The big thing here is - no one is competing with Microsoft.
If the linux community is not competing with Microsoft, then why all the constant comparisons to Windows about how linux is superior, which applications run on which platform, discussions of how to get more users off of Windows and onto a Linux desktop, etc. "Freedom of choice" is a beautiful thing in linux-land, but for someone on the outside looking in, which choice is the correct one for moving line of business apps to linux en masse (gnome/kde; xorg/xfree86; linux/*bsd/dragonfly)? I think that too many choices only results in unending confusion and a complete reluctance to abandon Windows by those who might otherwise make the switch.
(On a more personal note as a VB.NET developer, I am further put off by the superioristic attitude of many in the *nix community that I should abandon my language of choice and use java/c/c++/python/etc -- and then in the next breath I hear that linux is all about choice. It seems to be all about choice unless your choice doesn't agree with someone's pet project/favorite technology or you just want to use tools similar to what you used on Windows when gong to the linux platform.)
...or are there too many distros to keep track of? Granted, I am a Windows user (ASP.NET and Sql Server development is, well, pretty difficult on other platforms) so maybe it's simply beyond my understanding why there seem to be dozens and dozens of distros when there is only one linux kernel (there is only one kernel, right -- or has it been forked?). Also beyond me is the schism between KDE/Gnome, XFree86/X.org, etc. It seems to me that if the Linux community would just bury the hatchet and agree on a best of breed cross section of all the various options in building a system y'all would have the boys in Redmond over a barrel -- and their pants are around their ankles for the next few years until Longhorn comes out anyway. You're all blowing the best chance you're ever going to have to erode their use base -- unless you keep on with the "Gentoo sucks, (insert distro name here) rules!" carrying on...
You work for a non-profit organization and it's shelling out contribution money for Microsoft products?
Just because an organization is running Windows servers doesn't mean they have to pay for it. For some organizations Microsoft will donate software and coordinate with a local.NET users group to develop "line-of-business" applications unique to the non-profit. Case in point, the local (Kansas City).NET users group developed an internal application to allow the Salvation Army (SA) to coordinate donations and logistics getting items to/from the SA warehouse. Those who contributed to development were given copies of Visual Studio -- for the duration of the project, of course -- and server licenses were given to the SA by the local MS office.
Usually, Microsoft software is not free, but sometimes it is...
So Thunderbird 1.0 had a million downloads.... so what? I for one downloaded it more out of curiostiy than anything else. I played with it, used it for a couple days, and then went back to exclusilvely using only GMail. Thunderbird has a LONG way to do to catch up with even Outlook Express, much less "real" email and collaboration programs. They might get their act together just in time to get slapped to the back of the bus when Google releases a client app for GMail, which leaves me with the nagging question: who really gives a flip about Thunderbird?
And fifty years ago it was predicted we would all have flying cars and domestic servant robots by now too... As Yogi Berra put it: "Its tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
My friend has something like five DAT recorders for just this purpose. He's also in the market for something iPod-like for hauling around his tunes (Grateful Dead, mainly). An added bonus would be something that can record full quality audio at line input, and a double bonus would be real-time compression to a lossless format like FLAC. He's not looking to retire the DAT's just yet, but is casually keeping an eye open for something that might be able to do the job just as well -- and copying the audio data to the computer at hard drive speeds beats the hell out of real time or slightly faster than real time dumps from DAT to the audio processing workstation.
The disk would be running less than recording a line input at 44.1Khz WAV though. The reason I mention this is that a couple of my friends are audio engineer types and keeping an eye open for an iPod-like (loosely speaking) that has lots of storage, can record full quality audio at line level, and perhaps compress to lossy format as well, without shelling out thousands of dollars for "professional" solutions. On-site recording would be less of a need than a portable music library, but if they can kill two birds with one stone... why not?
For a device supposedly aimed at developers, and with as big as of a hard drive as this thing has, why doesn't it support FLAC?
