Dunno why we would want to presume that monopoly contracts between the city govt and a couple of providers is any better, and there are lots of reasons why it's worse.
1 ohm of wire makes a huge difference in the surge current when you turn it on.
Unless copper wire has gotten a lot worse since my 1978 ham radio handbook's table, it would take about 160 feet of #18 wire (about the smallest conceivable wire in an amp) to equal one ohm. Not many people would run wire all around their house, or even use anything this small, in anything resembling a power-carrying circuit.
>...I told you so. The minute you give up the physical > artifact and rely on a digital representation...
Tell me that Edison never patented the phonograph. Or the movie projector.
Those very pre-digital devices encumbered the media with all sorts of restrictions; it's just that the patents expired. Before then: "Sure, that may be an image of you, on film stock that you purchased and developed. All well and good. You just don't have the right to show it to anybody else on a device that resembles ours."
Especially on a forum dealing with intellectual property issues, let's be clear: you can try to Smash The System, you can try to amend it (e.g., 10-year copyrights or broader "fair use" rights) but when you try to pretend that it isn't pervasive througout the entire 21st century global economy, you're just wasting everybody's time.
Makes you wonder whether the Slashdotters above were actually playing MineSweeper when the details of "two's complement arithmetic" (aka, "subtraction") was covered, and were also sleeping thru their HS Geometry when complements of angles were discussed.
It's long been obvious that the typical slashdot flamethhrower only nominally has English as a first language. Now, it seems he's rather fuzzy about concepts in math, computing and systems, too.
Hard to imagine somebody who's too asleep to contemplate that "compliment" really means "complement" is somebody who groks the differences between by-ref and by-value, or any of the other zillion details that matter in our "profession."
Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing?
Yes.
Without the Administration's obscene rush to "protect" us with this wildly expensive, unlikely technology, we could have listened to the guys screaming, "the terrorists are coming at us with low tech weapons." Rummy's obsession with rogue states, instead of stateless terror, could almost be said to have cost us 9/11.
Almost any decision-making activity, including defense, requires a "pruning algorithm" of pursuing possible activities long enough to determine whether the likelihood of success is worth the subsequent search cost, and pruning the further branches (what-ifs) when the outlook is dim. The administration explicitly over-rode complaints about the feasibility and cost of this monstrosity. Lousy decisions.
Yes, I'd be happy to have a missile defense system, even if never used because it discouraged any crazies who someday might otherwise have acquired a nuclear ICBM. However, we have lots of other ways to address that problem, much cheaper. Here again, the US is discarding its options by our non-credible justification of pre-emption and emphasis on new development of offensive nukes (bunker busters).
To the extent that Star Wars displaced cheaper defenses against more imminent threats -- as it clearly has, thanks to GWB/Rummy/Cheney's "leadership" -- and to the extent that it is part of a pattern of promotion nuclear options by countries that want to protect themselves against being the next Iraq, it is a tragedy and our leaders should be held responsible.
Once again, Yes, GWB et al are responsible for the broader, and specific failure. "A mistake" is the kindest possible explanation among many darker reasons. This test should not have taken place.
As an iPod owner, I like the wide variety of accessories, choices in on-line music, etc. If the world moves massively to other formats, then Apple needs to retrofit my machine with WMA (or whatever) capability or I'll have less flexibility.
I would certainly advise considering the whole ecosystem as part of anybody's decision to buy the Sony solution in this area.
The prospective Sony owner faces a high risk of being stuck with limited music choices, no 3rd-party replacement parts (e.g., batteries) because of a limited market, artifacts in converting its ATRACS DRM'd music to another player's format when my machine dies & Sony is no longer interested in wasting its effort "competing" in this space, etc.
Apple -- and for that matter, all the not-yet-at-critical-mass WMA solutions -- all have these isolation / orphanized risks. You can reduce these by only ripping your own music to your device, but the stores ARE great for some music.
The risks now seem less for Apple than others -- so I won't "fret" -- but it's an issue to consider. Nothing to do with my manliness.
