I actually would, just to have a no-frills phone with Bluetooth connectivity, but it'd a) take bloody ages to read up on the subject matter to know what I'm actually doing there and b) be much more expensive than the "cheapest" Nokia with BT.
I also remember reading that OGG was notably more CPU-intensive (still true?).
There is the case of the Nex IIa, an MP3 player that was sold with the promise of Ogg Vorbis compatibility with a firmware patch later. In the end Frontier Labs announced that the Nex IIa's CPU wasn't fast enough for Vorbis playback and that they'd release an upgraded version with Vorbis compatibility under the name "Nex Black".
So yes, apparently Vorbis (which I assume you meant with "OGG") is more expensive to decode than MP3.
Too binary. They should rather go with a staggered system of markups/rebates. That way they don't refuse sales to anyone but they do encourage good grades. The table could look like that:
A: 10% rebate
B: 5% rebate
C: normal price
D: 5% markup
E: 10% markup
F: 20% markup
Unverified: Counts as an F
Markups don't apply to educational software (the stigma of having purchased that is bad enough already)
Of course then you still have to figure out whether you're dealing with a school kid and you have authenticate their parents etc., but you get a muich more acceptable system that even encourages gamers to do good in school - after all, ten per cent off ain't a bad deal.
Sitcoms have interperson relationships? I have yet to encounter one that uses the characters as something besides a way to set up the jokes. As for WoT... The relationships do get pretty complex and it is interesting to see how certain characters change and how they react to suddenly finding themselves on different sides of a conflict (and it gets even weirder because in theory everyone has the same goal). I think RJ pulls it off in a non-boring way, but then again I can stomach much of those relationships consisting of people not understanding each other and knowing it.
Of course having the interpersonal relationships all tangled up in some of the more convoluted part of the story helps to keep them interesting.
While it's true that the writing isn't genius, WoT shines on detail - both the world and the characters are plastic. WoT is pretty immersive, even if much of it consists of people sitting around brooding (Rand, I'm looking at you). The character interaction is much more solid than in most fiction I've read and the characters have their own personalities, some of them quite unique. The world is well thought-out and one feels that RJ has spent some time thinking it through. A meandering story and mediocre writing keep WoT from being a "best ever" kind of series, but it is utterly enjoyable if you value things like character interaction highly.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention it: There is a book like you describe for sale and for free download, actually. Atlanta Nights is truly a unique work of literature and everyone should or shouldn't have read it.
Agreed. Coincidentally, does anyone want to proof-read my upcoming Perry Rhodan novel? In this novel, Perry is turned into a woman, only to discover that he is actually the angel of deli food and he has to travel back in time to 1781 to save the world from the NASA, who also turned back in time to make everyone eat astronaut food so they forget about deli food.
The novel after that will be a Perry Rhodan/Gor/anthro veggies crossover which explores the BDSM relationship between Perry, a carrot and a family of rhubarbs.
No way, man. Edward Dijkstra built the first navigation system, Tommy Hoare invented the algorithm and Ronald Knuth wrote the Morris-Pratt worm, which later evolved into ILOVEYOU and Sobig.
Ha! And the professor had me fail the Computer History class! I still know everything!
By the way, German doesn't have that problem as we tend to germanize leanwords - "Virus" (vee-rus) uses the normal German rules for pluralization, turning into "Viren" (vee-ren). Of course that doesn't work too well with English - "virs"? "vires"? Actually, I'm fine as long as someone doesn't come up with "virora" while on a glue bender.
Actually, one of the things I really disliked about switching to the AM2 socket was the fact that not only did I have to buy a new mainboard matching the CPU but also new RAM and a new graphics card. Okay, the graphics card I can understand (AGP is pretty old, after all), but it annoyed me to no end that there weren't any decent boards with DDR1 support. When you're on a budget, having to upgrade 3/4 of your system at once not only leads to unfortunate decisions (like downgrading to 512 MiB of RAM in order to make the upgrade cost hurt less) but also makes debugging hardware issues a pain in the ass (you don't need to be on a budget for the last one to apply). If I had had to replace my hard drives as well a complete system replacement would've been cheaper.
Gradual upgrade paths are a very good thing; forcing the user to upgrade everything at once takes the fun out of upgrading.
As for bloated OSes: That's what modular drivers are for. Linux supports a wide range of hardware yet is considered very lean in some configurations.
Look, let's be honest -- Vista isn't bad. It may not be as pretty as OS X, but it's got the most attractive UI Microsoft has ever produced[...]
