Quirks and Quarks is now also available via the CBC in a Podcasting form, along with a program called "/Nerd".
The CBC has been doing an excellent job of exploiting the types of technologies/.ers love recently. First providing radio stream in Ogg Vorbis format, and now Podcasting. Cool:).
Yes, and? I don't care about fork bombs, since I don't run them on my PC... being able to run as many processes as I choose on that PC is a feature, not a flaw.
A fork bomb doesn't necessarily have to be due to a purposeful attack. A software bug can easily cause a fork bomb by going into an endless loop launching new processes. Should this take your system completely down?
Admittedly, you probably shouldn't bee seeing such a serious bug in any release software. But what if you're a developer, and have code that is forking in a loop which, due to logic problems, never exits? Should you be forced to reboot your system?
I can think of a lot of such instances where a runaway process might start forking -- and personally, I'd prefer to be able to kill the process instead of being forced to reboot. I doubt if I'm ever going to purposefully spawn 5000 simultaneous processes. I think you'd have a valid complaint if the OS was limiting you to 50 processes, but there is a realistic upper limit of the number of processes a given hardware configuration is going to be able to reliably handle -- why shouldn't the kernel prevent the system from surpassing such a limit? Do you really want to be able to open enough processes to kill your system so badly the only way out is a reboot?
To be insanely picky, and drive an otherwise good attempt at a joke right into the ground, if you properly follow the order of operations, your equation doesn't balance:
RHS = 0
LHS = 4 x 3 - 2 + a / 5 x 3 - c x 7
= C - 2 + 2 x 3 - 54
= C - 2 + 6 - 54
= -44 (or 0xFFFFFFBC)
LHS != RHS
As punishment, tonights homework is to re-express your expression in RPN:).
I was under the impression that running the OS off an iPod is something Apple has been discouraging.
It is, but there is at least one support article that says "you shouldn't do this, but here's how you can do it":).
My 15GB iPod has a minimal OS X install on it. I use it for maintenance a handful of times per year, and keep it set-up in the event my PowerBook ever has hard drive problems (if, for example, my PowerBook hard drive's SMART status reported a problem, I could boot off the iPod to minimize access to the main hard drive, and copy data off the main drive over to a network drive. I do keep daily backups of important documents, but like to have a backup system for accessing my data if things suddenly go bad with the hard drive).
I wouldn't use this setup for day-to-day access however.
And it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts, Pfohl said. [WHY, BECAUSE IT WOULD BRING IN HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN REVENUE?]
But would it? Let's remember that the comment is coming from a member of the Canadian Recording Industry Association. How many of the non-Canadians here are downloading Canadian music? If you're not Canadian, when was the last time you downloaded a track by the Tragically Hip (which is pretty much the biggest act in Canada)?
Here's an excersize if you're not Canadian. Fire up iTunes, and go into the Canadian iTunes Music Store. There is currently a category listing the 2005 Juno Award Nominees. Now go through the list and see if you've heard of even one band.
Canada actually has a whole lot of great music (way better than most of the crap coming out of the US, at least), but breaking those bands out of Canada and into the rest of the world has long been a problem. There have been some exceptions (Barenaked Ladies, Alanis Morriset, Celine Dion (shudder), Avril Levigne, and going back some Anne Murry and Rush) -- but by and large excellent Canadian bands go completely ignored by the rest of the world.
If you don't have a global audience like many US artists have access to, you're not going to make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, regardless of price. Using Canada as an example again, your audience size maxes out at 30 million people if you get every man, woman, and child -- regardless of age -- to buy your song. And that's only if you can create something that appeals to all of the major language groups (English and French being the two biggest) And when has that ever happened, short of maybe "O Canada" in its various forms?
Hopefully with time and thanks to the Internet nationality barriers will be broken. There are probably lots of people out there who would enjoy The Tragically Hip (for example), but who simply have never heard of them because they aren't marketed in their region (although they may not understand the significance of Fifty Mission Cap:) ). Heck, I imagine there is a lot of cool music from other parts of the world I've never heard of as well that suffer from the same problem here.
Five cents a song may help break down these barriers -- but it may not. There is still a lot of nationalism in this world (along with "not invented here" syndrome), and that takes a lot of time to overcome (if you ever do). So until such time that you can easily market any band outside your own borders, I can see that selling their music at $0.05 a piece isn't going to make you rich any time soon. The growth may be exponential, but it doesn't help you if your market is small -- it just means you saturate it even quicker, not that you make more money.
Why should it really matter what platform he's using? Is everyone worried that there is going to be an end to the x86 version or something?
Anyone who worrries that x86 support is going to end anytime soon is just silly. Thankfully, I don't see anyone claiming that anywhere. The sky is hardly falling.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter somewhere. Personally, I'm hoping that by having the "father of Linux" running Macintosh hardware that more attention will be made to PPC ports, incorporating more capabilities of the hardware, and bringing some of the distros more on par with their x86 cousins.