But how is it that "we" are so fiercely independent of NYT's business model but there's no OSN (open source news) equivalent? Could it be that the NYT is actually making news by getting Dr. Samuelson to spend productive time with a non-technical publication, streamlining his argument for that audience, and editing it into a timely, coherent report? Absent the NYT et al, you end up with reprinted lies from the White House (paid for by your taxes), or "debates" between a pair of rabid orangutans shrieking "Did!" and "Did Not!" paid for by SUVs.
I don't get how some people claim to care about their society but happily bite the hand of any non-public institution that feeds them with information that helps to support a democratic society. [cheap shots removed--Ed]
Slashdot Mirror
> There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
New computer math: learn to count to 3. Pascal programmers -- people, almost all of 'em -- easily write things like, VAR a: ARRAY[-128..127] OF REAL; Much harder to screw up array bounds when both lower and upper bounds are explicit, of any countable type and run-time checked.
Decoding an MP3/WMA/AAC file doesn't introduce distortion, but it exposes it. So when you play your purchased/rented/ripped music, there's a little distortion on top of it, ideally not too much. But when you take that now-distorted music and re-condense it to MP3/OGG/AAC/etc., you get original distortion plus more distortion. To avoid this, you need to rip it at a high bit rate, meaning that only half as much music fits on your portable player and it still sounds worse.
Plus which, this requires attention in real time, you have to type in ID tags if you want to know the title/album etc., and pretty soon you wonder whether your momma spent years of her life raising you in order for you waste 3 minutes so as to not spend $0.94 from some distributor and $0.05 on some artist you "like." (As in, "well, not really enough to send him a few pennies for his work.") That's $20/hour tops that your time and values are worth and is that who you are?
We jazz fans have it easier... many of the artists only sell their work thru their own sites, and none of the BS about the moneygrubbing RIAA applies. When you rip these tunes, you're plain & simple insisting that they play for you for free.
$2.99 for a bottle of a few dozen foam earplugs. Each pair is good for a couple of flights. The very small surcharge on a ticket is worth a lot.
Better yet, get some Etymotic 4P 'phones & plug 'em into an iPod full of your CD's.
I fly about weekly. Listening to favorite music at low volumes -- the roar of jets, as well as babies, etc., is blocked so effectively by these things -- makes for surprisingly relaxing travel. (Excellent hi fidelity, too.) Takes down the stress level a couple of notches. Read, snooze, whatever.
You might not like having to isolate yourself from fellow humans, but I don't get complaints about the ill effects because you choose not to.
Most of the time, people like perfect competition mainly because its [sic] the market with the lowest prices, not because of its efficiency to allocate resource...
Well, the two are one and the same: my resources, as well as society's, are directed to the products/services that make the people (at least those who care enuf to have accumulated with the most bux) happiest.
Doesn't do ME any good that Fry's sells $199 boxes, but what I think is basically junk provides good-enuf computing for millions. People don't want a DVD drive that will work under Vista without hours of driver hell, that's their business. They get it for $13 less than something that would be supported widely. Good for a ticket to MI/3 and a box of popcorn. Live it up!
I've always presumed that the "Nearest Netflix Facility" address means that the USPS routes it to... the nearest Netflix facility.
I often finish movies on the outbound leg of a biz trip. When I drop my DVD into the mail in downtown Minneapolis, methinks it goes to the Netflix sorting center that is supposedly an adjunct to the USPS facility @ MSP airport (despite receiving it in CA from the San Jose Netflix).
That would allow Netflix to have a hot movie spending as much time as possible in paying customers' hands.
...I want to be able to accept it right there...
Why is the obvious so difficult? All these islands of information!
Perhaps the OSes of the world could supply interfaces for synchronizing events, etc., so that updates migrate across in reasonable timeframes. (At least one, OS X provides an apparently little-used such API). But if there were a generally-accepted formulation, the plane tix I buy online would automatically (or as an option at Travelocity, NWA, etc.), show up in my calendars.
Frankly, I blame the PDA makers, especially Palm, who have coordination of info as their ONLY business, and yet have not evangelized easy transfer, preferring to lay off synchro onto each OS, telephone and manufacturer of other equipment. Practically guaranteed to drive their business into irrelevance. Which is exactly what seems to be happening.
All well & good for Google to play a bit well w/ others by using pre-existing interfaces, but synchro is many years away since so many other players have their own approaches.
The only real problem may be with the 3D card needed for the new gui.
