It's the CD-RW logic I was thinking of. Or maybe a combination of both CD-R and CD-RW thinking. If it can hold another session, then do it. If not, then blank it. Most of the CD writing software I've seen these days (commercially) have a feature that lets you write to the CD as if it were a local drive (in the user sense). I have users who use CDs as floppies, and this can be applied to other media as well. The mechanics of it are usually just adding to the session, as you mention.
There are 2 main ways of using CDRW as writeble medium. Use iso9660 and add new sessions to it (and blank the disc when full), or use packet writing.
Adding a new session involves a big overhead for the TOC and stuff, and it's rather slow. In XP, the new session gets created on the harddisk first, before you select burn to disk. This is not a good option for smaller flash memory. The UDF filesystem for packet writing lets you treat the CDRW as a true read-write medium, but it is not very widespread. The linux drivers for UDF are still experimental.
Actually, I believe that CDROM format is about equally widespread, and CDRW is nearly so. (I forget the ISO numbers.) The overhead, however, may be extensive.
The widespread cdrom format is iso9660 (plus extentions). The problem is that is is read only. You can only add tracks to it, with a lot of overhead. CDRW can be blanked, but the filesystem is still read only. The writable filesystem for CDRW is called UDF. This format is not nearly as widespread as iso9660. The linux drivers are still experimental, and I believe windows also needs addition driver installation.
anyone who currently has another OS interoperating with Windows via FAT may be just as likely to ditch Windows as they are the "other" OS.
But it may also stop (or at least deter) migration FROM windows, which occurs much more than than in the other direction. Honestly, do you think that if MS could stop migration in both directions today that they wouldn't?
Microsoft offers 2 types of licenses: - preformatted solid state media, $0.25 apiece, up to 250k per manufacturer - consumer electronics that read fat formatted solid state media, audio players, cameras and such, $0.25 apiece, up to 250k per licensee
In the first case, $0.25 might become substantial enough that the media will be shipped unformatted in the future. This is not a big problem, formatting under windows takes a few seconds (without media check) and you only do it once, it is quite painless. For most consumer electronics, $0.25 is probably low enough that manufacturers will pay up and pass the price on to consumers. Devices that do not read removable media can switch to a different filesystem, but they probably don't need a license anyway judging from the press release. Mass migration to a different filesystem is not likely. Card manufacturers will either ship unformatted, in which case it will probably be formatted with fat by the end user, or pay up and use fat, since that's what all current devices understand. Device manufacturers will pay up because they don't want to break compatibility with existing cards. The only way out that I see is if all device manufacturers standardize on one alternative filesystem (ext2?) and ship a Windows utility to format/read/write the card. This effectively requires an industry wide boycott of Microsoft. I'm not very optimistic about this happening...
> Whats so wrong with creating a valuable idea and expecting to profit from it.....?
They didn't create a valuable idea, the idea itself is nearly worthless. The only reason that it became valuable is that nobody expected them to charge for it.
The problem, I think, is that most people don't want to have to format their media before first use. It's convenient to just insert any card and start snapping pictures.
The behavior you suggest is exactly what would happen, but I doubt that any media manufacturer would do this because it would represent a substantial barrier for most people.
I very much doubt so. This might have been a problem if we were still using floppies. Maybe you still remember the days when floppies were shipped blank, and DOS (or pre OS X Macs) couldn't do anything else during formatting. Formatting floppies was SLOW. But now if you pop in a CF card and format without media check it only takes a few seconds. With win2k/xp multitasking you can do other things during the format, but it is so fast that you won't even need that.
Some posters commented in this thread that fat32 can support up to 2TB in theory, it's just that win2k/xp (perhaps also 98/me?) will not let you create or format such a partition. The problem with a 2TB fat32 partition is that the file allocation table itself will take up 256MB ram (or even 1GB if you want smaller clusters), see
storagereview.
In a way it is the Nash Equilibrium, in which we do not only what is best for us, but also what is best for the group.
That is not a Nash Equilibrium. In a Nash equilibrium, none of the players can gain higher profit by unilaterally deviating from the equilibrium outcome. This can lead to an outcome that is not the best for the group. The most famous example is the Prisoner's dilemma: the best strategy is for both players to cooperate, but this is not the Nash Equilibrium since either player can gain a higher reward for himself by deviating. If you don't have a Game Theory book at hand, consult Wiki
You can't just look at the "market value," but you have to look at the performance of the company. Apple, in its niche, does outperform just about everyone else - save Dell. Of course, one could argue that Dell is overextending itself... but I'll wait for that to happen instead of saying it will..
If you believe that the US equity market is reasonably efficient, the market value provides all the information you need. The market value is what society as a whole is willing to trade in exchange of ownership of the Dell company. It is also the current best guess of the (discounted) stream of all future revenues of the company, i.e., the market estimate of the future performance.
At the moment this happens to be about 11 times as high for Dell as for Apple. If you believe that Dell is overvalued compared to Apple, that your guess is better than the market's, you should go long in AAPL and short in DELL.
From the standpoint of the movies, the Saruman plot is finished, over, and done with. The seven minute scene you refer to is NOT important to the overall plot of the move: getting the ring to Mordor.
