I wanted to add that I buy a lot of my music via amazon mp3. Buying a single is a simple link to a.mp3 file. Buying an album gets you a.amz file, a more or less proprietary text file that is understood by the amazon downloader program to get the entire album. It is usable on Linux via a few options, but it would be so nice if one could just buy an album on Amazon and be offered a zip of goodies.
Register for free on the site, get emailed a url where you can download the latest album for free.
Three choices, lame mp3, flac, or 24 bit pcm. You get a single zip file, with a subdirectory with all the music. Named clearly in numerical order, tagged appropriately. id3 for mp3, flac tags for flac. Includes another subdirectory with an assortment of imagery, as well as some background images in common resolutions. I believe a brief information file was included too. A standardized cover.jpg which plays in many media players is included.
Past releases included AAC and maybe apple lossless, which allowed for embedding images into the files. NIN chose to embed images into these files.
Seriously, a single file album format sounds good. But it doesn't have to be over engineered. A good option can emerge without a major record company effort.
If the record companies are going to create a format that includes binaries, drm, or proprietary data formats, choose to charge more than the standard online $9.99, and disallow individual track purchases, then damn them to hell. But if they keep single tracks as an option, but just try to make the $9.99 album buy a little more attractive by offering something like what I described NIN doing above, then I'm for it. Offering a.bz2 w/ matroska, flac, png images, lyrics, information and more would certainly be a value add for me. But that sounds unlikely.
Music is still going strong. The great cohesive albums still exist.
You just have to find them in different places than we used to. We cannot look to radio or to TV. Every year, a new crop of excellent musicians comes out, with excellent albums. Internet radio, music review web sites, and this modern field of annual music festivals is an excellent place to find it all.
If you look to the old places to find new music, you will fail. But I'm tired of hearing that there is no more good music. The technology to create music has advanced and matured beyond what anyone expected, and costs have plummeted to obviate the need for recording studios. There is a higher quality back catalog out there to inspire new musicians. More people have the opportunity to dive in to making music than ever before, and a lot of it is excellent. I firmly believe that the best musicians to ever exist are alive today.
Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.
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Piracy and the PSP
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Piracy is the perfect excuse. Poor sales? Blame piracy, no one gets fired and they keep doing what they've been doing. The PSP is a neat system, which had a botched launch and poor support since. I had it and enjoyed it for a while, but it couldn't hold up to my DS. Why?
Piracy on the DS is much more fun. A flashcart with memory card can be had for under ten bucks. They do everything out the box, getting data on them is a cinch. If it truly is piracy that has killed the PSP, then the DS should have been gone and buried. It is not fun nor easy to play homebrew or emulators on most PSPs, especially the more recent. Yet the DSi has a $10 fix.
Perhaps one day Sony will stop making excuses and make systems and games that I want to buy.
I've been using Linux on my desktops and laptops for close to a decade, and I'm happy - why should I want more than that? I see this desire to have every desktop in the world use Linux, is that necessarily a good thing? So long as Linux and free software continues to improve, and no one is restricted from using it, I think that should be good enough. What is wrong with there being other users that choose other operating systems? I believe many users can benefit from a switch to Linux, but I don't see how that switch helps the whole. Desktop Linux is pretty good today and only improving. I can try picture a world where every desktop is Linux, and I don't see our lives being very different. Is global tux domination a worthwhile goal?
In regards to the article, I didn't interpret it to be that Red Hat actually believes the desktop is doomed or that there is no benefit to Linux on the desktop - just the point being made was that there was no economic case to be made for it and that there are adoption barriers. I think that is a perfectly accurate statement.
I can certainly understand the desire to let the OS "not handle" stuff, because there are plenty of OS's that do a bad job... "handling" stuff, to be sure.
But that's its job. It multiplexes your CPU to handle hundreds of threads at the same time, making each one think it has the entire CPU to itself. That's a pretty big job, and we trust the OS to handle it. Sure, there is a need for a good interface, a good point for what has to be abstracted and handled by the disk, what has to be handled by the OS - but SSDs seem different enough that exposing the black box a little more to the operating system could have advantages.
I worked at Circuit City from 2000 to 2003, and this was not the case for us.
