Not true - WNBC was up and broadcasting during the blackout. Of course, you needed a TV that has its own power source (generator, batteries, etc.) and an antenna.
Of course, most people don't have battery operated TVs - but they do have battery-operated radios.
They just think it is "more difficult". Back in the times of the VHS you just inserted the original and the blank and presseed REC+PLAY and voila.
Apparently, you've never heard of Macrovision. Not that it's hard to circumvent, but the average person on the street doesn't even know that it exists - they just know that they can't copy commercial VHS tapes.
DRM comes in pretending to be something that the user wants. It is a trojan horse, a virus. It is brought in, under the disguise of something that helps the system. Then, when it strikes, like this, it does nothing but hurt the system. It doesn't help the user, it hurts the user.
Yes, and I want to be able to transfer money from any account at my bank to any other account without there being any record. My bank won't let me do that. Certainly that would be optimal from my perspective, but what about everyone else?
DRM is the classic slippery slope. If we accept the infection, if we don't fight it tooth and nail, then down the road when it really is in everthing, we will have turned over all control to the big boys who control the DRM.
We have already "accepted" DRM. It's on every DVD, in every iPod, on every video game console, and in many, many other places. DRM is just a different application of encryption.
Prior to car safety regulation, people were not any more likely to die in an auto accident than they are now, and there were something close to 100 American auto companies.
This is just bullshit. Any research into the statistics will indicate otherwise. Since 1960, the fatality rate per mile traveled has dropped 3.42x. Since 1970, it has dropped 3.2x.
Spread your Libertarian bullshit elsewhere. The facts support the conclusion that safety standards have made vehicles significantly safer.
Even now, the U.S. keeps a lot of European small cars out of the U.S. market by insane safety regulations (which is why you can't buy a tiny little fuel efficient peugot or citron something similiar in the U.S.)
The reason you can't buy a tiny vehicle in the US (other than, for example, the Honda Insight) is that historically tiny vehicles have performed poorly in the market. Our safety regulations are neither "insane" nor are they particularly stringent - EuroNCAP, for example, is a considerably harder test than the NHTSA test (and more comparable to the IIHS tests).
If you look at ANY regulation that is passed, with the exception of regulation that is essentially already a social moor (such as laws against murder, rape, etc.), they are designed for the benfit of powerful economic interests.
Spoken like a true Libertarian. "If the government does it, it must be evil". Of course, big, powerful interests would never try to gain power through corporate means. Who needs anti-trust laws? Environmental regulations? It is foolish to trust that the government has our best interests in mind, but it is every bit as foolish to assume that corporations will act ethically.
That's why we need things like car safety regulations. This isn't rocket science: we have real-world crash test data indicating that cars are safer. And we have the statistics to indicate that those safer cars are saving lives. The facts support a simple conclusion: vehicle safety standards save lives.
Yes, exactly - Mythbusters isn't exactly what I'd call "scientific". Take it for what it is - an interesting and highly entertaining TV show. One of the best on television.
People who say there's nothing good on TV don't watch TV.
Well, seeing as we never used F in chem (either high school or engineering general chem), I didn't know that. 273.15K, on the hand, is much more familiar.
Open-source GPL + optional commercial licensing not good enough for you?
real database
But maybe we don't need a "real" database. Maybe we need an easy-to-use replacement for flat files with some database features. Not everyone is running a bank, or handling a billion emails a day, or tracking inventory for Wal-Mart. Lots of users just want something that can handle their small little application.
IMHO, one of the reasons why the web is broken is that it is so easy to create content that no one takes the time to learn the basic computer science involved
Spoken like a true CS major. CS is a valuable, valuable field - I have nothing but the highest respect for it (which is why I'm getting an ECE degree + CS minor). But the web is not 'broken' - it is the single most valuable informational resource that we have ever created. And the web is useful precisely because you don't have to understand CS to create content. Do you think that there would be 1/1000th of the content on the web if you had to understand CS to contribute to it? No. What we would end up with would be a web that consists entirely of pages created by pencilnecks like yourself and by corporations with big budgets. There would be no Slashdot. There would be no Wikipedia.
HP, Dell, Lenovo, and the like don't pay anywhere near retail price for components. Complete $250 PCs are common - with 256MB of DDR2, a Sempron 3400+, GeForce 6150 graphics, 80GB SATA drive, CD-ROM, flash card reader, and even a PCIe x16 slot.
