Via a phone jack? The one I played with used ethernet. I vaguely recall hearing about them adding a modem in one of the later revs.... It was a rather cool use of embedded Linux, IMHO. But I digress.
Ouch. The graphics and media (the high volume content) are served by Akamai. which has been known to scale up to 30 Gbps (yes, that's gigabits per second) in peak load periods. I think the text bandwidth from Apple's servers verges on a gigabit per second, but I could be wrong.
If Apple really was slashdotted, that either means that a trunk line went south or that this is the biggest download blitz in the history of the Internet. Either way, I wouldn't want to be in Apple's IT department today.:-)
I'm pretty sure the Mac version doesn't do that, so I'd say it's a bug in the install code. Make sure you send feedback with the feedback form on Apple's website so that the right people will know about the problem.
The parent poster was correct. These tests either show that the G5 and the Athlon 64 are equivalent or for a few tests, show a testing bias.
When reading my analysis, bear in mind that an average person with a stopwatch has +/- 1 second margin of error per test, so anything within two seconds is considered the same time.
Also consider that most machines spin down their hard drives when not in use, leading to up to a five second stall. Because there was no aggregation of multiple tests, tossing out any outliers in the process, these test results are basically useless, but you can consider them to have a +/- 12 second margin of error.
Finally, bear in mind that my analysis is extremely biased. Please look at the facts yourself and make your own decisions. Do not blindly accept my opinion as truth, as doing so doesn't do anyone any good.
Analysis of results:
Render test: all times identical.
Quicktime test:invalid (see below).
Photoshop 50 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5 for first place
Photoshop 150 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5.
Quake tests: invalid.
MS Word tests: invalid.
Reasons for invalidation of Quicktime test:
If two machines with similar performance suddenly show more than a factor of two difference, this almost always means that only one processor is being used on the slower system due to differences in the software used.
The test is poorly described so that it cannot be reproduced. There is no "Quicktime format". Quicktime is a wrapper movie for any of dozens of formats. QuickTime has different default codecs in different versions. I doubt Premiere installs the same version of QuickTime that most Mac OS X 10.2 users would have installed (thanks to Software Update), thus there is a good chance they were using different codecs in this test.
According to the QuickTime API docs, your application has to be modified to take full advantage of multiple processors when compressing images. Since Premiere for the Mac was last updated not long after that support was added in QuicktTime (as best I can tell), odds are very good that it does not use the new APIs, while recent Windows versions almost certainly do.
Reasons for invalidation of MS Word test: factor of four difference clearly indicates that software is not comparable across the two platforms. The results are beyond any sane person's ability to accept from nearly equivalent machines running even remotely similar code.
Reason for Quake test invalidation: this should be dependent on graphics card performance, not CPU performance. The G5 beat all but one configuration with an equivalent video card. This one configuration inexplicably was about 50% faster than all the other configurations. Since at least one machine in each 128M speed class uses 8x AGP, it is safe to assume that there are substantially different versions of ATI's drivers being used in these tests, rendering any results meaningless in terms of the performance of the machine itself. The most likely (but hard to prove) interpretation of these results is that the G5 performs slightly better than any Athlon64 when given an equivalent video card, and that the one machine is either mislabeled or has a newer version of the ATI drivers than the G5 and the other 128MB PCs.
According to their website, the correct procedure in those cases is to call customer service and tell them what diagnostics you have done to ensure that the drive itself is hosed (as opposed to mere data corruption) and they can issue an RMA via the phone. Sucks, yeah, but they're not going to refuse to honor the warranty just because you don't own a PC....:-)
Now all we need is "William Shatner Sings The Lindows Rock", and I think we have ourselves a tune the whole family can enjoy^H^H^H^H^Hflee from in terror.
I call bullshit, too. When I was in college, I administered a lab of 20-ish macs on 1/8th full time. Average time spent per week was less than two hours actually doing any maintenance with any other time playing with the UNIX box and baby-sitting people who were new to the platform.
