Ah yes, but look at how Amazon places this. Go to Amazon.co.uk and search for a DVD. Just below the 'buy' button is an 'add to rental' button (and also below the picture and basic info is a huge 'rent this dvd' banner). They are going to get a hell of a lot of people which only watch 4-6 DVDs a month and for cheaper than one dvd they could rent 6 for a month. To most, that seems like a great deal, especially when you can keep each DVD for 15 days (on the 3 at a time, 6/month plan).
Their turnaround is also very, very good and their selection is unmatched. Compare this with the likes of Lovefilm and screenselect which are really suffering lately - 5 days+ to turn around 2 DVDs - at that point you are wondering why you are paying for an 'unlimited' service at all.
As you can see, the cheapest version of RedHat is $179, but that only includes patches for one year. After that, it's another $49/year IIRC.
This is where the cost argument of Linux falls down somewhat. You basically have the 'wobbly' support of the community (FedoraUpdates for example) who provide a superb service but you couldn't run a critical business on it, simply because it is run by volunteers and you don't know if they'll have the resources or admin in the next 1, 2 or 5 years time.
Then you have Ubuntu which looks extremely promising - 18 months of guaranteed updates, but that pales in comparision to Microsoft's 10 and RedHat's 5.
I will be using Ubuntu for all my new installs now simply because it's a superb distro and I know that the maintainers of it care about having things just work, and don't expect me to jump through big hoops to upgrade it.
But really, Microsoft is the best deal when it comes to pricing for long-term. 10 years of upgrades for as little as $50 (if you got your license bundled with a Dell or similar) is a superb deal for client licensing.
However, for Linux I think Ubuntu or Novell/SUSE is a superb option. RedHat really do look insanely expensive.
Because OASIS is one specification which might be completely and utterly incompatible with the way Office lays things out, and would require a significant investment to change to it?
Also, I am sure there will be some features missing in the OASIS spec, and that means Microsoft has to go and lobby with OASIS to get it implemented...
all this so that other competitors can read/write its file formats much easier? Don't think so.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
He admitted that inside the ZIP they are currently storing the binary copy to make it easier to test and profile against the formats, but when Office 12 is released it'll just be the one XML, completely open format. He also made a point that they are going to have 'thousands' of examples on MSDN, along with very detailed documentation and whitepapers.
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
I have no idea how strong the encyption is on the AAC files; but if it's around the 1024bit mark with a good method then you are looking at thousands of years to decrypt with _all_ of the computers currently in the world (lots of teraflops).
Hymn is a nice idea but it requires a working decoder already installed, something that we won't have the liberty on in 30 years time.
You input them all, and let the statistics do their magic.
Just like your email spam filter can handle you pressing junk on stuff that isn't junk, or not junk on stuff that is, it's just all numbers and there is an inherent tolerance for small errors that will be created with this sort of system.
Look, if you are a fisherman god save you if you are basing your fishing job off a TV weather show. Radio 4 LW has special broadcasts just for this, or they can go on the numerous websites with very detailed graphics and information, all designed just for fishing.
I have many friends who live in the North of England and they are not 'offended' and to be honest I don't blame them for putting the SE at the front of it. It's the most populous region of the country, the most economically important and also where the triangle of power is kept. I can still see the weather perfectly fine (and in a lot more detail than the previous maps) and anyways, I can use the internet to get much better weather reports.
Yes - but it's the same anywhere. Do you honestly think that in 30 years time there will be decoders capable of decrypting 2003-era Apple DRM'ed AAC? Highly doubtful.
I spend about $50-60/month on CDs currently. I have spent about that for a good few years now. I'm not bothered about paying a recuring payment for the rest of my life, which is 1/10th of what I currently pay and access to nearly infinitely more music. Apple doesn't bring anything new really to the world of music, apart from having the first mega-popular MP3 player and managing to use all the computing power and bandwidth to... sell music in the exact same way it has been sold before.
From what I've read of the Yahoo music store, it keeps a good account of you. So, if, for example, your hard disk dies, it just takes one click for you to log back in and redownload all your music and have it categorised in the exact same way as it was before.
