The manufactures are still marketing the products as "mp3" Players even though they have support for different formats.
Well, at least one manucafturer (which I will not name here) markets his players as MP3 players (at least here) even if they DON'T actually play MP3s, only some proprietary ATRAC format;)
Well, port like port, they will make NetBSD run on everything. Having quite open ARM machine with existing Linux port makes is trivial for porting gurus to port NetBSD to it.
But the machine itself...? Oh my God, why is this piece of trash SO expensive?
I mean, you can buy VIA EPIA low-power, low-noise for a fraction of that price. If you want to go kinky, you can buy standard size ATX PowerPC board capable of running MorphOS (Amiga OS clone) and Linux for 415eur (G3 600MHz) or 670eur (G4 1GHz).
So, aside from running Risc OS, why would I want to buy that?
So you are in a position of luxury where it doesn't matter if a legit email is filtered out every now and then. I'm sure it works for you.
For the last 3yrs I've been working as a freelance consultant. Also I'm the typical guy with anxiety-depression condition, that has problems with everyday life support. And yet, I am able to keep all the important (i.e. paying) jobs w/o worrying about emails lost to spam filtering.
Get a life, get some good spam filter and stop bitching. In fact, for last three years, most of my lost income has been due to overzelous spamfighters (like ORBS etc).
I don't understand all this cry about spam. I've been using bogofilter almost since day one and today, if I see one spam a month I'm surprised.
Meanwhile, my spam folder is autocleaned via cron job from messages older than five days. Sometimes it accumulates 1500 messages (yes, that's 1500 spams in five days)[1].
But I had to ignore some guidelines to achieve these results. I didn't teach bogofilter from dead corpus, I just installed it over empty database and taught it live. Also spam cutoff is set to 50 instead of the default 90 (?). I do have occasional false positives (much rarer than false negatives) this way, but I like it anyway.
The best testament to all this is the unmasking of my address on/.
If I hear this stupid "besides, who needs all those GHz", I'm gonna go postal.
I need.
Since a year or so ago, when I told my series-junkie friends, that I am able to reauthor and copy all those sci-fi series we buy, my computer doesn't stop processing MPEG2[1]. If I could make it encode 2-3 more FPS for a reasonable price, I would.
As it stands now, raw processing power is everything to me. The stability of Linux under heavy load helps enormously.
Robert (happy AMD user)
[1] you know, there are countries where copying and giving away to your friends the movies or music you legally purchased is perfectly legal excercise of Fair Use
Have you included the cost for the OS and software bundle?
Oh yes, of course. OS was $0 and software bundle was another $0 from my hard earned money. Believe it or not, but neither me nor my wife have Windows installed, we both use Debian/KDE exclusively.
This is one more reason that the whole basis behind IP law needs to be reevaluated.
No.
The basis for copyright in US[1] is the greatest piece of philosophy regarding the development of knowledge around the world.
It's the current implementation of "IP laws"[2] that perverted those ideas, deprived all society from access even to public domain knowledge and made whores from people who actually create copyrightable works.
Robert
[1] the letter and the spirit of the original copyright regulations, including constitutional "to promote progress in useful arts and science...", as well as the whole discussion by Founding Fathers[3] regarding copyrights and related laws [2] there's actually no such thing as "Intelectual Property": copyrights, patents and trademark aren't "property", they are limited-time monopoly [3] the way I udnerstand it, events and discussions leading to creating a law, constitutional amandment etc in US are as important as the letter of the law in order to decide the hard, borderline cases
I would not switch to Mac OS X, Linux+KDE runs just fine for me. But I would gladly switch to PowerPC PC if they were made in volume, like x86 PCs are. The thing is that x86, even in its 64-bit incarnation is a total hack[1]. I'm not running to upgrade to x86-64 any time soon[2].
If I had comparable prices for barebone x86-32 and PPC system/components (up to 50% more for PPC) I wouldn't hesitate a minute. As it stands now, dollar for dollar, I can buy much better x86 machine which "solves" by force most of the architectural drawbacks.
Robert
PS Just don't tell me that I can buy brand X PPC machine for the price of some Dell/Gateway high-end PC: I have never in my life bought a brand name computer, I just buy the parts and build myself whatever machine I need.
