Broadly I agree with you. I think the only difference is in the reaction of content owners. I think that there's a kind of 'arms escalation' of DRM vs hackers. It's that thinking that produces ever more draconian DRM. To push the analogy to the limit - we're still in the 'cold war' mindset.
I don't have my laptop here but at a guess I'd say programs and non-media data take up less than 10Gb, possibly less than 5Gb.
But then I guess it depends what else you want to do with your laptop. If you're actually creating/editing your own graphics/sound/video then you'll probably use a lot. Someone like me who uses it mainly for web, email, writing and an occasional dabble in programming doesn't generate much of their own data.
My point would be that you can comfortably get 'of the order of' 100 movies - if you have a reasonable amount of disc set aside for it. The previous poster seemed unaware of that. In reality I wonder if he'd willing to settle for maybe 50, or 30. I mean how many spare batteries can he have;)
Yes, you can drive your car off, or over, a curb. But if there's a nice ramp cut in the curb where people intend for your car to go, it's easier to go that way, and most people will.
The trouble is that the first car to bump the curb creates a ramp for everyone else. So that tends to cause you to make the curb higher. Hence things like forced updates.
In the internet age once the file is unencrypted once it's potentially available everywhere. So DRM has to be equally ubiquitous and very hard to crack - aka 'draconian'.
Now, if I could just get a laptop disk drive that can hold a hundred movies or so, I'd be all set.
What format are you using for movies and how big's your hard-drive?
It's perfectly possible to encode a 2-hour movie to 700Mb in reasonable quality. 100 * 700Mb = 70Gb, my PB has an 80Gb drive. Of course 'reasonable quality' is very subjective so you may want to up that 700Mb, and you may have a smaller hard drive, but even so you're talking a fairly large collection of movies.
Plus don't forget that Accenture are essentially selling a service not code - even though they may actually be handing over the IPL for the code in many cases.
I used to work in the electricity supply industry in the UK and was there at the time of domestic de-regulation (1998). In a nutshell this meant that 12 regional electricity companies (RECs) all had to build new systems to pass customer information around to enable customers to switch suppliers. These systems had to conform to a specification written by a central independant body and pass certification testing. The upshot of which was that you had in one large consultancy I know of two teams on different floors of the same building writing an application for two different RECs but to the identical spec. Due to the nature of the contracts (IPL would be owned by the RECs) the teams had to be completely separate and not communicate.
Do you think that consultancy firm was bemoaning the lack of ability to share common code or rubbing their hands at the 2x profit per hourly rate of a consultant?
Interestingly, on one of the other systems, about half the RECs joined together and jointly commissioned an application from a single vendor which could then be configured for each REC - mostly stuff to do with scale.
From the REC's point of view it was all a question of whether they thought a particular system could give them a competitive advantage.
Since there are different ways to get to do the same thing (I always click the network icon in the systray) I think he meant "at most 8" - but hey no need to be pedantic huh?
I'm sick to death of people out there who reckon that Mac OSX is actually *easy* to use.
OK, I'll bite.
Any of you guys actually GOT a Mac?
Yep - same one as you
I have 2 laptops, one a Pentium M 1.8GHz and the other a 17" Powerbook, 1.5GHz. I am *constantly* pissed off at my Mac purchase.
Both have 1GB RAM, the intel version cost $2600, my Mac $4700. Totally NOT value for money.
Valid criticism but not a useability issue.
Software is hideously expensive for Macs, and doesn't work the way you want it. I bought the office suite as (of course) you need to have it, and Entourage isn't even compatible with Outlook, how *dumb* is that.
How is Microsoft's inability to make two of their programs compatible a problem with the useability of Mac OS X?
The adobe photoshop CS suite (or more likely, that fricking 'preview' program) managed to randomly kill a whole memory cards worth of images from my camera, say 300 pictures.
