At least today, you can still rip most CDs (if I had one I couldn't rip, it would go back as defective, period). I prefer higher bit rates (192 Kbps AAC).
I would never pay Tower prices ($18.99 for a new CD, who the hey are they kidding!) but if I can find an album (er... CD) where I like 5 or 6 songs, I'll pay $11 at Amazon or Target for it. I really do use the CD as the "rip from this" medium, though. I've heard of people that check out CDs from the local library and rip them at high bit rates -- perish that thought;-)
Not so much a fan of DRM on the iTunes songs though I do use iTunes every day.
Finally... I'm pretty anal about tagging on my songs, because it makes them a lot easier to sort/adjust/whatever. Legal issues of MP3/AAC downloads aside, last I looked tagging was a MESS on stuff on the P2P networks, and the bit rates were all over the map... my desire for order prefers something I have ripped myself.
Reasonable enough... I copy stuff to local once I hit the limit. I think the hard limit is actually really high, I just get an email every few hours once I'm above the soft limit (it used to be every few days, when the quota was 100 MB) so I did something about it.
13 GB on the server... someone needs to clean some stuff up. People won't do it until you make them... and often have no idea that that 10 meg attachment that they send to 30 people takes up 300 MB on the server.
Oh, you could pay EMC like $1M to use Centera to "single instance" that (or use Exchange single instancing) but that's a lot of work with multiple exchange servers, so must people just throw more storage at the problem. A real b*tch with NetApp prices, we use Xserve RAIDs and mirror them as it's about 1/10 the price/GB as NetApp or CX 300/500/700.
I mean, they have been circling for like 6 years now.
I have a friend there, he says the've lost money for 28 straight quarters. The layoffs they do EVERY quarter don't exactly help morale, either.
They're a premium brand, and USED to have cool stuff. They got passed in the graphics business, their bet on Itanium turned out to be a turkey, and the government isn't buying SGI stuff like they used to -- they used to have some nice hookups there.
Obviously, Slashdot is not prepared for the speed of your fingers. Had it been running on a new Mac with a core duo, it could have kept up you would have had first post. Drat!
There's very little bloat, though. Making a dual-platform binary would probably add 1 or 2 MB to a 10 MB executable, and nobody (well, except someone who REALLY knew what they were looking for), could tell whether it was single-platform or dual-platform by looking at the binary. There's a small note in "Get Info" but that's it.
Apple has specifically asked developers to not release builds with Intel code in them, until there is actual shipping Intel hardware.
From a development perspective, for Xcode apps, it is a single checkbox. Testing, obviously, is a bit more work. But if Adobe has Intel developer Macs (a fair bet), they may already be doing these builds internally.
Not necessarily that I want to be swimming in media, but that I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it.
I haven't seen a commercial in about a year (thank you 30 second skip), and I just tell TiVo what shows I like, and when I visit it, they're on there. Who knows when the shows play; I don't care.
I watch more shows now than I used to, but spend a lot less time doing it. Win-win, I say.
As to whether I'd let my children spend hours a day getting a media addition in front of a TV: No, and parenting skills haven't really changed since the advent of TV. Bad parents will still be bad parents.
When it's booted into Linux, can I actually use the phone? Say I want to dial someone, or a call comes in. Possible?
If that's 17 driver versions away, I'm thinking it may sorta defeat the purpose of running Linux on a phone.
Taco, where is the RIAA mentioned in the article?
on
RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
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· Score: 1
They're not. Because you're talking about the MPAA. The RIAA, while no less scummy than the MPAA, doesn't deal with movies and DVD players -- they do audio. They're the ones doing most of the suing of Grandmas and 9 year olds throughout the country.
I would think stuff like Craig's List would slaughter it. So much more dynamic, so much easier to get the word out (and very effectively in large markets like the SF Bay Area -- not sure how good it is elsewhere)... and FREE.
