Apple earns the same hardware margins as other PC vendors, it just doesn't lose money on $500 loss leaders like Dell and HP.
I'm pretty sure that Dell and HP make money on those $500 PCs. Sure, it's not as much as they make on a $2500 PC, but since they probably sell 30 $500 PCs for every single $2500 PC, they can't be selling them at a loss.
Because it's kind of a shitty design. To put in a "media reader", you're actually putting in several different media readers, all of which are going to be crappy and prone to break
If Apple really cared about things like this, then why do they insist on slot loading optical drives on their laptops that are prone to getting full of debris and breaking?
I don't know where you're coming from. USB keyboards and mice just work on Windows 98. Supposedly, they could be made to work in Windows 95, but I never got Microsoft's patch for Windows 95 to work. Granted, Windows 98 didn't have a mass storage driver (USB thumbdrives, etc. weren't common in 1998), but Windows ME did, and it worked fine. The NT line had to wait until Windows 2000 though, as Windows NT4 never got any official USB support as far as I'm aware.
The main reason why PC didn't go all USB in 1998 is that not everyone wanted to run Windows 98 at the time. People were still running Windows 95, 3.1, NT, as well as DOS and OS/2. There were some hacks by the BIOS manufacturers to make a USB keyboard look like a PS/2 to the OS for compatibility reasons, but that didn't always work right. Plus, people of the time still had a wide variety of PS/2 accessories, and PC manufacturers realized that not everyone wanted to throw all their perfectly good accessories in the trash (that's also the same reason that PCs still come with PCI slots, by the way). Finally, the PS/2 ports pretty much just work, and by having PS/2 keyboards and mice, that meant that more USB ports were open for other accessories. It wasn't until 2002 or so that more than 2 USB ports were common on computers. Even the original iMac only had 2 USB ports, which meant that most iMac owners had to run out and buy a USB hub to go along with all the accessories they had to repurchase.
Of course, that didn't mean some PC manufacturers didn't try to eliminate the PS/2 ports either. I have a Gateway which was originally a Celeron 700 running Windows ME that has no PS/2 ports (it also lacks a serial port, but retains the parallel port). Atleast Gateway realized that if they were going to eliminate the PS/2 ports, that they should put more than 2 USB ports on the computer (it has 5).
I still find it odd that in Windows, menus come down from a bar at the top of the window, except for what may be the single most frequently used menu, which comes up from the bottom.
Actually, Windows will have the menus come up from the bottom if there is not enough room to draw the menu from the top. It's easy to see, drag an application to the bottom of the screen then access the menus. It's just that the start menu is (usually) at the bottom of the screen, so you always get the drawn from the bottom behavior. You'll also notice that the menus from icons in the system tray, as well as the menu from applications on the taskbar when you right click on them also are drawn from the bottom.
Try to build a system equal to the Mac Mini. You will find it costs the same or more. And by the same I mean, similar size, no fans, equal CPU, DVD, etc.
Obviously the Mac Mini is the best at being the Mac Mini.
Now go out and find a computer for someone looking for a basic system for Joe User to use at home (i.e. internet, email, basic word processing, balance his checkbook, listen to some music, and organize photos). You can get a complete PC system that can do everything Joe User needs to do for under $500. Not so from Apple.
Lack of gaming support is not Apples fault... and it is not Microsoft who made Windows a gaming platform. Call your favorite game manufacturer and tell them that they suck...
It is in a way. The Mac Mini is too weak for the hardcore gamer. The iMac is not expandable enough, and tends to come with last years video card that can't be upgraded. The Mac Pro is powerful, but far too expensive compared to a custom rig and still is a bit limited in the upgrades department. It's not that you can't game on a Mac, it's just that Apple doesn't cater towards the gamer crowd so they tend to shun them.
I think a lot depends on what you study. When it comes to things that are more traditionally academia like science, arts, humanities, and things like that, you end up with teachers that are there because they love the subject matter and enjoy teaching. However, when it comes more to the applied areas of study in colleges, like business, engineering, and complete bullshit majors like aviation, I find a lot of the people teaching are there because they clearly couldn't cut it in industry. Of course, there are lots of exceptions, but in general I find the further removed the major is from the job market, the better the teachers are.
