At one point in my life I had a rather large collection of CDs in a nice CaseLogic case.
Then one day the car I was in gets hit and has to go into the body shop. Silly me at the time left the CaseLogic case in the trunk of the car because I already had full MP3 rips of everything in the case and I only played the CDs in the car.
Get car back from bodyshop....CaseLogic case is missing. Call to bodyshop to notify them of theft of my property and I get a line of "You singed away those rights when you accepted the quote". WTF!!!!! Go back and read the very very fine print. "By agreeing to this quote you agree to give up your right to claim lost property damages should items inside your car become misplaced". Uh, so let me get this straight, I've now just made it legal for then to steal anything out of my car and not be able to do a damn thing about it?
Thats pretty fucked in my opinion.
Anyways I digress.
So now I have MP3s for the 300CDs I owned before it was "liberated" by the body shop. If the RIAA sues me "by accident" then how would THAT situation play out? It was all music I ripped from my own CD collection (minus live recordings not available on CD which I do have to get online) but now those CDs are gone.
Show me a website that is database driven and has to figure out multipathed connections between all parts of it, in real-time, while users are able to logon and mess around with their information and add/remove users from their ring of friends.
Not to mention the mountain of emails such a system generates notifing users when someone has posted on their profile, or requested to be added, etc.
And then you have the massive amounts of images such a site has to store and quickly serve up since the point of such a site is to find your friends or new friends and you gotta have photos to be able to see what the people (hopefully) look like.
Now backup all of this in a transparent way from the users!
And while your doing all of this make sure that the site stays responsive to the thousands and thousands of people logged in simultaneously smalling your core database.
Still think 1 million unique users is an arbritary limit of a poorly coded webapp like this?
They ask for the $28 because doing a search like that requires serious CPU time as their interdependant network of connections grows. This is something that probably doesn't scale linearly and goes instead as a n log n function of some sort.
I could be wrong however.
As for #1, its because no one has done this before really. Sure some websites have tried to pull this off but it really has to be an app on the users system to help make the complexity of the queries and the complexities of the chat features work correctly otherwise your talking about all server-side stuff which means your going to have to create huge server farms as your base grows.
#3 I hate IE as much as you do. Has it occured to you that they are just two guys working on this and now that they just got their angel investor money they can actually hire someone to redesign their site so this complaint goes away?
How do they guarantee someone setting up an account is real?
One method would be to let someone use their credit card as a way of authorizing. Not actually charge anything, just doing a check on the name and address that way. You could then lockout people with multiple cards making fake accounts by only letting one name and one card auth...further different cards under the same name would be stopped from allowing to reg.
But you will still have to deal with the very serious issues of scaling the database with the userbase and handling the enormous amount of image traffic such a site generates.
Friendster has had a lot of growing pains once they got past the 1M+ mark.
MySpace.com is like Friendster but has more features and seems to work better then Friendster. It also works faster then Friendster. However I think they are only now reaching the.5M mark.
Tribe.net works because its database servers have not yet come close to getting 1M+ users on it.
Any database backend works at that small a scale, its once you go past the.5M-1.0M+ range where database backends start to become really important for these kinds of sites.
You mean like the original Creative Nomad Jukebox?
I owned one, it was not bad. But its battery life could have been better and its interface was for shit. Oh yeah and loading 10GB over USB1 sucked dog balls.
But now I own a 10GB iPod and it just kicks a whole hell of a lot more ass then that Creative one did.
Granted the newer stuff out there is a lot better now but even so when I compare them against my iPod I feel like they are still missing feature(s).
And I bet you believe in the liberal media conspiracy and jewish conspiracies too?
Ohhh! Look out, here come the black helicopters!
That's right, whenever your own narrow worldview gets challenged fabricate up a ricoculous conspiracy theory to explain it all away so your brain can rest easy in its Happy Place.
Or you could acknowledge the fact that more people are into Mac's now then used to be thanks to OS X. And when I saw that I don't necessarily mean they own an Apple. Before I got my 12" PowerBook I was a bigtime x86 user and before that an Amiga owner. But when OS X came out I saw it was what Linux had failed to achive, a useable UNIX based desktop for novices and powerusers alike.
As far as Apples being more expensive this is true to an extent in the desktop area. Servers and laptops however I feel are comptetively priced for the hardware package you get.
