writing programs in C# that run atop.Net is easier and more secure.
Says who? It certainly is/will be easier but more secure is something that has yet to be proven. To date, the track record is not impressive.
Well, sounds like you're spreading FUD to me. Compared to Win32, CLR almost has to be an improvement.
you're taking things out of context. Win32 has nothing to do with cluster-type software. What you need is math/dedicated scientific libraries and communication. And the former are the perfect candidate for per-platform optimisations[*], so.Net will not bring particularly new or innovative stuff here.
Why shouldn't somebody try to make a better product that embodies proven and well established ideas?
This is a particular niche market. "Proven and well established ideas" would be, I take it, for more generic ones. As not all things are equal, I will agree with the GP - clustering can use a slick package, but that has to also work extremely well, otherwise I'm willing to do a one-shot tuning of the system instead if I care about performance (and believe me, with clusters the certainly do)
To give you an example: say you buy computing time on a new-fangled Windows cluster. They schedule you some 3 months from now and you get 10 nodes and 200 hours. Things like libraries and amount of code to write being equal, will you favor:
a secure program
a fast program
[*]note that the core BLAS routines for instance are often written in optimized assembler.
Sarcasm aside, if it gets DRM-ed for the buyer's computer (and keeping track of computers should be about as easy as keeping track of people) then you might run into interesting pricing restrictions... I mean combinations. Something like "any purchase made by X or on the Y computer from the Z genre gets a 50% price hike" coupled with "you can only play this on N devices directly authorized from the computer from which you bought the song." Then your computer would just be a "secondary authorized player" - and any circumvention can be hit with DMCA suits.
The future is open... erm... in possibilities. Not all of those are open, though.
I think he has a point here and you missed it. Mrs. Non-Geek will never go for a piece-wise solution, she'll want something that can just be plugged in and works.
Also, 'streaming over wi-fi' is something that will most certainly produce the MIGO effect to Mrs Non-Geek. She has no idea what it is and, worse, is not interested in the gory details of how to set it up. You're trying to sell an idea to the wrong audience - that is, if t's a one piece kit that's been set up by the manufacturer, she might buy it; if it actually involves research into how to do it, let alone getting several components and setting it up, forget it. Even if the components play nice with each other and do self-discovery/self-configuration, a non-geek will not know enough to care.
My thoughts exactly - I was hoping to see more details on how it is different in a better way from Kerberos, but there's nothing (well, except "patent pending" which is hardly an improvement)
(Anything with "magic envelope" and "this is a metaphor" really shouldn't be taken as a protocol specification.)
Indeed. Maybe it was taken from the patent application? (can't tell, as there's nothing on uspto.gov so far)
As someone else pointed out, adserver.com suffices. Adblock would do a regexp match on it anyway, so everything from the domain will match and get blocked. Better yet, you can just combine adserver into some regexp - as Adblock will treat a rule like:
The Roman Empire, as long as it was an Empire, kept predicting its decline. Saying that is was on a vast, downhill slide. And I don't mean after Octavian, either, I mean long before Julius Caesar...
Erm... you are aware that before Julius Caesar Rome was a REPUBLIC, aren't you? Octavian (aka Augustus) was the first emperor. Caesar was just the last nail in the "res publica" coffin - but yeah, they saw that one coming, too. And actually the empire still had ups and downs... think Trajan and Constantine, not just Nero and Caligula (or, for that matter, the Eastern Empire, which survived the Western one by some 1000 years)
Newsflash: anything that is born dies, sooner or later. Well, except myself, of course:D
but how will that save energy on displays which, for instance, require frequent repaints?
Apparently it draws "more" power to change the state of the molecules - due to having to move around charge. Otherwise, the base layer acts as a capacitor, with the stored charge maintaining the on/off state. So you end up spending power mostly on the pixels that change between lit and unlit. Even with full-screen repaints not all pixels switch (think scrolling a page: lots of pixels just stay white between successive repaints) thus you can still get lower power consumption. Of course, for color displays this will probably be less efficient.