I would of agreed that paying $15/month or more for music rental is too much, but $5/month is an incredibly good deal, and I know for a fact all the Apple zealots on this site would absolutely lap it up if Jobs had announced it.
Why do I think 'M$' and Sony are using PPC? Simple, because IBM is the only ones that are allowing rental of their design instead requiring that they fab it for them. MS and Sony will produce their own chips, cutting out a lot of the middleman and instead just pay IBM for design royalites which are likely to be consideribly less than having IBM do it for them.
I agree that I don't think Steve will allow clones, but he doesn't have to on Intel - he can still say in the EULA for OSX that you must install on a Mac, and boom, there goes the oppertunity of Dell or HP selling systems with OSX on it. Sure, enthusiasts will continue to install it and break the EULA but they weren't likely to buy a Mac in the first place.
Because 90% of people watching are going to be from the south, and thus it's a better use of the screen space to show a more detailed forecast on the more populated south?
Remember: only 5million of the 60million people in the UK live in Scotland, and that number falls every year by about 100,000...
What I mean is that 'legacy', emulated, Carbon apps would run slower than 'legacy', emulated Cocoa apps because Carbon (by design) has many more functions compiled 'inside' the application, vs Cocoa which 'outsources' the majority of the functions to Cocoa objects on the system which are going to run very fast because they are not going to be emulated, even if the actual application itself is being emulated.
I love the fact that you threw China in there; nearly all of the iPods are made in China now, and all the big iBook/Mac Mini manufacturing contracts are going to Chinese companies.
Ironically, Dell is one of the only companies which doesn't outsource its desktop hardware assembly to China/Taiwan. They are all produced in the US.
Just because they are 'making good products and have a large stash of cash' doesn't mean that they are in a good position. The iPod could easily stop selling; take for example an exceedingly well produced and marketed 'Yahoo' music player which interfaced with Yahoo Music Unlimited. Say $199 for the player which had a 20GB HDD and $4.99/month for the unlimited music subscription and millions would 'switch' over -- I think the fact that the iPod isn't supported by the Yahoo Music store is the main roadblock in the way for Yahoo.
Who would bother paying $.99/song to Apple when you could go Yahoo and get the entire 1 million songs for $4.99/month? I usually purchase 50 'songs' (5 CDs) a month, that'd save me $45/month vs iTunes.
What? All expose is is an OpenGL transform, done on the video card. Why on earth would you want to use Altivec for that?
I think you are confusing it with Core Image, which supposedly recompiles to Altivec if there is no pixel shader support on the video card. I haven't seen anything use this yet though, and from the Core Image 'funhouse' that's installed when you install XCode 2 on Tiger I can tell you the difference between Core Image on a pixel shader supported GPU and an Altivec CPU (with no pixel shader GPU) is a huge scale, something like 100-500x faster on the GPU vs the CPU.
I don't really agree with most of what you are saying; Microsoft has really tightened up their security lately and it's nearly a non-issue on Windows Server 2003 (probably the only decent server product MS has ever made).
However, I do agree with your point about Apple being a 'sole supplier'. This is very important for people to understand. With Apple being the sole supplier for both hardware and software, they can never really be as efficent as two seperate companies working flat out on improving their efficiency and cost control -- look at the x86 hardware market, Dell, HP and IBM are competitng like crazy. It is impossible to suggest that similar gains in efficency would be effected inside one, huge corp.
I think that it could be time for Apple to switch to x86 once and for all. We are seeing the performance gap grow and grow between PPC chips and x86, especially with this weeks launch of the dual-core Pentium D.
If Apple were to switch to Intel they could recompile the entire OS: kernel, device drivers, windowing stack and 'core' applications and emulate the rest of the legacy PPC apps. This would be slow, but no where near as bad as most people make out - in Cocoa the vast majority of the time is spent executing the various libraries, which Apple would of recompiled to x86. Carbon would probably be a bit slow.
