If you really need to run software designed for a diff arch, get that machine and fire up VNC.
The only way I could see someone running PPC on X86 or vice-versa, would be to have a self-contained PCI board with the offending processor and an assortment of host-emulating devices.. including a framebuffer and bus bridge. Feasible, and probably worth big bucks if done correctly, but a major pain in the ass no less. You'd also probably need some sort of dedicated storage and memory for the slave processor, since your "main" system is aware of the slave, but not the opposite.
As an avid audio enthusiast (read: dogwhistle ears!), I'm led to wonder why people are still using sub-optimal encoder settings. I encode everything with LAME --preset extreme , which usually rounds out to 200kbit average VBR, and sounds good enough that I don't ever complain.
I see monkeys on the filesharing nets still doing CBR 128, which makes me want to cry. Sure, 128 was good enough when all we had was a Pentium-90 and 32mb of ram, just barely able to decode stereo in real-time, through a noisy SB16 and 6-watt Labtec desk speakers. That was ten years ago. Now that I can burn a CD-RW with the latest objects of my aural affection, and cruise around with a kilowatt of in-dash mp3 goodness, the bar has been raised significantly.
Yet it is easier to type "lame --preset extreme %1" than "lame -v -b 96 -B 192 -V 2 -h %1"
*phew*
So tiny, what is there to see ?
on
iMac G5 Porn Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I just "accidentally" visited the apple wwwstore a few days ago and needed all of my restraint to not call Visa and extend my credit a couple G's:) Those tiny G5's are damn sexy, and if they didn't cost so much I think I'd crack one open as well. I have a hunch they're using notebook technology in there. Heck, my P4 notebook is bigger than this G5 =)
A LOOOONG time ago, we used to hire people based on skills and experience.
A LOOOONG time ago, we didn't hire 14 year olds at McDonalds, and we didn't need to triple check our orders with the "manager" every frickin' time.
A LOOOONG time ago, companies were glad to offer reasonable compensation for a job well done.
I say let them have their funky hiring scheme. I think it's going to bite them in the ass in no time when the lawsuits start flying over crappy service. Cut-rate medical service ? Umm NO! It's already retarded enough as it is.
Spend less time inventing new ways to postalize the workforce, and more time updating these ancient medical practices. I treat my clanky little hatchback better than these people treat living people.
if you print stuff on other people's computers, and I will assume these people are idiots with their broken/default configs, then those idiots may or may not understand the warning in the way you intended it.
Some people will say "Oh gee my computer is so smart! Yay Compaq!", others will say "Holy bletcherous fsck midgets! I've been HACKED! Call the COPS! Call the PRESIDENT! Call Billco to fix my stupid machine!" And after little old Billco listens to his relatives/non-friends shriek for several hours he will want to print his fist up your ass.
Make that 1000 copies.
So please stop thinking like the world is populated with only geeks.. we are a minority, fools run the world, remember ?
- Hey Bubba, it's raining. Looks like a thunderstorm.
- Hey Cletus, maybe we should go hide under the truck.
If Bubba and Cletus know that lightning usually strikes during a big rain storm, then these campus monkeys should know better. If they insist on having a multimillion dollar detection device, I'm willing to help their cause by living in a luxurious condo 24/7 with a 100mbit link to the outside world and I will gladly phone them whenever I hear a thunderstorm. You can wire the millions to my paypal account.
Denon knows how to follow the other whoring asian manufacturers that cut costs at the expense of quality.
You can either try to sell a quality product at 3x the price of your competitor's brittle product, or you can think about what how you'll put food on your table in a year and sell cheap products at a low price point that consumers can swallow.
High-end products are no longer a business of their own, they're an add on. If you are a Panasonic or a JVC and have a good hold on the consumer-grade electronics market, then you can afford to run a high-profit elite audiophile division that might only net 1/20th in sales compared to your low-end lines, but brings in more profit and more importantly LOYAL CUSTOMERS. You sell someone a Marantz cd player, they will never go back to Best Buy's overhyped Sony time-bombs; but Marantz will never be as large as Sony's audio division, because they don't sell cheap crap that blows up after 6 months of casual use; they'd rather crank out quality products and hope that someday a loyal customer will spotaneously offer a beer or blowjob.