I got a $150 eMachines PC - with a 17" monitor, 512MB of DDR, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 80GB HDD, XP Home, and a 2.93GHz Celeron at Best Buy on Black Friday last year. It's not at all out of the question.
Not that it's hard to do that either - ripping 8 movies to XVID at once will certainly do it, and it's definitely "useful". Other options: 16-32 Xen virtual servers, 3D rendering, etc.
There are a lot of tasks that paralellize nicely. There are many that don't.
The new iPod Shuffle is a joke. A big part of the appeal of the Shuffle is that it had an integrated USB connector - you could use it to replace a USB flash drive and get an MP3 player to boot, without having to carry around a cable. Now you need a cable - a stupid proprietary one at that, not even a standard mini-USB connector. Moreover, one of the other advantages of the Shuffle was that you could hold it like a remote and operate it easily (and even shake it along to the music). Now that it's aluminum and roughly square, it's not going to be the easiest thing to hold.
The Nano is - well, also kind of disappointing. 8GB is nice (though SanDisk and other manufacturers already offered it), but the new design isn't really new at all. It looks like the iPod mini, which is great if you liked the Mini. I guess Apple didn't want their "mid-range" iPod looking like the "real thing", but, come on, the Nano looked great - so great, in fact, that Apple modeled the 5G after it. And where are the new features? No game downloads? No video playback? It's the same as the old Nano, but it doesn't look as cool. You can't even get the 8GB version in the new colors (it's black only).
And games? Great. You can download Bejewled onto your iPod. Nevermind the fact that you really need a touchscreen to play Bejewled. Nevermind that every cellphone and every PDA made in the last 5 years can already play games.
Movies? Apple's going to have to do better than $14.99 for a movie. I can get the DVD for that price, transfer it to a PSP/iPod/PDA, and be able to play it in DTS/DD 5.1 on my DVD player as well. Portable DVD player? $150, and it has a 7" screen too. Apple's service seems strangely reminiscent of the many movie download services that have been out for years (Movielink, anyone?).
Same iPods, different day. Apple can't seem to come up with anything new.
HDCP has been cracked already. It can be used with DVI. HDMI is no different in this regard. My TV doesn't have HDMI, but it does have DVI-HDCP. It can be used with HDMI simply by changing the connector.
It's like mini-USB vs. regular USB. It doesn't have anything to do with DRM because DVI already supported HDCP.
The main distinction between HDMI and DVI/component is that the former plays more directly into the hands of the DRM proponents even though DRM makes no sense for game console output.
No, the main differences between DVI and HDMI are that HDMI has a different (better) connector and can carry audio and additional control data.
You may be thinking about HDCP, which is the copy protection (DRM) standard. HDCP can be used with either HDMI or DVI.
Of course, the major difference between component and HDMI/DVI is that HDMI/DVI is digital. It doesn't make sense to output a nice digital signal into analog and then convert it back to digital to display it. Most of the time, you can't notice the difference, but it does exist.
I hate to say this but that is tarded, because my iPod, OS X, and iTunes doesn't have a single lick of DRM in it. It would if I purchased DRM'ed files from iTunes, but I don't. iTunes lets me rip my cds to mp3s and I can put them on my iPod.
What are you talking about? My Windows XP PC doesn't have a single piece of DRM media on it either, but it still has DRM. And Windows Media Player lets me rip my CDs to MP3 and put them on many, many different players.
What is up with this double-standard? Windows is evil for having DRM features, but when Apple does it with iTunes and Quicktime, it's just fine.
Better not buy a Mac, because every Mac comes with iTunes and evil iTunes DRM. And don't buy a DVD player, because those have DRM too. Don't get digital cable, don't use a satellite dish, don't buy an iPod, don't buy a new TV. And, whatever you do, don't use Windows Me, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (all have DRM).
DRM is just like encryption - what makes it "evil" is how it is used. I don't care if my OS has DRM (Vista's DRM consists of secure audio path + secure video path + WMDRM, two of which are already in XP). What I care about is:
1: Whether or not the restrictions placed upon the content are reasonable (this isn't a principle issue, just a pragmatic one - I'm not buying a CD that won't play on my PC or that installs spyware, and I'm not buying a music file that I can't transfer to my Treo and burn to a CD)
2: What the government does. Don't make circumventing DRM illegal. The DMCA is a bad law, it's wrong, and it should be modified to correct all of its bullshit provisions.
