Bologne. If he's a sysadmin, by definition, he can already impersonate any user he wants.
John Smith logged in this morning Reset j.smith password Log on to another machine as j.smith Do lots of naughty stuff Log off Either change password back to original before j.smith logs on next, or coincide your dirty deeds with scheduled downtime, password expiration, etc.
And why the hell should I have to wait for a user to turn up before I can fix their computer? Why, for that matter, does the user have to tap teir toe whilst I fix their computer? My company has about 20 teleworkers who, if I'm lucky, I get to see in person once a year. Our directors spend most of the time out of the office in meetings. If I'm only meant to do work on their machines when they're there to look over my shoulder, it means that:
a) they don't trust me as a sysadmin and therefore they're mad to keep employing me b) getting anything fixed requires at least two people with busy schedules to find time to meet each other, instead of having it all done by just one person, effectively doubling the time it takes to fix things.
The effective lack of "su - user" whilst resuming from a lock in windows is a bad design flaw, plain and simple.
Have you ever been to Holland? The people there speak English better than us Brits half the time.
At least in the UK we have a fine long standing tradition of toilet humour (or, to quote the Baron von Richtoffen, it's the basis for our entire culture), and the name "Wii" will likely condemn the console to an early grave due to the mass peurility that seems to be present in almost all non-formal media. Which is a shame.
Personally, I'd go even furher than that. To take my own example:
I, a poor student who has just got his first computer and a dialup connection, am given a tape by a university friend which I really like I download a shedload of their stuff from WinMX (they're a reasonably obscure band called Red Snapper) - I managed something like 8GB of tunes in a year on a 56k connection I leave uni, get a decent paying job doing computing and buy a few of their albums since I feel a bit guilty about ripping off their music Their record label (Warp) open a download store (bleep.com) where I can purchase high quality MP3's of all their other stuff - much better than the 128kbps badly tagged rips on the net. I have disposable income and a hankering for some good music, so I pull out the credit card Word of mouth and things like Last FM point me towards a shedload of bands who other fans of Red Snapper think I might like. Lo and behold, the recommendations are available as more high quality MP3's from bleep.com, tunetribe.com (the Last FM sister site) and a few others Net result - in the past few months I've bought about 20 albums from artists I'd never heard of.
I realise that I'm a minority and that anecdotes != data (plus the fact there are always some freeloaders who want something for nothing), but mine is a story of an emerging trend. People *do* eventually get bored with listening to the same old stuff (I hadn't bought any CD's in years simply because I never listened to the radio and I'd already got stuff from all of the bands my friends suggested to me).and want an easy way of finding something new. The internet doulcn't have been better suited to that purpose if it has been designed for it. Practically free publicity between a network of *thousands*. This doesn't benefit the big name acts like Madge and U2 because everyone already knows about them and knows what they sound like - the internet just points their fans in the direction of alternatives. And some of those users will inevitably decide to buy the latest J Random Singer album instead of Metallica's latets rock dross.
The cartel pushers have been shitting themselves over this prospect ever since Napster hove into view, and are becoming increasingly hungry for money and power and control over their audience as a result. But unless they succeed in introducing laws that make the latest Britney album a compulsory purchase for every last human on the planet, they're fighting a losing battle. And they know it.
Maybe at first they'll have to produce the files through literally aiming a video camera at their monitor and using a stereo microphone for sound... but I seriously doubt it.
Why even bother with that when you can buy the DVD you bought for £2 from your friendly neighborhood pirate DVD salesperson? Now you can avoid the middle man entirely and ensure that your DVD rips are 100% pirate material - not one penny sent to the evil capitalist pigdog dictators of Hollywood!
Heck, maybe even the big pirate organisations/orgaised crime will start their own P2P network system where you pay a subscription fee for the privelige of downloading your stuff direct from them, rather than going to the palaver of actually buying anythng as apallingly stone aged as an optical disc.
Bottom line is: if the content industries aren't prepared to capitalise on the ease of use of digital media, there are plenty of less (more?) scrupulous people who are. As everyone has gathered, this law is here to kick Joe Sixpa^H^H^H^H^HiPod in the balls, and it makes sweet FA difference to the industrial piraters who can afford production-level gear anyway./Disclaimer: I'm not American, but I live in the EU where this is gonna happen in the next 2-5 years
Ditto, although I made the switch to digital a while back (whcih of course has larger resolution than PAL IIRC). I watch TV on my MythTV box, which uses DVB-T capture cards displayed on a lovely Hyundai 19" CRT at 1280*1024, and whilst you can see artifacts on some channels (since some have lower bitrates than others - BBC 1 is about 2GB/hour, most others half that) it still looks stonkingly good on the monitor. The frontend hooked up to the 22" SD TV in the front room is indistinguishable from DVD content.
I'm not saying HDTV isn't worth the effort, but IMHO it definitely won't be worth the cost for quite some time. For my setup, I'd need a beefier set of GFX cards and CPU's plus about four times the storage space to make HDTV a viable option once it appears over this side of the pond for something that doesn't seem to make a huge difference to casual viewers like myself.
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, I can't help thinking that it seems horribly outdated.
Part of the reason that listening to music on your computer or MP3 player has become so popular was because it does away with the need for juggling dozens of CD's around at a time - I can just call up a tune from my music libary and play it. But if I want to see what the lyrics are, I have to search my big ol' box of CD's, find the disc and hope that it came with the lyrics printed in the booklet.
