By even the most cautious estimates, there are more Linux users than Mac users.
Do you have any facts to back this up? Remember that "Market Share" is actually % of annual sales. A study quoted here shows that macs are replaced less frequently than PCs, leading to lower yearly sales. This does not mean that there are fewer mac users, it means that there were fewer macs replaced.
I use a 64mb card up in a few hours and I have filled half of my 1G microdrive in a day.
At what resolution? The 16mb storage on this thing holds 52 pictures. No matter what mode you put it in, it takes 640x480 shots. The 1.3megapixel mode just blows up the 640x480 image when you retrieve it. It still stores it at 640x480.
Yor post also assumes that nobody involved with the project has a recent Mac or Final Cut Pro. While you might not have one, they are very popular among artists.
I'm making two points here. First, a Macintosh based editing system costs less than you think and does more than systems costing ten times as much. Second, if you are working on any kind of project, be it a movie or a mural, you only buy the things that you don't have. You wouldn't expect a house painter to buy a new ladder every time a job comes along (asuming the old one is good enough to do the job) would you?
You'll take one WITH commercials -- and like it.
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think that it would be more likely that anything you aren't licensed to see would be replaced by commercials. You go to your friend's house to watch a movie on her big screen TV and all you see is a series of Pepsi commercials.
In version 2.0 it selects the advertisements based on your thought patterns. If you think about sex a lot, you see lots of ads featuring Trojan Man.
Version 3 would take a different approach. It would alter your thought patterns to fit the available commercials. You don't think about homeowner's insurance? Now you do.
I would be in favor of this system. It would be so costly to develop that the ??AA would go bankrupt before realizing that there is no technical solution for "DRM."
I use "DRM" in quotes because it is more like DRI: Digital Rights Infringement. All of this DRM crap infringes on my digital rights.
Won't they just have a "re-tension" option on the players?
The problems are streching, physical contact, and frequency of use.
If the reader expects each bit to be X distance from the next, but the tape streches, then the read head will read some other magnetic data from the extended area. The same goes for wrinkling and bending.
Tapes are more likely to sustain this kind of wear since the process of using them involves physical contact. Take a look into an open VCR as you insert a tape. Those metal rods can damage your tape. They pull and flex the tape. The head can also damage the tape. The motors can damage the tape if they pull to hard an the tape reaches its end, resulting in a harsh jerk.
The reason that these problems are less likely to plague backup tapes is because of frequency of use:
How often do you insert each computer tape? Remember that the act of inserting the casette into a VCR causes physical contact with the actual tape.
How frequently do you use the tape at all? Don't you just write to it in most cases? Don't you only read from it infrequently and usually only once? When you re-write the tape, it can make up for some streching (within certain limits).
More importantly, how often do you "pause" a data tape? Pausing streches tape.
How often do you run the tape at high speed while the read head is in contact with it? That is exactly what happens when you scan tapes by pushing ff or rw in play mode. That is even more damaging to the tapes than just playing them.
Sure error correcting exists, but my point is that tape is more error-prone than other forms of storage since the simple act of reading or writing the data can degrade it.
This isn't VHS where it's stored in an analog format that degrades
Tape streaches. It flexes. It gets worn. It gets demagnetized. It tears.
The problem with VHS degradation over time has nothing to do with the data format on the tape. The problem is with the medium itself: flexible magnetic storage.
It's great if you aren't going to use it often, but if it keeps getting wound and unwound, wrapped around rollers, and pressed against a read head, it will wear out.
Someone was able to bring the ship to a complete halt because of user error. Do we really want the same sort of thing to happen in ATC?
That was exactly my point. The system should not crash - ever. I don't care why it crashed. If it's user error then the system needs to be designed so that user error cannot bring it down.
Management can blame the ATC workers all they want if the system crashes, but the fact is that the system is down and the planes are still in the air and need ATC.
It lists a few problems, but doesn't say if it could be the result of user error. We all know how users always say the system crashed when it's really their mistake
Does it matter? I know I wouldn't care why the system crashed if I was in the plane. I'd just want to get home alive. If the system crashes because of user error, then that is a serious flaw.
That was in 1993 -- 6th grade. That was on some IBM-compatible system. Before that, we only had Apple II's (e,c,& gs) in the classrooms, Tandys in the library, and an Amiga in the TV Production class. I remember bringing my Macintosh Classic II to school for a project on multimedia in 5th grade.