If you have 800 number service for any phone number when you get your bill from the telco it will list all of the phone numbers of the people who called your 800 number, even people with Caller ID blocked as the phone company *must* tell you the phone number of everyone using your 800 number services.
You ever do any work in a media lab? This is not all that uncommon a load of programs to need to use. If anything its on the lower end of the spectrum. If you are doing 3D modeling there is Maya Unlimited which is quite expensive, then you have specialized apps like Apple's Shake 3.0, discreets Combustion is pretty damn affordable nowadays but as short as 2-3 years ago some of the more esoteric higher end applications cost people as much as 20-50k for a piece of software that is now $500-4k in cost.
However the cost of the software usually pales in comparison to what good DVCAM and DVCPRO50 decks and other various shooting gear will cost you.
OpenOffice for OS X is nice but I am sorry the file formats for MS Office still are not 100% compatible for the files that I run across in my day to day uses.
Believe me I would have loved to use OpenOffice instead of MS Office but when you're dealing with document that use some fo the more advanced footnote and comments features OpenOffice just can't display the damn things right. It's because of that reason that I just said to hell with it and purchase MS Office for OS X and it works perfectly for my needs*.
* Your needs are probably different from mine and you may find OpenOffice a viable alternative for yourself. However if you have to exchange Word docs with people who use more advanced and niche features (think authors here) then your going to be up shit creek without a paddle and buying a copy of MS Office for OS X
Note I said I got the Mac the most recently in my disclaimer.
I used Premier on PC long before I had used it on a Mac.
Its UI (i hate having a billion floating windows with super tiny unreadable text) and stability (it would blowup in the middle of large edits, much time was lost) simply suck ASS. Ergo see that Adobe is claiming Premier Pro as being more stable because they dumped the ENTIRE previous codebase for Premier and have been doing a rewrite from scratch for the past 2.5 years!
So please, use your brain for rational logic and reasoning instead of being a knee-jerk troll and trying to classify me as a Mac zealot when I've quite clearly stated I use BOTH PCs and Macs.
Adobe Photoshop 7 for OS X...check Adobe Acrobat 6 for OS X (ugh its bloat)...check Adobe After Effects for OS X...check Adobe Preimier 6.5 for OS X....check Adobe Preimier Pro for OS X....no! Final Cut Pro 4 for OS X...check! Adobe Encore DVD for OS X...no! DVD Studio Pro 2 for OS X....check
For starters Adobe Preimeir sucks huge amounts of ass on Windows AND Mac. Its interface is crap and its buggy as hell and crashes too often when you are in the middle of a large editing project.
It is for shit! Now Preimeir Pro is supposed to be this great product because it is not based on the old Preimeir codebase! Its like what NT was to Windows for Workgroups for Microsoft. It remains to be seen if this is the case since its not quite out yet.
Under OS X you have a far more stable OS then Windows and far more flexibility to integrate UNIX tools into your workflow easily. Think Fark here for OS X. Yes I am aware of Cygwin stuff for Windows but its a layer on top of Windows whereas Fark lets you addon apps that are built directly ontop of the OS X BSD foundations.
I still have yet to see a good PC laptop that can compare to the 12" Powerbook I have.
Besides which, just what Adobe apps are you using? If its something other the Photoshop there are some good alternatives out there that don't cost quite as much.
Disclaimer: I started out on Apple IIe clones in the early 80's, then went to the Amiga, then to IBM PC's when the Pentium 60 was released and have both PCs and now a Mac for the last 6 months.
Just because the majority of people don't use it does not mean it is not the right tool!
Most serious admins run OS/390:)
I consider myself a pretty technically compentent sysadmin, however I will always try to never have to run a Windows server when I can do the same thing on a Linux box or on OS X or Solaris.
I've never used AIX or HP-UX and would love to learn it, but I've never worked anywhere that had it in operation. There seems to be people looking for folks with experience in these OS'es and hardware platforms but I'll be damned if I ever run into them as most IT shops I've worked at only ever have x86 Windows crap and/or/xor Linux and Solaris. I'm sure that my skills under Linux/Sloaris would probably translate to HP-UX and AIX to some degree (see the Rosetta Stone for UNIXes) but its hard to learn a platform when you never can get your hands on it and its a high-end niche.
Then again I see plenty of job postings for AS/400 folks and I think to myself "Yet another platform I will never get to work on".
The problem with IT these days is you run into positions where basically management took the positions of three people and crammed them into one at 1/3rd the pay. Then on top of that they want people to be subject matter experts on various technologies with more years of experience then some technologies have even existed!