I have to disagree. The article does a poor job at debunking, because its author was asking the wrong questions.
Take for instance the part where 9/11 was 'anticipated' - if this were indeed the case, then it's opening a whole new can of worms, by breaking usual assumptions on causality. Then a lot of bets are off about how to interpret the data. Add to this non-locality ('global consciousness' would be a macroscopically entangled state, right?) and what you have is a complete failure of consistently describing the results in terms of modern science.
As an example: the "I don't know" answers are, in spite of what the 'debunker' says, honest scientific answers. They're looking at correlations, but only on a limited subset. Is that 'data picking'? sure. Is it normal? yes - any experiment is 'data picking'. The problem here is that correlations need not be limited to 'global consciousness' - what if they also have to do with solar explosions, distant supernovas and so on? Where do you look for correlations? To keep within the given subset, one would have to look the other way around - events affecting many human beings that are correlated with spikes or not. They seem to be doing that, but the skeptics call it 'data picking'[*]. However, even in this case, interpreting the correlation that exist is purely statistical at this level and jumping at 'predicting the future'/'global consciousness' from them requires bypassing of a few basic Logic rules.
Remember, data are just that - the given. What's valid or invalid is how one interprets them.
[*] contrary to what you were saying ("Every time there's a deviation they go and actively look to match it to something.") Actually, this was one of the things the skepticreport guy took issue with. Apparently he didn't understand why they're doing that, either. That makes a big part of his 'debunking' rather toothless, unfortunately.
Nevermid Cell, that's not going to show in big db servers soon enough. What about Sun's Niagara? if you have some 32 cores in your server, one Oracle license for each is going to be huge.
Maybe that's why Sun is hinting at its own db? to try and push "per-core" db vendors to change the tune?
Hibernation is what you should be doing normally. That's NOT THE SAME THING as a reboot. Unfortunately, if you try this with Windows you'll see the need for an actual reboot soon enough and that's a problem.
My point? hibernation is the feature that you should have listed instead of "faster boot times" for a stable OS able to withstand uptimes longer than a few days. The mere thing that boot times matter on a workstation is wrong - I should only use the instant-on from hibernation, unless I'm patching the OS core and I need to reboot.
yeah, and calling names won't add weight to your argument. But you knew that already.
"Copyright infringement is a type of theft." No, it isnt. It is a violation of government granted temporary exclusive rights.
In all fairness, "property" is also about a government-granted (and protected) right - only less temporary. Some governments do grant it, some don't. In particular, in a police state "property" is quite an elusive notion.
However, the association between intellectual property and more traditional ones is usually for emotional purposes - people would tend to ignore differences. This goes on more for international uses of the term, as different countries attach slightly different meanings to ip and its associated rights. So it goes without saying that I stand with you w.r.t. the propaganda warning:-)
IBM's donation would appear to be largely useless but has no strings attached, Sun's appears to be very usefull but has strings as usual the community has become obsessed with the strings.
You seem to disregard the fact that 1600 patents that you can't use due to strings attached are actually harmful (you need to avoid them, Sun explicitly said the license is GPL-incompatible on purpose) while 500 patents that you don't need to use are harmless. Besides, let's see how Sun clarifies the "we don't know yet whether we want to retain the rights to sue our developers for patent infringement over these" stance.
Compare the two offerings to MS's offering of licensing protocols to anyone... who is willing to pay and sign the onerous non-disclosure license (yes, it's against F/OSS, sounds familiar?) And them saying that the protocols are "freely available" Strings attached are good now, eh?
If something is given freely, then it should have no limiting restrictions for use. Otherwise calling it "free" is just a PR stunt.
Ok let me get this straight. If I transfer 90,000 to my business partner in Soviet Russia, then the bank will call the police, brand me a terrorist and throw me in jail.
No, the bank should contact you to additionally validate the transaction if it might appear suspect - especially for this kind of money. After all, you must have given them a valid contact point, did you not?
