HTML was never "originally" designed for pixel-perfect accuracy, standardized "look", or standardized spatial relationships. Why do you think absolute positioning via CSS and XML extensions exist these days? Because HTML works so damn well for that sort of thing?
What happens when you resize a browser window? What happens when you resize a PDF or PS reader window? In a browser, the document's layout changes drastically. In a PDF or PS reader, it doesn't.
The original design intention was for easy markup and emphasis, not absolute *anything*. Everything to make that sort of thing happen has been an addition or a hack.
To put it bluntly: yes, there is a need for pixel-perfect rendering in a research paper, just like there's a need for pixel-perfect rendering in books, magazines, or any other published material.
What do you think a chart, or a graph, or a table is? Just an arbitrary collection of pixels?
Good spatial organization is an important part of presenting scientific and/or research data accurately and aesthetically.
Would you really trust the published results of years of research to, say, a non-portable CSS/HTML document, and hope for the best when your peers around the world try to print it?
If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.
Technical achivements aside, the most amusing thing about the 2.6 series of kernels is seeing all the large corporate entities with vested interests deal with the release schedule.
That is to say, there isn't one. I especially liked the quote from Torvalds I recently saw in a CNet news.com that basically said, "it'll be done when it's done - deal with it".
The most interesting thing about that page is the collection of hate mail that he got. Nevermind all that benchmark stuff that he yammers on about - everybody knows benchmarks are bullshit anyway.
Those comments really demonstrate the applicability of the bell curve to real-life situations, especially things like intelligence of a population.
Not everyone works with big-dollar Sun hardware that comes backed with 24/7 Sun support. Not everyone's hardware work consists of sliding CPU and disk modules out of nifty little slots and then tickling Solaris gently into seeing them. Not everyone works for a Fortune 100 company with benefits and a stable payroll. Some folks *wish* their most notable sysadmin duties include writing shellscripts.
If your job consists of the above, I see how you're confused as to what the source of burnout is. What I'm trying to say is - you're being awfully pretentious, close to the point of being a gloating asshole. Feel a little more compassion and empathy for your fellow tech workers. Your high-and-mighty tax bracket may remove you from worrying about doing work "for the money", and removing yourself socioeconomically from your struggling counterparts is dangerous, and also bad karma. Please - I know what's going through your head; pretty much every working professional thought the same thoughts at some point in their lives.
Judging from your use of "Winblows", I'm guessing you're fairly new on the scene, perhaps fresh out of college or high school, and haven't yet experienced the finer things of a UNIX sysadmin's career, like attempting to make the impossible happen day in and day out without so much as praise or acknowledgement.
Just wait a few years. You'll see. Don't think that your seemingly endless zeal and enthusiasm are *actually* endless.
So this kid gets sued by the RIAA for writing a generic search engine, is forced to settle for $12,000 (his entire life savings), and his only real shot at recouping all his settlement money is flushed down the toilet by a massive denial of service attack "unwittingly" perpetrated by Slashdot?
The Time Warner half may be a giant media corporation, but first and foremost, AOL is an internet service provider.
It could be argued that any increase in internet traffic directly results in a higher bottom line for their quarterly report (since AOL is undoubtedly paid for every byte that flows through its networks originating from smaller ISPs - roadrunner, earthlink, etc). It's called growth, and it's what fuels this stock market, as was witnessed by the implosion of dot-com stocks.
If AOL tracks the statistics on their network, they may realize that a huge percentage of their revenue stream comes in from p2p network traffic. This is probably a huge cash cow in terms of bandwidth resale.
Time Warner hasn't stopped growing by any appreciable rate. Neither has AOL. Winamp and Gnutella? How much traffic does this generate for AOL's networks? How much revenue? One can only imagine. As for mp3s being a detriment to TimeWarner's bottm line - as if there's a shortage of people buying music? I don't think so.
TCP does not provide its own underflow buffer. I'm sure modern implementations provide an overflow buffer to make sure it doesn't overwhelm the physical transport layer, but it is not the kind of buffer an application needs to ensure the seamless delivery of streaming content. Does any implementation of TCP allow for the aggregation of an arbitrary amount of data before handing it off to the application? No. That would be counter productive.
