I love OS X. I own a iMac G5 and a PowerBook, and my girlfriend has a iBook. As a platform it is pain free and makes a lot of task very simple. But I also have a secret love for Debian.
More and more I find that I actually need a dedicated server in the house. I need a web server, an NFS server, CVS and bittorrent. Its not that I can't perform these tasks on a Mac, its that I don't want to. They're all niggles that absorb resources... not a lot, but enough so that when it takes an extra bounce for Pages to open you start wondering if thats because something else is using those extra cycles. So I farm them out to an old PIII Debian box.
Mac OS X is a delight as single user platform. If you are actually sat at the box I can't think of a single OS I'd rather have at my finger tips. But if the closest your going to get to the box is an SSH session your Debian is a tough beat. I've installed Postgresql on the Debian box from the park via my PowerBook and a 3G phone. I frequently SSH into the box to run updates or, if there is a bit of software that I want to Bittorrent, I'll use firefox or lynx to get the torrent then btdownloadncurses so that I know it will be on the network by the time I get home. This is the power of dpkg, a feature that Apple really needs to add to OS X, but then as your a gentoo user I'm preaching to the converted.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't by a Mac mini, I'm just saying, that one person - one computer is a philosophy of the 90s. A mac mini with X11 is a great way to drive your Gentoo box - two heads are better than one and when you can pick up a usefull PC for ~$200 why not have 3?
I used to own an XBox. I got a lot of joy out of that little box, right up until the thing exploded. It was my own fault. I'd installed the modchip myself, and let my girlfriend touch it (it's like letting women on boats - a bad omen). The games were good, but what made the thing essential was being able to watch my DivX on my computer over a network cable.
At the time the XBox went bang I was in middle of 4 months of unemployment and replacing it was the lowest of my priorities (honest). As a substitute I used a wireless TV forwarder (that I already had) to get the stream direct from iMac G5 to my TV.
This isn't nearly as good a solution:
Screws with the WiFi
Much lower quality
Prone to interfance (from meat bags walking around)
Significantly more complicated... no really its beyond my girlfriend, and she's normally pretty savvy
No remote control. You can use Salling Clicker, but it interferes with the signal
Renderes my iMac useless for the duration... a problem when what its being used for is our PVRs of Laguna Beach... god I hate that show
Being able to use XBox Media Centre or equivalent is an essential aspect to my decision for which console I will buy next. I just wish you didn't have to mod the box to be able to use it... seems like a massive oversight.
I'm running a iMac G5 1.8GHz with 1GB of RAM and I'm a Java developer.
The game was playable and really took me back to 1997 and the first time I played Quake2 - a little too much. No other applications running and it still stuttered when a new model appeared. When it was just pulling things from memory the game ran incredibly smoothly.
This is easily the most impressive piece of Java programming I have ever seen. The game was responsive, and the graphics are amazing but you still get the feeling that the JIT was playing catchup in certain sections.
I have no doubt that this could match a C compiled version as 95% of the time it was running incredibly smoothly. But gaming is about a smooth, immersive experience (especially FPS) the semi-random 'jerks' make you aware that you are still playing a computer game and thats the real problem for a commercial vendor.
The one thing that you could probably get from Java that you wouldn't get from C is instant multi-processor support. Given two processors I see no reason why JIT / GC couldn't run in a seperate thread and provide the smooth experiance that we all crave. Not having a dual processor system I can't verify this theory, but this is where I expect to see real advances in the near future. We're already seeing that the first round of games for the 360 arn't fully utlizing the 3 cores, wouldn't garbage collection and JVM be a decent application for those wasted cores? It would certainly reduce the development times, and allow for games to be written for PS3 and the 360 simultaneously and, lets face it, Java development is significantly easier, easier to debug and significantly less prone to crashes.
To see this happen we need to see Sun / IBM developing a JVM for all the next gen consoles that really take advantage of the new architectures. There needs to be better SIMD support and it needs to be transparent to the developer.
I got my hands on a legacy PIII 533 with 64MB RAM, that was running Windows ME. That machine would have been a screemer back in 1997 but by todays standards it was totally unuseable. I thought it was the operating system, so I upgraded to a headleass Debian box and it flies! So long as the web browser is lynx and the mail app is pine!!
Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird are SLOW in 64MB RAM, and to be honest the PIII isn't helping much either. It's not that you couldn't be productive with the system its just that you'd be living in a world of lag and be less productive. I looked into upgrading the RAM, and because there were issues SDRAM, (i.e. it wasn't as interchangable as DDR on older motherboards) I could either payout for a new BIOS and some cheap RAM, or pay about the same for the more expensive, but compatible RAM. The stupid part is that this would have cost me ~$100 and I could buy a system that was significantly faster from Best Buy for ~$250.
In a world where hardware is cheap and software is free the only thing that really makes an impact to the bottom line is the human time spent on a task. I agree with the GP that there was no point spending money on a top of the range system for such mundane tasks, but to say that a 486 would be adequate is miserly and folly.
