IMHO, monopolies aren't capitalist. They're facist. It's true. You name a (realistic) market need -- i.e., something people are willing to pay for and that can be created *within the bounds of law* -- that somebody hasn't tried to sell.
Even so, anywhere you can get cable or DSL, you can also get frame relay or T1 run to your house. Sure, it costs more -- but again, the market.
I'd just like to point out, the original thread concerned dial-up (*not* broadband), in which case my generalization about the market is pretty much correct, because dial-up access really is a free and open market. IMHO, monopolies aren't capitalist. They're facist.
Even so, your generalization about broadband access is entirely incorrect. Anywhere you can get cable or DSL, you can also get frame relay or T1 run to your house. Sure, it costs more -- but again, the market.
Actually, voting with your wallet really does work. If there is a market for something, it will exist. That's the beauty of capitalism. So, if there's a market for truly unlimited access, there will be ISPs who offer it -- possibly at a premium, possibly not. You get what you pay for.
The best deal I've found is that Amazon.com is selling late-model 30 gig 3rd Generation iPods for the same price they're selling 20 gig 3rd generation iPods. They're also really pushing them, obviously to get rid of inventory...
They're charging a quarter/unit. That's nothing! That's *less* than the government charges me when I buy a flash memory card, consumer electronics device, etc. Its their IP. They can charge for it. If people aren't happy about it, they'll use something else.
This specifies that you will only use FAT to
(a)create portions of an operating system
(b)to create firmware, applications etc. i.e., NOT HARDWARE. You can use the firmware, application, etc. to setup the hardware, but you can't actually ship the hardware with FAT installed.
It seems to me that this pretty clearly means that, under the terms, you can't ship hard drives or flash memory with FAT preinstalled without the payment to Microsoft.
However, there seems to be more ambiguity with consumer electronics devices. The license grants that firmware/utilities may use FAT to "manufacture, install, and setup any hardware, firmware, or operating system software." The hardware here would be the Flash Memory cards that the firmware/utility in the device would be formatting. See, here you have to get into the tricky definition of "manufacture" "install" and "setup." I would wager that formatting for FAT using a consumer electronics device would qualify as "use" and not "install" or "setup". In which case the license outlaws it.
Did the cost of your EKG appear separately on the statement? How much was that?
I know a few physicians pretty well. Many have been backed into a corner, playing games with your insurance company, just to get you the care they think you need. You physician may have thought you needed an EKG as part of your check-up, just being thourough (not uncommon, if you're in your mid-20s, and never had one). But, on the other hand, they may know that your insurance company would never approve one for an otherwise healthy individual. So they had to lie and include it as a consultation fee. Most health insurers treat those very differently for cost approval purposes. Its certainly better than the full bill coming back to you.
What seems to be left out here is that phone number portability covers land-lines as well (at least, as I understand it). Has anybody tried switching their land number to a cell phone (or vice-versa, but why?), which should be theoretically possible under the new rules?
These things (i.e., laser cutters of this nature) have been around for a while. Any decent architecture graduate school has a few of them sitting around their fabrication shop, right next to the 3D plastic modeling system. They *are* incredibly useful for model making, and have been around for about 5 or 10 years. We've done some consulting to architecture schools, and I must say, the technology is impressive. It's particularly neat how it integrates with AutoCAD, and how you can use it to not only cut, but also score material.
Okay, here we see the biggest misconception involving the use of Linux in movie production.
Linux is primarily used on headless RENDER FARMS, clustered or network computers that simply do the number crunching. The editing/compositing is still usually done on an OS X or Windows platform (or, less often, Sun or SGI).
That isn't to say that Maya, which is available for Linux as a complete compositing workstation, isn't available for Linux -- it is. But, as a percentage of licenses, Maya for Linux is probably tiny. It doesn't make sense for them to develop the PLE version for Linux as well.
