The real thing at issue here is that by actually using a piece of software you must make a copy of it from the distribution media into RAM. You likely also make a copy of it onto a hard disk. Since this goes beyond the usual fair use doctorine the software can be licensed to provide more rights than you might otherwise have [or at least I believe that that is the line used by those in the software business]. The first sale doctrine does seem apply to the sale of music CDs. There are used CD stores and libraries do loan them out. _____________
They don't want to think the government is out to get them. (hint: it probably isn't.)
You're right of course. For the vast majority of us there really isn't anyone who's out to get us. But that doesn't mean that there aren't certian things that we would rather keep private. Furthermore, it makes a big difference when the government starts telling you what you can and cannot write.
Encryption just doesn't matter that much.
Encryption matters a lot. It's not the encryption itself that matters but the fact that I want to have the choice to communicate privately in whatever form I see fit. I reserve the right to write letters in Latin (a language unreadable by many) or in ROT13 or PGP encrypted. The point isn't about the encryption but rather it's about telling me how my personal communications must be conducted. It's true that I rarely hit the encrypt button on my mail client, but I insist on having that choice.
encryption is not like putting a letter in an envelope for mailing, because the envelope doesn't protect the contents of the letter so much as it contains them from the rigors of mailing. If people could save 15c by not using an envelope, they probably would.
It's true that envelopes do offer some benefits that aren't necessary for e-mail. With an e-mail there isn't the need to bind together various documents inside a paper wrapper. On the other hand, it would be fine with the post office if you were to use envelopes made of transparent bond but no one does that. In fact a great many people use security envalopes which have printing on the inside to make it difficult to see what is inside the envalope without opening it. Your argument about people being cheap and unwilling to pay for the security that envalopes provide is baffling to me. People do save 14c by sending a post card rather than an envalope via the US Postal Service. In addition, they save another 2-7c by not buying an envelope in the first place.
living in a safe world _is_ a good thing, for those of you who are about to suggest that no freedom is worth giving up for safety. Anyone who hasn't been mugged or assaulted on the street may sit out of any discussion about the value of a safe world.
Of course living in a save world is a good thing. I doubt that there's anyone here who will argue with that. My question for you is how will restricting people's rights in anyway work to reduce street crime? My contention is that it simply won't. Overall, it would seem that there are more ways in which we will be vulnerable to crime without access to encryption than if it is not avaliable to the law abiding. _____________
And Kent State having such a good reputation for being accomodating of student free speach rights. Hey, at least they didn't shoot these guys. _____________
I don't think that it's OS/2. Apparently this person is browsing using Netscape and AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeCompuserveWorldDominationEven WorseThanMicrosoft doesn't seem to have an OS/2 version, and I can't even find one on their ftp server going back to v3. The list of possible OS's is here. Many of the listed operating systems can be eliminated since they don't run on PC hardware that seems to leave Linux, SCO and BSD that will run on PC class hardware but it couldn't be them since they are clearly unix variants. The other possible systems to run on PC hardware would be QNX (no Netscape and pretty Unixish) and BeOS (no Netscape and probably could be called a Unix variant [it is POSTIX compliant]) so these don't seem to likely. Basically, I'd say that this whole question reeks of troll. We've been had. _____________
How ironic, the code may be free (speech) but the site sure ain't free (beer)!
