You ask a friend who knows more about computers to maintain yours. He sets it up with TPM, using a TPM-supporting operating system. Whenever you want to install software, you ask him, but you'd have to anyway. The information needed for someone else to do the same thing is also provided to you, it's not something you understand, but if your friend disappears, you can always get someone else who's tech savvy to continue where he left off.
Now, a few months later, your son tries to download a "free game". The free game is actually a trojan horse. The son is instantly stopped in his tracks because the free game is not signed by a trusted party, so the TPM supporting operating system prevents it from being run. A few weeks later, a buffer overflow in "Internet Wanderer" is discovered. Nobody bothers to exploit it, because only TPMOS runs Internet Wanderer, so even if you try to exploit it, the CPU will instantly crash Internet Wanderer the moment the code is called.
From a consumer point of view, as long as they have some control over who manages their system, TPM in an operating system that supports TPM properly (rather than using it as a crap copy-control mechanism like OS X) is theoretically a very good thing.
With respect, the GP's on the nose and your apparent lead-in to an ad-hominem attack doesn't exactly answer it.
I, personally, have had a variety of Macs, including two blue and whites, a couple of Beige G3s, and a TiBook. I can't say that any of these three model types were particularly alike, indeed I'd probably find more simularities (and less difficulty writing a common operating system) between my PCs (which are similarly as varied.)
It's not even as if OS X is perfectly integrated with all three: on the Beige G3s, Jaguar never supported some of the more basic features of the hardware, such as the serial ports and floppy drive. On the Blue and Whites, the ATI Rage 128 drivers have bugs such that blues occasionally (but reproducably and consistantly) get replaced with purples and yellows. The TiBook 800 worked fine with Jaguar, but Panther's temperature controls are wonky and the machine consistantly runs the fan too late, leading to guaranteed major crashes (as in the screen going gray and you getting the "You MUST restart your computer" message) after using anything majorly CPU heavy (such as Unreal.)
Having owned a variety of machines since the mid-eighties, I honestly can't say Apple's much vaunted "integration" is anything but a load of marketing hype. Their machines are as varied as the PC platform, but their belief they are testing their software with "everything out there" leads them to sloppy assumptions. The Mac platform is not faster than anything else, nor more reliable in practice, nor supportive of the entire system. I'm sure their latest PowerMac G5s are pretty reliable and "well supported", but I'd be surprised if, three or four years down the line, anyone still relying upon them will be singing the same tune.
A fractionally more famous hidden HTML comment appeared in Al Gore's election website, which thanked people who were "viewing source" for their interest and encouraged them to take part in the campaign.
monopoly is when a company has EXCLUSIVE control over a product or service,
More or less correct.
meaning that there is only ONE company who offers a product or service.
Absolutely not, that's doesn't follow at all.
One example of where a company can have exclusive control over a product or service but not be the only one offering products or services is where that company's hold on the market is such that others offering products or services in the same domain do so at the monopolist's grace, or do so with no long term business viability.
I could have competed with AT&T in the 1970s. I could have walked around the people in my neighbourhood with a bunch of copper wires and offered people phone service, and according to your definition, that would have meant AT&T wasn't a monopoly. Of course they were. And while GNU/Linux remains stuck in its meagre marketshare as far as the desktop goes, and Apple continues to sell desktop PCs with Microsoft's support rather than opposition, we can reliably call Microsoft a monopoly too.
One day it's possible that the market will change in a significant way that makes Microsoft's products obsolete. But until that day, their stranglehold on the desktop remains.
Running X11 apps under OS X isn't a pleasant experience, FWIW. That said, NeoOffice/J is an excellent improved OpenOffice.org system that replaces the X11 UI with one written in Java. So your point, in a roundabout way, still stands.
I can't agree with all the dissing of the Mac WMV player here.
It's a simple, light, client, that's spyware free and whose only bullshit is a "skin" selector. Unlike QuickTime it supports all of the basics in the box (the basic, "free", QT client doesn't even support full screen mode - and no bullshit please from the Apple apologists about how you can write AppleScript hacks to do this, given the absolute spitting contempt you'd have for anyone else's product that requires you launch an external script you've obtained from a third party to have that product do something that should be built in in the first place), and it's not nagware.
It does exactly what it's supposed to do. Any faults with "optimization" you complain about certainly haven't been noticed here on my ancient 800MHz TiBook.
Funnily enough, RealOne on Mac is likewise. An excellent bare-bones-but-does-everything-necessary-and-no-bu llshit client. I've only ever used it on Mac and GNU/Linux, so I get awfully surprised when I hear Slashdotters whining about it being a spyware bloat-fest. Well, apparently it is, on Windows.
WMV on Mac is better than QuickTime on Mac. It shouldn't be, but it is. It does what it's supposed to do. Performance is excellent. The only complaints I've ever had is that it's not as up-to-date as the Windows equivalent and that the format itself, like QuickTime, like Real, is an undocumented DRM-fest. But as a client, it's excellent. Its absense on the Mac platform (and worse, the fact we have to access WMV files via Apple's awful QuickTime client) is sad indeed.
