Most of my family are artists, so most of them use Apple computers. They're a lot quieter than any comparable machines I've seen. They aren't silent but compared to the boxes I'm using they seem like a whisper. If you feel the need to immediately spend extra money I'd recommend spending it on processor, there are no aftermarket options (that I know of) for replacing a processor on a current G4. Aftermarket RAM is available for substantially less than what apple charges. In addition their machines are amazingly easy to upgrade.
I'd recommending just getting the minimum configuration you can with the processor speed you want. You can purchase aftermarket hard drives, memory and other components later for substantially less.
For what one family member does with his G4 the SMP support is extremely helpful in terms of raw performance, but you've got to look at your applications and see if they exploit SMP. If you're writing your own code you can obviously make it support SMP, but you didn't really say what you were doing.
IDE on Apple's seem to work a lot better by default than IDE on PCs. I screw around with digital video, my sisters G4/733 captures via firewire without dropping a frame on the internal IDE drive. In order to duplicate this on my Windows 2000 box I had to install a second drive on a seperate bus from the system drive.
That didn't answer your question of course, but I just thought I'd point out that the comparision might not be so cut and dry.
I'd advice getting an aftermarket SCSI card and drive if you do decide to go that way however, you can save some money over Apple's prices.
Your argument is wrong, at least if you subscribe to evolution. There's a sequence of coin flips that have to take place. You don't just go from nothing to humanity in one probabilistic orgy. Each step along the way is a seperate coin toss, with the probability skewed highly towards an outcome of failure. I'm not even saying we've been visited or that its probably that we've been visisted. I don't think there's any evidence at all saying that we have been visited and probably a lot more that says we haven't.
But the article itself dismisses the likelyhood of us having been visited based on a series of statistical arguments. My point is that applying those same statistics says that we don't exist.
What's the probability that primitive life evolved?
What's the probability that intelligent life evolved?
The probabilities for either event are infinitesimal, at least in my opinion, yet here we are. Even if you discount the above two occurences and bring up intelligent design or pure creation you're faced with yet one more improbability:
What's the probability of the spontaneous existance of a supreme being?
If you look at any of the probabilities they seem to point to a vanishingly small probability that even the simplest forms of life exist, let alone any intelligent life. Yet we're here.
Perhaps excitedly was a better work. He probably said bollocks slowly as he imagined a pair of them, brimming with man-juice, slapping against his treble-chins. The editors would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the incorrect wording.
Trademarks only apply to specific areas. Lilo from Disney's point of view is a cartoon character and franchise. From the linux side of things its a boot loader. The two don't interfere with each other. Your argument collapses anyway, if lilo had to change names (which it wouldn't) linux wouldn't magically stop working.
Ahh, but would that have worked when I thought of it? No, it was still a very current movie. Critical reviews of the hollywoodification of the history hadn't been written yet, or at least weren't published. I had to piece together my own overview of the historical accuracy (not that there's anything wrong with that, it was a good exercise in researching an area I'm not familiar with).
The previous post on using +history -movie was closer to the bill, though I still think there's a place for winnowing by subject. History is fairly easy, but what if you're not sure of the terms for closely related subjects?
This doesn't really follow, the same company presently puts out both VHS and DVD versions of a movie. For instance, you can't sock it to the man by buying the VHS version of Little Mermaid. The man makes money off both versions. The price difference comes about mostly due to the cost of manufacture. The DVDs are stamped, the VHS tapes have to go through a recording process. The only way competition would come into play would be if seperate companies distributed the DVD and VHS versions.
When I saw Gladiator I was wondering how much of the story was actually historically accurate. I don't own an encyclopedia so I did a bit of research on the web. I looked up some of the main historical characters, Emperor Commodus, Marcus Aurelius and others, using google, altavista and others. What I found was that the spike of interest in the movie had completely swamped out any historical results. I had to wade through pages and pages of hits before I finally started getting to information that was useful in my context.
Google is my favourite search engine, even now, its ads are unobtrusive and don't pollute the search results. They've been good net citizens and they've done substantial research into how to better search. There results are typically the best as well.
In this case their search results were very broken however, at least for the purposes of my search. What I'd like to see is google, or an engine as effective as google, add in the ability to constrain your search to subject areas. In this instance I'd constrain my search to historical sites and would have received mostly uncorrupted hits. This is different than a web directory. Web directories don't classify sites based on there quality. Google does in a round about fashion, it lists sites with more people linking to it higher than sites with less links.
