Yes, I think this is exactly why. Other big vendors - IBM, HP, Sun - they all have Opteron/Athlon machines in their line-ups. When I asked a Dell rep why Dell had zero, and no intentions to ever have any AMD, he said it was because AMD wouldn't be able to supply them enough CPU's. I call bullshit. AMD has a great deal of production capacity, and adding more all the time. Dell wouldn't have to all of a sudden convert 100% of it's line up with AMD. But, therein may lie the problem. They very-well might have to, or lose some insane deals with Intel. I think that's why they stay Intel - and mention it on every single Dell ad.
If I could upgrade my existing 2P dell servers to even inefficient dual cores that run too hot, I'd do it. But I doubt my existing servers would be able to cool them, so it's probably not going to happen anywyas. If we could get 2x dual-Opteron servers, we'd jump on it for all our ESX servers - especially with ESX3 and native x64 memory support. SWEET! But no, we'll be stuck with Xeon "EMT64" bastardized x64 CPU's because we're locked into Dell.
Good thing we have people like you reminding us of this *every single time Trolltech is mentioned anywhere.*
$1800 isn't that big a deal with even a small business. Sure, I think it would be great if it were $100, but I don't fault them for that. $1800 is the price point for Trolltech where they feel it's still worth developing and still worth releasing regular GPL versions.
"*shrug* yeah. I've long since realised the whole concept of freedom in the US is lip service to some ideal everyone would like, and everyone has convinced themselves they have, but has long since left on the wings of excess litigation, patents, government regulations and stupid laws."
I definately agree that special interests and corporations have too much power, but I also don't take light the fact that at any given time I can go anywhere I want, do anything I want within reason, without telling anyone where I'm going or what I'm doing. This is a good thing. But, I do believe that the more important aspect of my own freedom is the freedom not be fucked with by other people.
It doesn't always work, but it's a lot better then many places in the world.
I was surprised this past weekend when I went to a few stores to buy a new gadget, and saw the prices of the mini-dvd players. They were always so very overpriced, but it looks like they've really come down a lot. Visit a few stores (Circuit City, Best Buy, etc) and you're bound to find one on sale. The Circuit City I stopped at had over 8 models to choose from.
Let's face it: Although Apple makes good stuff, they haven't done anything innovative since the original Mac. The iPod was simply an improvement on existing portable MP3 players. OSX is an improvement of BSD+OS9. Wait - what else does apple make?
Anyways, the new Video player might be good, but there just haven't been enough video players sold by other vendors to show Apple what they need to do to make their own better. Without that important data, I don't see Apple actually doing anything truely original.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple products are good quality and very usable.
Most of these guys already do bypass end-user installation by performing automatic installation via exploits, piggybacking on other apps, and deceiving install prompts.
Not HDTV. Sure, if you have an OTA HDTV card you could do it, but for cable TV unfortunately most cable companies are stopping this quite effectively by encrypting most (or some key) digital channels requiring the use of their boxes. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but there's just about zero capture boards available to record over DVI or Component. (Some exist, but are extremely expensive (15K+) and for professional AV shops.)
DRM is killing home-brew video, and it's pushing Linux to the side when it comes to A/V applications.
Breaking it down to 15 cents versus 40 cents is one thing, but for most of us, we just want some photos printed sometimes and it's much easier to do it at home, even if it's slightly more expensive. It's so easy now with the photo printers - many of them don't even require a PC if you don't want to edit them first. Plug in the camera, stick in the memory chip, whatever.
For the professional or the person that makes a LOT of photos, sure, in bulk you're definately better off with a printing service. But how many of us fall into this category? If I can go out on a weekend vacation, and then come back and print out the pictures I want, when I want, from the comfort of my own house - that sounds pretty good to me and worth the extra cost. I might only want one print from the whole set. I might want to do some small customizations and print a few copies until I get the one I want. I might not want to deal with driving to the store no matter how "kiosky" it might be.
