"THEN, how many people are actually left at this point that already have a HDTV and don't already own some sort of BR player. I mean, I have no numbers here but it can't be that large." I would say the majority. Most HDTVs are 1080i Just go to the local Walmart,Bestbuy,Sears and take a look. People buy there HDTVs and plug in there DVD player and it looks GREAT. A lot of people that buy HDTVs don't want or need a PS3. Their kids are all wanting Wiis or a 360 or maybe a PS3 but the majority seem to want the Wii. Now if Toshiba had managed to get an HDDVD drive in the Wii I think it would have won. If they could have kept the price point.
Okay I am a big fan of Linux but. My mother can not walk into a store and just buy a printer and be sure that it works with Linux. My mother can not walk into a store and just buy a scanner and be sure that it works with Linux. My mother can not put AOL "Yeckkk" on a computer and just have it work. Yes AOL sucks but my mother just wants dial up and has been using AOL forever and doesn't want to move Add in that she probably has a winmodem. I don't live in the same city as my parents so they go to some local place when they have issues. What are the odds that the local place knows diddly about Linux? So my Mother and father would have to. 1. Buy a Linux compatible modem or get there winmodem working. 2. Get a new ISP. 3. Find a printer that will work after much research. If they had broadband and I could just set up a working system for them they would be all set but Linux lacks the support that Windows has. It really isn't the fault the Linux developers "except their refusal to make a stable binary driver interface" that there is a lack of support. But there is still a lack of easy Walmart level support for Linux. I am hoping that the new netbooks will change that.
I went out and bought an HD-DVD player when they where on sale. I got one $99.00 before Blue-Ray won. It is a nice DVD player and the movies that I watch on it are also good. But when I bought it the check out person was shocked that I paid so much for a DVD player! I tried to explain HD to them and got a blank stare. People think that DVDs are HD! Frankly DVDs look great on my HDTV. Not even the HD-DVDs but the regular ones.
Yep I have a feeling that if it wasn't for the PS3 that we would be looking at Beta V2.0 I have to wonder just how many none PS3 players are out there? It is hard to tell because from what I hear the PS3 is the best player.
"a friend of mine is real paranoid." Really? "So when he took his computer into a large Office Supply Store Chain for optimization, " Not paranoid enough I would say. 1. optimization? What the heck is that? Run a virus scan, run adaware, remove any crapletts, run chkdsk/f, and disk defragmentor? Oh and empty the recycle bin.. And get charged $50 or more for it.
Sorry but those PC Tuneups just tick me off. I guess it is better than just trashing the system but good grief it is just evil. Maybe I should cut a deal with Adaware and create a Linux boot CD that has a linux version of adaware and Clam AV. Call it Computer Draino and sell it for $29.95 and offer free updates.
"My point still stands. The Ubuntu devs could have focused their efforts on Debian. Their distro today still is binary compatible with Debian. If they added their new features to the stock Debian, all Debian users benefit." They did and they called it Ubuntu. Shuttleworth has plans to make money with support and probably some other things and I doubt that would have worked just contributing to Debian. Also Shuttle worth would have no control over release dates, features, and then you have the entire what is free enough to include battle. Debian is a good distro and that is fine. They have there own goals and ideas of how Linux should be. But they are not compatible with Shuttleworth's. Also Ubuntu's cool new stuff is all GPL'd Nothing stops Debian from using what they want so the Ubuntu developers have contributed to Debian if the Debian developers want to take advantage of it.
"If it weren't for microsoft, and we could have had an open os running on open hardware from the start we would be far better off now." Probably not. Odds are that we would be hating Digital Research because CP/M-86/GEM sucked. Or we would be using Macs, Amigas, and or Atari STs. Oh and we would be saying how much better off we all would be if we all ran Linux on all of them.
Well I think you misunderstood my statment and or I was not clear enough. "You know I never used sentinels like that in any of my programs after I finished that class. " I said like that. What I should have said was that I don't use any extremely flawed sentinels like that. I have used things like negative numbers as a sentinel and as you pointed out c strings. I would never use a user inputted value as a sentinel which was what my instructor suggested. I do think that c strings are deeply flawed. The main benefit is that they take less memory but you pay for that with a lot of limitations like a concatenation requires a sequential scan. A good choice when 64k was a lot of ram. Not the right choice today.
