Feeding a troll, I know. However, NTFS is just as bad as ext2 when recovering from crashes. And it's not like Linux has a lack of journaling filesystems around (ReiserFS, XFS and ext3 come to mind), which can recover from crashes without as much as a hickup.
Last time I installed (a year or so ago) php still didn't work with apache 2, so I couldn't use it.
It worked wonderfully then, and does so now. Just don't use the threaded MPM, as PHP isn't thread-safe (or some of its modules aren't, if you want to be nitpicky).
Once Windows boots and the system driver loads, the fans slow down to a temperature-controlled speed. I pity the fool running Novell on these things though, because there *is* no driver and the fans roar constantly.... I guess if you're insane enough to run Novell, the constant barrage of decibels in the pain range is not going to bother you either.
Stupid design. IBM's xServers also have stacked sets of small high speed fans. However, these are controlled by the server's internal hardware. The big difference is that the fans slow down immediatly after POST, and work efficiently without drivers. You can access it, and OS drivers do so both in Windows and Linux. However, if the OS doesn't touch that hardware, it'll just work anyway.
Should each GTK+ application come with its own statically linked copy of GTK to be carried in memory separately for each app?
Why should they?
The natural response, of course, is to say: "no, that's an unnecessary reduction ad absurdum. We can just declare (by some means similar to the LSB) that all applications must use GTK+ 2.4."
Why not install GTK+ 2.4 AND GTK+ 2.6?
But then what do you do six months down the road when you start to see applications written for GTK+ 2.6? Now, either you have to convince every application developer to stick with 2.4 (unlikely); distribute those applications statically linked (ugly, see above); or explain to your users why they have to upgrade to the next version of your distribution to run what they want to run.
Install both gtk+ 2.4 and gtk+ 2.6. Have applications load libgtk+2.4.so or libgtk+2.6.so, not libgtk+.so. Most already do so.
1) Paying a bunch of private-sector PHD guys (i.e. expensive salary) to spend years and years on an item that most likely won't pan out
How would you value the work put out in the most successfull OSS projects? Aren't we talking the same dimension? Last time I checked, OSS proved a viable business model.
2) We've gotten the easy drugs out of the way, to do the stuff on the next level we are skirting the safety line and testing for a decade along with legal ramifications.
This is an artificial barrier to entry, erected by the industry itself.
My problem with such an answer is that it doesn't agree at all with history. There is no record of any civilization, ever, sustaining such motivations.
Go re-read your history books. Open up the chapter on the Renaissance, and focus clearly on the concept of patrons.
Easy example: suppose the existence of a molecular replicator on a small level, i.e. a device capable of "reading" medicine and generating perfect (i.e. digitally perfect) duplicates of the original at a significantly reduced cost. Now, there is a disease (it doesn't matter of what type). A developer (a person or a corporation, it doesn't matter) spends a few billion dollars to develop a medicine that perfectly cures the disease. The process is highly complex, and the procedure for making it is patented (like currently). However, the existence of the replicator means that anyone who obtains a microscopic sample can easily and cheaply replicate countless amounts. How is the developer to recoup his costs? He cannot sell the medicine for any more than it would cost to replicate it (assume that one person bought it at full price, but then sold a ton of it at cost).
Easy one out. You are describing an environment where the only cost for innovation is brain power. Open Source Software clearly demonstrated that innovation where the only cost is brainpower does not require patent incentives. It's a bit hard to understand if you get stuck in the current business models, but it's perfectly obvious if you look around...
By the way, music is such a scenario. It is, much like books, a market where the real added value is in the editorial business: selectively picking the best authors from a myriad, so that the general public doesn't have to. However, big labels can't morph into something like Blue Note Records without significant slimming down.
Mutations are rarely beneficial, and have not in recorded experiments created meaningfuly new information--at least not that I've seen.
Go read up on genetic algorithms. They not only evolve, are not only a proven theory, they are used in the field in inumerous fuzzy logic applications.
My favorite question along these lines is, 'what preceded the Big Bang'.
Simple enough, even if not satisfying: We'll never know. Nothing crossed the frontier of the Big Bang, not even information. Go read A Brief History of Time for a better explanation.
