I agree. Mac should ditch their hardware arm and concentrate on becoming a software company.
Any company selling stuff depends upon having any barriers to entry into their market as low as possible. For example Linux does better than Unix because of the huge number of x86 machines available as a potential market. x86 machines are cheap and numerous.
Mac's hardware arm relys upon its hardware being better to sell it at a premium. These are conflicting priorities which tend towards keeping Mac users in a minority, could be the death of Apple.
If I were Steve Jobs, I would stop making hardware, or maybe keep the designer PCs for posers as a sideline, and concentrate on selling MacOS X to the masses and their x86 machines, maybe concentrate on x86-64 or something. Overnight Apple could become a major threat to M$ in the desktop market. They have a big name, a good stable secure base product, and a reputation for easy to use software. Some proper competition for microsoft on their home ground could really force M$ to get their act together to make secure, reliable software.
Such a move could only be good news for the general public and mr Joe Newby computer user who would finally have a real choice to make, forcing him to decide whos Eulas he wanted to sign up to.
I used to work for a company who did IT contract work for a British Steel.
We had one vax system who job was something to do with stock tracking and dispatch that seemed to be having intermittent reboots. Every few days at around 5pm it would go off for 5 minutes and then restart as if nothing had happened. We spent days looking for bugs that might cause this to happen until eventually my boss decided to sit and watch it. So 5pm and the cleaner comes in and asks if its OK for her to clean up around my boss who said "fine". Moments later the server powers off and the screen goes blank, just as the cleaner starts her vacuum. Turned out she'd been seen the socket marked "Vax" and assumed that was where she was supposed to plug in her vacuum cleaner, unplugging our Vax when she started and plugging it back in when she finished.
The presence or not of Hawking radiation proves nothing about the nature of a black hole beyond its extreme gravitational field. Hawking Radiation is light emmited when a virtual photon/anti-photon pair emerges from the vacuum right on the event horizon. Usually the pair would mutually anhialate as if they had never existed, however, under extreme gravitational forces they are pulled apart, one into the black hole and one away from it. This is obviously going to be a very rare occurance which is why Hawking radiation is so weak. In fact, Hawking radiation theory states that the virtual anti-particle actually causes the black hole to loose mass, almost as if the black hole were evaporating away. In theory it is even possible for a black hole can attract no more fuel to completely evaporate to nothing simply from the hawking radiation.
The oldset football club in the world is Sheffield FC (nb FC is for Football Club not SC for soccer club) and was founded in 1857. We've been calling it football ever since then. Look at the names of the official orgs. The FA (football association), UEFA, (Union of European Football Associations), FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) etc. None of whom have "Soccer" in their names. I thank you.
I agree. I think that the cause of death is obvious. It was the severe anxiety of being away from the computer that caused a heart attack because he was afraid he might miss something important.
The article mentioned that the RIAA made this settlement out of court and that they were not forced as part of the settlement to admit any wrongdoing. Is it just me or is a settlement without an admission of guilt just a way to buy yourself out of trouble. It strikes me that the RIAA might be very happy to have avoided being found guilty of a crime by paying such a small price. Of course, without a judgement or an admission of guilt there is nothing to prevent the RIAA to start up price fixing again at a later date. To me it stinks of what could almost be called bribery.
I disagree. ActiveX/COM is a fantastic technology for programming once you get your head around it. A colleague of mine does OSS in his spare time and developed the SOAP implementation for TCL, and many a time he has moaned about the lack of a decent Linux implementation of COM. There is no good reason why there is no decent Linux implementation, beyond the fact that there is such a huge body of work to do to make it happen. This is the difference between a professional, commercial software company with thousands of developers, like M$, and the typical Linux developer who works in a loosely connected collection of individual part time Linux developers. It demonstrates almost perfectly the shortcomings of OSS.
I wasn't trying to have a logical argument beyond making the point that methane on the sea bed has NOTHING to do with the big bang which is something any 15 year old should be able to tell you.
The name calling came from the pathetic attempt to insult my.sig with a badly constructed sentence.