Re:Excess power usage
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Smart Power
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· Score: 3, Funny
That was outstanding, those analogies made about as much sense as a sausage mixer in a hot-tub to a certified accountant.
1. Net based to begin with - ie you know you're accessing something that's a front end to a huge database. Part of the iTunes database that it uses is on your own PC. iTunes is not 100% net oriented.
2. You know that Amazon is going to record purchases and visits, because that's a necessary part of the system.
3. Amazon shoves the fact it's doing this in your face, and does so in a way that means you know (a) what it's doing and the types of information it records and (b) how it's used. We all know what Amazon is doing, and we, most of us at least, generally find it useful.
4. Amazon doesn't use anything outside of its "realm" - it's not scanning other website's logs, let alone your hard disk or even your book shelves.
Entirely different. Chalk and cheese. Apples and oranges. etc.
As I read the article, they're not using CSS for the DVDs, but an entirely different encryption standard which is only implemented by special DVD players that support screener DVDs - this is one of the newer attempts to prevent screeners from being leaked.
Exactly why you'd implement region encoding on a screener-only DVD system is open to question. Maybe it's a legacy thing. Either way, it's dumbass, and much as I like the guy, I'm glad a major hollywood figure is getting a virtual beating for using DRM.
With anything where you can't compare apples to oranges, you can make up claim and find evidence to support it.
US carriers generally operate a different tariff structure to that of the rest of the world. As a result, it's hard to make direct comparisons. As a heavy mobile phone user, I have to say the US plans are, ultimately, cheaper than anything I'd find in the UK. If I wasn't a heavy user, then the plans would be a little more difficult to make use of.
Most US plans feature a large "unmetered" component. This generally comprises of off-peak calls, and/or in-network calls. Additionally, most feature a largish number of bundled minutes for calls that are metered.
Conversely, most UK plans (I'm familiar with the UK, but do not believe it's atypical) either comprise of a largish number of bundled minutes, typically for the same cost as the equivalent US plans (ie poorer value, because unmetered off-peak minutes aren't included), or are pay as you go, with rates generally comparable to US pay as you go rates. However, unlike the US, the minimum spend for a UK pay-as-you-go plan is usually much, much, lower. It's hard to spend less than $10 a month on top-ups, even if you never use the phone, to maintain a PAYG plan in the US (and many plans require topping up by $30 a month or worse), whereas typically you just need to make a phone call every few months to keep a UK PAYG plan active.
What does this mean in practice? It means that if you make thousands of minutes of calls a month, you're almost certainly better off in the US. Conversely, if you make one call every few days, and that's rarely more than a minute long, Europeans generally have better options available to them.
BTW, whether the phone subscriber pays for incoming calls is irrelevent to which system has the lower rates. Someone always pays for calls to mobiles, whether it's the subscriber or the caller, and on average, it's likely to balance out.
Putting in EVDO would increase the cost of the device while ensuring the only people who can make use of that feature are those who are also prepared to pay a dedicated service subscription on top of that, and who live in the handful of countries with IS95 ("CDMA") services.
Your point about Verizon and Bluetooth has an answer: as I understand it, Verizon will hook up any compatable phone to its service on request. If you want a phone that doesn't have the bluetooth capabilities crippled, buy it in that form, from a vendor that sells such phones unlocked, and switch your service over that way. Expect to pay more - Verizon doesn't subsidize phones it doesn't control.
As far as the GP's $100 figure goes, that strikes me as a lower rather than higher estimate. "Cheap" in the cellphone industry, meaning "massively cut down, stripped bare, using the simplest technology available, and mass produced up the wazoo" is around the $50-100 mark. While one can argue that an EVDO card doesn't have to support push-button interfaces, batteries, or LCD screens, equally the EVDO card requires more processing power than a "cheap" cellphone (which typically doesn't support EVDO...), and wouldn't be mass produced to the same level. $100 strikes me as a low estimate, not a high estimate. Of course, as you suggest, the functionality could be added as a plug in card. But then again, the functionality could be added in the form of an external bluetooth compatable cellphone. Which is probably better, and is what the 770 supports.
That's one possibility. Likewise it may be the extreme opposite. As OS X support dries up for PPC over the next ten years, Yellow Dog may be the only genuinely supported operating system for the existing base of PPC machines. More realisticly, it'll share that role with a few variants of the *BSDs.
That's not going to be a large number, with most of the users likely to be people building little servers etc, but it'll be a dominant player in that small market, which may be higher than the "Number of people who want to run GNU/Linux on a box that comes with OS X" in 2006.
They're a moderately respected Scottish newspaper. The British media in general isn't that great, IMO (I'm an ex-Brit), but the Scotsman is neither a good nor bad example of it.