People also like things of the "do it yourself" nature. It's not because it's cheaper to do it, it's because people like to feel independant and in control of what they do.
Well, I sort of insinuated much of that in less words. I'm not nearly as cynical as you, I guess.
I don't agree that all companies exist to sell crap products. I own a lot of really great stuff made by companies. In fact, I don't own much that's not made by a company, and I doubt everything you own was hand-made. There's always going to be people out there to make a quick buck but I don't see how that translates to "companies exist to sell crap products."
The record labels are companies indeed. And yes, they care about making money. But that doesn't mean that everyone they sign is crap. The Beatles, Ray Charles, The Beastie Boys, Elvis, REM, the Chilli Peppers, to name just a very small few, are or were all signed to major labels at one time. Are the Beatles 'whores'? Why did the labels sign them? Because they were very popular and they had a lot of money potential, yes. Explain to me why this is wrong?
I think you nead a reality check if you think everyone should be doing charity work for what YOU think should be sold. If you don't like it, you're free to not buy it. I agree that there's too much mediochre music, but I don't agree that all of it is, nor that it's some mystical "man" that we should always try to stick it to.
It's PEOPLE dammit, not ppl! You saved three whole keystrokes and you sound like a 12 year old gamer.
And, you don't have to end every sentence with "..."
I know I'll probably get modded down but sometimes you just can't help but say something.
As to your actual comments, you've explained exactly what's wrong with the big labels. If all you have is a nice body and a 'little' vocal talent then maybe you shouldn't be headlining for Busch Stadium. There's a lot of musicians that are actually very good and they shouldn't have to compete with that crap. It's hard enough as it is.
Not everything is crap, but a lot of stuff is, I agree. Just because a band is signed to a big label doesn't mean they're automatically crap. If they were crap to begin with, they'd always be crap, but if they were good this wouldn't change that.
The problem is that once a new type of musician becomes popular, the big labels all try to get a peice of the action which leaves us with a lot of very mediochre music.
I realize that I may have come off as anti-BSD and I'm not. I really like BSD a lot, ever since I used to use FreeBSD regularly for lots of things. I brought it up because the next step of "free" for Linux would be pretty much a BSD licence - ie take the code we don't care. GPL basically says take the code we don't care, but just don't change it and sell it closed source.
The base system of BSD might be BSD with BSD licencing, but GCC isn't and it tends to play a big part in free Unix these days. Not to mention Gnome or KDE which are both very popular GUI systems. Or pretty much anything else desktop related - media players, word processors, etc. You could probably come close to building a GPL-free BSD system for a server, but don't try to do any Windows server or client access. And you can't build it without GCC unless you get the non-bsd licensed Intel compilers.
I think the GPL is great, and I think the BSD license is great too. I'm a big proponent of the LGPL for core system libraries. But I really think the nature of the GPL has pushed *both* systems to another level. A lot of BSD fans tend to think that BSD has nothing to do with Linux, but all renewed interest in Unix, I believe from Linux and Linux based distributions, has played an enourmous part in getting more people into the game. We're all better for it.
BSD license aside, look at the licenses for other Unixes or other systems like Windows. You basically rent the stuff. You have to pay big bucks for it.
So, Linux has an excellent license when it comes to being able to use the great code and complete operating system components without paying a dime. If these people are really dying to write closed source applications using open source code, well, I don't know what to say. I think they could *pay* to do that, don't you?
So why didn't BSD get as popular as it is today without the GPL? Probably because corporations have been sucking out the peices they want to use and giving nothing back because they don't have to. The BSD community was never a sharing community. I don't think it is today either, although because of Linux it's become more so. Do you really think the *BSDs would be as popular now if Linux never came along?
Not to mention, most BSD systems use a heavy amount of GPL code these days, and the Linux kernel on GNU toolsets really took the GPL to the public. What would your favorite BSD look like without any of it?