Typical corporate computing environment studies show that it takes an average of one support person per 150-250 Macs, versus one per 50-60 PCs. That has been reported in study after study. Thus, the odds are very high that there is something unusual about your situation (assuming you aren't just trolling).
The only Mac computing environments that I've seen with high failure rates were old Mac OS (pre-X) machines where someone tried to add disgusting password protection software to prevent users from changing settings on the machines. Those labs were a constant headache, with failure after failure. The lab I ran (which didn't have crufty third-party extensions installed) had zero non-hardware failures in two years. If memory serves, the problems were:
Printer jammed once a week.
Printer crashed and needs to be power-cycled once a week.
Someone hooked an ethernet cable to his/her laptop and didn't hook it back to the desktop machine when done once a month.
Had to reseat the motherboard on a PowerMac 5400 a couple of times.
Had to reseat a cache card once.
Someone turned off the power switch on the back once a week.
The power cord got disconnected inadvertently once every few weeks.
Netscape crashed machines on occasion. Encouraged people to use IE, which generally didn't.
And those are basically all the problems that we experienced in two full years. If you have enough fires to keep a full-time technician working all week for only 50 Macs, then this suggests that either A. your Mac tech didn't set the machines up very well or B. your Mac tech needs to write up a document to help clueless newbie users figure out basic tasks without calling support every five minutes. In either case, you've found your problem, and it ain't the machine....
The reason I mentioned it is that, at least for laptops, Apple charges a flat-rate fee for service, assuming that there is any real hardware replaced. I don't know if that is the case for desktops, though. Worth asking about, anyway, as it might end up being cheaper to go that route if that is the case. At the very least, take it to a "genius" and see if he/she has any ideas.
I don't know Apple's reasoning, but I can think of at least one really good reason not to do so.
When companies start using power supplies with standard connectors, it greatly increases the odds that some unscrupulous service center will start cutting corners and using non-Apple parts that may or may not meet the same specs for wattage, DC quality, or audible noise, particularly for out-of-warranty repair.
This in turn could lead to surprises a few years down the road, and depending on state laws, it might even end up being Apple's responsibility to fix such problems (assuming that the repairs were done by an authorized repair center). Letting customers cut corners on their own hack-and-slash repairs is one thing. Letting authorized repair centers do so is another thing altogether....
Honestly, I think the right answer is for a third-party company to make a cable that adapts a standard ATX supply to the proprietary connector. That way, you solve both problems at once. Anybody tried such a thing?
If they are aware that it is a cell phone, it is illegal for them to call you at that number without your explicit authorization to do so. Thanks to modern technology and the availability of number block checking, it is rare for any telemarketing company not to know that a number is a cell phone....
Thus, odds are, if anybody calls you on your cell phone, it probably is someone to whom you gave your number (possibly accidentally) rather than a random telemarketer. If it is a random telemarketer, tell them that it is a cell phone. If they ever call you again, you can sue.
I've found several comments from a couple of years back that suggests that there is another "hidden" server that is the actual master. It is even hinted at by the root server RFC. If A really is the master, though, then yeah, it could get ugly.
It should be easy, assuming it isn't the master root server (and I don't think it is anymore), and assuming that the root servers respect the zone file's time to live.
First, you transfer a new zone file with a short TTL, say twelve hours. Next, you remove a.root-servers.net from the list of servers that are allowed to get a zone transfer from the master root server, set the TTL back to something sane, and wait 12 hours for the root zone to expire.
At that point, all the other root name servers will catch up and increase their TTL, but the NetSol root server should start returning SERVFAIL. Thus, name servers around the globe should start ignoring that server entirely. The problem should basically take care of itself.
There is a danger in wording it in the way that you did. By that standard, taking the traditional western legal definition of "consent" (which excludes assent due to coercion), any ruler who is in power as a result of force, threat of force, or oppression must therefore no longer have the right to govern....