When I was in High School, we played Doom II, Descent, and Duke Nukem in our programming class. We had people working on levels for Doom that looked like the school. We had a bunch of really crappy old 286s, but we had a few Pentiums that could handle it.
In Middle School, we played Sim City 2000 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in homeroom, science, and English.
In Elementary School, we played Wolfenstein 3D, Nibbles, Gorillas, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games in various classes.
We never had a game night, instead we had teachers who would not care about what we did, or who would let us play every once in a while, or who would make us play educational games.
Perl IS awkward and crazy. I've never understood the attraction to it. The few times I've had to dabble it in, it's just been frustrating, limiting, and ugly as hell. Bleh. I wish someone could explain it to me.
It's not that perl is akward. It's a language that lets you code in a number of different styles. It gives you the freedom to code your own way. This does reduce readability, but it greatly increases speed of coding. If others need to read your code, just set up style guidelines.
I use perl for just about all scripting I do on my system. Just a moment ago, I had to read an html file over http, but there were no line breaks. I just needed to get one piece of information, so I did this:
GET url|perl -ne 's/</\n</g;print;'|less
Sure it's unreadable, but it did the job. If I'd been writing CGI, I would've been more verbose since terse perl code can be difficult for even the author to understand by reading it.
perl gives you lots and lots of freedom. This is not a bad thing, but it is dangerous. Other languages force you to work in one way.
Think of a bike. A bike w/ trainig wheels makes it hard to fall over, but your agility is reduced. perl has no training wheels by default. You can write really nasty code that works but is unreadable. Perl is anything but limiting.
If you want more structure to protect you from yourself, try running perl the -w option and put "use strict" in your scripts. If you want pretty built-in identifiers, try "use English"
I've been coding for so long that the restrictions built into many other languages just get in my way most of the time. I like the way perl never gets in my way.
Ralph Nader already has his moment at the top of the world. His clout has long been exhausted and now he only sits on the top of the sun, melting away like Frosty the Snowman.
This is why 7000 people showed up in Tampa to hear him speak at Demoracy Rising? I didn't realise...
Not at all, I just think it's rather pathetic that Apple feels they have to pay people to use QuickTime in order to prop up sales of QT Pro. Being denied content, because I don't care to pay Apple (not Lucas bear in mind, Apple) is something that I don't like.
I may be mistake, but if I recall correctly, the pro version of QuickTime comes with a decoder that Apple has to pay a per-user fee for.
The hi-res trailers use that encoding to reduce the size of the stream. Apple pays for the decoder license with the money you pay for the pro version of QuickTime.
This doesn't seem shady at all. All companies pass their costs along to their customers.
Merging free-software and proprietary software is already a shame, but here we are a step higher!
You may be confusing "proprietary" software and "commercial" software. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. Just look at the fsf's category list.
My tablet PC cost $150 (used) and runs Linux just fine. It may not be very powerful (32mb ram, 2gb hd, 120mhz P1 iirc), but it is a great little machine. Ir's a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200.
I can work on cgi scripting or c programs. I can take notes in class with it. It's great for playing mp3s -- through the speaker or headphones, or miniplug-tape adapter. I can even use it to andmininster my server from the road (pcmcia e-net card).
It even runs Xwindows using a wm designed for PDAs.
Tablets have uses. Mine is cheaper and more powerful than a PDA or an MP3 player, although it it slightly less portable. Plus it gives me an excuse to practice writing pen drivers for Linux.
Truthfully, I'd rather have solitaire. That's what I used my PDA for. Since Sprint service in my area is pretty bad, I'm out of range a lot. If I've got a couple of minutes to kill and I'm out of range anyway, I might as well play something that does not require much time or thought. The game should save state between invocations so that it could be stopped and restarted at any time. I've played solitaire on a calculator before, so I know that it can be implemented using just a few keys for input, unlike NetHack.
You know what I hate? When I'm in the middle of raking it in in Slot Machine or beating my high score in Crab Catch on me cell (Sanyo 4500) and some insensitive prick calls my phone and the game quits. Like I care who's calling me. Sheesh, I was playing a game dammit! What else is my cell phone good for.
my experiences with all handhelds has been less than satisfactory when I have purchased one for under 200.00, I guess you can say that you get what you pay for.
