According to the Bulk Club's member roster, other subscribers include John Milton, an alias used by Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former neo-Nazi who became a penis-pill spammer.
A Neo-Nazi with a bad case of penis envy?? Say it ain't so.
But five years from now, when everybody buying a Dell or Gateway machine has the latest version of Office bundled with their machine, I will likely be the only guy who can't read their documents
Unlikely. Last I checked, having Office bundled on a new PC usually costs the consumer something like an extra $150-350, depending which version you want. Most new cheapie PCs from Dell and the like ship with MS Works. In fact, I believe the low-cost default for Dell notebooks is WordPerfect Office 11.
I understand all the uproar, but I seriously think this isn't going to have as big an impact as people are predicting. As an editor, I have to send documents back and forth. Rights management doesn't mean squat to me; I have contracts to protect my rights. If an author sells something I own, he's out of work. If it's really serious, I sue him. I don't need to have any of that nonsense built into my word processor -- all I need to do is edit documents, and those documents will regularly trade hands between all sorts of people before I'm done.
I imagine the real audience MS is targeting with the DRM stuff is the "enterprise" customer -- somebody with sensitive documents that are supposed to stay within the enterprise, and not get leaked out to other people. This is a specialized application with a specialized audience. If you want to use Microsoft Word to write documents that other people can read, you'll still be able to do that. Hell, if you're that worried, have Word save them as RTF.
Some of my favorite weekly comic strips have made the journey from print (in news weeklies) to online. Presumably, these guys don't get paid to reprint their comics on the Web, but it increases their exposure and maybe convinces their fans to lobby to get them into local weeklies.
WHY?! Please, take off your tinfoil for a while and go out for some air. not everyone is out to get you. Maybe they just want to offer their citizens, and especially the companies in their country a compelling alternative to American made products with poor support for their languages.
Uhhhhh...yeah. Which China have you been reading about?
Also of note is the shift in calculating cost from TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as has been calculated in the past, to ROI (Return on Investment)
And how, might I ask, is one expected to calculate the return on an investment of you haven't yet calculated its total cost? Man, consulting must be a great living.
Anyone who buys a PC because of lame ass benchmarks has no use for said PC, other than to yammer endlessly. If you work with macs, get a mac, if you work with PCs, get a PC, they're two completely different worlds.
Uhhh -- yeah. Well, I must be an official Man of Two Worlds, then, because I surf the Web, read email, and type documents on both Windows boxes and Macs. I even use the same word processor on both platforms. I share the same peripherals, I connect to the same network... hmm. Don't seem all that "completely different" to me.
I wonder how the AltiVec support in XLC for OSX compares to that in GCC?
My understanding was that GCC did little to nothing in the way of AltiVec optimization of "straight" C code. You have to write the AltiVec instructions yourself. The cool thing about AltiVec is that you don't have to write the vector code in assembly, you can do it in C. But still, it's not like you can (for example) flip on the AltiVec support in GCC, compile LAME, and have an AltiVec-enabled MP3 encoder. Somebody still has to come along and port the code to AltiVec (please, please)...
You know, it's people like you who lower the signal/noise ratio on Slashdot. Instead of complaining about all the posts that people should be making but aren't, or all the dumb post you expect to be seeing, why don't you be proactive and post one yourself?
Here's how it's done:
"Nice list you've come up with there. But it's obvious nobody is going to post any of these, because this is an Apple thread, and nobody in their right mind should be reading it. Apple is dead, everybody knows it, case closed."
Personally, I can't understand this at all. The device in question sounds so totally unlike a Palm as to make no odds. But putting aside all "bogus patent" claims -- even if you take away the credit-card-based function of the patent, how do they get around this one?
In connection with a system for simplifying the use of a plurality of credit cards, check cards, customer cards, or the like, it is proposed to provide an electronic multi-function card comprising a storage accommodating a plurality of individual data sets representing individual single-purpose cards, and comprising
at least two display boxes in which data can be displayed by electronic activation
Call me naive, but is there really a purpose in having a multi-tasking, Unix-like kernel... in a PDA?
Open source PDA operating system, OK I can see that. But why Linux? Seems to me somebody's just riding on buzzword cache without any regard to whether there's really any demand for a device like this.
I purchased a refurb Wallstreet G3/266 Powerbook, slapped 512 megs of RAM in it, and put OS X 10.2.6 on it, and it runs like a dream.
