OpenOffice is great, but it's much slower than MS Office.
I personally don't think the OO.o speed is a problem. For me, buying MS Office is a problem because I don't think the lost seconds here and there waiting for OO.o don't add up to $300 in lost productivity. Maybe it does in a large business environment but for a small business, $300 per computer is far too great of an expense for me to justify.
Cable companies that still pipe advertising after you already pay, etc.)
Yeah, sure. Most revenue for any given channel comes from advertising, they barely get anything from your cable fee. I think the portion they get from the cableco only pays for the uplink costs.
Standard answer: Slashdot is more than one person.
Very true. When you deal with large groups, often you really can't fairly characterize the group as a whole as hypocritical, only individuals. At Slashdot, different types of stories often attract different groups of posters.
For example, if you looked at slashdot using just one type of story, you might think slashdot as a whole being anti-IP. In some other types of stories, the general vibe might seem to be the opposite, but I would bet that there are different groups of people with different "hot button" topics that they respond to.
Overall, I would assume a multi-core system would scale fairly similarly to a multi-processor system.
It depends. Intel's 2C is currently better than 2P of single core, because Core shares cache. Intel's 2C*2P systems (51xx Xeon) already has a separate bus per processor, and that system is a four channel memory bus, so it doesn't hurt as much as it would have if it shared an FSB.
At the end of this year, it could be a little different. Kentsfield will have two dies which don't share cache between the dies, but each die will share cache between the two cores. A 2x Woodcrest would be better than a 1x Kentsfield because each processor module in the Woodcrest systems has its own FSB, two cores per FSB, but Kentsfield must split its FSB to four cores. The successor to Kentsfield will have a system that pools the cache between the cores.
I don't doubt it. We'll see eight cores available for typical workstations at the end of this year, the Cloverton (the next Xeon DP, 2 packates x 4 cores per package) will be available, about the same time as Kentsfield which is the four core desktop chip. And late last year / early this year was when dual core came out.
The market currently doesn't need eight cores in a desktop, but there may be a call for it in high end desktops and workstations.
I figure more cores is inevitable, but the issue is whether software will benefit from it. Unless clippy multiplies, it shouldn't be necessary for office tasks, so four+ would have to be found necessary for media, games or professional use.
What type of AV shop? If it is home theater, then that's no good unless they also sell presentation projectors. For others reading, home theater projectors are optimized for contrast ratio, presentation projectors are optimized for brightness for presenting in a lit room. You can mix the uses, but the results aren't necessarily as good, nor is the money necessarily as well spent.
The other point of the "long tail" is to allow more people to find employment at home doing what they like doing, or to pick up extra money where it might have been impossible even in mail order. The decreased costs you mention is key. I can set up a web store for a small amount of money, a very tiny fraction of buying retail frontage which couldn't be supported by my product line yet. Even the shelf space in a store might cost more than my web hosting costs.
As others said, the fee you pay to get the signal doesn't begin to pay for the production of any of the video you see. If you don't want the ads and don't want the bother of skipping ads, then the other model I suggest is either buy the TV sets for about $1 an episode, or go to Netflix. While fast forwarding commercials is fine, I don't think it is right for any of them to completely blank the screen because those ads do pay for the show you are watching.
With apologies to Star Trek fans everywhere, I agree.
B5 did have very good story telling, though I wish the FX, posting and acting was better. Most of the CG was rendered in 60fps interlaced rather than 24fps progressive telecined, so it looks downright awful on a progressive display or computer, deinterlacers don't help either. In "Comes The Inquisitor" the Captain's audio says "East" when his mouth is saying "West", and that was so obvious to me on first pass. The Star Trek series had much easier to watch visuals.
Personally, I think Firefly had so much more potential, too bad it got shot down. I think the quality of what was made beats the first season of any other Sci-fi TV show I've seen.
One OS 9 user related to me that OS9 had an awful problem with extensions, that they interfered with each other in baffling and unintelligible ways. The way to clear up the problem is to unload a bunch of extensions and reload them one (or a few) at a time to narrow down where the problem was. Frankly, I'm glad I avoided all that. I didn't have any such problems with Windows NT, but I was using it on an Alpha processor. The only real issue I had was a leak in the RAS service, which leaked to about 128MB, so at 100 days uptime (I'm not lying) I restarted the system.
This is the same guy that claimed that the only reason that Daikatana wasn't selling well was because of file sharing? Of course that takes ego or bias.
Shake-and-glow wouldn't work for me unless I shook it every so often, I think that might look dorky, regardless of mouse brand. I have my mouse set at a very high speed so I don't move it much. A tiny generator on the bottom of a mouse might jam up just like the Mighty Mouse's scroll ball does on occasion.