If I pay $200 for something, I expect to get a lot. I expect to get what I pay for feature-wise. I wouldn't gripe about a cheap PDA not having enough ram to hold a dozen e-books at once.
No matter what I pay, I do have a right to expect it to do what it says it does. I doubt that the documentation that comes with the Palm device says "mysteriously misinterperets stylus taps" in the feature specs.
I expect to get what I paid for. If I pay for a brand-new or refurbished item, I expect it to work.
Imagine when everything in your house runs through the XBox (or similiar device) as MS ultimately envisions.
Imagine the day when I allow Microsoft to control everything in my house. Why would anyone do that? If it controls home security, you might as well just not lock your doors if you are going to use a Microsoft product.
Remember, despite all of Microsof's plans, they can't take over your home unless you buy their products. The simple answer is not to do it. Don't let your friends do it either. Friends don't let friends use Microsoft.
Then again, why would I want any one company to control my home security, television, stereo, and toaster? Microsoft isn't the only dishonest company out there; and good companies can go bad. Tying your entire home into someone else's network seems insecure to me.
The Internet sharing networks will be filled with half-ass attempts at this process using a crappy speakers and a crappy microphone.
I made CDs of my audio tape collection. I used a double-ended autio cable, not a mic and some speakers. The quality loss was not noticable at all. I just ran cables from my stereo into my G4 and used simple audio recording software. Then I created a CD from those tracks. I also made MP3s for listening on my computer.
What will stop someone from doing exactly what I did using CD audio for input instead of a tape?
Read both CDs out in digital and do a bit-compare of them. You'll find that they are, indeed, extremely differet, because of the MP3 conversion process.
Unless you dl'ed the CD image. These are not MP3s, these are identical cd copies.
Slashdot Mirror
By even the most cautious estimates, there are more Linux users than Mac users.
Do you have any facts to back this up? Remember that "Market Share" is actually % of annual sales. A study quoted here shows that macs are replaced less frequently than PCs, leading to lower yearly sales. This does not mean that there are fewer mac users, it means that there were fewer macs replaced.
I use a 64mb card up in a few hours and I have filled half of my 1G microdrive in a day.
At what resolution? The 16mb storage on this thing holds 52 pictures. No matter what mode you put it in, it takes 640x480 shots. The 1.3megapixel mode just blows up the 640x480 image when you retrieve it. It still stores it at 640x480.
>Independant film makers probably don't buy a new Mac and software for every film they produce.
Maybe not, but they sure would have to buy the latest software, and the latest Mac every time one comes out if they want to stay ahead of the curve.
Yes, but the upgrade costs $299.
Yor post also assumes that nobody involved with the project has a recent Mac or Final Cut Pro. While you might not have one, they are very popular among artists.
I'm making two points here. First, a Macintosh based editing system costs less than you think and does more than systems costing ten times as much. Second, if you are working on any kind of project, be it a movie or a mural, you only buy the things that you don't have. You wouldn't expect a house painter to buy a new ladder every time a job comes along (asuming the old one is good enough to do the job) would you?
Is that possible????
I think that it would be more likely that anything you aren't licensed to see would be replaced by commercials. You go to your friend's house to watch a movie on her big screen TV and all you see is a series of Pepsi commercials.
In version 2.0 it selects the advertisements based on your thought patterns. If you think about sex a lot, you see lots of ads featuring Trojan Man.
Version 3 would take a different approach. It would alter your thought patterns to fit the available commercials. You don't think about homeowner's insurance? Now you do.
I would be in favor of this system. It would be so costly to develop that the ??AA would go bankrupt before realizing that there is no technical solution for "DRM."
I use "DRM" in quotes because it is more like DRI: Digital Rights Infringement. All of this DRM crap infringes on my digital rights.
Won't they just have a "re-tension" option on the players?
The problems are streching, physical contact, and frequency of use.
If the reader expects each bit to be X distance from the next, but the tape streches, then the read head will read some other magnetic data from the extended area. The same goes for wrinkling and bending.
Tapes are more likely to sustain this kind of wear since the process of using them involves physical contact. Take a look into an open VCR as you insert a tape. Those metal rods can damage your tape. They pull and flex the tape. The head can also damage the tape. The motors can damage the tape if they pull to hard an the tape reaches its end, resulting in a harsh jerk.