In a way yes, but in reality that's how most everyone trying to make money in the open source world is doing it. You give away your code and charge for a service that goes with it. RedHat et. al. give away their code (and even binaries) but charge you for services such as putting it in a box with a CD and manual or for telephone support./. provides a service (collecting technical news and discussions) that people may or may not consider worth paying for. Being that there are so many people here who insist that they could do a better job (spelling, editing, choosing stories, picking color schemes, generating html, etc.) than Taco and co. it probably wouldn't be too long before a good portion of the/. audience moved on. But, I'm sure that there are some people here who do really value what they get from/. and would be willing to contribute toward the cause. _____________
No, I actually ment what I said. This does vary a little bit by distro (Suse in particular is a little strange), but the usual scheme for Linux run levels is:
Halt
Single User
Multi user, no network
Multi user w/ network
Unused
X
Reboot
This is at least correct for the rpm based distros. I'm not sure about everyone else, but I think it's pretty consistent. I can't remember how to start a OL from 0. There should be a zero next to halt. _____________
4 TIMES more expensive than a doctor? What are you a DRUG DEALER?:-)
I was kind of wondering about that too. Last time I saw a doctor who wasn't the quack at the campus clinic it cost me $75. Taking into account a 1/3 overhead factor for the office and such we'll call it $50. The doctor probably spent 6 minutes with me or 0.1 hour. That makes an hourly rate of $500. If you're making four times that you're pegged at about $2k/hour or estimating to a 2000 hour working year about $4 million a year. If you're pulling in that kind of dough based entirely on your own labor (paper gains don't count) you can probably afford to hire your own doctors and dispense with the waiting room entirely. _____________
I've heard of some people setting up init scripts on laptops to use the (generally) unused runlevel 4. Usually I've heard about this in terms of enabling some power management features, but I don't see why you couldn't change the network startup scripts while you were at it. Once you'd done that it would just be a matter of typing init 4 or init 5 to switch between two different profiles. _____________
There are many people who dislike the iMac, but most people have to agree that at least it has quality industrial design.
So that's the term for that keyboard and mouse. I'd always figured that there was a more business oriented term than "GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING HUNK OF FLAMING SHIT WHAT KIND OF MUMBLEFUCK CAME UP WITH THIS FUCKING SHIT ASS STUFF DAMNIT FUCKING SHIT", that I usually hear people say when encountering the iMac keyboard and mouse.
I think that apple really missed the mark with that one. There are only 3 parts to a computer that really matter to the non computer person, the mouse, the screen and the keyboard. Everything else is the "hard drive" that most people don't understand at all anyway, but people can tell when they're holding a cheap piece of plastic and don't like it. _____________
I agree with you entirely. The current speed limit situation in the US is a major problem. It has gotten a little bit better in the last 5 years since the national speed limit was repealed and now most states have managed to come up with new rules that fit their particular situation (e.g. most of the congested areas in the east didn't do anything and most states in the midwest and west raised their limits to 70 or 75).
I also agree that there are more cost effective ways of doing local enforcement for problem areas. One of the best that I've seen is the radar trailer. They have a little trailer with a radar gun mounted on it and a big digital sign that shows the speed limit and the speed of cars passing in front of it. This also has the added bonus of setting off the yuppies fuzzbusters. _____________
So? That's the way that news is. There's going to be some items that you aren't interested it. Luck for you they all come with a headline and first paragraph if it's about something your're not interested in don't read it.
Why would you expect/. to be any different from other news sources in this regard? I get a newspaper every day that has a sports page. I never read the sports section because I don't care, but I don't complain that it comes with a paper because I know that there are other people who are interested in the sports scores. I also don't complain when there's a story about sports that's on the front page instead of the sports page. I just read the headline and decide if I want to read the article or not.
Surprisingly enough, I do pretty much the same thing on Slashdot. Mr. Malda is kind enough to put the headline and first paragraph right on the front page and you can decide if or ifn't you wish to read more or discuss that topic. It certianly isn't going to hurt you to read 2-3 paragraphs a day about Linux. _____________
Perhaps the hard disk guys should take a few months off from the race to make disks bigger (incidently, giving the tape drive guys some time to catch up) and spend their effort on other issues, such as 1) making their disks better at surviving power up and 2) reducing seek time.
I'll agree with you that the tape drives could do with a little catching up, but don't pretend that hard drives aren't improving in more ways than capacity.
