There is a long-standing Apple rule that says that none of the people in a project may put their names into the project anywhere, including in Easter eggs. (And, in fact, if you do manage to get an Easter egg into an Apple project, you'll be in a lot more trouble if your name is in it than if it isn't.) The alias here may just have been someone complaining that Apple wasn't letting him sign his real name. Or he could have put his real name in it and someone at Apple with a sense of humor enforced the prohibition in an amusing (to those in the know) way.
I think those are more likely explanations than any of the others I've seen. But hey, what do I know? I'm just an ex-Apple-employee.
With all the monitors I've used bar one, you can't see the stripes. I was going nuts trying to figure out why that one computer had pinstripes and none of my other 10.3 machines did...
Won't happen. An FM broadcast can be tracked down easily, and you wouldn't be affecting a large enough number of people to make it worthwhile.
You must be kidding. A small (but illegally high-powered) transmitter in the trunk of your car could do several hundred yards' radius easy. Get stuck in a traffic jam and you could torment everyone around you for an hour or two without a problem. And a moving low-power FM transmitter is about as easy to latch onto as a floating virus in a class 000 clean room.
While you were smugly typing in your oh-so-wise critique of Bush, did it ever even occur to you how inane this is? It's the central frickin' principal of federalist government, you idiot!
First... it's good to know that you're the authority on everything. I can relate, I am too. But don't be an asshole about it. You can know you're right about everything all the time and everyone else is wrong, but you don't have to be obnoxious when you're showing the light to the uninformed mortals around you.
Second, not that you'll even read this let alone actually make the attempt to comprehend it: part of the idea of having a federal government is that the states are not all equal. Should a poor state have lousy law enforcement and end up with ten times the crime rate of a rich one? In your world, yes, it should. In my world, no, the rich states should subsidize essential services, such as law enforcement, for the poorer ones. In much the same way that richer areas in a state should subsidize the poorer areas' schools, so that people who grow up in the poorer areas only have a terribly lousy chance at escaping poverty, instead of none at all.
Secondly, tilting your Gateway to reach the back port while it's running is a recipe for harddrive failure.
It's always nice to see someone who has been in computing for a long time, although it's a little disturbing to find that they haven't been paying attention. This may have been true fifteen years ago, but these days it's a little harder than that to screw up a hard drive.
Even fifteen years ago, for demo purposes the bernoulli boxes (IOmega's first removable offerings, used a sealed cartridge and a floating head just like a normal hard drive) used to be mounted on a piston that slammed them against a wall two or three times a second while they read and wrote, and they'd last several trade shows before crapping out.
AAC. Advanced Audio Codec. Arguably superior sound. Has nothing to do with DRM. There are a couple of companies that have DRM for MP3... going to stop using them too now?
Most of the features you just named are eating up space that I could use for something else, you know, like MUSIC
That's right. That 4 meg flash ROM that holds all the programs and data and stuff could be holding music, instead. Or do you mean the 300k of space it takes you to store your calendar, alarm clock, playlists, and text notes? Except you're not using those things, so I guess it doesn't.
As for not needing Firewire, I sure hope you mean that you can use USB 2 instead. (Firewire may or may not be technically superior, but USB 2 works fine for this.) Uploading 10 gigs of music via USB 1.1, however... well, you may not have anything better to do with your life, but I do. Or perhaps you know exactly what you're going to want to listen to tomorrow so you can sync overnight. I don't.
If I had a 60 gig iPod, I could just upload the whole collection -- taking what, a week? let's say 40 mbytes per minute, that's on the order of 1500 minutes, anyway -- and then I'd only have to update when I got a new album, I guess.
(Yes, I know, USB 1.1 is 10 megabits/sec, but it can't actually achieve that speed.)
A config front-end hardly qualifies as 'tons of value'. Since the heavy lifting is done by free software, they're in the same league with Linux distros here. Which means the big money should be for support, not for the install CD.
I love people who know exactly how everything 'should be'.