I didn't think so since if you did nobody would ever use IIS. I was thinking more of a file server, database server, mail/exchange server, or application server. I think those do require CALs. I don't know for sure since I don't deal with Windows servers much since Linux works for my needs and is free.
Okay how many support calls do you get with Windows support. I think our current package is like four calls a year but that is for developers and not the server. Next does the price for support go up per cal? When you want to add more users what will the cost be? Want to use a VM and add run more servers on the box? What will that cost? Want to add a backup server? What about development server? Unless you are using the entire Microsoft software stack why not move to Linux? Of course there is the added cost of retraining you to use Linux but as an Admin learning Linux is worth while if for no other reason that a good Linux Admin will find it pretty easy to move into Solaris or AIX as well as Linux.
Also frankly Linux support is optional for a Windows server it is mandatory.
A good question is. How much damage can your first programming teacher do? Actually that was probably his only real sin. While he wasn't a programmer by profession he a good math teacher. He really got into the math side of things.
He refused to teach Basic as a first language but instead taught us Pascal. He would flunk you for using a goto and yes pascal did support gotos so we learned structured programing.
I went into my first college programing course and aced it with little effort. My professor wondered where I learned to write such easy to read code.
I think we can forgive him for 99 as a sentinel. Now I just write all my code to die on my 70th birthday:)
Yep I remember my first programing instructor explaining the idea of sentinel. You pick a number that would never come up to mark the end of data input. like 99 for a year. This was only 83 so 99 didn't seem that far away. When I asked him about that his answer was. Nobody uses software for that long. You know I never used sentinels like that in any of my programs after I finished that class. I have to assume that it was a standard method back in the day like using i,j,k for integers in loops. "Fortran defined those as integers be default"
What is this protected mode of which you speak? I was using a PC not those dang new fangled AT where not on the market yet and cost as much as a car! Why wait until the 90s. I got my Amiga in 85.
Yep I remeber that was one of the things I hated about PCs. On my little C64 with two drives I could start it formatting a disk and the go do something else. Or I could format two disks at once. On the very expensive PCs you had to wait for the drive to format the floppy! Man they sucked. Then when I got my Amiga I was helping a local BBS test Zmodem. I downloaded a GIF and then the sysop asked me if it downloaded. I told him yes and to wait just a sec while I checked. He jumped right back and told me that I didn't have to log off and check it right now. I could wait until I was done on the BBS:) He was so confused when I told him that I didn't have to log off to check a GIF:) Man how did PCs ever win....
But Intel took a lot back with their "fake" quad cores. AMD lost a good bit of market share. They should have pushed out a fake quad core while they where worked on the true quad. Then throw in that the first true quads had some issues and you can see AMD took a bit of hit.
Maybe but the number one producer of GPUs is Intel. And I think the best that Intel can do with Crysis is 4 FPM on with the settings on high. Go buy Motortrend and see what is on the cover. Nobody cares that much about the low end of graphics but they out sell the high end in volume. There is money to be made in gaming cards but it is the low end is what pays the bills. It is just that the high end will become the low end at some point. But even then take a look at the reviews of high end video cards. Just being the fastest isn't good enough anymore. Heat and power use now come into play. The hot ticket in GPUs these days are the mid range cards like the 8800GT and the ATI 38XX and 48XX have become the cards of choice for gamers. BTW FPM stands for Frames Per Month in this case:)
""Gee, it's closed and I can't install apps on it like my other phone... Oh well, it's an iPhone!" Yes you can. "Oh well, it's an iPhone! I downloaded an update and now it's bricked... Oh well, it's an iPhone!" etc. ad absurdum." I don't think Apple invented that one.
One has to ponder the idea that the next IPod Touch might come with a camera and maybe a GPS. Why not make your touch your camera as well. A camera on a media player isn't any dumber than on a cell phone.
