Great strides are made weekly on the usability of linux, package management, dependencies, New File Systems, More apps, Wine etc.. and there is no doubt in my mind that they all work towards making Linux easier to use and more accessible to Lambda Joe's.
There is one thing without which no Joe User will go, no matter how pretty or compatible linux becomes: installing Apps.
No matter if you are a Windws, Linux or other die-hard you have to admit Mac OS X Make's it damn easy to instll 99% of the apps. Drag and drop what looks like a single file (in reality a *.app folder) and clik to run.
I immediately knew this was huge when OS X came out and made this possible on *NIX machines, and was secretly hoping that Linux wold catch up with it's own version and take-off.
Unfortunately, we are still relying on the age-old install with dependencies, of-course Synaptic, apt and Yum all make that easier but still too complex for 80% of the people.
When will we get drag and drop app install for Linux?
At last a solution for h264 DVD recoding!!
on
Sun Grid Compute Utility
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If I could compile mencode/mplayer for Solaris I could upload my dvd isos and get sun to encode these for me in H264 for my HTPC. I anticipate that each film would cost me ~$2. Not bad. Is that a safe bet? ANybody know what disk space they give for "personal files". Now to explain to my ISP that I am not participating in illegal file sharing with +100GB per month of traffic is not going to be easy..
More seriously, I could use this to run some of my Monte-Carlo simulators..
I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front). I cannot imagine that any computer could wake up and *instantly* playback full screen video. I just doesn't work like that. For all I can tell this is real unless he managed to hook up the iMac's screen directly to a behind the scenes PC. Even then I would have doubts. The little windows logo that replaces teh Mac at bootup tells me that this guy did his homework and was able to modify the EFI for it to load some custom bootloader
I think businesses here and there are starting to realize that the digital era creates a ton of data that needs archiving.
People continue to buy music, take pictures, capture videos, buy music etc.. but less and less of it comes on a physical support.
People tend to "rat pack" everything on their computers. The problem is computers are inherently unsecure and reliable. Even top geeks tend to forget to back up their material. Today we learn that indeed a DVD-R or CD-R is no good.
I have already started uploading my most precious data (pictures) to Flickr with a pro $25/year account. Unlimited storage and Flickr backup can retrieve everything for you if you need.
In the next 5-10years I predict many tears as people's computers get wiped out by viruses, get stolen or simply break-down.
Why can't a business offer unlimited storage with limited bandwith (i.e. 2gb/month)?
This is the only way digital media will survive throught the ages.
As someone who is attentive to the 3G phone scene I was at first impresseds with the capabilities of this tablet.
Looking a little more into the (hard to find) tech specs I soon realized that this device is nothing more than a 6680 or n70 hardware wise besides the gorgeous screen.
My only complaint with this tablet is the poor Multimedia performance I.e. QCIF videos @ 15 fps on a 800*480 screen?? Come on!.
I am not sure if the on chip DSP is put to use yet but if my N70 is any evidence, than it will not play anything MP4 at more than 200kbps. What a shame.
And for the love of god, this device is supposed to be a USER-Friendly device. People all-over are already spitting out debs that are as pleasant to install as it is to eat bolts. I don't want to fiddle on my tablet too! Palms are increasingly looking like the Macs vs the monster the community is transforming this thing into.
The Palm TX looks mighty sexy in comparison to this with a TCPMP running hi-bps videos and simple to install apps
This has been quite intelligently commented on NerdTV Ep4 Juicy bits.
He mentions AOL initial business model to have content providers pay AOL rather than AOL paying the providers and how they totally missed the opportunity to rule the internet.
Not a totally stupid idea...
The underlying assumption in your "Occident Vs. China" post is that the occident = America. America may be top dog for economics and many things but being a whistleblower for human rights protection is pretty ironic. Leave the old continent in charge of these matters; after all France invented the universal declaration of human rights didn't they?
Pardon my ignorance but wouldn't the availability of free occidental VPN servers and CGI proxys overwhelm the authorities? I mean they can block a few IP adresses by handpicking them but they cannot go ahead and block the whole internet, can they?
