I really don't see why younger people don't even have the option of being responsible for themselves - a perfect example is an article I read in the paper this afternoon stating that something like 15% (a number I felt was laughably low, but that's irrelevant) of teenagers (<18) surveyed said that they look at porn online. The article then went on to state what parents should do to 'protect' them from these sites. I'm interested in why people who, by their own admission, intentionally look at sexual images, need to be 'protected' until the magic changeover on their 18th birthday.
If it reports as the 117D in the system profiler then it's probably dual layer. If it reports as the 107D it probably isn't.
Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video
on
New Mac System Specs
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· Score: 1
The liquid cooling on the dual 2.5GHz is significantly quieter than even the fairly low volume fans on the dual 1.8 though.
I can kinda see where you're coming from - they obviously felt they needed a uberfast machine at any cost, but the upshot of that is far from a hack IMHO. The fact that they were forced to use a non-conventional (if expensive) solution means they got a chance to do it right and cut noise levels even further. The system noise may not be a huge sway factor in the purchase, but it does say to me that they didn't just do it out of neccessity; they did it right.
Having said that, you can 'feel' the difference in using a 2.5 compared to a 1.8. In my experience the cooling on the 1.8 at <20% is a constant, low-level hum which kicks into "150,000,000RPM jet turbine" on the odd occasion that you run it at >80% for too long. The 2.5 at <20% is a much lower level of constant cooling (sounds like one fan, at very low speed) to gently cool the liquid circuit, but then sending it to 25% load or above for more than about 20 seconds will kick in about 4 more fans at about half speed (only for about 10 secs though) and it happens fairly often, beyond that the cooling seems to level itself off - it's similar in stability to that in the 1.8 but noticable quieter, even at full load.
New Power Macs (don't know when it started, but I got my current machine mid March this year) have dual layer burners included, but not functional.
Apple calls it a "PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-117D" which is referred to almost nowhere, but on the physical drive it has another model number (I forget what) which is a dual layer drive. Many people have speculated that since Tiger supports dual layer burning from the Finder but Panther does not, the drives will automagically open themselves into dual layer mode when it's installed, or from a firmware update shortly afterwards. I guess I'm gonna find out when my copy arrives.
While having the ability to choose seems like a good idea, forcing companies to give you a choice inevitably leads to price structures like "$50 for a 50 channel bundle, or any channels of your choice for only $20 per channel". They blame it on something like 'costs of restructuring service' and charge you more for 3 channels than they do for 50. You're back where you started, essentially forced into buying the bundle.
Internet wouldn't be any different. "1Mbit DSL for $90, or 8Mbit for $20 if you subscribe to our $70 call plan". You have the choice not to pay for a voice line, but I bet 99% of people would keep the line and the company would wave those statistics around as proof that people don't want internet alone.
Even if it were made completely secure (let's say it could be done, for argument's sake) how many users would be willing to wait for 120GB+ to be randomly overwritten 5+ times? I know that using the '8 way random write' option on my OSX install CDs to nuke a 120GB drive before I sold my old Mac took one hell of a long time to run (multiple days, the kind of time a regular user is not going to enjoy waiting).
AFAICS they simply wouldn't bother waiting for this unless it was made significantly faster, and since I assume it's a pretty simple task I don't really see how that could be done.
Put it this way, eventually her school may get around to discussing programming (right now they're at the 'this is the back button in your web browser' stage) and when they do she'll probably put 1 and 1 together and get 10.
I don't know what country you're in, but here in the UK at least you'd be very lucky to find any school teaching any kind of programming. I'm 17 and at a decent state school - the limit of our computer teaching was basically MS Office training (yes, useful to many, but it's unfair to the geeks that they don't offer any real computer classes IMO). I've long since dropped ICT as a subject (they don't teach any 'proper' computer skills, however long you stay with it) and I've found myself learning about a million times more (self taught - the media teachers aren't bad, but they can barely manage their editing programs and as such aren't in a position to learn or teach new software) on my Media Studies course when I decided to produce a short CGI animation for the practical production component.
I think I kinda lost the point of this post somewhere along the way, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's great for her to learn for herself, especially as she's not likely to ever be taught about computers properly in school.
I must point you in the direction of VLC. It has more codecs than I've ever needed bundled with it, has more options and settings than Quicktime and even integrates nicely with the look and feel of OSX (something that can't be said for quite a few OSS tools, however much I like them)
The Gadget Show? Ugh. I watched a few episodes with interest since there was nothing similar on terrestrial TV, but it is the most non-technical, biased piece of crap I've ever seen. Half the time they spend the show emphasising one insignificant point of a product as the only reason to buy or avoid it.
