I develop for HD-DVD. We have an A1, an A2, and an Xbox 360. The only better player we've been able to test on is a software player. "Better" means it can theoretically use your hard drive for additional storage. "Theoretically" means it doesn't seem to, and every single software player has huge, application-breaking bugs. These aren't the kind of bugs you can code around -- these are things like persistant storage being wiped, or no Internet support.
But yeah, what would be a better HD-DVD player? The Xbox 360? Sorry, doesn't seem to be using the internal hard drive for persistent storage. And, despite those three cores, it's a lot more sluggish than the A1 with its -- what -- 1.7 ghz processor?
Maybe the A3. I guess time will tell. (Although I will say, one of the more annoying A1 design "features" will likely make scripts take up less RAM than on any other player, including, sadly, the A2.)
Those extra gigs could be put towards quailty or quanity. Consumers might care, or they might not.
Well, every HD-DVD player is guaranteed to have a base set of features, including Internet connectivity and persistent storage. So some of those features you'd pack into those extra 20 gigs can simply be downloaded. (Although, I admit, the required space is 128 megs of flash, so you'd need to attach a hard drive.)
But, those extra gigs can always be put on additional discs -- and if two HD-DVD discs are cheaper than one Blu-Ray disc, you've pretty much lost your advantage.
But if you want to point to something that blu-ray has that consumers will care about, it's the Sony catalog. It is huge. And the crown jewel is the entire James Bond collection. Joe Six-pack WILL want to see those on his player.
He's already got them in DVD. And for $99 (well, more now, but it'll come down again), he can get a player that will play those very well -- the A2 has one of the best DVD upscalers around -- so he can keep his old collection, but he'll buy new movies in HD. Or he can start buying HD-DVD "combo format" movies, and watch them on his DVD player until he can find an HD one.
Another angle to consider is that one advantage the studios gave to Blu-Ray was the extra protection (BD+) on top of AACS. That has since been cracked, so the DRM on BluRay is currently no more secure than HD-DVD.
I believe Blu-Ray requires at least AACS, and provides these other layers on top of it. HD-DVD supports a maximum of AACS, but also allows unencrypted discs.
It's interesting -- Blu-Ray is flexible in all the wrong places (essential features like, oh, interactivity at all), and HD-DVD is flexible in all the right places (if your movie fits on a red-laser disc, you save money, and you can pass those savings on to your consumers, but they won't know the difference -- it has all the same features).
Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD "tapes" are cheaper--they are both prohibitive expensive in -R/-RW versions, and movies on both are quite expensive.
Yet, from what I can tell, HD-DVD has the potential of being much cheaper than BR. (I realize this is like saying I have the potential to bone Natalie Portman, just saying.)
Two major factors:
First, licensing. While both are going to use AACS, I would guess that other licenses around HD-DVD would be cheaper. I could be completely wrong about that.
Second, DRM. HD-DVD can come without DRM, and some small studios are doing it. It means fewer features -- for example, no access to the 128 megs of flash memory that's on every player -- but it also saves you a licensing fee. BR not only requires AACS, they allow two additional standards: BD+ and BD-ROM Mark. The latter requires some data stored elsewhere on the disk -- I would guess this increases the cost of manufacturing.
From what I understand, in fact, it's relatively cheap to upgrade a standard DVD facility to support HD-DVD, and I know at least a few discs are coming that are literally two-sided -- one side DVD, one side HD. BR requires completely new equipment.
Also, the fact that HD-DVD has been $99 already suggests that it will win among non-gamers. The player will be cheaper, the discs are likely cheaper to produce (so can become cheaper), and the A2 is a damned good standard DVD player, too -- has a great upscaler, says my boss (who has a massive 1080p TV at home).
Now, the technical parts.
BR is the more flexible spec, it seems. Looking at a matrix between the two, on BR, secondary video and audio decoders (for picture-in-picture and, I guess, an overlayed audio commentary track), and Internet connectivity are all optional. It doesn't mention persistent storage, which is again, supported, but optional.
All of these things are mandatory on HD-DVD. Doesn't mean you need an Internet connection, but it means that every player must have an Ethernet port. Again, BR has more expensive players, but the cheapest ones aren't obligated to support any of these features.
The things that are mandatory on Blu-ray: more restrictions, and a bigger disc, always. By "more restrictions", there's the DRM, and also the region coding. (HD-DVDs are region-free.)
The only clear winner is Sony's bundled PS3, which purposely tagged along a BR drive to create an installed base for BR and drop the price of manufacturing. That means there are lots more BR players, but only because of the PS3:
How many gamers are there, versus non-gamers who will want this? I've heard of stores that have stopped selling SD TVs, and for $99, with a decent upscaler, that A2 is not a bad SD DVD player. So for all the millions of Average Joes out there, who don't play games and don't care about the "format war", this is still a sensible upgrade if they're into DVDs at all.
Neither format delivers anything that couldn't be done with DVDs using H.264.
Yes, they do, you just don't seem to care about it:
Who needs PC-style navigation or 20 hours of "extra features" when you can easily put an HD movie on DVD?
Well, first, the 300 HD-DVD appears to use more than a single layer for the main video alone. That's 15 gigs per layer. So "20 hours" could be made to fit, yes, but realistically, the space isn't entirely unused.
Second, even if you're convinced it is, HD-DVD, at least, supports red-laser discs. That means you can get an HD-DVD movie, with all the trimmings, on a dual-layer DVD disc, if it will fit.
