This is not an either/or scenario. There's room in the market for both streaming and locally-stored music because they serve different needs. Having locally-stored music means you get to the music you want to listen to when you want to listen to it. Having streaming music means you get to listen to a variety of music that may or may not be in your collection.
These ideas have coexisted for decades, with radio being the streaming medium and CDs (or, earlier, 8-tracks and records) being the local storage medium. Despite the availability of music on CD, people still listen to the radio. And despite the ubiquity of music on the radio, people still buy CDs.
I don't understand why gamers have this die hard loyalty/borderline bias for Intel.
Then:
Granted, they are better than AMD hands down [...]
Then:
Unless you're an extreme gamer [...]
How many times can you answer your own question in the same paragraph?
[...] it runs all these games just fine with excellent graphics at a 1680x1050 resolution.
If you're only gaming at 1680x1050, then you don't need top-end gear to play games. For those of us on 1920x1200 or higher, beefier components are necessary in order to achieve playable framerates.
Not necessarily. If you're trying to attract high-tech companies to an area that has no tech workers, then it makes sense to give the *first* company an incentive to build there (with smaller and smaller incentives as more companies come in). If there aren't any tech workers already in the area, it's going to cost a big company a lot of money to bring them in. That's a very real, tangible cost to the company.
Once the area is established and has a good number of tech companies and workers, the tech workers (who tend to make good money) will settle in because they can always find a new job at another company nearby. Then they'll spend their larger-than-average salaries on eating out, going to the movies, and all those other things that bring in sales tax dollars and put money into the pockets of "regular Joe" types.
To give you an example of this, consider the neighboring Colorado towns of Boulder and Longmont. Back in the early '60s, Longmont was largely an agriculturally-focused town and Boulder was, well, Boulder. In the '60s, IBM built a large plant smack dab between Boulder and Longmont and it employed thousands (my parents met while both were working for IBM, incidentally).
Before long, other tech companies (like Maxtor, Seagate, WD, StorageTek, National Semiconductor, DigitalGlobe, Amgen, Intrado, Xilinx, AMD, Webroot and more) opened up new offices and plants (or started in) in the Boulder/Longmont area. Housing prices started growing faster than the national average. Longmont's population exploded from about 23k to about 71k; Boulder's population increased by half, from about 66k to about 94k.
By the tech boom of the late-'90s and early-'00s, the Boulder/Longmont area had more tech workers per capita than Silicon Valley and housing prices were well above those of the surrounding areas. Even after the tech bubble burst, there was still plenty of new activity. The Boulder/Longmont area has seen amazing economic growth, and a much of that can be traced back, directly or indirectly, to IBM opening up its plant and employing thousands of tech workers where there were none before.
Now, in the case of this Apple datacenter, with only 100 employees, it's hard to see if that will make a large enough impact to help the local economy in the way that IBM's plant helped that of Boulder and Longmont, but sometimes you just need to take that first step to bring that company that everyone's heard of to your area; then maybe others will follow.
And *that's* why it sometimes makes sense to give businesses tax breaks.
I whole-heartedly disagree with your comments about extending Drupal beyond its core. Admittedly if you try using Drupal without installing any modules you'll get pretty limited functionality. If you want something to work differently, you can install one of the thousands (yes, thousands) of contributed modules or write your own using Drupal's API (which is actually pretty good, and it got even better in Drupal 6).
For theming, you can use a stock theme (like the default Garland), you can grab one of many contributed themes, or you can create your own (from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting point). Drupal sites don't have to look like Drupal the same way WordPress sites don't have to look like WordPress.
Just like any other system, Drupal is only as customizable as the amount of work you're willing to put into it. A lot of WordPress sites out there use stock Kubrick, just as many Drupal sites use stock Garland. But a lot of people choose to customize their sites by creating custom themes and writing custom code (or using freely available modules).
Want some examples of sites that use Drupal that look nothing like your basic Drupal install and have plenty of unique functionality? Have a look at Popular Science*, FastCompany, or MTV UK.
