I note that you're ignoring Apple's monopoly on media players. They dominate the market in hardware players and they prevent those players from working with software and stores other than iTunes.
Nobody seems to have pointed out that these apps are CEASING TO EXIST, they aren't installed by default anymore. That's it. I assume there is going to be a wizard that let's you choose to install it during the system install and/or it can be added via "Add/Remove Windows Components".
That's the best part of $10,000 for just *ONE* guitar players
No it's not. Use Craigslist and go to pawn shops. My brother used to get Fender Stratocasters for $100-$250, slightly battered. Why are you paying top dollar for equipment that is being hauled around and fucked up? Nobody will notice if your guitar is slightly out of tune.
(thinking of an example of a new Gibson Les Paul and a 50 watt Marshall half-stack).
Don't buy top-of-the-line equipment! If you're a good guitar player you'll sound fine on a $150 Yamaha that you bought at Wal-mart.
Heck, just a new set of tubes for a guitar amp can easily run $200-$300!
Stop being a primadonna and insisting on tube amps. Get a cheap-ass solid-state amp. You don't need to make the crowd's ears bleed.
That's not counting effects pedals and/or rackmount effects/processors,
You should keep this stuff at a minimum due to the aforementioned "hauling around and getting fucked up" problem.
The future will be "Songs are our promotion, and concerts are where the real money's at."
What do you mean by "future"? For most new artists this has been the reality for at least a decade. Contracts are written in such a way at the first few albums actually COST the band money. In fact, I'd argue that the record labels have effectively evolved into loan sharks for musicians.
OSX on the iPhone might be a little slicker, but there is A LOT (at least 100X) more software for Windows Mobile and it's much easier to develop custom apps. Ditto for Blackberries. If you need to make a custom cellphone or PDA app for your company your choices are basically Windows Mobile and nothing.
The tradeoff is that Windows Mobile is buggy crashy.
Everyone is comparing this new offering to the iPhone. But the interesting thing is that virtually no one compares it to the Blackberry - the new "has-been" of the so-called "Smart phone" industry.
The Blackberry, IMHO, is largely for the enterprise market. The key feature is that it syncs your corporate Exchange or Notes server to a central NOC so you can get corporate email over the air on your Blackberry. The G1 (and the iPhone for that matter) very specifically does not do that so in no way can it replace the Blackberry for most users.
Apple has said repeatedly, flat-out, that they will never operate a NOC. This means that the iPhone will not displace the Blackberry. Google has not announced any plans to operate a NOC.
Actually, I think there are fewer phones now with this jack than there used to be.
This is changing. The PRC has mandated that all phones sold in China must have a 2.5mm headphone jack and a mini USB 2.0 port used for charging and syncing. You can have extra ports, but these 2 are now REQUIRED in China. So if cellphone makers want to play in the huge Chinese market, they have to standardize.
When you need to cram something down people's throats, a ruthless military dictatorship can be handy.
A paranoid person might think that the whole reason for Google releasing Android is so that it can get a bullet-proof correlation between a person's online and real life identities.
Not THE reason, but A reason. The main purpose of Android is to serve advertising through the lucrative mobile internet market. A side-effect of this is to gather even more information to profile users for advertising.
The main problem I have with Windows is the laughable security
Define "security". When it comes to external exploits, Windows generally sucks for a variety of reasons. When it comes to internal access control, Unix sucks. In practice, everything runs as root because setting permissions is too much of a PITA and apps aren't packaged with security in mind (everything is dumped in/var or scattered all over). Yes, you can lock down the systems but what I've seen is that:
A) This really only works on single-function (effectively, single-user) servers, i.e. a dedicated web server.
B) Different apps use different permissions sets (unix permissions vs. SAMBA vs. Linux ACLs vs. SELinux vs. God only knows).
C) Virtually everything has to be done by hand, on a per-directory or even per-file basis.
At this point there are literally thousands of themes for Vista freely available. There were hundreds before Vista was even launched. Do a Google search for "Vista themes".