Theoretically true, but real world experience -- at least on G4/G5 systems -- speaks otherwise. I'm not entirely sure why, in part because I'm no system programmer, but you can go ahead and try it. Since this is a line we've been feeding our clients for a year now, some of my staff and I ran some crude benchmarks this morning (always fun to do on a working saturday...)
Take a miniDV camera, (or a Digi002 audio interface which also uses firewire) and check the CPU utilization and memory overhead (on a mac) when you're writing video/audio. My results were about 15-25% less utilization (around 60-80% vs. 80-100%, averaged accross two CPUs). Exact results depended on the system, (the G4 having less discrepancy than the G5), the software package (Final Cut, ProTools, or Avid XPRess DV) As for memory overhead, the results were curious. FireWire memory overhead stayed constant, whereas IDE memory overhead increased over time (they both started at about the same level). This was more of an issue in ProTools and less of an issue in Final Cut or Avid. I have no idea why this is, but I suspect some sort of buffering? Also, nice to know, going FireWire 400 camera to FireWire 800 drive on the G5 had no effect on CPU overhead but dropped memory use slightly, though probably inconsequentially so.
Since you peaked my curiosity, I also tested this on one of the WinXP Pro DV systems we currently have sitting around the office. Interestingly enough, the same did not hold true on the PC, at least under windows -- CPU/memory utilization was practically identical no matter where the file was writing to,and if anything was slightly *higher* being written to the FireWire bus. However, we did notice a rather large disadvantage when we switched from non-accellerated video to accellerated using one of the new Avid Adrenaline systems, which interfaces using FireWire. FireWire-to-FireWire (two channel, same card) on the PC was slow and kept crashing. Writing to internal non-system IDE drives fixed the problem, as did writing to external LVD SCSI drives, so long as the controller (as per Avid's rec) was on a different bus segment. We don't have avid configured on the mac yet for accellearted video
I really don't have time to test this out using RAID, either FireWire or otherwise. Maybe towards next week...
Okay, so if anybody can provide technical EXPLANATION for these observations, I would really, really love it -- because all I can explain them with is my intuition, which is often wrong.
Slightly OT, but if you're planning on getting a G4 over a G5 just because of internal drive expansion capability, you should think again.
If you are seriously interested in video editing, you'll want to get external firewire drives instead of internal IDE drives. You can plug in a huge number of the external drives, many more than you can fit in the case (or on the macs IDE controller) and software RAID them together. I'm a consultant who specializes in these things, and FireWire software RAID for video data is, in my experience, faster than software RAID on the IDE bus. I'm pretty sure this is because of issues having to do with the system disk also being on the IDE bus and a certain amount of overhead.
Even if you're not going to do RAID, getting an external firewire drive is still probably the way to go. If you're capturing video from another firewire device (say, digital camera or miniDV deck), the video will move directly accross the bus with less system overhead, resulting in a much more stable configuration. The drives are as fast (if not faster) than internal IDE, particularly on the G4s somewhat lackluster internal IDE controller. If you get a G5, you can even go for FireWire 800 -- although, my experience has shown that it isn't really worth the cost right now (you're better off with two or four FireWire 400 drives and RAID). Also great for data portability.
If you want the cheapest (and I think the best) place to buy firewire drives on the web, check out transintl.com. They're generally who we use when we do hardware integration that requires new firewire peripherals; for us that's about 30 drives/month. After a year of buying, we haven't had one that's been DOA, and of the 400-odd drives we've bought from them for our clients, we've had no failures after installation.
Apple has no interest in making QuickTime open source, and it's not for any malicious reasons. They want QuickTime to be as widely adopted as possible, particularly by the movie industry. They have had some success at this, namely, that nearly *all* major studios now release trailers in QuickTime format.
The problem with OSSing QuickTime is that you've lost *any* credibility for DRM with the movie studios. Regardless of the actual ability (or inability) of OSS programs to effectively implement DRM, and regardless of the merits of DRM itself, the movie industry, and big-name professional content creators in general, are going to walk away from anything that looks to them as insecure. An open source QuickTime would be seen as insecure.
