This is why a $300 computer today blows the doors off a computer built 5 years ago for $1000
Yep, increased performance at the same cost holds true for those components which are relatively mature in design, but still suited to incremental improvement. In computers, that's hard drives, RAM, CPUs and to some extent, mainboards. Other components which are fully mature in their niche, such as maths co-processors, soundcards and to a lesser extent, VGA and LAN adaptors get embedded into other components, which is where the real cost savings come from.
That modern $300 computer has a lot less parts than the equivalent previous generation $1000 item, and that's where I'd look to see ZhongKe making their savings. The computer may have 8GB storage for example, but it'll be flash ram embedded on the mainboard.
Are you referring to the legendary Jake Neuton, illegitimate scion of a brief, but passionate affair between Sir Isaac Newton and an uncharged subatomic particle, and author of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Typographica?
Anything that could be salvaged by another project would not be a waste, granted, but there is a heck of a lot that is just plain duplication.
Exactly. It's the same with car manufacturers. They all go off and develop their innovations separately - Different traction control systems can work by either cutting the ignition, reducing fuel or braking the wheels, for example.
Now it's true that each has advantages and disadvantages, but if all car manufacturers standardised on the same system it would reduce their costs, and none would have an unfair advantage. As it is, the only ones who benefit from all this choice are the people who buy the cars, or in the case of Linux distributions, use the operating systems.
It's a process called "competition" and is a fundamental part of a healthy capitalist economic system. It's a real shame format lockin is stopping it working on the operating system market...
It will be nice when it is released but shouldn't compare apples to apples.
Etch is what I'm using, which is why I posted those screenshots. Even so, Sarge has task-based package selection as well, so the parent's comment is still just FUD.
You HAVE to put in all the effort of selecting what you want from the package database.
Perhaps you should actually try installing a recent version of Debian sometime soon. In the meantime, these screenshots of Debian Etch's installer should reassure anyone who might be feeling a bit nervous after reading so much FUD.
can you conceive of how many cities are going to want one of these plants if it's for real?
If it's used effectively, a plant like this could clean up whole countries. In anticipation of it's availability, Australia has built a collection site for our most environmentally damaging garbage. Once this rubbish has been fed through a white-hot plasma, our country will be much cleaner, and it's wonderful that we'll finally be benefiting from something which has long been little more than a toxic eyesore.
People know what an MP3 is, and talking about OGG and AAC and Apple Lossless just confuses them.
Maybe not everyone knows what OGG is, but just about everyone has heard MP3s that have been re-encoded too many times, and most people DO understand the difference between lossless and lossy formats.
I don't buy from iTunes or any other online sites because I'd rather have the higher quality original and compress it myself onto my portable music players. If Apple, or anyone else for that matter, offered me the option of downloading lossless originals and included an option to compress them onto my portable player, I'd join the downloading generation.
Until then though, I see lossy formats as just another sneaky way recording companies are trying to make me repeatedly purchase the same product.
There is only one catch and that is Catch-22, which specifies that turning off p16INK4a for one's safety of your organs in the face of dangers that are real and immediate will cause cancer. Giving yourself cancer is not the process of a rational mind.
The trick might be to turn off the expression of the gene temporarily to rejuvenate aging organs, then switch it back in again to suppress cancer. That way, maybe Yossarian can have is cake and eat it too...
just wait until then and MP3 will be just as or more "free" than OGG (public domain is "more free" than GPL, sort of).
No, it won't be more free. The Ogg format is already as free and open as it is possible to get. From Vorbis.com:
What licensing applies to the Ogg Vorbis format?
The Ogg Vorbis specification is in the public domain. It is completely free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write Ogg Vorbis software which is compatible with the specification for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. However, the software packages we have developed are available under various free/open-source software licenses with varying allowances and restrictions.
There is some reference software suppied by Vorbis
What licensing applies to the included Ogg Vorbis software?
Most (but not all) of our utility software is released under the terms of the GNU GPL. The libraries and SDKs are released under our BSD-like license.
So MP3 may become AS free as Ogg, but Ogg is already available under the most liberal conditions possible. Licensing restrictions are not an excuse for not using it.