I know what you mean. I was awe struck by Ubuntu. I've got a powerbook, and a iMac G5 both of which I adore, but there is something hypnotic about Linux that keeps drawing me back. As a middle ground I've built a dirt cheap P3 system with Debian that I ssh -YC into which works great as a J2EE test bed, CVS repository, mail server, bittorrent etc, but its too slow for desktop use. However, the next time I've got a bit of spare cash for hardware it'll be a Linux box that I invest in rather than a Mac.
Don't get me wrong, I still think OS X is the best OS out there, it's a fantastic balance of power and ease of use, but I'm now finding that I use LaTeX, vi, eclipse more than MS Office and XTools and I genuinely enjoy getting my hands dirty in code changes so I'd really struggle to justify paying the apple tax next time I upgrade.
Is why people don't put the songs on their phones themselves? They're quite happy sending photos to each other via bluetooth and downloading songs to their iPods so why don't they download songs to their phones?
I've been doing it for a 4 or 5 years now (initially with IR and midi which I could understand was probably beyond most) but now that its just a case of dragging an iTunes song too your desktop then pressing cmd-shift-b (or right clicking it and choosing send file) to send it to your phone it amazes me that people don't do it more often.
I guess this is the point that the poster was trying to get across. People really don't associate iTunes music with ring tones. It's completely seperate in their heads. One's an impulse buy that they can do whilst watching TV, or waiting for a bus, the other is a considered purchase, even if it is half the price. The only thing that could change that is if Apple introduce a 'make ringtone button' to iTunes - that would REALLY piss off a lot of people (except of course the customers).
Of course companies and academics don't want IPv6 they already have the only real advantage it provides - per machine addressing. Why would they invest money to get something they already have?
IPv6 benefits individuals. It benefits P2P, VoIP, photo sharing, blogging and email (yes email - you don't need a third party server if you have a permanent web presence). Yes you can have all of that with IPv4, but its held together with hacks like NAT, port forwarding and man-in-the-middle servers. That's fine, if like me, you hold a degree in computer science and arn't put off by the nuances of network security, berkley ports and subnet masks but if you're a noob who just wants to share their Christmas pictures with friends and family its a pretty steep learning curve.
I'm a pretty typical nerd. My home network has 4 computers that regularly connect to the internet. Of those, 2 offer services such as SSH, bittorent, email and my testing web server. After christmas that will probably extend to a new XBox360 and a PSP (admittedly passive net users). Next Christmas it might be my mobile. The Christmas after that my espresso machine will probably be consulting a distributed database to see what is the best way of brewing Co-op's Fairtrade Java.
You can buy a computer the size of a pack of gum with a complete Linux operating system and enough horse power to run a web server for ~$200. That's too expensive to be ubiquitous but in 2-3 years time that figure will be in the region of $20 and it will be a WiFi network. It's going to happen.
IPv4 forces our devices to be passive because configuring a NAT Router and Firewall is hard for Joe Public. IPv4 means that we have to poll to get system updates. IPv4 means that I can't just ask my fridge what its contents are without configuring a seperate box. IPv4 means that I'm happy when a third party agrees to handle my communications - I actually ask them to listen in and they 'promise' not to read my mail or listen to my conversations. IPv4 means that when I get an email from my girlfriend at 195.95.195.94 I have no method of authenticating that.
IPv6 means that I buy bandwidth and nothing else. I don't get 100MB of web hosting, or a whopping 5 emails addresses, I get to use my over powered desktop machine with 200GB of 'web space' and as many email addresses as I please. IPv6 means that I can start to build a web of trust, so that I can start to authenticate the messages I receive against a web of my peers - not a single verisign certificate. IPv6 means that consumer electoronics can be connected to my data pipe and that the manufacturer can be responible for its up keep - including firewalls and virus protection.
In short IPv6 allows people to own a bit of the internet and say it's theirs rather than renting an inch and getting kicked off that inch every 4 hours.
I'm sorry, this is absolutely riddiculous. The last time I checked being blind / deaf / disabled didn't stop you from programming. Providing you have the mental aptitude you can do pretty much anything with a computer - look at Stephen Hawking - he writes books on physics that's got to be harder than programming!
If the various 'disabled' communities don't like the support that their 'given' with an open source project then they need to get programming the support themselves or raising funds so they can fund coffee addled nerds to do it for them.
In fact, if this is the only thing thats stopping Open Office being supported by local governments then I'll be supprised if its not in the next release.
I don't get it. What would I use it for? Is it for people that can't afford laptops but want the web on the move?
How many people is that exactly?
And its not like you can just use it anywhere. You're either using it on your home network, where it would be a toy not a tool (why wouldn't you use your real computer?) or your using it in an expensive access point, or do they expect you to steal other people's connection?
3 hours battery life?
$400?
I guess this might appeal to PDA people, but don't they have everything that this offers for less, in a smaller package with the same or better battery life?
...beowulf cluster, ok don't this would suck as much at this as much as an XBox, but I think the target market for this should be geeks, not noobs. As the article said, in order to get it working they had to put 512MB RAM in to get it acting like a modern PC. I can sympathize with this, but really, should this machine be allowed a GUI?
