I have seen mac applications coded by complete idiots not using Apple's guidelines hence: Apple+S did nothing...referring to programmers not the guy posting the comment.
Two things that was going on with Linux: first off Red Hat was releasing a new version about every 3 months. Second off: the fact that apps written for Red Hat might not work on Debian or at some future point those apps would be ported to say work on SuSE and no longer supported by Red Hat was the issue. Linux was too unstable in terms of development. The fact there was not a single "linux" hurt the platform in our opinion.
I hate to say it, but I was proven correct. The desktop version of Red Hat is no longer in production replaced by Fedora.
With Apple, we know if its written for OS X, it will work. If it doesn't we can call for support.
Biggest problem: the US's main source of geo-thermal activity is called yellowstone national park. Try setting up a power plant there and the same enviromentalist (or different ones actually) will start going ape because one is using a national park.
We say, "let's use wind power", some eviro group says, "It kills birds," say "let's use solar," some envrio group says, "It takes toxic chemicals to produce them," say "Let's use fission reactors," some enviro group says, "You can't do that, that's using the most evil thing of all: the N word: nuclear!".
Meanwhile, while all those groups are bitching at each other nothing gets done.
We switched away from Linux to Apple for our major applications. I work at a 3D Graphics studio and three years ago we seriously considered switching our last SGI Irix boxes to Linux to run our applications. Then people got into the "Well which distro do we run?" debate. Red Hat was the leader and Maya had just released a version for the Linux platform. However, we already had several debian boxes around, and others used SuSE at home.
There there was a couple of us that were BSD users and suggested switching to OS X. Then we had one Unix-based platform that could run lightwave or Maya, MS Office, Photoshop, and we already did 90%+ of our editing in Final Cut Pro. Even though Apple is expensive on the front end, every machine but three are now Macintosh including our server farm and SAN.
Granted, we are not "enterprise computing", but we use a lot of horse power. Having one standard platform for everything has saved us a lot of money because now we only three full time techs on staff instead of eight, and generally everything talks to each other without any problems. Extremely important when we can tap into every machine on the network for rendering tasks.
The very fact that Linux had so many forks and didn't have a centralized version caused it to loose out in our business.
True, but my cell phone has external caller ID (flip model). If I don't reconize it, it goes to voice mail. If its important they will leave a message.
At home, if unavailable or unknown (sometimes goof and I know the number) otherwise we just don't answer.
When I lived in Germany for a year, I like most every other student there, had a prepaid cell phone and learned how to use SMS as no one really used their phones to talk unlike the US.
Now that phones can log into services such as AIM or MSN messanger I wonder how that is changing?
One of the major reasons why people use SMS's in Germany, at least, was because there was a fix price per SMS and it was generally cheaper than talk time.
Piss off your consumers and they will go elsewhere...problem for OSS projects are the cost for software to switch to KDE or whatever: FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is extremely true in video production companies, especially small ones. I still know two people that used a G3 tower up until last fall when they purchased a top of the line Dual G5 machines after 6 years. They needed it to run FCP 4HD/64-bit. Why do we use the machines for so long? Because its not uncommon to drop $20,000 on a machine and realated software. Our primary rendering units for lightwave were $8k a peice without monitors. Believe it or not, some of our modeller's larger meshes can eat up 2GB or more of RAM, so having 8GB is extremely nice!
Right now we are suffering from a bottle neck in rendering. We typically make new hardware purchases every major Apple upgrade typically about every 6 months. The former top of the line machines get intergraded as render nodes, with older machines going off the render farm for general business use like for the secratary. (G3 400'sand G4 500's still run MS office just fine).
We were seriously considering purchasing some Mac Mini's and adding to the group for about $600. (Base model with 512MB of Ram). Why? Well for the base price of one entry level G5 we could purchase about 4 Mac Minis. 4 versus 1 machines, so even if one fails we still are at 75%. Typically we figure that if the Mac Minis took 1 hour each per frame and a G5 Tower could do 2.5 we'd still be rendering 4 frames per hour.
