I've watched the spec for "X% of part must survive X miles, X years" increase over time. Last one I worked on was 99.99966% of part must survive 15 years, 150000 miles. That's 4 parts out of 1 million failing.
They're being engineered to run longer, at least at the individual module level.
No, I bring it in for oil changes every 5k miles (manufacturer recommends 7500), and I replace fluids and all that, and I'm sure I'll have to replace brake pads and tires. But I don't need tuneups every 20k miles, because that functionality is taken care of by ECM. I don't need new plugs as often. Etc. Etc.
The odds are pretty good that my maintenance costs are lower than that vintage car's were when it was new. And its costs down the road will remain lower.
My time is worth money. The cost of parts is not the issue; me buying the headlights or my mechanic buying the headlights, doesn't matter to me, they'll cost the same. On the other hand, he charges less to do the repair than the monetary equivalent of my time.
Could I fix my car? Sure, if I wanted to spend the time. But I don't. I'd rather write music, or read, or waste my life on Slashdot.
Of course, if I keep my new car for twenty years, I'll have spent less on it than on your car you bought in 1980 and kept until 2000, because newer cars are designed to run with less and less frequent scheduled maintenance.
You cook from vegetables you grew and animals you raised, slaughtered, and dressed yourself, wearing clothes you made yourself? The point is that sooner or later you make a choice between investing time or money, and that for *most* people that choice w/r/t cars is shifting further and further towards money.
Really, I only have so much in the way of time, and cars don't make the list of 'things I have time to mess with'. On the other hand, I can do a lot of reading about how modern cars work. And do, which is good, considering I work in automotive electronics.
I mean, I had an 85 Civic that ran 250,000 no problem, why shouldn't a new one, better engineered, run longer?
I say buy a car and drive it into the ground. Old cars aren't necessarily better, and are often worse.
I have a new Mazda now, because I needed something that would reliably do the 40 miles a day I needed to drive. 20 years from now, I hope to have the same exact Mazda.
But I have no desire to work on my own car. Why should I? I work on automotive electronics for a living; I have other hobbies. That's why I make money - to pay for necessities, and after necessities, to pay other people to do things I need to do that I don't want to do.
Considering half of my degree was spent working with coding and communications, yes, I have.
Here's the problem with what you just suggested:
If you throw away the bits you don't need, and then add checksums and redundancy, you've eliminated most of the point of the initial compression. Archival work is always done with uncompressed media; redundancy is then added. Considering that a good archive is then going to proceed to add even more redundancy in storage (you don't store one copy of the data when you can store two, you don't store all your data in one place, etc, etc, etc) the minimal savings FLAC might add is more than outweighed by the time spent compressing it in the first place.
MP3 *is* lossy, by definition. MP3 can transparently compress, but that's beside the point, and for archival, you play the 'better safe than sorry game'. If you want to think of it as 'Someday in the future super-mechanized humans will be able to hear 40kHz tones', that's cool, but in the meantime, archivists will save each and every piece of data they can. It's like saying to an archivist "Just type in the text from that book, you won't need the actual layout of text on the page." You'll get laughed at.
FLAC is arguable. It's a trade between disk requirements and computation requirements. But for archival, you don't throw away any data you don't absolutely have to.
You wanna sell it to me cheap, if you hate it so much?
(Note: if you don't have at least 512MB of memory in there, it makes a big difference on OS X. Apple really shouldn't sell anything with less than 512; hell, I have 512 on my G3 powerbook. It makes a noticeable difference.)
A 1.4 GHz G4 doesn't compare to a 3.2 GHz P4, this is true. Hence the statement "MHz for MHz".
But a 1.4GHz G4 is noticeably faster (to me, at least) than the 1.5GHz P4 my brother's computer has (I use his as an example because I don't actually own any Intel chips; AMD and IBM chips in the computers I own).
Since the original poster was asking for a comparison, I gave him one.
ATI 3D card: Windows found it, installed it, and came up at 8x6. It then detected that I had 2 monitors attached, activated both of them, probed, and gave me an appropriate list of res/mods. 3D drivers were installed with a download and hitting "Next" a few times.
