Ummm. My life has been enriched for having read this comment. Thank you, moderators, for marking it as insightful. I don't know what I would have done had I not seen it.
Nope. I'll admit that I've never purchased a house. I always did wonder why my parents spent so much on carpeting, lawn care, paving the driveway, putting in a porch, redecording the living room, and painting the house.
I kept telling them that they could buy a killer 386 PC for the cost of the driveway, a killer 486 for the porch, a dual processor Pentium III for the carpeting, etc... but they never listened to me.
All I need is a room for my servers and a mattress. And maybe an air conditioner. Those systems get hot...
Well, considering that the average person doesn't spend thousands of dollars buying new computers every six months or upgrading their car stereo to shatter windows from a hundred feet away, that doesn't leave much but entertainment systems or power tools on which to waste all their money. Have you ever looked at the prices of the high-end televisions in Best Buy? Fucking insane. Who in their right mind spends $2000 on a television? I guess some people do, because I see them carting those huge boxes outside to their car.
If you're not buying a new Corvette or 3 GHz Pentium IV with 21" LCD, I guess you might as well upgrade your entertainment center. What else are those stinking rich assholes going to spend their money on? Compact discs?
How about a PCI video capture card (USB sucks), SCSI host adapter (for those cheap SCSI drives on ebay), second NIC (having two NICs lets you share your broadband connection), ATA 133 IDE controller (for that new Western Digital you mentioned), sound card (Creative Labs doesn't seem to support the Mac any more...?), hardware MPEG encoder/decoder, cryptography co-processor, etc.
There's a lot more than ATI and Seagate out there. I can deal with not having Matrox video cards (kinda sucks) or Tekram SCSI cards (oh well), but paying double the PC price for your hardware -- when you can even find any upgrades -- is just outrageous. It's better to just buy a brand new Mac than try to upgrade an old Mac. I'm sure they're designed that way.:)
Apple actually uses some nice hardware in their newer PowerMacs. 64 bit/66 MHz PCI, Nvidia GeForce4 graphics, dual CPUs... I wouldn't mind having a dual G4 PowerMac.
Still, the upgrade options do kind of suck. Adaptec, Nvidia, and ATI are the only manufacturers who support the Mac. Bleh.
It's not my fault someone was stupid and naive enough to sign a bad contract. I'm not here to subsidize mediocre artists who are "punker than thou". I'm not really impressed at all by Fugazi. Why should I buy their stuff? Just because they're on an independant label? I think not.
Here's a hint for all the artists whining about how unfair their contracts are: read it before you sign it! When I get a job, I don't constantly whine about how unfair my salary is. I ask for a raise or get a different job if I want more money.
1) As a few anonymous cowards have asked, "Who is Don Marti, and why should I care about his opinions?" I don't really see why this is headline news. Most of probably don't care about him, and his opinions are not very interesting or revolutionary. In short, he's just a regular guy who got interviewed. If I were a little more cynical, I might even suggest that this was a cheap ploy to get a few thousands hits on someone's banner ads.
2) Quoting from the article:
Software is a good thing because in software, a small investment can create and manage great complexity. When you impose the same transaction costs on software as on hardware, much useful software that could otherwise have been created does not exist. We are seeing this today in the field of video compression. The MPEG patent licensing mess is excluding everyone except for large, well-funded corporations from creating innovative new video-related software.
I don't follow this. What MPEG patent licensing mess? There is none. If you want to use an algorithm developed by someone else, at great expense, you follow their rules. If you want to use their algorithm for free... then, I'm sorry, you'll just have to come up with your own algorithm. And when you're done, don't forget to give it away for free.
3) Uhhh... this guy has what qualifications to be talking about law and interpreting the Constitution? I didn't see anything in his bio about being a lawyer.
The solution is to not use hardware that has integrated DRM. It's the same old thing as before. If hardware manufacturers push proprietary solutions that don't fill a need that consumers want, the products will fail. It has happened before, and I'm sure that if consumers don't want DRM hardware, these solutions will fail, too.