Ripping a cd was a challenge for Win98 users, maybe, but not for OS 9 users. I still have my Mac from 1999. It is a 350mhz G4 and has no problem, even today, ripping a cd while surfing the web AND playing songs from the iTunes library while it rips the cd. You want to rip on the quality of Apple's gear at the time? Why is my G4 still a decent machine, while P3s are landfill fodder?
OS9 was a cooperative multitasking operating system (OSX is a different beast, of course). Since it didn't do multitasking properly, if you took focus away from your encoding program to do something else, your encoding basically ground to a halt. That wasn't true of PCs of the time, though the encoding process was so ram and processor intensive for the machines of the day, you were best off just leaving it alone for a typical 16-64MB Windows 95/98 system common back then.
Besides, P3's are still very useful systems, I have some still in use. The only reason they get trashed now is the availablity of even faster hardware for very cheap/free, and sadly the leaky capacitors that plagues everything from this era.
As far as it being technically difficult to rip a cd, I guess inserting the cd and pushing the button in iTunes is difficult? Just because the masses where wallowing in the mediocrity of Win98 boxes that couldn't do much in the multi-media department, doesn't detract from the Macs ability to do cool things like ripping cds to our iTunes libraries with ease.
I was talking of life before iTunes and similar software. I'm talking about ripping CDs on c.1997 hardware that people were running at the time. I wouldn't want to try to rip a CD on a 1997 Performa either without a paperclip handy. By 2000, there were plenty of click and go software for the PC side, such as MusicMatch jukebox or whatever it was called to name one program. Even iTunes ran on Windows 98, though I would advise against it.
You are right about it being hard to get a good rip without skips (on the PC side). Yet another reason Napster was such a dog. You could never count on the quality of the file you were getting (no thanks to the PCs inability to make good mp3 files to share). Again, this is why iTunes has a bigger impact than Napster. Users like myself found it worth our time to spend $1 on a song that was guaranteed to work, come with the real artwork, and be properly named and tagged. Napster, in short, became a monumental waste of time, weeding through the mislabeled, crappy rips of cds. Unless, of course, you were part of that 18-twentysomething crowd that had a hard time saving $1 for a song and has been raised with an anything goes mentality when it comes to the use of the 'net.
No, the impact of Napster was that it opened up people's eyes to a new way of looking at things. You can get music a different way than the way it had been for decades. It was possible to only get the tracks you liked instead buying an album. You can share your music tastes with people all over the world. You can try a wide variety of music from artists you weren't familar with for a very low cost. If you were a creater of music, it was even more huge as you now had a way to distribute your music worldwide for low cost, totally cutting out the middleman. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but everyone, including the record labels, knew right away that things were changed forever, long before Apple came to the table with the iPod, iTunes, and the iTMS.
With the new perspective of distributing music over the internet, selling tracks ala iTunes was obvious. Apple wasn't even the first one here, beaten by companies like eMusic and MP3.com. What iTunes brought to the table was a way to "go legit" with music from the big labels, and a nicely integrated package with the iPod. Of course, things like a gaurenteed level of quality helped (I agree on Napster, often you had no idea what you were going to get!). Napster was revolutionary, while iTunes was more an evolutionary step.
If it's a early 2003 machine, it's probably an AGP machine with DDR memory. You'll be looking at a new processor, new memory, new CPU, and new video card at the least. While you can do all of that for the price of a PS3, I might be more inclined to spend $50 or so and put more ram into it and stretch it out for another year or more.
If you make enough trouble to get the police to be called out, and I'm not talking about peaceful protest but screaming and throwing beer bottles at cars at 2am, you should not be expecting a stern talking to and a lolly pop from the officer that has to deal with your dumb ass, but an ass kicking that will make you afraid to do it twice.
That's against the whole seperation of powers thing. The police are supposed to enforce the laws, not dish out punishment. If the punk kid is being enough of a problem to deserve it, then arrest them.
In a nutshell, anyone downgrading their software to 1.1.2 or 1.1.1 or lower and who says they experiencing better cell phone reception is working under the placebo effect, because the firmware they are downgrading doesn't affect the radio at all. And no one knows how to downgrade the baseband firmware - or if they do, the technique isn't being publicized.