If I want to have a more convenient way of storing the lyrics (say, in a text file or metadata), where can I find a digital copy of the lyrics with copyright condoned by the artist? 9 out of 10 times, I can't since most artists don't carry lyrics on their sites and neither do the record labels. So if you're not allowed to use lyrics sites, you're not provided with a digital copy of the lyrics along with your MP3/AAC/whatever (4AD have started flogging non-DRM 192kbps AAC on their website BTW) download and you're not allowed to type out the lyrics from the CD leaflet (since that would also be a breach of copyright), what are you to do? If you listen to music through your computer, the (legal) options seem to be a) don't understand the lyrics or b) go through a boatload of fuss to get to read them. As a customer, I don't find this acceptable.
In my humble opinion, I find lyrics pretty useless without the song to go with them. Sure, you'll get the meaning of the song, but you won't hear any of the emotion or anything conveyed in the presentation of those lyrics - it's akin to the difference of hearing a poem recited first by the author, and secondly by a Stephen Hawking-esque voice synthesiser. The same metric applies to things like guitar tabs, samples and all of the other myriad form of work that go into a song - music is greater than the sum of it's parts, and treating those parts as equally valuable as the music, and therefore something to be hidden away forever, will possibly provide the greatest blow to artistic expression music has seen for centuries.
Please remember that the overwhelming majority of people who use lyrics sites already have the music and are just looking for a quick and easy way of reading the lyrics. Pulling figures out of my arse I'd say approximately 0.001% of lyrics site users will actually copy those lyrics to use in their own songs or whatever.
Just another complete over-reaction by the music labels IMHO, but more needs to be done by the artists if they wish to provide an alternative to lyrics sites./Disclaimer: I religiously embed lyrics and track-listings of dance mixes in music metadata, as I happen to like "completion"
Amen to that, brother. It was obvious that 3G was going to turn into a turgid cash-cow when the networks spent billions of £££ buying the 3G airwaves from the UK government. From that point on, cheap contracts and cheap pay-as-you-go were a thing of the past.
Case in point - I've been a Vodafone customer since 1998, and by 2002 had gotten pretty used to being treated very nicely indeed. I had a nice phone, and a cheap-as-hell contract (£6/month with 300min off-peak calls to landlines or other Vodafone mobiles). I asked to have my phone upgraded to a decent one soon after the 3G bidding war - all the ones they offered me were turkeys. So I asked how much it would cost me to get a Nokia 6310i (the best "business" phone available then IMHO) - they told me I'd need £100 to upgrade from my current model, plus mandatory switching to a new contract at £30/month with 60 free any-time any-network minutes a month. I told them to sod off, spent £350 on an off-the-shelf 6310i. And have had that ever since.
Fast forward to today and I still don't see any phones I want that are better than my 6310i. I keep getting letters and phone calls from them asking if I want to take advantage of their "free" upgrades, but (like so many other/.'ers) I don't want a phone that can't give me the weeks-worth of standy time I get out of my current Nokia (still only on it's first battery). They keep telling me how I can pay for the privelige of downloading 10-second footie clips and keep up with the latest music videos and ringtomes - and many seem genuinely shocked when I tell them that never, in my whole waking life, have I never dreamt about a world where I can watch football and the latest contemperaneous crap^H^H^H^H pop music. My phone goes ring ring and lets me talk to people. It sends and receives text messages. It has a nifty calendar/TODO list that I can hook up with my Linux box via a COM port or Bluetooth. That's all I want, yet Vodafone can't seem to offer me a sturdy phone with these features. I am, however, half-tempted to take up their upgrade offer and flog the phone on when I receive it.
And now I hear that providers are crippling their grossly over-featured phones so that users can't even access their own content on them...! Forcnig people to upload their shitty low-res cameraphone pics over their providers network, rather than being able to grab them over BT like any sane phone would let you. Forcing people to buy appalling awful ringtones at £2 a pop (if you're lucky and don't have to pay the £15/month subscription for a ringtone service) rather than letting people chuck their own WAV, MIDI or MP3 on there. Need to sync your address book with your PC? Why not use the internet for only £6/hr?!
The mobile honeymoon is, unfortunately, over. Telcos are fast turning into the **AA's of the telecoms world in their lust for profit and control over their userbase. Cute things like DVB reception aren't even on their radar, since they can just flog you the last months TV for £5 a clip.
...but what about motherboards? Last time I paid attention to Intel's dual core offerings, they would only work on boards equipped with the 9[4|5]5 chipsets. In the UK at least, the cheapest compatible board I can find from my fave hardware retailer costs £75, with the cheapest dual-core compatible AMD 939 board clocking in at under £50.
Bearing in mind that the 3800 X2 costs £230 and the P4D 820 costs £170 from the same store, for only £35 extra I get a duallie that'll thrash the P4D 820 and 830, plus using less power to boot, so within a few months it'll have paid for itself (if, like me, you count doing work faster as payment anyway - otherwise you'll have to wait a few months more for the leccy bills to add up).
My beef with these atricles and so many like them? The pseudo-TCO doesn't take the cost of the other hardware into account. A CPU is pretty useless without a compatible motherboard, no?
Woo, cheers for the link - certainly an interesting filter if you're an AviSynth user (of which I am not, unfortunately). Although looking at the blogs on VirtualDub.org, it looks like people are already writing GPU-based filters (such as bicubic resize, etc). Although whether they'll ever become part of VirtualDubMod (which has seemed dead for a while) remains to be seen.
Another great idea that will no doubt be poorly implemented and suffer from a closed spec, stifling developer input.
At the risk of becoming -1 redundant, many other posters have already pointed out that stuff like this should be done in a generic shader language so that it can be run across a gamut of GFX cards - I'm no programmer, but in my mind this would be like current CPU apps asking "do you support MMX? SSE? SSE2?" etc etc etc. Interesting projects like LibSh offer to provide a platform-independent method of integrating GPU shader routines into standard C++ programs.
