Except the controllers it didn't come with only had one button, just like the Atari 2600. First they gripe that the controller only has one button, then they gripe that they're forced to choose their own damn controller. There's just no satsifying the slashbots.
If you mirror across two disks and put the into storage, and one develops some minor errors, it is not possible to tell which one has the errors unless the data itself stores error checking and correction information.
Actually, all hard drives store a CRC or other error detection method with each and every sector, and have been doing this for decades. Generally it should be easily possible and reliable to tell whether any given data is correct or not. It's the error recovery that's always been the tricky part.
Mirroring the same data on two hard drives is relatively space-intensive (vs using RAID-5 or PAR2). Like RAID-5, one of the drives can die and the data is recoverable, but mirroring makes it a lot simpler to read the data.
A.) It may be cheap and sexy, but it's hard to find apps for. Best Buy, for example, carries no Mac software.
Ignoring for a moment the dual-system software that gets carried accidentally by Best Buy, CompUSA carries Mac software.
B.) No Games. Sorry.
Yes there are games. Just maybe not the ones you want to play. Sorry. This is primarly due to the near total market share of Windows. (There are even less games for Linux.) If I want to play games, I've got a PS2, a Gamecube, and just about every system ever released in the United States, except XBox. I don't even play games on my one Windows system.
C.) Regardless of the low price, Apple has a huge hurdle to overcome with the general masses that they won't be missing out if they get it.
Just log in as ">console". Or over SSH for that matter. The graphics don't slow anything down if they're not being used. And as someone else said, OS X Server on XServe is designed to be run headless.
Well, you know what I meant. I meant the "free" BSDs (not to be confused with FreeBSD).
Everything that's in BSD is also "free" in OS X. The non-free parts of OS X aren't in Darwin or BSD. There's no Quartz, Aqua, Quicktime, iTunes, etc. in BSD. You also don't get Apple's particular packaging of the OS for free either, but that doesn't stop anyone from making their own distro of Darwin/BSD.
Just because someone charges money for a distro that comes with non-free stuff doesn't make its core less free (as in speech). I don't hear people bitching about Red Hat Enterprise not being a "free" OS, especially now that the "free version of Red Hat" doesn't exist any more (yes, I know they renamed it, but there's more to it than that).
So in other words, OS/2, with it's "true pre-emptive multitasking" had a major flaw in common with the classic MacOS? The whole point of pre-emptive multitasking is that one process can't wedge the whole system. While background tasks would still work, the user perception was no better than with a cooperative multi-tasking system, because the GUI was not pre-emptive.
There's a little something I learned while getting my CS degree, it's called "queues". There's no reason to block and wait for an app to respond a GUI event when you can stick it on an input queue.
Well, if there's one thing I remember about OS/2 (3.0, IIRC), it's how when an app froze up, the entire OS/2 GUI froze up for like two minutes before it realized "duh, something's not right here". I've never seen that in Windows... when an app freezes, only its own windows get stuck.
What if the BSD lawsuit (from AT&T/USL) had never happened? That slowed down development of BSD for long enough to give Linux a chance to exist. If it weren't for the lawsuit, not only would Linux likely not have gone anywhere beyond printing "A" and "B" on a console, but the main open source license would be BSD, not GPL. And HURD would still not even be a blip on the radar until 2005.
Is your external possibly a 5400 RPM drive? A laptop drive in an external case is likely to be a 4500 or 5400 RPM drive. And a regular 3 1/2" drive will be either 5400 or 7200 RPM.
You can't get one for less than $480, and that's for the 256 MB combodrive version.
Wow, discounts sure are backwards on the mini. I just checked, and the K-12 discount price on the base mini is indeed $480. The developer discount price is $475, and I am aware of a corporate discount price at $470. I know margins are slim on the mini, but this is completely backwards from their discounts on higher priced stuff.
Um, not really. If you hook up two drives to the same Firewire port and try to copy between them, then it will indeed be slower. But 400 mbits/sec is still faster than the sustained data rate of a single 7200rpm drive. Just because ATA-100 goes to 100 mbytes/sec doesn't mean your drive will go that fast. In fact, ATA-100 is that fast so you can hook up two drives.
