1) Top 40 radio has always been on top of the ratings. It still is. Oldies stations and easy listening are the next down. So called Modern Rock stations are very popular these days, moreso than the independent stations of the 1980s, and in some markets they compete with Top 40.
2) People love to experiment. There are experiments ALL OVER my radio right now...folks experimenting with hip-hop in rock, with guitars in hip-hop, people bringing back the who, the stones, the doors! We have a local act which is resurrecting soul vocals over hip-hop lyrics with 1980s new wave samples! Problem is, none of these experimental records will sell more than 30,000 copies without a single strident hit. Example: The Gorillaz. A very clever idea by four independent artists that proved to sell more copies than any of their solo works. Why? One great song that just happened to be kinda about weed.
3) People still play in bars. Where do you live that there's nothing but techno? I go to bars all the time to hear live bands. I was at a CD release party last night with damn near 200 people. My buddies who play in bands have more gigs than they can play! Clubs are just another type of bar that appeals to a different person than the live music goer.
4) You're joking, right? You think the world has progressed because Wayne's World is droll? How do you think 8 Mile is going to look in 2013? Times change, but people don't. A lot of us like music, and not just some guy plinking on a synthesizer for 16 measures then adding a scratched record.
Try "Songs for the Deaf," released in 2002 by the Queens of the Stone Age. That album tells the story of the death of radio via the medium of discordant songs narrated by famous DJs.
Or how about "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence," released by Dream Theatre the same year. An amazing record, the best from these guys.
Or, if you want some hip-hop in your rock opera, try "I, Phantom" by Mr. Lif. Or how about "Blazing Arrow" by Blackalicious. There's an overall theme to J-Live's "The Best Part," too...
There's plenty of innovation in music. You're just too lazy to find it.
The key to beating a troll is to burn them out with Karma.
I got trolled three times the other day. Responded to each. +3 insightful, +3 insightful, +2 funny. The troll? -1, 0, -1. That leaves the score dasmb 8, troll -2. A respectable hockey score.
More of them would do so when they realize their kids could do their homework and email on the same machine. Right now, many people are buying consoles every two years AND a PC every two years. This would basically save the cost of the console.
Actually, if you gave your soiled clothes to the salvation army, the volunteers would scowl at you. They throw them away...so basically, you just made their job harder.
I doesn't matter if your computer doubles as a jukebox or a chicken coop. Your OS is different from the OS on the Roku. It has different drivers, different software, and different stuff compiled into the kernel.
No two Linux OS are the same. Because of this, it is entirely possible to make a busted ass compile of Linux. If the kernel is busted, then the source of the problems most definitely is the Linux OS. But the CAUSE is compilation ineptitude.
As so many people are wont to say, Linux isn't an Operating System. It's just a kernel. The Operating System is the series of tools that work on top of the kernel.
Therefore, the Linux OS used by the NSA, the Linux OS used on my webservers, the Linux OS that's on the Zaurus, the Linux OS on the Tivo, and Roku's own Linux OS, are all COMPLETELY different systems. There are many similarities...but you can't make a blanket statement like "Linux is ready for prime time." It is for some implementations of the OS, and not for others. I certainly wouldn't consider an HDTV driver that crashes as often as this reviewer suggests to be ready for prime time -- and I hope this machine isn't using the high level encryption that the NSA uses in theirs.
Well, uh...if Microsoft hadn't made the Media Center edition of Windows, there'd have been nothing to clone. So nobody would have tried to make Linux do it in the first place!
I think the original reviewer was actually complaining about the Linux-based plugin system...something the TiVo doesn't have. There's an inherent difference between writing a brand new application and creating a pretty front end to a bunch of open source components. The former may take more time, but you have MUCH tighter control over how you use and present data...how to handle failovers...and even how to better direct the QA process.
My guess is that Roku is undermanned and they're trying to cash in on being the first to market with an HD system, that they can fix the bugs later. It won't work, of course, because small houses can't take this kind of negative press. Shame, too...I kind of like the LOOK of Roku's gear, and it's certainly ambitious.
