Anywho, I find most all TCO calculations to be dubious and akin to damned lies.
So true. I mean, Linux is "free", and by that I mean you get the source and all of that. The next release will be free as well. It doesn't EOL (so long as you support yourself). Migration from Linux to another UNIX is very cost effective. Migration to Windows is expensive, and migration off of Windows is expensive.
But my ramblings and all of thest TCO ramblings are utter BS. The T in TCO is Total, which includes inception to end of life. I know that companies like Tivo, Agami, Linksys, and places like supercomputing centers really believe that the freeness in terms of cost and having the source is a very worthwile expendature of their time with little expense in dollars.
I love Linux and all, but what kind of support would be offered compared to Windows support? I have no experience with Windows support (don't use it), but when I call my ISP and other companies, they ask questions like "What version of Windows are you using?" By being a Linux and Mac guy, I find myself self supported much of the time, which is OK most of the time, but when the internet is down or something that is not OS dependant, I have issues from time to time, and its next to impossible to talk with support people sometimes.
Now, I'm not talking about me. I've run Linux on a number of Dells (hundreds), but I don't need Linux support, but for "normal" people or whatever, what kind of support will they get?
There aren't any nobel prize winning boxers because they are devoting their time to boxing and not to science. I'd suspect you could find some nobel prize winners that work out.
To refine that, look at it statistically.
Lets define 'really good looking' as someone that is the best looking out of 500. Lets define 'really smart' as someone that is the smartest out of 500. Lets define 'really strong' as someone that is the strongest out of 500.
To have all three, you are now at 1/1500, and that is assuming that good looking, smart, and strong are completely evenly distributed and they don't interfere with each other.
Now, how many nobel prize winners are there walking around?
To be extremely gifted in one area is rare. to be extremely gifted in two areas, is more rare, to be extremely gifted in three areas is even more rare, etc, etc.
They think its better for us to try out their products, see if we like them and buy later, rather than using their competitors' software. Feel free to correct my logic if I'm reading this wrong.
Microsoft doesn't really make any money off of Windows via off the shelf retail editions. They make money off of taxing OEMs by shipping their OS with new boxes regardless if you want or need a license, they get paid. They then make money off of site licenses where its common for the box to come with a license and then the site pays a separate license.
And that fact that it carries sound is laughable too. WTF?!? Didn't we just spend 20 years being sold home theater gear and being told how the built-in speakers suck? And now the great leap forward is to use a shitty integrated cable like Apple shipped on the 6100 and abandoned over a decade ago?!?!?
I'm not familiar with the integraded Apple cable, but the HDMI cable with integrated sound is kinda cool. How this benefits a video card on a computer, is to be determined. But with HDMI and integrated video and sound you can eitehr plug the guy into the TV alone, or plug it into an AV receiver and there is only one cable. Compare that to say a Sony SACD/DVD player with component outputs where you are expected to plug in 6 analog connections for SACD playback, 1 video cable wich consists of 3 analog connections for component output, and a digital cable for audio, I welcome the simplicity. I just wish the connector was better designed.
I'm the proud owner of a toddler, and try as i might occasionally the little bugger will without doubt get her hands on a shiny disc, perhaps accidentally left in the DVD player overnight and she chewed on the remote i accidentally left on the sofa and nibbled the eject button. anyway, you can be careful but hey, i'm only human right.
And back on topic, toddlers (cats, dogs, vacuum cleaners, etc) are incompatable with HDMI.
For the life of me, I don't know why this connection ever became a standard. For those that do not know, the HDMI plugs come out very easily. Also, for grapics cards (I did not read the article), I don't see the benefit of HDMI. DVI is electically the same, but it does add digital sound over the same cable, and AFAIK, DVI also supports DRM via HDCP and all that jazz as well to appease the people that care about this stuff.
Is there anyone who actually likes HDMI? Are there any benefits to using HDMI on computers over DVI? Personally, I much prefer DVI...
One of the most clever uses of document.write I've seen was something like: document.write("<--") YOU NEED JAVSCRIPT FOR THIS PAGE document.write("-->")
The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
But that has nothing to do with DST, that has to do with 1) what time you come and go to work and how long you stay there, and 2) the days are simply shorter in the winter because the Earth's axis. In extreme Northern and Southern climates (think North and South polar regions), its daylight and dark 24 hours a day depending on the season, and changing the clock will not change that.
