How can we be surprised, when Microsoft has been heavy pusher of the LACK of need for a formal university degree. Why spend 4 years in a Computer Science program when you can spend a few grand, take a crash course, and get your MCD or MCSE certificate in a few weeks?
In fact, I remember Gates several years ago bragging about how he prefers not to hire CS grads because they come out of school with too many limitations programmed into their brains.
Yeah, limitations, like how to write good code, how one should avoid side effects in functions, write black box functions, learn how to develop testing functions to push a full range of possible inputs to functions to test them, how to document properly, etc, etc.. You know, all that stuff that cuts down on the number of lines of code per day a programmer pumps out...
Every few days a mozilla story is posted, and then the same old tired replies are repeated.
Editors of slashdot could improve the productivity of the entire geek world by simply posting mozilla stories and point the comments to an older mozilla story comment section. Then we wouldn't have to repost our same old arguments...
If someone makes a web page that requires CSS (or requires that some specific style be used) to look good, then they're messing up.
Oh, so you admit that people who make pages that require IE to look good are messing up too?
I hope you also realize how some really neat stuff is not being done because of lack of standards support in IE. IE is to Mozilla now what NS 4.x was to IE before now.
Interesting, but couldn't someone still just boot into single user mode and get into all of your files? (I'm a unix geek and new mac owner. Is it even possible to do this? I thought I remembered doing it with some magic key combo, but can't remember if I was prompted for a password).
There are some areas where free market doesn't work and government must do the job. Would you want to privitize our road network? The military?
It's not like a rail competitor can come in and lay down a new northeast corridor between Boston and Washington and compete with Amtrak. It's part of the national infrastructure and should be treated that way.
Now maybe if the feds owned the rails and provide police, something could be done. But that doesn't look likely. Amtrak pays for their own police force, maintenance to their own rails, rent on rails they don't own, and railroads pay property taxes on the land the rails occupy.
It amazes me that, after all the hell Britain has gone through after privitizing its rail system, that people in the U.S. still scream about how privitization is the answer to everything.
Whatever you do, don't ground it in more than one place. About 15 years ago, I saw a case with some thick ethernet run between two buildings underground that was grounded in each place. I'm no EE, but the way it was described to me was that the ground floated or something, and basically any difference between ground in the two buildings anywhere, even in their electrical equipment, would often cause ground to route to the other building via the ethernet and in the process run through a lot of equipment. A lot of transceivers, NIC cards, and some mobos were blown over those few months before it was fixed...
Maybe someone with some real education in this area can explain it better. Still, point is, you're probably best off running fiber between buildings to be safe.
I can copy a digital signal for use inside my household, but not usable outside the local LAN? How is THAT accomplised? First, almost everyone's local lan is in a 192.168 block or 10. block. But besides that, I cap my TV shows on my computer, edit out commercials (oh oh...) and burn to VCD and watch in living room. Once on VCD, what then? It melts if it wanders out of my home, like a holodeck character walking out of the holodeck? (Unless he has one of those devices on his arm of course...)
My bank (centura.com) says on their web site that they don't support NS 6 browsers, but it works just fine. My school's braindead portal program, Pipeline, does a browser sniff and says it won't work with NS 6, but if you use IE to find the logon page, and then go straight to that in Netscape 6 (or mozilla) and hence bypass the browser sniff, the entire site works just fine.
Maybe I should be wondering if there is a conspiracy going on here!:)
I mainly wanted it to cap TV shows on schedule, edit out commercials, save to VCD and watch in living room in DVD player.
I've had a few problems with it. First, when recording in mpeg-2 mode, if I play it in other mpeg viewers, the aspect ratio is opposite, like 480x640 instead of 640x480.
If I cap to VCD (mpeg1) format, it's fine. But if I use any mpeg editing tools like Power Director, the audio and video get out of sync. Very annoying. Hauppauge has a "cuts only" mpeg editor on their site, but it's not the best. While the a/v stay in sync, for some reason, the frames where I make the cuts get off sometimes. So if I'm real careful to cut at the start and end of commercials, sometimes I'll get the first 5-10 seconds of a commercial and then miss the first 5-10 seconds of the show after it.
Overall, not real happy. I'm kinda of wishing I got a standard WDM capable capture card and used software-based encoding...
The other thing that ticked me off is I recently bought a dvd iMac and expected to be able to cap in mpeg2 on my PC, transfer to the mac and write out to the mac's DVD-R drive, but the damn iDVD software that comes with the iMac will only work with DV or quicktime movies (and qt pro won't import mpeg-2)
But have a look at the source. script element outside the head element, no root html element. The source is horrible. There's no way a human wrote that out by hand, some gawd-awful program must have produced it. Fortunately for that program, it doesn't confess itself in a meta tag.