All you lose is the burst speed of the drive cache, which doesn't help much if the OS is caching the data itself anyhow.
why not have the fansubbers just release their subtitles with no video?
Because of the other problem with fansubs... when raw scripts are released, the bootleggers in Hong Kong will happily use them to make pirate DVDs. You can easily tell which bootlegs didn't use fansubber scripts, because they're badly translated into "Engrish".
If they were ripped from VHS, they don't have 720x480 resolution to begin with. VHS really can't give you much better than 320x240x60, or 320x480x30 (with a 2:1 pixel size) if you de-interlace. 2-hour mode isn't so bad, but back when tapes cost $5-$10 each, nobody really wanted to use anything but 6-hour mode, myself included. With SVHS, you could probably get 640x480/720x480, but it wasn't around then. And I'm sure that few of these are readily available on U-Matic.
Seriously. How is something attached to the outside a battery going to affect the chemistry inside a battery? This is just as useless as those little $200 stickers you were supposed to stick to the bottom of your gas tank.
As for the stick-on antennas, they're not trying to affect something that's inside your cellphone that they can't touch. Radio waves don't see the case of your cell phone. RF != chemistry
Then replace "Sparc" with "PowerPC". He's talking about non-x86 players. There are currently no WMV9 player codecs for non-x86 except for the Mac version of WMP9. Which refuses to play.AVI files, by the way.
Flash isn't really very cross-platform. Sure, there's a Windows version and a Mac version, and a Linux version, but that doesn't really get you much farther than WMV (it gets you Linux). Is there a Solaris or BeOS or IRIX version of Flash?
Actually, the copy operation taking more than 59 seconds isn't a problem. On any "normal" Unix system, the file isn't actually deleted until all users of it are closed, which is something that a lot of script kiddies don't know when they try to delete the system log. All rm does is remove the directory entry and decrement the link count in the inode. I haven't tested it, but I think HFS+ under OS X also has this behavior.
Windows Media Player 9 for the Mac will play WM9 (WMV3) encoded video... but it will not play.AVI files. It will, however, play WM9-WMV files. (I have also heard it will not play ASF files.) Since there is no other program which will play WMV3 codec files on a Mac (the existing open-source codecs are x86-only), there is no way currently for a Mac to play a WM9-AVI file, other than somehow translating the file to a WMV container format.
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Except the controllers it didn't come with only had one button, just like the Atari 2600. First they gripe that the controller only has one button, then they gripe that they're forced to choose their own damn controller. There's just no satsifying the slashbots.
Nintendo to release Gamecube 365. (366 on leap years)
Wow, so now in addition to Breakout and Super Breakout, you can play Photoshop on your 2600 too!
For people concerned with the preservation of "data", they've sure picked an interesting format to write about it in.
Actually, all hard drives store a CRC or other error detection method with each and every sector, and have been doing this for decades. Generally it should be easily possible and reliable to tell whether any given data is correct or not. It's the error recovery that's always been the tricky part.
Mirroring the same data on two hard drives is relatively space-intensive (vs using RAID-5 or PAR2). Like RAID-5, one of the drives can die and the data is recoverable, but mirroring makes it a lot simpler to read the data.
Ignoring for a moment the dual-system software that gets carried accidentally by Best Buy, CompUSA carries Mac software.
B.) No Games. Sorry.
Yes there are games. Just maybe not the ones you want to play. Sorry. This is primarly due to the near total market share of Windows. (There are even less games for Linux.) If I want to play games, I've got a PS2, a Gamecube, and just about every system ever released in the United States, except XBox. I don't even play games on my one Windows system.
C.) Regardless of the low price, Apple has a huge hurdle to overcome with the general masses that they won't be missing out if they get it.
I have no idea what you were trying to say there.
Just log in as ">console". Or over SSH for that matter. The graphics don't slow anything down if they're not being used. And as someone else said, OS X Server on XServe is designed to be run headless.
Everything that's in BSD is also "free" in OS X. The non-free parts of OS X aren't in Darwin or BSD. There's no Quartz, Aqua, Quicktime, iTunes, etc. in BSD. You also don't get Apple's particular packaging of the OS for free either, but that doesn't stop anyone from making their own distro of Darwin/BSD.
