I don't see why they would drop PPC support yet. Certainly, stripping PPC code from an Intel Mac doesn't make much difference to the disc space use. Mostly, stripping out unused languages makes much more difference. I gained 2.5GB of space on my MacBook Pro by doing so and I now have universal binaries that are very similar in size to those seen in Snow.
They still have to maintain a port of Mac OS X just in case, and the also have to keep OS X running on the iPhone (Strong ARM) so I don't see the benefit of focussing just on Intel CPUs. In addition, keeping code running on PPC will help with keeping bugs down as it is often the case that just the act of compiling C code for a different architecture can result in unseen bugs showing up. As for performance tuning, rarely do you need to worry about much more than some small parts of the code to fine tune for a specific platform.
I'm not surprised that this developer preview is Intel only but I will be surprised to see the final release be Intel only. Leopard on PPC could no doubt do with some fine tuning although it does run surprisingly well on my nearly five year old G4 iBook. Besides which, the last of the PPC machines were being sold by Apple as late as the end of 2006 (PowerMac G5s) so I think it would be a bad move for them to drop support this early.
Not free but I've recommended and used Kerio Mailserver at two sites that had either had Exchange in the past or considered it. Support for Outlook clients is pretty good, the web interface is nice and quick and it works with Thunderbird, Apple Mail and other standard clients. CalDAV calendar support is there now so I can sync iCal with the server and it also supports Mail for Exchange on Symbian which gives me push e-mail, tasks, contacts and calendar.
All in all it works as advertised and as far as the Windows users are concerned it works with Outlook so they are happy while the price per seat is much better than Exchange. The server software runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Not affiliated but a happy customer.
Must be my age having started out on the Commodore Pet back in the 70's. I always use white on a black background. Then again, I mostly use VI for programming too. I just find the expanse of white with black text to be quite wearing IMHO.
I have a simple rule that I hold above all others. Always tell the truth. Religion claims to be the truth but won't back it up beyond saying you have to believe without proof.
If religion (any religion out of the thousands that exist or have existed) is a lie then it breaks rule number one and breaking that rule cancels out any other benefit it might have. Use all the long words and persuasive arguments you like but unless you can prove what you say is the truth you are pushing a lie. True or false, which is it?
I don't know about all this fun stuff. I use Linux because it does the job I need it to. More to the point though, when something goes wrong it is pretty simple to track it down and fix it. Heck, I have repaired systems that have become seriously mangled where with Windows you wouldn't have much choice but to start over.
I switched to Linux from UNIX (Irix at that time) and did so because that is the environment I need for my work. These days I use OS X for much the same reason. Whatever MS does to Windows, it is still a very closed system. If closed floats your boat, fine, but don't try and say that closed gets you a more reliable and cost effective system.
Vertinox said "Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts."
I think the difference today is home cinema/theater is much more practical. Back when I got into this I had found I was buying various movies in widescreen on VHS (1990 or so) because it was great to see the whole picture. However, VHS just couldn't hold enough detail to allow for widescreen presentation, especially when I got a 16:9 TV in 1992. (OK, so I'm a classic early adopter.) Anyway, at about this time multistandard LaserDisc players were becoming available so the pathetic PAL LD library could be supplemented by the 10,000+ titles available on LD from the US. Picture quality of LD was vastly better than VHS. The basic luma resolution was 400+ lines compared with barely 240 lines for VHS but it was the chroma where LD really shined. Compared to a VHS tape where colour was muddy, a LD looked rich and crisp. This meant that LD was a viable format for widescreen and projection. Also, many films were available in widescreen with extras etc on LD so for movie enthusiasts the LD was it. LD pretty much launched home cinema as a mainstream possibility. Sure, there were collectors with 16 and 35mm projection systems at home and boy did I envy them but it wasn't practical, LD was.
I lived with a standard CRT widescreen set until the mid 90's and built up a decent collection of movies and kept looking at projection. The big Barco CRT projectors were horrendously expensive and needed expensive video processors to improve the quality of standard definition material enough that you wouldn't see the scanlines. Fortunately at this time, DLP appeared and I was able to buy a projector that lacked scanlines although it didn't have the same black level capability but it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Around that time DVD was released. Resolution was slightly better than LD but the real killer was that the discs were much smaller and cheaper so it was natural to buy a player. Side by side there wasn't enough of a difference to warrant replacing all my LDs with DVDs and I have continued to use the LD player.