It's got a good network card, a half decent amount of RAM and a harddisk. I'm seeing a fileserver, bittorent client, tomcat, CVS, distcc, firewall, game/print server etc. It takes cheap DDR, so if you want to run JBoss or MySQL that is a real possibility, but what I'm thinking is stick a $20 WiFi card in it, and stick it in a cupboard/basement away from harms reach.
I have a PowerBook and a iMac G5, and although both of these are fully capable of running all of those applications, I like keeping my development boxes 'clean'. Farming out essential, but resource nibbling tasks out to smaller, disposable boxes makes a lot of sense to me.
I've got a Orange 3G mobile thats a video phone, and I've got Apple iChat which is a video phone. I might be comparing Apples and Oranges, but I'm not 5 years in the future.
Is 'flurry' the correct collective noun? Wouldn't a spindle or harddisk review be more apropriate?
I'm more confused than ever
on
Reining in Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I write a novel, and put on the floor in the street, somebody picks it up and reads it, they arn't violating copyright because they haven't create a copy.
If I write the same novel and leave it on a public file server, if someone picks it up and reads it or saves it to disk they have made a copy of it (because thats how digital reading works) so they have violated copyright, unless I allow them the right to make one copy. So what happens the next time I open the file? Technically I'll have a copy on disk and a copy in memory - so I'll have two copies. Or worse, I decide I want to read it on a different computer, I copy it to the other computer, delete from the current computer and then read it on the other computer. As far as I'm concerned there is still only one copy, but in reality there are three: the copy marked for deletion on my harddrive, the copy on the other computers harddrive and the copy in memory. All this before we start getting our knickers in a twist about caching and registers!
Digital data really stuggles with copyright, because even the most simple of actions require that the data be duplicated, and the reason we duplicate over transfer is because it's faster and safer. Once something is digitized good luck trying to keep control over its distribution.
Googles actions here show a complete disregard for conventional copoyright. Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital, then disitributing it on the web is not what fair use had in mind, and really should involve giving some money to the copyright holders, probably a lot of money.
I really like it. Modern, but with strong links to the Beastie of old. To paraphase Robbie Coltrane "Its like triple expansion steam engines: an idea so simple you are convinced that given enough paper and a desert island, you'd come up with it yourself... of course you never would".
Don't feel too bad. The XBox 360 is coming out in a couple of weeks and then you'll be able to have a whole seperate system for gaming that plugs nicely into your big screen tv and comes with a dedicated game controller and 3 PPC processors. Best of all it costs about the same as a decent video card.
OK its not quite as portable as a laptop, but if you want portable get a PSP or DS, they're way cheaper than decent graphics card.
You're welcome to screw up your own kids. Don't fuck with mine.
I don't think thats true at all. If they screw up their kid thats one more murderer / rapist / thief / terrorist on your streets. Its another mal-peer for child to become associated with, that could corrupt your own. What people do to the next generation affects everyone around them directly.
The thing I don't understand about creationists is why have they picked on that one aspect of Science to get so pissy about. How about gravity? Aristotal was a pretty bright guy, and he was convinced that the reason birds flew was because that was their place in life (and that they contained more of the air element) and yet we still have no solid proof that gravity exists. We have models that are predictable but we don't know how it works. Why don't creationists try and get schools to teach that its Gods will that massive objects are attracted to each other? How about Radiation? We know that some objects release alpha particles, but we have no idea when it will happen. Why don't we teach that God made the particles appear? I don't get me started on Maths. The square root of -1! That makes 666 look positively saintly!
The Framers were right to keep church and state seperate. It the responsibility of the state to pass on all the knowledge that it has to its people. It is the responsibility of the churches to explain to people how that fits in with their religion. There needs to be some flexibilty. Evolution is our best theory so far, just like quantum theory or special relativity. We expect them to change because we know they arn't the complete theory of everything and its important that students understand this. In the same manner religious fundamentalists need to embrace a similar flexibility and understand that all of our religious texts are the word of God written down by man and that all men are faliable and encourage people to interpret their religious texts and look for the word of God within the words of men that died many hundreds of years ago, where their thoughts were framed by their experiences and knowledge of their day.
Buy a wireless TV forwarder like the PHILIPS SBCVL1100. They're designed so that you can watch Sky/Cable in other rooms, but they hook up to TV-Out just as well. Ive got one hooked up to my iMac G5 and it works great, especially when you use Salling Clicker as a remote control. I have small complaints about it interfering with WiFi and body masses can upset it, but you can turn it off pretty easily.
Doesn't it concern you a bit that this has happened? When I was a kid you expected your consoles to last, and they did, my NES still boots up fine and every games works (after I've brushed off the dust) the same with my spectrum 48k! But my XBox died after just 2 years of abuse.
We should be upgrading because the new console offers something that we need (better gameplay more realisitic deaths, whatever floats your boat) not because the hardware is 'flaky' after just a few short years.
Let the people choose and support their own software. A hetrogenous network is more secure not less. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, iCal, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SAMBA, NFS, XML, CVS, LDAP, OpenDocument, MS-Document etc. These are the technologies that you choose from, not the applications or the OS.