If you're overworked, push back. If it comes down to it, blackmail them. ("I'm the only one that knows the root passwords. I could just quit tomorrow and completely screw you, or you can get me more help. It's up to you.")
Frankly, you're probably already past the point of no return. Start looking for a new job. Tell no one. Just skip out of work over the next few weeks while you're doing your job search. They might fire you for not showing up, but you're quitting anyway. When you get the new job, immediately quit with no notice. Make certain you don't document anything or tell them anything, especially critical information. Then when they call you back desperately asking for help, tell them you'll consult with them at 3 times your previous rate. Remember, they fucked you by squeezing as much work as they could out of you, it's now your turn to fuck them by squeezing as much money as you can out of them.
They underscoped. Hardware requirements for 2007 went up. Assuming his site didn't blow the migration, this won't happen. They probably wanted unified messaging or the improved web portal, both of which would naturally increase hardware requirements.
I should probably point out that your best bet is a technology called Dolby Digital Live that remixes stereo recordings to DD in real time. As far as I'm aware, it's restricted to specialty PC soundcards like this one: http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/mtgoddl/home.aspx.
It works fairly well, especially if you like bass. The compression they use seems to be very good at detecting the "lows" and redirecting those to the LFE channel making much better use of your sub-woofer. Everything else is just "okay". You get a good sense of "the source is in front of me" but that's it.
Perhaps needless to say, this technology works best with video games.
Encoded 5.1 albums, ready to play back on the home system.
Very, very, very, little new music is recorded in 5.1. Mastering costs are AT LEAST an order of magnitude higher, if you spend $100,000 for a stereo album mastering that in 5.1 will cost you AT LEAST $1,000,000 and probably closer to $5,000,000. And remember, nowadays the ARTISTS pick up the tab of mastering, not the studio. So mastering that album in 5.1 adds to their massive debts (since few artists are making much money).
You CAN do 5.1 with substandard equipment, but the resulting album will usually be inferior to a stereo mix and VASTLY more time consuming.
The quicker they cross the line where it inconveniences your average consumer, the quicker we'll get to the point where DRM becomes a total flop.
It's already a total flop. These are just recreations of the abject failure that was Divx. Divx SEEMED like a bigger failure due to the useless hardware sitting on store shelves, but the money and development effort pissed away on DRM is beginning to cost media companies.
Previously, the best way to pay was with a US Post Office money order.
Money orders are basically cash. This is a TERRIBLE idea.
What you would do is write a description of the item that you had purchased, and if you didn't get it, the seller had committed mail fraud.
The USPS doesn't prosecute individuals for mail fraud on eBay. And even if they did, the worst offenders are overseas and out of the reach of the USPS.
Other payment methods (Visa, MC, PayPal) isn't going to spend a whole lot of effort to recover minor amounts of money, they may refund your money,
The credit card companies will almost certainly refund your money because they MAKE MONEY on refunds. Ebay sellers are often charged $250 for each chargeback. American Express almost always takes the side of the consumer, they expect every merchant using AMEX to have a 30-day "no questions asked" return policy.
This goes back to the reason why you don't really want to hack government entities, is that they will spend a fortune on tracking down the perpetrator all out of disproportion to the actual damage caused.
No they won't. Most attacks against the Pentagon, NSA, and the White House aren't even investigated.
Think about this logically for a second: How many IP scanners are out there (lots) and how much IP space does the federal government have (lots and lots)? So logically if you run a port scanner on "the internet" (as many attackers do) you're going to hit a lot of federal IPs. Do you seriously think the feds investigate every one of those (several hundered per day) IP scans?
The way you, or whoever it was that posted, phrased it I was under the impression that they were calculating total area.
To be blunt, if large-scale solar power generation was feasible someone would already be doing it. The IN PRACTICE costs I've seen for various projects (like solar powered independent cell and wi-fi towers), is astronomical. Highly suspect theoretical calculations do not impress me.
This means that with these terrible assumptions, we could produce almost 500 times the power that we currently do with just solar power.