Also, RTSP is a protocol-independent stream control mechanism. The RFC clearly states that all application data is transmitted out-of-band in another protocol. It is only a "transmission control" protocol (not to be confused with TCP, of course) and allows for the transport-independent control of data streaming to and from different sources on the net.
In other words, it's not used to make sure the content itself gets from one place to another reliably (or unreliably). In fact, the RFC also provides support to specify a lower-transport protocol for (out-of-band) streams, either UDP or TCP. This would presumably would allow for both reliable and unreliable transmission of data, depending on your specific application.
So in conclusion, reinventing TCP with UDP is a dumb idea and is not what RTSP aims to do. It probably plays a vital role in controlling the behavior of things such as VoIP phones. In such applications, when latency is negligible, buffers are not practical, and a reliable transport mechanism is assumed, then no, a buffer is not necessary or practical, but these assumptions do not apply to the internet-at-large in the least. If you want reliable data on the internet, you use TCP. Period.
A server that streams media data does not need to "try to keep advancing time at a constant rate".
Media formats include timing information as part of the specification, and operate independently of transport technology. The only thing you need to worry about is supplying data at a sufficient rate. Modern streaming technologies incorporate the use of prebuffering and strong compression to overcome this.
So at 156 seconds into a media-viewing session, you want to be streaming data from much further in the file to the client application.
You wonder what EFI and some new heads could do for your 1970 VW Van? Well, if you approach the problem with the ignorance you just displayed in your post, it would probably blow a hole through the side of your van's engine.
Apart from actual hardware failure (your injectors seizing or fuel lines rupturing), misconfigured electronic fuel injection systems are the first, last, and only reason a computer-managed motor will blow up these days. And it does happen. A LOT.
What happens if you accidentally program your air/fuel ratio to go to 20:1 at 6000RPMs in 4th gear? Your motor will catastrophically fail (i.e., explode into little pieces and shower your engine bay with molten iron and aluminum). If this happens on a dyno while you're tuning for maximum power, well then you better feel lucky if you don't get a piece of pistonhead lodged into your face by way of your chest.
Tuning a modern EFI system isn't exactly the same as making sure the knobs on your carb are correct before you drive your junky van to work.
It takes time.
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If IBM had the legal grounds to base a countersuit on one (or more... probably more) of their numerous patents, it would take a very, very long time to prepare these things in an airtight way, not like what SCO has done with their haphazard and amateurish nonsense.
One thing's for certain; no matter what hapens, IBM will make sure their rebuttals and countersuits are extremely well supported and factually correct, probably with the help of many, many highly paid expert witnesses.
I'm expecting them to try to prove a point in court, to legitimize their new business model, and to open up future revenue streams for cooperation (they need to clear EVERYONE of this nonsense, or else an entire industry [the one they created by embracing Linux] might disappear).
It would do better for their bottom line in the long run to prove their business model is sound, and to legally fuck their competition (i.e., SCO) than just outright buying SCO; it would then look like they are covering something up.
"if you can't figure out how to install [MySQL/PostgresSQL] then you aren't smart enough to use them"
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later."
Uhm, no shit? I need only to look at my personal library of O'Reilly books and/or API manuals to know that 99% of the information contained therein is absolutely fucking useless to me *right now*, but I'm certainly going to need them. That's why I bought the books, instead of going to the library to take notes.
"My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material."
Why should the author of the book expect the purchasers of his work to own the complete works of his (many) competitors? Can't the book stand on its own merit? Where is your analysis of this possibility?
The gripes presented have absolutely no credibility, and this whole "review" seems to be based on the premise of stating the painfully obvious.
I have a DLP projector - Infocus LP330 - that I use for movies. It only cost me $900 used, and I use it to project an image about 75" (or so) wide on my living room wall. Image quality is good, but not great, and there is a halo of light that surrounds the projected image. A cloth-bezeled screen setup would solve my problems; right now it's just on my wall.