Their 'review' of the PSP vs. DS was laughable; it basically said that the PSP is better (which I agree with), however their reasoning was based mainly on 'it looks nicer and costs more' and not much else. The Mac Mini review was, if anything, worse. The explained that it wasn't cheap because in their opinion it's useless if it isn't bundled with a £100 pair of speakers, a £350 copy of MS Office and a brand new LCD monitor and therefore you may as well go and buy an £800 Windows Laptop.
I wouldn't say thickness is the issue here; While I'll agree that the PSP casing doesn't scratch easily (certainly the coating is tougher than the laser side of a standard DVD or CD), making minor scratches (the kind that don't matter on the outer casing of a games console, for obvious reasons) is trivial and looking at the data density of these things, a minor scratch is all it would take to ruin a fair amount of information (assuming there isn't some ultra-robust error correction that they haven't mentioned).
Even if they sorted that, price does matter. I realise that many people will pay for style and ease of use (hence why the iPod did so well despite the cost) but if you're trying to compete with a 'premium' player, the first thing you want to do is at least match the price.
"Until now, the complaint was that Sony products sold at a major premium," said Gregory Kukolj, general manager of the personal audio group in Europe...
...The 1Gb model will still cost £200 compared to Apple's iPod Shuffle at £99. The new models will feature a OLED display though.
If you're selling 1GB of flash at £30 more than a 6GB iPod mini, and you don't think that's "a major premium" I don't think an OLED screen is going to save you.
From TFA: The microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs.
Looks to me like a fundamental difference in uses: these wires would be great in pendrives or MP3 players, where flash memory is currently used. No need to use them in place of DVDs or CDs though: we've already got ~50GB optical storage on the way and nobody will be happy if they change the size/shape of the media.
I actually agree, despite the fact that your analogy looks completely different to mine. You still need to pay the water bill (or pay for the bandwidth). You are still responsible if someone tells you in advance that they will use your hose/connection for illegal activity. You are not, however, responsible if it is available as a service to the neighbours (a sign above the hose saying free water/an open AP) and they choose to abuse that.
Yes you can be sued as you are RESPONSIBLE and LIABLE to the service agreement and no you should NOT be resharing it. Its like hiring out an already hired appartment, usually you cannot do this. Its like hiring out a car you bought on hire purchase, you DONT own it. Its you name on the dotted line, not the general publics.
I'd say it'd be more like letting people stay in a spare bedroom in the apartment you're renting.
No charge to the person making use of your facilities and you're still using it primarily, but you're also helping out those around you if they happen to need it. The question would be, therefore, can you be held responsible if the person staying in that bedroom stores stolen (I know, I know - sharing!= theft, but it's the closest comparison I've got) goods in it should you be held responsible? I would certainly think not, but there is often an unfortunate amount of truth in the saying "No good deed goes unpunished."
Those are not people I want to live beside afterwards.
So put them in prison for the rest of their life. They are removed from society and therefore no longer a danger, you don't have to 'live beside' them. You also don't have any of the associated problems with wrong convictions and, to be honest, from a crime deterrent point of view I consider life in prison a more unpleasant prospect than death anyway.
Why would you need to buy another computer? iTunes and iPods work fine on Windows or reasonably well on Linux. Fair enough if you don't want to buy an iPod - why not just rip the songs to MP3 and put them on your phone? Then you don't need to go paying again for music you own. If you really want to pay for downloads rather than hard copies you can also use hymn to strip the DRM from legally purchased iTunes songs which can then be used with any standard FairPlay-incapable MP4 software that'll run on Symbian on your phone, without any restriction hassle.
I'd like to know if there's anything I've missed here, but if I were you I wouldn't be giving my money or approval to a big evil setup designed to make the big bosses richer while giving you less rights.
Photoshop is a high end piece of design software. Many high end designers use Macs. Macs have single button mice.
I find the interface excellent, and much prefer it to the Gimp. I would class myself as a high-use amateur and the Gimp on Windows was the first graphics app that I used, followed by Gimp/Linux when I switched OS's, followed by Photoshop 6 on Windows when I switched back temporarily, finally followed by Photoshop CS on OSX when I got my Mac 6 months ago. I want to like The Gimp, I really do, but I simply prefer Photoshop. I don't claim to be an interface expert, but I've tried with both pieces of software and I know which one worked for me. YMMV.