There are times I think a newspaper is great -- on a train, on an airplane, or when I want to sit outside in the sun with a cup of coffee. So for relaxing news delivery. But most of the time, web sites (or, even better, RSS feeds) are just so much more timely. And with RSS, I can get the headlines from a few sources, so when one site cock-blocks me by invalidating my BugMeNot login (cough, FY NYT!), I can read the article elsewhere, or just be content with the title.
But, typically, layers are used to make non-destructive edits to images. For example, start with an image with low contrast. You can make the edits directly with the "levels" tool to adjust the white and black points. Save it, and the changes are permanent, and irreversible (well, unless you go back to the unedited original... you DID do "save as..." correct?).
Another option is to create a new adjustment layer, and make it "levels." Then you make the changes, and it looks to you exactly like you had edited the base photo layer. What you can *also* do is show or hide the layer (by clicking a little "eyeball" icon on it), and blend the layer by changing the opacity from anywhere between 0 and 100%. This way, if you make a "levels" layer, and a "curves" layer, and a "saturation" layer, you can turn them each on and off in order to see how they affect "the big picture," and see if you're heading in the right direction.
Layers are also good with masks -- say one part of the photo is really dark, you could select a region, and then do a new layer with "shadows and highlights." I will create a new layer and mask out everything but what was selected. You can then fudge with the mask (editing it by using brush tools to tune the edges), do a guassian blur to make it blend better and not be apparent, yadda. Layers are VERY powerful, and pro users make very extensive use of them. They're probably the single most important tool for the professional user, and were really the turning point in PHotoshop when they were introduced way back in version 2 or 3.
The one real stinky thing about them is they are full bitmaps. If you start with a 9 MB RAW file (say from a 20D), it is opened as 24 MB uncompressed. Each additional layer adds about 24 more MB to the file, so with 10 layers you're looking at a 260 MB file. And these things take FOREVER to save, and obviously hog a lot of disk. Some people I know have files with layers that are 1.5 GB in size. Ouch. If Aperture can use CoreImage to dynamically render all this, it could save tens or hundreds of gigs of disk space for pro photographers.
I don't believe Aperture *HAS* to support layers. Because it keeps a record of the manipulations that you do, and CoreImage dynamically does them on the fly, and shows you the file with the updates applied. CoreImage uses the GPU so it's fast enough that you don't actually have to save the effects, as layers.
The huge bonus there would be in this for me is... a 10 MB RAW file ends up being a 150-500 MB.PSD document with 10 layers and sharpening applied. Which is freaking ridiculous, and absolutely KILLS the machine. CoreImage should give you about 90% more disk space for your RAW files... as it seems Aperture keeps 2 files (one is the original RAW, and one's the updated one with data about the effects).
The answers to your other two questions are a definite yes.
Google TV already exists in a form
on
GoogleTV Coming Soon?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Google has a relationship with Current TV (Al Gore's TV company), and a spot called "Google Current" that airs on a regular basis.
This could be a more formal solidification of the relationship, or hiring for someone to manage the relationship, or I guess it could be something altogether new. Certainly Current TV isn't 100% full of non-repeating content, so there is some room for Google to take more of their broadcast time.
There are equivalent tools for distributing or forcing updates for Windows machines in a corporate environment.
I have a helluva time with the Red Hat client updater. They want email/password, and I always lose it and have to go through a big fucking rigorous process every time I do a re-install.
I just use Macs now, but "back in the day" I resorted to Ximian's tools, as they were FAR FAR FAR superior to the Red Hat update mechanisms, for me at least.
Often the issue is, the "in house" applications were developed by non-developers... people start with an Excel spreadsheet, convert it to an Access database, and things get popular. At that point, someone brings it into.NET and extends it so there's a web interface to the small thing that started as an Excel spreadsheet.
And it goes on from there. There are often hundreds of these types of applications at your typical "large" company -- though I wrote a few of them when I was doing consulting.
