Me too. I've never bought a mac for actual day-to-day use (once bought an ancient SE/30 for playing around with). This mini, I will buy. First I'll wait a month or two to see if there are unexpected downsides ofcourse. But if there aren't, I will buy one.
I'd probably do that anyways since I'm not really fond of MacOS X (no troll intended).
What do you think is wrong with it? Really, I'd like to know. I don't own a mac myself, but from what I've seen from the most recent releases of mac os x, it blows away any other operating system for anything except gaming.
In a pipelined CPU (which accounts for nearly all in use today), it will take many many cycles for it to move from one end of the die to the other as the instruction executes. You're right, the bigger the die, the harder it is to have tight clocks if you spread everything out. But its just never done that way...
Very true.
Still, the signal needs to be able to cross the distance of the stage in your pipeline during the clock cycle. Smaller stages still mean you can have faster clock rates, as the intel chips demonstrate. All the clock rate benefits have come by making stages smaller (whether by reducing their functionality, optimizing their design, or shrinking the process). It seems we've reached the limit of how small they can be made, with intel seeing not just diminishing but vanishing returns of reducing the stage size to be able to bump up the clockrate.
There's no effective limit in bandwidth. Once you saturate the bandwidth of a medium, you can always add more wires. With computation, there's always some segment of a problem that cannot be parallelized -- sometimes it's a significant chunk.
Not to mention that in networks, concurrency doesn't matter because the signals have no cross-dependencies. In computing however, every thread of your multi-threaded application has a relationship to the other threads, and so you must be explicitly aware of the constraints imposed by that relationship, which has a nasty tendency to lead to more code (which slows down everything even more).
There are three things I consider necessary for developers to paradigm-shift to writing multi-threaded apps by default:
- Built-in transparent multithreading in the supporting libraries and components that come with your programming environment of choice.
- Language features for easily supporting locking in a manner that doesn't require you to constantly be aware of everything that leads to thread-unsafe locking. I'm thinking of something like the synchronized keyword in java, only more evolved to be able to chart dependencies of a piece of code to all the objects that it needs and handle locking efficiently and automagically.
- Debuggers that are thread-aware, and let you get an overview of the interactions of the different threads, by limiting breakpoints and code stepping to a single thread, or a set of threads, and by showing thread dependencies and lock status (likely intertwined with the aforementioned language features).
None of these are anywhere close to where they should be, and some languages are completely dead in the water, like the favorite of the linux community, C. As a result, people only write multi-threaded apps when they absolutely have to. My one experience with writing a multi-threaded app was painful at the least. I don't want to revisit debugging concurrent threads with the current generation of developer tools. It sucks.
There's some disagreement on what went on between April Glaspie and Saddam in the 1990 meeting. But, it seems pretty clear the US knew in advance about the kuwait invasion plans, and did nothing to stop them.
I find it hard watching TV on its own now without playing on the Internet at the same time. TV is a great background activity, though not a good foreground one, IMHO.
I gave up owning a TV for that very same reason. TV's informational value is pretty low when you factor in that most of TV's content is uninteresting to me personally (TV is one of the most wasteful uses of bandwidth I can imagine). I vastly prefer getting my information from the web, because there I only get that information that directly coincides with my personal passions and interests.
Ofcourse, there is good stuff on TV, but for that there is bittorrent.
Are companies deliberately avoiding it and going with Symbian?
The problem with the microsoft smartphone platforms were that they were and slow, and/or difficult to use, and more importantly they were all bulky pieces of pocketweight. This has been amended with the most recent versions of their software and phones like the orange c500. I expect it to really take off, since it's finally competitive with the symbian phones. I know I'm getting one within the next two months.
Information and content is a lot cheaper and more easily accessible than it was a few years ago. The RIAA still sells CDs for $10-$20, when a CD holds 700MB of music/data, tops. Meanwhile, a DVD, with 8GB of Video/Music/Data, is usually in the $20 range. Already, CDs seem overpriced.
Quantity and value are unrelated things. I perceive the entertainment value of a CD to be much higher than that of a DVD, since I will get over 20 hours of entertainment out of an average CD, while getting less than 10 out of an average DVD, so I'm willing to pay twice as much for a CD as for a DVD (but I think DVD's still cost too much for the pitiful amount of entertainment they provide, so I only buy CD's).
This underlines the basic problem that the entire entertainment industry is facing: the cost to obtaining entertainment. It is now so easy to obtain cheap/free entertainment that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to pay for the cost of a CD or DVD. This has been exacerbated by ubiquitous broadband internet, which allows obtaining store-sold entertainment at lower cost than the stores price it (for those who factor the moral cost of piracy as being low/negligible).
In the end, the solution is providing more value for less money. That means moving to cheaper, internet-based, distribution models. The Itunes music store is a good first step here, but it doesn't provide much in the way of added value over the P2P networks (by including artwork, lyrics, bundled video downloads, and so on) and its search functionality is truly lousy, so it still has a high cost for obtaining access to new entertainment. If they could layer a search engine like that of cd baby on top of the itms and store more useful metadata inside the files (like adding a lyrics field to every song), it would really take off.