It is art because it provokes thought and discussion. How can you think of the poor PC counting down to, and being the cause of its own destruction, and not feel a mixture of an childlike glee at watching something being crushed for no reason, and despair as you become away of the futility of it all, and how it is a metaphor for life. In a way, we are all like the server, counting down the days until we a crushed by the passing of time. The only difference is we have a choice to do something a little more important and have the opportunity to have an immortal effect on the world before we die, as opposed to simply count down to impending doom, and tell everyone when it is.
There is of course the extremely voyeuristic temptation to be connected to the web page when the crusher comes down, but that's just sick.
How about this then. In the UK we get a minimum of 4 weeks paid holiday a year. In Germany you'd get 6. In the US you're lucky to get 2. I know where I'd rather live.
Besides, growth and wealth are not the only measure of a country's success. How about child poverty, access to healthcare, equality of opportunity, wage gap between the richest and poorest, protection of citizens wellbeing against the excesses of corporations. What about happiness? As a nation the USA may be very wealthy, but you have serious problems regarding poverty, education, pollution, economic racial segregation. You are the only country in history to make corruption a legal career choice, which is why your constitution has become the plaything of Mickey Mouse and the RIAA. Your politicians live on bribes and yet you still elect them. You may be rich, but I'd rather be poor than stupid.
The core will remain the same, and that is what takes the vast majority of the design effort. Bolting on a new memory controller should be an almost trivial task in comparison. Anyway, the performance boost from having the memory controller on chip is going to outway almost any evolutionary progress in RAM speed that happens between now and the next iteration of the CPU.
But in order to have a strong voice we must speak with one voice. One issue in particular comes to mind. Current political thinking is towards curtailing our freedom to share any information outside of a DRM enviroment. Simply emailing your congressman or whatever won't do anything as you may be a lone voice speaking about something he doesn't understand. A political body such as a trade union can have a leader who can stand up and and say "I represent half a million of the finest minds in the country. Listen to what I have to say" A voice like that cannot be ignored, and more importantly it gives a focus to geek activism for the media to identify and promote. TV and newspaper stories swing public opinion more than a few emails to friends, and public opinion can be manipulated with phrases like "freedom of speach" and "police state".
OK the slashdot crowd are very intelligent but don't let us be crippled by it. We don't need to be told what to do, we just need to vote on issues that affect us all so that some kind of consensus can be found and our view expressed loudly and clearly.
The EFF does a good job fighting against existing law, but in reality it is just a bunch of lawyers with geek rights at heart. It doesn't represent a democraticly expressed opinion of geekdom as a whole.
Given the job of the average/.er I guess we must face the possibility that there are those among us or our peers who are responsible for actually writing DRM code and developing the hardware and software that make DRM a possibilty. These people must be shown the error of their ways and stopped. If the message is spread wide throughout geekdom perhaps the RIAA and MPAA and their cronies will be unable to find anyone willing to develop such a system.
What we need is a union of geeks. Then we as a community could speak with a single voice and get something done. Hell, we're a powerful group if only we would realise. How much of the modern world relies upon the IT industry? what if we simply downed keyboards and refused to fix the telecoms networks, production systems and desktop PC's of the world? What would happen if all the sysadmins shut down their servers and went home. With a union, those of us whos jobs are not vital to the smooth running of the country could support those of us who are.
Governments spread FUD about the possibility of terrorists bringing down the internet or stopping the electronic flow of money around the world. We know that this is not possible for a terrorist organisation, but it is possible for a geeks union, and not by hacking. We could bring the world to its knees by simply not doing our jobs. I think someone might start to take note of our grievences then.
If I, as a UK national was hacked by the FBI I would expect the agents in question to be charged under UK law. Of course the difference in this case is that an extridition treaty exists between the US and the UK and so the agents should be extradited. I on the other hand probably wouldn't be extradited because the evidence to my crime obtained by the FBI would not be admissable in a UK court having been obtained without a warrent. btw IANAL.
If you're playing in the international arena, with foreign allies, and against foreign adversaries then a world court is very much "a jury of your peers" or does the US feel that its citizens are morally, socially or genetically superior to the other members of the UN and the security council?