I think Apple is stuck here. I don't blame them for not releasing QuickTime in OSS (besides the fact that it would remove yet *another* reason to switch to mac, because OSS QuickTime would see a Linux port faster than you can say "Linus Torvalds"), and I don't think that it's going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, there are *tons* of perfectly good OSS media handlers out there, and, if they use standard codecs (as most of them do), its generally not too complex to convert. If streaming is what you are interested, I'd see the other post (about Darwin Streaming) and try to reverse-engineer a client. It shouldn't be too hard for an ambitious programmer, as far as I can see...
I completely agree with almost everything in parent, except for the notion that the cost of printing books has dropped. I mean, it's certainly dropped in the last 100 years. But the cost of printing books since he 1950s, adjusted for inflation, has risen astronomically. This is primarily because of the general increase in the cost of wood products in general, which has *far* outstripped inflation in the last 50 years. Publishers are making nearly identical margins on the books they produce, in spite of books costing, on average, more than ten times what they did in the 1960s and 70s. Go find an old mass-market paperback (those are the small ones, not the full-size trade paperbacks) novel from the 70s; chances are the cover price is around $0.99, maybe $1.50. Mass-market paperback novels nowadays run between $6.99 and $10. This is *not* talking about insane hardcover book deals with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Anne Coulter. I'm talking about paperbacks -- the examples I used, personally, were between old, first-paperback Vonnegut and Heinlein vs. new, current-printing paperback Vonnegut and Heinlein.
Completely incorrect. I'm typing this on an HP Notebook. My cat knocked a can of Diet Coke all over the notebook two months ago. I sent it back to HP, No Questions Asked, three days later, had a new notebook.
I had to pay $350 extra for this warranty, mind you -- but the notebook itself was a steal at under a grand (after rebates), so the warranty brought it up to an average price level.
My other notebook (i.e., the one provided by my business) is a TiBook 15 inch. We have 3-year applecare agreements corp-wide. They're pretty good, and I highly reccommend them. Things break. Apple fixes them. As long as its not obvious neglect, they'll usually fix it. And even if it is obvious neglect, if you go to a little apple certified repair center (those places are *full* of mac lovers), they'll be apt to cut you some slack.
Getting your Mac repaired is all about personal relationships. Buy from a small dealer, who also happens to be authorized. *NOT* from a major store.
Well, here's an interesting question. What if a Microsoft developer -- who has access to MS's CSS property -- or two also codes for the Open Source movement. It's probably that one or more such people exist. Or not just Microsoft, but any CSS developers
Assuming that this is the case, how would the OSS movement ever know if somebody was slipping CSS code out into the open. They wouldn't, they're'd be no way to check.
What I'm scared of is a trump card. Linux becomes popular. Suddenly, Microsoft discloses a bunch of code that they document way the heck back to 1999, let's say with respect to display drivers/engine. Identical code happens to be in Linux. Now Microsoft says "all Linux users, you have 30 days to either A) remove any tainted software from your system or B) pay us a one-time licsening fee equal to about 3/4 the cost of windows or C) get windows at 1/2 normal cost." Meanwhile, the OSS movement comes up with an open-source solution, but has its credibility forever and irrevocably damaged. Who knows how many trump cards Microsoft (or any other closed-source vendor that *needs* microsoft's cross-licsensed IP) holds...
Well, if that's the argument, then it's already being done. Unless you buy "organic" food (which maybe you do, and that's almost always non-GM), then you're getting food with pesticides on them. Or beef with hormones (which also doesn't have to be labled). What's needed is a campaign which lables food as "NON GM" not a campaign which labels food as "GM" -- much like organic/hormone free food today. And it should cost a premium, because in a very short time it will be much more expensive (than GM food) to produce. Maybe the organic/pesticide/hormone analogy is much better. None of those things are proven to cause cancer -- but then again, they aren't proven not to. Just like GM.