1) There is no way that startup cannot be the most stressful mode of operation for a harddrive. There's this thing called Newtonian Physics which applies to most objects larger than electorns, making metal disks that took less energy to move from a stop to 7.5k-10k RPM than to keep moving at that speed would be a violation of Newton's laws. There is also the problem of electric motors, by nature they will appear to be of extremely low resistance when stopped and thus allow a relatively high current to flow when power is first applied (Combination of Ohm's law and lack of back EMF produced by moving a current through a B field as described by Gauss' Law). These sudden current surges can be tempered somewhat by good circuit design, but they cannot be completely eliminated. Drives are becoming more reliable overall and are better able to handle spinup stress, but the laws of physics can't be changed and they insist that spinning up a drive will be stressful.
2) Reducing seek time can be accomplished in a few different ways:
Reduce disk diameter
Move heads faster
Increase rotational speed
All of these things are infact happening, 3.5" disks are now much more common than the 5.25" disks of yore and the 2.5" laptop drives are becomming more and more common, the problem is that when the disk gets smaller its capacity gets smaller too. Drive heads are moving faster by the day, but they too are subject to Newton's laws. If you want to move drive heads faster there's going to be more wear on the drive. Increasing rotational speed is probably the area where drives are making the biggest speed gains these days. Low end IDE drives are now spinning at 7500 RPM, a year ago the $100 drive was spinning at 5400. This stuff is really increasing fast and it's cool. _____________
Re:bottleneck is probably the compression
on
MP3 Recorders?
·
· Score: 2
Are you getting realtime compression though? Anybody with a computer can encode.mp3s, it's just a matter of being patient. I've done it on my old P120 machine back in the day, granted a 5 minute track took 6 hours to encode and once I'd done that it took 100% of my processor to play it back, but it was cool. Now I've got an Athlon 800 machine and even with that kind of power it's just a little bit faster than real time in doing the compression.
I'd say that the biggest problem with doing direct to mp3 recording is going to be getting the power to do real time compressions and getting it small and low powered. For now I'd stick with minidisks, they're cheap, small and fast. _____________
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
You don't think companies would be willing to recompile their code so that 90% of the computer market (x86 pc's) could run it?
I'll name you one company that sure as hell won't recompile its OSX apps to run on an Intel platform... Microsoft.
Quite frankly, Apple can't afford to induce the wrath of Microsoft. If Apple were to start making an operating system that was real competition for Microsoft that ran on the same hardware IE and Office for Mac would disappear faster than you can imagine. Linux manages to stumble by without these applications, but there's no way in hell that MacOS would get by without them. Apple needs Microsoft because Apple's own Claris/Apple/whoever owns it these days Works is adequate by and large, but it's not office and many people really do need to have office. Apple also doesn't make a web browser and the Netscape one for MacOS really isn't much good (for that matter, are they even making one for OSX? I sure haven't heard about it...).
Where is Apple really going to be if they're pushing a platform that costs money, for which there isn't a real browser or office suite, and can run on systems that cost less than the hardware Apple sells? If they were to do that they'd be looking a lot like Be in a real big hurry. Be is a cool product and all and really has some good ideas in it, but I don't envy their market position one bit and I'm sure that Apple doesn't either. _____________
This whole thing strikes me as kind of silly. To get the facts right, Wired News and Wired Magazine are not the same thing. Wired news is now a Lycos property, while Wired Magazine is owned by Condé Nast Publications. Several years ago Wired News was run by the same people as Wired Magazine, but it was since sold off and there is no business interaction between the two besides sharing the domain name.
The MacNN article only seems to contest the statement from Wired News that Mr. Jobs used profanity in every sentance. Obviously this isn't true, we all know this. It's called hyberbole, the stretching of the truth to emphasize your point. Hyberbole is a fairly common device that writers use to make their writing more vivid and we should all know when it is happening and how to interpret it. When Wired News says in an editorial piece "Every sentence he uttered -- every single one -- contained an expletive" we should be able to interpret that as "Mr. Jobs used profanity in quantities that many would consider excessive." The fact that Mr. Jobs may have uttered a sentance during the session which did not contain an expletive is neither news nor grounds for discrediting Mr. Kahney's article on Wired News. _____________
If you want to get rid of the evil cookies in IE, just add the offending domains to the list of restricted sites. Long lists of known ad servers can be easily found on the interent. Cookie setting is disabled by default for the restriced sites list.
