Windows 3.1 used to come on 6? floppy disks. Windows XP comes on a CD now, probably at least 300 MB compressed. Most linux distros come on DVDs now, or have 3-6 CDs. But that's only because they include just about every application you could ever want. For those who want smaller distros, there's Damn Small Linux, which takes up 50 MB of hard disk space, and include XMMS, FireFox, a word processor, IM software, and a bunch of other nice stuff. There are certain distros out there that require tons of resources, but there's also quite a few that are geared towards running with very little resources. With linux, you can run up to date software, on a Pentium 100, with 32 megs of RAM. With windows, it's impossible to run up to date software with those specs.
$5K plus support? wow, that sucks. For $5000 they'd better throw in some support for free. And all this Per CPU stuff really gets on my nerves. Oh, sorry, you have good hardware, so you have to pay more. No wait, you don't have good hardware, you have an old dual CPU Pentium Pro, but you still have to pay more. If they want to charge more for people who have more power, they really should charge per cycle.
Looks pretty good, but that hidden link could cause problems for legitimate users. There's some browsers that prefetch all the links on a page, in order to be able to show the content faster when you get around to clicking the link. Banning any user who loads a link would probably block out all the users who used such tools. Although, maybe that's a good thing, because they are using way more bandwidth than necessary, by loading your entire site, even though they aren't going to look at it.
Blog spam is just about page ranks. There's bots scouring the net for anything that looks like a blog or Bulletin Board and posting tons of crap. I started getting a lot of blog spam on my site a couple of months ago. Thing is, links couldn't even be posted. There was a bunch of URLs, but none of them had links in them, because I don't allow any kind of HTML in the posts specifically for this reason. The thing that annoyed me the most was how ugly these things make the site look. Anyway, I implemented a bunch of rules, and haven't had much of a problem since. I think google should fix their pagerank system so that the spammers don't get anything out of spamming.
That's a good idea. Maybe there could be a free linux distro that included all the necessary stuff to run a game, and developers could use that to make their games. No more worrying about Norton taking up all the resources, or MSN messenger popping up all the time in the middle of the game, or having to test the game under 1800 different windows configurations. I doubt this would be possible with a windows base, because I don't think MS would let game company give away parts of the OS free with the game. That would give people another way to run a computer, without ever really needing to buy windows.
The difference is what MS Charges for the upgrades. You can upgrade your copy of PostGres/MySQL/Openoffice for free. With MS, you pay $500 for an office suite, and don't get any new features for the next 5 years. You're lucky if you get all the bugs fixed. I find it appauling how much MS charges for their software, especially with the low level of support you get. The MS equivalent of the open source alternative, is usually 3x that of the competition, and for paying that extra money, you get less frequent upgrades, slow bug fixes, and little to no actual support.
I just tried this. Using bzip2 and gzip, the file ends up bigger when compressed. Any file with enough entropy ends up bigger than the original file. I doubt that any algorithm could achieve good compression of the already compressed files that we are already storing (open office, mp3, jpeg, video, and tons of others). As a general ruled, stuff that is compressible (text) doesn't take up so much space anyway, it's the binary data that takes up all the space, and it's also the stuff that doesn't compress well.
Exactly. I live in Canada, and most of the geeks I know are in quite good shape. Most of them at at least somewhat active, having hobbies which at least require them to not be sitting in front of the screen. I find that most of the people I know who are overweight are those without hobbies, who sit on the couch all day. Most of the time, geeks don't fit this profile.
Try removing your wallet from you back pocket to alleviate back pain. I've heard it's a major cause of back pain because it causes you to sit on an angle, which is a problem with geeks who do a lot of sitting.
Yeah, I've tried that, and although I noticed it was faster, I always wanted to run 1 or 2 Gnome/KDE apps, which of course required that I loaded the libraries, which slowed everything back down.
