Yes, and most of my music that i downloaded was live shows and things that I can't buy. Anything I could buy, I have bought either on CD or for the last two years on iTunes. Plus being a study, I'm sure there are people that exclusively pirate and others that exclusively buy music. The results are the average.
I haven't tried the mac mini since the apple store 45 minutes away did not have any yet. I find it hard to believe that intel graphics are good at all, let alone better than a radeon chipsest. With computer games demanding upper 9000 series or better radeon cards now or slightly lower nvidia chipsets, its going to be difficult to game on them. I've been planning on buying a mac mini for the living room and wanted something my wife could causually play WoW on. I can't sell her on intel graphics. The dual cpu means nothing when a game won't load. (it doesn't if it loads... most aren't SMP aware yet)
Sadly he's had a script and actors ready to make Indiana Jones 4 for some time but won't do it. It sounds like he doesn't think it will make money. Being an even number it may be awful, but I'd like to see one last big budget indy film:)
I've never looked at the specific claims in this case, but I think many people on slashdot are against patents as they are applied to software. Many people feel that patent law should not be applied to software. From a business perspective or the way the courts like to view computer stuff its a "product". As a computer scientist, its viewed as an algorithm... or more generally math. Everything we write can be proven correct with math and if someone patented how to calculate loan payments or the pythagorean theorem we'd have serious problems. Sometimes there is only a few possible ways to solve a problem from a practical standpoint. Should those few solutions be patented? Anyone interested in open source software, especially things like linux should see that software patents are a bad thing. In my example, the little guy is hurt because he can get handed a lawsuit for adding something to the linux kernel.
Of course I know nothing about law.:)
I still don't understand how someone can patent a genetic defect in blood. Isn't my wife prior art?
Re:NES for the 21st Century
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Flashback NES
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Super Mario Bros. was violent.. hell you jumped and crushed goombas and kicked turles to hell down cliffs... and lets not forget the falling dragons (or whatever bouser was).
With zelda, you stabbed things with a sword!
Similarly, TMNT was all about killing shit.
Most of the racing games allowed you to push people off the side of the road, Nintendo's ice hockey had fights I think? Ok I think Nintendo pinball was safe, jeopardy and chessmaster. Duckhunt involved shooting things... damn dog wouldn't die. And world class track meet was very violent.. why? I hurt myself using that damn pad and fighting over my friends in "two player" where i'd push his ass on the floor and he'd trip me.
Apple sells computers too. I think people forget that. Remember we've seen two OSX viruses recently. Do people develop viruses for dead platforms? I think not. Also, I'd guess that OSX and Linux are about equal in terms of installs counting desktops and servers. If its ok to support the underdog (linux) on slashdot, why is every other OS always dead or dying? I maybe only one person, but I personally administer 40 OSX clients and 2 xserves at work and have 4 macs in my home. Apple wouldn't have had the money to make the iPod if it weren't for the iMac and iBook.
Unrelated, on the dead os count I have 3 BSD machines and a sparc running solaris too, but only one machine running Linux.:)
Not with the bush administration. You see Microsoft got away free after being voted a monopoly and look at the recent telco mergers. They don't do the *same* thing, so it will go through no problem.
Hell save a little longer and get one of the new intel based iMacs. When vista runs on it, you'll get "next generation games" and you can always run any new titles for the Mac plus WoW! Some games will run on the new ones like quake3 (third party port). I have no idea how well rosetta does for PPC games. I'd love to know that as i have quite a few strategy games for the mac, plus enemy territory. Or for the pc crowd, just buy an adequate box every other year ($500 or so).. then you lived the sony lifecycle with a new pc every two years. On a big sale, thats three shit dell low end pcs with monitor upgrades for the lazy type. Everyone in your home can have a pc for the price of the ps3.
Maybe I missed it, but everyone seems to think this is all about blue ray. What about IBM? Microsoft had xbox 360 delays with the PPC chips and apple has claimed IBM was short changing them on processors for some time. Maybe this is IBM's fault? IBM did have to ramp up to actually fulfil Microsoft's obligations. I guess IBM can't handle Intel and Motorolla's embedded market very well. (ok its freescale or something now..)
FreeBSD has 3 thread library choices as of 5.4 and 6.0. libc_r, an M:N implementation and a newer 1:1 library. Only the 1:1 library is in active development and patches are not usually applied to the other two. The 1:1 library was developed during early FreeBSD 5.x development for kernel operations and after benchmarking it, someone made the call to push it into userland.
Recently, on one of the freebsd lists (hackers or performance) there were some benchmarks with mysql on the different threading implementations. I think that was a good sample of the performance characteristics of each if you're interested.