While the article does state that MIT says that they will hand over the information once the RIAA goes through the appropriate channels, this seems to me like a likely candidate for conciliatory legalspeak. They have to say "oh, of course, that's the only problem." I think this is mainly a delaying tactic, something that they're doing to come up with a better reason why not to comply. I think they'll come up with something. I mean, MIT certainly has the resources to deal with the RIAA, if they choose to -- and something tells me, given their student base, it's likely that they will.
My favorite comment on this subject comes from Thomas Friedman, the NYT Foreign Affairs columnist, who made an interesting observation the last time he was in Geneva:
The menu at a top restaurant he dined in was very explicit at the bottom to note that "no GM products" are used in any of the foods prepared. Meanwhile, everybody around Mr. Friedman was smoking like a chimney. For all the problems in the US, Europe outsmokes us by an, excuse the pun, (un)healthy margin.
Point being: let's be really, really concerned about something that has no known health risks, and instead blatantly ignore the known (and severe) health risks associated with something else.
I'm not saying GM crops are completely harmless. That is a blanket statement that doesn't consider the variety of genetic modification going on (for instance, intraspecies genetic insertion (cloning a bunch of different genes from a bunch of different corn species) is substantially different than interspecies modification (inserting bacterial/fungal genes into corn). Current GM debate rarely acknowledges this important difference: in the first process, humanity is merely speeding, aiding, augmenting what could potentially be a natural process (and one that we have been doing, simply by selective breeding, since we domesticated wheat). In the second process, we are doing something distinctly unnatural, which may or may not have positive or negative effects, and which should probably be studied more closely (and should be much more heavily regulated).
Burning paper in large amounts, obviously, has some interesting environmental impacts -- not to mention, requires space where you can safely burn the material.
A much simpler alternative is to pulverize it. First, cross-cut shred. Then, get a cheap blender, or a few cheap blenders (they're like $10-$20 a piece at Wal-Mart or from numerous vendors online). Place cross-cut shreds in blender (cross-cut not really necessary, but helpful because paper is smaller to start with), add some water, and blend. You will have pulp within about twenty seconds.
You can also use a food processor, although with less satisfactory results, and at a higher price.
If you are really adventurous, you should be aware that you have just completed the first step towards making your own recycled paper! Congratulations! Now all you need is a wire mesh screen, and you'll be churning out 100% recycled stationary in no time.
You're absolutely right. What I meant, and I probably should've been more specific, is selling a program/plug-in for GIMP that has the Pantone Matching System solid-to-process presets built-in (essentially what Photoshop can do), so that you don't have to go buy the $150 or so solid-to-process swatch kit. They're not exact, I know, but since so many pro print houses now use a four-color system anyway, Process CMYK colors have virtually become a standard unto themselves in the graphics industry -- in fact, Pantone even sells a swatch guide specifically for standardized process colors.
I hope that clears things up on the technical front.
The advantage of the Pantone guides (which are conveniently listed, albeit with prices in UKP, at this site, is that they are true standards which have been adopted wholesale by the entire graphics industry. A designer in Berlin can call a designer in San Francisco and talk about color schemes, referring specifically to either Pantone Process or Solid colors. While the CMYK values for Process could be entered manually, it is still impossible to replicate Pantone Solid, and, in spite of what is mentioned above, support for Pantone Solid colors is vital to nearly all graphic designers. GIMP DOES need that capability to be successful as a professional alternative to Photoshop.
Yes, there's an interesting conundrum here -- the color standards themselves (i.e., Pantone) could never actually be distributed with GIMP, because they are licensed under a non-GPL compatabile scheme. They would have to be "sold" (because the libraries cost money; that's one of the reasons why Photoshop is so expensive, and one of the many reasons why Adobe doesn't mind Photoshop piracy so much), and somebody would have to do the selling (perhaps Pantone themselves?) Furthurmore, you're never going to see wholesale adoptation by the Graphics world of any standard OTHER than Pantone. I work with these people every day. You'd might as well try to convince the Pope to pray to Allah...