Spokespeople for your company have been mentioning 'open formats' and 'interoperability' recently, and Microsoft's superiority therein.
Why do you believe that it is easier to standardise and interoperate across a range of hardware and software platforms with closed, patented document formats such as those used by MS Office rather than open, free (as in speech), soon to be ISO standardised, XML formats such as those used by OpenOffice?
The only interesting question is: if, and this is a big if, if they they ever find themselves to be losing marketshare in a substantial way, will they be able to move fast enough to change and adapt? or will they maintain their mantra to the end?
And by substantial, I don't mean FireFox and it's 3%--I mean, for a serious threat to emerge, it would have to be somewhere above 20% of the market Microsoft wants to own. Otherwise it's just an outlier.
I know we haven't seen the end of the fight yet, but the only market I can think of that MS looked at, has high profile support in and is failing in is the music market. The.wma stores outnumber the.aac/.mp3/.ogg/FLAC/anything else stores 10 to 1 and they have names like Napster (albeit only the name, no other link to the original) behind them yet the iPod is blowing them out of the water.
What is their answer to this? Tie the consumer into rented music making cancellations of the subscription nearly impossible unless you want all your tracks to self destruct. The end user may be ignorant of the DRM tech used, but they sure as hell don't want to be locked into a single company charging whatever the hell they like for the rest of their lives.
I think this is what MS looks like when they start to loose a market: they don't know how to compete on a playing field not tilted their way (why would they? They've always made sure they don't need to). Because they are loosing the market they feel that they have to lock users in to prevent more of them leaving - it looks as if MS honestly don't realise that they could compete on quality and probably settle at 50/50 market share with Apple - instead they say a big 'Fuck You' to the customers and make sure that anybody who gives them money is stuck giving them money forever, that way they will, in their minds at least, own the market forever; except they won't, because the user's won't bite and they will be lost to the service that gives them more rights and the ability to opt out without killing $n worth of music.
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They also make it sound like Sony learned from this first mistake, when in fact they kept putting out ATRAC3 only players until last year IIRC.
I really don't see why younger people don't even have the option of being responsible for themselves - a perfect example is an article I read in the paper this afternoon stating that something like 15% (a number I felt was laughably low, but that's irrelevant) of teenagers (<18) surveyed said that they look at porn online. The article then went on to state what parents should do to 'protect' them from these sites. I'm interested in why people who, by their own admission, intentionally look at sexual images, need to be 'protected' until the magic changeover on their 18th birthday.
If it reports as the 117D in the system profiler then it's probably dual layer. If it reports as the 107D it probably isn't.
The liquid cooling on the dual 2.5GHz is significantly quieter than even the fairly low volume fans on the dual 1.8 though.
I can kinda see where you're coming from - they obviously felt they needed a uberfast machine at any cost, but the upshot of that is far from a hack IMHO. The fact that they were forced to use a non-conventional (if expensive) solution means they got a chance to do it right and cut noise levels even further. The system noise may not be a huge sway factor in the purchase, but it does say to me that they didn't just do it out of neccessity; they did it right.
Having said that, you can 'feel' the difference in using a 2.5 compared to a 1.8. In my experience the cooling on the 1.8 at <20% is a constant, low-level hum which kicks into "150,000,000RPM jet turbine" on the odd occasion that you run it at >80% for too long. The 2.5 at <20% is a much lower level of constant cooling (sounds like one fan, at very low speed) to gently cool the liquid circuit, but then sending it to 25% load or above for more than about 20 seconds will kick in about 4 more fans at about half speed (only for about 10 secs though) and it happens fairly often, beyond that the cooling seems to level itself off - it's similar in stability to that in the 1.8 but noticable quieter, even at full load.
New Power Macs (don't know when it started, but I got my current machine mid March this year) have dual layer burners included, but not functional.
Apple calls it a "PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-117D" which is referred to almost nowhere, but on the physical drive it has another model number (I forget what) which is a dual layer drive. Many people have speculated that since Tiger supports dual layer burning from the Finder but Panther does not, the drives will automagically open themselves into dual layer mode when it's installed, or from a firmware update shortly afterwards. I guess I'm gonna find out when my copy arrives.
While having the ability to choose seems like a good idea, forcing companies to give you a choice inevitably leads to price structures like "$50 for a 50 channel bundle, or any channels of your choice for only $20 per channel". They blame it on something like 'costs of restructuring service' and charge you more for 3 channels than they do for 50. You're back where you started, essentially forced into buying the bundle.