If you want something with all the features, try PostgreSQL. If you want a reason for choosing MySQL or Postgres, how's about running it on a bunch of different operating systems, or actually getting your software upgraded more often then once every 5 years.
I've done all that, and it still appears slow. Lag when typing in textboxes and lots of other problems. I know my computer is slow, and I know that Gnome is much faster than KDE, even when I disable everything on KDE, and leave gnome as default.
I was a KDE user for a while. It was always slow and kludgy. I recently switched to Gnome on a whim, and I have to say It's about 10 times faster than KDE. What do you do to get KDE running faster than gnome?
Or, you could change the ID3 tag, which would change the MD5, and make the file untraceable. Or, maybe they just MD5 everything except the header, but then you could just change 1 byte, you wouldn't really lose any audio quality. You could just add 0.01 seconds of silence at the end of the song, changing the md5. This is so much easier to circumvent than watermarking that it isn't even funny. Anyway, my point still stands. CDs are lossless and don't have DRM, they should be selling digital downloads that are lossless and DRM free.
What's this ringtone philosophy you speak of? The company i'm with currently charges $2-$5 for a ringtone, and the same goes for screensavers. I thought it was quite common for cell phone companies to charge more for the ringtone of a song than iTunes charges for the actual song.
I was kind of being sarcastic. I know that PC mods are still around. The problem is, is that you see more games, even on PC, going towards Pay for Play. Descent 3 came with it's own level editor. User created content was 99% of the fun in the old games.
Remember when people used to play online games on PC, and there was thousands of Maps, Models, and complete game Mods available for free on the internet. Oh, and you could play for free, as long as you could find someone who wanted to run the server. Yeah, those were the days.
Most people don't know what a distributor cap is either, so why should they care. Oh yeah, because without it, your car wouldn't go anywhere. Most people don't know what a capacitor is, so why should they care. Oh, because almost no piece of electronics would work without it. Just because people don't understand rootkits, doesn't mean we should go around like mad, installing them on every computer, just to protect the precious copyrighted music.
I've heard nintendo is going to make the online play free. They will obviously charge for game downloads, but I hear that everything else is going to be free. I think this is the right model to use. It's hard for people to spend $400 on the system, and then spend $60 for each game, and then spend another $70 a year just to play those games online.
All the anti-unix/linux guys were saying that all the important stuff is in their home folder anyway, so it didn't matter if malware/viruses could only attack the home folder, because that's all that matters. Now we know why, It's nice to not have to worry about reinstalling the operating system because of malware, or formatting the entire hard drive. At the very worst, we'd have to back up important stuff, wipe out the home dir, and put the documents back in.
Exactly. You wouldn't allow your employees to make unaccounted for Long distance calls, or do other such things. but sometimes things go too far. Some employers have a whitelist of sites, and you can't access anything else. It's like giving someone a hammer, and saying they can only use it to take nails out. Don't severly cripple the tool just so people won't bang their thumbs.
Yeah, they should have called email, instant telegram instead, or personal telegram, or something along those lines. Because you can send anything through the mail. You can basically only send words through telegrams. Email is basically telegrams on computers. They were designed to send text, and that's about it. If you want to transfer big files, there's much easier ways to do it than email. I don't know about you, but I don't like waiting 1/2 hour to get an important message because some idiot sent me a 500 MB file.
Standard as in "De facto" standard. Like MS Windows or MS Word. It's not really a standard per se, but supported by a large number of vendors and available to most users.
That's the killer right there. AAC is pretty much only supported on iPods, but if you have an iPod, and you're going to buy online music, you might as well go through iTunes. WMA is more standard, but I don't think iPod plays it, so it's dead in the water. MP3 works on just about everything, but has no DRM. Maybe they will go DRM Free. CDs are DRM Free, and people are allowed to sell those, what's really stopping a company from selling DRM Free downloads. A company as popular as google might have the size to convince the labels that DRM isn't needed if you charge the right price.