I suspect it might come in under $560, configured with HTPC AMD® 3000+, 250GB HD, 512MB, DVD/CD Combo, TV-Capture, Hardware MPEG. At least, that's what it says in TFA...
I think the fact that Microsoft considers this a feature worthy of pushing shows how trivial "enhancements" to Windows have become at this point.
It's just a marketing exercise.
Quite smart, really - you generate a lot of hype about something absolutely trivial and get the user community, blogs, forums etc all hyped up. Then you implement the trivially pointless feature you've managed to convince people to really want, and proudly announce that you're responsive to your customers needs.
Then you can get quietly back to locking them out from their own data with proprietary formats and DRM.
In many normal PC users' minds backing up to CD or DVD is apparently more 'safe' because their impression of hard disk storage is something magic inside their computer box which can't be moved or transplanted.
In this case, the "normal PC users' minds" are the ones who are correct and all of the "me too" posters who are offering HD solutions are wrong.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with the Slashdot hive mind's response to this question because I'm with the submitter on this. I want to be able to conveniently back up to DVDs. I've seen all the arguments in favor of hard drives, and they're all reasonably correct in that they're easy and inexpensive, but they're wrong in believing that's a good backup strategy. They're wrong because a single portable hard drive is not massively redundant, and it's not write only.
I do use a 60GB portable drive as a convenient way to have copies of my data. I do have a RAID 5 array in my main computer. I don't consider that as adequate backup, because there are so so many ways I could overwrite or trash both copies. With a dual layer DVD drive and $55 worth of blanks, I can make fifteen copies of that 30GB drive and have them at home, work, at friends and families homes, and I know that read-only good copy of foo.doc will never be overwritten because I have a typo moment and leave the "l" off without noticing.
Score 1 point for the dumb ordinary user and 0 for the geeks at/.
However, at that point, I cannot take that portion of code and use it in another piece of software without the GPL taking over the entire code base.
Yes, you can. If you have copyright over that code, you can reuse it in your own proprietary projects even after you have released it as GPL. It's only other people's code you cannot appropriate.
This "Linux is for freeloading pr0n downloaders" meme sure is making the rounds here,
Slashdot has always had a big astroturfer presence, and the main method of attack against any of the FOSS projects has always been the propagation of semi-true memes.
Linux is hard to install" "Use open source tools and the GPL will contaminate your proprietary code" "Open Office is slow" "If Linux was as popular as Windows there'd be just as many Linux viruses"
All these and more have had their day in the sun and been exposed, as eventually will TFA itself. It's just how modern marketing works - every tiny bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt MS et al can sow in the minds of potential switchers is another building block shoring up their monopoly, and online forums like Slashdot have been very fertile ground for them lately.
If it's worth it to you to keep it on your hard drive, it's worth obtaining legitimately.
That market model will only be fair if the movie/music makers agree to refund my money when I pay for one of their products, listen to/watch it, then decide it's crap.
In many ways, these guys brought this on themselves. They use paid shills and astroturf to market the hell out of shitty movies like Snakes on a Plane, while virtually ignoring a beauty like Thank You for Smoking, then whine when ripped off consumers look for better ways to preview the products.
The thing is, for me at least, this isn't about the $12 I have to pay for the movie. It's about the value of my own time. Other people are prepared to pay upwards of $120/hr for my attention and I don't believe I should value it any less. When I decide to watch a movie, I normally get a few, start watching and if any are crap, they'll be ejected and the next one loaded up.
With your business model, I pay just as much for the 10 minutes of timewasting crap as I do for the watchable movies. There's no market pressure on the suppliers, so they'll keep producing pap.
Tech: "Is it Home Basic, Home Premium, Homosexual, Gamer, Business, Business Gamer, I Think I'm Running A Business But Might Be Delusional, OpenVista, NetVista, Free...oh wait, Ultimate?"
Microsoft really IS going all out to appeal to Mac users...
Besides, it's just a quote from The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
Yes, thanks to your sig I familiarised myself with the master's great work a few months ago, so I owe you a vote of thanks for that. Still won't stop me nitpicking your posts at every opportunity though. This is Slashdot, after all.
I dunno, it just seems sort of tacky to me.