Then along came HD. Finally, the combination of digital projection, surround sound and high definition discs resulted in the ability to perfectly replicate the cinema experience at a budget. Sure, most people think the discs and players are the expensive part but when you think that fifteen years ago a good home cinema set up was going to cost you well north of $100,000 and today you can far outstrip that with an HD DVD or BD player and a DLP projector you can see that things have really improved. Heck, you can get better quality that most cinemas for under $2000 these days. HD DLP projectors are under $1000, HD DVD player, nice amp and speakers, easily under a grand and awesome quality. Get a BD player later and you're set to avoid the sticky carpets and overpriced drinks of the local cinema.
I don't consider LD a failure, it was part of the evolution. Certainly I can't equate LD with HD DVD or BD since LD as a format survived for over 20 years and had a vast catalogue.
MS abuses its monopoly, that is the problem. OOXML is just another example of them trying to force everyone to do things their way and if that means breaking a few rules so be it. If the ISO actually controlled OOXML then they would be able to fix some of the more hideous problems with OOXML but MS has publicly stated that they will retain control of the 'standard'. Basically, they just want OOXML to be an ISO standard so they can say it is an ISO standard but in reality it will be an MS standard, controlled by MS and won't even document the shipping version used by Office. Bribing the members of ISO to vote for OOXML is what has got them in hot water but to them the risk that OOXML isn't a standard is far worse than anything the EU might do to them so it is worth it.
Most robust machine I have ever owned apart from the ancient Toshiba with a P75 CPU is my iBook. I've lugged it around the world (to NZ twice now from the UK) and it has held up very nicely. Would hope the current MacBook would survive to the same degree as the materials are similar. Polycarb case gets scratched but otherwise very tough, keyboard takes a pounding and overall it has done me proud now for over four years. Compare that to less than a year for any of the PC laptops I bought before their cases had chunks missing, keys falling off and backlight, battery and power supply failure.
Sure, you could buy a toughbook or something for big money but for a regular off-the-shelf laptop, the MacBook should do you fine. Get a decent semi-hard case for it and slap it in your backpack.
Patio11 said "Like it or not, you live in the House That Bill Built."
Actually, if you took MS out of the equation I doubt things would be any different today except that some other platform would be the most popular. Also, you assume that back in the late 80's there were no cheap solutions that could do what people needed (document preparation for example) and again you are wrong. The Amstrad WPCs were a good example of a cheap piece of hardware with integrated software aimed at the business desktop. They didn't run any form of DOS but they did have a decent word processing environment, came with a dot matrix or daisy wheel printer and you could also program them to do other stuff. Those were so much cheaper than PCs it just isn't funny. Hardware manufacturers made the PC cheap, not MS. Without Windows there would have been GEM for instance which was much better than Windows at the time. CP/M existed as a business environment. Notice I haven't even mentioned the Mac.
What the PC did was allow lots of different manufacturers to build IBM compatible computers that could run the same software as the genuine article (some better than others) and MS as the software platform owner did very nicely out of it. Bill and Co built nothing. They got lucky and were in the right place at the right time on a hardware platform when people wanted to standardise. They have exploited that to control the market ever since and that includes killing many great technologies until they were ready to produce something of worse quality years later. Standardisation would have happened without them as it was time for it to happen and other attempts had already been made. I'm sure we would have been much further along if we hadn't had such an abusive company in control of the market.
The Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and so on were all capable of many of the things that Windows is only recently capable of and yet they were all products of the 1980s. MS has done nothing to advance the state of computing. The resources that are wasted on trying to deal with their proprietary crap would have been better spent elsewhere. Even today with OOXML we are still fighting them while they dig their heels in to slow progress until they are good and ready.
20 years and counting Bill. 20 years. I weep for the state of computing under MS's jackboot.
"Not true. Since July 2007, if you produce biofuels in quantities of less than 2500 litres per year, there is no tax to pay. 2500 litres is over 550 imperial gallons, therefore if your vehicle can get an average of 40 mpg, you can drive 22000 miles per year tax free !"
That is great news! I left the UK and moved to NZ in May 07 so I hadn't heard about it. Of course, I still stand by my judgement that if these fuels become popular the government will replace its current fuel tax with some other form of tax. Road tolls sound likely to me. Just like income tax, what the government gives with one hand, they will take with the other.
Don't expect the price of any petrol replacement to be any less than petrol if widely deployed.