I'm quite certain that this is not what you meant.:-)
Junk fax laws are an entirely different animal. They make it illegal to make someone else pay for unwanted communication, in much the same way as it is illegal to hack some company's PBX system to use it as a relay for your long-distance calls. Your freedom of speech ends where it causes harm to others, and thus junk fax laws do not need to exempt anyone any more than anti-graffiti laws do.
Where there is no direct financial harm to the recipient, such as the DNC list law, these amount to nuisance laws, and fall under much closer scrutiny where freedom of speech is concerned, as well they should.
In a way, it is good to see this law receiving such close constitutional scrutiny. While the law's purpose is noble, if there are problems in the law, they need to be fixed now before they do actually prevent some form of speech that should be rightfully protected. That having been said, I suspect this law will hold up to scrutiny fairly well.
For people who aren't familiar with use taxes, they basically boil down to taxes charged for using a product. The claim is that it is not taxing interstate commerce because it can then be taken out of state without paying the tax, so long as it is not used within the state. Basically, this provides the same exemption as is made for sales tax to resellers, however, and thus should reasonably be construed as putting its policy in line with sales taxes, hence regardless of word choise, it is, in fact, a sales tax on interstate commerce.
The problem with this is that sales taxes were intended to provide for basic services needed by brick-and-mortar stores, such as police and fire protection, etc. Goods imported into the state do not benefit from this protection, and thus cannot legitimately be charged sales tax. This is the spirit of the interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
The states get around this by calling it a "use tax", but in reality, it behaves identically to a sales tax, and thus any sane and reasonable judiciary should call it a sales tax, which would be illegal on interstate purchases.
Sadly, these cases keep coming up before conservative judiciaries who go solely by the letter of the laws, ignoring the spirit of the laws entirely. If they actually paid attention to the spirit of the laws, they would see them as what they are---thinly-veiled attempts to charge sales tax on interstate commerce. It is truly apalling that the courts have not struck these down as unconstitutional yet.
Regardless of the whole use tax issue, though, sales tax is a terrible means of generating revenue that is doomed to fail in the long run. There are two reasons for this:
First, it punishes the people at the bottom unequally because they spend the majority of their income buying things. As such, it is the most completely discriminatory tax system one can impose from a consumer's perspective. The result is that states end up putting in clauses to allow certain goods to not be taxed. There is some question about the constitutionality of taxes with such provisions, as they are also clearly discriminatory from a business perspective. This could make for an interesting case in a few years.
Second, sales and use taxes are fundamentally tied to purchasing, which rises and falls with the economy much more so than other methods such as property taxes, income taxes, and corporate taxes. States that depend on sales tax are not really collapsing because of internet commerce. They are collapsing because:
Purchasing as a whole has decreased
States squandered the increased revenues during the economic boom on new programs instead of saving it or using it to pay off debts
States created new programs during the good times, which still must be paid for
Instead of whining about how internet sales are hurting their revenue, those state legislators should get off their overpaid backsides and fix the broken tax system that they depend upon. The problem is, if they actually moved to a fair tax system, they would never be reelected... and that is, after all, what this comes down to....
Except reality is otherwise. The online merchants tend to undercut local businesses by 30-50%. I don't know of any state sales tax that is quite that high (though Tennessee is getting close....:-)
The problem is that sales tax is inherently a poor way of generating revenue. Even if states start charging taxes for online orders, people will just start picking up the telephone instead, like we used to. There is no gain to be had here for the states, despite their naive belief in this "magic bullet".
However, allowing taxation on internet purchases could potentially set back internet commerce by a decade by making it more costly to do business on the internet (since everyone would then start using the phone to place the actual order), thus resulting in higher prices, less competition, and a significant overall downturn in our nation's economy, resulting in countless lost jobs, resulting in decreased purchasing, resulting in decreased revenue from sales taxes. The net effect is a -decrease- in overall sales tax revenue.
I wish that people like him would learn the difference between defending the spirit of the Constitution and defending the letter of the Constitution, and more importantly, would realize that doing the former often means voting in a way that is contrary to the latter.