Are you aware that it's only been within the past few months that there have been some fixes for sleep support on Apple laptops? I'm running a PowerBook here myself, but until more recently couldn't even consider running Linux on it, as if I did I couldn't put the system to sleep (and expect it to wake back up, at least). The built-in AirPort Extreme wireless adapter is likewise unsupported.
Having Mr. Torvalds running on Macintosh hardware may help illuminate these issues, and get a push going to get Apple to open up their specs a bit more, or at the very least attract more Open Source developers to the cause. Personally, while I run OS X as my main desktop environment on my PowerBook, I wouldn't mind seeing PPC Linux on-par with x86 Linux when it comes to hardware compatibility. It's close, but there is room for improvement.
(And for the record, while OS X is my day-to-day OS for getting work done, I do keeep an Ubuntu PPC live CD in my laptop bag for those times when I want/need to run Linux, and have several Intel-based Linux boxes which I routinely access through the PowerBook).
let's not scapegoat unit testing in the name of covering up the real problem, which is people following the cash trail, as opposed to following more disciplined software development practices.
I don't disagree -- it's the reason why I used "market forces" in quotes. It certainly is an excuse, and a pretty poor one at that. I'm not trying to make excuses for the industry, only to point out the industry's point of view.
But I said it is a hypothetical situation, and it was obviously an example that was deliberately chosen as an exaggeration. What about the core of the remark? Why don't we talk about manufacturers like Belkin?
Well, we can talk about Belkin if you really want, but I think I only own one or two Belkin products (all cables), so I can't really comment on the quality of their goods, making it a pretty one-way conversation:).
But I think you missed the point -- I agree with your assessment of the computer industry, and only wanted to point out that other industries involved in product manufacture have certain government regulations and oversights to comply with that gives them an added incentive to do the job right the first time. Computer companies can afford to be lazy and ship shoddy products, because unless they are seriously unsafe, nobody is going to prevent them from putting them on a store shelf and selling them to whomever comes along.
Let's consider the hypothetical situation where Airbus releases the A380 prematurely (to keep ahead of the market) and creates an airplane that costs an incredible amount of money to maintain - or even worse, breaks regularly. What happens in this situation? Easy; everyone throws up a huge stink, and Airbus loses lots and lots of business for the next few years or decades.
It tends to be for situations like this that governments come in. If Airbus produces a plane which is unsafe, it won't get government certification to be flown in a nations airspace. Transport Canada (or whatever the corresponding agency is in the US) isn't going to license a plane which is prone to blowing up, causing Airbus to not even make sales in the first place.
But we don't have this sort of oversight in most computer software (there are exceptions, of course -- including software for flight systems). Microsoft can ship a crappy product, and nobody ever tels them otherwise. Heck, in this case governments the world over actually buy their products themselves, endorsing their products through their use (and I have a doozy of a story I'd love to share if it weren't for the fact I had a military security clearance at the time I encountered it. Sorry, but as much as I love to tell a good story on slashdot, having the military police or RCMP at my door would _not_ be cool:P).
People would argue whether or not such oversight would be a good thing for softwaree in general -- my point isn't to suggest it's necessary, but more that companies like Airbus have special added incentive to ensure the quality of their products beyond what most software companies so.
Yaz.
Re:Shouldn't that be too bloated to test?
on
Too Darned Big to Test?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If NASA managed to debug the entire shuttle flight control software, I'd expect a company the size of Microsoft to be able to debug a server application.
The problem is that in the NASA case, if they don't get that shuttle flight control system ready on time for launch, they can easily push the launch back indefinately. It isn't as if they're going to go out of business if they don't have launches due to unsafe conditions.
Besides which, once the flight control system version x.y is finished, the development tea doesn't then immediately start working on flight control system version x.y+1 (or worse, versionn x+1.0). It isn't as if NASA finishes a shutttle, and then immediately starts building a new, improved shuttle.
But this is exactly what happens in big software houses. The pressure to release ahead of your competition and stay ahead (or catch up with) the perceived feature curve is huge. Delays are bad -- delays equal lost sales. And once the product is done, unlike a bridge or a plane or a shuttle which will last 20 - 30 years or more as is, that software immediately starts getting new features and major modifications for "the next version".
And perhaps worse, once a version ships, most software development companies stop any sort of further testing -- instead, they rely upon customers to report problems, and typically only then do they investigate (and, hopefully, fix the problem).
The process is different due to "market forces". Personally, I don't like it either, and have stayed away from corporate software development for some time because of it. It's simply not a good way to develop software, as eventually the poor design decisions and rushed jobs (and burnt out developers) cost the company and the users dearly.
I've seen a standard TV operating while completely submersed in liquid fluorocarbon (note: note chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)). As the liquid is non-condusive, the electronics come to absolutely no harm. Keep it cool, and provide some currant to keep the liquid flowing, and I'd imagine you'd have an expensive, workable solution.