Some small app ala Google WIFI with rolling IPs (in an encrypted list of course) connecting to dynamic hostnames would be too much of a task for the authorities to bear with.
You are absolutely right. The population is NEVER normally distributed, we just assume so to facilitate interpretation.
Just a couple of points on your comments however: - The events you talked about are Exceptional. The more you train a Neural network on historical data, the "fitter" your model becomes to your data. The problem is that this contradicts to model's ability to generalize and thus to predict "crashes" and other donw-the-fat-tail "nth" standard devaition events. That's why I said I wanted to keep out of the exceptional category.
-Just as much as Future contracts are NEVER equal to the value of the underlyers at the maturity date, crowd predictions are not good use. However if sample=population AND everybody has an interest/commitment in/to realize predictions then teh event will happen. I.e if all the players in a given market bought/sold at a given date Futures for a same maturity at the same strike then the price at maturity would equal strike as long as all teh actors hedged would hedge themselves until then.
Did you ever hear of the game played on Wall-Street years ago where a monkey would randomly pick stock while an analyst hand-picked some favourites. Guess who had the best returns after 6 months? Not the one in a suit.
However, I am sure that if you repeated the experience, the analyst would eventually get better because he would recongize patterns, while the monkey could be assimilated to a random variable.
History repeats itself. Patterns are the key in predicting the future. It is not clear however if humans are the at recognising them (as humans have emotions) and if a larger network of neural networks (i.e. more brains) have a stronger ability to forecast.
Predicting involves extrapolating from a current ** sample** of data to predict the future based on one own interpretation/recognition of patterns.
The better your size and quality of your sample combined with a finely tuned pattern recognition the better your forecast (I won't go into exceptional events which by definition are exceptional).
So what do we have here? A larger sample of better quality for starters.
Also do not underestimate the power of the masses. If your sample=population size this is no longer forecasting (i.e. extrapolation) but the writing on the wall! (as long as people do as they say they are going to do).
So if your sample size increases dramatically, with better quality (smart employees) things will tend to happen as per the survey!
I know I am oversimplifying but but these are the basics of neural networks (or in this case a neural network of neural networks). Look it up.
Of course, predicting is not extrapolating if it is purely a random guess.
Whooooohhh Cool it buddy!. I 'm not rationalizing Apple's move to x86. I'm not saying it's cheaper and I'm not suggesting people should move to Apple. It's all about different needs for different people. Please don't put me in the same basket as apple fanboys
My point is that I am very sorry to see that commodity hardware is becoming less "commoditized" because of all the different standards: SATA, PATA, x86, x86-64, DDR2, Rambus etc... So switching to a Mac I was giving up less than what I had imagined. I had a different experience from yours: you know I did have other computers before I made it to Apple and yes they were great. However with my average upgrade cycle of 24-36 months I have never been able to leverage my motherboard or CPUs in an upgrade. So you bought more wisely than I did, or were lucky to embrace an architecture at the beggining of a life cycle: well done.
I never buy top-end stuff: I find there is most value in mid-range. The problems you get with that are those I listed.
I still have a couple of x86 PCs built from spare parts I had. I use them as home servers and they will continue to live as such because I do not need 3Ghz for SMB and light web traffic. When they die I will be forced to upgrade the motherboard and CPU (and most possibly the ram too).
My mention of Apple was just to say that MOST of the people on x86 will go ahead and change the whole machine because of incompatibility issues. You fit in the 5% tail.
Generally, If you want to see improvements you will need to upgrade other components. While I agree PATA is here to stay for the next couple of years at least, you will be forced to upgrade one day or another, just as for hte motherboards.
I'm not arguing that Macs are cheaper; they are not. I didn't switch for cost and performance alone; I also factored ease of use etc.. For me it turns out to be the better "deal" (not in a dollar way).