I'll bet that the real fun comes when people buy these whizzy new boxen and realize a few months later that they won't play the encrypted HiDef (both standards) on their big-$$$ TV because the HiDef folks insist on an encrypted end-to-end chain, including the viewing device. Your current high-end video cards might do you exactly zero good if your goal is to surpass current DVD viewing quality. And you DID buy that 42" beauty that is compatible with the yet-to-be-finalized DRM standards, right?
Of course, this ain't MicroSoft's issue. But mightn't it be the unmentioned reason why MS is delaying the consumer versions (only) of Vista -- they reasonably don't want to get associated with a major consumer purchase that was obsolete out of the box (not just deprecated).
Takers?
What makes this a "gaming" headset? ...
... optimized for millisecond feedback..." In fact: any crappy speaker that can barely reproduce ordinary speech has sub-millisecond response; this has no meaning whatsoever.
.04 millisecond off the audio lag time. Thanks to Everglide, we now know that real pro gamers get their edge from millisecond audio feedback, a previously unknown edge. As a side effect, the Etymotics, Shures et al. can also make beautiful and even loud music.
Maybe the fact that it will be sold thru word-of-mouth and other channels where the audio freaks won't see it and laugh their fool heads off it. Or the fact that it will be "reviewed" by ignoramuses who think they're writing English when they spout total garbage such as, "events where you cannot lack not having the Everglide s-500" or regurgitate meaningless marketing BS such as "This membrane is said to be by the company, faster
Except for the meta-meaning: this product is made for a sub-genre to which I don't belong, and aren't interested in coming out into the light of day. (In response to all of you who made fun of my iPod, call it, gaming fanboys, who would buy anything if it came from Gaming Inc.). And the fact that the post is on Slashdot conveys better to me that I look skeptically at any claims to audio intelligence.
If you really want near-instantaneous responsiveness, go for Etymotics or other in-ear plugs that put the driver another 1/2" closer to your eardrum: that'll shave another
Everglide should stick to making sex lubricants.
I suppose if one is a relativist, they might ask, "Ethics? By whose standards?"
Please don't confuse us moral relativists with thieves. Your argument (and I don't even quibble with your conclusions) employs lots of "man is the measure of all things" arguments. I'm a believer (natch) that moving towards what feels like the lesser of two evils puts you on the path to Nirvana (at least, MOST of the time).
Unlike radios, VCRs, etc., a CRT display encounters a fair thermal shock when switching from OFF to ON. Standby keeps a trickle warmth, allowing for BOTH faster ON and longer life. This is probably a good tradeoff Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)-wise, assuming that a TV is switched on once or twice a day on average.
Laser printers have a similar need to warm up the fuser prior to outputting paper. Standby mode, with a (probably, primitive) prediction of when you'll use it next, allows a good tradeoff of availability vs energy use. Smarter standby would be better, but turning it hard off means that you're spending some time serving your appliances -- preparing its bath, so to speak -- rather than the other way 'round.
I leave the question of the social value of watching TV to others.
You can lease the X86 developer's box from Apple, or you can shell out $500 for a Mac mini, and use the no-charge developer tools.
Unless you're a very fast learner, you'll spend a fair amount of time learning Apple's tools, frameworks, etc., that will be virtually identical on the X86 and PPC platforms. That is, identical except for whatever weird bugs are in these initial developer boxes. Unless your time or the potential app isn't worth much, the $500 won't be a major factor in your choice of developing for OSX.
The developer boxes are for people with major products on Apple, who need to ensure that they have dual binary apps on store shelves the day that Apple ships the customer X86 boxes. Somebody who's "interested" in getting into OSX can spare themselves a lot of rough edges.
Once you have a working app on the PPC box, you can shell out for whatever Apple has available on X86 (or borrow some time on one from a developer acquaintance), and port your code. You'll minimize your effort to grok Apple's bleeding-edge stuff, because the developer boxes will be better by the time you are ready to port. If Apple is even halfway telling the truth, you'll just flip the "dual binary" switch and your will be good to go.
You can then sell the mini box for at least a few pennies. Not a very expensive learning experience.
... heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at.
...) then you can compare each of the test sets with features, letting you know how much the feature contributes to the type of work that is critical path for your applications.