We currrently have 6 Mac Mini's on order to test them out. If all else fails, the the none Graphics people will be getting nice new upgrades on their desks.
Having this kind of information though is nice because it plays a role in determining when we make major hardware additions (we're talking spending $50k+ at a time). The thing is, we don't typically purchase first generation Apple anything. We purchased 12 new Dual G4's two weeks after the release of the first G5's just to make sure the bugs were worked out.
We just figured we'd play a hunch and buying $3,000 worth of new computers isn't a major purchase to us (2 copies of Lightwave in our business).
That's why its worth spending $2.50 and renting the game first. Then if its really worth it I can wait 6 months to a year for the price to go down to $20...
I've seen wireless adaptors for the Xbox already. Would make it nice if a friend brings his over and want to set up two rooms to play 4v4 Halo without needed 100 feet of ethernet cable...
I have to agree with you on this. The Hubble has done its job and lasted its planned mission duration. If its cheaper to build something new cheaper and at least as good (and from what I've read the newer hubble would be even better due to better technology now that can lighten it up some) I think we need to reconsider fixing the old thing.
Even if one gets the $2B, why not say the hell with it and then build two new hubbles? Double the amount of research time that can be done.
There maybe HST nastalgists, and those saying why put more space junk up etc. etc., but Hubble's done a wonderful job at what it was designed to do.
I much rather see the money spent wisely if its going to be spent.
I think this is an unfair troll. While there are legit reasoning for having p2p networks, let's be honest why they exist and what their number one usage is: download pirated content.
Whether its walking out of a store with a five finger discount or downloading via bittorrent, or your favorite application here.
Although I do admit a lot of bittorent links are for useful things like OSS applications, but many more aren't OSS.
In the process with a couple friends starting a company for side work creating custom 3D logos from 2D in Lightwave and doing animations of those logos for web, presentaions, broadcast, etc.
We all had mutual interests and people already owned all the needed hardware and software (which is proably about $25000 between the three of us). The other two have worked in video production for 5 - 8 years each and I've done some work in 3D studio and blende along with final cut pro plus I have 5 years of being a Unix system admin. So building a rendering farm is up my ally. Plus I also had the business skills from helping start 3 other companies, 2 of which saw sucesss.
I preached to them two simple rules: start small and pay with cash. We started by doing free work for a couple larger churches for their sunday morning broadcasts on the local access channel. Then we saved money from our day jobs and filed LLC status and opened a business checking account. From the church job we got three referal jobs and things started building from there. Last week we placed an order for 5 Mac Minis to start our rendering farm all paid for in cash and next month we'll start placing 3 ads in the local business journal.
Hopefully by this summer at least one of us can quit their full time job, although one is working contract basis now and not getting the hours he needs, and our goal is by March of 2006 to all be working full time for our business.
Will the money saved enable NASA to save the Hubble Space Telescope?
No, that would take about a Billion dollars, half of that for the shuttle launch alone. While people are clamering about the HST's demise, its been up there for 15 years, its done its job after getting fixed. From what I've read it would make a hell of a lot more sense that for the amount of money it would cost to repair the hubble, one could build a brand new updated version and launch aboard a Delta -IV for the same cost.
If not, then what is NASA planning to study after everything shuts down? I mean the shuttles aren't flying, the hubble's about to be scrapped...
There will some gap time, but the HST is supposed to be replaced with the Webb. Granted the Webb is designed to do infrared observations, so no more cool looking deep space picks in visable light spectrum, but the Webb's mission is to learn more about quazars and the Big Bang. The Shuttles will be flying again here in a couple months and NASA has other plans.
Historically NASA has a habbit of cutting smaller projects. Think about SETI and their like $1M budget they had when it was funded by NASA. Now thanks to Paul Allen they are building their own array of small radio dishes and probably will do the job better than what the government could have.
