In a few years, the situation will be different, with more infrastructure in place and wider competition from DSL.
Is this accurate? I thought it was the other way 'round: DSL is pretty much the only choice in most of the country, and the far-off pipe dream of cable is a distant but looming threat.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but at work exactly two people have cable modem access, both live way out in the boonies. Everyone else (like I) has 384k CIR DSL, because that's all you can affordably get these days. [Nevermind that the CIR is complete bull. Everyone's hitting the 1.5M burst rate.]
Welcome to California.
Is the situation really reversed in the larger national context?
Not to be rude, but I believe you spelled PacBell/SBC incorrectly.
The practices you site are endemic to every RBOC I've ever seen. Nothing about BellSouth makes them especially worse than the others. Not that I discourage complaints -- it's possible that if people start making more noise about how poorly their RBOC treats them, there might eventually be some changes!
The best way to do it though is to run Terminal Server.
And Terminal Server comes built into which version of NT4? Oh.
Funny how multiuser capabilities are built into nearly every major OS since 1970, disregarding the degenerate case of a few popular desktop products, and yet is an add-on product grafted on to NT over 10 years after its initial release.
I'd imagine it would involve something arcane and poorly documented, involving manipulating SIDs by hand. And I strongly suspect it wouldn't be something the casual user could take advantage of.
Yes, it's unfair to say NT isn't multiuser. With some various bolt-ons and heavy work with a saw, it is in fact multiuser by most standards. However, I think it's fair to say NT isn't as thoroughly or intuitively multiuser as UNIX.
The OS needs to grow out of the "Keep a 386 useful" to a higher level now.
Why? So you can -- as you allude to -- commercially exploit it? I welcome the contributions that you will make as a result of finding that, since the drivers and documentation you're looking for don't exist, you'll write them yourself as a part of your commercial project.
Obviously, since you plan to profit from using Linux, and you've found an itch to scratch before you can do so, the Linux community stands to gain from your work. That's the altruistic side of how Free Software works, after all.
But let me make a point: your little commercial project doesn't mean squat to me. I don't buy your hardware, I don't buy your software, and I'm not a shareholder of your company. Therefore, saying "the OS needs to grow out of..." is wrong. You want it to grow, and that's fine, but it doesn't need to in order to serve most of the needs to which it's put.
Linux runs on lots of cheap, dinky, commodity hardware. That is one of it's greatest values, and just because that threatens the business model of certain monolithic workstation vendors who'd like to embrace and extend it doesn't mean it has to change, as you say, "to a higher level now."
I am explicitly giving you the benefit of the doubt by not reading your comment as: "I would really love to use Linux but since it doesn't have all this stuff that my company wants, I'm going to bitch." I can't imagine that's what you intend to say, but I have to point out that it sounds an awful lot like it.
I'm also explicitly declaring that I welcome your certain nameless company into the Linux fold. Just don't force your worldview on me, 'kay?
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5 # 'cuz debian ships a cruddy 5.004 use Rant::Soapbox; my $post = new Rant::Soapbox; $post->content( <<END ); After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.
MOSIX is a very valuable contribution to free software and quite a few people, raving license lunatics especially, ought to say a silent (or vocal!) "thank you."
More software is a good thing. More free software is a very good thing. Rabid lunatic license paranoia is a bad thing. END warn "./ probably ate the last post due to entity translation.\n"; $post->send_without_preview || die "I hate when posting doesn't work.\n";
Perhaps this cash infusion will be used for a nice propaganda campaign.
Perhaps this cash infusion will be used to finish the product to the point that it will boot on anything but the most vanilla hardware.
As desktop OS software goes, I have a certain liking for BeOS -- it's an example of the quality of well-done, cathedral software in much the same way as Linux & BSD are examples of quality bazaar-ish software (although admittedly, the BSD bazaar is fairly small, but that's beside the point here.)
Of course, the flip side is that BSD and Linux can install on the hardware I use, and BeOS can't (due to its reliance on an ATAPI CD-ROM drive for installation, which I just plain old don't use around here. I'd have to take my masq box down to yank the only ATAPI drive I have.)
It's a little premature to recommend a propaganda push. Let's see it boot, first.
Re:Maybe you're one of the lucky few...
on
wcarchive Upgraded
·
· Score: 1
100mbit connection.. divided by 5000 users.. = 20000 BITS per second per person.