The flipside is providing more value, and the only way to achieve that is moving away from the one-size-fits-all model of content creation. Ways must be found to serve niches with quality goods. This will likely involve creative licensing terms, so it becomes possible for a single guy to create whatever he sees in his mind's eye without some corporation funding him by reusing cheaply existing footage/sound. It will also involve making content creation tools widely available. You should be able to use the same tools that pixar uses to create a 3D scene, and then hire time on a render farm to render it at high quality.
The risk of bugs/flaws in C is no more or no less than any other language. In fact, I'd argue the that a good C programmer can write just as good of code as a Java programmer.
I understand C is your pet language, but that's just insane. What is a constant is the number of bugs per instruction for every programmer (this is supported by many studies). You use a language that requires 10 instructions to do a task, you'll have 10 times bug rate bugs in your resulting code. You use one that requires a 100, you'll have 100 times bug rate, hence more bugs. The benefit of java is that it does a lot for you. You get memory management that works and is incredibly simple to use (so simple you can avoid learning about how it works and still write decent code). You get easy object orientation without having to "roll your own". You get an extremely rich set of supporting libraries (more so than C). As a result, you need less code in java to do the same job. Less code == less bugs. It's that simple.
Last time I looked C ran faster than Java as there isn't the overhead of the JVM and all the other stuff in J2EE.
That may be true, but it does not matter. Performance is just not that important in most large programming projects. The reason is that programmer time is orders of magnitude more expensive than processor time, so if you can offload effort from the programmer onto the CPU, it's good business. That's why java and visual basic are such hits in the business world. They let you do more work with less human effort.
And you appear to be an atheist or an agnostic attempting to influence the life of a person with faith.
Your post leads to the implication that it's easy to have respect for the non-faithful while you show disrespect to the faithful.
Oh no, an oppressed believer. Help me mommy, the evil agnostic guy is making me do things.
At no point did I say anything that was meant as a command for religious people. Nor did I say I somehow malign or feel superior to faithful people in general. If you misconstrued my statements as such, that is your problem.
Religious people have never been oppressed by the non-religious. It's so funny that the fear of agnostics and atheists dominating the lives of the faithful runs so strong when religious persecution in the past was always perpetrated by those with different religions.
For the record, I have many friends who strongly believe in God (and base their actions in life on their belief). I respect their belief, because I can't prove them wrong. I just don't partake in it, since I can't convince myself any specific religion has it by the right end. (In other words, I'm on the fence waiting for a sign.) What I do not respect is when religious people try to control the lives of those around them, which happens a lot more often than non-religious people doing it. It's just that most of the believers are blind to the oppression their own consorts wreak on the world, because it agrees with their personal morality, so they do not see it as oppression.
And what was your attack on me other than an attempt to shut me up? Where are the arguments against what I was saying? Seemingly lost in the long list of personal attacks and assumptions about just how much of a bastard I am. If I believed that those who are religious always must oppress the voice of those who aren't, you would be proof for my belief. Ofcourse I don't believe that, but hey, you can keep trying to convince me.
Cellphones are going to become all-purpose digital interfaces. They're going to have several wireless and wired network connections (likely different profiles on a software-based universal transceiver), and they will automagically choose that connection that fits your predetermined profile, whether it be cheapest (some network connections will be free, either through donation or through corporate sponsorship), or fastest. Your employer will likely offer a free network subscription as part of their benefits package.
Those cellphones will have large fold-out/roll-out screens to accompany the regular small screen, fuel cells instead of batteries so they'll last for weeks, really fast cpu's and huge harddrives (it's just a matter of time before the first cellphone with a 100 gb disk arrives).
Everywhere you go there will be expansion stations that network with your cellphone (wireless network or standardized docking station) and extend its functionality, by providing TV-in/out, more storage space, a decent screen/keyboard/mouse, and so on. You will have these at home too. They won't be required for using most software, but will make it handy. Additionally, you will carry around feature boxes, that will connect to the cellphone (wired or wireless) to extend its functionality. The cellphone itself will be more modular too, it will be possible to replace the cpu with a faster version. Still, most people will upgrade their cellphones regularly, since even in the future they can't build motherboards that accept new cpu's indefinitely.
Most of your documents will be stored online. You will synchronize the contents of your cellphone either manually or automatically. Only those documents that have changed will be uploaded. The remote filesystem will be versioned, so you'll never lose an old version of anything. After all, storage space is getting ever cheaper, so where there is a choice between a tiny bit of convenience and saving gobs of disk space, the convenience wins. That's why gmail provides a gigabyte of space, and that's why we have to expect that everything we do will be saved to disk at some point in time.
The boxed software business will disappear almost entirely. Software is meant to be subscribed to, not sold over the counter. Its business model does not lend itself to selling for a one time fee, since most of the cost of software is after the first sale (maintenance / support). This will not mean the death of open source, since you'll be able to subscribe to free software too. This will work a bit like debian, only more user friendly. With upgrades being tested by bleeding edge communities, and then flowing out to the "regular" users, who can choose to let them install automatically, or at the time of their choosing.