Personally I would like to see a Very Long Base Line interferomtor built that might actually be able to see planets orbiting distant stars.
For the vast majority of game players I'd agree. The PS2 and Xbox has become the favorite nightly entertainment for males 18 - 30. Tv's become increasingly aware this demographic isn't watching as much TV as in previous generations.
I think it comes down to its not a problem until you can't afford it anymore. I've been known before, especially in college, to play Rainbow 6 online for hours on a saturday afternoon while doing laundry. That's not addiction, that was a saturday afternoon that I played a game. And it wasn't every saturday afternoon for that matter too.
I found that I tend to go in phases with gaming. I'll rent a game like KOTOR II and play it every free moment of the day for a week. Then I won't touch the Xbox for two weeks.
AS far as online time goes, I spend probably 80 hours or more a week online. Granted a lot of it is around searching for new models and textures and tutorials for Blender 3D and other media creation applications I use for work. Plus all the time I spend emailling clients and sub-contractors, etc..
When I saw people in 2001 and 2002 paying upwards of 2 Euro each for Cell Phone ringtones, I knew it would work for MP3 files too. The whole issue was a fair balance between protecting against piracy and giving people fair use. Its been said before, but Apple pretty well nailed it.
I still say that there needs to be a system where once you purchase it you can keep it. Wether that would be buring say a physical DVD or what ever comes next or the ablity to redownload and have some kind of key to reunlock it again.
Again I have to use Apple as an example. Two years ago I bought QuickTime pro. Well two logic boards and system wipes later, I can go into my account and get my access key online.
I am not against DRM so long as there is a balance. No matter what your view on the media industry is, I respect the ideas of copyrights.
Why? I work in the industry in a small company that produces 3D FX for smaller video producers using Lightwave 3D and other high price software. I have seen people try entering the market with pirated software and once they are discovered blacklisted. Why? Lightwave is about $1600 a seat. We pay for it. I didn't quite understand what people meant by "piracy hurts" until I started working in the industry and it changed my mind a little.
Like I said, there has to be a fair balance and it will work...
I think your idea has some merit. Coming from printing/publishing and graphics areas, most of our costs are centered around printing(paper and ink) and distribution.
Still some people just like paper. I'm just a commoner, but there is something I like about reading the news paper in the morning even though I get the major headlines everytime I go online.
Pdf or the like is a good idea because then if people want a hard copy, they can then print it on their own dime.
Still it takes money to run webservers and manage a large site, just not as much. The only problem I have with governments or businesses offering supports in the form of donations is the expectations (like getting a standard pushed through that happens to be their standard). I'd like the IEEE to stay out on its own.
This game is actually a Mod based around the http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ Vegastrike game engine. Vega Strike is completely opensource creation of a Privateer like game. The graphics engine is actually quite advance even if some of its other features are still lagging behind.
Is optimized code damn it! I installed OO on my dad's K6-2 400 a couple years ago after a monster system crash due to a virus. Works for him for typing letters and tracking his stocks in a spreadsheet. He had no problems what so ever using it. His only complaint was it take a long time to load.
In OO 2 its supposed to load faster, but to be honest, Hell Works 2.0 has done basically everything I've needed since 1988. Office 2000 added some useful features, but then I switched to Macintosh anyway. I wish they would optimize the code and take out the bloat. I would be impressed if just once someone came up with an application that version 2.0 ran on older hardware instead needing newer stuff because of code optimatzation.
I have Office V.x for my Mac primarily for one program: PowerPoint. I've just purchased iWork and damned impressed with Pages and Keynote 2. Still not as many design templates as Powerpoint for Mac, but I am sure that will change with time.
Not exactly sure where SG-1 is going too. Part of what made the show one of the better film to TV series, at the beginning at least on Showtime, was the fact the show came in DD souround sound, no commericals, and the fact that Michael Shanks looks and sounds way too much like James Spader.