If you want to be more restrictive you can disable cookies for the internet zone and add sites you want to allow to set cookies into the trusted sites zone. Keep in mind that it is necessary to enable cookie setting on most e-tail sites to keep track of your shopping cart. _____________
Furthermore, what the hell is the casual gaming market? I have over 200 games for various platforms, many of which run on emulators on my PC, and this thing only will allow 60 games to be stored?
The casual gaming market is the people who don't own 200 video games. Obviously you're not part of that market.
What they're tageting is the people who would otherwise drive to a store and rent a video game to play for an evening or two and then return. All they're doing is trying to expand the pay per view model to video games and it seems to make sense to me. There are lots of people who pay $4-5 to play a video game for a couple of hours before returning it to the store. They would probably also be willing to pay $5-6 to have the game delivered to their home in a matter of minutes and its use enabled for the next 48 hours. I'm sure the Sega will still allow games to be purchased on a permanent basis for $40-50 (or whatever games cost these days) especially when they already got the $6 you spent when you tested out the game from their pay per view service. _____________
A few years ago the/. community was a lot more closed. Now people can say IE is better than Netscape without getting flamed to hell...
Well, these days it's true. There's a big difference there. The other thing is that a piece of shit on a stick does a better job of showing webpages than recent versions (especially Linux versions) of Netscape. Thankfully, Konqueror is maturing quickly and is starting to feel like a really good browser. _____________
Northern Light never tried to be a portal -- they're still just a (bad) search engine.
I wouldn't say that Northern Light is a bad search engine. I've actually found it to be quite good for some specific purposes. If you want a newspaper of journal article it'll find it right off. If you are looking for serious research on a relatively obscure topic you're much less likely to find a link to a page that reads "Welcome to Jim's Pancreatic Cancer Page!! Click on the Flashing Pancreas to Enter!!!" . For general searching I almost always use Google or Metacrawler, but Northern Light has it's uses and when you need it it really shines. _____________
You're right. I believe that the proper term for this kind of trickery is domain name hijacking. That is, they took a name which rightfully belongs to and is in use by someone else and had the DNS records changed to point to a different site. If you ask me this is an even lower form sleaze than cyber-squatting. At least with the cyber-squatters you can just buy them off. _____________
While in four black men are going to prison, drug laws jail crack users longer than powdered cocaine users. (The only real difference between rocks and poweder: powder is the popular choice of white addicts, while the rocks are mostly used by blacks.)
I don't very much like this example of how black people are suppressed in this country, mostly because it's not a very good one. While I'll readily agree with you that the differences in penalties are quite unfair, it must be considered how this came to pass. The fact is that the stricter penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine came from the same people who are now crying about the unfairness of this policy. When crack was introduced it quickly became apparent that it is a much more damaging drug to inner-city communities (or all races though it has a particular impact on blacks) due to its relatively low price. This is the reason that black community leaders lobbied for stricter penalties and enforcement against crack rather than for powder cocaine. This link provides some interesting discussion on the topic.
The real problem is that this effort, as with most of the efforts in the "War On Drugs" has had unintended consequences. Having really strict penalties against those who use and/or sell drugs does not stop this activity from taking place, it merely makes it more violent and dangerous to society. Please no note that I'm not saying that drug abuse is harmless to society (I believe exactly the opposite), what I am saying is that our current criminal policies aren't solving the problem and may actually be making it worse. _____________
If they were truly selling a service I would be better off having it then not having it.
Sure they're selling a service. Apparently there are many people who think that they are better off because they receive this service, that's why so many people are willing to pay for the service. If it didn't make them better off they wouldn't pay for it. The service that cable/sat. TV providers give is access to their really good antennas.