Anyone else would have charged something like the desktop price + about $100 for the extra integration for the bare system software and add a premium for support.
Yes indeed. And anyone else would have carefully made sure that you needed to use that support, too.
Apple being Apple, the premium is already in the baseline (and you get a limited number of clients as a perk). Unfortunately, this mentality will only enforce a marketshare cap for OSX Server.
Hogwash. The population of people who are unwilling to pay an extra $1000 for a good, low-mantenance server software solution tend to be the people who make their own $400 servers. (And then get confused when they die.)
Those willing to spend some money on the server will get X Serves anyway. Which come with an unlimited client copy of Mac OS X Server.
Yes, I am in IT. And we'll be getting an X Serve within the next year, and already have one machine running X Server (as a test machine for our server software). If the CTO weren't a Linux kernel hacker, we'd probably already have an X Serve or two.
If you're a student, you can get Server for $99... get a developer's license, which comes with a 5-user license for X Server.
If not, you can get a regular developer's package for $500/year, which doesn't save you anything from Server, but does get you hardware discounts, and seedings, and a dev tech support issue or two, and some other fun stuff.
Either way, it would not go any further if it did skip, it wouldn't magically get more speed if it skips, it will lose speed.
Actually, yes, the projectile would go quite a bit farther if it skipped. Given that the alternative is the projectile sinking.
And no, I'm not being a smartass. (Well, yes, I am. But you deserve it.) Because the projectile being fired at a line-of-sight target could conceivably (very easily) hit something outside of line-of-sight if it skips. Of course, you have to worry about skipping rounds from machine guns and suchlike, too, but they don't have 250 km ranges.
Of course, stealing an iPod from a BMW doesn't mean you have to steal the whole car, just smash the window. This will be a huge boon to radio thieves, as the iPod's white case is easily spotted even through tinted windows.
That is to say, 'I didn't bother to even read the article header, let alone the actual article, or I'd know that the iPod itself is in the glove compartment. Also, the controls are the same ones that are in all BMWs so there's no way of knowing that there's an iPod in the car at all until after you've broken the window, but since I'm not bright enough to read before I criticize, I didn't realize this.'
It's probably a much easier route than the current approach of mugging people with white headphones or an externally displayed iPod.
That is to say, 'I'm not smart enough to ever check back on a subject like this, so I don't know that the rumors that lots of people were getting mugged for their iPods were just that: rumors. Rumors, moreover, started by one British tabloid which leaked out into the more mainstream press before being disproved by a couple reporters who actually went and interviewed police sources, something the original author didn't do.'
All in all the iPod's high profile and distinctive white case helps thieves identify and target their owners. This has the advantage of increasing the risk to consumers who are willing to pay good money for DRM'd music.
That is to say, 'I'm a zealot -- an ignorant zealot; but then, most are -- who thinks that anyone who pays for music with DRM actually deserves to get mugged and potentially killed for it.'
The one I actually ordered was from Firewire Depot (fwdepot.com). It's a three-drive RAID-5 hardware, with hot-swappable IDE drives that rebuild on the fly. Does onlyRAID 5 though. But it's firewire 800 and costs $800. Works fine with 250 gig drives, so that's 500 gigs of redundant hot-swappable storage.
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware. However, if the speed tests I've seen are to be believed, it is quite a lot faster than even other Oxford 911/922 chipset cases, so it still might be worth it to someone.
FW Depot also has a really nifty clustering 5-drive RAID-5 box (so it can be used with multiple hosts) that does Firewire 800, USB2, and SATA for $1450, I believe. Damn good deal.
The one I actually got was from Firewire Depot (fwdepot.com). It's a three-drive RAID-5 hardware, with hot-swappable IDE drives that rebuild on the fly. Does onlyRAID 5 though. But it's firewire 800 and costs $800. Works fine with 250 gig drives, so that's 500 gigs of redundant hot-swappable storage.
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware.