We don't like bloated code that takes gigs of RAM to run.
Vista sits at around 450MB idle on my system. Final versions should be similar to XP in memory usage.
We don't like code that was written so poorly, or in such retarded languages, that it takes a 2+ GHz PC to get those applications / OS's running in less than sixty seconds.
Vista RC1 (5600) is every bit as fast as XP on my 1.8GHz Athlon 64 "Newcastle" or my 1.73GHz P-M "Dothan". Neither has dual-channel memory, neither has a particularly good GPU (GeForce 6200 on my desktop, Go 6400 on the laptop).
We don't like little "thought bubbles" interrupting us every few minutes to tell us some irrelevant thing like an icon on the desktop is underused.
That would be XP. There are significantly fewer notification bubbles in Vista, actually.
In my home town (Fort Collins, CO), the school district got a similarly crazy idea - build a brand-new, $36 million dollar high school. It was expensive, it was controversial, but in the end it had a far better idea: spend more now to spend less later. The new school, Fossil Ridge, was designed to be highly energy efficent - it is expected to save the district almost $60,000 per year in energy costs. Since the school is likely to be in service for 30+ years, that adds up to a substantial savings. The district also recieved substantial grants from the Feds for building an eco-friendly school.
Oh, and Fossil Ridge has SmartBoards too - but only in a few rooms. The lockers are manual, students aren't given laptops (although there are 180 laptops in "mobile labs" that teachers can bring to classrooms, and nearly 700 desktop PCs), and the rooms don't have plasma TVs. And, of course, students still use textbooks and good old pencil and paper.
In a district that has budget problems (as this PA district apparently does), building a "super-school" that costs 3x as much as a conventional school just doesn't make sense. In the real world, we have a term for that - incredible waste.
Look at what Apple has been able to accomplish by mixing the code and culture of thir own system with that of NeXT and with that of the FOSS community.
An OS that only runs on their hardware?
When will they realize that by mixing all of their software with lots of stuff from the FOSS community, they can grow the functionality of their software by orders of magnitude while increasing its stability?
Statements like this indicated that you really don't understand why people choose Windows. Apple may have the luxury of breaking compatibility with the previous 20 years of their OS, but Microsoft doesn't. If Windows changes dramatically, who is going to update the tens of thousands of drivers and applications to run on the next OS?
I never understood this MS terminology. From my point of view a Release Candidate is in a shape that I could just recompile the software without the debugging symbols if no major bugs are reported. No one considers this to be even a remote possibility in case of Vista RC1. My guess is that they will also need a RC2, RC3 and maybe even RC4 and than a RRC1 (real Release Candidate) before shipping.
You have to understand the development model used in large commercial software projects. RC1 was probably forked several weeks ago, and it's not at all uncommon to release an RC that you know has bugs - Wikipedia definition or not.
Besides, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS has had like 200 updates since it shipped. Doesn't seem like a "final" product to me.
To me, that is Apple. Yes their computers aren't the cheapest, but in 3 years I had to replace my desktop Dell 3 times due to hardware problems. Yes Apple has had hardware problems too, but the quality of hardware IS high, and the Mini is a really nice bit of engineering, as is my Nano
Apple computers are made in the same Chinese manufacturers by the same Chinese ODMs that make PCs. Quanta, for example, makes the MacBook, and they also make a substantial portion of Dell's notebooks.
It's the same chips on the same board in the same case. For a notebook that's as generic as the MacBook, Apple sure has had a lot of problems.
1: No distance measurement is given, so the measurement is bunk anyway. 2: The quietest fan-based PSUs are around 18dBA/1m, and that's difficult to measure - typing, nearby traffic, and just about any other noise can easily muffle a sound that is that quiet.
The only way to build a "silent" PC is to build one with no fans and no optical/hard drives. Even then, poor power circuitry can make noise.
LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better.
That's just crap. I own a cheapshit 27" LCD HDTV (Syntax Olevia, 720p native resolution, 16x9, $500). DVDs look good on it, but I wouldn't say that they look "great". Compared to content from my PC (H.264 trailers from Apple's movie trailer page), the sharpness and detail is simply not there. No amount of sharpening or noise reduction is going to make what's essentially a very low resolution format (720x480) look decent.