I cannot speak for CC nationwide, as I was in a store in the northeast, but we had a "price match plus" policy. If you found a lower price from a brick and mortar store, and you or we could verify it, we matched the price and beat it by 10% of the difference. Perhaps this was not the case before or after I was there, or in different regions.
To the best of my knowledge, prices were also identical to the competition. Every weekend a small group of us would comb through every newspaper they brought in, and would familiarize ourselves with what the competition was advertising in their flyers. We were usually the ones to announce to customers that a certain item was on a price match sale, and managers were supportive in helping us get them that lower price. We would call or go online to verify a better price if needed. Only very rarely did a customer find a lower price elsewhere and bring it to our attention.
Now, I also think this was the "best" time for customers with CC. They had come out of a DivX salesman era, which stained the companies opinions in many peoples minds. The company started to revise its checkout system, and brighten up stores, as well as introduced a completely new layout for the new stores. But it was still playing catchup to the other guys. The same poor management was running the show. Any progress here was lost with the changes to the payment structure which lost a lot of good will with loyal employees, which were later outright laid off. Then they were just slow with keeping up with the competition with Firedog, and never had the kind of HDTV showcasing that Best Buy was able to foster.
The rise of Best Buy and Walmart did the company in, with superior selection, store layout, and even colors. Seriously, Blue and White or Blue and Yellow, just flat out beat Red and Black. Our stores were dark, dated, they felt old, the store was like the weird used car salesman of electronics. While the "we don't have checkout counters" idea was an interesting experiment, it was a failed one that the company never truly fixed. A poorly run company can survive in the absence of great competition, and I think CC was floundering for the past decade. Semi-competent (at least more competent than Circuit City) competition and a recession is all it took.
Back in the day, BeOS booted in 6 seconds to a fully usable desktop (6 seconds after the POST). I don't think that is what you are looking for though, and I don't know how far the Free clone, Haiku, has come.
More realistically, there is this interesting Linux distribution, Webconverger:
I've used it for a few web-only systems. Boots up fast enough. Use it as a starting point to tweak.
Basically, firefox becomes your operating system and UI. Neat idea.
I think an important thing to mention to those that are not NIN fans is how this release was announced.
It wasn't.
Two hours before this album was released online, there was an ominous "Two hours..." message posted at nin.com
Then, BAM, new album. Even the most die-hard NIN fan had no clue it was coming. Where as before the marketing procedure took months, and there were many slow leaks in the process, this time Trent was in control.
Make an album, make artwork, set up servers, release online. Its a good setup. Do you have any idea about the kind of label BS that you have to go through with an album? The promotion, the radio samplers, the flyers, posters, it is a lot of time and effort - there is like a 3 month window for it all. Here, Trent took his 10 weeks to make it, and then pretty much put it on his website.
You can bet the next album has an even shorter window, and again he is in control of its secrecy. I've never before seen someone announce *and* release an album on the same day, and with Trent's history, he was the last person I expected it from.
I agree with you mostly, you bring up interesting points, as a fellow thinkpad lover, this would be my devil's advocacy.
I agree, the x61 already is impressive. I looked at widescreen as a gimmick for a few years, but after using one for a while, it truly is amazing. Its matched with our eyes and for a screen that may actually be physically smaller, the widescreen gives this psychological effect of being larger. I now prefer them. 1440x900 at that size isn't something I would demand, but I wouldn't turn it down either. Its about time that dot pitch on screens took a big improvement. More pixels are good, but we don't always want 30" screens. In the short term, the only downside is small fonts. Properly designed systems use the extra pixels to provide more detail on those fonts, and widgets, and icons. I think that with 22" screens becoming cheap, the monitor frontier will be dot pitch some time soon.
Regarding the touch pads, I prefer the trackpad myself. But for others, this is a deal breaker. For first time thinkpad owners, you want to be able to just jump on board and touch a pad. Also, when using my thinkpad on the go, I like having both. I alternate between them as I fatigue in different ways. The r60e omits the touchpad as a cost cutting measure. Who knows if there would be an x300e (I doubt).