-- Your sig: "... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.
Pot, meet kettle...
But you're right though. This is really sophomoric stuff. It's a pity they feel they have lower themselves to taunt their competitors instead of focusing their vision on groundbreaking products the way Hewlett, Packard and to a lesser extent, von Bechtolsheim did in their day.
Sadly, both companies have lost that edge, and now produce mostly bland generic products, little different to any of the mass-market offerings.
the technique described sounds pretty unworkable for any kind of industrial production-- it takes a week to grow the harvested tissue 14%
It takes a week to grow live cattle 2%. That's almost an order of magnitude advantage for the in-vitro version. The big advantage though, would be if you could scale it to continuous production - pump nutrients in one end and slice slabs of beef off the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, increased performance at the same cost holds true for those components which are relatively mature in design, but still suited to incremental improvement. In computers, that's hard drives, RAM, CPUs and to some extent, mainboards. Other components which are fully mature in their niche, such as maths co-processors, soundcards and to a lesser extent, VGA and LAN adaptors get embedded into other components, which is where the real cost savings come from.
That modern $300 computer has a lot less parts than the equivalent previous generation $1000 item, and that's where I'd look to see ZhongKe making their savings. The computer may have 8GB storage for example, but it'll be flash ram embedded on the mainboard.
Are you referring to the legendary Jake Neuton, illegitimate scion of a brief, but passionate affair between Sir Isaac Newton and an uncharged subatomic particle, and author of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Typographica?
Exactly. And here's me thinking all the negative strangelets just hung out on MySpace.
Exactly. It's the same with car manufacturers. They all go off and develop their innovations separately - Different traction control systems can work by either cutting the ignition, reducing fuel or braking the wheels, for example.
Now it's true that each has advantages and disadvantages, but if all car manufacturers standardised on the same system it would reduce their costs, and none would have an unfair advantage. As it is, the only ones who benefit from all this choice are the people who buy the cars, or in the case of Linux distributions, use the operating systems.
It's a process called "competition" and is a fundamental part of a healthy capitalist economic system. It's a real shame format lockin is stopping it working on the operating system market...
Etch is what I'm using, which is why I posted those screenshots. Even so, Sarge has task-based package selection as well, so the parent's comment is still just FUD.
Perhaps you should actually try installing a recent version of Debian sometime soon. In the meantime, these screenshots of Debian Etch's installer should reassure anyone who might be feeling a bit nervous after reading so much FUD.
http://srom.zgp.org/
I must have been out when that was going on. Can you give an example of when it's happened?
If it's used effectively, a plant like this could clean up whole countries. In anticipation of it's availability, Australia has built a collection site for our most environmentally damaging garbage. Once this rubbish has been fed through a white-hot plasma, our country will be much cleaner, and it's wonderful that we'll finally be benefiting from something which has long been little more than a toxic eyesore.
Maybe not everyone knows what OGG is, but just about everyone has heard MP3s that have been re-encoded too many times, and most people DO understand the difference between lossless and lossy formats.
I don't buy from iTunes or any other online sites because I'd rather have the higher quality original and compress it myself onto my portable music players. If Apple, or anyone else for that matter, offered me the option of downloading lossless originals and included an option to compress them onto my portable player, I'd join the downloading generation.
Until then though, I see lossy formats as just another sneaky way recording companies are trying to make me repeatedly purchase the same product.
Speak for yourself, it's going very well for me so far.
Sorry to hear it hasn't worked out for you though. Better luck next time.
There is only one catch and that is Catch-22, which specifies that turning off p16INK4a for one's safety of your organs in the face of dangers that are real and immediate will cause cancer. Giving yourself cancer is not the process of a rational mind.
The trick might be to turn off the expression of the gene temporarily to rejuvenate aging organs, then switch it back in again to suppress cancer. That way, maybe Yossarian can have is cake and eat it too...
Actually, the MIPS chip could end up being the most widely deployed CPU on the planet. It's the basis of China's Godson series of chips. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=24 882
No, it won't be more free. The Ogg format is already as free and open as it is possible to get. From Vorbis.com:
There is some reference software suppied by Vorbis So MP3 may become AS free as Ogg, but Ogg is already available under the most liberal conditions possible. Licensing restrictions are not an excuse for not using it.I suspect it might come in under $560, configured with HTPC AMD® 3000+, 250GB HD, 512MB, DVD/CD Combo, TV-Capture, Hardware MPEG. At least, that's what it says in TFA...