USB printer/scanner: Installed the HP drivers from the CD they provided. Stick CD in drive. Hit next a few times. Plug in device when prompted. Hit next a few more times. Done.
Parallel printer: Drivers included.
Network card: Autoconfigured. DHCPed. SP2 will fix the open by default problem, but I run a hardware firewall for this very reason.
Nvidia sound: Autoconfigured.
Ipod: Autodetected as Firewire storage, no driver install necessary.
I'd love to win a Grammy for my music, but I'm not expecting to, so I sure as hell wouldn't write and publish an acceptance speech.
Maybe arrogant wasn't quite the right word, but the man, after NOT winning an award, went right ahead and published the "This is what I would have said if I'd won that award".
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a parts supplier.
I've watched the spec for "X% of part must survive X miles, X years" increase over time. Last one I worked on was 99.99966% of part must survive 15 years, 150000 miles. That's 4 parts out of 1 million failing.
They're being engineered to run longer, at least at the individual module level.
No, I bring it in for oil changes every 5k miles (manufacturer recommends 7500), and I replace fluids and all that, and I'm sure I'll have to replace brake pads and tires. But I don't need tuneups every 20k miles, because that functionality is taken care of by ECM. I don't need new plugs as often. Etc. Etc.
The odds are pretty good that my maintenance costs are lower than that vintage car's were when it was new. And its costs down the road will remain lower.
I have a mechanic I trust not to lie to me.
My time is worth money. The cost of parts is not the issue; me buying the headlights or my mechanic buying the headlights, doesn't matter to me, they'll cost the same. On the other hand, he charges less to do the repair than the monetary equivalent of my time.
Could I fix my car? Sure, if I wanted to spend the time. But I don't. I'd rather write music, or read, or waste my life on Slashdot.
Of course, if I keep my new car for twenty years, I'll have spent less on it than on your car you bought in 1980 and kept until 2000, because newer cars are designed to run with less and less frequent scheduled maintenance.
You cook from vegetables you grew and animals you raised, slaughtered, and dressed yourself, wearing clothes you made yourself? The point is that sooner or later you make a choice between investing time or money, and that for *most* people that choice w/r/t cars is shifting further and further towards money.
Really, I only have so much in the way of time, and cars don't make the list of 'things I have time to mess with'. On the other hand, I can do a lot of reading about how modern cars work. And do, which is good, considering I work in automotive electronics.
I'm with you on a lot of that, but radio/cruise controls on your steering wheel are kinda nice.
Sit in an 89 Civic. Now sit in a 04 Civic. Now park them side by side and look.
And remember, the 04 Civic gets 36/44mpg, and the 89 Civic gets 34/38. In a much bigger vehicle.
Or, they might have set their prices to pay off their specified rate-of-return after X years on the line, where X is in the range of 6-10.
I don't check any boxes, ever. Deal with it.
I read the summaries on the first page.
Each and every one appeared to be a comment. People make mistakes.
Now, my one link, to the text of the law itself, says:
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law by 1
President Clinton on October 28, 1998."
That's pretty funny. :)
But the rest of the page has the correct spelling. Including the filename.
And it will likely lack some component (can't remember the name of it) that's required to get OS X running. So why would I want it, anyway?
G5 with no Aqua? Hell with that.
Hey, idjit.
I linked to the ACTUAL LAW.
It is DMCA. Not DCMA. Digital. Millenium. Copyright. Act.
A bunch of dumb motherfuckers on Google does not a correct answer make.
Is it really?
What if my new Civic runs 1 million miles?
I mean, I had an 85 Civic that ran 250,000 no problem, why shouldn't a new one, better engineered, run longer?
I say buy a car and drive it into the ground. Old cars aren't necessarily better, and are often worse.
I have a new Mazda now, because I needed something that would reliably do the 40 miles a day I needed to drive. 20 years from now, I hope to have the same exact Mazda.