One of those assumptions was covering every square inch of the earth's surface with solar cells, including the oceans, which is pretty unfeasible. Secondly, your measure of efficiency is off by an order of magnitude due to this thing called "night", half of the day solar cells don't work compared to the continuous operation of nuclear plants, so the real measure is closer to 5%. I'll give you the nonexistent 30% cells.
Now how much of the earth's surface can we cover with solar cells? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet it's a lot less than 1%. Which means that your 30% cells can't meet our CURRENT needs.
That's not "triple redundant" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 3 drives in the SAME DEVICE using the SAME virtual filesystem. Of top of it, this is NetApp's buggy proprietary crap. Use a real filesystem.
I ripped my entire Simpsons DVD collection, encoded it using x264, and put each episode in a Matroska file using GNU/Linux
Most people use the Matroska format for bundling subtitles (because there aren't any other good reasons to use it), that's what has problems on non-Windows platforms. Did Matroska work out-of-the-box on your MacBook or Nokia N800? Last I checked MacOS didn't ship with Matroska support, but I might be wrong about this.
This doesn't invalidate my point that Matroska works on far less formats than, say, Divx.
CODEC pack
So-called "CODEC packs" in Windows include Matroska and other container support.
Obviously the goal of the Weathermen in general, and this attack in particular, was to end the Vietnam war. The Pentagon is clearly military target. You're just being petulant.
Actually, no, it did surprisingly little to the economy.
Wall Street was briefly SHUT DOWN. If that's not "disrupting the economy", I don't know what is.
They didn't use or threaten violence against civilians
Are you seriously going to claim that no Georgian civilians we injured in the Russian invasion? I'm sure you'll say that was "accidental" but "accidental" also counts. If civilians are killed you have only their WORD FOR IT that it wasn't intentional and governments almost always lie about such things. So the only reasonable assumption is that all killing of civilians are deliberate.
If "Joe the terrorist" is sitting in a movie theater crowded with civilians and you drop a 1000 lbs. bomb on the theater killing everyone inside you're not "targeting Joe the terrorist" you're targeting the THEATER.
fairly tight definition (already quoted).
The Russian invasion of Georgia clearly falls within the definition you cited. Any attack that results in the death of civilians is terrorism.
Actually, in Brazil, ethanol is somewhat successfully competeing with petrol. And not this blended petrol-ethanol garbage, 100% ethanol fuel. The ethanol fuel insdustry is producing a profit with _zero_ governement subsidies.
Ethanol in Brazil is government subsidized. There are numerous incentives including tax incentives and land credits. Brazil has STOPPED (they were doing it before) handing out cash to encourage growers because they no longer need to. Sugar refineries are/were heavily subsidized. However, it's at least as profitable as oil in Brazil.
One of the reasons it is more successful than the US is that sugarcane is used instead of corn
Still snake oil. Sugarcane requires lots of water and heat (which will tell you WHY it works better), i.e. tropical climates only. In the US that means Hawaii and Puerto Rico. And you have to cut down the jungle to cultivate the sugarcane, which in the long run reduces your rainfall, which means there are practical limits on the volume of sugarcane you can grow. And it's nowhere near enough, even with completely destroying Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
If "energy independence" is a goal, ethanol does not get us there. The US would require massive ethanol imports from tropical nations. Nations FAR less stable than Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East.
Ethanol fuel also produces about 10% of the exhaust.
This is just wrong, it's 25-50%.
Yes ethanol gets about 30% less milage than the same volume of gasoline
Pure ethanol is closer to 50-60% less mileage vs. good gasoline engines.
In the worst case scenario, we'd actually generate more pollution and waste more energy if we switched to ethanol. In practice, it would be very difficult to generate more pollution, but it's very likely that the whole system will be far less efficient than the gasoline system.
Slashdot Mirror
ARE NOT ceasing to exist
For Apple to do the same thing,
I note that you're ignoring Apple's monopoly on media players. They dominate the market in hardware players and they prevent those players from working with software and stores other than iTunes.
Nobody seems to have pointed out that these apps are CEASING TO EXIST, they aren't installed by default anymore. That's it. I assume there is going to be a wizard that let's you choose to install it during the system install and/or it can be added via "Add/Remove Windows Components".