If you have extensive data sets of tests, together with a variety of major architectural features (GHz, FSB speed, L2 Cache, RAM size, disk speeds,
For example, compilations often cut sharply into programming productivity, and so are very expensive in wasting user time. Typically, they depend as much on good disk I/O as they do CPU speed. But headline CPU speed (or maybe, is usually the attribute chosen.
Deconstructing speeds can give you better insight into getting the best performance for your application mix. By homogenizing the non-CPU info, this test makes it impossible to determine critical paths besides the CPU.
If you DID get such a set of runs, the comparison is OLS regression... best done with time as the objective, and features converted into some unit that approximates, "how long will a chunk of productive work be tied up in this part of the chain?"
I think this is right on target, but there are some other wrinkles...
/.ers to realize that it's not just the accident of who got into the music biz that they're acting so aggressively against our short-term interets. It's because they have grown up in a world where that was the meal ticket to success; if they weren't predatory they didn't survive. The industry actually DOES perform a function for artists by promoting them to radio stations (sometimes illegally, thru payola)), record stores and customers (thru big ads in magazines, deals w/ movie studios, etc....). Otherwise, why would any artist sign? So what we're seeing is comparable to Detroit in the 70's: their oligopoly is falling apart; niche artists increasingly have alternate venues (lots of jazz artists are selling exclusively thru "personal" web sites). The RIAA is fighting for its life, because they don't want anybody else pre-empting the "Here's the next great artist" thing.
With Apple having nearly 100% market share, there's NO incentive for anybody else to open another music store and collect 9 cents times the 38 albums they'd sell. If everybody's price rises to $1.39 and the stores can have a 25 cent margin, then other companies might compete with iTMS. Obviously Apple doesn't want this, while the RIAA does -- so that it can sell music to those people who buy non-iPod players. (Right now, people who buy other MP3 players are pretty starved for "legal distribution" support, meaning that they probably rip off music rather than buy it.)
If Apple gets much bigger (and by selling multiple millions of iPods a year, it looks like a pretty sure bet), the RIAA goes from holding all the cards as a near-monopoly, to being vendors to a true monopoly. While IANAL, the RIAA sounds dangerously close to sharing negotiating strategies through the press, which is cartel-type price collusion -- illegal as hell. They must be at least a little desperate to allow the press to report how they're talking among themselves in conferences about how they're trying to raise prices.
Personally, I can deal with the idea of some tracks at 79, some at 99 and some at 1.29 -- the "complexity" argument is BS -- Job's cover for his real rationale. Variable pricing might even be good for me, because I mostly buy stuff from the back catalog that logically would command lower prices. But Jobs is reasonably (from his perspective) trying to protect the low-price, low margin deals that drive the majority of sales. Making it hard to buy music online EXCEPT thru iTMS means that iPods are the only sensible player. Profit!!! for Apple.
While I'm not a great fan of the RIAA, I'd ask
And the conclusion? Apple has equal incentive to charge more -- "whatever the traffic will bear -- when they are in control; their history is rife with it. No surprise. It's not because Jobs is a jerk (it doesn't matter whether he is, or isn't), but because it's Econ 101 and Jobs is trying to run a business that has a responsibility to its shareholders who put up the grubstake, to make money.
MS is obliged to its shareholders to act in the way that makes the most money for them. The only time management should hold back is when they worry that everybody else will take their marbles and go home, causing MS shareholders to make less money. To understand this announcement, hop in the WayBack machine & watch All the President's Men. Follow the money.
MS has (legitimate) interest in selling its intellectual property, expanding the market for MS PC technologies, gaining competitive advantage in having "the best" DVD format on its game player, etc. All they have to do is determine what combination of features maximizes their various divisions' total profits, time their announcement for best possible "they're a distant second" leapfrogging, and ONLY THEN get some decent PR type to choose the senior engineer to put their best foot forward. That's what they've just done.
Not that the arguments are false; they sound reasonable enough. (If they didn't, they wouldn't have been made.) It's just that they are so (expectedly) lopsided. They make it seem a huge deal that they've got double-sided disks in pre-production at 20% more storage than the 1G Blu-Ray, and will lock in at 40% less storage than the Blu-Ray pre-production "totally unproven" technology. It's just that nobody should make decisions by listening to only one competitor's argument.