Many programmers, and companies, are willing to contribute to GPL codebases because they're not willing to let the competition or some company to take their work, close source it, and sell it as something new and better to make bundles of cash. If they're going to give to the community, they want others to do the same. The GPL promotes that type of system.
People will complain about it because they want to use the code like it was public domain but it's not. Maybe this is considered "holding it back" but in my opinion we don't want that kind of thing anyways.
A RAID card failure is hardly the fault of the OS, and a SCSI/SAN configuration that would have that completed transaction not be written to disk would also not be the fault of the OS.
I don't blame Windows in many cases where the system fails. Windows 2003 might not be the fastest, and it's certainly not the cheapest, but it does work if you have good hardware. These Dell servers just suck, and everyone's using them now. I have retarded problems with all our Dell stuff and it often appears to be a software problem. It's really not. When I used high-end IBM x86 servers at my last contract the infrastructure was solid. All Windows, and it all worked. Clusters were solid.
I don't know what they've got going on (cheap ass hardware that's not built very well is my guess) but the Dell stuff just stinks.
But who's going to demand credit card statements and social security cards in the midst of an attack? This would be for the aftermath, in which case there should be plenty of infrastructure running if they're asking for it.
Actually, this TV does support HDCP over HDMI, which is the whole encryption bullshit with the secure path. Technically, HDMI is basically just DVI plus some extra pins for digital audio, all on one cable (it's backward compatible with DVI.) They added the whole HDCP stuff to it, which is why HDMI is nearly synonomous with DRM.
The analog "hole" is because the FCC (or whomever) said they must allow unencrypted analog to be passed through for older sets, and rightfully so. It'll be the content providers or hardware makers that force the issue of lower quality out analog - because component cables are capable of full 1080i. It's not quite as nice as 1080i over DVI, but it comes close enough.
I think it would be crap if they had all this digital content unplayable by almost all HDTV's made except for the past year. I won't put it past them though. As much as I hate anything to do with DRM, at least my TV will play it in the event that it's the way things will be.
Incidently, I'm one of those crazypersons that purchased an expensive HDTV. I went with the Sharp LC-45GX6U TV - it's a 45" LCD TV that can do some really cool stuff - including a full 1920x1080 (no overscan) over a DVI bridge/switchbox you can install between the screen and it's external A/V concentrator and ATSC reciever. Counter Strike on this thing is the best. The TV was $4000 before extended warranty and shipping, which was a good price.
HDTV looks really nice though. You can clearly (no pun intended) see a big difference between standard definition and HD stuff. It's actually quite amazing especially because a lot of channels do broadcast 1080i which this TV will display with no scaling. I mostly went with the LCD TV, dispite being a bit more expensive then a similarly sized plasma, because of LCD's much longer lifespan and this TV's ability to rock hard with a PC connection.
So I'd really like to see more HDTV stuff become available. I'm going to get a DVHS unit so I can play some of the DVHS movies that are available. There's actually quite a few. Baseball looks really great on NESN, too. But, I really think the insane DRM being implimented in both HD-DVD and Blu Ray make the whole thing just boring. Not to mention that there's even a format battle at all.. blah.
I do believe that it's probably the widescreen format alone that really helps with enjoyable viewing. If things were lower resolution yet still 16:9 it would still look a lot better then 4:3. The extra pixels really do allow you to see more of the little background nuances that you miss with a lower resolution picture, though.
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Yes, I think this is exactly why. Other big vendors - IBM, HP, Sun - they all have Opteron/Athlon machines in their line-ups. When I asked a Dell rep why Dell had zero, and no intentions to ever have any AMD, he said it was because AMD wouldn't be able to supply them enough CPU's. I call bullshit. AMD has a great deal of production capacity, and adding more all the time. Dell wouldn't have to all of a sudden convert 100% of it's line up with AMD. But, therein may lie the problem. They very-well might have to, or lose some insane deals with Intel. I think that's why they stay Intel - and mention it on every single Dell ad.