* Disclaimer: I work for the company that built PopSci's new site and was one of the developers that worked on the site.
Because our drinking water comes straight from the Rocky Mountains, we inhabitants of Boulder, Colorado will remain unchanged while the lot of you mutate into hideous freaks. Ironically, this will make Boulderites the most normal people on the planet.
I listened to the whole program and this is perhaps the worst idea I've heard towards overcoming the pervasive lack of health insurance. Most of the people who don't have health insurance don't have it because they can't afford it. A somewhat decent plan costs a couple hundred dollars a month for individuals and several hundred for families. The people who can't afford these prices don't choose buying an iPhone and a new HDTV over getting health insurance--they don't have the money in the first place.
While the state claims that the prices will be lower because of this law, they've established a council to look into ways of lowering costs--and their suggestions won't be implemented until at least 2008. So for the rest of this year at least, costs aren't any cheaper than they were before this law went into effect. And knowing most insurance companies, if they can reduce their costs, it's unlikely they'd ever pass those savings onto consumers willingly.
They say there won't be a penalty for people who genuinely can't afford health insurance, but the state gets to arbitrarily draw the line between who makes enough money and who doesn't. And when it comes to providing services for citizens, governments don't usually err on the side of compassion.
I frequently make DVDs of the stuff on my TiVo to show to a group of friends. It's not a simple or fast process, so I only do it with stuff I think they'll really like.
Is that enough to convince you that just because you don't find it useful, someone else might?
You're missing the point that this is exactly what's happening. By implementing PatchGuard, Microsoft was trying to make the OS more secure. But because these "security" companies bitched and moaned that Microsoft shut them out of the kernel (where no software but the OS ought to be), Microsoft must now make the system less secure in order to look like they're not abusing their monopoly powers.
No reasonable person can place the blame on Microsoft here. If they don't open up the kernel to Symantec, McAfee, et al. then they'll be opening themselves up to another anti-trust lawsuit, risking billions of dollars in fines and damages in both the US and the EU. Not even Microsoft can afford that.
You're wrong. Open-source developers' time is finite, which means they must prioritize. Bugs that affect security (should) get handled first, followed by bugs that affect primary components (thus affecting most users), followed by bugs that cause those little quirks we all love to hate.
In this prioritization process, a bug that will affect nearly every user gets handled fairly quickly. But a bug that only affects, say, one percent of the users will take quite a while longer. And if there's a bug that affects one user in 10 million and would take a week of a developer's time, it's just never going to get fixed because there are always more important bugs developers could be working on.
Open-source projects may not have to worry about the bottom line, but the prioritization is the same because both open-source projects and closed-source projects have a finite resource. With an open-source project, that finite resource is developers' time. In a closed-source project, the finite resource may LOOK like money, but that money only buys developers' time by hiring the developers.
So the question isn't "What will this do to my bottom line?" but rather "What is the best use of my developers' time?"--a question that both open-source and closed-source projects have to ask.
As a Coloradan, I fully support renaming the state to Colbertado (the "t" is silent!). Only we'd have to move that hippie commune Boulder to Massachusetts. We can't have Boulderites fouling up Dr. Colbert's namesake with their pot smoke and liberal agendas.
I work for a small WISP and I've dealt with more than my fair share of WRT54G routers. We began with the WRT54Gv4 router and they were spectacular. They were solid, stable, and only had problems when they were struck by lightning (don't ask...). We distributed many dozens of these routers. To my knowledge, every one of them is still in use today.
Then Linksys released their version 5 of the router. We deployed dozens more of these. We've had two main problems with them: the WAN port loses its ability to communicate with a static IP address (it thinks it's been assigned 0.0.0.0--very helpful); or the WLAN connection permanently ceases to work properly (it still puts out radiation at 2.4GHz but it's just noise). Out of the dozens of these v5 routers we've installed for customers, approximately 25% have been returned to Linksys.