Buy a Mac or buy a workstation if you don't want DRM. You can get a 64 bit DEC Alpha really cheap now.
"I can't reveal my source, but a federal agency involved in espionage actually did a rating system of almost every citizen in this country," Ponemon claims. "It was based on all sorts of information-public sources, private sources. If people are not opted in"-meaning they haven't chosen to participate-"one can generally assume that information was gathered through an illegal system."
Uhhh... do you really believe this nonsense? Let's see what's on the front page of your "news source":
Taken FATAL ABDUCTION?
Was Pennsylvania Man Abducted And Killed By ETs?
"I WILL be as brief as possible. A man named Todd Sees was abducted and murdered by aliens on Montour Ridge in Northumberland County near the town of Northumberland, Pa. This is a big sloppy coverup if there ever was one."
Uhhhh.... can you say Weekly World News?
You know, your post just made me even more sure of my position, not less. If every privacy advocate is as wacky as you are, then I was right all along when I insinuated that you're paranoid.
There's a difference between being paranoid ("but THEY might be watching me!") and caring about security ("Maybe I should encrypt my password...").
Maybe as a "privacy advocate" you find the idea of someone knowing your salary frightening, but I sure don't. If you ask me, I'll tell you. Maybe you don't want anyone to know how much you weigh or what your favorite softdrink is. I really don't care who knows this.
When it comes to something like people being able to get to material possessions of mine, I start to care. This is when I demand high security and good encryption. I don't want hackers to get into my bank account with a minimum of effort. That's just ridiculous and lazy on the part of the bank.
I really find that log on screen at Yahoo annoying. I'd rather have my account be public, with no password. I don't care who sees my Yahoo e-mail. I'm sick of entering passwords all the time.
You have to do that to access most areas of the Apple web site, too.
I'd love to see all the tech support docs on Apple's web site show up on a P2P network. Who cares about this useless pop culture? If you're going to break copyright law, then make it something worthwhile.
And I can tell the difference between 120 Hz refresh rate and 160 Hz refresh rate. It's about more than your eyes. It's also about pressing the button that makes to OSD pop up and tell me what the refresh rate is.
I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. If a $75 CPU runs at 1.5 GHz and is fast enough for 75-90% of the computing tasks you do, and a 2.5 GHz CPU costs over $500... then why would you even consider the 2.5 GHz CPU? It's too expensive, and it would only impact on a small number of computing tasks (encoding/decoding, video capture, DOOM3).
Now that even value CPUs are ridiculously fast, there isn't much reason to buy the top of the line. I used to buy dual processor boards and populate them with two of Intel's second or third fastest workstation CPU. Those days are over, since I can't really imagine myself wasting so much money, just to get an additional few megahertz. Now I look to previous generation workstation CPUs, since they're being dumped on the market to clear stock. Plenty fast enough for me. My last purchase was two 1.2 GHz Athlon MPs, back when the 1.6 MHz (1800+ MP or thereabouts) MPs were being sold.
I'm sure that the OEM motherboards will eventually have only USB ports. I'd like to have more options available to me for my systems, though. Hopefully, PS/2 won't die out any day soon. I see nothing wrong with it, and I have lots of PS/2 peripherals that work just fine.
I did break down and buy a USB keyboard, but only because my stupid PowerMac lacks support for anything else. Too bad there isn't an I/O card you can use to get PS/2, serial, and parallel.
Ummmm... okay, I sort of agree with you. But you can't truly say that any IDE solution has more throughput than cutting-edge SCSI. You didn't really say that in as many words in your post, but it seems sort of hinted at in the second to last paragraph. Having your own controller hooked up to every drive isn't really a feature.... it's an ugly hack to get around the braindead design of IDE. It doesn't give you any advantages over using a good SCSI solution, like triple channel Ultra160 or Ultra320 cards.