I had a task of getting doling out IP addresses at a large regional telco (they used fscking STATIC IP addresses at a campus of 14,000 people, and would NOT entertain prospects of using DHCP, despite repeated cries of idiocy), and I had to match spreadsheets of usernames with hosts files, based on the cube in the company. The person before me was manually matching things with grep and taking about 20 hours/week to match the user list with the hosts file manually -- I wrote an access database which would suck in the hosts file and user list dynamically, match them all, and output a suggested spreadsheet. Took me about a day to write it and debug it. This thing grew from there and became somewhat of a beast. Unfortauntely, this happens often, and it was never designed to be maintanable when initially coded.
When I said Safari (and other browsers) render it like crap, I was referring specifically to the rendering of OWA, not to general sites. They render most general sites just fine. OWA has some tree controls and other things that are nonstandard and only IE6 will render them properly.
It's the CORPORATE desktop. Microsoft does NOT want to break that.
And they have users locked DEEP into Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). They have also had corporate users develop custom ActiveX controls, yadda yadda.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it. They are hopelessly dependent on it. And they cannot use Macs (because Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 5 for Mac all render it like crap), and they cannot use alternative browsers on a PC. If Microsoft "fixed" IE, they would offend their corporate customers, who are exactly the people they're trying to get billions out of when Vista/IE 7 ship, and that WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Believe me, I get the "fix your browser because NONE of our corporate IT apps work on it!" like every week. And saying "hey, not our fault" doesn't matter to these people. It means they cannot use their apps, or run key business components, on our platform, and there's not much we can do about it to fix things. And it sucks. Microsoft knows this, of course.
The point you miss, is that this would require an entire change in Apple's business model. The entire spending company infrastructure would change -- as right now they get, what, $1B in revenue from software? If they quit with the hardware (save iPod), that's a 50-60% loss in revenue.
Presumably the software component would go up, but would it go up $6B or so? Hard to say, and BIG pains during the transition period. And what would they get from it, really? For the home user, an iBook/iMac/Mini... isn't that much more expensive than a PC.
For business... OS X is still more the limiting factor than the price of hardware. "We run in house application X" or "This MUST run Outlook 2003" or "You MUST run our homebrew VPN application" or "IT says you MUST run Windows, so we can lock down your machine" are ALL way more likely to kill OS X adoption, at current, than "This Apple box is 12% more expensive than that Windows box, though it's 44.1% more reliable."
My hunch: Apple has looked at and considered this before (really?), and ran the numbers, and knows more than a Linux guy who pulls guesses out of his ass.
The Do Not Call list is a federal list. It is not under attack, or at least, the details of the article don't discuss it.
What is discussed is STRICTER state laws in 5 specific states. These are completely separate laws, and are outside the scope of the DNC list.
The federal list is not under attack at all. I'm not in an affected state, so this doesn't affect me (or those of you outside the 5 specific states) in any way whatsoever.
Now it could be that this is the first step in a slippery slope of attacks, but nowhere in the article is that mentioned. You can put your tin foil hats back in the drawer, for now.
Real numbers? Why are you comparing a $400 PC to a PowerMac then (as the cheapest PowerMac is $1600), when the "real" PCs are such hunks of junk that they share RAM between the system and the video card?
If you're going to play that game, at least use a comparable Mac like the Mini which costs $499 in a comparable configuration to that $400 PC.
For those who'd rather just block the ads
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
Agreed. It's not anecdotal. And I didn't run the tests so I'm just relaying information.
My point is that it's not 60x slower for all database operations for all databases, which is the impression you might get by just blindly reading the Anandtech article.
I also agree that dual Xeon 2.4 is old technology.. I'm certain a dual Opteron would be faster than both. But their "anecdotal" statement indicated that it's not an order of magnitude slower (or faster) than dual Xeons, for that matter. And you can only get 2x the performance of a dual Xeon 2.4 today, so again, it's typically "close enough" for most things. If you need your database to be 5x faster than a dual 2.4 Xeon, you MUST cluster or buy an SMP box (or hell add more indexes) to your database, because you cannot buy a dual CPU box that's 5x faster, today.
Slashdot Mirror
At least today, you can still rip most CDs (if I had one I couldn't rip, it would go back as defective, period). I prefer higher bit rates (192 Kbps AAC).