I believe others have posted the original source was New Scientist which can be a good magazine, and can be downright awful. I subscribed to them for a year, and in that one year they published no less than three cover stories speculating on whether we live in The Matrix. That's them doing the pop-science thing to try to draw readers into the magazine to read the more serious stuff, but it does undermine the more serious stuff too.
Or we could ignore classification completely, including the "commercially owned" nonsense which has always been a loophole, not something rational. While, yes, heavy lifting vehicles used in industry will use higher amounts of fuel, the average B2B salesperson doesn't need an SUV any more than the average commuter.
Businesses that require industrial vehicles will be within a particular percentage of vehicles sold over the next few years, so it's relatively easy to factor them in in a call to generally reduce average gas usage figures.
There's no reason to target consumers as if most vehicles sold to businesses would never need gas usage reductions, or consumers would never (as has been proven wrong) buy a truck or SUV.
No, the GP's right. The article he quoted implied that soundtrack was irrelevent, by saying, directly, that it's the visual performance that matters.
There are a bunch of films that I believe got through in part because of the soundtracks. SW:ANH may have had an interesting story, but the music, in my view, did a fantastic job of communicating that, and I don't doubt that without it, it'd have been seen as a movie with interesting effects but little else to commend it. Watching ANH without the music would be like reading a book without punctuation marks.
Re:No conspiracy to see here [OT?]
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The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 1, Insightful
It's relatively easy to explain. You keep going on, and on, and on, and on, and on about how copyrights should be abolished. A sizable proportion, possible the majority, I don't know, of Slashdot readers are, to put it bluntly, cheapskate freeloaders who want to be able to download anything they like and not contribute a cent towards its development.
These people are being seriously burnt right now, because a group representing a large number of companies that fund the creation of much that the aforementioned Slashdot readers want for free (No! Not the Association of Responsible Sellers of Erotica; I'm talking about the music industry's rep, the RIAA) is threatening them with ferocious lawsuits of the type that seriously hurt.
Now this position doesn't make them libertarians, let alone anarchists, or even anarcho-capitalists, or Trotskyite Libertarians, or the Judean People's Front. But it does make them supportive of anyone who promotes abolishing laws against freeloading. And that's what you're doing.
So you're being modded up. You can always depend on those threatened by a law to support those who oppose it, regardless of whether the law is right, wrong, or right in principle but in need of serious tweaking.
HSDPA is part of the W-CDMA standard, which is Qualcomm's next generation high speed cellular tech
Not really. W-CDMA was developed by one of the Japanese networks (I forget which) and is an air interface technology (ie it forms the bottom layers of a mobile phone system, it's not a system by itself.) One of the standards that runs over it is UMTS, which is essentially the next version of GSM. Qualcomm had little to do with W-CDMA's development, though they're nominally supporting it.
Qualcomm's mobile phone standard is called IS-95, is often refered to as CDMA, and will not likely use W-CDMA at any time soon.
FYI, CDMA is a peer of GSM. CDMA is used by Sprint, Verizon, Alltel etc, while GSM is used by T-Mobile, Cingular. 1xRTT is CDMA data, while GPRS is GSM data. EVDO et al are high speed CDMA data, while the EDGE stuff is GSM's answer
EDGE is a bolt on to existing GSM networks to improve data rates and is nominally 3G, but on the bottom end of that. However, UMTS is ultimately GSM's path to 3G data rates. W-CDMA and HSDPA are supported by UMTS. So you'll see Cingular and T-Mobile rolling this technology out, while Sprint PCS, Verizon, et al, rolling out the EVDO stuff.
Lord of the Rings? Do you not know how much nine and a half hours of airtime costs, even with free nights, weekends, and special extended version deleted scenes included?
In any case, all of this reminds me of the problems we (about ten students) had a decade or so back when we got lost on a field trip after our plane ran out of fuel somewhere in the Pacific ocean. We, fortunately, were close to a neighbouring island, and all swam to safety, but we immediately had problems. There was no problem with the notion of being rescued, we found garbage on one side of the island with evidence (old programmes and menus) that a cruise ship landed there once every month to allow passengers to tour. But in the mean time, we had to find food, build shelter, and do something to enable communication throughout the entire island.
The latter probably deserves some explanation. Early on we found that we had problems with people wandering off and being unreachable for extended periods of time. We were worried about the potential for accidents, with people stranded and nobody able to find them. What we all felt was necessary was a crude phone network. Opinion differed as to whether we should use copper, putting fixed line telephones around the island at convenient locations, or whether we should use something like a mobile phone system. In the end, I think most people were agreed the latter was preferable. We used a crude, power level controlled, frequency hopping TDMA over FSK signaling system (largely to save power) with a simple ADPCM codec throttled down to 16kbps (transmitted speech was bearable but hardly "toll quality". We went at that rate to save transistors and also help save power) This took a lot of work, and was quite a learning experience: only one person in the group had ever built a transistor before from raw sand, so you can imagine the problems we had building a full blown mobile phone. Some work though, some of which involved magnifying glasses (well, glasses) and sunlight, meant we were able to build some simple integrated circuits, including one that implemented 16 NAND gates.