I agree with you that IDE solutions are novel, making inroads, and are a great solution for low-end data storage. Once you reach the mid-range market, however, I really would have to suggest that you use SCSI. SCSI was designed intelligently, without any ugly hacks to work around. Many of the features are not apparent in benchmarks or low-end usage. Sometimes, you won't even see any apparent benefit to SCSI unless you're dealing with high-end or cutting-edge storage solutions! What you're missing, however, is that these storage solutions (even if it's just a simple file server with a bunch of disks (JBOD)), each disk drive has a massive warranty (5 years is the industry standard), is over-engineered (so that it doesn't fail right after the warranty period ends), and is compatible with every other SCSI storage solution ever made. Do you need your drives to be external? No problem. Do you need your disks to go into an Alpha server? No problem. What about the existing RAID setup? No problem.
IDE is a great innovation, and I'm glad that Maxtor is pushing the envelope. However, to suggest that SCSI is obsolete, except in the most demanding situation possible... ugh... I don't know about you, but I trust a Seagate Cheetah a lot more than a Maxtor DiamondMax. Sure, you could load up all the brand new servers with low-end motherboards, generic RAM, and IDE hard drives, but I'd be a little wary of depending on them when the site gets slashdotted.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Most of the time, the problem is with the browsers, though. When you allow yourself to compromise for the sake of compatibility with poorly designed browsers, this is exactly what happens.
Granted, sometimes it's unavoidable, since backward compatibility can't be maintained. In this case, the problem is with standard HTML. However, when the HTML is standard, it's a bug in the browser, which needs to be addressed.
Just because void main{} can compile doesn't mean it's right.
I don't see how that's possible, since you're using standard HTML. Wow. Maybe your web site got sucked into an alternate dimension where HTML versions are not backwards compatible?
I hated MFM, RLL, and ESDI drives. I bought a couple 20MB and 40MB MFM drives in the mid-80s, though. Sometime around 1989-90, I paid $400 for a Seagate 80MB SCSI drive, plus a negligible amount for an ST01 SCSI controller (8 bit ISA, PIO). I paid $525 for a 105MB Toshiba IDE drive in 1991, plus $25 for a (16 bit ISA, PIO) IDE controller, for a total of $550. Over the next few years, I bought cheap Maxtor and Western Digital IDE drives, which were usually between $200 and $250. I remember when Western Digital announced their first EIDE drive, the 340MB Caviar. In fact, I still have one of them. It died, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it in the trash. It's a piece of history, don't ya know. Maybe I should get it bronzed.
Let's see... in October of 99, I bought the fastest drive on the market, a 9.1GB Quantum Atlas 10K. Of course, they also came in an 18GB size, but I couldn't afford that. The drive was $500, and the Ultra2 SCSI controller was $180. This year, I bought the fastest drive on the market again, a 36GB Seagate Cheetah X15 rev2. This drive was only $260. I'm looking to buy a 64 bit PCI Ultra160 controller (I've got six or seven Ultra2 drives now), and they start at only $80! Amazing.
It's much more fun to stay on the bleeding edge than to pay through the nose for a bigger IDE drive. Most users probably wouldn't even notice if you replaced their 40GB drive with a 4GB drive. Some might not even notice if you ran QNX from flash ROM and kept their Netscape bookmarks in NVRAM. Good idea for an internet appliance, maybe?
My advice: go high-end SCSI. You'll have more fun and be the envy of geeks everywhere.
Actually, the business plan worked perfectly. There was nothing wrong with it. The only problem is finding such gullible investors a second time. Oh well. I feel bad that I didn't incorporate myself quickly enough to scam an investor.
I'm not quite sure what they mean, but I think they will be making the CVS server pay-to-play. Will it be illegal to redistribute GPL'd code from the CVS server?
Blender's sources will be opened under the GNU GPL.
No costs, site access and Membership will become gratis, and open for everyone.