People here seem to follow the "You get what you pay for" motto pretty closely. If somebody gives you something for free and there is a problem with it, well, it's your problem. Wheras if you BUY something and there is a problem with it, it's the provider's problem.
I disagree entirely, as I believe everybody should be paid for their work, that no product is perfect and that it is just as wrong to provide half-assed service for free as it is to charge for it. You don't give soiled clothes to the Salvation Army or spoiled milk to needy school children. But like I said, most people here have some opinion that things that aren't perfect aren't worth paying for, and things that are perfect still aren't worth paying for (*cough* iPod) until they're MORE perfect. Strange, that free software should attract so many demanding cheapskates...
Oh, who are also quite community oriented and willing to help you fix or workaround bugs in other peoples' systems. Just wanted to interject that so I don't look like a complete Troll.
And, well, there's this thing called a "subroutine library"...you write it once, use it from two places.
And this is exactly what Windows does, more or less. UN-fortunately, certain programs were told to, by default, automatically handle files using functions from these libraries -- including libraries which handle executable scripts that basically have free reign over the system. This is the problem -- not that the same libraries were used for both user functions and "teh intarnet," but that the designers foolishly allowed scripts from an alien source (such as the internet) to run uninhibited in user space.
never automatically execuite something that might be unsafe
There's a big difference between opening a text file for edits and opening a system configuration window. What Apple does is prevent casual users and their programs from making edits to system files without realizing an edit will be made...basically, by forcing the user to run in user mode and setting all important system files owned to root and with access set to 755. "Administrator" users under OS X are members of wheel, and thus can use sudo to temporarily assume root access to system files. Apple has automated this process in their installer and system preferences programs.
OS X is still vulnerable to spyware that might be piggybacking onto desired installers...but it takes more than an autoexecing script or a few mis-clicks to do so.
I'd have to say you have a very skewed opinion of how programs work.
See, if you have to do something twice, you only write it once. Because if you had to write it twice, each version would be twice as buggy. Which in your case would mean twice as many exploits. It really isn't rocket science to see which is a better idea from a process management perspective. If you want stable code, you can't go writing a separate version of something just for use on the internet.
What you should do, however, is never make the assumption that what the program is being told to do is what the USER wants the program to do. This works for local exploits as well...like when your brother starts trying to screw around with the network settings. If your program is being asked to do something twitchy...like delete something, change a system setting, open a port, etc...then your program should require user input before doing so. It should never automatically execute anything that might be unsafe.
Which is where Apple's one step better than Windows. It asks you for your system password before mucking with the system. It asks for your system password before deleting system wide programs. It unpacks archives automatically, but doesn't run the files inside. And it can be made to ask for your user password before messing with your user settings.
This is a stupid comment. Robbers already KNOW where the rich neighbourhoods are. How do I know this? Because I know where the rich neighbourhoods are. I look for sparse residential areas with big houses and few trees. Chances are somebody rich lives there.
And if you need a lot of RAM to figure out which house on my block has the Porsche parked in front of it, methinks you need to spend some time away from the computer.
So make your own. Like I said, the battery in my old 386 laptop was about the size of a Tupperware sandwich box. You could fit about four of the new Powerbook's batteries in that space, each of which has the same battery life as the original NiCd. Wire them up in parallel, and run with it!
Of course, you'd be even better off putting the lowest spec modern mobile processor in a box with the lowest spec modern hard drive, a simple cool running 2d video card and a big chain of batteries. Today's mobile chips are very efficient BUT the fast ones still need plenty of juice to run. But the problem you'd be solving would create a bunch of other ones...like the machine that you would create would run for 24 hours but would be too slow to run the software you want. Or you'd get tired of lugging around a twenty pound machine.
In fact, if you compare the dimensions and weight of today's laptops with those of even five years ago, you'll realize why we don't see a huge increase in battery life. Designers have been trying to make these things small enough to lug around comfortable! Now that they've done that, they can devote their time to making them even more efficient without slowing them down to far -- which, with the new batch of Centrino laptops, is exactly what they're doing.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. While there have been many components specially designed for low power mobile use, many companies are putting regular old Pentium 4s and even regular 3.5" hard drives into laptops, relying on the battery to get 2+ hour charge times. The mobile devices you're speaking of -- machines with processors like the X-scale, the Crusoe, or even the Pentium M -- do in fact get vastly better charge times than the classic 2 - 4 hour laptop. My old Toshiba Pocket PC got 8 hours easy unless you had the wireless on...and I've seen the slower of the Pentium Centrino laptops in a 12" screen push 6 hours.