Well Sun has changed the threading design several times in Solaris. You need to be more specific. Sun used a model where one cpu was the controller (scheduler) and the other cpus ran jobs in sun os 4.x and in early Solaris versions it used a m:n model where there would be m user threads to n kernel threads similar to how Microsoft's.NET framework creates threads. Newer versions of solaris (9 and 10) are more like linux and freebsd's latest threading library and make 1:1 relationships between userland and kernel threads. I'm not an expert at this and have been taking an operating systems class this term where this has been discussed.
As for dragonfly, I do think that Matt was right about some problems with freebsd 5 and 6 but each release is getting faster. 6.1 beta is noticably faster. Dragonfly isn't revolutionary though. I think some of the ideas from Mach inspired some of their design decisions and we all know Apple has the most succesful Mach kernel in the commercial world.
I don't know if we'll see freebsd or dragonfly look super impressive on multicore cpus, but I do know that openbsd and netbsd may not scale well depending on what they are working on. I can tell you that freebsd 6 does fine on my dual xeon machine. Solaris 10 on the same system seemed slightly slow but i think that was driver support more than anything. Linux IS SLOW on the system regardless of the scheduler. For that OS class, I had to install the 2.6.15 kernel and custom compile it for my system prior to our work on adding system calls. Its not as fast (gentoo) as freebsd 6 was on the system, but faster than freebsd 5.x. (especially disk io) I don't know why linux seems slow as it is using both cpus quite well. Of course this is percieved speed.. i haven't done any formal benchmarks.
Maybe someone should do a serious benchmark on FreeBSD 6, Netbsd 3, Dragonfly (whatever the latest is), OpenBSD 3.8, Linux 2.6.15 (gentoo distro?), and for kicks OpenDarwin all running on the same dual core hardware. Hell if i get time this summer, i might do it.
Re:How does it handle values outside the range?
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More iTunes Math
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Yeah and the fact that most OSS development is with gtk or qt. It would be nice if we standardized on a toolkit/library for some things. If it were GNUstep, it would help promote sharing apps with macs which would give apps that much more market share.
I don't know if its true, but most people online tell me that GNUstep developers are a bit inflexible about enhancements/patches to keep it more in sync with Apple's offerings.
Interesting perspective. I just had a conversation about how computers made 10 years ago held up better than modern ones. I have a sun workstation from 1992 sitting on my desk. It still works great. Only thing thats been replaced that I'm aware of was the hard drive. Conversely, my wife's powermac had the logic board fail after 3 years of constant use. Its the only part that failed in her system though. However, during the last 3 years i've owned 6 cd burners. I burn about 100 disks a year. I have a friend with a 2x burner that still works. I'd say quality is much worse than it was overall. Anyone remember when floppy disk drives outlasted the computers they were in? The only thing i think has gotten better is hard drives. I'm sure the increased failure rates of computers are in part the heat and power requirements of the newer systems. At work, i've seen dell machines fail within 3 days of placement. Why? They were engineered poorly and did not provide adequate ventilation. One of the fans didn't work at full power and one burned up all components. Dell only kept the case. Granted it was one of the mini form factor gx280s, but it had pleanty of room around it. I think people need to realize that all pc vendors do something wrong to save money. HP puts in power supplies that are too small, Dell machines usually don't get enough ventilation (although newer machines are a bit better), most gateway machines i've seen have their hard drives or motherboards go out, IBM thinkpads often lose their hard drives since heat from the processor is aimed at the drives, etc. Its not limited to pc vendors, asus has bios problems with their boards and i've seen several fall apart after a years usage.
As for cars, I think there is a reason Toyota is number one. I don't personally like toyota but after buying a 2005 saturn ion for my wife I understand that the 70s are back for GM.
Expectations are high because people make less money now than they did 5 years ago. Things need to last now. I'm actually getting the powermac repaired because i can't afford 2000 for a new g5. Heaven forbid i take away my wife's WoW computer.
The problems you experienced are due to it being a beta. In the real world, beta means that the software is unfinished and not ready for general use. Google calls everything a beta and people don't realize what it means anymore. For example, netscape 2 beta crashed going to websites much like IE7 beta can. Netscape 4 pr2 crashed like crazy as did IE4 beta 2. In the old days, beta's didn't work right because they were not done. In google language, they call everything a beta so that they can say its a beta if it doesn't work right or people bitch about lack of features. Its very clever but now people expect beta code to be perfect. Next alpha code will be real beta code until google starts releasing public "alphas".
Also, let me address your points.
1. its microsoft, would they really support firefox? Most of their sites are going IE only again to a point i can't use IE7 beta on them as they are coded for IE6. 2. see beta dialog above 3. i agree 4. sounds good.