As for the "PC-style navigation", that sounds like someone who hasn't used it. There are more than enough gimmicks to sell this concept, and remember, Joe User doesn't give a fuck about DRM; he didn't give a fuck about DRM when this was about DVD vs VHS and your argument might have been for Video CDs (but with MP
I'll admit that the popularity of a program does influence how secure it appears. There will be more attempts at cracking the dominant OS.
But, with an open source program, the more popular (and "standard") it is, the more attempts will be made at fixing it, also.
And, so far, I've seen nothing to convince me that a piece of software cannot be both ubiquitous and bulletproof.
Let me put it this way...
How many times has Google.com been cracked?
Now, yes, the same arguments could be applied to the iPhone SDK -- but I'd think they'd be applied to iPhones, period, no matter if you're allowed to run third-party apps on them. After all, being popular means someone will find a way to crack the iPhone's Safari and release a worm onto an unsuspecting Windows-based corporate network!!!
And I would have to laugh at any admin who starts banning either gPhone or iPhone. Security is about economics, not paranoia. Otherwise, you may as well unplug everything, including power, just to be safe! (Except, you won't be.)
It's still confirmation bias, no matter how you paint it.
You still have not shown beyond reasonable doubt. It is still possible to reasonably doubt he did it.
Were I a prosecutor, yes, I could make a damned good case that he did it. Were I defense, I'd probably have a harder time -- mostly because I'm not a lawyer. But were I juror, he'd walk.
The only reason I'm in the habit of turning my monitor off at home is that unlike most appliances, its "standby" mode includes a bright, blue, flashing light. The light is on, solid, when the machine is on, but it blinks on and off constantly when it's in standby. I realize the LCD uses almost no power, but it both gives me a visual cue that the thing is still wasting power, and it actually keeps me awake at night (it's in my bedroom).
But, I'd argue that no matter what the reason that people are lazy, or even whether or not they are lazy, this technology is still an improvement. Really, even if you meticulously turn off your monitor every day, why wouldn't you want one of these?
If you could have enough memory bandwidth, might it eventually trump PCI-E? Because with PCI-E, it still has to be copied into RAM on another card. With onboard, not only would it be easier to upgrade (just upgrade your system RAM), but if it was designed properly, the video would just pull the assets from where they already are in application memory.
But maybe it's a stupid question -- I suspect it's kind of like asking "If you could have a fast enough single core, wouldn't green threads be great?"
Efficient copies are the hardest, as POSIX does not -- in fact, I don't know of ANY filesystem API that lets you create a copy-on-write file.
Also, how are you planning to handle branching?
I realize you're talking a light tool, but I'd like light and uncrippled, if possible. Because if you add these things back in, you would basically have everything you need from svn -- or a local one like bzr.
(If you're vigilent enough to use CVS or SVN, by the way, just use bzr for local-only stuff.)
For example: Was Quake a genius program, or a ripoff of Doom?
If by "design part", you mean strictly graphics, you're clearly wrong about Time Machine.
If by "design part", you mean the high-level design of the technical underpinnings -- for instance, the way in which Time Machine watches the filesystem for changes, and makes all revisions available as part of the filesystem at every level (so that only Time Machine can tell it's not actually making a full backup of your entire hard drive once an hour)...
If that's your definition of "design", you mean software design, which is quite a bit different than UI design. When most people say "design", they generally mean that UI part, the fancy graphics and so on.
And if that's your definition, you're still wrong, because the "Linux version" is actually more about the UI, and is actually technically less advanced, even if they had the same interface. So no one "made it for Linux".
I'll be willing to bet that it's not a "hard link" in the strictest sense. You see...
The problem with hardlinks to directories is, you can create loops that way.
If you allow this, you have to use a garbage collector for your filesystem, instead of (or in addition to) a simple reference-counting scheme. Or you can just leak disk space...
A naive garbage collector would basically involve searching the entire tree for orphaned folder hierarchies, and freeing them.
And not allowing this is tricky.
For most cases of needing a hardlinked directory, Linux can simply use symlinks. For cases where symlinks won't work (because some program is actually checking for them), a bind mount will work.
But I don't think either of them cover the intent here, which is to make a copy-on-write image of a directory tree, not a hardlink. After all, if it was a hardlink to the current state of the rest of the FS, and I rename a file in my home directory, it'll be renamed in the most recent backup, too. Maybe it's only between backup revisions?
I don't know about Time Machine, but I have set up BackupPC for work.
Here's what it does that's unique:
Incremental and full backups with rsync. (Too bad it forces you to do "full" every now and then, a waste of bandwidth, but read on...)
Compression and pooling. Every file backed up is first bzip2'd, then hashed, before it's stored. By checking that hash, it will only store each copy of a file once. So, this handles if you have the same file three times in a single backup (ie three separate locations in your home dir), or if you delete a file and then restore it later, either by accident or from somewhere else.
I imagine Time Machine could be like that, though I'm not sure. If it relies on ZFS, it would at least be faster.
To be fair, what BackupPC cannot do is store incremental backups on the same machine efficiently. You can do an rsync backup with hardlinks, and as long as you can be sure that anything overwriting a file will delete it or rename a tempfile on top of it, you can basically have anything that hasn't changed be stored only once.
But, BackupPC and native rsync are both slow with lots of files. It has to be a LOT of files, but the issue is still there. I've actually run out of RAM when trying to backup a BackupPC repository itself with rsync, which is why it now uses drbd instead.