Keep in mind as well, that Macs don't depreciate as fast as PCs. So when I am "forced" to upgrade my whole machine, I might end-up paying sometimes less than what it would be for a new PC: Remember, when you already have a machine (or car for example): Cost = New machine price - Old machine resale price With Macs the latter is usually higher.
I also think that machines should be balanced and that Hard Drive and Graphics card upgrades are about as much as I will do because changing CPUs without improving memory bandwith, latency, HD I/O has little real performance improvements
While you are probably getting a good deal out of this it cannot be done by everybody:
-- as we've seen a few days ago, people will often give, store or throw away computers. So you won't be getting a Cpu from them.
-- Also, the person who sells you his CPU, if his machine was still functional before the sale, how will he make his machine work now? Get another CPU:-)? It's a catch 22. In days where people are trying to extend the life of machines that isn't very practical.
-- Say you bought your machine right before they announce a switch: They probably won't release much faster CPUs until the switch. So what's your incentive to buy a 2nd hand CPU for a ~20% performance increase?
As much as I like your solution, it isn't mainstream. Also please consider that as they change PIN layouts all the time, your potential market for a compatible CPU will be further reduced
I am an Apple kind of guy. When I switched a couple of years ago, the thing I was most upset about was the inability to upgrade my system myself. I was afraid that with Macs I would be locked in the hardware and would have to upgrade the whole machine when I needed an upgrade. Well that's true: if you want to upgrade the CPU on your Mac you have to change your machine (Ok you could maybe buy some "overdrive" for your Mac). Well on x86 it's the same thing! Theoritically you could swap out your processor for a faster one, but the average production life of a CPU socket is LESS than the average time you use a CPU before thinking about upgrading it.
So on x86 when you think about upgrading that 2 year old CPU to something new, well the pin layout has changed and you need to buy a new motherboard, with new type of Ram, and now new components (SATA, PCI-X etc...) Although you could change all these components idividually, you must admit just changing the whole machine is often a better deal.
I highly suspect intel has a built-in incentive to do so as they produce chipsets for the motherboards, and most of the chips in the new parts involved when "upgrading".
Upgrading no longer exists, it should be called "changing-my-machine".
.. so that this thing does not do an IP geographical check?
Netflix is fine but it isn't "global" in the sense that you rely on physical transport. Netflix even has to setup local warehouses for faster deliveries.
However this on-demand download is truly global. Sure they will require US credit card, fine I can do around that.
However, Imagine being able to download movies from your living room here in Europe *before* they usually hit the theaters? All this semi-legally (no p2p but you might be infringing EULA).
Movielink or whatever that was called did IP checks, hope NetFlix "forgets"...
Now, I need to talk my buddies in the US into sending me a Tivo box.
Skype for all the gripe we may have against it for being closed source and not interoperable with other VOIP providers (FWD, Vonage etc..) does have the most important feature (and holds a monopoly for it too):Encryption
I didn't like having an old fart snooping on my AIM conversations a few years ago and I put an end to it very quick; I've been using Trillian and now Adium with secure IM and OTR encryption.
As much as I like having cheap calls and all I rather my private conversations stay.. well... private.
Skype is the only interplatform secure voice application.
Gizmo can take it's fancy gui and go right back to the drawing board as far as I'm concerned.
If you ask me voip with sip (ala vonage) is just a disaster waiting to happen, sooner or later somebody will write an article in NYTimes or some mass distribution newspaper about how insecure and easy it is for somebody on your campus/office/wifi... LAN to record your conversation and everybody is going to freak out.
Encryption should be built-in NOW before it is too late to change the standards.
May not be a blog in the sense that it has a major audience, but it does have links to other websites, and does collect optionions about news events. Tell me again how this isn't a blog?
Slashdot Mirror
Great strides are made weekly on the usability of linux, package management, dependencies, New File Systems, More apps, Wine etc.. and there is no doubt in my mind that they all work towards making Linux easier to use and more accessible to Lambda Joe's.
There is one thing without which no Joe User will go, no matter how pretty or compatible linux becomes: installing Apps.
