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User: questamor

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  1. Re:Unimpressive... on Apple Sells Two Million Songs in 16 Days · · Score: 1

    Positive Spin, in two weeks Apple has become the largest legit online music service company

    Are there any stats around on what other online music retailers are selling? That's the downloadable music kind, not simply ordering CDs. I do suspect the iTunes music store sales to slow down in time, but are apple outstripping other retailers by 2:1, 10:1, or more? Is their one million songs in the first week really that impressive in relative terms?. I find it pretty good going in absolute numbers, considering there's such a tiny percentage of computer owners actually able to use it.

    I love the way iTunes work through the store and hope it succeeds with a bigger & better catalogue, but the skeptic in me wants to know the numbers!

  2. Re:What surprises me, given their user base on Apple Sells Two Million Songs in 16 Days · · Score: 1

    Absolutely. Part of the problem with a distributor releasing out of print works, especially the more obscure kind, is that they could have a decent production run of a few tens of thousands of discs, then be unable to sell them in short order; essentially meaning for a good library of such stuff, the backlog needs to be stored somewhere, and could be sitting about for years before all is sold.

    With an online digital-only store, that's irrelevant. A huge obscure catalogue could take up a few dozen gig of storage space.

  3. Re:unt now... on Apple Sells Two Million Songs in 16 Days · · Score: 1

    That's been my thoughts on this - It's been sitting there being a "good idea" for ages. There's no innovation in putting together an online music store, and indeed it's not a first. All it needed was to bring a few current things together, and polish... Among their other talents, Apple are fantastic at providing 'polish'!

    The way things stand now, nothing is simpler than using the Apple Music Store. Current offerings have been more painful to use than walking out your front door and buying a real CD, and that defeats the purpose of being online, downloading online, and having copyable digital media files that can be put to CD. I'm truly stunned at how easy it is to use, now I've gone back and looked at the alternatives.

  4. Re:Not ppc603s on Intel Reveals Itanium 2 Glitch · · Score: 1

    Show me where I mentioned "Apple". I mentioned Motorola PPC chips, not Apple.

    Show me where I was "all over them (intel) for shoddy quality".

    You seem quite heated up about some little presumptions you made up in your own mind about what I said. Do you often get in this state of arguing with your own misconceptions?

  5. Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire on IP over Firewire Updated · · Score: 1

    It's not necessarily better, or worse, than any other networking, it's just there because it's useful. Macs going back a few years now all have firewire. The hardware exists on the machines already, and writing a driver to give a little extra free functionality never hurt.

    You probably COULD create a fresh new firewire only protocol to communicate to other machines, but when TCP/IP is awfully well tested already and integrates with every other app - hey, it's free extra functionality.

    now IP over USB? why not!

  6. Re:Can you say hub? on IP over Firewire Updated · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Firewire cable to connect the two machines: $little

    Hub or switch that can support the same speeds: $fuckloads

  7. Not ppc603s on Intel Reveals Itanium 2 Glitch · · Score: 4, Informative

    ow about Motorola leaving out critical instructions in the PPC603 and crippling every machine with one compared to the PPC601?

    That's a very very big reinterpretation of the facts. ppc603 machines were designed for low cost low heat. One of the ways to do this was to further remove instructions that were not needed, legacy instructions from pre-PPC601, and were never designed to be in the 601. They were not 'critical' and did not cripple anything. ppc603 cpus ended up working just for the purpose they were designed for. cheaper and less energy-hungry cpus.

    the G3 floating point debacle where excel spreadsheets would show up errors consistently

    You made a typo there. "Pentium" is not spelled "G3"

  8. Re:How about others (AMD, Mot, IBM) on Intel Reveals Itanium 2 Glitch · · Score: 3, Informative

    The 68040 bug affected quite a few LC040 machines, which made running FPU emulation on them horrid. Basically, trapping calls to the FPU in order to emulate them in software doesn't work as it should. It's b0rked, and most Apple 68LC040 machines just cannot fully emulate an FPU. That wasn't such a problem with the MacOS at the time, as it didn't need an FPU for any functions, nor did most apps.

    Running a normal Linux or NetBSD on one of these machines is asking for pain however,.

  9. Re:Not capitalized on Sudden Death Experience · · Score: 1

    damned silly hats.

  10. AMD and apple as a point of interest on Taking Apart An Airport Extreme Base Station · · Score: 4, Informative

    FWIW, Apple have been using AMD chips through their machines for quite a while. I have dozens of older macs, from early powermacs back through quadras and mac II machines, and there are several AMD chips on some of those boards. They're not doing anything but auxiliary functions such as serial port controllers and the like, but they're there all the same

  11. Re:more pro use of linux on The Fix Is In: Ardour Set For Summer Release · · Score: 1, Funny

    They need to just, for the love of god, make the interface not suck!

    Oh. so it shouldn't be renamed "Sound Gimp"? :)

  12. Re:Won't replace Pro Tools anytime soon on The Fix Is In: Ardour Set For Summer Release · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One thing often mentioned with the 'big' apps compared to free software is the monetary cost. The software is minimal when it comes to the costs of an entire studio. For larger projects with big profit margins it's next to nothing. The embedded knowledge of thousands of Pro Tools users isn't going to go away just because a few thousand dollars can be saved on projects that are worth millions.