Personally, however, I think a better system would be something akin to running a sterling engine in reverse. By rotating the crankshaft via an electric motor, you'll produce heat on one side of the cylinder, and cold on the other. Apply the cold side to the CPU, and vent the hot side outside the system case. The danger here is to create a way to preveent the engine from being run in reverse, as if the electric motor isn't powered for some reason, the engine will start running off the CPU's heat, rotating the electric motor, creating electricity.
Which is, of course, something else you could purposefully do. A sterling engine could be used to utilize the heat dissipated from a CPU or GPU in order to generate rotational movement, which could then be converted into electricity. Add a battery to store the charge, and you could probably run a diskette drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive completely off the waste heat from your CPU (with the big downside being you don't wind up providing a whole lot of cooling capacity to the CPU itself this way).
Why bother with reverse engineering ALAC? So far, I have seen / read mention of only one major useful thing that has been learned: ALAC uses adaptive compression algorithms.
One possible reason would be in order to stream to an AirPort Express with AirTunes. AirTunes uses a standard streaming protocol (RTSP), but streams the data in Apple Lossless format. Because of this, you currently require either a Mac OS X or Windows XP machine running iTunes to steam audio to the AirPort Express.
Being able to stream from Linux would certainly open up some new possibilities. And being able to transcode from Ogg Vorbis to ALAC in order to stream to an AirPort Express would be pretty cool (and is something you can't currently do under iTunes, even with the third-party Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in).
Linux would still be missing the admin tools to configure the AirPort Express in the first place, but being able to stream from other OS's to AirTunes would be pretty cool.
Now all the inventor needs to do is to invent some sort of electric machine that will turn the crank for you. You could take a motor, and put it in some sort of project box, with some wires coming out of it to plug into the wall, and some sort of arm to turn the crank on the cranking machine...then when you want to recharge your iPod Shuffle, plug it into the crank, and mate the crank with the crank motor, and then plug the mottor into the wall. Then you have the benefits of hand-cranking, without all the manual labour.
Genius! I'm going to go an apply for a patent on this one for sure!
Yaz.
Re:This version doesnt fix some new type of popups
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
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· Score: 1
The site uses Javascript to detect the (non)existance of the popup window to unhide a div. So disabling Javascript does indeed get rid of this issue - and an unfortunately large amount of useful functionality. Ah, well.
Well, just to ensure I haven't confused anybody, I do not have Javascript disabled. I've just used Firefox's advanced options to prevent certain Javascript functions from working, including raising and lowering windows, moving and resizing windows, removing the status bar, and changing the status bar. But that's it. Otherwise, Javascript is completely enabled.
I have AdBlock, too, but it's really not very strict - it's only blocking an ad with "/RealMedia/ads/" in it, so maybe it's that one?
I don't really know. I was under the impression that Adblock couldn't necessarily block the pop-up window itself, but instead its contents. I'm also running Flashblock (so I don't download Flash media that I haven't blocked or otherwise whitelisted). Javascript is enabled, but I've disabled Javascript from being able to raise/lower windows, move or resize windows, hide the status bar, or change the status bar text.
That, and I do have some scripts blocked by Adblock (one script on one site I'm on pops up a "You can't do that" dialog if you right-click on anything on the site. Obliterated that one pretty quickly;) ). So perhaps I've already blocked whatever is causing everyone else to get pop-ups.
Which would seem to me that, the moral of the story is, get Adblock:).
(And for those who think everyone should download all the ads and Flash a site throws at them, I'm sometimes accessing the 'net via GPRS, where ads not only increase the download time for many pages (significantly), but also winds up costing me money. I even connect to a special proxy that re-compresses what images do remain down to lower colour depths and overall file sizes just to max out the speed and minimize the cost when I'm on the road).
Yaz.
Re:This version doesnt fix some new type of popups
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Try this site: It shows a sarcastic popup saying "your browser has successfully blocked a popup!" http://www.indianmasala.com/
Not here. FireFox 1.0.1 on Mac OS X.
I don't know what it is about my configuration, but even with stories earlier this week about various sites using pop-ups that can defeat Firefox's pop-up blocker, I haven't been able to get any of the referenced sites to send me a pop-up, even after 20 reloads.
Maybe it's Adblock. Or maybe it's the fact that I've disabled many of the Javascript features. Or that since v1.0 I had requested pop-ups redirected to open new tabs instead of a new window (and then, I'm only getting pop-ups that I've specifically clicked on and permitted).
mod parent post up. He states all the major issues you will encounter in a basement.
No, don't mod the parent up, as it's not good generic advice.
Basement issues depend completely on where you live, and what the water table is like. Both the current house I live in and the previous house I lived in were atop hills, and were significantly above the water table (by between 15 and 30 meters in both cases). And neither have had a single drop of water in the basement ever (we owned the previous home for twenty years, and it was only about 8 meters from the hill, which was one side of a valley left over from an ice age glacial river). Flooding of biblical propertions could have occurred and our basement would have been bone dry.