I would prescribe investing in training in both MS and a Linux distribution for the support staff, providing a base install of Ubuntu and the option of installing a Windows if you really can't get on with it. Make sure there is a local wiki with how to connect to various servers and let those that can choose the OS and applications that they feel the most comfortable with. If the new consultant uses FreeBSD / Mac OS X let them connect to your network and connect to the servers using the credentials that the infrastructure guys provide.
Thinking you can protect the network from the inside by locking off features or limiting the OS that you can use is short sighted, it only stops thoese who don't know how to circumvent these measures and thats not who you are trying to stop.
People need to learn to be more afraid of a homogenous network as its the hunting ground of vendor lock-ins and security holes.
When I bought my 12" PowerBook I knew that it was going to be my desktop computer so I bought a 17" LCD (I dual-head it) and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for comfort. The reason that was better for me than a mini is because I can use it on the train and in the park and it has battery backup built in (so I can move it around whilst its sleeping). The reason its better than a 20" monster is because it weighs 3 pounds and has an 6 hour battery life, oh and it'll be a lot cheaper (everything is more expensive when its built into a laptop).
I don't need my laptop to be the most powerfull machine in the building as long as it can connect to the most powerful machine in the building (thank God for 3G and WiFi). I don't really need to use it in the park, but on a cool, bright October day like today, it is a privaledge thats hard to resist. But size sells, so no doubt your wifes company will be buying these 20" screens by the dozen, her chiropractor will give herself a raise and you'll be buying an SUV to drop the laptop off at work;)
I'm not saying you're wrong, clearly this is a matter of personal preference, but there is a counter point to your objections.
Since getting a 20" widescreen iMac I'd not go back. It gives you the same advantages as a dual head system but without the join: rather than reading more of the same webpage it means you can read the webpage AND see the document you're working on. Thats not so say I wouldn't want more height too!
Even in the wikipedia article that you cite, they say that there is a chance, although there are no confirmations, that the STU-III has been hacked. But thats not really my point here. Even if the hardware is secure, the human element is open to attack: "Everybody breaks on the third day".
From what I understand of cracking, you always take the path of least resistance. If cracking the encryption is hard, you think outside the box and use other technologies to get what you want, lazer listening devices, moles, a cute, russian 'massage therapist'. If a door has a lock, go through the window, if there are no windows go through the air vents, if you can't get through the air-vents, intercept the people that come out the building, take their tags, fingers and retiners and go through the door. We've all seen the films, read the books and are currently working on the t-shirt.
All you can do is make the job harder. For a given timeframe the difficulty may tend to infinity - but a dedicated, skilled and well resourced cracker will find that hole eventually. The best you can hope for is that the secure timeframe is longer than the sensitivity of the data.
We're all IT pros or enthusiasts right? Are any of us really under the impression that anything is really secure? Given enough time and resources anything can be cracked - and if its not the computer system its the users that are the weakest link.
If you need to believe that what you are saying is secure, or need to advise people that need to believe that you can secure things, surely thats what you tell them.
VoIP is has a few killer advantages: reduced costs, CD quality sound, potential to expand to video and REDUCED COSTS.
The security surrounding it may stop pesky neighbourhood kids splicing into your phone line and listening in, but there is NO technology that will prevent a dedicated and skilled cracker from listening into anything you broadcast or keep on your computer. But they are few and far between and I like those odds (its not as if I have any real secrets). What really bothers me about this is the idea of government mandated backdoors.
How can a country that gives its citizens the right to bear arms and form militia not see that in the information age encryption is the next Smith and Western? In that respect its not designed to stop the police from arresting you, or to help you rob banks. Sure you can use it for such, but thats not what it was designed for, it is designed to help you protect yourself, your family and your possesions and act as a deterent. Just don't expect your six-shooter to defend you from a trained assasin.
I live in the UK, so I don't carry a gun (not that I would in the US either), but I do lock my house and my car - and I don't give the police a master key unless they ask me and provide a warrant. Thats fair. Builders don't look the other way whilst the police come on site and install a special secret door that only they can use and the reason that doesn't happen, is because there would be two sets of people that have the key, the police and the criminals. Its the same with encryption.
Exactly! C is really complicated. I mean there should be a language where all you have to do is push things onto the stack or heap, move things into registers and add them together, maybe add a few exotic things like mulitplication and bit shifting for fun! We could give it a snappy name like reduced instruction set, or RISC for short. If it got too complicated we could then write another program that takes more abstract concepts like objects and functions and then reduce these down to our RISC instructions... you know for beginners... oh wait.
I guess this is the point you were trying to make... I was just having fun fleshing it out;) And now for the bit where I rant on...
Running a country is always going to be more complicated than making a cup of tea. The reason I don't find running the country difficult is because other people (stupid first past the post politics) voted a guy to do it for me. The only way you can get computers to make complicated tasks easier is if they can do it for you. At the moment thats limited to doing a lot of math very quickly - and thats not what people want. Its the same with programming languages. Programming a computer should be no more difficult than giving instructions to a stupid child - but it is because all computers can do is very fast math and we don't have the math for identifying and describing objects.