What's really needed -- and what Time Machine _may_ provide, though again, I don't know, without picking up a copy of Leopard -- is support for this kind of thing at the filesystem level. Basically an auto-CVS (or SVN, at least). I'd be happy using a distributed VCS locally -- something like bzr or mercurial, though it'd be nice if it could be as smart as BackupPC about multiple copies of the same file -- but that still means moving (renaming), deleting, creating, etc all have to be done manually (bzr mv, bzr cp, bzr rm, etc). Some FUSE module would be great...
There's still one thing lacking from that -- cp is still inefficient. Would be really nice to have it copy-on-write. But, I guess that's not happening without changing POSIX, which I guess isn't happening.
I find that they aren't even mutually exclusive if you're talking about the same person.
Many geeks working on FOSS are much more interested in how well something works than how easy it is to get started with. This is why, for quite a long time, Linux was hard to install, but ran well while it was up.
This goes for UIs also. As a user, I'm much more interested in how well something works once I know how to use it than how steep the learning curve is. To a point, of course -- I still haven't learned TeX.
So, as a sort of irrelevant example, while the Firefox and Konqueror logos may kind of look like the Explorer or Netscape logos -- all browser logos seem to have a globe in there somehow -- you still are going to be clicking on Firefox, or maybe "Firefox web browser" or "Web browser -- Firefox", and not "Internet Explorer".
Believe it or not, this actually a problem for some people. But there are all kinds of similar problems -- for instance, The Gimp, for awhile, was about five windows. This works fine if you've got a decent window manager and/or a second monitor / virtual desktop system, but for many people coming from Photoshop, it didn't work at all. (There are other things Photoshop has that Gimp lacks, but I think Gimp was actually more usable on multiple monitors until Photoshop gained the ability to pop out windows. But my memory is fuzzy on that.)
Apple seems to do a good job of making it visually discoverable, though -- something only rarely seen in FOSS. For instance, I was using WindowMaker for years before I tried OS X, and the window manager certainly existed before I touched it. So when I saw OS X's Dock, I immediately knew what it was. But here's the thing -- so did everyone else, or at least, enough to use it (sort of) without panicing.
Maybe not as well as they should, of course -- I know far too many Mac users who keep some 20-40 things in their dock, most of them running -- I'm not exaggerating! But OS X knows how to swap, so while it is kind of stupid, it's not critically stupid, like not knowing how to run an app in the first place (could be problematic in WindowMaker).
But try to deny that the only people for whom this poses an attractive solution are the exact people who need more direct family involvement, not less.
My parents both work. My little brother, for awhile, had a WoW addiction, and isn't always trustworthy.
So...
The process ofa parent busting a kid in a lie and then doing something about it is good for the kid, good for the parent, and good for the relationship.
Given that my parents are unable to supervise my brother all day, every day, this seems pretty effective -- he says he wasn't playing it all day at home after he called in sick? Or all night after he pretended to go to bed? Fine, but the computer says otherwise.
I would say that more direct family involvement is not a bad thing, but it's also not mutually exclusive with good use of this technology.
The good thing is that is easy to work with and works really good.
Not for long. As someone else pointed out, it doesn't support ipv6. Therefore, you have to patch it yourself if you want ipv6 support.
This is exactly what killed Minix, and it's a damned shame. If you've got a LOT of time, you may want to follow along with the famous "Linux is Obsolete" thread, in which AST claims Linux is obsolete due to not having a microkernel, and others respond by pointing out that it has all kinds of things users actually care about that Minix doesn't.
You see, Minix was a small, free Unix-like OS for PCs. But, it was maintained and controlled by Andy Tanenbaum (AST), Linus' professor in OS design, who distributed it (with source code) with his book, but with a license that didn't allow you to redistribute it. So, you could redistribute patches, but that was it -- unless your work was blessed by AST and included in the official release, that was it.
So, in order to get a few nice features that Linux had very early on -- a multithreaded filesystem, for instance, or native 386 (32-bit) support -- you had to buy the book, install Minix, install the source code, download the patches, patch it, recompile it, and reinstall it from your newly-compiled version. Or you could just download Linux and go -- the GPL meant that people could fork it if Linus didn't allow their patches, and he generally did, if they were useful.
Price played a big part, too. You could buy an older 8086 or so (maybe a 286?) and the Minix book, or, for the same price, you could buy a 386 and put Linux on it for free.
So, this is exactly what kills things like qmail and djbdns for me. Now, qmail, I could care less about now, as Postfix works fine, and has lots of other features I like. But DNS -- it's frickin' DNS! I don't need Bind, no one does. I like the way djbdns is configured, and how lightweight it is... but I am getting sick of having to manually download, patch, and compile it every fucking time.
When I was on Gentoo, it made sense, as we could just use the ebuild script to do the same thing. But on Ubuntu, sorry, no more. Not unless DJB opens up very, very soon.
He might, you know. AST did, finally -- the Minix license appears to be some BSD variant. It didn't save Minix, though -- this happened in 2000, by which time, most people had abandoned it entirely for Linux and BSD. I'll probably do the same -- Bind is looking like less and less of a pain every time I go through the manual download/unpack/patch/compile/install cycle.
First, it's a blatant rewrite in at least a few places -- while I saw what he was trying to say, maybe, it was worded so horribly wrong that I'd be amazed if it wasn't intentional.
"Google's operating system is open, meaning anyone can write software for it."
Yeah, that's not at all implying that it's about an open platform (vs iPhones locked down one), and not about an open source platform.
But more importantly, he's assuming that cell phone viruses are somehow new with this phone, and that they will somehow cause problems for a corporate network, and that the way to deal with it is anti-virus.