I'm afraid I can't get too worked up about ATI's implementation though. What with their "what's Linux?" reputation and the heavily competitive/proprietary world of GPU subsystems, I find it unlikely that they'd open up an API to allow non-ATI apps to hook into the GFX card, meaning that I wouldn't be able to use my GPU to speed up my XviD transcodes in VDubMod. I wish they'd prove me wrong, but I doubt it somehow. All glitz and no geek (unless of course it does turn out to be written in a platform independent shader language that allows anyone to hook into it, then I'll eat my words;)).
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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Sure, I could just install them manually - it's quite easy after all. Indeed, I've compiled and installed plenty of my own stuff already - lots of plugins for GIMP, Amarok and other misc utils for the most part.
The problem I have with going for a non-portage route for Java is that it's be a struggle to keep it updated. Since Java would be the only app on my system that could represent a mojor security problem if a bug was found, my days would be spent scanning Bugtraq to see when I should upgrade the JRE next. There's no technical reason portage can't do this for me, it's just the portage maintainers being stubborn.
In the meantime, I'm only gonna be using the AMD64 arch for servers where things like win32codecs and SSE/SSE2 optimisations don't make a whole lotta difference.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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Are you using 1.x or 2.0? I don't recall having any problems with 1.x, but 2.0 is much more reliant on Java it seems, and leads to the atrociously slow startup times.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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I was wary of that too. The times I reported were done after just logging in after a reboot, so there shouldn't be anything cached. To make doubly sure, I turned off swap and still saw a colossal speed increase. This was on Linux and I don't have the quiskstarter installed.
It seems a significant portion of OOo's startup time was waiting for the JVM to load (since I don't have any other Java apps and rarely see/use it on web pages), and at the moment disabling it doesn't seem to give any less functionality. I imagine there may be problems with the new database stuff, but I use UNIX ODBC for my DB connection which bypasses Java.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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The fact of the matter is, I think Gentoo is great. But I'm put off by their eternal reaction that everything should have a native 64bit version, and if it doesn't then stuff it. Getting 32bit apps to work nicely and seamlessly on Gentoo can be an exercise in pain - if you want to be able to play anything that relies on win32codecs (WMV, etc etc) you have to manually download and install an unsupported 3rd party ebuild of mPlayer. If you want something like Xine (like me), you have to build your own. Because of the way portage works, if you want a nice frontend instead of the appallingly awful GTK interface you have to compile your own from scratch.
Same thing for the JRE. I don't want to have to manually install anything when it's only the stubborness of the devs that keeps precompiled 32bit apps for AMD64 users out of portage. I don't want the hassle of updating it manually. As far as I can see, there's no technical reason why installing openoffice-bin with the java USE flag doesn't pull down the 32bit JRE as a dependency.
I'm complaining here because requests for features like this in the Gentoo forums seem to fall on deaf ears. It's the reason I'm switching back to a 32bit install - I like Gentoo, but I'm not prepared to put up with its incredible clunkiness WRT to mixing 32 and 64bit apps when distros like Fedora don't have the same problem.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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I'd chance my arm and say a fair bit.
I made the mistake of opting for x86-64 Gentoo for one of my desktop boxes ("upgrading" it to 32bit this weekend), meaning I have to use the 32bit precompiled OpenOffice binaries. But these need hooking into a 32bit JRE which x86-64 Gentoo doesn't have, since making 32bit apps available through Portage is seemingly something that Gentoo Won't Do Because You Should Be Happy With 64bit. So whenever you start OOo it spends about a minute looking for a JVM (and failing) before you can do anything. I could have manually installed Sun's 32bit JRE, but I can't be bothered.
Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.
By way of comparison, I tried the same trick on my 32bit box (similar spec but with slower HDD's) and OOo was as snappy as hell and opened like the proverbial soil off a shovel.
If there's any functionality I miss through disabling Java, I haven't encountered any yet. And please note I'm not saying that Java is slow to execute (it isn't), it's just appallingly slow to load.
Of course, as the article states, gauging a chips' performance isn't a simple matter since everyone has different performance metrics based on the software they use. How many John Q Public will use 3DS Max and encode MPEG4 and give a rats ass about miniscule performance differences anyway? In my expereince, non-power users who do alot of CPU-intensive stuff just leave their computer overnight when they're converting the birthday DV into an MPEG or whatnot - for them, "slow" usually equates to "Swapping between apps takes an age cos I don't have nearly enough RAM in my bargain basement beige box" rather than a lack of high floating point scores.
And is overclocking allowed? And what memory/chipsets/I/O are we able to use? Do power bills count towards overall system cost? All of these points are glossed over or omitted entirely from the article.
That said, since the article is talking about general purpose computing, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say one of the AMD 64bit Semprons. Great performance across the board at a very low price (some very cheap and decent mobo's out there too). For more server/workstation-like workloads, I'd go for something like an overclocked Athlon X2 3800 (I'm informed almost all will overclock from 2.0GHz to 2.4GHz without even raising the core voltage - not tried it myself though as I'm not into overclocking - which nets you the power of an X2 4600 for ~£220 less based on todays UK prices).
All in all, the article was just another excuse to say "Woooweee! We've got lots of processors, let's use all our benchmarks du jour as an excuse for an article". Sigh.
Indeed, as much as I like their chips, their marketing is abysmal, and a great part of me believes that their recent success has been due in no small part to grassroots geeks raving on about how great the chips are for server and workstation workloads. Pre-AMD64/x86-64, AMD were hampered in the server/workstation segment by poor chipset support (IIRC only the AMD 760 chipsets were available for Athlon MP's) which kept the MP's stuck on slow RAM for the majority of their lifetime. In the desktop sector, poor chipset support was another bugbear until nVidia came along and raised the bar considerably. Now that the memory controller is embedded in the CPU, there's alot less to go wrong in the chipset(s) - but the stigma of "AMD = slow and unreliable" still remains with some.