The phone will become the financial hub. It will securely log in to your bank. It will behave like a debit/credit card, where you will wave it across some gizmo, and then punch in a PIN on the phone for approval. In fact, likely credit cards will just become payment profiles on the phone, whhere you select one depending on how you wish to pay. This will likely be combined with some kind of biometric test, like a fingerprint scanner. Since scanner technology will follow the path of OLED screens (wrt becoming cheap, small and powerful), all phones will have built-in high-res scanners, in addition to the high-quality cameras which are already just around the corner.
Those who can't afford to be part of this brave new wireless world will be even more cast out of society than they are today. The gap between rich and poor will grow. The GINI coefficient will become ever higher. Lots of people will still complain about the growing poverty gap, and yet the politicians will still do nothing about it, since white middle class will still be their bread and butter, and white middle class won't allow funds being diverted from the rich to the poor.
And as for the PC, well, beige boxes were always inconvenient an
You're a fucking idiot who doesn't respect other's beliefs? My belief in God doesn't effect you in the least, so how about you back off and stop trying to call me mentally damaged?
OK, I know people who believe can believe strange and illogical things, but that is ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that people who have faith don't influence the lives of the atheists and the agnostics? How about the hundreds to thousands of "morally" inspired laws which make no sense from a non-believer point of view, like the ban on gay marriage? How about the requirement to hold a christian-style faith (or pretend you do) before you can credibly be elected to a national public office (name me a muslim or openly agnostic senator, I dare you)? How about the immediate social stigma you gather in tons of circles when you admit to not believing in God?
It would be easier to have respect for the faithful if they had any respect for the non-faithful. As it is, a lot of faithful not only do not respect those who choose not to hold that faith, but actively attempt to enforce religious dogma onto those people. Like trying to replace the reality of evolution with the dogmatic fiction of creationism. (This, incidentally, is where the "mentally damaged" remark comes from. Denying reality is a hallmark of the insane.)
Let's be honest here, you're not being true to your faith if you're not actively trying to turn people who don't believe (since almost all faiths require this). So the better a believer you are, the more likely you are to be affecting the life of the person you replied to.
That Gimp's interface sucks is one of the few reasons I still need to open Win4Lin from time to time: To run Paint Shop Pro. PSP 4.3 used to run under Wine but it no longer ran on the version that came with RH9 so I have to run Win4Lin to get PSP to work.
You can run photoshop under codeweavers' crossover office. It's not perfect, but it works.
I'm sure Gimp has lots of nice features but the interface is a joke. And to those that tell me that I should just learn the interface, no thanks. All my other Linux applications make sense and have an interface that is easy to sit down and use. Gimp is a major exception even within the Linux application area.
I agree. I've tried and tried to learn gimp's "way of working", and despite getting things done, I still don't care much for it. It has all the functionality I need, but the UI is unfriendly. It has some good things compared to photoshop, like not being MDI, and good improvements have come, like filter improvements to match those of photoshop and doing away with the tool window madness (tons of windows, all the time) of earlier versions, but there's still a number of major irritations left in the UI and the supporting documentation.
My two wishes for the gimp would be:
- A guide that explains what gimp functionality corresponds to what photoshop functionality. It's gotten easier to find over the years, and the filters have been padded out so there's more of a one to one correspondancy, but as a gimp newbie it's often still not immediately obvious how to do things, and reading the entire manual to learn the equivalents is a no-go.
- Grouping functionality together more. For example, there are a whole range of selection tools in the toolbox, rectangular select, round select, freeform select, and so on. Why do they need to be different buttons, and why are common selections settings, like anti-aliasing and feathering, duplicated in the tool settings panel of these tools? It clutters and complicates the interface without providing any actual benefit, and seems to only be there to make sure the existing (relatively small) gimp userbase can keep the interface they've gotten used to, at the cost of diminishing migration from photoshop users to gimp (it makes a bad first impression to see a toolbox that cluttered).
Oh, and while I'm at it, will someone explain the point behind allowing different canvas and layer sizes? I don't get it. And it just gets in my way.
Let me repeat: gimp does everything I need it to, and has a for a long time. And yet I still use photoshop. If the interface was just a bit more simplified, and it was just a bit more obvious to migrate from photoshop, I'd be there. But as it stands...
What is YOUR family was about to be blown away by a home-made cruise missile.
Home-made cruise missile? Why would they do that? It's MUCH easier to smuggle a bomb in through the unscanned cargo containers and deliver it in the back of a van than it is to strap it to a cruise missile.
Remember this: all this galileo and gps blocking amounts to is misdirection. It is the appearance of improving security while not actually doing anything. The US is not credibly safer from terrorist attacks, and bush is ignoring the long list of ways to really improve security, like protecting the chemical plants with actual people guarding them, scanning cargo containers for bombs, and tons of stuff of that order.
Number one, this is old, since the iPod firmware that did this, iPod Updater 2004-11-15, was released a month ago.
Number two, Apple is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's DRM, period.
I'm all for free business, but that also involves customers being able to freely take their business elsewhere. This basically is a lock-in tactic tieing you to the itms if you have an ipod.
Apple can't have it both ways. If they intend to use the ipod to drive sales of the itunes music store, then yes, drm it all you want and make sure that the only legally bought music that will run on an ipod is itunes music store bought stuff.
