This is just complete bullshit (much like the last "leaked Cube" story was - I'm really starting to lose my faith in these rumor sites) and here's why:
When Apple, or Dell, or Compaq, or any one of 100 other big PC manufacturers, picks a component for their system, it's not the same process as Joe Blow going over to Tom's Hardware, reading about the fastest thing on the market, and then ordering one of them. No. Graphics cards and the like are rigorously tested for hundreds and hundreds of hours to ensure a.) compatibility and b.) stability. Often times the overall design of the computer is influenced by the chip itself; if it kicks out too much heat it will be oriented a certain way, or the airflow in the case will be rearranged to accomodate it, etcetera. In addition, a lot of possible scenarios are thrown at the completed machine to make sure it's not going to crash. Building a mass produced PC (or Mac) is a lot more of a science than most of us who consider it erector set engineering give it credit for. A very obvious case would be the iMac, but even for G4's and G3's, a lot more thought goes into them besides slamming together a bunch of components and praying for the best.
With that in mind, I hope you see how utterly impossible this story is. Jobs cannot simply switch out the graphics chip without seriously delaying the product and causing massive engineering and supply headaches.
The fact that you actually equate karma with some vague notion of self worth illustrates more clearly than anything I can say that you, especially you, should not be advising anyone how to moderate. Moderation is not a dick-measuring contest, as you seem to think it is. So next time, before you try to preach to me, go read the fucking Bible.
I'm not trolling either, but StarOffice could really deal a deadly blow to KDE. A lot of people have posted on Slashdot that Sun already has a small army of engineers working on porting StarOffice to bonobo, a GNOME-centric API. I have read the same things elsewhere. If GNOME was to get an extremely competent Office suite such as StarOffice and KDE was left running the "emulated" version, a lot of people who really don't care what desktop environment they use would have a very compelling reason to switch.
It takes SOOOooo long to loead because it implements, among other things, it's own window manager and widgket toolkit. Obviously this is wholly unnecessary but it is a good way to maintain a product across a lot of different platforms, because it's easier to write and maintain a toolkit for each system than port every line of code to it. The downside is that performance suffers a lot. I've heard rumblings of a full-on GNOME port of StafOffice, which will be really wonderful - fast and featureful.
Quarter earnings reports are coming out today. I'd say any measure of stock fluctuation coming in reaction to their decision to open StarOffice is pretty much irrelevant for the next week or so.
Woohoo OLE! If there's one feature I want added to my windowing environment, it's OLE. That oughta make it stable. And useful, too!
Truthfully this sounds more and more like Windows the more I read on. Not trying to be an OS bigot here, but with all those added features, things are gonna get less and less stable. I've been introduced to a new phenomenon recently, and that is of my window manager crashing. I hadn't ever really seen that under Linux prior to switching to a mature version of Gnome. The crashes are rare, but I'm worried it's a sign of things to come.
Bzzt! Wro-ong! If you're going to be a prick about it, at least check your facts. Cause you look like a real ass if you're wrong.
SunOS 5.x and Solaris 2.x (up to 2.6) were exactly the same thing. You can prove this to yourself if you want by doing a 'uname -a' on any Solaris box (up to 2.6) - you will see "SunOS 5.x". Solaris 2.7 for some reason morphed into Solaris 7. I haven't used it but I have a feeling uname would report it as SunOS 5.7 e.g. Solaris 2.7. Solaris 8 is Solaris 2.8 etc.
I read a study once where something like 50+% of people said the first thing that popped into their mind when they saw a combination of red and white in correct proportions was the words "Coca-Cola" - and that was spanning a whole bunch of different ethnicities. Microsoft may be a common phrase amongst stock-laden Gen-Xers (and Yers, I guess), and anyone else American who hasn't been living in a cave for the last few years, but it's nothing compared to the incredible brand recognition that Coke has built in literally every single country in the civilized world. It's cheesy, but Coke's entire theme of it being a common denominator of all humanity is kind of true - they sell it everywhere.
Funny enough, they also sell it for whatever they can get it for. I'll never forget being in Indonesia during the height of a civil war and acquiring glass bottles of Coke (the big ones, not the little 8 oz'rs) for the equivalent of like 4 or 5 US cents.