From the standpoint of the movies, this is true, because the movie is told from a different perspective than the book. The movie is told mainly by an anonymous narrator (but appears to switch from time to time to being told by Galadriel, oddly enough). In the book, the story is told by the Hobbits. This is why the Scouring of the Shire is just as important as the fall of Sauron. Seeing their homeland corrupted affected them more than seeing Gondor on the brink of destruction. And note that Saruman does not come to his end in the scene that will be left out from the theatrical release, but in the Shire in a scene that was probably never shot.
They are rebranded machines from Asia, so expect about the same level of linux/*BSD/etc support as any other obscure lowest bidder import type of notebook (kludgy but improving).
The majority of brand name laptops today are rebranded machines from Asia.
Linux is cool, nice, may even be optimized but my current powerbook is way faster than the P3/600 Linux laptop I had before switching (I don't care about existing models).
I know how you feel. MacOS is cool, nice, may even be optimized, but my current thinkpad is way faster than the 68K/16 System 7 laptop I had before switching (I don't care about existing models either).
MacOS is definetly getting quicker, and is already very easy to use. But I'll give you a (slightly altered) quote to sum up the situation: 'Linux makes the easy things difficult, but it makes the hard things easier and the impossible things possible.'
Wheras MacOS makes the easy things easy, the hard things hard and the impossible things not possible.
This is very true. OS X is more suitable for general day to day computing and mainstream apps. Linux is easier to customize for niche applications. You can set up Point Of Sale systems, kiosk type apps and terminals for (almost) nothing with Linux and old x86 hardware. With a bit of care, you can assemble your own specialized distributions on a 128mb compactflash or a live cdr, something I don't see happening with OS X.
Sounds nice, the only question is wether people believe you or not. I've myself owned promises (stock options) worth several millions some time ago (worthless now, of course), so I prefer cash instead.
Cash is also a promise, only from a presubably more reliable organization.
There are not that many hard drive brands left anymore. I bet that for every brand you name someone on/. can tell you that they've experienced a defective drive.
To follow up on my own post, the complete letter can be found here, the 1997 Wired article here. Note that the article mentions "Where once [Apple] commanded nearly one-fifth the world's personal computer sales, its share has dwindled to less than 4 percent." Now, 6 years later this has not grown (it may have even shrunk a percentage point)...
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft offers 2 types of licenses:
- preformatted solid state media, $0.25 apiece, up to 250k per manufacturer
- consumer electronics that read fat formatted solid state media, audio players, cameras and such, $0.25 apiece, up to 250k per licensee
In the first case, $0.25 might become substantial enough that the media will be shipped unformatted in the future. This is not a big problem, formatting under windows takes a few seconds (without media check) and you only do it once, it is quite painless. For most consumer electronics, $0.25 is probably low enough that manufacturers will pay up and pass the price on to consumers. Devices that do not read removable media can switch to a different filesystem, but they probably don't need a license anyway judging from the press release. Mass migration to a different filesystem is not likely. Card manufacturers will either ship unformatted, in which case it will probably be formatted with fat by the end user, or pay up and use fat, since that's what all current devices understand. Device manufacturers will pay up because they don't want to break compatibility with existing cards. The only way out that I see is if all device manufacturers standardize on one alternative filesystem (ext2?) and ship a Windows utility to format/read/write the card. This effectively requires an industry wide boycott of Microsoft. I'm not very optimistic about this happening...
> Whats so wrong with creating a valuable idea and expecting to profit from it.....?
They didn't create a valuable idea, the idea itself is nearly worthless. The only reason that it became valuable is that nobody expected them to charge for it.
> If you need NTFS-support you already have it on your harddrive, so no problems taking it right off the disk.
Not necessarily. You may have formatted a (removable) harddisk with ntfs just to store data.
Some posters commented in this thread that fat32 can support up to 2TB in theory, it's just that win2k/xp (perhaps also 98/me?) will not let you create or format such a partition. The problem with a 2TB fat32 partition is that the file allocation table itself will take up 256MB ram (or even 1GB if you want smaller clusters), see storagereview.
The elves just pulled a prank on those stupid dwarves.
> SCO will be furious cause they forgot
:-)
> Linux Kernel - license problems
No license problems, they're still using the 2.2 kernel
-- running 3.0r1 at home
> I'd be most interested in the differences between say a 486DX66 with 128Megs and a P90with 32Megs.
A 486 with 128MB ram would be pretty interesting in itself.
> this feels like apple circa july 1998. mcnealy should take a page from job's book on how
> to pull yr company back from the brink:
iSPARCS, now in 5 fruit flavours.
> yeah, it's really tough to give out 100 million DIGITAL COPIES .. geeze....
Do you realize that this is about 400 TERABYTES?
Win98 is not affected. Or is it just that they don't bother to check it anymore?
There are not that many hard drive brands left anymore. I bet that for every brand you name someone on /. can tell you that they've experienced a defective drive.
To follow up on my own post, the complete letter can be found here, the 1997 Wired article here. Note that the article mentions "Where once [Apple] commanded nearly one-fifth the world's personal computer sales, its share has dwindled to less than 4 percent." Now, 6 years later this has not grown (it may have even shrunk a percentage point)...