Membership will be still required for some community services, like access to CVS, forums, etc.
Other services might be offered without Memerbership, open for everyone.
Details on the services will be made available later."
So, it looks like the source code will be GPL. That's good. However, you won't be able to access the CVS without paying. That's bad. They might let you have access to other services. That's good. But there are no promises, and there are no details. That's bad.
This doesn't look like any open source project I've ever seen. I don't remember ever having to pay to access the linux kernel CVS. Hmmm. Well, I don't really care, anyways. I don't use 3D programs. I'm just trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that, you have a problem, with comma splices.
Ummm. My life has been enriched for having read this comment. Thank you, moderators, for marking it as insightful. I don't know what I would have done had I not seen it.
Nope. I'll admit that I've never purchased a house. I always did wonder why my parents spent so much on carpeting, lawn care, paving the driveway, putting in a porch, redecording the living room, and painting the house.
I kept telling them that they could buy a killer 386 PC for the cost of the driveway, a killer 486 for the porch, a dual processor Pentium III for the carpeting, etc... but they never listened to me.
All I need is a room for my servers and a mattress. And maybe an air conditioner. Those systems get hot...
Well, considering that the average person doesn't spend thousands of dollars buying new computers every six months or upgrading their car stereo to shatter windows from a hundred feet away, that doesn't leave much but entertainment systems or power tools on which to waste all their money. Have you ever looked at the prices of the high-end televisions in Best Buy? Fucking insane. Who in their right mind spends $2000 on a television? I guess some people do, because I see them carting those huge boxes outside to their car.
If you're not buying a new Corvette or 3 GHz Pentium IV with 21" LCD, I guess you might as well upgrade your entertainment center. What else are those stinking rich assholes going to spend their money on? Compact discs?
How about a PCI video capture card (USB sucks), SCSI host adapter (for those cheap SCSI drives on ebay), second NIC (having two NICs lets you share your broadband connection), ATA 133 IDE controller (for that new Western Digital you mentioned), sound card (Creative Labs doesn't seem to support the Mac any more...?), hardware MPEG encoder/decoder, cryptography co-processor, etc.
:)
There's a lot more than ATI and Seagate out there. I can deal with not having Matrox video cards (kinda sucks) or Tekram SCSI cards (oh well), but paying double the PC price for your hardware -- when you can even find any upgrades -- is just outrageous. It's better to just buy a brand new Mac than try to upgrade an old Mac. I'm sure they're designed that way.
Apple actually uses some nice hardware in their newer PowerMacs. 64 bit/66 MHz PCI, Nvidia GeForce4 graphics, dual CPUs... I wouldn't mind having a dual G4 PowerMac.
Still, the upgrade options do kind of suck. Adaptec, Nvidia, and ATI are the only manufacturers who support the Mac. Bleh.
It's not my fault someone was stupid and naive enough to sign a bad contract. I'm not here to subsidize mediocre artists who are "punker than thou". I'm not really impressed at all by Fugazi. Why should I buy their stuff? Just because they're on an independant label? I think not.
Here's a hint for all the artists whining about how unfair their contracts are: read it before you sign it! When I get a job, I don't constantly whine about how unfair my salary is. I ask for a raise or get a different job if I want more money.
2) Quoting from the article:
I don't follow this. What MPEG patent licensing mess? There is none. If you want to use an algorithm developed by someone else, at great expense, you follow their rules. If you want to use their algorithm for free... then, I'm sorry, you'll just have to come up with your own algorithm. And when you're done, don't forget to give it away for free.
3) Uhhh... this guy has what qualifications to be talking about law and interpreting the Constitution? I didn't see anything in his bio about being a lawyer.
Uhhh... no.
The solution is to not use hardware that has integrated DRM. It's the same old thing as before. If hardware manufacturers push proprietary solutions that don't fill a need that consumers want, the products will fail. It has happened before, and I'm sure that if consumers don't want DRM hardware, these solutions will fail, too.