Double that. It's a pair of 100Mb connections.
Not that it helps all that much to go from 2k/sec to 4...
But then again, cdrom.com doesn't run at 5000 users constantly, like it did with the 3600 limit.
I notice a lot of symbolic links in the distro directories, and was wondering if there's a good method to raping it all, maintaining the symbolic links, and packing it for a CD burn.
mirror scripts.
In the case of RedHat, there's a mirror perl script that's used to make a local copy from either the distribution server (assuming you can stand the lack of speed) or one of the mirrors. It's not too hard to set up, and if memory serves, there's a decent HOWTO about burning a bootable CD from your mirror files.
There are ISO images out there, but all of them seem to be on slow servers, alas. Nobody's managed to get an ISO up on a speedy server like wcarchive.
Debian alludes to being able to do much the same thing, but it was easier for me to just snare the ISO.
I hear tell that Mandrake also distributes official ISO images.
Histoically, Caldera has done the same thing, but so far I haven't come across the actual files for the most recent release (but then, I'm not looking too hard).
No sign of ISOs for SuSE or Stampede.
I wouldn't know squat about TurboLinux because... well, does anyone even use TL?
It's also noteworthy that one almost never finds ISO images of the various BSDs. Seems like the BSD folks are image-averse, preferring (like Debian) to guide folks towards mirroring and (unlike Debian) not distributing an ISO at all. This is vaguely understandable given the size of the thing.
I'm sorry to hear that your route to wcarchive is so bad. I can assure you that there is plenty of bandwidth available to the box: from home, I get full line speed (150K/second) every time I go there. Of course, they peer directly with my upstream's (Pac Bell DSL) router at PBNAP, so I'm 7 hops from the box (Hey! Waitaminnit! Yt used to be 5! There goes PBI adding more routing between me and the backbone... argh!).
At work, I've hit 400K/sec, but then we have way more OC-48s into BBN than we know what to do with.
You obviously don't own a K6, nor bothered to look at any data aside from MHz.
I've owned three. And received excellent performance from all of them. Integer performance has always been a strong point of the K6, and that held true. Certainly I am able to perceive a difference in performance between the K6/200 and the MMX/200, in the AMD's favor.
My friend bought one for that reason. It couldn't compile the kernel, thanks to various errors AMD eventually got rid of.
The Signal 11 / Segfault problem was resolved in steppings prior to the debut of the 233. I believe it existed only in steppings prior to revision C, all of which were 166 and 200 MHz parts. My early K6/200, at 225 on a 75MHz bus, is quite good at compiling kernels, or X, or what have you.
if you try something FPU intensive like playing mp3s or quake
Need I even bother trotting out the old "AMD FPU is faster, it's just not pipelined enough" argument? I get the feeling this is going to be one of those perennial Hatfield & McCoy blood feuds.
Be careful buying AMD. They make good chips, but they've never released a chip which could compete with its intel equivilant in all categories.
I would say the same things about Intel chips. The C300A cranked up to 464MHz, roughly the equivalent of the K6/3-450, lacks 3DNow and the AMD part's higher-performance cache, for example.
I'm a firm believer in price/performance. That's why I sprung for the C300A with my most recent CPU. $60 for a 464MHz part that outstrips a P2 is, hands down, the bargain of the year. Until the stock of 300 MHz Celerons dries up completely, Intel is at the top of my chart.
Honestly, I think I'll be happy on the day the Alpha comes out on top of said "chart". Unfortunately it's still priced out of the range of something I would purchase for personal use.
First AMD said about the same thing about the K6 among other chips...
And shortly after ramping up production, the K6 was the fastest x86 chip in production inclusive of Intel's offerings for several months. Try not to omit that little tidbit.
If you're complaining about a lack of good cases, it's pretty safe to say you've never worked with the SuperMicro 750. It's a dream case. Everything is accessible, everything is done with common sense, and it's actually fairly attractive as the typical klunky eastern-bloc design of cases go.
I think they're unattractive. But it's not for me to say what people might enjoy. I simply have some minor criticisms:
They look cheap. Really cheap. Like bargain basement $29 at the corner-OEM-shop cheap. Maybe it's the dirt-poor quality of the images (or the site in general), but I get a general sense of flimsiness from looking at them. Then again, I get the same feeling from iMacs and iLoaf boxes.