Actually, I'm not sure on that one. I mean, most parts look nice, but I find the damn flashing status bars so distracting that I still prefer the Win 98 look. The Vista UI demands too much attention for my taste. Other than that, it does look good, though.
If you don't need Windows to run Microsoft Office, what is it good for?
Running Windows apps that aren't Microsoft Office. Just vecause CxO can run IE7 and Office doesn't mean it can run some obscure Win-only app with a user base of 5.000 that just happens to be the one app $INDUSTRY can absolutely not do without.
After point and counterpoint for a while, anyone who I talk to about this issue "Why use OS X vs. Linux vs. Windows" always boils down to "It costs too much for mac hardware to use the OS."
Actually, in the last couple months more and more people I know are trading that argument in for "I'm waiting for Apple to release Leopard". It's pretty amazing how fast people can go from steadfast Linux users to Jobs keynote junkies (although they will lose any and all interest in keynotes once Leopard comes out. Until 10.6 is announced...).
While KDE/Gnome do work pretty well in the desktop, I have to say that Aqua beats the shit out of them on the laptop. OS X just gets out of the way in a way that Linux doesn't do.
Of course it's a matter of taste and Macs have their own problems, especially in the dev department and with package managers - the only stable and remotely usable package manager we get is apt (via Fink), which emulates Debian's package management right down to the ancient package versions; Portage/OS X would be better in all possible ways if it would work reliably and Mac Ports is worse than both. But I'm willing to put up with that because unlike with Linux, with OS X the package manager is only a small part of the whole experience (of course, whether that's a good thing is up to the user to decide).
OS X certainly is an alternative to Linux and Apple laptops are usually within the same price range as non-Apple ones of comparable power. I can't really speak about the desktop/workstation market, but Apple's laptops are worth their money.
- 20 Dollars of potential sales to you [total: 20 $]
- A further 150 Dollars of merchandise because you found put that the band sucks before attending their concert [total: 170 $]
- The above again, times 15, because you played some of the songs to your friends who now also won't attend the concert [total: 2,720 $]
- The above again, times 2,000,000, because every pirate uploads their bounty to BitDonkey [total: 5.44 G$]
- The above again, times 2,000,000, because your peers share the stuff further [total: 10,880 quadrillion Dollars]
So, if piracy wouldn't exist, the music industry would make roughly 900,000 times the USA's GDP, in America alone. The world's reserve banks would have to issue more money because there'd be no other way for the RIAA to be so profitable.
These numbers are totally scientific and calculated by someone who's mere years away from potentially being a professor of computer science, so it's completely impossible for this study to be wrong.
Heh. Finally a reason to feel good about German laws for a change. In Germany, EULAs are usually void due to the fact that you only read them after the purchase. In order for any EULA to have any legal meaning, the software company would have to make a compelling case that they indeed presented the EULA to you before the purchase.
The concept behind that (not that IANAL) is that the EULA was not part of the sales agreement and thus the buyer never could disagree with it prior to purchase; forcing people to randomly enter a contract to use something they just bought isn't allowed, thus EULAs would only have any legal bearing if they were presented prior to purchase. Yes, that would mean printing the entire EULA somewhere on the box or forcing salespeople to hand it to you before you buy the software.
For the vast majority of XP users, 64 bit had pretty much zero benefit (and quite a few disadvantages) until maybe a year - 18 months tops - ago.
In fact, I know nobody who actually uses 64-bit Windows at home. Everyone has his AMD64-compatible setup, but even Vista goes purely in 32-bit mode because the 64-bit version has compatibility problems, stability or performance issues etc.
The only boxen I've seen actually make use of their 64-bit architecture were Linux boxen and Macs (kind of; pure 64-bit mode coming with Leopard). Windows users usually treat their AMD64 CPUs as really fast i686s.
xf86-video-ati would be what Debian uses. Gentoo would rather use xorg-video-ati, as it has already adopted the cutting-edge XFree86 fork called X.Org.;)
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Just leave him in there long enough and the cat will have clawed him to death.
I actually would, just to have a no-frills phone with Bluetooth connectivity, but it'd a) take bloody ages to read up on the subject matter to know what I'm actually doing there and b) be much more expensive than the "cheapest" Nokia with BT.
I also remember reading that OGG was notably more CPU-intensive (still true?).