I heard on NPR the other day, that the _real_ reason for DST is not to save energy, but rather to appease the retail sector. They have data that people are more willing to go out and spend money after work if its not dark. So people go motoring around in their fuel efficient SUVs, blow money, and thus energy is saved!
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Sometimes I think humans are the silliest of all animals.
Load average is a bad way of looking at machine utilization. Load average is the average number of processes on the run queue over the last 1,5,15 minutes.
This may be wrong, but I've always looked at load as the number of processes waiting for resources (usually disk, CPU, or network).
I've seen boxes with issues that have had a number of processes stuck in the nonkillable D (disk) wait state that were just stuck, but they had no real impact on the system besides artifically running the load up.
I've also seen where load was reported as N/NCPUs and N regardless of the number of CPUs.
Like all statistics, any single number in isolation is just a number. Even if the real meaning is the average number of processes in the run queue, that does not tell you much. Thinking of it as the number of processes waiting for some piece of hardware seems more accurate.
Why are you sick of hearing that linux is a kernel? It is a statement of fact.
To be pedantic, yes, linux is a kernel. But it is more than that. We hear all the time about "Linux on the desktop". Well, if Linux is just a kernel, then talking about Linux on the desktop is an oxymoron until deskop services are added to the kernel.
ntoskrnl.exe is a kernel, which is used as part of the Windows operating system. Darwin is a kernel, which is used as part of the MacOSX operating system, and can be used elsewhere as well.
Again, all true. But Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux are beyond that. Windows is a jack of all trades, popular OS that everybody knows.
Linux is more of a state of mind. Linux implies open source. Linux implies freedom. Linux implies hacking to get it to run on picture frames, WAPs, super computers, car computers, wearable computers, and all that.
Yes, Linux is a kernel, but nobody runs just a kernel. I'm typing this from a Linux machine. Below me on the first floor, I have hundreds of Linux servers. Down the hall, I have hundreds more. To me, Linux on the desktop is not as nice as OS X, and conversely, I prefer Linux on my servers over OS X. And when I say I like Linux here, but not as much there, I'm not talking about the kernel, I'm talking about the whole package.
I'm sick of hearing that. So, what is OS X? What is Windows? What is FreeBSD? What is Solaris?
Linux is many things, and what it is to you, might be something different to other people. Linux runs everything from "supercomputers" to picture frames, and Linux means something different to all of those people.
For what its worth, Linus is more proud to find out that his new picture frame he bought for his wife runs linux than a supercomputer.
TIFF had a problem like that in it's early days when the name was said to stand for "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats". The same things happens today when I try to open a.avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it.
At least TIFF meant the image was a TIFF in a known format. I'm assuming the problem was that people only half implemented the standards in the beginning, but they were at least known.
Cute snippet from wikipedia:
Every TIFF file begins with a 2-byte indicator of byte order: "II" for little endian and "MM" for big endian byte ordering. The following 2 bytes represent the number 42. The number 42 was selected "for its deep philosophical significance." What pisses me off is that today, an AVI could stand for "Any Video Inside". You have no idea what is inside of an AVI file without opening it. Its just a container, with unknown contents.
I'm not a codec geek, so could someone explain the benefits of having a container with unknown crap inside of it? OGG is the same way. I don't know the details, but from what I've heard calling an OGG an OGG is useless because it could have Vorbis encoded or FLAC (which is a container and a codec combined) or I guess something else.
Why is a Kilobyte 1024 bytes, if "Kilo" means 1000, both according to the SI and the greeks (Kilo is derived from khilioi). If 1 kg = 1000g, 1 kV = 1000V, 1 km = 1000m, why should hard disks break the pattern?
The thing that gets _really_ confusing is that a byte does not have to be 8 bits. I don't know of any modern computers that don't use 8 bit bytes, but there were 7 and 9 bit byte machines back in the day.
Harddrive manufactures have their version of bytes, networking people speak in bits, and all of it is a mess.
A friend of mine is older than me, and when he was in school light came in angstroms, but today light come in nanometers. (Anstroms are deprecated because they are not in the SI power of a thousand rule).
The moral of the story is that standards are not that standard, but when the standard becomes standard the standard is subject to change at any time:)
A better questions is.. why does Windows Vista (the most advanced OS on planet earth per Steve and Bill) use alphabet device names in 2007?
