Not to mention that VIA are still making x86 compatible processors... I think all of the motherboard chipset makers still produce integrated sound chipsets, very similar but not identical to intel's.
Sounds like the drive is corrupt, or worse, dead... Does it still not recognise it if you boot from install media? Boot the install CD/DVD, and run disk utility from the menu, see if that lets you format the drive... If not, the drive is probably dead.
Yes, he could have set aside money and invested it wisely while he had it... He could be writing new songs right now to make new money, he could be performing the existing works to make money... Instead, he's sitting on his lazy back side asking why he doesn't get paid for something he contributed to many years ago. I don't think anyone should be able to keep deriving revenue from some work they did years ago, they should be still performing and creating works now if they want a continued revenue stream.
Command line is much easier to support over the phone, just so long as the person on the other end can read and write they effectively just act as a proxy for the shell, reading the output aloud and typing what you tell them. Obviously the intermediate proxy makes it a little slower than entering commands by hand, but it's far less error prone. Asking someone to read exactly what they see, rather than having to describe a graphical representation of anything (their description will be their own interpretation, which you then have to interpret yourself)... Also the command line is sequential, it's easy to understand that new information will be displayed under the old information - like it would be in a book or transcript of a conversation, whereas a graphical program could display information anywhere on the screen.
You're right, telephone support of a command line system is much easier than a graphical one, mainly because a textual flow is much closer to a conversation, which is what a telephone is designed to carry. The person you're supporting need only proxy the text back and forth.
That's exactly the kind of shaping my ISP is using... P2P traffic has the lowest priority, but i can still max out my line during the night. Things like VOIP have the highest priority, so it works even during busy periods... SSH etc has a middling priority, which gets reduced if a connection is using a lot of traffic (ie bulk transfers via scp rather than an interactive shell)... HTTP also has a middling priority, but it gets reduced for bulk transfers just the same, so the first few mb will go fast, then it slows down if the network is busy.
It does work quite well, i can download p2p at full speed over night, browsing/ssh/voip/etc works well all the time.
They dictated that all departments had to change to the ODF format forthwith, not the openoffice format (as used in openoffice 1.x) which is somewhat different and now deprecated.
Thus, they require that you use applications which support the ODF format, giving you the choice of using: Open Office Star Office IBM Workplace / Lotus KOffice MSOffice (with odf-converter plugin) MSOffice (with sun odf plugin) OSX TextEdit (text documents only) AbiWord (text documents only) Gnumeric (spreadsheets only) Google Docs&Spreadsheets
As opposed to using microsoft's formats, which gives you the "choice" of using: MSOffice
How exactly are they forcing anyone? They are giving users more choice than they had before, not less.
What would you prefer the Massachusetts government do, and how would this provide more choice to users?
Something like a "WP5 line formatting" tag isn't restricted to old documents. If you were writing a new word processor, you could add it. In ODF, you'd make up a tag, and in OOXML, you might be able to use the one they provided. But in neither case, ODF nor OOXML, would anyone else's word processor be required to support WP5 line formatting. For whatever reason, both ODF and OOXML decided not to cover all possible things from legacy documents, and so for both of them, people WILL be going beyond the standard. The difference is in OOXML, they've guessed at a dozen or so places they think this will happen, and tried to make it so different implementations extending the standard for those cases will do it in the same way. Which is what's bad, if such formatting is necessary then it should be implemented in a generic way. If someone would explain exactly what "wp5 line formatting" and the other similarly vague quotes actually meant, it wouldn't be so hard to implement for future versions. Assuming it's really not possible with the current format (we don't know since we don't have full details of what exactly these tags mean).
That's insane, why should someone be able to record a song in their teens and then expect to live off that for the rest of their life? What gives them the right to work in their teens, and then laze about for the rest of their lives while still raking in the money? If anything, copyright terms should be decreased specifically to prevent that happening - you should continue to work, or at the least invest wisely, if you want to continue making money... Not continue making money from some work you did 90 years ago.
Providing an un throttled service will only appeal to a small number of clued up consumers, the large mass market providers will cater to the masses who don't understand or don't care. The smaller ISPs will have less coverage, and be more expensive. And many people will find themselves in areas only served by the large providers.
Well, users may also have a legitimate need to send out large numbers of mails. I would allow everything until we receive complaints, and then impose restrictions on the customer until it can be determined what happened. If someone is spamming, they are almost certainly violating the AUP. And most spam blacklists will try to inform an ISP when someone is spamming. If you're ISP is generally run responsibly, then it's not hard to get the addresses de-blacklisted once the spammer has been removed.