If google is so noble, why don't they release their gmail software as open source. (i.e. the code running on their servers) I wouldn't mind having a good webmail and mail server setup on my server. I hear the argument microsoft should open source windows all the time, why not google's software.
I'm still hopeful about hula.. novell's open source mail server. Someone is working on freebsd patches so maybe it will get stable. If not, it might even persuade me to use linux.
Yes and i think thats a problem with the pro firefox movement. People still need to patch IE because so many applications use IE's rendering engine for other content. Windows update (or the new Microsoft update) are your friends. If software is built into your operating system, someone might be able to use it to gain control of your machine. It still needs to be patched.
Hmm.. well pcs might go up in price now that they must include real video cards. Apple ships Radeon or nvidia cards in everything and have for years. No intel onboard POS cards. All macs can run games as a result even the low end laptops. Thats why people pay for macs. Price out a dell with a radeon or recent nvidia card in it and then compare apple's prices. Apple is VERY competative.
Its also true that you can get a dell desktop with monitor for 300-400 dollars and that a mac mini is 500 plus you need a monitor. However, the mac has a real video card in it too. You can't game on a 300 hundred dollar dell. Most don't even have agp or pciE slots to upgrade your onboard video and standard pci don't cut it anymore. Before you try to say macs aren't upgradable, my wife's powermac has a retail ati 9800 in it and it shipped with a geforce 4 mx 32mb AGP card.
Your argument is 5 years old. Steve jobs now wants to ship affordable computers and thats part of the intel switch.
Finally, if you are referring to home built pcs, must people don't do that. Sure slashdot readers can slap a computer together for a few hundred bucks thats quite nice, but my mom or cousin can't. Apple sells computers and if you compare dell, sony, gateway, lenovo (or whatever ibm pcs are), or hp i think you'll see they aren't cheap. Dell's gaming line is quite expensive in fact. You can even buy a powermac or well equipped iMac for Dell prices. Dell gaming or dell precision workstations are in the quality realm of apple powermacs.
Now lets see you build a core duo for less than apple with a 17 inch widescreen lcd display, remote control, radeon graphics, and other specs in a small form factor. 17 inch lcd displays are cheap, but not widescreen displays. Price DELL out on those.
Thats great and all but i think the key here is price and availability. Intel took over the server market with their low end chips. Companies said they wanted cheap servers and lots of servers. IBM and Sun have a vested interest in the return of big iron but i don't know if companies want that. I'm curious to see what happens with the new sun and ibm moves.
While I agree that Microsoft should fix Windows and their application software, their one care beta isn't that bad. I've already caught things that SAV 9 corporate can not detect with it. Obviously, MS is doing better than Symantec. The firewall is not much different than the windows built in firewall (SP2). The neat thing is that the one care firewall actually works properly and does not block legitimate (or all) traffic like the Norton Internet Security 2005 package. NIS often breaks after patches and does not allow any traffic.
I've been a symantec customer for 6 years, since McAfee became NAI and started to suck bad. I'm not entirely sad about this MS product. My system is much faster with it loaded than with SAV9 or NIS 2005. Maybe McAfee and Symantec will try to compete again.
Also, this one care product also has a backup solution similar to apple's.Mac Backup.App program. The big difference is that apple lets you backup to a hard disk or network volume. If microsoft adds that feature, I may be buying it after the beta period.
You are right of course.. i do think microsoft can do better than symantec. Microsoft could do better and fix windows instead of charge for one care as well. They do have the source code to windows. If you are mad about it, write a rep in your government to go after microsoft for a antitrust when it ships.
Its not just random keywords. I had my wife read it to me. Its a description of the content on their site. Considering its a graphical page, they were probably making it useful. I don't see what the problem with bmw's content. Hell it would assist blind people (although they dont need cars).
Damn google fan boys... think before you speak... google is just pissed because they didn't make ad dollars off this. They do text ads all the time and get praised on it. I hate adsense! Links on pages attacked to every frickin word is annoying.. there is nothing different with what bmw did except its THEIR website and THEIR content.
Google sucks. Get over it. And no i'm not a yahoo, msn or any other fan boy.. just stating the obvious. I just wish we had a good search engine to use and not one based on greed. And speaking of google, why didn't they use their hordes of phds to write an algorithm to detect that page if its a problem.
c) Figure you're being tracked, pull in to a 7/11 and steal another car if you can't get the tracking device off or don't have time too. They just encouraged carjacking.
Yes and as someone else pointed out the person could use.NET 2 above that has many of these features, the mono project DOES NOT support.NET 2 code at this time. The parent is right.