Of course I am somewhat biased here as I am currently out of work thanks to a recent layoff (thanks Cox Business Services!) and the market here in Southern California seems dismal at best. So time to go back to college and finish up the degree (yeah, I was stupid) in CS and perhaps get a minor in chemistry or biology and perhaps parlay that into a bioinformatics career, who knows? Perhaps with the 2 years it will take and a little luck the economy will get better?
Re:Problems with newer versions
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
Yeah I have to agree here, compiling PHP is a massive PITA. In fact, compiling PHP makes compiling Apache look easy and trivial by comparison.
Don't get me wrong, I like its ability to be modular but I swear someone needs to write a console GUI frontend for compiling PHP ala kernel source via ncurses with some intelligence to auto-download sources for various modular libraries and build them in a apt-get style.
Hmmm of course now that I think about this problem it just sounds like you need an apt-get made just for PHP
"He's a criminal, he's in jail, society is better for it"
Is society really better for it? I am not convinced.
Did the guy kill anyone? No.
Do you even know what all of the enforceable laws on you that are applicable in just your city? How about state laws? How about Federal laws?
Face it, YOU ARE A CRIMINAL BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT YET!
There are so many old laws from earlier in our countries history that no one remembers plus all the current laws that we know some things about, and then all the new laws gettign legislated we know less about that I could practically prove everyone in the US is a criminal of some sort.
Would you have the ENTIRE COUNTRY in jail? Would it "be better for society"? I think not!
This is the main reason why the US does not operate on the strict rule of law alone, if it did we would all be screwed.
This is why laws are open to interpretation by judges and jurys.
But the judgement in this case was FAR too harsh. It smells of trumped up charges of damages like in Kevin Mitnick's case.
Frankly, the smart thing for DirecTV to do in this case was have the guy under house arrest and then hire him on to help make their product more secure against his fellow pirates.
That would have been the moral and socially reforming way to handle a case like this. Not this ridiculous 180 million dollar damage assetment to be payed out over 30,000 years! How much you want to bet if this guy marries and has kids that they will try to make the kids inherit the payments for the debt!?!?!
They might as well just kill this guy. What good is living a life where you are forced to payback restitution without anything leftover for oneself to even have a meager life of solitude and reflection.
Note, I am not abdicating the death penalty here I am saying that this kind of unjust and unfair punishment might as well be a death sentence in todays consumerist state we live in. They might as well be condemning this guy to be DirecTV & Echostar's indentured servant for the rest of his remaining life.
"To put it in perspective, this is like comparing Intel's Prescott processor (aka Pentium 5 - 90nm) or Madison to G4"
Care to give me a hit off your crack pipe?
The G4 processor has been out in various speed grades and minor revisions for a HELL of a lot longer then the last three months.
The G5 might not be shipping *right now this very moment* but it does physically exist in a stable enough form for Apple to feed confident to benchmark it against known, released CPU technology that is at the leading edge of the Intel workstation performance market.
Sure, Intel is coming out with the Prescott (aka Pentium 4?/5?) in Q4 of 2004 at a speed of around 3.4GHz but that is a *desktop* CPU and not a server Xeon CPU. Intel does have a roadmap spelling out when Xeons get to 3.2GHz and 800Mhz FSB finally.
If Intel has a Prescott system or a more advanced Xeon DP system working well enough to SPECmark I will garuarntee you that there will be a press release from Intel regarding how their "new Xeon 3.2GHz with 800Mhz FSB and expanded cache" now "regains the performance crown back from the clutches of Apple" and expect to see it between now and August when the G5 are expected/hoped to start shipping in volume.
Re:WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU....
on
Phish Moves To FLAC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You have to realize your bias towards having a ludicrous amount of hard drive space in your home pc. Listen to yourself here:
"I have 500 GB in my PC now"
I have 120gb in my desktop, the laptop has 40gb. I do work on DVD's so I use a lot of that space for video I am editing and/or compressing or touching up. The *only* system I use that has 500GB is the main video capture station I use at the media lab I help out at that has a 3ware Escalade RAID card with 8 IDE drives in a RAID 5 array totalling 500GB in size (give or take a few dozen GB).
Granted you can get 250GB hard drives now and I hear 300GB drives are coming up soon around the bend those drives still command a price premium over your 120GB/160GB hard drives.
If I had 500GB of storage on my personal desktop I might be inclined to store my music in FLAC just as you do.