The reason that these problems are less likely to plague backup tapes is because of frequency of use:
How often do you insert each computer tape? Remember that the act of inserting the casette into a VCR causes physical contact with the actual tape.
How frequently do you use the tape at all? Don't you just write to it in most cases?
Don't you only read from it infrequently and usually only once? When you re-write the tape, it can make up for some streching (within certain limits).
More importantly, how often do you "pause" a data tape? Pausing streches tape.
How often do you run the tape at high speed while the read head is in contact with it? That is exactly what happens when you scan tapes by pushing ff or rw in play mode. That is even more damaging to the tapes than just playing them.
Sure error correcting exists, but my point is that tape is more error-prone than other forms of storage since the simple act of reading or writing the data can degrade it.
This isn't VHS where it's stored in an analog format that degrades
Tape streaches. It flexes. It gets worn. It gets demagnetized. It tears.
The problem with VHS degradation over time has nothing to do with the data format on the tape. The problem is with the medium itself: flexible magnetic storage.
It's great if you aren't going to use it often, but if it keeps getting wound and unwound, wrapped around rollers, and pressed against a read head, it will wear out.
Someone was able to bring the ship to a complete halt because of user error. Do we really want the same sort of thing to happen in ATC?
That was exactly my point. The system should not crash - ever. I don't care why it crashed. If it's user error then the system needs to be designed so that user error cannot bring it down.
Management can blame the ATC workers all they want if the system crashes, but the fact is that the system is down and the planes are still in the air and need ATC.
It lists a few problems, but doesn't say if it could be the result of user error. We all know how users always say the system crashed when it's really their mistake
Does it matter? I know I wouldn't care why the system crashed if I was in the plane. I'd just want to get home alive. If the system crashes because of user error, then that is a serious flaw.
Wolfenstein 3D? Wow, you're pretty young.
That was in 1993 -- 6th grade. That was on some IBM-compatible system. Before that, we only had Apple II's (e,c,& gs) in the classrooms, Tandys in the library, and an Amiga in the TV Production class. I remember bringing my Macintosh Classic II to school for a project on multimedia in 5th grade.
When I was in High School, we played Doom II, Descent, and Duke Nukem in our programming class. We had people working on levels for Doom that looked like the school. We had a bunch of really crappy old 286s, but we had a few Pentiums that could handle it.
In Middle School, we played Sim City 2000 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in homeroom, science, and English.
In Elementary School, we played Wolfenstein 3D, Nibbles, Gorillas, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games in various classes.
We never had a game night, instead we had teachers who would not care about what we did, or who would let us play every once in a while, or who would make us play educational games.
It's not that perl is akward. It's a language that lets you code in a number of different styles. It gives you the freedom to code your own way. This does reduce readability, but it greatly increases speed of coding. If others need to read your code, just set up style guidelines.
I use perl for just about all scripting I do on my system. Just a moment ago, I had to read an html file over http, but there were no line breaks. I just needed to get one piece of information, so I did this:Sure it's unreadable, but it did the job. If I'd been writing CGI, I would've been more verbose since terse perl code can be difficult for even the author to understand by reading it.
perl gives you lots and lots of freedom. This is not a bad thing, but it is dangerous. Other languages force you to work in one way.
Think of a bike. A bike w/ trainig wheels makes it hard to fall over, but your agility is reduced. perl has no training wheels by default. You can write really nasty code that works but is unreadable. Perl is anything but limiting.
If you want more structure to protect you from yourself, try running perl the -w option and put "use strict" in your scripts. If you want pretty built-in identifiers, try "use English"
I've been coding for so long that the restrictions built into many other languages just get in my way most of the time. I like the way perl never gets in my way.
Ralph Nader already has his moment at the top of the world. His clout has long been exhausted and now he only sits on the top of the sun, melting away like Frosty the Snowman.
This is why 7000 people showed up in Tampa to hear him speak at Demoracy Rising? I didn't realise...
Not at all, I just think it's rather pathetic that Apple feels they have to pay people to use QuickTime in order to prop up sales of QT Pro. Being denied content, because I don't care to pay Apple (not Lucas bear in mind, Apple) is something that I don't like.