Anyways, those are my little, offtopics Coke tidbits:) Coke's reach and recognition is staggering, and far supercedes anything Microsoft will probably ever have to offer, unless they start making shoes...
I meant the issue was dead and buried. DeCSS is still very much alive, friend. All of the code segments I have seen make it painfully obvious how to implement them. Any half-assed C programmer can look at a function called "void css_descramble(byte *, byte *)" and know what to do with it.
Also, there is a very well documented and exquisitely commented, GPLd library called css-auth that takes care of all descrambling needs.
I don't see any evidence of balkanization here. I see multiple implementations of the same code, but that's no more "balkanized" than Linux having 15 different IRC clients, etc. Everyone wants to do it their own way. So what.
I imagine that many copies of DeCSS will be deleted voluntary if the court so orders.
Well, except for one anyways. There is a copy of the DeCSS code actually entered into the court record (some idiot lawyer for MPAA made this mistake). That is a public document and is not going to go anywhere soon. I can go dredge up court records from the 19th century if I was so inclined. DeCSS has, in essence, been immortalized by the very people that were moving to kill it. At any rate, it's time to shift your frame of mind. Previously (pre-Internet, that is) you would be right - just because it was out there doesn't mean they can't legislate against it. Now, though, you're wrong. The Internet is making legislation a moot point for many things that the government held a tight legal grip on for years: gambling, encryption, copyrights, and, yes, fair use, just to name a few.
Back when the mach64 was a new chip ATI owned the 2D performance segment of the market. Imagine my surprise, then, to open up a computer like 7 years after I bought my first mach64-equipped card (which was top of the line, at the time), and find a graphics card powered by... another mach64. ATI built this baby into everything right on up through the 3D Rage II+ AFAIK. You are right, though, their 3D chipsets have historically been met with a collective yawn (Rage Fury MAXX, anyone?). Interestingly only Nvidia was able to pull itself out of the "home user" 3D thicket and become a tier-1 manufacturer along with 3DFx (spelled the _old_ way):)
I'm not trying to be flippant, but who really gives a fuck? DeCSS is dead and buried as far as I'm concerned. Everyone either has a copy on their hard drive or can snag one from somewhere. Even in a worst case scenario you can pull one of 100 or so copies from FreeNet, and those will never, ever go away, can't be legislated out of existence, can't even be traced. So as far as the "case" goes, so what? It doesn't exactly have any bearing on anything right now, other than symbolic value.
Also, DVD-RAM discs won't play in a retail DVD player. Period.
Right - I actually included that idea in my post but took it out later because I thought I was rambling. Obviously, the only way that this has a prayer of working is with some beefy servers and big, fat internet connections. Even then it's too much of a stretch given today's technology, but I guess that could at least be concievable in a few years.
However, the company's press release contradicts pretty much everything you say:
AppleSoup's peer-to-peer solution connects members' hard drives to create a global, virtual library of non-infringing content. When a member requests a specific piece of digital content, AppleSoup sends him or her directly to another member's hard drive within a matter of seconds to retrieve the file. The platform makes a plethora of specific, valued information available to the masses, without the cumbersome scalability issues of the central server model.
There you have it. These aren't stupid people, judging from their backers, so I'd say they know a bit more than they're letting on in their release. Nevertheless, the idea seems just totally brain-dead as it stands now.
The problem with Gnutella, and any peer-to-peer ("P2P!", ugh) paradigm for distribution, is that it's just not going to work for movies - not for the feature-length ones that would be the main draw, anyways. Many people speak in ominous tones on Slashdot and in the newsmedia about the copyright cataclysm that will occur with digital video & ripped DVDs as it has so emphatically for music recently. Frankly I just don't see it. There just isn't the bandwidth to pull this off, and there won't be for a long, long time. Just do some simple math - the average MP3 is probably 5mb in size; the average DVD is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-17gb big depending on length. Even at the most conservative estimate, people would need to increase their bandwidth by three orders of magnitude to emulate that speed and convenience of Napster. Companies like Qwest proclaim with alacrity that bandwidth is doubling every few years a la Moore's law. Even in their wildest, most orgasmic bandwidth-filled dreams (you have to see their commercials to know what I'm talking about), I don't think they can concieve of a thousandfold increase anytime soon. Neither can I.