Well, it depends on how they are judging their signal strength. If they are going off of what their phone tells them rather than actual performance when using it, it's concievable that the signal strentgth indicator has been tweaked somehow in the iPhone 1.1.2 software.
According to Wikipedia, Napster peaked at 26.4 million users*. That's pretty big in my book, and the impact was huge. I can't find any numbers for the iTunes music store, but I found that iTunes has only recently surpassed that number for users of the iTunes software**. Given that not everyone that users the iTunes software is going to buy from the iTunes store, I'm going to go with Napster still being bigger than iTMS. Of course, given the numbers that site also gives for Real Player, you might take those numbers with a grain of salt.
Also, ripping CDs was still a challenge for many people back in 1999. You were fine if you had one of those new-fangled P3 computers. But for those with older Pentiums and K6's with fussy 4x-8x CD drives, it was a bit of challenge to get a good rip without skips, and then the encoding could take as long as 3-4 minutes per song. During which you generally couldn't use the PC too. It couldn't have been much better on the Mac side, given the quality of Apple's gear of the time.
I don't know where you were back in 1999, but I remember everyone had Napster installed on their PC. It wasn't hard to use either, install it, search for whatever, and download it. It was so easy that people were downloading MP3's of stuff they owned on CDs because it was easier than ripping was back then. As a matter of fact, you could argue that it created the market for the iPod, because what use is a MP3 player if you don't have MP3s?
While it is true that iTunes is installed on a lot oy computers, the vast majority of these iTunes is never used, and the only reason they have it on their computer is because it came with Quicktime.
The point is that 512MB Vista machines and 128MB XP machines were very cheap machines, while the Macs are sold at a premium. Other than the form factor and the fact it's a Mac, the Mini really doesn't have anything else going for it.
Thank you for reminding me. Sometimes I lose track of the context of the topic I'm in, and I only look at the immediate context plus The Article, not the context in between.
No problem:)
If this number goes too low, watch fewer students pay for on-campus housing.
It might have an effect, but most colleges already offer a crippled internet connection in the dorms. Dropping/throttling of P2P traffic (atleast non-disguised traffic), firewalled ports, transparent proxying of traffic, NAT, limited to one computer per person, per-day bandwidth limits, things like that. It seems that students more or less put up with it, or aren't savvy enough to realize what's going on.
But which organization would you prioritize over another organization? What makes a particular address "desirable" or "not desirable" to you? Does it depend on how much the site pays you for priority routing?
The original discussion was how to throttle P2P traffic on a college network when the students are encrypting the traffic. To which I said, it's easy - you just have to watch for P2P-like activity (such as lots of multiple connections). As you point out, trying to differentiate "legit" connections so you don't count them in some kind of connections count does put them into the net nuetrality debate. So I would guess that most colleges would just go by a number - you have more connections than that, and you'll get slapped down. Besides, it's easier for them that way anyway. You like to open 15 webpages at once? Too bad.
Which would hurt users of sites that use HTTPS (HTTP tunneled over SSL). Besides, how can you tell whether traffic is encrypted or just compressed?
Well, if you are going to open dozens of HTTPS connections at once, you'll probably get slapped down here too. And compressed and encrypted wouldn't make a difference anyway, as the goal here is to keep people from using P2P by mangling the packets in the hope that the school will just let them through. Compressed packets would be treated the same as encrypted if they can't be examined.
Mac doesn't sell a computer with really low specs, because they give a bad user experience.
Is that why the $2500 Mac Pro comes with a whopping 1GB of ram? And while the current Mac Mini is no screamer, the original Mac Mini with its 1.25Ghz processor, 256MB of ram, and 4200RPM harddrive was an incredibly low spec computer when it came out in 2005.
Well, you were responding to a comment about "the biggest thing since CDs". Considering that Napster, Limewire, etc. were around long before iTunes, I'm going to have to go with P2P on this one. The impact of iTunes' is undeniable, but on the other hand P2P was (and still is) bigger than iTunes, and will probably always be that way.
Umm, what? An iPod will take any MP3 you throw at it. Yeah, they can have their own DRM, but they work with DRM-free recordings just fine. Who is crippling whom?
