I love OS X, but I caution you to to keep your eyes open, or rather, don't have unrealistic expectations. Switching platforms is never totally easy, although I think adding a MacOS system is currently the easiest platform to switch to from Windows. The mini is a nice system, but if you are a heavy multitasker, as well use Firefox and Thunderbird, you will want 1GB (which you should upgrade yourself & not pay Apple to do it). I have 512MB and I still page out.
Don't expect things to behave the way you are used to, and feel free to experiment and read up a lot. I don't remember how many Google searches I did that included "OS X" plus the subject.
The biggest thing is you will want to run USB Overdrive because Apple's mouse acceleration controls are very limited.
The mini is a fine system, IMO, and it is my current primary desktop but I can imagine people giving up prematurely out of frustration just because switching to any new OS takes time. The base system is very good, and I have found a workaround for just about everything I didn't like.
...and if the person that hacked it causes problems, if they are found, will probably be charged with terrorism. Probably be charged with terrorism for just trying to hack it. Not that I mind, trying to f*ck with mass transit where lives might be at stake, is just plain stupid for anyone that doesn't want to be charged with negligent homicide or worse.
I think for communications, Indium circuits will be most useful in the RF circuits, but the circuits that feed or recieve the information from those RF circuits will likely be CMOS
Most of China's land mass is worthless, after all (why do you think Tiawan is so important to them?)
Why is their land worthless? Too rocky? They do have a pretty huge amount of coal for energy supplies but I don't know if you mean value of land for farming. Apparently they have enough farmland to be able to export food to the US, given how much pressure some sectors of farming are getting from Chinese imports.
I don't think anyone even needs 10Mbps ports for gaming, but it's nice to have one device that has a router and gigabit ports, rather than buying two separate devices provided you don't need a lot of ports. Obviously the speed of gigabit ports aren't for the internet but for communicating over the local network.
I need you to back up that violence claim. The people at Sveasoft seem to be pretty nice, and this is the first time I've heard of anyone say this. The only thing that happens is that they cancel your support if they find you redistributing the package. That's hardly violence.
Supposedly RMS himself has said that the Sveasoft terms comply with the terms of GPL.
And that's $199. Don't forget the RAM too, though it does have the keyboard and mouse, though only PS/2. Not a bad price, but it's not a Mac either, I already have PCs that are a lot better than that. That said, I wouldn't buy a Mac to run linux or a plain BSD, I'd buy it for OS X. In my opinion, as a desktop OS, OS X as a whole is lightyears ahead of any Linux or other BSD I've seen.
they could have tried an online business model based on BitTorrent.
I won't be a participating customer if any company that uses BitTorrent. I've only rarely seen BitTorrent work adequately in my opinion. I'm on a T1 and for every slashdot torrent I've used, the direct downloads of the same file was faster and more reliable. Even if it did work, I don't want to be subsidizing their business model with my own expensive upload bandwidth, I'd rather that bandwidth go to waste.
This looks like pretty neat technology; if used with cell phones it could give the user a little more privacy, and the rest of us a little more peace and quiet.
I think history shows that people will use the rudest and most annoying use of a technology whenever possible. In this case, I think they will still use "push to talk", not speak, but have the speakers on as loud as possible to "share" the other end of the conversation.
She said, "but $15 or $20 isn't that much for soemthing you enjoy."
That is very true, but the thing is, there are so many entertainment options to compete with that $15 for a sixty minute disc just doesn't compare well.
Also, I don't spend $15-$20 on CDs. I usually spend $10, at most, maybe $12. The figures you cite are probaly "list" price, which I don't see outside of a mall store.
Very few people in the US pay list price for anything, books may be an exception, on CDs, complaining about $15-$20 CDs generally seems to hurt the argument of those complaining about prices. Some countries like Germany and Japan seem to enforce list price as an anti-trust measure to prevent big box stores from squeezing out the neighborhood stores, but not the US.
While there is no truly safe job, construction can be pretty dangerous. On the up side, it's sometimes pretty decent paying for blue collar work.