I think duel core will rule laptops for a while yet. The simple reason is that most PC users are not screaming for more power. Excluding gamers most users computers are fast enough until they become bogged down with malware. Netbooks and Nettops I predict will be the next big thing. We don't need bigger and faster PCs anymore. We need smaller, lighter, and more convenient.
I would have to say that they are still pretty uncommon. Gaming laptops are no where near the majority of laptop users. Even then I would guess that duel core systems out sell quad core laptops at least 50 to 1 if not higher but I am just guessing.
Gamers are like sports car buyers. They are few, not a large profit base, and only important for their halo effect. Now the manufactures do make some good money off the games because they soak them and get to recoup a large section of their RnD. What gamers really help with is the Halo effect. A lot of gamers will buy Intel not because they are going to get the top of the line CPU but because they dream of someday getting that top of the line CPU so they buy a motherboard that will work with it. Intel has better and faster CPUs but I will be that even with that most gamers are still buying dual-core cpus.
Oh and gamers don't buy the most expensive hardware. The HPC have them beat. Those are the people that really push out some bucks. You think a top of the line gaming rig is expensive. Price a top of the line IBM POWER system:)
The problem is that you are just looking at one pattern of use. Yes VIM maybe very productive but it is not easy to learn or to use. VIM or Emacs is great if you use it everyday all day. But most users are not that program centric. They use many programs every day.
Was the rush to both a native quad core and quad core on the desktop. Desktops matter less than less these days. Notebooks are more and more important. You don't put quad core in notebooks yet. If AMD can pull off Fusion and have it compete with Intel in the laptop space they may actually do well again. There current problem is they are not competing with the ATOM yet. The netbook may be the next big battle ground. Most people don't want a faster machine anymore. And most laptop users don't want faster laptop. What they want is one that runs longer and is smaller and lighter.
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"THEN, how many people are actually left at this point that already have a HDTV and don't already own some sort of BR player. I mean, I have no numbers here but it can't be that large."
I would say the majority.
Most HDTVs are 1080i Just go to the local Walmart,Bestbuy,Sears and take a look.
People buy there HDTVs and plug in there DVD player and it looks GREAT.
A lot of people that buy HDTVs don't want or need a PS3. Their kids are all wanting Wiis or a 360 or maybe a PS3 but the majority seem to want the Wii.
Now if Toshiba had managed to get an HDDVD drive in the Wii I think it would have won. If they could have kept the price point.
Okay I am a big fan of Linux but.
My mother can not walk into a store and just buy a printer and be sure that it works with Linux.
My mother can not walk into a store and just buy a scanner and be sure that it works with Linux.
My mother can not put AOL "Yeckkk" on a computer and just have it work.
Yes AOL sucks but my mother just wants dial up and has been using AOL forever and doesn't want to move Add in that she probably has a winmodem.
I don't live in the same city as my parents so they go to some local place when they have issues.
What are the odds that the local place knows diddly about Linux?
So my Mother and father would have to.
1. Buy a Linux compatible modem or get there winmodem working.
2. Get a new ISP.
3. Find a printer that will work after much research.
If they had broadband and I could just set up a working system for them they would be all set but Linux lacks the support that Windows has. It really isn't the fault the Linux developers "except their refusal to make a stable binary driver interface" that there is a lack of support. But there is still a lack of easy Walmart level support for Linux.
I am hoping that the new netbooks will change that.
I don't know about 1-C engine but I do know that P&W does test fire Centar engines in a vacuum chamber.
Okay I think the outburst was unnecessary and I don't think it was a great idea.
Is it a big deal? I really don't think so. While I am offended.
I went out and bought an HD-DVD player when they where on sale. I got one $99.00 before Blue-Ray won.
It is a nice DVD player and the movies that I watch on it are also good. But when I bought it the check out person was shocked that I paid so much for a DVD player! I tried to explain HD to them and got a blank stare. People think that DVDs are HD!
Frankly DVDs look great on my HDTV. Not even the HD-DVDs but the regular ones.