A brave soul, I installed it on my Wallstreet G3/233 with 192MB RAM, and it runs fine on that too. Not great, but hey, I'm not looking for a replacement for my desktop machine. I'm looking for something that will let me compute on the road and has parity with the applications etc. that I use on my desktop. So far, this is doing that for me. Admittedly, it is pretty sluggish, but I'm mostly using it to type documents on, so my demands are low.
Personally, whatever Apple's claims were aside, I think this is a pretty acceptable achievement, considering that compared to the current Mac line (going back to the blue G3), these older Macs have:
A different ROM design
On-motherboard SCSI controllers
No on-motherboard USB or FireWire
An ADB bus -- which must be supported to use the mouse and keyboard
Eight-pin serial ports -- though admittedly you can't do much with them in OS X
Older graphics controllers, from a different vendor than they use now, or in some cases an Apple proprietary chipset
A different sound subsystem
Etc... the hardware is dramatically different.
The fact that I can fire up my 1998 PowerBook, run the latest generation of the Mac OS from SIX YEARS LATER and have it work -- including instant support for my PCMCIA USB adapter, my hot-swappable CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives (no movie playback), even my THIRD-PARTY hot swappable drive bay Zip drive, plus be able to put it to sleep and wake it back up in about two seconds (something Mac OS 9 could never do) -- I think is pretty impressive.
To put things in perspective, in 1990 my desktop computer ran at 10MHz, had 640K of RAM and a 10MB hard drive. In 1996, my desktop computer ran at 150MHz (more than ten times faster), had 64MB of RAM -- over six times more memory than the hard disk space on my old machine -- and two 2GB hard drives, which my 1990 operating system wouldn't have even been able to access. That's how much things change in six years.
P.S. One note on Mac OS X performance... some time ago, I replaced the 4GB internal hard drive on this beast with an 18GB number. I wonder if the smaller drives/slower speed drives that shipped on some of these older Macs might have something to do with poor overall performance -- given swap disk requirements etc.?
I remember ads. They had turtles with Pentiums on their backs. Other ads had words like 'Supercomputer' and 'Megaflop' in them. I thought slow, way behind the times PPC chips were many times faster than their x86 cousins? Now is that not true?
I know you're just trying to be a smartass, but those ads were for G4 chips. A Wallstreet PowerBook is a G3 machine. That's the whole point of the article, if you'd read it.
That's beacuse companies don't like to advertise that fact. Companies often outsource their production; and as long as they do some basic testing, who will know the difference?
So true. Lucky for us that we live in a country governed by the rule of law. Companies might not want to disclose where their goods came from, but that's kinda too bad.
With all due respect, book piracy will mostly involve new releases.
Not true! While obscure books perhaps won't be pirated all that often, classics (including "classic" sci-fi like the Dune series or Asimov's Foundation books) tend to remain in circulation. It's all about demand.
Ummm, I don't know, maybe pay for it, like you do when you're working for someone else?
Yes, yes, spoken very authoritatively and with the requisite amount of condescension for a Slashdot poster.
Fact is, however, insurance is a much better deal when you get it through an organization than if you get it as an individual. That's because health insurance is a numbers game. If they can sign up an entire company, it's a pretty safe bet that not everyone in that company is going to be hospitalized at once. If it's just you they're signing up -- who knows what your problem is?
So it isn't just a matter of whether you're employer is paying for it or if you're paying for it yourself. As an individual, you're typically going to pay a higher monthly rate and still get a higher deductible or fewer benefits. Coverage for your children or spouse is going to be still more.
So maybe the question shouldn't have been, "what do you do for insurance," but "how do you get good, quality, comprehensive healthcare in the United States as a self-employed person"?
This bike might have a internal coaster brake, like kids' bikes, or may very well be a fixed gear bike. These things do exist and are perfectly suitable to most urban environments (with the possible exeption of cities like San Francisco).
Nope -- freak-o bike messenger types ride those things, even here in San Francisco. Fixies are quite a fad among those guys, actually. They'll probably tell you it means less moving parts, so less potential for failure during a day of extensive riding... about the only thing that can break is your chain or your headset... maybe you could chip a tooth off your gear... or maybe your frame could crack.
The person who's accounts were being accessed happened to be at home at the time that Jiang used his/her account and immediatly knew that someone had gained access through the GoToMyPC service and contacted the authorities.