[1] luckily, most of that is well hidden behind the C compiler [2] price is not totally a non-issue;)
So, it is better version of democracy, you get to chose between the candidates that really matter. They were preselected for your convenience earlier. No, you can't know who selected them[1].
Excuse me, haven't I seen this before...? Ah, yes, in the (non-existant today) People Republic of Poland. The political system then was called "Socialist Democracy" or "Dictature of Proletariat".
Well, have fun in the "Land of the Free" -- been there, done that, can't say I liked it much.
Robert
[1] vide the case of the list of Republican Convention attendees
Geez, why not use GMX.de which expressly allows anyone to use 1GB via WebDAV for free? And for couple of bucks you can extend it to couple GBs.
I know, I know... Because you can.
But when you take into account that as soon as people will actually start using this gmailfs or GMail Drive the protocols will change, why waste time for it at all, when better, free alternatives already exist?
so what they'd really need are AI pilots, rather than flying cars.
And with AI pilots you can just ditch flying: traffic jams can be avoided completely by perfect cooperation of well disciplined drivers. Quite impossible with humans.
Just look at the column of any (para)military outfit starting the parade march.
Well trained people keep the right distances while forming as well as starting and stopping, so the column starts moving immediately in all places.
Badly trained recruits at the front of the column start walking immediatelly, while those at the end have to wait to have space to start walking. It looks just like traffic jams.
Well, right-left division of the political scene was obsolete even 50 years ago. Just take a look at political program of NSDAP that really looks like "socialist" is not only the part of name.
Traditionally, all parties with "national" or "natonalist" in name are considered right-wing. Also all the parties with religious and/or family values are considered right-wing.
But we have all over the world religious-family parties, our Polish is even similarly named: League of Polish Families. Aside from being "civilised racists", anti-gay and against people thinking and deciding for themselves, they demand welfare state that shields families from poverty and responsibility for upbringing its children.
Science itself does not have an agenda like an institution such as the vatican does.
Now, you are mistaken, Mister. I am an atheist in a Catholic country, but I try to ``know my enemy''.
Vatican for a long time has been claiming that evolution is a mechanism created by God, in order to make his creation (the Earth and Universe) perfect, self-sustainable.
It's the specialty of American Protestant churches to take the Bible literally, claiming that Earth is 10k years old etc.
People just need to buy an Athlon 64, a graphics card, a motherboard, and RAM.
And while XBox in Europe runs 149eur, from the necessary parts you enumerated, only RAM falls below this price. Well, maybe also motherboard, if it's not too good.
Well, I've been going out with two geeky, linux groking, smart and hot chicks (unfortunately not at once). But they were both almost criminally insane;)
HP did some time ago some research into JIT compilers and they managed to run PA-RISC programs with JIT on PA-RISC processor faster than natively. The answer is loop unrolling, cache locality, linear execution etc.
Dig in Ars Technica for more info, they covered the topic in detail couple of years ago.
People are used to the fact, that when they buy in bulk, the price is lower.
So, what would you buy: game console from the (currently) biggest vendor of game consoles for $170 and DVR from the (currently) biggest vendor of DVRs for $200, or half-assed device that is console and DVR, but costs how much? $600? More?
Same goes for camera+palm+mp3 player vs. separate components.
I will never buy convergence device, that is more expensive and less featureful/usable than the sum of its parts. I always carry my backpack, so the space isn't a problem;)
Robert
PS And I didn't even touch the usability. When desired form factors for phone and PDA are exactly opposite, I don't see a posibility to create a good phone-PDA hybrid.
And when you buy DVR and console separately, you can use them both at the same time. I doubt this is possible in case of Sony PSX.
Slashdot Mirror
The manufactures are still marketing the products as "mp3" Players even though they have support for different formats.
;)
Well, at least one manucafturer (which I will not name here) markets his players as MP3 players (at least here) even if they DON'T actually play MP3s, only some proprietary ATRAC format
Robert
Seems like all the vulnerability reports are vulnerable to reporing them on /.
Robert
Well, I have a clamav running on my mail server and it sorts out virus emails as well as bounces containing them.
Robert
Well, port like port, they will make NetBSD run on everything. Having quite open ARM machine with existing Linux port makes is trivial for porting gurus to port NetBSD to it.