He's correct though, the iPod is pretty much the only music player out there that doesn't support Windows Media files. Of course, you probably don't care, as I don't either, as Microsoft's DRM is as useless to me as Apple's DRM.
The Zune met the sales goals set by Microsoft. People are buying them. How can it be a failure? It really doesn't matter (at this point atleast) to Microsoft that it isn't selling as many as the iPod, because that wasn't their goal. But hey, if you want to redefine "failure" as not having the top spot, you should start hounding Apple for the failure of the Macintosh and its 3-7% marketshare.
If I was doing this, I might have to make the list manually since I didn't find anything like "list of IP addresses of popular sites" on Google with a quick search. Keep in mind that this would only affect users connecting to something like 15 websites at once anyway. Another alternative would be to not apply any rules if the traffic is non-encrypted, non-P2P too.
When I open 20 different web sites in 20 different Firefox tabs, is it any different? When my RSS reader pings 20 different feeds on 20 different sites, is it any different?
The fact that your computer is going to generate a bit of traffic, mostly one-way (incoming into your computer), then it will stop makes it quite different. Granted, false positives are probably unavoidable, but only throttling traffic if P2P-like activity is sustained for 30-60 seconds, and having the algorithm ignore traffic from IPs of sites like Youtube, CNN, Yahoo, Fark, etc. would help keep legit users from getting stomped.
This is a 50Mhz 486dx laptop with a 8megs of ram. What OS can I reasonable run on it besides DOS, baslinux (basic linux - damn small linux is to big). and some floppy based OSs like maybe if I can even QNX demo of i can even find it anymore? To bad I can't get AROS to run on it.
You should be able to run Windows 95 on that without a problem. I used Windows 95a on a Thinkpad 486DX/33 with 12MB and it was acceptable. Good luck tracking down a copy of the floppy disk installation kit though.
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
I actually thought Microsoft was going to copy Apple on this. In other words, release a slow, bloated, unusable piece of crap OS like Apple did with 10.0, then wow everyone as they optomize the heck out of it. Which is why I'm a bit surprised that Vista SP1 supposedly doesn't have much of an improvement.
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Apple earns the same hardware margins as other PC vendors, it just doesn't lose money on $500 loss leaders like Dell and HP.
I'm pretty sure that Dell and HP make money on those $500 PCs. Sure, it's not as much as they make on a $2500 PC, but since they probably sell 30 $500 PCs for every single $2500 PC, they can't be selling them at a loss.
Because it's kind of a shitty design. To put in a "media reader", you're actually putting in several different media readers, all of which are going to be crappy and prone to break
If Apple really cared about things like this, then why do they insist on slot loading optical drives on their laptops that are prone to getting full of debris and breaking?
I don't know where you're coming from. USB keyboards and mice just work on Windows 98. Supposedly, they could be made to work in Windows 95, but I never got Microsoft's patch for Windows 95 to work. Granted, Windows 98 didn't have a mass storage driver (USB thumbdrives, etc. weren't common in 1998), but Windows ME did, and it worked fine. The NT line had to wait until Windows 2000 though, as Windows NT4 never got any official USB support as far as I'm aware.
The main reason why PC didn't go all USB in 1998 is that not everyone wanted to run Windows 98 at the time. People were still running Windows 95, 3.1, NT, as well as DOS and OS/2. There were some hacks by the BIOS manufacturers to make a USB keyboard look like a PS/2 to the OS for compatibility reasons, but that didn't always work right. Plus, people of the time still had a wide variety of PS/2 accessories, and PC manufacturers realized that not everyone wanted to throw all their perfectly good accessories in the trash (that's also the same reason that PCs still come with PCI slots, by the way). Finally, the PS/2 ports pretty much just work, and by having PS/2 keyboards and mice, that meant that more USB ports were open for other accessories. It wasn't until 2002 or so that more than 2 USB ports were common on computers. Even the original iMac only had 2 USB ports, which meant that most iMac owners had to run out and buy a USB hub to go along with all the accessories they had to repurchase.
Of course, that didn't mean some PC manufacturers didn't try to eliminate the PS/2 ports either. I have a Gateway which was originally a Celeron 700 running Windows ME that has no PS/2 ports (it also lacks a serial port, but retains the parallel port). Atleast Gateway realized that if they were going to eliminate the PS/2 ports, that they should put more than 2 USB ports on the computer (it has 5).