Attempting to draw sort of a line between "OS" and "irregular tools":
[DSA 664-1] New cpio packages fix insecure file permissions
It has been discovered, that cpio, a program to manage archives of files, creates output files with -O and -F with broken permissions due to a reset zero umask which allows local users to read or overwrite those files.
Annoying, but hardly "critical"
*[DSA 659-1] New libpam-radius-auth packages fix several vulnerabilities This is actually a mixed bag.
The Debian package accidently installed its configuration file/etc/pam_radius_auth.conf world-readable.
rather embarassing, but Deb-specific.
Leon Juranic discoverd an integer underflow in the mod_auth_radius module for Apache which is also present in libpam-radius-auth.
more general, indeed.
and even (assuming a KDE desktop): [DSA 660-1] New kdebase packages fix authentication bypass
Raphaël Enrici discovered that the KDE screensaver can crash under certain local circumstances. This can be exploited by an attacker with physical access to the workstation to take over the desktop session.
This problem has been fixed upstream in KDE 3.0.5 and is thereforefixed in the unstable (sid) and testing (sarge) distributions already.
The rest are additional packages installed on a per-need basis. You don't argue MSSQL vulnerabilities are Windows vulnerabilities, do you? Or those of the compiler? (f2c indeed - that must be highly critical for home users)
Contrast this with the Windows anouncement where the 10 vulns affecting the OS are rated Critical.
EULA for software is to be expected (although the specific terms may or may not be onerous), but what's with EULAs for patches? I mean, if I want to stick with, say, win2k until it's EOL-ed, I STILL need to accept new EULAs with NEW RESTRICTIONS FOR ME in order to keep it patched???
They sell you the bloody OS license and they start taking back your right to use the OS piece by piece with "security udates"
Seems to be a quite complicated way to say 'no comment'.
More like a complicated way of saying "we have no idea whether there's any merit to it or not, but even if it were, we think they took the wrong approach" He says we do not support these actions from SCO twice. How much clearer could he be considering it's an ongoing case?
Now, if a certain Darl had been the speaker here, 100 negations would have been worthless. But unless there's evidence to the contrary, I would consider this to be in good faith. He did say their business relies on Linux being successful, btw.
If that binary is modified, it can no longer access the sealed storage.
This is good news for data corruption. All your data is fscked.
If it were true, it's good news for a lot of corporations, too. Update WMP due to some security bug and you won't be able to access the authorisation data for playing the songs you purchased online. OOps! time to re-buy them! and even if you use a friendly store that will give you extra free downloads for purchased songs to cover that situation, you end up with: 1. parts of the disk space being lost (I assume that if you can't read the protected area you can't delete it either) and 2. reliance on the store not closing or losing their (presumably protected, too) customers' past transaction information due to simlar TCPA glitches.
so why then bring on the pointless cost comparison? As I said, the guy already paid for the Mini, ALL of the rest was extra cost. As TFA says, he wanted to know how much x86 computing power HE can fit in that particular case[*] He wasn't hunting for a price comparison.
Now that the shoe's on the other foot, it's "ridiculous". [...] And then more than make up for it with their profit margins. Your point?
Maybe you can enlighten me about which shoe is that. Bear in mind that what the guy did was not assemble a PC from standard components, following teh standard recipe - he wanted to fit them in a box for which there's no standard/optimized build procedure. Non-standard means expensive and suboptimal - witness the fact that he had to get a pre-release nano-ITX mobo+CPU combo to make it happen, with the side effect of too large a cooler. How does this compare with Apple custom-designing the mobo specifically for the Mini? Answer: it does not.
My point, if you really need this re-spelled out is: this was not a price comparison - merely someone's curiosity. Your post tried to argue "there's no point" through "there's no financial profit" which in these circumstances is silly.