The cost/benefit analysis is a great one (and how I originally got my boss to replace the 1.*GHz Willamette P4's he was buying with AXP's which gave about 30% more performance for the same system cost), but I don't think it's as easy to convince larger companies so quickly - like you say, it just takes time.
And as much as I'd like to see Intel brought to justice for what I see are fairly clear antitrust violations (most notably the intentionally crippled compiler), I can't help but wonder if it would have helped AMD's bottom line if they'd spent their legal budget on a quality marketing campaign instead.
Really, why would someone choose to use a chip that is less powerful, intrinsically costs more to operate, and costs more to cool?
Regrettably, because it has the Intel logo on it. I'm lucky working in a company where if I say I want AMD, I get AMD. I'm sure there's plenty of hardware geeks on/. who've asked for a shiny new Opteron server and been smacked back by either a company "Intel-only" policy, or their reseller's "Intel only" policy.
FWIW, AMD recently launched the new single-core Opteron 254 and it utterly trounces the Intel competition. Even in benchmarks that have been traditional strongholds for the Netburst architecture.
If that's how they're working it out, then they're boned. I and pretty much everyone I know always give false DoB's when t'internet "requires" it - I usually sign myself as 1900-01-01, making me 105.
Although if Yahoo insitute another rule of "no coffin-dodgers in chatrooms full of nubile ladies", then I'm boned!
I've been a colossal fan of Wallace and Gromit ever since I first saw A Grand Day Out when I was in my early teens, and I'm quite saddened by this loss. I know that, as far as things go, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to Aardmann as a company, but... the prospect of me owning a piece of genuine W&G on-set memorabilia has now diminished quite considerably! Whilst their financial value may have been little, it's very sad to hear that remnants of some of the best animation I've ever seen no longer exist.
As an aside, I saw a preview screening of the Were-Rabbit this weekend (first time I've been to the cinema in over a year and I noticed that the Federation Against Copyright Theft are now busy telling all and sundry that using a camcorder will land you in jail for 10 years) and it's well worth a watch. Humour "for all the family" (i.e. it's not dumbed down toy marketing fodder purely for kids) and the wealth of visual puns and arcane geekery will have any seasoned/.'er with a sense of humour stifling a giggle or two. As an even more OT aside, it's a pity that the USA doesn't have Wendsleydale cheese as readily available as we do here in the UK!
Does Linux/OSS innovate? Firstly, what do you mean when you say "innovate"? Does it refer to an all-in-one business solution, an individual app, or what?
I'm no coder myself, but I'll hazard a guess that there's a hundred innovative ways of codig things in the kernel alone. What about Samba? Cobbled together from an incomplete spec of SMB and packet sniffing, it's turned into possibly the biggest killer app for Linux in the SOHO business marketplace. It also spawned rsync which, I believe, was farily innovative in itself.
In terms of applications, you may have something of a point - but remeber that most OSS coders will deliver something that they see the users or they themselves need. What with the ubiquity of Windows, it's hardly surprising that alot of apps end up behaving somewhat like those in windows or OSX or . And yet we still see plenty of nifty tricks - KDE's KIO-slaves (integrating file management with the internet waaaaaaay more than MS's pathetic attempt at the same thing with IE/Explorer) to name one.
And lastly, isn't OSS an innovation in itself (as you rightyly point out)? It turned the whole world (or corporate plutocracy as I sometimes refer to it) of IT on its head by introducing a way for the unwashed hippy masses (:rolleyes:) to fight back and regain a system that the users control, rather than the money-hungry corps. If that isn't an innovation to be proud of, then I don't know what is. You can't put a patent on freedom for the users.
OSS does innovate. It's just that alot of the innovations are hidden behind ths screens, and masked by what users (and developers) want.
Already happened, sorta. There's a silent GFX cooler by Thermaltake called the Schooner that uses a heatpipe to extend cooling fins outside of the back of the case via an empty PCI slot. Quite nifty IMHO, although I don't like the idea of a fairly fragile piece of metal next to big hulking VGA/DVI connectors.
A zealot? Wow, never had that one before. Exactly what sort of zealot am I?
Yes, I only quoted the examples of my own expereince with my own company, which is hardly a big one with a staff of six people. So I guess my statement of "there's software we need to use to do our daily business that will only work with admin or power user privs" was entirely worthless then, as I and the OP are clearly the only people in the whole world who have this problem. You asked a question, and I gave you some examples. Easy enough to understand?
I see exactly the same thing with any number of law companies that have some shitty custom-made DB frontend or some special proofing software - they just won't run without r/w to program files. But as the Adobe and Kodak example shows, it's clearly not just restricted to the small coding houses - this is software aimed solely at businesses. Some of it you can get around with the "Run As..." feature, but this isn't a viable option when the software needs access to the domain - which of course, the sudo'd user the software is running as isn't privy to.
And note I didn't say I needed admin privs to run Winamp or Acrobat. I said they need access to write to program files to work properly. For example, I can't use the Acrobat Catalogue function if I can't write to program files - it opens, but refuses to do anything.
It's a problem that needs to be tackled by both MS and the developers, and people like you bitching that it's down to our own incompetence isn't going to solve anything.
If ever a/. post deserved a +5 Informative, this was it - well done. A simple, blow-by-blow account of everything a "Power User" would need to know about switching to Opera and what it can do for them - I've half a mind to send this to the Opera folks to put up on their website - you even taught me a few tricks, and I've been using Opera since 4.x, I think.
And just for the record, despite being a colossal fan of OSS, Opera is still my browser of choice simply because it does what it does better than any other browser out there. IMHO Firefox is great for almost all users - especially those migrating from IE (Opera can be very confusing for a new user not used to so much inbuilt functionality) - but, if you can forgive its closed-source nature, Opera does have something for you.