I still find it odd that in Windows, menus come down from a bar at the top of the window, except for what may be the single most frequently used menu, which comes up from the bottom.
Actually, Windows will have the menus come up from the bottom if there is not enough room to draw the menu from the top. It's easy to see, drag an application to the bottom of the screen then access the menus. It's just that the start menu is (usually) at the bottom of the screen, so you always get the drawn from the bottom behavior. You'll also notice that the menus from icons in the system tray, as well as the menu from applications on the taskbar when you right click on them also are drawn from the bottom.
Try to build a system equal to the Mac Mini. You will find it costs the same or more. And by the same I mean, similar size, no fans, equal CPU, DVD, etc.
Obviously the Mac Mini is the best at being the Mac Mini.
Now go out and find a computer for someone looking for a basic system for Joe User to use at home (i.e. internet, email, basic word processing, balance his checkbook, listen to some music, and organize photos). You can get a complete PC system that can do everything Joe User needs to do for under $500. Not so from Apple.
Lack of gaming support is not Apples fault... and it is not Microsoft who made Windows a gaming platform. Call your favorite game manufacturer and tell them that they suck...
It is in a way. The Mac Mini is too weak for the hardcore gamer. The iMac is not expandable enough, and tends to come with last years video card that can't be upgraded. The Mac Pro is powerful, but far too expensive compared to a custom rig and still is a bit limited in the upgrades department. It's not that you can't game on a Mac, it's just that Apple doesn't cater towards the gamer crowd so they tend to shun them.
Not many now, as that was one of the few keys that had the honor of being blacklisted from SP1 (IIRC). But yeah, I know that one.
I think a lot depends on what you study. When it comes to things that are more traditionally academia like science, arts, humanities, and things like that, you end up with teachers that are there because they love the subject matter and enjoy teaching. However, when it comes more to the applied areas of study in colleges, like business, engineering, and complete bullshit majors like aviation, I find a lot of the people teaching are there because they clearly couldn't cut it in industry. Of course, there are lots of exceptions, but in general I find the further removed the major is from the job market, the better the teachers are.
Ripping a cd was a challenge for Win98 users, maybe, but not for OS 9 users. I still have my Mac from 1999. It is a 350mhz G4 and has no problem, even today, ripping a cd while surfing the web AND playing songs from the iTunes library while it rips the cd. You want to rip on the quality of Apple's gear at the time? Why is my G4 still a decent machine, while P3s are landfill fodder?
OS9 was a cooperative multitasking operating system (OSX is a different beast, of course). Since it didn't do multitasking properly, if you took focus away from your encoding program to do something else, your encoding basically ground to a halt. That wasn't true of PCs of the time, though the encoding process was so ram and processor intensive for the machines of the day, you were best off just leaving it alone for a typical 16-64MB Windows 95/98 system common back then.
Besides, P3's are still very useful systems, I have some still in use. The only reason they get trashed now is the availablity of even faster hardware for very cheap/free, and sadly the leaky capacitors that plagues everything from this era.
As far as it being technically difficult to rip a cd, I guess inserting the cd and pushing the button in iTunes is difficult? Just because the masses where wallowing in the mediocrity of Win98 boxes that couldn't do much in the multi-media department, doesn't detract from the Macs ability to do cool things like ripping cds to our iTunes libraries with ease.
I was talking of life before iTunes and similar software. I'm talking about ripping CDs on c.1997 hardware that people were running at the time. I wouldn't want to try to rip a CD on a 1997 Performa either without a paperclip handy. By 2000, there were plenty of click and go software for the PC side, such as MusicMatch jukebox or whatever it was called to name one program. Even iTunes ran on Windows 98, though I would advise against it.
You are right about it being hard to get a good rip without skips (on the PC side). Yet another reason Napster was such a dog. You could never count on the quality of the file you were getting (no thanks to the PCs inability to make good mp3 files to share). Again, this is why iTunes has a bigger impact than Napster. Users like myself found it worth our time to spend $1 on a song that was guaranteed to work, come with the real artwork, and be properly named and tagged. Napster, in short, became a monumental waste of time, weeding through the mislabeled, crappy rips of cds. Unless, of course, you were part of that 18-twentysomething crowd that had a hard time saving $1 for a song and has been raised with an anything goes mentality when it comes to the use of the 'net.