This is a) not a useability issue and b) if down to photoshop, nothing to do with Mac OS X
The DVD player program isn't region free. This pisses me off as Australia & USA don't share regions. If you need to play DVDs, something like VLC is needed but that's freeware ANYWAY and available for Windows too.
Yep but Windows doesn't come with a DVD player at all, and any commercial software won't be region free. Your problem here is with the DVD region encoding system not OS X. And once again it's not really a useability issue - that would be if you found the DVD player's controls difficult, annoying or confusing in some way.
Windows in Aqua can only be resized down the bottom right.
True. Doesn't seem to slow me down now I'm used to it though.
Rendering takes bloody ages, at least on my 1.5GHz model.
This is performance, not useability.
I use FreeBSD *all* the time, and have it running permanently on my other laptop through VMWare, and the BSD subsystem that's under Mac OSX (which is *why* I bought the mac laptop in the first place) is *nothing* like it.
This only makes it a useability issue if you expect Darwin to be like FreeBSD and you need to do stuff at a pretty low level. I don't recall ever seeing any statement from Apple saying Darwin was compatible at that level. If that's the reason you bought a mac - you probably should have done more research.
I mean to get stuff done, how do you guys actually see this happening?
Not sure what this sentence means - what 'stuff' are you trying to get done?
You can't run serious UNIX,
You can. You may need to actually learn something new though. Once again Darwin != FreeBSD
you can't script the interface using button hooks, it's all shit.
I haven't played with Automater yet but I suspect it'll do what you want if you're prepared to learn it.
Most of your criticisms are not even problems with Mac OS X much less Mac OS X useability.
And there is plenty of things to like about Apple, but there's plenty to dislike such as their proprietary hardware/software combination, the fact that all the useful software that I like on Linux doesn't have a free software equivalent on OS X. Everything from small utilities to usenet news clients becomes yet another expense.
Sounds like you've never heard of Fink or Darwin Ports. Which is ironic given that you were berating the GP for not knowing about Linux useability features.
even though they removed some of his dialog, the stuff they replaced it with was suitably funny
Have to disagree there. They replace my favourite ever joke (not my favourite H2G2 joke, not my favourite DNA joke, my favourite ever joke ) -
"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in an airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."
They replaced that piece of utter genius with Ford saying "Do you want a hug?"
The services control panel allows you to set the 'Log On As' user for the service - it's only system by default. IIRC it requires 'Log On as a Batch Job' privilege - but I think that's a good thing.
Except that 'Brit' is a contraction of Briton (i.e. native of Britain) - hence the apostrophe, standing in for the missing letters 'on', is appropriate.
In Pratchett's early proto-Discworld book, Strata, he has a future earth where the human population is severely diminished (can't remember why) and robots are programmed to dance a Morris dance to preserve it.
Are you suggesting that someone running RH 5.2 or whatever, who finds a security flaw in their ancient version of fileutils just upgrades to the latest and greatest since it can "be compiled against any 2.x.x" kernel?
Or are you suggesting they can go find the source for that old version in the GNU archives and patch that?
How many different packages would this person have to track and patch manually? (remember we're talking about a distro no longer supported by the vendor) How many conflicts and inconsistencies would need resolving?
What is it that you think distro vendors do anyway?
I wasn't arguing the comparison with NT per se, just the notion that it doesn't matter when distro vendors drop support since we have the source for Linux going back to 2.0.x. In theory perhaps (though I'm still sceptical that everyone involved has kept all their old source), in practice it'd be a nightmare.
Ultimately, we don't need to expect a Linux vendor to have as long a support cycle. One thing that is different is that the Linux distro companies is that they do not control the source code, and that code is publicly available to anyone forever (the Linux kernel right back to the first 0.whatever release is available). Not only that, the Linux kernel support team DOES support old kernels--a lot of relevant patches are still backported to the 2.0.x kernels (which are as old as NT4). That is one of closed sources disadvantages-the vendor has to either open the source or offer indefinite support or the project is 100% guaranteed to become extinct.
