Sure, and supermarkets sell some items at a loss too, but again these are part of a money making business plan... how it what Microsoft did NOT dumping?
Re:Great, except that this company is in a defecit
on
Amazon Makes a Profit
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Amazon's P/S (1.23) is certainly higher than the brick & mortar book stores (Barnes & Noble 0.47, Borders 0.56), but that seems reasonable considering their massively lower overhead costs and need for inventory. You're also paying for the growth - they've come from nowhere to now have sales of the same magnitude as these two, and increased revenues by about 15% last year...
You're still taking a gamble that revenue growth will continue, but that seems a reasonable gamble - not an outrageous overvaluation.
IANAL, but AFAIK companies are in general NOT free to to sell products below cost or give them away for free - that's called dumping, and is illegal.
I think the only reason the games consoles can do it is because it's part of a viable and LEGAL business model - razor and razorblades, not an attempt to use your deeper pockets to put a rival out of business as Microsoft did to Netscape.
Nice in theory, but in practice Gigabit ethernet does not deliver Gb/sec - and in fact Ethernet's contention access mechanism (CSMA/CD) guarantees that you won't!. In practice you're better off with channel bonded 100Mb/sec Ethernet and a smart switch topology such as KLAT2's Flat Neighborhood Networks to minimize latency and maximize inter-node bandwidth.
IMO the X-Box would be a poor PVR, unless it has the horsepower, disk access etc to record TV at the same time as playing games or DVDs. This isn't necessary for the ability to pause live TV (when you're presumably not wanting to play games - but who knows), but it certainly a requirement for the PVR to be able to record shows for you whenever they are on.
Personally I don't think game box / PVR is a good combo - I'd prefer a dedicated PVR.
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
Why?
If a 1.6 GHz (AMD) chip is faster than a 2.0 GHz (Intel) chip, then this seems to be a singularly useless number... if only had any meaning when the two companies had more similar architectures where the MHz figures were at least roughly comparable.
Note, incidently that the original speed measure was MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second), but this was not MIPS of the CPU/computer in question, but rather MIPS normalized to a VAX 780 having 1 MIPS.
How on earth we got to the point that people started to measure speed by MHz is beyond me. For the previous generation x86 CPUS it was admittedly semi-reasonable, but across architectures it was always useless.... Have you ever checked the clock speeds of the top SPECINT scores...
Well the new system would have it's downsides too. I can imagine what you'd get when your GPS corrdinates were 3rd stall down in a typical public bathroom - probably an uploaded pic of the last guy there whacking off or taking a dump.
Similarly you might not want to be reading your gizmo in your girlfriends bedrom. Virtual graffiti is exactly what it is.
However I could see this as being a cool and useful app for wireles PDAs - id the GPS could be cheap enough to be a standard item. Imaging sitting in a restaurant or vacation resort and being able to access what others in the same spot had to advise ("check out the waitresses hooters", or "try the beef!")...
If any company was putting together such a system they could "seed" it with useful data by tying companies web sites, restaurant reviews or other pertinent data to their known geographic locations.
Nope - the sampling accuracy and quantization is only going to affect the accuracy to which you can reconstruct the component frequencies. Whether or not your sampling is capturing given frequency components is a matter of the sampling rate (or more generally - as is applicable here in the case on non-uniform sampling - the minimum inter-sample delays). Higher sampling rate will only gain you higher frequency components; the lower frequency components are already going to be there unless you deliberately chose to lose them via a high pass filter.
Regarding 16 bit vs 24 bit "samples", note that there's a difference between sampling accuracy and the number of bits to store your quantized samples. The two are only the same if you're using linear quantization and thus, for example, storing your 24-bit accuracy sample "itself" (i.e. linearly quantized into 2**24 discrete steps). Linear quantization is rather wasteful as the human hearing system does not have equal discrimination at all volume levels, so you might want to quantize more roughly at higher volume levels something like this:
So you could sample at 24 bits to capture additional detail at low volume and yet non-linearly quantize to store your samples in 16 bits wihtout losing that detail.
You're confused. uLaw uses uniform sampling but non-uniform quantising, which makes sense given the human perceptual system. It's similar to using Mel coefficients as the basis of speech recognition or compression).
Actually there's many companies bigger than OSDN which benefit from Linux and to who the bandwidth cost would be negligable or free (they already pay for fat net pipes).
IBM would be top of my list, but there's also SGI, Compaq, maybe RedHat (soon to be AOL-Time-Warner?!), SuSE...
How is this any more convenient than apt-get which is also available for RPM based systems?
Personally I find that I rely on the installed RPMS of most everything (and once in a while upgrade my distro to get the newer X, KDE etc), and simply compile from tarballs anything that I really care about and want to be up-to-date with, which basically means development libraries and a few cutting edge utilities. It works for me.
Re:how is it GNU-based if it has a _BSD_ kernel?
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 2
Uh, no... Debian sit's a GNU system on top of the GNU glibc library, just the same as any other Linux distribution.
The glibc library provides the userland interface to the kernel.