I think the effort needs to be put into safer construction tools. Nail guns, circular saws and table saws are all good places to keep improving. There's a guy trying to sell a design that stops a rotating blade in milliseconds but the table saw makers simply aren't interested, despite the current litigious environment and the fact that table saws are the #1 source of injuries.
Yeah, I remember a PETA member saying that chicken farmers deliberately burn off the beaks of chickens. For whatever reason, the person did not care to explain. I've been to chicken farms and have never seen a chicken whose beaks have been burned off or damaged in any way. There's no reason I can think to do that, and it takes time and money to do that, so I really don't think it is done in general practice.
While I know there's money to be made, it's in a relatively small niche that it doesn't make much of a dent.
What those companies need to do though is to compete on dollars for the people that don't give a damn about animal friendliness. I think only then will such a business truly make a difference.
Companies like IBM sells hardware. If making Linux available for their servers makes it easier for them to sell them, then yes, I can see them adding to the Linux kernel. To apply this in a broader sense, only hardware companies would be able to support software.
I've seen the claim that FOSS developers can make money by selling support for their software. That's kind of backwards as then there is no incentive to make their software easy to use or install, and actually creates a disincentive because that means hard to use software generates more support money.
HP had announced in August 2004 a laptop with a specially tweaked version of SuSE, so it would like, actually sleep, hibernate and wake up properly. The model was nx5000. I'm surprised that model is no longer available, only nine months after the fact. IBM has also sold Linux based laptops. The HP nc6x00 series is supposedly available with FreeDOS instead of Windows XP, but there is a disconnect between the sales pitch page and the store page, like it's hard to figure out how to configure it with an SXGA+ screen, I can't find how to ask for FreeDOS instead.
I think that assumes there was a choice. The dealer doesn't necessarily handle that, that is often done at the manufacturer level. I don't know if the computer industry has an assembly and inventory method that allows for truly custom choices like this, where they know the unit with serial number ending in 13242 won't have an OS in it. It's not like the auto industry where you can request a build with certain packages, certain paint and so on, from the factory.
The best I've seen are pseudo-modular systems where the laptop is shipped without a CPU, memory or hard drive and those components are added in at the shop (or the buyer, I guess).
Probably. There are others working on using worker's desktop systems as spare compute nodes for the evening. An Apple project manager announced that OS X 10.4 will include Xgrid for every version for desktop, server and cluster, so they all can be configured as supplemental nodes. I think they are planning to include Xgrid free of charge.
WMP for the Mac works, although I have read somewhere that it won't play DRM'd files. I think WMP Mac works better than VLC for Mac, or VLC for Windows for that matter.
Since speed isn't an issue for recording 20Mbps video (ATSC max), you don't even need the speed afforded by a 4200 RPM drive to record it.
My HTPC has a surprisingly quiet 15k RPM drive for booting. I don't use it for PVR yet though, but I do have a separate, slower drive for storing audio and video.
I think an argument can be made for keeping the hard drive storage system in a closet somewhere and a super quiet system with only one drive in the living room, as a RAID system uses a lot of drives that do generate noise.
Of course, TV on demand has absolutely no benefits. Like the chance of offering content that wouldn't normally show up on even conventional cable channels. Not all of it will be good, but I think it offers opportunities for independents to distribute their videos without having to suck up to cable giants for limited air time at a time slot that no one watches.
And since it's a web server dynamically serving one channel at a time to you, it would be extremely easy for the IPTV provider to record what one watches.
That is a good point, but lots of webservers are already recording what they can of what you do. I suppose you could flush your cookies and never log into any site and such, but that's extreme.
Don't tell me that Tivo doesn't record what you do, and they offer the ability to timeshift in a way that is similar to what IPTV might offer. They say they don't record such information if you ask them not to, but I don't trust them not to do so. I expect the cable-company provided PVR boxes to be even shadier.
Slashdot Mirror
I love OS X, but I caution you to to keep your eyes open, or rather, don't have unrealistic expectations. Switching platforms is never totally easy, although I think adding a MacOS system is currently the easiest platform to switch to from Windows. The mini is a nice system, but if you are a heavy multitasker, as well use Firefox and Thunderbird, you will want 1GB (which you should upgrade yourself & not pay Apple to do it). I have 512MB and I still page out.