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory. Of course, the government just becomes dependent on the taxes and so will want a big cut of any other fuel source. Certainly, in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it. The justification is that the tax is used to maintain the roads although that is supposed to be what the road tax is for. Anyway, it is currently cheaper to use vegetable oil and pay the tax than to use fossil diesel but if it gets more popular to use such biofuels the price differential will go away. Sure, they will be largely carbon neutral but the government will still want the same amount of income from fuel sales, they're addicted. I think the US drivers will have to get used to similar things. Accept it, whether the fuel is from fossil or modern sources, the price is going to remain high. You'll never see $1 per gallon again.
I used to commute daily between Edinburgh and Newcastle which is roughly 100 miles each way. I would walk for half an hour to get to the train station, then spend an hour and a half on the train. Fortunately, my office was pretty much right next to the station in Newcastle. Each morning I would copy the various TV shows I liked off my TiVo onto my laptop and watch them on either journey. I travelled first class too which was fairly expensive (£800 per month) but I did get free tea and biccies plus use of the first class lounge if the train was delayed. This all worked out very nicely and was so much better than driving which would have taken me the same amount of time but been nothing like as relaxing as well as meaning I would have to use 3 hours of my free time at home to watch those shows I liked or just not watch them. Public transport in this day and age can be a very viable way to commute.
All the UNIX skills I developed over the last 20 years are still useful. So glad I haven't bothered to spend any time on the MS treadmill. Heck, all the software I wrote over the last 20 years can still be compiled and runs happily on a modern machine that is hundreds of times faster than the SPARCstation 1 I used to run on.
Do you think the PHBs will ever learn that using proprietary systems like Windows may seem cheaper in the short term but in the long run you open your wallet and let them take take take?
I'll doubtless get modded to hell for this but what the hey.
Have any of you ever heard an analogue master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard a very high quality vinyl pressing of said master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard high quality CD 24 bit mastered from the same master tape on said high end audio gear? I have.
Just so people understand this, I'll take this slowly.
The CD sounded great. Very crisp and clear. However, it sounded like a recording. The vinyl produced something of the ambience which was missing from the CD. This is probably down to distortions in the analogue playback system but those distortions did manage to produce a more lifelike sound than the CD did. However, neither was a patch on the master tape. The CD sounded harsh and thin, lacking the dynamics and clarity of the master tape. The LP was closer but still didn't sound real. With the master tape you would swear that you were there. Awesome.
On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is an MP3 and 10 is the master tape, the LP was about a 6, maybe a 7. The CD was a 4 at best and that was an audiophile CD, not the compressed to death crap that most CDs are. It is conceivable that SACD or DVD-A can get closer, maybe even all the way to a 10 but there is bugger all available on either format.
Don't quote Nyquist and human ears this and that at me until you have been exposed to the best analogue tape can offer.
Billosaur said "When you start treating your customers as criminals, you have slipped over the edge and down the slippery slope toward oblivion."
Someone should tell Microsoft that. Yesterday, my XP Pro machine informed me that my genuine OEM installed copy was using a VLK that has been blocked leaving me with limited update capabilities and a nice banner that says my machine is running pirated software. Later in the day it changed its mind and now says the license key was never even generated by MS at all. All this and I have a genuine CD with the hologram and the sticker assuring me that it is OEM Software with the little genuine hologram text strip. Today, the machine is still complaining that the software is pirated.
"btw Mazda is American. and even if not would you expect Germany to not use a Porsche/Beemer?"
I am aware that Mazda is American owned. I actually drive a Mazda 6 wagon and I love the build quality and reliability. I used to drive nothing but Fords but they were horribly built and nasty to drive. Not the case with the Mazda. So, yes, American owned but it doesn't feel like a Ford although it is as cheap to run as a Ford.
As for a German KITT, it would be seriously cool and Porsche and BMW both have a heritage of quality sports cars. It makes sense for the country that makes the show to use a car from their own manufacturers but the Mustang.....?
Clearly a fantasy story because anyone really wanting to design a powerful fast car and put a supercomputer with AI in wouldn't be using a Mustang. Heck, I would go with something like the Mazda RX8. It at least looks sporty and in some ways quite similar to the original KITT. Of course, it isn't American so I'll no doubt get modded down by y'all.....
"OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad? Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards."
Because PDF works and can be implemented?