No matter if you are a Windws, Linux or other die-hard you have to admit Mac OS X Make's it damn easy to instll 99% of the apps. Drag and drop what looks like a single file (in reality a *.app folder) and clik to run.
I immediately knew this was huge when OS X came out and made this possible on *NIX machines, and was secretly hoping that Linux wold catch up with it's own version and take-off.
Unfortunately, we are still relying on the age-old install with dependencies, of-course Synaptic, apt and Yum all make that easier but still too complex for 80% of the people.
When will we get drag and drop app install for Linux?
If I could compile mencode/mplayer for Solaris I could upload my dvd isos and get sun to encode these for me in H264 for my HTPC.
I anticipate that each film would cost me ~$2. Not bad. Is that a safe bet? ANybody know what disk space they give for "personal files".
Now to explain to my ISP that I am not participating in illegal file sharing with +100GB per month of traffic is not going to be easy..
More seriously, I could use this to run some of my Monte-Carlo simulators..
I was sceptic as well but if you watch carefully he actually turns on the Mac from sleep mode at one point (see teh white Led on the front). I cannot imagine that any computer could wake up and *instantly* playback full screen video. I just doesn't work like that.
For all I can tell this is real unless he managed to hook up the iMac's screen directly to a behind the scenes PC. Even then I would have doubts.
The little windows logo that replaces teh Mac at bootup tells me that this guy did his homework and was able to modify the EFI for it to load some custom bootloader
For those who don't want to sell their souls to Quicktime heres the Video
I think businesses here and there are starting to realize that the digital era creates a ton of data that needs archiving.
People continue to buy music, take pictures, capture videos, buy music etc.. but less and less of it comes on a physical support.
People tend to "rat pack" everything on their computers. The problem is computers are inherently unsecure and reliable. Even top geeks tend to forget to back up their material.
Today we learn that indeed a DVD-R or CD-R is no good.
I have already started uploading my most precious data (pictures) to Flickr with a pro $25/year account. Unlimited storage and Flickr backup can retrieve everything for you if you need.
In the next 5-10years I predict many tears as people's computers get wiped out by viruses, get stolen or simply break-down.
Why can't a business offer unlimited storage with limited bandwith (i.e. 2gb/month)?
This is the only way digital media will survive throught the ages.
As someone who is attentive to the 3G phone scene I was at first impresseds with the capabilities of this tablet.
Looking a little more into the (hard to find) tech specs I soon realized that this device is nothing more than a 6680 or n70 hardware wise besides the gorgeous screen.
My only complaint with this tablet is the poor Multimedia performance I.e. QCIF videos @ 15 fps on a 800*480 screen?? Come on!.
I am not sure if the on chip DSP is put to use yet but if my N70 is any evidence, than it will not play anything MP4 at more than 200kbps. What a shame.
And for the love of god, this device is supposed to be a USER-Friendly device. People all-over are already spitting out debs that are as pleasant to install as it is to eat bolts.
I don't want to fiddle on my tablet too! Palms are increasingly looking like the Macs vs the monster the community is transforming this thing into.
The Palm TX looks mighty sexy in comparison to this with a TCPMP running hi-bps videos and simple to install apps
This has been quite intelligently commented on NerdTV Ep4 Juicy bits.
He mentions AOL initial business model to have content providers pay AOL rather than AOL paying the providers and how they totally missed the opportunity to rule the internet.
Not a totally stupid idea...
Didn't know OpenOffice.org ran on Macs natively (except NeoOffice).
Does OO.org 2 run natively?
The underlying assumption in your "Occident Vs. China" post is that the occident = America.
America may be top dog for economics and many things but being a whistleblower for human rights protection is pretty ironic.
Leave the old continent in charge of these matters; after all France invented the universal declaration of human rights didn't they?
"Private VPNs" was supposed to read "Public VPNs" of course...
Pardon my ignorance but wouldn't the availability of free occidental VPN servers and CGI proxys overwhelm the authorities?
I mean they can block a few IP adresses by handpicking them but they cannot go ahead and block the whole internet, can they?