In the end, eight of us worked on the mobile phone system, while one went out hunting for food and the other built a number of huts for shelter. The completed system was ready a few days before help finally arrived: it wasn't that impressive, battery life (the batteries weren't rechargable, we used limes with copper and iron cathodes/anodes) was about a day, less if you used the things, and despite seventeen well placed base stations around the island (which was, maybe, five miles wide - it took around three or four hours to walk around the entire thing), there were a number of coverage blackspots.
Anyway, I guess this relates to your point thusly: early on, we had a lot of arguments about what the cellphones should include. Many wanted us to power the things with full blown DSP CPUs rather than build discrete logic finite state machines to control the things. The argument that was with general purpose CPUs, we could also put games, calculators, and calanders on the things. It all came down to timings, with some people feeling we should be as basic as possible, so our phones could be online relatively quickly. In the end the group sided with the latter point of view. Clearly sometimes simpler is better. When you're building a communications system with limited resources, clearly trying to build an all-singing all-dancing cellphone system is stupid. I can't imagine how long it would have taken had we tried to implement, say, a CDMA based system.
As an aside I still have my phone somewhere. I'm very proud of the SIM card, which I built myself out of melted copper and pulp made out of crushed leaves and tree bark juice. The phone number, five-seven-two, is hardwired.
Cingular and the Sprint PCS part of Sprint-Nextel have unlimited data plans too, as I understand it, they're just a little pricy. If I recall correctly, Cingular's data add-on is around $80 (they have lower priced offerings if you promise to only use it with a PDA, but I'd call that a "limit") Most, if not all, packet data offerings result in an IP address that either (a) is NAT'd, or (b) doesn't accept incoming connections (or does, but only from IP addresses recently contacted)
Not that I'm disagreeing with you that there's a lot of price gouging going on. Most operators seem to price their services as if they're still selling 8kps CDPD packet data. 3c a kilobyte is absurd, and Cingular looks for every excuse to charge it (MediaNET on GoPhone, for example, will result in those charges if you try to use it with a laptop to access ordinary TCP/IP, even though they advertise a 1c a kilobyte rate for WAP browsing)
The vulnerability is in the Microsoft Windows Graphics Rendering Engine, which is a part of the Windows kernel, and is why the exploit affects Windows versions from Win98 to WinXP.
Are you sure about that? Windows 98 and Windows XP have completely different kernels - I don't mean XP's 98 with a bit added, I mean XP is the latest version of NT, and 98 is the latest version of "DOS" Windows 1.0. They're unrelated as operating systems, except Microsoft has made the effort to get them successively more compatable so it can drop "DOS" Windows completely. Which it has.
They no doubt share common code, but it's in user space, not kernel space.
I also have a gut feeling that the Graphics Rendering Engine doesn't reside in kernel space in XP. While Microsoft was criticised for undermining it's original microkernel design when, in NT 4, they added the display device drivers to the kernel, I don't believe they added substantially more than that.
Virtual PC and WINE running under Linux do not use the Microsoft Graphics Rendering Engine.
Virtual PC almost certainly does. It doesn't replace the kernel or rest of Windows at all. It requires a clean, complete, copy of Microsoft Windows be installed inside of it.
As for WINE, many people do replace most of the components of WINE with those of Windows except for some specific instances. Whether the GRE is one of those components I don't know. WINE tries to be compatable "as-is", but has been woefully incomplete in the past, and it's just been easier for many people to install the "real" Windows DLLs and other system files with it.
Even if they did, a Windows program trying to run in a Linux environment is a fish out of water, and can't do much besides SEGFAULT and exit.
The purpose of WINE is to provide Windows programs with the ability to run and do more than SEGFAULT and exit. The purpose of Virtual PC is to provide a complete emulation of a PC. In both senses, a Windows application running under either in a Linux environment is not a "Fish out of water", more a "Fish in a bowl." Under Virtual PC, the app will be able to do as much damage to the virtual environment as the same app running on a Windows-only PC. Under WINE, the app may be able to infect those parts of the file system visible to the WINE environment, depending on whether WINE is compatable enough.
Therefore, Linux (and Mac) users are safe, even if they are running IE or Office - just like the article said.
If the Mac is running a PC emulator, then no, they're not completely safe, their Windows virtual environment may be trashable. The rest of the Mac will likely be fine. The same is true of a Virtual PC based system under Linux. The jury is out in terms of the information available to me on whether IE running under WINE is suseptable. I don't know if the GRE is one of the things WINE emulates always or only optionally.
I've never had a problem with wildcards. I've always known exactly how they work. So I'm still trying to work out how, some time around 8 years ago, I'm looking around at/etc, and thinking "There's a passwd~, and passwd.bak, and I really should get rid of them" (first mistake), typed "rm/etc/passwd*" (because the files I wanted to delete were passwd with something on the end, right?)