DVI is the one last rediculous holdout and I hate it. I want a DVI thinkpad out without needing a dock. I trust that Lenovo is smarter than I am, and they do tons of market research. The official Lenovo blog site has discussed this. As best I recall, the home user would want DVI, but business users use that port for one thing - projectors. Lots and lots of projectors everywhere, almost all of them accept VGA. A DVI to VGA adapter is cheap and small, but having to remember it is enough of a burden for some people. Leaving that at home could mean your presentation doesn't get presented, and you lose your job. An x300 with DVI is pretty much my perfect laptop.
Are you sure that most disk access is sequential? I was sure it was the other way around. Video editing, loading games, perhaps large audio or image work - sequential. But most usage, booting, running programs, internet use, programming even. Lots and lots of itty bitty files. An SSD effectively lets all of those files load as if it were one large one. The random access is so good, we can take a hit on sequential and it will still be better. Plus, modern SSDs have sequential access roughly that of a good hard disk. (Reading.... write is closing in too.)They ARE also lighter. In time, if something like a 1.8" format takes over (because the size of the SSD has no impact on the speed, unlike an HD), we can have such incredible weight and power savings if the entire computer is designed from the ground up to expect the thermal and shock tolerances of an SSD.
Perhaps 5 years ago I got off of floppies. (Sounds like a drug habit, no?)
Now, I am in the process of doing the same with discs. Ripped my last CD, and Amazon Mp3 ensures that I need not buy another one ever.
I use free software, all of it a download.
Backup to a paid rsync server. Most people could use cheap external HD.
Movies more and more on demand, or pc-free dvd playing. A few years from now, online movie download stores will be as common as music.
When I realized that my one and ONLY use for my CD drive was for burning ISOs for OPERATING SYSTEMS (emphasized because this is not something the average consumer plays with), I restricted my OS-play to ones I could use from my thumb-drive, and network boot.
My ONE external DVD-burner is collecting dust. I'm done with optical, like floppy magnetic before it. 5-10 years, magnetic disks are gone too, and we live in a solid-state, networked world.
About a week ago someone pointed me to Amazon Mp3. I vaguely remember hearing about it a few months ago. I cared for the news then about as much as I do about every other online music service -- not at all. But this really is different.
I am all for some of the high quality independent musicians out there, and all the ways to get good free music. But unless I am horribly inept in my searches, I think there is something to say for the quality of record-label backed music. Higher production values, more time and money to work on the music, I don't know what it is.
While I would love Flac online, that is an unrealistic expectation, and 256Kbps VBR mp3 files are pretty damn good. I can say that I am now, finally, done with CDs. All the artists I could think of, with few tiny exceptions, are available on Amazon. Those few were probably with Sony. Just like I exorcised floppies from my life 5 years ago, I think I can do the same with CDs soon. The music is great quality, cheap, no restrictions, and just oh so easy to buy. (Yay 1-click patents!).
As for using it in Linux, as some may be interested in. Individual tracks are a normal browser.mp3 download. Downloading an entire album downloads a.amz file, a tracklist more or less, that is opened by an amazon proprietary downloader, that queues and resumes files. While I would prefer a zip (or better), this is reasonable given that they want tighter integration to people's wmp and itunes organizations, and less disk space usage on their ends (storing an album twice - either that or zipping on the fly). The windows Amazon Mp3 Downloader works under WINE, mostly. It will D/L the album if you don't touch it, just let it do its thing. The program crashes if you try to operate it, but that isn't needed. The FAQ says that a Linux downloader is in development. I wish they just gave specs on the.amz file instead. Someone would have made a nice Amazon Mp3 downloader and it would be in my distribution repos by now. (I haven't looked at the.amz files myself yet, it can't be that complicated.) But still... this is great. My CD collection was fun when it was small, but it has become a large piece of furniture over the years. This is finally some real progress.
The article itself isn't as bad as the summary may appear.
Jaron Lanier, the author, is a friend of Richard Stallman, and he makes a simple and clear argument. It isn't a fear-mongering piece against free software, but rather a loving criticism from a passionate believer in it.
I see this a lot with/. articles. Some intelligent person makes a mildly controversial statement, more or less quietly but public to his/her audience. But when that same article is posted on a giant news aggregation site, it appears like he/she is making this grand soapbox statement to the world with the intent to piss it off.