However. That's not what apple has been saying. They've been saying that they're using the itunes music store to drive ipod sales. Now, I get why in that case they wouldn't want other hardware players to be able to play the DRM'd itms files. But what is completely asinine is locking out users from choice of who they buy their songs with to put on their ipod.
As an ipod owner, I am pretty pissed about this, even if I had no intention of buying anything in the real store. It's just bad business. It's what microsoft would do. Heck, not even microsoft has sunk this low, since at least with the WMA platform you have a range of music stores to choose from. This decision to lock out real is as incompatible with the apple image as possible.
But then, I realise that apple has always screwed over their customers. It's why they're not bigger than they are.
It's only illegal to break encryption if it forms an effective copyright protection measure (I forget the exact terminology, but that's close enough). In this case, it wouldn't actually be protecting anyone's copyright, so they would be legally entitled to break it.
So, the pirate would include a self-made image of a giant middlefinger inside the encrypted file. He would then own the copyright to at least part of the encrypted work, and thereby it would be illegal under both the DMCA and the EUCD to break the encryption on that file.
I've been to Europe a couple of times on vacation and the most dissappointing thing was the food. I always, -always- heard about how good the food is in Europe.
"Europe" is too amorphous. I can't argue with you, because there are indeed regions in europe where the food is bad. I'll have to hope for the best that you're not one of these people who've visited britain and then think they know what european food is like.
All I know is... when I went to NY and my NY friend took me to restaurants she said had great food, I thought it was only average.
For the best food in europe I would have to advise france, and in second place, italy.
the other was at Macromedia, looking at Dreamweaver "Oh come on, anyone who really wants to code HTML uses vi/emacs! Who'd pay $400 for another WYSIWYG HTML editor when they can get hotmetal for free?" Turned out? A ton of people who wanted a good one.
Face it -- we're just not very good at predicting market success for some products:)
That's because of a fundamental difference between slashdot geeks and normal people. Slashdot geeks love technology for the sake of technology. Regular people love technology because it does things for them or makes them do things quicker/better. A product like dreamweaver is unattractive to a slashdotter because it hides the underlying technology, adding a layer of obfuscation. At the same time, it's attractive to a normal person because it lets you put content on the internet quicker.
If you want to build software that sells, this is the way to do it:
1) Find a common task in any particular market that can be optimized. 2) Write software so users can do that task as easily and quickly as possible, not impeding any other tasks they might have, thereby saving them time and effort. 3)... 4) Profit
So people tell me "Check snopes, they're impartial" but I say they might not be (at least when it comes to partisan politics). In other words we're forced to have faith in them. Forgive me for being skeptical after watching this whole thing play out on the net with the snopes people.
Obviously there is no such animal as an "impartial source". Everything human made is inherently biased.
To get an unbiased view on a story you would have to know all facts related to that story in depth. This is impossible however, because: a) not all facts are known in the public sphere; a consequence of imperfect information gathering. b) not all facts are reported in any single news story; a consequence of bandwidth being limited, and complex issues requiring series of books instead of series of articles to be a complete accounting of the issue. c) editors enforcing their editorial needs on reporters, such as editors on commercial news sources minimizing exposure for those stories that damage the advertisers or their corporate masters.
So, to say that a source has lost credibility because they have been shown to be biased is pretty silly. Everything is biased. It is impossible with complex issues to even get all the facts, let alone report them in an unbiased way. Heck, it's not even possible to read an unbiased story (if you ever find one) in a way that is unbiased, since we all have to deal with cognitive dissonance, and our imperfect understanding of reality means that we will discount some correct facts because they don't fit in well with some erroneous views we hold.
The only way currently that I see to get a somewhat unbiased view is to be an information hawk, get your news from all sources, cross-compare stories, keep fact databases, historical timelines, do some interviewing of key players, and generally be a reporter yourself and not rely on anyone's analysis. Since nobody can be honestly expected to do all that, I would advise the simple solution of bringing back two things people take for granted but haven't actually existed for a while now: the right to equal time for any side of the story, and the obligation of news organizations to not knowingly lie.
If you want to look at the total productivity of the US vs other Nations you find that in almost every industry it's very hard to match the US.
Ah, but total productivity is deceptive, because the US has people working more hours than most other nations. If you look at productivity per hour europeans are roughly as productive as americans. They just want more free time, so they work fewer hours, so the totals are lower.
Same thing for economic growth. America's growth is always portrayed as somehow much higher than europe's, but if you break it down to a net purchasing power per person figure (which means you account for differences in population growth and inflation) the growth difference is below 1 percent.
It's like they say, there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.
Read the IPCC reports on climate change, not just the books trying, and failing, to debunk them, take a look at the global warming early warning signs map, and read the debunkings of where ever you got your views on climate change from (a good way is to do a google search on '"information source" debunked', where you fill in your information source's title. Climate change is real, it is dangerous, and it must be stopped.
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Me too. I've never bought a mac for actual day-to-day use (once bought an ancient SE/30 for playing around with). This mini, I will buy. First I'll wait a month or two to see if there are unexpected downsides ofcourse. But if there aren't, I will buy one.
You want a machine from the 21st century, only to run a 1980's window system in order to interact with your clone of 1970's UNIX?
Ofcourse, Mac OS X is the wedding between mac os classic (early 80's tech) with nextstep (late 80's tech).