(What would be doubly-nice is if it supported real-time recording to FLAC from a line level input, but I'll bitch and whine about the absence of that feature when they get around to having it at least *play* FLAC...)
And they wonder why users clamor for a tool that will allow them to rip DVD's for backup and conveniently drop all the mandatory commercials from the "backup" copies...
Why is the MPAA going after "the problem" without proposing "a solution" to go with it? Do they think that crushing BitTorrent will be the end of their troubles? Did they not see what happened when the music industry crushed Napster? Instead of having one point of distribution that can be monitored, they created the situation that cutting off one head causes dozens more to pop up. What they *should* do is come up with an online video store to offer a legit alternative. Heck, they could even use BitTorrent for distribution...
The first thing I thought of when I saw the topic was "Microsoft -- the licensing comes due in December" but I missed on getting this tid-bit in first... I need to stop paying so much attention to my job and pay closer attention to/. so I don't miss such opportunities to post. Oh well...
What a day on/. -- first an article on the hydrogen economy, now fusion... I'm on the edge of my seat anticipating the personal hovercraft story that CowboyNeal is probably proofing as I type this...
Re:Why is this a good thing?
on
A .Net CPU
·
· Score: 1
From the article: "Bush and Kerry managed to find one piece of common ground: Both spoke glowingly of a future powered by fuel cells."
So what we've got are two politicians running for national office endorsing a futuristic, Utopian idea that will not likely happen in any of our lifetimes....
And here I thought there was going to be a great need for VB6 and that I would be viable for the next 20 years on that alone... Time to learn the new language of the month, I suppose.
Are they going after that niche market of manager types who are just not satisfied playing with their Crackberries, err, Blackberries during those long and boring meetings? Are they really selling enough Tablet PC's for this to matter a hill of beans in the first place, or just another paper tiger for Microsoft to say "we dominate this market too..."
Why is this a good thing?
on
A .Net CPU
·
· Score: 1
One of the major *advantages* of.NET over Java is that a.NET is supposedly compiled to NATIVE CODE on the first run, not interpreted bytecode like java. That being the case, what good is the.NET runtime in hardware? Faster compilation?.NET's compilation doesn't take forever anyway -- it's not Gentoo for crying out loud...
There in only one reason I can think of that small hard drives are not currently used on digicams: power consumption. If the iPod (and its imitators) were not caching info to flash memory and having to run their mini hard drives all the time, the longevity of both the battery and the hard drive itself would be significantly reduced. Unless you are willing to compress all video shot on your camera, the memory format will need to be able to write at a speed of no less than 25 Mbps and flash memory is only now getting up to that point -- and it's ain't gonna be cheap for an application like this, methinks.
In fact, they are buying LOTS of them... and if the damn thing supported FLAC I would buy it too and load up the whole 80 or 100 or 120 GB it offered (I don't want to hear about iPods supporting AppleLossless -- that is not an open format so I don't plan on using it).
Okay, I thought the story about only the old people in South Korea using email was funny, and the spin offs of "In Korea only old people do {insert activity here}" were funny for a bit, but you people wanting to get in your crack about old Koreans on EVERY SINGLE THREAD are just not funny and are ruining what was a pretty funny joke in the process. </RANT>
Am I the only one wondering when we're going to see a TCO study involving the use of Mac OS? Surely there has to be some cost savings in reduced downtime and administration with using a Mac...
In case you forgot, we're discussing the FUTURE of digital audio, not its past. Furthermore, redbook CD's don't have DRM on them because:
* they were created in 1980 * there was no such thing as PC yet * PC's didn't even ship with hard drives until the second half of the 80's * If I recall correctly, as of about 1990 a 10MB hard drive was still considered huge
With what tool were you going to copy CD's in the early 80's, might I ask? There was no DRM on CD's because the ability to copy a CD was not even a practical concern when the format was created.