As soon as we have the math to describe identifying objects within a huge 2D matrix, and using pre-programmed experiences to give an depth of field, and an idea of how light should treat that object, we're going to be stuck with Photoshop and Java.
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I love OS X. I own a iMac G5 and a PowerBook, and my girlfriend has a iBook. As a platform it is pain free and makes a lot of task very simple. But I also have a secret love for Debian.
More and more I find that I actually need a dedicated server in the house. I need a web server, an NFS server, CVS and bittorrent. Its not that I can't perform these tasks on a Mac, its that I don't want to. They're all niggles that absorb resources... not a lot, but enough so that when it takes an extra bounce for Pages to open you start wondering if thats because something else is using those extra cycles. So I farm them out to an old PIII Debian box.
Mac OS X is a delight as single user platform. If you are actually sat at the box I can't think of a single OS I'd rather have at my finger tips. But if the closest your going to get to the box is an SSH session your Debian is a tough beat. I've installed Postgresql on the Debian box from the park via my PowerBook and a 3G phone. I frequently SSH into the box to run updates or, if there is a bit of software that I want to Bittorrent, I'll use firefox or lynx to get the torrent then btdownloadncurses so that I know it will be on the network by the time I get home. This is the power of dpkg, a feature that Apple really needs to add to OS X, but then as your a gentoo user I'm preaching to the converted.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't by a Mac mini, I'm just saying, that one person - one computer is a philosophy of the 90s. A mac mini with X11 is a great way to drive your Gentoo box - two heads are better than one and when you can pick up a usefull PC for ~$200 why not have 3?
At the time the XBox went bang I was in middle of 4 months of unemployment and replacing it was the lowest of my priorities (honest). As a substitute I used a wireless TV forwarder (that I already had) to get the stream direct from iMac G5 to my TV.
This isn't nearly as good a solution:
Being able to use XBox Media Centre or equivalent is an essential aspect to my decision for which console I will buy next. I just wish you didn't have to mod the box to be able to use it... seems like a massive oversight.
I'm running a iMac G5 1.8GHz with 1GB of RAM and I'm a Java developer.
The game was playable and really took me back to 1997 and the first time I played Quake2 - a little too much. No other applications running and it still stuttered when a new model appeared. When it was just pulling things from memory the game ran incredibly smoothly.
This is easily the most impressive piece of Java programming I have ever seen. The game was responsive, and the graphics are amazing but you still get the feeling that the JIT was playing catchup in certain sections.
I have no doubt that this could match a C compiled version as 95% of the time it was running incredibly smoothly. But gaming is about a smooth, immersive experience (especially FPS) the semi-random 'jerks' make you aware that you are still playing a computer game and thats the real problem for a commercial vendor.
The one thing that you could probably get from Java that you wouldn't get from C is instant multi-processor support. Given two processors I see no reason why JIT / GC couldn't run in a seperate thread and provide the smooth experiance that we all crave. Not having a dual processor system I can't verify this theory, but this is where I expect to see real advances in the near future. We're already seeing that the first round of games for the 360 arn't fully utlizing the 3 cores, wouldn't garbage collection and JVM be a decent application for those wasted cores? It would certainly reduce the development times, and allow for games to be written for PS3 and the 360 simultaneously and, lets face it, Java development is significantly easier, easier to debug and significantly less prone to crashes.
To see this happen we need to see Sun / IBM developing a JVM for all the next gen consoles that really take advantage of the new architectures. There needs to be better SIMD support and it needs to be transparent to the developer.
Hear! Hear!
I got my hands on a legacy PIII 533 with 64MB RAM, that was running Windows ME. That machine would have been a screemer back in 1997 but by todays standards it was totally unuseable. I thought it was the operating system, so I upgraded to a headleass Debian box and it flies! So long as the web browser is lynx and the mail app is pine!!
Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird are SLOW in 64MB RAM, and to be honest the PIII isn't helping much either. It's not that you couldn't be productive with the system its just that you'd be living in a world of lag and be less productive. I looked into upgrading the RAM, and because there were issues SDRAM, (i.e. it wasn't as interchangable as DDR on older motherboards) I could either payout for a new BIOS and some cheap RAM, or pay about the same for the more expensive, but compatible RAM. The stupid part is that this would have cost me ~$100 and I could buy a system that was significantly faster from Best Buy for ~$250.
In a world where hardware is cheap and software is free the only thing that really makes an impact to the bottom line is the human time spent on a task. I agree with the GP that there was no point spending money on a top of the range system for such mundane tasks, but to say that a 486 would be adequate is miserly and folly.
I know what you mean. I was awe struck by Ubuntu. I've got a powerbook, and a iMac G5 both of which I adore, but there is something hypnotic about Linux that keeps drawing me back. As a middle ground I've built a dirt cheap P3 system with Debian that I ssh -YC into which works great as a J2EE test bed, CVS repository, mail server, bittorrent etc, but its too slow for desktop use. However, the next time I've got a bit of spare cash for hardware it'll be a Linux box that I invest in rather than a Mac.