My tirade ignored this fact because reducing the power used by components isn't having much of an effect either way -- because the goal hasn't been to create a processor that can run for a day on a 7200 mAh power cell, but to create as fast a chip as possible that will run within the usual period of 4-6 hours -- or to decrease the required size and capacity of the battery to meet that period, thus making the device more portable. My Powerbook G4 has a 3600 mAh battery that gets the same battery life as my old Pismo with a 4800 mAh battery...and it's half the size. You HAVE to trade off somewhere...and the reason you don't see a large performance increase is that manufacturers are engineering machines to be more efficient, but have the same overall battery life.
This was what Apple did with the iPod 3G -- they used a smaller battery with 30% lower overall capacity than the iPod 2G as a way to decrease the overall footprint of the internals while maintaining very modest battery life (some say lower, but certainly not 30% lower).
Here, here. I think it's obvious the problem is not that battery technology has lagged. If it had, our computers would be getting WORSE battery life as performance increased, but instead it's stayed about the same. Meaning that battery improvements are progressing at EXACTLY THE SAME RATE as processor improvements, but the one is shadowing the other.
In short, want better battery life? Get a shittier machine. Battery life on my wife's 2 year old iBook is better than that of my brand new Powerbook. Smaller display, older video card, smaller hard drive, slower chip, no DVD...each of these sucks my power bigtime.
Same with the PocketPC vs Palm Pilot argument from a few years back. I heard a lot of whining about the PocketPC's 4 to 6 hour battery life from Palm proponents getting several days. Of course, their screens weren't backlit, weren't colour, didn't have sound, they had no compact flash card to power and the processor was about 10 times less powerful. Of course, they would commonly turn their machines off every five minutes rather than play MP3s on them all day. But oh, how come the more powerful machine has worse batter life? Dumbasses, do the friggin math.
I'd love to see what the LI+ battery from my Powerbook could do in my old 386 800x600 CGA laptop. That got 4 hours of life on 9 NiCd cells!
Lower prices are a a good thing for CONSUMERS. It's a bad thing for companies, and a bad thing for their employees. That's why Wal-Mart's practice of lowering their prices below those of rival stores, even if it means a loss, is anti-competetive. It will cause companies to go out of business, leaving only Wal-Mart in their wake. This is the sort of thing that destroys towns.
Now, Open Source Software is usually free. It don't get no cheaper. And that's a bad thing. Because if Open Source puts a company out of business in a particular market, there's only Open Source left in its wake. Meaning no competetion. How is this bad? Well, you're hard pressed to sell webserver software thanks to Apache. Does this mean Apache is the end all, be all, best possible approach to web serving? Of course not. But it does mean that it won't be profitable to write your own, even if your own webserver had superior performance and managability, because the inferior product is so inexpensive as to make it worth the hassle for many.
I'm sick of hearing that the price of software is a tax. Hey: if a product takes a million dollars to write (which is pretty cheap), another million to support for a year, and has a market of roughly ten thousand, how much do you have to charge for it? If your answer is "nothing, because 10% of them will buy support licenses from you for $1000 a year," you're wrong.
I think Microsoft employees are PLENTY ethical. The ones I've met have been. They are somewhere between dreamers and pragmatists.
The only reason Microsoft's marketting seem so nefarious is that they're at the top. When a company at the bottom bundles practically everything you need when computing along with their OS, e.g. Apple, it's a good business practice. When Microsoft does it, it's anti-competetive, despite the fact that these guys at the bottom are apparently competing quite nicely.
So you're saying that anybody who isn't for Open Source Software lacks beliefs? Frankly, I'm insulted.