It didn't even click right away. I suddenly couldn't do anything, and it took several seconds before it clicked that the error messages were because I'd deleted "passwd", because my choice of wildcard was stupid.
It's possible to be a good developer yet not be competent to admin one's own machine.
Well, yeah, but the discussion seems to be breaking down after a relatively reasonable comment that if a developer has a "development box" that they admin, and they break it, they should fix it.
I don't normally side with the Tech Services people on Slashdot, because most of the ones who appear on Slashdot are, well, to be honest, power-crazed nuts, but in this case the OP was absolutely right. If you want the right to admin your own machine, it's natural you should be the one to fix it. Ask for help if need be, but don't expect someone else to fix your own problem. You're either competent enough to ask for a particular right, and should be responsible for exercising it, or not, in which case get someone else to do it.
The aforementioned TS.on.slashdot people tend to be grizzled veterans who have had to clear up more than one mess because a manager or CEO insisted that, because of their position within the company, they should have admin rights because they're all-powerful and all-powerful-control-over-their-own-computer will go with their job. After clearing up spyware and putting all those "files I didn't think I needed" back into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, the TS.on.slashdot people tend to get to the point they want everyone to have a version of Windows that gets reinstalled every time you reboot the computer. Even if I disagree with them, I'm not remotely surprised. The relatively simple principle of "Want above the norm? Know what you're doing, and take responsibility" seems a much better alternative. The TS people I deal with in real life do tend to consider that a founding principle, and I thank them for it.
Re:KDE more configurable ?
on
Why KDE Rules
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· Score: 1
Also, I recall some talks of some developers saying that the menu bar at top could confuse users who use "focus follow mouse". As I use this focus model, I must agree.
Depends on how you implement bringing up the menu. If the menu is sitting up there permanently, then yeah, focus-follows-mouse is pretty much incompatable.
The Amiga, however, used to use a system where the menu didn't appear until you pressed the menu button on the mouse (the right button, FWIW.) As a result, focus followed mouse was perfectly compatable with the system (once the menu was up, it wouldn't changed until you released the button, so you could easily move the mouse there and select whatever you wanted without problems), and indeed there was a "Commodity" (a system hack in an AmigaOS framework designed for system hacks, essentially) that enabled FFM, with no real downside.
If/when I write my own operating system (*snort* hahahah! That'll probably get finished around the same time as my novel.;-), it'll use exactly that system. It worked very well, and pretty intuitively, and also meant the area taken up by the menu bar could be used for, for example, current application information, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, a few months later, your son tries to download a "free game". The free game is actually a trojan horse. The son is instantly stopped in his tracks because the free game is not signed by a trusted party, so the TPM supporting operating system prevents it from being run. A few weeks later, a buffer overflow in "Internet Wanderer" is discovered. Nobody bothers to exploit it, because only TPMOS runs Internet Wanderer, so even if you try to exploit it, the CPU will instantly crash Internet Wanderer the moment the code is called.
From a consumer point of view, as long as they have some control over who manages their system, TPM in an operating system that supports TPM properly (rather than using it as a crap copy-control mechanism like OS X) is theoretically a very good thing.
I, personally, have had a variety of Macs, including two blue and whites, a couple of Beige G3s, and a TiBook. I can't say that any of these three model types were particularly alike, indeed I'd probably find more simularities (and less difficulty writing a common operating system) between my PCs (which are similarly as varied.)
It's not even as if OS X is perfectly integrated with all three: on the Beige G3s, Jaguar never supported some of the more basic features of the hardware, such as the serial ports and floppy drive. On the Blue and Whites, the ATI Rage 128 drivers have bugs such that blues occasionally (but reproducably and consistantly) get replaced with purples and yellows. The TiBook 800 worked fine with Jaguar, but Panther's temperature controls are wonky and the machine consistantly runs the fan too late, leading to guaranteed major crashes (as in the screen going gray and you getting the "You MUST restart your computer" message) after using anything majorly CPU heavy (such as Unreal.)
Having owned a variety of machines since the mid-eighties, I honestly can't say Apple's much vaunted "integration" is anything but a load of marketing hype. Their machines are as varied as the PC platform, but their belief they are testing their software with "everything out there" leads them to sloppy assumptions. The Mac platform is not faster than anything else, nor more reliable in practice, nor supportive of the entire system. I'm sure their latest PowerMac G5s are pretty reliable and "well supported", but I'd be surprised if, three or four years down the line, anyone still relying upon them will be singing the same tune.
A fractionally more famous hidden HTML comment appeared in Al Gore's election website, which thanked people who were "viewing source" for their interest and encouraged them to take part in the campaign.
One example of where a company can have exclusive control over a product or service but not be the only one offering products or services is where that company's hold on the market is such that others offering products or services in the same domain do so at the monopolist's grace, or do so with no long term business viability.