Mine is still hooked up to a VGA monitor, and Ikaruga gets a spin almost every day, but I still suck at it.
Had the console been properly marketed in North America, Sega would probably still be cranking out consoles today. It's the asian piracy market that killed it outright. Is it Taiwan that doesn't honor internation copyright ? Anyways, out there you can just buy pirated copies from the corner store or video rental place. Piracy is a BUSINESS over there, with employees and taxes. Over here people 'think' of getting a modchip, over there you buy the system premodded right from the electronics dealer.
I used to do PSX mod installations locally, and it took me forever to get rid of my initial order of 15 chips. If people really wanted to pirate games here, they'd have no problem blowing 50-80$ on a mod and 'recouping' their investment after only 2 games.
On the other hand, lots and lots of people have emulated satellite systems, VCR timebase-correctors to defeat VHS copy protection, CD burners and camera phones. We pirate a lot of shit!
Mostly because BSD has a hard time keeping up with new hardware, perhaps because it is such a frickin' pain to upgrade, but there lies its strength. It is mostly frozen, so we rarely get nasty exploit surprises.
Let's say I am having a party in my own back yard, everyone drunk and drugged to delight, and someone decides to strip naked and start an orgy. It is a private party and as long as the neighbors don't complain, then it is perfectly legal for us to be having an orgy in the back yard (tall wooded fences are a good idea).
During said orgy, if I were to put on a movie of a certain genre, for party entertainment purposes, it would be a private reproduction.
If we run off to an empty field and do the same, it is still a private party. We would be trespassing on someone else's field, but that's our only crime.
The movie license is ambiguous so that it can be wielded either way in court, influenced by the lawyers and the judge him/herself. The court decides how many people it takes before it no longer counts as a private party. Ten, twenty, or maybe the judge is a pale-skinned cave dweller and has only 2 friends, one being a rat, so he considers any more than 1.5 guests to be a sickeningly large public gathering that requires an alcohol permit. It's all in the interpretation.
If the license had been worded to say "You can watch this with up to 7 other people" then we'd be on to something, and to 'be legit', if you had 40 people watching then you'd have to pay 5 rentals or whatever. Kind of like the old Warcraft games where you could have a lan-party with just 1 or 2 cd's because each server could host 2 clients for 'free'.
Here's a new spin: what about student film groups ? How many high school/college have a bunch of film geeks who gather at noon or after hours to take in various cult art films and whatnot ? Is that private or public reproduction ? Is it okay just because they're teenagers, or should we go RIAA on them and sue everything that moves ?
Food for thought. Too bad the thinkers aren't in power.
You need to find a better record store. Oh you mean a CD store, that's different!
I find it humorous when they offer between 5 and 12 albums for preview on those little headphone jukebokes. Humorous because they will consistently pick out 11 rap or gaymetal albums, and one stunning non-pop album. There are litterally tens of thousands of albums in-store, but you only get to hear a dozen of the latest, most overhyped teen pukes.
Cross the street to the _record_ store, and shrinkwrap is nowhere to be seen. There are several SL1200 decks with decent headphones, and you can grab any record and have an earfull, for as long as you like.
Of course, you'll pay on average 20$ for a vinyl album, 5-10$ for a single, but by the time you've got your wallet out, you know you're going to love this music so it is worth every penny.
No, seriously I'm in the same boat =) But in my case it's truckloads of music loops and high resolution instrument samples. Right now I have them on several hundred CD's and recently a few DVD's, but when I'm in the middle of composing a melody and I'm looking for the perfect sound, it is just an inspiration ruiner to swap through dozens of discs until I find the right beat.