We no longer use Linksys routers for our customers. We sell D-Link WBR-1310 routers instead. It took me a while to get over my initial snobbish elitism (I'd used D-Link's products in the past and they were less than stellar) but now I'm a believer. The WBR-1310 is fantastic. We've put a couple dozen of these in the field and so far there hasn't been one issue among them. D-Link has really cleaned up their act. It also helps that these basic routers are dirt cheap. Even Office Depot sells them for $40-60 so you can imagine what wholesale prices are like...
At home, I'd had different problems with my WRT54Gv5. Basically, any time I tried to use BitTorrent, the router would play hide-and-seek with my network. It didn't matter whether it was LAN or WLAN, the connection would cut out every two minutes. Only a power cycle would bring it back. I've since replaced it with the aforementioned D-Link WBR-1310 and I'm pleased as punch. BitTorrent works faster than ever and I've not yet had to power cycle the thing after two months of punishing use.
So... Mixed reviews? Hardly. The WRT54Gv5 is the least reliable router I've ever used, and I've used a LOT in that price range. It's a bloody shame, too, because Linksys really had something going with the v4 of the same router. If they sold them again, we'd buy a hundred in an instant, with orders for hundreds more down the road. But somehow, I doubt Linksys will ever go back to the v4.
Here's hoping that this new DD-WRT release will ease the pain of so many unfortunate buyers of the WRT54Gv5.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, no.
This is not an either/or scenario. There's room in the market for both streaming and locally-stored music because they serve different needs. Having locally-stored music means you get to the music you want to listen to when you want to listen to it. Having streaming music means you get to listen to a variety of music that may or may not be in your collection.
These ideas have coexisted for decades, with radio being the streaming medium and CDs (or, earlier, 8-tracks and records) being the local storage medium. Despite the availability of music on CD, people still listen to the radio. And despite the ubiquity of music on the radio, people still buy CDs.
The problem was that the technology to make them work well was prohibitively expensive if even available.
This was George Lucas' reasoning for creating the Star Wars Special Editions. Just because the technology is there doesn't mean we should use it.
(I kid, I kid. Natal looks awesome.)
I don't understand why gamers have this die hard loyalty/borderline bias for Intel.
Then:
Granted, they are better than AMD hands down [...]
Then:
Unless you're an extreme gamer [...]
How many times can you answer your own question in the same paragraph?
[...] it runs all these games just fine with excellent graphics at a 1680x1050 resolution.
If you're only gaming at 1680x1050, then you don't need top-end gear to play games. For those of us on 1920x1200 or higher, beefier components are necessary in order to achieve playable framerates.
Not necessarily. If you're trying to attract high-tech companies to an area that has no tech workers, then it makes sense to give the *first* company an incentive to build there (with smaller and smaller incentives as more companies come in). If there aren't any tech workers already in the area, it's going to cost a big company a lot of money to bring them in. That's a very real, tangible cost to the company.
Once the area is established and has a good number of tech companies and workers, the tech workers (who tend to make good money) will settle in because they can always find a new job at another company nearby. Then they'll spend their larger-than-average salaries on eating out, going to the movies, and all those other things that bring in sales tax dollars and put money into the pockets of "regular Joe" types.
To give you an example of this, consider the neighboring Colorado towns of Boulder and Longmont. Back in the early '60s, Longmont was largely an agriculturally-focused town and Boulder was, well, Boulder. In the '60s, IBM built a large plant smack dab between Boulder and Longmont and it employed thousands (my parents met while both were working for IBM, incidentally).
Before long, other tech companies (like Maxtor, Seagate, WD, StorageTek, National Semiconductor, DigitalGlobe, Amgen, Intrado, Xilinx, AMD, Webroot and more) opened up new offices and plants (or started in) in the Boulder/Longmont area. Housing prices started growing faster than the national average. Longmont's population exploded from about 23k to about 71k; Boulder's population increased by half, from about 66k to about 94k.