Way back in the beginning that's exactly what the cable TV services provided. The simple fact was that not everyone in town lived on top of a tall hill and had the resources to put up a really tall antenna. So, someone decided to buy some land on top of a high hill and put up a big antenna they then offered the service of being connected to this antenna for a price. Seems like service to me, you pay someone to get something that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to get.
Obviously, things have evolved a bit since then and you can now get much more on pay TV than you'd ever be able to get off of even the best antennas but it doesn't change the fact that you are paying for the service of being able to receive television broadcasts that you would not be able to with rabbit ears on top of your TV. DirectTV works in a little different way now, they aren't offering the service of improving reception (you can receive the signal fine without their help) but rather they are offering the service of providing software to interpret the signal that you receive and possibly the rental service of the reception equipment (not quite sure how their contract is written). If you don't think that this service is worth the price being offered you don't have to buy it. That's your free choice. _____________
I'm not saying the 'net' wouldn't be interesting to have access to in any place, just the same as it would be interesting to have the net accessable in a washroom. Interesting like, "Oh wow, what kind of person has to get their email while they're in the washroom".
Hey, don't knock it 'till you've tried it man. Once you get over the "Oh, wow" reaction it's seems as normal as reading the newspaper while you do your thing. _____________
I did that once. The sysadmin starred my password. At that time we had to dial into the modem server and telnet from there to get a shell prompt, so I wrote a eudora script to get me to a shell prompt and then download my mail from there. Seems that I had a little bug in the script that caused it to keep attempting to log into the mail server. I forget how many times I ended up being logged in, but I do remember the sysadmin showing me the printout of the log and yelling "Do you know what this is?" _____________
Slashdot Mirror
The real thing at issue here is that by actually using a piece of software you must make a copy of it from the distribution media into RAM. You likely also make a copy of it onto a hard disk. Since this goes beyond the usual fair use doctorine the software can be licensed to provide more rights than you might otherwise have [or at least I believe that that is the line used by those in the software business]. The first sale doctrine does seem apply to the sale of music CDs. There are used CD stores and libraries do loan them out.
_____________
You're right of course. For the vast majority of us there really isn't anyone who's out to get us. But that doesn't mean that there aren't certian things that we would rather keep private. Furthermore, it makes a big difference when the government starts telling you what you can and cannot write.
Encryption just doesn't matter that much.
Encryption matters a lot. It's not the encryption itself that matters but the fact that I want to have the choice to communicate privately in whatever form I see fit. I reserve the right to write letters in Latin (a language unreadable by many) or in ROT13 or PGP encrypted. The point isn't about the encryption but rather it's about telling me how my personal communications must be conducted. It's true that I rarely hit the encrypt button on my mail client, but I insist on having that choice.
encryption is not like putting a letter in an envelope for mailing, because the envelope doesn't protect the contents of the letter so much as it contains them from the rigors of mailing. If people could save 15c by not using an envelope, they probably would.
It's true that envelopes do offer some benefits that aren't necessary for e-mail. With an e-mail there isn't the need to bind together various documents inside a paper wrapper. On the other hand, it would be fine with the post office if you were to use envelopes made of transparent bond but no one does that. In fact a great many people use security envalopes which have printing on the inside to make it difficult to see what is inside the envalope without opening it. Your argument about people being cheap and unwilling to pay for the security that envalopes provide is baffling to me. People do save 14c by sending a post card rather than an envalope via the US Postal Service. In addition, they save another 2-7c by not buying an envelope in the first place.
living in a safe world _is_ a good thing, for those of you who are about to suggest that no freedom is worth giving up for safety. Anyone who hasn't been mugged or assaulted on the street may sit out of any discussion about the value of a safe world.
Of course living in a save world is a good thing. I doubt that there's anyone here who will argue with that. My question for you is how will restricting people's rights in anyway work to reduce street crime? My contention is that it simply won't. Overall, it would seem that there are more ways in which we will be vulnerable to crime without access to encryption than if it is not avaliable to the law abiding.
_____________
And Kent State having such a good reputation for being accomodating of student free speach rights. Hey, at least they didn't shoot these guys.