Any more non-researched ideas you would *me* to shoot down?:-)
The redbook CD specification was created in 1980 -- LONG BEFORE there was any concern about digital piracy. CD burners and blank media either were not available or were cost prohibitive, and does anyone recall just how big hard drives were at the time? 5MB? You were not exaclty going to image a CD to your computer and begin copying it even if the burners had been available. It was not for AT LEAST another ten years that all relevant costs were to the point that it was cost effective for those without morals to pirate redbook CD's.
And on the topic of redbooks and DRM, there have been several attempts by The Labels to put copy protection on the CD (see the latest Beatles release for an example). These CD's don't conform to the redbook specification and the packaging even says that the media will not play on all devices. The only reason this isn't done more widely is because consumers won't buy media that will not play in their car, their older CD player hooked to their stereo, their portables, their computers, etc (and we generally don't appreciate being treated as prospective pirates by the media companies either).
Contrast audio CD's with DVD: even though it was not yet cost effective to pirate DVDs when they were released, it was foreseeable that such copying would be feasible before long, hence the CSS scheme. The studios are lucky that the resolution of new TVs and monitors is high enough to make DVDs look bad and require a technology upgrade. You can guarantee that this next generation of video disks will have MUCH stronger DRM. Unfortunately for the record labels, the redbook CD spec was good enough to still be the gold standard in digital audio 24 years later. If they could ever convince us that we need to scrap redbooks in favor of a new surround-sound CD format, you can rest assured that such a disk format will be armored with DRM as well.
Which goes back to my point: as long as they have what we want, they are going to protect it.
Whatever evil the record companies remind you of, they are the ones holding the content that the vast majority of folks want, and they choose AAC+FairPlay or WMA+DRM because they want positive control of the end consumption (to a certain degree) of the product. This will never change, so for a given format to be accepted by those who are holding the goods that we all want, the distribution format will need to have acceptable-to-good levels of rights management on board. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and The Labels have what we want -- and they are not going to distribute it in FLAC.
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The big thing here is - no one is competing with Microsoft.
If the linux community is not competing with Microsoft, then why all the constant comparisons to Windows about how linux is superior, which applications run on which platform, discussions of how to get more users off of Windows and onto a Linux desktop, etc. "Freedom of choice" is a beautiful thing in linux-land, but for someone on the outside looking in, which choice is the correct one for moving line of business apps to linux en masse (gnome/kde; xorg/xfree86; linux/*bsd/dragonfly)? I think that too many choices only results in unending confusion and a complete reluctance to abandon Windows by those who might otherwise make the switch.
(On a more personal note as a VB.NET developer, I am further put off by the superioristic attitude of many in the *nix community that I should abandon my language of choice and use java/c/c++/python/etc -- and then in the next breath I hear that linux is all about choice. It seems to be all about choice unless your choice doesn't agree with someone's pet project/favorite technology or you just want to use tools similar to what you used on Windows when gong to the linux platform.)
...or are there too many distros to keep track of? Granted, I am a Windows user (ASP.NET and Sql Server development is, well, pretty difficult on other platforms) so maybe it's simply beyond my understanding why there seem to be dozens and dozens of distros when there is only one linux kernel (there is only one kernel, right -- or has it been forked?). Also beyond me is the schism between KDE/Gnome, XFree86/X.org, etc. It seems to me that if the Linux community would just bury the hatchet and agree on a best of breed cross section of all the various options in building a system y'all would have the boys in Redmond over a barrel -- and their pants are around their ankles for the next few years until Longhorn comes out anyway. You're all blowing the best chance you're ever going to have to erode their use base -- unless you keep on with the "Gentoo sucks, (insert distro name here) rules!" carrying on...
You work for a non-profit organization and it's shelling out contribution money for Microsoft products?
Just because an organization is running Windows servers doesn't mean they have to pay for it. For some organizations Microsoft will donate software and coordinate with a local .NET users group to develop "line-of-business" applications unique to the non-profit. Case in point, the local (Kansas City) .NET users group developed an internal application to allow the Salvation Army (SA) to coordinate donations and logistics getting items to/from the SA warehouse. Those who contributed to development were given copies of Visual Studio -- for the duration of the project, of course -- and server licenses were given to the SA by the local MS office.