So it really depends on where you live as to whether or not you're going to encounter water issues in your basement. If you're in a flood plain or near a lake or ocean at sea level, then yes -- you have the potential for water problems. Whether or not the original poster is in such a situation, we don't know, for they haven't said.
If you're doing any serious printing or publishing work, having proper colour calibration is of key importance. There are standards now that allow you to avoid having to print proofs prior to press production.
This does require that you are using a suitable display technology (like the Apple Cinema displays) which has the necessary characteristics (luminance and colour gamut) to display images as if they were on paper. Virtually all professional printing solutions are calibrated to a colour standard -- calibrating your monitor to the same standard allows you to produce content with colours that will look the same printed as you experience them on screen.
Admittedly, once again the person asking the question didn't provide enough innformation on what they're trying to do, but my guess is the need the calibration for proper colour printing.
So does someone have the answer? What the hell do these terms mean, and are they useful any more?
I've always had a (slightly) different definition (and number of letters) for the various "greek letter" status elements (which I use in my Open Source project, the jSyncManager):
alpha - A work in progress which is feature incomplete.
beta - the product is now feature complete, and requires rigourous testing.
gamma - All bugs found in the beta phase have been fixed, with a last opportunity to detect any problems with the fixes themselves (effectively what others call the "Release Candidate").
final - Done like dinner. Package it up and get it into the hands of customers.
The problem I run into isn't the never-ending beta -- it's the never-ending alpha stage:P. A big part of this tends to have to do with trying to fit in user requests for enhancement, and simply not having the time nor manpower to get it all done in a timely manner (as we're not a project that attracts a lot of developers willing to contribute to the core). Our beta phases tend to be fairly short, in large part because once we hit beta, we've typically hit a feature freeze as well, and are only going to fix bugs.
IMO, if it's not feature complete, you have no right calling it a "beta", as much of your high-level testing is going to be useless if you're going to be adding code during the beta phase. Adding new features effectively "resets" the status back to the beginning of "beta" -- making the term effectively meaningless.
I think you're mistaken about a few things, so please give me the opportunity to set you right.
I seem to be one of the three or four geeks left in the world that does *not* own an iPod, so forgive me if I sound backwards. In addition to craving every gadget that comes out like nearly every one of my fellow geeks does, I'm also an audiophile. I need to have the *best* sound available when I listen to music, and I hardly ever listen to just *a song;* it's either the entire album or nothing.
I don't seee how or why this would prevent you from owning an iPod. Along with AAC and MP3 format files, the iPod can also play WAV, AIFF, and Apple Lossless format files -- the latter of which would probably be ideal for your situation. And you can store and easily play entire albums on the iPod -- it will store the album information and allow you to select an album to be played, and will then play it. And as one tiny device can easily hold hundreds of albums, it would seem ideal for your situation. Rip your CDs into iTunes in Apple Lossless format to keep the quality maxed out, and take your CD collection everywhere you want to go.
Want to play those songs you downloaded off of iTunes or Napster on your expensive 7.1 surround-sound entertainment system? Tough cookies; you're restricted to either your PC or your iPod.
Sorry, but that's just not true when it comes to iTunes. You have more choices than just PC or iPod. In particular, you can burn any music in iTunes to an audio CD, but perhaps more useful is an AirPort Express with AirTunes. I have one -- you just plug it into a wall socket on one end, and then plug it into an audio device on the other (via either 3mm stereo analogue cabling or via mini-Toslink optical cabling, which is well suited for a 7.1 surround sound system). You can now stream your music digitally using Apple Lossless format from your PC directly to your surround sound system, or any other device you want to plug into it. The audio is streamed via either a wired or wireless connection between your PC and the AirPort Express in Apple Lossless format, where it is decoded right at the AirPort Express.
Either one is also somewhat expensive. iTunes costs at least $12 for a full album, which is about the cost of your average CD, but you also have lots of added external costs: the time and bandwidth it takes to download the songs, even more time if you want to upload it to an iPod, and the cost of HDD storage space.
I suppose it depends on geographic factors somewhat. Here in Canada, a full album on iTMS is typically $9.99 CDN (~$8.07US), which is quite a bit lower than what the vast majority of retail CDs go for (ranging from about $11.99 CDN and up on Amazon.ca, for example, and that doesn't include shipping).
And it isn't as if buying audio CDs doesn't take time and effort as well. To buy an audio CD offline, I have to drive to a store (wasting time and money on gasoline), spend time finding what I want in the store, spending time in line to pay for the CD(s) at the store, and then more time and money to drive back home. And that's assuming the store even has what I want -- if they don't, I have to drive to another store and start the process all over again.
Contrast this to buying a song off iTMS: I waste no time going to a store. I get my music immediately. I don't have to stand in line, I don't have to move the car out of the garage and drive around town. The time to download a song via broadband is measured in seconds. I don't have to pay for bandwidth beyond a flat monthly rate which I'm paying for whether I download 5MB of data or 50GB of data.