_____________
I don't think that it's OS/2. Apparently this person is browsing using Netscape and AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeCompuserveWorldDominationEven WorseThanMicrosoft doesn't seem to have an OS/2 version, and I can't even find one on their ftp server going back to v3. The list of possible OS's is here. Many of the listed operating systems can be eliminated since they don't run on PC hardware that seems to leave Linux, SCO and BSD that will run on PC class hardware but it couldn't be them since they are clearly unix variants. The other possible systems to run on PC hardware would be QNX (no Netscape and pretty Unixish) and BeOS (no Netscape and probably could be called a Unix variant [it is POSTIX compliant]) so these don't seem to likely. Basically, I'd say that this whole question reeks of troll. We've been had.
_____________
In a way yes, but in reality that's how most everyone trying to make money in the open source world is doing it. You give away your code and charge for a service that goes with it. RedHat et. al. give away their code (and even binaries) but charge you for services such as putting it in a box with a CD and manual or for telephone support. /. provides a service (collecting technical news and discussions) that people may or may not consider worth paying for. Being that there are so many people here who insist that they could do a better job (spelling, editing, choosing stories, picking color schemes, generating html, etc.) than Taco and co. it probably wouldn't be too long before a good portion of the /. audience moved on. But, I'm sure that there are some people here who do really value what they get from /. and would be willing to contribute toward the cause.
_____________
This is at least correct for the rpm based distros. I'm not sure about everyone else, but I think it's pretty consistent. I can't remember how to start a OL from 0. There should be a zero next to halt.
_____________
I was kind of wondering about that too. Last time I saw a doctor who wasn't the quack at the campus clinic it cost me $75. Taking into account a 1/3 overhead factor for the office and such we'll call it $50. The doctor probably spent 6 minutes with me or 0.1 hour. That makes an hourly rate of $500. If you're making four times that you're pegged at about $2k/hour or estimating to a 2000 hour working year about $4 million a year. If you're pulling in that kind of dough based entirely on your own labor (paper gains don't count) you can probably afford to hire your own doctors and dispense with the waiting room entirely.
_____________
I've heard of some people setting up init scripts on laptops to use the (generally) unused runlevel 4. Usually I've heard about this in terms of enabling some power management features, but I don't see why you couldn't change the network startup scripts while you were at it. Once you'd done that it would just be a matter of typing init 4 or init 5 to switch between two different profiles.
_____________
So that's the term for that keyboard and mouse. I'd always figured that there was a more business oriented term than "GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING HUNK OF FLAMING SHIT WHAT KIND OF MUMBLEFUCK CAME UP WITH THIS FUCKING SHIT ASS STUFF DAMNIT FUCKING SHIT", that I usually hear people say when encountering the iMac keyboard and mouse.
I think that apple really missed the mark with that one. There are only 3 parts to a computer that really matter to the non computer person, the mouse, the screen and the keyboard. Everything else is the "hard drive" that most people don't understand at all anyway, but people can tell when they're holding a cheap piece of plastic and don't like it.
_____________
I also agree that there are more cost effective ways of doing local enforcement for problem areas. One of the best that I've seen is the radar trailer. They have a little trailer with a radar gun mounted on it and a big digital sign that shows the speed limit and the speed of cars passing in front of it. This also has the added bonus of setting off the yuppies fuzzbusters.
_____________
Why would you expect /. to be any different from other news sources in this regard? I get a newspaper every day that has a sports page. I never read the sports section because I don't care, but I don't complain that it comes with a paper because I know that there are other people who are interested in the sports scores. I also don't complain when there's a story about sports that's on the front page instead of the sports page. I just read the headline and decide if I want to read the article or not.
Surprisingly enough, I do pretty much the same thing on Slashdot. Mr. Malda is kind enough to put the headline and first paragraph right on the front page and you can decide if or ifn't you wish to read more or discuss that topic. It certianly isn't going to hurt you to read 2-3 paragraphs a day about Linux.
