The concept of proprietary *nix is dying out because it doesn't make sense. People don't use MacOS X to get access to *nix on Apple hardware.
It doesn't matter why people use OS X - the fact is that they use it, period. How are they somehow not using Unix just because they never see the command line? Is a Linux user who never sees the command line (okay, maybe this is a little implausible, but imagine a way user-friendly distribution) not using Linux?
Well.. some do, but they quickly realize that it just doesn't cut it, compared to Linux or OpenBSD.
Doesn't "cut it"? OS X is BSD, and its Unix component, Darwin, is not proprietary. It is just as open source as Linux. Tcsh and bash are there (well, bash is available separately) and you can compile most POSIX-compliant Unix software (INCLUDING X11 apps, as there is a rootless X11 server available for Quartz).
MacOS X is NOT more popular than Linux and BSD, even just on the desktop. How so? Because Linux and BSD users aren't counted whereas people who pay for OS X are. There are many times more Linux boxes out there than OS X.
Linux and every other Unix kills OS X on the server - no question about it. But I think on the desktop you'll find a different story. The commonly-held belief is that Macs currently hold about 5% of the desktop market. Assuming half of these Macs run OS X, that's 2.5% of all desktop computers running OS X. I would be very, very surprised if Linux and all the non-OS X BSDs combined held half of this percentage in the overall, non-techie, non-geek market. Certainly inside such areas, the usage of Linux and other free Unixes is much higher, but Linux-using geeks really do make up only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer users. Believe it or not... I don't see how this is so hard to take, with all the soccer moms buying computers from Sears these days.
Whats more, most people using OS X are clueless Mac users who would have upgraded whether it was *nix based or not.
Irrelevant.
Since OS X was derived from a version of BSD (and a rather old one IIRC), you can't say that Apple produced it in "1/10 of the time as Linux."
It's been available for 1/10 of the time, though. BSD was quite a bit more mature in the early '90s than Linux was, but come on - Linux has had more than ten years to play catch up. It's not like in 1990, BSD wasn't just a tiny shell of what it would become in OS X. Yes, there was Nextstep, but that was just a faint precursor to what OS X would become. To be fair though, you're right, OS X's foundation was partially already there, while Linux was built from scratch. I'm not sure how significant that is, though.
Windows is no better than Unix with X-Windows. The only way to get highly consistent theming in Windows is to use Microsoft applications exclusively. To get highly consistent theming under Unix, pick either Gnome or KDE and stick with it.
I understand I will be modded down because I am not supporting the/. party line, but Windows's consistency is no better than Unix's?!? Now, come on, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I think someone's been spending too much time perfecting his Linus Torvalds impression here. There are two aspects of theming - visual and functional. You can change how an app looks while retaining the way it works completely. (E.g. I have three titlebar buttons, and rather than change what they do, I'll just change their color.) This is what most themeable Windows apps do.
Now, I agree that Windows is butt-ugly, but one thing it's not, as long as you stay away from buggy-as-hell out-of-date shareware pieces of arse, is inconsistent.
You stated that "to get highly consistent theming under Unix, pick either Gnome or KDE and stick with it." That's a pretty darned big limitation, isn't it? I suppose I could go write two apps that work and look the same, call them "consistent," and say I've just trumped MS. (Sorry. "M$.") Yippee me.
That's a really funny definition of "monopoly." By your logic, Sun has a monopoly on Solaris, SGI has a monopoly on IRIX, HP has a monopoly on HPUX, and IBM has a monopoly on AIX. Monopolies = bad, so Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM are all evil, and will be until they port their big iron OSes to your peecee. "I want 4Dwm! Open-source it, SGI! Give it to me free, or else yer nothin' but a dirty monopolist!"
Aqua is a work of art. Believe it or not/., some people in the world actually believe in intellectual property.
Apple is not predatory. It's too small to be predatory. Its attack of the clones happened only after a radical shift in management. I think the term there would be "non-suicidal," not "predatory."
How does Apple sell out its users? I've had a mac.com email address for the longest time (Mac owners get them for free - how evil of Apple to offer such nasty tie-ins!), even though I've rarely used it, and I've not gotten a SINGLE piece of spam to it. Ever.