This is wrong on all counts. Cell phone (and mobile) viruses are not new, though they've never been widespread. They generally don't jump to desktop machines -- the corporate network should be safe. And generally, no one's stupid enough to run anti-virus software on Linux, and very few on the Mac -- even on Windows, the usefulness of anti-virus is questionable.
So, your IT guy might freak out -- but really, you've got a much higher risk of getting hit by some road warrior bringing his laptop back into the company network (from Starbucks or whatever).
So that's two for two. Spam him again. Any chance he'll write an update that isn't pure bullshit?
I would be willing to bet that Linux has all of these features too. But I would also be willing to bet that they don't work as seamlessly as OS X.
For "safe sleep", it's not, simply because it's third-party (on Ubuntu). This means you need to know which package it is, and you probably need to follow a howto online -- one which will take you probably five or ten minutes, even if you know nothing about Linux, but it kind of kills any chance for it being that "seamless".
For everything else, it is. On my Kubuntu, I can choose "Log out..." -- maybe not intuitive, except the icon is a big red power button -- and from that menu, I can choose "Hibernate" or "Standby", or just "Log out", "Restart", and "Turn off". (I think it's standby, maybe it's called suspend.)
What's not seamless? Well, my laptop is a fairly unique setup -- I dual-boot Linux and Windows, and I have a shared, encrypted partition between the two, doesn't really work well on either of them, but it's tolerable. I have a custom hibernate script that makes sure it's unmounted first. But, unless you boot off a USB stick so you can encrypt 75% of your hard drive (the other 25% being an XP install, and XP won't boot from encrypted stuff), chances are it'll work pretty well as-is for you.
It could be a LOT better, though. Windows resumes MUCH faster on the same machine -- it appears to be the bootloader loading that image. Linux doesn't start loading the image until it's been booting for about 5 seconds.
Then again, it's doing crypto and compression, and it's not prompting me for a password -- and I can hibernate one OS, and boot the other. I call it a win.
As others have stated before me, its really not the act of changing the grades thats so bad. Its the methods employed in doing so.
I think it's both.
Would you think they deserve such a harsh sentence if, for instance, they had broken into the school's proxy server in order to unblock Myspace? (Fairly unlikely, as they would probably simply set up their own proxy, but something equally innocuous that still requires some amount of admin access.)
Basically, I'm still kind of bitter about Google releasing a standard that, well, doesn't seem much better than Facebook. For it to truly be open, you have to allow users, not just website admins, to choose other services than Google.
I can connect with Gmail people from any email server, because they talk SMTP. I can connect with Google Talk people from any Jabber server. I cannot connect with OpenSocial/Orkut people from any other authentication/profile server than Google's.
OpenID has already solved that problem. It doesn't do all the social networking stuff -- yet -- but it was a start. I don't really care if you throw it out and make up your own standard, so long as you have at least that basic level of functionality.
Well, the case of GW, the point is more true. If you are right about GW, and make a bunch of policy changes, then, humanity is theoretically somehow better off. If, on the other hand, you are wrong, then, you've just ruined a bunch of countries for no other reason than some big con game.
Well, if it's done right, it doesn't necessarily ruin those countries, and can still be a good thing.
For instance, no one is disputing the fact that cheap oil is going away, very soon, and we need an alternative. Making a country less dependent on oil -- particularly foreign oil -- is absolutely a good thing.
(I realize that solar is problematic here, but it's looking like there is no one alternative.)
Yeah, but, if he was trying to hide money from his wife, he could do that to a degree by having a place to live!
Or by having a Swiss Bank account, sure.
But that doesn't fit with having to hide himself from whoever/whatever has done whatever they've done to his wife. And being a lunatic paranoid is not a crime, either.
I don't think I really have to present a complete picture here. I'm just showing you where yours is incomplete. And if no one has a complete picture, what does that tell you?
But you shouldn't have to get tricky in a language to do common things.
Why not?
One of the biggest strengths of Ruby, for instance, is that most of the language is, itself, written in Ruby. Thus, while it does make it easy to do common things, the way in which it makes it easy is at least as tricky as Javascript.
So, one of the biggest strengths of Javascript is that you can do a common thing in an easy way, or a hard way, or a tricky way. And that, once you are doing things the tricky way, it actually isn't that bad to use -- in other words, you can sort of invent the equivalent of Ruby's standard library.
But put this in context -- people are talking about it as if they really don't understand it. For instance: "I don't like Python, but even that would be an improvement over Javascript." I would be comfortable making that statement about Visual Basic, but not Javascript -- maybe Python would be an improvement, but they are dismissing the language without even looking at it.
There are things wrong with every language. If we're willing to have a serious discussion about what's wrong with Javascript, and why we think other languages might be better (or what we should change for ES4), I'm all for that. But I do kind of feel that Douglas Crockford should be required reading before anyone dismisses the language so casually.
Like, what does he need this money for? Let's see, he's not paying his child support, he's not paying alimony, and he's not getting himself a place to live. Sounds to me like he's abandoned all of his responsibilities...
He was also running a company, and yes, those people like to be paid.
and for what? Jeez, I would think the most logical explanation is that he was leaving the country.
Plenty of people abandon their responsibilities and don't leave the country.
So you are saying we could just "mail a check to a russian programmer". seriously, how does he get $9000 in cash to Russia. It doesn't stack up at all.
Why not? Maybe he just likes to keep it in cash?
Or here's a thought: He was going through a bitter divorce. I'm not surprised he had money he didn't want his wife (or her attourneys) to know about. Bastard? Yes. Murderer? No.
