I think the reason is already given: he's ill, and he's receiving hospice care or medical care. Even with insurance, medical bills add up REALLY QUICKLY. For that matter, I don't know how good writer's guild insurance really is (or even if such a thing exists), but I imagine is probably isn't stellar. People can blow through fortunes (like 7 digit fortunes) in a matter of months if there are expensive procedures to be done. I don't know what he makes from book sales or how much he had saved, but he'd have to be a fairly wealthy author in order to absorb modern medical costs without a problem.
Not necessarily. People keep pushing this viewpoint, but it isn't always true. Sure, if you're using a fisher price speaker with your computer, you might not be able to discrimiate between sound cards, but in general, a relay race is a more apt analogy for audio equipment than a chain. Each component can single-handedly degrade or improve the performance of the entire system regardless of the other components' performance.
To answer the original question, I think the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 is one of the best consumer audio cards on the market (so long as you're not looking for a ton of I/O).
Yeah, Apple stuff often does that kind of thing. iPods can tell too (obviously), since they pause when you unplug headphones. Additionally, many companies have started creating dual-purpose jacks. Sometimes these are user conrolled (say, between a mic in or a headphone jack), but sometimes they can actually detect resistance or whatever on the jack and make an automatic switch between different options (detecing an S/PDIF out, for instance). This is why I qualified my statement with "usually". While these things are available, they are not yet the "norm" - or at any rate, the API for queries of this nature are not yet standarized. I don't think that the WDM api has any "is his junk plugged in?" function. And certainly, OS X, with its 4% market share, hardly qualifies as "the norm".
To be fair, the portion of the article that you quoted is infact objectively true, and not editorial at all. If I were as upset with the current state of blogs as you obviously are, I would have quoted the following gems from this article:
The truth is, Apple and Google are already plenty tight. (perhaps true but badly phrased)
or
Well, duh. That's the business model in Redmond. (badly written and possibly misleading; several reputable companies have headquarters in Redmond, and many of which have varying business models.
Those quotes could actually be misattributed to non-adult persons.
While I suppose you could disable sound in bios, it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of motherboards have onboard sound (no need for anything so crude as a perpendicular addon). Just for a sample, I looked at AMD motherboards on Newegg (they have them separated, or I would have looked at both). Of the roughly 250 motherboards that they have, about 230 have onboard sound. I personally have not seen a new motherboard without onboard sound since before the Towers fell.
All this to say, nobody would notice if they do require a sound device.
Oh yeah, and of course Vista wouldn't require speakers (unless some interface mechanisms are purely auditory). There usually isn't any way for the OS to tell if you have anything plugged into an analog audio out.
They might not even be interested in learning how to use Wikipedia.
I'd bet they are now.
Moreover, the whole point of Wikipedia was to be accessible to a variety of different kinds of people in order to encourage people with various skillsets to contribute. Clearly, some people that know how to use wikipedia know a great deal about ferries.
Consider that computers these days are becoming all purpose tools. While many slashdot visitors are not exactly savvy in the culinary arts, I would guess that most of us can use a fork pretty well. That is because the fork has become a tool that is useful to the general population. Wikipedia is such a tool (though far less ubiquitous, and somewhat less useful).
I realize that these ferry operators are not the right generation for such a skill and they ought to be given a significant amount of latitude for such a limitation; however, let's just say that if, in 25 years, a 50 year old ferry operator gave the same excuse, I would be a little concerned.
While I understand that Dell sucks (I hate them too), I don't really think that I understand your comment. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that Dell could have a sub-brand that did focus on performance, and while they might be overpriced, could probably put together something at the very pinnacle of performance available from consumer parts. I don't think that somehow the "innate Dellness" slipped through the vents in the case and made it slow. Perhaps Dell mismanaged it, but it wasn't a forgone that they would do so, and it isn't necessarily true that Dell will continue to mismanage it. Heck, it might not be Dell at all. Maybe Alienware just screwed up; all kinds people do that (Dell employees and even formerly non-Dell employees!).
Either way, whoever is responsible will probably wake up quickly if they get more reviews like this.