;-)
I would never pay Tower prices ($18.99 for a new CD, who the hey are they kidding!) but if I can find an album (er... CD) where I like 5 or 6 songs, I'll pay $11 at Amazon or Target for it. I really do use the CD as the "rip from this" medium, though. I've heard of people that check out CDs from the local library and rip them at high bit rates -- perish that thought
Not so much a fan of DRM on the iTunes songs though I do use iTunes every day.
Finally... I'm pretty anal about tagging on my songs, because it makes them a lot easier to sort/adjust/whatever. Legal issues of MP3/AAC downloads aside, last I looked tagging was a MESS on stuff on the P2P networks, and the bit rates were all over the map... my desire for order prefers something I have ripped myself.
Reasonable enough... I copy stuff to local once I hit the limit. I think the hard limit is actually really high, I just get an email every few hours once I'm above the soft limit (it used to be every few days, when the quota was 100 MB) so I did something about it.
13 GB on the server... someone needs to clean some stuff up. People won't do it until you make them... and often have no idea that that 10 meg attachment that they send to 30 people takes up 300 MB on the server.
Oh, you could pay EMC like $1M to use Centera to "single instance" that (or use Exchange single instancing) but that's a lot of work with multiple exchange servers, so must people just throw more storage at the problem. A real b*tch with NetApp prices, we use Xserve RAIDs and mirror them as it's about 1/10 the price/GB as NetApp or CX 300/500/700.
I mean, they have been circling for like 6 years now.
I have a friend there, he says the've lost money for 28 straight quarters. The layoffs they do EVERY quarter don't exactly help morale, either.
They're a premium brand, and USED to have cool stuff. They got passed in the graphics business, their bet on Itanium turned out to be a turkey, and the government isn't buying SGI stuff like they used to -- they used to have some nice hookups there.
Turn out the lights, the party's over.
Sounds an amicable tactic.
If I turn the burner on full blast, and put my hand on it. I get burned. That's dangerous!
Obviously, Slashdot is not prepared for the speed of your fingers. Had it been running on a new Mac with a core duo, it could have kept up you would have had first post. Drat!
There's very little bloat, though. Making a dual-platform binary would probably add 1 or 2 MB to a 10 MB executable, and nobody (well, except someone who REALLY knew what they were looking for), could tell whether it was single-platform or dual-platform by looking at the binary. There's a small note in "Get Info" but that's it.
Apple has specifically asked developers to not release builds with Intel code in them, until there is actual shipping Intel hardware.
From a development perspective, for Xcode apps, it is a single checkbox. Testing, obviously, is a bit more work. But if Adobe has Intel developer Macs (a fair bet), they may already be doing these builds internally.
What goes around, comes around?
Not necessarily that I want to be swimming in media, but that I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it.
I haven't seen a commercial in about a year (thank you 30 second skip), and I just tell TiVo what shows I like, and when I visit it, they're on there. Who knows when the shows play; I don't care.
I watch more shows now than I used to, but spend a lot less time doing it. Win-win, I say.
As to whether I'd let my children spend hours a day getting a media addition in front of a TV: No, and parenting skills haven't really changed since the advent of TV. Bad parents will still be bad parents.
When it's booted into Linux, can I actually use the phone? Say I want to dial someone, or a call comes in. Possible?
If that's 17 driver versions away, I'm thinking it may sorta defeat the purpose of running Linux on a phone.
They're not. Because you're talking about the MPAA. The RIAA, while no less scummy than the MPAA, doesn't deal with movies and DVD players -- they do audio. They're the ones doing most of the suing of Grandmas and 9 year olds throughout the country.
I would think stuff like Craig's List would slaughter it. So much more dynamic, so much easier to get the word out (and very effectively in large markets like the SF Bay Area -- not sure how good it is elsewhere)... and FREE.
There are times I think a newspaper is great -- on a train, on an airplane, or when I want to sit outside in the sun with a cup of coffee. So for relaxing news delivery. But most of the time, web sites (or, even better, RSS feeds) are just so much more timely. And with RSS, I can get the headlines from a few sources, so when one site cock-blocks me by invalidating my BugMeNot login (cough, FY NYT!), I can read the article elsewhere, or just be content with the title.