Just because something's based on old technology, doesn't mean it's bad.
I'd probably do that anyways since I'm not really fond of MacOS X (no troll intended).
What do you think is wrong with it? Really, I'd like to know. I don't own a mac myself, but from what I've seen from the most recent releases of mac os x, it blows away any other operating system for anything except gaming.
Unfortunately, with Keanu Reeves in the lead who knows.
Well, his role requires constantly acting high, so I don't think it'll be that much of a problem.
In a pipelined CPU (which accounts for nearly all in use today), it will take many many cycles for it to move from one end of the die to the other as the instruction executes. You're right, the bigger the die, the harder it is to have tight clocks if you spread everything out. But its just never done that way...
Very true.
Still, the signal needs to be able to cross the distance of the stage in your pipeline during the clock cycle. Smaller stages still mean you can have faster clock rates, as the intel chips demonstrate. All the clock rate benefits have come by making stages smaller (whether by reducing their functionality, optimizing their design, or shrinking the process). It seems we've reached the limit of how small they can be made, with intel seeing not just diminishing but vanishing returns of reducing the stage size to be able to bump up the clockrate.
There's no effective limit in bandwidth. Once you saturate the bandwidth of a medium, you can always add more wires. With computation, there's always some segment of a problem that cannot be parallelized -- sometimes it's a significant chunk.
Not to mention that in networks, concurrency doesn't matter because the signals have no cross-dependencies. In computing however, every thread of your multi-threaded application has a relationship to the other threads, and so you must be explicitly aware of the constraints imposed by that relationship, which has a nasty tendency to lead to more code (which slows down everything even more).
There are three things I consider necessary for developers to paradigm-shift to writing multi-threaded apps by default:
- Built-in transparent multithreading in the supporting libraries and components that come with your programming environment of choice.
- Language features for easily supporting locking in a manner that doesn't require you to constantly be aware of everything that leads to thread-unsafe locking. I'm thinking of something like the synchronized keyword in java, only more evolved to be able to chart dependencies of a piece of code to all the objects that it needs and handle locking efficiently and automagically.
- Debuggers that are thread-aware, and let you get an overview of the interactions of the different threads, by limiting breakpoints and code stepping to a single thread, or a set of threads, and by showing thread dependencies and lock status (likely intertwined with the aforementioned language features).
None of these are anywhere close to where they should be, and some languages are completely dead in the water, like the favorite of the linux community, C. As a result, people only write multi-threaded apps when they absolutely have to. My one experience with writing a multi-threaded app was painful at the least. I don't want to revisit debugging concurrent threads with the current generation of developer tools. It sucks.
converting to DivX will result in both a generational loss, and some mpeg-4 specific loss of quality
Generational loss? Mind explaining that one? I don't see where digital cross-conversion gets involved with analog generational loss.
There's some disagreement on what went on between April Glaspie and Saddam in the 1990 meeting. But, it seems pretty clear the US knew in advance about the kuwait invasion plans, and did nothing to stop them.
I find it hard watching TV on its own now without playing on the Internet at the same time. TV is a great background activity, though not a good foreground one, IMHO.
I gave up owning a TV for that very same reason. TV's informational value is pretty low when you factor in that most of TV's content is uninteresting to me personally (TV is one of the most wasteful uses of bandwidth I can imagine). I vastly prefer getting my information from the web, because there I only get that information that directly coincides with my personal passions and interests.
Ofcourse, there is good stuff on TV, but for that there is bittorrent.
What's Smartphone doing?
Are companies deliberately avoiding it and going with Symbian?
The problem with the microsoft smartphone platforms were that they were and slow, and/or difficult to use, and more importantly they were all bulky pieces of pocketweight. This has been amended with the most recent versions of their software and phones like the orange c500. I expect it to really take off, since it's finally competitive with the symbian phones. I know I'm getting one within the next two months.
Information and content is a lot cheaper and more easily accessible than it was a few years ago. The RIAA still sells CDs for $10-$20, when a CD holds 700MB of music/data, tops. Meanwhile, a DVD, with 8GB of Video/Music/Data, is usually in the $20 range. Already, CDs seem overpriced.
Quantity and value are unrelated things. I perceive the entertainment value of a CD to be much higher than that of a DVD, since I will get over 20 hours of entertainment out of an average CD, while getting less than 10 out of an average DVD, so I'm willing to pay twice as much for a CD as for a DVD (but I think DVD's still cost too much for the pitiful amount of entertainment they provide, so I only buy CD's).
This underlines the basic problem that the entire entertainment industry is facing: the cost to obtaining entertainment. It is now so easy to obtain cheap/free entertainment that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to pay for the cost of a CD or DVD. This has been exacerbated by ubiquitous broadband internet, which allows obtaining store-sold entertainment at lower cost than the stores price it (for those who factor the moral cost of piracy as being low/negligible).
In the end, the solution is providing more value for less money. That means moving to cheaper, internet-based, distribution models. The Itunes music store is a good first step here, but it doesn't provide much in the way of added value over the P2P networks (by including artwork, lyrics, bundled video downloads, and so on) and its search functionality is truly lousy, so it still has a high cost for obtaining access to new entertainment. If they could layer a search engine like that of cd baby on top of the itms and store more useful metadata inside the files (like adding a lyrics field to every song), it would really take off.