Of course it won't run them as well. Clearly, you've never tried to open a large document (100+ pages) with pictures, tables, and indexes using Word (or especially OpenOffice which saves more money than a hardware upgrade would cost). It's a nightmare; imagine trying to drag an 18 wheeler with a Geo Metro. Even webpages can be a bit taxing these days. A sufficiently complex flash animation (yes, I hate flash too), or even AJAX webapp can bring a 1Ghz duron to its knees, especially when the rendering gets complex; Google fortunately has fairly simple AJAX pages, but others are not so kind.
Moreover, there is nothing like using an SMP system: either two processors or a single dual-core (hyperthreading is exempt from this comment). Having all those piddly little background tasks on one core means that the second core is available just to obey your whims. The latency in executing business and web apps with a dual-core is unparalleled.
Clearly you're cheap, and I can respect that (heaven knows I'm almost as poor as they get). Perhaps you have a point that the $350 processor that the grandparent spoke of is not in the optimal point of the price/performance curve, but even for people that just use Word and Firefox, you can't claim that a new $150 dual-core won't run stuff significantly faster than Duron; and you don't even have to blow that extra imaginary money on an octa-core[sic] processor to get the extra horsepower.
In either case, I consider your minimalist elitism offtopic.
I know you're just joking and using Radiohead as a random example, but to be fair, Radiohead never commented to "Wired" about this article. That means, they could be holding out because of "album" construct, or because of the pay; or, for nother reason that nobody seems to have mentioned ("Wired" included); maybe some musicians could be holding out because of DRM? I know it's a long shot, but some musicians actually have scruples, and actually know what's up with online rights. And, who know better how record labels screw people over than musicians?
So give them a break, because they might be holding out for the right reason: I know I would.
Is that the sound of a non-profit organization selling laptops at cost? These people will probably make passable salaries courtesy of the organization, but these are not going to be multi-million dollar CEOs and CTOs. Their only major gain here is possibly the minor fame that comes with starting a project like this. In fact, I think most of the companies involved are selling the parts are near cost. The fact is that everybody wants to get a choke-hold on emerging markets (the same markets that these target); but even if that happens for AMD and the like, I don't think Negroponte or any other "owner" is going to be exploiting starving children or their poor governments in order to buy shiny red Ferraris.
In a country whose No. 1 public health goal is halfing public defecation by 2012 (a real problem since over 20% of the population are infected by hookworms:
Ahh, I'm glad you cleared that up I guess the "effect of extensive laptop use on children's health" is just a secondary concern (I'm not actually aiming my sarcasm at you here; I'm just curious how the Indian government could care about E.M. radiation when there are much larger concerns).
Providing children with reading lessons...
I bet you'll never guess what the internet can do these days. Not only can it display words like "dog", but it can even show pictures of dogs next to them! (and here, my sarcasm is actually aimed at you)
The laptops can really be an essential part of even a developing childs education. Certainly, electricity is needed to power them (I'll grant you that), but I would take the laptops in a heartbeat above lightbulbs. Children can sleep when it's dark, and do their work during the day outdoors (preferably in areas that are not poo-adjacent.. but the laptop will teach them how to find those places).
You can give all the anecdotal evidence that you want, and it won't change the facts. These places are destitute because their population is uneducated and unable to generate income.
Suppose for the following the survival rate for children is 20% (i.e. horrific).
YOUR IDEAL SCENARIO: you can somehow convince enough people in various charitable organizations to feed the entire child population until they grow up to become unproductive, uneducated (but perhaps self-sustaining) people with mediocre quality of life. Then, when the next generation of children comes along, you're going to have to try to convince the same people (or perhaps different people) again to "think of the children" by giving money. Except this time there will be more children because the previous generation all survived. And somewhere along the lines, people will stop giving money and 80% of the population will die, except that the population by then will be enormous, and that same 80% death rate will represent 100 times the number of people.