As has been covered so many times here before, more expensive hardware != overpriced hardware. You get what you pay for. This is a myth that really needs to get shot down - I don't see why so many obviously smart geeks have such a terrible time understanding this. Some people in the world are actually not content with cheap-ass high-MHz beige commodity boxes built by soulless vendors like Dell, Gateway, etc. who just don't give a shit about their product and who WOULD sell their customers out to gain any edge they could in the cutthroat Wintel market.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but I am a Mac/Linux user and I will go to certain lengths to defend the company against the heaps of obvious bullshit piled upon it. I agree that a large and powerful Apple would not be a pretty sight. I would be most content with Apple at around 10-15% market share.
Sun is beginning to remind me a lot of Apple. Their hardware is way overpriced and they refuse to accept the fact that commercial proprietary *nixes are quickly dying out, being replaced by Linux and *BSD. Instead, they're sinking large amounts of capital into maintaining their own closed operating systems. It's a shame, really, because they both make well-built hardware, use non-Intel cpu's, and have a solid customer support record. They could be making more money and doing the OSS community a great service by helping out if they'd just wake up.
OS X is at least half open-source. Apple's hardware is more expensive than PC hardware, but more expensive != overpriced. You get what you pay for, and Apple these days is not having a hard time getting people to pay for their machines.
How is Apple's "commercial proprietary *nix" "dying out" when it has already catapulted far beyond Linux and all the BSDs combined on the desktop, in about 1/10 of the time it took for Linux to get where it's at now? How is it "dying out" when, that said, it's currently growing faster than any Unix ever has?
Do you think the only reason Apple, Sun, IBM, SGI, etc. maintain their own Unixes is because they haven't yet "woken up"?
Alex
Eggs and mac & cheese? What I want to know is.
on
The Future of MREs
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· Score: 0, Troll
I went home this past winter break. We have a kind of half-finished basement, which is carpeted and heated but only one wall is drywall. It's kind of a "den" type room, or it could be seen as a spare bedroom. Anyway, there is a 13" TV in this room. A monophonic Magnavox, with the speaker pointed left out of the side of the enclosure, made around 1989. An absolute piece of shit by any standard.
My girlfriend and I stayed up late one night to watch one of those strange HBO late-night movies cuddled up in front of this little 13" TV, and it was probably the most enjoyable movie-viewing experience I've had in years. I've seen Hollywood epics on huge-screened surround sound systems, I've seen numerous films inside state-of-the-art theatres, but I must say, this little 13" television had them all beat.
I guess I don't expect most Slashdotters to understand that, but...
who the Hell thinks dragging a disc to the trash in order to eject it (a la OS9) is usable?
I'm sure a bright person like you wouldn't be so stupid as to comment on something you've never used before, so I'm sure you already know that once you start dragging a disk in OS X, the trash icon turns into an eject icon. I'm sure you also know that you can command-click (right-click) a disk icon and choose "eject" from the context menu.
I agree that dragging a disk to a trash is unusable. I mean, holy shit, how are people supposed to remember that? "Disk... trash. Trash?!? NO!!! Where is my emergency eject paperclip?!?" The mind boggles.
Your own logic answers your question. You say that the digital copies are higher quality than CDs. But the market has clearly shown that CD quality is "good enough". Thus, no higher quality master is necessary [since digital copies are losses]
That makes sense, but what if the digital "rips" of the analog CDs were approximately equal in quality to normal CDs, while the analog CDs themselves were marketed as being "phenomenal, audiophile quality, whiz-bang, woo-woo, unbelievable, amazing, you have to have this!" and priced no more than digital CDs (or maybe even less than digital CDs in order to establish themselves in the marketplace. I mean, if the RIAA can sell the Backstreet Boys and Kenny G, they have to be able to sell anything.
I suppose you're right about the market being content with the quality of current CDs, but perhaps with enough clever marketing, the industry would be able to "raise the threshold" and increase people's expectations. Perhaps they could throw in other gimmicks like 5.1 analog channels or something.
My whole train of thought is trying to recreate the days when we all made cassette copies of music and the music industry didn't care because the copies were inferior to the originals.
Of course, this could be applied to DVDs as well - a 720p or 1080i analog picture and analog, CD-quality 5.1-channel sound on a 5 1/4" disc. We have the technology. Sure, the discs could be digitized, but when selling to a home theater crowd, it's all about quality, and the copies wouldn't be quite as good.
I just want to come up with an idea so simple and beautiful that it will change the world. Why is that so hard to do?:)
I've thought about this for a while, and was wondering if anyone would like to offer their thoughts.