The scroll is a useful feature and is the only reason I keep the Mighty Mouse. All the other competitors that scroll horizontally with the tilt wheel require a lot of force and is only an on/off button, not a proportional positioning device, with Mighty Mouse, it just rolls effortlessly.
I thought the laser pointing was only introduced last year.
AMD can and do make chipsets, but unfortunately, they have been behind for some time. For a while, AMD had the only ones for their multi-processor chips.
One thng I can think of is for each Z value chosen, to make lines between adjacent points and test if any point on that line segment crosses that Z. It's pretty iterative but you'll get your point cloud. That's relatively straightforward, provided you have a fairly regular series of points.
Another way was to use vector math, make a triangle between three terrain points and try to see if it intersects with your Z plane. Maybe ten years ago I made an algorithm that returns a line segment if there was such an intersection.
If you wanted to do curve fitting and see where that curve passes your z plane, that could be done, but that's beyond my education.
The BV list is enough, it doesn't take long and it doesn't really need a lot of experimentation. It does not take long to go through the entire list. I question the consumerist view of just replacing or upgrading when what already exists can do the job. I question the need to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, except for major projects and games, I usually fall short of needing 512MB of RAM.
That and once the OS is tweaked, then you can just make an image and reinstall from the image.
I think you are right for the most part. However, podcasts give a better media voice to the person making them, so the discussion can rise above the five word sound bite. I happen to listen to Barack Obama, he averages a couple recordings per month. His recordings are fairly high quality from a vocal perspective (pretty good equipment and setup) isn't high polish, doesn't have goofy intro or background music, doesn't sound like a campaign ad or anything like that. I think he started his podcast over a year ago. His program seems to be pretty honest and fair, he lays out the issues and his concerns about the current events in what I think is a reasonable manner without resorting to attacks on a person, party or ideology, without trite slogans or logical fallacies. I don't expect that to be typical of podcasts by politicians, but at least keep an open mind that there will be some gems.
I think that makes sense. I think it also makes sense to set up a script to test the number of read/write cycles, write 0xAA bytes to the entire crard, verify, write 0x55s, verify and count how many full write cycles it can take before it fails.
Do you mean whether it will require DRM? All the current portable media players will play non-DRM media in some format or another, so I don't really understand the issue. Even that other player that's a four letter word doesn't require DRM media to operate. If you are against the player even supporting DRM, then you'll probably have a problem with this one too because I doubt Microsoft would sell a player that doesn't support DRM at all, afterall, Plays For Sure is a Microsoft technology, and I doubt the larger rights holders (the __AAs) would licence their media without it.
OS X's strengths tend to lie in niche groups (Music, Video and Graphics) or the arcane (command line *nix world). Win XP does everyday business tasks in a more comprehensible manner for most folks because most folks have been trained that way.
If you mean Microsoft Office, that's available for the Mac too. I'm not sure what's different about Office:mac that would make that transition hard.
OS X also has a good strength in maintainability too. The need to reinstall the OS is generally a lot less often, and when you do reinstall the OS, the user accounts and most of the software is retained too. With Windows, far too many programs need certain dll or registry voodoo and as such, those generally need a reinstall. And don't forget tracking down and reinstalling the drivers too. The native ability to boot off of external drives even if the internal drive is cooked is a nice thing to have too.
That's true. I remember reading an article about legislation that left air conditioner efficiency alone in favor of worrying about the efficiency of ceiling fans, and the some of the fans in question in the article weren't pure fans but fans with light fixtures. If you apply Amdahl's law, you worry about the big components of energy use first, especially in terms of what is the biggest energy gain you can get for the least expense.
Yes, and Microsoft Windows and Office has competitors, but in the broad view of things, those competitors don't seem very relevant. I mean, for vector graphics, it would seem that there is only one real choice, and that's Illustrator. Indesign has competitors but in many respects, the markets for those are different. For raster images, Photoshop seems to be the only product in its class, other image programs exist but either have a different focus, a different market or generally isn't taken seriously.
I will be buying CorelDraw soon, but not necessarily because it's the best (I really don't know), but it is the software package that is best supported by the piece of machinery that I am buying. CorelDraw seems to have a niche in that particular category of machinery, the three companies I've investigated recommend CorelDraw, and I didn't ask why they've settled on that.
The site suggests that those Microsoft products aren't available yet as anything more than a preview, not something I'd trust to a paying project like I might with an Adobe program.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice is great, but it's much slower than MS Office.