    Where inroads will be made for now, is in small productions that have no choice. Where once their project was impossible due to monetary constraints it will now be one step closer to reality.

  13. Nice one with no thought. on New Ultra-Intrusive Pop-up Ads Introduced · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This one will work quickly to do two things.

    1. make sure a user of a website is forced to see at least one ad for 15 seconds.

    2. make sure the user goes "wtf is this shit?" and go find a better site without that kind of crap.

    even if it becomes pervasive, and 90% of sites use this kind of 'feature' in its ads, it'll force people over to the sites who don't... which will in turn increase their traffic and own ad revenue.

    tards!

  14. Re:Yes, more support... on Debian NetBSD for Sparc · · Score: 1

    The original poster was talking about MkLinux, which is an apple job. I run the MkLinux kernel on one of my powermacs.

  15. Re:Good work. sort of... on Intel's Itanium Will Get x86 Emulation · · Score: 1

    My classes were based on x86, but also delved sideways into motorola 68k, perhaps with a 70/30 split there, just taking those two into consideration.

    The rest was a good mix of 8bit embedded devices, and some build-your-own-cpu emulations. This was in the early 1990s however.

    Like the OP, I've come across a few very new graduates who were taught x86 only. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the attitude that they must have been taught it because it was the best and only real option.

    Most popular perhaps, but not best.

  16. Why I wrote it. on Why Do People Write Open Source Software? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wrote mine and released it OSS for one reason - laziness.

    One was a simple addressbook, 2 were games, and one a graphics prog - the latter for Commodore 64s.

    I released them all as free software, source included, and didn't know what the GPL was at the time. All the same it was open source, simply because I couldn't be bothered with the marketing/distribution/etc. I may have sold them as shareware or donationware had I a strong enough urge to, but for me the majority of the fun was in writing the programs themselves. Getting money for them seemed more work than I could be bothered putting into it

  17. Re:Hope the lawsuit gets thrown out, if there is o on Penny Arcade vs. American Greetings · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sucks to be them

    What was the purpose of getting the image pulled - to stop people seeing a ripoff of their product/image/whatever

    Now the story's on 2 places online, has the attention of the slashdot crowd, and shall be mirrored in dozens of places it never would have gotten to.

    Thanks guys - I wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't wanted it pulled!

  18. Re:Security just isn't the focus of a lot of peopl on Social Engineering Still Best Way to Crack Security · · Score: 1

    I'm constantly amused by the couples I know who give each other passwords. It seems mandatory sometimes, that when online friends break up, one of them (or both) will access the other's email/bank account/isp/whatever and snoop about.

    As much as couples, too, often it's just people who're sort-of-friends who'll give each other passwords freely. I don't understand that at all. Perhaps I just don't trust my friends enough?

    Naaaah

  19. How big are these things? on Microsoft Windows Update and Network Bandwidth? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not being a windows user, how big are the windows updates and how often do they come?

    Apple's own software updates are pretty big, although with a much smaller percentage of machines as macs they're not going to cause the same volume of problems. The last few I've seen have been around 40MB, with one topping out at 80, and most security updates (every 2 months perhaps) being 5-15MB

  20. Re:Umm... on "Case Modding" a Nissan Sentra · · Score: 1

    This Sentra case mod (Nissan suck for their bullshit against Uzi Nissan re: nissan.com btw) is kind of the automotive equivalent of running a PC as a motherboard stuck to the wall.

    Good case airflow, sort of :)

  21. Re:Why? on LCD Display/Image Capture Device · · Score: 1

    It may not be useful for every optical input job, but if it were able to look far enough away from the screen to capture imagery and act as a webcam in some way, then there's possibilities for video conferencing for starters.

  22. Gas clouds... Sun... Opteron chips on Sun May Use Opteron Chips · · Score: 3, Funny

    After reading the previous article about gas clouds, space, and all kinds of astronomy stuff, I misinterpreted this title to mean someone had discovered good old Sol up there was powered by AMD Opterons.

    Took half a second for me to realise they don't quite run THAT hot.

  23. Should they have privacy? on Spammers, Privacy, Anti-Spam, and Lawsuits · · Score: 1

    Should spammers get some privacy protection too?

    No. Definitely not.

  24. Re:*cork pop* on Xerox Alto Computer 30th Anniversary · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ethernet was another of theirs, from memory

    or one they refined to usefulness anyhows. If I weren't so lazy I'd go look it up somewhere :)

  25. Alternatives to the GUI on Xerox Alto Computer 30th Anniversary · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If they (and the followon effects, such as apples machines, and windows etc) hadn't created the GUI as we now have it - which in many ways is unchanged, ie overlapping windows, mouse, etc... what kind of interface would we have?

    I'm willing to accept it was a pretty good jump of thought to create the gui on a bitmapped display after so much text-only based human-computer-interaction, but are there other ways of interfacing? perhaps other GUI ideas that we don't see just because they weren't first, and hence now the most developed?