There are many implementations of PDF including commercial and open source ones. They can interoperate with high fidelity. OOXML isn't even implemented according to the specs in MS Office 2007 and there are no other reliable implementations.
"I think the ghosting might be from the game, i have a really old psp and that never happens, but I have never played GTA. I was always impressed by the screen."
The ghosting happens on all material, games, movies, you name it. Dark objects moving over light backgrounds make it very obvious. The screen can look nice but this really does annoy the heck out of me and spoils an otherwise attractive video device.
"I don't know what you consider to be cheap for memory, but 4GB memory sticks are currently around 30-40 bucks. The slim version is supposed to speed up load times."
4GB doesn't really result in much of an improvement compared with the 80GB Video iPod I use most of the time. The screen on the iPod is smaller but better (no trails, brighter) and the capacity means I can just choose to watch something on a whim rather than having to plan to have the material available on the PSP. Convenience wins every time. I wouldn't even consider an iPod Touch because the capacity is too small.
"if it were higher resolution, you id be complaining about diminished battery life."
Nope. The resolution is fine. It just has these horrid trails which annoy me. Take an area of light colour, have something dark move across it, nasty trails. The slim reportedly has the same problem. Does it in games and movies. I prefer my Video iPod even though the screen is smaller because it is a better screen. Oh, and the 80GB capacity means I have loads of material to watch whereas with the PSP I have to decide what I want to watch in advance.
I got a PSP as soon as they appeared largely to play the GTA games which I had enjoyed so much on the PS2. I have both games and I haven't finished either of them. The screen is poor because it has very slow response so you get trails all over the place. The controls are cramped and mean I can't use the thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Memory capacity is low and expensive to add and still limited so as a movie player it isn't very good either because you have to compress the movies too much and the dreadful screen doesn't help. The speakers are rotten so you really have to use headphones too and the time it takes to load a game seems like forever.
So, to summarise, poor controls, poor screen and poor performance. Making it thinner isn't going to change things much.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why they would drop PPC support yet. Certainly, stripping PPC code from an Intel Mac doesn't make much difference to the disc space use. Mostly, stripping out unused languages makes much more difference. I gained 2.5GB of space on my MacBook Pro by doing so and I now have universal binaries that are very similar in size to those seen in Snow.
They still have to maintain a port of Mac OS X just in case, and the also have to keep OS X running on the iPhone (Strong ARM) so I don't see the benefit of focussing just on Intel CPUs. In addition, keeping code running on PPC will help with keeping bugs down as it is often the case that just the act of compiling C code for a different architecture can result in unseen bugs showing up. As for performance tuning, rarely do you need to worry about much more than some small parts of the code to fine tune for a specific platform.
I'm not surprised that this developer preview is Intel only but I will be surprised to see the final release be Intel only. Leopard on PPC could no doubt do with some fine tuning although it does run surprisingly well on my nearly five year old G4 iBook. Besides which, the last of the PPC machines were being sold by Apple as late as the end of 2006 (PowerMac G5s) so I think it would be a bad move for them to drop support this early.
Not free but I've recommended and used Kerio Mailserver at two sites that had either had Exchange in the past or considered it. Support for Outlook clients is pretty good, the web interface is nice and quick and it works with Thunderbird, Apple Mail and other standard clients. CalDAV calendar support is there now so I can sync iCal with the server and it also supports Mail for Exchange on Symbian which gives me push e-mail, tasks, contacts and calendar.
All in all it works as advertised and as far as the Windows users are concerned it works with Outlook so they are happy while the price per seat is much better than Exchange. The server software runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Not affiliated but a happy customer.
Must be my age having started out on the Commodore Pet back in the 70's. I always use white on a black background. Then again, I mostly use VI for programming too. I just find the expanse of white with black text to be quite wearing IMHO.
I have a simple rule that I hold above all others. Always tell the truth. Religion claims to be the truth but won't back it up beyond saying you have to believe without proof.
If religion (any religion out of the thousands that exist or have existed) is a lie then it breaks rule number one and breaking that rule cancels out any other benefit it might have. Use all the long words and persuasive arguments you like but unless you can prove what you say is the truth you are pushing a lie. True or false, which is it?
I don't know about all this fun stuff. I use Linux because it does the job I need it to. More to the point though, when something goes wrong it is pretty simple to track it down and fix it. Heck, I have repaired systems that have become seriously mangled where with Windows you wouldn't have much choice but to start over.