Running at 1600x1200 means your're fill-rate dependent. It has nothing to do with your CPU.
In that particular game (morrowind), for whatever reason, running it at 1024x768 or even below doesn't improve the framerate, so I might as well go for the clarity of a higher DPI on the screen... which is pretty damn impressive btw...
Pricing, innovation, quick to market, online services...when was the last time you saw microsoft work this hard to get market share?
Yeah, until they dominate this market as well, then the innovation that we care about will stop and other innovation, like controlling living room entertainment and pricing, will begin.
Hmm, there's about 50 miles of dead space along US 93 between Wickenburg and I-40 in Arizona. I travel that road about once or twice a year with my friend on road trips. As well as my Verizon phone, I also have a Nextel and my friend has Sprint PCS. At different points, there were signals on each of the three sets. I was surprised the Nextel did so well personally. Sprint was the worse of the three.
And this didn't cost anything, just monitoring whether it could receive signals. I admit it doesn't give a full analysis of quality, drop rate, etc, but a lousy signal is better than no signal and that road (being the best road between Phoenix and Las Vegas) gets a lot of travel. I'm surprised cell service sucks so bad along it.
Speaking of Sprint PCS, I've always considered their "100% digital ads" to be something to be ashamed of, not brag about. If I can't get a digital signal, I'd much rather have an old-fashined A or B side analog network to fall back on....
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"?
It ain't now, that's for sure. I have a p4-2Ghz, 512 megs of PC800 and a ge4 ti4600, and I can still only get about 15 fps in Balmor within the Morrowind game at 1600x1200 (with all eye candy features turned up high). What a fine game it is too. Pushes eye candy to an entire new level, and the game play rocks too...
It also ain't now because it takes too damn long to re-encode an mpeg video stream. After I cap an hour long episode of my favorite TV series and exercise my fair use rights to edit out commercials for my personal private viewing later, it takes about 30 minutes to re-encode it into a compatible VCD format for my living room's DVD player. (Oh, I'm sorry, that's considered stealing by some. I tell you what, I've seen a lot of commercials a frame at a time and have to pay extra attention to them as I attempt to make a clean cut, just so I can satisfy my stupid collecting habit with a full set of VCDs for some stupid show I most likely will never watch again...)
And it certainly won't be enough horsepower by the time the next OS release of Windows comes out, because Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, plans on doing away with a simple file system and replacing it with a database where all PCs saved data goes, which I'm sure will require a 5 Ghz PC with 5 gigs of RAM. (And you think registry corruption is bad...) And this will help people find their old data how? The same people who can't figure out how to construct a decent google query? Your typical marketing person for example, "find marketing report -- 2,042 results found." instead of something like "find marketing report where client equals wonka and body includes teenagers, candy and syringes, and month equals april, may, or june and year equals 2000."
A great example of how the SCCCA or whatever it's called this week isn't going to do squat to prevent illegal copies, but will only hurt the honest consumer. Something the software industry figured out in the 80s.
... unless they put in content protection in camcorders so I can't make videos of my kids and give copies to my parents. Oh yeah, that would enrage every parent in the country like no other political topic could...
I've gotten some e-mail basically saying this would be useless because most users aren't savvy enough to know how to shift their usage around, but by the cable companies own admission, the bulk of bandwidth is used by a small portion of subscribers. I put it to you that these same subscribers are the ones who would know how to shift their usage around via programattic means.
Given half a chance, I don't believe most of us geeks are unreasonable. And if variable bandwidth caps were instituted that were raised or lowered based on demand, just like the compression level on a CDMA cell signal is manipulated based on cellular tower usage and capacity, you'd start to see a lot of tools written that would make shifting of bandwidth around available for average users too...
I understand the rationale for caps but I wish it was implemented with a bit more imagination and skill. Cable modem bandwidth usage has peak and off-peak hours. At 6am on a Sunday morning it's practically dead while Tuesday at 7pm it's heavy. So why can't they uncap or raise the cap during off peak hours so someone that wants to download three ISOs of redhat 7.3 could program their box to grab it early Sunday morning? All that bandwidth they are saving during off peak hours is wasted. It's not like they can apply it back during peak usage.
This would also encourage off peak usage. It'd be far better to squeeze out that 2 gig download quickly when it has no real impact on others versus taking hours due to a cap during peak.
I'm guessing you just can't reprovision the cable boxes that quickly and dynamically everywhere, but damn, it makes sense and I still don't understand why caps aren't implemented using some QOS type service at the head-end anyway...
Some page with a WTC survivor story where a guy had just walked out of the lobby of the first tower to collapse and as it started to collapse, the fireball that rushed down ahead of it and blew out the lobby apparently hurled him across the street and out of the way of the collapsing building.