It seems like at the end of this season a lot of things are going to get rapped up. **Spoiler Alert from here on**
Richard Dean Anderson will be gone next season, personal reasons, the whole Jaffa rebellion and war against the gauold apparently are going to be pretty well wrapped up along with the replicators, and if that's the case, its almost like asking what's left to do? They apparently are going to be going off into a new tanget with more about the acients, but they have Altantis to do that...
Still there is a couple good highlights, Ben Browder (Farscape) is joining the cast to replace the O'Neil smart-ass casting (good choice in my humble opinion). Also Amanda Tapping will be missing the first part of the season due to having a baby so they are bringing in Claudia Black (Farscape) for a 5 episode story arc. So for their first part of Season 9. Wise move of Sci-Fi parts. Number of Farscape fans also probably watch SG-1 now, if not it might bring a few over to the show.
Also the whole being lost in space thing gets resolved too by the end of season 1 of Atlantis. So it hopefully Atlantis won't get the stalness of say Voyager.
On Satitalite radio/TV and Cable, you choose to pay for the service. Broadcast television is over air transmission anyone with TV may tune in at only the cost of the TV and electricity to run it.
If you find cable indecent, you don't pay for the service. Arguement can be made if you don't like what's on broadcast TV, don't watch as well, but you don't pay directly for the programming on the public airwaves.
If people don't want South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut airing in all its rated R glory at midnight on saturday's then they won't watch it.
When I was a teen and in college using Napster back in the glory day's, I didn't see anything wrong with it. It really wasn't until I starting working in the video production business that really changed my mind. A lot of the music and stuff we use in projects are licenced or commissioned from local music producers that literally feed their families from those royalities and work.
Its just like I wouldn't want to see someone use the work I've done and use it for their own purposes without asking. I might not care on most of it, but there is a priniciple there that if someone is going to produce the work, they should be rewarded for it.
You can spew crap about how evil the recording empire is, etc. etc. but at the end of the day, sharing copyrighted works is theft.
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I have seen mac applications coded by complete idiots not using Apple's guidelines hence: Apple+S did nothing...referring to programmers not the guy posting the comment.
pssst....I still use GWBasic...DOS 3.23 rulz!!!!
I hate to say it, but I was proven correct. The desktop version of Red Hat is no longer in production replaced by Fedora.
With Apple, we know if its written for OS X, it will work. If it doesn't we can call for support.
every Mac application I have, that will open file->save or save.
We say, "let's use wind power", some eviro group says, "It kills birds," say "let's use solar," some envrio group says, "It takes toxic chemicals to produce them," say "Let's use fission reactors," some enviro group says, "You can't do that, that's using the most evil thing of all: the N word: nuclear!".
Meanwhile, while all those groups are bitching at each other nothing gets done.
There there was a couple of us that were BSD users and suggested switching to OS X. Then we had one Unix-based platform that could run lightwave or Maya, MS Office, Photoshop, and we already did 90%+ of our editing in Final Cut Pro. Even though Apple is expensive on the front end, every machine but three are now Macintosh including our server farm and SAN.
Granted, we are not "enterprise computing", but we use a lot of horse power. Having one standard platform for everything has saved us a lot of money because now we only three full time techs on staff instead of eight, and generally everything talks to each other without any problems. Extremely important when we can tap into every machine on the network for rendering tasks.
The very fact that Linux had so many forks and didn't have a centralized version caused it to loose out in our business.
At home, if unavailable or unknown (sometimes goof and I know the number) otherwise we just don't answer.
Now that phones can log into services such as AIM or MSN messanger I wonder how that is changing?
One of the major reasons why people use SMS's in Germany, at least, was because there was a fix price per SMS and it was generally cheaper than talk time.
Right now we are suffering from a bottle neck in rendering. We typically make new hardware purchases every major Apple upgrade typically about every 6 months. The former top of the line machines get intergraded as render nodes, with older machines going off the render farm for general business use like for the secratary. (G3 400'sand G4 500's still run MS office just fine).