Nope. I crafted a model consistent with the facts at hand. Just like, someone examining a bunch of fossils might say, geez, stacked together, this is evolution we are talking about. Or, how someone looking at a bunch of ice cores, might say, geez, the planet is getting warmer.
Global warming has morethan just a bunch of ice cores.
There is considerably less evidence that Reiser committed any crime other than a questionable lifestyle and choice of reading material than there is for either of those two theories. Hell, Evolution has eyewitnesses -- Darwin actually saw it happen on that island. And even so, there was still a reasonable doubt of the mechanism of natural selection at that time, so we had to gather more evidence before it became a (mostly) undisputed fact.
And these are for scientific theories, where having the wrong theory for the origin of the universe means, worst case, you're ignorant. Here, if I'm wrong, a murdering bastard goes free. If you're wrong, an innocent man dies.
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Could you point me to a better player, maybe?
I develop for HD-DVD. We have an A1, an A2, and an Xbox 360. The only better player we've been able to test on is a software player. "Better" means it can theoretically use your hard drive for additional storage. "Theoretically" means it doesn't seem to, and every single software player has huge, application-breaking bugs. These aren't the kind of bugs you can code around -- these are things like persistant storage being wiped, or no Internet support.
But yeah, what would be a better HD-DVD player? The Xbox 360? Sorry, doesn't seem to be using the internal hard drive for persistent storage. And, despite those three cores, it's a lot more sluggish than the A1 with its -- what -- 1.7 ghz processor?
Maybe the A3. I guess time will tell. (Although I will say, one of the more annoying A1 design "features" will likely make scripts take up less RAM than on any other player, including, sadly, the A2.)
Well, every HD-DVD player is guaranteed to have a base set of features, including Internet connectivity and persistent storage. So some of those features you'd pack into those extra 20 gigs can simply be downloaded. (Although, I admit, the required space is 128 megs of flash, so you'd need to attach a hard drive.)
But, those extra gigs can always be put on additional discs -- and if two HD-DVD discs are cheaper than one Blu-Ray disc, you've pretty much lost your advantage.
He's already got them in DVD. And for $99 (well, more now, but it'll come down again), he can get a player that will play those very well -- the A2 has one of the best DVD upscalers around -- so he can keep his old collection, but he'll buy new movies in HD. Or he can start buying HD-DVD "combo format" movies, and watch them on his DVD player until he can find an HD one.
I believe Blu-Ray requires at least AACS, and provides these other layers on top of it. HD-DVD supports a maximum of AACS, but also allows unencrypted discs.
It's interesting -- Blu-Ray is flexible in all the wrong places (essential features like, oh, interactivity at all), and HD-DVD is flexible in all the right places (if your movie fits on a red-laser disc, you save money, and you can pass those savings on to your consumers, but they won't know the difference -- it has all the same features).
Yet, from what I can tell, HD-DVD has the potential of being much cheaper than BR. (I realize this is like saying I have the potential to bone Natalie Portman, just saying.)
Two major factors:
First, licensing. While both are going to use AACS, I would guess that other licenses around HD-DVD would be cheaper. I could be completely wrong about that.
Second, DRM. HD-DVD can come without DRM, and some small studios are doing it. It means fewer features -- for example, no access to the 128 megs of flash memory that's on every player -- but it also saves you a licensing fee. BR not only requires AACS, they allow two additional standards: BD+ and BD-ROM Mark. The latter requires some data stored elsewhere on the disk -- I would guess this increases the cost of manufacturing.
From what I understand, in fact, it's relatively cheap to upgrade a standard DVD facility to support HD-DVD, and I know at least a few discs are coming that are literally two-sided -- one side DVD, one side HD. BR requires completely new equipment.
Also, the fact that HD-DVD has been $99 already suggests that it will win among non-gamers. The player will be cheaper, the discs are likely cheaper to produce (so can become cheaper), and the A2 is a damned good standard DVD player, too -- has a great upscaler, says my boss (who has a massive 1080p TV at home).
Now, the technical parts.
BR is the more flexible spec, it seems. Looking at a matrix between the two, on BR, secondary video and audio decoders (for picture-in-picture and, I guess, an overlayed audio commentary track), and Internet connectivity are all optional. It doesn't mention persistent storage, which is again, supported, but optional.
All of these things are mandatory on HD-DVD. Doesn't mean you need an Internet connection, but it means that every player must have an Ethernet port. Again, BR has more expensive players, but the cheapest ones aren't obligated to support any of these features.
The things that are mandatory on Blu-ray: more restrictions, and a bigger disc, always. By "more restrictions", there's the DRM, and also the region coding. (HD-DVDs are region-free.)
How many gamers are there, versus non-gamers who will want this? I've heard of stores that have stopped selling SD TVs, and for $99, with a decent upscaler, that A2 is not a bad SD DVD player. So for all the millions of Average Joes out there, who don't play games and don't care about the "format war", this is still a sensible upgrade if they're into DVDs at all.
Yes, they do, you just don't seem to care about it:
Well, first, the 300 HD-DVD appears to use more than a single layer for the main video alone. That's 15 gigs per layer. So "20 hours" could be made to fit, yes, but realistically, the space isn't entirely unused.
Second, even if you're convinced it is, HD-DVD, at least, supports red-laser discs. That means you can get an HD-DVD movie, with all the trimmings, on a dual-layer DVD disc, if it will fit.
As for the "PC-style navigation", that sounds like someone who hasn't used it. There are more than enough gimmicks to sell this concept, and remember, Joe User doesn't give a fuck about DRM; he didn't give a fuck about DRM when this was about DVD vs VHS and your argument might have been for Video CDs (but with MP
Only when I get the distinct impression that everyone's forgotten. Consider what I was replying to:
Easily sounded like someone in need of a history lesson.