Then again, he just got out of the hospital and had burns all over his body as well as numerous fractures and broken bones. I don't think he'd be able to get up and engage in a fight and take a few dozen blows to the head and chest with a blunt instrument, like happens in many movies...
Yeah, this DUL crap prevented me (as a former @home customer) from just using my own sendmail server to send out my e-mails, since the no good piece of flock() @home server was constantly down.
Of course, due to DUL use in some places, my e-mail would bounce when trying to send to them.:(
I'm not really bitter against DUL users. The spam shit is out of hand and you do what you gotta do. It's just one more reason to hate selfish spammers who are ruining the net...
I can't believe it. The saddest part about this Wal-Mart PC is that it costs the same as the damn video card (gf4, ti4600) that I bought last night (just to play that damn Morrowind game...)
I should be shot (and I will be shot if someone tells my wife how much I spent on it.)
Re:New to Macs, Do They Charge for Updates?
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 2
I hope this helped
Yes, it did. Doesn't sound too excessive. I mean, they could call it Mac OS X SE and charge $99 for it...
(Yes, I heard next year Microsoft is going to release XP SE -- second edition, amazing but true...)
I guess when it finally comes out, I'll be anxious to get it. Mail order means patience. Decending on the full service Apple only dealer I bought it from should hopefully get it for me quick. (I found those cards you spoke of, I was wondering what they were for, thanks...)
(My god, I can't believe I'm a Mac fanatic now... I resisted for sooo long too...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, I remember Gates several years ago bragging about how he prefers not to hire CS grads because they come out of school with too many limitations programmed into their brains.
Yeah, limitations, like how to write good code, how one should avoid side effects in functions, write black box functions, learn how to develop testing functions to push a full range of possible inputs to functions to test them, how to document properly, etc, etc.. You know, all that stuff that cuts down on the number of lines of code per day a programmer pumps out...
Editors of slashdot could improve the productivity of the entire geek world by simply posting mozilla stories and point the comments to an older mozilla story comment section. Then we wouldn't have to repost our same old arguments...
Oh, so you admit that people who make pages that require IE to look good are messing up too?
I hope you also realize how some really neat stuff is not being done because of lack of standards support in IE. IE is to Mozilla now what NS 4.x was to IE before now.
IE = Old and Busted
Mozilla = New Hotness
http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/demos/eagle-sun.h tml
btw, it looks like shiat on IE 6...
Interesting, but couldn't someone still just boot into single user mode and get into all of your files? (I'm a unix geek and new mac owner. Is it even possible to do this? I thought I remembered doing it with some magic key combo, but can't remember if I was prompted for a password).
It's not like a rail competitor can come in and lay down a new northeast corridor between Boston and Washington and compete with Amtrak. It's part of the national infrastructure and should be treated that way.
Now maybe if the feds owned the rails and provide police, something could be done. But that doesn't look likely. Amtrak pays for their own police force, maintenance to their own rails, rent on rails they don't own, and railroads pay property taxes on the land the rails occupy.
It amazes me that, after all the hell Britain has gone through after privitizing its rail system, that people in the U.S. still scream about how privitization is the answer to everything.
Maybe someone with some real education in this area can explain it better. Still, point is, you're probably best off running fiber between buildings to be safe.
I can copy a digital signal for use inside my household, but not usable outside the local LAN? How is THAT accomplised? First, almost everyone's local lan is in a 192.168 block or 10. block. But besides that, I cap my TV shows on my computer, edit out commercials (oh oh...) and burn to VCD and watch in living room. Once on VCD, what then? It melts if it wanders out of my home, like a holodeck character walking out of the holodeck? (Unless he has one of those devices on his arm of course...)
Really? According to the article, this is what they do if they catch you.
Oh boy, the risk/benefit ratio for that one isn't hard to figure out....
Maybe I should be wondering if there is a conspiracy going on here! :)
I've had a few problems with it. First, when recording in mpeg-2 mode, if I play it in other mpeg viewers, the aspect ratio is opposite, like 480x640 instead of 640x480.
If I cap to VCD (mpeg1) format, it's fine. But if I use any mpeg editing tools like Power Director, the audio and video get out of sync. Very annoying. Hauppauge has a "cuts only" mpeg editor on their site, but it's not the best. While the a/v stay in sync, for some reason, the frames where I make the cuts get off sometimes. So if I'm real careful to cut at the start and end of commercials, sometimes I'll get the first 5-10 seconds of a commercial and then miss the first 5-10 seconds of the show after it.
Overall, not real happy. I'm kinda of wishing I got a standard WDM capable capture card and used software-based encoding...