Yeah, i have no issues paying for a 1mb connection or whatever, but i do object to paying for an "unlimited" 100mb connection, where the small print declares there is actually a "fair use" limit and doesnt even say what it is. Any limit imposed should be clearly defined, and i would gladly pay extra for a true unlimited connection. It should also be mandatory to declare any contention up front too, like "you have an 8mb link to a 800mb backbone, which has up to 200 users so you're connection could drop to 4mb during busy periods". Customers should know exactly what service they're paying for.
There's also cases where you want to do something the gui doesn't provide for, or if something breaks in a way not fixable by the gui. If you have done a manual setup before, then even if you ordinarily use a graphical tool, you can still use the command line if you need it.
And it's not just linux this applies too, i've encountered windows and mac problems where it was necessary to use the cli or edit the registry to make something work or fix a problem.
"user friendliness" as usually discussed, allows users with no experience to do something quickly. For experienced users, command lines are often much quicker. What's good is to have the choice, a watered down gui for new users, while having a capable command line for experienced users.
To give an example that annoys me, a graphical "installer" program which requires you to sit there and keep hitting next is very annoying, compared to a package manager where i can type a single command and not be bothered by it until the install finishes or fails.
There are many earlier programs all with their own bugs, it makes no sense to encapsulate all of their bugs in a new format.
If WP5 has some line spacing modes which can't be specified in a new format, then it's worth modifying the new format to handle it. The new format should be flexible enough that line spacing can be specified fairly arbitrarily. Instead of saying "line space like wordperfect 5", it should be possible to do something like "use 1cm line spacing", and specify the spacing in a standard unit of measurement. If it's not then the format should be improved to make it possible to use a generic flag like this, rather than specifically mentioning some older app.
Programs designed to convert older WP5 documents should know that wp5 does 1cm line spacing, and specify this in the output file. If they want to convert it back, the converter program should know that 1cm line spacing corresponds to default line spacing in WP5...
As for a rational way to argue this is bad, of course using application specific tags is bad, it's a slippery slope that potentially never ends, what about "format-like-tasword-on-the-sinclair-spectrum" ? How much extra garbage will developers of modern applications be saddled with to support ancient apps?
If these formatting options are desirable, why not specify them in a generic flexible way, so that line spacing etc can be completely arbitrarily defined, that way you have a single way to do things, files converted from older apps will still look the same, new files can be converted to old formats instead of just existing old files being converted back. Saying "use wp5 line spacing" is lazy and pretty amateurish, saying "space lines by " is far more fitting for a modern standard.
Why should "wp5 style line spacing" be restricted to old converted documents, what if i want to create a new file that uses wp5 style line spacing? Also, if you have "format like old apps" tags, what happens if you create a new document and try to convert it to a format used by these old apps? Would it save properly without these compatibility tags?
It's not about forcing openoffice down anyone's throats... It's about giving people the freedom to choose whatever program they want based on their individual benefits, rather than on compatibility with proprietary microsoft formats where other vendors will always be at a disadvantage.
Firefox is gaining ground because the web is based on standards, with only a relatively small (and decreasing) level of corruption by microsoft. By comparison, their office document formats are entirely controlled and dictated by microsoft and not disclosed to third parties.
A significant number of organizations have looked at using openoffice, and most of those who decided against it did so because of compatibility concerns. If an open format was dominant, then openoffice would have a significant market share today (even if based on cost alone), the application itself would be significantly better (more users would attract more developers, and less time spent reverse engineering proprietary formats would leave more time to improve other areas) and other competing applications would also be significantly improved in order to compete.
The DRM needed to be closed to satisfy the music companies, otherwise the itunes store wouldn't have had big name bands. Non DRM'd files work just fine... The AAC format is also a standard, it's not a proprietary Apple format, only the DRM is proprietary.
Apple is more open than they were, OSX is now based on an open source OS whereas =OS9 was based on entirely their own proprietary design, their hardware is now x86 based and fairly standard etc... They are also moving to DRM-free songs on itunes, which certainly can be played on other devices, they are in the standard AAC format (not quite as widely supported as mp3, but still a standard documented format - they play just fine on linux)... Companies don't change overnight, Apple are moving in the right direction. A probably better example of a formerly totally closed company becoming more open would be IBM...