Apple would also have to roll out XCode 3 which could produce PPC/x86 binaries. Give it a year or two and the vast majority of the apps people will be running will be entirely x86 native and only a small proportion of them emulated. We must also not forget that the x86-64 architecture is a lot more PPC like than plain ol' x86 and it has many more registers which would aid PPC emulation.
The results of this for Apple would be great -- 2 companies competiting for their processors, access to all the latest-and-greatest x86 motherboard features (SLI) not to mention huge cost savings.
Altivec doesn't enable anything like expose; I'm on an iBook G3 currently and when I press F9 I get this effect that is... oh, wait, expose! (Hint: The G3 doesn't have Altivec).
Of course you are confusing Altivec, a very boring-and-not-very-important vector instruction set with Quartz and Quartz Extreme, something that is much more cool, but hey, who cares -- why let facts get in the way?!
I agree on games. Don't bother with Macs if you like to play games -- but then again, the Xbox 360/PS3 with a proper DVI/HDMI output + keyboard/mouse support would be enough for me to drop my gaming PC -- the Mac just doesn't have the number or the quality of games that you get on the PC. The ports to the Mac are usually very poor quality and are often very obviously unfinished (such as age of mythology with its 'Please go to the Windows control panel...' in it's settings window).
But, as for your second issue there is VLC, which is a very good video player. Plays everything I've thrown at it - DiVX, XViD, WMV, OGM, MKV, and probably a few more.
Finally your last issue is easily solved. You can turn on the 'tabbing' round the OS option in System Preferences --> Keyboard & Mouse --> Keyboard shortcuts.
You can also launch applications very easily on Tiger with Spotlight - control+space to bring spotlight up, type what you want and press enter. Or you could use something like LaunchBar which is designed to launch applications very quickly.
I'm a bit confused how it's going to work over WiFi. WiFi is half-duplex, high latency (10-100x vs Ethernet) and very bandwidth-lacking.
Clustered computing has a major downfall, and that's bandwidth between the nodes. 2GBit/sec, full duplex fibre gets saturated very easily on current clusters.
I'm a bit confused how a 802.11g (~20mbit/sec) is going to be enough to do anything reasonable, especially considering most tasks people want to do with the devices you gave all require very serial access. Take HDTV decoding; it's very real time and doesn't scale well on a SMP enviroment.
Even 802.11n (100-600Mbit/sec) isn't really going to be enough - video games can easily saturate a 16Gbit/sec AGP bus with textures and rendering operations, so scaling down isn't possible without some crazy automatic program recompilation.
I'd guess another 500 flights/year could come because of this. This is going to mean a huge infrastructure will spring up because of this.
That is going to mean it's going to be much easier to build more spacecraft, the cost of launching per tonne will go down, meaning things like helium extraction from the moon could become viable, along with space-based power collection (set up a solar panel fab in space and get the needed raw materials from space).
Considering the 'official' ed2k client connects to both 'classic' ed2k servers and overnet he's not badly wrong.
The difference between BitTorrent and ed2k is quite simple: ed2k has a concept of 'shared folders', BitTorrent doesn't. This means that on ed2k you are sharing your upload between 20-2500 files, on BitTorrent you are just sharing it between how many torrents you have open.
Also, the software is far more portable and it's open source also. This means it's got a much bigger 'brainshare' with *nix admins who often have 100mbit/sec lines that they can use for sharing from -- compared to the ed2k which has (or at least did when I used it a few years ago) mainly German T-DSL users, which used to be 128kbit. No wonder the speeds sucked so much.
a) Only works on Windows, b) Makes you install the entire installer again instead of a 'diff'-style patch, c) The installer is nearly 5MB, which means it's too big for most to download on 56k or GPRS
Another problem with the 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 updates is that they all required 'staggering' based on language becuase MozFo doesn't have the sort of server infrastructure to serve millions of downloads at once.
I agree on principle but I'm not sure that it's the case in reality.
On XP SP2 it does quite a good job at keeping all the spyware and popups out (quite suprisingly good actually). Nevertheless people still get flooded with ads because they download.exes and double click them - this happens on both firefox and IE.