If I could upgrade my existing 2P dell servers to even inefficient dual cores that run too hot, I'd do it. But I doubt my existing servers would be able to cool them, so it's probably not going to happen anywyas. If we could get 2x dual-Opteron servers, we'd jump on it for all our ESX servers - especially with ESX3 and native x64 memory support. SWEET! But no, we'll be stuck with Xeon "EMT64" bastardized x64 CPU's because we're locked into Dell.
Good thing we have people like you reminding us of this *every single time Trolltech is mentioned anywhere.*
$1800 isn't that big a deal with even a small business. Sure, I think it would be great if it were $100, but I don't fault them for that. $1800 is the price point for Trolltech where they feel it's still worth developing and still worth releasing regular GPL versions.
"*shrug* yeah. I've long since realised the whole concept of freedom in the US is lip service to some ideal everyone would like, and everyone has convinced themselves they have, but has long since left on the wings of excess litigation, patents, government regulations and stupid laws."
I definately agree that special interests and corporations have too much power, but I also don't take light the fact that at any given time I can go anywhere I want, do anything I want within reason, without telling anyone where I'm going or what I'm doing. This is a good thing. But, I do believe that the more important aspect of my own freedom is the freedom not be fucked with by other people.
It doesn't always work, but it's a lot better then many places in the world.
I was surprised this past weekend when I went to a few stores to buy a new gadget, and saw the prices of the mini-dvd players. They were always so very overpriced, but it looks like they've really come down a lot. Visit a few stores (Circuit City, Best Buy, etc) and you're bound to find one on sale. The Circuit City I stopped at had over 8 models to choose from.
So you're telling me that non-Americans enjoy carrying around 20lb of chargers, cables, equipment, and batteries?
Europeans are stranger then I thought, I guess.
Let's face it: Although Apple makes good stuff, they haven't done anything innovative since the original Mac. The iPod was simply an improvement on existing portable MP3 players. OSX is an improvement of BSD+OS9. Wait - what else does apple make?
Anyways, the new Video player might be good, but there just haven't been enough video players sold by other vendors to show Apple what they need to do to make their own better. Without that important data, I don't see Apple actually doing anything truely original.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple products are good quality and very usable.
Fighting on Slashdot is like the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded.
PS. You're a shining example of why I don my sig.
I'm not sure what constitutes a "coherent though" like the other guy said, but I think your post was funny =)
THE NEW AMD AND MCDONALDS JOINT VENTURE: THE MCAMD MCJUNKON PROCESSOR! Free when you SUPER SIZE any 'value' meal!
Most of these guys already do bypass end-user installation by performing automatic installation via exploits, piggybacking on other apps, and deceiving install prompts.
Not HDTV. Sure, if you have an OTA HDTV card you could do it, but for cable TV unfortunately most cable companies are stopping this quite effectively by encrypting most (or some key) digital channels requiring the use of their boxes. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but there's just about zero capture boards available to record over DVI or Component. (Some exist, but are extremely expensive (15K+) and for professional AV shops.)
DRM is killing home-brew video, and it's pushing Linux to the side when it comes to A/V applications.
Breaking it down to 15 cents versus 40 cents is one thing, but for most of us, we just want some photos printed sometimes and it's much easier to do it at home, even if it's slightly more expensive. It's so easy now with the photo printers - many of them don't even require a PC if you don't want to edit them first. Plug in the camera, stick in the memory chip, whatever.
For the professional or the person that makes a LOT of photos, sure, in bulk you're definately better off with a printing service. But how many of us fall into this category? If I can go out on a weekend vacation, and then come back and print out the pictures I want, when I want, from the comfort of my own house - that sounds pretty good to me and worth the extra cost. I might only want one print from the whole set. I might want to do some small customizations and print a few copies until I get the one I want. I might not want to deal with driving to the store no matter how "kiosky" it might be.