No, the impact of Napster was that it opened up people's eyes to a new way of looking at things. You can get music a different way than the way it had been for decades. It was possible to only get the tracks you liked instead buying an album. You can share your music tastes with people all over the world. You can try a wide variety of music from artists you weren't familar with for a very low cost. If you were a creater of music, it was even more huge as you now had a way to distribute your music worldwide for low cost, totally cutting out the middleman. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but everyone, including the record labels, knew right away that things were changed forever, long before Apple came to the table with the iPod, iTunes, and the iTMS.
With the new perspective of distributing music over the internet, selling tracks ala iTunes was obvious. Apple wasn't even the first one here, beaten by companies like eMusic and MP3.com. What iTunes brought to the table was a way to "go legit" with music from the big labels, and a nicely integrated package with the iPod. Of course, things like a gaurenteed level of quality helped (I agree on Napster, often you had no idea what you were going to get!). Napster was revolutionary, while iTunes was more an evolutionary step.
If it's a early 2003 machine, it's probably an AGP machine with DDR memory. You'll be looking at a new processor, new memory, new CPU, and new video card at the least. While you can do all of that for the price of a PS3, I might be more inclined to spend $50 or so and put more ram into it and stretch it out for another year or more.
If you make enough trouble to get the police to be called out, and I'm not talking about peaceful protest but screaming and throwing beer bottles at cars at 2am, you should not be expecting a stern talking to and a lolly pop from the officer that has to deal with your dumb ass, but an ass kicking that will make you afraid to do it twice.
That's against the whole seperation of powers thing. The police are supposed to enforce the laws, not dish out punishment. If the punk kid is being enough of a problem to deserve it, then arrest them.
In a nutshell, anyone downgrading their software to 1.1.2 or 1.1.1 or lower and who says they experiencing better cell phone reception is working under the placebo effect, because the firmware they are downgrading doesn't affect the radio at all. And no one knows how to downgrade the baseband firmware - or if they do, the technique isn't being publicized.
Well, it depends on how they are judging their signal strength. If they are going off of what their phone tells them rather than actual performance when using it, it's concievable that the signal strentgth indicator has been tweaked somehow in the iPhone 1.1.2 software.
According to Wikipedia, Napster peaked at 26.4 million users*. That's pretty big in my book, and the impact was huge. I can't find any numbers for the iTunes music store, but I found that iTunes has only recently surpassed that number for users of the iTunes software**. Given that not everyone that users the iTunes software is going to buy from the iTunes store, I'm going to go with Napster still being bigger than iTMS. Of course, given the numbers that site also gives for Real Player, you might take those numbers with a grain of salt.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster/
**http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0702/
Also, ripping CDs was still a challenge for many people back in 1999. You were fine if you had one of those new-fangled P3 computers. But for those with older Pentiums and K6's with fussy 4x-8x CD drives, it was a bit of challenge to get a good rip without skips, and then the encoding could take as long as 3-4 minutes per song. During which you generally couldn't use the PC too. It couldn't have been much better on the Mac side, given the quality of Apple's gear of the time.
I don't know where you were back in 1999, but I remember everyone had Napster installed on their PC. It wasn't hard to use either, install it, search for whatever, and download it. It was so easy that people were downloading MP3's of stuff they owned on CDs because it was easier than ripping was back then. As a matter of fact, you could argue that it created the market for the iPod, because what use is a MP3 player if you don't have MP3s?
While it is true that iTunes is installed on a lot oy computers, the vast majority of these iTunes is never used, and the only reason they have it on their computer is because it came with Quicktime.
The point is that 512MB Vista machines and 128MB XP machines were very cheap machines, while the Macs are sold at a premium. Other than the form factor and the fact it's a Mac, the Mini really doesn't have anything else going for it.
Thank you for reminding me. Sometimes I lose track of the context of the topic I'm in, and I only look at the immediate context plus The Article, not the context in between.
:)
No problem
If this number goes too low, watch fewer students pay for on-campus housing.