I disagree with your second comment. IE uses COM to attach itself to the OS. Mozilla uses XPCOM to do.. the exact same thing. Just because IE can look like windows explorer when you type C:\Program Files doesn't mean it is.
No 'jail' is going to be bulletproof. Look at the amount of problems people have with chroot, you'll find one process that has to both be run at 'root' level and also user accessible. SELinux has gone some way to solve this but it's going to be some way before it's 100% fixed.
I do think some people are slightly niave at how good MS is under competition. They have some incredibly talented developers at MSFT and very good rewards packages aswell as providing an excellent working atmopshere for their developers.
Synaptic and apt-get are just different interfaces to the same thing. Infact syanptic really just passes commands to apt-get for you.
What I did was searched for nvidia and right clicked on them, selected 'reinstall this package' and it seemed to work just fine. YMMV, though.
dpkg is a way of installing individual.deb files you download from the internet or from a CD. It's basically like MSI on Windows. It usually doesn't work very well though because of dependencies that can't get resolved, if you don't get a.deb specifically for your distribution.
I think apt-get uses dpkg to install it's package files. So basically dpkg is the 'core' and apt-get just makes it a lot lot easier to install right first time.
What happened when your wolf broke is that you installed a new kernel which requries a new nvidia driver, compiled specifically for that kernel. Basically Ubuntu will handle this and all you have to do is type the two commands that install the NVidia binary again and it'll set it up again for you.
It would be nice if Ubuntu handled this automatically when upgrading kernels, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, but look at how Amazon places this. Go to Amazon.co.uk and search for a DVD. Just below the 'buy' button is an 'add to rental' button (and also below the picture and basic info is a huge 'rent this dvd' banner). They are going to get a hell of a lot of people which only watch 4-6 DVDs a month and for cheaper than one dvd they could rent 6 for a month. To most, that seems like a great deal, especially when you can keep each DVD for 15 days (on the 3 at a time, 6/month plan).
Their turnaround is also very, very good and their selection is unmatched. Compare this with the likes of Lovefilm and screenselect which are really suffering lately - 5 days+ to turn around 2 DVDs - at that point you are wondering why you are paying for an 'unlimited' service at all.
But this doesn't explain why the marketshare on major websites and even web development sites is so poor: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp - 2.9% vs Linux's 3.3%.
This trend is echoed everywhere online.
I find it hard to believe that only approx 10% of the installed base of Macs are online...
Not true.
t /
Free RedHat doesn't exist anymore.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/clien
As you can see, the cheapest version of RedHat is $179, but that only includes patches for one year. After that, it's another $49/year IIRC.
This is where the cost argument of Linux falls down somewhat. You basically have the 'wobbly' support of the community (FedoraUpdates for example) who provide a superb service but you couldn't run a critical business on it, simply because it is run by volunteers and you don't know if they'll have the resources or admin in the next 1, 2 or 5 years time.
Then you have Ubuntu which looks extremely promising - 18 months of guaranteed updates, but that pales in comparision to Microsoft's 10 and RedHat's 5.
I will be using Ubuntu for all my new installs now simply because it's a superb distro and I know that the maintainers of it care about having things just work, and don't expect me to jump through big hoops to upgrade it.
But really, Microsoft is the best deal when it comes to pricing for long-term. 10 years of upgrades for as little as $50 (if you got your license bundled with a Dell or similar) is a superb deal for client licensing.
However, for Linux I think Ubuntu or Novell/SUSE is a superb option. RedHat really do look insanely expensive.
Because OASIS is one specification which might be completely and utterly incompatible with the way Office lays things out, and would require a significant investment to change to it?
Also, I am sure there will be some features missing in the OASIS spec, and that means Microsoft has to go and lobby with OASIS to get it implemented...
all this so that other competitors can read/write its file formats much easier? Don't think so.
Depends.
If you are using the styling tools in MS Word/Excel/whatever, and applying a 'headline' style to all of the headlines, then it'll do the second.