I personally don't think the OO.o speed is a problem. For me, buying MS Office is a problem because I don't think the lost seconds here and there waiting for OO.o don't add up to $300 in lost productivity. Maybe it does in a large business environment but for a small business, $300 per computer is far too great of an expense for me to justify.
Cable companies that still pipe advertising after you already pay, etc.)
Yeah, sure. Most revenue for any given channel comes from advertising, they barely get anything from your cable fee. I think the portion they get from the cableco only pays for the uplink costs.
Standard answer: Slashdot is more than one person.
Very true. When you deal with large groups, often you really can't fairly characterize the group as a whole as hypocritical, only individuals. At Slashdot, different types of stories often attract different groups of posters.
For example, if you looked at slashdot using just one type of story, you might think slashdot as a whole being anti-IP. In some other types of stories, the general vibe might seem to be the opposite, but I would bet that there are different groups of people with different "hot button" topics that they respond to.
Nah, that's too much work, I'd rather just lock it down.
Overall, I would assume a multi-core system would scale fairly similarly to a multi-processor system.
It depends. Intel's 2C is currently better than 2P of single core, because Core shares cache. Intel's 2C*2P systems (51xx Xeon) already has a separate bus per processor, and that system is a four channel memory bus, so it doesn't hurt as much as it would have if it shared an FSB.
At the end of this year, it could be a little different. Kentsfield will have two dies which don't share cache between the dies, but each die will share cache between the two cores. A 2x Woodcrest would be better than a 1x Kentsfield because each processor module in the Woodcrest systems has its own FSB, two cores per FSB, but Kentsfield must split its FSB to four cores. The successor to Kentsfield will have a system that pools the cache between the cores.
I don't doubt it. We'll see eight cores available for typical workstations at the end of this year, the Cloverton (the next Xeon DP, 2 packates x 4 cores per package) will be available, about the same time as Kentsfield which is the four core desktop chip. And late last year / early this year was when dual core came out.
The market currently doesn't need eight cores in a desktop, but there may be a call for it in high end desktops and workstations.
I figure more cores is inevitable, but the issue is whether software will benefit from it. Unless clippy multiplies, it shouldn't be necessary for office tasks, so four+ would have to be found necessary for media, games or professional use.
What type of AV shop? If it is home theater, then that's no good unless they also sell presentation projectors. For others reading, home theater projectors are optimized for contrast ratio, presentation projectors are optimized for brightness for presenting in a lit room. You can mix the uses, but the results aren't necessarily as good, nor is the money necessarily as well spent.
The other point of the "long tail" is to allow more people to find employment at home doing what they like doing, or to pick up extra money where it might have been impossible even in mail order. The decreased costs you mention is key. I can set up a web store for a small amount of money, a very tiny fraction of buying retail frontage which couldn't be supported by my product line yet. Even the shelf space in a store might cost more than my web hosting costs.
As others said, the fee you pay to get the signal doesn't begin to pay for the production of any of the video you see. If you don't want the ads and don't want the bother of skipping ads, then the other model I suggest is either buy the TV sets for about $1 an episode, or go to Netflix. While fast forwarding commercials is fine, I don't think it is right for any of them to completely blank the screen because those ads do pay for the show you are watching.
With apologies to Star Trek fans everywhere, I agree.
B5 did have very good story telling, though I wish the FX, posting and acting was better. Most of the CG was rendered in 60fps interlaced rather than 24fps progressive telecined, so it looks downright awful on a progressive display or computer, deinterlacers don't help either. In "Comes The Inquisitor" the Captain's audio says "East" when his mouth is saying "West", and that was so obvious to me on first pass. The Star Trek series had much easier to watch visuals.
Personally, I think Firefly had so much more potential, too bad it got shot down. I think the quality of what was made beats the first season of any other Sci-fi TV show I've seen.
One OS 9 user related to me that OS9 had an awful problem with extensions, that they interfered with each other in baffling and unintelligible ways. The way to clear up the problem is to unload a bunch of extensions and reload them one (or a few) at a time to narrow down where the problem was. Frankly, I'm glad I avoided all that. I didn't have any such problems with Windows NT, but I was using it on an Alpha processor. The only real issue I had was a leak in the RAS service, which leaked to about 128MB, so at 100 days uptime (I'm not lying) I restarted the system.
It just screams Civil-Rights-Violation-Waiting-To-Happen.
So, you say your name is Achmed?
This is the same guy that claimed that the only reason that Daikatana wasn't selling well was because of file sharing? Of course that takes ego or bias.
Shake-and-glow wouldn't work for me unless I shook it every so often, I think that might look dorky, regardless of mouse brand. I have my mouse set at a very high speed so I don't move it much. A tiny generator on the bottom of a mouse might jam up just like the Mighty Mouse's scroll ball does on occasion.