I could have competed with AT&T in the 1970s. I could have walked around the people in my neighbourhood with a bunch of copper wires and offered people phone service, and according to your definition, that would have meant AT&T wasn't a monopoly. Of course they were. And while GNU/Linux remains stuck in its meagre marketshare as far as the desktop goes, and Apple continues to sell desktop PCs with Microsoft's support rather than opposition, we can reliably call Microsoft a monopoly too.
One day it's possible that the market will change in a significant way that makes Microsoft's products obsolete. But until that day, their stranglehold on the desktop remains.
Running X11 apps under OS X isn't a pleasant experience, FWIW. That said, NeoOffice/J is an excellent improved OpenOffice.org system that replaces the X11 UI with one written in Java. So your point, in a roundabout way, still stands.
It's a simple, light, client, that's spyware free and whose only bullshit is a "skin" selector. Unlike QuickTime it supports all of the basics in the box (the basic, "free", QT client doesn't even support full screen mode - and no bullshit please from the Apple apologists about how you can write AppleScript hacks to do this, given the absolute spitting contempt you'd have for anyone else's product that requires you launch an external script you've obtained from a third party to have that product do something that should be built in in the first place), and it's not nagware.
It does exactly what it's supposed to do. Any faults with "optimization" you complain about certainly haven't been noticed here on my ancient 800MHz TiBook.
Funnily enough, RealOne on Mac is likewise. An excellent bare-bones-but-does-everything-necessary-and-no-bu llshit client. I've only ever used it on Mac and GNU/Linux, so I get awfully surprised when I hear Slashdotters whining about it being a spyware bloat-fest. Well, apparently it is, on Windows.
WMV on Mac is better than QuickTime on Mac. It shouldn't be, but it is. It does what it's supposed to do. Performance is excellent. The only complaints I've ever had is that it's not as up-to-date as the Windows equivalent and that the format itself, like QuickTime, like Real, is an undocumented DRM-fest. But as a client, it's excellent. Its absense on the Mac platform (and worse, the fact we have to access WMV files via Apple's awful QuickTime client) is sad indeed.
Welcome to my friends list...
1. Net based to begin with - ie you know you're accessing something that's a front end to a huge database. Part of the iTunes database that it uses is on your own PC. iTunes is not 100% net oriented.
2. You know that Amazon is going to record purchases and visits, because that's a necessary part of the system.
3. Amazon shoves the fact it's doing this in your face, and does so in a way that means you know (a) what it's doing and the types of information it records and (b) how it's used. We all know what Amazon is doing, and we, most of us at least, generally find it useful.
4. Amazon doesn't use anything outside of its "realm" - it's not scanning other website's logs, let alone your hard disk or even your book shelves.
Entirely different. Chalk and cheese. Apples and oranges. etc.
Exactly why you'd implement region encoding on a screener-only DVD system is open to question. Maybe it's a legacy thing. Either way, it's dumbass, and much as I like the guy, I'm glad a major hollywood figure is getting a virtual beating for using DRM.
Couldn't you underclock it? Presumably you'd save power and reduce the temperature somewhat if you did that.
US carriers generally operate a different tariff structure to that of the rest of the world. As a result, it's hard to make direct comparisons. As a heavy mobile phone user, I have to say the US plans are, ultimately, cheaper than anything I'd find in the UK. If I wasn't a heavy user, then the plans would be a little more difficult to make use of.
Most US plans feature a large "unmetered" component. This generally comprises of off-peak calls, and/or in-network calls. Additionally, most feature a largish number of bundled minutes for calls that are metered.
Conversely, most UK plans (I'm familiar with the UK, but do not believe it's atypical) either comprise of a largish number of bundled minutes, typically for the same cost as the equivalent US plans (ie poorer value, because unmetered off-peak minutes aren't included), or are pay as you go, with rates generally comparable to US pay as you go rates. However, unlike the US, the minimum spend for a UK pay-as-you-go plan is usually much, much, lower. It's hard to spend less than $10 a month on top-ups, even if you never use the phone, to maintain a PAYG plan in the US (and many plans require topping up by $30 a month or worse), whereas typically you just need to make a phone call every few months to keep a UK PAYG plan active.
What does this mean in practice? It means that if you make thousands of minutes of calls a month, you're almost certainly better off in the US. Conversely, if you make one call every few days, and that's rarely more than a minute long, Europeans generally have better options available to them.
BTW, whether the phone subscriber pays for incoming calls is irrelevent to which system has the lower rates. Someone always pays for calls to mobiles, whether it's the subscriber or the caller, and on average, it's likely to balance out.
Your point about Verizon and Bluetooth has an answer: as I understand it, Verizon will hook up any compatable phone to its service on request. If you want a phone that doesn't have the bluetooth capabilities crippled, buy it in that form, from a vendor that sells such phones unlocked, and switch your service over that way. Expect to pay more - Verizon doesn't subsidize phones it doesn't control.