However if you don't bother and just use the font pulldowns and size pulldown menus it will do the first.
So really, it all depends on how you set it up.
No they won't.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
He admitted that inside the ZIP they are currently storing the binary copy to make it easier to test and profile against the formats, but when Office 12 is released it'll just be the one XML, completely open format. He also made a point that they are going to have 'thousands' of examples on MSDN, along with very detailed documentation and whitepapers.
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
I have no idea how strong the encyption is on the AAC files; but if it's around the 1024bit mark with a good method then you are looking at thousands of years to decrypt with _all_ of the computers currently in the world (lots of teraflops).
Hymn is a nice idea but it requires a working decoder already installed, something that we won't have the liberty on in 30 years time.
You input them all, and let the statistics do their magic.
Just like your email spam filter can handle you pressing junk on stuff that isn't junk, or not junk on stuff that is, it's just all numbers and there is an inherent tolerance for small errors that will be created with this sort of system.
I'm not making that statistic up:
Scotland
Population: 5.1 Million
England
Population: 50 Million
Look, if you are a fisherman god save you if you are basing your fishing job off a TV weather show. Radio 4 LW has special broadcasts just for this, or they can go on the numerous websites with very detailed graphics and information, all designed just for fishing.
I have many friends who live in the North of England and they are not 'offended' and to be honest I don't blame them for putting the SE at the front of it. It's the most populous region of the country, the most economically important and also where the triangle of power is kept. I can still see the weather perfectly fine (and in a lot more detail than the previous maps) and anyways, I can use the internet to get much better weather reports.
Yes - but it's the same anywhere. Do you honestly think that in 30 years time there will be decoders capable of decrypting 2003-era Apple DRM'ed AAC? Highly doubtful.
I spend about $50-60/month on CDs currently. I have spent about that for a good few years now. I'm not bothered about paying a recuring payment for the rest of my life, which is 1/10th of what I currently pay and access to nearly infinitely more music. Apple doesn't bring anything new really to the world of music, apart from having the first mega-popular MP3 player and managing to use all the computing power and bandwidth to... sell music in the exact same way it has been sold before.
From what I've read of the Yahoo music store, it keeps a good account of you. So, if, for example, your hard disk dies, it just takes one click for you to log back in and redownload all your music and have it categorised in the exact same way as it was before.
I would of agreed that paying $15/month or more for music rental is too much, but $5/month is an incredibly good deal, and I know for a fact all the Apple zealots on this site would absolutely lap it up if Jobs had announced it.
Why do I think 'M$' and Sony are using PPC? Simple, because IBM is the only ones that are allowing rental of their design instead requiring that they fab it for them. MS and Sony will produce their own chips, cutting out a lot of the middleman and instead just pay IBM for design royalites which are likely to be consideribly less than having IBM do it for them.
I agree that I don't think Steve will allow clones, but he doesn't have to on Intel - he can still say in the EULA for OSX that you must install on a Mac, and boom, there goes the oppertunity of Dell or HP selling systems with OSX on it. Sure, enthusiasts will continue to install it and break the EULA but they weren't likely to buy a Mac in the first place.
Because 90% of people watching are going to be from the south, and thus it's a better use of the screen space to show a more detailed forecast on the more populated south?
Remember: only 5million of the 60million people in the UK live in Scotland, and that number falls every year by about 100,000...
What I mean is that 'legacy', emulated, Carbon apps would run slower than 'legacy', emulated Cocoa apps because Carbon (by design) has many more functions compiled 'inside' the application, vs Cocoa which 'outsources' the majority of the functions to Cocoa objects on the system which are going to run very fast because they are not going to be emulated, even if the actual application itself is being emulated.
I love the fact that you threw China in there; nearly all of the iPods are made in China now, and all the big iBook/Mac Mini manufacturing contracts are going to Chinese companies.
Ironically, Dell is one of the only companies which doesn't outsource its desktop hardware assembly to China/Taiwan. They are all produced in the US.