I'll bite -- who are these "authorities"? Just curious... so here I am, sitting at home in front of my computer, I've got my bag of corn nuts on one side and my 40 oz. of Olde English 800 on the other... and my cursor starts moving by itself. OK, I establish that somebody is using my computer via GoToPC (I've never used this software, not really sure how it works) -- who do I call?
I'm really curious, probably mostly because I come from San Francisco, where if you call the cops and tell them there's been a car accident, they won't come unless you tell them someone's been injured.
I know at least one guy who would like to lease a computer short-term, because he has bad repeat stress injuries and really can't use computers very often.
As to whether your model would work, that would depend on how much you leased the computer for. I'm thinking the audience for a leased computer like this would be less-experienced computer users -- say, older folks. Hate to say it, but they're going to have a harder time warming up to Linux than to, for instance, a Macintosh. That means more tech support. Will the cost of leasing the computer really pay for the time you'll spend on the phone?
All the reasons you cite why telecommuting might not work make some degree of sense... however, I see it as more of a management problem than a problem with the telecommuting employee.
Here's how it works:
1. Employee starts working from home.
2. Pointy-haired manager walks past his desk, doesn't see him anymore, doesn't have anyone to yell at or hand off busy-work to.
3. Out of sight, out of mind.
4. Employee's caseload drops, productivity of said employee goes down.
Seems to me, if you're worried about the productivity of your telecommuting employees, give them something to do.
"Here is a task. It needs to be completed by such and such date. If you consistently fail to deliver, find yourself another job."
The real wake up call about passports happened for me when my first one expired. I had memorized the number and assumed that naturally this ultra important piece of ID would be kept for life --not a chance.
This is just about the weirdest thing I've ever heard. You realize that your passport number in no way identifies you, but rather the document itself -- right? New passport, new passport number. How else would you, for example... invalidate expired passports?
The fact that you would even bother to memorize this number seems so bizarre that I have to think this is a troll...
Metadata is very application specific and most of filesystem are agnostic about it. Typically it must be handled by another layer on a top of FS. ...
You may research and find some software implementing a layer (on a top of a regular FS) specially designed to handle MP3 playlists. But again, that would be a layer on a top of FS, not a filesystem by itself.
So how does this answer the earlier poster's question?
When he was talking about "MP3 metadata," I don't think he was talking about playlists. He was talking about ID3 tags, if I understand correctly.
Currently, MP3 files store their metadata in a special area within the file itself. Presumably, on a machine that handles file metadata at the filesystem level, you would abandon this barbaric idea and use the tools available to store MP3 metadata in the filesystem.
So what happens when you try to copy an MP3 from a filesystem that supports metadata to one that doesn't?
Answer: Probably about the same thing that happens when you try to send a file from Mac OS 9's HFS filesystem to an MS-DOS computer. Either you use some kind of special translation program (MacBinary, or an archiver like StuffIt that supports Mac OS Resource Forks), or you lose the metadata.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny ... at least once upon a time, 666-6666 in San Francisco got you the Jesuits.
I understand all the uproar, but I seriously think this isn't going to have as big an impact as people are predicting. As an editor, I have to send documents back and forth. Rights management doesn't mean squat to me; I have contracts to protect my rights. If an author sells something I own, he's out of work. If it's really serious, I sue him. I don't need to have any of that nonsense built into my word processor -- all I need to do is edit documents, and those documents will regularly trade hands between all sorts of people before I'm done.
I imagine the real audience MS is targeting with the DRM stuff is the "enterprise" customer -- somebody with sensitive documents that are supposed to stay within the enterprise, and not get leaked out to other people. This is a specialized application with a specialized audience. If you want to use Microsoft Word to write documents that other people can read, you'll still be able to do that. Hell, if you're that worried, have Word save them as RTF.
Some of my favorite weekly comic strips have made the journey from print (in news weeklies) to online. Presumably, these guys don't get paid to reprint their comics on the Web, but it increases their exposure and maybe convinces their fans to lobby to get them into local weeklies.
Tony Millionaire's Maakies is pure genius.
Try Underworld , by Kaz, if you want to tickle your cynical side.
You know, it's people like you who lower the signal/noise ratio on Slashdot. Instead of complaining about all the posts that people should be making but aren't, or all the dumb post you expect to be seeing, why don't you be proactive and post one yourself?
Here's how it's done:
There, now we can get some discussion going.
Call me naive, but is there really a purpose in having a multi-tasking, Unix-like kernel ... in a PDA?