Any consumer who uses a projector to watch TV is, in my opinion, not focusing their monetary efforts in the right place. A substantially-sized HDTV these days is less than the cost of a projector, and will undoubtedly look better in the middle of the day.
However, when it's dark out, your friends (or... ahem... friend) is over, nothing beats an entire living room wall worth of screen real estate. Toss in a decent surround sound system, and you've got yourself maybe $6 worth of the $10 a movie ticket costs. I haven't been to the theater in months.
Using the XGA input is also great for parties and mp3 visualizations, displaying music videos, whatever.
I posted one of those "Enjoy yourself while you still can." posts.
Like many, I got interested in technology early.
There was no computer club at my school, and I wasn't exactly a social outcast, so I decided to skip the middle man and go straight to work in the "computer industry" at the age of 15. This was following a couple of non-tech jobs, including an office clerk-type role and an AutoCAD draftsman.
I also got very involved in a local LUG, even so far as to call myself a co-founder, helped plan weekends events, etc. Also did basic sysadmin stuff for my high school.
I don't regret anything I did, quite the contrary; I just wish I had done it a little later. After two years of working at a dead-end dot-com (you could tell it was going to implode) and helping organize large weekly events for the lug, not to mention dealing with computer networks and their associated bullshit at school all day for one reason or another, I realized that I was doing too much, to soon, for the sake of a) pursuing this one aspect of my intellectual curiosity and b) getting into a decent university, which was pretty much guaranteed anyway. I wasn't one of those people who was going to drop out of high school for a $50k/year job.
When I was around 17 (senior), I drastically cut back my hours, loosed my involvement with the LUG a bit, and started having a non-insignificant social life. For that year and a half before I went to college, I had the best times of my life with the friends I have known all throughout high school but never really had time to hang out with. I took the money I had made, bought a nice car, and some nice things, experimented with the ALKY, picked up the guitar, and drums, and piano (again), and just generally did OTHER stuff for a while. Took some nice vacations with my friends, and a whole slew of other stuff that I can't list here. It's not like I was going to start saving for retirement or something back then.
So what if it throttled my hot-blooded pursuit for intellectual supremacy for a while? Big deal. Now in college, I am in the thick of it again, including contract work, school work, volunteer work, and extracurricular business development, and I am absolutely grateful that I allowed myself to take the time off. I think it's critical in preventing burnout, and you should do it starting early as possible. I wasn't about to turn into the grizzly-bearded pear-shaped UNIX kook that impressed me so much, for some reason.
If you enjoy what you enjoy doing, you will ALWAYS be able to do it, given that you sufficiently intelligent enough to support your interests. But my suggestion is take some time to enjoy something that you won't get a chance to do again, like ENJOY HIGH SCHOOL. Your mileage may vary, my experiences are only my own.
If you were such a power user, you'd make symlinks to make everything work the way you want it to, while enjoying the out-of-box benefits of such a system.
There are professionals who are serious about productivity, and who do not mind spending over $3,000 for a top-of-the-line setup that will last them 5-10 years, and there's people who want to spend $500 every 3 months upgrading a PC. It's not a COOL thing to be as miserly as possible with the *tools of your trade*, no matter how many hobbyist idiots tell you so.
I now have a dual 1.25 G4 w/ a Cinema screen, running OS X, and glad I made the switch. Everything is beautiful. It simply *does not get any better* than OS X for desktop use. For example: taking a digital pic on my camera, plugging it into my USB hub that's built into my keyboard, dragging the icons seamlessly onto my desktop, and then opening a terminal to scp those images to a web server with real bandwidth. Sticking in a CD, ripping and encoding in one drag, and then scp'ing (or dragging and dropping) those files to a media machine in my living room (running an embedded OS such as Linux or BSD)? Hmm.
Or perhaps building, testing, and editing all my projects that I do for work, on my home machine, while enjoying the slick user interface and incredibly useful bundled software that *doesn't* look and feel like an ass covered in sandpaper?
Games? Videos? Prettiness? Let me assure you, Linux desktops don't look as good as OS X desktops.
Or opening 2 PDFs, 2 windows of code, and an editor at the same time on my large cinema screen, and writing that spec sheet or whitepaper in half the time it used to, without constantly switching back in forth.