Just because they are 'making good products and have a large stash of cash' doesn't mean that they are in a good position. The iPod could easily stop selling; take for example an exceedingly well produced and marketed 'Yahoo' music player which interfaced with Yahoo Music Unlimited. Say $199 for the player which had a 20GB HDD and $4.99/month for the unlimited music subscription and millions would 'switch' over -- I think the fact that the iPod isn't supported by the Yahoo Music store is the main roadblock in the way for Yahoo.
Who would bother paying $.99/song to Apple when you could go Yahoo and get the entire 1 million songs for $4.99/month? I usually purchase 50 'songs' (5 CDs) a month, that'd save me $45/month vs iTunes.
What? All expose is is an OpenGL transform, done on the video card. Why on earth would you want to use Altivec for that?
I think you are confusing it with Core Image, which supposedly recompiles to Altivec if there is no pixel shader support on the video card. I haven't seen anything use this yet though, and from the Core Image 'funhouse' that's installed when you install XCode 2 on Tiger I can tell you the difference between Core Image on a pixel shader supported GPU and an Altivec CPU (with no pixel shader GPU) is a huge scale, something like 100-500x faster on the GPU vs the CPU.
I don't really agree with most of what you are saying; Microsoft has really tightened up their security lately and it's nearly a non-issue on Windows Server 2003 (probably the only decent server product MS has ever made).
However, I do agree with your point about Apple being a 'sole supplier'. This is very important for people to understand. With Apple being the sole supplier for both hardware and software, they can never really be as efficent as two seperate companies working flat out on improving their efficiency and cost control -- look at the x86 hardware market, Dell, HP and IBM are competitng like crazy. It is impossible to suggest that similar gains in efficency would be effected inside one, huge corp.
I think that it could be time for Apple to switch to x86 once and for all. We are seeing the performance gap grow and grow between PPC chips and x86, especially with this weeks launch of the dual-core Pentium D.
If Apple were to switch to Intel they could recompile the entire OS: kernel, device drivers, windowing stack and 'core' applications and emulate the rest of the legacy PPC apps. This would be slow, but no where near as bad as most people make out - in Cocoa the vast majority of the time is spent executing the various libraries, which Apple would of recompiled to x86. Carbon would probably be a bit slow.
Apple would also have to roll out XCode 3 which could produce PPC/x86 binaries. Give it a year or two and the vast majority of the apps people will be running will be entirely x86 native and only a small proportion of them emulated. We must also not forget that the x86-64 architecture is a lot more PPC like than plain ol' x86 and it has many more registers which would aid PPC emulation.
The results of this for Apple would be great -- 2 companies competiting for their processors, access to all the latest-and-greatest x86 motherboard features (SLI) not to mention huge cost savings.
Altivec doesn't enable anything like expose; I'm on an iBook G3 currently and when I press F9 I get this effect that is... oh, wait, expose! (Hint: The G3 doesn't have Altivec).
Of course you are confusing Altivec, a very boring-and-not-very-important vector instruction set with Quartz and Quartz Extreme, something that is much more cool, but hey, who cares -- why let facts get in the way?!
I agree on games. Don't bother with Macs if you like to play games -- but then again, the Xbox 360/PS3 with a proper DVI/HDMI output + keyboard/mouse support would be enough for me to drop my gaming PC -- the Mac just doesn't have the number or the quality of games that you get on the PC. The ports to the Mac are usually very poor quality and are often very obviously unfinished (such as age of mythology with its 'Please go to the Windows control panel...' in it's settings window).
But, as for your second issue there is VLC, which is a very good video player. Plays everything I've thrown at it - DiVX, XViD, WMV, OGM, MKV, and probably a few more.
Finally your last issue is easily solved. You can turn on the 'tabbing' round the OS option in System Preferences --> Keyboard & Mouse --> Keyboard shortcuts.
You can also launch applications very easily on Tiger with Spotlight - control+space to bring spotlight up, type what you want and press enter. Or you could use something like LaunchBar which is designed to launch applications very quickly.