But I have no desire to work on my own car. Why should I? I work on automotive electronics for a living; I have other hobbies. That's why I make money - to pay for necessities, and after necessities, to pay other people to do things I need to do that I don't want to do.
Not until you spell it right.
DMCA.
Considering half of my degree was spent working with coding and communications, yes, I have.
Here's the problem with what you just suggested:
If you throw away the bits you don't need, and then add checksums and redundancy, you've eliminated most of the point of the initial compression. Archival work is always done with uncompressed media; redundancy is then added. Considering that a good archive is then going to proceed to add even more redundancy in storage (you don't store one copy of the data when you can store two, you don't store all your data in one place, etc, etc, etc) the minimal savings FLAC might add is more than outweighed by the time spent compressing it in the first place.
MP3 *is* lossy, by definition. MP3 can transparently compress, but that's beside the point, and for archival, you play the 'better safe than sorry game'. If you want to think of it as 'Someday in the future super-mechanized humans will be able to hear 40kHz tones', that's cool, but in the meantime, archivists will save each and every piece of data they can. It's like saying to an archivist "Just type in the text from that book, you won't need the actual layout of text on the page." You'll get laughed at.
FLAC is arguable. It's a trade between disk requirements and computation requirements. But for archival, you don't throw away any data you don't absolutely have to.
The last automotive module I worked on, the design spec called for roughly the following:
(6sigma) of units may fail in first 15 years in operation.
(6sigma) of units may fail in 150,000 miles.
6sigma equates to roughly 3.4 failures per million.
Cars are being designed to a *much* higher spec than they used to be.
No, the day I got to call Cory Doctorow arrogant was today. Did you miss it?
How about ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE who got nominated and didn't win? Any of them publishing their acceptance speeches?
Arrogant, arrogant, arrogant. Damn. Did I do it again?
So...
You wanna sell it to me cheap, if you hate it so much?
(Note: if you don't have at least 512MB of memory in there, it makes a big difference on OS X. Apple really shouldn't sell anything with less than 512; hell, I have 512 on my G3 powerbook. It makes a noticeable difference.)
A 1.4 GHz G4 doesn't compare to a 3.2 GHz P4, this is true. Hence the statement "MHz for MHz".
But a 1.4GHz G4 is noticeably faster (to me, at least) than the 1.5GHz P4 my brother's computer has (I use his as an example because I don't actually own any Intel chips; AMD and IBM chips in the computers I own).
Since the original poster was asking for a comparison, I gave him one.
Or my install:
Modem: I don't have one. Sorry.
ATI 3D card: Windows found it, installed it, and came up at 8x6. It then detected that I had 2 monitors attached, activated both of them, probed, and gave me an appropriate list of res/mods. 3D drivers were installed with a download and hitting "Next" a few times.
USB printer/scanner: Installed the HP drivers from the CD they provided. Stick CD in drive. Hit next a few times. Plug in device when prompted. Hit next a few more times. Done.
Parallel printer: Drivers included.
Network card: Autoconfigured. DHCPed. SP2 will fix the open by default problem, but I run a hardware firewall for this very reason.
Nvidia sound: Autoconfigured.
Ipod: Autodetected as Firewire storage, no driver install necessary.
External FW harddrive: As above.
Midiman USB-MIDI interface: Simple driver install.
I'm not saying Linux hasn't gotten better, but its not better than Windows. Maybe on par with, but only for experienced users.
I sure as hell wouldn't publish it after the fact, when I'd *lost*.
I call that arrogant, not the writing it. Writing it is sensible. Publishing it after he lost is arrogant.
MHz for MHz, G4 is faster than P4.
How much faster, I will not say, but a 1.4GHz G4 is very different from a 1.4GHz P4. Or P3.
I'd love to win a Grammy for my music, but I'm not expecting to, so I sure as hell wouldn't write and publish an acceptance speech.
Maybe arrogant wasn't quite the right word, but the man, after NOT winning an award, went right ahead and published the "This is what I would have said if I'd won that award".
No, I'd say arrogant is the right word.