Please stop putting cheap ass wifi chips (which only support WEP) in consumer electronics. I really shouldn't have to leave my network open to all comers to use your shit.
$200-$300 will buy you a mid range current generation video card. It won't buy you anything approaching a "hardcore" card. Your $35 ebay card cost a lot more when it was new, and current. You can get decent older generation cards if you look, but you have to remember their driver development was subsidized by their release pricing.
Yes, any system you pay $273 for new is shit. The manufacturer isn't going to bother writing any more than the absolute bare minimum drivers it has to to sell it (don't count on any updates), and certainly no one is going to go out of their way to write free drivers for them.
If you pay for uncracked DRM media, you're encouraging this sort of bullshit. Just pirate it until they either go out of business or stop being assholes.
You should expect to pay around that just for a video card to play games on. *All* PC's sold these days have "3D support", but that doesn't mean they're powerful enough for anything more than web browsing.
You don't get to bitch when it doesn't work very well. You get what you pay for. Those $200 ultra cheap systems aren't intended for gaming, regardless of OS.
That's the pointy end of the risk you keep going on about accepting. You can't have it both ways; either you've accepted and accounted that possibility, or you're no more exposing yourself to risk than you claim your employees are.
Businesses don't exist outside of persons. They produce nothing in and of themselves, though they are quite often a drain on society. People, by and large, are quite valuable to governments. Most live productive lives, contribute to their communities, and (more importantly to their government) reliably pay their taxes.
What governments are leery to discourage is investment, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
USB host really isn't that tough. My mp3 player can act as one, and will snarf photos over a standard camera USB interface (mtp I assume, but I've never tried it).
Firewire does have many advantages over USB. That isn't in question. Most of them are rather irrelevant, but not all of them. It probably will hang on in esoteric or high end niches, lots of stupid and irrelevant standards do (hello, minidisc).
This discussion was actually about portable media.
This isn't an "anti-Mac" thing. I don't really care one way or another about Apple or it's products. Is it "anti-Mac" to ignore them?
Portability is a prerequisite to ease of use and reliability. It's pretty hard to use an interface that doesn't exist on the systems you want to use.
I don't imagine you'll find many netcafes that won't allow you to burn cds/dvds of data you bring in. You'll have to have a way to get that data on their systems though, and that isn't firewire.
Why would you ever need to stream live footage from a camcorder? I think you've stepped way outside reasonable use cases.
I've never seen a mac netcafe, and I seriously doubt they exist in any real numbers. Macs are still very much a niche product purchased largely by those with more money than sense.
Lots of people pass around things like cameras expecting them to "just work". That doesn't happen with firewire.
You're running back into the portability argument. What are you going to do with that camera when you're on vacation and need to use some netcafe with windows 98 boxen?
I think you've granted that for portable media, USB is king, which was my original point.
For non portable (or minimally portable) external drives, there are other superior interfaces to firewire. If multiple people need to access the data, NAS on a gigabit lan does the job better. If large amounts of data need to be moved around a few discrete locations, eSATA is superior.
USB alone may not have made firewire redundant, but it is redundant none the less. I fail to see any real use cases were there isn't a better solution.
That's how we choose standards, for the most part.
If you only intend to plug the drive into your own systems, there's scant reason for them to be external. You might as well throw them inside the case. If you're moving around too much data to be practical over a network (or over long distances) and you control both endpoints, eSATA is probably better.
If you need portability, you need an interface that you can count on being everywhere. That's not firewire.
Slashdot Mirror
So how do you add people if they can't go buy the player's handbook for the edition you play?
I knew there'd be these kind of shenanigans when the license was sold to the "Magik: Buy More Stuff" people.
You may as well leave the network open. It's trivial to recover a WEP key.
Please stop putting cheap ass wifi chips (which only support WEP) in consumer electronics. I really shouldn't have to leave my network open to all comers to use your shit.
That's pretty obvious in politics (though it's actually the balls).
They'll have to give everything to both. If it's not available at the preferred merchant, people will just pirate it.
Because Apple won't licenses for it, it isn't even a consideration.
I'd assumed the streaming was a separate offering.