I'm not sure how the details of this would work, self-nomination would not necessarily work. Porn companies would gladly pollute the keywords on the off chance that somebody looking for history would buy a membership to their site. Letting individuals vote a site into or out of a keyword might work, though you'd be in danger of concerted efforts to say vote out anti-Scientologist information and vote in pro-Scientologist information when both actually could be under a religious keyword.
Anyway, linking to more sites isn't necessarily helpful in my opinion. What I'd prefer is the ability to narrow the focus of my searches.
In this case the original waveform is destroyed though. I can't get to the more detailed article, but in the less detailed one it states that the original is disembodied. Thats a fancy way of saying destroyed, though in reality its probably the reporters poor interpretation of what the scientist said. Elementary particles have a set of attributes that exactly describe them, but if you observe these attributes you modify them. So somehow something must be both observing it (which destroys the orignal particle) and changing its own characteristics such that they're identical to the ex-particle.
Companies have an ethical responsibility to protect their customers data at least as closely as they protect their own data. Any company that is willing to state, like the Allan Paller, head of the SANS institute "Given that the person who's card is stolen has no economic liability", is extremely dishonest or so completely unknowledgable that anybody using his company to train system administrators is insane. At one time this may have been true but many people now use cheque cards for online transactions. Many of these don't afford any protection at all. In the case of credit card fraud the impact on their customers can be both instantaneous and devastating. This money comes directly out of their bank accounts.
On the one hand corporations don't want any official policy about network security, on the other hand they're not willing to go to the lengths of due viligance. In most cases this would involve hiring an outside agency to design the software and network infrastructure to handle client billing and data.
I never said that people weren't willing to pay, I said they're not willing to pay meaninful amounts. The Baen Free library sells books that have already fallen out of favour in book stores, they've sold all they will ever sell that way. The authors are getting a couple grand more selling electronic copies. A couple grand doesn't make a living. It's a nice bonus if you've already made your living off of the book.
There's actually a pretty cool demonstration you can do. Buy a few NIB (Neodymium-Iron-Boron) magnets off of Ebay. You can get small ones for around 50 cents to a buck. The round disc shaped ones work best. They're viciously powerful.
Anyway, you can play with repulsion effects, its freaky how much repulsion there is. Even more interesting is dropping the magnet down a copper tube. The magnet will fall very slowly without touching the sides of the tube, a kind of magnetic braking effect.
The falling magnet induces a current to circulate in the copper tube (Lorenz' law?), this current in turn produces a magnetic field that opposes the magnetic field of the magnet. Because of this its opposed on all sides (and stays centered) and resists the force of gravity.
I also have a heat sink off the first generation Sony CD player, its aluminum and the fins are just wider than the height of my disc magnets. You can then see the effect in a side profile.
Tad William's Shadowland was serialized but wasn't pay-per-chapter. There was a one time fee associated with it (I can't remember how much I payed but it wasn't a great amount, definately less than a hardcover, probably more than a paperback). The first couple of chapters were and are free.
I had never heard of Tad William's till a friend turned me on to his Otherland series, which I devoured. I still haven't read his other books but I did look up his website to find out when the next book in the series would occur.
That's where I found out about his Shadowmarch experiment. He was making an honest effort at it, unlike Steven King, so I decided to sign up.
I think this fails for one reason: The average internet user isn't willing to pay a meaningful amount for content. If you've got old material which isn't selling well anyway you can probably make a bit of money. If you've got new material you'll probably never make enough to justify the time and effort writing it, assuming you're trying to make a living rather than supplement a living.
Marketing is probably part of his problem, the only time I saw ads was when my ad-free subscription to Sluggy Freelance cookie would expire. I think I've probably seen the ad pop up a couple times on sinfest as well.
I think your students just had a piss-poor teacher. In our first computer science course in high school we programmed a blackjack simulation once we had the basics down. Many of us were proto-geeks, but only one of the class had any actual prior experience. This was done on Commodore Pet's, the Vic 20 wasn't going to be around for another year or so.
I'm all for cheap broadband, but are any of the companies actually making money with that business model? If they continue down their current course (flat rate pricing, relatively unlimited usage) then yes, customers will be happy. They'll be happy right until their broadband provider goes belly up.