Usually, Microsoft software is not free, but sometimes it is...
So Thunderbird 1.0 had a million downloads.... so what? I for one downloaded it more out of curiostiy than anything else. I played with it, used it for a couple days, and then went back to exclusilvely using only GMail. Thunderbird has a LONG way to do to catch up with even Outlook Express, much less "real" email and collaboration programs. They might get their act together just in time to get slapped to the back of the bus when Google releases a client app for GMail, which leaves me with the nagging question: who really gives a flip about Thunderbird?
And fifty years ago it was predicted we would all have flying cars and domestic servant robots by now too... As Yogi Berra put it: "Its tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
My friend has something like five DAT recorders for just this purpose. He's also in the market for something iPod-like for hauling around his tunes (Grateful Dead, mainly). An added bonus would be something that can record full quality audio at line input, and a double bonus would be real-time compression to a lossless format like FLAC. He's not looking to retire the DAT's just yet, but is casually keeping an eye open for something that might be able to do the job just as well -- and copying the audio data to the computer at hard drive speeds beats the hell out of real time or slightly faster than real time dumps from DAT to the audio processing workstation.
I don't know about the ERP/CRM angle, but wouldn't Berkeley DB (www.sleepycat.com) be a viable alternative to Access for easy data storage?
The disk would be running less than recording a line input at 44.1Khz WAV though. The reason I mention this is that a couple of my friends are audio engineer types and keeping an eye open for an iPod-like (loosely speaking) that has lots of storage, can record full quality audio at line level, and perhaps compress to lossy format as well, without shelling out thousands of dollars for "professional" solutions. On-site recording would be less of a need than a portable music library, but if they can kill two birds with one stone... why not?
For a device supposedly aimed at developers, and with as big as of a hard drive as this thing has, why doesn't it support FLAC?
(What would be doubly-nice is if it supported real-time recording to FLAC from a line level input, but I'll bitch and whine about the absence of that feature when they get around to having it at least *play* FLAC...)
And they wonder why users clamor for a tool that will allow them to rip DVD's for backup and conveniently drop all the mandatory commercials from the "backup" copies...
Why is the MPAA going after "the problem" without proposing "a solution" to go with it? Do they think that crushing BitTorrent will be the end of their troubles? Did they not see what happened when the music industry crushed Napster? Instead of having one point of distribution that can be monitored, they created the situation that cutting off one head causes dozens more to pop up. What they *should* do is come up with an online video store to offer a legit alternative. Heck, they could even use BitTorrent for distribution...
The first thing I thought of when I saw the topic was "Microsoft -- the licensing comes due in December" but I missed on getting this tid-bit in first... I need to stop paying so much attention to my job and pay closer attention to /. so I don't miss such opportunities to post. Oh well...
What a day on /. -- first an article on the hydrogen economy, now fusion... I'm on the edge of my seat anticipating the personal hovercraft story that CowboyNeal is probably proofing as I type this...
Clearly you are not familiar with .NET, which is compliled to NATIVE CODE before it is run.
From the article: "Bush and Kerry managed to find one piece of common ground: Both spoke glowingly of a future powered by fuel cells."
So what we've got are two politicians running for national office endorsing a futuristic, Utopian idea that will not likely happen in any of our lifetimes....
This is news?
And here I thought there was going to be a great need for VB6 and that I would be viable for the next 20 years on that alone... Time to learn the new language of the month, I suppose.
Are they going after that niche market of manager types who are just not satisfied playing with their Crackberries, err, Blackberries during those long and boring meetings? Are they really selling enough Tablet PC's for this to matter a hill of beans in the first place, or just another paper tiger for Microsoft to say "we dominate this market too..."