I'm a bit confused how it's going to work over WiFi. WiFi is half-duplex, high latency (10-100x vs Ethernet) and very bandwidth-lacking.
Clustered computing has a major downfall, and that's bandwidth between the nodes. 2GBit/sec, full duplex fibre gets saturated very easily on current clusters.
I'm a bit confused how a 802.11g (~20mbit/sec) is going to be enough to do anything reasonable, especially considering most tasks people want to do with the devices you gave all require very serial access. Take HDTV decoding; it's very real time and doesn't scale well on a SMP enviroment.
Even 802.11n (100-600Mbit/sec) isn't really going to be enough - video games can easily saturate a 16Gbit/sec AGP bus with textures and rendering operations, so scaling down isn't possible without some crazy automatic program recompilation.
This is a huge boon for spaceflight.
I'd guess another 500 flights/year could come because of this. This is going to mean a huge infrastructure will spring up because of this.
That is going to mean it's going to be much easier to build more spacecraft, the cost of launching per tonne will go down, meaning things like helium extraction from the moon could become viable, along with space-based power collection (set up a solar panel fab in space and get the needed raw materials from space).
Considering the 'official' ed2k client connects to both 'classic' ed2k servers and overnet he's not badly wrong.
The difference between BitTorrent and ed2k is quite simple: ed2k has a concept of 'shared folders', BitTorrent doesn't. This means that on ed2k you are sharing your upload between 20-2500 files, on BitTorrent you are just sharing it between how many torrents you have open.
Also, the software is far more portable and it's open source also. This means it's got a much bigger 'brainshare' with *nix admins who often have 100mbit/sec lines that they can use for sharing from -- compared to the ed2k which has (or at least did when I used it a few years ago) mainly German T-DSL users, which used to be 128kbit. No wonder the speeds sucked so much.
The problem is that it:
a) Only works on Windows,
b) Makes you install the entire installer again instead of a 'diff'-style patch,
c) The installer is nearly 5MB, which means it's too big for most to download on 56k or GPRS
Another problem with the 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 updates is that they all required 'staggering' based on language becuase MozFo doesn't have the sort of server infrastructure to serve millions of downloads at once.
I agree on principle but I'm not sure that it's the case in reality.
.exes and double click them - this happens on both firefox and IE.
On XP SP2 it does quite a good job at keeping all the spyware and popups out (quite suprisingly good actually). Nevertheless people still get flooded with ads because they download
I disagree with your second comment. IE uses COM to attach itself to the OS. Mozilla uses XPCOM to do.. the exact same thing. Just because IE can look like windows explorer when you type C:\Program Files doesn't mean it is.
No 'jail' is going to be bulletproof. Look at the amount of problems people have with chroot, you'll find one process that has to both be run at 'root' level and also user accessible. SELinux has gone some way to solve this but it's going to be some way before it's 100% fixed.
I do think some people are slightly niave at how good MS is under competition. They have some incredibly talented developers at MSFT and very good rewards packages aswell as providing an excellent working atmopshere for their developers.
3 bilion?
Various sources seems to suggest this is the much more accurate figure:
1,298,847,624 (July 2004 est.)
Yea, I agree on the Windows tutorial.
.deb files you download from the internet or from a CD. It's basically like MSI on Windows. It usually doesn't work very well though because of dependencies that can't get resolved, if you don't get a .deb specifically for your distribution.
Synaptic and apt-get are just different interfaces to the same thing. Infact syanptic really just passes commands to apt-get for you.
What I did was searched for nvidia and right clicked on them, selected 'reinstall this package' and it seemed to work just fine. YMMV, though.
dpkg is a way of installing individual
I think apt-get uses dpkg to install it's package files. So basically dpkg is the 'core' and apt-get just makes it a lot lot easier to install right first time.
What happened when your wolf broke is that you installed a new kernel which requries a new nvidia driver, compiled specifically for that kernel. Basically Ubuntu will handle this and all you have to do is type the two commands that install the NVidia binary again and it'll set it up again for you.
It would be nice if Ubuntu handled this automatically when upgrading kernels, though.