It sucks, but companies can't lose money hand over first indefinately. The changes will definately affect me, but I also see the need for the changes.
Re:Perfect for pirates?
on
DVDs By Mail?
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· Score: 1
I don't believe your claims. DiVX quality is lousy for anything other than playing in a small window once compression is high enough to fit onto even a couple of CD-ROM. Even if you ignore the obvious stuff, like any text being so band limited that it looks like it was written with magic markers, there are so many artifacts that really sitting down and watching something is pointless. Sure, you can fit a movie onto a CD-ROM, but you may as well throw it out since you'll never watch it again.
I'd be a bit more consternated about the requirement to use Windows to register/download the important bits. I can wait a couple of extra weeks to get a reasonably stable binary, but having to have access to Windows is really annoying.
It's not just plain theft, the artists get payed for their work. They may not in your opinion be payed enough, but thats their choice. The RIAA are scoundrels and should probably be hit with monopoly charges, but what they do isn't theft. A lot of people, not just artists are fucked over by corporations, even engineers or programmers. A lot of us are salaried employees and so get a fixed income regardless of how many hours we work. We work on understaffed and overmanaged projects and have to put in 10s of hours per week overtime just to keep up with the guy two cubicles over. This isn't theft either.
They apparently have physical access to the archive, so unless strong encryption was used the password itself probably isn't necessary. I've had to do this before, I received a demo machine for literally pennies on the dollar at my old lab. The only catch is that the root password was lost. I mounted the hard drive in another machine and just modified/etc/passwd that way. I eventually did a full reinstall but at the time my installation media was on loan elsewhere.
What were they supposed to name it? It's MPEG 4, so.mp4 seems appropriate, more appropriate than.mp3 was for MPEG 1, layer 3 incidentally. It's a standard that will be used by a number of companies, so calling it by a "proprietary" file extension would be inappropriate. The.mp4 extension predates Apple's adoption incidently.
No, Verisign deserves a hard time over this. In fact, if enough people find this objectionable they deserve to go out of business. Just because something happens to be legal doesn't mean that I can't find it morally or politically objectionable. Corporations have a lot more political clout than citizens, even when they use eff.org, since they can afford to hand out more large bags of cash. Part of the defense against enabling unjust wiretaps is to make it financially harmful for a company to support them.
I noticed right away that it didn't say it had tube output, it said it supports vacuum tube audio output. I imagine any tube on the device is there more for effect than anything else. The most important part would be the filter capacitors but I still wouldn't use this with anything other than the crap Creative puts out as amplifiers and speakers.
I think we're going to see banner ads on television myself, albeit maybe not click through. Most stations already continuously display there logo other than during commercials, some even have really annoying animations. I expect that we'll soon see advertisements in the borders, probably shifting from left, right, top bottom to help foil software that automatically would black it out.
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Most of my family are artists, so most of them use Apple computers. They're a lot quieter than any comparable machines I've seen. They aren't silent but compared to the boxes I'm using they seem like a whisper. If you feel the need to immediately spend extra money I'd recommend spending it on processor, there are no aftermarket options (that I know of) for replacing a processor on a current G4. Aftermarket RAM is available for substantially less than what apple charges. In addition their machines are amazingly easy to upgrade.
I'd recommending just getting the minimum configuration you can with the processor speed you want. You can purchase aftermarket hard drives, memory and other components later for substantially less.
For what one family member does with his G4 the SMP support is extremely helpful in terms of raw performance, but you've got to look at your applications and see if they exploit SMP. If you're writing your own code you can obviously make it support SMP, but you didn't really say what you were doing.
IDE on Apple's seem to work a lot better by default than IDE on PCs. I screw around with digital video, my sisters G4/733 captures via firewire without dropping a frame on the internal IDE drive. In order to duplicate this on my Windows 2000 box I had to install a second drive on a seperate bus from the system drive.
That didn't answer your question of course, but I just thought I'd point out that the comparision might not be so cut and dry.
I'd advice getting an aftermarket SCSI card and drive if you do decide to go that way however, you can save some money over Apple's prices.
Your argument is wrong, at least if you subscribe to evolution. There's a sequence of coin flips that have to take place. You don't just go from nothing to humanity in one probabilistic orgy. Each step along the way is a seperate coin toss, with the probability skewed highly towards an outcome of failure. I'm not even saying we've been visited or that its probably that we've been visisted. I don't think there's any evidence at all saying that we have been visited and probably a lot more that says we haven't.