And that's just downloading. The idea that people could actually start serving these behemoth files to other people is just ludicrous - there is even less upstream bandwidth in a consumer connection that downstream, usually.
So you are sort of half right and half wrong. Their advertiser-supported service isn't going to work, but neither will Gnutella. Nothing will. Movies are just such a bigger beast than music. They will take horrendous amounts of time and effort to distribute, and time is the enemy if you've ever used Napster. Most people don't have the patience or goodwill to let some stranger tie up their computer for the next four days finishing their "Driving Miss Daisy" download. The one thing the P2P paradigm was not made for was longevity.
In short, I just don't see digital movie distribution taking off in the near future. Even if people could download at 30mbps off their cable modems, which is a long time coming, it would still take more than a day to polish off a single DVD movie. All but the most dedicated of geeks will just pay the $19.95 at Best Buy and get it over with.
StarOffice has not gained significant acceptance because it is a BEAST to run. The thing slows to a crawl on my 64mb P3-400 laptop and results in nearly constant disk swapping. This is because, among other things, StarOffice implements its own Window manager, widget toolkit, etc. The first thing that StarOffice needs to do, if GPL'd, would be to tear out that annoying Win98-clone WM and implement it using standard gtk or Qt API calls. StarOffice is an incredibly mature and featureful product that, in spite of its performance issues, has proven pretty stable. Lack of a competent Office suite for Linux has proven one of the last barriers to mainstream acceptance, and SO is in a good position to erase that. But all of that is a moot point if no one can run it.
The moral of the story? Be careful with hard and fast rules...
Rules like... everyone must love O'Reilly? Cause I think most of their new books suck. Programming Perl is an absolute masterpiece, but I haven't found anything that really wowed me over recently.
Hey editors! When I was _9_ I crax0red the popular SurfWatch internet filtering program into oblivion by exploiting a race condition! Where's my interview?
Seriously, I'm sure this guy is a charming young man - and probably a decent second baseman too - but there are just so many other people you should spend your time interviewing. As a general rule, I'd like to suggest you refrain from posting lengthy discourse with people who place on or more of the following phrases on their homepage:
Slashdot Mirror
Cough cough cough **ripoff** cough cough... ;)
--
This is just complete bullshit (much like the last "leaked Cube" story was - I'm really starting to lose my faith in these rumor sites) and here's why:
When Apple, or Dell, or Compaq, or any one of 100 other big PC manufacturers, picks a component for their system, it's not the same process as Joe Blow going over to Tom's Hardware, reading about the fastest thing on the market, and then ordering one of them. No. Graphics cards and the like are rigorously tested for hundreds and hundreds of hours to ensure a.) compatibility and b.) stability. Often times the overall design of the computer is influenced by the chip itself; if it kicks out too much heat it will be oriented a certain way, or the airflow in the case will be rearranged to accomodate it, etcetera. In addition, a lot of possible scenarios are thrown at the completed machine to make sure it's not going to crash. Building a mass produced PC (or Mac) is a lot more of a science than most of us who consider it erector set engineering give it credit for. A very obvious case would be the iMac, but even for G4's and G3's, a lot more thought goes into them besides slamming together a bunch of components and praying for the best.
With that in mind, I hope you see how utterly impossible this story is. Jobs cannot simply switch out the graphics chip without seriously delaying the product and causing massive engineering and supply headaches.
--
The fact that you actually equate karma with some vague notion of self worth illustrates more clearly than anything I can say that you, especially you, should not be advising anyone how to moderate. Moderation is not a dick-measuring contest, as you seem to think it is. So next time, before you try to preach to me, go read the fucking Bible.
--
I'm not trolling either, but StarOffice could really deal a deadly blow to KDE. A lot of people have posted on Slashdot that Sun already has a small army of engineers working on porting StarOffice to bonobo, a GNOME-centric API. I have read the same things elsewhere. If GNOME was to get an extremely competent Office suite such as StarOffice and KDE was left running the "emulated" version, a lot of people who really don't care what desktop environment they use would have a very compelling reason to switch.