NEGROPONTE's LESS-THAN-IDEAL YET REALISTIC SCENARIO: that same money that was going to be used to feed the children is used to educated the children (buy the laptops which in turn give them access to knowledge). 80% of the population dies out. The remaining 20% become well-educated productive members of a society which is now suddenly educated. Business are attracted, people generate income by becoming employees, people use that money to start businesses or their own, and the next generation receives the benefits of their education. This process of course happens much more slowly than one would assume from that description, but it happens nevertheless. 80% of this generations children died (which is truly tragic), but in the long run, the region is better off.
Of course, I think that Negroponte would suggest that people keep the basics-based charity flowing to those kinds of places during the OLPC phase so that we can avoid the pointless loss of life. Regardless, the OLPC money would mean that there wouldn't have to be charity money flowing into those places in a generation or two; My point is that the basics without the education is almost completely pointless in the long run.
Firstly, it isn't like debt payments drop off the face of the earth. They go to other corporations or countries who in turn feed their poor or employ people who can feed their families with the money.
Secondly, I'll give you 1 guess concerning how countries get out of debt.... .... .... They educate their citizens to generate capital!
How about not? See, we could give the huge population of India food until the rest of the world runs out of money, and it wouldn't help that much. The children need a way to earn their own food, or else nothing will change in the long run. A starving child who can program a computer or manage a business or teach history won't be starving for long, especially in a place like India that is just starting to be recognized as a potential high-level worker pool.
Nintendos were so solid because they literally were solid state devices - they had no movable parts. Instead, they used cartridges which turned out not to have enough capacity for modern games. I guess reliability is the price you have to pay for cutting edge graphics and sound.
From what I've heard, MS has had significantly more problems with their Xbox line than Sony has had.
Anecdotely, I bought my 1st gen ps2 refurb 3.5 years ago, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever. Moreover, I'm not aware of any friends with PS2s that had any problems (or at least those that managed to get a 2nd gen ps2 or later). In contrast, my roommate's Xbox is just about dead (it doesn't even boot most of the time).
I think you took the word "legitimate" out of context there. The status of "legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings" will remain constant regardless of the outcome of this case. They will remain legitimate whether XM wins or loses. The only question is whether other methods of disseminating and cataloging copyrighted music (specifically, recording satalite radio) are legal.
Whatever, this is a brilliant move on the RIAA's part (just the kind of legal thugery they always do).
It's just a ploy; they sue the most conservative organization out there (XM is not exactly a Fair Use advocate), and even if they lose, it gives consumers (and even the courts) the impression that the line is being fought somewhere much closer to the RIAA's ideal legal system.
Metaphorically, if you sue tons of people for simply saying your name in public, then perhaps it will be easier to make people think that saying *bad* things about you in public is *definitely* slander.
Look at Fairplay DRM. From what I understand, the assumption is that every AAC audio stream for a particular song is encrypted with the same master key. The user specific part comes in when an AAC player uses the "User Key" to decrypt the "Master key" (both stored in the MP4 container in the case of AAC) in realtime.
I assume that Warner Bros' scheme will just distributed the master-key-encrypted video streams with Bittorrent and either offload the encrypted master keys to some kind of insideous local DRM database on your computer, or simply append it (or prepend it) to the file after the download completes.
They've had user to user voice communication for quite a while now (long before Google for instance). Moreover, (AFAIK) they are the only IM service to allow PSTN termination; Skype was never really an IM service (it was primarily VOIP). The real contenders in this particular market (text IM services integrating voice communications) are MSN, Yahoo, AOL [AIM], and Google [Talk]. Of those, aren't they now the early bird?
How about Office XP which runs on w98? It isn't the newest version, but I'm sure it's good enough for state/non-profit agencies. Or, in any case, I don't think there are people crying themselves to sleep wishing they had office 2003 file format compatibility.
Why is the parent modded insightful? Modems are all over the freaking place. Any analog large-pipe that carries data requires a modem; cable, DSL (including T1, T3, etc). If you are a home owner with internet access (and don't have FIOS), you most likely have a modem. And regardless, the point is that Hayes isn't popular anymore. With all their resources, they could have switched to home networking equipment or online multimedia or microwave macaroni and cheese, but instead they faded into obscurity.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason is already given: he's ill, and he's receiving hospice care or medical care. Even with insurance, medical bills add up REALLY QUICKLY. For that matter, I don't know how good writer's guild insurance really is (or even if such a thing exists), but I imagine is probably isn't stellar. People can blow through fortunes (like 7 digit fortunes) in a matter of months if there are expensive procedures to be done. I don't know what he makes from book sales or how much he had saved, but he'd have to be a fairly wealthy author in order to absorb modern medical costs without a problem.