People also like things of the "do it yourself" nature. It's not because it's cheaper to do it, it's because people like to feel independant and in control of what they do.
This is why at-home printing has taken off.
Well, I sort of insinuated much of that in less words. I'm not nearly as cynical as you, I guess.
I don't agree that all companies exist to sell crap products. I own a lot of really great stuff made by companies. In fact, I don't own much that's not made by a company, and I doubt everything you own was hand-made. There's always going to be people out there to make a quick buck but I don't see how that translates to "companies exist to sell crap products."
The record labels are companies indeed. And yes, they care about making money. But that doesn't mean that everyone they sign is crap. The Beatles, Ray Charles, The Beastie Boys, Elvis, REM, the Chilli Peppers, to name just a very small few, are or were all signed to major labels at one time. Are the Beatles 'whores'? Why did the labels sign them? Because they were very popular and they had a lot of money potential, yes. Explain to me why this is wrong?
I think you nead a reality check if you think everyone should be doing charity work for what YOU think should be sold. If you don't like it, you're free to not buy it. I agree that there's too much mediochre music, but I don't agree that all of it is, nor that it's some mystical "man" that we should always try to stick it to.
It's PEOPLE dammit, not ppl! You saved three whole keystrokes and you sound like a 12 year old gamer.
And, you don't have to end every sentence with "..."
I know I'll probably get modded down but sometimes you just can't help but say something.
As to your actual comments, you've explained exactly what's wrong with the big labels. If all you have is a nice body and a 'little' vocal talent then maybe you shouldn't be headlining for Busch Stadium. There's a lot of musicians that are actually very good and they shouldn't have to compete with that crap. It's hard enough as it is.
Not everything is crap, but a lot of stuff is, I agree. Just because a band is signed to a big label doesn't mean they're automatically crap. If they were crap to begin with, they'd always be crap, but if they were good this wouldn't change that.
The problem is that once a new type of musician becomes popular, the big labels all try to get a peice of the action which leaves us with a lot of very mediochre music.
I'm sure a cat species, that nobody has ever been able to confirm even existed, posed a HUGE PROBLEM to the outback wildlife environment.
Seriously, give me a break.
I realize that I may have come off as anti-BSD and I'm not. I really like BSD a lot, ever since I used to use FreeBSD regularly for lots of things. I brought it up because the next step of "free" for Linux would be pretty much a BSD licence - ie take the code we don't care. GPL basically says take the code we don't care, but just don't change it and sell it closed source.
The base system of BSD might be BSD with BSD licencing, but GCC isn't and it tends to play a big part in free Unix these days. Not to mention Gnome or KDE which are both very popular GUI systems. Or pretty much anything else desktop related - media players, word processors, etc. You could probably come close to building a GPL-free BSD system for a server, but don't try to do any Windows server or client access. And you can't build it without GCC unless you get the non-bsd licensed Intel compilers.
I think the GPL is great, and I think the BSD license is great too. I'm a big proponent of the LGPL for core system libraries. But I really think the nature of the GPL has pushed *both* systems to another level. A lot of BSD fans tend to think that BSD has nothing to do with Linux, but all renewed interest in Unix, I believe from Linux and Linux based distributions, has played an enourmous part in getting more people into the game. We're all better for it.
Sounds like a great opportunity for them to abuse the 5 year maximum sentence by counting each DVD sale or each title sold as a seperate offense.
"You are heretofore charged with 1,344 counts of theft by rules of the DMCA."
BSD license aside, look at the licenses for other Unixes or other systems like Windows. You basically rent the stuff. You have to pay big bucks for it.
So, Linux has an excellent license when it comes to being able to use the great code and complete operating system components without paying a dime. If these people are really dying to write closed source applications using open source code, well, I don't know what to say. I think they could *pay* to do that, don't you?