The scroll is a useful feature and is the only reason I keep the Mighty Mouse. All the other competitors that scroll horizontally with the tilt wheel require a lot of force and is only an on/off button, not a proportional positioning device, with Mighty Mouse, it just rolls effortlessly.
I thought the laser pointing was only introduced last year.
AMD can and do make chipsets, but unfortunately, they have been behind for some time. For a while, AMD had the only ones for their multi-processor chips.
One thng I can think of is for each Z value chosen, to make lines between adjacent points and test if any point on that line segment crosses that Z. It's pretty iterative but you'll get your point cloud. That's relatively straightforward, provided you have a fairly regular series of points.
Another way was to use vector math, make a triangle between three terrain points and try to see if it intersects with your Z plane. Maybe ten years ago I made an algorithm that returns a line segment if there was such an intersection.
If you wanted to do curve fitting and see where that curve passes your z plane, that could be done, but that's beyond my education.
The BV list is enough, it doesn't take long and it doesn't really need a lot of experimentation. It does not take long to go through the entire list. I question the consumerist view of just replacing or upgrading when what already exists can do the job. I question the need to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, except for major projects and games, I usually fall short of needing 512MB of RAM.
That and once the OS is tweaked, then you can just make an image and reinstall from the image.
Hey, OO.o is so independent of the operating system that my copy of 2.0.3 (or whatever was latest as of last week) can't even cut and paste!
I think you are right for the most part. However, podcasts give a better media voice to the person making them, so the discussion can rise above the five word sound bite. I happen to listen to Barack Obama, he averages a couple recordings per month. His recordings are fairly high quality from a vocal perspective (pretty good equipment and setup) isn't high polish, doesn't have goofy intro or background music, doesn't sound like a campaign ad or anything like that. I think he started his podcast over a year ago. His program seems to be pretty honest and fair, he lays out the issues and his concerns about the current events in what I think is a reasonable manner without resorting to attacks on a person, party or ideology, without trite slogans or logical fallacies. I don't expect that to be typical of podcasts by politicians, but at least keep an open mind that there will be some gems.
I think that makes sense. I think it also makes sense to set up a script to test the number of read/write cycles, write 0xAA bytes to the entire crard, verify, write 0x55s, verify and count how many full write cycles it can take before it fails.
Do you mean whether it will require DRM? All the current portable media players will play non-DRM media in some format or another, so I don't really understand the issue. Even that other player that's a four letter word doesn't require DRM media to operate. If you are against the player even supporting DRM, then you'll probably have a problem with this one too because I doubt Microsoft would sell a player that doesn't support DRM at all, afterall, Plays For Sure is a Microsoft technology, and I doubt the larger rights holders (the __AAs) would licence their media without it.
OS X's strengths tend to lie in niche groups (Music, Video and Graphics) or the arcane (command line *nix world). Win XP does everyday business tasks in a more comprehensible manner for most folks because most folks have been trained that way.
If you mean Microsoft Office, that's available for the Mac too. I'm not sure what's different about Office:mac that would make that transition hard.
OS X also has a good strength in maintainability too. The need to reinstall the OS is generally a lot less often, and when you do reinstall the OS, the user accounts and most of the software is retained too. With Windows, far too many programs need certain dll or registry voodoo and as such, those generally need a reinstall. And don't forget tracking down and reinstalling the drivers too. The native ability to boot off of external drives even if the internal drive is cooked is a nice thing to have too.
That's true. I remember reading an article about legislation that left air conditioner efficiency alone in favor of worrying about the efficiency of ceiling fans, and the some of the fans in question in the article weren't pure fans but fans with light fixtures. If you apply Amdahl's law, you worry about the big components of energy use first, especially in terms of what is the biggest energy gain you can get for the least expense.
Almost every Adobe product has competitors.
Yes, and Microsoft Windows and Office has competitors, but in the broad view of things, those competitors don't seem very relevant. I mean, for vector graphics, it would seem that there is only one real choice, and that's Illustrator. Indesign has competitors but in many respects, the markets for those are different. For raster images, Photoshop seems to be the only product in its class, other image programs exist but either have a different focus, a different market or generally isn't taken seriously.
I will be buying CorelDraw soon, but not necessarily because it's the best (I really don't know), but it is the software package that is best supported by the piece of machinery that I am buying. CorelDraw seems to have a niche in that particular category of machinery, the three companies I've investigated recommend CorelDraw, and I didn't ask why they've settled on that.
The site suggests that those Microsoft products aren't available yet as anything more than a preview, not something I'd trust to a paying project like I might with an Adobe program.