I know I just need hard drives, but the problems are connectivity and bandwidth. I could buy a fancy IDE raid card and hook up four 200gb drives, but the PCI bandwidth will be maxxed out and my sound will suffer. If I use the onboard IDE and SATA connectors it's not so bad, because they run on Hypertransport and my PCI bandwidth is unharmed, but then where do I plug my CD and DVD drives ? A musician that can't load nor burn CD's is in a tight spot!
Someone suggested fibre-channel, which was sounding great until I found out how much those little bastards cost. I think I'd rather build a cluster of Gig-E fileservers and network-RAID them together or something:)
I guess I need to wait for PCI-Express to go mainstream, then maybe someone will release a PCI-X16 raid board that can handle the 400-500mb/sec combined throughput of a low-end raid array.
No matter which path I choose for storage _hardware_, I still need software to manage that huge file pile. ISO's of every disc, and a CD emulator with a front-end adapted to this mass storage. It's not trivial!
There used to be a site called Fravia (now reborn into something more legal). It had lots of reverse engineering-info, but the most interesting part, and the only thing that has survived to this day, is a series of articles on "How to find what you're looking for", well-digested information and theory on efficient search methods.
I find that most web users have an intrinsic fear of searching, or fail to use the search engine properly. They don't know which keywords to use, or how to wield the quotes and plus/minus operands to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Then they stare at me with a blown mind when I offer a concise query string that pulls the needle from the haystack "How did you do that ?"
The guy who used to run Fravia now runs http://www.searchlores.org/
HTTP is fine, a stream-transfer protocol can only do so much.
HTML however feels rather clunky now with all these bloated half-supported standards tacked onto it. We still don't have consistent rendering across the board, and it's still a pain in the posterior to publish anything. CSS, that wretched hammer of aborted salvation, is yet another limited hack.
We used to have HTML glitches and workarounds, now we have CSS glitches and workarounds; design compromises in a system that was supposed to break the boundaries of visual layout. Well here we are 5 years later and the graphics artists are still using Flash instead of CSS... I even collapsed and learned the dark art of PHP-generated Flash to do some things that just weren't worth the trouble in CSS. Content is king, but we have 256mb video cards and we want to use them!
Ok I just woke up and my brain hasn't warmed up yet. I thought you could transfer just any music to the iPod (no, I don't have one yet), well, any music that isn't encumbered by non-Apple DRM. I'd think the best way for Real to enable their music purchases on an iPod would be to turn the file into a naked MP3/AAC but that's probably illegal for Real to do.
So now what is this Harmony software and how does it work ? Does it fake an Apple digital signature, or does it even upload directly to the iPod bypassing any Apple security features ? Both of these scenarios would mean that Apple's IP is at stake, just like DeCSS was born out of Xing's crappy DVD software. Someone could reverse eng Harmony and render Apple's DRM obsolete, so it is quite natural that they will defend themselves.
If the PHB is tech illiterate yet still insists on making blind purchase decisions, let the punk shoot himself in the foot. You can always find a better boss elsewhere, or save up and launch your own business with _your_ skills and computer savoir-faire. Just be loyal to your paycheck until opportunity comes knocking.
I've seen whole government ministries dance around Linux. When the time came to convert, they chickened out and bought million$ in HP hardware and Tru64 Unix, totally defeating the point of FREE/OSS. And this was a department that was under direct pressure from the mothership to watch their deficit and strive toward profitability (which would have been easy if we didn't have a legion of tired old IT farts).
If your boss can't tell the difference between a 2 million$ investment + tech training, and a 0$ investment + tech training, then you should just smile and cash your fat check because there is no salvation for such math flunkies.
By having to write documentation, coders might actually realize how frickin' contorted their config files are and try to clean it up rather than have to document hundreds of dark options with "zarp_blorg_snootle = uHb ; This is a hack"
I know it's not 'fun' or 'easy', I code in random bursts too, and my first versions are always "unreadable but it works great!", but if I use the app at all then I do a complete rewrite for the v2.0, since the v1.0 was more of a design-as-you-code exercise, and the resulting code is always cleaner, faster, and much more easily extendable/reusable.