Unless you are someones legal guardian you have no legal obligation to prevent them committing a crime. If I see a man with a knife about to stab someone, I have no legal obligation to try and stop them under UK law, so long as I dont actively assist them. I may have a moral obligation, but thats a matter for me and my own sense of self preservation.
First, the idea that the whole mass of the "universe" was contained in a microdot just at the Big Bang isn't really right (depending on what you mean by "universe"). The whole mass of today's observable universe, yes. But if you take the cosmological models at face value, the universe is probably infinite in extent, and always was (at least as far back as you can go without worrying about unknown theories of quantum gravity).
Is that really correct? I was under the impression that the entire universe actually WAS tiny. As I understand it, the 3 spatial dimensions we all know and love were all wrapped up in a tiny bubble in higher dimensional space.
This is a result of general relativiy where we talk about the curvature of space-time as a result of mass. With an almost infinite mass density you would have an almost infinite curvature of space-time, and so the entire universe existed inside a small bubble of space.
I'm sure that was what my cosmology lecturers taught me unless I was too drunk to remember correctly.
Does anyone remember the episode of The Outer Limits where the mad scientist invected himself with nanobots designed to make him better? First of all they cured his blindness but then they decided that he'd be more effective with gills and all kinds of other funky mutations.
Call me crazy, but I'll leave the gills to the fish.
What about that gauss gun that guy was building from disposable cameras. A couple of those and you really are getting towards a nice battlemech. Perhaps some particularly bored and suicidal slashdotters could be persuaded to arm some of these up to the teeth and fight it out in a battle to the death. I for one would quite like to see CowboyNeal get a bolt of white hot plasma up his ass.
But you already have a minimum wage, so what's the problem. Any minimum wage rise that cost jobs is a good thing, because it will force people to look for more productive and more valuable work. Any job that pays too little for a person to live on with a decent level of self-respect isn't a job worth having in your economy. If it turns out to be a job that is vital to the well being of the country such as essential infrastructure, then it deserves to be better paid and higher valued. Minimum wage protects unskilled labour from the pressures of a free market that does not value work done for the common good. M$ can get away with charging lots of money for its OS's because people perceive that it is important to have them, and there are direct productivity bonus's which come from having easy to use software. Who could say that about having clean streets or cheap tasty food?
When it comes down to it, you'll only pay what you think you can get away with. If the value of clean streets or decent food isn't obvious to you then you always feel you're paying too much. If you think your paying too much then you'll look for something cheaper, and with large numbers of people willing to work for the crumbs that fall from the rich mans table, there will always be a downward pressure on low wages.
Worldwide free trade is meaningless when applied to much of the work done by those on a minimum wage. What is the point of having someone in Africa willing to sweep the streets of New York for 10c per hour? Only when a full range of economic activity can be found in all cities, in all countries of the world, can a balanced market be claimed to exist, and that's not going to happen while a few US based multinationals own all the patents and all the copyrights that prevent companies in the third world developing a fair economy. Claiming that tearing down world trade barriers is a panacea is like saying that the title of the fastest man in the world should be decided on a single race, but where 1 or 2 of the runners get to start at half distance, and while they're there, they get to put up barriers and hurdles the everyone else has to jump over first. Until everyone can start the race equally there is no fair race, and that is the point of trade regulation and minimum wages.
In fighting against a fair minimum wage you are seeking to perpetuate the oppression of the poorly educated, unskilled workforce, just like the land owning Lords and Knights of hundreds of years ago in Britain. They lived lives of luxury and fought endless wars by taxing the poor for everything they had. From those times we have the legend of a man who would steal from the rich and give to the poor. Consider this, Robin Hood, a man whose deeds have been romanticised in countless Hollywood films and whose story continues to be loved, would today be considered a dangerous left wing terrorist, and would have just as much reason to operate in 21st centaury USA as in Britain in middle ages.
I use RMJ's for ripping my CD's because I find it quicker and more reliable than any other free (as in beer) encoder. What I really want to be able to do is then play them through winamp because real one stinks as playback software. Can we expect RMJ plugins for other players?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Mac should ditch their hardware arm and concentrate on becoming a software company.