But the article itself dismisses the likelyhood of us having been visited based on a series of statistical arguments. My point is that applying those same statistics says that we don't exist.
The probabilities for either event are infinitesimal, at least in my opinion, yet here we are. Even if you discount the above two occurences and bring up intelligent design or pure creation you're faced with yet one more improbability:
If you look at any of the probabilities they seem to point to a vanishingly small probability that even the simplest forms of life exist, let alone any intelligent life. Yet we're here.
Actually, I read it for the pictures.
Perhaps excitedly was a better work. He probably said bollocks slowly as he imagined a pair of them, brimming with man-juice, slapping against his treble-chins. The editors would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the incorrect wording.
Trademarks only apply to specific areas. Lilo from Disney's point of view is a cartoon character and franchise. From the linux side of things its a boot loader. The two don't interfere with each other. Your argument collapses anyway, if lilo had to change names (which it wouldn't) linux wouldn't magically stop working.
Ahh, but would that have worked when I thought of it? No, it was still a very current movie. Critical reviews of the hollywoodification of the history hadn't been written yet, or at least weren't published. I had to piece together my own overview of the historical accuracy (not that there's anything wrong with that, it was a good exercise in researching an area I'm not familiar with).
The previous post on using +history -movie was closer to the bill, though I still think there's a place for winnowing by subject. History is fairly easy, but what if you're not sure of the terms for closely related subjects?
This doesn't really follow, the same company presently puts out both VHS and DVD versions of a movie. For instance, you can't sock it to the man by buying the VHS version of Little Mermaid. The man makes money off both versions. The price difference comes about mostly due to the cost of manufacture. The DVDs are stamped, the VHS tapes have to go through a recording process. The only way competition would come into play would be if seperate companies distributed the DVD and VHS versions.
Google is my favourite search engine, even now, its ads are unobtrusive and don't pollute the search results. They've been good net citizens and they've done substantial research into how to better search. There results are typically the best as well.
In this case their search results were very broken however, at least for the purposes of my search. What I'd like to see is google, or an engine as effective as google, add in the ability to constrain your search to subject areas. In this instance I'd constrain my search to historical sites and would have received mostly uncorrupted hits. This is different than a web directory. Web directories don't classify sites based on there quality. Google does in a round about fashion, it lists sites with more people linking to it higher than sites with less links.
I'm not sure how the details of this would work, self-nomination would not necessarily work. Porn companies would gladly pollute the keywords on the off chance that somebody looking for history would buy a membership to their site. Letting individuals vote a site into or out of a keyword might work, though you'd be in danger of concerted efforts to say vote out anti-Scientologist information and vote in pro-Scientologist information when both actually could be under a religious keyword.
Anyway, linking to more sites isn't necessarily helpful in my opinion. What I'd prefer is the ability to narrow the focus of my searches.
In this case the original waveform is destroyed though. I can't get to the more detailed article, but in the less detailed one it states that the original is disembodied. Thats a fancy way of saying destroyed, though in reality its probably the reporters poor interpretation of what the scientist said. Elementary particles have a set of attributes that exactly describe them, but if you observe these attributes you modify them. So somehow something must be both observing it (which destroys the orignal particle) and changing its own characteristics such that they're identical to the ex-particle.
On the one hand corporations don't want any official policy about network security, on the other hand they're not willing to go to the lengths of due viligance. In most cases this would involve hiring an outside agency to design the software and network infrastructure to handle client billing and data.
It isn't thats the point. Copper isn't ferrous either, but passing a current through it makes a magnetic field. This is how motors work.
I never said that people weren't willing to pay, I said they're not willing to pay meaninful amounts. The Baen Free library sells books that have already fallen out of favour in book stores, they've sold all they will ever sell that way. The authors are getting a couple grand more selling electronic copies. A couple grand doesn't make a living. It's a nice bonus if you've already made your living off of the book.
Anyway, you can play with repulsion effects, its freaky how much repulsion there is. Even more interesting is dropping the magnet down a copper tube. The magnet will fall very slowly without touching the sides of the tube, a kind of magnetic braking effect.