FW Depot also has a really nifty clustering 5-drive RAID-5 box (so it can be used with multiple hosts) that does Firewire 800, USB2, and SATA for $1450, I believe. Damn good deal.
Just bought one from Granite Digital. It's a hardware-RAID-5 4-drive chassis that works with Firewire 400, and it costs $900 or so. The Firewire 800 version costs $1100 or so.
There are alternatives, ones without the hardware RAID that only cost $250 or so, but if you're going for reliable and fast, the Firewire 800 hardware-RAID-5 case is the way to go. (For us, it was reliable and large and Linux-compatible we were going for).
and I've *never* seen a program crash or behave strangely because of a 'bit error' before...
My god, man, how do you know? It's not like the computer would put up a dialog that says, "Gamma Ray Error. Next time use ECC RAM, sucker!" In fact, the only way that you could credibly claim this is if you'd never seen any program of any kind crash or behave strangely unless you knew the exact reason it was doing that. If that's so, in what wonderful world do you live, and how do I visit for long enough to make illegal copies of all of the software there? (And no, 'because it's Windows' is not an exact enough reason.)
Back when it was parity RAM, there was a certain amount of justification for the 'Using parity RAM means that you crash 1/9 of the time for no reason whatsoever' joke. But I understand that ECC fixes that, and it might be worth it. I wish I had some numbers for how often bit-flips do occur in normal usage. (That is to say, not in a science lab, not in a shielded bunker, and not in a university setting with 200 computers all up close and personal). But don't assume they've never happened to you.
-fred
(Who until this very moment assumed that the EM tag was to insert an em dash. What? It seemed reasonable to me.)
First off, did you even read any of the damn press coverage over the election scandal, or are you just parroting the party line? Go check out some of the meta-reportage of six months after the election.
Second, the vote totals were within 200 (GWB on top) when the rererecounting was over. However, there were more than 500 votes that were counted that were later found to be illegal (military absentee) votes. It was obvious who they were voting for, of course. But they were still illegal. All of the Democrats' obvious-but-illegal votes were denied, and 500 illegal-but-obvious Republican votes were counted.
And that's not even to mention the literally thousands of voters who were denied voting rights because of fictitious prison records. Overwhelmingly black. Overwhelmingly Democrat. Illegal, but apparently (in your eyes) irrelevant, because they were unable to actually cast votes.
I can't believe I'm even bothering with this, everyone has made up their minds about it, in the face of or in denial of the evidence as the case may be.
1. Your vote would be better served if it was cast for the tooth fairy.
Now, really.
First off, his vote isn't being served. Perhaps you meant that he would be better served by voting for the tooth fairy.
But, second, that's not true. It's not to say he'd be any worse served by voting for the tooth fairy. But I honestly don't think he'd be any better served.
You feel free to vote for Kush or Berry, I can't see any difference between them, both are evil men , who lie when it suits them, just seeking power... I'll vote for freedom, liberty, and good, in the form of Badnarik.
Wow. And here I thought only the Republicans were allowed to arbitrarily decide who is evil.
And when you live in a society, you agree to give up some of your liberty and freedom in order to support the society. You admit it: you say that the only thing that government should do is protect us from one another. So the government is restricting your freedom in order to protect people.
I happen to think that a government has a responsibility to do more than that. I can see the Libertarian point of view, I just don't agree with it.
And that, in essence, is what many of the Libertarians I've talked to don't understand. They think that the only logical position is theirs, so when I say that I have a different idea of the role of government than they do, many of them just can't grasp that. There's got to be some reason that I'm disagreeing with them. The easy way of dealing with it, instead of actually considering opposing viewpoints, is to call your opponents evil. It's what religious people do when you try to get them to examine their convictions. And make no mistake about it, there are a lot of Libertarians for whom the free market is God. That is to say, that from it come all good things, and nothing bad, and that that is an assumption that doesn't require examination.
There are no assumptions that don't require examination.
In England, how do you deal with things that are sometimes treated as collective nouns and sometimes aren't? And isn't there a big grey area? (Just call me a grammar geek.)