The time to upload a song to my iPod via Firewire is likewise calculated in seconds -- usually less than 10s per song (and my collection has some very long songs, including many >15 minutes long).
As for the cost of HDD storage space, in my case I've already paid for
Is there a point to these toolbars that I'm missing?
I visited a relative recently who is running Windows and IE still, and who had no less than 5 different "toolbars" on their browser.
Frankly, I don't see the point at all. I haven't seen a single thing that any of these toolbars add which bookmarks and the built-in search field in Firefox don't, other than a whole lot of useless clutter. Indeed, most Winndows/IE users I know who have all of these bars installed don't even use them (and often don't remember how they got there).
So is there a point why anyone would want these toolbars in the first place? They look like useless cruft at best, and spyware and advertising vectors at worst.
/* The next three lines prevents the shell from running atop DR-DOS. */
/* This method does nothing except change Win32s enough to break application compatibility with OS/2 */
/* This is the file that permits our partners to install spyware on users machines */
/* A constant to permit the NSA to decrypt anything encrypted on a Windows machine. */
/* This function detects the user agent, and gives it preference if it's IE */
/* A random hex number generator for GPF error dialogs. */
/* This function bolts IE into any application. It doesn't really do anything, but we link every library anyway, so we can claim that IE is an intregal part of Windows */
/* This function breaks the NetBEUI protocol slightly so we can claim that Samba is an "incompatible version" */
Slashdot Mirror
Quirks and Quarks is now also available via the CBC in a Podcasting form, along with a program called "/Nerd".
The CBC has been doing an excellent job of exploiting the types of technologies /.ers love recently. First providing radio stream in Ogg Vorbis format, and now Podcasting. Cool :).
Yaz.
A fork bomb doesn't necessarily have to be due to a purposeful attack. A software bug can easily cause a fork bomb by going into an endless loop launching new processes. Should this take your system completely down?
Admittedly, you probably shouldn't bee seeing such a serious bug in any release software. But what if you're a developer, and have code that is forking in a loop which, due to logic problems, never exits? Should you be forced to reboot your system?
I can think of a lot of such instances where a runaway process might start forking -- and personally, I'd prefer to be able to kill the process instead of being forced to reboot. I doubt if I'm ever going to purposefully spawn 5000 simultaneous processes. I think you'd have a valid complaint if the OS was limiting you to 50 processes, but there is a realistic upper limit of the number of processes a given hardware configuration is going to be able to reliably handle -- why shouldn't the kernel prevent the system from surpassing such a limit? Do you really want to be able to open enough processes to kill your system so badly the only way out is a reboot?
Yaz.
Good job -- but that's not in Reverse Polish Notation :).
Yaz.
To be insanely picky, and drive an otherwise good attempt at a joke right into the ground, if you properly follow the order of operations, your equation doesn't balance:
RHS = 0
LHS = 4 x 3 - 2 + a / 5 x 3 - c x 7
= C - 2 + 2 x 3 - 54
= C - 2 + 6 - 54
= -44 (or 0xFFFFFFBC)
LHS != RHS
As punishment, tonights homework is to re-express your expression in RPN :).
Yaz.
...it's 0x423a35c7, which isn't particularily meaningful.
Wake me up when it's 0x42424242 or something, okay?
Yaz.
It is, but there is at least one support article that says "you shouldn't do this, but here's how you can do it" :).
My 15GB iPod has a minimal OS X install on it. I use it for maintenance a handful of times per year, and keep it set-up in the event my PowerBook ever has hard drive problems (if, for example, my PowerBook hard drive's SMART status reported a problem, I could boot off the iPod to minimize access to the main hard drive, and copy data off the main drive over to a network drive. I do keep daily backups of important documents, but like to have a backup system for accessing my data if things suddenly go bad with the hard drive).
I wouldn't use this setup for day-to-day access however.
Yaz.
But would it? Let's remember that the comment is coming from a member of the Canadian Recording Industry Association. How many of the non-Canadians here are downloading Canadian music? If you're not Canadian, when was the last time you downloaded a track by the Tragically Hip (which is pretty much the biggest act in Canada)?
Here's an excersize if you're not Canadian. Fire up iTunes, and go into the Canadian iTunes Music Store. There is currently a category listing the 2005 Juno Award Nominees. Now go through the list and see if you've heard of even one band.
Canada actually has a whole lot of great music (way better than most of the crap coming out of the US, at least), but breaking those bands out of Canada and into the rest of the world has long been a problem. There have been some exceptions (Barenaked Ladies, Alanis Morriset, Celine Dion (shudder), Avril Levigne, and going back some Anne Murry and Rush) -- but by and large excellent Canadian bands go completely ignored by the rest of the world.