If you are backing up your FLAC's to DVD that means you must be getting about 11 FLAC encoded CDs to a single 4.7GB DVD-R, is that about right?
As far as your "bite" and "punch" goes I will have to give FLAC a try and see if I can tell the difference you speak of here. Typically I am unable to hear the differences but I am willing to learn something new!
Oh, cool. I hadn't heard about the hydrogenaudio.org stuff yet so I will have to go read up on it. Bear in mind I haven't had a reason to encode CD's to MP3 for a few months now since my taste in music keep me from purchasing music constantly (I like classical and have enough of that for now...oh and I like techno/electronica/house and I only buy those after seeing people spin/perform live and if I like what they do.)
As far as the ReQuest stuff you pointed out, yeah since I have no job right now I am definitley in the market for a $3,000-$4,000 digital audio player. So are the rest of Slashdot users I am sure (well, perhaps some). It's certainly priced into the hi-fi audiophile range, that is for sure!
Freedom of choice for the consumer is good when the consumer is sufficently informed so they can take proper advantage of their freedoms. I am not so sure this is the case or state of affairs for many people right now. However I could be wrong and it might be changing for the better. Then again this is still a world where people typically buy something because its got a bigger number then vendor Y's product which is technically superior (VHS vs Beta, AMD CPU vs Intel CPUs, Multi-speaker seperates car audio vs 2000 watt monster base boxes).
Hey if enough Slashdot users try to patent ridiculous concepts/ideas/the letter I/etc we can break the US patent system since I bet it only uses a 32-bit unsinged interger for storing the patent number in the USPO database.
Enough patents get filed and *wham* no more patents can get filed until the USPO upgrades their computer systems to handle it. Knowing how long it takes government agencies to approve a computer purchase plan and then tender bids from competitive vendors in the market we could easily shutdown the USPO for at least three years! This would give us, the EFF, and other sane people some breathing room to try and enact sensible laws to restrict the ridiculousness of these patent lawsuits we keep seeing!
Slashdot Mirror
At one point in my life I had a rather large collection of CDs in a nice CaseLogic case.
Then one day the car I was in gets hit and has to go into the body shop. Silly me at the time left the CaseLogic case in the trunk of the car because I already had full MP3 rips of everything in the case and I only played the CDs in the car.
Get car back from bodyshop....CaseLogic case is missing. Call to bodyshop to notify them of theft of my property and I get a line of "You singed away those rights when you accepted the quote". WTF!!!!! Go back and read the very very fine print. "By agreeing to this quote you agree to give up your right to claim lost property damages should items inside your car become misplaced". Uh, so let me get this straight, I've now just made it legal for then to steal anything out of my car and not be able to do a damn thing about it?
Thats pretty fucked in my opinion.
Anyways I digress.
So now I have MP3s for the 300CDs I owned before it was "liberated" by the body shop. If the RIAA sues me "by accident" then how would THAT situation play out? It was all music I ripped from my own CD collection (minus live recordings not available on CD which I do have to get online) but now those CDs are gone.
I find this a disconcerning thought problem.
I "extend" my middle finger towards the RIAA, again.
er s/smalling/slamming/
Show me a website that is database driven and has to figure out multipathed connections between all parts of it, in real-time, while users are able to logon and mess around with their information and add/remove users from their ring of friends.
Not to mention the mountain of emails such a system generates notifing users when someone has posted on their profile, or requested to be added, etc.
And then you have the massive amounts of images such a site has to store and quickly serve up since the point of such a site is to find your friends or new friends and you gotta have photos to be able to see what the people (hopefully) look like.
Now backup all of this in a transparent way from the users!
And while your doing all of this make sure that the site stays responsive to the thousands and thousands of people logged in simultaneously smalling your core database.
Still think 1 million unique users is an arbritary limit of a poorly coded webapp like this?
They ask for the $28 because doing a search like that requires serious CPU time as their interdependant network of connections grows. This is something that probably doesn't scale linearly and goes instead as a n log n function of some sort.
I could be wrong however.
As for #1, its because no one has done this before really. Sure some websites have tried to pull this off but it really has to be an app on the users system to help make the complexity of the queries and the complexities of the chat features work correctly otherwise your talking about all server-side stuff which means your going to have to create huge server farms as your base grows.
#3 I hate IE as much as you do. Has it occured to you that they are just two guys working on this and now that they just got their angel investor money they can actually hire someone to redesign their site so this complaint goes away?
