You're absolutely right. I do the IT work for an office of about 30 people, which recently has involved building a couple of new servers and setting up a solid backup plan. In turn this has involved buying around a dozen new disks over the course of about 6 months.
Of these drives, two (one each from two different retailers) were damaged upon unpacking them. One had a section of the plastic surrounding the jumper block punched in at an angle, and the other had a small but obvious bit of rasping on the metal of one side. (Once the damage was found, it was obvious that there was corresponding damage to the packaging, but in the process of paying etc at the store I hadn't looked close enough. Lesson: with fragile goods such as disks, insist on unpacking them in the store before paying.)
I returned both of course; the first one the retailer wouldn't accept back until I kicked up a stink and demanded to speak to the manager; the second took it back with no arguments (and even an apology).
I guess the thing is though, for every drive that has visible damage, how many have been mishandled and will show a correspondingly shorter lifetime without having any obvious damage? I can imagine many ways these drives could be dropped or shocked without leaving marks.
Yes. This was all discussed months ago. To clarify (Lawyers, correct me if I'm wrong here since I'm not one):
The relevant quote is this.
4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
(emphasis mine)
Firstly, this clause doesn't say you can't run Vista Home Basic in a VM. It says that for a given, already installed copy, you can't also run it inside a VM. The Ultimate one says the opposite, which implies that if you have a single valid installation of Vista Ultimate, you can also run it inside VMs without purchasing additional licenses.
Secondly, even if it were true that the cheaper versions weren't licensed for VM use, this has no relevance to Macs in particular. Flamebait up the wazoo.
Hmm, that's strange. I guess it's a separate problem with the Macbook Pro then, because it completely disappeared as soon as I started using the 3-pin plug. In fact I'd probably say it's not actually a problem at all with the MBP - I think it's just a consequence of having a device with a metal case fed by an ungrounded power supply. In that case, the only real error is shipping duck bills without earth pins.
I experienced the same problem with my Macbook Pro when using the 2-pin 'duck-bill' connector for the power pack. Try it with the 240V lead with the 3-pin plug on it.
I first discovered this when I could feel a very faint tingle in my wrists when I rested my hands on the machine to type.
I tested mine with a multimeter (between a case screw and the earth pin of a standard power lead that's plugged in) and when using the 2-pin plug, the case voltage was about 30V DC (can't remember if it was positive or negative). With the 3-pin connector, it was 0V exactly.
As far as I know, this is a common problem with unearthed electronics that have to produce their own artificial, 'floating' ground.
Macs have it both ways, because they can do it both ways.
Whether you're talking about the contrast between fun and serious work, or between elegant, streamlined interfaces and to-the-metal programming, the Mac is happy to handle both ends of the scale at once, with no fuss and no interruptions.
That's one of the reasons people get so defensive of Macs and Apple in general. They're not perfect, sure--but they're really very, very good. And when people find something that they really like, they become passionate about it--whether it's a car or a sports team or a piece of technology like a computer.
A lot of people use this as an excuse to dismiss their opinion as worthless fanboyism. That's not fair. Rose coloured glasses might tint the scene, but they can't reassemble it.
The only way to automate the process (theoretically as well as currently) is to have the target machine search and manage patching itself
Theoretically as well as currently? That's not right, there's certainly ways to achieve it without manually downloading each patch separately.
How about a bundle that is continually updated to just contain _everything_? Since it would all be managed by one installer, the duplication of the installer across multiple executables would be eliminated, which would probably save a lot of space (I'd say it'd be on the level of a meg or so per file). Yes, this would be a very large file. But who cares? The initial download required for the 60 or so patches for a fresh XP install wouldn't be all that much less (maybe it'd require 20% more bandwidth.. who cares).
Or, even better, how about a scanning tool that's updated each month as new patches are rolled out, that can be downloaded to a USB stick or similar, and run on a new offline machine. The tool inspects the target machine and generates an XML file (required-patches-for-#{hostname}.xml, or maybe with a UUID or whatever is appropriate) that you submit in a webform to download a zipped archive of all appropriate patches. Put the USB stick back in the target, run the tool again, and it automatically installs all the patches it finds in the bundle, checking against the XML it generated earlier. Easy.
It'd work, it's prettty simple, and if it was done correctly, would completely warrant that the target machine didn't touch the interwebs until it was completely patched up-to-the-minute.
I don't know if that was sarcasm or not, but in case anyone's wondering, that was a (imo pretty funny) reference to the Paul Simon track Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes, from his '86 release Graceland.
Having tested it this afternoon, I can report that iTunes 7 does indeed do true gapless playback.
Now, there seem to be two types built in:
- The first is standard gapless - the end of one file and the beginning of another coincide with no introduced gap. This is presumably a change in the playback / buffering code.