What's a few weeks pay for this? I choose to give my money to Apple, instead of the OTHER billion-dollar multinational corporation that really doesn't give a shit about me in the end. At least one has solid products. I don't care if the aforementioned activities can be "done" on other operating systems, I didn't even have to configure anything on this one. I look at code and Makefiles enough as it is, I don't want to do it to play mp3s.
You have been brainwashed by Intel, Microsoft, AMD, and whoever else, into buying a new processor with a new chipset and socket format with a marginal speed increase every year, so you can do the SAME STUFF you did last year, just "faster". And you have to BUILD it? Fuck, you must be kidding me. I'd rather get a preboxed Dell than continue to building new desktops every year. It gets old, folks, especially with all the bullshit Taiwanese motherboards coming out these days. And no, I don't give enough of a shit to start memorizing Abit and Asus part numbers. I have a life outside of this box known as a computer.
I bought my 400MHz Celeron at about the time my mom bought her 400MHz (or so) G3 Macintosh. Guess who's machine is still useable to this day, and who's machine is an aged piece of shit that has trouble booting without losing a few random sectors off the hard drive?
And if you STILL think I got ripped off - haha, I can afford it, and you can't. Get a job that pays more than 10 dollars an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML was never "originally" designed for pixel-perfect accuracy, standardized "look", or standardized spatial relationships. Why do you think absolute positioning via CSS and XML extensions exist these days? Because HTML works so damn well for that sort of thing?
What happens when you resize a browser window? What happens when you resize a PDF or PS reader window? In a browser, the document's layout changes drastically. In a PDF or PS reader, it doesn't.
The original design intention was for easy markup and emphasis, not absolute *anything*. Everything to make that sort of thing happen has been an addition or a hack.
Not layout.
You're wrong. Just accept that and move on.
To put it bluntly: yes, there is a need for pixel-perfect rendering in a research paper, just like there's a need for pixel-perfect rendering in books, magazines, or any other published material.
What do you think a chart, or a graph, or a table is? Just an arbitrary collection of pixels?
Good spatial organization is an important part of presenting scientific and/or research data accurately and aesthetically.
Would you really trust the published results of years of research to, say, a non-portable CSS/HTML document, and hope for the best when your peers around the world try to print it?
I'm going to hazard an obvious guess here.
If you have a random subset within a larger set [p2p users in the USA], a randomly distributed decrease in the superset will correlate with a similar decrease in the subset.
Technical achivements aside, the most amusing thing about the 2.6 series of kernels is seeing all the large corporate entities with vested interests deal with the release schedule.
That is to say, there isn't one. I especially liked the quote from Torvalds I recently saw in a CNet news.com that basically said, "it'll be done when it's done - deal with it".
What a thinly veiled attempt at a troll.
The RIAA isn't going to shut your own band's site down because you're hosting your own MP3s of original songs. Get real, buddy.
They're in the business of protecting their members, not offensively eliminating non-members. Their tactics are questionable.
Although the RIAA:mafia analogy extends to a certain threshold, the RIAA isn't *actually* the mafia.
The most interesting thing about that page is the collection of hate mail that he got. Nevermind all that benchmark stuff that he yammers on about - everybody knows benchmarks are bullshit anyway.
Those comments really demonstrate the applicability of the bell curve to real-life situations, especially things like intelligence of a population.
Not everyone works with big-dollar Sun hardware that comes backed with 24/7 Sun support. Not everyone's hardware work consists of sliding CPU and disk modules out of nifty little slots and then tickling Solaris gently into seeing them. Not everyone works for a Fortune 100 company with benefits and a stable payroll. Some folks *wish* their most notable sysadmin duties include writing shellscripts.
If your job consists of the above, I see how you're confused as to what the source of burnout is. What I'm trying to say is - you're being awfully pretentious, close to the point of being a gloating asshole. Feel a little more compassion and empathy for your fellow tech workers. Your high-and-mighty tax bracket may remove you from worrying about doing work "for the money", and removing yourself socioeconomically from your struggling counterparts is dangerous, and also bad karma. Please - I know what's going through your head; pretty much every working professional thought the same thoughts at some point in their lives.