That's the best part of $10,000 for just *ONE* guitar players
No it's not. Use Craigslist and go to pawn shops. My brother used to get Fender Stratocasters for $100-$250, slightly battered. Why are you paying top dollar for equipment that is being hauled around and fucked up? Nobody will notice if your guitar is slightly out of tune.
(thinking of an example of a new Gibson Les Paul and a 50 watt Marshall half-stack).
Don't buy top-of-the-line equipment! If you're a good guitar player you'll sound fine on a $150 Yamaha that you bought at Wal-mart.
Heck, just a new set of tubes for a guitar amp can easily run $200-$300!
Stop being a primadonna and insisting on tube amps. Get a cheap-ass solid-state amp. You don't need to make the crowd's ears bleed.
That's not counting effects pedals and/or rackmount effects/processors,
You should keep this stuff at a minimum due to the aforementioned "hauling around and getting fucked up" problem.
Of the money that the manufacturer does collect, most of it goes to employees, suppliers, and contractors -- not the fat cats.
Who are all these essential people you are referring to?
I've heard the very same reaction from every person I have ever met that walked into a major record label: "What are all these people DOING?"
If you're making $100k per year for essentially nothing, you're a fat cat.
The future will be "Songs are our promotion, and concerts are where the real money's at."
What do you mean by "future"? For most new artists this has been the reality for at least a decade. Contracts are written in such a way at the first few albums actually COST the band money. In fact, I'd argue that the record labels have effectively evolved into loan sharks for musicians.
Relative to PalmOS, Windows Mobile cures cancer.
OSX on the iPhone might be a little slicker, but there is A LOT (at least 100X) more software for Windows Mobile and it's much easier to develop custom apps. Ditto for Blackberries. If you need to make a custom cellphone or PDA app for your company your choices are basically Windows Mobile and nothing.
The tradeoff is that Windows Mobile is buggy crashy.
Everyone is comparing this new offering to the iPhone. But the interesting thing is that virtually no one compares it to the Blackberry - the new "has-been" of the so-called "Smart phone" industry.
The Blackberry, IMHO, is largely for the enterprise market. The key feature is that it syncs your corporate Exchange or Notes server to a central NOC so you can get corporate email over the air on your Blackberry. The G1 (and the iPhone for that matter) very specifically does not do that so in no way can it replace the Blackberry for most users.
Apple has said repeatedly, flat-out, that they will never operate a NOC. This means that the iPhone will not displace the Blackberry. Google has not announced any plans to operate a NOC.
Actually, I think there are fewer phones now with this jack than there used to be.
This is changing. The PRC has mandated that all phones sold in China must have a 2.5mm headphone jack and a mini USB 2.0 port used for charging and syncing. You can have extra ports, but these 2 are now REQUIRED in China. So if cellphone makers want to play in the huge Chinese market, they have to standardize.
When you need to cram something down people's throats, a ruthless military dictatorship can be handy.
A paranoid person might think that the whole reason for Google releasing Android is so that it can get a bullet-proof correlation between a person's online and real life identities.
Not THE reason, but A reason. The main purpose of Android is to serve advertising through the lucrative mobile internet market. A side-effect of this is to gather even more information to profile users for advertising.
The main problem I have with Windows is the laughable security
Define "security". When it comes to external exploits, Windows generally sucks for a variety of reasons. When it comes to internal access control, Unix sucks. In practice, everything runs as root because setting permissions is too much of a PITA and apps aren't packaged with security in mind (everything is dumped in /var or scattered all over). Yes, you can lock down the systems but what I've seen is that:
A) This really only works on single-function (effectively, single-user) servers, i.e. a dedicated web server.
B) Different apps use different permissions sets (unix permissions vs. SAMBA vs. Linux ACLs vs. SELinux vs. God only knows).
C) Virtually everything has to be done by hand, on a per-directory or even per-file basis.
YMMV.
At this point there are literally thousands of themes for Vista freely available. There were hundreds before Vista was even launched. Do a Google search for "Vista themes".