_____________
I wanna Mexican a-Radio-o-o-o
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
_____________
I'll agree with you that the tape drives could do with a little catching up, but don't pretend that hard drives aren't improving in more ways than capacity.
1) There is no way that startup cannot be the most stressful mode of operation for a harddrive. There's this thing called Newtonian Physics which applies to most objects larger than electorns, making metal disks that took less energy to move from a stop to 7.5k-10k RPM than to keep moving at that speed would be a violation of Newton's laws. There is also the problem of electric motors, by nature they will appear to be of extremely low resistance when stopped and thus allow a relatively high current to flow when power is first applied (Combination of Ohm's law and lack of back EMF produced by moving a current through a B field as described by Gauss' Law). These sudden current surges can be tempered somewhat by good circuit design, but they cannot be completely eliminated. Drives are becoming more reliable overall and are better able to handle spinup stress, but the laws of physics can't be changed and they insist that spinning up a drive will be stressful.
2) Reducing seek time can be accomplished in a few different ways:
- Reduce disk diameter
- Move heads faster
- Increase rotational speed
All of these things are infact happening, 3.5" disks are now much more common than the 5.25" disks of yore and the 2.5" laptop drives are becomming more and more common, the problem is that when the disk gets smaller its capacity gets smaller too. Drive heads are moving faster by the day, but they too are subject to Newton's laws. If you want to move drive heads faster there's going to be more wear on the drive. Increasing rotational speed is probably the area where drives are making the biggest speed gains these days. Low end IDE drives are now spinning at 7500 RPM, a year ago the $100 drive was spinning at 5400. This stuff is really increasing fast and it's cool._____________
I'd say that the biggest problem with doing direct to mp3 recording is going to be getting the power to do real time compressions and getting it small and low powered. For now I'd stick with minidisks, they're cheap, small and fast.
_____________
I'll name you one company that sure as hell won't recompile its OSX apps to run on an Intel platform... Microsoft.
Quite frankly, Apple can't afford to induce the wrath of Microsoft. If Apple were to start making an operating system that was real competition for Microsoft that ran on the same hardware IE and Office for Mac would disappear faster than you can imagine. Linux manages to stumble by without these applications, but there's no way in hell that MacOS would get by without them. Apple needs Microsoft because Apple's own Claris/Apple/whoever owns it these days Works is adequate by and large, but it's not office and many people really do need to have office. Apple also doesn't make a web browser and the Netscape one for MacOS really isn't much good (for that matter, are they even making one for OSX? I sure haven't heard about it...).
Where is Apple really going to be if they're pushing a platform that costs money, for which there isn't a real browser or office suite, and can run on systems that cost less than the hardware Apple sells? If they were to do that they'd be looking a lot like Be in a real big hurry. Be is a cool product and all and really has some good ideas in it, but I don't envy their market position one bit and I'm sure that Apple doesn't either.
_____________
The MacNN article only seems to contest the statement from Wired News that Mr. Jobs used profanity in every sentance. Obviously this isn't true, we all know this. It's called hyberbole, the stretching of the truth to emphasize your point. Hyberbole is a fairly common device that writers use to make their writing more vivid and we should all know when it is happening and how to interpret it. When Wired News says in an editorial piece "Every sentence he uttered -- every single one -- contained an expletive" we should be able to interpret that as "Mr. Jobs used profanity in quantities that many would consider excessive." The fact that Mr. Jobs may have uttered a sentance during the session which did not contain an expletive is neither news nor grounds for discrediting Mr. Kahney's article on Wired News.
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If you want to be more restrictive you can disable cookies for the internet zone and add sites you want to allow to set cookies into the trusted sites zone. Keep in mind that it is necessary to enable cookie setting on most e-tail sites to keep track of your shopping cart.
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The casual gaming market is the people who don't own 200 video games. Obviously you're not part of that market.