Bad marketing. People who care about their case are going to go out and drop the $200 for a SuperMicro 750 and a few cans of Krylon. Everyone else will pretty much take whatever is on the shelf at Sears. VARs are going to stay away from these things in droves.
Poor I.D. What is with that swoopy neckline bit? Why does it look like something clipped on to an existing plain sheetmetal case? It seems like in ripping off the iLoaf and the iMac, these guys have snapped up only the things that are annoying about its design (with the exception of those funky crate-handles... good god, what was Apple thinking when they said, "Hey, let's put 4 spoilers on it! That'll make people think it's fast!")
Color selection. What's it going to take to get a *good* case in black? It seems like black hardware is always of the extremely flimsy variety.
And as a general aside to all of the folks ranting about the genius of the Apple iLoaf case: "Go look at a SM 750."
Lemley pointed to the recent launch of DIVX, a technologically protected version of the digital versatile disc, or DVD. "If I bought a movie on DIVX it would expire after a specified time," much like the self-destructing tapes in Mission: Impossible, Lemley explained.
It seems counterintuitive to me that one would want to compare a product to DIVX as a model for success. Given that the market has essentially spurned DIVX, and that the enthusiast community has rejected it even more violently, I would strongly advise any vendor from drawing this kind of parallel, as Professor Lemley. Either he is taking a dig at Intertrust's system, which I doubt, or he is especially clueless.
To say, "See! This product is just like DIVX!" seems to be a recipe for disaster.
"Technology makes enforcement essentially costless," says Mark Lemley, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, who adds that tech fixes offer IP holders more control over their products than they would otherwise get.
Here Lemley seems to suggest that the cost of developing a secure distribution system, as well as maintaining it, is very low.
Tell that to cable TV operators, who have seen analog descramblers proliferate to the point that they are moving consumers in a forced march towards "digital cable," which provides them only some semblance of control over distribution.
Tell that to the DSS folks, who suck in the (admittedly fairly low) cost of distributing fresh keycards every few months, and who must maintain and operate their monitoring systems to authenticate users and manage channel distribution.
Tell it to Microsoft, the company that has arguably experienced the biggest brunt of software piracy, despite any number of (fairly half-hearted) attempts to curb piracy in order to drive profit upward.
Technology isn't cost-free, especially not secure digital distribution technology.
All this without factoring in the biggest problem that content distributors face in the current age: end-user acceptance. The RIAA, for example, is so late to the party that it's almost inconceivable that they can have any impact on the market's direction, and certainly not by pushing "secure" technologies that have a higher hassle factor and little benefit over existing free and open distribution.
I don't exactly condone piracy -- I'd be out of a job if honest people didn't pay for software -- but I don't believe that introducing additional hassles and restrictions into end-users' lives is the right direction to go.
Maybe if the RIAA, SPA ("Don't Copy That Floppy!"), and other organizations of their ilk used education instead of FUD, they would see more positive results? Believing in the essential badness of human nature does not endear one to the marketplace.
you'd be able to take advantage of the superior TCP/IP stack linux has to offer.
I do every day. I praise Allah for its existance regularly. Doesn't help in this case.
euro VCD site
Bully for you, sir. I'm so impressed with your trading prowess. =P
and if you can't handle.rar files I guess that answers why you can't handle linux:p
Cute. But it's the coralling of piles and piles of dinky files that I find annoying. Has nothing to do with the merits of RAR over something else. I'd be just as crabby about having to download little ZOO splitfiles, or 180 sharfiles.
I don't think Stephenson was attacking Disney. I suspect that to merely be a poor choice of words on your part, because it's fairly obvious in his text that he admires the "Disney interface" for it's amazing power, for its ability to perform the tasks for which it is designed.
And you seem to take his comparisons of interfaces out of context. The purposes of the interfaces are practically impertinent to the discussion: they're meta-protocols by which some form of communication takes place. Perhaps he is unfair in comparing a nearly all-downstream "Disney interface" to a mostly-upstream GUI, but I think the parallels he draws are valid.
I think you have missed the point that Stephenson wasn't writing a critical piece. It was almost purely an illustrative work, and while you or I may or may not agree with his perceptions, it's not arguable that they are his perceptions.
At no point in his document does he indicate that only he speaks the gospel truth.