Hard work done for the sake of hard work is the same as pushing a boulder up a hill. Sure, you might enjoy the exercise. Personally, I'd rather use the crane to move the boulder up and then get my exercise doing something that has more benefit in other areas at the same time.
Again, just because you see it that way does not mean that's the only perspective. Unless you personally heard the guy saying "and in the end it was pointless" how is your personal preference of any relevance for the his work's value in this case? All you are saying is "Were I the one to do this, it would have been pointless" So I assume you're not an engineering geek, your curiosity goes in a different direction - fine. But why would that grant you the authority to make value judgements on how someone else applies his curiosity?
[*] more specifically, for that section area of the case (which is why he went for the VIA mobo, with all that it implied)
You seem to be missing the point - along with a loty of Mini apologists around here. This was not done to replace the Mini. There's such a thing called the Do It Yourself culture that Apple users will never understand. It's about the satisfaction of doing something with your own hands, the harder the better. Just because from your chair you don't see a point does not mean there's none.
Yeah, and about the part with it costing more - OF COURSE it costed more. First, he BOUGHT THE MINI. Second, it's ridiculous to compare production costs of a corporation with homebrew assemblies of non-commodity parts (no, I don't think n-ITX will qualify as commodity; for the matter, laptop drives almost don't, either) Apple will buy bulk and get better prices even if you used the same freaking parts, were all of them available.
Whatever happened to 'news for nerds' - you actually get a story that would qualify and most of the the comments might as well have been 'he should have given me the Mini instead of commiting this sacrilege' Get over yourself, the world is bigger than your computer screen.
There are fundamental things missing. For example, there is no single development environment for Linux as there is for Microsoft,
neither is there a single sign-on system.
OK, the.NET Passport system that MS just retired from general use? that's their idea of mission critical addition for Windows? Yeah, that's really just one stupid exec talking nonsense. Unfortunately.
"Crippled" is when something isn't working the way it was intended.
By your definition, Win XP Home is not a crippled version of XP Pro, since it 'works as intended' Go think about it for a while. Hint: the keyword here is 'intended'
Keep in mind that mplayer uses win32 dlls, so if your game is non-x86-32 then it's useless.
However, as xine-lib seems to have acquired support for Sorenson3 codecs from ffmpeg, that should be the preferred (although probably slightly illegal in some places) method to see QT files on non-Win32/OSX systems
The weak says you have to show that it's most likely probable for this universe to exist in a way we can live in it and that we can exist at some time and point within it.
This did not parse quite right... anyway, grammar aside, there's a better variant for it. The probability only needs to have a local maximum - provided that the probability for the Universe to tunnel to a different maximum is compatible with our estimates for its lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
you're taking things out of context. Win32 has nothing to do with cluster-type software. What you need is math/dedicated scientific libraries and communication. And the former are the perfect candidate for per-platform optimisations[*], so
This is a particular niche market. "Proven and well established ideas" would be, I take it, for more generic ones. As not all things are equal, I will agree with the GP - clustering can use a slick package, but that has to also work extremely well, otherwise I'm willing to do a one-shot tuning of the system instead if I care about performance (and believe me, with clusters the certainly do)
To give you an example: say you buy computing time on a new-fangled Windows cluster. They schedule you some 3 months from now and you get 10 nodes and 200 hours. Things like libraries and amount of code to write being equal, will you favor:
[*]note that the core BLAS routines for instance are often written in optimized assembler.
Sarcasm aside, if it gets DRM-ed for the buyer's computer (and keeping track of computers should be about as easy as keeping track of people) then you might run into interesting pricing restrictions ... I mean combinations. Something like "any purchase made by X or on the Y computer from the Z genre gets a 50% price hike" coupled with "you can only play this on N devices directly authorized from the computer from which you bought the song." Then your computer would just be a "secondary authorized player" - and any circumvention can be hit with DMCA suits.
... erm ... in possibilities. Not all of those are open, though.
The future is open
I think he has a point here and you missed it. Mrs. Non-Geek will never go for a piece-wise solution, she'll want something that can just be plugged in and works.