- The second is scanned gapless - in addition to the introduced gap being eliminated, you can mark a 'gapless album' - which I assume actually removes (or rather, removes for playback) silence from the start and end of tracks. This would explain the 'scanning for gapless playback' background scan upon the initial launch of iTunes 7.
What I have been wanting for so long is the standard gapless kind - I don't want silence trimmed from the tracks, I just want them to from one to the next with no gaps introduced. So for those who have been after the same thing, I can confirm that this now works with no extra flag-setting or configuration.
For the record, I tested it out on Pink Floyd's The Wall. Sounded great.:)
Microsoft is a company, and its employees are there to do their job, for the company. They get paid to serve the company.
(In theory), The recording labels are there for the artists. They get a cut of sales to do things for the artist like promote their work, and press & distribute CDs. They get paid to serve the artist.
The way you describe things, is as if the whole music world consists of a single entity, the collective recording labels, that employ artists to promote & be a face for their music. It almost sounds as if you're implying the music is being written centrally by the labels, instead of by the artists!
Oh wait, that's pretty much a functional description of the popular music industry.
In other creative fields, like books, the author of the content retains the copyright. The current state of the music industry, with so much central ownership and control, is a terrible setup. What you describe is actually closer to the truth than you imply. But that's not a good thing.
If anyone's interested, I just picked up a new 2GHz Macbook Pro yesterday, serial number starting with W8612.
I have the CPU whine, which is fixed by running MagicNoiseKiller. Not a problem at all, since I just set it as a startup item.
My screen is perfect, no flickering or dead pixels, really bright and vivid. Once MagicNoiseKiller has done its thing, this laptop is really pretty incredibly quiet - a lot better than the Toshiba P4 mode it's replacing.
I think the recent cries to the effect that Apple's build quality is slipping are pretty overrated - this laptop feels incredibly solid and well built. I'm a very happy Apple customer - to the point of chuckling madly.
In fact, I prove him even wronger, because I slid down the iPod-to-Mac slippery slope.
It all started with a 3G iPod. That led to a Mac Mini with a gig of RAM (made a huge difference from the 512MB I started with), an iPod Shuffle, and (once I'm rich enough) probably a Macbook.
99 percent of the parents in this state will tell their kids that evolution is fact.
I wouldn't be so sure of that -- from what I've read quite a significant number of Americans believe evolution is flawed. 37% of Americans want creationism taught in schools, not just alongside evolution but in place of it (NewScientist, Oct '05).
I think it's highly optimistic to rely on the parents to set the record straight.
No matter what the device, moving to LEDs is always an improvement in my book -- they're low power, last basically forever, and all the rest of it. This is pretty nice technology from NEC. Now all we need are a few other manufacturers to get in on the LED action and drive the prices (and the thickness of the display) down.
At the same time, I can't help thinking that the whole design paradigm of using a light generation source, with a filter in front, is sort of non-optimal. All the work that has to be done to spread the light correctly with those lightguides etc. It'll be interesting to see where display tech goes in the next 15 years -- maybe some sort of sheet of micro-LEDs that emit light for individual pixels.
Although, what with the current desire to significantly increase DPI, and the graphics card power we have now starting to make it feasible, this probably wouldn't work too well... I don't know how likely we are to develop LEDs at cellular dimensions any time soon.
I give the Nano double thumbs-up. Very slick design. And the fact that we're up into multiple gigabytes in a completely solid state device is pretty exciting. I have a 1GB Shuffle, which I'm really happy with, mainly because of its size and weight (or lack thereof), excellent audio quality and solid-state-ness. I'd probably consider getting a Nano if I had the money.
The thing I'm most interested to learn, though, is how its bass response compares to other models. As is detailed here, the Shuffle has a far superior amplifier (based on a push-pull design, I believe) and as a result performs way above the competition in the lower end of the spectrum. The old Mini, however, was the worst of the lot. It just couldn't flesh out those wide low-frequency waves.
So, which amp did the Nano get? The gutsy push-pull setup from the Shuffle, or the... improvable amp from the Mini?
It has been known for some time now that most Slashdotters don't get through the first sentence of a topic's blurb, and as such all subsequent text is being removed to save on printing costs.
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That's still better as a for { } loop. Apart from it's concise variable initialisation and post-loop statement, for is while.
for (i = 0; not bail_condition; i++) {
for (j = 0; not bail_condition; j++) {
inner loop
}
outer loop
}
You're absolutely right. I do the IT work for an office of about 30 people, which recently has involved building a couple of new servers and setting up a solid backup plan. In turn this has involved buying around a dozen new disks over the course of about 6 months.