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --Henry Spencer
I laugh when I hear at work someone talking about thier J: drive or some other random letter of the alphabet, and us oldschool UNIX guys talk about home, mail, and things in real words.
I'm a 100% unix guy. In my NSHO, there is no other OS. Macs have come around, and they are UNIX based now. Basically, everything in 2007 is UNIX based besides Windows.
I will keep repeating this until its not true, but MS's poor choices in OS design (to use the term losely) has set back computing by at least a decade.
Its really sad that Windows is so popular. I'm relatively new to UNIX, since 93-94 or so, and I'm still amazed at how well it was set up in the late 60s/early 70s and how it is still _the_ OS in 2007.
Is UNIX perfect? No. But I find it interesting that No other OS implementation that I know of (besides Windows) has lasted over the years.
This is perhaps the most exciting news that I've heard in the past month
This is perhaps yet another example of the old boss being the same as the new boss.
So, we have media cartels that through payola, DMCA, and copyright do whatever they want, and now the government comes in and says. "We've been nice to you, now you have to pay some extra protection so something bad does not happen to you".
The media cartels are still there. Payola just got temporarily more expensive. DMCA is still here, and nothing is different.
I would much prefer if there was an actual free market. The entertainment business has gotten absolutely horrible, where entertainment is the lowest priority, and legislation and money is the priority today.
I remember when bands could fill up football stadiums in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Today, its tough to sell out a 10,000 to 20,000 venue, and when that happens, its an older band playing their greatest hits from a decade or more ago.
All of this crap has stifled creativity. I don't think creativity is down in the human gene pool, I think the ability for creativity to come out is practically illegal.
She managed to find a tool that you could use to remove the cruft and unused images and that could result in massive file size reductions (in the order of many megabytes).
A guy I work with can't figure out why 150 meg+ powerpoint files run slowly on his laptop computer.
A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions. Sorry I can't cite it properly. It was one of those stories that he repeated on more than one occasion.
This is well documented beyond WWII POWs and beyond religion as well.
A POW with a belief that he will get out and have a steak will have a higher probablility of surviving than one who believes he will die in the camp.
This is why the EMT people say "Your going to make it, hang in there, your going to be fine" even when there is little to no hope. These beliefs, true or not do have positive impact on people.
No, but, faith requires lack of reasoning. If by stupid you mean intellectual capacity, then people that do not reason are stupid. QED.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Not always the case. Religion just tends to be slow in accepting the prove. Science tends to not disprove things. You can disprove a hypothesis but that only effects a theory. Theories tend to be positive in verbiage.
I'd suggest a scientific method refresher course.
Nothing negative can be proven, observed or measured. You cannot prove that I was not at the library at 3 PM on Wednesday.
Theories are stated so that they are testable.
Accepted theories are accepted until new information comes around to either negate a theory or refine it.
Newton's "laws" (actually theories) about motion were great until Einstein and Heisenburg came along.
In odt, for instance, images go in a subdirectory "Pictures" as whatever file type was imported. So no, it isn't bloated.
Kinda reminds you of that web thing now doesn't it?
Apple's excellent Keynote program does this. The "file" is actually a directory, and inside of that are the images, etc. Its also cool because the images are kept in their origninal format and they are then resized or whatever by th e client program (again like that web thingy).
I find Word and PowerPoint files as bloated. The subdirectory or subfolder idea is much more flexable and reliable. Heck, you can even look and grab a picture in the Pictures folder without even opening the original document.
What tool I use to decrypt this legally acquired file with my legally acquired key with should be no ones business but my own.
Correct, with the exception that the distribution of said content goes back to copyright law, which is pretty clear, which makes laws like the DMCA redundant and unnecessary.
All of these extra laws and paranoia on the content holder's part are a big loss for everybody and a no win for anybody. SCMS basically killed the DAT platform. I've had to "illegally" get around Macrovision so that I could view my DVD player that I bought on my TV that I bought with the DVDs that I bought. I'm running into HDCP issues today to use over $50,000 worth of AV equipment that my work bought.
Its nonsense. And I'm sick of having to deal with it.
But what seems to happen is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up more and more ram even after Safari is shut down. After a couple days of usage, I feel the need for a restart just to flush out this annoyance.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, It's only a minor annoyance, but it is definitely noticeable and something I hope is dealt with when 10.5 comes out.