You simply have to 'Manage your manager'.
Please mod the parent up, he's spot on here.
If you're overworked, push back. If it comes down to it, blackmail them. ("I'm the only one that knows the root passwords. I could just quit tomorrow and completely screw you, or you can get me more help. It's up to you.")
Frankly, you're probably already past the point of no return. Start looking for a new job. Tell no one. Just skip out of work over the next few weeks while you're doing your job search. They might fire you for not showing up, but you're quitting anyway. When you get the new job, immediately quit with no notice. Make certain you don't document anything or tell them anything, especially critical information. Then when they call you back desperately asking for help, tell them you'll consult with them at 3 times your previous rate. Remember, they fucked you by squeezing as much work as they could out of you, it's now your turn to fuck them by squeezing as much money as you can out of them.
IMAP is fundamentally broken, so most Exchange admins don't want to encourage users to use it. Use POP, you admin will be more likely to enable that.
poor performance of Exchange 2007 /QUOTE
They underscoped. Hardware requirements for 2007 went up. Assuming his site didn't blow the migration, this won't happen. They probably wanted unified messaging or the improved web portal, both of which would naturally increase hardware requirements.
I should probably point out that your best bet is a technology called Dolby Digital Live that remixes stereo recordings to DD in real time. As far as I'm aware, it's restricted to specialty PC soundcards like this one: http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/mtgoddl/home.aspx.
It works fairly well, especially if you like bass. The compression they use seems to be very good at detecting the "lows" and redirecting those to the LFE channel making much better use of your sub-woofer. Everything else is just "okay". You get a good sense of "the source is in front of me" but that's it.
Perhaps needless to say, this technology works best with video games.
Encoded 5.1 albums, ready to play back on the home system.
Very, very, very, little new music is recorded in 5.1. Mastering costs are AT LEAST an order of magnitude higher, if you spend $100,000 for a stereo album mastering that in 5.1 will cost you AT LEAST $1,000,000 and probably closer to $5,000,000. And remember, nowadays the ARTISTS pick up the tab of mastering, not the studio. So mastering that album in 5.1 adds to their massive debts (since few artists are making much money).
You CAN do 5.1 with substandard equipment, but the resulting album will usually be inferior to a stereo mix and VASTLY more time consuming.
The quicker they cross the line where it inconveniences your average consumer, the quicker we'll get to the point where DRM becomes a total flop.
It's already a total flop. These are just recreations of the abject failure that was Divx. Divx SEEMED like a bigger failure due to the useless hardware sitting on store shelves, but the money and development effort pissed away on DRM is beginning to cost media companies.
Previously, the best way to pay was with a US Post Office money order.
Money orders are basically cash. This is a TERRIBLE idea.
What you would do is write a description of the item that you had purchased, and if you didn't get it, the seller had committed mail fraud.
The USPS doesn't prosecute individuals for mail fraud on eBay. And even if they did, the worst offenders are overseas and out of the reach of the USPS.
Other payment methods (Visa, MC, PayPal) isn't going to spend a whole lot of effort to recover minor amounts of money, they may refund your money,
The credit card companies will almost certainly refund your money because they MAKE MONEY on refunds. Ebay sellers are often charged $250 for each chargeback. American Express almost always takes the side of the consumer, they expect every merchant using AMEX to have a 30-day "no questions asked" return policy.
This goes back to the reason why you don't really want to hack government entities, is that they will spend a fortune on tracking down the perpetrator all out of disproportion to the actual damage caused.
No they won't. Most attacks against the Pentagon, NSA, and the White House aren't even investigated.
Think about this logically for a second: How many IP scanners are out there (lots) and how much IP space does the federal government have (lots and lots)? So logically if you run a port scanner on "the internet" (as many attackers do) you're going to hit a lot of federal IPs. Do you seriously think the feds investigate every one of those (several hundered per day) IP scans?
The way you, or whoever it was that posted, phrased it I was under the impression that they were calculating total area.