We were seriously considering purchasing some Mac Mini's and adding to the group for about $600. (Base model with 512MB of Ram). Why? Well for the base price of one entry level G5 we could purchase about 4 Mac Minis. 4 versus 1 machines, so even if one fails we still are at 75%. Typically we figure that if the Mac Minis took 1 hour each per frame and a G5 Tower could do 2.5 we'd still be rendering 4 frames per hour.
We currrently have 6 Mac Mini's on order to test them out. If all else fails, the the none Graphics people will be getting nice new upgrades on their desks.
Having this kind of information though is nice because it plays a role in determining when we make major hardware additions (we're talking spending $50k+ at a time). The thing is, we don't typically purchase first generation Apple anything. We purchased 12 new Dual G4's two weeks after the release of the first G5's just to make sure the bugs were worked out. We just figured we'd play a hunch and buying $3,000 worth of new computers isn't a major purchase to us (2 copies of Lightwave in our business).
I've seen wireless adaptors for the Xbox already. Would make it nice if a friend brings his over and want to set up two rooms to play 4v4 Halo without needed 100 feet of ethernet cable...
Even if one gets the $2B, why not say the hell with it and then build two new hubbles? Double the amount of research time that can be done.
There maybe HST nastalgists, and those saying why put more space junk up etc. etc., but Hubble's done a wonderful job at what it was designed to do.
I much rather see the money spent wisely if its going to be spent.
Whether its walking out of a store with a five finger discount or downloading via bittorrent, or your favorite application here.
Although I do admit a lot of bittorent links are for useful things like OSS applications, but many more aren't OSS.
We all had mutual interests and people already owned all the needed hardware and software (which is proably about $25000 between the three of us). The other two have worked in video production for 5 - 8 years each and I've done some work in 3D studio and blende along with final cut pro plus I have 5 years of being a Unix system admin. So building a rendering farm is up my ally. Plus I also had the business skills from helping start 3 other companies, 2 of which saw sucesss.
I preached to them two simple rules: start small and pay with cash. We started by doing free work for a couple larger churches for their sunday morning broadcasts on the local access channel. Then we saved money from our day jobs and filed LLC status and opened a business checking account. From the church job we got three referal jobs and things started building from there. Last week we placed an order for 5 Mac Minis to start our rendering farm all paid for in cash and next month we'll start placing 3 ads in the local business journal.
Hopefully by this summer at least one of us can quit their full time job, although one is working contract basis now and not getting the hours he needs, and our goal is by March of 2006 to all be working full time for our business.
You know, given how fucked up the Tax Code is, people that develop applictions like Tax Cut deserve the $20 I spend on it a year...
No, that would take about a Billion dollars, half of that for the shuttle launch alone. While people are clamering about the HST's demise, its been up there for 15 years, its done its job after getting fixed. From what I've read it would make a hell of a lot more sense that for the amount of money it would cost to repair the hubble, one could build a brand new updated version and launch aboard a Delta -IV for the same cost.
There will some gap time, but the HST is supposed to be replaced with the Webb. Granted the Webb is designed to do infrared observations, so no more cool looking deep space picks in visable light spectrum, but the Webb's mission is to learn more about quazars and the Big Bang. The Shuttles will be flying again here in a couple months and NASA has other plans.
Historically NASA has a habbit of cutting smaller projects. Think about SETI and their like $1M budget they had when it was funded by NASA. Now thanks to Paul Allen they are building their own array of small radio dishes and probably will do the job better than what the government could have.
Personally I would like to see a Very Long Base Line interferomtor built that might actually be able to see planets orbiting distant stars.
I think it comes down to its not a problem until you can't afford it anymore. I've been known before, especially in college, to play Rainbow 6 online for hours on a saturday afternoon while doing laundry. That's not addiction, that was a saturday afternoon that I played a game. And it wasn't every saturday afternoon for that matter too.