Go download a 1080p trailer from Apple's site. Play it on your monitor. Then go play a DVD. Even on a 17" LCD at 1280x1024 it's extremely noticable. Now imagine this blown up to 55".
Rear-Projection CRT TVs have problems. Particularly cheap rear-projection CRT TVs. Of course you're not going to be able to tell the difference on a crappy 55" TV. Or, for that matter, on an EDTV plasma display. Even a direct-view CRT television will mask the differences. But when you view HD content on an LCD TV, an HD Plasma display, or on a microdisplay-based projection TV (DLP or LCD), there is a very distinct and noticable difference.
You know what? Most people wouldn't know picture quality if it hit them in the face. The Comcast box at our local Circuit City (which was being used to demo HD Cable) had its output set to 480i. No one had bothered to change the menu option to make it output 1080i or 720p. The HD-DVD demo at our Best Buy was running in 480p.
Am I going to buy an HD-DVD player? No. Not for $500. But once they cost $100 and there's plenty of content, I'm going to make the jump.
As for the "evil" DRM, it's going to be cracked. DVDs have DRM too, of course. I frankly don't see how the DRM affects me - DVDs aren't going away anytime soon, so if you want to rip your movies to XVID or something it's still going to be possible. You'll be able to rip them in HD as well, of course, once HD-DVD is cracked.
It's not about performance. Read that again. In today's market, it's about the platform and the pricing as much as it is about the product. Core 2 is too expensive ($240 for a 2.13GHz Core 2). Most of the market doesn't care whether or not Intel's $250 CPU beats AMD's $250 CPU (as it turns out, the competition is remarkably close). It's not about Athlon X2 vs Core 2. It's about Sempron vs. Celeron.
The end of the Intel monopoly hasn't happened yet. It didn't happen when Athlon 64 or Opteron was released. It didn't happen when AMD got major OEM support from HP, Sun, and IBM.
It's going to happen this October for one reason: Dell. Dell is going to start shipping AMD desktops and laptops. If I were Intel, I'd be very, very worried. AMD has never had such widespread market acceptance.
AMD's certainly making it easy for them; they've been twiddling their thumbs (or have done a great job at acting like they have) for the past three years.
One could say the same thing about Intel. From the release of Athlon 64 to the release of Core 2, nothing that Intel has released for desktop computers has even been close to the AMD equivolent. AMD has been idle for the past three years (if by "idle", you mean only releasing Turion 64, Athlon 64 X2, DDR2 support, SSE3, 64-bit Semprons, and a whole mess of other features) because they are focused on eliminating the manufacturing gap with Intel. Fab 36 and Chartered are the reasons that AMD got Dell as a customer.
Wikipedia is broken. Funamentally broken. You see, Wikipedia is incapable of arriving at the truth. It is only able to arrive at content that appears true. Try it yourself: create an account and make a few valid edits. Then, a week later, go rogue. Edit a page and add some bogus information. But here's the kicker - add information that appears to be valid yet is entirely bogus. Bonus points if it's hard to verify. Make up a new product. Create a fake study. Make up a new term in a field of your choosing. The thing to remember is this: make your changes slowly, and don't be blatant.
See how long your misinformation lasts. Chances are, it will be deleted very quickly. But some of the time your change will be accepted. And the older it gets, the more "real" it becomes. Soon you will see your fact repeated all over the web. Soon it will seem real to the casual searcher on Google.
Smile a bit. You just redefined reality. It was easy, too. I've done it many times. But you know that there is something wrong: if it was this easy for you to do it, what about someone with a real desire to change reality? Someone who can put up a website that looks professional. Someone who can write a bogus study and post it on a bogus site. You realize that we really can't trust Wikipedia at all.
What's the problem with that? Wikipedia isn't intended to be authoritative. But, unfortunately, it is. Wikipedia creates an 'echo chamber', where mistruth can be amplified and repeated so much that it becomes the new fact. That's dangerous. Really dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true - WNBC was up and broadcasting during the blackout. Of course, you needed a TV that has its own power source (generator, batteries, etc.) and an antenna.
Of course, most people don't have battery operated TVs - but they do have battery-operated radios.