You're right of course but you're not comparing like with like. Linux is just the kernel, NT is the OS. Can you still find all the programs and utilities that make your system useable back to an equivalent level of the 2.0.x kernel? What about the ones the distro customized and/or provided their own updates for - are those old packages still available with source?
When I briefly had it installed, I found google desktop search invaluable for searching source code. I work in Ingres support and have the full source code for Ingres on my PC - it's only 300Mb but several tens of millions of lines of code. Searching quickly for a particular error message or all the modules where a particular routine was called from was invaluable.
The fact that it also indexed Outlook messages meant that I could also use it to quickly find emails as well.
Of course I can do that without google - but it's slooooooow.
Sadly since I regularly copy lots of files, some large, onto my PC - which is a few years old - the performance slowed noticeably. So I uninstalled it and now I'm back to using recursive grep on unix for the source code.
I've heard something similar - though I don't have those figures myself. I do know that until recently the way we did accounting meant we didn't count a Unicenter installation (with embedded Ingres) as an Ingres installation. Oracle on the other hand do count say Oracle Financials as an Oracle RDBMS installation.
Ingres and Cloudscape are clearly orphanware where CA and IBM clearly saw no need for the database management systems.
I work for CA in Ingres support. I can tell you that that statement is absolutely untrue. Every CA product that requires a repository or database of some kind either already uses Ingres or is in the process of being ported to use it. It's ridiculous to suggest that we'd 'abandon' software that's going to be at the heart of virtually every other product and service we sell.
Let's be clear, whether or not $1M is a bargain or the going rate, CA is NOT doing this because of the cost. They're doing it for a) publicity and b) to get people involved with the Ingres source.
Releasing Ingres into open source is one thing - actually attracting developers to work with them is another and this is a way to kickstart that process.
Oh, and, the entries will be open source and the ownership will remain with the developers - so CA don't 'get to keep the entries' any more than any one else.
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Broadly I agree with you. I think the only difference is in the reaction of content owners. I think that there's a kind of 'arms escalation' of DRM vs hackers. It's that thinking that produces ever more draconian DRM. To push the analogy to the limit - we're still in the 'cold war' mindset.
I don't have my laptop here but at a guess I'd say programs and non-media data take up less than 10Gb, possibly less than 5Gb.
;)
But then I guess it depends what else you want to do with your laptop. If you're actually creating/editing your own graphics/sound/video then you'll probably use a lot. Someone like me who uses it mainly for web, email, writing and an occasional dabble in programming doesn't generate much of their own data.
My point would be that you can comfortably get 'of the order of' 100 movies - if you have a reasonable amount of disc set aside for it. The previous poster seemed unaware of that. In reality I wonder if he'd willing to settle for maybe 50, or 30. I mean how many spare batteries can he have
Then there's always external drives.
The trouble is that the first car to bump the curb creates a ramp for everyone else. So that tends to cause you to make the curb higher. Hence things like forced updates.
In the internet age once the file is unencrypted once it's potentially available everywhere. So DRM has to be equally ubiquitous and very hard to crack - aka 'draconian'.
What format are you using for movies and how big's your hard-drive?
It's perfectly possible to encode a 2-hour movie to 700Mb in reasonable quality. 100 * 700Mb = 70Gb, my PB has an 80Gb drive. Of course 'reasonable quality' is very subjective so you may want to up that 700Mb, and you may have a smaller hard drive, but even so you're talking a fairly large collection of movies.
Plus don't forget that Accenture are essentially selling a service not code - even though they may actually be handing over the IPL for the code in many cases.
I used to work in the electricity supply industry in the UK and was there at the time of domestic de-regulation (1998). In a nutshell this meant that 12 regional electricity companies (RECs) all had to build new systems to pass customer information around to enable customers to switch suppliers. These systems had to conform to a specification written by a central independant body and pass certification testing. The upshot of which was that you had in one large consultancy I know of two teams on different floors of the same building writing an application for two different RECs but to the identical spec. Due to the nature of the contracts (IPL would be owned by the RECs) the teams had to be completely separate and not communicate.