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Windows 3.1 used to come on 6? floppy disks. Windows XP comes on a CD now, probably at least 300 MB compressed. Most linux distros come on DVDs now, or have 3-6 CDs. But that's only because they include just about every application you could ever want. For those who want smaller distros, there's Damn Small Linux, which takes up 50 MB of hard disk space, and include XMMS, FireFox, a word processor, IM software, and a bunch of other nice stuff. There are certain distros out there that require tons of resources, but there's also quite a few that are geared towards running with very little resources. With linux, you can run up to date software, on a Pentium 100, with 32 megs of RAM. With windows, it's impossible to run up to date software with those specs.
$5K plus support? wow, that sucks. For $5000 they'd better throw in some support for free. And all this Per CPU stuff really gets on my nerves. Oh, sorry, you have good hardware, so you have to pay more. No wait, you don't have good hardware, you have an old dual CPU Pentium Pro, but you still have to pay more. If they want to charge more for people who have more power, they really should charge per cycle.
Looks pretty good, but that hidden link could cause problems for legitimate users. There's some browsers that prefetch all the links on a page, in order to be able to show the content faster when you get around to clicking the link. Banning any user who loads a link would probably block out all the users who used such tools. Although, maybe that's a good thing, because they are using way more bandwidth than necessary, by loading your entire site, even though they aren't going to look at it.
Blog spam is just about page ranks. There's bots scouring the net for anything that looks like a blog or Bulletin Board and posting tons of crap. I started getting a lot of blog spam on my site a couple of months ago. Thing is, links couldn't even be posted. There was a bunch of URLs, but none of them had links in them, because I don't allow any kind of HTML in the posts specifically for this reason. The thing that annoyed me the most was how ugly these things make the site look. Anyway, I implemented a bunch of rules, and haven't had much of a problem since. I think google should fix their pagerank system so that the spammers don't get anything out of spamming.
That's a good idea. Maybe there could be a free linux distro that included all the necessary stuff to run a game, and developers could use that to make their games. No more worrying about Norton taking up all the resources, or MSN messenger popping up all the time in the middle of the game, or having to test the game under 1800 different windows configurations. I doubt this would be possible with a windows base, because I don't think MS would let game company give away parts of the OS free with the game. That would give people another way to run a computer, without ever really needing to buy windows.
Here's a nice algorithm.
If (compressedfile.size > originalfile.size) {
saveUncompressedFile();
}
else {
saveCompressedFile();
}
The difference is what MS Charges for the upgrades. You can upgrade your copy of PostGres/MySQL/Openoffice for free. With MS, you pay $500 for an office suite, and don't get any new features for the next 5 years. You're lucky if you get all the bugs fixed. I find it appauling how much MS charges for their software, especially with the low level of support you get. The MS equivalent of the open source alternative, is usually 3x that of the competition, and for paying that extra money, you get less frequent upgrades, slow bug fixes, and little to no actual support.
I just tried this. Using bzip2 and gzip, the file ends up bigger when compressed. Any file with enough entropy ends up bigger than the original file. I doubt that any algorithm could achieve good compression of the already compressed files that we are already storing (open office, mp3, jpeg, video, and tons of others). As a general ruled, stuff that is compressible (text) doesn't take up so much space anyway, it's the binary data that takes up all the space, and it's also the stuff that doesn't compress well.
Exactly. I live in Canada, and most of the geeks I know are in quite good shape. Most of them at at least somewhat active, having hobbies which at least require them to not be sitting in front of the screen. I find that most of the people I know who are overweight are those without hobbies, who sit on the couch all day. Most of the time, geeks don't fit this profile.
Try removing your wallet from you back pocket to alleviate back pain. I've heard it's a major cause of back pain because it causes you to sit on an angle, which is a problem with geeks who do a lot of sitting.
Yeah, I've tried that, and although I noticed it was faster, I always wanted to run 1 or 2 Gnome/KDE apps, which of course required that I loaded the libraries, which slowed everything back down.