In general, I find 10.4 to be a minor annoyance. I consider it growing pains. 10.4 added TONS of new stuff, but this new stuff is, well, new, and not necessarily mature. Things like core audio, quartz extreme, spotlight, etc. All of these things are great, and a work in progress, but they are not bug free. I find 10.3 to be more stable featurewise than 10.4. 10.4 in some respects performs better, and in some respects performs worse.
I find recent versions of Safari to be less than desirable. It almost chokes on digg.com for some reason (CSS?), and other sites. You load the page, and then the CPU burns for a while before its completely rendered.
I believe that 10.5 will be better. Or at least I sure hope so.
They blindly refuse to support telling that "we don't support anything other than RHEL".
In my experience, "support" is pretty much a misnomer.
What happens basically 100% of the time is that they blame anything and everything besides their product. The only way around this is if you buy all of your stuff from one company and have one support contract for all of that stuff.
Example, I had a certified and partnered RAID array, HBA card, OS, and system hardware that were all OK with each other. When I had a problem, every one of the hardware people said, "If the lights are on, then it works according to me, having it work with your environment is your problem". At home, I have a piece of hardware where the driver breaks _EVERY TIME_ I do an OS update, so they taught me not to do OS updates. They do update their driver within a period of time, but if I call them or if I go to their website, they never say "This driver does not work after upgrading to OS x.y". I've gotten hot and bothered about it, but I've just given up. One time, they came out with an update within a few days of me calling and asking about it, yet the asshat on the phone could not say "We are working on it, its a known issue".
It kills me the amount of money that "support" costs, and management and all of that love support for some reason, but I've found more real support from online forums, mailinglists, and newsgroups for free software than I have for any paid for support for "real" products.
Oh, while I'm on a rant here. What about the support answer to the request of: "I need your product to support feature X". And the answer is, pay us more money for the latest version of our product, drop all of your production work you are doing, have a downtime, and then _if_ it works, and _if_ its bugfree and works 100% as advertised, then you will now have feature X. I'm sorry that is not support, that is buying a new product, which could very well be from another vendor.
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Anywho, I find most all TCO calculations to be dubious and akin to damned lies.
So true. I mean, Linux is "free", and by that I mean you get the source and all of that. The next release will be free as well. It doesn't EOL (so long as you support yourself). Migration from Linux to another UNIX is very cost effective. Migration to Windows is expensive, and migration off of Windows is expensive.
But my ramblings and all of thest TCO ramblings are utter BS. The T in TCO is Total, which includes inception to end of life. I know that companies like Tivo, Agami, Linksys, and places like supercomputing centers really believe that the freeness in terms of cost and having the source is a very worthwile expendature of their time with little expense in dollars.
Been using Linux since '94. Never had to compile X even once.
I've been using Linux since 94 as well, and I've had to compile X once, but I've compiled it many other times as well.
I had to compile X because the only X that worked with my laptop at the time was the CVS version of X.
I have to get geek points for that, right?
I love Linux and all, but what kind of support would be offered compared to Windows support? I have no experience with Windows support (don't use it), but when I call my ISP and other companies, they ask questions like "What version of Windows are you using?" By being a Linux and Mac guy, I find myself self supported much of the time, which is OK most of the time, but when the internet is down or something that is not OS dependant, I have issues from time to time, and its next to impossible to talk with support people sometimes.
Now, I'm not talking about me. I've run Linux on a number of Dells (hundreds), but I don't need Linux support, but for "normal" people or whatever, what kind of support will they get?
There aren't any nobel prize winning boxers because they are devoting their time to boxing and not to science. I'd suspect you could find some nobel prize winners that work out.
To refine that, look at it statistically.
Lets define 'really good looking' as someone that is the best looking out of 500.
Lets define 'really smart' as someone that is the smartest out of 500.
Lets define 'really strong' as someone that is the strongest out of 500.
To have all three, you are now at 1/1500, and that is assuming that good looking, smart, and strong are completely evenly distributed and they don't interfere with each other.
Now, how many nobel prize winners are there walking around?
To be extremely gifted in one area is rare. to be extremely gifted in two areas, is more rare, to be extremely gifted in three areas is even more rare, etc, etc.
They think its better for us to try out their products, see if we like them and buy later, rather than using their competitors' software. Feel free to correct my logic if I'm reading this wrong.
Microsoft doesn't really make any money off of Windows via off the shelf retail editions. They make money off of taxing OEMs by shipping their OS with new boxes regardless if you want or need a license, they get paid. They then make money off of site licenses where its common for the box to come with a license and then the site pays a separate license.