Of these drives, two (one each from two different retailers) were damaged upon unpacking them. One had a section of the plastic surrounding the jumper block punched in at an angle, and the other had a small but obvious bit of rasping on the metal of one side. (Once the damage was found, it was obvious that there was corresponding damage to the packaging, but in the process of paying etc at the store I hadn't looked close enough. Lesson: with fragile goods such as disks, insist on unpacking them in the store before paying.)
I returned both of course; the first one the retailer wouldn't accept back until I kicked up a stink and demanded to speak to the manager; the second took it back with no arguments (and even an apology).
I guess the thing is though, for every drive that has visible damage, how many have been mishandled and will show a correspondingly shorter lifetime without having any obvious damage? I can imagine many ways these drives could be dropped or shocked without leaving marks.
The relevant quote is this. (emphasis mine)
Firstly, this clause doesn't say you can't run Vista Home Basic in a VM. It says that for a given, already installed copy, you can't also run it inside a VM. The Ultimate one says the opposite, which implies that if you have a single valid installation of Vista Ultimate, you can also run it inside VMs without purchasing additional licenses.
Secondly, even if it were true that the cheaper versions weren't licensed for VM use, this has no relevance to Macs in particular. Flamebait up the wazoo.
Again, this is just my take on it.
Hmm, that's strange. I guess it's a separate problem with the Macbook Pro then, because it completely disappeared as soon as I started using the 3-pin plug. In fact I'd probably say it's not actually a problem at all with the MBP - I think it's just a consequence of having a device with a metal case fed by an ungrounded power supply. In that case, the only real error is shipping duck bills without earth pins.
I experienced the same problem with my Macbook Pro when using the 2-pin 'duck-bill' connector for the power pack. Try it with the 240V lead with the 3-pin plug on it.
I first discovered this when I could feel a very faint tingle in my wrists when I rested my hands on the machine to type.
I tested mine with a multimeter (between a case screw and the earth pin of a standard power lead that's plugged in) and when using the 2-pin plug, the case voltage was about 30V DC (can't remember if it was positive or negative). With the 3-pin connector, it was 0V exactly.
As far as I know, this is a common problem with unearthed electronics that have to produce their own artificial, 'floating' ground.
I think that's the point they're trying to make.
Macs have it both ways, because they can do it both ways.
Whether you're talking about the contrast between fun and serious work, or between elegant, streamlined interfaces and to-the-metal programming, the Mac is happy to handle both ends of the scale at once, with no fuss and no interruptions.
That's one of the reasons people get so defensive of Macs and Apple in general. They're not perfect, sure--but they're really very, very good. And when people find something that they really like, they become passionate about it--whether it's a car or a sports team or a piece of technology like a computer.
A lot of people use this as an excuse to dismiss their opinion as worthless fanboyism. That's not fair. Rose coloured glasses might tint the scene, but they can't reassemble it.
Try it with lime, it's much nicer.
And while you're at it, try a nicer brew like a Cantina or an Amstel.
The only way to automate the process (theoretically as well as currently) is to have the target machine search and manage patching itself
Theoretically as well as currently? That's not right, there's certainly ways to achieve it without manually downloading each patch separately.
How about a bundle that is continually updated to just contain _everything_? Since it would all be managed by one installer, the duplication of the installer across multiple executables would be eliminated, which would probably save a lot of space (I'd say it'd be on the level of a meg or so per file). Yes, this would be a very large file. But who cares? The initial download required for the 60 or so patches for a fresh XP install wouldn't be all that much less (maybe it'd require 20% more bandwidth.. who cares).
Or, even better, how about a scanning tool that's updated each month as new patches are rolled out, that can be downloaded to a USB stick or similar, and run on a new offline machine. The tool inspects the target machine and generates an XML file (required-patches-for-#{hostname}.xml, or maybe with a UUID or whatever is appropriate) that you submit in a webform to download a zipped archive of all appropriate patches. Put the USB stick back in the target, run the tool again, and it automatically installs all the patches it finds in the bundle, checking against the XML it generated earlier. Easy.
It'd work, it's prettty simple, and if it was done correctly, would completely warrant that the target machine didn't touch the interwebs until it was completely patched up-to-the-minute.
I don't know if that was sarcasm or not, but in case anyone's wondering, that was a (imo pretty funny) reference to the Paul Simon track Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes, from his '86 release Graceland.
Good album too.
Having tested it this afternoon, I can report that iTunes 7 does indeed do true gapless playback.
:)
Now, there seem to be two types built in:
- The first is standard gapless - the end of one file and the beginning of another coincide with no introduced gap. This is presumably a change in the playback / buffering code.
- The second is scanned gapless - in addition to the introduced gap being eliminated, you can mark a 'gapless album' - which I assume actually removes (or rather, removes for playback) silence from the start and end of tracks. This would explain the 'scanning for gapless playback' background scan upon the initial launch of iTunes 7.