Since what apparently makes content producers nervous is consumers' ability to make an infinite number of perfect copies of their products, why not develop an analog CD? Laserdiscs were/are analog, and looked great. The technology has to exist for SACD-quality analog audio on an optical disc. I'm sure the technology also exists to extend such a disc to a longer shelf life before degradation than vinyl, current CDs, magnetic tapes, etc. (especially laserdiscs).
Thanks to the analog CD's very high fidelity, you'd be able to make 24/96 digital copies that sound even better than current CDs, but are NOT master-quality. Inherent "copy protection." If the RIAA thinks that the digital copies are too high-fidelity, well, then they can just tone down the analog quality a notch. There has to be a threshold that will make (almost) everyone happy, or in any case, many more than are happy now.
It seems to me that an analog CD would be the vinyl that's better than vinyl, and the CD that's better than the CD. Comments?
I completely agree with this, and I'm not even old either (20).
The first means of Internet access my family had was via this textmode online service called Delphi. This was before there were any local ISPs in my area, at least that I knew about, and on top of that, our 2400bps modem was insufficient for anything other than textmode.
Anyway, I was a moderate video game enthusiast, and one of the first websites I ever visited, at around 11:30pm, was www.nintendo.com. On Nintendo's site, which had to have been quite new at the time, there was a link to some kind of "About" page. Nothing special, except for the way it "hit" me. There was something about knowing that the characters on my screen had originated from Seattle thousands of miles away that just made me go "wow." On the page was some kind of random quip like, "the food at CafZ Mario is top notch," and it just made me stop and think: What did CafZ Mario look like? Would the lights be on at this time of night? What kind of food did they serve?
I suppose, in short, the web, or the WWW as it was usually called then, served as the ultimate antithesis to the relative isolation I was so used to. (Or something.)
I remember my first 28.8 modem, with my first PPP link to an ISP (this was right after SLIP fell out of favor, around them time when 8MB of RAM cost $300). My ISP gave me Mosaic to use as my web browser. Shortly thereafter, I went to download a new web browser... I think it was called "Netscape" or something. This was back when Netscape was considered really cool. Remember how the N used to animate differently than it does now? It was cooler then. Remember how... okay, nevermind.
I could go on even more about the first time I actually chatted with people over the Net (WOW!! REAL... PEOPLE!! They can hear me! They're TALKING to me! Ahhhh!"), and how now I don't even think twice about it. As could others, I'm sure.
Personally, if I were female, I think I would find that rather terrifying. But maybe I'm just out of touch. Wait, is this Slashdot? Then, no, I guess it's you who's out of touch.:)
Manufacturers SCARE you with "You MUST open this in a Clean Room, or you will have an unworking drive." Companies do that crap all the time.
Manufacturers don't say that. They put a seal across the lid that says "if you break this seal, you void your warranty." They don't say anything about damaging the drive. THEY KNOW that opening the drive, while possibly not causing immediate failure, most likely WILL increase its probability of failure dramatically, and they don't want to be liable for your stupidity. Why do you think hard drives are manufactured in clean rooms in the first place?
Personally, I think that's bullshit. If people knew they could take a platter with data they needed, and move it to a working drive for $200 (the cost of a new drive), they wouldn't spend THOUSANDS to have a company do it for them. Just check out the ads in the back of Computer Shopper.
Why do you think the manufacturers put the warranty seal on the drive? Drive manufacturers don't give half a shit about the numerous companies that restore/move data and advertise in the back of Computer Shopper, as you mentioned. Do you really think IBM and Seagate are doing back-room deals with Bob's Hard Drive Repair Shop in Tuscaloosa, AL in order to conspire against the consumer and screw him over?
How many of you who claim a clean room is needed, have ever TRIED taking apart a HD, and putting it back togerther? I have, and it worked fine.
Apparently you're one of the lucky ones. Many others posting here have tried the same thing, with a quite different outcome.
You people open TV's and VCR's and PC Power Supplies (I know you do, because I do), why havn't you opened a HD?
Note the difference. Look on the back of a TV or VCR, and it says "Do not open - No user serviceable parts inside." It doesn't say your warranty will be voided. Now compare that to the hard drive seal, which doesn't say anything about "user-serviceability" but DOES specify that your warranty will be voided. Why is your warranty not voided when you open your TV or VCR? Because opening it will not increase its probable failure rate. Why is the warning there, then? Because it contains parts that can kill you, and manufacturers don't want to see you get hurt, because they know that if you get hurt, you'll sue them.