Heck, I did that last week by accident. I had written a fairly long perl script to automate the creation of a full-blown webhosting account (vhost, email, ftp, templates etc). Wouldn't you know it, in my sleepy daze I deleted the script just as I had finalized it. Well I rewrote it in 1/10th the time now that I knew exactly what I wanted it to do, and it was shorter (more modular functions) and less bug-prone.. I even threw in a few command-line options so I don't have to edit the config file all the time.
It's daunting, but some big projects could really use a fresh start, with proper documentation maintained from the beginning.
I, for one, would like a filesystem with unrestricted metadata and easy access to it. Say you have a folder full of camera pictures, store a thumbnail, comment, date etc but in the filesystem where it doesn't get in the way of stupid little utils that barf on comment headers, something like Mac's resource forks. In essence each file would have a matching metadata chunk, handled by the kernel.
This patent argument is ridiculous because Creative never wrote a single game in the history of the company. They make sound cards and drivers, and they sell rebadged graphics cards designed and manufactured by OTHER COMPANIES (NVidia, Permedia, S3).
My extreme distaste is for rushed-out-the-door drivers. Rarely does a day go by without my video card crashing at the desktop. Sure, they rock at running games and making lots of noise and heat, but when it comes to basic computing they fall short, very short.
This is why I love Matrox, because normal people spend more time working than playing. That said, I hate the Parhelia 512 because it's overpriced and underperformant. Give me a triple-head card that can run Doom3 at 1920x1440 and I will gladly plunk down 500$, just like I did several long years ago with a Geforce2 GTS when it was just a newborn, while everyone else was still giddy over their Voodoo 2 and TNT2. That same Geforce2 just recently fried after 4 long years of duty, and it was still fine for many games.
500$ / 4 years is 125$ per year, or 10$ per month for mind-blowing speed. Buy a budget card that you'll upgrade every year and you'll spend just as much in the end, except you'll always be in the bottom performance tier. That's how you measure the value of something.
Communication on my car is best done with a bumper sticker.
"Bite my shiny metal ass"
I'm one of those road warriors who holds an extreme grudge against Honda teens, Lexus dinks, and every other idiot who fails to realize that:
a. you're just a sack of meat, $$$ or not b. other people are sacks of meat too c. cars are tougher than sacks of meat
When someone consciously pulls a stupid stunt near me, I take it as a threat to my health and well-being, and react accordingly. Getting the finger is getting off easy, in the street or a bar it would have been a severe beating.
It seems domain name disputes are a constant hassle these days, yet when you go to register your company name and trademark there is no dispute; it's either available or it's not. The problem with domain names is that they are global, there is no such thing as state or country jurisdiction when it comes to a domain name.
Just like me, I'm Billco and when I popped up on the internet many many years ago, Billco.com was already taken by some graphics gig, so I said "Oh well" and registered Fnarg. I'm sure plenty of people who 'know' me have looked up Billco.com because I'm that kind of guy, a tech keystone if you will, and it sucks but the other guy was there first.
I think similar domain names should be allowed. Froogles is not Froogle, just like Googles is not Google. If someone can't tell the difference then they shouldn't be surfing the net until they learn to read.
What if it were a street address ? But they use numbers so we don't have much affinity for those. How many times have you missed a street address by one, and pulled up in the neighbor's driveway then backed up ? Should your friend sue his neighbor because people are likely to miss the driveway ? Same thing on the net. If I make a typo and end up at the wrong site then it's MY TYPO and it's not 'wrong' site's fault, nor is it the lawyer's job to correct it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Hellooooooooo? Vapor!
If you really need to run software designed for a diff arch, get that machine and fire up VNC.
The only way I could see someone running PPC on X86 or vice-versa, would be to have a self-contained PCI board with the offending processor and an assortment of host-emulating devices.. including a framebuffer and bus bridge. Feasible, and probably worth big bucks if done correctly, but a major pain in the ass no less. You'd also probably need some sort of dedicated storage and memory for the slave processor, since your "main" system is aware of the slave, but not the opposite.