In fact, I'd say scrap the.NET idea all together since Linux is a requirement. Mono is not ready for production use because its not compatible yet. Someday maybe it will work on Linux and provide 2 operating systems for which.NET can run. I don't believe that solaris or mac os x ports will ever work the same as the Linux port. The lack of interest in fixing BSD bugs in the Mono project is proof they don't care about other platforms. (and it is Novell and Western Michigan University grads we are talking about)
If the requirements for his proposal only required windows,.NET 2 would be a great solution. I agree with everyone else that a higher level language is the way to go. If the person insists on C++ on windows, don't use the MS compiler if you want some portability. If money is no object, maybe licensing Qt for windows and Linux is a good idea. Gtk might work as well.
I think it depends on the games you play too. Its similar to video card choice. If you buy games from a company that favors AMD or reacts quickly to whats popular, then AMD chips would be the best choice. If you play a few year old games, or from a vendor that favors intel its more logical to buy intel. Likewise, some companies optimize for ATI and others nVidia.
The other factor is what operating systems you intend to use and the motherboard chipset. Gamer rigs are often custom built and therefore gamers can pick known stable chipsets. If you walk into best buy and pick up a machine, its bound to have a cheap chipset. I prefer intel chips because I know the intel based chipsets will have working usb, agp (or pciE), etc. AMD processors are great, but the chipsets to go with them often suck.
I suspect intel will need to work on speedy chips after they get their power usage under control. Soon software will be optimzied for AMD chips and intel will have to play catch up. The more popular AMD gets, the more reliable the motherboards will become (i hope).
Just as a side note, i have a dual xeon 2.0ghz and an amd sempron 2300+ (nforce2). WIth a non SMP kernel in linux or freebsd 6 I noticed that the two systems run about the same speed. They seem very comparable. The AMD machine even has a slower bus speed. And both have different disk subsystems (xeon has a u160 scsi disk and the amd box has a sata raid 1 array). I just find it interesting that cpu bound operations are similar for an intel workstation class chip and a low end amd thats rated only 300 mhz faster. On freebsd, this is with custom kernels and userland recompiled for the chips. Generic performance is worse on the amd machine.
If you're building a PVR, stick to a generic tv tuner card. ATI rage theater chipsets are not usually supported (AIW, etc) in most open source operating systems. Something more generic will work almost anywhere (even *BSD).
In general, nvidia cards are better in open source operating systems in part because nvidia actually writes drivers for linux, freebsd, and solaris to some degree (now oss). I love ati cards, but my love of BSD trumps that. I do have to say the fx 5200 card i bought looks great on the console and runs enemy territory at a playable level in freebsd 6 with xorg 6.8.2 and linux emulation. I tried my aiw 9600xt in linux a few months ago and it looked sweet. i can't give a framerate comparison because the nvidia card is in a different pc and one of them is a dual xeon and the other is a sempron.
What I find interesting about your comment is that you admit its probably impossible to make bulletproof software, yet you think they should rewrite it "correctly". I see comments like this all the time on slashdot and on security minded lists like bugtraq, webappsec, etc. I've yet to see anyone come up with a list or example site that is "written correctly." In the rare case someone does offer an example, its usually as bad as something I'd see in a CS class. There is like one or two input fields that have very well defined input. Anyone could write secure code for that. On the Internet, its not that easy. People want to post HTML comments, invalid HTML, 10 year old HTML, javascript they generated on some site to make a button or sig come alive. Blogging sites have two target audiences, 18-30 year olds and younger people. Most younger people would prefer to use an IM client than anything else, and occasionally older people do keep blogs. Live Journal has a better range than most sites. Most people in these target groups want to post HTML comments or at least rich formatted posts.
I don't think people realize how complex a blogging site can be. Attempting to secure a blogging site is a real task. Live journal actually has a revenue stream and paid programmers so there is less excuse for them not to try, but succeeding is another matter. In reality, if they cut of rich content posting then their users will move on to another service or simply find a OSS product they can run themselves. Then we'll have automated attacks on those scripts. I've written a blogging site in java, and its not even close to secure. I'm in the process of rewriting the whole thing in a language I'm more familiar with. Its not an easy task.
Multiple platforms? I count 2 without looking at hardware. Linux and Windows... Thats not exactly ground breaking. IBM has to support windows and likes linux. Maybe they should consider other platforms like say Solaris, MacOS X, FreeBSD, something HP makes, etc. With open solaris and the rumors about licensing floating around IBM may wish they had solaris support. Personally, I have a FreeBSD and Windows setup at the moment so it does me little good. Even if i get it to run under linux emulation, its going to be slow. I guess I'll stick to mysql.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and most of my music that i downloaded was live shows and things that I can't buy. Anything I could buy, I have bought either on CD or for the last two years on iTunes. Plus being a study, I'm sure there are people that exclusively pirate and others that exclusively buy music. The results are the average.