Not necessarily. People keep pushing this viewpoint, but it isn't always true. Sure, if you're using a fisher price speaker with your computer, you might not be able to discrimiate between sound cards, but in general, a relay race is a more apt analogy for audio equipment than a chain. Each component can single-handedly degrade or improve the performance of the entire system regardless of the other components' performance.
To answer the original question, I think the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 is one of the best consumer audio cards on the market (so long as you're not looking for a ton of I/O).
Yeah, Apple stuff often does that kind of thing. iPods can tell too (obviously), since they pause when you unplug headphones. Additionally, many companies have started creating dual-purpose jacks. Sometimes these are user conrolled (say, between a mic in or a headphone jack), but sometimes they can actually detect resistance or whatever on the jack and make an automatic switch between different options (detecing an S/PDIF out, for instance). This is why I qualified my statement with "usually". While these things are available, they are not yet the "norm" - or at any rate, the API for queries of this nature are not yet standarized. I don't think that the WDM api has any "is his junk plugged in?" function. And certainly, OS X, with its 4% market share, hardly qualifies as "the norm".
What adult writes like this?
To be fair, the portion of the article that you quoted is infact objectively true, and not editorial at all. If I were as upset with the current state of blogs as you obviously are, I would have quoted the following gems from this article:
The truth is, Apple and Google are already plenty tight. (perhaps true but badly phrased)
or
Well, duh. That's the business model in Redmond. (badly written and possibly misleading; several reputable companies have headquarters in Redmond, and many of which have varying business models.
Those quotes could actually be misattributed to non-adult persons.
While I suppose you could disable sound in bios, it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of motherboards have onboard sound (no need for anything so crude as a perpendicular addon). Just for a sample, I looked at AMD motherboards on Newegg (they have them separated, or I would have looked at both). Of the roughly 250 motherboards that they have, about 230 have onboard sound. I personally have not seen a new motherboard without onboard sound since before the Towers fell.
All this to say, nobody would notice if they do require a sound device.
Oh yeah, and of course Vista wouldn't require speakers (unless some interface mechanisms are purely auditory). There usually isn't any way for the OS to tell if you have anything plugged into an analog audio out.
They might not even be interested in learning how to use Wikipedia.
I'd bet they are now.
Moreover, the whole point of Wikipedia was to be accessible to a variety of different kinds of people in order to encourage people with various skillsets to contribute. Clearly, some people that know how to use wikipedia know a great deal about ferries.
Consider that computers these days are becoming all purpose tools. While many slashdot visitors are not exactly savvy in the culinary arts, I would guess that most of us can use a fork pretty well. That is because the fork has become a tool that is useful to the general population. Wikipedia is such a tool (though far less ubiquitous, and somewhat less useful).
I realize that these ferry operators are not the right generation for such a skill and they ought to be given a significant amount of latitude for such a limitation; however, let's just say that if, in 25 years, a 50 year old ferry operator gave the same excuse, I would be a little concerned.
While I understand that Dell sucks (I hate them too), I don't really think that I understand your comment. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that Dell could have a sub-brand that did focus on performance, and while they might be overpriced, could probably put together something at the very pinnacle of performance available from consumer parts. I don't think that somehow the "innate Dellness" slipped through the vents in the case and made it slow. Perhaps Dell mismanaged it, but it wasn't a forgone that they would do so, and it isn't necessarily true that Dell will continue to mismanage it. Heck, it might not be Dell at all. Maybe Alienware just screwed up; all kinds people do that (Dell employees and even formerly non-Dell employees!).
Either way, whoever is responsible will probably wake up quickly if they get more reviews like this.
You missed firefox/thunderbird. It's shocking how many people don't have them, and how much grief they put themselves through because they don't.