If you want something with all the features, try PostgreSQL. If you want a reason for choosing MySQL or Postgres, how's about running it on a bunch of different operating systems, or actually getting your software upgraded more often then once every 5 years.
I've done all that, and it still appears slow. Lag when typing in textboxes and lots of other problems. I know my computer is slow, and I know that Gnome is much faster than KDE, even when I disable everything on KDE, and leave gnome as default.
I was a KDE user for a while. It was always slow and kludgy. I recently switched to Gnome on a whim, and I have to say It's about 10 times faster than KDE. What do you do to get KDE running faster than gnome?
Or, you could change the ID3 tag, which would change the MD5, and make the file untraceable. Or, maybe they just MD5 everything except the header, but then you could just change 1 byte, you wouldn't really lose any audio quality. You could just add 0.01 seconds of silence at the end of the song, changing the md5. This is so much easier to circumvent than watermarking that it isn't even funny. Anyway, my point still stands. CDs are lossless and don't have DRM, they should be selling digital downloads that are lossless and DRM free.
What's this ringtone philosophy you speak of? The company i'm with currently charges $2-$5 for a ringtone, and the same goes for screensavers. I thought it was quite common for cell phone companies to charge more for the ringtone of a song than iTunes charges for the actual song.
I was kind of being sarcastic. I know that PC mods are still around. The problem is, is that you see more games, even on PC, going towards Pay for Play. Descent 3 came with it's own level editor. User created content was 99% of the fun in the old games.
Remember when people used to play online games on PC, and there was thousands of Maps, Models, and complete game Mods available for free on the internet. Oh, and you could play for free, as long as you could find someone who wanted to run the server. Yeah, those were the days.
Most people don't know what a distributor cap is either, so why should they care. Oh yeah, because without it, your car wouldn't go anywhere. Most people don't know what a capacitor is, so why should they care. Oh, because almost no piece of electronics would work without it. Just because people don't understand rootkits, doesn't mean we should go around like mad, installing them on every computer, just to protect the precious copyrighted music.
I've heard nintendo is going to make the online play free. They will obviously charge for game downloads, but I hear that everything else is going to be free. I think this is the right model to use. It's hard for people to spend $400 on the system, and then spend $60 for each game, and then spend another $70 a year just to play those games online.
All the anti-unix/linux guys were saying that all the important stuff is in their home folder anyway, so it didn't matter if malware/viruses could only attack the home folder, because that's all that matters. Now we know why, It's nice to not have to worry about reinstalling the operating system because of malware, or formatting the entire hard drive. At the very worst, we'd have to back up important stuff, wipe out the home dir, and put the documents back in.
Exactly. You wouldn't allow your employees to make unaccounted for Long distance calls, or do other such things. but sometimes things go too far. Some employers have a whitelist of sites, and you can't access anything else. It's like giving someone a hammer, and saying they can only use it to take nails out. Don't severly cripple the tool just so people won't bang their thumbs.
Yeah, they should have called email, instant telegram instead, or personal telegram, or something along those lines. Because you can send anything through the mail. You can basically only send words through telegrams. Email is basically telegrams on computers. They were designed to send text, and that's about it. If you want to transfer big files, there's much easier ways to do it than email. I don't know about you, but I don't like waiting 1/2 hour to get an important message because some idiot sent me a 500 MB file.
Standard as in "De facto" standard. Like MS Windows or MS Word. It's not really a standard per se, but supported by a large number of vendors and available to most users.
That's the killer right there. AAC is pretty much only supported on iPods, but if you have an iPod, and you're going to buy online music, you might as well go through iTunes. WMA is more standard, but I don't think iPod plays it, so it's dead in the water. MP3 works on just about everything, but has no DRM. Maybe they will go DRM Free. CDs are DRM Free, and people are allowed to sell those, what's really stopping a company from selling DRM Free downloads. A company as popular as google might have the size to convince the labels that DRM isn't needed if you charge the right price.