I find it very interesting that all the posts in this thread that agree with yours have all been modded up, while those that don't have been modded down. Watch this one get modded to 0 by all the elite Slashdot case modders with neon-lit IDE RAID-0 arrays.
Is that all that's available for Mozilla in the theme department?
By the way, does anyone know what happened to the "old" Modern look? The one that used the shinier, darker blues, which got replaced sometime early in the 0.9.x series. Apparently I'm one of the six Mozilla users on the face of the earth who actually liked that theme better than the current Modern theme.
Does anyone ever test these things on something other than a beige box? Downloaded the disk image, started it up and no banana. If you're not going to test the 'release' on OS X, then here's a hint: Don't put a link to it on your site. It looks bad. Makes you look like a bunch of slackers. People who use Macs are quite used to not being supported by the latest software anyway, so not having the OS X port until someone actually runs it is much better than having a broken one.
Ahem, I just downloaded the OS X build of 0.9.8 an hour ago, and it hasn't crashed yet on my TiBook. It's a huge improvement over 0.9.7 in fact, at least in the user interface department (all Aqua widgets). What do you mean, "no banana?" Were you expecting a banana of some sort?
I agree that DRAM is certainly more reliable than hard disk storage, but I should point out that a computer's power-up "memory test" is more like a "memory count" than anything. The machine says it's "testing" the memory, but it's basically paging through it to make sure it's all there. It will miss all but the most severe memory problems.
I speak from experience, as the owner of several past flaky PCs that had bad RAM, and the owner of an SGI Indigo2, which had a SIMM that would get parity errors every now and then that the POST (or whatever it's called on SGIs) would fail to detect. If you really want to test the memory, you're going to have to run some real memory-test software, which typically takes a loooong time to run (hours or days). That's because a great number of memory errors happen only slightly too frequently to be called flukes.
Well said sir. Now prepare to be modded down by the hordes of jealous Linux users that have not yet awaken at this early 3:57pm CST hour on a Saturday afternoon.:)
But who's going to pay for help when they could just get help for free elsewhere? (Mailing lists, message boards, Usenet, friends...) Will the revenue brought in by support be enough to keep an entire software company afloat?
I don't know, perhaps this is off-topic, but I'll bet a lot of others are wondering the same thing: What would happen if, tomorrow, Linus got splattered by a bus and Alan Cox choked to death on his cheesesteak? Who/what would fill the power vacuum? Would the kernel fork? Are there "succession" plans already in place?
CHRP is long dead, and has been ever since Steve killed the Mac clones. POP has "been around" since IBM released an open spec for a reference POP motherboard a few years ago ('98 maybe?), but although a few small companies pledged to actually manufacture this board or one like it, none of them actually did. One of the companies was called Silicon Fruit, but I don't know what ever happened to them.
Motorola is dragging its ass wrt the PowerPC at the moment, in part because it sells far more embedded PPCs than PPCs designed to be put in Apple computers, and in part because it's currently going through some very bad times economically, laying off a lot of the staff that would have otherwise have been churning out vital chips like the G5s.
Keep in mind that IBM is another manufacturer of PPCs, and although Motorola has been sitting on its duff recently in advancing the PPC platform, IBM hasn't. AFAIK, Apple is currently locked in a contract with Motorola that prohibits them from obtaining their chips from IBM, but I know this is not indefinite and I'm not sure when the contract expires. If/when Apple starts using IBM's superior PPCs, their computers' speed lag, whether real or perceived or mythical, is sure to diminish.
It's not that Apple doesn't want to put higher-clocked and superior chips in their machines.
Somebody soon is going to produce a distro that will be "the crossover distro" that will propel Linux into the mainstream. When this happens, and the illusion of windows is shattered, then there will be an avalanche of development for Linux.
Someday soon the Amiga will rise again. When this happens, and the illusion of the PC is shattered, there will be an avalanche of development for the Amiga.
Games development will eventually flourish on Linux; its development is logical and organinc rather than driven by the need to release sucessive versions of boxed software on time. This will probably mean that the stability, refinement and quality of the of the games will be unprecedented.