By the tech boom of the late-'90s and early-'00s, the Boulder/Longmont area had more tech workers per capita than Silicon Valley and housing prices were well above those of the surrounding areas. Even after the tech bubble burst, there was still plenty of new activity. The Boulder/Longmont area has seen amazing economic growth, and a much of that can be traced back, directly or indirectly, to IBM opening up its plant and employing thousands of tech workers where there were none before.
Now, in the case of this Apple datacenter, with only 100 employees, it's hard to see if that will make a large enough impact to help the local economy in the way that IBM's plant helped that of Boulder and Longmont, but sometimes you just need to take that first step to bring that company that everyone's heard of to your area; then maybe others will follow.
And *that's* why it sometimes makes sense to give businesses tax breaks.
I think we need to extend Godwin's Law to include child molesters...
I whole-heartedly disagree with your comments about extending Drupal beyond its core. Admittedly if you try using Drupal without installing any modules you'll get pretty limited functionality. If you want something to work differently, you can install one of the thousands (yes, thousands) of contributed modules or write your own using Drupal's API (which is actually pretty good, and it got even better in Drupal 6).
For theming, you can use a stock theme (like the default Garland), you can grab one of many contributed themes, or you can create your own (from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting point). Drupal sites don't have to look like Drupal the same way WordPress sites don't have to look like WordPress.
Just like any other system, Drupal is only as customizable as the amount of work you're willing to put into it. A lot of WordPress sites out there use stock Kubrick, just as many Drupal sites use stock Garland. But a lot of people choose to customize their sites by creating custom themes and writing custom code (or using freely available modules).
Want some examples of sites that use Drupal that look nothing like your basic Drupal install and have plenty of unique functionality? Have a look at Popular Science*, FastCompany, or MTV UK.
* Disclaimer: I work for the company that built PopSci's new site and was one of the developers that worked on the site.
Because our drinking water comes straight from the Rocky Mountains, we inhabitants of Boulder, Colorado will remain unchanged while the lot of you mutate into hideous freaks. Ironically, this will make Boulderites the most normal people on the planet.
I weep for the future.
Only Celine Dion is in Las Vegas now.
Decisions, decisions...
Ryan Fenton? That's a strange name for a protocol...
It stands for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization.
I listened to the whole program and this is perhaps the worst idea I've heard towards overcoming the pervasive lack of health insurance. Most of the people who don't have health insurance don't have it because they can't afford it. A somewhat decent plan costs a couple hundred dollars a month for individuals and several hundred for families. The people who can't afford these prices don't choose buying an iPhone and a new HDTV over getting health insurance--they don't have the money in the first place.
While the state claims that the prices will be lower because of this law, they've established a council to look into ways of lowering costs--and their suggestions won't be implemented until at least 2008. So for the rest of this year at least, costs aren't any cheaper than they were before this law went into effect. And knowing most insurance companies, if they can reduce their costs, it's unlikely they'd ever pass those savings onto consumers willingly.
They say there won't be a penalty for people who genuinely can't afford health insurance, but the state gets to arbitrarily draw the line between who makes enough money and who doesn't. And when it comes to providing services for citizens, governments don't usually err on the side of compassion.
So how is this better than leaving things alone?
My Mac-using friends tell me one button is all you ever need...
I have in fact seen an HP printer display the message "PC load letter." I still don't know what it means.
I frequently make DVDs of the stuff on my TiVo to show to a group of friends. It's not a simple or fast process, so I only do it with stuff I think they'll really like.
Is that enough to convince you that just because you don't find it useful, someone else might?
You're missing the point that this is exactly what's happening. By implementing PatchGuard, Microsoft was trying to make the OS more secure. But because these "security" companies bitched and moaned that Microsoft shut them out of the kernel (where no software but the OS ought to be), Microsoft must now make the system less secure in order to look like they're not abusing their monopoly powers. No reasonable person can place the blame on Microsoft here. If they don't open up the kernel to Symantec, McAfee, et al. then they'll be opening themselves up to another anti-trust lawsuit, risking billions of dollars in fines and damages in both the US and the EU. Not even Microsoft can afford that.