Also, 'streaming over wi-fi' is something that will most certainly produce the MIGO effect to Mrs Non-Geek. She has no idea what it is and, worse, is not interested in the gory details of how to set it up. You're trying to sell an idea to the wrong audience - that is, if t's a one piece kit that's been set up by the manufacturer, she might buy it; if it actually involves research into how to do it, let alone getting several components and setting it up, forget it. Even if the components play nice with each other and do self-discovery/self-configuration, a non-geek will not know enough to care.
Hmm. It's basically Kerberos, except totally broken.
My thoughts exactly - I was hoping to see more details on how it is different in a better way from Kerberos, but there's nothing (well, except "patent pending" which is hardly an improvement)
(Anything with "magic envelope" and "this is a metaphor" really shouldn't be taken as a protocol specification.)
Indeed. Maybe it was taken from the patent application? (can't tell, as there's nothing on uspto.gov so far)
Check out the adblock forums for some interesting filter lists
The Roman Empire, as long as it was an Empire, kept predicting its decline. Saying that is was on a vast, downhill slide. And I don't mean after Octavian, either, I mean long before Julius Caesar...
... you are aware that before Julius Caesar Rome was a REPUBLIC, aren't you? Octavian (aka Augustus) was the first emperor. Caesar was just the last nail in the "res publica" coffin - but yeah, they saw that one coming, too. And actually the empire still had ups and downs ... think Trajan and Constantine, not just Nero and Caligula (or, for that matter, the Eastern Empire, which survived the Western one by some 1000 years)
:D
Erm
Newsflash: anything that is born dies, sooner or later. Well, except myself, of course
but how will that save energy on displays which, for instance, require frequent repaints?
Apparently it draws "more" power to change the state of the molecules - due to having to move around charge. Otherwise, the base layer acts as a capacitor, with the stored charge maintaining the on/off state. So you end up spending power mostly on the pixels that change between lit and unlit. Even with full-screen repaints not all pixels switch (think scrolling a page: lots of pixels just stay white between successive repaints) thus you can still get lower power consumption. Of course, for color displays this will probably be less efficient.
I have to disagree. The article does a poor job at debunking, because its author was asking the wrong questions.
Take for instance the part where 9/11 was 'anticipated' - if this were indeed the case, then it's opening a whole new can of worms, by breaking usual assumptions on causality. Then a lot of bets are off about how to interpret the data. Add to this non-locality ('global consciousness' would be a macroscopically entangled state, right?) and what you have is a complete failure of consistently describing the results in terms of modern science.
As an example: the "I don't know" answers are, in spite of what the 'debunker' says, honest scientific answers. They're looking at correlations, but only on a limited subset. Is that 'data picking'? sure. Is it normal? yes - any experiment is 'data picking'. The problem here is that correlations need not be limited to 'global consciousness' - what if they also have to do with solar explosions, distant supernovas and so on? Where do you look for correlations? To keep within the given subset, one would have to look the other way around - events affecting many human beings that are correlated with spikes or not. They seem to be doing that, but the skeptics call it 'data picking'[*]. However, even in this case, interpreting the correlation that exist is purely statistical at this level and jumping at 'predicting the future'/'global consciousness' from them requires bypassing of a few basic Logic rules.
Remember, data are just that - the given. What's valid or invalid is how one interprets them.
[*] contrary to what you were saying ("Every time there's a deviation they go and actively look to match it to something.") Actually, this was one of the things the skepticreport guy took issue with. Apparently he didn't understand why they're doing that, either. That makes a big part of his 'debunking' rather toothless, unfortunately.
Nevermid Cell, that's not going to show in big db servers soon enough. What about Sun's Niagara? if you have some 32 cores in your server, one Oracle license for each is going to be huge.
Maybe that's why Sun is hinting at its own db? to try and push "per-core" db vendors to change the tune?