The image sensor deal is nice -- that's what allows color synchronization. But Pantone is the key. Pantone is the amazing system that absolutely positively guarantees that whatever Pantone color I pick, that same color will come out at the printer's end (not my little desktop printer, I mean the guy accross town who's making 10,000 copies). Yes, Pantone colors could be converted to CMYK, and then used -- but that would be painful, and any program releasing such color standards would be illegal.
The solution, it seems to me, is for a bunch of Linux programmers to offer to write a Pantone plug-in for GIMP; they will then have to hammer out a licensing scheme that satisfies both them and the holders of the Pantone patents. I'm waiting for this to happen...
Two words: color management. GIMP is great for web graphics, but CMYK color management is practically non-existant in GIMP. You can't do (print) graphics work without it (CMYK CM), pure and simple. Somebody needs to write P-Tone libraries and a complete color-management suite for GIMP. Then it will be able to compete, maybe...
But they aren't, not really. The overlap is comprable to what occurs in the car industry: I can get a high-end Dodge for the same price as a mid-range Chrysler. Which one has more features? That depends on the model, and how I customize it.
From a a quantitative point of view, the iBook starts at $1000, while the 12in TiBook starts at $1699. The "higher-end" 14in. iBook should really be compared with the 15in. powerbook, with which it is perhaps more accurately compared...
Regardless of this hype about the SPECint and SPECfp score, I'm much more interested in real-world performance -- specifically the Photoshop tests given closer to the bottom of the page. It's real application support that counts.
I'm the head of a mid-sized consulting company that deals almost exclusively with digital media and digital arts firms. We have a few G5s on order, and because we're a solutions provider, we'll probably get them pretty early. I'm going to wait and see exactly how fast they are, not just in Photoshop, but also in Final Cut Pro -- which in my experience has a history of outrunning similar applications on faster hardware. It's going to be real-world performance that matters. Not SPECfp scores. And we won't know the real-world performance until people start getting their hands on some production units. End of story.
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Even so, anywhere you can get cable or DSL, you can also get frame relay or T1 run to your house. Sure, it costs more -- but again, the market.
Even so, your generalization about broadband access is entirely incorrect. Anywhere you can get cable or DSL, you can also get frame relay or T1 run to your house. Sure, it costs more -- but again, the market.
Actually, voting with your wallet really does work. If there is a market for something, it will exist. That's the beauty of capitalism. So, if there's a market for truly unlimited access, there will be ISPs who offer it -- possibly at a premium, possibly not. You get what you pay for.
The best deal I've found is that Amazon.com is selling late-model 30 gig 3rd Generation iPods for the same price they're selling 20 gig 3rd generation iPods. They're also really pushing them, obviously to get rid of inventory...
They're charging a quarter/unit. That's nothing! That's *less* than the government charges me when I buy a flash memory card, consumer electronics device, etc. Its their IP. They can charge for it. If people aren't happy about it, they'll use something else.
This specifies that you will only use FAT to
(a)create portions of an operating system
(b)to create firmware, applications etc. i.e., NOT HARDWARE. You can use the firmware, application, etc. to setup the hardware, but you can't actually ship the hardware with FAT installed.
It seems to me that this pretty clearly means that, under the terms, you can't ship hard drives or flash memory with FAT preinstalled without the payment to Microsoft.
However, there seems to be more ambiguity with consumer electronics devices. The license grants that firmware/utilities may use FAT to "manufacture, install, and setup any hardware, firmware, or operating system software." The hardware here would be the Flash Memory cards that the firmware/utility in the device would be formatting. See, here you have to get into the tricky definition of "manufacture" "install" and "setup." I would wager that formatting for FAT using a consumer electronics device would qualify as "use" and not "install" or "setup". In which case the license outlaws it.
QED.
I know a few physicians pretty well. Many have been backed into a corner, playing games with your insurance company, just to get you the care they think you need. You physician may have thought you needed an EKG as part of your check-up, just being thourough (not uncommon, if you're in your mid-20s, and never had one). But, on the other hand, they may know that your insurance company would never approve one for an otherwise healthy individual. So they had to lie and include it as a consultation fee. Most health insurers treat those very differently for cost approval purposes. Its certainly better than the full bill coming back to you.