Okay, more seriously, open-source game development will never flourish on any platform, if Apache, the Linux kernel, and Samba are at all similar (and I don't see why they wouldn't be). They're all great pieces of software, worked on by a bunch of extremely smart people, but they're all in a state of perpetual gestation, as they have been for years. They've been tweaked and rebuilt piece-by-piece over the years as different things have been demanded of them. People are still using the Linux kernel, but not many people are still playing Wolfenstein 3D, which is from a similar era.
PC game development is all about compensating for gamers' short attention spans and being ahead of the curve - making the best damned game possible as fast as you can make it. You can write an open-source 3D engine and develop a whole series of games that use it, but as evidenced by the likes of Tux Racer, it will probably take the open-source project no less than twice the time than it would take a commercial software company to do the same. Once the engine/game is finished, there's already something newer and better out from a closed-source company, and all the open-source project can do, with its head still spinning of course, is fix bugs and increase stability, maybe port to different platforms, etc. The thing is, people tire of even the best games after awhile. I'd reckon Wolf 3D is more stable and has fewer bugs than RtCW, but I know which one I'd rather play.
(And as a long-time Linux user, I'm not knocking open-source - I just feel that the open-source development model is much better for some things than for others.)
Games are the icing on the cake; got to turn the oven on first, decide on the flavour and mix the batter before we try and eat it.
By the time the open-source project has turned on the oven and decided upon the flavor, id or Sierra or whatever is licking the frosting off the beater.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter why people use OS X - the fact is that they use it, period. How are they somehow not using Unix just because they never see the command line? Is a Linux user who never sees the command line (okay, maybe this is a little implausible, but imagine a way user-friendly distribution) not using Linux?
Doesn't "cut it"? OS X is BSD, and its Unix component, Darwin, is not proprietary. It is just as open source as Linux. Tcsh and bash are there (well, bash is available separately) and you can compile most POSIX-compliant Unix software (INCLUDING X11 apps, as there is a rootless X11 server available for Quartz).
Linux and every other Unix kills OS X on the server - no question about it. But I think on the desktop you'll find a different story. The commonly-held belief is that Macs currently hold about 5% of the desktop market. Assuming half of these Macs run OS X, that's 2.5% of all desktop computers running OS X. I would be very, very surprised if Linux and all the non-OS X BSDs combined held half of this percentage in the overall, non-techie, non-geek market. Certainly inside such areas, the usage of Linux and other free Unixes is much higher, but Linux-using geeks really do make up only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer users. Believe it or not... I don't see how this is so hard to take, with all the soccer moms buying computers from Sears these days.
Irrelevant.
It's been available for 1/10 of the time, though. BSD was quite a bit more mature in the early '90s than Linux was, but come on - Linux has had more than ten years to play catch up. It's not like in 1990, BSD wasn't just a tiny shell of what it would become in OS X. Yes, there was Nextstep, but that was just a faint precursor to what OS X would become. To be fair though, you're right, OS X's foundation was partially already there, while Linux was built from scratch. I'm not sure how significant that is, though.
Alex
Is that true alpha-blended, updates-as-you-solid-drag-it-around transparency? Just a question. If it is, good job - if it's not, OS X has you beat.
Alex
All I can say is:
Linux is ready for the desktop! Linux is ready for the desktop!
I understand I will be modded down because I am not supporting the /. party line, but Windows's consistency is no better than Unix's?!? Now, come on, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I think someone's been spending too much time perfecting his Linus Torvalds impression here. There are two aspects of theming - visual and functional. You can change how an app looks while retaining the way it works completely. (E.g. I have three titlebar buttons, and rather than change what they do, I'll just change their color.) This is what most themeable Windows apps do.
Now, I agree that Windows is butt-ugly, but one thing it's not, as long as you stay away from buggy-as-hell out-of-date shareware pieces of arse, is inconsistent.
You stated that "to get highly consistent theming under Unix, pick either Gnome or KDE and stick with it." That's a pretty darned big limitation, isn't it? I suppose I could go write two apps that work and look the same, call them "consistent," and say I've just trumped MS. (Sorry. "M$.") Yippee me.
Alex
That's a really funny definition of "monopoly." By your logic, Sun has a monopoly on Solaris, SGI has a monopoly on IRIX, HP has a monopoly on HPUX, and IBM has a monopoly on AIX. Monopolies = bad, so Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM are all evil, and will be until they port their big iron OSes to your peecee. "I want 4Dwm! Open-source it, SGI! Give it to me free, or else yer nothin' but a dirty monopolist!"