Hibernation is what you should be doing normally. That's NOT THE SAME THING as a reboot. Unfortunately, if you try this with Windows you'll see the need for an actual reboot soon enough and that's a problem.
My point? hibernation is the feature that you should have listed instead of "faster boot times" for a stable OS able to withstand uptimes longer than a few days. The mere thing that boot times matter on a workstation is wrong - I should only use the instant-on from hibernation, unless I'm patching the OS core and I need to reboot.
yeah, and calling names won't add weight to your argument. But you knew that already.
4) Improved boot times
When this is what one boasts for a workstation OS then you know there's trouble. Or Windows.
"Copyright infringement is a type of theft."
:-)
No, it isnt. It is a violation of government granted temporary exclusive rights.
In all fairness, "property" is also about a government-granted (and protected) right - only less temporary. Some governments do grant it, some don't. In particular, in a police state "property" is quite an elusive notion.
However, the association between intellectual property and more traditional ones is usually for emotional purposes - people would tend to ignore differences. This goes on more for international uses of the term, as different countries attach slightly different meanings to ip and its associated rights. So it goes without saying that I stand with you w.r.t. the propaganda warning
IBM's donation would appear to be largely useless but has no strings attached, Sun's appears to be very usefull but has strings as usual the community has become obsessed with the strings.
... who is willing to pay and sign the onerous non-disclosure license (yes, it's against F/OSS, sounds familiar?) And them saying that the protocols are "freely available" Strings attached are good now, eh?
You seem to disregard the fact that 1600 patents that you can't use due to strings attached are actually harmful (you need to avoid them, Sun explicitly said the license is GPL-incompatible on purpose) while 500 patents that you don't need to use are harmless. Besides, let's see how Sun clarifies the "we don't know yet whether we want to retain the rights to sue our developers for patent infringement over these" stance.
Compare the two offerings to MS's offering of licensing protocols to anyone
If something is given freely, then it should have no limiting restrictions for use. Otherwise calling it "free" is just a PR stunt.
Ok let me get this straight. If I transfer 90,000 to my business partner in Soviet Russia, then the bank will call the police, brand me a terrorist and throw me in jail.
No, the bank should contact you to additionally validate the transaction if it might appear suspect - especially for this kind of money. After all, you must have given them a valid contact point, did you not?
[DSA 664-1] New cpio packages fix insecure file permissions Annoying, but hardly "critical"
*[DSA 659-1] New libpam-radius-auth packages fix several vulnerabilities
This is actually a mixed bag.rather embarassing, but Deb-specific.more general, indeed.
and even (assuming a KDE desktop):
[DSA 660-1] New kdebase packages fix authentication bypass
The rest are additional packages installed on a per-need basis. You don't argue MSSQL vulnerabilities are Windows vulnerabilities, do you? Or those of the compiler? (f2c indeed - that must be highly critical for home users)
Contrast this with the Windows anouncement where the 10 vulns affecting the OS are rated Critical.
Therefore, 13 new Windows security vulnerabilities.
.Net framework installed, so that makes 10 updates only for me.
Nope. I don't have SharePoint, MSOffice or the
EULA for software is to be expected (although the specific terms may or may not be onerous), but what's with EULAs for patches? I mean, if I want to stick with, say, win2k until it's EOL-ed, I STILL need to accept new EULAs with NEW RESTRICTIONS FOR ME in order to keep it patched???
They sell you the bloody OS license and they start taking back your right to use the OS piece by piece with "security udates"
Seems to be a quite complicated way to say 'no comment'.
More like a complicated way of saying "we have no idea whether there's any merit to it or not, but even if it were, we think they took the wrong approach" He says we do not support these actions from SCO twice. How much clearer could he be considering it's an ongoing case?
Now, if a certain Darl had been the speaker here, 100 negations would have been worthless. But unless there's evidence to the contrary, I would consider this to be in good faith. He did say their business relies on Linux being successful, btw.
If that binary is modified, it can no longer access the sealed storage.
This is good news for data corruption. All your data is fscked.