The flipside is providing more value, and the only way to achieve that is moving away from the one-size-fits-all model of content creation. Ways must be found to serve niches with quality goods. This will likely involve creative licensing terms, so it becomes possible for a single guy to create whatever he sees in his mind's eye without some corporation funding him by reusing cheaply existing footage/sound. It will also involve making content creation tools widely available. You should be able to use the same tools that pixar uses to create a 3D scene, and then hire time on a render farm to render it at high quality.
The risk of bugs/flaws in C is no more or no less than any other language. In fact, I'd argue the that a good C programmer can write just as good of code as a Java programmer.
I understand C is your pet language, but that's just insane. What is a constant is the number of bugs per instruction for every programmer (this is supported by many studies). You use a language that requires 10 instructions to do a task, you'll have 10 times bug rate bugs in your resulting code. You use one that requires a 100, you'll have 100 times bug rate, hence more bugs. The benefit of java is that it does a lot for you. You get memory management that works and is incredibly simple to use (so simple you can avoid learning about how it works and still write decent code). You get easy object orientation without having to "roll your own". You get an extremely rich set of supporting libraries (more so than C). As a result, you need less code in java to do the same job. Less code == less bugs. It's that simple.
Last time I looked C ran faster than Java as there isn't the overhead of the JVM and all the other stuff in J2EE.
That may be true, but it does not matter. Performance is just not that important in most large programming projects. The reason is that programmer time is orders of magnitude more expensive than processor time, so if you can offload effort from the programmer onto the CPU, it's good business. That's why java and visual basic are such hits in the business world. They let you do more work with less human effort.
And you appear to be an atheist or an agnostic attempting to influence the life of a person with faith.
Your post leads to the implication that it's easy to have respect for the non-faithful while you show disrespect to the faithful.
Oh no, an oppressed believer. Help me mommy, the evil agnostic guy is making me do things.
At no point did I say anything that was meant as a command for religious people. Nor did I say I somehow malign or feel superior to faithful people in general. If you misconstrued my statements as such, that is your problem.
Religious people have never been oppressed by the non-religious. It's so funny that the fear of agnostics and atheists dominating the lives of the faithful runs so strong when religious persecution in the past was always perpetrated by those with different religions.
For the record, I have many friends who strongly believe in God (and base their actions in life on their belief). I respect their belief, because I can't prove them wrong. I just don't partake in it, since I can't convince myself any specific religion has it by the right end. (In other words, I'm on the fence waiting for a sign.) What I do not respect is when religious people try to control the lives of those around them, which happens a lot more often than non-religious people doing it. It's just that most of the believers are blind to the oppression their own consorts wreak on the world, because it agrees with their personal morality, so they do not see it as oppression.
And what was your attack on me other than an attempt to shut me up? Where are the arguments against what I was saying? Seemingly lost in the long list of personal attacks and assumptions about just how much of a bastard I am. If I believed that those who are religious always must oppress the voice of those who aren't, you would be proof for my belief. Ofcourse I don't believe that, but hey, you can keep trying to convince me.
Want to know what's actually going to happen?
Cellphones are going to become all-purpose digital interfaces. They're going to have several wireless and wired network connections (likely different profiles on a software-based universal transceiver), and they will automagically choose that connection that fits your predetermined profile, whether it be cheapest (some network connections will be free, either through donation or through corporate sponsorship), or fastest. Your employer will likely offer a free network subscription as part of their benefits package.
Those cellphones will have large fold-out/roll-out screens to accompany the regular small screen, fuel cells instead of batteries so they'll last for weeks, really fast cpu's and huge harddrives (it's just a matter of time before the first cellphone with a 100 gb disk arrives).
Everywhere you go there will be expansion stations that network with your cellphone (wireless network or standardized docking station) and extend its functionality, by providing TV-in/out, more storage space, a decent screen/keyboard/mouse, and so on. You will have these at home too. They won't be required for using most software, but will make it handy. Additionally, you will carry around feature boxes, that will connect to the cellphone (wired or wireless) to extend its functionality. The cellphone itself will be more modular too, it will be possible to replace the cpu with a faster version. Still, most people will upgrade their cellphones regularly, since even in the future they can't build motherboards that accept new cpu's indefinitely.
Most of your documents will be stored online. You will synchronize the contents of your cellphone either manually or automatically. Only those documents that have changed will be uploaded. The remote filesystem will be versioned, so you'll never lose an old version of anything. After all, storage space is getting ever cheaper, so where there is a choice between a tiny bit of convenience and saving gobs of disk space, the convenience wins. That's why gmail provides a gigabyte of space, and that's why we have to expect that everything we do will be saved to disk at some point in time.
The boxed software business will disappear almost entirely. Software is meant to be subscribed to, not sold over the counter. Its business model does not lend itself to selling for a one time fee, since most of the cost of software is after the first sale (maintenance / support). This will not mean the death of open source, since you'll be able to subscribe to free software too. This will work a bit like debian, only more user friendly. With upgrades being tested by bleeding edge communities, and then flowing out to the "regular" users, who can choose to let them install automatically, or at the time of their choosing.