Yeah, didn't think you did.
The next question to follow then is:
How do they guarantee someone setting up an account is real?
One method would be to let someone use their credit card as a way of authorizing. Not actually charge anything, just doing a check on the name and address that way. You could then lockout people with multiple cards making fake accounts by only letting one name and one card auth...further different cards under the same name would be stopped from allowing to reg.
But you will still have to deal with the very serious issues of scaling the database with the userbase and handling the enormous amount of image traffic such a site generates.
Friendster has had a lot of growing pains once they got past the 1M+ mark.
.5M mark.
MySpace.com is like Friendster but has more features and seems to work better then Friendster. It also works faster then Friendster. However I think they are only now reaching the
Tribe.net works because its database servers have not yet come close to getting 1M+ users on it.
.5M-1.0M+ range where database backends start to become really important for these kinds of sites.
Any database backend works at that small a scale, its once you go past the
You mean like the original Creative Nomad Jukebox?
I owned one, it was not bad. But its battery life could have been better and its interface was for shit. Oh yeah and loading 10GB over USB1 sucked dog balls.
But now I own a 10GB iPod and it just kicks a whole hell of a lot more ass then that Creative one did.
Granted the newer stuff out there is a lot better now but even so when I compare them against my iPod I feel like they are still missing feature(s).
And I bet you believe in the liberal media conspiracy and jewish conspiracies too?
Ohhh! Look out, here come the black helicopters!
That's right, whenever your own narrow worldview gets challenged fabricate up a ricoculous conspiracy theory to explain it all away so your brain can rest easy in its Happy Place.
Or you could acknowledge the fact that more people are into Mac's now then used to be thanks to OS X. And when I saw that I don't necessarily mean they own an Apple. Before I got my 12" PowerBook I was a bigtime x86 user and before that an Amiga owner. But when OS X came out I saw it was what Linux had failed to achive, a useable UNIX based desktop for novices and powerusers alike.
As far as Apples being more expensive this is true to an extent in the desktop area. Servers and laptops however I feel are comptetively priced for the hardware package you get.
If you have 800 number service for any phone number when you get your bill from the telco it will list all of the phone numbers of the people who called your 800 number, even people with Caller ID blocked as the phone company *must* tell you the phone number of everyone using your 800 number services.
Pretty neat, eh?
for they find annoying people & problems crunchy and rather tasty.
In Soviet Russia, spam spams you back!
You ever do any work in a media lab? This is not all that uncommon a load of programs to need to use. If anything its on the lower end of the spectrum. If you are doing 3D modeling there is Maya Unlimited which is quite expensive, then you have specialized apps like Apple's Shake 3.0, discreets Combustion is pretty damn affordable nowadays but as short as 2-3 years ago some of the more esoteric higher end applications cost people as much as 20-50k for a piece of software that is now $500-4k in cost.
However the cost of the software usually pales in comparison to what good DVCAM and DVCPRO50 decks and other various shooting gear will cost you.
OpenOffice for OS X is nice but I am sorry the file formats for MS Office still are not 100% compatible for the files that I run across in my day to day uses.
Believe me I would have loved to use OpenOffice instead of MS Office but when you're dealing with document that use some fo the more advanced footnote and comments features OpenOffice just can't display the damn things right. It's because of that reason that I just said to hell with it and purchase MS Office for OS X and it works perfectly for my needs*.
* Your needs are probably different from mine and you may find OpenOffice a viable alternative for yourself. However if you have to exchange Word docs with people who use more advanced and niche features (think authors here) then your going to be up shit creek without a paddle and buying a copy of MS Office for OS X
Yes I would have.
Note I said I got the Mac the most recently in my disclaimer.
I used Premier on PC long before I had used it on a Mac.
Its UI (i hate having a billion floating windows with super tiny unreadable text) and stability (it would blowup in the middle of large edits, much time was lost) simply suck ASS. Ergo see that Adobe is claiming Premier Pro as being more stable because they dumped the ENTIRE previous codebase for Premier and have been doing a rewrite from scratch for the past 2.5 years!
So please, use your brain for rational logic and reasoning instead of being a knee-jerk troll and trying to classify me as a Mac zealot when I've quite clearly stated I use BOTH PCs and Macs.