Yep I have a feeling that if it wasn't for the PS3 that we would be looking at Beta V2.0
I have to wonder just how many none PS3 players are out there? It is hard to tell because from what I hear the PS3 is the best player.
"a friend of mine is real paranoid." /f, and disk defragmentor?
Really?
"So when he took his computer into a large Office Supply Store Chain for optimization, "
Not paranoid enough I would say.
1. optimization? What the heck is that?
Run a virus scan, run adaware, remove any crapletts, run chkdsk
Oh and empty the recycle bin.. And get charged $50 or more for it.
Sorry but those PC Tuneups just tick me off. I guess it is better than just trashing the system but good grief it is just evil.
Maybe I should cut a deal with Adaware and create a Linux boot CD that has a linux version of adaware and Clam AV. Call it Computer Draino and sell it for $29.95 and offer free updates.
"My point still stands. The Ubuntu devs could have focused their efforts on Debian. Their distro today still is binary compatible with Debian. If they added their new features to the stock Debian, all Debian users benefit."
They did and they called it Ubuntu. Shuttleworth has plans to make money with support and probably some other things and I doubt that would have worked just contributing to Debian.
Also Shuttle worth would have no control over release dates, features, and then you have the entire what is free enough to include battle.
Debian is a good distro and that is fine. They have there own goals and ideas of how Linux should be.
But they are not compatible with Shuttleworth's. Also Ubuntu's cool new stuff is all GPL'd Nothing stops Debian from using what they want so the Ubuntu developers have contributed to Debian if the Debian developers want to take advantage of it.
"If it weren't for microsoft, and we could have had an open os running on open hardware from the start we would be far better off now."
Probably not.
Odds are that we would be hating Digital Research because CP/M-86/GEM sucked. Or we would be using Macs, Amigas, and or Atari STs. Oh and we would be saying how much better off we all would be if we all ran Linux on all of them.
Well I think you misunderstood my statment and or I was not clear enough.
"You know I never used sentinels like that in any of my programs after I finished that class. "
I said like that. What I should have said was that I don't use any extremely flawed sentinels like that.
I have used things like negative numbers as a sentinel and as you pointed out c strings. I would never use a user inputted value as a sentinel which was what my instructor suggested.
I do think that c strings are deeply flawed. The main benefit is that they take less memory but you pay for that with a lot of limitations like a concatenation requires a sequential scan.
A good choice when 64k was a lot of ram. Not the right choice today.
I didn't think so since if you did nobody would ever use IIS.
I was thinking more of a file server, database server, mail/exchange server, or application server. I think those do require CALs. I don't know for sure since I don't deal with Windows servers much since Linux works for my needs and is free.
Okay how many support calls do you get with Windows support. I think our current package is like four calls a year but that is for developers and not the server.
Next does the price for support go up per cal?
When you want to add more users what will the cost be?
Want to use a VM and add run more servers on the box? What will that cost?
Want to add a backup server? What about development server?
Unless you are using the entire Microsoft software stack why not move to Linux? Of course there is the added cost of retraining you to use Linux but as an Admin learning Linux is worth while if for no other reason that a good Linux Admin will find it pretty easy to move into Solaris or AIX as well as Linux.
Also frankly Linux support is optional for a Windows server it is mandatory.
A good question is.
How much damage can your first programming teacher do?
Actually that was probably his only real sin. While he wasn't a programmer by profession he a good math teacher. He really got into the math side of things.
He refused to teach Basic as a first language but instead taught us Pascal. He would flunk you for using a goto and yes pascal did support gotos so we learned structured programing.
I went into my first college programing course and aced it with little effort. My professor wondered where I learned to write such easy to read code.
I think we can forgive him for 99 as a sentinel. :)
Now I just write all my code to die on my 70th birthday
Yep I remember my first programing instructor explaining the idea of sentinel. You pick a number that would never come up to mark the end of data input. like 99 for a year. This was only 83 so 99 didn't seem that far away.
When I asked him about that his answer was.
Nobody uses software for that long.
You know I never used sentinels like that in any of my programs after I finished that class. I have to assume that it was a standard method back in the day like using i,j,k for integers in loops. "Fortran defined those as integers be default"
Tell that to Intel and AMD!