And that fact that it carries sound is laughable too. WTF?!? Didn't we just spend 20 years being sold home theater gear and being told how the built-in speakers suck? And now the great leap forward is to use a shitty integrated cable like Apple shipped on the 6100 and abandoned over a decade ago?!?!?
I'm not familiar with the integraded Apple cable, but the HDMI cable with integrated sound is kinda cool. How this benefits a video card on a computer, is to be determined. But with HDMI and integrated video and sound you can eitehr plug the guy into the TV alone, or plug it into an AV receiver and there is only one cable. Compare that to say a Sony SACD/DVD player with component outputs where you are expected to plug in 6 analog connections for SACD playback, 1 video cable wich consists of 3 analog connections for component output, and a digital cable for audio, I welcome the simplicity. I just wish the connector was better designed.
I'm the proud owner of a toddler, and try as i might occasionally the little bugger will without doubt get her hands on a shiny disc, perhaps accidentally left in the DVD player overnight and she chewed on the remote i accidentally left on the sofa and nibbled the eject button. anyway, you can be careful but hey, i'm only human right.
And back on topic, toddlers (cats, dogs, vacuum cleaners, etc) are incompatable with HDMI.
For the life of me, I don't know why this connection ever became a standard. For those that do not know, the HDMI plugs come out very easily. Also, for grapics cards (I did not read the article), I don't see the benefit of HDMI. DVI is electically the same, but it does add digital sound over the same cable, and AFAIK, DVI also supports DRM via HDCP and all that jazz as well to appease the people that care about this stuff.
Is there anyone who actually likes HDMI? Are there any benefits to using HDMI on computers over DVI? Personally, I much prefer DVI...
One of the most clever uses of document.write I've seen was something like: document.write("<--") YOU NEED JAVSCRIPT FOR THIS PAGE document.write("-->")
The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
But that has nothing to do with DST, that has to do with 1) what time you come and go to work and how long you stay there, and 2) the days are simply shorter in the winter because the Earth's axis. In extreme Northern and Southern climates (think North and South polar regions), its daylight and dark 24 hours a day depending on the season, and changing the clock will not change that.
I heard on NPR the other day, that the _real_ reason for DST is not to save energy, but rather to appease the retail sector. They have data that people are more willing to go out and spend money after work if its not dark. So people go motoring around in their fuel efficient SUVs, blow money, and thus energy is saved!
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Sometimes I think humans are the silliest of all animals.
Load average is a bad way of looking at machine utilization. Load average is the average number of processes on the run queue over the last 1,5,15 minutes.
This may be wrong, but I've always looked at load as the number of processes waiting for resources (usually disk, CPU, or network).
I've seen boxes with issues that have had a number of processes stuck in the nonkillable D (disk) wait state that were just stuck, but they had no real impact on the system besides artifically running the load up.
I've also seen where load was reported as N/NCPUs and N regardless of the number of CPUs.
Like all statistics, any single number in isolation is just a number. Even if the real meaning is the average number of processes in the run queue, that does not tell you much. Thinking of it as the number of processes waiting for some piece of hardware seems more accurate.
Why are you sick of hearing that linux is a kernel? It is a statement of fact.
To be pedantic, yes, linux is a kernel. But it is more than that. We hear all the time about "Linux on the desktop". Well, if Linux is just a kernel, then talking about Linux on the desktop is an oxymoron until deskop services are added to the kernel.
ntoskrnl.exe is a kernel, which is used as part of the Windows operating system. Darwin is a kernel, which is used as part of the MacOSX operating system, and can be used elsewhere as well.
Again, all true. But Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux are beyond that. Windows is a jack of all trades, popular OS that everybody knows.
Linux is more of a state of mind. Linux implies open source. Linux implies freedom. Linux implies hacking to get it to run on picture frames, WAPs, super computers, car computers, wearable computers, and all that.
Yes, Linux is a kernel, but nobody runs just a kernel. I'm typing this from a Linux machine. Below me on the first floor, I have hundreds of Linux servers. Down the hall, I have hundreds more. To me, Linux on the desktop is not as nice as OS X, and conversely, I prefer Linux on my servers over OS X. And when I say I like Linux here, but not as much there, I'm not talking about the kernel, I'm talking about the whole package.
Linux is a kernel.