Don't expect things to behave the way you are used to, and feel free to experiment and read up a lot. I don't remember how many Google searches I did that included "OS X" plus the subject.
The biggest thing is you will want to run USB Overdrive because Apple's mouse acceleration controls are very limited.
The mini is a fine system, IMO, and it is my current primary desktop but I can imagine people giving up prematurely out of frustration just because switching to any new OS takes time. The base system is very good, and I have found a workaround for just about everything I didn't like.
...and if the person that hacked it causes problems, if they are found, will probably be charged with terrorism. Probably be charged with terrorism for just trying to hack it. Not that I mind, trying to f*ck with mass transit where lives might be at stake, is just plain stupid for anyone that doesn't want to be charged with negligent homicide or worse.
I think for communications, Indium circuits will be most useful in the RF circuits, but the circuits that feed or recieve the information from those RF circuits will likely be CMOS
Most of China's land mass is worthless, after all (why do you think Tiawan is so important to them?)
Why is their land worthless? Too rocky? They do have a pretty huge amount of coal for energy supplies but I don't know if you mean value of land for farming. Apparently they have enough farmland to be able to export food to the US, given how much pressure some sectors of farming are getting from Chinese imports.
I don't think anyone even needs 10Mbps ports for gaming, but it's nice to have one device that has a router and gigabit ports, rather than buying two separate devices provided you don't need a lot of ports. Obviously the speed of gigabit ports aren't for the internet but for communicating over the local network.
I need you to back up that violence claim. The people at Sveasoft seem to be pretty nice, and this is the first time I've heard of anyone say this. The only thing that happens is that they cancel your support if they find you redistributing the package. That's hardly violence.
Supposedly RMS himself has said that the Sveasoft terms comply with the terms of GPL.
I don't know where the $89 system is, but the closest I can find is the Geekit:
Geekit
And that's $199. Don't forget the RAM too, though it does have the keyboard and mouse, though only PS/2. Not a bad price, but it's not a Mac either, I already have PCs that are a lot better than that. That said, I wouldn't buy a Mac to run linux or a plain BSD, I'd buy it for OS X. In my opinion, as a desktop OS, OS X as a whole is lightyears ahead of any Linux or other BSD I've seen.
they could have tried an online business model based on BitTorrent.
I won't be a participating customer if any company that uses BitTorrent. I've only rarely seen BitTorrent work adequately in my opinion. I'm on a T1 and for every slashdot torrent I've used, the direct downloads of the same file was faster and more reliable. Even if it did work, I don't want to be subsidizing their business model with my own expensive upload bandwidth, I'd rather that bandwidth go to waste.
This looks like pretty neat technology; if used with cell phones it could give the user a little more privacy, and the rest of us a little more peace and quiet.
I think history shows that people will use the rudest and most annoying use of a technology whenever possible. In this case, I think they will still use "push to talk", not speak, but have the speakers on as loud as possible to "share" the other end of the conversation.
She said, "but $15 or $20 isn't that much for soemthing you enjoy."
That is very true, but the thing is, there are so many entertainment options to compete with that $15 for a sixty minute disc just doesn't compare well.
Also, I don't spend $15-$20 on CDs. I usually spend $10, at most, maybe $12. The figures you cite are probaly "list" price, which I don't see outside of a mall store.
Very few people in the US pay list price for anything, books may be an exception, on CDs, complaining about $15-$20 CDs generally seems to hurt the argument of those complaining about prices. Some countries like Germany and Japan seem to enforce list price as an anti-trust measure to prevent big box stores from squeezing out the neighborhood stores, but not the US.
While there is no truly safe job, construction can be pretty dangerous. On the up side, it's sometimes pretty decent paying for blue collar work.
I think the effort needs to be put into safer construction tools. Nail guns, circular saws and table saws are all good places to keep improving. There's a guy trying to sell a design that stops a rotating blade in milliseconds but the table saw makers simply aren't interested, despite the current litigious environment and the fact that table saws are the #1 source of injuries.
ATSC 1080i is 1920x1080, interlace scanned.