The other thing that ticked me off is I recently bought a dvd iMac and expected to be able to cap in mpeg2 on my PC, transfer to the mac and write out to the mac's DVD-R drive, but the damn iDVD software that comes with the iMac will only work with DV or quicktime movies (and qt pro won't import mpeg-2)
I just can't win it seems...
But have a look at the source. script element outside the head element, no root html element. The source is horrible. There's no way a human wrote that out by hand, some gawd-awful program must have produced it. Fortunately for that program, it doesn't confess itself in a meta tag.
Actually, 4.2 since IE skipped a version to match up with Netscape's version 3...
In that particular game (morrowind), for whatever reason, running it at 1024x768 or even below doesn't improve the framerate, so I might as well go for the clarity of a higher DPI on the screen... which is pretty damn impressive btw...
Yeah, until they dominate this market as well, then the innovation that we care about will stop and other innovation, like controlling living room entertainment and pricing, will begin.
And this didn't cost anything, just monitoring whether it could receive signals. I admit it doesn't give a full analysis of quality, drop rate, etc, but a lousy signal is better than no signal and that road (being the best road between Phoenix and Las Vegas) gets a lot of travel. I'm surprised cell service sucks so bad along it.
Speaking of Sprint PCS, I've always considered their "100% digital ads" to be something to be ashamed of, not brag about. If I can't get a digital signal, I'd much rather have an old-fashined A or B side analog network to fall back on....
It ain't now, that's for sure. I have a p4-2Ghz, 512 megs of PC800 and a ge4 ti4600, and I can still only get about 15 fps in Balmor within the Morrowind game at 1600x1200 (with all eye candy features turned up high). What a fine game it is too. Pushes eye candy to an entire new level, and the game play rocks too...
It also ain't now because it takes too damn long to re-encode an mpeg video stream. After I cap an hour long episode of my favorite TV series and exercise my fair use rights to edit out commercials for my personal private viewing later, it takes about 30 minutes to re-encode it into a compatible VCD format for my living room's DVD player. (Oh, I'm sorry, that's considered stealing by some. I tell you what, I've seen a lot of commercials a frame at a time and have to pay extra attention to them as I attempt to make a clean cut, just so I can satisfy my stupid collecting habit with a full set of VCDs for some stupid show I most likely will never watch again...)
And it certainly won't be enough horsepower by the time the next OS release of Windows comes out, because Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, plans on doing away with a simple file system and replacing it with a database where all PCs saved data goes, which I'm sure will require a 5 Ghz PC with 5 gigs of RAM. (And you think registry corruption is bad...) And this will help people find their old data how? The same people who can't figure out how to construct a decent google query? Your typical marketing person for example, "find marketing report -- 2,042 results found." instead of something like "find marketing report where client equals wonka and body includes teenagers, candy and syringes, and month equals april, may, or june and year equals 2000."
Given half a chance, I don't believe most of us geeks are unreasonable. And if variable bandwidth caps were instituted that were raised or lowered based on demand, just like the compression level on a CDMA cell signal is manipulated based on cellular tower usage and capacity, you'd start to see a lot of tools written that would make shifting of bandwidth around available for average users too...
This would also encourage off peak usage. It'd be far better to squeeze out that 2 gig download quickly when it has no real impact on others versus taking hours due to a cap during peak.
I'm guessing you just can't reprovision the cable boxes that quickly and dynamically everywhere, but damn, it makes sense and I still don't understand why caps aren't implemented using some QOS type service at the head-end anyway...
Some page with a WTC survivor story where a guy had just walked out of the lobby of the first tower to collapse and as it started to collapse, the fireball that rushed down ahead of it and blew out the lobby apparently hurled him across the street and out of the way of the collapsing building.
Then again, he just got out of the hospital and had burns all over his body as well as numerous fractures and broken bones. I don't think he'd be able to get up and engage in a fight and take a few dozen blows to the head and chest with a blunt instrument, like happens in many movies...
Of course, due to DUL use in some places, my e-mail would bounce when trying to send to them. :(
I'm not really bitter against DUL users. The spam shit is out of hand and you do what you gotta do. It's just one more reason to hate selfish spammers who are ruining the net...
I should be shot (and I will be shot if someone tells my wife how much I spent on it.)
Yes, it did. Doesn't sound too excessive. I mean, they could call it Mac OS X SE and charge $99 for it...
(Yes, I heard next year Microsoft is going to release XP SE -- second edition, amazing but true...)
I guess when it finally comes out, I'll be anxious to get it. Mail order means patience. Decending on the full service Apple only dealer I bought it from should hopefully get it for me quick. (I found those cards you spoke of, I was wondering what they were for, thanks...)
(My god, I can't believe I'm a Mac fanatic now... I resisted for sooo long too...:-)