Aqua is a work of art. Believe it or not /., some people in the world actually believe in intellectual property.
Apple is not predatory. It's too small to be predatory. Its attack of the clones happened only after a radical shift in management. I think the term there would be "non-suicidal," not "predatory."
How does Apple sell out its users? I've had a mac.com email address for the longest time (Mac owners get them for free - how evil of Apple to offer such nasty tie-ins!), even though I've rarely used it, and I've not gotten a SINGLE piece of spam to it. Ever.
As has been covered so many times here before, more expensive hardware != overpriced hardware. You get what you pay for. This is a myth that really needs to get shot down - I don't see why so many obviously smart geeks have such a terrible time understanding this. Some people in the world are actually not content with cheap-ass high-MHz beige commodity boxes built by soulless vendors like Dell, Gateway, etc. who just don't give a shit about their product and who WOULD sell their customers out to gain any edge they could in the cutthroat Wintel market.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but I am a Mac/Linux user and I will go to certain lengths to defend the company against the heaps of obvious bullshit piled upon it. I agree that a large and powerful Apple would not be a pretty sight. I would be most content with Apple at around 10-15% market share.
OS X is at least half open-source. Apple's hardware is more expensive than PC hardware, but more expensive != overpriced. You get what you pay for, and Apple these days is not having a hard time getting people to pay for their machines.
How is Apple's "commercial proprietary *nix" "dying out" when it has already catapulted far beyond Linux and all the BSDs combined on the desktop, in about 1/10 of the time it took for Linux to get where it's at now? How is it "dying out" when, that said, it's currently growing faster than any Unix ever has?
Do you think the only reason Apple, Sun, IBM, SGI, etc. maintain their own Unixes is because they haven't yet "woken up"?
Alex
How long do we have to wait for hot grits?
I went home this past winter break. We have a kind of half-finished basement, which is carpeted and heated but only one wall is drywall. It's kind of a "den" type room, or it could be seen as a spare bedroom. Anyway, there is a 13" TV in this room. A monophonic Magnavox, with the speaker pointed left out of the side of the enclosure, made around 1989. An absolute piece of shit by any standard.
My girlfriend and I stayed up late one night to watch one of those strange HBO late-night movies cuddled up in front of this little 13" TV, and it was probably the most enjoyable movie-viewing experience I've had in years. I've seen Hollywood epics on huge-screened surround sound systems, I've seen numerous films inside state-of-the-art theatres, but I must say, this little 13" television had them all beat.
I guess I don't expect most Slashdotters to understand that, but...
Alex
I'm sure a bright person like you wouldn't be so stupid as to comment on something you've never used before, so I'm sure you already know that once you start dragging a disk in OS X, the trash icon turns into an eject icon. I'm sure you also know that you can command-click (right-click) a disk icon and choose "eject" from the context menu.
I agree that dragging a disk to a trash is unusable. I mean, holy shit, how are people supposed to remember that? "Disk... trash. Trash?!? NO!!! Where is my emergency eject paperclip?!?" The mind boggles.
Alex
That makes sense, but what if the digital "rips" of the analog CDs were approximately equal in quality to normal CDs, while the analog CDs themselves were marketed as being "phenomenal, audiophile quality, whiz-bang, woo-woo, unbelievable, amazing, you have to have this!" and priced no more than digital CDs (or maybe even less than digital CDs in order to establish themselves in the marketplace. I mean, if the RIAA can sell the Backstreet Boys and Kenny G, they have to be able to sell anything.
I suppose you're right about the market being content with the quality of current CDs, but perhaps with enough clever marketing, the industry would be able to "raise the threshold" and increase people's expectations. Perhaps they could throw in other gimmicks like 5.1 analog channels or something.
My whole train of thought is trying to recreate the days when we all made cassette copies of music and the music industry didn't care because the copies were inferior to the originals.
Of course, this could be applied to DVDs as well - a 720p or 1080i analog picture and analog, CD-quality 5.1-channel sound on a 5 1/4" disc. We have the technology. Sure, the discs could be digitized, but when selling to a home theater crowd, it's all about quality, and the copies wouldn't be quite as good.
I just want to come up with an idea so simple and beautiful that it will change the world. Why is that so hard to do? :)
Alex
I've thought about this for a while, and was wondering if anyone would like to offer their thoughts.