Just for the record, I am not a sysadmin.
Judging from your use of "Winblows", I'm guessing you're fairly new on the scene, perhaps fresh out of college or high school, and haven't yet experienced the finer things of a UNIX sysadmin's career, like attempting to make the impossible happen day in and day out without so much as praise or acknowledgement.
Just wait a few years. You'll see. Don't think that your seemingly endless zeal and enthusiasm are *actually* endless.
Well, the speedometer calibration problem is easily solved by GPS.
Simple problem, simple solution.
Hi Kris,
Yeah that's me. How's it going, man?
Drop me a line in my public web e-mail box @yahoo.com, I'm looking forward to catching up with you.
My account there is mfhughes.
See ya.
So this kid gets sued by the RIAA for writing a generic search engine, is forced to settle for $12,000 (his entire life savings), and his only real shot at recouping all his settlement money is flushed down the toilet by a massive denial of service attack "unwittingly" perpetrated by Slashdot?
:(
This world is a cruel, cruel place.
The Time Warner half may be a giant media corporation, but first and foremost, AOL is an internet service provider.
It could be argued that any increase in internet traffic directly results in a higher bottom line for their quarterly report (since AOL is undoubtedly paid for every byte that flows through its networks originating from smaller ISPs - roadrunner, earthlink, etc). It's called growth, and it's what fuels this stock market, as was witnessed by the implosion of dot-com stocks.
If AOL tracks the statistics on their network, they may realize that a huge percentage of their revenue stream comes in from p2p network traffic. This is probably a huge cash cow in terms of bandwidth resale.
Time Warner hasn't stopped growing by any appreciable rate. Neither has AOL. Winamp and Gnutella? How much traffic does this generate for AOL's networks? How much revenue? One can only imagine. As for mp3s being a detriment to TimeWarner's bottm line - as if there's a shortage of people buying music? I don't think so.
And didn't he say he was quitting, anyway?
TCP does not provide its own underflow buffer. I'm sure modern implementations provide an overflow buffer to make sure it doesn't overwhelm the physical transport layer, but it is not the kind of buffer an application needs to ensure the seamless delivery of streaming content. Does any implementation of TCP allow for the aggregation of an arbitrary amount of data before handing it off to the application? No. That would be counter productive.
Also, RTSP is a protocol-independent stream control mechanism. The RFC clearly states that all application data is transmitted out-of-band in another protocol. It is only a "transmission control" protocol (not to be confused with TCP, of course) and allows for the transport-independent control of data streaming to and from different sources on the net.
In other words, it's not used to make sure the content itself gets from one place to another reliably (or unreliably). In fact, the RFC also provides support to specify a lower-transport protocol for (out-of-band) streams, either UDP or TCP. This would presumably would allow for both reliable and unreliable transmission of data, depending on your specific application.
So in conclusion, reinventing TCP with UDP is a dumb idea and is not what RTSP aims to do. It probably plays a vital role in controlling the behavior of things such as VoIP phones. In such applications, when latency is negligible, buffers are not practical, and a reliable transport mechanism is assumed, then no, a buffer is not necessary or practical, but these assumptions do not apply to the internet-at-large in the least. If you want reliable data on the internet, you use TCP. Period.
A server that streams media data does not need to "try to keep advancing time at a constant rate".
Media formats include timing information as part of the specification, and operate independently of transport technology. The only thing you need to worry about is supplying data at a sufficient rate. Modern streaming technologies incorporate the use of prebuffering and strong compression to overcome this.
So at 156 seconds into a media-viewing session, you want to be streaming data from much further in the file to the client application.
You wonder what EFI and some new heads could do for your 1970 VW Van? Well, if you approach the problem with the ignorance you just displayed in your post, it would probably blow a hole through the side of your van's engine.
Apart from actual hardware failure (your injectors seizing or fuel lines rupturing), misconfigured electronic fuel injection systems are the first, last, and only reason a computer-managed motor will blow up these days. And it does happen. A LOT.