They just think it is "more difficult". Back in the times of the VHS you just inserted the original and the blank and presseed REC+PLAY and voila.
Apparently, you've never heard of Macrovision. Not that it's hard to circumvent, but the average person on the street doesn't even know that it exists - they just know that they can't copy commercial VHS tapes.
That M$ managed to ship one that did means they shorted several qualifying steps required for a UL listing with obviously dangerous results.
The power supply was designed and manufactured by Delta Electronics, one of the largest manufacturers of power supplies in the world. It is UL listed.
DRM comes in pretending to be something that the user wants. It is a trojan horse, a virus. It is brought in, under the disguise of something that helps the system. Then, when it strikes, like this, it does nothing but hurt the system. It doesn't help the user, it hurts the user.
Yes, and I want to be able to transfer money from any account at my bank to any other account without there being any record. My bank won't let me do that. Certainly that would be optimal from my perspective, but what about everyone else?
DRM is the classic slippery slope. If we accept the infection, if we don't fight it tooth and nail, then down the road when it really is in everthing, we will have turned over all control to the big boys who control the DRM.
We have already "accepted" DRM. It's on every DVD, in every iPod, on every video game console, and in many, many other places. DRM is just a different application of encryption.
Fight the laws. Not the technology.
This is just bullshit. Any research into the statistics will indicate otherwise. Since 1960, the fatality rate per mile traveled has dropped 3.42x. Since 1970, it has dropped 3.2x.
Spread your Libertarian bullshit elsewhere. The facts support the conclusion that safety standards have made vehicles significantly safer.
The reason you can't buy a tiny vehicle in the US (other than, for example, the Honda Insight) is that historically tiny vehicles have performed poorly in the market. Our safety regulations are neither "insane" nor are they particularly stringent - EuroNCAP, for example, is a considerably harder test than the NHTSA test (and more comparable to the IIHS tests).
Spoken like a true Libertarian. "If the government does it, it must be evil". Of course, big, powerful interests would never try to gain power through corporate means. Who needs anti-trust laws? Environmental regulations? It is foolish to trust that the government has our best interests in mind, but it is every bit as foolish to assume that corporations will act ethically.
That's why we need things like car safety regulations. This isn't rocket science: we have real-world crash test data indicating that cars are safer. And we have the statistics to indicate that those safer cars are saving lives. The facts support a simple conclusion: vehicle safety standards save lives.
Yes, exactly - Mythbusters isn't exactly what I'd call "scientific". Take it for what it is - an interesting and highly entertaining TV show. One of the best on television.
People who say there's nothing good on TV don't watch TV.
Well, seeing as we never used F in chem (either high school or engineering general chem), I didn't know that. 273.15K, on the hand, is much more familiar.
which is neither yours nor very good SQL
s istent-read.html
Open-source GPL + optional commercial licensing not good enough for you?
real database
But maybe we don't need a "real" database. Maybe we need an easy-to-use replacement for flat files with some database features. Not everyone is running a bank, or handling a billion emails a day, or tracking inventory for Wal-Mart. Lots of users just want something that can handle their small little application.
IMHO, one of the reasons why the web is broken is that it is so easy to create content that no one takes the time to learn the basic computer science involved
Spoken like a true CS major. CS is a valuable, valuable field - I have nothing but the highest respect for it (which is why I'm getting an ECE degree + CS minor). But the web is not 'broken' - it is the single most valuable informational resource that we have ever created. And the web is useful precisely because you don't have to understand CS to create content. Do you think that there would be 1/1000th of the content on the web if you had to understand CS to contribute to it? No. What we would end up with would be a web that consists entirely of pages created by pencilnecks like yourself and by corporations with big budgets. There would be no Slashdot. There would be no Wikipedia.
In MySQL, the second query would have to wait.
Perhaps you should stop using MyISAM and start using InnoDB:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-con
HP, Dell, Lenovo, and the like don't pay anywhere near retail price for components. Complete $250 PCs are common - with 256MB of DDR2, a Sempron 3400+, GeForce 6150 graphics, 80GB SATA drive, CD-ROM, flash card reader, and even a PCIe x16 slot.
I got a $150 eMachines PC - with a 17" monitor, 512MB of DDR, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 80GB HDD, XP Home, and a 2.93GHz Celeron at Best Buy on Black Friday last year. It's not at all out of the question.