Internet wouldn't be any different. "1Mbit DSL for $90, or 8Mbit for $20 if you subscribe to our $70 call plan". You have the choice not to pay for a voice line, but I bet 99% of people would keep the line and the company would wave those statistics around as proof that people don't want internet alone.
Even if it were made completely secure (let's say it could be done, for argument's sake) how many users would be willing to wait for 120GB+ to be randomly overwritten 5+ times? I know that using the '8 way random write' option on my OSX install CDs to nuke a 120GB drive before I sold my old Mac took one hell of a long time to run (multiple days, the kind of time a regular user is not going to enjoy waiting).
AFAICS they simply wouldn't bother waiting for this unless it was made significantly faster, and since I assume it's a pretty simple task I don't really see how that could be done.
Put it this way, eventually her school may get around to discussing programming (right now they're at the 'this is the back button in your web browser' stage) and when they do she'll probably put 1 and 1 together and get 10.
I don't know what country you're in, but here in the UK at least you'd be very lucky to find any school teaching any kind of programming. I'm 17 and at a decent state school - the limit of our computer teaching was basically MS Office training (yes, useful to many, but it's unfair to the geeks that they don't offer any real computer classes IMO). I've long since dropped ICT as a subject (they don't teach any 'proper' computer skills, however long you stay with it) and I've found myself learning about a million times more (self taught - the media teachers aren't bad, but they can barely manage their editing programs and as such aren't in a position to learn or teach new software) on my Media Studies course when I decided to produce a short CGI animation for the practical production component.
I think I kinda lost the point of this post somewhere along the way, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's great for her to learn for herself, especially as she's not likely to ever be taught about computers properly in school.
MIT is too busy building the worlds tallest and most complex beer bong.
You think a bunch of MIT guys can beat these (particularly this one)? Good luck to them!
I must point you in the direction of VLC. It has more codecs than I've ever needed bundled with it, has more options and settings than Quicktime and even integrates nicely with the look and feel of OSX (something that can't be said for quite a few OSS tools, however much I like them)
The Gadget Show? Ugh. I watched a few episodes with interest since there was nothing similar on terrestrial TV, but it is the most non-technical, biased piece of crap I've ever seen. Half the time they spend the show emphasising one insignificant point of a product as the only reason to buy or avoid it.
Their 'review' of the PSP vs. DS was laughable; it basically said that the PSP is better (which I agree with), however their reasoning was based mainly on 'it looks nicer and costs more' and not much else. The Mac Mini review was, if anything, worse. The explained that it wasn't cheap because in their opinion it's useless if it isn't bundled with a £100 pair of speakers, a £350 copy of MS Office and a brand new LCD monitor and therefore you may as well go and buy an £800 Windows Laptop.
I wouldn't say thickness is the issue here; While I'll agree that the PSP casing doesn't scratch easily (certainly the coating is tougher than the laser side of a standard DVD or CD), making minor scratches (the kind that don't matter on the outer casing of a games console, for obvious reasons) is trivial and looking at the data density of these things, a minor scratch is all it would take to ruin a fair amount of information (assuming there isn't some ultra-robust error correction that they haven't mentioned).
Even if they sorted that, price does matter. I realise that many people will pay for style and ease of use (hence why the iPod did so well despite the cost) but if you're trying to compete with a 'premium' player, the first thing you want to do is at least match the price.
"Until now, the complaint was that Sony products sold at a major premium," said Gregory Kukolj, general manager of the personal audio group in Europe...
...The 1Gb model will still cost £200 compared to Apple's iPod Shuffle at £99. The new models will feature a OLED display though.
If you're selling 1GB of flash at £30 more than a 6GB iPod mini, and you don't think that's "a major premium" I don't think an OLED screen is going to save you.
From TFA: The microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs.
Looks to me like a fundamental difference in uses: these wires would be great in pendrives or MP3 players, where flash memory is currently used. No need to use them in place of DVDs or CDs though: we've already got ~50GB optical storage on the way and nobody will be happy if they change the size/shape of the media.
I actually agree, despite the fact that your analogy looks completely different to mine. You still need to pay the water bill (or pay for the bandwidth). You are still responsible if someone tells you in advance that they will use your hose/connection for illegal activity. You are not, however, responsible if it is available as a service to the neighbours (a sign above the hose saying free water/an open AP) and they choose to abuse that.