So what's your excuse?
I'll admit that the popularity of a program does influence how secure it appears. There will be more attempts at cracking the dominant OS.
But, with an open source program, the more popular (and "standard") it is, the more attempts will be made at fixing it, also.
And, so far, I've seen nothing to convince me that a piece of software cannot be both ubiquitous and bulletproof.
Let me put it this way...
How many times has Google.com been cracked?
Now, yes, the same arguments could be applied to the iPhone SDK -- but I'd think they'd be applied to iPhones, period, no matter if you're allowed to run third-party apps on them. After all, being popular means someone will find a way to crack the iPhone's Safari and release a worm onto an unsuspecting Windows-based corporate network!!!
And I would have to laugh at any admin who starts banning either gPhone or iPhone. Security is about economics, not paranoia. Otherwise, you may as well unplug everything, including power, just to be safe! (Except, you won't be.)
It's still confirmation bias, no matter how you paint it.
You still have not shown beyond reasonable doubt. It is still possible to reasonably doubt he did it.
Were I a prosecutor, yes, I could make a damned good case that he did it. Were I defense, I'd probably have a harder time -- mostly because I'm not a lawyer. But were I juror, he'd walk.
The only reason I'm in the habit of turning my monitor off at home is that unlike most appliances, its "standby" mode includes a bright, blue, flashing light. The light is on, solid, when the machine is on, but it blinks on and off constantly when it's in standby. I realize the LCD uses almost no power, but it both gives me a visual cue that the thing is still wasting power, and it actually keeps me awake at night (it's in my bedroom).
But, I'd argue that no matter what the reason that people are lazy, or even whether or not they are lazy, this technology is still an improvement. Really, even if you meticulously turn off your monitor every day, why wouldn't you want one of these?
If you could have enough memory bandwidth, might it eventually trump PCI-E? Because with PCI-E, it still has to be copied into RAM on another card. With onboard, not only would it be easier to upgrade (just upgrade your system RAM), but if it was designed properly, the video would just pull the assets from where they already are in application memory.
But maybe it's a stupid question -- I suspect it's kind of like asking "If you could have a fast enough single core, wouldn't green threads be great?"
Efficient copies are the hardest, as POSIX does not -- in fact, I don't know of ANY filesystem API that lets you create a copy-on-write file.
Also, how are you planning to handle branching?
I realize you're talking a light tool, but I'd like light and uncrippled, if possible. Because if you add these things back in, you would basically have everything you need from svn -- or a local one like bzr.
(If you're vigilent enough to use CVS or SVN, by the way, just use bzr for local-only stuff.)
For example: Was Quake a genius program, or a ripoff of Doom?
If by "design part", you mean strictly graphics, you're clearly wrong about Time Machine.
If by "design part", you mean the high-level design of the technical underpinnings -- for instance, the way in which Time Machine watches the filesystem for changes, and makes all revisions available as part of the filesystem at every level (so that only Time Machine can tell it's not actually making a full backup of your entire hard drive once an hour)...
If that's your definition of "design", you mean software design, which is quite a bit different than UI design. When most people say "design", they generally mean that UI part, the fancy graphics and so on.
And if that's your definition, you're still wrong, because the "Linux version" is actually more about the UI, and is actually technically less advanced, even if they had the same interface. So no one "made it for Linux".
I'll be willing to bet that it's not a "hard link" in the strictest sense. You see...
The problem with hardlinks to directories is, you can create loops that way.
If you allow this, you have to use a garbage collector for your filesystem, instead of (or in addition to) a simple reference-counting scheme. Or you can just leak disk space...
A naive garbage collector would basically involve searching the entire tree for orphaned folder hierarchies, and freeing them.
And not allowing this is tricky.
For most cases of needing a hardlinked directory, Linux can simply use symlinks. For cases where symlinks won't work (because some program is actually checking for them), a bind mount will work.
But I don't think either of them cover the intent here, which is to make a copy-on-write image of a directory tree, not a hardlink. After all, if it was a hardlink to the current state of the rest of the FS, and I rename a file in my home directory, it'll be renamed in the most recent backup, too. Maybe it's only between backup revisions?
I don't know about Time Machine, but I have set up BackupPC for work.
Here's what it does that's unique:
Incremental and full backups with rsync. (Too bad it forces you to do "full" every now and then, a waste of bandwidth, but read on...)
Compression and pooling. Every file backed up is first bzip2'd, then hashed, before it's stored. By checking that hash, it will only store each copy of a file once. So, this handles if you have the same file three times in a single backup (ie three separate locations in your home dir), or if you delete a file and then restore it later, either by accident or from somewhere else.
I imagine Time Machine could be like that, though I'm not sure. If it relies on ZFS, it would at least be faster.
To be fair, what BackupPC cannot do is store incremental backups on the same machine efficiently. You can do an rsync backup with hardlinks, and as long as you can be sure that anything overwriting a file will delete it or rename a tempfile on top of it, you can basically have anything that hasn't changed be stored only once.
But, BackupPC and native rsync are both slow with lots of files. It has to be a LOT of files, but the issue is still there. I've actually run out of RAM when trying to backup a BackupPC repository itself with rsync, which is why it now uses drbd instead.