;-)
I switched to Linux from UNIX (Irix at that time) and did so because that is the environment I need for my work. These days I use OS X for much the same reason. Whatever MS does to Windows, it is still a very closed system. If closed floats your boat, fine, but don't try and say that closed gets you a more reliable and cost effective system.
Actually, UNIX is fun I guess
Vertinox said "Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts."
I think the difference today is home cinema/theater is much more practical. Back when I got into this I had found I was buying various movies in widescreen on VHS (1990 or so) because it was great to see the whole picture. However, VHS just couldn't hold enough detail to allow for widescreen presentation, especially when I got a 16:9 TV in 1992. (OK, so I'm a classic early adopter.) Anyway, at about this time multistandard LaserDisc players were becoming available so the pathetic PAL LD library could be supplemented by the 10,000+ titles available on LD from the US. Picture quality of LD was vastly better than VHS. The basic luma resolution was 400+ lines compared with barely 240 lines for VHS but it was the chroma where LD really shined. Compared to a VHS tape where colour was muddy, a LD looked rich and crisp. This meant that LD was a viable format for widescreen and projection. Also, many films were available in widescreen with extras etc on LD so for movie enthusiasts the LD was it. LD pretty much launched home cinema as a mainstream possibility. Sure, there were collectors with 16 and 35mm projection systems at home and boy did I envy them but it wasn't practical, LD was.
I lived with a standard CRT widescreen set until the mid 90's and built up a decent collection of movies and kept looking at projection. The big Barco CRT projectors were horrendously expensive and needed expensive video processors to improve the quality of standard definition material enough that you wouldn't see the scanlines. Fortunately at this time, DLP appeared and I was able to buy a projector that lacked scanlines although it didn't have the same black level capability but it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Around that time DVD was released. Resolution was slightly better than LD but the real killer was that the discs were much smaller and cheaper so it was natural to buy a player. Side by side there wasn't enough of a difference to warrant replacing all my LDs with DVDs and I have continued to use the LD player.
Then along came HD. Finally, the combination of digital projection, surround sound and high definition discs resulted in the ability to perfectly replicate the cinema experience at a budget. Sure, most people think the discs and players are the expensive part but when you think that fifteen years ago a good home cinema set up was going to cost you well north of $100,000 and today you can far outstrip that with an HD DVD or BD player and a DLP projector you can see that things have really improved. Heck, you can get better quality that most cinemas for under $2000 these days. HD DLP projectors are under $1000, HD DVD player, nice amp and speakers, easily under a grand and awesome quality. Get a BD player later and you're set to avoid the sticky carpets and overpriced drinks of the local cinema.
I don't consider LD a failure, it was part of the evolution. Certainly I can't equate LD with HD DVD or BD since LD as a format survived for over 20 years and had a vast catalogue.
"At least my copy of Windows XP is legal."
So is mine but WGA doesn't think so.
MS abuses its monopoly, that is the problem. OOXML is just another example of them trying to force everyone to do things their way and if that means breaking a few rules so be it. If the ISO actually controlled OOXML then they would be able to fix some of the more hideous problems with OOXML but MS has publicly stated that they will retain control of the 'standard'. Basically, they just want OOXML to be an ISO standard so they can say it is an ISO standard but in reality it will be an MS standard, controlled by MS and won't even document the shipping version used by Office. Bribing the members of ISO to vote for OOXML is what has got them in hot water but to them the risk that OOXML isn't a standard is far worse than anything the EU might do to them so it is worth it.
Most robust machine I have ever owned apart from the ancient Toshiba with a P75 CPU is my iBook. I've lugged it around the world (to NZ twice now from the UK) and it has held up very nicely. Would hope the current MacBook would survive to the same degree as the materials are similar. Polycarb case gets scratched but otherwise very tough, keyboard takes a pounding and overall it has done me proud now for over four years. Compare that to less than a year for any of the PC laptops I bought before their cases had chunks missing, keys falling off and backlight, battery and power supply failure.
Sure, you could buy a toughbook or something for big money but for a regular off-the-shelf laptop, the MacBook should do you fine. Get a decent semi-hard case for it and slap it in your backpack.
The Harrier Jump Jet has been pretty successful. Only now, 40 years on, are there viable replacements on the horizon.
:-(
On the whole though, I agree. Brits are great at coming up with stuff and then having others make a fortune off them
Patio11 said "Like it or not, you live in the House That Bill Built."