First, calling someone who has asked you not to call them is harassment, which is explicitly NOT protected speech. This law simply provides a mechanism for someone to ask a large number of companies not to harass them---a group of companies who have utterly ignored those people's requests as a general rule.
Second, this law does not abridge the freedom of speech, but rather, sets time, place, and manner restrictions upon that speech. Specifically, the manner cannot be by phone if that phone call terminates in a place that has requested not to receive such solicitations. They could still solicit business by mail or other methods. They could stil solicit business by calling these people at work. They simply cannot continue to do so by calling them at home. TPM restrictions on commercial speech on private property have repeatedly been upheld by the courts, in cases such as "Pennsylvania Alliance for Jobs & Energy v. Council of Munhall" and "Chapman v. Thomas".
There is no Constitutional problem with this law at all. There's a big difference between defending the spirit of the constitution and taking a dogmatically purist approach to its interpretation. The former is admirable. The latter is outright dangerous.
...could be easily applied (or mis-applied) to serious downloaders or even somebody who shared a single song with enough people.
The Audio Home Recording Act was designed explicitly to prevent that. Criminal prosecution is, by law, only for commercial infringement. It would take one heck of an anti-consumer power shift to change that.
So, far, no one has found an artist that has received any part of this.
That's because the money doesn't pay artists, and AFAIK, it doesn't pay the RIAA, either. It pays the performance rights groups, who then pay the copyright holder on the music/words. Few people who are described as "artists" have done much of the actual creative work behind their songs....
Join ASCAP/BMI/SESAC. If you write a song that gets enough airplay to make the national charts, you'll see a portion of the dispensation.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple really was slashdotted, that either means that a trunk line went south or that this is the biggest download blitz in the history of the Internet. Either way, I wouldn't want to be in Apple's IT department today. :-)
When reading my analysis, bear in mind that an average person with a stopwatch has +/- 1 second margin of error per test, so anything within two seconds is considered the same time.
Also consider that most machines spin down their hard drives when not in use, leading to up to a five second stall. Because there was no aggregation of multiple tests, tossing out any outliers in the process, these test results are basically useless, but you can consider them to have a +/- 12 second margin of error.
Finally, bear in mind that my analysis is extremely biased. Please look at the facts yourself and make your own decisions. Do not blindly accept my opinion as truth, as doing so doesn't do anyone any good.
Analysis of results:
- Render test: all times identical.
- Quicktime test:invalid (see below).
- Photoshop 50 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5 for first place
- Photoshop 150 MB test: tie between Polywell 2 and dual G5.
- Quake tests: invalid.
- MS Word tests: invalid.
Reasons for invalidation of Quicktime test:- If two machines with similar performance suddenly show more than a factor of two difference, this almost always means that only one processor is being used on the slower system due to differences in the software used.
- The test is poorly described so that it cannot be reproduced. There is no "Quicktime format". Quicktime is a wrapper movie for any of dozens of formats. QuickTime has different default codecs in different versions. I doubt Premiere installs the same version of QuickTime that most Mac OS X 10.2 users would have installed (thanks to Software Update), thus there is a good chance they were using different codecs in this test.
- According to the QuickTime API docs, your application has to be modified to take full advantage of multiple processors when compressing images. Since Premiere for the Mac was last updated not long after that support was added in QuicktTime (as best I can tell), odds are very good that it does not use the new APIs, while recent Windows versions almost certainly do.
Reasons for invalidation of MS Word test: factor of four difference clearly indicates that software is not comparable across the two platforms. The results are beyond any sane person's ability to accept from nearly equivalent machines running even remotely similar code.Reason for Quake test invalidation: this should be dependent on graphics card performance, not CPU performance. The G5 beat all but one configuration with an equivalent video card. This one configuration inexplicably was about 50% faster than all the other configurations. Since at least one machine in each 128M speed class uses 8x AGP, it is safe to assume that there are substantially different versions of ATI's drivers being used in these tests, rendering any results meaningless in terms of the performance of the machine itself. The most likely (but hard to prove) interpretation of these results is that the G5 performs slightly better than any Athlon64 when given an equivalent video card, and that the one machine is either mislabeled or has a newer version of the ATI drivers than the G5 and the other 128MB PCs.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
You: $300 for electricity? But I only used the #*&^$@#&$^ thing for five minutes!