It looks like the HDV standard is 1440x1080 though, horizontally stretched. HDV is a consumer HD digital video standard that uses standard DV tapes.
I wondered why the DiDio name looked familiar. I'd say the fire she's getting is somewhat deserved then, given the sort of thing she pumps out.
Really, emacs is a whole lot of stuff that just happens to have text editing functionality along with it, so why not genes?
Yeah, I remember a PETA member saying that chicken farmers deliberately burn off the beaks of chickens. For whatever reason, the person did not care to explain. I've been to chicken farms and have never seen a chicken whose beaks have been burned off or damaged in any way. There's no reason I can think to do that, and it takes time and money to do that, so I really don't think it is done in general practice.
While I know there's money to be made, it's in a relatively small niche that it doesn't make much of a dent.
What those companies need to do though is to compete on dollars for the people that don't give a damn about animal friendliness. I think only then will such a business truly make a difference.
Companies like IBM sponser FOSS development.
Companies like IBM sells hardware. If making Linux available for their servers makes it easier for them to sell them, then yes, I can see them adding to the Linux kernel. To apply this in a broader sense, only hardware companies would be able to support software.
I've seen the claim that FOSS developers can make money by selling support for their software. That's kind of backwards as then there is no incentive to make their software easy to use or install, and actually creates a disincentive because that means hard to use software generates more support money.
HP had announced in August 2004 a laptop with a specially tweaked version of SuSE, so it would like, actually sleep, hibernate and wake up properly. The model was nx5000. I'm surprised that model is no longer available, only nine months after the fact. IBM has also sold Linux based laptops. The HP nc6x00 series is supposedly available with FreeDOS instead of Windows XP, but there is a disconnect between the sales pitch page and the store page, like it's hard to figure out how to configure it with an SXGA+ screen, I can't find how to ask for FreeDOS instead.
I think that assumes there was a choice. The dealer doesn't necessarily handle that, that is often done at the manufacturer level. I don't know if the computer industry has an assembly and inventory method that allows for truly custom choices like this, where they know the unit with serial number ending in 13242 won't have an OS in it. It's not like the auto industry where you can request a build with certain packages, certain paint and so on, from the factory.
The best I've seen are pseudo-modular systems where the laptop is shipped without a CPU, memory or hard drive and those components are added in at the shop (or the buyer, I guess).
Probably. There are others working on using worker's desktop systems as spare compute nodes for the evening. An Apple project manager announced that OS X 10.4 will include Xgrid for every version for desktop, server and cluster, so they all can be configured as supplemental nodes. I think they are planning to include Xgrid free of charge.
His insinuation that as an AMD fanboy, I am unable to discern the lack of power of XYZ technology is a little irritating.
The chipset and the technology doesn't lack power. That's not the point. The point is that they weren't as reliable as they should have been.
WMP for the Mac works, although I have read somewhere that it won't play DRM'd files. I think WMP Mac works better than VLC for Mac, or VLC for Windows for that matter.
Since speed isn't an issue for recording 20Mbps video (ATSC max), you don't even need the speed afforded by a 4200 RPM drive to record it.
My HTPC has a surprisingly quiet 15k RPM drive for booting. I don't use it for PVR yet though, but I do have a separate, slower drive for storing audio and video.
I think an argument can be made for keeping the hard drive storage system in a closet somewhere and a super quiet system with only one drive in the living room, as a RAID system uses a lot of drives that do generate noise.
Of course, TV on demand has absolutely no benefits. Like the chance of offering content that wouldn't normally show up on even conventional cable channels. Not all of it will be good, but I think it offers opportunities for independents to distribute their videos without having to suck up to cable giants for limited air time at a time slot that no one watches.
And since it's a web server dynamically serving one channel at a time to you, it would be extremely easy for the IPTV provider to record what one watches.
That is a good point, but lots of webservers are already recording what they can of what you do. I suppose you could flush your cookies and never log into any site and such, but that's extreme.
Don't tell me that Tivo doesn't record what you do, and they offer the ability to timeshift in a way that is similar to what IPTV might offer. They say they don't record such information if you ask them not to, but I don't trust them not to do so. I expect the cable-company provided PVR boxes to be even shadier.