As an avid audio enthusiast (read: dogwhistle ears!), I'm led to wonder why people are still using sub-optimal encoder settings. I encode everything with LAME --preset extreme , which usually rounds out to 200kbit average VBR, and sounds good enough that I don't ever complain.
I see monkeys on the filesharing nets still doing CBR 128, which makes me want to cry. Sure, 128 was good enough when all we had was a Pentium-90 and 32mb of ram, just barely able to decode stereo in real-time, through a noisy SB16 and 6-watt Labtec desk speakers. That was ten years ago. Now that I can burn a CD-RW with the latest objects of my aural affection, and cruise around with a kilowatt of in-dash mp3 goodness, the bar has been raised significantly.
Yet it is easier to type "lame --preset extreme %1" than "lame -v -b 96 -B 192 -V 2 -h %1"
*phew*
I just "accidentally" visited the apple wwwstore a few days ago and needed all of my restraint to not call Visa and extend my credit a couple G's :) Those tiny G5's are damn sexy, and if they didn't cost so much I think I'd crack one open as well. I have a hunch they're using notebook technology in there. Heck, my P4 notebook is bigger than this G5 =)
Then we will all plug the sound card's digital-out to the digital-in and wait a few minutes. Walla!
Anything that is output from a computer can also be input. If it's on your screen or in your speakers then you can capture it.
Well then, may I suggest your city invest in an atmospheric umbrella ? =)
(what movie was that from ?)
A LOOOONG time ago, we used to hire people based on skills and experience.
A LOOOONG time ago, we didn't hire 14 year olds at McDonalds, and we didn't need to triple check our orders with the "manager" every frickin' time.
A LOOOONG time ago, companies were glad to offer reasonable compensation for a job well done.
I say let them have their funky hiring scheme. I think it's going to bite them in the ass in no time when the lawsuits start flying over crappy service. Cut-rate medical service ? Umm NO! It's already retarded enough as it is.
Spend less time inventing new ways to postalize the workforce, and more time updating these ancient medical practices. I treat my clanky little hatchback better than these people treat living people.
Simple answer:
if you print stuff on other people's computers, and I will assume these people are idiots with their broken/default configs, then those idiots may or may not understand the warning in the way you intended it.
Some people will say "Oh gee my computer is so smart! Yay Compaq!", others will say "Holy bletcherous fsck midgets! I've been HACKED! Call the COPS! Call the PRESIDENT! Call Billco to fix my stupid machine!" And after little old Billco listens to his relatives/non-friends shriek for several hours he will want to print his fist up your ass.
Make that 1000 copies.
So please stop thinking like the world is populated with only geeks.. we are a minority, fools run the world, remember ?
- Hey Bubba, it's raining. Looks like a thunderstorm.
- Hey Cletus, maybe we should go hide under the truck.
If Bubba and Cletus know that lightning usually strikes during a big rain storm, then these campus monkeys should know better. If they insist on having a multimillion dollar detection device, I'm willing to help their cause by living in a luxurious condo 24/7 with a 100mbit link to the outside world and I will gladly phone them whenever I hear a thunderstorm. You can wire the millions to my paypal account.
Denon knows how to follow the other whoring asian manufacturers that cut costs at the expense of quality.
You can either try to sell a quality product at 3x the price of your competitor's brittle product, or you can think about what how you'll put food on your table in a year and sell cheap products at a low price point that consumers can swallow.
High-end products are no longer a business of their own, they're an add on. If you are a Panasonic or a JVC and have a good hold on the consumer-grade electronics market, then you can afford to run a high-profit elite audiophile division that might only net 1/20th in sales compared to your low-end lines, but brings in more profit and more importantly LOYAL CUSTOMERS. You sell someone a Marantz cd player, they will never go back to Best Buy's overhyped Sony time-bombs; but Marantz will never be as large as Sony's audio division, because they don't sell cheap crap that blows up after 6 months of casual use; they'd rather crank out quality products and hope that someday a loyal customer will spotaneously offer a beer or blowjob.