If you don't have a global audience like many US artists have access to, you're not going to make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, regardless of price. Using Canada as an example again, your audience size maxes out at 30 million people if you get every man, woman, and child -- regardless of age -- to buy your song. And that's only if you can create something that appeals to all of the major language groups (English and French being the two biggest) And when has that ever happened, short of maybe "O Canada" in its various forms?
Hopefully with time and thanks to the Internet nationality barriers will be broken. There are probably lots of people out there who would enjoy The Tragically Hip (for example), but who simply have never heard of them because they aren't marketed in their region (although they may not understand the significance of Fifty Mission Cap :) ). Heck, I imagine there is a lot of cool music from other parts of the world I've never heard of as well that suffer from the same problem here.
Five cents a song may help break down these barriers -- but it may not. There is still a lot of nationalism in this world (along with "not invented here" syndrome), and that takes a lot of time to overcome (if you ever do). So until such time that you can easily market any band outside your own borders, I can see that selling their music at $0.05 a piece isn't going to make you rich any time soon. The growth may be exponential, but it doesn't help you if your market is small -- it just means you saturate it even quicker, not that you make more money.
Yaz.
Anyone who worrries that x86 support is going to end anytime soon is just silly. Thankfully, I don't see anyone claiming that anywhere. The sky is hardly falling.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter somewhere. Personally, I'm hoping that by having the "father of Linux" running Macintosh hardware that more attention will be made to PPC ports, incorporating more capabilities of the hardware, and bringing some of the distros more on par with their x86 cousins.
Are you aware that it's only been within the past few months that there have been some fixes for sleep support on Apple laptops? I'm running a PowerBook here myself, but until more recently couldn't even consider running Linux on it, as if I did I couldn't put the system to sleep (and expect it to wake back up, at least). The built-in AirPort Extreme wireless adapter is likewise unsupported.
Having Mr. Torvalds running on Macintosh hardware may help illuminate these issues, and get a push going to get Apple to open up their specs a bit more, or at the very least attract more Open Source developers to the cause. Personally, while I run OS X as my main desktop environment on my PowerBook, I wouldn't mind seeing PPC Linux on-par with x86 Linux when it comes to hardware compatibility. It's close, but there is room for improvement.
(And for the record, while OS X is my day-to-day OS for getting work done, I do keeep an Ubuntu PPC live CD in my laptop bag for those times when I want/need to run Linux, and have several Intel-based Linux boxes which I routinely access through the PowerBook).
Yaz.
I don't disagree -- it's the reason why I used "market forces" in quotes. It certainly is an excuse, and a pretty poor one at that. I'm not trying to make excuses for the industry, only to point out the industry's point of view.
Yaz.
Well, we can talk about Belkin if you really want, but I think I only own one or two Belkin products (all cables), so I can't really comment on the quality of their goods, making it a pretty one-way conversation :).
But I think you missed the point -- I agree with your assessment of the computer industry, and only wanted to point out that other industries involved in product manufacture have certain government regulations and oversights to comply with that gives them an added incentive to do the job right the first time. Computer companies can afford to be lazy and ship shoddy products, because unless they are seriously unsafe, nobody is going to prevent them from putting them on a store shelf and selling them to whomever comes along.
Yaz.
It tends to be for situations like this that governments come in. If Airbus produces a plane which is unsafe, it won't get government certification to be flown in a nations airspace. Transport Canada (or whatever the corresponding agency is in the US) isn't going to license a plane which is prone to blowing up, causing Airbus to not even make sales in the first place.
But we don't have this sort of oversight in most computer software (there are exceptions, of course -- including software for flight systems). Microsoft can ship a crappy product, and nobody ever tels them otherwise. Heck, in this case governments the world over actually buy their products themselves, endorsing their products through their use (and I have a doozy of a story I'd love to share if it weren't for the fact I had a military security clearance at the time I encountered it. Sorry, but as much as I love to tell a good story on slashdot, having the military police or RCMP at my door would _not_ be cool :P).
People would argue whether or not such oversight would be a good thing for softwaree in general -- my point isn't to suggest it's necessary, but more that companies like Airbus have special added incentive to ensure the quality of their products beyond what most software companies so.
Yaz.
The problem is that in the NASA case, if they don't get that shuttle flight control system ready on time for launch, they can easily push the launch back indefinately. It isn't as if they're going to go out of business if they don't have launches due to unsafe conditions.
Besides which, once the flight control system version x.y is finished, the development tea doesn't then immediately start working on flight control system version x.y+1 (or worse, versionn x+1.0). It isn't as if NASA finishes a shutttle, and then immediately starts building a new, improved shuttle.
But this is exactly what happens in big software houses. The pressure to release ahead of your competition and stay ahead (or catch up with) the perceived feature curve is huge. Delays are bad -- delays equal lost sales. And once the product is done, unlike a bridge or a plane or a shuttle which will last 20 - 30 years or more as is, that software immediately starts getting new features and major modifications for "the next version".