I'm sick of hearing that. So, what is OS X? What is Windows? What is FreeBSD? What is Solaris?
Linux is many things, and what it is to you, might be something different to other people. Linux runs everything from "supercomputers" to picture frames, and Linux means something different to all of those people.
For what its worth, Linus is more proud to find out that his new picture frame he bought for his wife runs linux than a supercomputer.
At least TIFF meant the image was a TIFF in a known format. I'm assuming the problem was that people only half implemented the standards in the beginning, but they were at least known.
Cute snippet from wikipedia: Every TIFF file begins with a 2-byte indicator of byte order: "II" for little endian and "MM" for big endian byte ordering. The following 2 bytes represent the number 42. The number 42 was selected "for its deep philosophical significance." What pisses me off is that today, an AVI could stand for "Any Video Inside". You have no idea what is inside of an AVI file without opening it. Its just a container, with unknown contents.
I'm not a codec geek, so could someone explain the benefits of having a container with unknown crap inside of it? OGG is the same way. I don't know the details, but from what I've heard calling an OGG an OGG is useless because it could have Vorbis encoded or FLAC (which is a container and a codec combined) or I guess something else.
Yuck.
Why is a Kilobyte 1024 bytes, if "Kilo" means 1000, both according to the SI and the greeks (Kilo is derived from khilioi). If 1 kg = 1000g, 1 kV = 1000V, 1 km = 1000m, why should hard disks break the pattern?
:)
Read all about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
The thing that gets _really_ confusing is that a byte does not have to be 8 bits. I don't know of any modern computers that don't use 8 bit bytes, but there were 7 and 9 bit byte machines back in the day.
Harddrive manufactures have their version of bytes, networking people speak in bits, and all of it is a mess.
A friend of mine is older than me, and when he was in school light came in angstroms, but today light come in nanometers. (Anstroms are deprecated because they are not in the SI power of a thousand rule).
The moral of the story is that standards are not that standard, but when the standard becomes standard the standard is subject to change at any time
A better questions is.. why does Windows Vista (the most advanced OS on planet earth per Steve and Bill) use alphabet device names in 2007?
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --Henry Spencer
I laugh when I hear at work someone talking about thier J: drive or some other random letter of the alphabet, and us oldschool UNIX guys talk about home, mail, and things in real words.
I'm a 100% unix guy. In my NSHO, there is no other OS. Macs have come around, and they are UNIX based now. Basically, everything in 2007 is UNIX based besides Windows.
I will keep repeating this until its not true, but MS's poor choices in OS design (to use the term losely) has set back computing by at least a decade.
Its really sad that Windows is so popular. I'm relatively new to UNIX, since 93-94 or so, and I'm still amazed at how well it was set up in the late 60s/early 70s and how it is still _the_ OS in 2007.
Is UNIX perfect? No. But I find it interesting that No other OS implementation that I know of (besides Windows) has lasted over the years.
This is perhaps the most exciting news that I've heard in the past month
This is perhaps yet another example of the old boss being the same as the new boss.
So, we have media cartels that through payola, DMCA, and copyright do whatever they want, and now the government comes in and says. "We've been nice to you, now you have to pay some extra protection so something bad does not happen to you".
The media cartels are still there. Payola just got temporarily more expensive. DMCA is still here, and nothing is different.
I would much prefer if there was an actual free market. The entertainment business has gotten absolutely horrible, where entertainment is the lowest priority, and legislation and money is the priority today.
I remember when bands could fill up football stadiums in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Today, its tough to sell out a 10,000 to 20,000 venue, and when that happens, its an older band playing their greatest hits from a decade or more ago.
All of this crap has stifled creativity. I don't think creativity is down in the human gene pool, I think the ability for creativity to come out is practically illegal.
She managed to find a tool that you could use to remove the cruft and unused images and that could result in massive file size reductions (in the order of many megabytes).
:)
A guy I work with can't figure out why 150 meg+ powerpoint files run slowly on his laptop computer.
He's a computer scientist, so I forgive him
A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions. Sorry I can't cite it properly. It was one of those stories that he repeated on more than one occasion.
This is well documented beyond WWII POWs and beyond religion as well.
A POW with a belief that he will get out and have a steak will have a higher probablility of surviving than one who believes he will die in the camp.
This is why the EMT people say "Your going to make it, hang in there, your going to be fine" even when there is little to no hope. These beliefs, true or not do have positive impact on people.