Lots of times dropping out is not the way to accomplish change.
But sometimes it is. You're still funding the MAFIAA through Netflix. Just use thepiratebay.com and don't fund them at all.
$200-$300 will buy you a mid range current generation video card. It won't buy you anything approaching a "hardcore" card. Your $35 ebay card cost a lot more when it was new, and current. You can get decent older generation cards if you look, but you have to remember their driver development was subsidized by their release pricing.
Yes, any system you pay $273 for new is shit. The manufacturer isn't going to bother writing any more than the absolute bare minimum drivers it has to to sell it (don't count on any updates), and certainly no one is going to go out of their way to write free drivers for them.
Again, you get what you pay for.
I didn't think I'd need to spell that out.
If you pay for uncracked DRM media, you're encouraging this sort of bullshit. Just pirate it until they either go out of business or stop being assholes.
They should offer reasonable terms, and put their foot down on DRM. There are plenty of indy film makers who'd be happy with that arrangement.
Starve the bastards out until they play fair.
You should expect to pay around that just for a video card to play games on. *All* PC's sold these days have "3D support", but that doesn't mean they're powerful enough for anything more than web browsing.
If you're not allowed to use the tools until you are?
You don't get to bitch when it doesn't work very well. You get what you pay for. Those $200 ultra cheap systems aren't intended for gaming, regardless of OS.
Here's the ancestor.
Would you really want to find a firewire only external drive 15 years from now?
That's the pointy end of the risk you keep going on about accepting. You can't have it both ways; either you've accepted and accounted that possibility, or you're no more exposing yourself to risk than you claim your employees are.
Businesses don't exist outside of persons. They produce nothing in and of themselves, though they are quite often a drain on society. People, by and large, are quite valuable to governments. Most live productive lives, contribute to their communities, and (more importantly to their government) reliably pay their taxes.
What governments are leery to discourage is investment, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
Your clients only bring it up because they know you can do something about it. If your hands were tied, they wouldn't bother.
All that link leads to is a registration page.
USB host really isn't that tough. My mp3 player can act as one, and will snarf photos over a standard camera USB interface (mtp I assume, but I've never tried it).
Firewire does have many advantages over USB. That isn't in question. Most of them are rather
irrelevant, but not all of them. It probably will hang on in esoteric or high end niches, lots of stupid and irrelevant standards do (hello, minidisc).
This discussion was actually about portable media.
This isn't an "anti-Mac" thing. I don't really care one way or another about Apple or it's products. Is it "anti-Mac" to ignore them?
Portability is a prerequisite to ease of use and reliability. It's pretty hard to use an interface that doesn't exist on the systems you want to use.
I don't imagine you'll find many netcafes that won't allow you to burn cds/dvds of data you bring in. You'll have to have a way to get that data on their systems though, and that isn't firewire.
Why would you ever need to stream live footage from a camcorder? I think you've stepped way outside reasonable use cases.
I've never seen a mac netcafe, and I seriously doubt they exist in any real numbers. Macs are still very much a niche product purchased largely by those with more money than sense.
Lots of people pass around things like cameras expecting them to "just work". That doesn't happen with firewire.
You're running back into the portability argument. What are you going to do with that camera when you're on vacation and need to use some netcafe with windows 98 boxen?
I know very well what it is.
For all reasonable applications, one of NAS, USB or eSATA is superior to firewire.
I think you've granted that for portable media, USB is king, which was my original point.
For non portable (or minimally portable) external drives, there are other superior interfaces to firewire. If multiple people need to access the data, NAS on a gigabit lan does the job better. If large amounts of data need to be moved around a few discrete locations, eSATA is superior.
USB alone may not have made firewire redundant, but it is redundant none the less. I fail to see any real use cases were there isn't a better solution.
That's how we choose standards, for the most part.
If you only intend to plug the drive into your own systems, there's scant reason for them to be external. You might as well throw them inside the case. If you're moving around too much data to be practical over a network (or over long distances) and you control both endpoints, eSATA is probably better.
If you need portability, you need an interface that you can count on being everywhere. That's not firewire.
You'll find you're incorrect.