Yeah, and forget about a decent transfer rate - my Intel Pro 2915ABG couldn't even hit 25KB/s. And it randomly disconnected.
Not that it's hard to do that either - ripping 8 movies to XVID at once will certainly do it, and it's definitely "useful". Other options: 16-32 Xen virtual servers, 3D rendering, etc.
There are a lot of tasks that paralellize nicely. There are many that don't.
The new iPod Shuffle is a joke. A big part of the appeal of the Shuffle is that it had an integrated USB connector - you could use it to replace a USB flash drive and get an MP3 player to boot, without having to carry around a cable. Now you need a cable - a stupid proprietary one at that, not even a standard mini-USB connector. Moreover, one of the other advantages of the Shuffle was that you could hold it like a remote and operate it easily (and even shake it along to the music). Now that it's aluminum and roughly square, it's not going to be the easiest thing to hold.
The Nano is - well, also kind of disappointing. 8GB is nice (though SanDisk and other manufacturers already offered it), but the new design isn't really new at all. It looks like the iPod mini, which is great if you liked the Mini. I guess Apple didn't want their "mid-range" iPod looking like the "real thing", but, come on, the Nano looked great - so great, in fact, that Apple modeled the 5G after it. And where are the new features? No game downloads? No video playback? It's the same as the old Nano, but it doesn't look as cool. You can't even get the 8GB version in the new colors (it's black only).
And games? Great. You can download Bejewled onto your iPod. Nevermind the fact that you really need a touchscreen to play Bejewled. Nevermind that every cellphone and every PDA made in the last 5 years can already play games.
Movies? Apple's going to have to do better than $14.99 for a movie. I can get the DVD for that price, transfer it to a PSP/iPod/PDA, and be able to play it in DTS/DD 5.1 on my DVD player as well. Portable DVD player? $150, and it has a 7" screen too. Apple's service seems strangely reminiscent of the many movie download services that have been out for years (Movielink, anyone?).
Same iPods, different day. Apple can't seem to come up with anything new.
HDCP has been cracked already. It can be used with DVI. HDMI is no different in this regard. My TV doesn't have HDMI, but it does have DVI-HDCP. It can be used with HDMI simply by changing the connector.
It's like mini-USB vs. regular USB. It doesn't have anything to do with DRM because DVI already supported HDCP.
The main distinction between HDMI and DVI/component is that the former plays more directly into the hands of the DRM proponents even though DRM makes no sense for game console output.
No, the main differences between DVI and HDMI are that HDMI has a different (better) connector and can carry audio and additional control data.
You may be thinking about HDCP, which is the copy protection (DRM) standard. HDCP can be used with either HDMI or DVI.
Of course, the major difference between component and HDMI/DVI is that HDMI/DVI is digital. It doesn't make sense to output a nice digital signal into analog and then convert it back to digital to display it. Most of the time, you can't notice the difference, but it does exist.
You can bet a lot of greedy individuals learned a valuable lesson from the Xbox 360 fiasco, and the money to be made off short supplies.
Yes, because buying a product at an artificially low price and selling at market price is so evil.
I hate to say this but that is tarded, because my iPod, OS X, and iTunes doesn't have a single lick of DRM in it. It would if I purchased DRM'ed files from iTunes, but I don't. iTunes lets me rip my cds to mp3s and I can put them on my iPod.
What are you talking about? My Windows XP PC doesn't have a single piece of DRM media on it either, but it still has DRM. And Windows Media Player lets me rip my CDs to MP3 and put them on many, many different players.
What is up with this double-standard? Windows is evil for having DRM features, but when Apple does it with iTunes and Quicktime, it's just fine.
Messages like: We don't like DRM.
Better not buy a Mac, because every Mac comes with iTunes and evil iTunes DRM. And don't buy a DVD player, because those have DRM too. Don't get digital cable, don't use a satellite dish, don't buy an iPod, don't buy a new TV. And, whatever you do, don't use Windows Me, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (all have DRM).