The phone will become the financial hub. It will securely log in to your bank. It will behave like a debit/credit card, where you will wave it across some gizmo, and then punch in a PIN on the phone for approval. In fact, likely credit cards will just become payment profiles on the phone, whhere you select one depending on how you wish to pay. This will likely be combined with some kind of biometric test, like a fingerprint scanner. Since scanner technology will follow the path of OLED screens (wrt becoming cheap, small and powerful), all phones will have built-in high-res scanners, in addition to the high-quality cameras which are already just around the corner.
Those who can't afford to be part of this brave new wireless world will be even more cast out of society than they are today. The gap between rich and poor will grow. The GINI coefficient will become ever higher. Lots of people will still complain about the growing poverty gap, and yet the politicians will still do nothing about it, since white middle class will still be their bread and butter, and white middle class won't allow funds being diverted from the rich to the poor.
And as for the PC, well, beige boxes were always inconvenient an
You're a fucking idiot who doesn't respect other's beliefs? My belief in God doesn't effect you in the least, so how about you back off and stop trying to call me mentally damaged?
OK, I know people who believe can believe strange and illogical things, but that is ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that people who have faith don't influence the lives of the atheists and the agnostics? How about the hundreds to thousands of "morally" inspired laws which make no sense from a non-believer point of view, like the ban on gay marriage? How about the requirement to hold a christian-style faith (or pretend you do) before you can credibly be elected to a national public office (name me a muslim or openly agnostic senator, I dare you)? How about the immediate social stigma you gather in tons of circles when you admit to not believing in God?
It would be easier to have respect for the faithful if they had any respect for the non-faithful. As it is, a lot of faithful not only do not respect those who choose not to hold that faith, but actively attempt to enforce religious dogma onto those people. Like trying to replace the reality of evolution with the dogmatic fiction of creationism. (This, incidentally, is where the "mentally damaged" remark comes from. Denying reality is a hallmark of the insane.)
Let's be honest here, you're not being true to your faith if you're not actively trying to turn people who don't believe (since almost all faiths require this). So the better a believer you are, the more likely you are to be affecting the life of the person you replied to.
That Gimp's interface sucks is one of the few reasons I still need to open Win4Lin from time to time: To run Paint Shop Pro. PSP 4.3 used to run under Wine but it no longer ran on the version that came with RH9 so I have to run Win4Lin to get PSP to work.
You can run photoshop under codeweavers' crossover office. It's not perfect, but it works.
I'm sure Gimp has lots of nice features but the interface is a joke. And to those that tell me that I should just learn the interface, no thanks. All my other Linux applications make sense and have an interface that is easy to sit down and use. Gimp is a major exception even within the Linux application area.
I agree. I've tried and tried to learn gimp's "way of working", and despite getting things done, I still don't care much for it. It has all the functionality I need, but the UI is unfriendly. It has some good things compared to photoshop, like not being MDI, and good improvements have come, like filter improvements to match those of photoshop and doing away with the tool window madness (tons of windows, all the time) of earlier versions, but there's still a number of major irritations left in the UI and the supporting documentation.
My two wishes for the gimp would be:
- A guide that explains what gimp functionality corresponds to what photoshop functionality. It's gotten easier to find over the years, and the filters have been padded out so there's more of a one to one correspondancy, but as a gimp newbie it's often still not immediately obvious how to do things, and reading the entire manual to learn the equivalents is a no-go.
- Grouping functionality together more. For example, there are a whole range of selection tools in the toolbox, rectangular select, round select, freeform select, and so on. Why do they need to be different buttons, and why are common selections settings, like anti-aliasing and feathering, duplicated in the tool settings panel of these tools? It clutters and complicates the interface without providing any actual benefit, and seems to only be there to make sure the existing (relatively small) gimp userbase can keep the interface they've gotten used to, at the cost of diminishing migration from photoshop users to gimp (it makes a bad first impression to see a toolbox that cluttered).
Oh, and while I'm at it, will someone explain the point behind allowing different canvas and layer sizes? I don't get it. And it just gets in my way.
Let me repeat: gimp does everything I need it to, and has a for a long time. And yet I still use photoshop. If the interface was just a bit more simplified, and it was just a bit more obvious to migrate from photoshop, I'd be there. But as it stands...
What is YOUR family was about to be blown away by a home-made cruise missile.
Home-made cruise missile? Why would they do that? It's MUCH easier to smuggle a bomb in through the unscanned cargo containers and deliver it in the back of a van than it is to strap it to a cruise missile.
Remember this: all this galileo and gps blocking amounts to is misdirection. It is the appearance of improving security while not actually doing anything. The US is not credibly safer from terrorist attacks, and bush is ignoring the long list of ways to really improve security, like protecting the chemical plants with actual people guarding them, scanning cargo containers for bombs, and tons of stuff of that order.
Number one, this is old, since the iPod firmware that did this, iPod Updater 2004-11-15, was released a month ago.
Number two, Apple is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's DRM, period.
I'm all for free business, but that also involves customers being able to freely take their business elsewhere. This basically is a lock-in tactic tieing you to the itms if you have an ipod.