There is the case of the Nex IIa, an MP3 player that was sold with the promise of Ogg Vorbis compatibility with a firmware patch later. In the end Frontier Labs announced that the Nex IIa's CPU wasn't fast enough for Vorbis playback and that they'd release an upgraded version with Vorbis compatibility under the name "Nex Black".
So yes, apparently Vorbis (which I assume you meant with "OGG") is more expensive to decode than MP3.
Too binary. They should rather go with a staggered system of markups/rebates. That way they don't refuse sales to anyone but they do encourage good grades. The table could look like that:
A: 10% rebate
B: 5% rebate
C: normal price
D: 5% markup
E: 10% markup
F: 20% markup
Unverified: Counts as an F
Markups don't apply to educational software (the stigma of having purchased that is bad enough already)
Of course then you still have to figure out whether you're dealing with a school kid and you have authenticate their parents etc., but you get a muich more acceptable system that even encourages gamers to do good in school - after all, ten per cent off ain't a bad deal.
Too bad some labels refuse to have their stuff on iTunes Plus. That has kept me from buying an album or two.
Sitcoms have interperson relationships? I have yet to encounter one that uses the characters as something besides a way to set up the jokes. As for WoT... The relationships do get pretty complex and it is interesting to see how certain characters change and how they react to suddenly finding themselves on different sides of a conflict (and it gets even weirder because in theory everyone has the same goal). I think RJ pulls it off in a non-boring way, but then again I can stomach much of those relationships consisting of people not understanding each other and knowing it.
Of course having the interpersonal relationships all tangled up in some of the more convoluted part of the story helps to keep them interesting.
While it's true that the writing isn't genius, WoT shines on detail - both the world and the characters are plastic. WoT is pretty immersive, even if much of it consists of people sitting around brooding (Rand, I'm looking at you). The character interaction is much more solid than in most fiction I've read and the characters have their own personalities, some of them quite unique. The world is well thought-out and one feels that RJ has spent some time thinking it through. A meandering story and mediocre writing keep WoT from being a "best ever" kind of series, but it is utterly enjoyable if you value things like character interaction highly.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention it: There is a book like you describe for sale and for free download, actually. Atlanta Nights is truly a unique work of literature and everyone should or shouldn't have read it.
Agreed. Coincidentally, does anyone want to proof-read my upcoming Perry Rhodan novel? In this novel, Perry is turned into a woman, only to discover that he is actually the angel of deli food and he has to travel back in time to 1781 to save the world from the NASA, who also turned back in time to make everyone eat astronaut food so they forget about deli food.
The novel after that will be a Perry Rhodan/Gor/anthro veggies crossover which explores the BDSM relationship between Perry, a carrot and a family of rhubarbs.
No way, man. Edward Dijkstra built the first navigation system, Tommy Hoare invented the algorithm and Ronald Knuth wrote the Morris-Pratt worm, which later evolved into ILOVEYOU and Sobig.
Ha! And the professor had me fail the Computer History class! I still know everything!
By the way, German doesn't have that problem as we tend to germanize leanwords - "Virus" (vee-rus) uses the normal German rules for pluralization, turning into "Viren" (vee-ren). Of course that doesn't work too well with English - "virs"? "vires"? Actually, I'm fine as long as someone doesn't come up with "virora" while on a glue bender.
Indeed. I think Apple should release the MacBook Pro X-treme Fatal1ty 0wnage Edition with a trackpad with 10 buttons, force feedback and a coolie hat.
Actually, one of the things I really disliked about switching to the AM2 socket was the fact that not only did I have to buy a new mainboard matching the CPU but also new RAM and a new graphics card. Okay, the graphics card I can understand (AGP is pretty old, after all), but it annoyed me to no end that there weren't any decent boards with DDR1 support. When you're on a budget, having to upgrade 3/4 of your system at once not only leads to unfortunate decisions (like downgrading to 512 MiB of RAM in order to make the upgrade cost hurt less) but also makes debugging hardware issues a pain in the ass (you don't need to be on a budget for the last one to apply). If I had had to replace my hard drives as well a complete system replacement would've been cheaper.
Gradual upgrade paths are a very good thing; forcing the user to upgrade everything at once takes the fun out of upgrading.
As for bloated OSes: That's what modular drivers are for. Linux supports a wide range of hardware yet is considered very lean in some configurations.
In one decade I expect Apple to have the same product, just with an 8x2.5 GHz CPU and 1 TiB of drive space...
He writes code that produces the final graphics, and runs memory-and-processor hogs like Photoshop and Illustrator all the time.