My point was that regardless of the legal and ethical concerns, I don't even see what the appeal is to begin with! Not only are you stealing intellectual property, but you are stealing crappy, artifacty, PostageStamp-O-Vision copies of intellectual property! With crummy audio!
Because the servers are consistently mobbed and usually hosted on distant and cruddy networks like home.com. I have *never* seen a VCD server get up above 50K/sec, and rarely above 20K.
I've got 1.5 megabit DSL unshared. That means I can hit 150K/sec when the server is willing to get that kind of speed out (and isn't on the far side of alternet) But I spent a couple of bored evenings trying to get a VCD, any VCD, to see what the fuss was about. But ain't nobody serving them that can hit my kind of speed.
At one point I sat down and spent three late-night hours trying to parlay four or five different servers into sending me data fast enough to fill my pipe.
Be realistic, it just ain't all that easy.
And let's be honest, the piles of little RARs are incredibly mindbogglingly annoying.
And DCC offerbots are really irritating. Someone ought to think about using FTP for serious piracy.
Never mind the legal aspects of this, but the technical and practical barriers are high enough that it's a pretty rare person who is willing to put in the several hours of work it takes to gather up a bunch of little RARs from all around the net into a VCD.
The hassle:payoff ratio is far out of kilter here. For all that effort, what do you get? A big, grainy MPEG. I think I'll pass, thanks.
Downloading these movies, burning them, and watching them on your home theatre system is more convenient that going out to the movies.
Downloading a couple of hundred little splitty RAR files from an IRC bot is how convenient, again?
Sure, you don't have the social disadvantages of actually going to the theater, but look at what you get:
* Grainy artifacty MPEG video * not presented in theatrical aspect ratio * No AC-3 * I'm sorry, but that TV of yours is not a 27' projection screen. Not even close.
I tried the VCD thing to see what all the hype was about, and so far, I've been unable to find a server that can come anywhere close to filling my 150K/sec pipe, and it's royally annoying to deal with all the pippy little split-files that pirates so dearly adore.
So far I've come nowhere close to actually finishing a VCD download, and even if I managed to do it -- which, honestly, if I can't sit through, it's very unlikely that Joe Sixpack will -- the VCDs I've seen out there (mostly HK bootlegs sold in the back of your shady corner VAR shops) are of amazingly poor quality.
I just cannot conceive in any way how it would be worth it to spend two hours fighting an IRC bot, getting piss-and transfer rates [I've *never* seen one of these servers get up above 50K/sec, and I spent a couple of nights hunting], and managing 50+ little fileparts, just to have an MPEG of a film that'll be on LD or DVD in a couple of months anyways. I don't get how people can find the hassle worth it.
Translation: I hated the amount of time and effort it consumed to get anywhere close to acquiring one of these things, and if the experience is generally like that, the payoff just isn't there. Nevermind the ethical concerns.
Even with a megabit and a half of unshared residential bandwidth, I just can't see myself wanting to spend a couple of hours pulling down an MPEG VCD image of some Hong Kong ShoulderVision version of the latest flick.
Yes, $9 is a whole hell of a lot of dough to scrape up to go see the film in person, but given the difference between a half-decent theater experience (or even a half-decent home theater experience!) and some grainy VideoCD, I think it's worth it to scrape up the cash and risk the customary repeated chair-kickings from the incessantly babbling child behind me.
VideoCD does not have source material quality equivalent to something I would want to own, even for the ostensible free price of DCCing it from EFNet #vcd (never mind that the DCC fserves were amazingly slow when I tried it on a lark... they all seem to reside on home.com or some other poorly-peered network).
In fact, the fserve experience is such a pain the ass that I can't imagine anyone wanting to deal with queueing up 150 little rar'ed-up bits of a grainy SneakerCam VCD anyways! I'd rather just hold out for a few months and cop the LD, and have the flick in nice widescreen with AC-3.
Slashdot Mirror
In a few years, the situation will be different, with more infrastructure in place and wider competition from DSL.
Is this accurate? I thought it was the other way 'round: DSL is pretty much the only choice in most of the country, and the far-off pipe dream of cable is a distant but looming threat.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but at work exactly two people have cable modem access, both live way out in the boonies. Everyone else (like I) has 384k CIR DSL, because that's all you can affordably get these days. [Nevermind that the CIR is complete bull. Everyone's hitting the 1.5M burst rate.]
Welcome to California.