As far as the GP's $100 figure goes, that strikes me as a lower rather than higher estimate. "Cheap" in the cellphone industry, meaning "massively cut down, stripped bare, using the simplest technology available, and mass produced up the wazoo" is around the $50-100 mark. While one can argue that an EVDO card doesn't have to support push-button interfaces, batteries, or LCD screens, equally the EVDO card requires more processing power than a "cheap" cellphone (which typically doesn't support EVDO...), and wouldn't be mass produced to the same level. $100 strikes me as a low estimate, not a high estimate. Of course, as you suggest, the functionality could be added as a plug in card. But then again, the functionality could be added in the form of an external bluetooth compatable cellphone. Which is probably better, and is what the 770 supports.
That's not going to be a large number, with most of the users likely to be people building little servers etc, but it'll be a dominant player in that small market, which may be higher than the "Number of people who want to run GNU/Linux on a box that comes with OS X" in 2006.
I believe others have posted the original source was New Scientist which can be a good magazine, and can be downright awful. I subscribed to them for a year, and in that one year they published no less than three cover stories speculating on whether we live in The Matrix. That's them doing the pop-science thing to try to draw readers into the magazine to read the more serious stuff, but it does undermine the more serious stuff too.
Businesses that require industrial vehicles will be within a particular percentage of vehicles sold over the next few years, so it's relatively easy to factor them in in a call to generally reduce average gas usage figures.
There's no reason to target consumers as if most vehicles sold to businesses would never need gas usage reductions, or consumers would never (as has been proven wrong) buy a truck or SUV.
There are a bunch of films that I believe got through in part because of the soundtracks. SW:ANH may have had an interesting story, but the music, in my view, did a fantastic job of communicating that, and I don't doubt that without it, it'd have been seen as a movie with interesting effects but little else to commend it. Watching ANH without the music would be like reading a book without punctuation marks.
These people are being seriously burnt right now, because a group representing a large number of companies that fund the creation of much that the aforementioned Slashdot readers want for free (No! Not the Association of Responsible Sellers of Erotica; I'm talking about the music industry's rep, the RIAA) is threatening them with ferocious lawsuits of the type that seriously hurt.
Now this position doesn't make them libertarians, let alone anarchists, or even anarcho-capitalists, or Trotskyite Libertarians, or the Judean People's Front. But it does make them supportive of anyone who promotes abolishing laws against freeloading. And that's what you're doing.
So you're being modded up. You can always depend on those threatened by a law to support those who oppose it, regardless of whether the law is right, wrong, or right in principle but in need of serious tweaking.
Qualcomm's mobile phone standard is called IS-95, is often refered to as CDMA, and will not likely use W-CDMA at any time soon.
EDGE is a bolt on to existing GSM networks to improve data rates and is nominally 3G, but on the bottom end of that. However, UMTS is ultimately GSM's path to 3G data rates. W-CDMA and HSDPA are supported by UMTS. So you'll see Cingular and T-Mobile rolling this technology out, while Sprint PCS, Verizon, et al, rolling out the EVDO stuff.In any case, all of this reminds me of the problems we (about ten students) had a decade or so back when we got lost on a field trip after our plane ran out of fuel somewhere in the Pacific ocean. We, fortunately, were close to a neighbouring island, and all swam to safety, but we immediately had problems. There was no problem with the notion of being rescued, we found garbage on one side of the island with evidence (old programmes and menus) that a cruise ship landed there once every month to allow passengers to tour. But in the mean time, we had to find food, build shelter, and do something to enable communication throughout the entire island.
The latter probably deserves some explanation. Early on we found that we had problems with people wandering off and being unreachable for extended periods of time. We were worried about the potential for accidents, with people stranded and nobody able to find them. What we all felt was necessary was a crude phone network. Opinion differed as to whether we should use copper, putting fixed line telephones around the island at convenient locations, or whether we should use something like a mobile phone system. In the end, I think most people were agreed the latter was preferable. We used a crude, power level controlled, frequency hopping TDMA over FSK signaling system (largely to save power) with a simple ADPCM codec throttled down to 16kbps (transmitted speech was bearable but hardly "toll quality". We went at that rate to save transistors and also help save power) This took a lot of work, and was quite a learning experience: only one person in the group had ever built a transistor before from raw sand, so you can imagine the problems we had building a full blown mobile phone. Some work though, some of which involved magnifying glasses (well, glasses) and sunlight, meant we were able to build some simple integrated circuits, including one that implemented 16 NAND gates.
In the end, eight of us worked on the mobile phone system, while one went out hunting for food and the other built a number of huts for shelter. The completed system was ready a few days before help finally arrived: it wasn't that impressive, battery life (the batteries weren't rechargable, we used limes with copper and iron cathodes/anodes) was about a day, less if you used the things, and despite seventeen well placed base stations around the island (which was, maybe, five miles wide - it took around three or four hours to walk around the entire thing), there were a number of coverage blackspots.