They are different problems... Raytracing has long been done in parallel, right from the days of the amiga with screamernet clustering and probably long before that too. Frames can be rendered out of sequence and recombined later with pre-rendered scenes, that's not the case with realtime rendering of games. It doesn't matter if one frame takes longer than others to render either.
Games simply aren't written to take advantage of lots of cpus, raytracing programs are and have been for years.
You also make a valid point about the GPU, most of the rendering is done on the GPUs with relatively little help from the main CPU.
While sun had a part in it, the ODF format differs somewhat from the previous staroffice format. The ODF format was a result of collaboration between several parties, sun played a large part simply because they already had a capable open format and it made little sense to reinvent the wheel.
Sun did this to help open up the market, so that they would be able to compete on an even playing field. This doesn't just benefit sun, but also any other company wanting to compete in that market. Ofcourse it wasn't done out of charity, corporations never do anything out of charity, there is always an ulterior motive. The difference is that sun's goals have side effects which benefit others, whereas microsoft's goals don't benefit anyone else.
Sun have also competed in a legal way, microsoft have being involved in shady activities like vote rigging, what rational explanation can you give why illegal activities like this should be allowed?
And to answer your final question - because microsoft are too powerful in certain markets, and something needs to be done to ensure that we have free and open markets for the benefit of the vast majority of people. Competition and choice is good for consumers and drives progress. Having a single incumbent supplier is bad and results in stagnation, just look at the USSR...
GM aren't big enough in their market to force their will on customers... If GM do something that is against the interest of their customers, those customers can easily buy from Ford, Toyota, Honda etc... Microsoft have sufficient power to screw their customers and make them suck it up. That's the issue people have. Governments are customers too, and also don't want to be screwed.
Microsoft would rather give away all their european profits in fines, than lose marketshare... If they lose a significant share, then support for alternatives will increase and lockin will decrease, eventually causing a cascade reaction causing microsoft to lose significant levels of marketshare elsewhere and be forced to fight against competitors in a more even marketplace.
Regarding the coment about giving files long names to make it clear where they were downloaded from...
AmigaOS used to do something similar, anything you downloaded had a "filenote" that contained the full URL. A filenote is a smal text string associated with the file, a file comment. I believe OSX Leopard can do something similar, because when you try to run something you downloaded it tells you where you downloaded it from... But i'm not sure how to query this information manually.
The Amiga implementation was incredibly useful tho, and i terribly miss this feature from more modern systems, perhaps something like this should be implemented into linux.
Well once one of the cracking groups has made their own nocd crack (and it happens fairly quickly these days) the "protection" becomes worthless anyway.
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Not to mention that VIA are still making x86 compatible processors...
I think all of the motherboard chipset makers still produce integrated sound chipsets, very similar but not identical to intel's.
Sounds like the drive is corrupt, or worse, dead...
Does it still not recognise it if you boot from install media?
Boot the install CD/DVD, and run disk utility from the menu, see if that lets you format the drive... If not, the drive is probably dead.
Yes, he could have set aside money and invested it wisely while he had it...
He could be writing new songs right now to make new money, he could be performing the existing works to make money...
Instead, he's sitting on his lazy back side asking why he doesn't get paid for something he contributed to many years ago.
I don't think anyone should be able to keep deriving revenue from some work they did years ago, they should be still performing and creating works now if they want a continued revenue stream.
Command line is much easier to support over the phone, just so long as the person on the other end can read and write they effectively just act as a proxy for the shell, reading the output aloud and typing what you tell them. Obviously the intermediate proxy makes it a little slower than entering commands by hand, but it's far less error prone. Asking someone to read exactly what they see, rather than having to describe a graphical representation of anything (their description will be their own interpretation, which you then have to interpret yourself)... Also the command line is sequential, it's easy to understand that new information will be displayed under the old information - like it would be in a book or transcript of a conversation, whereas a graphical program could display information anywhere on the screen.
You're right, telephone support of a command line system is much easier than a graphical one, mainly because a textual flow is much closer to a conversation, which is what a telephone is designed to carry. The person you're supporting need only proxy the text back and forth.
That's exactly the kind of shaping my ISP is using...
P2P traffic has the lowest priority, but i can still max out my line during the night.
Things like VOIP have the highest priority, so it works even during busy periods...
SSH etc has a middling priority, which gets reduced if a connection is using a lot of traffic (ie bulk transfers via scp rather than an interactive shell)...