Is the situation really reversed in the larger national context?
[long list of woes]
Not to be rude, but I believe you spelled PacBell/SBC incorrectly.
The practices you site are endemic to every RBOC I've ever seen. Nothing about BellSouth makes them especially worse than the others. Not that I discourage complaints -- it's possible that if people start making more noise about how poorly their RBOC treats them, there might eventually be some changes!
The best way to do it though is to run Terminal Server.
/" &
And Terminal Server comes built into which version of NT4? Oh.
Funny how multiuser capabilities are built into nearly every major OS since 1970, disregarding the degenerate case of a few popular desktop products, and yet is an add-on product grafted on to NT over 10 years after its initial release.
What's the NT equivalent of:
$ sudo fredp -c "xterm" &
$ sudo miked -c "xterm" &
$ sudo billg -c "rm -fr
$ sudo luser -c "netscape http://www.microsoft.com/" &
$ sudo yuser -c "netscape http://www.sun.com/" &
[CTRL][ALT][F1]
gin: harrys
ord:
$ top
[CTRL][ALT][F12]
I'd imagine it would involve something arcane and poorly documented, involving manipulating SIDs by hand. And I strongly suspect it wouldn't be something the casual user could take advantage of.
Yes, it's unfair to say NT isn't multiuser. With some various bolt-ons and heavy work with a saw, it is in fact multiuser by most standards. However, I think it's fair to say NT isn't as thoroughly or intuitively multiuser as UNIX.
That seems to be by design as best I can tell.
...if they'll provide binaries for those of us who already have the games on That Other Platform.
I already own the data, all I need are nice new Linux binaries.
The OS needs to grow out of the "Keep a 386 useful" to a higher level now.
Why? So you can -- as you allude to -- commercially exploit it? I welcome the contributions that you will make as a result of finding that, since the drivers and documentation you're looking for don't exist, you'll write them yourself as a part of your commercial project.
Obviously, since you plan to profit from using Linux, and you've found an itch to scratch before you can do so, the Linux community stands to gain from your work. That's the altruistic side of how Free Software works, after all.
But let me make a point: your little commercial project doesn't mean squat to me. I don't buy your hardware, I don't buy your software, and I'm not a shareholder of your company. Therefore, saying "the OS needs to grow out of..." is wrong. You want it to grow, and that's fine, but it doesn't need to in order to serve most of the needs to which it's put.
Linux runs on lots of cheap, dinky, commodity hardware. That is one of it's greatest values, and just because that threatens the business model of certain monolithic workstation vendors who'd like to embrace and extend it doesn't mean it has to change, as you say, "to a higher level now."
I am explicitly giving you the benefit of the doubt by not reading your comment as: "I would really love to use Linux but since it doesn't have all this stuff that my company wants, I'm going to bitch." I can't imagine that's what you intend to say, but I have to point out that it sounds an awful lot like it.
I'm also explicitly declaring that I welcome your certain nameless company into the Linux fold. Just don't force your worldview on me, 'kay?
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5
# 'cuz debian ships a cruddy 5.004
use Rant::Soapbox;
my $post = new Rant::Soapbox;
$post->content( <<END );
After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.
MOSIX is a very valuable contribution to free software and quite a few people, raving license lunatics especially, ought to say a silent (or vocal!) "thank you."
More software is a good thing. More free software is a very good thing. Rabid lunatic license paranoia is a bad thing.
END
warn "./ probably ate the last post due to entity translation.\n";
$post->send_without_preview || die "I hate when posting doesn't work.\n";
Help Slashdot beat the Mac's!
Excuse me. Someone who abuses apostraphes should not be giving out grammatical advice, even with tongue firmly in place amongst cheek.
Perhaps this cash infusion will be used for a nice propaganda campaign.
Perhaps this cash infusion will be used to finish the product to the point that it will boot on anything but the most vanilla hardware.
As desktop OS software goes, I have a certain liking for BeOS -- it's an example of the quality of well-done, cathedral software in much the same way as Linux & BSD are examples of quality bazaar-ish software (although admittedly, the BSD bazaar is fairly small, but that's beside the point here.)
Of course, the flip side is that BSD and Linux can install on the hardware I use, and BeOS can't (due to its reliance on an ATAPI CD-ROM drive for installation, which I just plain old don't use around here. I'd have to take my masq box down to yank the only ATAPI drive I have.)