You're wrong. Open-source developers' time is finite, which means they must prioritize. Bugs that affect security (should) get handled first, followed by bugs that affect primary components (thus affecting most users), followed by bugs that cause those little quirks we all love to hate.
In this prioritization process, a bug that will affect nearly every user gets handled fairly quickly. But a bug that only affects, say, one percent of the users will take quite a while longer. And if there's a bug that affects one user in 10 million and would take a week of a developer's time, it's just never going to get fixed because there are always more important bugs developers could be working on.
Open-source projects may not have to worry about the bottom line, but the prioritization is the same because both open-source projects and closed-source projects have a finite resource. With an open-source project, that finite resource is developers' time. In a closed-source project, the finite resource may LOOK like money, but that money only buys developers' time by hiring the developers.
So the question isn't "What will this do to my bottom line?" but rather "What is the best use of my developers' time?"--a question that both open-source and closed-source projects have to ask.
Shows what you know. Microsoft started Vista development WAY before OS X...
It's like naming a fake psychic detective agency "Psych."
As a Coloradan, I fully support renaming the state to Colbertado (the "t" is silent!). Only we'd have to move that hippie commune Boulder to Massachusetts. We can't have Boulderites fouling up Dr. Colbert's namesake with their pot smoke and liberal agendas.
If you give me one of these systems, I promise to review it on my blog.
Best Wishes,
Greg
Let me rephrase:
"To me, that sounded like a challenge."
I'm lazy, so I meant it sounded like a challenge... to someone else.
That sounds like a challenge to me!
I'd rather turn a PSP into a router. At least then it would do something useful...
I work for a small WISP and I've dealt with more than my fair share of WRT54G routers. We began with the WRT54Gv4 router and they were spectacular. They were solid, stable, and only had problems when they were struck by lightning (don't ask...). We distributed many dozens of these routers. To my knowledge, every one of them is still in use today.
Then Linksys released their version 5 of the router. We deployed dozens more of these. We've had two main problems with them: the WAN port loses its ability to communicate with a static IP address (it thinks it's been assigned 0.0.0.0--very helpful); or the WLAN connection permanently ceases to work properly (it still puts out radiation at 2.4GHz but it's just noise). Out of the dozens of these v5 routers we've installed for customers, approximately 25% have been returned to Linksys.
We no longer use Linksys routers for our customers. We sell D-Link WBR-1310 routers instead. It took me a while to get over my initial snobbish elitism (I'd used D-Link's products in the past and they were less than stellar) but now I'm a believer. The WBR-1310 is fantastic. We've put a couple dozen of these in the field and so far there hasn't been one issue among them. D-Link has really cleaned up their act. It also helps that these basic routers are dirt cheap. Even Office Depot sells them for $40-60 so you can imagine what wholesale prices are like...
At home, I'd had different problems with my WRT54Gv5. Basically, any time I tried to use BitTorrent, the router would play hide-and-seek with my network. It didn't matter whether it was LAN or WLAN, the connection would cut out every two minutes. Only a power cycle would bring it back. I've since replaced it with the aforementioned D-Link WBR-1310 and I'm pleased as punch. BitTorrent works faster than ever and I've not yet had to power cycle the thing after two months of punishing use.
So... Mixed reviews? Hardly. The WRT54Gv5 is the least reliable router I've ever used, and I've used a LOT in that price range. It's a bloody shame, too, because Linksys really had something going with the v4 of the same router. If they sold them again, we'd buy a hundred in an instant, with orders for hundreds more down the road. But somehow, I doubt Linksys will ever go back to the v4.
Here's hoping that this new DD-WRT release will ease the pain of so many unfortunate buyers of the WRT54Gv5.