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Bologne. If he's a sysadmin, by definition, he can already impersonate any user he wants.
John Smith logged in this morning
Reset j.smith password
Log on to another machine as j.smith
Do lots of naughty stuff
Log off
Either change password back to original before j.smith logs on next, or coincide your dirty deeds with scheduled downtime, password expiration, etc.
And why the hell should I have to wait for a user to turn up before I can fix their computer? Why, for that matter, does the user have to tap teir toe whilst I fix their computer? My company has about 20 teleworkers who, if I'm lucky, I get to see in person once a year. Our directors spend most of the time out of the office in meetings. If I'm only meant to do work on their machines when they're there to look over my shoulder, it means that:
a) they don't trust me as a sysadmin and therefore they're mad to keep employing me
b) getting anything fixed requires at least two people with busy schedules to find time to meet each other, instead of having it all done by just one person, effectively doubling the time it takes to fix things.
The effective lack of "su - user" whilst resuming from a lock in windows is a bad design flaw, plain and simple.
Have you ever been to Holland? The people there speak English better than us Brits half the time.
At least in the UK we have a fine long standing tradition of toilet humour (or, to quote the Baron von Richtoffen, it's the basis for our entire culture), and the name "Wii" will likely condemn the console to an early grave due to the mass peurility that seems to be present in almost all non-formal media. Which is a shame.
Personally, I'd go even furher than that. To take my own example:
I, a poor student who has just got his first computer and a dialup connection, am given a tape by a university friend which I really like
I download a shedload of their stuff from WinMX (they're a reasonably obscure band called Red Snapper) - I managed something like 8GB of tunes in a year on a 56k connection
I leave uni, get a decent paying job doing computing and buy a few of their albums since I feel a bit guilty about ripping off their music
Their record label (Warp) open a download store (bleep.com) where I can purchase high quality MP3's of all their other stuff - much better than the 128kbps badly tagged rips on the net. I have disposable income and a hankering for some good music, so I pull out the credit card
Word of mouth and things like Last FM point me towards a shedload of bands who other fans of Red Snapper think I might like. Lo and behold, the recommendations are available as more high quality MP3's from bleep.com, tunetribe.com (the Last FM sister site) and a few others
Net result - in the past few months I've bought about 20 albums from artists I'd never heard of.
I realise that I'm a minority and that anecdotes != data (plus the fact there are always some freeloaders who want something for nothing), but mine is a story of an emerging trend. People *do* eventually get bored with listening to the same old stuff (I hadn't bought any CD's in years simply because I never listened to the radio and I'd already got stuff from all of the bands my friends suggested to me).and want an easy way of finding something new. The internet doulcn't have been better suited to that purpose if it has been designed for it. Practically free publicity between a network of *thousands*. This doesn't benefit the big name acts like Madge and U2 because everyone already knows about them and knows what they sound like - the internet just points their fans in the direction of alternatives. And some of those users will inevitably decide to buy the latest J Random Singer album instead of Metallica's latets rock dross.
The cartel pushers have been shitting themselves over this prospect ever since Napster hove into view, and are becoming increasingly hungry for money and power and control over their audience as a result. But unless they succeed in introducing laws that make the latest Britney album a compulsory purchase for every last human on the planet, they're fighting a losing battle. And they know it.
Welcome to the free market.
Why even bother with that when you can buy the DVD you bought for £2 from your friendly neighborhood pirate DVD salesperson? Now you can avoid the middle man entirely and ensure that your DVD rips are 100% pirate material - not one penny sent to the evil capitalist pigdog dictators of Hollywood!
Heck, maybe even the big pirate organisations/orgaised crime will start their own P2P network system where you pay a subscription fee for the privelige of downloading your stuff direct from them, rather than going to the palaver of actually buying anythng as apallingly stone aged as an optical disc.
Bottom line is: if the content industries aren't prepared to capitalise on the ease of use of digital media, there are plenty of less (more?) scrupulous people who are. As everyone has gathered, this law is here to kick Joe Sixpa^H^H^H^H^HiPod in the balls, and it makes sweet FA difference to the industrial piraters who can afford production-level gear anyway.
Ditto, although I made the switch to digital a while back (whcih of course has larger resolution than PAL IIRC). I watch TV on my MythTV box, which uses DVB-T capture cards displayed on a lovely Hyundai 19" CRT at 1280*1024, and whilst you can see artifacts on some channels (since some have lower bitrates than others - BBC 1 is about 2GB/hour, most others half that) it still looks stonkingly good on the monitor. The frontend hooked up to the 22" SD TV in the front room is indistinguishable from DVD content.
I'm not saying HDTV isn't worth the effort, but IMHO it definitely won't be worth the cost for quite some time. For my setup, I'd need a beefier set of GFX cards and CPU's plus about four times the storage space to make HDTV a viable option once it appears over this side of the pond for something that doesn't seem to make a huge difference to casual viewers like myself.
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, I can't help thinking that it seems horribly outdated.
/Disclaimer: I religiously embed lyrics and track-listings of dance mixes in music metadata, as I happen to like "completion"
Part of the reason that listening to music on your computer or MP3 player has become so popular was because it does away with the need for juggling dozens of CD's around at a time - I can just call up a tune from my music libary and play it. But if I want to see what the lyrics are, I have to search my big ol' box of CD's, find the disc and hope that it came with the lyrics printed in the booklet.