Don't get me wrong, I still think OS X is the best OS out there, it's a fantastic balance of power and ease of use, but I'm now finding that I use LaTeX, vi, eclipse more than MS Office and XTools and I genuinely enjoy getting my hands dirty in code changes so I'd really struggle to justify paying the apple tax next time I upgrade.
Is why people don't put the songs on their phones themselves? They're quite happy sending photos to each other via bluetooth and downloading songs to their iPods so why don't they download songs to their phones?
I've been doing it for a 4 or 5 years now (initially with IR and midi which I could understand was probably beyond most) but now that its just a case of dragging an iTunes song too your desktop then pressing cmd-shift-b (or right clicking it and choosing send file) to send it to your phone it amazes me that people don't do it more often.
I guess this is the point that the poster was trying to get across. People really don't associate iTunes music with ring tones. It's completely seperate in their heads. One's an impulse buy that they can do whilst watching TV, or waiting for a bus, the other is a considered purchase, even if it is half the price. The only thing that could change that is if Apple introduce a 'make ringtone button' to iTunes - that would REALLY piss off a lot of people (except of course the customers).
Of course companies and academics don't want IPv6 they already have the only real advantage it provides - per machine addressing. Why would they invest money to get something they already have?
IPv6 benefits individuals. It benefits P2P, VoIP, photo sharing, blogging and email (yes email - you don't need a third party server if you have a permanent web presence). Yes you can have all of that with IPv4, but its held together with hacks like NAT, port forwarding and man-in-the-middle servers. That's fine, if like me, you hold a degree in computer science and arn't put off by the nuances of network security, berkley ports and subnet masks but if you're a noob who just wants to share their Christmas pictures with friends and family its a pretty steep learning curve.
I'm a pretty typical nerd. My home network has 4 computers that regularly connect to the internet. Of those, 2 offer services such as SSH, bittorent, email and my testing web server. After christmas that will probably extend to a new XBox360 and a PSP (admittedly passive net users). Next Christmas it might be my mobile. The Christmas after that my espresso machine will probably be consulting a distributed database to see what is the best way of brewing Co-op's Fairtrade Java.
You can buy a computer the size of a pack of gum with a complete Linux operating system and enough horse power to run a web server for ~$200. That's too expensive to be ubiquitous but in 2-3 years time that figure will be in the region of $20 and it will be a WiFi network. It's going to happen.
IPv4 forces our devices to be passive because configuring a NAT Router and Firewall is hard for Joe Public. IPv4 means that we have to poll to get system updates. IPv4 means that I can't just ask my fridge what its contents are without configuring a seperate box. IPv4 means that I'm happy when a third party agrees to handle my communications - I actually ask them to listen in and they 'promise' not to read my mail or listen to my conversations. IPv4 means that when I get an email from my girlfriend at 195.95.195.94 I have no method of authenticating that.
IPv6 means that I buy bandwidth and nothing else. I don't get 100MB of web hosting, or a whopping 5 emails addresses, I get to use my over powered desktop machine with 200GB of 'web space' and as many email addresses as I please. IPv6 means that I can start to build a web of trust, so that I can start to authenticate the messages I receive against a web of my peers - not a single verisign certificate. IPv6 means that consumer electoronics can be connected to my data pipe and that the manufacturer can be responible for its up keep - including firewalls and virus protection.
In short IPv6 allows people to own a bit of the internet and say it's theirs rather than renting an inch and getting kicked off that inch every 4 hours.
I'm sorry, this is absolutely riddiculous. The last time I checked being blind / deaf / disabled didn't stop you from programming. Providing you have the mental aptitude you can do pretty much anything with a computer - look at Stephen Hawking - he writes books on physics that's got to be harder than programming!
If the various 'disabled' communities don't like the support that their 'given' with an open source project then they need to get programming the support themselves or raising funds so they can fund coffee addled nerds to do it for them.
In fact, if this is the only thing thats stopping Open Office being supported by local governments then I'll be supprised if its not in the next release.
I don't get it. What would I use it for? Is it for people that can't afford laptops but want the web on the move?
How many people is that exactly?
And its not like you can just use it anywhere. You're either using it on your home network, where it would be a toy not a tool (why wouldn't you use your real computer?) or your using it in an expensive access point, or do they expect you to steal other people's connection?
3 hours battery life?
$400?
I guess this might appeal to PDA people, but don't they have everything that this offers for less, in a smaller package with the same or better battery life?
...beowulf cluster, ok don't this would suck as much at this as much as an XBox, but I think the target market for this should be geeks, not noobs. As the article said, in order to get it working they had to put 512MB RAM in to get it acting like a modern PC. I can sympathize with this, but really, should this machine be allowed a GUI?
It's got a good network card, a half decent amount of RAM and a harddisk. I'm seeing a fileserver, bittorent client, tomcat, CVS, distcc, firewall, game/print server etc. It takes cheap DDR, so if you want to run JBoss or MySQL that is a real possibility, but what I'm thinking is stick a $20 WiFi card in it, and stick it in a cupboard/basement away from harms reach.