It's a little premature to recommend a propaganda push. Let's see it boot, first.
100mbit connection..
divided by 5000 users..
= 20000 BITS per second per person.
Double that. It's a pair of 100Mb connections.
Not that it helps all that much to go from 2k/sec to 4...
But then again, cdrom.com doesn't run at 5000 users constantly, like it did with the 3600 limit.
I notice a lot of symbolic links in the distro directories, and was wondering if there's a good method to raping it all, maintaining the symbolic links, and packing it for a CD burn.
mirror scripts.
In the case of RedHat, there's a mirror perl script that's used to make a local copy from either the distribution server (assuming you can stand the lack of speed) or one of the mirrors. It's not too hard to set up, and if memory serves, there's a decent HOWTO about burning a bootable CD from your mirror files.
There are ISO images out there, but all of them seem to be on slow servers, alas. Nobody's managed to get an ISO up on a speedy server like wcarchive.
Debian alludes to being able to do much the same thing, but it was easier for me to just snare the ISO.
I hear tell that Mandrake also distributes official ISO images.
Histoically, Caldera has done the same thing, but so far I haven't come across the actual files for the most recent release (but then, I'm not looking too hard).
No sign of ISOs for SuSE or Stampede.
I wouldn't know squat about TurboLinux because... well, does anyone even use TL?
It's also noteworthy that one almost never finds ISO images of the various BSDs. Seems like the BSD folks are image-averse, preferring (like Debian) to guide folks towards mirroring and (unlike Debian) not distributing an ISO at all. This is vaguely understandable given the size of the thing.
I'm sorry to hear that your route to wcarchive is so bad. I can assure you that there is plenty of bandwidth available to the box: from home, I get full line speed (150K/second) every time I go there. Of course, they peer directly with my upstream's (Pac Bell DSL) router at PBNAP, so I'm 7 hops from the box (Hey! Waitaminnit! Yt used to be 5! There goes PBI adding more routing between me and the backbone... argh!).
At work, I've hit 400K/sec, but then we have way more OC-48s into BBN than we know what to do with.
You obviously don't own a K6, nor bothered to look at any data aside from MHz.
I've owned three. And received excellent performance from all of them. Integer performance has always been a strong point of the K6, and that held true. Certainly I am able to perceive a difference in performance between the K6/200 and the MMX/200, in the AMD's favor.
My friend bought one for that reason. It couldn't compile the kernel, thanks to various errors AMD eventually got rid of.
The Signal 11 / Segfault problem was resolved in steppings prior to the debut of the 233. I believe it existed only in steppings prior to revision C, all of which were 166 and 200 MHz parts. My early K6/200, at 225 on a 75MHz bus, is quite good at compiling kernels, or X, or what have you.
if you try something FPU intensive like playing mp3s or quake
Need I even bother trotting out the old "AMD FPU is faster, it's just not pipelined enough" argument? I get the feeling this is going to be one of those perennial Hatfield & McCoy blood feuds.
Be careful buying AMD. They make good chips, but they've never released a chip which could compete with its intel equivilant in all categories.
I would say the same things about Intel chips. The C300A cranked up to 464MHz, roughly the equivalent of the K6/3-450, lacks 3DNow and the AMD part's higher-performance cache, for example.
I'm a firm believer in price/performance. That's why I sprung for the C300A with my most recent CPU. $60 for a 464MHz part that outstrips a P2 is, hands down, the bargain of the year. Until the stock of 300 MHz Celerons dries up completely, Intel is at the top of my chart.
Honestly, I think I'll be happy on the day the Alpha comes out on top of said "chart". Unfortunately it's still priced out of the range of something I would purchase for personal use.
First AMD said about the same thing about the K6 among other chips...
And shortly after ramping up production, the K6 was the fastest x86 chip in production inclusive of Intel's offerings for several months. Try not to omit that little tidbit.
If you're complaining about a lack of good cases, it's pretty safe to say you've never worked with the SuperMicro 750. It's a dream case. Everything is accessible, everything is done with common sense, and it's actually fairly attractive as the typical klunky eastern-bloc design of cases go.
I think they're unattractive. But it's not for me to say what people might enjoy. I simply have some minor criticisms:
They look cheap. Really cheap. Like bargain basement $29 at the corner-OEM-shop cheap. Maybe it's the dirt-poor quality of the images (or the site in general), but I get a general sense of flimsiness from looking at them. Then again, I get the same feeling from iMacs and iLoaf boxes.