Re:Debian is not Linux
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 2
That's true of EVERY Linux distribution - they all pair the GNU libraries (glibc, etc), GNU tools (gcc, etc), with Linux kernel. There's no such thing as a non-GNU Linux system, and I don't think anyone trying to sell a Linux distribution that consisted of Linus's kernel sitting on a CD all alone would get too far!;-)
Re:What came first, the GNU kernel or linux?
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 2, Informative
Linus's kernel and the GNU project are two seperate things. GNU predates the Linus's kernel and was always meant to be a complete Unix implementation - both user tools such as gcc, glibc, emacs, tar, ftp, etc, etc, and the kernel HURD. The timing of it was that the GNU project was pretty much complete excepting HURD while in parallel and independently Linus had started his kernel project and it had got to the point of being usable.
My history is a bit shaky here, but I think it was the Slackware team which first made the unholy alliance of the GNU tools and Linus's kernel, and released it as a Unix distibution. I think Linus may have coined the name "Linux" a bit earlier for the combination of his kernel and a small set of GNU tools.
I think that Debian is more of a Linux distribution than a GNU project - even though the GNU project is what make Linux possible, they've never actually put out distributions of their OS themselves. But of course Stallman would like them to get credit for the fact that the only part of Linux that is Linus's is the kernel (a miniscule part of what's in a "Linux" distribution).. hence the GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD pedantry which is quite reasonable apart from Stallman's initially obnoxious way of handling it.
I'm sure an aerospace company like Boeing has pretty tight government / miliarty connections, and people with security clearance at the top. I'd have to guess that the CIA worked with Boeing to do it under the noses of the Chinese guards.
But I'd be interested to hear hear how somthing like this is really done too - not that I expect to!
Who said we didn't expect them to find them? I'm sure the chinese knew it was going to be bugged just as we'd know they would... so it makes a lot of sense to plant enough reasonably easy to find bugs to give them the false security of thinking they've debugged the plane.
Your criticisms of PDF are answered by your own last paragraph! PDF is a distribution format, not a source format. You should be concerned about who has control of your source format (e.g. Microsoft who deliberately change the.doc format with every Word release to force upgrades), but the only criteria for a distribution format should be whether people on every platform can read/print it, which is true of PDF. The fact the PDF has an open specification is really just a bonus, given that PDF readers are freely available from Adobe for every platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Unix is defined as a collection of standards, not by someone's IP.
I'm not even sure that Linux can be considered Unix - although it's pretty close to POSIX (but there again, so is Windows NT).
Sure, and supermarkets sell some items at a loss too, but again these are part of a money making business plan... how it what Microsoft did NOT dumping?
Amazon's P/S (1.23) is certainly higher than the brick & mortar book stores (Barnes & Noble 0.47, Borders 0.56), but that seems reasonable considering their massively lower overhead costs and need for inventory. You're also paying for the growth - they've come from nowhere to now have sales of the same magnitude as these two, and increased revenues by about 15% last year...
You're still taking a gamble that revenue growth will continue, but that seems a reasonable gamble - not an outrageous overvaluation.
All IMO, IANAL, etc.
Watcha talkin' about Willis?
Guyana and Ghana are different countries.
IANAL, but AFAIK companies are in general NOT free to to sell products below cost or give them away for free - that's called dumping, and is illegal.
I think the only reason the games consoles can do it is because it's part of a viable and LEGAL business model - razor and razorblades, not an attempt to use your deeper pockets to put a rival out of business as Microsoft did to Netscape.
I don't think they're after money - I think they're out to get a deal that enables AOL to compete with MSN in terms of the PC desktop.
Nice in theory, but in practice Gigabit ethernet does not deliver Gb/sec - and in fact Ethernet's contention access mechanism (CSMA/CD) guarantees that you won't!. In practice you're better off with channel bonded 100Mb/sec Ethernet and a smart switch topology such as KLAT2's Flat Neighborhood Networks to minimize latency and maximize inter-node bandwidth.
;-)
KLAT2 FNN
Note to moderators: above link refers to Linux, AMD processors and Beowulf clusters! Do the right thing!
IMO the X-Box would be a poor PVR, unless it has the horsepower, disk access etc to record TV at the same time as playing games or DVDs. This isn't necessary for the ability to pause live TV (when you're presumably not wanting to play games - but who knows), but it certainly a requirement for the PVR to be able to record shows for you whenever they are on.
Personally I don't think game box / PVR is a good combo - I'd prefer a dedicated PVR.
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
Why?
If a 1.6 GHz (AMD) chip is faster than a 2.0 GHz (Intel) chip, then this seems to be a singularly useless number... if only had any meaning when the two companies had more similar architectures where the MHz figures were at least roughly comparable.
Note, incidently that the original speed measure was MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second), but this was not MIPS of the CPU/computer in question, but rather MIPS normalized to a VAX 780 having 1 MIPS.
How on earth we got to the point that people started to measure speed by MHz is beyond me. For the previous generation x86 CPUS it was admittedly semi-reasonable, but across architectures it was always useless.... Have you ever checked the clock speeds of the top SPECINT scores...
Well the new system would have it's downsides too. I can imagine what you'd get when your GPS corrdinates were 3rd stall down in a typical public bathroom - probably an uploaded pic of the last guy there whacking off or taking a dump.