And perhaps worse, once a version ships, most software development companies stop any sort of further testing -- instead, they rely upon customers to report problems, and typically only then do they investigate (and, hopefully, fix the problem).
The process is different due to "market forces". Personally, I don't like it either, and have stayed away from corporate software development for some time because of it. It's simply not a good way to develop software, as eventually the poor design decisions and rushed jobs (and burnt out developers) cost the company and the users dearly.
Yaz.
I've seen a standard TV operating while completely submersed in liquid fluorocarbon (note: note chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)). As the liquid is non-condusive, the electronics come to absolutely no harm. Keep it cool, and provide some currant to keep the liquid flowing, and I'd imagine you'd have an expensive, workable solution.
Personally, however, I think a better system would be something akin to running a sterling engine in reverse. By rotating the crankshaft via an electric motor, you'll produce heat on one side of the cylinder, and cold on the other. Apply the cold side to the CPU, and vent the hot side outside the system case. The danger here is to create a way to preveent the engine from being run in reverse, as if the electric motor isn't powered for some reason, the engine will start running off the CPU's heat, rotating the electric motor, creating electricity.
Which is, of course, something else you could purposefully do. A sterling engine could be used to utilize the heat dissipated from a CPU or GPU in order to generate rotational movement, which could then be converted into electricity. Add a battery to store the charge, and you could probably run a diskette drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive completely off the waste heat from your CPU (with the big downside being you don't wind up providing a whole lot of cooling capacity to the CPU itself this way).
Yaz.
Yaz.
One possible reason would be in order to stream to an AirPort Express with AirTunes. AirTunes uses a standard streaming protocol (RTSP), but streams the data in Apple Lossless format. Because of this, you currently require either a Mac OS X or Windows XP machine running iTunes to steam audio to the AirPort Express.
Being able to stream from Linux would certainly open up some new possibilities. And being able to transcode from Ogg Vorbis to ALAC in order to stream to an AirPort Express would be pretty cool (and is something you can't currently do under iTunes, even with the third-party Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in).
Linux would still be missing the admin tools to configure the AirPort Express in the first place, but being able to stream from other OS's to AirTunes would be pretty cool.
Yaz.
Now all the inventor needs to do is to invent some sort of electric machine that will turn the crank for you. You could take a motor, and put it in some sort of project box, with some wires coming out of it to plug into the wall, and some sort of arm to turn the crank on the cranking machine...then when you want to recharge your iPod Shuffle, plug it into the crank, and mate the crank with the crank motor, and then plug the mottor into the wall. Then you have the benefits of hand-cranking, without all the manual labour.
Genius! I'm going to go an apply for a patent on this one for sure!
Yaz.
Well, just to ensure I haven't confused anybody, I do not have Javascript disabled. I've just used Firefox's advanced options to prevent certain Javascript functions from working, including raising and lowering windows, moving and resizing windows, removing the status bar, and changing the status bar. But that's it. Otherwise, Javascript is completely enabled.
Yaz.
I don't really know. I was under the impression that Adblock couldn't necessarily block the pop-up window itself, but instead its contents. I'm also running Flashblock (so I don't download Flash media that I haven't blocked or otherwise whitelisted). Javascript is enabled, but I've disabled Javascript from being able to raise/lower windows, move or resize windows, hide the status bar, or change the status bar text.
That, and I do have some scripts blocked by Adblock (one script on one site I'm on pops up a "You can't do that" dialog if you right-click on anything on the site. Obliterated that one pretty quickly ;) ). So perhaps I've already blocked whatever is causing everyone else to get pop-ups.
Which would seem to me that, the moral of the story is, get Adblock :).
(And for those who think everyone should download all the ads and Flash a site throws at them, I'm sometimes accessing the 'net via GPRS, where ads not only increase the download time for many pages (significantly), but also winds up costing me money. I even connect to a special proxy that re-compresses what images do remain down to lower colour depths and overall file sizes just to max out the speed and minimize the cost when I'm on the road).
Yaz.
Not here. FireFox 1.0.1 on Mac OS X.
I don't know what it is about my configuration, but even with stories earlier this week about various sites using pop-ups that can defeat Firefox's pop-up blocker, I haven't been able to get any of the referenced sites to send me a pop-up, even after 20 reloads.
Maybe it's Adblock. Or maybe it's the fact that I've disabled many of the Javascript features. Or that since v1.0 I had requested pop-ups redirected to open new tabs instead of a new window (and then, I'm only getting pop-ups that I've specifically clicked on and permitted).
Or, maybe I'm just very, very, very lucky. Nah!
Yaz.
No, don't mod the parent up, as it's not good generic advice.
Basement issues depend completely on where you live, and what the water table is like. Both the current house I live in and the previous house I lived in were atop hills, and were significantly above the water table (by between 15 and 30 meters in both cases). And neither have had a single drop of water in the basement ever (we owned the previous home for twenty years, and it was only about 8 meters from the hill, which was one side of a valley left over from an ice age glacial river). Flooding of biblical propertions could have occurred and our basement would have been bone dry.