Layers can be a lot of things.
But, typically, layers are used to make non-destructive edits to images. For example, start with an image with low contrast. You can make the edits directly with the "levels" tool to adjust the white and black points. Save it, and the changes are permanent, and irreversible (well, unless you go back to the unedited original... you DID do "save as..." correct?).
Another option is to create a new adjustment layer, and make it "levels." Then you make the changes, and it looks to you exactly like you had edited the base photo layer. What you can *also* do is show or hide the layer (by clicking a little "eyeball" icon on it), and blend the layer by changing the opacity from anywhere between 0 and 100%. This way, if you make a "levels" layer, and a "curves" layer, and a "saturation" layer, you can turn them each on and off in order to see how they affect "the big picture," and see if you're heading in the right direction.
Layers are also good with masks -- say one part of the photo is really dark, you could select a region, and then do a new layer with "shadows and highlights." I will create a new layer and mask out everything but what was selected. You can then fudge with the mask (editing it by using brush tools to tune the edges), do a guassian blur to make it blend better and not be apparent, yadda. Layers are VERY powerful, and pro users make very extensive use of them. They're probably the single most important tool for the professional user, and were really the turning point in PHotoshop when they were introduced way back in version 2 or 3.
The one real stinky thing about them is they are full bitmaps. If you start with a 9 MB RAW file (say from a 20D), it is opened as 24 MB uncompressed. Each additional layer adds about 24 more MB to the file, so with 10 layers you're looking at a 260 MB file. And these things take FOREVER to save, and obviously hog a lot of disk. Some people I know have files with layers that are 1.5 GB in size. Ouch. If Aperture can use CoreImage to dynamically render all this, it could save tens or hundreds of gigs of disk space for pro photographers.
I don't believe Aperture *HAS* to support layers. Because it keeps a record of the manipulations that you do, and CoreImage dynamically does them on the fly, and shows you the file with the updates applied. CoreImage uses the GPU so it's fast enough that you don't actually have to save the effects, as layers.
.PSD document with 10 layers and sharpening applied. Which is freaking ridiculous, and absolutely KILLS the machine. CoreImage should give you about 90% more disk space for your RAW files... as it seems Aperture keeps 2 files (one is the original RAW, and one's the updated one with data about the effects).
The huge bonus there would be in this for me is... a 10 MB RAW file ends up being a 150-500 MB
The answers to your other two questions are a definite yes.
Google has a relationship with Current TV (Al Gore's TV company), and a spot called "Google Current" that airs on a regular basis.
6 20_0_4_0_C for one example. Or, do a Google search for "Google Current TV" Just don't look for details on Eric Schmidt at the same time ;-)
This could be a more formal solidification of the relationship, or hiring for someone to manage the relationship, or I guess it could be something altogether new. Certainly Current TV isn't 100% full of non-repeating content, so there is some room for Google to take more of their broadcast time.
See:
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=9
There are equivalent tools for distributing or forcing updates for Windows machines in a corporate environment.
I have a helluva time with the Red Hat client updater. They want email/password, and I always lose it and have to go through a big fucking rigorous process every time I do a re-install.
I just use Macs now, but "back in the day" I resorted to Ximian's tools, as they were FAR FAR FAR superior to the Red Hat update mechanisms, for me at least.
Often the issue is, the "in house" applications were developed by non-developers... people start with an Excel spreadsheet, convert it to an Access database, and things get popular. At that point, someone brings it into .NET and extends it so there's a web interface to the small thing that started as an Excel spreadsheet.
And it goes on from there. There are often hundreds of these types of applications at your typical "large" company -- though I wrote a few of them when I was doing consulting.