Hmm lets see here:
Adobe Photoshop 7 for OS X...check
Adobe Acrobat 6 for OS X (ugh its bloat)...check
Adobe After Effects for OS X...check
Adobe Preimier 6.5 for OS X....check
Adobe Preimier Pro for OS X....no!
Final Cut Pro 4 for OS X...check!
Adobe Encore DVD for OS X...no!
DVD Studio Pro 2 for OS X....check
For starters Adobe Preimeir sucks huge amounts of ass on Windows AND Mac. Its interface is crap and its buggy as hell and crashes too often when you are in the middle of a large editing project.
It is for shit! Now Preimeir Pro is supposed to be this great product because it is not based on the old Preimeir codebase! Its like what NT was to Windows for Workgroups for Microsoft. It remains to be seen if this is the case since its not quite out yet.
Under OS X you have a far more stable OS then Windows and far more flexibility to integrate UNIX tools into your workflow easily. Think Fark here for OS X. Yes I am aware of Cygwin stuff for Windows but its a layer on top of Windows whereas Fark lets you addon apps that are built directly ontop of the OS X BSD foundations.
I still have yet to see a good PC laptop that can compare to the 12" Powerbook I have.
Besides which, just what Adobe apps are you using? If its something other the Photoshop there are some good alternatives out there that don't cost quite as much.
Disclaimer: I started out on Apple IIe clones in the early 80's, then went to the Amiga, then to IBM PC's when the Pentium 60 was released and have both PCs and now a Mac for the last 6 months.
Just because the majority of people don't use it does not mean it is not the right tool!
:)
Most serious admins run OS/390
I consider myself a pretty technically compentent sysadmin, however I will always try to never have to run a Windows server when I can do the same thing on a Linux box or on OS X or Solaris.
I've never used AIX or HP-UX and would love to learn it, but I've never worked anywhere that had it in operation. There seems to be people looking for folks with experience in these OS'es and hardware platforms but I'll be damned if I ever run into them as most IT shops I've worked at only ever have x86 Windows crap and/or/xor Linux and Solaris. I'm sure that my skills under Linux/Sloaris would probably translate to HP-UX and AIX to some degree (see the Rosetta Stone for UNIXes) but its hard to learn a platform when you never can get your hands on it and its a high-end niche.
Then again I see plenty of job postings for AS/400 folks and I think to myself "Yet another platform I will never get to work on".
The problem with IT these days is you run into positions where basically management took the positions of three people and crammed them into one at 1/3rd the pay. Then on top of that they want people to be subject matter experts on various technologies with more years of experience then some technologies have even existed!
Of course I am somewhat biased here as I am currently out of work thanks to a recent layoff (thanks Cox Business Services!) and the market here in Southern California seems dismal at best. So time to go back to college and finish up the degree (yeah, I was stupid) in CS and perhaps get a minor in chemistry or biology and perhaps parlay that into a bioinformatics career, who knows? Perhaps with the 2 years it will take and a little luck the economy will get better?
Yeah I have to agree here, compiling PHP is a massive PITA. In fact, compiling PHP makes compiling Apache look easy and trivial by comparison.
Don't get me wrong, I like its ability to be modular but I swear someone needs to write a console GUI frontend for compiling PHP ala kernel source via ncurses with some intelligence to auto-download sources for various modular libraries and build them in a apt-get style.
Hmmm of course now that I think about this problem it just sounds like you need an apt-get made just for PHP
"He's a criminal, he's in jail, society is better for it"
Is society really better for it? I am not convinced.
Did the guy kill anyone? No.
Do you even know what all of the enforceable laws on you that are applicable in just your city? How about state laws? How about Federal laws?
Face it, YOU ARE A CRIMINAL BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT YET!
There are so many old laws from earlier in our countries history that no one remembers plus all the current laws that we know some things about, and then all the new laws gettign legislated we know less about that I could practically prove everyone in the US is a criminal of some sort.
Would you have the ENTIRE COUNTRY in jail? Would it "be better for society"? I think not!
This is the main reason why the US does not operate on the strict rule of law alone, if it did we would all be screwed.
This is why laws are open to interpretation by judges and jurys.
But the judgement in this case was FAR too harsh. It smells of trumped up charges of damages like in Kevin Mitnick's case.
Frankly, the smart thing for DirecTV to do in this case was have the guy under house arrest and then hire him on to help make their product more secure against his fellow pirates.
That would have been the moral and socially reforming way to handle a case like this. Not this ridiculous 180 million dollar damage assetment to be payed out over 30,000 years! How much you want to bet if this guy marries and has kids that they will try to make the kids inherit the payments for the debt!?!?!