Anyway, I guess this relates to your point thusly: early on, we had a lot of arguments about what the cellphones should include. Many wanted us to power the things with full blown DSP CPUs rather than build discrete logic finite state machines to control the things. The argument that was with general purpose CPUs, we could also put games, calculators, and calanders on the things. It all came down to timings, with some people feeling we should be as basic as possible, so our phones could be online relatively quickly. In the end the group sided with the latter point of view. Clearly sometimes simpler is better. When you're building a communications system with limited resources, clearly trying to build an all-singing all-dancing cellphone system is stupid. I can't imagine how long it would have taken had we tried to implement, say, a CDMA based system.
As an aside I still have my phone somewhere. I'm very proud of the SIM card, which I built myself out of melted copper and pulp made out of crushed leaves and tree bark juice. The phone number, five-seven-two, is hardwired.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you that there's a lot of price gouging going on. Most operators seem to price their services as if they're still selling 8kps CDPD packet data. 3c a kilobyte is absurd, and Cingular looks for every excuse to charge it (MediaNET on GoPhone, for example, will result in those charges if you try to use it with a laptop to access ordinary TCP/IP, even though they advertise a 1c a kilobyte rate for WAP browsing)
They no doubt share common code, but it's in user space, not kernel space.
I also have a gut feeling that the Graphics Rendering Engine doesn't reside in kernel space in XP. While Microsoft was criticised for undermining it's original microkernel design when, in NT 4, they added the display device drivers to the kernel, I don't believe they added substantially more than that.
Virtual PC almost certainly does. It doesn't replace the kernel or rest of Windows at all. It requires a clean, complete, copy of Microsoft Windows be installed inside of it.As for WINE, many people do replace most of the components of WINE with those of Windows except for some specific instances. Whether the GRE is one of those components I don't know. WINE tries to be compatable "as-is", but has been woefully incomplete in the past, and it's just been easier for many people to install the "real" Windows DLLs and other system files with it.
The purpose of WINE is to provide Windows programs with the ability to run and do more than SEGFAULT and exit. The purpose of Virtual PC is to provide a complete emulation of a PC. In both senses, a Windows application running under either in a Linux environment is not a "Fish out of water", more a "Fish in a bowl." Under Virtual PC, the app will be able to do as much damage to the virtual environment as the same app running on a Windows-only PC. Under WINE, the app may be able to infect those parts of the file system visible to the WINE environment, depending on whether WINE is compatable enough. If the Mac is running a PC emulator, then no, they're not completely safe, their Windows virtual environment may be trashable. The rest of the Mac will likely be fine. The same is true of a Virtual PC based system under Linux. The jury is out in terms of the information available to me on whether IE running under WINE is suseptable. I don't know if the GRE is one of the things WINE emulates always or only optionally.Everyone has brainfarts too.
I've never had a problem with wildcards. I've always known exactly how they work. So I'm still trying to work out how, some time around 8 years ago, I'm looking around at /etc, and thinking "There's a passwd~, and passwd.bak, and I really should get rid of them" (first mistake), typed "rm /etc/passwd*" (because the files I wanted to delete were passwd with something on the end, right?)
It didn't even click right away. I suddenly couldn't do anything, and it took several seconds before it clicked that the error messages were because I'd deleted "passwd", because my choice of wildcard was stupid.
I don't normally side with the Tech Services people on Slashdot, because most of the ones who appear on Slashdot are, well, to be honest, power-crazed nuts, but in this case the OP was absolutely right. If you want the right to admin your own machine, it's natural you should be the one to fix it. Ask for help if need be, but don't expect someone else to fix your own problem. You're either competent enough to ask for a particular right, and should be responsible for exercising it, or not, in which case get someone else to do it.
The aforementioned TS.on.slashdot people tend to be grizzled veterans who have had to clear up more than one mess because a manager or CEO insisted that, because of their position within the company, they should have admin rights because they're all-powerful and all-powerful-control-over-their-own-computer will go with their job. After clearing up spyware and putting all those "files I didn't think I needed" back into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, the TS.on.slashdot people tend to get to the point they want everyone to have a version of Windows that gets reinstalled every time you reboot the computer. Even if I disagree with them, I'm not remotely surprised. The relatively simple principle of "Want above the norm? Know what you're doing, and take responsibility" seems a much better alternative. The TS people I deal with in real life do tend to consider that a founding principle, and I thank them for it.
The Amiga, however, used to use a system where the menu didn't appear until you pressed the menu button on the mouse (the right button, FWIW.) As a result, focus followed mouse was perfectly compatable with the system (once the menu was up, it wouldn't changed until you released the button, so you could easily move the mouse there and select whatever you wanted without problems), and indeed there was a "Commodity" (a system hack in an AmigaOS framework designed for system hacks, essentially) that enabled FFM, with no real downside.
If/when I write my own operating system (*snort* hahahah! That'll probably get finished around the same time as my novel. ;-), it'll use exactly that system. It worked very well, and pretty intuitively, and also meant the area taken up by the menu bar could be used for, for example, current application information, etc.