Bad marketing. People who care about their case are going to go out and drop the $200 for a SuperMicro 750 and a few cans of Krylon. Everyone else will pretty much take whatever is on the shelf at Sears. VARs are going to stay away from these things in droves.
Poor I.D. What is with that swoopy neckline bit? Why does it look like something clipped on to an existing plain sheetmetal case? It seems like in ripping off the iLoaf and the iMac, these guys have snapped up only the things that are annoying about its design (with the exception of those funky crate-handles... good god, what was Apple thinking when they said, "Hey, let's put 4 spoilers on it! That'll make people think it's fast!")
Color selection. What's it going to take to get a *good* case in black? It seems like black hardware is always of the extremely flimsy variety.
And as a general aside to all of the folks ranting about the genius of the Apple iLoaf case: "Go look at a SM 750."
Lemley pointed to the recent launch of DIVX, a technologically protected version of the digital versatile disc, or DVD. "If I bought a movie on DIVX it would expire after a specified time," much like the self-destructing tapes in Mission: Impossible, Lemley explained.
It seems counterintuitive to me that one would want to compare a product to DIVX as a model for success. Given that the market has essentially spurned DIVX, and that the enthusiast community has rejected it even more violently, I would strongly advise any vendor from drawing this kind of parallel, as Professor Lemley. Either he is taking a dig at Intertrust's system, which I doubt, or he is especially clueless.
To say, "See! This product is just like DIVX!" seems to be a recipe for disaster.
"Technology makes enforcement essentially costless," says Mark Lemley, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, who adds that tech fixes offer IP holders more control over their products than they would otherwise get.
Here Lemley seems to suggest that the cost of developing a secure distribution system, as well as maintaining it, is very low.
Tell that to cable TV operators, who have seen analog descramblers proliferate to the point that they are moving consumers in a forced march towards "digital cable," which provides them only some semblance of control over distribution.
Tell that to the DSS folks, who suck in the (admittedly fairly low) cost of distributing fresh keycards every few months, and who must maintain and operate their monitoring systems to authenticate users and manage channel distribution.
Tell it to Microsoft, the company that has arguably experienced the biggest brunt of software piracy, despite any number of (fairly half-hearted) attempts to curb piracy in order to drive profit upward.
Technology isn't cost-free, especially not secure digital distribution technology.
All this without factoring in the biggest problem that content distributors face in the current age: end-user acceptance. The RIAA, for example, is so late to the party that it's almost inconceivable that they can have any impact on the market's direction, and certainly not by pushing "secure" technologies that have a higher hassle factor and little benefit over existing free and open distribution.
I don't exactly condone piracy -- I'd be out of a job if honest people didn't pay for software -- but I don't believe that introducing additional hassles and restrictions into end-users' lives is the right direction to go.
Maybe if the RIAA, SPA ("Don't Copy That Floppy!"), and other organizations of their ilk used education instead of FUD, they would see more positive results? Believing in the essential badness of human nature does not endear one to the marketplace.
Get out to the theaters some time. $9 is not unheard of, $8.50 is not really all that uncommon, and $7 is a rare deal.
you'd be able to take advantage of the superior TCP/IP stack linux has to offer.
.rar files I guess that answers why you can't handle linux :p
I do every day. I praise Allah for its existance regularly. Doesn't help in this case.
euro VCD site
Bully for you, sir. I'm so impressed with your trading prowess. =P
and if you can't handle
Cute. But it's the coralling of piles and piles of dinky files that I find annoying. Has nothing to do with the merits of RAR over something else. I'd be just as crabby about having to download little ZOO splitfiles, or 180 sharfiles.
{FLASHBACK TYPE=C64}
...oh, Punter protocol, how I miss you...
{/FLASHBACK}
I don't think Stephenson was attacking Disney. I suspect that to merely be a poor choice of words on your part, because it's fairly obvious in his text that he admires the "Disney interface" for it's amazing power, for its ability to perform the tasks for which it is designed.
And you seem to take his comparisons of interfaces out of context. The purposes of the interfaces are practically impertinent to the discussion: they're meta-protocols by which some form of communication takes place. Perhaps he is unfair in comparing a nearly all-downstream "Disney interface" to a mostly-upstream GUI, but I think the parallels he draws are valid.