If it were true, it's good news for a lot of corporations, too. Update WMP due to some security bug and you won't be able to access the authorisation data for playing the songs you purchased online. OOps! time to re-buy them! and even if you use a friendly store that will give you extra free downloads for purchased songs to cover that situation, you end up with: 1. parts of the disk space being lost (I assume that if you can't read the protected area you can't delete it either) and 2. reliance on the store not closing or losing their (presumably protected, too) customers' past transaction information due to simlar TCPA glitches.
Me: This is just a geek's homebrew project...
so why then bring on the pointless cost comparison? As I said, the guy already paid for the Mini, ALL of the rest was extra cost. As TFA says, he wanted to know how much x86 computing power HE can fit in that particular case[*] He wasn't hunting for a price comparison.
Now that the shoe's on the other foot, it's "ridiculous".
[...]
And then more than make up for it with their profit margins. Your point?
Maybe you can enlighten me about which shoe is that. Bear in mind that what the guy did was not assemble a PC from standard components, following teh standard recipe - he wanted to fit them in a box for which there's no standard/optimized build procedure. Non-standard means expensive and suboptimal - witness the fact
that he had to get a pre-release nano-ITX mobo+CPU combo to make it happen, with the side effect of too large a cooler. How does this compare with Apple custom-designing the mobo specifically for the Mini? Answer: it does not.
My point, if you really need this re-spelled out is: this was not a price comparison - merely someone's curiosity. Your post tried to argue "there's no point" through "there's no financial profit" which in these circumstances is silly.
Hard work done for the sake of hard work is the same as pushing a boulder up a hill. Sure, you might enjoy the exercise. Personally, I'd rather use the crane to move the boulder up and then get my exercise doing something that has more benefit in other areas at the same time.
Again, just because you see it that way does not mean that's the only perspective. Unless you personally heard the guy saying "and in the end it was pointless" how is your personal preference of any relevance for the his work's value in this case? All you are saying is "Were I the one to do this, it would have been pointless" So I assume you're not an engineering geek, your curiosity goes in a different direction - fine. But why would that grant you the authority to make value judgements on how someone else applies his curiosity?
[*] more specifically, for that section area of the case (which is why he went for the VIA mobo, with all that it implied)
You seem to be missing the point - along with a loty of Mini apologists around here. This was not done to replace the Mini. There's such a thing called the Do It Yourself culture that Apple users will never understand. It's about the satisfaction of doing something with your own hands, the harder the better. Just because from your chair you don't see a point does not mean there's none.
Yeah, and about the part with it costing more - OF COURSE it costed more. First, he BOUGHT THE MINI. Second, it's ridiculous to compare production costs of a corporation with homebrew assemblies of non-commodity parts (no, I don't think n-ITX will qualify as commodity; for the matter, laptop drives almost don't, either) Apple will buy bulk and get better prices even if you used the same freaking parts, were all of them available.
Whatever happened to 'news for nerds' - you actually get a story that would qualify and most of the the comments might as well have been 'he should have given me the Mini instead of commiting this sacrilege' Get over yourself, the world is bigger than your computer screen.
OK, the
"Crippled" is when something isn't working the way it was intended.
By your definition, Win XP Home is not a crippled version of XP Pro, since it 'works as intended' Go think about it for a while. Hint: the keyword here is 'intended'
Keep in mind that mplayer uses win32 dlls, so if your game is non-x86-32 then it's useless.
However, as xine-lib seems to have acquired support for Sorenson3 codecs from ffmpeg, that should be the preferred (although probably slightly illegal in some places) method to see QT files on non-Win32/OSX systems
The weak says you have to show that it's most likely probable for this universe to exist in a way we can live in it and that we can exist at some time and point within it.
... anyway, grammar aside, there's a better variant for it. The probability only needs to have a local maximum - provided that the probability for the Universe to tunnel to a different maximum is compatible with our estimates for its lifetime.
This did not parse quite right