So it really depends on where you live as to whether or not you're going to encounter water issues in your basement. If you're in a flood plain or near a lake or ocean at sea level, then yes -- you have the potential for water problems. Whether or not the original poster is in such a situation, we don't know, for they haven't said.
Yaz.
If you're doing any serious printing or publishing work, having proper colour calibration is of key importance. There are standards now that allow you to avoid having to print proofs prior to press production.
This does require that you are using a suitable display technology (like the Apple Cinema displays) which has the necessary characteristics (luminance and colour gamut) to display images as if they were on paper. Virtually all professional printing solutions are calibrated to a colour standard -- calibrating your monitor to the same standard allows you to produce content with colours that will look the same printed as you experience them on screen.
Admittedly, once again the person asking the question didn't provide enough innformation on what they're trying to do, but my guess is the need the calibration for proper colour printing.
Yaz.
Since 1979 we've known the answer to that question.
Yaz.
I've always had a (slightly) different definition (and number of letters) for the various "greek letter" status elements (which I use in my Open Source project, the jSyncManager):
The problem I run into isn't the never-ending beta -- it's the never-ending alpha stage :P. A big part of this tends to have to do with trying to fit in user requests for enhancement, and simply not having the time nor manpower to get it all done in a timely manner (as we're not a project that attracts a lot of developers willing to contribute to the core). Our beta phases tend to be fairly short, in large part because once we hit beta, we've typically hit a feature freeze as well, and are only going to fix bugs.
IMO, if it's not feature complete, you have no right calling it a "beta", as much of your high-level testing is going to be useless if you're going to be adding code during the beta phase. Adding new features effectively "resets" the status back to the beginning of "beta" -- making the term effectively meaningless.
But I guess I'm just old fashioned that way...
Yaz.
I think you're mistaken about a few things, so please give me the opportunity to set you right.
I don't seee how or why this would prevent you from owning an iPod. Along with AAC and MP3 format files, the iPod can also play WAV, AIFF, and Apple Lossless format files -- the latter of which would probably be ideal for your situation. And you can store and easily play entire albums on the iPod -- it will store the album information and allow you to select an album to be played, and will then play it. And as one tiny device can easily hold hundreds of albums, it would seem ideal for your situation. Rip your CDs into iTunes in Apple Lossless format to keep the quality maxed out, and take your CD collection everywhere you want to go.
Sorry, but that's just not true when it comes to iTunes. You have more choices than just PC or iPod. In particular, you can burn any music in iTunes to an audio CD, but perhaps more useful is an AirPort Express with AirTunes. I have one -- you just plug it into a wall socket on one end, and then plug it into an audio device on the other (via either 3mm stereo analogue cabling or via mini-Toslink optical cabling, which is well suited for a 7.1 surround sound system). You can now stream your music digitally using Apple Lossless format from your PC directly to your surround sound system, or any other device you want to plug into it. The audio is streamed via either a wired or wireless connection between your PC and the AirPort Express in Apple Lossless format, where it is decoded right at the AirPort Express.
I suppose it depends on geographic factors somewhat. Here in Canada, a full album on iTMS is typically $9.99 CDN (~$8.07US), which is quite a bit lower than what the vast majority of retail CDs go for (ranging from about $11.99 CDN and up on Amazon.ca, for example, and that doesn't include shipping).
And it isn't as if buying audio CDs doesn't take time and effort as well. To buy an audio CD offline, I have to drive to a store (wasting time and money on gasoline), spend time finding what I want in the store, spending time in line to pay for the CD(s) at the store, and then more time and money to drive back home. And that's assuming the store even has what I want -- if they don't, I have to drive to another store and start the process all over again.
Contrast this to buying a song off iTMS: I waste no time going to a store. I get my music immediately. I don't have to stand in line, I don't have to move the car out of the garage and drive around town. The time to download a song via broadband is measured in seconds. I don't have to pay for bandwidth beyond a flat monthly rate which I'm paying for whether I download 5MB of data or 50GB of data.
The time to upload a song to my iPod via Firewire is likewise calculated in seconds -- usually less than 10s per song (and my collection has some very long songs, including many >15 minutes long).
As for the cost of HDD storage space, in my case I've already paid for
Is there a point to these toolbars that I'm missing?
I visited a relative recently who is running Windows and IE still, and who had no less than 5 different "toolbars" on their browser.
Frankly, I don't see the point at all. I haven't seen a single thing that any of these toolbars add which bookmarks and the built-in search field in Firefox don't, other than a whole lot of useless clutter. Indeed, most Winndows/IE users I know who have all of these bars installed don't even use them (and often don't remember how they got there).
So is there a point why anyone would want these toolbars in the first place? They look like useless cruft at best, and spyware and advertising vectors at worst.
Yaz.
Yaz.