I think you have missed the point that Stephenson wasn't writing a critical piece. It was almost purely an illustrative work, and while you or I may or may not agree with his perceptions, it's not arguable that they are his perceptions.
At no point in his document does he indicate that only he speaks the gospel truth.
This has just what to do with what I was saying?
My point was that regardless of the legal and ethical concerns, I don't even see what the appeal is to begin with! Not only are you stealing intellectual property, but you are stealing crappy, artifacty, PostageStamp-O-Vision copies of intellectual property! With crummy audio!
Because the servers are consistently mobbed and usually hosted on distant and cruddy networks like home.com. I have *never* seen a VCD server get up above 50K/sec, and rarely above 20K.
I've got 1.5 megabit DSL unshared. That means I can hit 150K/sec when the server is willing to get that kind of speed out (and isn't on the far side of alternet) But I spent a couple of bored evenings trying to get a VCD, any VCD, to see what the fuss was about. But ain't nobody serving them that can hit my kind of speed.
At one point I sat down and spent three late-night hours trying to parlay four or five different servers into sending me data fast enough to fill my pipe.
Be realistic, it just ain't all that easy.
And let's be honest, the piles of little RARs are incredibly mindbogglingly annoying.
And DCC offerbots are really irritating. Someone ought to think about using FTP for serious piracy.
Never mind the legal aspects of this, but the technical and practical barriers are high enough that it's a pretty rare person who is willing to put in the several hours of work it takes to gather up a bunch of little RARs from all around the net into a VCD.
The hassle:payoff ratio is far out of kilter here. For all that effort, what do you get? A big, grainy MPEG. I think I'll pass, thanks.
Downloading these movies, burning them, and watching them on your home theatre system is more convenient that going out to the movies.
Downloading a couple of hundred little splitty RAR files from an IRC bot is how convenient, again?
Sure, you don't have the social disadvantages of actually going to the theater, but look at what you get:
* Grainy artifacty MPEG video
* not presented in theatrical aspect ratio
* No AC-3
* I'm sorry, but that TV of yours is not a 27' projection screen. Not even close.
I tried the VCD thing to see what all the hype was about, and so far, I've been unable to find a server that can come anywhere close to filling my 150K/sec pipe, and it's royally annoying to deal with all the pippy little split-files that pirates so dearly adore.
So far I've come nowhere close to actually finishing a VCD download, and even if I managed to do it -- which, honestly, if I can't sit through, it's very unlikely that Joe Sixpack will -- the VCDs I've seen out there (mostly HK bootlegs sold in the back of your shady corner VAR shops) are of amazingly poor quality.
I just cannot conceive in any way how it would be worth it to spend two hours fighting an IRC bot, getting piss-and transfer rates [I've *never* seen one of these servers get up above 50K/sec, and I spent a couple of nights hunting], and managing 50+ little fileparts, just to have an MPEG of a film that'll be on LD or DVD in a couple of months anyways. I don't get how people can find the hassle worth it.
Translation: I hated the amount of time and effort it consumed to get anywhere close to acquiring one of these things, and if the experience is generally like that, the payoff just isn't there. Nevermind the ethical concerns.
Any theater which can only break even on selling housefuls of $9 tickets needs to seriously reconsider its business model.
Even with a megabit and a half of unshared residential bandwidth, I just can't see myself wanting to spend a couple of hours pulling down an MPEG VCD image of some Hong Kong ShoulderVision version of the latest flick.
Yes, $9 is a whole hell of a lot of dough to scrape up to go see the film in person, but given the difference between a half-decent theater experience (or even a half-decent home theater experience!) and some grainy VideoCD, I think it's worth it to scrape up the cash and risk the customary repeated chair-kickings from the incessantly babbling child behind me.
VideoCD does not have source material quality equivalent to something I would want to own, even for the ostensible free price of DCCing it from EFNet #vcd (never mind that the DCC fserves were amazingly slow when I tried it on a lark... they all seem to reside on home.com or some other poorly-peered network).
In fact, the fserve experience is such a pain the ass that I can't imagine anyone wanting to deal with queueing up 150 little rar'ed-up bits of a grainy SneakerCam VCD anyways! I'd rather just hold out for a few months and cop the LD, and have the flick in nice widescreen with AC-3.