Since what apparently makes content producers nervous is consumers' ability to make an infinite number of perfect copies of their products, why not develop an analog CD? Laserdiscs were/are analog, and looked great. The technology has to exist for SACD-quality analog audio on an optical disc. I'm sure the technology also exists to extend such a disc to a longer shelf life before degradation than vinyl, current CDs, magnetic tapes, etc. (especially laserdiscs).
Thanks to the analog CD's very high fidelity, you'd be able to make 24/96 digital copies that sound even better than current CDs, but are NOT master-quality. Inherent "copy protection." If the RIAA thinks that the digital copies are too high-fidelity, well, then they can just tone down the analog quality a notch. There has to be a threshold that will make (almost) everyone happy, or in any case, many more than are happy now.
It seems to me that an analog CD would be the vinyl that's better than vinyl, and the CD that's better than the CD. Comments?
Alex
I completely agree with this, and I'm not even old either (20).
The first means of Internet access my family had was via this textmode online service called Delphi. This was before there were any local ISPs in my area, at least that I knew about, and on top of that, our 2400bps modem was insufficient for anything other than textmode.
Anyway, I was a moderate video game enthusiast, and one of the first websites I ever visited, at around 11:30pm, was www.nintendo.com. On Nintendo's site, which had to have been quite new at the time, there was a link to some kind of "About" page. Nothing special, except for the way it "hit" me. There was something about knowing that the characters on my screen had originated from Seattle thousands of miles away that just made me go "wow." On the page was some kind of random quip like, "the food at CafZ Mario is top notch," and it just made me stop and think: What did CafZ Mario look like? Would the lights be on at this time of night? What kind of food did they serve?
I suppose, in short, the web, or the WWW as it was usually called then, served as the ultimate antithesis to the relative isolation I was so used to. (Or something.)
I remember my first 28.8 modem, with my first PPP link to an ISP (this was right after SLIP fell out of favor, around them time when 8MB of RAM cost $300). My ISP gave me Mosaic to use as my web browser. Shortly thereafter, I went to download a new web browser... I think it was called "Netscape" or something. This was back when Netscape was considered really cool. Remember how the N used to animate differently than it does now? It was cooler then. Remember how... okay, nevermind.
I could go on even more about the first time I actually chatted with people over the Net (WOW!! REAL... PEOPLE!! They can hear me! They're TALKING to me! Ahhhh!"), and how now I don't even think twice about it. As could others, I'm sure.
Alex
Personally, if I were female, I think I would find that rather terrifying. But maybe I'm just out of touch. Wait, is this Slashdot? Then, no, I guess it's you who's out of touch. :)
Wait a minute...
Okay, perhaps I'm only making it obvious that I failed college precalculus, but if A = B, and B = C... then A does equal C, right? :)
Alex (English major)
Manufacturers don't say that. They put a seal across the lid that says "if you break this seal, you void your warranty." They don't say anything about damaging the drive. THEY KNOW that opening the drive, while possibly not causing immediate failure, most likely WILL increase its probability of failure dramatically, and they don't want to be liable for your stupidity. Why do you think hard drives are manufactured in clean rooms in the first place?
Why do you think the manufacturers put the warranty seal on the drive? Drive manufacturers don't give half a shit about the numerous companies that restore/move data and advertise in the back of Computer Shopper, as you mentioned. Do you really think IBM and Seagate are doing back-room deals with Bob's Hard Drive Repair Shop in Tuscaloosa, AL in order to conspire against the consumer and screw him over?
Apparently you're one of the lucky ones. Many others posting here have tried the same thing, with a quite different outcome.
Note the difference. Look on the back of a TV or VCR, and it says "Do not open - No user serviceable parts inside." It doesn't say your warranty will be voided. Now compare that to the hard drive seal, which doesn't say anything about "user-serviceability" but DOES specify that your warranty will be voided. Why is your warranty not voided when you open your TV or VCR? Because opening it will not increase its probable failure rate. Why is the warning there, then? Because it contains parts that can kill you, and manufacturers don't want to see you get hurt, because they know that if you get hurt, you'll sue them.
I find it very interesting that all the posts in this thread that agree with yours have all been modded up, while those that don't have been modded down. Watch this one get modded to 0 by all the elite Slashdot case modders with neon-lit IDE RAID-0 arrays.
Alex
Is that all that's available for Mozilla in the theme department?
By the way, does anyone know what happened to the "old" Modern look? The one that used the shinier, darker blues, which got replaced sometime early in the 0.9.x series. Apparently I'm one of the six Mozilla users on the face of the earth who actually liked that theme better than the current Modern theme.