No, just filter anyone who is in law enforcement or public office. Maybe if they can't get to any websites, they will understand how dumb it is.
I haven't tried the mac mini since the apple store 45 minutes away did not have any yet. I find it hard to believe that intel graphics are good at all, let alone better than a radeon chipsest. With computer games demanding upper 9000 series or better radeon cards now or slightly lower nvidia chipsets, its going to be difficult to game on them. I've been planning on buying a mac mini for the living room and wanted something my wife could causually play WoW on. I can't sell her on intel graphics. The dual cpu means nothing when a game won't load. (it doesn't if it loads... most aren't SMP aware yet)
Sadly he's had a script and actors ready to make Indiana Jones 4 for some time but won't do it. It sounds like he doesn't think it will make money. Being an even number it may be awful, but I'd like to see one last big budget indy film :)
I've never looked at the specific claims in this case, but I think many people on slashdot are against patents as they are applied to software. Many people feel that patent law should not be applied to software. From a business perspective or the way the courts like to view computer stuff its a "product". As a computer scientist, its viewed as an algorithm... or more generally math. Everything we write can be proven correct with math and if someone patented how to calculate loan payments or the pythagorean theorem we'd have serious problems. Sometimes there is only a few possible ways to solve a problem from a practical standpoint. Should those few solutions be patented? Anyone interested in open source software, especially things like linux should see that software patents are a bad thing. In my example, the little guy is hurt because he can get handed a lawsuit for adding something to the linux kernel.
:)
Of course I know nothing about law.
I still don't understand how someone can patent a genetic defect in blood. Isn't my wife prior art?
Super Mario Bros. was violent.. hell you jumped and crushed goombas and kicked turles to hell down cliffs... and lets not forget the falling dragons (or whatever bouser was).
With zelda, you stabbed things with a sword!
Similarly, TMNT was all about killing shit.
Most of the racing games allowed you to push people off the side of the road, Nintendo's ice hockey had fights I think? Ok I think Nintendo pinball was safe, jeopardy and chessmaster. Duckhunt involved shooting things... damn dog wouldn't die. And world class track meet was very violent.. why? I hurt myself using that damn pad and fighting over my friends in "two player" where i'd push his ass on the floor and he'd trip me.
Apple sells computers too. I think people forget that. Remember we've seen two OSX viruses recently. Do people develop viruses for dead platforms? I think not. Also, I'd guess that OSX and Linux are about equal in terms of installs counting desktops and servers. If its ok to support the underdog (linux) on slashdot, why is every other OS always dead or dying? I maybe only one person, but I personally administer 40 OSX clients and 2 xserves at work and have 4 macs in my home. Apple wouldn't have had the money to make the iPod if it weren't for the iMac and iBook.
:)
Unrelated, on the dead os count I have 3 BSD machines and a sparc running solaris too, but only one machine running Linux.
Not with the bush administration. You see Microsoft got away free after being voted a monopoly and look at the recent telco mergers. They don't do the *same* thing, so it will go through no problem.
Hell save a little longer and get one of the new intel based iMacs. When vista runs on it, you'll get "next generation games" and you can always run any new titles for the Mac plus WoW! Some games will run on the new ones like quake3 (third party port). I have no idea how well rosetta does for PPC games. I'd love to know that as i have quite a few strategy games for the mac, plus enemy territory. Or for the pc crowd, just buy an adequate box every other year ($500 or so).. then you lived the sony lifecycle with a new pc every two years. On a big sale, thats three shit dell low end pcs with monitor upgrades for the lazy type. Everyone in your home can have a pc for the price of the ps3.
Maybe I missed it, but everyone seems to think this is all about blue ray. What about IBM? Microsoft had xbox 360 delays with the PPC chips and apple has claimed IBM was short changing them on processors for some time. Maybe this is IBM's fault? IBM did have to ramp up to actually fulfil Microsoft's obligations. I guess IBM can't handle Intel and Motorolla's embedded market very well. (ok its freescale or something now..)
FreeBSD has 3 thread library choices as of 5.4 and 6.0. libc_r, an M:N implementation and a newer 1:1 library. Only the 1:1 library is in active development and patches are not usually applied to the other two. The 1:1 library was developed during early FreeBSD 5.x development for kernel operations and after benchmarking it, someone made the call to push it into userland.
Recently, on one of the freebsd lists (hackers or performance) there were some benchmarks with mysql on the different threading implementations. I think that was a good sample of the performance characteristics of each if you're interested.