We can hypothesize that Big Bangs are cyclic (with either Big Crunches or random matter/anti-matter energy/anti-energy dissolution in between). If this holds true, before the Big Bang was another universe, and after the next Big Bang there is another one.
I specially like this theory, because the number of iterations is infinite. The probability of the exact initial conditions for the current universe are non-zero (or we wouldn't be here), and thus we shall be here again sometime in the future (scientific-based reincarnation).
Your view is also extremely popular, and it is almost impossible ot convince you of the contrary without some effort on your part. You have to question the need to close the source in order to make money off software. The big question is there. I usually try to reason by going to the extreme, so bear with me.
Imagine a scenario where open-source is mandatory. Purely fictitious (remember, this is reasoning by extremes). I can see two outcomes. Either:
a) IT collapses. No one gets paid to do IT, so no one pursues IT, and the world adapts to living without computers, or
b) There is enough business in building custom applications to support the IT 'industry'. The custom applications incrementally contribute software to the free software pool, increasing the breadth of applications of IT.
Scenario a) would be true if the large majority of software business was done by selling software. Conversely, scenario b) would be true if most money made in this business is done creating custom software.
Today, there are large business areas in both camps. While MS and Oracle make large lumps of money off selling s/w, IBM and Accenture are in the same league, living off custom software (aka consulting).
Where is the truth? While I don't know for sure that we wouldn't enter a serious crisis if all software were Free all of a sudden, I know for sure that OSS is here to stay, and is slowly eating away the advantage field of commercial businesses. Linux or Postgresql came a long way in the last ten years, and it is expectable they'll cover as much ground in the next ten. If I needed to bet, I'd bet in consulting companies, which adapt pretty well to OSS. And I would bet OSS as a major driving force in the IT industry, one that changes how business is done.
Corollary: No, IBM was not being benevolent when putting its weight behind Linux. It was a brilliant business move.
And that the width on the chat tabs can be limited so that onefriend "Jane Doe - I'm feeling really bitchy today!!!!!" doesn't push all the other tabs out of view...
If you set the Alias for that contact, that's what will appear on the tab. You can still get the full MSN text by hovering with the mouse over the contact in the list.
It would be hard to hide from any Linux Live CD's. You boot a read only file system (not modifiable by a bug), load a trusted application (FDISK or Disk Druid) and check the partition table. Not much can hide from a scan from a non-compromised OS.
It need not show up in the partition table. Just use up a part of the disk and somehow guarantee it won't be written over:
Let those cylinders remain unallocated by any partition (like Thinkpad's do with system restore files), or
Mark the sectors bad (like some DOS-era viruses did), or
Mark the sectors used in the windows filesystem (again, some DOS-era viruses did that)
There are a lot of people who defend Moore's law is a particular case of a more general law, stating that science evolves on an exponential scale. So, we might end up calling this exponential growth Moore's law, even if Moore only observed that effect in transistor density. I'd not call it wrong.
This is only true for lossless codecs. This won't work for any lossy codec. You can't go from MP3->WAV->MP3 for example without quality loss. Same with WMA, AAC, and pretty much all the popular lossy codecs. For more information, see this discussion on HydrogenAudio.
It's certainly true for wav->mp3->wav->mp3 if the first encoder loses the same frequencies as the third encoder in the pipeline -- and assuming there are no losses in the mp3->wav conversion.
Please remove vinyl from your list. A well taken care of record on a good turntable with a good phono pre-amp can often sound superior to the CD of the same music.
... for the selected few that can hear sound above 22KHz. There's a simple test: can you hear dog whistles? If you can't drop the vinyl is superior crap. The CD contains the same information, for all efects, and today's DACs behave way better than turntable needle amplifier circuits ever did. Downstream, it's the same equipement.
If you keep transcoding your file over and over again you are not losing imperceptible data.
You might not lose any data at all. It depends on the transcoding. Say you grab a perfect, audible-band-complete FLAC and keep only mid-tones [50Hz-15KHz], then enconde it in the frequency domain. Let's call this new format CRAP.
CRAP saves space by throwing away data, losing quality. However, you only lose quality the first time around. You can transcode between FLAC and CRAP as many times as you want, and there is no subsequent data or quality loss.