It might have an effect, but most colleges already offer a crippled internet connection in the dorms. Dropping/throttling of P2P traffic (atleast non-disguised traffic), firewalled ports, transparent proxying of traffic, NAT, limited to one computer per person, per-day bandwidth limits, things like that. It seems that students more or less put up with it, or aren't savvy enough to realize what's going on.
But which organization would you prioritize over another organization? What makes a particular address "desirable" or "not desirable" to you? Does it depend on how much the site pays you for priority routing?
The original discussion was how to throttle P2P traffic on a college network when the students are encrypting the traffic. To which I said, it's easy - you just have to watch for P2P-like activity (such as lots of multiple connections). As you point out, trying to differentiate "legit" connections so you don't count them in some kind of connections count does put them into the net nuetrality debate. So I would guess that most colleges would just go by a number - you have more connections than that, and you'll get slapped down. Besides, it's easier for them that way anyway. You like to open 15 webpages at once? Too bad.
Which would hurt users of sites that use HTTPS (HTTP tunneled over SSL). Besides, how can you tell whether traffic is encrypted or just compressed?
Well, if you are going to open dozens of HTTPS connections at once, you'll probably get slapped down here too. And compressed and encrypted wouldn't make a difference anyway, as the goal here is to keep people from using P2P by mangling the packets in the hope that the school will just let them through. Compressed packets would be treated the same as encrypted if they can't be examined.
Mac doesn't sell a computer with really low specs, because they give a bad user experience.
Is that why the $2500 Mac Pro comes with a whopping 1GB of ram? And while the current Mac Mini is no screamer, the original Mac Mini with its 1.25Ghz processor, 256MB of ram, and 4200RPM harddrive was an incredibly low spec computer when it came out in 2005.
Well, you were responding to a comment about "the biggest thing since CDs". Considering that Napster, Limewire, etc. were around long before iTunes, I'm going to have to go with P2P on this one. The impact of iTunes' is undeniable, but on the other hand P2P was (and still is) bigger than iTunes, and will probably always be that way.
Umm, what? An iPod will take any MP3 you throw at it. Yeah, they can have their own DRM, but they work with DRM-free recordings just fine. Who is crippling whom?
He's correct though, the iPod is pretty much the only music player out there that doesn't support Windows Media files. Of course, you probably don't care, as I don't either, as Microsoft's DRM is as useless to me as Apple's DRM.
The Zune met the sales goals set by Microsoft. People are buying them. How can it be a failure? It really doesn't matter (at this point atleast) to Microsoft that it isn't selling as many as the iPod, because that wasn't their goal. But hey, if you want to redefine "failure" as not having the top spot, you should start hounding Apple for the failure of the Macintosh and its 3-7% marketshare.
If I was doing this, I might have to make the list manually since I didn't find anything like "list of IP addresses of popular sites" on Google with a quick search. Keep in mind that this would only affect users connecting to something like 15 websites at once anyway. Another alternative would be to not apply any rules if the traffic is non-encrypted, non-P2P too.
When I open 20 different web sites in 20 different Firefox tabs, is it any different? When my RSS reader pings 20 different feeds on 20 different sites, is it any different?
The fact that your computer is going to generate a bit of traffic, mostly one-way (incoming into your computer), then it will stop makes it quite different. Granted, false positives are probably unavoidable, but only throttling traffic if P2P-like activity is sustained for 30-60 seconds, and having the algorithm ignore traffic from IPs of sites like Youtube, CNN, Yahoo, Fark, etc. would help keep legit users from getting stomped.
This is a 50Mhz 486dx laptop with a 8megs of ram. What OS can I reasonable run on it besides DOS, baslinux (basic linux - damn small linux is to big). and some floppy based OSs like maybe if I can even QNX demo of i can even find it anymore? To bad I can't get AROS to run on it.
You should be able to run Windows 95 on that without a problem. I used Windows 95a on a Thinkpad 486DX/33 with 12MB and it was acceptable. Good luck tracking down a copy of the floppy disk installation kit though.
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
I actually thought Microsoft was going to copy Apple on this. In other words, release a slow, bloated, unusable piece of crap OS like Apple did with 10.0, then wow everyone as they optomize the heck out of it. Which is why I'm a bit surprised that Vista SP1 supposedly doesn't have much of an improvement.