Buy a Mac or buy a workstation if you don't want DRM. You can get a 64 bit DEC Alpha really cheap now.
Yeah, use a firewire interface. The Formac Synchrotech is a professional solution. I didn't see a consumer version in my 30 seconds of searching.
Uhhh... do you really believe this nonsense? Let's see what's on the front page of your "news source":
Uhhhh.... can you say Weekly World News?
You know, your post just made me even more sure of my position, not less. If every privacy advocate is as wacky as you are, then I was right all along when I insinuated that you're paranoid.
There's a difference between being paranoid ("but THEY might be watching me!") and caring about security ("Maybe I should encrypt my password...").
Maybe as a "privacy advocate" you find the idea of someone knowing your salary frightening, but I sure don't. If you ask me, I'll tell you. Maybe you don't want anyone to know how much you weigh or what your favorite softdrink is. I really don't care who knows this.
When it comes to something like people being able to get to material possessions of mine, I start to care. This is when I demand high security and good encryption. I don't want hackers to get into my bank account with a minimum of effort. That's just ridiculous and lazy on the part of the bank.
I really find that log on screen at Yahoo annoying. I'd rather have my account be public, with no password. I don't care who sees my Yahoo e-mail. I'm sick of entering passwords all the time.
You have to do that to access most areas of the Apple web site, too.
I'd love to see all the tech support docs on Apple's web site show up on a P2P network. Who cares about this useless pop culture? If you're going to break copyright law, then make it something worthwhile.
So, it's okay for you to ignore the copyright on movies and music, but they can't ignore the copyright on some software?
I would die laughing if I saw modified, binary-only releases of GNU utilities on a P2P network.
And I can tell the difference between 120 Hz refresh rate and 160 Hz refresh rate. It's about more than your eyes. It's also about pressing the button that makes to OSD pop up and tell me what the refresh rate is.
I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. If a $75 CPU runs at 1.5 GHz and is fast enough for 75-90% of the computing tasks you do, and a 2.5 GHz CPU costs over $500... then why would you even consider the 2.5 GHz CPU? It's too expensive, and it would only impact on a small number of computing tasks (encoding/decoding, video capture, DOOM3).
Now that even value CPUs are ridiculously fast, there isn't much reason to buy the top of the line. I used to buy dual processor boards and populate them with two of Intel's second or third fastest workstation CPU. Those days are over, since I can't really imagine myself wasting so much money, just to get an additional few megahertz. Now I look to previous generation workstation CPUs, since they're being dumped on the market to clear stock. Plenty fast enough for me. My last purchase was two 1.2 GHz Athlon MPs, back when the 1.6 MHz (1800+ MP or thereabouts) MPs were being sold.
What the hell?
Who keeps moderating everything in this story as a troll? Stop giving this man mod points!
I'm sure that the OEM motherboards will eventually have only USB ports. I'd like to have more options available to me for my systems, though. Hopefully, PS/2 won't die out any day soon. I see nothing wrong with it, and I have lots of PS/2 peripherals that work just fine.
I did break down and buy a USB keyboard, but only because my stupid PowerMac lacks support for anything else. Too bad there isn't an I/O card you can use to get PS/2, serial, and parallel.
Ummmm... okay, I sort of agree with you. But you can't truly say that any IDE solution has more throughput than cutting-edge SCSI. You didn't really say that in as many words in your post, but it seems sort of hinted at in the second to last paragraph. Having your own controller hooked up to every drive isn't really a feature.... it's an ugly hack to get around the braindead design of IDE. It doesn't give you any advantages over using a good SCSI solution, like triple channel Ultra160 or Ultra320 cards.