What's really needed -- and what Time Machine _may_ provide, though again, I don't know, without picking up a copy of Leopard -- is support for this kind of thing at the filesystem level. Basically an auto-CVS (or SVN, at least). I'd be happy using a distributed VCS locally -- something like bzr or mercurial, though it'd be nice if it could be as smart as BackupPC about multiple copies of the same file -- but that still means moving (renaming), deleting, creating, etc all have to be done manually (bzr mv, bzr cp, bzr rm, etc). Some FUSE module would be great...
There's still one thing lacking from that -- cp is still inefficient. Would be really nice to have it copy-on-write. But, I guess that's not happening without changing POSIX, which I guess isn't happening.
I find that they aren't even mutually exclusive if you're talking about the same person.
Many geeks working on FOSS are much more interested in how well something works than how easy it is to get started with. This is why, for quite a long time, Linux was hard to install, but ran well while it was up.
This goes for UIs also. As a user, I'm much more interested in how well something works once I know how to use it than how steep the learning curve is. To a point, of course -- I still haven't learned TeX.
So, as a sort of irrelevant example, while the Firefox and Konqueror logos may kind of look like the Explorer or Netscape logos -- all browser logos seem to have a globe in there somehow -- you still are going to be clicking on Firefox, or maybe "Firefox web browser" or "Web browser -- Firefox", and not "Internet Explorer".
Believe it or not, this actually a problem for some people. But there are all kinds of similar problems -- for instance, The Gimp, for awhile, was about five windows. This works fine if you've got a decent window manager and/or a second monitor / virtual desktop system, but for many people coming from Photoshop, it didn't work at all. (There are other things Photoshop has that Gimp lacks, but I think Gimp was actually more usable on multiple monitors until Photoshop gained the ability to pop out windows. But my memory is fuzzy on that.)
Apple seems to do a good job of making it visually discoverable, though -- something only rarely seen in FOSS. For instance, I was using WindowMaker for years before I tried OS X, and the window manager certainly existed before I touched it. So when I saw OS X's Dock, I immediately knew what it was. But here's the thing -- so did everyone else, or at least, enough to use it (sort of) without panicing.
Maybe not as well as they should, of course -- I know far too many Mac users who keep some 20-40 things in their dock, most of them running -- I'm not exaggerating! But OS X knows how to swap, so while it is kind of stupid, it's not critically stupid, like not knowing how to run an app in the first place (could be problematic in WindowMaker).
My parents both work. My little brother, for awhile, had a WoW addiction, and isn't always trustworthy.
So...
The process ofa parent busting a kid in a lie and then doing something about it is good for the kid, good for the parent, and good for the relationship.Given that my parents are unable to supervise my brother all day, every day, this seems pretty effective -- he says he wasn't playing it all day at home after he called in sick? Or all night after he pretended to go to bed? Fine, but the computer says otherwise.
I would say that more direct family involvement is not a bad thing, but it's also not mutually exclusive with good use of this technology.
Not for long. As someone else pointed out, it doesn't support ipv6. Therefore, you have to patch it yourself if you want ipv6 support.
This is exactly what killed Minix, and it's a damned shame. If you've got a LOT of time, you may want to follow along with the famous "Linux is Obsolete" thread, in which AST claims Linux is obsolete due to not having a microkernel, and others respond by pointing out that it has all kinds of things users actually care about that Minix doesn't.
You see, Minix was a small, free Unix-like OS for PCs. But, it was maintained and controlled by Andy Tanenbaum (AST), Linus' professor in OS design, who distributed it (with source code) with his book, but with a license that didn't allow you to redistribute it. So, you could redistribute patches, but that was it -- unless your work was blessed by AST and included in the official release, that was it.
So, in order to get a few nice features that Linux had very early on -- a multithreaded filesystem, for instance, or native 386 (32-bit) support -- you had to buy the book, install Minix, install the source code, download the patches, patch it, recompile it, and reinstall it from your newly-compiled version. Or you could just download Linux and go -- the GPL meant that people could fork it if Linus didn't allow their patches, and he generally did, if they were useful.
Price played a big part, too. You could buy an older 8086 or so (maybe a 286?) and the Minix book, or, for the same price, you could buy a 386 and put Linux on it for free.
So, this is exactly what kills things like qmail and djbdns for me. Now, qmail, I could care less about now, as Postfix works fine, and has lots of other features I like. But DNS -- it's frickin' DNS! I don't need Bind, no one does. I like the way djbdns is configured, and how lightweight it is... but I am getting sick of having to manually download, patch, and compile it every fucking time.
When I was on Gentoo, it made sense, as we could just use the ebuild script to do the same thing. But on Ubuntu, sorry, no more. Not unless DJB opens up very, very soon.
He might, you know. AST did, finally -- the Minix license appears to be some BSD variant. It didn't save Minix, though -- this happened in 2000, by which time, most people had abandoned it entirely for Linux and BSD. I'll probably do the same -- Bind is looking like less and less of a pain every time I go through the manual download/unpack/patch/compile/install cycle.
First, it's a blatant rewrite in at least a few places -- while I saw what he was trying to say, maybe, it was worded so horribly wrong that I'd be amazed if it wasn't intentional.
"Google's operating system is open, meaning anyone can write software for it."
Yeah, that's not at all implying that it's about an open platform (vs iPhones locked down one), and not about an open source platform.
But more importantly, he's assuming that cell phone viruses are somehow new with this phone, and that they will somehow cause problems for a corporate network, and that the way to deal with it is anti-virus.
This is wrong on all counts. Cell phone (and mobile) viruses are not new, though they've never been widespread. They generally don't jump to desktop machines -- the corporate network should be safe. And generally, no one's stupid enough to run anti-virus software on Linux, and very few on the Mac -- even on Windows, the usefulness of anti-virus is questionable.