What seems to be left out here is that phone number portability covers land-lines as well (at least, as I understand it). Has anybody tried switching their land number to a cell phone (or vice-versa, but why?), which should be theoretically possible under the new rules?
-Shylock
These things (i.e., laser cutters of this nature) have been around for a while. Any decent architecture graduate school has a few of them sitting around their fabrication shop, right next to the 3D plastic modeling system. They *are* incredibly useful for model making, and have been around for about 5 or 10 years. We've done some consulting to architecture schools, and I must say, the technology is impressive. It's particularly neat how it integrates with AutoCAD, and how you can use it to not only cut, but also score material.
Linux is primarily used on headless RENDER FARMS, clustered or network computers that simply do the number crunching. The editing/compositing is still usually done on an OS X or Windows platform (or, less often, Sun or SGI).
That isn't to say that Maya, which is available for Linux as a complete compositing workstation, isn't available for Linux -- it is. But, as a percentage of licenses, Maya for Linux is probably tiny. It doesn't make sense for them to develop the PLE version for Linux as well.
Take a miniDV camera, (or a Digi002 audio interface which also uses firewire) and check the CPU utilization and memory overhead (on a mac) when you're writing video/audio. My results were about 15-25% less utilization (around 60-80% vs. 80-100%, averaged accross two CPUs). Exact results depended on the system, (the G4 having less discrepancy than the G5), the software package (Final Cut, ProTools, or Avid XPRess DV) As for memory overhead, the results were curious. FireWire memory overhead stayed constant, whereas IDE memory overhead increased over time (they both started at about the same level). This was more of an issue in ProTools and less of an issue in Final Cut or Avid. I have no idea why this is, but I suspect some sort of buffering? Also, nice to know, going FireWire 400 camera to FireWire 800 drive on the G5 had no effect on CPU overhead but dropped memory use slightly, though probably inconsequentially so.
Since you peaked my curiosity, I also tested this on one of the WinXP Pro DV systems we currently have sitting around the office. Interestingly enough, the same did not hold true on the PC, at least under windows -- CPU/memory utilization was practically identical no matter where the file was writing to,and if anything was slightly *higher* being written to the FireWire bus. However, we did notice a rather large disadvantage when we switched from non-accellerated video to accellerated using one of the new Avid Adrenaline systems, which interfaces using FireWire. FireWire-to-FireWire (two channel, same card) on the PC was slow and kept crashing. Writing to internal non-system IDE drives fixed the problem, as did writing to external LVD SCSI drives, so long as the controller (as per Avid's rec) was on a different bus segment. We don't have avid configured on the mac yet for accellearted video
I really don't have time to test this out using RAID, either FireWire or otherwise. Maybe towards next week...
Okay, so if anybody can provide technical EXPLANATION for these observations, I would really, really love it -- because all I can explain them with is my intuition, which is often wrong.
If you are seriously interested in video editing, you'll want to get external firewire drives instead of internal IDE drives. You can plug in a huge number of the external drives, many more than you can fit in the case (or on the macs IDE controller) and software RAID them together. I'm a consultant who specializes in these things, and FireWire software RAID for video data is, in my experience, faster than software RAID on the IDE bus. I'm pretty sure this is because of issues having to do with the system disk also being on the IDE bus and a certain amount of overhead.
Even if you're not going to do RAID, getting an external firewire drive is still probably the way to go. If you're capturing video from another firewire device (say, digital camera or miniDV deck), the video will move directly accross the bus with less system overhead, resulting in a much more stable configuration. The drives are as fast (if not faster) than internal IDE, particularly on the G4s somewhat lackluster internal IDE controller. If you get a G5, you can even go for FireWire 800 -- although, my experience has shown that it isn't really worth the cost right now (you're better off with two or four FireWire 400 drives and RAID). Also great for data portability.