Some small app ala Google WIFI with rolling IPs (in an encrypted list of course) connecting to dynamic hostnames would be too much of a task for the authorities to bear with.
Any other ideas?
You are absolutely right. The population is NEVER normally distributed, we just assume so to facilitate interpretation.
Just a couple of points on your comments however:
- The events you talked about are Exceptional. The more you train a Neural network on historical data, the "fitter" your model becomes to your data. The problem is that this contradicts to model's ability to generalize and thus to predict "crashes" and other donw-the-fat-tail "nth" standard devaition events. That's why I said I wanted to keep out of the exceptional category.
-Just as much as Future contracts are NEVER equal to the value of the underlyers at the maturity date, crowd predictions are not good use. However if sample=population AND everybody has an interest/commitment in/to realize predictions then teh event will happen. I.e if all the players in a given market bought/sold at a given date Futures for a same maturity at the same strike then the price at maturity would equal strike as long as all teh actors hedged would hedge themselves until then.
Did you ever hear of the game played on Wall-Street years ago where a monkey would randomly pick stock while an analyst hand-picked some favourites. Guess who had the best returns after 6 months? Not the one in a suit.
However, I am sure that if you repeated the experience, the analyst would eventually get better because he would recongize patterns, while the monkey could be assimilated to a random variable.
History repeats itself. Patterns are the key in predicting the future. It is not clear however if humans are the at recognising them (as humans have emotions) and if a larger network of neural networks (i.e. more brains) have a stronger ability to forecast.
Predicting involves extrapolating from a current ** sample** of data to predict the future based on one own interpretation /recognition of patterns.
The better your size and quality of your sample combined with a finely tuned pattern recognition the better your forecast (I won't go into exceptional events which by definition are exceptional).
So what do we have here? A larger sample of better quality for starters.
Also do not underestimate the power of the masses. If your sample=population size this is no longer forecasting (i.e. extrapolation) but the writing on the wall! (as long as people do as they say they are going to do).
So if your sample size increases dramatically, with better quality (smart employees) things will tend to happen as per the survey!
I know I am oversimplifying but but these are the basics of neural networks (or in this case a neural network of neural networks). Look it up.
Of course, predicting is not extrapolating if it is purely a random guess.
Have fun!
Ok, GTalk is completely down now..
It will drop your connection in 10 secs.
and get disconnected + loose your buddy list...
Whooooohhh
Cool it buddy!. I 'm not rationalizing Apple's move to x86. I'm not saying it's cheaper and I'm not suggesting people should move to Apple. It's all about different needs for different people. Please don't put me in the same basket as apple fanboys
My point is that I am very sorry to see that commodity hardware is becoming less "commoditized" because of all the different standards: SATA, PATA, x86, x86-64, DDR2, Rambus etc...
So switching to a Mac I was giving up less than what I had imagined.
I had a different experience from yours: you know I did have other computers before I made it to Apple and yes they were great. However with my average upgrade cycle of 24-36 months I have never been able to leverage my motherboard or CPUs in an upgrade.
So you bought more wisely than I did, or were lucky to embrace an architecture at the beggining of a life cycle: well done.
I never buy top-end stuff: I find there is most value in mid-range. The problems you get with that are those I listed.
I still have a couple of x86 PCs built from spare parts I had. I use them as home servers and they will continue to live as such because I do not need 3Ghz for SMB and light web traffic. When they die I will be forced to upgrade the motherboard and CPU (and most possibly the ram too).
My mention of Apple was just to say that MOST of the people on x86 will go ahead and change the whole machine because of incompatibility issues.
You fit in the 5% tail.
Generally, If you want to see improvements you will need to upgrade other components.
While I agree PATA is here to stay for the next couple of years at least, you will be forced to upgrade one day or another, just as for hte motherboards.
I'm not arguing that Macs are cheaper; they are not. I didn't switch for cost and performance alone; I also factored ease of use etc.. For me it turns out to be the better "deal" (not in a dollar way).