The Dreamcast died because Sega killed it.
Mine is still hooked up to a VGA monitor, and Ikaruga gets a spin almost every day, but I still suck at it.
Had the console been properly marketed in North America, Sega would probably still be cranking out consoles today. It's the asian piracy market that killed it outright. Is it Taiwan that doesn't honor internation copyright ? Anyways, out there you can just buy pirated copies from the corner store or video rental place. Piracy is a BUSINESS over there, with employees and taxes. Over here people 'think' of getting a modchip, over there you buy the system premodded right from the electronics dealer.
I used to do PSX mod installations locally, and it took me forever to get rid of my initial order of 15 chips. If people really wanted to pirate games here, they'd have no problem blowing 50-80$ on a mod and 'recouping' their investment after only 2 games.
On the other hand, lots and lots of people have emulated satellite systems, VCR timebase-correctors to defeat VHS copy protection, CD burners and camera phones. We pirate a lot of shit!
So funny, yet so true.
Mostly because BSD has a hard time keeping up with new hardware, perhaps because it is such a frickin' pain to upgrade, but there lies its strength. It is mostly frozen, so we rarely get nasty exploit surprises.
But BSD still sucks =)
Let's go on another wonderful broken /. analogy.
Let's say I am having a party in my own back yard, everyone drunk and drugged to delight, and someone decides to strip naked and start an orgy. It is a private party and as long as the neighbors don't complain, then it is perfectly legal for us to be having an orgy in the back yard (tall wooded fences are a good idea).
During said orgy, if I were to put on a movie of a certain genre, for party entertainment purposes, it would be a private reproduction.
If we run off to an empty field and do the same, it is still a private party. We would be trespassing on someone else's field, but that's our only crime.
The movie license is ambiguous so that it can be wielded either way in court, influenced by the lawyers and the judge him/herself. The court decides how many people it takes before it no longer counts as a private party. Ten, twenty, or maybe the judge is a pale-skinned cave dweller and has only 2 friends, one being a rat, so he considers any more than 1.5 guests to be a sickeningly large public gathering that requires an alcohol permit. It's all in the interpretation.
If the license had been worded to say "You can watch this with up to 7 other people" then we'd be on to something, and to 'be legit', if you had 40 people watching then you'd have to pay 5 rentals or whatever. Kind of like the old Warcraft games where you could have a lan-party with just 1 or 2 cd's because each server could host 2 clients for 'free'.
Here's a new spin: what about student film groups ? How many high school/college have a bunch of film geeks who gather at noon or after hours to take in various cult art films and whatnot ? Is that private or public reproduction ? Is it okay just because they're teenagers, or should we go RIAA on them and sue everything that moves ?
Food for thought. Too bad the thinkers aren't in power.
You need to find a better record store. Oh you mean a CD store, that's different!
I find it humorous when they offer between 5 and 12 albums for preview on those little headphone jukebokes. Humorous because they will consistently pick out 11 rap or gaymetal albums, and one stunning non-pop album. There are litterally tens of thousands of albums in-store, but you only get to hear a dozen of the latest, most overhyped teen pukes.
Cross the street to the _record_ store, and shrinkwrap is nowhere to be seen. There are several SL1200 decks with decent headphones, and you can grab any record and have an earfull, for as long as you like.
Of course, you'll pay on average 20$ for a vinyl album, 5-10$ for a single, but by the time you've got your wallet out, you know you're going to love this music so it is worth every penny.
Dude, quit downloading porn and warez!
:)
No, seriously I'm in the same boat =) But in my case it's truckloads of music loops and high resolution instrument samples. Right now I have them on several hundred CD's and recently a few DVD's, but when I'm in the middle of composing a melody and I'm looking for the perfect sound, it is just an inspiration ruiner to swap through dozens of discs until I find the right beat.