Of course it won't run them as well. Clearly, you've never tried to open a large document (100+ pages) with pictures, tables, and indexes using Word (or especially OpenOffice which saves more money than a hardware upgrade would cost). It's a nightmare; imagine trying to drag an 18 wheeler with a Geo Metro. Even webpages can be a bit taxing these days. A sufficiently complex flash animation (yes, I hate flash too), or even AJAX webapp can bring a 1Ghz duron to its knees, especially when the rendering gets complex; Google fortunately has fairly simple AJAX pages, but others are not so kind.
Moreover, there is nothing like using an SMP system: either two processors or a single dual-core (hyperthreading is exempt from this comment). Having all those piddly little background tasks on one core means that the second core is available just to obey your whims. The latency in executing business and web apps with a dual-core is unparalleled.
Clearly you're cheap, and I can respect that (heaven knows I'm almost as poor as they get). Perhaps you have a point that the $350 processor that the grandparent spoke of is not in the optimal point of the price/performance curve, but even for people that just use Word and Firefox, you can't claim that a new $150 dual-core won't run stuff significantly faster than Duron; and you don't even have to blow that extra imaginary money on an octa-core[sic] processor to get the extra horsepower.
In either case, I consider your minimalist elitism offtopic.
I know you're just joking and using Radiohead as a random example, but to be fair, Radiohead never commented to "Wired" about this article. That means, they could be holding out because of "album" construct, or because of the pay; or, for nother reason that nobody seems to have mentioned ("Wired" included); maybe some musicians could be holding out because of DRM? I know it's a long shot, but some musicians actually have scruples, and actually know what's up with online rights. And, who know better how record labels screw people over than musicians?
So give them a break, because they might be holding out for the right reason: I know I would.
Cha-Ching!!!
Is that the sound of a non-profit organization selling laptops at cost? These people will probably make passable salaries courtesy of the organization, but these are not going to be multi-million dollar CEOs and CTOs. Their only major gain here is possibly the minor fame that comes with starting a project like this. In fact, I think most of the companies involved are selling the parts are near cost. The fact is that everybody wants to get a choke-hold on emerging markets (the same markets that these target); but even if that happens for AMD and the like, I don't think Negroponte or any other "owner" is going to be exploiting starving children or their poor governments in order to buy shiny red Ferraris.
In a country whose No. 1 public health goal is halfing public defecation by 2012 (a real problem since over 20% of the population are infected by hookworms:
Ahh, I'm glad you cleared that up I guess the "effect of extensive laptop use on children's health" is just a secondary concern (I'm not actually aiming my sarcasm at you here; I'm just curious how the Indian government could care about E.M. radiation when there are much larger concerns).
Providing children with reading lessons...
I bet you'll never guess what the internet can do these days. Not only can it display words like "dog", but it can even show pictures of dogs next to them! (and here, my sarcasm is actually aimed at you)
The laptops can really be an essential part of even a developing childs education. Certainly, electricity is needed to power them (I'll grant you that), but I would take the laptops in a heartbeat above lightbulbs. Children can sleep when it's dark, and do their work during the day outdoors (preferably in areas that are not poo-adjacent.. but the laptop will teach them how to find those places).
You can give all the anecdotal evidence that you want, and it won't change the facts. These places are destitute because their population is uneducated and unable to generate income.
Suppose for the following the survival rate for children is 20% (i.e. horrific).
YOUR IDEAL SCENARIO: you can somehow convince enough people in various charitable organizations to feed the entire child population until they grow up to become unproductive, uneducated (but perhaps self-sustaining) people with mediocre quality of life. Then, when the next generation of children comes along, you're going to have to try to convince the same people (or perhaps different people) again to "think of the children" by giving money. Except this time there will be more children because the previous generation all survived. And somewhere along the lines, people will stop giving money and 80% of the population will die, except that the population by then will be enormous, and that same 80% death rate will represent 100 times the number of people.