Sadly, LaBarbera completely avoids the issue of whether Godzilla steaks taste like chicken. Enquiring minds want to know.
It's just a marketing exercise.
Quite smart, really - you generate a lot of hype about something absolutely trivial and get the user community, blogs, forums etc all hyped up. Then you implement the trivially pointless feature you've managed to convince people to really want, and proudly announce that you're responsive to your customers needs.
Then you can get quietly back to locking them out from their own data with proprietary formats and DRM.
In this case, the "normal PC users' minds" are the ones who are correct and all of the "me too" posters who are offering HD solutions are wrong.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with the Slashdot hive mind's response to this question because I'm with the submitter on this. I want to be able to conveniently back up to DVDs. I've seen all the arguments in favor of hard drives, and they're all reasonably correct in that they're easy and inexpensive, but they're wrong in believing that's a good backup strategy. They're wrong because a single portable hard drive is not massively redundant, and it's not write only.
I do use a 60GB portable drive as a convenient way to have copies of my data. I do have a RAID 5 array in my main computer. I don't consider that as adequate backup, because there are so so many ways I could overwrite or trash both copies. With a dual layer DVD drive and $55 worth of blanks, I can make fifteen copies of that 30GB drive and have them at home, work, at friends and families homes, and I know that read-only good copy of foo.doc will never be overwritten because I have a typo moment and leave the "l" off without noticing.
Score 1 point for the dumb ordinary user and 0 for the geeks at /.
Yes, you can. If you have copyright over that code, you can reuse it in your own proprietary projects even after you have released it as GPL. It's only other people's code you cannot appropriate.
Slashdot has always had a big astroturfer presence, and the main method of attack against any of the FOSS projects has always been the propagation of semi-true memes.
Linux is hard to install" "Use open source tools and the GPL will contaminate your proprietary code" "Open Office is slow" "If Linux was as popular as Windows there'd be just as many Linux viruses" All these and more have had their day in the sun and been exposed, as eventually will TFA itself. It's just how modern marketing works - every tiny bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt MS et al can sow in the minds of potential switchers is another building block shoring up their monopoly, and online forums like Slashdot have been very fertile ground for them lately.
That market model will only be fair if the movie/music makers agree to refund my money when I pay for one of their products, listen to/watch it, then decide it's crap.
In many ways, these guys brought this on themselves. They use paid shills and astroturf to market the hell out of shitty movies like Snakes on a Plane, while virtually ignoring a beauty like Thank You for Smoking, then whine when ripped off consumers look for better ways to preview the products.
The thing is, for me at least, this isn't about the $12 I have to pay for the movie. It's about the value of my own time. Other people are prepared to pay upwards of $120/hr for my attention and I don't believe I should value it any less. When I decide to watch a movie, I normally get a few, start watching and if any are crap, they'll be ejected and the next one loaded up.
With your business model, I pay just as much for the 10 minutes of timewasting crap as I do for the watchable movies. There's no market pressure on the suppliers, so they'll keep producing pap.
Microsoft really IS going all out to appeal to Mac users...
Yes, thanks to your sig I familiarised myself with the master's great work a few months ago, so I owe you a vote of thanks for that. Still won't stop me nitpicking your posts at every opportunity though. This is Slashdot, after all.
--
Your sig: "... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.
Pot, meet kettle...
But you're right though. This is really sophomoric stuff. It's a pity they feel they have lower themselves to taunt their competitors instead of focusing their vision on groundbreaking products the way Hewlett, Packard and to a lesser extent, von Bechtolsheim did in their day.
Sadly, both companies have lost that edge, and now produce mostly bland generic products, little different to any of the mass-market offerings.
It takes a week to grow live cattle 2%. That's almost an order of magnitude advantage for the in-vitro version. The big advantage though, would be if you could scale it to continuous production - pump nutrients in one end and slice slabs of beef off the other.