The problem arises when different formats/encoders throw away different parts of the spectrum. Then, the end result is a file that contains only the frequencies nobody threw away along the transcoding pipeline.
In the end, I mean to say a transcoder in and by itself won't cause loss of data. You can convert to wav and back to a compressed format with no data loss, if you know what you're doing.
They were launched practically at the same time. iTunes existed prior to the iPod, and acquired iPod support within 1 week of the iPod launch announcement. Wikipedia links: here and here.
I suppose we can disagree on what a "big" company is, but there were plenty of MP3 players on the market when the iPod came out. Creative, you know the guys that made all those SoundBlaster cards that were the de facto standard for computer sound seemed to be in a much better position than Apple was to take over that market.
Don't downplay iTunes. No company presented the solution Apple did, with an easy way to buy songs for your portable music player. And, naturally, there's the design and leverage of the Apple brand to polish the product package. The iPod was a management insight and it sure was an Apple sidestep.
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Feeding a troll, I know. However, NTFS is just as bad as ext2 when recovering from crashes. And it's not like Linux has a lack of journaling filesystems around (ReiserFS, XFS and ext3 come to mind), which can recover from crashes without as much as a hickup.
For a system like this, I'd use a parallel filesystem. If on a budget, I'd go with GFS.
Easy one out. You are describing an environment where the only cost for innovation is brain power. Open Source Software clearly demonstrated that innovation where the only cost is brainpower does not require patent incentives. It's a bit hard to understand if you get stuck in the current business models, but it's perfectly obvious if you look around...
By the way, music is such a scenario. It is, much like books, a market where the real added value is in the editorial business: selectively picking the best authors from a myriad, so that the general public doesn't have to. However, big labels can't morph into something like Blue Note Records without significant slimming down.
bittorrent and rsync, off the top of my head. Less than 20yrs, innovative. Your turn, now...
Imagine a scenario where open-source is mandatory. Purely fictitious (remember, this is reasoning by extremes). I can see two outcomes. Either:
a) IT collapses. No one gets paid to do IT, so no one pursues IT, and the world adapts to living without computers, or
b) There is enough business in building custom applications to support the IT 'industry'. The custom applications incrementally contribute software to the free software pool, increasing the breadth of applications of IT.
Scenario a) would be true if the large majority of software business was done by selling software. Conversely, scenario b) would be true if most money made in this business is done creating custom software.
Today, there are large business areas in both camps. While MS and Oracle make large lumps of money off selling s/w, IBM and Accenture are in the same league, living off custom software (aka consulting).
Where is the truth? While I don't know for sure that we wouldn't enter a serious crisis if all software were Free all of a sudden, I know for sure that OSS is here to stay, and is slowly eating away the advantage field of commercial businesses. Linux or Postgresql came a long way in the last ten years, and it is expectable they'll cover as much ground in the next ten. If I needed to bet, I'd bet in consulting companies, which adapt pretty well to OSS. And I would bet OSS as a major driving force in the IT industry, one that changes how business is done.
Corollary: No, IBM was not being benevolent when putting its weight behind Linux. It was a brilliant business move.
Nope. during version 7 there were unofficial builds of pgsql for windows that ran without need for Cygwin.
1.5kw is not a lot anyway. Your main point stands.
There are a lot of people who defend Moore's law is a particular case of a more general law, stating that science evolves on an exponential scale. So, we might end up calling this exponential growth Moore's law, even if Moore only observed that effect in transistor density. I'd not call it wrong.
The question is extremely vague. If web access is the only requisite, I'd go with Horde.
CRAP saves space by throwing away data, losing quality. However, you only lose quality the first time around. You can transcode between FLAC and CRAP as many times as you want, and there is no subsequent data or quality loss.
The problem arises when different formats/encoders throw away different parts of the spectrum. Then, the end result is a file that contains only the frequencies nobody threw away along the transcoding pipeline.
In the end, I mean to say a transcoder in and by itself won't cause loss of data. You can convert to wav and back to a compressed format with no data loss, if you know what you're doing.
Simple enough...
They were launched practically at the same time. iTunes existed prior to the iPod, and acquired iPod support within 1 week of the iPod launch announcement. Wikipedia links: here and here.