They might as well just kill this guy. What good is living a life where you are forced to payback restitution without anything leftover for oneself to even have a meager life of solitude and reflection.
Note, I am not abdicating the death penalty here I am saying that this kind of unjust and unfair punishment might as well be a death sentence in todays consumerist state we live in. They might as well be condemning this guy to be DirecTV & Echostar's indentured servant for the rest of his remaining life.
God I fucking hate corporations.
Whats the big fucking deal here fucker?
"To put it in perspective, this is like comparing Intel's Prescott processor (aka Pentium 5 - 90nm) or Madison to G4"
Care to give me a hit off your crack pipe?
The G4 processor has been out in various speed grades and minor revisions for a HELL of a lot longer then the last three months.
The G5 might not be shipping *right now this very moment* but it does physically exist in a stable enough form for Apple to feed confident to benchmark it against known, released CPU technology that is at the leading edge of the Intel workstation performance market.
Sure, Intel is coming out with the Prescott (aka Pentium 4?/5?) in Q4 of 2004 at a speed of around 3.4GHz but that is a *desktop* CPU and not a server Xeon CPU. Intel does have a roadmap spelling out when Xeons get to 3.2GHz and 800Mhz FSB finally.
If Intel has a Prescott system or a more advanced Xeon DP system working well enough to SPECmark I will garuarntee you that there will be a press release from Intel regarding how their "new Xeon 3.2GHz with 800Mhz FSB and expanded cache" now "regains the performance crown back from the clutches of Apple" and expect to see it between now and August when the G5 are expected/hoped to start shipping in volume.
You have to realize your bias towards having a ludicrous amount of hard drive space in your home pc. Listen to yourself here:
"I have 500 GB in my PC now"
I have 120gb in my desktop, the laptop has 40gb. I do work on DVD's so I use a lot of that space for video I am editing and/or compressing or touching up. The *only* system I use that has 500GB is the main video capture station I use at the media lab I help out at that has a 3ware Escalade RAID card with 8 IDE drives in a RAID 5 array totalling 500GB in size (give or take a few dozen GB).
Granted you can get 250GB hard drives now and I hear 300GB drives are coming up soon around the bend those drives still command a price premium over your 120GB/160GB hard drives.
If I had 500GB of storage on my personal desktop I might be inclined to store my music in FLAC just as you do.
If you are backing up your FLAC's to DVD that means you must be getting about 11 FLAC encoded CDs to a single 4.7GB DVD-R, is that about right?
As far as your "bite" and "punch" goes I will have to give FLAC a try and see if I can tell the difference you speak of here. Typically I am unable to hear the differences but I am willing to learn something new!
Oh, cool. I hadn't heard about the hydrogenaudio.org stuff yet so I will have to go read up on it. Bear in mind I haven't had a reason to encode CD's to MP3 for a few months now since my taste in music keep me from purchasing music constantly (I like classical and have enough of that for now...oh and I like techno/electronica/house and I only buy those after seeing people spin/perform live and if I like what they do.)
As far as the ReQuest stuff you pointed out, yeah since I have no job right now I am definitley in the market for a $3,000-$4,000 digital audio player. So are the rest of Slashdot users I am sure (well, perhaps some). It's certainly priced into the hi-fi audiophile range, that is for sure!
Freedom of choice for the consumer is good when the consumer is sufficently informed so they can take proper advantage of their freedoms. I am not so sure this is the case or state of affairs for many people right now. However I could be wrong and it might be changing for the better. Then again this is still a world where people typically buy something because its got a bigger number then vendor Y's product which is technically superior (VHS vs Beta, AMD CPU vs Intel CPUs, Multi-speaker seperates car audio vs 2000 watt monster base boxes).
Hey if enough Slashdot users try to patent ridiculous concepts/ideas/the letter I/etc we can break the US patent system since I bet it only uses a 32-bit unsinged interger for storing the patent number in the USPO database.
Enough patents get filed and *wham* no more patents can get filed until the USPO upgrades their computer systems to handle it. Knowing how long it takes government agencies to approve a computer purchase plan and then tender bids from competitive vendors in the market we could easily shutdown the USPO for at least three years! This would give us, the EFF, and other sane people some breathing room to try and enact sensible laws to restrict the ridiculousness of these patent lawsuits we keep seeing!