Any company selling stuff depends upon having any barriers to entry into their market as low as possible. For example Linux does better than Unix because of the huge number of x86 machines available as a potential market. x86 machines are cheap and numerous.
Mac's hardware arm relys upon its hardware being better to sell it at a premium. These are conflicting priorities which tend towards keeping Mac users in a minority, could be the death of Apple.
If I were Steve Jobs, I would stop making hardware, or maybe keep the designer PCs for posers as a sideline, and concentrate on selling MacOS X to the masses and their x86 machines, maybe concentrate on x86-64 or something. Overnight Apple could become a major threat to M$ in the desktop market. They have a big name, a good stable secure base product, and a reputation for easy to use software. Some proper competition for microsoft on their home ground could really force M$ to get their act together to make secure, reliable software.
Such a move could only be good news for the general public and mr Joe Newby computer user who would finally have a real choice to make, forcing him to decide whos Eulas he wanted to sign up to.
Can I burn Celine Dion for 99c? A nice big Bonfire.
I used to work for a company who did IT contract work for a British Steel.
We had one vax system who job was something to do with stock tracking and dispatch that seemed to be having intermittent reboots. Every few days at around 5pm it would go off for 5 minutes and then restart as if nothing had happened. We spent days looking for bugs that might cause this to happen until eventually my boss decided to sit and watch it. So 5pm and the cleaner comes in and asks if its OK for her to clean up around my boss who said "fine". Moments later the server powers off and the screen goes blank, just as the cleaner starts her vacuum. Turned out she'd been seen the socket marked "Vax" and assumed that was where she was supposed to plug in her vacuum cleaner, unplugging our Vax when she started and plugging it back in when she finished.
The presence or not of Hawking radiation proves nothing about the nature of a black hole beyond its extreme gravitational field. Hawking Radiation is light emmited when a virtual photon/anti-photon pair emerges from the vacuum right on the event horizon. Usually the pair would mutually anhialate as if they had never existed, however, under extreme gravitational forces they are pulled apart, one into the black hole and one away from it. This is obviously going to be a very rare occurance which is why Hawking radiation is so weak. In fact, Hawking radiation theory states that the virtual anti-particle actually causes the black hole to loose mass, almost as if the black hole were evaporating away. In theory it is even possible for a black hole can attract no more fuel to completely evaporate to nothing simply from the hawking radiation.
Maybe the word is british, frankly I don't care.
The oldset football club in the world is Sheffield FC (nb FC is for Football Club not SC for soccer club) and was founded in 1857. We've been calling it football ever since then. Look at the names of the official orgs. The FA (football association), UEFA, (Union of European Football Associations), FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) etc. None of whom have "Soccer" in their names. I thank you.
I agree. I think that the cause of death is obvious. It was the severe anxiety of being away from the computer that caused a heart attack because he was afraid he might miss something important.
The article mentioned that the RIAA made this settlement out of court and that they were not forced as part of the settlement to admit any wrongdoing. Is it just me or is a settlement without an admission of guilt just a way to buy yourself out of trouble. It strikes me that the RIAA might be very happy to have avoided being found guilty of a crime by paying such a small price. Of course, without a judgement or an admission of guilt there is nothing to prevent the RIAA to start up price fixing again at a later date. To me it stinks of what could almost be called bribery.
I disagree. ActiveX/COM is a fantastic technology for programming once you get your head around it. A colleague of mine does OSS in his spare time and developed the SOAP implementation for TCL, and many a time he has moaned about the lack of a decent Linux implementation of COM. There is no good reason why there is no decent Linux implementation, beyond the fact that there is such a huge body of work to do to make it happen. This is the difference between a professional, commercial software company with thousands of developers, like M$, and the typical Linux developer who works in a loosely connected collection of individual part time Linux developers. It demonstrates almost perfectly the shortcomings of OSS.
I wasn't trying to have a logical argument beyond making the point that methane on the sea bed has NOTHING to do with the big bang which is something any 15 year old should be able to tell you.
.sig with a badly constructed sentence.
The name calling came from the pathetic attempt to insult my
Don't you mean "you're", a contraction of "You Are"? Besides, your comment was a statement, not a question so why the question mark? Dumbass!!