Keep in mind as well, that Macs don't depreciate as fast as PCs. So when I am "forced" to upgrade my whole machine, I might end-up paying sometimes less than what it would be for a new PC:
Remember, when you already have a machine (or car for example):
Cost = New machine price - Old machine resale price
With Macs the latter is usually higher.
I also think that machines should be balanced and that Hard Drive and Graphics card upgrades are about as much as I will do because changing CPUs without improving memory bandwith, latency, HD I/O has little real performance improvements
While you are probably getting a good deal out of this it cannot be done by everybody:
:-)? It's a catch 22. In days where people are trying to extend the life of machines that isn't very practical.
-- as we've seen a few days ago, people will often give, store or throw away computers. So you won't be getting a Cpu from them.
-- Also, the person who sells you his CPU, if his machine was still functional before the sale, how will he make his machine work now? Get another CPU
-- Say you bought your machine right before they announce a switch: They probably won't release much faster CPUs until the switch. So what's your incentive to buy a 2nd hand CPU for a ~20% performance increase?
As much as I like your solution, it isn't mainstream. Also please consider that as they change PIN layouts all the time, your potential market for a compatible CPU will be further reduced
They make a living out of this!
I am an Apple kind of guy.
When I switched a couple of years ago, the thing I was most upset about was the inability to upgrade my system myself.
I was afraid that with Macs I would be locked in the hardware and would have to upgrade the whole machine when I needed an upgrade. Well that's true: if you want to upgrade the CPU on your Mac you have to change your machine (Ok you could maybe buy some "overdrive" for your Mac).
Well on x86 it's the same thing!
Theoritically you could swap out your processor for a faster one, but the average production life of a CPU socket is LESS than the average time you use a CPU before thinking about upgrading it.
So on x86 when you think about upgrading that 2 year old CPU to something new, well the pin layout has changed and you need to buy a new motherboard, with new type of Ram, and now new components (SATA, PCI-X etc...)
Although you could change all these components idividually, you must admit just changing the whole machine is often a better deal.
I highly suspect intel has a built-in incentive to do so as they produce chipsets for the motherboards, and most of the chips in the new parts involved when "upgrading".
Upgrading no longer exists, it should be called "changing-my-machine".
..and have no idea what is going on here's the dirty video
.. so that this thing does not do an IP geographical check?
Netflix is fine but it isn't "global" in the sense that you rely on physical transport. Netflix even has to setup local warehouses for faster deliveries.
However this on-demand download is truly global.
Sure they will require US credit card, fine I can do around that.
However, Imagine being able to download movies from your living room here in Europe *before* they usually hit the theaters? All this semi-legally (no p2p but you might be infringing EULA).
Movielink or whatever that was called did IP checks, hope NetFlix "forgets"...
Now, I need to talk my buddies in the US into sending me a Tivo box.
Er,, could somebody explain to me what a root server is?
Please be kind http://from.free.fr/hotcoffee.wmv
Skype for all the gripe we may have against it for being closed source and not interoperable with other VOIP providers (FWD, Vonage etc..) does have the most important feature (and holds a monopoly for it too):Encryption
I didn't like having an old fart snooping on my AIM conversations a few years ago and I put an end to it very quick; I've been using Trillian and now Adium with secure IM and OTR encryption.
As much as I like having cheap calls and all I rather my private conversations stay.. well... private.
Skype is the only interplatform secure voice application.
Gizmo can take it's fancy gui and go right back to the drawing board as far as I'm concerned.
If you ask me voip with sip (ala vonage) is just a disaster waiting to happen, sooner or later somebody will write an article in NYTimes or some mass distribution newspaper about how insecure and easy it is for somebody on your campus/office/wifi... LAN to record your conversation and everybody is going to freak out.
Encryption should be built-in NOW before it is too late to change the standards.
So you don't read blogs ay?
How about slashdot?
May not be a blog in the sense that it has a major audience, but it does have links to other websites, and does collect optionions about news events. Tell me again how this isn't a blog?