And maybe Chris Sharp isn't who you think he is. Red Hat is, after all, a software company. If Mr. Sharp worked there, and decided that the umpteen failures in their manipulation of the "OSS Model" were indemic to OSS itself, it would be foolish of him to stick by it because he "believed" in it. Maybe he decided, as many others outside of Slashdot have, that not every aspect of traditional software is inherently evil. Maybe he realized that "forced upgrades" pay the bills which fix the software and finance new development. Maybe he noticed that when you can download something for free OR pay $50 for it and get support, most people will err for free and just fight through the issues -- so if you want to make money, you can't give them the option.
My hosting business started as a web collective. Everybody was gonna pay for his percentage of the server, and we were going to be a non-profit. For art! For software! For the sheer coolness of being the first Open Cost webserver! But when it came time to pay the bills, nobody ever had the money, and since we were equal partners I couldn't well shut them off without selling out, could I? Eventually, I had to turn commercial to pay the massive hosting bill, and you know what? Selling a little webspace for a fair price was FAR BETTER from pretty much every standpoint than trying to force everybody to pitch in to a communal server. I still attracted artists and programmers, but if somebody didn't pay, I could shut off their account, and then the money came in real quick. Yeah, I guess I abandoned my morals. But the more authoritative method actually worked. And that goes pretty far in my book.
Actually, I'd like to see the numbers on just how many people make money in OSS versus commercial software, and how much work they had to do to get that money.
I'd like to see that, because it could go a long way in either direction to convincing programmers what they should do with their lives. And it could save a lot of idealistic young programmers from writing corporate America's infrastructure while they themselves have to get fast food jobs.
Gentlemen: if you do work, you should be rewarded for it, and the reward should fit the work done. Old hardware shouldn't be good enough...until you can make the same $25-$50 per hour writing open source software than you can writing equivalent closed source software, OSS is failing developers. Neat features and customizable desktops don't feed my dog, they don't paint my house, and they don't repair the clutch on my car.
Uh, exactly this happens already. We had to go through three different companies before we could find one who could fix our boiler. It was kind of an obscure model, very efficient for its time, but parts were apparently hard to come by.
Unfortunately, the first two companies didn't tell us parts weren't available for the boiler. They told us it was unfixable, tried to sell us a new boiler. We asked them if they could adjust a standard part to fit it, and they just shook their heads. Have to machine a new one, and that's expensive because it's completely custom work. The third guy, luckily, knew that model boiler and was able to hunt down a part for us. It still cost an arm, but I got to keep the leg.
Back to the metaphor, with Open Source there's no guarantees that a particular project will exist or be supported after a few months. For development to continue on a project over a number of years, the project either has to be profitable or popular. Choose a niche project, or use a popular project in a unique way, and you're stuck with the check for custom work. Is this really what we want? To pay $100 per hour to get our software cooked up with no guarantees? Or to hire your own developer to come up to speed on the OSS codebase and write the software for you? Maybe this would work for a big corporation, but my company employs 20 people. We don't even have an IT guy. We're certainly not going to pay somebody to write custom software every time we have a bug. And if we do, we're going to want to resell that work, not be forced to give it back to a community that's just failed us.
Personally, I like open source software as a framework for creating for-pay software and services...but I have to agree with Microsoft that there are some things I'd just rather have the assurance of a well run company employing smart designers and knowledgable maintainers. I just don't get that in the OSS world. Instead, I get a bunch of altruistic cowboy coders doing what they like when they like it, and maybe helping me out in their spare time if I donate. Tell me, how does this uncertainty help government, help business or help education?
Really? Don't tell my adapter. It's been doing this since 2001, and I'm afraid if you tell it that it can't it will stop working. Like when the coyote would look down in Looney Tunes.
Yeah. It's great that Linux can now do what Apple did back in 1999.
(this isn't a dig on Linux, btw...I'm really impressed that wireless works so well on it...so much as an "hey apple has cool stuff first" post. i've been burning DVDs on my powerbook lately and have been very pleased with how painless it's been -- so long as you're willing to give up a little control).
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1) Top 40 radio has always been on top of the ratings. It still is. Oldies stations and easy listening are the next down. So called Modern Rock stations are very popular these days, moreso than the independent stations of the 1980s, and in some markets they compete with Top 40.