--
It takes SOOOooo long to loead because it implements, among other things, it's own window manager and widgket toolkit. Obviously this is wholly unnecessary but it is a good way to maintain a product across a lot of different platforms, because it's easier to write and maintain a toolkit for each system than port every line of code to it. The downside is that performance suffers a lot. I've heard rumblings of a full-on GNOME port of StafOffice, which will be really wonderful - fast and featureful.
--
Quarter earnings reports are coming out today. I'd say any measure of stock fluctuation coming in reaction to their decision to open StarOffice is pretty much irrelevant for the next week or so.
--
What's mOffice?
--
Woohoo OLE! If there's one feature I want added to my windowing environment, it's OLE. That oughta make it stable. And useful, too!
Truthfully this sounds more and more like Windows the more I read on. Not trying to be an OS bigot here, but with all those added features, things are gonna get less and less stable. I've been introduced to a new phenomenon recently, and that is of my window manager crashing. I hadn't ever really seen that under Linux prior to switching to a mature version of Gnome. The crashes are rare, but I'm worried it's a sign of things to come.
--
For sure. You can't have Emacs in your corner and not win that battle :).
--
Bzzt! Wro-ong! If you're going to be a prick about it, at least check your facts. Cause you look like a real ass if you're wrong.
SunOS 5.x and Solaris 2.x (up to 2.6) were exactly the same thing. You can prove this to yourself if you want by doing a 'uname -a' on any Solaris box (up to 2.6) - you will see "SunOS 5.x". Solaris 2.7 for some reason morphed into Solaris 7. I haven't used it but I have a feeling uname would report it as SunOS 5.7 e.g. Solaris 2.7. Solaris 8 is Solaris 2.8 etc.
--
I read a study once where something like 50+% of people said the first thing that popped into their mind when they saw a combination of red and white in correct proportions was the words "Coca-Cola" - and that was spanning a whole bunch of different ethnicities. Microsoft may be a common phrase amongst stock-laden Gen-Xers (and Yers, I guess), and anyone else American who hasn't been living in a cave for the last few years, but it's nothing compared to the incredible brand recognition that Coke has built in literally every single country in the civilized world. It's cheesy, but Coke's entire theme of it being a common denominator of all humanity is kind of true - they sell it everywhere.
:) Coke's reach and recognition is staggering, and far supercedes anything Microsoft will probably ever have to offer, unless they start making shoes...
Funny enough, they also sell it for whatever they can get it for. I'll never forget being in Indonesia during the height of a civil war and acquiring glass bottles of Coke (the big ones, not the little 8 oz'rs) for the equivalent of like 4 or 5 US cents.
Anyways, those are my little, offtopics Coke tidbits
--
I meant the issue was dead and buried. DeCSS is still very much alive, friend. All of the code segments I have seen make it painfully obvious how to implement them. Any half-assed C programmer can look at a function called "void css_descramble(byte *, byte *)" and know what to do with it.
Also, there is a very well documented and exquisitely commented, GPLd library called css-auth that takes care of all descrambling needs.
I don't see any evidence of balkanization here. I see multiple implementations of the same code, but that's no more "balkanized" than Linux having 15 different IRC clients, etc. Everyone wants to do it their own way. So what.
--
Eheh.. +1, Style. :)
--
I imagine that many copies of DeCSS will be deleted voluntary if the court so orders.
Well, except for one anyways. There is a copy of the DeCSS code actually entered into the court record (some idiot lawyer for MPAA made this mistake). That is a public document and is not going to go anywhere soon. I can go dredge up court records from the 19th century if I was so inclined. DeCSS has, in essence, been immortalized by the very people that were moving to kill it. At any rate, it's time to shift your frame of mind. Previously (pre-Internet, that is) you would be right - just because it was out there doesn't mean they can't legislate against it. Now, though, you're wrong. The Internet is making legislation a moot point for many things that the government held a tight legal grip on for years: gambling, encryption, copyrights, and, yes, fair use, just to name a few.