If you want the cheapest (and I think the best) place to buy firewire drives on the web, check out transintl.com. They're generally who we use when we do hardware integration that requires new firewire peripherals; for us that's about 30 drives/month. After a year of buying, we haven't had one that's been DOA, and of the 400-odd drives we've bought from them for our clients, we've had no failures after installation.
Cheers,
Shylock
The problem with OSSing QuickTime is that you've lost *any* credibility for DRM with the movie studios. Regardless of the actual ability (or inability) of OSS programs to effectively implement DRM, and regardless of the merits of DRM itself, the movie industry, and big-name professional content creators in general, are going to walk away from anything that looks to them as insecure. An open source QuickTime would be seen as insecure.
I think Apple is stuck here. I don't blame them for not releasing QuickTime in OSS (besides the fact that it would remove yet *another* reason to switch to mac, because OSS QuickTime would see a Linux port faster than you can say "Linus Torvalds"), and I don't think that it's going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, there are *tons* of perfectly good OSS media handlers out there, and, if they use standard codecs (as most of them do), its generally not too complex to convert. If streaming is what you are interested, I'd see the other post (about Darwin Streaming) and try to reverse-engineer a client. It shouldn't be too hard for an ambitious programmer, as far as I can see...
I completely agree with almost everything in parent, except for the notion that the cost of printing books has dropped. I mean, it's certainly dropped in the last 100 years. But the cost of printing books since he 1950s, adjusted for inflation, has risen astronomically. This is primarily because of the general increase in the cost of wood products in general, which has *far* outstripped inflation in the last 50 years. Publishers are making nearly identical margins on the books they produce, in spite of books costing, on average, more than ten times what they did in the 1960s and 70s. Go find an old mass-market paperback (those are the small ones, not the full-size trade paperbacks) novel from the 70s; chances are the cover price is around $0.99, maybe $1.50. Mass-market paperback novels nowadays run between $6.99 and $10. This is *not* talking about insane hardcover book deals with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Anne Coulter. I'm talking about paperbacks -- the examples I used, personally, were between old, first-paperback Vonnegut and Heinlein vs. new, current-printing paperback Vonnegut and Heinlein.
I had to pay $350 extra for this warranty, mind you -- but the notebook itself was a steal at under a grand (after rebates), so the warranty brought it up to an average price level.
My other notebook (i.e., the one provided by my business) is a TiBook 15 inch. We have 3-year applecare agreements corp-wide. They're pretty good, and I highly reccommend them. Things break. Apple fixes them. As long as its not obvious neglect, they'll usually fix it. And even if it is obvious neglect, if you go to a little apple certified repair center (those places are *full* of mac lovers), they'll be apt to cut you some slack.
Getting your Mac repaired is all about personal relationships. Buy from a small dealer, who also happens to be authorized. *NOT* from a major store.
Assuming that this is the case, how would the OSS movement ever know if somebody was slipping CSS code out into the open. They wouldn't, they're'd be no way to check.
What I'm scared of is a trump card. Linux becomes popular. Suddenly, Microsoft discloses a bunch of code that they document way the heck back to 1999, let's say with respect to display drivers/engine. Identical code happens to be in Linux. Now Microsoft says "all Linux users, you have 30 days to either A) remove any tainted software from your system or B) pay us a one-time licsening fee equal to about 3/4 the cost of windows or C) get windows at 1/2 normal cost." Meanwhile, the OSS movement comes up with an open-source solution, but has its credibility forever and irrevocably damaged. Who knows how many trump cards Microsoft (or any other closed-source vendor that *needs* microsoft's cross-licsensed IP) holds...
Well, if that's the argument, then it's already being done. Unless you buy "organic" food (which maybe you do, and that's almost always non-GM), then you're getting food with pesticides on them. Or beef with hormones (which also doesn't have to be labled). What's needed is a campaign which lables food as "NON GM" not a campaign which labels food as "GM" -- much like organic/hormone free food today. And it should cost a premium, because in a very short time it will be much more expensive (than GM food) to produce. Maybe the organic/pesticide/hormone analogy is much better. None of those things are proven to cause cancer -- but then again, they aren't proven not to. Just like GM.