Ahem, I just downloaded the OS X build of 0.9.8 an hour ago, and it hasn't crashed yet on my TiBook. It's a huge improvement over 0.9.7 in fact, at least in the user interface department (all Aqua widgets). What do you mean, "no banana?" Were you expecting a banana of some sort?
The author is also trying to convey himself as an idiotic dork.
I agree that DRAM is certainly more reliable than hard disk storage, but I should point out that a computer's power-up "memory test" is more like a "memory count" than anything. The machine says it's "testing" the memory, but it's basically paging through it to make sure it's all there. It will miss all but the most severe memory problems.
I speak from experience, as the owner of several past flaky PCs that had bad RAM, and the owner of an SGI Indigo2, which had a SIMM that would get parity errors every now and then that the POST (or whatever it's called on SGIs) would fail to detect. If you really want to test the memory, you're going to have to run some real memory-test software, which typically takes a loooong time to run (hours or days). That's because a great number of memory errors happen only slightly too frequently to be called flukes.
Well said sir. Now prepare to be modded down by the hordes of jealous Linux users that have not yet awaken at this early 3:57pm CST hour on a Saturday afternoon. :)
But who's going to pay for help when they could just get help for free elsewhere? (Mailing lists, message boards, Usenet, friends...) Will the revenue brought in by support be enough to keep an entire software company afloat?
I don't know, perhaps this is off-topic, but I'll bet a lot of others are wondering the same thing: What would happen if, tomorrow, Linus got splattered by a bus and Alan Cox choked to death on his cheesesteak? Who/what would fill the power vacuum? Would the kernel fork? Are there "succession" plans already in place?
Maybe I'm just paranoid.
Alex
CHRP is long dead, and has been ever since Steve killed the Mac clones. POP has "been around" since IBM released an open spec for a reference POP motherboard a few years ago ('98 maybe?), but although a few small companies pledged to actually manufacture this board or one like it, none of them actually did. One of the companies was called Silicon Fruit, but I don't know what ever happened to them.
Alex
Motorola is dragging its ass wrt the PowerPC at the moment, in part because it sells far more embedded PPCs than PPCs designed to be put in Apple computers, and in part because it's currently going through some very bad times economically, laying off a lot of the staff that would have otherwise have been churning out vital chips like the G5s.
Keep in mind that IBM is another manufacturer of PPCs, and although Motorola has been sitting on its duff recently in advancing the PPC platform, IBM hasn't. AFAIK, Apple is currently locked in a contract with Motorola that prohibits them from obtaining their chips from IBM, but I know this is not indefinite and I'm not sure when the contract expires. If/when Apple starts using IBM's superior PPCs, their computers' speed lag, whether real or perceived or mythical, is sure to diminish.
It's not that Apple doesn't want to put higher-clocked and superior chips in their machines.
Someday soon the Amiga will rise again. When this happens, and the illusion of the PC is shattered, there will be an avalanche of development for the Amiga.
Okay, more seriously, open-source game development will never flourish on any platform, if Apache, the Linux kernel, and Samba are at all similar (and I don't see why they wouldn't be). They're all great pieces of software, worked on by a bunch of extremely smart people, but they're all in a state of perpetual gestation, as they have been for years. They've been tweaked and rebuilt piece-by-piece over the years as different things have been demanded of them. People are still using the Linux kernel, but not many people are still playing Wolfenstein 3D, which is from a similar era.
PC game development is all about compensating for gamers' short attention spans and being ahead of the curve - making the best damned game possible as fast as you can make it. You can write an open-source 3D engine and develop a whole series of games that use it, but as evidenced by the likes of Tux Racer, it will probably take the open-source project no less than twice the time than it would take a commercial software company to do the same. Once the engine/game is finished, there's already something newer and better out from a closed-source company, and all the open-source project can do, with its head still spinning of course, is fix bugs and increase stability, maybe port to different platforms, etc. The thing is, people tire of even the best games after awhile. I'd reckon Wolf 3D is more stable and has fewer bugs than RtCW, but I know which one I'd rather play.
(And as a long-time Linux user, I'm not knocking open-source - I just feel that the open-source development model is much better for some things than for others.)
By the time the open-source project has turned on the oven and decided upon the flavor, id or Sierra or whatever is licking the frosting off the beater.
Alex