In American English:
The country is one of only three with laws prohibiting pet ferrets.
The country is in mourning today.
Clearly the second example uses 'country' as a collective noun. (It *could* be a metaphor instead, anthropomorphizing the country, but that's not what it conveys.) You could substitute the word 'class' or 'company' and it would mean the same thing (except, of course, for the object.)
So would you say 'The country are in mourning today'?
> They actually make no money at all on the iTunes music store
This is false. Apple announced a 'small profit' on the iTMS. Yes, that includes costs. Profit is AFTER costs. This rumor came up because one 'journalist' (or 'analyst' or whatever) posted something that said 'I don't see how they can be profitable' and then another one posted 'this business model couldn't possibly be profitable' and another one posted 'the iTunes Music Service can't be profitable' and then, finally, that turned into 'they aren't profitable'. It's not true, but it makes a good story.
> and their profit margins on the iPod are lower than you'd think.
Depends what you think. They're significantly lower than the profit margins on their Macs, and somewhat higher than the profit margins for most of the rest of the MP3-player industry.
Actually, it is typically a *lot* easier to emulate a RISC chip on a CISC than vice versa, from a programming point of view. (And yes, I speak from personal experience.) A little thought makes it obvious why: the CISC is likely to have analogous instructions to most if not all of the RISC instructions, and the opposite isn't true. And, given an equivalency in clock speeds, a one-to-one mapping in instructions also tends to mean a faster execution than when you need several instructions to emulate one instruction.
Basically, you have that completely ass-backwards.
One, get an older computer for a server. My main server machine is a PowerMac G4 Cube. No fans, just a heat sink. Does all a server needs to.
Two, use a laptop as your main machine. My 15" AlBook is great on the road, and then I bring it in and plug it into all the cables and I can't tell it's not a desktop. And together they don't give off much heat and (this is the best part) when they're both powered on, with all peripherals, the noisiest thing in the room is the external DVD-RW drive's fan. No lie.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a long-standing Apple rule that says that none of the people in a project may put their names into the project anywhere, including in Easter eggs. (And, in fact, if you do manage to get an Easter egg into an Apple project, you'll be in a lot more trouble if your name is in it than if it isn't.) The alias here may just have been someone complaining that Apple wasn't letting him sign his real name. Or he could have put his real name in it and someone at Apple with a sense of humor enforced the prohibition in an amusing (to those in the know) way.
I think those are more likely explanations than any of the others I've seen. But hey, what do I know? I'm just an ex-Apple-employee.
-fred
Congratulations, you have an excellent monitor.
With all the monitors I've used bar one, you can't see the stripes. I was going nuts trying to figure out why that one computer had pinstripes and none of my other 10.3 machines did...
-fred
-fred
Second, not that you'll even read this let alone actually make the attempt to comprehend it: part of the idea of having a federal government is that the states are not all equal. Should a poor state have lousy law enforcement and end up with ten times the crime rate of a rich one? In your world, yes, it should. In my world, no, the rich states should subsidize essential services, such as law enforcement, for the poorer ones. In much the same way that richer areas in a state should subsidize the poorer areas' schools, so that people who grow up in the poorer areas only have a terribly lousy chance at escaping poverty, instead of none at all.
It's a pity I mostly have to live in your world.
-fred
Even fifteen years ago, for demo purposes the bernoulli boxes (IOmega's first removable offerings, used a sealed cartridge and a floating head just like a normal hard drive) used to be mounted on a piston that slammed them against a wall two or three times a second while they read and wrote, and they'd last several trade shows before crapping out.
Computers really aren't that fragile these days.
-fred
As for not needing Firewire, I sure hope you mean that you can use USB 2 instead. (Firewire may or may not be technically superior, but USB 2 works fine for this.) Uploading 10 gigs of music via USB 1.1, however... well, you may not have anything better to do with your life, but I do. Or perhaps you know exactly what you're going to want to listen to tomorrow so you can sync overnight. I don't.