I found that I tend to go in phases with gaming. I'll rent a game like KOTOR II and play it every free moment of the day for a week. Then I won't touch the Xbox for two weeks.
AS far as online time goes, I spend probably 80 hours or more a week online. Granted a lot of it is around searching for new models and textures and tutorials for Blender 3D and other media creation applications I use for work. Plus all the time I spend emailling clients and sub-contractors, etc..
I still say that there needs to be a system where once you purchase it you can keep it. Wether that would be buring say a physical DVD or what ever comes next or the ablity to redownload and have some kind of key to reunlock it again.
Again I have to use Apple as an example. Two years ago I bought QuickTime pro. Well two logic boards and system wipes later, I can go into my account and get my access key online.
I am not against DRM so long as there is a balance. No matter what your view on the media industry is, I respect the ideas of copyrights.
Why? I work in the industry in a small company that produces 3D FX for smaller video producers using Lightwave 3D and other high price software. I have seen people try entering the market with pirated software and once they are discovered blacklisted. Why? Lightwave is about $1600 a seat. We pay for it. I didn't quite understand what people meant by "piracy hurts" until I started working in the industry and it changed my mind a little.
Like I said, there has to be a fair balance and it will work...
Still some people just like paper. I'm just a commoner, but there is something I like about reading the news paper in the morning even though I get the major headlines everytime I go online.
Pdf or the like is a good idea because then if people want a hard copy, they can then print it on their own dime.
Still it takes money to run webservers and manage a large site, just not as much. The only problem I have with governments or businesses offering supports in the form of donations is the expectations (like getting a standard pushed through that happens to be their standard). I'd like the IEEE to stay out on its own.
Bah...that's just German for "The, The, The" sorry to all simpsons fans for that poor use of an omage...
In OO 2 its supposed to load faster, but to be honest, Hell Works 2.0 has done basically everything I've needed since 1988. Office 2000 added some useful features, but then I switched to Macintosh anyway. I wish they would optimize the code and take out the bloat. I would be impressed if just once someone came up with an application that version 2.0 ran on older hardware instead needing newer stuff because of code optimatzation.
I have Office V.x for my Mac primarily for one program: PowerPoint. I've just purchased iWork and damned impressed with Pages and Keynote 2. Still not as many design templates as Powerpoint for Mac, but I am sure that will change with time.
It seems like at the end of this season a lot of things are going to get rapped up. **Spoiler Alert from here on**
Richard Dean Anderson will be gone next season, personal reasons, the whole Jaffa rebellion and war against the gauold apparently are going to be pretty well wrapped up along with the replicators, and if that's the case, its almost like asking what's left to do? They apparently are going to be going off into a new tanget with more about the acients, but they have Altantis to do that...
Still there is a couple good highlights, Ben Browder (Farscape) is joining the cast to replace the O'Neil smart-ass casting (good choice in my humble opinion). Also Amanda Tapping will be missing the first part of the season due to having a baby so they are bringing in Claudia Black (Farscape) for a 5 episode story arc. So for their first part of Season 9. Wise move of Sci-Fi parts. Number of Farscape fans also probably watch SG-1 now, if not it might bring a few over to the show.
Also the whole being lost in space thing gets resolved too by the end of season 1 of Atlantis. So it hopefully Atlantis won't get the stalness of say Voyager.
If you find cable indecent, you don't pay for the service. Arguement can be made if you don't like what's on broadcast TV, don't watch as well, but you don't pay directly for the programming on the public airwaves.
If people don't want South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut airing in all its rated R glory at midnight on saturday's then they won't watch it.
Its just like I wouldn't want to see someone use the work I've done and use it for their own purposes without asking. I might not care on most of it, but there is a priniciple there that if someone is going to produce the work, they should be rewarded for it.
You can spew crap about how evil the recording empire is, etc. etc. but at the end of the day, sharing copyrighted works is theft.