So why didn't BSD get as popular as it is today without the GPL? Probably because corporations have been sucking out the peices they want to use and giving nothing back because they don't have to. The BSD community was never a sharing community. I don't think it is today either, although because of Linux it's become more so. Do you really think the *BSDs would be as popular now if Linux never came along?
Not to mention, most BSD systems use a heavy amount of GPL code these days, and the Linux kernel on GNU toolsets really took the GPL to the public. What would your favorite BSD look like without any of it?
Many programmers, and companies, are willing to contribute to GPL codebases because they're not willing to let the competition or some company to take their work, close source it, and sell it as something new and better to make bundles of cash. If they're going to give to the community, they want others to do the same. The GPL promotes that type of system.
People will complain about it because they want to use the code like it was public domain but it's not. Maybe this is considered "holding it back" but in my opinion we don't want that kind of thing anyways.
A RAID card failure is hardly the fault of the OS, and a SCSI/SAN configuration that would have that completed transaction not be written to disk would also not be the fault of the OS.
I don't blame Windows in many cases where the system fails. Windows 2003 might not be the fastest, and it's certainly not the cheapest, but it does work if you have good hardware. These Dell servers just suck, and everyone's using them now. I have retarded problems with all our Dell stuff and it often appears to be a software problem. It's really not. When I used high-end IBM x86 servers at my last contract the infrastructure was solid. All Windows, and it all worked. Clusters were solid.
I don't know what they've got going on (cheap ass hardware that's not built very well is my guess) but the Dell stuff just stinks.
But who's going to demand credit card statements and social security cards in the midst of an attack? This would be for the aftermath, in which case there should be plenty of infrastructure running if they're asking for it.
You really don't know what you're talking about do you?
Huh? What's true?
No, I just think you're a dipshit if you missed it. It was painfully obvious.
Actually, this TV does support HDCP over HDMI, which is the whole encryption bullshit with the secure path. Technically, HDMI is basically just DVI plus some extra pins for digital audio, all on one cable (it's backward compatible with DVI.) They added the whole HDCP stuff to it, which is why HDMI is nearly synonomous with DRM.
The analog "hole" is because the FCC (or whomever) said they must allow unencrypted analog to be passed through for older sets, and rightfully so. It'll be the content providers or hardware makers that force the issue of lower quality out analog - because component cables are capable of full 1080i. It's not quite as nice as 1080i over DVI, but it comes close enough.
I think it would be crap if they had all this digital content unplayable by almost all HDTV's made except for the past year. I won't put it past them though. As much as I hate anything to do with DRM, at least my TV will play it in the event that it's the way things will be.
Incidently, I'm one of those crazypersons that purchased an expensive HDTV. I went with the Sharp LC-45GX6U TV - it's a 45" LCD TV that can do some really cool stuff - including a full 1920x1080 (no overscan) over a DVI bridge/switchbox you can install between the screen and it's external A/V concentrator and ATSC reciever. Counter Strike on this thing is the best. The TV was $4000 before extended warranty and shipping, which was a good price.
HDTV looks really nice though. You can clearly (no pun intended) see a big difference between standard definition and HD stuff. It's actually quite amazing especially because a lot of channels do broadcast 1080i which this TV will display with no scaling. I mostly went with the LCD TV, dispite being a bit more expensive then a similarly sized plasma, because of LCD's much longer lifespan and this TV's ability to rock hard with a PC connection.
So I'd really like to see more HDTV stuff become available. I'm going to get a DVHS unit so I can play some of the DVHS movies that are available. There's actually quite a few. Baseball looks really great on NESN, too. But, I really think the insane DRM being implimented in both HD-DVD and Blu Ray make the whole thing just boring. Not to mention that there's even a format battle at all.. blah.
I do believe that it's probably the widescreen format alone that really helps with enjoyable viewing. If things were lower resolution yet still 16:9 it would still look a lot better then 4:3. The extra pixels really do allow you to see more of the little background nuances that you miss with a lower resolution picture, though.