2) People love to experiment. There are experiments ALL OVER my radio right now...folks experimenting with hip-hop in rock, with guitars in hip-hop, people bringing back the who, the stones, the doors! We have a local act which is resurrecting soul vocals over hip-hop lyrics with 1980s new wave samples! Problem is, none of these experimental records will sell more than 30,000 copies without a single strident hit. Example: The Gorillaz. A very clever idea by four independent artists that proved to sell more copies than any of their solo works. Why? One great song that just happened to be kinda about weed.
3) People still play in bars. Where do you live that there's nothing but techno? I go to bars all the time to hear live bands. I was at a CD release party last night with damn near 200 people. My buddies who play in bands have more gigs than they can play! Clubs are just another type of bar that appeals to a different person than the live music goer.
4) You're joking, right? You think the world has progressed because Wayne's World is droll? How do you think 8 Mile is going to look in 2013? Times change, but people don't. A lot of us like music, and not just some guy plinking on a synthesizer for 16 measures then adding a scratched record.
Need rock opera?
Try "Songs for the Deaf," released in 2002 by the Queens of the Stone Age. That album tells the story of the death of radio via the medium of discordant songs narrated by famous DJs.
Or how about "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence," released by Dream Theatre the same year. An amazing record, the best from these guys.
Or, if you want some hip-hop in your rock opera, try "I, Phantom" by Mr. Lif. Or how about "Blazing Arrow" by Blackalicious. There's an overall theme to J-Live's "The Best Part," too...
There's plenty of innovation in music. You're just too lazy to find it.
The key to beating a troll is to burn them out with Karma.
I got trolled three times the other day. Responded to each. +3 insightful, +3 insightful, +2 funny. The troll? -1, 0, -1. That leaves the score dasmb 8, troll -2. A respectable hockey score.
More of them would do so when they realize their kids could do their homework and email on the same machine. Right now, many people are buying consoles every two years AND a PC every two years. This would basically save the cost of the console.
Actually, if you gave your soiled clothes to the salvation army, the volunteers would scowl at you. They throw them away...so basically, you just made their job harder.
I doesn't matter if your computer doubles as a jukebox or a chicken coop. Your OS is different from the OS on the Roku. It has different drivers, different software, and different stuff compiled into the kernel.
No two Linux OS are the same. Because of this, it is entirely possible to make a busted ass compile of Linux. If the kernel is busted, then the source of the problems most definitely is the Linux OS. But the CAUSE is compilation ineptitude.
As so many people are wont to say, Linux isn't an Operating System. It's just a kernel. The Operating System is the series of tools that work on top of the kernel.
Therefore, the Linux OS used by the NSA, the Linux OS used on my webservers, the Linux OS that's on the Zaurus, the Linux OS on the Tivo, and Roku's own Linux OS, are all COMPLETELY different systems. There are many similarities...but you can't make a blanket statement like "Linux is ready for prime time." It is for some implementations of the OS, and not for others. I certainly wouldn't consider an HDTV driver that crashes as often as this reviewer suggests to be ready for prime time -- and I hope this machine isn't using the high level encryption that the NSA uses in theirs.
Well, uh...if Microsoft hadn't made the Media Center edition of Windows, there'd have been nothing to clone. So nobody would have tried to make Linux do it in the first place!
I think the original reviewer was actually complaining about the Linux-based plugin system...something the TiVo doesn't have. There's an inherent difference between writing a brand new application and creating a pretty front end to a bunch of open source components. The former may take more time, but you have MUCH tighter control over how you use and present data...how to handle failovers...and even how to better direct the QA process.
My guess is that Roku is undermanned and they're trying to cash in on being the first to market with an HD system, that they can fix the bugs later. It won't work, of course, because small houses can't take this kind of negative press. Shame, too...I kind of like the LOOK of Roku's gear, and it's certainly ambitious.
If I had any modpoints, they would be yours.
Instead, I will offer an explanation:
People here seem to follow the "You get what you pay for" motto pretty closely. If somebody gives you something for free and there is a problem with it, well, it's your problem. Wheras if you BUY something and there is a problem with it, it's the provider's problem.