But the machine itself...? Oh my God, why is this piece of trash SO expensive?
I mean, you can buy VIA EPIA low-power, low-noise for a fraction of that price. If you want to go kinky, you can buy standard size ATX PowerPC board capable of running MorphOS (Amiga OS clone) and Linux for 415eur (G3 600MHz) or 670eur (G4 1GHz).
So, aside from running Risc OS, why would I want to buy that?
Robert
So you are in a position of luxury where it doesn't matter if a legit email is filtered out every now and then. I'm sure it works for you.
For the last 3yrs I've been working as a freelance consultant. Also I'm the typical guy with anxiety-depression condition, that has problems with everyday life support. And yet, I am able to keep all the important (i.e. paying) jobs w/o worrying about emails lost to spam filtering.
Get a life, get some good spam filter and stop bitching. In fact, for last three years, most of my lost income has been due to overzelous spamfighters (like ORBS etc).
Robert
I don't understand all this cry about spam. I've been using bogofilter almost since day one and today, if I see one spam a month I'm surprised.
/.
Meanwhile, my spam folder is autocleaned via cron job from messages older than five days. Sometimes it accumulates 1500 messages (yes, that's 1500 spams in five days)[1].
But I had to ignore some guidelines to achieve these results. I didn't teach bogofilter from dead corpus, I just installed it over empty database and taught it live. Also spam cutoff is set to 50 instead of the default 90 (?). I do have occasional false positives (much rarer than false negatives) this way, but I like it anyway.
The best testament to all this is the unmasking of my address on
And there are better filters than bogofilter.
Robert
PS I work exclusivelly on Linux, but viruses are annoying anyway, so I installed Clam AV, hence viruses don't increase my spam count.
If I hear this stupid "besides, who needs all those GHz", I'm gonna go postal.
I need.
Since a year or so ago, when I told my series-junkie friends, that I am able to reauthor and copy all those sci-fi series we buy, my computer doesn't stop processing MPEG2[1]. If I could make it encode 2-3 more FPS for a reasonable price, I would.
As it stands now, raw processing power is everything to me. The stability of Linux under heavy load helps enormously.
Robert
(happy AMD user)
[1] you know, there are countries where copying and giving away to your friends the movies or music you legally purchased is perfectly legal excercise of Fair Use
Have you included the cost for the OS and software bundle?
Oh yes, of course. OS was $0 and software bundle was another $0 from my hard earned money. Believe it or not, but neither me nor my wife have Windows installed, we both use Debian/KDE exclusively.
Robert
This is one more reason that the whole basis behind IP law needs to be reevaluated.
No.
The basis for copyright in US[1] is the greatest piece of philosophy regarding the development of knowledge around the world.
It's the current implementation of "IP laws"[2] that perverted those ideas, deprived all society from access even to public domain knowledge and made whores from people who actually create copyrightable works.
Robert
[1] the letter and the spirit of the original copyright regulations, including constitutional "to promote progress in useful arts and science...", as well as the whole discussion by Founding Fathers[3] regarding copyrights and related laws
[2] there's actually no such thing as "Intelectual Property": copyrights, patents and trademark aren't "property", they are limited-time monopoly
[3] the way I udnerstand it, events and discussions leading to creating a law, constitutional amandment etc in US are as important as the letter of the law in order to decide the hard, borderline cases
Would you switch?
;)
I would not switch to Mac OS X, Linux+KDE runs just fine for me. But I would gladly switch to PowerPC PC if they were made in volume, like x86 PCs are. The thing is that x86, even in its 64-bit incarnation is a total hack[1]. I'm not running to upgrade to x86-64 any time soon[2].
If I had comparable prices for barebone x86-32 and PPC system/components (up to 50% more for PPC) I wouldn't hesitate a minute. As it stands now, dollar for dollar, I can buy much better x86 machine which "solves" by force most of the architectural drawbacks.
Robert
PS Just don't tell me that I can buy brand X PPC machine for the price of some Dell/Gateway high-end PC: I have never in my life bought a brand name computer, I just buy the parts and build myself whatever machine I need.