Well Sun has changed the threading design several times in Solaris. You need to be more specific. Sun used a model where one cpu was the controller (scheduler) and the other cpus ran jobs in sun os 4.x and in early Solaris versions it used a m:n model where there would be m user threads to n kernel threads similar to how Microsoft's .NET framework creates threads. Newer versions of solaris (9 and 10) are more like linux and freebsd's latest threading library and make 1:1 relationships between userland and kernel threads. I'm not an expert at this and have been taking an operating systems class this term where this has been discussed.
As for dragonfly, I do think that Matt was right about some problems with freebsd 5 and 6 but each release is getting faster. 6.1 beta is noticably faster. Dragonfly isn't revolutionary though. I think some of the ideas from Mach inspired some of their design decisions and we all know Apple has the most succesful Mach kernel in the commercial world.
I don't know if we'll see freebsd or dragonfly look super impressive on multicore cpus, but I do know that openbsd and netbsd may not scale well depending on what they are working on. I can tell you that freebsd 6 does fine on my dual xeon machine. Solaris 10 on the same system seemed slightly slow but i think that was driver support more than anything. Linux IS SLOW on the system regardless of the scheduler. For that OS class, I had to install the 2.6.15 kernel and custom compile it for my system prior to our work on adding system calls. Its not as fast (gentoo) as freebsd 6 was on the system, but faster than freebsd 5.x. (especially disk io) I don't know why linux seems slow as it is using both cpus quite well. Of course this is percieved speed.. i haven't done any formal benchmarks.
Maybe someone should do a serious benchmark on FreeBSD 6, Netbsd 3, Dragonfly (whatever the latest is), OpenBSD 3.8, Linux 2.6.15 (gentoo distro?), and for kicks OpenDarwin all running on the same dual core hardware. Hell if i get time this summer, i might do it.
Yeah and the fact that most OSS development is with gtk or qt. It would be nice if we standardized on a toolkit/library for some things. If it were GNUstep, it would help promote sharing apps with macs which would give apps that much more market share.
I don't know if its true, but most people online tell me that GNUstep developers are a bit inflexible about enhancements/patches to keep it more in sync with Apple's offerings.
Interesting perspective. I just had a conversation about how computers made 10 years ago held up better than modern ones. I have a sun workstation from 1992 sitting on my desk. It still works great. Only thing thats been replaced that I'm aware of was the hard drive. Conversely, my wife's powermac had the logic board fail after 3 years of constant use. Its the only part that failed in her system though. However, during the last 3 years i've owned 6 cd burners. I burn about 100 disks a year. I have a friend with a 2x burner that still works. I'd say quality is much worse than it was overall. Anyone remember when floppy disk drives outlasted the computers they were in? The only thing i think has gotten better is hard drives. I'm sure the increased failure rates of computers are in part the heat and power requirements of the newer systems. At work, i've seen dell machines fail within 3 days of placement. Why? They were engineered poorly and did not provide adequate ventilation. One of the fans didn't work at full power and one burned up all components. Dell only kept the case. Granted it was one of the mini form factor gx280s, but it had pleanty of room around it. I think people need to realize that all pc vendors do something wrong to save money. HP puts in power supplies that are too small, Dell machines usually don't get enough ventilation (although newer machines are a bit better), most gateway machines i've seen have their hard drives or motherboards go out, IBM thinkpads often lose their hard drives since heat from the processor is aimed at the drives, etc. Its not limited to pc vendors, asus has bios problems with their boards and i've seen several fall apart after a years usage.
As for cars, I think there is a reason Toyota is number one. I don't personally like toyota but after buying a 2005 saturn ion for my wife I understand that the 70s are back for GM.
Expectations are high because people make less money now than they did 5 years ago. Things need to last now. I'm actually getting the powermac repaired because i can't afford 2000 for a new g5. Heaven forbid i take away my wife's WoW computer.
The problems you experienced are due to it being a beta. In the real world, beta means that the software is unfinished and not ready for general use. Google calls everything a beta and people don't realize what it means anymore. For example, netscape 2 beta crashed going to websites much like IE7 beta can. Netscape 4 pr2 crashed like crazy as did IE4 beta 2. In the old days, beta's didn't work right because they were not done. In google language, they call everything a beta so that they can say its a beta if it doesn't work right or people bitch about lack of features. Its very clever but now people expect beta code to be perfect. Next alpha code will be real beta code until google starts releasing public "alphas".
Also, let me address your points.
1. its microsoft, would they really support firefox? Most of their sites are going IE only again to a point i can't use IE7 beta on them as they are coded for IE6.