Do you think that consultancy firm was bemoaning the lack of ability to share common code or rubbing their hands at the 2x profit per hourly rate of a consultant?
Interestingly, on one of the other systems, about half the RECs joined together and jointly commissioned an application from a single vendor which could then be configured for each REC - mostly stuff to do with scale.
From the REC's point of view it was all a question of whether they thought a particular system could give them a competitive advantage.
And 5 is somehow not less than 8?
Since there are different ways to get to do the same thing (I always click the network icon in the systray) I think he meant "at most 8" - but hey no need to be pedantic huh?
The recording and movie industries would love to see this particular bit of hyperbole become widespread,
It already is widespread. That ship has sailed. If it helps, this article proves that people don't see it as "especially evil".
I'm sick to death of people out there who reckon that Mac OSX is actually *easy* to use.
OK, I'll bite.
Any of you guys actually GOT a Mac?
Yep - same one as you
I have 2 laptops, one a Pentium M 1.8GHz and the other a 17" Powerbook, 1.5GHz. I am *constantly* pissed off at my Mac purchase.
Both have 1GB RAM, the intel version cost $2600, my Mac $4700. Totally NOT value for money.
Valid criticism but not a useability issue.
Software is hideously expensive for Macs, and doesn't work the way you want it. I bought the office suite as (of course) you need to have it, and Entourage isn't even compatible with Outlook, how *dumb* is that.
How is Microsoft's inability to make two of their programs compatible a problem with the useability of Mac OS X?
The adobe photoshop CS suite (or more likely, that fricking 'preview' program) managed to randomly kill a whole memory cards worth of images from my camera, say 300 pictures.
This is a) not a useability issue and b) if down to photoshop, nothing to do with Mac OS X
The DVD player program isn't region free. This pisses me off as Australia & USA don't share regions. If you need to play DVDs, something like VLC is needed but that's freeware ANYWAY and available for Windows too.
Yep but Windows doesn't come with a DVD player at all, and any commercial software won't be region free. Your problem here is with the DVD region encoding system not OS X. And once again it's not really a useability issue - that would be if you found the DVD player's controls difficult, annoying or confusing in some way.
Windows in Aqua can only be resized down the bottom right.
True. Doesn't seem to slow me down now I'm used to it though.
Rendering takes bloody ages, at least on my 1.5GHz model.
This is performance, not useability.
I use FreeBSD *all* the time, and have it running permanently on my other laptop through VMWare, and the BSD subsystem that's under Mac OSX (which is *why* I bought the mac laptop in the first place) is *nothing* like it.
This only makes it a useability issue if you expect Darwin to be like FreeBSD and you need to do stuff at a pretty low level. I don't recall ever seeing any statement from Apple saying Darwin was compatible at that level. If that's the reason you bought a mac - you probably should have done more research.
I mean to get stuff done, how do you guys actually see this happening?
Not sure what this sentence means - what 'stuff' are you trying to get done?
You can't run serious UNIX,
You can. You may need to actually learn something new though. Once again Darwin != FreeBSD
you can't script the interface using button hooks, it's all shit.
I haven't played with Automater yet but I suspect it'll do what you want if you're prepared to learn it.
Most of your criticisms are not even problems with Mac OS X much less Mac OS X useability.
Sounds like you've never heard of Fink or Darwin Ports. Which is ironic given that you were berating the GP for not knowing about Linux useability features.
The only UK TV airing I'm aware of was the SciFi channel - which showed it in the correct order.
Have to disagree there. They replace my favourite ever joke (not my favourite H2G2 joke, not my favourite DNA joke, my favourite ever joke ) -
They replaced that piece of utter genius with Ford saying "Do you want a hug?"