I disagree entirely, as I believe everybody should be paid for their work, that no product is perfect and that it is just as wrong to provide half-assed service for free as it is to charge for it. You don't give soiled clothes to the Salvation Army or spoiled milk to needy school children. But like I said, most people here have some opinion that things that aren't perfect aren't worth paying for, and things that are perfect still aren't worth paying for (*cough* iPod) until they're MORE perfect. Strange, that free software should attract so many demanding cheapskates...
Oh, who are also quite community oriented and willing to help you fix or workaround bugs in other peoples' systems. Just wanted to interject that so I don't look like a complete Troll.
And, well, there's this thing called a "subroutine library"...you write it once, use it from two places.
And this is exactly what Windows does, more or less. UN-fortunately, certain programs were told to, by default, automatically handle files using functions from these libraries -- including libraries which handle executable scripts that basically have free reign over the system. This is the problem -- not that the same libraries were used for both user functions and "teh intarnet," but that the designers foolishly allowed scripts from an alien source (such as the internet) to run uninhibited in user space.
never automatically execuite something that might be unsafe
There's a big difference between opening a text file for edits and opening a system configuration window. What Apple does is prevent casual users and their programs from making edits to system files without realizing an edit will be made...basically, by forcing the user to run in user mode and setting all important system files owned to root and with access set to 755. "Administrator" users under OS X are members of wheel, and thus can use sudo to temporarily assume root access to system files. Apple has automated this process in their installer and system preferences programs.
OS X is still vulnerable to spyware that might be piggybacking onto desired installers...but it takes more than an autoexecing script or a few mis-clicks to do so.
I'd have to say you have a very skewed opinion of how programs work.
See, if you have to do something twice, you only write it once. Because if you had to write it twice, each version would be twice as buggy. Which in your case would mean twice as many exploits. It really isn't rocket science to see which is a better idea from a process management perspective. If you want stable code, you can't go writing a separate version of something just for use on the internet.
What you should do, however, is never make the assumption that what the program is being told to do is what the USER wants the program to do. This works for local exploits as well...like when your brother starts trying to screw around with the network settings. If your program is being asked to do something twitchy...like delete something, change a system setting, open a port, etc...then your program should require user input before doing so. It should never automatically execute anything that might be unsafe.
Which is where Apple's one step better than Windows. It asks you for your system password before mucking with the system. It asks for your system password before deleting system wide programs. It unpacks archives automatically, but doesn't run the files inside. And it can be made to ask for your user password before messing with your user settings.
Real men don't care WHAT the real answer is...instead, they choose one at random and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees.
Which is why true && false == true. What, you wanna start? BRING IT ON!
Some of the first road maps in this country included photographs of poorly marked intersections. Check out the third photo down.
This is a stupid comment. Robbers already KNOW where the rich neighbourhoods are. How do I know this? Because I know where the rich neighbourhoods are. I look for sparse residential areas with big houses and few trees. Chances are somebody rich lives there.
And if you need a lot of RAM to figure out which house on my block has the Porsche parked in front of it, methinks you need to spend some time away from the computer.
So make your own. Like I said, the battery in my old 386 laptop was about the size of a Tupperware sandwich box. You could fit about four of the new Powerbook's batteries in that space, each of which has the same battery life as the original NiCd. Wire them up in parallel, and run with it!
Of course, you'd be even better off putting the lowest spec modern mobile processor in a box with the lowest spec modern hard drive, a simple cool running 2d video card and a big chain of batteries. Today's mobile chips are very efficient BUT the fast ones still need plenty of juice to run. But the problem you'd be solving would create a bunch of other ones...like the machine that you would create would run for 24 hours but would be too slow to run the software you want. Or you'd get tired of lugging around a twenty pound machine.