DRM is just like encryption - what makes it "evil" is how it is used. I don't care if my OS has DRM (Vista's DRM consists of secure audio path + secure video path + WMDRM, two of which are already in XP). What I care about is:
1: Whether or not the restrictions placed upon the content are reasonable (this isn't a principle issue, just a pragmatic one - I'm not buying a CD that won't play on my PC or that installs spyware, and I'm not buying a music file that I can't transfer to my Treo and burn to a CD)
2: What the government does. Don't make circumventing DRM illegal. The DMCA is a bad law, it's wrong, and it should be modified to correct all of its bullshit provisions.
We don't like bloated code that takes gigs of RAM to run.
Vista sits at around 450MB idle on my system. Final versions should be similar to XP in memory usage.
We don't like code that was written so poorly, or in such retarded languages, that it takes a 2+ GHz PC to get those applications / OS's running in less than sixty seconds.
Vista RC1 (5600) is every bit as fast as XP on my 1.8GHz Athlon 64 "Newcastle" or my 1.73GHz P-M "Dothan". Neither has dual-channel memory, neither has a particularly good GPU (GeForce 6200 on my desktop, Go 6400 on the laptop).
We don't like little "thought bubbles" interrupting us every few minutes to tell us some irrelevant thing like an icon on the desktop is underused.
That would be XP. There are significantly fewer notification bubbles in Vista, actually.
In my home town (Fort Collins, CO), the school district got a similarly crazy idea - build a brand-new, $36 million dollar high school. It was expensive, it was controversial, but in the end it had a far better idea: spend more now to spend less later. The new school, Fossil Ridge, was designed to be highly energy efficent - it is expected to save the district almost $60,000 per year in energy costs. Since the school is likely to be in service for 30+ years, that adds up to a substantial savings. The district also recieved substantial grants from the Feds for building an eco-friendly school.
Oh, and Fossil Ridge has SmartBoards too - but only in a few rooms. The lockers are manual, students aren't given laptops (although there are 180 laptops in "mobile labs" that teachers can bring to classrooms, and nearly 700 desktop PCs), and the rooms don't have plasma TVs. And, of course, students still use textbooks and good old pencil and paper.
In a district that has budget problems (as this PA district apparently does), building a "super-school" that costs 3x as much as a conventional school just doesn't make sense. In the real world, we have a term for that - incredible waste.
Look at what Apple has been able to accomplish by mixing the code and culture of thir own system with that of NeXT and with that of the FOSS community.
An OS that only runs on their hardware?
When will they realize that by mixing all of their software with lots of stuff from the FOSS community, they can grow the functionality of their software by orders of magnitude while increasing its stability?
Statements like this indicated that you really don't understand why people choose Windows. Apple may have the luxury of breaking compatibility with the previous 20 years of their OS, but Microsoft doesn't. If Windows changes dramatically, who is going to update the tens of thousands of drivers and applications to run on the next OS?
I never understood this MS terminology. From my point of view a Release Candidate is in a shape that I could just recompile the software without the debugging symbols if no major bugs are reported. No one considers this to be even a remote possibility in case of Vista RC1. My guess is that they will also need a RC2, RC3 and maybe even RC4 and than a RRC1 (real Release Candidate) before shipping.
You have to understand the development model used in large commercial software projects. RC1 was probably forked several weeks ago, and it's not at all uncommon to release an RC that you know has bugs - Wikipedia definition or not.
Besides, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS has had like 200 updates since it shipped. Doesn't seem like a "final" product to me.
To me, that is Apple. Yes their computers aren't the cheapest, but in 3 years I had to replace my desktop Dell 3 times due to hardware problems. Yes Apple has had hardware problems too, but the quality of hardware IS high, and the Mini is a really nice bit of engineering, as is my Nano
Apple computers are made in the same Chinese manufacturers by the same Chinese ODMs that make PCs. Quanta, for example, makes the MacBook, and they also make a substantial portion of Dell's notebooks.
It's the same chips on the same board in the same case. For a notebook that's as generic as the MacBook, Apple sure has had a lot of problems.
I call bullshit on the "14dbA" power supply.
1: No distance measurement is given, so the measurement is bunk anyway.
2: The quietest fan-based PSUs are around 18dBA/1m, and that's difficult to measure - typing, nearby traffic, and just about any other noise can easily muffle a sound that is that quiet.
The only way to build a "silent" PC is to build one with no fans and no optical/hard drives. Even then, poor power circuitry can make noise.
LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better.