And he doesn't even think twice about it? The power of that Mac mini must be real ultimate...
Look, let's be honest -- Vista isn't bad. It may not be as pretty as OS X, but it's got the most attractive UI Microsoft has ever produced[...]
Actually, I'm not sure on that one. I mean, most parts look nice, but I find the damn flashing status bars so distracting that I still prefer the Win 98 look. The Vista UI demands too much attention for my taste. Other than that, it does look good, though.
And Breakout... and... and.. Super Breakout.
*goes back to playing Escape Velocity*
If you don't need Windows to run Microsoft Office, what is it good for?
Running Windows apps that aren't Microsoft Office. Just vecause CxO can run IE7 and Office doesn't mean it can run some obscure Win-only app with a user base of 5.000 that just happens to be the one app $INDUSTRY can absolutely not do without.
After point and counterpoint for a while, anyone who I talk to about this issue "Why use OS X vs. Linux vs. Windows" always boils down to "It costs too much for mac hardware to use the OS."
Actually, in the last couple months more and more people I know are trading that argument in for "I'm waiting for Apple to release Leopard". It's pretty amazing how fast people can go from steadfast Linux users to Jobs keynote junkies (although they will lose any and all interest in keynotes once Leopard comes out. Until 10.6 is announced...).
While KDE/Gnome do work pretty well in the desktop, I have to say that Aqua beats the shit out of them on the laptop. OS X just gets out of the way in a way that Linux doesn't do.
Of course it's a matter of taste and Macs have their own problems, especially in the dev department and with package managers - the only stable and remotely usable package manager we get is apt (via Fink), which emulates Debian's package management right down to the ancient package versions; Portage/OS X would be better in all possible ways if it would work reliably and Mac Ports is worse than both. But I'm willing to put up with that because unlike with Linux, with OS X the package manager is only a small part of the whole experience (of course, whether that's a good thing is up to the user to decide).
OS X certainly is an alternative to Linux and Apple laptops are usually within the same price range as non-Apple ones of comparable power. I can't really speak about the desktop/workstation market, but Apple's laptops are worth their money.
Worse! If you piraterize a music CD they lose...
- 20 Dollars of potential sales to you [total: 20 $]
- A further 150 Dollars of merchandise because you found put that the band sucks before attending their concert [total: 170 $]
- The above again, times 15, because you played some of the songs to your friends who now also won't attend the concert [total: 2,720 $]
- The above again, times 2,000,000, because every pirate uploads their bounty to BitDonkey [total: 5.44 G$] - The above again, times 2,000,000, because your peers share the stuff further [total: 10,880 quadrillion Dollars]
So, if piracy wouldn't exist, the music industry would make roughly 900,000 times the USA's GDP, in America alone. The world's reserve banks would have to issue more money because there'd be no other way for the RIAA to be so profitable.
These numbers are totally scientific and calculated by someone who's mere years away from potentially being a professor of computer science, so it's completely impossible for this study to be wrong.
Heh. Finally a reason to feel good about German laws for a change. In Germany, EULAs are usually void due to the fact that you only read them after the purchase. In order for any EULA to have any legal meaning, the software company would have to make a compelling case that they indeed presented the EULA to you before the purchase.
The concept behind that (not that IANAL) is that the EULA was not part of the sales agreement and thus the buyer never could disagree with it prior to purchase; forcing people to randomly enter a contract to use something they just bought isn't allowed, thus EULAs would only have any legal bearing if they were presented prior to purchase. Yes, that would mean printing the entire EULA somewhere on the box or forcing salespeople to hand it to you before you buy the software.
In fact, you can do entirely without them if your vehicle was properly designed with the cubic nature of time in mind.
For the vast majority of XP users, 64 bit had pretty much zero benefit (and quite a few disadvantages) until maybe a year - 18 months tops - ago.
In fact, I know nobody who actually uses 64-bit Windows at home. Everyone has his AMD64-compatible setup, but even Vista goes purely in 32-bit mode because the 64-bit version has compatibility problems, stability or performance issues etc.
The only boxen I've seen actually make use of their 64-bit architecture were Linux boxen and Macs (kind of; pure 64-bit mode coming with Leopard). Windows users usually treat their AMD64 CPUs as really fast i686s.
xf86-video-ati would be what Debian uses. Gentoo would rather use xorg-video-ati, as it has already adopted the cutting-edge XFree86 fork called X.Org. ;)