The menu at a top restaurant he dined in was very explicit at the bottom to note that "no GM products" are used in any of the foods prepared. Meanwhile, everybody around Mr. Friedman was smoking like a chimney. For all the problems in the US, Europe outsmokes us by an, excuse the pun, (un)healthy margin.
Point being: let's be really, really concerned about something that has no known health risks, and instead blatantly ignore the known (and severe) health risks associated with something else.
I'm not saying GM crops are completely harmless. That is a blanket statement that doesn't consider the variety of genetic modification going on (for instance, intraspecies genetic insertion (cloning a bunch of different genes from a bunch of different corn species) is substantially different than interspecies modification (inserting bacterial/fungal genes into corn). Current GM debate rarely acknowledges this important difference: in the first process, humanity is merely speeding, aiding, augmenting what could potentially be a natural process (and one that we have been doing, simply by selective breeding, since we domesticated wheat). In the second process, we are doing something distinctly unnatural, which may or may not have positive or negative effects, and which should probably be studied more closely (and should be much more heavily regulated).
A much simpler alternative is to pulverize it. First, cross-cut shred. Then, get a cheap blender, or a few cheap blenders (they're like $10-$20 a piece at Wal-Mart or from numerous vendors online). Place cross-cut shreds in blender (cross-cut not really necessary, but helpful because paper is smaller to start with), add some water, and blend. You will have pulp within about twenty seconds.
You can also use a food processor, although with less satisfactory results, and at a higher price.
If you are really adventurous, you should be aware that you have just completed the first step towards making your own recycled paper! Congratulations! Now all you need is a wire mesh screen, and you'll be churning out 100% recycled stationary in no time.
I hope that clears things up on the technical front.
The advantage of the Pantone guides (which are conveniently listed, albeit with prices in UKP, at this site, is that they are true standards which have been adopted wholesale by the entire graphics industry. A designer in Berlin can call a designer in San Francisco and talk about color schemes, referring specifically to either Pantone Process or Solid colors. While the CMYK values for Process could be entered manually, it is still impossible to replicate Pantone Solid, and, in spite of what is mentioned above, support for Pantone Solid colors is vital to nearly all graphic designers. GIMP DOES need that capability to be successful as a professional alternative to Photoshop.
The image sensor deal is nice -- that's what allows color synchronization. But Pantone is the key. Pantone is the amazing system that absolutely positively guarantees that whatever Pantone color I pick, that same color will come out at the printer's end (not my little desktop printer, I mean the guy accross town who's making 10,000 copies). Yes, Pantone colors could be converted to CMYK, and then used -- but that would be painful, and any program releasing such color standards would be illegal.
The solution, it seems to me, is for a bunch of Linux programmers to offer to write a Pantone plug-in for GIMP; they will then have to hammer out a licensing scheme that satisfies both them and the holders of the Pantone patents. I'm waiting for this to happen...
Two words: color management. GIMP is great for web graphics, but CMYK color management is practically non-existant in GIMP. You can't do (print) graphics work without it (CMYK CM), pure and simple. Somebody needs to write P-Tone libraries and a complete color-management suite for GIMP. Then it will be able to compete, maybe...
From a a quantitative point of view, the iBook starts at $1000, while the 12in TiBook starts at $1699. The "higher-end" 14in. iBook should really be compared with the 15in. powerbook, with which it is perhaps more accurately compared...
I'm the head of a mid-sized consulting company that deals almost exclusively with digital media and digital arts firms. We have a few G5s on order, and because we're a solutions provider, we'll probably get them pretty early. I'm going to wait and see exactly how fast they are, not just in Photoshop, but also in Final Cut Pro -- which in my experience has a history of outrunning similar applications on faster hardware. It's going to be real-world performance that matters. Not SPECfp scores. And we won't know the real-world performance until people start getting their hands on some production units. End of story.