The last of 471 words in TFA: NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for three years.
Not exactly "Comet to Hit Earth in 10 Hours, Wiping Out All Life," is it? Couple of engineers develop a proof of concept and their firms' PHBs insist on the obligatory "can't cause harm" statement. I guess newspaper sellers in Tokyo can breathe a little easier.
And slashdotters can stop hyperventilating, too.
Apple also attempts to dumb down (simplify) the disk allocation issue regards space for music vs pictures. If you have more music than the nano holds, AND you want album art (well, it's nice), you have to choose. The interface raises an issue that Mr. Mossberg attempted to put to rest.
Theoretically, this should allow reduction in price in ALL markets.
...) bundled in. US and other first-world consumers are -- big duh -- less price sensitive than other countries' consumers, who have much lower disposable income. Better to say that this phone marks progress in value-engineering standard features, in a way that MIGHT apply to the more full-featured phones that we like.
Not, because US phones don't sell very well unless they have all the extra goodies (cameras, PIMs, mini-browsers,
Side note: D'ya spoze that people in other countries whine about the price and capability of their tiny marvels the way Americans do?
The biggest gotcha with Rosetta is that it will not translate opcodes for G4 or G5 processors.
Don'cha think that developers would only bother to put in G4 or G5 dependencies if the extra performance were worth precluding sales go the base of G3's? That stuff doesn't want to run in emulation, anyway -- if a real G3 isn't good enough, an emulated one certainly isn't.
These developers seem most likely to be enthusiastic about squeezing every drop of juice out of the Intel boxes. Who's heard any of them announce that they're opting out of selling to the bleeding edge?
wireless internet access for individuals doesn't provide any obvious economic benefits that would increase the taxable base.
This is such a cramped standard for judgement as to be useless.
Suppose (at an admitted extreme) a municipality figured out how to provide free transportation service at a cost to the city of $1/month per person. As a side effect, more than 5% adoption rate would cut down air pollution, congestion, etc. But -- because of network effects -- it couldn't be done piecemeal. All or nothing.
This would save many residents hundreds, or even many thousands of dollars per month. You'd think it'd make people want to move to the city, or perhaps just enjoy a higher standard of living from living in Enlightenedville.
But Noooooo... sorry, it doesn't increase the tax base, and, in fact, could substantially cut retail sales of autos, gas and insurance in the area. So tax rates might have to go up on other locally-taxed items, even tho total taxes fell with the purchase of uneconomical cars and etc. Certainly, those with a pathological aversion to public transit or others not close to the new lines would be unhappy.
Snide cheapshots at putting used car salesmen to honest work aside, this hypothetical example is a clear win for any burg that could pull it off. The only difference between this and the free WiFi is one of extent, not structure. So, why not evaluate "free" WiFi in terms of whether the city could provide a greater benefit than cost?
I seem to recall a large fraction of US internet users are already high-speed, and they would theoretically be willing to convert for $0.01 per month lower cost to them (or if the reliability/service were better than the DSL or cable providers). The dial-up contingent apparently haven't decided that DSL or cable is worth $44.95/month, but presumably would be willing to be taxed more than the $20/month that they spend on AOL, MSN or whoever, to cover the snappier response. Finally, there's the non-internet contingent who presumably don't want to pay anything for their personal benefit, but might like the idea of their kids getting access in libraries, neighbors who have service, etc. I'll take a guess that these are NOT the ones who would bear much in the way of taxes to provide internet, as long as it wasn't financed by a big increase in sales taxes.
There are just some areas where the free market isn't, and network services such as water, last mile telephone and electricity are the historical examples, due to high infra-structure costs that are geographical in nature. Seems like last-mile internet access is the same thing to me. Dunno why we would want to presume that monopoly contracts between the city govt and a couple of providers is any better, and there are lots of reasons why it's worse.
1 ohm of wire makes a huge difference in the surge current when you turn it on.
Unless copper wire has gotten a lot worse since my 1978 ham radio handbook's table, it would take about 160 feet of #18 wire (about the smallest conceivable wire in an amp) to equal one ohm. Not many people would run wire all around their house, or even use anything this small, in anything resembling a power-carrying circuit.