What they're tageting is the people who would otherwise drive to a store and rent a video game to play for an evening or two and then return. All they're doing is trying to expand the pay per view model to video games and it seems to make sense to me. There are lots of people who pay $4-5 to play a video game for a couple of hours before returning it to the store. They would probably also be willing to pay $5-6 to have the game delivered to their home in a matter of minutes and its use enabled for the next 48 hours. I'm sure the Sega will still allow games to be purchased on a permanent basis for $40-50 (or whatever games cost these days) especially when they already got the $6 you spent when you tested out the game from their pay per view service.
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Well, these days it's true. There's a big difference there. The other thing is that a piece of shit on a stick does a better job of showing webpages than recent versions (especially Linux versions) of Netscape. Thankfully, Konqueror is maturing quickly and is starting to feel like a really good browser.
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I wouldn't say that Northern Light is a bad search engine. I've actually found it to be quite good for some specific purposes. If you want a newspaper of journal article it'll find it right off. If you are looking for serious research on a relatively obscure topic you're much less likely to find a link to a page that reads "Welcome to Jim's Pancreatic Cancer Page!! Click on the Flashing Pancreas to Enter!!!" . For general searching I almost always use Google or Metacrawler, but Northern Light has it's uses and when you need it it really shines.
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You're right. I believe that the proper term for this kind of trickery is domain name hijacking. That is, they took a name which rightfully belongs to and is in use by someone else and had the DNS records changed to point to a different site. If you ask me this is an even lower form sleaze than cyber-squatting. At least with the cyber-squatters you can just buy them off.
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I don't very much like this example of how black people are suppressed in this country, mostly because it's not a very good one. While I'll readily agree with you that the differences in penalties are quite unfair, it must be considered how this came to pass. The fact is that the stricter penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine came from the same people who are now crying about the unfairness of this policy. When crack was introduced it quickly became apparent that it is a much more damaging drug to inner-city communities (or all races though it has a particular impact on blacks) due to its relatively low price. This is the reason that black community leaders lobbied for stricter penalties and enforcement against crack rather than for powder cocaine. This link provides some interesting discussion on the topic.
The real problem is that this effort, as with most of the efforts in the "War On Drugs" has had unintended consequences. Having really strict penalties against those who use and/or sell drugs does not stop this activity from taking place, it merely makes it more violent and dangerous to society. Please no note that I'm not saying that drug abuse is harmless to society (I believe exactly the opposite), what I am saying is that our current criminal policies aren't solving the problem and may actually be making it worse.
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Sure they're selling a service. Apparently there are many people who think that they are better off because they receive this service, that's why so many people are willing to pay for the service. If it didn't make them better off they wouldn't pay for it. The service that cable/sat. TV providers give is access to their really good antennas.
Way back in the beginning that's exactly what the cable TV services provided. The simple fact was that not everyone in town lived on top of a tall hill and had the resources to put up a really tall antenna. So, someone decided to buy some land on top of a high hill and put up a big antenna they then offered the service of being connected to this antenna for a price. Seems like service to me, you pay someone to get something that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to get.
Obviously, things have evolved a bit since then and you can now get much more on pay TV than you'd ever be able to get off of even the best antennas but it doesn't change the fact that you are paying for the service of being able to receive television broadcasts that you would not be able to with rabbit ears on top of your TV. DirectTV works in a little different way now, they aren't offering the service of improving reception (you can receive the signal fine without their help) but rather they are offering the service of providing software to interpret the signal that you receive and possibly the rental service of the reception equipment (not quite sure how their contract is written). If you don't think that this service is worth the price being offered you don't have to buy it. That's your free choice.
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Hey, don't knock it 'till you've tried it man. Once you get over the "Oh, wow" reaction it's seems as normal as reading the newspaper while you do your thing.
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I did that once. The sysadmin starred my password. At that time we had to dial into the modem server and telnet from there to get a shell prompt, so I wrote a eudora script to get me to a shell prompt and then download my mail from there. Seems that I had a little bug in the script that caused it to keep attempting to log into the mail server. I forget how many times I ended up being logged in, but I do remember the sysadmin showing me the printout of the log and yelling "Do you know what this is?"
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