If I want to have a more convenient way of storing the lyrics (say, in a text file or metadata), where can I find a digital copy of the lyrics with copyright condoned by the artist? 9 out of 10 times, I can't since most artists don't carry lyrics on their sites and neither do the record labels. So if you're not allowed to use lyrics sites, you're not provided with a digital copy of the lyrics along with your MP3/AAC/whatever (4AD have started flogging non-DRM 192kbps AAC on their website BTW) download and you're not allowed to type out the lyrics from the CD leaflet (since that would also be a breach of copyright), what are you to do? If you listen to music through your computer, the (legal) options seem to be a) don't understand the lyrics or b) go through a boatload of fuss to get to read them. As a customer, I don't find this acceptable.
In my humble opinion, I find lyrics pretty useless without the song to go with them. Sure, you'll get the meaning of the song, but you won't hear any of the emotion or anything conveyed in the presentation of those lyrics - it's akin to the difference of hearing a poem recited first by the author, and secondly by a Stephen Hawking-esque voice synthesiser. The same metric applies to things like guitar tabs, samples and all of the other myriad form of work that go into a song - music is greater than the sum of it's parts, and treating those parts as equally valuable as the music, and therefore something to be hidden away forever, will possibly provide the greatest blow to artistic expression music has seen for centuries.
Please remember that the overwhelming majority of people who use lyrics sites already have the music and are just looking for a quick and easy way of reading the lyrics. Pulling figures out of my arse I'd say approximately 0.001% of lyrics site users will actually copy those lyrics to use in their own songs or whatever.
Just another complete over-reaction by the music labels IMHO, but more needs to be done by the artists if they wish to provide an alternative to lyrics sites.
Amen to that, brother. It was obvious that 3G was going to turn into a turgid cash-cow when the networks spent billions of £££ buying the 3G airwaves from the UK government. From that point on, cheap contracts and cheap pay-as-you-go were a thing of the past.
/.'ers) I don't want a phone that can't give me the weeks-worth of standy time I get out of my current Nokia (still only on it's first battery). They keep telling me how I can pay for the privelige of downloading 10-second footie clips and keep up with the latest music videos and ringtomes - and many seem genuinely shocked when I tell them that never, in my whole waking life, have I never dreamt about a world where I can watch football and the latest contemperaneous crap^H^H^H^H pop music. My phone goes ring ring and lets me talk to people. It sends and receives text messages. It has a nifty calendar/TODO list that I can hook up with my Linux box via a COM port or Bluetooth. That's all I want, yet Vodafone can't seem to offer me a sturdy phone with these features. I am, however, half-tempted to take up their upgrade offer and flog the phone on when I receive it.
Case in point - I've been a Vodafone customer since 1998, and by 2002 had gotten pretty used to being treated very nicely indeed. I had a nice phone, and a cheap-as-hell contract (£6/month with 300min off-peak calls to landlines or other Vodafone mobiles). I asked to have my phone upgraded to a decent one soon after the 3G bidding war - all the ones they offered me were turkeys. So I asked how much it would cost me to get a Nokia 6310i (the best "business" phone available then IMHO) - they told me I'd need £100 to upgrade from my current model, plus mandatory switching to a new contract at £30/month with 60 free any-time any-network minutes a month. I told them to sod off, spent £350 on an off-the-shelf 6310i. And have had that ever since.
Fast forward to today and I still don't see any phones I want that are better than my 6310i. I keep getting letters and phone calls from them asking if I want to take advantage of their "free" upgrades, but (like so many other
And now I hear that providers are crippling their grossly over-featured phones so that users can't even access their own content on them...! Forcnig people to upload their shitty low-res cameraphone pics over their providers network, rather than being able to grab them over BT like any sane phone would let you. Forcing people to buy appalling awful ringtones at £2 a pop (if you're lucky and don't have to pay the £15/month subscription for a ringtone service) rather than letting people chuck their own WAV, MIDI or MP3 on there. Need to sync your address book with your PC? Why not use the internet for only £6/hr?!
The mobile honeymoon is, unfortunately, over. Telcos are fast turning into the **AA's of the telecoms world in their lust for profit and control over their userbase. Cute things like DVB reception aren't even on their radar, since they can just flog you the last months TV for £5 a clip.
...but what about motherboards? Last time I paid attention to Intel's dual core offerings, they would only work on boards equipped with the 9[4|5]5 chipsets. In the UK at least, the cheapest compatible board I can find from my fave hardware retailer costs £75, with the cheapest dual-core compatible AMD 939 board clocking in at under £50.
Bearing in mind that the 3800 X2 costs £230 and the P4D 820 costs £170 from the same store, for only £35 extra I get a duallie that'll thrash the P4D 820 and 830, plus using less power to boot, so within a few months it'll have paid for itself (if, like me, you count doing work faster as payment anyway - otherwise you'll have to wait a few months more for the leccy bills to add up).
My beef with these atricles and so many like them? The pseudo-TCO doesn't take the cost of the other hardware into account. A CPU is pretty useless without a compatible motherboard, no?
Woo, cheers for the link - certainly an interesting filter if you're an AviSynth user (of which I am not, unfortunately). Although looking at the blogs on VirtualDub.org, it looks like people are already writing GPU-based filters (such as bicubic resize, etc). Although whether they'll ever become part of VirtualDubMod (which has seemed dead for a while) remains to be seen.
Another great idea that will no doubt be poorly implemented and suffer from a closed spec, stifling developer input.
;)).
At the risk of becoming -1 redundant, many other posters have already pointed out that stuff like this should be done in a generic shader language so that it can be run across a gamut of GFX cards - I'm no programmer, but in my mind this would be like current CPU apps asking "do you support MMX? SSE? SSE2?" etc etc etc. Interesting projects like LibSh offer to provide a platform-independent method of integrating GPU shader routines into standard C++ programs.