I have a PowerBook and a iMac G5, and although both of these are fully capable of running all of those applications, I like keeping my development boxes 'clean'. Farming out essential, but resource nibbling tasks out to smaller, disposable boxes makes a lot of sense to me.
I've got a Orange 3G mobile thats a video phone, and I've got Apple iChat which is a video phone. I might be comparing Apples and Oranges, but I'm not 5 years in the future.
Is 'flurry' the correct collective noun? Wouldn't a spindle or harddisk review be more apropriate?
If I write a novel, and put on the floor in the street, somebody picks it up and reads it, they arn't violating copyright because they haven't create a copy.
If I write the same novel and leave it on a public file server, if someone picks it up and reads it or saves it to disk they have made a copy of it (because thats how digital reading works) so they have violated copyright, unless I allow them the right to make one copy. So what happens the next time I open the file? Technically I'll have a copy on disk and a copy in memory - so I'll have two copies. Or worse, I decide I want to read it on a different computer, I copy it to the other computer, delete from the current computer and then read it on the other computer. As far as I'm concerned there is still only one copy, but in reality there are three: the copy marked for deletion on my harddrive, the copy on the other computers harddrive and the copy in memory. All this before we start getting our knickers in a twist about caching and registers!
Digital data really stuggles with copyright, because even the most simple of actions require that the data be duplicated, and the reason we duplicate over transfer is because it's faster and safer. Once something is digitized good luck trying to keep control over its distribution.
Googles actions here show a complete disregard for conventional copoyright. Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital, then disitributing it on the web is not what fair use had in mind, and really should involve giving some money to the copyright holders, probably a lot of money.
I really like it. Modern, but with strong links to the Beastie of old. To paraphase Robbie Coltrane "Its like triple expansion steam engines: an idea so simple you are convinced that given enough paper and a desert island, you'd come up with it yourself... of course you never would".
Don't feel too bad. The XBox 360 is coming out in a couple of weeks and then you'll be able to have a whole seperate system for gaming that plugs nicely into your big screen tv and comes with a dedicated game controller and 3 PPC processors. Best of all it costs about the same as a decent video card.
OK its not quite as portable as a laptop, but if you want portable get a PSP or DS, they're way cheaper than decent graphics card.
What a fantastic idea! Why didn't you UNIX guys think of that whilst you were eating ambrosia up in your ivory tower eh? ... Oh...
Microsoft 'innovating' once again, and giving the people what the want (10 years after everyone else). Go Redmond!
I don't think thats true at all. If they screw up their kid thats one more murderer / rapist / thief / terrorist on your streets. Its another mal-peer for child to become associated with, that could corrupt your own. What people do to the next generation affects everyone around them directly.
The thing I don't understand about creationists is why have they picked on that one aspect of Science to get so pissy about. How about gravity? Aristotal was a pretty bright guy, and he was convinced that the reason birds flew was because that was their place in life (and that they contained more of the air element) and yet we still have no solid proof that gravity exists. We have models that are predictable but we don't know how it works. Why don't creationists try and get schools to teach that its Gods will that massive objects are attracted to each other? How about Radiation? We know that some objects release alpha particles, but we have no idea when it will happen. Why don't we teach that God made the particles appear? I don't get me started on Maths. The square root of -1! That makes 666 look positively saintly!
The Framers were right to keep church and state seperate. It the responsibility of the state to pass on all the knowledge that it has to its people. It is the responsibility of the churches to explain to people how that fits in with their religion. There needs to be some flexibilty. Evolution is our best theory so far, just like quantum theory or special relativity. We expect them to change because we know they arn't the complete theory of everything and its important that students understand this. In the same manner religious fundamentalists need to embrace a similar flexibility and understand that all of our religious texts are the word of God written down by man and that all men are faliable and encourage people to interpret their religious texts and look for the word of God within the words of men that died many hundreds of years ago, where their thoughts were framed by their experiences and knowledge of their day.
Buy a wireless TV forwarder like the PHILIPS SBCVL1100. They're designed so that you can watch Sky/Cable in other rooms, but they hook up to TV-Out just as well. Ive got one hooked up to my iMac G5 and it works great, especially when you use Salling Clicker as a remote control. I have small complaints about it interfering with WiFi and body masses can upset it, but you can turn it off pretty easily.
Doesn't it concern you a bit that this has happened? When I was a kid you expected your consoles to last, and they did, my NES still boots up fine and every games works (after I've brushed off the dust) the same with my spectrum 48k! But my XBox died after just 2 years of abuse.
We should be upgrading because the new console offers something that we need (better gameplay more realisitic deaths, whatever floats your boat) not because the hardware is 'flaky' after just a few short years.
Let the people choose and support their own software. A hetrogenous network is more secure not less. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, iCal, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SAMBA, NFS, XML, CVS, LDAP, OpenDocument, MS-Document etc. These are the technologies that you choose from, not the applications or the OS.
I would prescribe investing in training in both MS and a Linux distribution for the support staff, providing a base install of Ubuntu and the option of installing a Windows if you really can't get on with it. Make sure there is a local wiki with how to connect to various servers and let those that can choose the OS and applications that they feel the most comfortable with. If the new consultant uses FreeBSD / Mac OS X let them connect to your network and connect to the servers using the credentials that the infrastructure guys provide.