One of the major *advantages* of .NET over Java is that a .NET is supposedly compiled to NATIVE CODE on the first run, not interpreted bytecode like java. That being the case, what good is the .NET runtime in hardware? Faster compilation? .NET's compilation doesn't take forever anyway -- it's not Gentoo for crying out loud...
There in only one reason I can think of that small hard drives are not currently used on digicams: power consumption. If the iPod (and its imitators) were not caching info to flash memory and having to run their mini hard drives all the time, the longevity of both the battery and the hard drive itself would be significantly reduced. Unless you are willing to compress all video shot on your camera, the memory format will need to be able to write at a speed of no less than 25 Mbps and flash memory is only now getting up to that point -- and it's ain't gonna be cheap for an application like this, methinks.
In fact, they are buying LOTS of them... and if the damn thing supported FLAC I would buy it too and load up the whole 80 or 100 or 120 GB it offered (I don't want to hear about iPods supporting AppleLossless -- that is not an open format so I don't plan on using it).
But a HDD based video camera would be nice too.
Okay, I thought the story about only the old people in South Korea using email was funny, and the spin offs of "In Korea only old people do {insert activity here}" were funny for a bit, but you people wanting to get in your crack about old Koreans on EVERY SINGLE THREAD are just not funny and are ruining what was a pretty funny joke in the process.
</RANT>
Am I the only one wondering when we're going to see a TCO study involving the use of Mac OS? Surely there has to be some cost savings in reduced downtime and administration with using a Mac...
In case you forgot, we're discussing the FUTURE of digital audio, not its past. Furthermore, redbook CD's don't have DRM on them because:
:-)
* they were created in 1980
* there was no such thing as PC yet
* PC's didn't even ship with hard drives until the second half of the 80's
* If I recall correctly, as of about 1990 a 10MB hard drive was still considered huge
With what tool were you going to copy CD's in the early 80's, might I ask? There was no DRM on CD's because the ability to copy a CD was not even a practical concern when the format was created.
Any more non-researched ideas you would *me* to shoot down?
The redbook CD specification was created in 1980 -- LONG BEFORE there was any concern about digital piracy. CD burners and blank media either were not available or were cost prohibitive, and does anyone recall just how big hard drives were at the time? 5MB? You were not exaclty going to image a CD to your computer and begin copying it even if the burners had been available. It was not for AT LEAST another ten years that all relevant costs were to the point that it was cost effective for those without morals to pirate redbook CD's.
And on the topic of redbooks and DRM, there have been several attempts by The Labels to put copy protection on the CD (see the latest Beatles release for an example). These CD's don't conform to the redbook specification and the packaging even says that the media will not play on all devices. The only reason this isn't done more widely is because consumers won't buy media that will not play in their car, their older CD player hooked to their stereo, their portables, their computers, etc (and we generally don't appreciate being treated as prospective pirates by the media companies either).
Contrast audio CD's with DVD: even though it was not yet cost effective to pirate DVDs when they were released, it was foreseeable that such copying would be feasible before long, hence the CSS scheme. The studios are lucky that the resolution of new TVs and monitors is high enough to make DVDs look bad and require a technology upgrade. You can guarantee that this next generation of video disks will have MUCH stronger DRM. Unfortunately for the record labels, the redbook CD spec was good enough to still be the gold standard in digital audio 24 years later. If they could ever convince us that we need to scrap redbooks in favor of a new surround-sound CD format, you can rest assured that such a disk format will be armored with DRM as well.
Which goes back to my point: as long as they have what we want, they are going to protect it.
Whatever evil the record companies remind you of, they are the ones holding the content that the vast majority of folks want, and they choose AAC+FairPlay or WMA+DRM because they want positive control of the end consumption (to a certain degree) of the product. This will never change, so for a given format to be accepted by those who are holding the goods that we all want, the distribution format will need to have acceptable-to-good levels of rights management on board. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and The Labels have what we want -- and they are not going to distribute it in FLAC.