HTTP also has a middling priority, but it gets reduced for bulk transfers just the same, so the first few mb will go fast, then it slows down if the network is busy.
It does work quite well, i can download p2p at full speed over night, browsing/ssh/voip/etc works well all the time.
They dictated that all departments had to change to the ODF format forthwith, not the openoffice format (as used in openoffice 1.x) which is somewhat different and now deprecated.
Thus, they require that you use applications which support the ODF format, giving you the choice of using:
Open Office
Star Office
IBM Workplace / Lotus
KOffice
MSOffice (with odf-converter plugin)
MSOffice (with sun odf plugin)
OSX TextEdit (text documents only)
AbiWord (text documents only)
Gnumeric (spreadsheets only)
Google Docs&Spreadsheets
As opposed to using microsoft's formats, which gives you the "choice" of using:
MSOffice
How exactly are they forcing anyone? They are giving users more choice than they had before, not less.
What would you prefer the Massachusetts government do, and how would this provide more choice to users?
That's insane, why should someone be able to record a song in their teens and then expect to live off that for the rest of their life?
What gives them the right to work in their teens, and then laze about for the rest of their lives while still raking in the money?
If anything, copyright terms should be decreased specifically to prevent that happening - you should continue to work, or at the least invest wisely, if you want to continue making money... Not continue making money from some work you did 90 years ago.
Providing an un throttled service will only appeal to a small number of clued up consumers, the large mass market providers will cater to the masses who don't understand or don't care.
The smaller ISPs will have less coverage, and be more expensive. And many people will find themselves in areas only served by the large providers.
Well, users may also have a legitimate need to send out large numbers of mails. I would allow everything until we receive complaints, and then impose restrictions on the customer until it can be determined what happened. If someone is spamming, they are almost certainly violating the AUP. And most spam blacklists will try to inform an ISP when someone is spamming. If you're ISP is generally run responsibly, then it's not hard to get the addresses de-blacklisted once the spammer has been removed.
Yeah, i have no issues paying for a 1mb connection or whatever, but i do object to paying for an "unlimited" 100mb connection, where the small print declares there is actually a "fair use" limit and doesnt even say what it is.
Any limit imposed should be clearly defined, and i would gladly pay extra for a true unlimited connection. It should also be mandatory to declare any contention up front too, like "you have an 8mb link to a 800mb backbone, which has up to 200 users so you're connection could drop to 4mb during busy periods". Customers should know exactly what service they're paying for.
Yup, finding and deleting a registry key is real user friendly...
There's also cases where you want to do something the gui doesn't provide for, or if something breaks in a way not fixable by the gui. If you have done a manual setup before, then even if you ordinarily use a graphical tool, you can still use the command line if you need it.
And it's not just linux this applies too, i've encountered windows and mac problems where it was necessary to use the cli or edit the registry to make something work or fix a problem.
"user friendliness" as usually discussed, allows users with no experience to do something quickly. For experienced users, command lines are often much quicker.
What's good is to have the choice, a watered down gui for new users, while having a capable command line for experienced users.
To give an example that annoys me, a graphical "installer" program which requires you to sit there and keep hitting next is very annoying, compared to a package manager where i can type a single command and not be bothered by it until the install finishes or fails.
There are many earlier programs all with their own bugs, it makes no sense to encapsulate all of their bugs in a new format.
If WP5 has some line spacing modes which can't be specified in a new format, then it's worth modifying the new format to handle it. The new format should be flexible enough that line spacing can be specified fairly arbitrarily. Instead of saying "line space like wordperfect 5", it should be possible to do something like "use 1cm line spacing", and specify the spacing in a standard unit of measurement. If it's not then the format should be improved to make it possible to use a generic flag like this, rather than specifically mentioning some older app.
Programs designed to convert older WP5 documents should know that wp5 does 1cm line spacing, and specify this in the output file. If they want to convert it back, the converter program should know that 1cm line spacing corresponds to default line spacing in WP5...
As for a rational way to argue this is bad, of course using application specific tags is bad, it's a slippery slope that potentially never ends, what about "format-like-tasword-on-the-sinclair-spectrum" ? How much extra garbage will developers of modern applications be saddled with to support ancient apps?
If these formatting options are desirable, why not specify them in a generic flexible way, so that line spacing etc can be completely arbitrarily defined, that way you have a single way to do things, files converted from older apps will still look the same, new files can be converted to old formats instead of just existing old files being converted back. Saying "use wp5 line spacing" is lazy and pretty amateurish, saying "space lines by " is far more fitting for a modern standard.