Apple can't have it both ways. If they intend to use the ipod to drive sales of the itunes music store, then yes, drm it all you want and make sure that the only legally bought music that will run on an ipod is itunes music store bought stuff.
However. That's not what apple has been saying. They've been saying that they're using the itunes music store to drive ipod sales. Now, I get why in that case they wouldn't want other hardware players to be able to play the DRM'd itms files. But what is completely asinine is locking out users from choice of who they buy their songs with to put on their ipod.
As an ipod owner, I am pretty pissed about this, even if I had no intention of buying anything in the real store. It's just bad business. It's what microsoft would do. Heck, not even microsoft has sunk this low, since at least with the WMA platform you have a range of music stores to choose from. This decision to lock out real is as incompatible with the apple image as possible.
But then, I realise that apple has always screwed over their customers. It's why they're not bigger than they are.
Actually, it should be 80s and 90s because the decades are plural not possessive or a contraction.
Bob's quick guide to the apostrophe
It's always better to explain grammar with visual aids.
It's only illegal to break encryption if it forms an effective copyright protection measure (I forget the exact terminology, but that's close enough). In this case, it wouldn't actually be protecting anyone's copyright, so they would be legally entitled to break it.
So, the pirate would include a self-made image of a giant middlefinger inside the encrypted file. He would then own the copyright to at least part of the encrypted work, and thereby it would be illegal under both the DMCA and the EUCD to break the encryption on that file.
I've been to Europe a couple of times on vacation and the most dissappointing thing was the food. I always, -always- heard about how good the food is in Europe.
... when I went to NY and my NY friend took me to restaurants she said had great food, I thought it was only average.
"Europe" is too amorphous. I can't argue with you, because there are indeed regions in europe where the food is bad. I'll have to hope for the best that you're not one of these people who've visited britain and then think they know what european food is like.
All I know is
For the best food in europe I would have to advise france, and in second place, italy.
the other was at Macromedia, looking at Dreamweaver "Oh come on, anyone who really wants to code HTML uses vi/emacs! Who'd pay $400 for another WYSIWYG HTML editor when they can get hotmetal for free?" Turned out? A ton of people who wanted a good one.
:)
...
Face it -- we're just not very good at predicting market success for some products
That's because of a fundamental difference between slashdot geeks and normal people. Slashdot geeks love technology for the sake of technology. Regular people love technology because it does things for them or makes them do things quicker/better. A product like dreamweaver is unattractive to a slashdotter because it hides the underlying technology, adding a layer of obfuscation. At the same time, it's attractive to a normal person because it lets you put content on the internet quicker.
If you want to build software that sells, this is the way to do it:
1) Find a common task in any particular market that can be optimized.
2) Write software so users can do that task as easily and quickly as possible, not impeding any other tasks they might have, thereby saving them time and effort.
3)
4) Profit
So people tell me "Check snopes, they're impartial" but I say they might not be (at least when it comes to partisan politics). In other words we're forced to have faith in them. Forgive me for being skeptical after watching this whole thing play out on the net with the snopes people.
Obviously there is no such animal as an "impartial source". Everything human made is inherently biased.
To get an unbiased view on a story you would have to know all facts related to that story in depth. This is impossible however, because:
a) not all facts are known in the public sphere; a consequence of imperfect information gathering.
b) not all facts are reported in any single news story; a consequence of bandwidth being limited, and complex issues requiring series of books instead of series of articles to be a complete accounting of the issue.
c) editors enforcing their editorial needs on reporters, such as editors on commercial news sources minimizing exposure for those stories that damage the advertisers or their corporate masters.
So, to say that a source has lost credibility because they have been shown to be biased is pretty silly. Everything is biased. It is impossible with complex issues to even get all the facts, let alone report them in an unbiased way. Heck, it's not even possible to read an unbiased story (if you ever find one) in a way that is unbiased, since we all have to deal with cognitive dissonance, and our imperfect understanding of reality means that we will discount some correct facts because they don't fit in well with some erroneous views we hold.
The only way currently that I see to get a somewhat unbiased view is to be an information hawk, get your news from all sources, cross-compare stories, keep fact databases, historical timelines, do some interviewing of key players, and generally be a reporter yourself and not rely on anyone's analysis. Since nobody can be honestly expected to do all that, I would advise the simple solution of bringing back two things people take for granted but haven't actually existed for a while now: the right to equal time for any side of the story, and the obligation of news organizations to not knowingly lie.
If you want to look at the total productivity of the US vs other Nations you find that in almost every industry it's very hard to match the US.
Ah, but total productivity is deceptive, because the US has people working more hours than most other nations. If you look at productivity per hour europeans are roughly as productive as americans. They just want more free time, so they work fewer hours, so the totals are lower.
Same thing for economic growth. America's growth is always portrayed as somehow much higher than europe's, but if you break it down to a net purchasing power per person figure (which means you account for differences in population growth and inflation) the growth difference is below 1 percent.
It's like they say, there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.
Read the IPCC reports on climate change, not just the books trying, and failing, to debunk them, take a look at the global warming early warning signs map, and read the debunkings of where ever you got your views on climate change from (a good way is to do a google search on '"information source" debunked', where you fill in your information source's title. Climate change is real, it is dangerous, and it must be stopped.