What is this protected mode of which you speak? I was using a PC not those dang new fangled AT where not on the market yet and cost as much as a car!
Why wait until the 90s. I got my Amiga in 85.
Yep I remeber that was one of the things I hated about PCs. :)
On my little C64 with two drives I could start it formatting a disk and the go do something else. Or I could format two disks at once.
On the very expensive PCs you had to wait for the drive to format the floppy!
Man they sucked.
Then when I got my Amiga I was helping a local BBS test Zmodem. I downloaded a GIF and then the sysop asked me if it downloaded. I told him yes and to wait just a sec while I checked. He jumped right back and told me that I didn't have to log off and check it right now. I could wait until I was done on the BBS:) He was so confused when I told him that I didn't have to log off to check a GIF
Man how did PCs ever win....
But Intel took a lot back with their "fake" quad cores. AMD lost a good bit of market share. They should have pushed out a fake quad core while they where worked on the true quad. Then throw in that the first true quads had some issues and you can see AMD took a bit of hit.
Maybe but the number one producer of GPUs is Intel. :)
And I think the best that Intel can do with Crysis is 4 FPM on with the settings on high.
Go buy Motortrend and see what is on the cover. Nobody cares that much about the low end of graphics but they out sell the high end in volume.
There is money to be made in gaming cards but it is the low end is what pays the bills. It is just that the high end will become the low end at some point.
But even then take a look at the reviews of high end video cards. Just being the fastest isn't good enough anymore. Heat and power use now come into play. The hot ticket in GPUs these days are the mid range cards like the 8800GT and the ATI 38XX and 48XX have become the cards of choice for gamers.
BTW FPM stands for Frames Per Month in this case
""Gee, it's closed and I can't install apps on it like my other phone... Oh well, it's an iPhone!"
Yes you can.
"Oh well, it's an iPhone! I downloaded an update and now it's bricked... Oh well, it's an iPhone!" etc. ad absurdum."
I don't think Apple invented that one.
One has to ponder the idea that the next IPod Touch might come with a camera and maybe a GPS.
Why not make your touch your camera as well. A camera on a media player isn't any dumber than on a cell phone.
I think duel core will rule laptops for a while yet. The simple reason is that most PC users are not screaming for more power. Excluding gamers most users computers are fast enough until they become bogged down with malware.
Netbooks and Nettops I predict will be the next big thing.
We don't need bigger and faster PCs anymore.
We need smaller, lighter, and more convenient.
I would have to say that they are still pretty uncommon.
Gaming laptops are no where near the majority of laptop users.
Even then I would guess that duel core systems out sell quad core laptops at least 50 to 1 if not higher but I am just guessing.
Gamers are like sports car buyers.
They are few, not a large profit base, and only important for their halo effect.
Now the manufactures do make some good money off the games because they soak them and get to recoup a large section of their RnD.
What gamers really help with is the Halo effect. A lot of gamers will buy Intel not because they are going to get the top of the line CPU but because they dream of someday getting that top of the line CPU so they buy a motherboard that will work with it.
Intel has better and faster CPUs but I will be that even with that most gamers are still buying dual-core cpus.
Oh and gamers don't buy the most expensive hardware. The HPC have them beat. Those are the people that really push out some bucks. :)
You think a top of the line gaming rig is expensive. Price a top of the line IBM POWER system
The problem is that you are just looking at one pattern of use.
Yes VIM maybe very productive but it is not easy to learn or to use.
VIM or Emacs is great if you use it everyday all day. But most users are not that program centric. They use many programs every day.
Was the rush to both a native quad core and quad core on the desktop.
Desktops matter less than less these days. Notebooks are more and more important. You don't put quad core in notebooks yet.
If AMD can pull off Fusion and have it compete with Intel in the laptop space they may actually do well again.
There current problem is they are not competing with the ATOM yet. The netbook may be the next big battle ground. Most people don't want a faster machine anymore. And most laptop users don't want faster laptop. What they want is one that runs longer and is smaller and lighter.