Thinking you can protect the network from the inside by locking off features or limiting the OS that you can use is short sighted, it only stops thoese who don't know how to circumvent these measures and thats not who you are trying to stop.
People need to learn to be more afraid of a homogenous network as its the hunting ground of vendor lock-ins and security holes.
When I bought my 12" PowerBook I knew that it was going to be my desktop computer so I bought a 17" LCD (I dual-head it) and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for comfort. The reason that was better for me than a mini is because I can use it on the train and in the park and it has battery backup built in (so I can move it around whilst its sleeping). The reason its better than a 20" monster is because it weighs 3 pounds and has an 6 hour battery life, oh and it'll be a lot cheaper (everything is more expensive when its built into a laptop).
;)
I don't need my laptop to be the most powerfull machine in the building as long as it can connect to the most powerful machine in the building (thank God for 3G and WiFi). I don't really need to use it in the park, but on a cool, bright October day like today, it is a privaledge thats hard to resist. But size sells, so no doubt your wifes company will be buying these 20" screens by the dozen, her chiropractor will give herself a raise and you'll be buying an SUV to drop the laptop off at work
I'm not saying you're wrong, clearly this is a matter of personal preference, but there is a counter point to your objections.
Since getting a 20" widescreen iMac I'd not go back. It gives you the same advantages as a dual head system but without the join: rather than reading more of the same webpage it means you can read the webpage AND see the document you're working on. Thats not so say I wouldn't want more height too!
Even in the wikipedia article that you cite, they say that there is a chance, although there are no confirmations, that the STU-III has been hacked. But thats not really my point here. Even if the hardware is secure, the human element is open to attack: "Everybody breaks on the third day".
From what I understand of cracking, you always take the path of least resistance. If cracking the encryption is hard, you think outside the box and use other technologies to get what you want, lazer listening devices, moles, a cute, russian 'massage therapist'. If a door has a lock, go through the window, if there are no windows go through the air vents, if you can't get through the air-vents, intercept the people that come out the building, take their tags, fingers and retiners and go through the door. We've all seen the films, read the books and are currently working on the t-shirt.
All you can do is make the job harder. For a given timeframe the difficulty may tend to infinity - but a dedicated, skilled and well resourced cracker will find that hole eventually. The best you can hope for is that the secure timeframe is longer than the sensitivity of the data.
We're all IT pros or enthusiasts right? Are any of us really under the impression that anything is really secure? Given enough time and resources anything can be cracked - and if its not the computer system its the users that are the weakest link.
If you need to believe that what you are saying is secure, or need to advise people that need to believe that you can secure things, surely thats what you tell them.
VoIP is has a few killer advantages: reduced costs, CD quality sound, potential to expand to video and REDUCED COSTS.
The security surrounding it may stop pesky neighbourhood kids splicing into your phone line and listening in, but there is NO technology that will prevent a dedicated and skilled cracker from listening into anything you broadcast or keep on your computer. But they are few and far between and I like those odds (its not as if I have any real secrets). What really bothers me about this is the idea of government mandated backdoors.
How can a country that gives its citizens the right to bear arms and form militia not see that in the information age encryption is the next Smith and Western? In that respect its not designed to stop the police from arresting you, or to help you rob banks. Sure you can use it for such, but thats not what it was designed for, it is designed to help you protect yourself, your family and your possesions and act as a deterent. Just don't expect your six-shooter to defend you from a trained assasin.
I live in the UK, so I don't carry a gun (not that I would in the US either), but I do lock my house and my car - and I don't give the police a master key unless they ask me and provide a warrant. Thats fair. Builders don't look the other way whilst the police come on site and install a special secret door that only they can use and the reason that doesn't happen, is because there would be two sets of people that have the key, the police and the criminals. Its the same with encryption.
Exactly! C is really complicated. I mean there should be a language where all you have to do is push things onto the stack or heap, move things into registers and add them together, maybe add a few exotic things like mulitplication and bit shifting for fun! We could give it a snappy name like reduced instruction set, or RISC for short. If it got too complicated we could then write another program that takes more abstract concepts like objects and functions and then reduce these down to our RISC instructions... you know for beginners... oh wait.
;) And now for the bit where I rant on...
I guess this is the point you were trying to make... I was just having fun fleshing it out
Running a country is always going to be more complicated than making a cup of tea. The reason I don't find running the country difficult is because other people (stupid first past the post politics) voted a guy to do it for me. The only way you can get computers to make complicated tasks easier is if they can do it for you. At the moment thats limited to doing a lot of math very quickly - and thats not what people want. Its the same with programming languages. Programming a computer should be no more difficult than giving instructions to a stupid child - but it is because all computers can do is very fast math and we don't have the math for identifying and describing objects.
As soon as we have the math to describe identifying objects within a huge 2D matrix, and using pre-programmed experiences to give an depth of field, and an idea of how light should treat that object, we're going to be stuck with Photoshop and Java.