I'm afraid I can't get too worked up about ATI's implementation though. What with their "what's Linux?" reputation and the heavily competitive/proprietary world of GPU subsystems, I find it unlikely that they'd open up an API to allow non-ATI apps to hook into the GFX card, meaning that I wouldn't be able to use my GPU to speed up my XviD transcodes in VDubMod. I wish they'd prove me wrong, but I doubt it somehow. All glitz and no geek (unless of course it does turn out to be written in a platform independent shader language that allows anyone to hook into it, then I'll eat my words
Sure, I could just install them manually - it's quite easy after all. Indeed, I've compiled and installed plenty of my own stuff already - lots of plugins for GIMP, Amarok and other misc utils for the most part.
The problem I have with going for a non-portage route for Java is that it's be a struggle to keep it updated. Since Java would be the only app on my system that could represent a mojor security problem if a bug was found, my days would be spent scanning Bugtraq to see when I should upgrade the JRE next. There's no technical reason portage can't do this for me, it's just the portage maintainers being stubborn.
In the meantime, I'm only gonna be using the AMD64 arch for servers where things like win32codecs and SSE/SSE2 optimisations don't make a whole lotta difference.
Are you using 1.x or 2.0? I don't recall having any problems with 1.x, but 2.0 is much more reliant on Java it seems, and leads to the atrociously slow startup times.
I was wary of that too. The times I reported were done after just logging in after a reboot, so there shouldn't be anything cached. To make doubly sure, I turned off swap and still saw a colossal speed increase. This was on Linux and I don't have the quiskstarter installed.
It seems a significant portion of OOo's startup time was waiting for the JVM to load (since I don't have any other Java apps and rarely see/use it on web pages), and at the moment disabling it doesn't seem to give any less functionality. I imagine there may be problems with the new database stuff, but I use UNIX ODBC for my DB connection which bypasses Java.
The fact of the matter is, I think Gentoo is great. But I'm put off by their eternal reaction that everything should have a native 64bit version, and if it doesn't then stuff it. Getting 32bit apps to work nicely and seamlessly on Gentoo can be an exercise in pain - if you want to be able to play anything that relies on win32codecs (WMV, etc etc) you have to manually download and install an unsupported 3rd party ebuild of mPlayer. If you want something like Xine (like me), you have to build your own. Because of the way portage works, if you want a nice frontend instead of the appallingly awful GTK interface you have to compile your own from scratch.
Same thing for the JRE. I don't want to have to manually install anything when it's only the stubborness of the devs that keeps precompiled 32bit apps for AMD64 users out of portage. I don't want the hassle of updating it manually. As far as I can see, there's no technical reason why installing openoffice-bin with the java USE flag doesn't pull down the 32bit JRE as a dependency.
I'm complaining here because requests for features like this in the Gentoo forums seem to fall on deaf ears. It's the reason I'm switching back to a 32bit install - I like Gentoo, but I'm not prepared to put up with its incredible clunkiness WRT to mixing 32 and 64bit apps when distros like Fedora don't have the same problem.
I'd chance my arm and say a fair bit.
I made the mistake of opting for x86-64 Gentoo for one of my desktop boxes ("upgrading" it to 32bit this weekend), meaning I have to use the 32bit precompiled OpenOffice binaries. But these need hooking into a 32bit JRE which x86-64 Gentoo doesn't have, since making 32bit apps available through Portage is seemingly something that Gentoo Won't Do Because You Should Be Happy With 64bit. So whenever you start OOo it spends about a minute looking for a JVM (and failing) before you can do anything. I could have manually installed Sun's 32bit JRE, but I can't be bothered.
Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.
By way of comparison, I tried the same trick on my 32bit box (similar spec but with slower HDD's) and OOo was as snappy as hell and opened like the proverbial soil off a shovel.
If there's any functionality I miss through disabling Java, I haven't encountered any yet. And please note I'm not saying that Java is slow to execute (it isn't), it's just appallingly slow to load.
Easy way around that - hook up a generator to your spinny-spinny leccy meter ;)
Of course, as the article states, gauging a chips' performance isn't a simple matter since everyone has different performance metrics based on the software they use. How many John Q Public will use 3DS Max and encode MPEG4 and give a rats ass about miniscule performance differences anyway? In my expereince, non-power users who do alot of CPU-intensive stuff just leave their computer overnight when they're converting the birthday DV into an MPEG or whatnot - for them, "slow" usually equates to "Swapping between apps takes an age cos I don't have nearly enough RAM in my bargain basement beige box" rather than a lack of high floating point scores.
And is overclocking allowed? And what memory/chipsets/I/O are we able to use? Do power bills count towards overall system cost? All of these points are glossed over or omitted entirely from the article.
That said, since the article is talking about general purpose computing, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say one of the AMD 64bit Semprons. Great performance across the board at a very low price (some very cheap and decent mobo's out there too). For more server/workstation-like workloads, I'd go for something like an overclocked Athlon X2 3800 (I'm informed almost all will overclock from 2.0GHz to 2.4GHz without even raising the core voltage - not tried it myself though as I'm not into overclocking - which nets you the power of an X2 4600 for ~£220 less based on todays UK prices).
All in all, the article was just another excuse to say "Woooweee! We've got lots of processors, let's use all our benchmarks du jour as an excuse for an article". Sigh.
Indeed, as much as I like their chips, their marketing is abysmal, and a great part of me believes that their recent success has been due in no small part to grassroots geeks raving on about how great the chips are for server and workstation workloads. Pre-AMD64/x86-64, AMD were hampered in the server/workstation segment by poor chipset support (IIRC only the AMD 760 chipsets were available for Athlon MP's) which kept the MP's stuck on slow RAM for the majority of their lifetime. In the desktop sector, poor chipset support was another bugbear until nVidia came along and raised the bar considerably. Now that the memory controller is embedded in the CPU, there's alot less to go wrong in the chipset(s) - but the stigma of "AMD = slow and unreliable" still remains with some.