Dumbass!!! there was no Earth at the Big Bang. There wasn't even any methane. Or probably even surface of anything.
It is art because it provokes thought and discussion. How can you think of the poor PC counting down to, and being the cause of its own destruction, and not feel a mixture of an childlike glee at watching something being crushed for no reason, and despair as you become away of the futility of it all, and how it is a metaphor for life. In a way, we are all like the server, counting down the days until we a crushed by the passing of time. The only difference is we have a choice to do something a little more important and have the opportunity to have an immortal effect on the world before we die, as opposed to simply count down to impending doom, and tell everyone when it is.
There is of course the extremely voyeuristic temptation to be connected to the web page when the crusher comes down, but that's just sick.
INJURY DATA Total Fatal: 2
# Crew: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
# Pass: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
Great, so not only are these poor guys dead, but the FAA investigators are calling them overweight too.
It a poor show when corpses are told to go on a diet.
How about this then. In the UK we get a minimum of 4 weeks paid holiday a year. In Germany you'd get 6. In the US you're lucky to get 2. I know where I'd rather live.
Besides, growth and wealth are not the only measure of a country's success. How about child poverty, access to healthcare, equality of opportunity, wage gap between the richest and poorest, protection of citizens wellbeing against the excesses of corporations. What about happiness? As a nation the USA may be very wealthy, but you have serious problems regarding poverty, education, pollution, economic racial segregation. You are the only country in history to make corruption a legal career choice, which is why your constitution has become the plaything of Mickey Mouse and the RIAA. Your politicians live on bribes and yet you still elect them. You may be rich, but I'd rather be poor than stupid.
The core will remain the same, and that is what takes the vast majority of the design effort. Bolting on a new memory controller should be an almost trivial task in comparison. Anyway, the performance boost from having the memory controller on chip is going to outway almost any evolutionary progress in RAM speed that happens between now and the next iteration of the CPU.
But in order to have a strong voice we must speak with one voice. One issue in particular comes to mind. Current political thinking is towards curtailing our freedom to share any information outside of a DRM enviroment. Simply emailing your congressman or whatever won't do anything as you may be a lone voice speaking about something he doesn't understand. A political body such as a trade union can have a leader who can stand up and and say "I represent half a million of the finest minds in the country. Listen to what I have to say" A voice like that cannot be ignored, and more importantly it gives a focus to geek activism for the media to identify and promote. TV and newspaper stories swing public opinion more than a few emails to friends, and public opinion can be manipulated with phrases like "freedom of speach" and "police state".
OK the slashdot crowd are very intelligent but don't let us be crippled by it. We don't need to be told what to do, we just need to vote on issues that affect us all so that some kind of consensus can be found and our view expressed loudly and clearly.
The EFF does a good job fighting against existing law, but in reality it is just a bunch of lawyers with geek rights at heart. It doesn't represent a democraticly expressed opinion of geekdom as a whole.
Given the job of the average /.er I guess we must face the possibility that there are those among us or our peers who are responsible for actually writing DRM code and developing the hardware and software that make DRM a possibilty. These people must be shown the error of their ways and stopped. If the message is spread wide throughout geekdom perhaps the RIAA and MPAA and their cronies will be unable to find anyone willing to develop such a system.
What we need is a union of geeks. Then we as a community could speak with a single voice and get something done. Hell, we're a powerful group if only we would realise. How much of the modern world relies upon the IT industry? what if we simply downed keyboards and refused to fix the telecoms networks, production systems and desktop PC's of the world? What would happen if all the sysadmins shut down their servers and went home. With a union, those of us whos jobs are not vital to the smooth running of the country could support those of us who are.
Governments spread FUD about the possibility of terrorists bringing down the internet or stopping the electronic flow of money around the world. We know that this is not possible for a terrorist organisation, but it is possible for a geeks union, and not by hacking. We could bring the world to its knees by simply not doing our jobs. I think someone might start to take note of our grievences then.
If I, as a UK national was hacked by the FBI I would expect the agents in question to be charged under UK law. Of course the difference in this case is that an extridition treaty exists between the US and the UK and so the agents should be extradited. I on the other hand probably wouldn't be extradited because the evidence to my crime obtained by the FBI would not be admissable in a UK court having been obtained without a warrent. btw IANAL.