NEGROPONTE's LESS-THAN-IDEAL YET REALISTIC SCENARIO: that same money that was going to be used to feed the children is used to educated the children (buy the laptops which in turn give them access to knowledge). 80% of the population dies out. The remaining 20% become well-educated productive members of a society which is now suddenly educated. Business are attracted, people generate income by becoming employees, people use that money to start businesses or their own, and the next generation receives the benefits of their education. This process of course happens much more slowly than one would assume from that description, but it happens nevertheless. 80% of this generations children died (which is truly tragic), but in the long run, the region is better off.
Of course, I think that Negroponte would suggest that people keep the basics-based charity flowing to those kinds of places during the OLPC phase so that we can avoid the pointless loss of life. Regardless, the OLPC money would mean that there wouldn't have to be charity money flowing into those places in a generation or two; My point is that the basics without the education is almost completely pointless in the long run.
Firstly, it isn't like debt payments drop off the face of the earth. They go to other corporations or countries who in turn feed their poor or employ people who can feed their families with the money.
Secondly, I'll give you 1 guess concerning how countries get out of debt....
....
....
They educate their citizens to generate capital!
How about not? See, we could give the huge population of India food until the rest of the world runs out of money, and it wouldn't help that much. The children need a way to earn their own food, or else nothing will change in the long run. A starving child who can program a computer or manage a business or teach history won't be starving for long, especially in a place like India that is just starting to be recognized as a potential high-level worker pool.
Nintendos were so solid because they literally were solid state devices - they had no movable parts. Instead, they used cartridges which turned out not to have enough capacity for modern games. I guess reliability is the price you have to pay for cutting edge graphics and sound.
From what I've heard, MS has had significantly more problems with their Xbox line than Sony has had.
Anecdotely, I bought my 1st gen ps2 refurb 3.5 years ago, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever. Moreover, I'm not aware of any friends with PS2s that had any problems (or at least those that managed to get a 2nd gen ps2 or later). In contrast, my roommate's Xbox is just about dead (it doesn't even boot most of the time).
I voted for Kodos.
I think you took the word "legitimate" out of context there. The status of "legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings" will remain constant regardless of the outcome of this case. They will remain legitimate whether XM wins or loses. The only question is whether other methods of disseminating and cataloging copyrighted music (specifically, recording satalite radio) are legal.
Whatever, this is a brilliant move on the RIAA's part (just the kind of legal thugery they always do).
It's just a ploy; they sue the most conservative organization out there (XM is not exactly a Fair Use advocate), and even if they lose, it gives consumers (and even the courts) the impression that the line is being fought somewhere much closer to the RIAA's ideal legal system.
Metaphorically, if you sue tons of people for simply saying your name in public, then perhaps it will be easier to make people think that saying *bad* things about you in public is *definitely* slander.
Look at Fairplay DRM. From what I understand, the assumption is that every AAC audio stream for a particular song is encrypted with the same master key. The user specific part comes in when an AAC player uses the "User Key" to decrypt the "Master key" (both stored in the MP4 container in the case of AAC) in realtime.
I assume that Warner Bros' scheme will just distributed the master-key-encrypted video streams with Bittorrent and either offload the encrypted master keys to some kind of insideous local DRM database on your computer, or simply append it (or prepend it) to the file after the download completes.
They've had user to user voice communication for quite a while now (long before Google for instance). Moreover, (AFAIK) they are the only IM service to allow PSTN termination; Skype was never really an IM service (it was primarily VOIP). The real contenders in this particular market (text IM services integrating voice communications) are MSN, Yahoo, AOL [AIM], and Google [Talk]. Of those, aren't they now the early bird?
How about Office XP which runs on w98? It isn't the newest version, but I'm sure it's good enough for state/non-profit agencies. Or, in any case, I don't think there are people crying themselves to sleep wishing they had office 2003 file format compatibility.
Actually, they did switch to home networking; zoom/hayes. But they lost their market share anyway.
Why is the parent modded insightful? Modems are all over the freaking place. Any analog large-pipe that carries data requires a modem; cable, DSL (including T1, T3, etc). If you are a home owner with internet access (and don't have FIOS), you most likely have a modem. And regardless, the point is that Hayes isn't popular anymore. With all their resources, they could have switched to home networking equipment or online multimedia or microwave macaroni and cheese, but instead they faded into obscurity.