Open source PDA operating system, OK I can see that. But why Linux? Seems to me somebody's just riding on buzzword cache without any regard to whether there's really any demand for a device like this.
Personally, whatever Apple's claims were aside, I think this is a pretty acceptable achievement, considering that compared to the current Mac line (going back to the blue G3), these older Macs have:
- A different ROM design
- On-motherboard SCSI controllers
- No on-motherboard USB or FireWire
- An ADB bus -- which must be supported to use the mouse and keyboard
- Eight-pin serial ports -- though admittedly you can't do much with them in OS X
- Older graphics controllers, from a different vendor than they use now, or in some cases an Apple proprietary chipset
- A different sound subsystem
- Etc... the hardware is dramatically different.
The fact that I can fire up my 1998 PowerBook, run the latest generation of the Mac OS from SIX YEARS LATER and have it work -- including instant support for my PCMCIA USB adapter, my hot-swappable CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives (no movie playback), even my THIRD-PARTY hot swappable drive bay Zip drive, plus be able to put it to sleep and wake it back up in about two seconds (something Mac OS 9 could never do) -- I think is pretty impressive.To put things in perspective, in 1990 my desktop computer ran at 10MHz, had 640K of RAM and a 10MB hard drive. In 1996, my desktop computer ran at 150MHz (more than ten times faster), had 64MB of RAM -- over six times more memory than the hard disk space on my old machine -- and two 2GB hard drives, which my 1990 operating system wouldn't have even been able to access. That's how much things change in six years.
P.S. One note on Mac OS X performance ... some time ago, I replaced the 4GB internal hard drive on this beast with an 18GB number. I wonder if the smaller drives/slower speed drives that shipped on some of these older Macs might have something to do with poor overall performance -- given swap disk requirements etc.?
I know you're just trying to be a smartass, but those ads were for G4 chips. A Wallstreet PowerBook is a G3 machine. That's the whole point of the article, if you'd read it.
If Xiph wants to make money off Ogg, they should sell it. If I want to donate money, I'll donate it to cancer research or something.
Fact is, however, insurance is a much better deal when you get it through an organization than if you get it as an individual. That's because health insurance is a numbers game. If they can sign up an entire company, it's a pretty safe bet that not everyone in that company is going to be hospitalized at once. If it's just you they're signing up -- who knows what your problem is?
So it isn't just a matter of whether you're employer is paying for it or if you're paying for it yourself. As an individual, you're typically going to pay a higher monthly rate and still get a higher deductible or fewer benefits. Coverage for your children or spouse is going to be still more.
So maybe the question shouldn't have been, "what do you do for insurance," but "how do you get good, quality, comprehensive healthcare in the United States as a self-employed person"?
I'm really curious, probably mostly because I come from San Francisco, where if you call the cops and tell them there's been a car accident, they won't come unless you tell them someone's been injured.
As to whether your model would work, that would depend on how much you leased the computer for. I'm thinking the audience for a leased computer like this would be less-experienced computer users -- say, older folks. Hate to say it, but they're going to have a harder time warming up to Linux than to, for instance, a Macintosh. That means more tech support. Will the cost of leasing the computer really pay for the time you'll spend on the phone?
Here's how it works:
1. Employee starts working from home.
2. Pointy-haired manager walks past his desk, doesn't see him anymore, doesn't have anyone to yell at or hand off busy-work to.
3. Out of sight, out of mind.
4. Employee's caseload drops, productivity of said employee goes down.
Seems to me, if you're worried about the productivity of your telecommuting employees, give them something to do.
"Here is a task. It needs to be completed by such and such date. If you consistently fail to deliver, find yourself another job."
Just that simple. No?
The fact that you would even bother to memorize this number seems so bizarre that I have to think this is a troll...
When he was talking about "MP3 metadata," I don't think he was talking about playlists. He was talking about ID3 tags, if I understand correctly.
Currently, MP3 files store their metadata in a special area within the file itself. Presumably, on a machine that handles file metadata at the filesystem level, you would abandon this barbaric idea and use the tools available to store MP3 metadata in the filesystem.
So what happens when you try to copy an MP3 from a filesystem that supports metadata to one that doesn't?
Answer: Probably about the same thing that happens when you try to send a file from Mac OS 9's HFS filesystem to an MS-DOS computer. Either you use some kind of special translation program (MacBinary, or an archiver like StuffIt that supports Mac OS Resource Forks), or you lose the metadata.