In fact, if you compare the dimensions and weight of today's laptops with those of even five years ago, you'll realize why we don't see a huge increase in battery life. Designers have been trying to make these things small enough to lug around comfortable! Now that they've done that, they can devote their time to making them even more efficient without slowing them down to far -- which, with the new batch of Centrino laptops, is exactly what they're doing.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. While there have been many components specially designed for low power mobile use, many companies are putting regular old Pentium 4s and even regular 3.5" hard drives into laptops, relying on the battery to get 2+ hour charge times. The mobile devices you're speaking of -- machines with processors like the X-scale, the Crusoe, or even the Pentium M -- do in fact get vastly better charge times than the classic 2 - 4 hour laptop. My old Toshiba Pocket PC got 8 hours easy unless you had the wireless on...and I've seen the slower of the Pentium Centrino laptops in a 12" screen push 6 hours.
My tirade ignored this fact because reducing the power used by components isn't having much of an effect either way -- because the goal hasn't been to create a processor that can run for a day on a 7200 mAh power cell, but to create as fast a chip as possible that will run within the usual period of 4-6 hours -- or to decrease the required size and capacity of the battery to meet that period, thus making the device more portable. My Powerbook G4 has a 3600 mAh battery that gets the same battery life as my old Pismo with a 4800 mAh battery...and it's half the size. You HAVE to trade off somewhere...and the reason you don't see a large performance increase is that manufacturers are engineering machines to be more efficient, but have the same overall battery life.
This was what Apple did with the iPod 3G -- they used a smaller battery with 30% lower overall capacity than the iPod 2G as a way to decrease the overall footprint of the internals while maintaining very modest battery life (some say lower, but certainly not 30% lower).
Here, here. I think it's obvious the problem is not that battery technology has lagged. If it had, our computers would be getting WORSE battery life as performance increased, but instead it's stayed about the same. Meaning that battery improvements are progressing at EXACTLY THE SAME RATE as processor improvements, but the one is shadowing the other.
In short, want better battery life? Get a shittier machine. Battery life on my wife's 2 year old iBook is better than that of my brand new Powerbook. Smaller display, older video card, smaller hard drive, slower chip, no DVD...each of these sucks my power bigtime.
Same with the PocketPC vs Palm Pilot argument from a few years back. I heard a lot of whining about the PocketPC's 4 to 6 hour battery life from Palm proponents getting several days. Of course, their screens weren't backlit, weren't colour, didn't have sound, they had no compact flash card to power and the processor was about 10 times less powerful. Of course, they would commonly turn their machines off every five minutes rather than play MP3s on them all day. But oh, how come the more powerful machine has worse batter life? Dumbasses, do the friggin math.
I'd love to see what the LI+ battery from my Powerbook could do in my old 386 800x600 CGA laptop. That got 4 hours of life on 9 NiCd cells!
Lower prices are a a good thing for CONSUMERS. It's a bad thing for companies, and a bad thing for their employees. That's why Wal-Mart's practice of lowering their prices below those of rival stores, even if it means a loss, is anti-competetive. It will cause companies to go out of business, leaving only Wal-Mart in their wake. This is the sort of thing that destroys towns.
Now, Open Source Software is usually free. It don't get no cheaper. And that's a bad thing. Because if Open Source puts a company out of business in a particular market, there's only Open Source left in its wake. Meaning no competetion. How is this bad? Well, you're hard pressed to sell webserver software thanks to Apache. Does this mean Apache is the end all, be all, best possible approach to web serving? Of course not. But it does mean that it won't be profitable to write your own, even if your own webserver had superior performance and managability, because the inferior product is so inexpensive as to make it worth the hassle for many.
I'm sick of hearing that the price of software is a tax. Hey: if a product takes a million dollars to write (which is pretty cheap), another million to support for a year, and has a market of roughly ten thousand, how much do you have to charge for it? If your answer is "nothing, because 10% of them will buy support licenses from you for $1000 a year," you're wrong.
I think Microsoft employees are PLENTY ethical. The ones I've met have been. They are somewhere between dreamers and pragmatists.
The only reason Microsoft's marketting seem so nefarious is that they're at the top. When a company at the bottom bundles practically everything you need when computing along with their OS, e.g. Apple, it's a good business practice. When Microsoft does it, it's anti-competetive, despite the fact that these guys at the bottom are apparently competing quite nicely.