--
Back when the mach64 was a new chip ATI owned the 2D performance segment of the market. Imagine my surprise, then, to open up a computer like 7 years after I bought my first mach64-equipped card (which was top of the line, at the time), and find a graphics card powered by ... another mach64. ATI built this baby into everything right on up through the 3D Rage II+ AFAIK. You are right, though, their 3D chipsets have historically been met with a collective yawn (Rage Fury MAXX, anyone?). Interestingly only Nvidia was able to pull itself out of the "home user" 3D thicket and become a tier-1 manufacturer along with 3DFx (spelled the _old_ way) :)
--
I'm not trying to be flippant, but who really gives a fuck? DeCSS is dead and buried as far as I'm concerned. Everyone either has a copy on their hard drive or can snag one from somewhere. Even in a worst case scenario you can pull one of 100 or so copies from FreeNet, and those will never, ever go away, can't be legislated out of existence, can't even be traced. So as far as the "case" goes, so what? It doesn't exactly have any bearing on anything right now, other than symbolic value.
Also, DVD-RAM discs won't play in a retail DVD player. Period.
--
Underrun is a bit of a moot point on rewriteable media.
--
However, the company's press release contradicts pretty much everything you say: There you have it. These aren't stupid people, judging from their backers, so I'd say they know a bit more than they're letting on in their release. Nevertheless, the idea seems just totally brain-dead as it stands now.
--
The problem with Gnutella, and any peer-to-peer ("P2P!", ugh) paradigm for distribution, is that it's just not going to work for movies - not for the feature-length ones that would be the main draw, anyways. Many people speak in ominous tones on Slashdot and in the newsmedia about the copyright cataclysm that will occur with digital video & ripped DVDs as it has so emphatically for music recently. Frankly I just don't see it. There just isn't the bandwidth to pull this off, and there won't be for a long, long time. Just do some simple math - the average MP3 is probably 5mb in size; the average DVD is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-17gb big depending on length. Even at the most conservative estimate, people would need to increase their bandwidth by three orders of magnitude to emulate that speed and convenience of Napster. Companies like Qwest proclaim with alacrity that bandwidth is doubling every few years a la Moore's law. Even in their wildest, most orgasmic bandwidth-filled dreams (you have to see their commercials to know what I'm talking about), I don't think they can concieve of a thousandfold increase anytime soon. Neither can I.
And that's just downloading. The idea that people could actually start serving these behemoth files to other people is just ludicrous - there is even less upstream bandwidth in a consumer connection that downstream, usually.
So you are sort of half right and half wrong. Their advertiser-supported service isn't going to work, but neither will Gnutella. Nothing will. Movies are just such a bigger beast than music. They will take horrendous amounts of time and effort to distribute, and time is the enemy if you've ever used Napster. Most people don't have the patience or goodwill to let some stranger tie up their computer for the next four days finishing their "Driving Miss Daisy" download. The one thing the P2P paradigm was not made for was longevity.
In short, I just don't see digital movie distribution taking off in the near future. Even if people could download at 30mbps off their cable modems, which is a long time coming, it would still take more than a day to polish off a single DVD movie. All but the most dedicated of geeks will just pay the $19.95 at Best Buy and get it over with.
--
I see windows, I see buttons. It can be ported.
--
StarOffice has not gained significant acceptance because it is a BEAST to run. The thing slows to a crawl on my 64mb P3-400 laptop and results in nearly constant disk swapping. This is because, among other things, StarOffice implements its own Window manager, widget toolkit, etc. The first thing that StarOffice needs to do, if GPL'd, would be to tear out that annoying Win98-clone WM and implement it using standard gtk or Qt API calls. StarOffice is an incredibly mature and featureful product that, in spite of its performance issues, has proven pretty stable. Lack of a competent Office suite for Linux has proven one of the last barriers to mainstream acceptance, and SO is in a good position to erase that. But all of that is a moot point if no one can run it.
--
Clickitty click.
Was that really that hard?
--
The moral of the story? Be careful with hard and fast rules...
Rules like... everyone must love O'Reilly? Cause I think most of their new books suck. Programming Perl is an absolute masterpiece, but I haven't found anything that really wowed me over recently.
--
Seriously, I'm sure this guy is a charming young man - and probably a decent second baseman too - but there are just so many other people you should spend your time interviewing. As a general rule, I'd like to suggest you refrain from posting lengthy discourse with people who place on or more of the following phrases on their homepage:
- "AOL Sucks"
etc..."Visual Basic"
--
This show is pure ratings whorage at its basest form.
:)
I definitely have not & will not ever watch a minute of it
--