That's just crap. I own a cheapshit 27" LCD HDTV (Syntax Olevia, 720p native resolution, 16x9, $500). DVDs look good on it, but I wouldn't say that they look "great". Compared to content from my PC (H.264 trailers from Apple's movie trailer page), the sharpness and detail is simply not there. No amount of sharpening or noise reduction is going to make what's essentially a very low resolution format (720x480) look decent.
Go download a 1080p trailer from Apple's site. Play it on your monitor. Then go play a DVD. Even on a 17" LCD at 1280x1024 it's extremely noticable. Now imagine this blown up to 55".
Rear-Projection CRT TVs have problems. Particularly cheap rear-projection CRT TVs. Of course you're not going to be able to tell the difference on a crappy 55" TV. Or, for that matter, on an EDTV plasma display. Even a direct-view CRT television will mask the differences. But when you view HD content on an LCD TV, an HD Plasma display, or on a microdisplay-based projection TV (DLP or LCD), there is a very distinct and noticable difference.
You know what? Most people wouldn't know picture quality if it hit them in the face. The Comcast box at our local Circuit City (which was being used to demo HD Cable) had its output set to 480i. No one had bothered to change the menu option to make it output 1080i or 720p. The HD-DVD demo at our Best Buy was running in 480p.
Am I going to buy an HD-DVD player? No. Not for $500. But once they cost $100 and there's plenty of content, I'm going to make the jump.
As for the "evil" DRM, it's going to be cracked. DVDs have DRM too, of course. I frankly don't see how the DRM affects me - DVDs aren't going away anytime soon, so if you want to rip your movies to XVID or something it's still going to be possible. You'll be able to rip them in HD as well, of course, once HD-DVD is cracked.
It's not about performance. Read that again. In today's market, it's about the platform and the pricing as much as it is about the product. Core 2 is too expensive ($240 for a 2.13GHz Core 2). Most of the market doesn't care whether or not Intel's $250 CPU beats AMD's $250 CPU (as it turns out, the competition is remarkably close). It's not about Athlon X2 vs Core 2. It's about Sempron vs. Celeron.
The end of the Intel monopoly hasn't happened yet. It didn't happen when Athlon 64 or Opteron was released. It didn't happen when AMD got major OEM support from HP, Sun, and IBM.
It's going to happen this October for one reason: Dell. Dell is going to start shipping AMD desktops and laptops. If I were Intel, I'd be very, very worried. AMD has never had such widespread market acceptance.
AMD's certainly making it easy for them; they've been twiddling their thumbs (or have done a great job at acting like they have) for the past three years.
One could say the same thing about Intel. From the release of Athlon 64 to the release of Core 2, nothing that Intel has released for desktop computers has even been close to the AMD equivolent. AMD has been idle for the past three years (if by "idle", you mean only releasing Turion 64, Athlon 64 X2, DDR2 support, SSE3, 64-bit Semprons, and a whole mess of other features) because they are focused on eliminating the manufacturing gap with Intel. Fab 36 and Chartered are the reasons that AMD got Dell as a customer.
Wikipedia is broken. Funamentally broken. You see, Wikipedia is incapable of arriving at the truth. It is only able to arrive at content that appears true. Try it yourself: create an account and make a few valid edits. Then, a week later, go rogue. Edit a page and add some bogus information. But here's the kicker - add information that appears to be valid yet is entirely bogus. Bonus points if it's hard to verify. Make up a new product. Create a fake study. Make up a new term in a field of your choosing. The thing to remember is this: make your changes slowly, and don't be blatant.
See how long your misinformation lasts. Chances are, it will be deleted very quickly. But some of the time your change will be accepted. And the older it gets, the more "real" it becomes. Soon you will see your fact repeated all over the web. Soon it will seem real to the casual searcher on Google.
Smile a bit. You just redefined reality. It was easy, too. I've done it many times. But you know that there is something wrong: if it was this easy for you to do it, what about someone with a real desire to change reality? Someone who can put up a website that looks professional. Someone who can write a bogus study and post it on a bogus site. You realize that we really can't trust Wikipedia at all.
What's the problem with that? Wikipedia isn't intended to be authoritative. But, unfortunately, it is. Wikipedia creates an 'echo chamber', where mistruth can be amplified and repeated so much that it becomes the new fact. That's dangerous. Really dangerous.