If you're playing in the international arena, with foreign allies, and against foreign adversaries then a world court is very much "a jury of your peers" or does the US feel that its citizens are morally, socially or genetically superior to the other members of the UN and the security council?
I disagree.
Unless you are someones legal guardian you have no legal obligation to prevent them committing a crime. If I see a man with a knife about to stab someone, I have no legal obligation to try and stop them under UK law, so long as I dont actively assist them. I may have a moral obligation, but thats a matter for me and my own sense of self preservation.
Is that really correct? I was under the impression that the entire universe actually WAS tiny. As I understand it, the 3 spatial dimensions we all know and love were all wrapped up in a tiny bubble in higher dimensional space.
This is a result of general relativiy where we talk about the curvature of space-time as a result of mass. With an almost infinite mass density you would have an almost infinite curvature of space-time, and so the entire universe existed inside a small bubble of space.
I'm sure that was what my cosmology lecturers taught me unless I was too drunk to remember correctly.
Does anyone remember the episode of The Outer Limits where the mad scientist invected himself with nanobots designed to make him better? First of all they cured his blindness but then they decided that he'd be more effective with gills and all kinds of other funky mutations.
Call me crazy, but I'll leave the gills to the fish.
What about that gauss gun that guy was building from disposable cameras. A couple of those and you really are getting towards a nice battlemech. Perhaps some particularly bored and suicidal slashdotters could be persuaded to arm some of these up to the teeth and fight it out in a battle to the death. I for one would quite like to see CowboyNeal get a bolt of white hot plasma up his ass.
But you already have a minimum wage, so what's the problem. Any minimum wage rise that cost jobs is a good thing, because it will force people to look for more productive and more valuable work. Any job that pays too little for a person to live on with a decent level of self-respect isn't a job worth having in your economy. If it turns out to be a job that is vital to the well being of the country such as essential infrastructure, then it deserves to be better paid and higher valued. Minimum wage protects unskilled labour from the pressures of a free market that does not value work done for the common good. M$ can get away with charging lots of money for its OS's because people perceive that it is important to have them, and there are direct productivity bonus's which come from having easy to use software. Who could say that about having clean streets or cheap tasty food?
When it comes down to it, you'll only pay what you think you can get away with. If the value of clean streets or decent food isn't obvious to you then you always feel you're paying too much. If you think your paying too much then you'll look for something cheaper, and with large numbers of people willing to work for the crumbs that fall from the rich mans table, there will always be a downward pressure on low wages.
Worldwide free trade is meaningless when applied to much of the work done by those on a minimum wage. What is the point of having someone in Africa willing to sweep the streets of New York for 10c per hour? Only when a full range of economic activity can be found in all cities, in all countries of the world, can a balanced market be claimed to exist, and that's not going to happen while a few US based multinationals own all the patents and all the copyrights that prevent companies in the third world developing a fair economy. Claiming that tearing down world trade barriers is a panacea is like saying that the title of the fastest man in the world should be decided on a single race, but where 1 or 2 of the runners get to start at half distance, and while they're there, they get to put up barriers and hurdles the everyone else has to jump over first. Until everyone can start the race equally there is no fair race, and that is the point of trade regulation and minimum wages.
In fighting against a fair minimum wage you are seeking to perpetuate the oppression of the poorly educated, unskilled workforce, just like the land owning Lords and Knights of hundreds of years ago in Britain. They lived lives of luxury and fought endless wars by taxing the poor for everything they had. From those times we have the legend of a man who would steal from the rich and give to the poor. Consider this, Robin Hood, a man whose deeds have been romanticised in countless Hollywood films and whose story continues to be loved, would today be considered a dangerous left wing terrorist, and would have just as much reason to operate in 21st centaury USA as in Britain in middle ages.
I use RMJ's for ripping my CD's because I find it quicker and more reliable than any other free (as in beer) encoder. What I really want to be able to do is then play them through winamp because real one stinks as playback software. Can we expect RMJ plugins for other players?