Do I need to say more?
It's not CA's machines that's the problem. It's their customers.
The services control panel allows you to set the 'Log On As' user for the service - it's only system by default. IIRC it requires 'Log On as a Batch Job' privilege - but I think that's a good thing.
And it's been around since NT 4.
Except that 'Brit' is a contraction of Briton (i.e. native of Britain) - hence the apostrophe, standing in for the missing letters 'on', is appropriate.
In Pratchett's early proto-Discworld book, Strata, he has a future earth where the human population is severely diminished (can't remember why) and robots are programmed to dance a Morris dance to preserve it.
Are you suggesting that someone running RH 5.2 or whatever, who finds a security flaw in their ancient version of fileutils just upgrades to the latest and greatest since it can "be compiled against any 2.x.x" kernel?
Or are you suggesting they can go find the source for that old version in the GNU archives and patch that?
How many different packages would this person have to track and patch manually? (remember we're talking about a distro no longer supported by the vendor) How many conflicts and inconsistencies would need resolving?
What is it that you think distro vendors do anyway?
I wasn't arguing the comparison with NT per se, just the notion that it doesn't matter when distro vendors drop support since we have the source for Linux going back to 2.0.x. In theory perhaps (though I'm still sceptical that everyone involved has kept all their old source), in practice it'd be a nightmare.
Ultimately, we don't need to expect a Linux vendor to have as long a support cycle. One thing that is different is that the Linux distro companies is that they do not control the source code, and that code is publicly available to anyone forever (the Linux kernel right back to the first 0.whatever release is available). Not only that, the Linux kernel support team DOES support old kernels--a lot of relevant patches are still backported to the 2.0.x kernels (which are as old as NT4). That is one of closed sources disadvantages-the vendor has to either open the source or offer indefinite support or the project is 100% guaranteed to become extinct.
You're right of course but you're not comparing like with like. Linux is just the kernel, NT is the OS. Can you still find all the programs and utilities that make your system useable back to an equivalent level of the 2.0.x kernel? What about the ones the distro customized and/or provided their own updates for - are those old packages still available with source?
thanks I will
When I briefly had it installed, I found google desktop search invaluable for searching source code. I work in Ingres support and have the full source code for Ingres on my PC - it's only 300Mb but several tens of millions of lines of code. Searching quickly for a particular error message or all the modules where a particular routine was called from was invaluable.
The fact that it also indexed Outlook messages meant that I could also use it to quickly find emails as well.
Of course I can do that without google - but it's slooooooow.
Sadly since I regularly copy lots of files, some large, onto my PC - which is a few years old - the performance slowed noticeably. So I uninstalled it and now I'm back to using recursive grep on unix for the source code.
I've heard something similar - though I don't have those figures myself. I do know that until recently the way we did accounting meant we didn't count a Unicenter installation (with embedded Ingres) as an Ingres installation. Oracle on the other hand do count say Oracle Financials as an Oracle RDBMS installation.
Ingres and Cloudscape are clearly orphanware where CA and IBM clearly saw no need for the database management systems.
I work for CA in Ingres support. I can tell you that that statement is absolutely untrue. Every CA product that requires a repository or database of some kind either already uses Ingres or is in the process of being ported to use it. It's ridiculous to suggest that we'd 'abandon' software that's going to be at the heart of virtually every other product and service we sell.
Let's be clear, whether or not $1M is a bargain or the going rate, CA is NOT doing this because of the cost. They're doing it for a) publicity and b) to get people involved with the Ingres source.
Releasing Ingres into open source is one thing - actually attracting developers to work with them is another and this is a way to kickstart that process.
Oh, and, the entries will be open source and the ownership will remain with the developers - so CA don't 'get to keep the entries' any more than any one else.
Between those two, it isn't Ingres doing the catch-up.
...when you do the rest of the job and port all the applications.
The data is the easy bit.
Have a read of the terms and conditions