No, but, faith requires lack of reasoning. If by stupid you mean intellectual capacity, then people that do not reason are stupid. QED.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
From the HHGTTG, for those that don't know it...
Not always the case. Religion just tends to be slow in accepting the prove. Science tends to not disprove things. You can disprove a hypothesis but that only effects a theory. Theories tend to be positive in verbiage.
I'd suggest a scientific method refresher course.
Nothing negative can be proven, observed or measured. You cannot prove that I was not at the library at 3 PM on Wednesday.
Theories are stated so that they are testable.
Accepted theories are accepted until new information comes around to either negate a theory or refine it.
Newton's "laws" (actually theories) about motion were great until Einstein and Heisenburg came along.
In odt, for instance, images go in a subdirectory "Pictures" as whatever file type was imported. So no, it isn't bloated.
Kinda reminds you of that web thing now doesn't it?
Apple's excellent Keynote program does this. The "file" is actually a directory, and inside of that are the images, etc. Its also cool because the images are kept in their origninal format and they are then resized or whatever by th e client program (again like that web thingy).
I find Word and PowerPoint files as bloated. The subdirectory or subfolder idea is much more flexable and reliable. Heck, you can even look and grab a picture in the Pictures folder without even opening the original document.
You could stop buying it.
Good advice. Its the same I tell to people that complain about Windows or other Microsoft products.
What tool I use to decrypt this legally acquired file with my legally acquired key with should be no ones business but my own.
Correct, with the exception that the distribution of said content goes back to copyright law, which is pretty clear, which makes laws like the DMCA redundant and unnecessary.
All of these extra laws and paranoia on the content holder's part are a big loss for everybody and a no win for anybody. SCMS basically killed the DAT platform. I've had to "illegally" get around Macrovision so that I could view my DVD player that I bought on my TV that I bought with the DVDs that I bought. I'm running into HDCP issues today to use over $50,000 worth of AV equipment that my work bought.
Its nonsense. And I'm sick of having to deal with it.
But what seems to happen is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up more and more ram even after Safari is shut down. After a couple days of usage, I feel the need for a restart just to flush out this annoyance.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, It's only a minor annoyance, but it is definitely noticeable and something I hope is dealt with when 10.5 comes out.
In general, I find 10.4 to be a minor annoyance. I consider it growing pains. 10.4 added TONS of new stuff, but this new stuff is, well, new, and not necessarily mature. Things like core audio, quartz extreme, spotlight, etc. All of these things are great, and a work in progress, but they are not bug free. I find 10.3 to be more stable featurewise than 10.4. 10.4 in some respects performs better, and in some respects performs worse.
I find recent versions of Safari to be less than desirable. It almost chokes on digg.com for some reason (CSS?), and other sites. You load the page, and then the CPU burns for a while before its completely rendered.
I believe that 10.5 will be better. Or at least I sure hope so.
They blindly refuse to support telling that "we don't support anything other than RHEL".
In my experience, "support" is pretty much a misnomer.
What happens basically 100% of the time is that they blame anything and everything besides their product. The only way around this is if you buy all of your stuff from one company and have one support contract for all of that stuff.
Example, I had a certified and partnered RAID array, HBA card, OS, and system hardware that were all OK with each other. When I had a problem, every one of the hardware people said, "If the lights are on, then it works according to me, having it work with your environment is your problem". At home, I have a piece of hardware where the driver breaks _EVERY TIME_ I do an OS update, so they taught me not to do OS updates. They do update their driver within a period of time, but if I call them or if I go to their website, they never say "This driver does not work after upgrading to OS x.y". I've gotten hot and bothered about it, but I've just given up. One time, they came out with an update within a few days of me calling and asking about it, yet the asshat on the phone could not say "We are working on it, its a known issue".
It kills me the amount of money that "support" costs, and management and all of that love support for some reason, but I've found more real support from online forums, mailinglists, and newsgroups for free software than I have for any paid for support for "real" products.
Oh, while I'm on a rant here. What about the support answer to the request of: "I need your product to support feature X". And the answer is, pay us more money for the latest version of our product, drop all of your production work you are doing, have a downtime, and then _if_ it works, and _if_ its bugfree and works 100% as advertised, then you will now have feature X. I'm sorry that is not support, that is buying a new product, which could very well be from another vendor.
Support is mostly an illusion.