2. see beta dialog above
3. i agree
4. sounds good.
If google is so noble, why don't they release their gmail software as open source. (i.e. the code running on their servers) I wouldn't mind having a good webmail and mail server setup on my server. I hear the argument microsoft should open source windows all the time, why not google's software.
I'm still hopeful about hula.. novell's open source mail server. Someone is working on freebsd patches so maybe it will get stable. If not, it might even persuade me to use linux.
Yes and i think thats a problem with the pro firefox movement. People still need to patch IE because so many applications use IE's rendering engine for other content. Windows update (or the new Microsoft update) are your friends. If software is built into your operating system, someone might be able to use it to gain control of your machine. It still needs to be patched.
Hmm.. well pcs might go up in price now that they must include real video cards. Apple ships Radeon or nvidia cards in everything and have for years. No intel onboard POS cards. All macs can run games as a result even the low end laptops. Thats why people pay for macs. Price out a dell with a radeon or recent nvidia card in it and then compare apple's prices. Apple is VERY competative.
Its also true that you can get a dell desktop with monitor for 300-400 dollars and that a mac mini is 500 plus you need a monitor. However, the mac has a real video card in it too. You can't game on a 300 hundred dollar dell. Most don't even have agp or pciE slots to upgrade your onboard video and standard pci don't cut it anymore. Before you try to say macs aren't upgradable, my wife's powermac has a retail ati 9800 in it and it shipped with a geforce 4 mx 32mb AGP card.
Your argument is 5 years old. Steve jobs now wants to ship affordable computers and thats part of the intel switch.
Finally, if you are referring to home built pcs, must people don't do that. Sure slashdot readers can slap a computer together for a few hundred bucks thats quite nice, but my mom or cousin can't. Apple sells computers and if you compare dell, sony, gateway, lenovo (or whatever ibm pcs are), or hp i think you'll see they aren't cheap. Dell's gaming line is quite expensive in fact. You can even buy a powermac or well equipped iMac for Dell prices. Dell gaming or dell precision workstations are in the quality realm of apple powermacs.
Now lets see you build a core duo for less than apple with a 17 inch widescreen lcd display, remote control, radeon graphics, and other specs in a small form factor. 17 inch lcd displays are cheap, but not widescreen displays. Price DELL out on those.
Thats great and all but i think the key here is price and availability. Intel took over the server market with their low end chips. Companies said they wanted cheap servers and lots of servers. IBM and Sun have a vested interest in the return of big iron but i don't know if companies want that. I'm curious to see what happens with the new sun and ibm moves.
While I agree that Microsoft should fix Windows and their application software, their one care beta isn't that bad. I've already caught things that SAV 9 corporate can not detect with it. Obviously, MS is doing better than Symantec. The firewall is not much different than the windows built in firewall (SP2). The neat thing is that the one care firewall actually works properly and does not block legitimate (or all) traffic like the Norton Internet Security 2005 package. NIS often breaks after patches and does not allow any traffic.
.Mac Backup.App program. The big difference is that apple lets you backup to a hard disk or network volume. If microsoft adds that feature, I may be buying it after the beta period.
I've been a symantec customer for 6 years, since McAfee became NAI and started to suck bad. I'm not entirely sad about this MS product. My system is much faster with it loaded than with SAV9 or NIS 2005. Maybe McAfee and Symantec will try to compete again.
Also, this one care product also has a backup solution similar to apple's
You are right of course.. i do think microsoft can do better than symantec. Microsoft could do better and fix windows instead of charge for one care as well. They do have the source code to windows. If you are mad about it, write a rep in your government to go after microsoft for a antitrust when it ships.
Its not just random keywords. I had my wife read it to me. Its a description of the content on their site. Considering its a graphical page, they were probably making it useful. I don't see what the problem with bmw's content. Hell it would assist blind people (although they dont need cars).
Damn google fan boys... think before you speak... google is just pissed because they didn't make ad dollars off this. They do text ads all the time and get praised on it. I hate adsense! Links on pages attacked to every frickin word is annoying.. there is nothing different with what bmw did except its THEIR website and THEIR content.
Google sucks. Get over it. And no i'm not a yahoo, msn or any other fan boy.. just stating the obvious. I just wish we had a good search engine to use and not one based on greed. And speaking of google, why didn't they use their hordes of phds to write an algorithm to detect that page if its a problem.
c) Figure you're being tracked, pull in to a 7/11 and steal another car if you can't get the tracking device off or don't have time too. They just encouraged carjacking.
Yes and as someone else pointed out the person could use .NET 2 above that has many of these features, the mono project DOES NOT support .NET 2 code at this time. The parent is right.