Yes you can be sued as you are RESPONSIBLE and LIABLE to the service agreement and no you should NOT be resharing it. Its like hiring out an already hired appartment, usually you cannot do this. Its like hiring out a car you bought on hire purchase, you DONT own it. Its you name on the dotted line, not the general publics.
I'd say it'd be more like letting people stay in a spare bedroom in the apartment you're renting.
No charge to the person making use of your facilities and you're still using it primarily, but you're also helping out those around you if they happen to need it. The question would be, therefore, can you be held responsible if the person staying in that bedroom stores stolen (I know, I know - sharing!= theft, but it's the closest comparison I've got) goods in it should you be held responsible? I would certainly think not, but there is often an unfortunate amount of truth in the saying "No good deed goes unpunished."
Those are not people I want to live beside afterwards.
So put them in prison for the rest of their life. They are removed from society and therefore no longer a danger, you don't have to 'live beside' them. You also don't have any of the associated problems with wrong convictions and, to be honest, from a crime deterrent point of view I consider life in prison a more unpleasant prospect than death anyway.
Coral Cache is working fairly fast.
I want to thank you for bringing the word groinular to my vocabulary; it's just the funniest sounding word I've heard in a long time.
Why would you need to buy another computer? iTunes and iPods work fine on Windows or reasonably well on Linux. Fair enough if you don't want to buy an iPod - why not just rip the songs to MP3 and put them on your phone? Then you don't need to go paying again for music you own. If you really want to pay for downloads rather than hard copies you can also use hymn to strip the DRM from legally purchased iTunes songs which can then be used with any standard FairPlay-incapable MP4 software that'll run on Symbian on your phone, without any restriction hassle.
I'd like to know if there's anything I've missed here, but if I were you I wouldn't be giving my money or approval to a big evil setup designed to make the big bosses richer while giving you less rights.
If I had an otherwise incurable form of cancer? Yes. Yes I would.
Coralised. I think I got it in time.
Buttons that you hold down to get more buttons?
Photoshop is a high end piece of design software. Many high end designers use Macs. Macs have single button mice.
I find the interface excellent, and much prefer it to the Gimp. I would class myself as a high-use amateur and the Gimp on Windows was the first graphics app that I used, followed by Gimp/Linux when I switched OS's, followed by Photoshop 6 on Windows when I switched back temporarily, finally followed by Photoshop CS on OSX when I got my Mac 6 months ago. I want to like The Gimp, I really do, but I simply prefer Photoshop. I don't claim to be an interface expert, but I've tried with both pieces of software and I know which one worked for me. YMMV.
Spokespeople for your company have been mentioning 'open formats' and 'interoperability' recently, and Microsoft's superiority therein.
Why do you believe that it is easier to standardise and interoperate across a range of hardware and software platforms with closed, patented document formats such as those used by MS Office rather than open, free (as in speech), soon to be ISO standardised, XML formats such as those used by OpenOffice?
The only interesting question is: if, and this is a big if, if they they ever find themselves to be losing marketshare in a substantial way, will they be able to move fast enough to change and adapt? or will they maintain their mantra to the end?
.wma stores outnumber the .aac/.mp3/.ogg/FLAC/anything else stores 10 to 1 and they have names like Napster (albeit only the name, no other link to the original) behind them yet the iPod is blowing them out of the water.
And by substantial, I don't mean FireFox and it's 3%--I mean, for a serious threat to emerge, it would have to be somewhere above 20% of the market Microsoft wants to own. Otherwise it's just an outlier.
I know we haven't seen the end of the fight yet, but the only market I can think of that MS looked at, has high profile support in and is failing in is the music market. The
What is their answer to this? Tie the consumer into rented music making cancellations of the subscription nearly impossible unless you want all your tracks to self destruct. The end user may be ignorant of the DRM tech used, but they sure as hell don't want to be locked into a single company charging whatever the hell they like for the rest of their lives.
I think this is what MS looks like when they start to loose a market: they don't know how to compete on a playing field not tilted their way (why would they? They've always made sure they don't need to). Because they are loosing the market they feel that they have to lock users in to prevent more of them leaving - it looks as if MS honestly don't realise that they could compete on quality and probably settle at 50/50 market share with Apple - instead they say a big 'Fuck You' to the customers and make sure that anybody who gives them money is stuck giving them money forever, that way they will, in their minds at least, own the market forever; except they won't, because the user's won't bite and they will be lost to the service that gives them more rights and the ability to opt out without killing $n worth of music.