I know I just need hard drives, but the problems are connectivity and bandwidth. I could buy a fancy IDE raid card and hook up four 200gb drives, but the PCI bandwidth will be maxxed out and my sound will suffer. If I use the onboard IDE and SATA connectors it's not so bad, because they run on Hypertransport and my PCI bandwidth is unharmed, but then where do I plug my CD and DVD drives ? A musician that can't load nor burn CD's is in a tight spot!
Someone suggested fibre-channel, which was sounding great until I found out how much those little bastards cost. I think I'd rather build a cluster of Gig-E fileservers and network-RAID them together or something
I guess I need to wait for PCI-Express to go mainstream, then maybe someone will release a PCI-X16 raid board that can handle the 400-500mb/sec combined throughput of a low-end raid array.
No matter which path I choose for storage _hardware_, I still need software to manage that huge file pile. ISO's of every disc, and a CD emulator with a front-end adapted to this mass storage. It's not trivial!
There used to be a site called Fravia (now reborn into something more legal). It had lots of reverse engineering-info, but the most interesting part, and the only thing that has survived to this day, is a series of articles on "How to find what you're looking for", well-digested information and theory on efficient search methods.
I find that most web users have an intrinsic fear of searching, or fail to use the search engine properly. They don't know which keywords to use, or how to wield the quotes and plus/minus operands to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Then they stare at me with a blown mind when I offer a concise query string that pulls the needle from the haystack "How did you do that ?"
The guy who used to run Fravia now runs http://www.searchlores.org/
HTTP is fine, a stream-transfer protocol can only do so much.
HTML however feels rather clunky now with all these bloated half-supported standards tacked onto it. We still don't have consistent rendering across the board, and it's still a pain in the posterior to publish anything. CSS, that wretched hammer of aborted salvation, is yet another limited hack.
We used to have HTML glitches and workarounds, now we have CSS glitches and workarounds; design compromises in a system that was supposed to break the boundaries of visual layout. Well here we are 5 years later and the graphics artists are still using Flash instead of CSS... I even collapsed and learned the dark art of PHP-generated Flash to do some things that just weren't worth the trouble in CSS. Content is king, but we have 256mb video cards and we want to use them!
Ok I just woke up and my brain hasn't warmed up yet. I thought you could transfer just any music to the iPod (no, I don't have one yet), well, any music that isn't encumbered by non-Apple DRM. I'd think the best way for Real to enable their music purchases on an iPod would be to turn the file into a naked MP3/AAC but that's probably illegal for Real to do.
So now what is this Harmony software and how does it work ? Does it fake an Apple digital signature, or does it even upload directly to the iPod bypassing any Apple security features ? Both of these scenarios would mean that Apple's IP is at stake, just like DeCSS was born out of Xing's crappy DVD software. Someone could reverse eng Harmony and render Apple's DRM obsolete, so it is quite natural that they will defend themselves.
Why help the stupid ?
If the PHB is tech illiterate yet still insists on making blind purchase decisions, let the punk shoot himself in the foot. You can always find a better boss elsewhere, or save up and launch your own business with _your_ skills and computer savoir-faire. Just be loyal to your paycheck until opportunity comes knocking.
I've seen whole government ministries dance around Linux. When the time came to convert, they chickened out and bought million$ in HP hardware and Tru64 Unix, totally defeating the point of FREE/OSS. And this was a department that was under direct pressure from the mothership to watch their deficit and strive toward profitability (which would have been easy if we didn't have a legion of tired old IT farts).
If your boss can't tell the difference between a 2 million$ investment + tech training, and a 0$ investment + tech training, then you should just smile and cash your fat check because there is no salvation for such math flunkies.