What happens if you accidentally program your air/fuel ratio to go to 20:1 at 6000RPMs in 4th gear? Your motor will catastrophically fail (i.e., explode into little pieces and shower your engine bay with molten iron and aluminum). If this happens on a dyno while you're tuning for maximum power, well then you better feel lucky if you don't get a piece of pistonhead lodged into your face by way of your chest.
Tuning a modern EFI system isn't exactly the same as making sure the knobs on your carb are correct before you drive your junky van to work.
If IBM had the legal grounds to base a countersuit on one (or more... probably more) of their numerous patents, it would take a very, very long time to prepare these things in an airtight way, not like what SCO has done with their haphazard and amateurish nonsense.
One thing's for certain; no matter what hapens, IBM will make sure their rebuttals and countersuits are extremely well supported and factually correct, probably with the help of many, many highly paid expert witnesses.
I'm expecting them to try to prove a point in court, to legitimize their new business model, and to open up future revenue streams for cooperation (they need to clear EVERYONE of this nonsense, or else an entire industry [the one they created by embracing Linux] might disappear).
It would do better for their bottom line in the long run to prove their business model is sound, and to legally fuck their competition (i.e., SCO) than just outright buying SCO; it would then look like they are covering something up.
BSD tools are BSD tools, and Linux tools are GNU tools.
http://www.gnu.org
Why do you think Stallman and his ankle-biters are so adamant about calling it GNU/Linux? Cause they're all BSD fans?
"if you can't figure out how to install [MySQL/PostgresSQL] then you aren't smart enough to use them"
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later."
Uhm, no shit? I need only to look at my personal library of O'Reilly books and/or API manuals to know that 99% of the information contained therein is absolutely fucking useless to me *right now*, but I'm certainly going to need them. That's why I bought the books, instead of going to the library to take notes.
"My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material."
Why should the author of the book expect the purchasers of his work to own the complete works of his (many) competitors? Can't the book stand on its own merit? Where is your analysis of this possibility?
The gripes presented have absolutely no credibility, and this whole "review" seems to be based on the premise of stating the painfully obvious.
Note: I'm an OS X user.
I think that's a big fat lie.
I have a DLP projector - Infocus LP330 - that I use for movies. It only cost me $900 used, and I use it to project an image about 75" (or so) wide on my living room wall. Image quality is good, but not great, and there is a halo of light that surrounds the projected image. A cloth-bezeled screen setup would solve my problems; right now it's just on my wall.
... ahem ... friend) is over, nothing beats an entire living room wall worth of screen real estate. Toss in a decent surround sound system, and you've got yourself maybe $6 worth of the $10 a movie ticket costs. I haven't been to the theater in months.
Any consumer who uses a projector to watch TV is, in my opinion, not focusing their monetary efforts in the right place. A substantially-sized HDTV these days is less than the cost of a projector, and will undoubtedly look better in the middle of the day.
However, when it's dark out, your friends (or
Using the XGA input is also great for parties and mp3 visualizations, displaying music videos, whatever.
I posted one of those "Enjoy yourself while you still can." posts.
Like many, I got interested in technology early.
There was no computer club at my school, and I wasn't exactly a social outcast, so I decided to skip the middle man and go straight to work in the "computer industry" at the age of 15. This was following a couple of non-tech jobs, including an office clerk-type role and an AutoCAD draftsman.
I also got very involved in a local LUG, even so far as to call myself a co-founder, helped plan weekends events, etc. Also did basic sysadmin stuff for my high school.
I don't regret anything I did, quite the contrary; I just wish I had done it a little later. After two years of working at a dead-end dot-com (you could tell it was going to implode) and helping organize large weekly events for the lug, not to mention dealing with computer networks and their associated bullshit at school all day for one reason or another, I realized that I was doing too much, to soon, for the sake of a) pursuing this one aspect of my intellectual curiosity and b) getting into a decent university, which was pretty much guaranteed anyway. I wasn't one of those people who was going to drop out of high school for a $50k/year job.