The falling magnet induces a current to circulate in the copper tube (Lorenz' law?), this current in turn produces a magnetic field that opposes the magnetic field of the magnet. Because of this its opposed on all sides (and stays centered) and resists the force of gravity.
I also have a heat sink off the first generation Sony CD player, its aluminum and the fins are just wider than the height of my disc magnets. You can then see the effect in a side profile.
Off-topic I guess, but it was cool anyway.
Tad William's Shadowland was serialized but wasn't pay-per-chapter. There was a one time fee associated with it (I can't remember how much I payed but it wasn't a great amount, definately less than a hardcover, probably more than a paperback). The first couple of chapters were and are free.
I had never heard of Tad William's till a friend turned me on to his Otherland series, which I devoured. I still haven't read his other books but I did look up his website to find out when the next book in the series would occur.
That's where I found out about his Shadowmarch experiment. He was making an honest effort at it, unlike Steven King, so I decided to sign up.
I think this fails for one reason: The average internet user isn't willing to pay a meaningful amount for content. If you've got old material which isn't selling well anyway you can probably make a bit of money. If you've got new material you'll probably never make enough to justify the time and effort writing it, assuming you're trying to make a living rather than supplement a living.
Marketing is probably part of his problem, the only time I saw ads was when my ad-free subscription to Sluggy Freelance cookie would expire. I think I've probably seen the ad pop up a couple times on sinfest as well.
I think your students just had a piss-poor teacher. In our first computer science course in high school we programmed a blackjack simulation once we had the basics down. Many of us were proto-geeks, but only one of the class had any actual prior experience. This was done on Commodore Pet's, the Vic 20 wasn't going to be around for another year or so.
It sucks, but companies can't lose money hand over first indefinately. The changes will definately affect me, but I also see the need for the changes.
I don't believe your claims. DiVX quality is lousy for anything other than playing in a small window once compression is high enough to fit onto even a couple of CD-ROM. Even if you ignore the obvious stuff, like any text being so band limited that it looks like it was written with magic markers, there are so many artifacts that really sitting down and watching something is pointless. Sure, you can fit a movie onto a CD-ROM, but you may as well throw it out since you'll never watch it again.
I'd be a bit more consternated about the requirement to use Windows to register/download the important bits. I can wait a couple of extra weeks to get a reasonably stable binary, but having to have access to Windows is really annoying.
It's not just plain theft, the artists get payed for their work. They may not in your opinion be payed enough, but thats their choice. The RIAA are scoundrels and should probably be hit with monopoly charges, but what they do isn't theft. A lot of people, not just artists are fucked over by corporations, even engineers or programmers. A lot of us are salaried employees and so get a fixed income regardless of how many hours we work. We work on understaffed and overmanaged projects and have to put in 10s of hours per week overtime just to keep up with the guy two cubicles over. This isn't theft either.
They apparently have physical access to the archive, so unless strong encryption was used the password itself probably isn't necessary. I've had to do this before, I received a demo machine for literally pennies on the dollar at my old lab. The only catch is that the root password was lost. I mounted the hard drive in another machine and just modified /etc/passwd that way. I eventually did a full reinstall but at the time my installation media was on loan elsewhere.
What were they supposed to name it? It's MPEG 4, so .mp4 seems appropriate, more appropriate than .mp3 was for MPEG 1, layer 3 incidentally. It's a standard that will be used by a number of companies, so calling it by a "proprietary" file extension would be inappropriate. The .mp4 extension predates Apple's adoption incidently.
No, Verisign deserves a hard time over this. In fact, if enough people find this objectionable they deserve to go out of business. Just because something happens to be legal doesn't mean that I can't find it morally or politically objectionable. Corporations have a lot more political clout than citizens, even when they use eff.org, since they can afford to hand out more large bags of cash. Part of the defense against enabling unjust wiretaps is to make it financially harmful for a company to support them.
I noticed right away that it didn't say it had tube output, it said it supports vacuum tube audio output. I imagine any tube on the device is there more for effect than anything else. The most important part would be the filter capacitors but I still wouldn't use this with anything other than the crap Creative puts out as amplifiers and speakers.
I think we're going to see banner ads on television myself, albeit maybe not click through. Most stations already continuously display there logo other than during commercials, some even have really annoying animations. I expect that we'll soon see advertisements in the borders, probably shifting from left, right, top bottom to help foil software that automatically would black it out.