If I had a 60 gig iPod, I could just upload the whole collection -- taking what, a week? let's say 40 mbytes per minute, that's on the order of 1500 minutes, anyway -- and then I'd only have to update when I got a new album, I guess.
(Yes, I know, USB 1.1 is 10 megabits/sec, but it can't actually achieve that speed.)
-fred
Those willing to spend some money on the server will get X Serves anyway. Which come with an unlimited client copy of Mac OS X Server.
Yes, I am in IT. And we'll be getting an X Serve within the next year, and already have one machine running X Server (as a test machine for our server software). If the CTO weren't a Linux kernel hacker, we'd probably already have an X Serve or two.
-fred
...if you get the student Apple developer's edition you get a 5-user X Server license with it. For $99.
And yes, you can use it as a production server.
-fred
If you're a student, you can get Server for $99... get a developer's license, which comes with a 5-user license for X Server.
If not, you can get a regular developer's package for $500/year, which doesn't save you anything from Server, but does get you hardware discounts, and seedings, and a dev tech support issue or two, and some other fun stuff.
That's how I got mine.
-fred
And no, I'm not being a smartass. (Well, yes, I am. But you deserve it.) Because the projectile being fired at a line-of-sight target could conceivably (very easily) hit something outside of line-of-sight if it skips. Of course, you have to worry about skipping rounds from machine guns and suchlike, too, but they don't have 250 km ranges.
-fred
I love the people who post on slashdot and call other people 'nerds'. I mean, come on then, what are you doing reading this?
-fred
This translation brought to you by babelfish++.
-fred
Given that this is a Mac, shouldn't that be Moof hah hah?
-fred
The one I actually ordered was from Firewire Depot (fwdepot.com). It's a three-drive RAID-5 hardware, with hot-swappable IDE drives that rebuild on the fly. Does onlyRAID 5 though. But it's firewire 800 and costs $800. Works fine with 250 gig drives, so that's 500 gigs of redundant hot-swappable storage.
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware. However, if the speed tests I've seen are to be believed, it is quite a lot faster than even other Oxford 911/922 chipset cases, so it still might be worth it to someone.
FW Depot also has a really nifty clustering 5-drive RAID-5 box (so it can be used with multiple hosts) that does Firewire 800, USB2, and SATA for $1450, I believe. Damn good deal.
-fred
The one I actually got was from Firewire Depot (fwdepot.com). It's a three-drive RAID-5 hardware, with hot-swappable IDE drives that rebuild on the fly. Does onlyRAID 5 though. But it's firewire 800 and costs $800. Works fine with 250 gig drives, so that's 500 gigs of redundant hot-swappable storage.
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware.
FW Depot also has a really nifty clustering 5-drive RAID-5 box (so it can be used with multiple hosts) that does Firewire 800, USB2, and SATA for $1450, I believe. Damn good deal.
-fred
Just bought one from Granite Digital. It's a hardware-RAID-5 4-drive chassis that works with Firewire 400, and it costs $900 or so. The Firewire 800 version costs $1100 or so.
There are alternatives, ones without the hardware RAID that only cost $250 or so, but if you're going for reliable and fast, the Firewire 800 hardware-RAID-5 case is the way to go. (For us, it was reliable and large and Linux-compatible we were going for).
-fred
Back when it was parity RAM, there was a certain amount of justification for the 'Using parity RAM means that you crash 1/9 of the time for no reason whatsoever' joke. But I understand that ECC fixes that, and it might be worth it. I wish I had some numbers for how often bit-flips do occur in normal usage. (That is to say, not in a science lab, not in a shielded bunker, and not in a university setting with 200 computers all up close and personal). But don't assume they've never happened to you.
-fred
(Who until this very moment assumed that the EM tag was to insert an em dash. What? It seemed reasonable to me.)
First off, did you even read any of the damn press coverage over the election scandal, or are you just parroting the party line? Go check out some of the meta-reportage of six months after the election.