By having to write documentation, coders might actually realize how frickin' contorted their config files are and try to clean it up rather than have to document hundreds of dark options with "zarp_blorg_snootle = uHb ; This is a hack"
I know it's not 'fun' or 'easy', I code in random bursts too, and my first versions are always "unreadable but it works great!", but if I use the app at all then I do a complete rewrite for the v2.0, since the v1.0 was more of a design-as-you-code exercise, and the resulting code is always cleaner, faster, and much more easily extendable/reusable.
Heck, I did that last week by accident. I had written a fairly long perl script to automate the creation of a full-blown webhosting account (vhost, email, ftp, templates etc). Wouldn't you know it, in my sleepy daze I deleted the script just as I had finalized it. Well I rewrote it in 1/10th the time now that I knew exactly what I wanted it to do, and it was shorter (more modular functions) and less bug-prone.. I even threw in a few command-line options so I don't have to edit the config file all the time.
It's daunting, but some big projects could really use a fresh start, with proper documentation maintained from the beginning.
I, for one, would like a filesystem with unrestricted metadata and easy access to it. Say you have a folder full of camera pictures, store a thumbnail, comment, date etc but in the filesystem where it doesn't get in the way of stupid little utils that barf on comment headers, something like Mac's resource forks. In essence each file would have a matching metadata chunk, handled by the kernel.
This patent argument is ridiculous because Creative never wrote a single game in the history of the company. They make sound cards and drivers, and they sell rebadged graphics cards designed and manufactured by OTHER COMPANIES (NVidia, Permedia, S3).
My extreme distaste is for rushed-out-the-door drivers. Rarely does a day go by without my video card crashing at the desktop. Sure, they rock at running games and making lots of noise and heat, but when it comes to basic computing they fall short, very short.
This is why I love Matrox, because normal people spend more time working than playing. That said, I hate the Parhelia 512 because it's overpriced and underperformant. Give me a triple-head card that can run Doom3 at 1920x1440 and I will gladly plunk down 500$, just like I did several long years ago with a Geforce2 GTS when it was just a newborn, while everyone else was still giddy over their Voodoo 2 and TNT2. That same Geforce2 just recently fried after 4 long years of duty, and it was still fine for many games.
500$ / 4 years is 125$ per year, or 10$ per month for mind-blowing speed. Buy a budget card that you'll upgrade every year and you'll spend just as much in the end, except you'll always be in the bottom performance tier. That's how you measure the value of something.
Communication on my car is best done with a bumper sticker.
"Bite my shiny metal ass"
I'm one of those road warriors who holds an extreme grudge against Honda teens, Lexus dinks, and every other idiot who fails to realize that:
a. you're just a sack of meat, $$$ or not
b. other people are sacks of meat too
c. cars are tougher than sacks of meat
When someone consciously pulls a stupid stunt near me, I take it as a threat to my health and well-being, and react accordingly. Getting the finger is getting off easy, in the street or a bar it would have been a severe beating.
Many US-based companies, ISP's and the like, farm out their support to canadian call centers.
Why ? Because we're not a bunch of disrespectful pricks.
Thank you.
It seems domain name disputes are a constant hassle these days, yet when you go to register your company name and trademark there is no dispute; it's either available or it's not. The problem with domain names is that they are global, there is no such thing as state or country jurisdiction when it comes to a domain name.
Just like me, I'm Billco and when I popped up on the internet many many years ago, Billco.com was already taken by some graphics gig, so I said "Oh well" and registered Fnarg. I'm sure plenty of people who 'know' me have looked up Billco.com because I'm that kind of guy, a tech keystone if you will, and it sucks but the other guy was there first.
I think similar domain names should be allowed. Froogles is not Froogle, just like Googles is not Google. If someone can't tell the difference then they shouldn't be surfing the net until they learn to read.
What if it were a street address ? But they use numbers so we don't have much affinity for those. How many times have you missed a street address by one, and pulled up in the neighbor's driveway then backed up ? Should your friend sue his neighbor because people are likely to miss the driveway ? Same thing on the net. If I make a typo and end up at the wrong site then it's MY TYPO and it's not 'wrong' site's fault, nor is it the lawyer's job to correct it for me.