I agree with you that IDE solutions are novel, making inroads, and are a great solution for low-end data storage. Once you reach the mid-range market, however, I really would have to suggest that you use SCSI. SCSI was designed intelligently, without any ugly hacks to work around. Many of the features are not apparent in benchmarks or low-end usage. Sometimes, you won't even see any apparent benefit to SCSI unless you're dealing with high-end or cutting-edge storage solutions! What you're missing, however, is that these storage solutions (even if it's just a simple file server with a bunch of disks (JBOD)), each disk drive has a massive warranty (5 years is the industry standard), is over-engineered (so that it doesn't fail right after the warranty period ends), and is compatible with every other SCSI storage solution ever made. Do you need your drives to be external? No problem. Do you need your disks to go into an Alpha server? No problem. What about the existing RAID setup? No problem.
IDE is a great innovation, and I'm glad that Maxtor is pushing the envelope. However, to suggest that SCSI is obsolete, except in the most demanding situation possible... ugh... I don't know about you, but I trust a Seagate Cheetah a lot more than a Maxtor DiamondMax. Sure, you could load up all the brand new servers with low-end motherboards, generic RAM, and IDE hard drives, but I'd be a little wary of depending on them when the site gets slashdotted.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Most of the time, the problem is with the browsers, though. When you allow yourself to compromise for the sake of compatibility with poorly designed browsers, this is exactly what happens.
Granted, sometimes it's unavoidable, since backward compatibility can't be maintained. In this case, the problem is with standard HTML. However, when the HTML is standard, it's a bug in the browser, which needs to be addressed.
Just because void main{} can compile doesn't mean it's right.
I don't see how that's possible, since you're using standard HTML. Wow. Maybe your web site got sucked into an alternate dimension where HTML versions are not backwards compatible?
I hated MFM, RLL, and ESDI drives. I bought a couple 20MB and 40MB MFM drives in the mid-80s, though. Sometime around 1989-90, I paid $400 for a Seagate 80MB SCSI drive, plus a negligible amount for an ST01 SCSI controller (8 bit ISA, PIO). I paid $525 for a 105MB Toshiba IDE drive in 1991, plus $25 for a (16 bit ISA, PIO) IDE controller, for a total of $550. Over the next few years, I bought cheap Maxtor and Western Digital IDE drives, which were usually between $200 and $250. I remember when Western Digital announced their first EIDE drive, the 340MB Caviar. In fact, I still have one of them. It died, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it in the trash. It's a piece of history, don't ya know. Maybe I should get it bronzed.
Let's see... in October of 99, I bought the fastest drive on the market, a 9.1GB Quantum Atlas 10K. Of course, they also came in an 18GB size, but I couldn't afford that. The drive was $500, and the Ultra2 SCSI controller was $180. This year, I bought the fastest drive on the market again, a 36GB Seagate Cheetah X15 rev2. This drive was only $260. I'm looking to buy a 64 bit PCI Ultra160 controller (I've got six or seven Ultra2 drives now), and they start at only $80! Amazing.
It's much more fun to stay on the bleeding edge than to pay through the nose for a bigger IDE drive. Most users probably wouldn't even notice if you replaced their 40GB drive with a 4GB drive. Some might not even notice if you ran QNX from flash ROM and kept their Netscape bookmarks in NVRAM. Good idea for an internet appliance, maybe?
My advice: go high-end SCSI. You'll have more fun and be the envy of geeks everywhere.
Actually, the business plan worked perfectly. There was nothing wrong with it. The only problem is finding such gullible investors a second time. Oh well. I feel bad that I didn't incorporate myself quickly enough to scam an investor.
I'm not quite sure what they mean, but I think they will be making the CVS server pay-to-play. Will it be illegal to redistribute GPL'd code from the CVS server?
"After the campaign
So, it looks like the source code will be GPL. That's good. However, you won't be able to access the CVS without paying. That's bad. They might let you have access to other services. That's good. But there are no promises, and there are no details. That's bad.
This doesn't look like any open source project I've ever seen. I don't remember ever having to pay to access the linux kernel CVS. Hmmm. Well, I don't really care, anyways. I don't use 3D programs. I'm just trolling.