Why should "wp5 style line spacing" be restricted to old converted documents, what if i want to create a new file that uses wp5 style line spacing?
Also, if you have "format like old apps" tags, what happens if you create a new document and try to convert it to a format used by these old apps? Would it save properly without these compatibility tags?
It's not about forcing openoffice down anyone's throats...
It's about giving people the freedom to choose whatever program they want based on their individual benefits, rather than on compatibility with proprietary microsoft formats where other vendors will always be at a disadvantage.
Firefox is gaining ground because the web is based on standards, with only a relatively small (and decreasing) level of corruption by microsoft. By comparison, their office document formats are entirely controlled and dictated by microsoft and not disclosed to third parties.
A significant number of organizations have looked at using openoffice, and most of those who decided against it did so because of compatibility concerns. If an open format was dominant, then openoffice would have a significant market share today (even if based on cost alone), the application itself would be significantly better (more users would attract more developers, and less time spent reverse engineering proprietary formats would leave more time to improve other areas) and other competing applications would also be significantly improved in order to compete.
The DRM needed to be closed to satisfy the music companies, otherwise the itunes store wouldn't have had big name bands. Non DRM'd files work just fine...
The AAC format is also a standard, it's not a proprietary Apple format, only the DRM is proprietary.
Apple is more open than they were, OSX is now based on an open source OS whereas =OS9 was based on entirely their own proprietary design, their hardware is now x86 based and fairly standard etc... They are also moving to DRM-free songs on itunes, which certainly can be played on other devices, they are in the standard AAC format (not quite as widely supported as mp3, but still a standard documented format - they play just fine on linux)...
Companies don't change overnight, Apple are moving in the right direction.
A probably better example of a formerly totally closed company becoming more open would be IBM...
They are different problems...
Raytracing has long been done in parallel, right from the days of the amiga with screamernet clustering and probably long before that too. Frames can be rendered out of sequence and recombined later with pre-rendered scenes, that's not the case with realtime rendering of games. It doesn't matter if one frame takes longer than others to render either.
Games simply aren't written to take advantage of lots of cpus, raytracing programs are and have been for years.
You also make a valid point about the GPU, most of the rendering is done on the GPUs with relatively little help from the main CPU.
While sun had a part in it, the ODF format differs somewhat from the previous staroffice format. The ODF format was a result of collaboration between several parties, sun played a large part simply because they already had a capable open format and it made little sense to reinvent the wheel.
Sun did this to help open up the market, so that they would be able to compete on an even playing field. This doesn't just benefit sun, but also any other company wanting to compete in that market.
Ofcourse it wasn't done out of charity, corporations never do anything out of charity, there is always an ulterior motive. The difference is that sun's goals have side effects which benefit others, whereas microsoft's goals don't benefit anyone else.
Sun have also competed in a legal way, microsoft have being involved in shady activities like vote rigging, what rational explanation can you give why illegal activities like this should be allowed?
And to answer your final question - because microsoft are too powerful in certain markets, and something needs to be done to ensure that we have free and open markets for the benefit of the vast majority of people. Competition and choice is good for consumers and drives progress. Having a single incumbent supplier is bad and results in stagnation, just look at the USSR...
GM aren't big enough in their market to force their will on customers... If GM do something that is against the interest of their customers, those customers can easily buy from Ford, Toyota, Honda etc... Microsoft have sufficient power to screw their customers and make them suck it up. That's the issue people have. Governments are customers too, and also don't want to be screwed.
Microsoft would rather give away all their european profits in fines, than lose marketshare...
If they lose a significant share, then support for alternatives will increase and lockin will decrease, eventually causing a cascade reaction causing microsoft to lose significant levels of marketshare elsewhere and be forced to fight against competitors in a more even marketplace.
Regarding the coment about giving files long names to make it clear where they were downloaded from...
AmigaOS used to do something similar, anything you downloaded had a "filenote" that contained the full URL. A filenote is a smal text string associated with the file, a file comment.
I believe OSX Leopard can do something similar, because when you try to run something you downloaded it tells you where you downloaded it from... But i'm not sure how to query this information manually.
The Amiga implementation was incredibly useful tho, and i terribly miss this feature from more modern systems, perhaps something like this should be implemented into linux.
Well once one of the cracking groups has made their own nocd crack (and it happens fairly quickly these days) the "protection" becomes worthless anyway.