.NET idea all together since Linux is a requirement. Mono is not ready for production use because its not compatible yet. Someday maybe it will work on Linux and provide 2 operating systems for which .NET can run. I don't believe that solaris or mac os x ports will ever work the same as the Linux port. The lack of interest in fixing BSD bugs in the Mono project is proof they don't care about other platforms. (and it is Novell and Western Michigan University grads we are talking about)
.NET 2 would be a great solution. I agree with everyone else that a higher level language is the way to go. If the person insists on C++ on windows, don't use the MS compiler if you want some portability. If money is no object, maybe licensing Qt for windows and Linux is a good idea. Gtk might work as well.
In fact, I'd say scrap the
If the requirements for his proposal only required windows,
I think it depends on the games you play too. Its similar to video card choice. If you buy games from a company that favors AMD or reacts quickly to whats popular, then AMD chips would be the best choice. If you play a few year old games, or from a vendor that favors intel its more logical to buy intel. Likewise, some companies optimize for ATI and others nVidia.
The other factor is what operating systems you intend to use and the motherboard chipset. Gamer rigs are often custom built and therefore gamers can pick known stable chipsets. If you walk into best buy and pick up a machine, its bound to have a cheap chipset. I prefer intel chips because I know the intel based chipsets will have working usb, agp (or pciE), etc. AMD processors are great, but the chipsets to go with them often suck.
I suspect intel will need to work on speedy chips after they get their power usage under control. Soon software will be optimzied for AMD chips and intel will have to play catch up. The more popular AMD gets, the more reliable the motherboards will become (i hope).
Just as a side note, i have a dual xeon 2.0ghz and an amd sempron 2300+ (nforce2). WIth a non SMP kernel in linux or freebsd 6 I noticed that the two systems run about the same speed. They seem very comparable. The AMD machine even has a slower bus speed. And both have different disk subsystems (xeon has a u160 scsi disk and the amd box has a sata raid 1 array). I just find it interesting that cpu bound operations are similar for an intel workstation class chip and a low end amd thats rated only 300 mhz faster. On freebsd, this is with custom kernels and userland recompiled for the chips. Generic performance is worse on the amd machine.
If you're building a PVR, stick to a generic tv tuner card. ATI rage theater chipsets are not usually supported (AIW, etc) in most open source operating systems. Something more generic will work almost anywhere (even *BSD).
In general, nvidia cards are better in open source operating systems in part because nvidia actually writes drivers for linux, freebsd, and solaris to some degree (now oss). I love ati cards, but my love of BSD trumps that. I do have to say the fx 5200 card i bought looks great on the console and runs enemy territory at a playable level in freebsd 6 with xorg 6.8.2 and linux emulation. I tried my aiw 9600xt in linux a few months ago and it looked sweet. i can't give a framerate comparison because the nvidia card is in a different pc and one of them is a dual xeon and the other is a sempron.
What I find interesting about your comment is that you admit its probably impossible to make bulletproof software, yet you think they should rewrite it "correctly". I see comments like this all the time on slashdot and on security minded lists like bugtraq, webappsec, etc. I've yet to see anyone come up with a list or example site that is "written correctly." In the rare case someone does offer an example, its usually as bad as something I'd see in a CS class. There is like one or two input fields that have very well defined input. Anyone could write secure code for that. On the Internet, its not that easy. People want to post HTML comments, invalid HTML, 10 year old HTML, javascript they generated on some site to make a button or sig come alive. Blogging sites have two target audiences, 18-30 year olds and younger people. Most younger people would prefer to use an IM client than anything else, and occasionally older people do keep blogs. Live Journal has a better range than most sites. Most people in these target groups want to post HTML comments or at least rich formatted posts.
I don't think people realize how complex a blogging site can be. Attempting to secure a blogging site is a real task. Live journal actually has a revenue stream and paid programmers so there is less excuse for them not to try, but succeeding is another matter. In reality, if they cut of rich content posting then their users will move on to another service or simply find a OSS product they can run themselves. Then we'll have automated attacks on those scripts. I've written a blogging site in java, and its not even close to secure. I'm in the process of rewriting the whole thing in a language I'm more familiar with. Its not an easy task.
Multiple platforms? I count 2 without looking at hardware. Linux and Windows... Thats not exactly ground breaking. IBM has to support windows and likes linux. Maybe they should consider other platforms like say Solaris, MacOS X, FreeBSD, something HP makes, etc. With open solaris and the rumors about licensing floating around IBM may wish they had solaris support. Personally, I have a FreeBSD and Windows setup at the moment so it does me little good. Even if i get it to run under linux emulation, its going to be slow. I guess I'll stick to mysql.