[1] luckily, most of that is well hidden behind the C compiler
[2] price is not totally a non-issue
There already is bookmark XML standard, it's called XBEL. But AFAIR only Galeon and Konqueror use it :(
Robert
So, it is better version of democracy, you get to chose between the candidates that really matter. They were preselected for your convenience earlier. No, you can't know who selected them[1].
Excuse me, haven't I seen this before...? Ah, yes, in the (non-existant today) People Republic of Poland. The political system then was called "Socialist Democracy" or "Dictature of Proletariat".
Well, have fun in the "Land of the Free" -- been there, done that, can't say I liked it much.
Robert
[1] vide the case of the list of Republican Convention attendees
Geez, why not use GMX.de which expressly allows anyone to use 1GB via WebDAV for free? And for couple of bucks you can extend it to couple GBs.
I know, I know... Because you can.
But when you take into account that as soon as people will actually start using this gmailfs or GMail Drive the protocols will change, why waste time for it at all, when better, free alternatives already exist?
Robert
so what they'd really need are AI pilots, rather than flying cars.
;)
And with AI pilots you can just ditch flying: traffic jams can be avoided completely by perfect cooperation of well disciplined drivers. Quite impossible with humans.
Just look at the column of any (para)military outfit starting the parade march.
Well trained people keep the right distances while forming as well as starting and stopping, so the column starts moving immediately in all places.
Badly trained recruits at the front of the column start walking immediatelly, while those at the end have to wait to have space to start walking. It looks just like traffic jams.
Robert
(after basic 1.5yr military service
Well, right-left division of the political scene was obsolete even 50 years ago. Just take a look at political program of NSDAP that really looks like "socialist" is not only the part of name.
Traditionally, all parties with "national" or "natonalist" in name are considered right-wing. Also all the parties with religious and/or family values are considered right-wing.
But we have all over the world religious-family parties, our Polish is even similarly named: League of Polish Families. Aside from being "civilised racists", anti-gay and against people thinking and deciding for themselves, they demand welfare state that shields families from poverty and responsibility for upbringing its children.
What do you call this if not left-wing?
Robert
Science itself does not have an agenda like an institution such as the vatican does.
Now, you are mistaken, Mister. I am an atheist in a Catholic country, but I try to ``know my enemy''.
Vatican for a long time has been claiming that evolution is a mechanism created by God, in order to make his creation (the Earth and Universe) perfect, self-sustainable.
It's the specialty of American Protestant churches to take the Bible literally, claiming that Earth is 10k years old etc.
Robert
Why are we not seeing Linux vs. Solaris X?
For the same reason we don't see much Linux vs Longhorn articles?
Robert
Naaah... They must have referred to ``Polish Hell'' ;)
Robert
People just need to buy an Athlon 64, a graphics card, a motherboard, and RAM.
And while XBox in Europe runs 149eur, from the necessary parts you enumerated, only RAM falls below this price. Well, maybe also motherboard, if it's not too good.
Robert
Well, I've been going out with two geeky, linux groking, smart and hot chicks (unfortunately not at once). But they were both almost criminally insane ;)
;)
So I married smart, hot arts major
Robert
HP did some time ago some research into JIT compilers and they managed to run PA-RISC programs with JIT on PA-RISC processor faster than natively. The answer is loop unrolling, cache locality, linear execution etc.
Dig in Ars Technica for more info, they covered the topic in detail couple of years ago.
Robert
There is no spoon^H^H^H^H^HIBM
You almost nailed the problem.
;)
People are used to the fact, that when they buy in bulk, the price is lower.
So, what would you buy: game console from the (currently) biggest vendor of game consoles for $170 and DVR from the (currently) biggest vendor of DVRs for $200, or half-assed device that is console and DVR, but costs how much? $600? More?
Same goes for camera+palm+mp3 player vs. separate components.
I will never buy convergence device, that is more expensive and less featureful/usable than the sum of its parts. I always carry my backpack, so the space isn't a problem
Robert
PS And I didn't even touch the usability. When desired form factors for phone and PDA are exactly opposite, I don't see a posibility to create a good phone-PDA hybrid.
And when you buy DVR and console separately, you can use them both at the same time. I doubt this is possible in case of Sony PSX.
You might as well do nslookup on this address and check how it looks then.
Should be "informative", not "funny" ;)
Robert