So, your IT guy might freak out -- but really, you've got a much higher risk of getting hit by some road warrior bringing his laptop back into the company network (from Starbucks or whatever).
So that's two for two. Spam him again. Any chance he'll write an update that isn't pure bullshit?
For "safe sleep", it's not, simply because it's third-party (on Ubuntu). This means you need to know which package it is, and you probably need to follow a howto online -- one which will take you probably five or ten minutes, even if you know nothing about Linux, but it kind of kills any chance for it being that "seamless".
For everything else, it is. On my Kubuntu, I can choose "Log out..." -- maybe not intuitive, except the icon is a big red power button -- and from that menu, I can choose "Hibernate" or "Standby", or just "Log out", "Restart", and "Turn off". (I think it's standby, maybe it's called suspend.)
What's not seamless? Well, my laptop is a fairly unique setup -- I dual-boot Linux and Windows, and I have a shared, encrypted partition between the two, doesn't really work well on either of them, but it's tolerable. I have a custom hibernate script that makes sure it's unmounted first. But, unless you boot off a USB stick so you can encrypt 75% of your hard drive (the other 25% being an XP install, and XP won't boot from encrypted stuff), chances are it'll work pretty well as-is for you.
It could be a LOT better, though. Windows resumes MUCH faster on the same machine -- it appears to be the bootloader loading that image. Linux doesn't start loading the image until it's been booting for about 5 seconds.
Then again, it's doing crypto and compression, and it's not prompting me for a password -- and I can hibernate one OS, and boot the other. I call it a win.
I think it's both.
Would you think they deserve such a harsh sentence if, for instance, they had broken into the school's proxy server in order to unblock Myspace? (Fairly unlikely, as they would probably simply set up their own proxy, but something equally innocuous that still requires some amount of admin access.)
This has been common on all OSes for awhile now -- not sure how it maps to Apple's "command" vs "control" buttons, but here:
ctrl+drag: copy
shift+drag: move
right-click+drag: pop-up menu with a choice between the two, or maybe more
(On OS X, it's been awhile, but I'll guess that command+drag is copy, and ctrl+drag is pop-up.)
Similarly:
select, press 'del' key: (usually) prompt for move to trash
select, shift+del: delete immediately, or prompt to delete -- permanent, no trash
I'll link to my other comment on this issue.
Basically, I'm still kind of bitter about Google releasing a standard that, well, doesn't seem much better than Facebook. For it to truly be open, you have to allow users, not just website admins, to choose other services than Google.
I can connect with Gmail people from any email server, because they talk SMTP. I can connect with Google Talk people from any Jabber server. I cannot connect with OpenSocial/Orkut people from any other authentication/profile server than Google's.
OpenID has already solved that problem. It doesn't do all the social networking stuff -- yet -- but it was a start. I don't really care if you throw it out and make up your own standard, so long as you have at least that basic level of functionality.
Well, if it's done right, it doesn't necessarily ruin those countries, and can still be a good thing.
For instance, no one is disputing the fact that cheap oil is going away, very soon, and we need an alternative. Making a country less dependent on oil -- particularly foreign oil -- is absolutely a good thing.
(I realize that solar is problematic here, but it's looking like there is no one alternative.)
Or by having a Swiss Bank account, sure.
But that doesn't fit with having to hide himself from whoever/whatever has done whatever they've done to his wife. And being a lunatic paranoid is not a crime, either.
I don't think I really have to present a complete picture here. I'm just showing you where yours is incomplete. And if no one has a complete picture, what does that tell you?
Why not?
One of the biggest strengths of Ruby, for instance, is that most of the language is, itself, written in Ruby. Thus, while it does make it easy to do common things, the way in which it makes it easy is at least as tricky as Javascript.
So, one of the biggest strengths of Javascript is that you can do a common thing in an easy way, or a hard way, or a tricky way. And that, once you are doing things the tricky way, it actually isn't that bad to use -- in other words, you can sort of invent the equivalent of Ruby's standard library.
But put this in context -- people are talking about it as if they really don't understand it. For instance: "I don't like Python, but even that would be an improvement over Javascript." I would be comfortable making that statement about Visual Basic, but not Javascript -- maybe Python would be an improvement, but they are dismissing the language without even looking at it.
There are things wrong with every language. If we're willing to have a serious discussion about what's wrong with Javascript, and why we think other languages might be better (or what we should change for ES4), I'm all for that. But I do kind of feel that Douglas Crockford should be required reading before anyone dismisses the language so casually.
He was also running a company, and yes, those people like to be paid.
Plenty of people abandon their responsibilities and don't leave the country.
Why not? Maybe he just likes to keep it in cash?
Or here's a thought: He was going through a bitter divorce. I'm not surprised he had money he didn't want his wife (or her attourneys) to know about. Bastard? Yes. Murderer? No.
Evolution has more evidence than just a bunch of fossils, and a bunch of fossils have been completely wrong.
Global warming has more than just a bunch of ice cores.
There is considerably less evidence that Reiser committed any crime other than a questionable lifestyle and choice of reading material than there is for either of those two theories. Hell, Evolution has eyewitnesses -- Darwin actually saw it happen on that island. And even so, there was still a reasonable doubt of the mechanism of natural selection at that time, so we had to gather more evidence before it became a (mostly) undisputed fact.
And these are for scientific theories, where having the wrong theory for the origin of the universe means, worst case, you're ignorant. Here, if I'm wrong, a murdering bastard goes free. If you're wrong, an innocent man dies.