Just because someone charges money for a distro that comes with non-free stuff doesn't make its core less free (as in speech). I don't hear people bitching about Red Hat Enterprise not being a "free" OS, especially now that the "free version of Red Hat" doesn't exist any more (yes, I know they renamed it, but there's more to it than that).
There's a little something I learned while getting my CS degree, it's called "queues". There's no reason to block and wait for an app to respond a GUI event when you can stick it on an input queue.
Well, if there's one thing I remember about OS/2 (3.0, IIRC), it's how when an app froze up, the entire OS/2 GUI froze up for like two minutes before it realized "duh, something's not right here". I've never seen that in Windows... when an app freezes, only its own windows get stuck.
/and BSD would probably still be dying
That's because your slashdot user ID is > 250000.
Is your external possibly a 5400 RPM drive? A laptop drive in an external case is likely to be a 4500 or 5400 RPM drive. And a regular 3 1/2" drive will be either 5400 or 7200 RPM.
It also can tell you if your microwave oven is working! (and how much leakage you're absorbing by standing in front of it)
Wow, discounts sure are backwards on the mini. I just checked, and the K-12 discount price on the base mini is indeed $480. The developer discount price is $475, and I am aware of a corporate discount price at $470. I know margins are slim on the mini, but this is completely backwards from their discounts on higher priced stuff.
Um, not really. If you hook up two drives to the same Firewire port and try to copy between them, then it will indeed be slower. But 400 mbits/sec is still faster than the sustained data rate of a single 7200rpm drive. Just because ATA-100 goes to 100 mbytes/sec doesn't mean your drive will go that fast. In fact, ATA-100 is that fast so you can hook up two drives.
All you lose is the burst speed of the drive cache, which doesn't help much if the OS is caching the data itself anyhow.
Because of the other problem with fansubs... when raw scripts are released, the bootleggers in Hong Kong will happily use them to make pirate DVDs. You can easily tell which bootlegs didn't use fansubber scripts, because they're badly translated into "Engrish".
If they were ripped from VHS, they don't have 720x480 resolution to begin with. VHS really can't give you much better than 320x240x60, or 320x480x30 (with a 2:1 pixel size) if you de-interlace. 2-hour mode isn't so bad, but back when tapes cost $5-$10 each, nobody really wanted to use anything but 6-hour mode, myself included. With SVHS, you could probably get 640x480/720x480, but it wasn't around then. And I'm sure that few of these are readily available on U-Matic.
"Mah battery lasts fur two whole weeks now that ah larned ta just tarn mah cellphone off."
Seriously. How is something attached to the outside a battery going to affect the chemistry inside a battery? This is just as useless as those little $200 stickers you were supposed to stick to the bottom of your gas tank.
As for the stick-on antennas, they're not trying to affect something that's inside your cellphone that they can't touch. Radio waves don't see the case of your cell phone. RF != chemistry
Then replace "Sparc" with "PowerPC". He's talking about non-x86 players. There are currently no WMV9 player codecs for non-x86 except for the Mac version of WMP9. Which refuses to play .AVI files, by the way.
Flash isn't really very cross-platform. Sure, there's a Windows version and a Mac version, and a Linux version, but that doesn't really get you much farther than WMV (it gets you Linux). Is there a Solaris or BeOS or IRIX version of Flash?
Someone needs to make some iPod Mini shaped pieces of white chocolate. Then you really could C(h)ocolate Your Mini!
Actually, the copy operation taking more than 59 seconds isn't a problem. On any "normal" Unix system, the file isn't actually deleted until all users of it are closed, which is something that a lot of script kiddies don't know when they try to delete the system log. All rm does is remove the directory entry and decrement the link count in the inode. I haven't tested it, but I think HFS+ under OS X also has this behavior.
Windows Media Player 9 for the Mac will play WM9 (WMV3) encoded video... but it will not play .AVI files. It will, however, play WM9-WMV files. (I have also heard it will not play ASF files.) Since there is no other program which will play WMV3 codec files on a Mac (the existing open-source codecs are x86-only), there is no way currently for a Mac to play a WM9-AVI file, other than somehow translating the file to a WMV container format.