Now all we need is "William Shatner Sings The Lindows Rock", and I think we have ourselves a tune the whole family can enjoy^H^H^H^H^Hflee from in terror.
Typical corporate computing environment studies show that it takes an average of one support person per 150-250 Macs, versus one per 50-60 PCs. That has been reported in study after study. Thus, the odds are very high that there is something unusual about your situation (assuming you aren't just trolling).
The only Mac computing environments that I've seen with high failure rates were old Mac OS (pre-X) machines where someone tried to add disgusting password protection software to prevent users from changing settings on the machines. Those labs were a constant headache, with failure after failure. The lab I ran (which didn't have crufty third-party extensions installed) had zero non-hardware failures in two years. If memory serves, the problems were:
- Printer jammed once a week.
- Printer crashed and needs to be power-cycled once a week.
- Someone hooked an ethernet cable to his/her laptop and didn't hook it back to the desktop machine when done once a month.
- Had to reseat the motherboard on a PowerMac 5400 a couple of times.
- Had to reseat a cache card once.
- Someone turned off the power switch on the back once a week.
- The power cord got disconnected inadvertently once every few weeks.
- Netscape crashed machines on occasion. Encouraged people to use IE, which generally didn't.
And those are basically all the problems that we experienced in two full years. If you have enough fires to keep a full-time technician working all week for only 50 Macs, then this suggests that either A. your Mac tech didn't set the machines up very well or B. your Mac tech needs to write up a document to help clueless newbie users figure out basic tasks without calling support every five minutes. In either case, you've found your problem, and it ain't the machine....When companies start using power supplies with standard connectors, it greatly increases the odds that some unscrupulous service center will start cutting corners and using non-Apple parts that may or may not meet the same specs for wattage, DC quality, or audible noise, particularly for out-of-warranty repair.
This in turn could lead to surprises a few years down the road, and depending on state laws, it might even end up being Apple's responsibility to fix such problems (assuming that the repairs were done by an authorized repair center). Letting customers cut corners on their own hack-and-slash repairs is one thing. Letting authorized repair centers do so is another thing altogether....
Honestly, I think the right answer is for a third-party company to make a cable that adapts a standard ATX supply to the proprietary connector. That way, you solve both problems at once. Anybody tried such a thing?
Thus, odds are, if anybody calls you on your cell phone, it probably is someone to whom you gave your number (possibly accidentally) rather than a random telemarketer. If it is a random telemarketer, tell them that it is a cell phone. If they ever call you again, you can sue.
First, you transfer a new zone file with a short TTL, say twelve hours. Next, you remove a.root-servers.net from the list of servers that are allowed to get a zone transfer from the master root server, set the TTL back to something sane, and wait 12 hours for the root zone to expire.
At that point, all the other root name servers will catch up and increase their TTL, but the NetSol root server should start returning SERVFAIL. Thus, name servers around the globe should start ignoring that server entirely. The problem should basically take care of itself.
I'm quite certain that this is not what you meant. :-)
Where there is no direct financial harm to the recipient, such as the DNC list law, these amount to nuisance laws, and fall under much closer scrutiny where freedom of speech is concerned, as well they should.
In a way, it is good to see this law receiving such close constitutional scrutiny. While the law's purpose is noble, if there are problems in the law, they need to be fixed now before they do actually prevent some form of speech that should be rightfully protected. That having been said, I suspect this law will hold up to scrutiny fairly well.