Actually, if you took MS out of the equation I doubt things would be any different today except that some other platform would be the most popular. Also, you assume that back in the late 80's there were no cheap solutions that could do what people needed (document preparation for example) and again you are wrong. The Amstrad WPCs were a good example of a cheap piece of hardware with integrated software aimed at the business desktop. They didn't run any form of DOS but they did have a decent word processing environment, came with a dot matrix or daisy wheel printer and you could also program them to do other stuff. Those were so much cheaper than PCs it just isn't funny. Hardware manufacturers made the PC cheap, not MS. Without Windows there would have been GEM for instance which was much better than Windows at the time. CP/M existed as a business environment. Notice I haven't even mentioned the Mac.
What the PC did was allow lots of different manufacturers to build IBM compatible computers that could run the same software as the genuine article (some better than others) and MS as the software platform owner did very nicely out of it. Bill and Co built nothing. They got lucky and were in the right place at the right time on a hardware platform when people wanted to standardise. They have exploited that to control the market ever since and that includes killing many great technologies until they were ready to produce something of worse quality years later. Standardisation would have happened without them as it was time for it to happen and other attempts had already been made. I'm sure we would have been much further along if we hadn't had such an abusive company in control of the market.
The Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and so on were all capable of many of the things that Windows is only recently capable of and yet they were all products of the 1980s. MS has done nothing to advance the state of computing. The resources that are wasted on trying to deal with their proprietary crap would have been better spent elsewhere. Even today with OOXML we are still fighting them while they dig their heels in to slow progress until they are good and ready.
20 years and counting Bill. 20 years. I weep for the state of computing under MS's jackboot.
smoker2 said
"Not true. Since July 2007, if you produce biofuels in quantities of less than 2500 litres per year, there is no tax to pay. 2500 litres is over 550 imperial gallons, therefore if your vehicle can get an average of 40 mpg, you can drive 22000 miles per year tax free !"
That is great news! I left the UK and moved to NZ in May 07 so I hadn't heard about it. Of course, I still stand by my judgement that if these fuels become popular the government will replace its current fuel tax with some other form of tax. Road tolls sound likely to me. Just like income tax, what the government gives with one hand, they will take with the other.
Don't expect the price of any petrol replacement to be any less than petrol if widely deployed.
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory. Of course, the government just becomes dependent on the taxes and so will want a big cut of any other fuel source. Certainly, in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it. The justification is that the tax is used to maintain the roads although that is supposed to be what the road tax is for. Anyway, it is currently cheaper to use vegetable oil and pay the tax than to use fossil diesel but if it gets more popular to use such biofuels the price differential will go away. Sure, they will be largely carbon neutral but the government will still want the same amount of income from fuel sales, they're addicted. I think the US drivers will have to get used to similar things. Accept it, whether the fuel is from fossil or modern sources, the price is going to remain high. You'll never see $1 per gallon again.
I used to commute daily between Edinburgh and Newcastle which is roughly 100 miles each way. I would walk for half an hour to get to the train station, then spend an hour and a half on the train. Fortunately, my office was pretty much right next to the station in Newcastle. Each morning I would copy the various TV shows I liked off my TiVo onto my laptop and watch them on either journey. I travelled first class too which was fairly expensive (£800 per month) but I did get free tea and biccies plus use of the first class lounge if the train was delayed. This all worked out very nicely and was so much better than driving which would have taken me the same amount of time but been nothing like as relaxing as well as meaning I would have to use 3 hours of my free time at home to watch those shows I liked or just not watch them. Public transport in this day and age can be a very viable way to commute.
All the UNIX skills I developed over the last 20 years are still useful. So glad I haven't bothered to spend any time on the MS treadmill. Heck, all the software I wrote over the last 20 years can still be compiled and runs happily on a modern machine that is hundreds of times faster than the SPARCstation 1 I used to run on.
Do you think the PHBs will ever learn that using proprietary systems like Windows may seem cheaper in the short term but in the long run you open your wallet and let them take take take?
I'll doubtless get modded to hell for this but what the hey.
Have any of you ever heard an analogue master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard a very high quality vinyl pressing of said master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard high quality CD 24 bit mastered from the same master tape on said high end audio gear? I have.
Just so people understand this, I'll take this slowly.