I may be mistake, but if I recall correctly, the pro version of QuickTime comes with a decoder that Apple has to pay a per-user fee for.
The hi-res trailers use that encoding to reduce the size of the stream. Apple pays for the decoder license with the money you pay for the pro version of QuickTime.
This doesn't seem shady at all. All companies pass their costs along to their customers.
Merging free-software and proprietary software is already a shame, but here we are a step higher!
You may be confusing "proprietary" software and "commercial" software. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. Just look at the fsf's category list.
My tablet PC cost $150 (used) and runs Linux just fine. It may not be very powerful (32mb ram, 2gb hd, 120mhz P1 iirc), but it is a great little machine. Ir's a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200.
I can work on cgi scripting or c programs. I can take notes in class with it. It's great for playing mp3s -- through the speaker or headphones, or miniplug-tape adapter. I can even use it to andmininster my server from the road (pcmcia e-net card).
It even runs Xwindows using a wm designed for PDAs.
Tablets have uses. Mine is cheaper and more powerful than a PDA or an MP3 player, although it it slightly less portable. Plus it gives me an excuse to practice writing pen drivers for Linux.
Is there a version control system in place? I want check out a previous version and get my old girlfriend back...
What frightens me is the possibility that my old girlfriend might try that trick to get me back. <shudder>
My only complaint about the base is that all of the inputs are in the rear. ... Why should I have to reach around to plug in my iPod?
Rotate the base. I tried this at the Apple Store, it works. Just turn the base slightly and you get easy access to the ports. Remember, the arm turns.
Truthfully, I'd rather have solitaire. That's what I used my PDA for. Since Sprint service in my area is pretty bad, I'm out of range a lot. If I've got a couple of minutes to kill and I'm out of range anyway, I might as well play something that does not require much time or thought. The game should save state between invocations so that it could be stopped and restarted at any time. I've played solitaire on a calculator before, so I know that it can be implemented using just a few keys for input, unlike NetHack.
You know what I hate? When I'm in the middle of raking it in in Slot Machine or beating my high score in Crab Catch on me cell (Sanyo 4500) and some insensitive prick calls my phone and the game quits. Like I care who's calling me. Sheesh, I was playing a game dammit! What else is my cell phone good for.
my experiences with all handhelds has been less than satisfactory when I have purchased one for under 200.00, I guess you can say that you get what you pay for.
If I pay $200 for something, I expect to get a lot. I expect to get what I pay for feature-wise. I wouldn't gripe about a cheap PDA not having enough ram to hold a dozen e-books at once.
No matter what I pay, I do have a right to expect it to do what it says it does. I doubt that the documentation that comes with the Palm device says "mysteriously misinterperets stylus taps" in the feature specs.
I expect to get what I paid for. If I pay for a brand-new or refurbished item, I expect it to work.
Imagine when everything in your house runs through the XBox (or similiar device) as MS ultimately envisions.
Imagine the day when I allow Microsoft to control everything in my house. Why would anyone do that? If it controls home security, you might as well just not lock your doors if you are going to use a Microsoft product.
Remember, despite all of Microsof's plans, they can't take over your home unless you buy their products. The simple answer is not to do it. Don't let your friends do it either. Friends don't let friends use Microsoft.
Then again, why would I want any one company to control my home security, television, stereo, and toaster? Microsoft isn't the only dishonest company out there; and good companies can go bad. Tying your entire home into someone else's network seems insecure to me.
Already farmers and heavy machinery is moving towards natural gas or propane.
... oil!
LPG is made from
Didn't someone figure out a way to make fule from soy beans? Why are we paying farmers NOT to grow soy beans?
The Internet sharing networks will be filled with half-ass attempts at this process using a crappy speakers and a crappy microphone.
I made CDs of my audio tape collection. I used a double-ended autio cable, not a mic and some speakers. The quality loss was not noticable at all. I just ran cables from my stereo into my G4 and used simple audio recording software. Then I created a CD from those tracks. I also made MP3s for listening on my computer.
What will stop someone from doing exactly what I did using CD audio for input instead of a tape?
There is NO technological solution to piracy
Read both CDs out in digital and do a bit-compare of them. You'll find that they are, indeed, extremely differet, because of the MP3 conversion process.
Unless you dl'ed the CD image. These are not MP3s, these are identical cd copies.