When I was around 17 (senior), I drastically cut back my hours, loosed my involvement with the LUG a bit, and started having a non-insignificant social life. For that year and a half before I went to college, I had the best times of my life with the friends I have known all throughout high school but never really had time to hang out with. I took the money I had made, bought a nice car, and some nice things, experimented with the ALKY, picked up the guitar, and drums, and piano (again), and just generally did OTHER stuff for a while. Took some nice vacations with my friends, and a whole slew of other stuff that I can't list here. It's not like I was going to start saving for retirement or something back then.
So what if it throttled my hot-blooded pursuit for intellectual supremacy for a while? Big deal. Now in college, I am in the thick of it again, including contract work, school work, volunteer work, and extracurricular business development, and I am absolutely grateful that I allowed myself to take the time off. I think it's critical in preventing burnout, and you should do it starting early as possible. I wasn't about to turn into the grizzly-bearded pear-shaped UNIX kook that impressed me so much, for some reason.
If you enjoy what you enjoy doing, you will ALWAYS be able to do it, given that you sufficiently intelligent enough to support your interests. But my suggestion is take some time to enjoy something that you won't get a chance to do again, like ENJOY HIGH SCHOOL. Your mileage may vary, my experiences are only my own.
Don't do it. Enjoy your high school years while you still can.
Soon, if you're any good at what you do, you will be immersed in nothing but computers.
If you were such a power user, you'd make symlinks to make everything work the way you want it to, while enjoying the out-of-box benefits of such a system.
Duh? Isn't this the POINT of open systems?
There are professionals who are serious about productivity, and who do not mind spending over $3,000 for a top-of-the-line setup that will last them 5-10 years, and there's people who want to spend $500 every 3 months upgrading a PC. It's not a COOL thing to be as miserly as possible with the *tools of your trade*, no matter how many hobbyist idiots tell you so.
I now have a dual 1.25 G4 w/ a Cinema screen, running OS X, and glad I made the switch. Everything is beautiful. It simply *does not get any better* than OS X for desktop use. For example: taking a digital pic on my camera, plugging it into my USB hub that's built into my keyboard, dragging the icons seamlessly onto my desktop, and then opening a terminal to scp those images to a web server with real bandwidth. Sticking in a CD, ripping and encoding in one drag, and then scp'ing (or dragging and dropping) those files to a media machine in my living room (running an embedded OS such as Linux or BSD)? Hmm.
Or perhaps building, testing, and editing all my projects that I do for work, on my home machine, while enjoying the slick user interface and incredibly useful bundled software that *doesn't* look and feel like an ass covered in sandpaper?
Games? Videos? Prettiness? Let me assure you, Linux desktops don't look as good as OS X desktops.
Or opening 2 PDFs, 2 windows of code, and an editor at the same time on my large cinema screen, and writing that spec sheet or whitepaper in half the time it used to, without constantly switching back in forth.
What's a few weeks pay for this? I choose to give my money to Apple, instead of the OTHER billion-dollar multinational corporation that really doesn't give a shit about me in the end. At least one has solid products. I don't care if the aforementioned activities can be "done" on other operating systems, I didn't even have to configure anything on this one. I look at code and Makefiles enough as it is, I don't want to do it to play mp3s.
You have been brainwashed by Intel, Microsoft, AMD, and whoever else, into buying a new processor with a new chipset and socket format with a marginal speed increase every year, so you can do the SAME STUFF you did last year, just "faster". And you have to BUILD it? Fuck, you must be kidding me. I'd rather get a preboxed Dell than continue to building new desktops every year. It gets old, folks, especially with all the bullshit Taiwanese motherboards coming out these days. And no, I don't give enough of a shit to start memorizing Abit and Asus part numbers. I have a life outside of this box known as a computer.
I bought my 400MHz Celeron at about the time my mom bought her 400MHz (or so) G3 Macintosh. Guess who's machine is still useable to this day, and who's machine is an aged piece of shit that has trouble booting without losing a few random sectors off the hard drive?
And if you STILL think I got ripped off - haha, I can afford it, and you can't. Get a job that pays more than 10 dollars an hour.
The computer that you're using now probably runs at 12V also, regulated by that 300W+ power supply that you plug into the wall.
Duhh??