The CD sounded great. Very crisp and clear. However, it sounded like a recording. The vinyl produced something of the ambience which was missing from the CD. This is probably down to distortions in the analogue playback system but those distortions did manage to produce a more lifelike sound than the CD did. However, neither was a patch on the master tape. The CD sounded harsh and thin, lacking the dynamics and clarity of the master tape. The LP was closer but still didn't sound real. With the master tape you would swear that you were there. Awesome.
On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is an MP3 and 10 is the master tape, the LP was about a 6, maybe a 7. The CD was a 4 at best and that was an audiophile CD, not the compressed to death crap that most CDs are. It is conceivable that SACD or DVD-A can get closer, maybe even all the way to a 10 but there is bugger all available on either format.
Don't quote Nyquist and human ears this and that at me until you have been exposed to the best analogue tape can offer.
Billosaur said "When you start treating your customers as criminals, you have slipped over the edge and down the slippery slope toward oblivion."
Someone should tell Microsoft that. Yesterday, my XP Pro machine informed me that my genuine OEM installed copy was using a VLK that has been blocked leaving me with limited update capabilities and a nice banner that says my machine is running pirated software. Later in the day it changed its mind and now says the license key was never even generated by MS at all. All this and I have a genuine CD with the hologram and the sticker assuring me that it is OEM Software with the little genuine hologram text strip. Today, the machine is still complaining that the software is pirated.
My Macs never do this to me........
"btw Mazda is American. and even if not would you expect Germany to not use a Porsche/Beemer?"
I am aware that Mazda is American owned. I actually drive a Mazda 6 wagon and I love the build quality and reliability. I used to drive nothing but Fords but they were horribly built and nasty to drive. Not the case with the Mazda. So, yes, American owned but it doesn't feel like a Ford although it is as cheap to run as a Ford.
As for a German KITT, it would be seriously cool and Porsche and BMW both have a heritage of quality sports cars. It makes sense for the country that makes the show to use a car from their own manufacturers but the Mustang.....?
Clearly a fantasy story because anyone really wanting to design a powerful fast car and put a supercomputer with AI in wouldn't be using a Mustang. Heck, I would go with something like the Mazda RX8. It at least looks sporty and in some ways quite similar to the original KITT. Of course, it isn't American so I'll no doubt get modded down by y'all.....
"OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards."
Because PDF works and can be implemented?
There are many implementations of PDF including commercial and open source ones. They can interoperate with high fidelity. OOXML isn't even implemented according to the specs in MS Office 2007 and there are no other reliable implementations.
"I think the ghosting might be from the game, i have a really old psp and that never happens, but I have never played GTA. I was always impressed by the screen."
The ghosting happens on all material, games, movies, you name it. Dark objects moving over light backgrounds make it very obvious. The screen can look nice but this really does annoy the heck out of me and spoils an otherwise attractive video device.
"I don't know what you consider to be cheap for memory, but 4GB memory sticks are currently around 30-40 bucks. The slim version is supposed to speed up load times."
4GB doesn't really result in much of an improvement compared with the 80GB Video iPod I use most of the time. The screen on the iPod is smaller but better (no trails, brighter) and the capacity means I can just choose to watch something on a whim rather than having to plan to have the material available on the PSP. Convenience wins every time. I wouldn't even consider an iPod Touch because the capacity is too small.
"if it were higher resolution, you id be complaining about diminished battery life."
Nope. The resolution is fine. It just has these horrid trails which annoy me. Take an area of light colour, have something dark move across it, nasty trails. The slim reportedly has the same problem. Does it in games and movies. I prefer my Video iPod even though the screen is smaller because it is a better screen. Oh, and the 80GB capacity means I have loads of material to watch whereas with the PSP I have to decide what I want to watch in advance.
" have an old one and I really really hate the screen."
I've read reviews of the new one and they say the screen is the same. For that reason alone I wouldn't bother buying the slim.
I got a PSP as soon as they appeared largely to play the GTA games which I had enjoyed so much on the PS2. I have both games and I haven't finished either of them. The screen is poor because it has very slow response so you get trails all over the place. The controls are cramped and mean I can't use the thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Memory capacity is low and expensive to add and still limited so as a movie player it isn't very good either because you have to compress the movies too much and the dreadful screen doesn't help. The speakers are rotten so you really have to use headphones too and the time it takes to load a game seems like forever.
So, to summarise, poor controls, poor screen and poor performance. Making it thinner isn't going to change things much.
No, you're thinking of digg.
Actually, if this was on digg it would be 'your thinking of digg'