The cost/benefit analysis is a great one (and how I originally got my boss to replace the 1.*GHz Willamette P4's he was buying with AXP's which gave about 30% more performance for the same system cost), but I don't think it's as easy to convince larger companies so quickly - like you say, it just takes time.
And as much as I'd like to see Intel brought to justice for what I see are fairly clear antitrust violations (most notably the intentionally crippled compiler), I can't help but wonder if it would have helped AMD's bottom line if they'd spent their legal budget on a quality marketing campaign instead.
Really, why would someone choose to use a chip that is less powerful, intrinsically costs more to operate, and costs more to cool?
/. who've asked for a shiny new Opteron server and been smacked back by either a company "Intel-only" policy, or their reseller's "Intel only" policy.
Regrettably, because it has the Intel logo on it. I'm lucky working in a company where if I say I want AMD, I get AMD. I'm sure there's plenty of hardware geeks on
FWIW, AMD recently launched the new single-core Opteron 254 and it utterly trounces the Intel competition. Even in benchmarks that have been traditional strongholds for the Netburst architecture.
If that's how they're working it out, then they're boned. I and pretty much everyone I know always give false DoB's when t'internet "requires" it - I usually sign myself as 1900-01-01, making me 105.
Although if Yahoo insitute another rule of "no coffin-dodgers in chatrooms full of nubile ladies", then I'm boned!
I've been a colossal fan of Wallace and Gromit ever since I first saw A Grand Day Out when I was in my early teens, and I'm quite saddened by this loss. I know that, as far as things go, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to Aardmann as a company, but... the prospect of me owning a piece of genuine W&G on-set memorabilia has now diminished quite considerably! Whilst their financial value may have been little, it's very sad to hear that remnants of some of the best animation I've ever seen no longer exist.
/.'er with a sense of humour stifling a giggle or two. As an even more OT aside, it's a pity that the USA doesn't have Wendsleydale cheese as readily available as we do here in the UK!
As an aside, I saw a preview screening of the Were-Rabbit this weekend (first time I've been to the cinema in over a year and I noticed that the Federation Against Copyright Theft are now busy telling all and sundry that using a camcorder will land you in jail for 10 years) and it's well worth a watch. Humour "for all the family" (i.e. it's not dumbed down toy marketing fodder purely for kids) and the wealth of visual puns and arcane geekery will have any seasoned
Does Linux/OSS innovate? Firstly, what do you mean when you say "innovate"? Does it refer to an all-in-one business solution, an individual app, or what?
I'm no coder myself, but I'll hazard a guess that there's a hundred innovative ways of codig things in the kernel alone. What about Samba? Cobbled together from an incomplete spec of SMB and packet sniffing, it's turned into possibly the biggest killer app for Linux in the SOHO business marketplace. It also spawned rsync which, I believe, was farily innovative in itself.
In terms of applications, you may have something of a point - but remeber that most OSS coders will deliver something that they see the users or they themselves need. What with the ubiquity of Windows, it's hardly surprising that alot of apps end up behaving somewhat like those in windows or OSX or . And yet we still see plenty of nifty tricks - KDE's KIO-slaves (integrating file management with the internet waaaaaaay more than MS's pathetic attempt at the same thing with IE/Explorer) to name one.
And lastly, isn't OSS an innovation in itself (as you rightyly point out)? It turned the whole world (or corporate plutocracy as I sometimes refer to it) of IT on its head by introducing a way for the unwashed hippy masses (:rolleyes:) to fight back and regain a system that the users control, rather than the money-hungry corps. If that isn't an innovation to be proud of, then I don't know what is. You can't put a patent on freedom for the users.
OSS does innovate. It's just that alot of the innovations are hidden behind ths screens, and masked by what users (and developers) want.
Already happened, sorta. There's a silent GFX cooler by Thermaltake called the Schooner that uses a heatpipe to extend cooling fins outside of the back of the case via an empty PCI slot. Quite nifty IMHO, although I don't like the idea of a fairly fragile piece of metal next to big hulking VGA/DVI connectors.
A zealot? Wow, never had that one before. Exactly what sort of zealot am I?
Yes, I only quoted the examples of my own expereince with my own company, which is hardly a big one with a staff of six people. So I guess my statement of "there's software we need to use to do our daily business that will only work with admin or power user privs" was entirely worthless then, as I and the OP are clearly the only people in the whole world who have this problem. You asked a question, and I gave you some examples. Easy enough to understand?
I see exactly the same thing with any number of law companies that have some shitty custom-made DB frontend or some special proofing software - they just won't run without r/w to program files. But as the Adobe and Kodak example shows, it's clearly not just restricted to the small coding houses - this is software aimed solely at businesses. Some of it you can get around with the "Run As..." feature, but this isn't a viable option when the software needs access to the domain - which of course, the sudo'd user the software is running as isn't privy to.
And note I didn't say I needed admin privs to run Winamp or Acrobat. I said they need access to write to program files to work properly. For example, I can't use the Acrobat Catalogue function if I can't write to program files - it opens, but refuses to do anything.
It's a problem that needs to be tackled by both MS and the developers, and people like you bitching that it's down to our own incompetence isn't going to solve anything.
If ever a /. post deserved a +5 Informative, this was it - well done. A simple, blow-by-blow account of everything a "Power User" would need to know about switching to Opera and what it can do for them - I've half a mind to send this to the Opera folks to put up on their website - you even taught me a few tricks, and I've been using Opera since 4.x, I think.
And just for the record, despite being a colossal fan of OSS, Opera is still my browser of choice simply because it does what it does better than any other browser out there. IMHO Firefox is great for almost all users - especially those migrating from IE (Opera can be very confusing for a new user not used to so much inbuilt functionality) - but, if you can forgive its closed-source nature, Opera does have something for you.