So you're saying that anybody who isn't for Open Source Software lacks beliefs? Frankly, I'm insulted.
And maybe Chris Sharp isn't who you think he is. Red Hat is, after all, a software company. If Mr. Sharp worked there, and decided that the umpteen failures in their manipulation of the "OSS Model" were indemic to OSS itself, it would be foolish of him to stick by it because he "believed" in it. Maybe he decided, as many others outside of Slashdot have, that not every aspect of traditional software is inherently evil. Maybe he realized that "forced upgrades" pay the bills which fix the software and finance new development. Maybe he noticed that when you can download something for free OR pay $50 for it and get support, most people will err for free and just fight through the issues -- so if you want to make money, you can't give them the option.
My hosting business started as a web collective. Everybody was gonna pay for his percentage of the server, and we were going to be a non-profit. For art! For software! For the sheer coolness of being the first Open Cost webserver! But when it came time to pay the bills, nobody ever had the money, and since we were equal partners I couldn't well shut them off without selling out, could I? Eventually, I had to turn commercial to pay the massive hosting bill, and you know what? Selling a little webspace for a fair price was FAR BETTER from pretty much every standpoint than trying to force everybody to pitch in to a communal server. I still attracted artists and programmers, but if somebody didn't pay, I could shut off their account, and then the money came in real quick. Yeah, I guess I abandoned my morals. But the more authoritative method actually worked. And that goes pretty far in my book.
Actually, I'd like to see the numbers on just how many people make money in OSS versus commercial software, and how much work they had to do to get that money.
I'd like to see that, because it could go a long way in either direction to convincing programmers what they should do with their lives. And it could save a lot of idealistic young programmers from writing corporate America's infrastructure while they themselves have to get fast food jobs.
Gentlemen: if you do work, you should be rewarded for it, and the reward should fit the work done. Old hardware shouldn't be good enough...until you can make the same $25-$50 per hour writing open source software than you can writing equivalent closed source software, OSS is failing developers. Neat features and customizable desktops don't feed my dog, they don't paint my house, and they don't repair the clutch on my car.
Uh, exactly this happens already. We had to go through three different companies before we could find one who could fix our boiler. It was kind of an obscure model, very efficient for its time, but parts were apparently hard to come by.
Unfortunately, the first two companies didn't tell us parts weren't available for the boiler. They told us it was unfixable, tried to sell us a new boiler. We asked them if they could adjust a standard part to fit it, and they just shook their heads. Have to machine a new one, and that's expensive because it's completely custom work. The third guy, luckily, knew that model boiler and was able to hunt down a part for us. It still cost an arm, but I got to keep the leg.
Back to the metaphor, with Open Source there's no guarantees that a particular project will exist or be supported after a few months. For development to continue on a project over a number of years, the project either has to be profitable or popular. Choose a niche project, or use a popular project in a unique way, and you're stuck with the check for custom work. Is this really what we want? To pay $100 per hour to get our software cooked up with no guarantees? Or to hire your own developer to come up to speed on the OSS codebase and write the software for you? Maybe this would work for a big corporation, but my company employs 20 people. We don't even have an IT guy. We're certainly not going to pay somebody to write custom software every time we have a bug. And if we do, we're going to want to resell that work, not be forced to give it back to a community that's just failed us.
Personally, I like open source software as a framework for creating for-pay software and services...but I have to agree with Microsoft that there are some things I'd just rather have the assurance of a well run company employing smart designers and knowledgable maintainers. I just don't get that in the OSS world. Instead, I get a bunch of altruistic cowboy coders doing what they like when they like it, and maybe helping me out in their spare time if I donate. Tell me, how does this uncertainty help government, help business or help education?
Really? Don't tell my adapter. It's been doing this since 2001, and I'm afraid if you tell it that it can't it will stop working. Like when the coyote would look down in Looney Tunes.
Yeah. It's great that Linux can now do what Apple did back in 1999.
(this isn't a dig on Linux, btw...I'm really impressed that wireless works so well on it...so much as an "hey apple has cool stuff first" post. i've been burning DVDs on my powerbook lately and have been very pleased with how painless it's been -- so long as you're willing to give up a little control).