The problem with this is that sales taxes were intended to provide for basic services needed by brick-and-mortar stores, such as police and fire protection, etc. Goods imported into the state do not benefit from this protection, and thus cannot legitimately be charged sales tax. This is the spirit of the interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
The states get around this by calling it a "use tax", but in reality, it behaves identically to a sales tax, and thus any sane and reasonable judiciary should call it a sales tax, which would be illegal on interstate purchases.
Sadly, these cases keep coming up before conservative judiciaries who go solely by the letter of the laws, ignoring the spirit of the laws entirely. If they actually paid attention to the spirit of the laws, they would see them as what they are---thinly-veiled attempts to charge sales tax on interstate commerce. It is truly apalling that the courts have not struck these down as unconstitutional yet.
Regardless of the whole use tax issue, though, sales tax is a terrible means of generating revenue that is doomed to fail in the long run. There are two reasons for this: First, it punishes the people at the bottom unequally because they spend the majority of their income buying things. As such, it is the most completely discriminatory tax system one can impose from a consumer's perspective. The result is that states end up putting in clauses to allow certain goods to not be taxed. There is some question about the constitutionality of taxes with such provisions, as they are also clearly discriminatory from a business perspective. This could make for an interesting case in a few years.
Second, sales and use taxes are fundamentally tied to purchasing, which rises and falls with the economy much more so than other methods such as property taxes, income taxes, and corporate taxes. States that depend on sales tax are not really collapsing because of internet commerce. They are collapsing because:
- Purchasing as a whole has decreased
- States squandered the increased revenues during the economic boom on new programs instead of saving it or using it to pay off debts
- States created new programs during the good times, which still must be paid for
Instead of whining about how internet sales are hurting their revenue, those state legislators should get off their overpaid backsides and fix the broken tax system that they depend upon. The problem is, if they actually moved to a fair tax system, they would never be reelected... and that is, after all, what this comes down to....*sigh*
The problem is that sales tax is inherently a poor way of generating revenue. Even if states start charging taxes for online orders, people will just start picking up the telephone instead, like we used to. There is no gain to be had here for the states, despite their naive belief in this "magic bullet".
However, allowing taxation on internet purchases could potentially set back internet commerce by a decade by making it more costly to do business on the internet (since everyone would then start using the phone to place the actual order), thus resulting in higher prices, less competition, and a significant overall downturn in our nation's economy, resulting in countless lost jobs, resulting in decreased purchasing, resulting in decreased revenue from sales taxes. The net effect is a -decrease- in overall sales tax revenue.
Simply put, it just won't work.
First, calling someone who has asked you not to call them is harassment, which is explicitly NOT protected speech. This law simply provides a mechanism for someone to ask a large number of companies not to harass them---a group of companies who have utterly ignored those people's requests as a general rule.
Second, this law does not abridge the freedom of speech, but rather, sets time, place, and manner restrictions upon that speech. Specifically, the manner cannot be by phone if that phone call terminates in a place that has requested not to receive such solicitations. They could still solicit business by mail or other methods. They could stil solicit business by calling these people at work. They simply cannot continue to do so by calling them at home. TPM restrictions on commercial speech on private property have repeatedly been upheld by the courts, in cases such as "Pennsylvania Alliance for Jobs & Energy v. Council of Munhall" and "Chapman v. Thomas".
There is no Constitutional problem with this law at all. There's a big difference between defending the spirit of the constitution and taking a dogmatically purist approach to its interpretation. The former is admirable. The latter is outright dangerous.
The Audio Home Recording Act was designed explicitly to prevent that. Criminal prosecution is, by law, only for commercial infringement. It would take one heck of an anti-consumer power shift to change that.
That's because the money doesn't pay artists, and AFAIK, it doesn't pay the RIAA, either. It pays the performance rights groups, who then pay the copyright holder on the music/words. Few people who are described as "artists" have done much of the actual creative work behind their songs....
Join ASCAP/BMI/SESAC. If you write a song that gets enough airplay to make the national charts, you'll see a portion of the dispensation.