The BS detectors are not amused.
> ...I told you so. The minute you give up the physical ...
> artifact and rely on a digital representation
Tell me that Edison never patented the phonograph. Or the movie projector.
Those very pre-digital devices encumbered the media with all sorts of restrictions; it's just that the patents expired. Before then: "Sure, that may be an image of you, on film stock that you purchased and developed. All well and good. You just don't have the right to show it to anybody else on a device that resembles ours."
Especially on a forum dealing with intellectual property issues, let's be clear: you can try to Smash The System, you can try to amend it (e.g., 10-year copyrights or broader "fair use" rights) but when you try to pretend that it isn't pervasive througout the entire 21st century global economy, you're just wasting everybody's time.
Makes you wonder whether the Slashdotters above were actually playing MineSweeper when the details of "two's complement arithmetic" (aka, "subtraction") was covered, and were also sleeping thru their HS Geometry when complements of angles were discussed.
It's long been obvious that the typical slashdot flamethhrower only nominally has English as a first language. Now, it seems he's rather fuzzy about concepts in math, computing and systems, too.
Hard to imagine somebody who's too asleep to contemplate that "compliment" really means "complement" is somebody who groks the differences between by-ref and by-value, or any of the other zillion details that matter in our "profession."
Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing?
Yes.
Without the Administration's obscene rush to "protect" us with this wildly expensive, unlikely technology, we could have listened to the guys screaming, "the terrorists are coming at us with low tech weapons." Rummy's obsession with rogue states, instead of stateless terror, could almost be said to have cost us 9/11.
Almost any decision-making activity, including defense, requires a "pruning algorithm" of pursuing possible activities long enough to determine whether the likelihood of success is worth the subsequent search cost, and pruning the further branches (what-ifs) when the outlook is dim. The administration explicitly over-rode complaints about the feasibility and cost of this monstrosity. Lousy decisions.
Yes, I'd be happy to have a missile defense system, even if never used because it discouraged any crazies who someday might otherwise have acquired a nuclear ICBM. However, we have lots of other ways to address that problem, much cheaper. Here again, the US is discarding its options by our non-credible justification of pre-emption and emphasis on new development of offensive nukes (bunker busters).
To the extent that Star Wars displaced cheaper defenses against more imminent threats -- as it clearly has, thanks to GWB/Rummy/Cheney's "leadership" -- and to the extent that it is part of a pattern of promotion nuclear options by countries that want to protect themselves against being the next Iraq, it is a tragedy and our leaders should be held responsible.
Once again, Yes, GWB et al are responsible for the broader, and specific failure. "A mistake" is the kindest possible explanation among many darker reasons. This test should not have taken place.
Howzabout "network" effects?
As an iPod owner, I like the wide variety of accessories, choices in on-line music, etc. If the world moves massively to other formats, then Apple needs to retrofit my machine with WMA (or whatever) capability or I'll have less flexibility.
I would certainly advise considering the whole ecosystem as part of anybody's decision to buy the Sony solution in this area.
The prospective Sony owner faces a high risk of being stuck with limited music choices, no 3rd-party replacement parts (e.g., batteries) because of a limited market, artifacts in converting its ATRACS DRM'd music to another player's format when my machine dies & Sony is no longer interested in wasting its effort "competing" in this space, etc.
Apple -- and for that matter, all the not-yet-at-critical-mass WMA solutions -- all have these isolation / orphanized risks. You can reduce these by only ripping your own music to your device, but the stores ARE great for some music.
The risks now seem less for Apple than others -- so I won't "fret" -- but it's an issue to consider. Nothing to do with my manliness.
(retinal scan login required)
But how is it that "we" are so fiercely independent of NYT's business model but there's no OSN (open source news) equivalent? Could it be that the NYT is actually making news by getting Dr. Samuelson to spend productive time with a non-technical publication, streamlining his argument for that audience, and editing it into a timely, coherent report? Absent the NYT et al, you end up with reprinted lies from the White House (paid for by your taxes), or "debates" between a pair of rabid orangutans shrieking "Did!" and "Did Not!" paid for by SUVs.
I don't get how some people claim to care about their society but happily bite the hand of any non-public institution that feeds them with information that helps to support a democratic society. [cheap shots removed--Ed]