What I have been wanting for so long is the standard gapless kind - I don't want silence trimmed from the tracks, I just want them to from one to the next with no gaps introduced. So for those who have been after the same thing, I can confirm that this now works with no extra flag-setting or configuration.
For the record, I tested it out on Pink Floyd's The Wall. Sounded great.
You have it backwards.
Microsoft is a company, and its employees are there to do their job, for the company. They get paid to serve the company.
(In theory), The recording labels are there for the artists. They get a cut of sales to do things for the artist like promote their work, and press & distribute CDs. They get paid to serve the artist.
The way you describe things, is as if the whole music world consists of a single entity, the collective recording labels, that employ artists to promote & be a face for their music. It almost sounds as if you're implying the music is being written centrally by the labels, instead of by the artists!
Oh wait, that's pretty much a functional description of the popular music industry.
In other creative fields, like books, the author of the content retains the copyright. The current state of the music industry, with so much central ownership and control, is a terrible setup. What you describe is actually closer to the truth than you imply. But that's not a good thing.
If anyone's interested, I just picked up a new 2GHz Macbook Pro yesterday, serial number starting with W8612.
I have the CPU whine, which is fixed by running MagicNoiseKiller. Not a problem at all, since I just set it as a startup item.
My screen is perfect, no flickering or dead pixels, really bright and vivid. Once MagicNoiseKiller has done its thing, this laptop is really pretty incredibly quiet - a lot better than the Toshiba P4 mode it's replacing.
I think the recent cries to the effect that Apple's build quality is slipping are pretty overrated - this laptop feels incredibly solid and well built. I'm a very happy Apple customer - to the point of chuckling madly.
Give Handbrake a go. It's worked really well for me on my Mac Mini.
It can encode using ffmpeg or XviD (iirc), and the audio in MP3 or MP4 (i.e. AAC).
Yep, I'm in pretty much the same boat.
In fact, I prove him even wronger, because I slid down the iPod-to-Mac slippery slope.
It all started with a 3G iPod. That led to a Mac Mini with a gig of RAM (made a huge difference from the 512MB I started with), an iPod Shuffle, and (once I'm rich enough) probably a Macbook.
In other news, Dvorak is a jackass.
I think you're right to an extent, but the innovation comments are intended to be more general.
The density of the word 'innovation' in things MS say is directly proportional to how scared they are of the thing they're talking about.
It's actually closer to 40 years.. but yeah :)
99 percent of the parents in this state will tell their kids that evolution is fact.
I wouldn't be so sure of that -- from what I've read quite a significant number of Americans believe evolution is flawed. 37% of Americans want creationism taught in schools, not just alongside evolution but in place of it (NewScientist, Oct '05).
I think it's highly optimistic to rely on the parents to set the record straight.
No matter what the device, moving to LEDs is always an improvement in my book -- they're low power, last basically forever, and all the rest of it. This is pretty nice technology from NEC. Now all we need are a few other manufacturers to get in on the LED action and drive the prices (and the thickness of the display) down.
At the same time, I can't help thinking that the whole design paradigm of using a light generation source, with a filter in front, is sort of non-optimal. All the work that has to be done to spread the light correctly with those lightguides etc. It'll be interesting to see where display tech goes in the next 15 years -- maybe some sort of sheet of micro-LEDs that emit light for individual pixels.
Although, what with the current desire to significantly increase DPI, and the graphics card power we have now starting to make it feasible, this probably wouldn't work too well... I don't know how likely we are to develop LEDs at cellular dimensions any time soon.
Nice to see a bit of ASR Redundancy every now and then.
(That's Acronym Suffix Redundancy)
... Initial reports coming in from early buyers praise the table as 'impossibly' sturdy ...
I give the Nano double thumbs-up. Very slick design. And the fact that we're up into multiple gigabytes in a completely solid state device is pretty exciting. I have a 1GB Shuffle, which I'm really happy with, mainly because of its size and weight (or lack thereof), excellent audio quality and solid-state-ness. I'd probably consider getting a Nano if I had the money.
... improvable amp from the Mini?
The thing I'm most interested to learn, though, is how its bass response compares to other models. As is detailed here, the Shuffle has a far superior amplifier (based on a push-pull design, I believe) and as a result performs way above the competition in the lower end of the spectrum. The old Mini, however, was the worst of the lot. It just couldn't flesh out those wide low-frequency waves.
So, which amp did the Nano get? The gutsy push-pull setup from the Shuffle, or the
And I sympathize with those people who have to choose between working a terrible telemarketing job and eating.
I don't see how this choice could ever arise, but I for one would take the meal and run.
What about Windows ME?
Saving the best till last, eh?
Cardboard minus unity? You were lucky.
It has been known for some time now that most Slashdotters don't get through the first sentence of a topic's blurb, and as such all subsequent text is being removed to save on printing costs.