Second, the vote totals were within 200 (GWB on top) when the rererecounting was over. However, there were more than 500 votes that were counted that were later found to be illegal (military absentee) votes. It was obvious who they were voting for, of course. But they were still illegal. All of the Democrats' obvious-but-illegal votes were denied, and 500 illegal-but-obvious Republican votes were counted.
And that's not even to mention the literally thousands of voters who were denied voting rights because of fictitious prison records. Overwhelmingly black. Overwhelmingly Democrat. Illegal, but apparently (in your eyes) irrelevant, because they were unable to actually cast votes.
I can't believe I'm even bothering with this, everyone has made up their minds about it, in the face of or in denial of the evidence as the case may be.
-fred
First off, his vote isn't being served. Perhaps you meant that he would be better served by voting for the tooth fairy.
But, second, that's not true. It's not to say he'd be any worse served by voting for the tooth fairy. But I honestly don't think he'd be any better served.
-fred
And when you live in a society, you agree to give up some of your liberty and freedom in order to support the society. You admit it: you say that the only thing that government should do is protect us from one another. So the government is restricting your freedom in order to protect people.
I happen to think that a government has a responsibility to do more than that. I can see the Libertarian point of view, I just don't agree with it.
And that, in essence, is what many of the Libertarians I've talked to don't understand. They think that the only logical position is theirs, so when I say that I have a different idea of the role of government than they do, many of them just can't grasp that. There's got to be some reason that I'm disagreeing with them. The easy way of dealing with it, instead of actually considering opposing viewpoints, is to call your opponents evil. It's what religious people do when you try to get them to examine their convictions. And make no mistake about it, there are a lot of Libertarians for whom the free market is God. That is to say, that from it come all good things, and nothing bad, and that that is an assumption that doesn't require examination.
There are no assumptions that don't require examination.
-fred
In American English: Clearly the second example uses 'country' as a collective noun. (It *could* be a metaphor instead, anthropomorphizing the country, but that's not what it conveys.) You could substitute the word 'class' or 'company' and it would mean the same thing (except, of course, for the object.)
So would you say 'The country are in mourning today'?
-fred
And no, I don't care if you don't care.
> They actually make no money at all on the iTunes music store
This is false. Apple announced a 'small profit' on the iTMS. Yes, that includes costs. Profit is AFTER costs. This rumor came up because one 'journalist' (or 'analyst' or whatever) posted something that said 'I don't see how they can be profitable' and then another one posted 'this business model couldn't possibly be profitable' and another one posted 'the iTunes Music Service can't be profitable' and then, finally, that turned into 'they aren't profitable'. It's not true, but it makes a good story.
> and their profit margins on the iPod are lower than you'd think.
Depends what you think. They're significantly lower than the profit margins on their Macs, and somewhat higher than the profit margins for most of the rest of the MP3-player industry.
-fred
The Apple Store UK had this wrong. The original announcement said July. Basically, they screwed up.
-fred
Another totally uninformed post.
Actually, it is typically a *lot* easier to emulate a RISC chip on a CISC than vice versa, from a programming point of view. (And yes, I speak from personal experience.) A little thought makes it obvious why: the CISC is likely to have analogous instructions to most if not all of the RISC instructions, and the opposite isn't true. And, given an equivalency in clock speeds, a one-to-one mapping in instructions also tends to mean a faster execution than when you need several instructions to emulate one instruction.
Basically, you have that completely ass-backwards.
-fred
Two solutions to this.
One, get an older computer for a server. My main server machine is a PowerMac G4 Cube. No fans, just a heat sink. Does all a server needs to.
Two, use a laptop as your main machine. My 15" AlBook is great on the road, and then I bring it in and plug it into all the cables and I can't tell it's not a desktop. And together they don't give off much heat and (this is the best part) when they're both powered on, with all peripherals, the noisiest thing in the room is the external DVD-RW drive's fan. No lie.
Until I have to turn on the damn PC, anyway.
-fred