To be blunt, if large-scale solar power generation was feasible someone would already be doing it. The IN PRACTICE costs I've seen for various projects (like solar powered independent cell and wi-fi towers), is astronomical. Highly suspect theoretical calculations do not impress me.
This means that with these terrible assumptions, we could produce almost 500 times the power that we currently do with just solar power.
One of those assumptions was covering every square inch of the earth's surface with solar cells, including the oceans, which is pretty unfeasible. Secondly, your measure of efficiency is off by an order of magnitude due to this thing called "night", half of the day solar cells don't work compared to the continuous operation of nuclear plants, so the real measure is closer to 5%. I'll give you the nonexistent 30% cells.
Now how much of the earth's surface can we cover with solar cells? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet it's a lot less than 1%. Which means that your 30% cells can't meet our CURRENT needs.
Nice try.
That's not "triple redundant" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 3 drives in the SAME DEVICE using the SAME virtual filesystem. Of top of it, this is NetApp's buggy proprietary crap. Use a real filesystem.
I ripped my entire Simpsons DVD collection, encoded it using x264, and put each episode in a Matroska file using GNU/Linux
Most people use the Matroska format for bundling subtitles (because there aren't any other good reasons to use it), that's what has problems on non-Windows platforms. Did Matroska work out-of-the-box on your MacBook or Nokia N800? Last I checked MacOS didn't ship with Matroska support, but I might be wrong about this.
This doesn't invalidate my point that Matroska works on far less formats than, say, Divx.
CODEC pack
So-called "CODEC packs" in Windows include Matroska and other container support.
Incorrect. It was not a "stated aim",
Obviously the goal of the Weathermen in general, and this attack in particular, was to end the Vietnam war. The Pentagon is clearly military target. You're just being petulant.
Actually, no, it did surprisingly little to the economy.
Wall Street was briefly SHUT DOWN. If that's not "disrupting the economy", I don't know what is.
They didn't use or threaten violence against civilians
Are you seriously going to claim that no Georgian civilians we injured in the Russian invasion? I'm sure you'll say that was "accidental" but "accidental" also counts. If civilians are killed you have only their WORD FOR IT that it wasn't intentional and governments almost always lie about such things. So the only reasonable assumption is that all killing of civilians are deliberate.
If "Joe the terrorist" is sitting in a movie theater crowded with civilians and you drop a 1000 lbs. bomb on the theater killing everyone inside you're not "targeting Joe the terrorist" you're targeting the THEATER.
fairly tight definition (already quoted).
The Russian invasion of Georgia clearly falls within the definition you cited. Any attack that results in the death of civilians is terrorism.
Actually, in Brazil, ethanol is somewhat successfully competeing with petrol. And not this blended petrol-ethanol garbage, 100% ethanol fuel. The ethanol fuel insdustry is producing a profit with _zero_ governement subsidies.
Ethanol in Brazil is government subsidized. There are numerous incentives including tax incentives and land credits. Brazil has STOPPED (they were doing it before) handing out cash to encourage growers because they no longer need to. Sugar refineries are/were heavily subsidized. However, it's at least as profitable as oil in Brazil.
One of the reasons it is more successful than the US is that sugarcane is used instead of corn
Still snake oil. Sugarcane requires lots of water and heat (which will tell you WHY it works better), i.e. tropical climates only. In the US that means Hawaii and Puerto Rico. And you have to cut down the jungle to cultivate the sugarcane, which in the long run reduces your rainfall, which means there are practical limits on the volume of sugarcane you can grow. And it's nowhere near enough, even with completely destroying Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
If "energy independence" is a goal, ethanol does not get us there. The US would require massive ethanol imports from tropical nations. Nations FAR less stable than Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East.
Ethanol fuel also produces about 10% of the exhaust.
This is just wrong, it's 25-50%.
Yes ethanol gets about 30% less milage than the same volume of gasoline
Pure ethanol is closer to 50-60% less mileage vs. good gasoline engines.
In the worst case scenario, we'd actually generate more pollution and waste more energy if we switched to ethanol. In practice, it would be very difficult to generate more pollution, but it's very likely that the whole system will be far less efficient than the gasoline system.