I had a task of getting doling out IP addresses at a large regional telco (they used fscking STATIC IP addresses at a campus of 14,000 people, and would NOT entertain prospects of using DHCP, despite repeated cries of idiocy), and I had to match spreadsheets of usernames with hosts files, based on the cube in the company. The person before me was manually matching things with grep and taking about 20 hours/week to match the user list with the hosts file manually -- I wrote an access database which would suck in the hosts file and user list dynamically, match them all, and output a suggested spreadsheet. Took me about a day to write it and debug it. This thing grew from there and became somewhat of a beast. Unfortauntely, this happens often, and it was never designed to be maintanable when initially coded.
When I said Safari (and other browsers) render it like crap, I was referring specifically to the rendering of OWA, not to general sites. They render most general sites just fine. OWA has some tree controls and other things that are nonstandard and only IE6 will render them properly.
It's the CORPORATE desktop. Microsoft does NOT want to break that.
And they have users locked DEEP into Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). They have also had corporate users develop custom ActiveX controls, yadda yadda.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it. They are hopelessly dependent on it. And they cannot use Macs (because Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 5 for Mac all render it like crap), and they cannot use alternative browsers on a PC. If Microsoft "fixed" IE, they would offend their corporate customers, who are exactly the people they're trying to get billions out of when Vista/IE 7 ship, and that WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Believe me, I get the "fix your browser because NONE of our corporate IT apps work on it!" like every week. And saying "hey, not our fault" doesn't matter to these people. It means they cannot use their apps, or run key business components, on our platform, and there's not much we can do about it to fix things. And it sucks. Microsoft knows this, of course.
The point you miss, is that this would require an entire change in Apple's business model. The entire spending company infrastructure would change -- as right now they get, what, $1B in revenue from software? If they quit with the hardware (save iPod), that's a 50-60% loss in revenue.
Presumably the software component would go up, but would it go up $6B or so? Hard to say, and BIG pains during the transition period. And what would they get from it, really? For the home user, an iBook/iMac/Mini... isn't that much more expensive than a PC.
For business... OS X is still more the limiting factor than the price of hardware. "We run in house application X" or "This MUST run Outlook 2003" or "You MUST run our homebrew VPN application" or "IT says you MUST run Windows, so we can lock down your machine" are ALL way more likely to kill OS X adoption, at current, than "This Apple box is 12% more expensive than that Windows box, though it's 44.1% more reliable."
My hunch: Apple has looked at and considered this before (really?), and ran the numbers, and knows more than a Linux guy who pulls guesses out of his ass.
This has NOTHING to do with the Do Not Call list!
The Do Not Call list is a federal list. It is not under attack, or at least, the details of the article don't discuss it.
What is discussed is STRICTER state laws in 5 specific states. These are completely separate laws, and are outside the scope of the DNC list.
The federal list is not under attack at all. I'm not in an affected state, so this doesn't affect me (or those of you outside the 5 specific states) in any way whatsoever.
Now it could be that this is the first step in a slippery slope of attacks, but nowhere in the article is that mentioned. You can put your tin foil hats back in the drawer, for now.
Real numbers? Why are you comparing a $400 PC to a PowerMac then (as the cheapest PowerMac is $1600), when the "real" PCs are such hunks of junk that they share RAM between the system and the video card?
If you're going to play that game, at least use a comparable Mac like the Mini which costs $499 in a comparable configuration to that $400 PC.
http://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/userC ontent.css
I don't use Firefox, I happen to prefer Safari, so I just use this style sheet (download it, save it) and it blocks > 80% of ads.
Agreed. It's not anecdotal. And I didn't run the tests so I'm just relaying information.
My point is that it's not 60x slower for all database operations for all databases, which is the impression you might get by just blindly reading the Anandtech article.
I also agree that dual Xeon 2.4 is old technology.. I'm certain a dual Opteron would be faster than both. But their "anecdotal" statement indicated that it's not an order of magnitude slower (or faster) than dual Xeons, for that matter. And you can only get 2x the performance of a dual Xeon 2.4 today, so again, it's typically "close enough" for most things. If you need your database to be 5x faster than a dual 2.4 Xeon, you MUST cluster or buy an SMP box (or hell add more indexes) to your database, because you cannot buy a dual CPU box that's 5x faster, today.