Heh - good point with the tent shit there!
Similarly you might not want to be reading your gizmo in your girlfriends bedrom. Virtual graffiti is exactly what it is.
However I could see this as being a cool and useful app for wireles PDAs - id the GPS could be cheap enough to be a standard item. Imaging sitting in a restaurant or vacation resort and being able to access what others in the same spot had to advise ("check out the waitresses hooters", or "try the beef!")...
If any company was putting together such a system they could "seed" it with useful data by tying companies web sites, restaurant reviews or other pertinent data to their known geographic locations.
Nope - the sampling accuracy and quantization is only going to affect the accuracy to which you can reconstruct the component frequencies. Whether or not your sampling is capturing given frequency components is a matter of the sampling rate (or more generally - as is applicable here in the case on non-uniform sampling - the minimum inter-sample delays). Higher sampling rate will only gain you higher frequency components; the lower frequency components are already going to be there unless you deliberately chose to lose them via a high pass filter.
.. (10 11) (12 13) ... (20 21 22) (23 24 25) etc
Regarding 16 bit vs 24 bit "samples", note that there's a difference between sampling accuracy and the number of bits to store your quantized samples. The two are only the same if you're using linear quantization and thus, for example, storing your 24-bit accuracy sample "itself" (i.e. linearly quantized into 2**24 discrete steps). Linear quantization is rather wasteful as the human hearing system does not have equal discrimination at all volume levels, so you might want to quantize more roughly at higher volume levels something like this:
(0) (1) (2)
So you could sample at 24 bits to capture additional detail at low volume and yet non-linearly quantize to store your samples in 16 bits wihtout losing that detail.
They better be - the president was almost taken out by a pretzel.
You're confused. uLaw uses uniform sampling but non-uniform quantising, which makes sense given the human perceptual system. It's similar to using Mel coefficients as the basis of speech recognition or compression).
Actually there's many companies bigger than OSDN which benefit from Linux and to who the bandwidth cost would be negligable or free (they already pay for fat net pipes).
IBM would be top of my list, but there's also SGI, Compaq, maybe RedHat (soon to be AOL-Time-Warner?!), SuSE...
How is this any more convenient than apt-get which is also available for RPM based systems?
Personally I find that I rely on the installed RPMS of most everything (and once in a while upgrade my distro to get the newer X, KDE etc), and simply compile from tarballs anything that I really care about and want to be up-to-date with, which basically means development libraries and a few cutting edge utilities. It works for me.
Uh, no... Debian sit's a GNU system on top of the GNU glibc library, just the same as any other Linux distribution.
The glibc library provides the userland interface to the kernel.
That's true of EVERY Linux distribution - they all pair the GNU libraries (glibc, etc), GNU tools (gcc, etc), with Linux kernel. There's no such thing as a non-GNU Linux system, and I don't think anyone trying to sell a Linux distribution that consisted of Linus's kernel sitting on a CD all alone would get too far! ;-)
Linus's kernel and the GNU project are two seperate things. GNU predates the Linus's kernel and was always meant to be a complete Unix implementation - both user tools such as gcc, glibc, emacs, tar, ftp, etc, etc, and the kernel HURD. The timing of it was that the GNU project was pretty much complete excepting HURD while in parallel and independently Linus had started his kernel project and it had got to the point of being usable.
My history is a bit shaky here, but I think it was the Slackware team which first made the unholy alliance of the GNU tools and Linus's kernel, and released it as a Unix distibution. I think Linus may have coined the name "Linux" a bit earlier for the combination of his kernel and a small set of GNU tools.
I think that Debian is more of a Linux distribution than a GNU project - even though the GNU project is what make Linux possible, they've never actually put out distributions of their OS themselves. But of course Stallman would like them to get credit for the fact that the only part of Linux that is Linus's is the kernel (a miniscule part of what's in a "Linux" distribution).. hence the GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD pedantry which is quite reasonable apart from Stallman's initially obnoxious way of handling it.
I'm sure an aerospace company like Boeing has pretty tight government / miliarty connections, and people with security clearance at the top. I'd have to guess that the CIA worked with Boeing to do it under the noses of the Chinese guards.
But I'd be interested to hear hear how somthing like this is really done too - not that I expect to!
Yep. Boeing's located in Seattle, so bugs kind of go with the territory anyway.
Who said we didn't expect them to find them? I'm sure the chinese knew it was going to be bugged just as we'd know they would... so it makes a lot of sense to plant enough reasonably easy to find bugs to give them the false security of thinking they've debugged the plane.
What the hell are you - some kind of turd engineer?
Nah, the bugs were to collect material for "Communists gone wild".
Your criticisms of PDF are answered by your own last paragraph! PDF is a distribution format, not a source format. You should be concerned about who has control of your source format (e.g. Microsoft who deliberately change the .doc format with every Word release to force upgrades), but the only criteria for a distribution format should be whether people on every platform can read/print it, which is true of PDF. The fact the PDF has an open specification is really just a bonus, given that PDF readers are freely available from Adobe for every platform.