I've experienced this myself. I may write a post about what I feel is wrong with UI design currently, in some situations, and it may be well reasoned and fair. But if that same post were put in front of millions, my point appears skewed to sound as if I were some kind of expert, and the world was wrong and foolish for not understanding me.
But my point here would be that Jaron is no Dvorak. Flatly avoiding reading a person's point of view, but then deriding the person for that point of view, seems kind of disingenuous to me.
A few years ago I set up an incredible sound system with a diy subwoofer I built, and was very disappointed with the quality of music played through it as mp3 when compared with CD. Even the insane 320kbps lame preset, the low end just didn't sound quite right. It was garbage, actually.
I assumed that I could clearly tell the difference between mp3 (on cd) and the original cds, it wasn't even a question. The effect was so noticeable that everyone who listened could tell a difference.
I was disappointed, but eventually I had the idea to take the same mp3s, and decode them back to pcm and burn CDs from them on my pc, and play these CDs through the system. They sounded wonderful.
So the perceived difference between mp3 and pcm wasn't due to mp3 itself, but the low quality mp3 decoding hardware built into my cd player. I think this is worth mentioning as something to rule out of any testing. mp3 may be excellent, but not all decoders are as good as the latest software player on our pcs. Some are cheap 30 cent chips that do not represent the same amount of audiophile grade sound effort that some software devs put in. Now, I just stream music from a pc as a jukebox via spdif. Older albums are 320 mp3, newer ones flac (Because disk space is too cheap to care now.)
There are a number of devices that I feel are incomplete and are not in the consumer's best interest, but once they are tweaked or reconfigured they can be interesting tools and toys.
I am conflicted however on whether or not these should be companies that I give money too. The iPhone, certain Linksys routers, the PSP, game consoles, gee any number of interesting devices that are encumbered. I want the tech, but want to avoid giving money to ideas I disagree with.
I sometimes wonder why companies take this route. If they find enthusiasm in their product, why continue to restrict or regulate its use? Are those that want unencumbered devices a minority? Warranty issues? Are there other avenues of revenue from partnered companies with a their own motivations?
I like how TI handled this with their calculators. Some high end graphing calculators (I think the TI-85 and TI-92) had no native way to run assembly, just basic. People found flaws in the system to get assembly running and there grew a healthy homebrew scene for us. Instead of trying to quelch this interest, they revised the next calculators to run assembly natively. (I think the TI-86 and TI-92Plus) Why isn't it always the best business case to go "oh people like our product for $FOO, lets make it easier for them to $FOO"?
More power to those out there that edit wikis religiously, blog daily, use and create mashups, get their news through an RSS reader, can name their favorite 10 podcasts, share their Google calendars with their friends, have a FlickR and Delicious account, use 100 firefox plugins, and have an application-loaded Facebook among their many social networking sites - these can be some great tools with great utility to people.
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know. I'm a Computer Science Masters student, and my friends work in industry. Am I backwards? Antiquated? Should I be mashing it up? I do it like I have for years - an xterm, an email app, an IM app, and a tabbed-to-the-hilt browser.
No preferred media for me.
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Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I am not looking to continue buying movies on plastic discs. Having movies sent through the mail or having to drive to a store should be unnecessary now. There are already a few internet on demand services for movies, and plenty of cable/satellite on demand services. Ownership services ala iTunes is probably around the corner. DRM-free would be ideal, so really whichever gets around to that first wins in my opinion. Not happening any time soon, but really not an issue in the debate. HD, Blueray, and iTunes all have it. With regards to pornography, I expect the industry will continue moving into the online direction. I suspect they will continue to be pioneers in the area actually.
8 years ago I purged floppies from my life, ripping them out of every device I had, and saving all of that data to newer disc. Around 2 years ago I pretty much purged CD/DVD from everything, sans a single portable USB DVD-RW drive I can use for anything. Magnetic and optical medium had its time. Flash drives/cards, solid state disk drives, and networks should be everything. Of course, the transition is slow, but that's why I took a stand. I don't buy software, I install new OS' from the network or an existing partition. The DVDRW drive is a read once and rip solution for music CDs, and periodic DVD backup aside from rsync. Movies I use cable on demand services, DVR, and theaters.
About the only reason why I would care for any next-generation disc medium would be for a viable backup solution. Not many available, nor cost effective at the moment. This is a pretty geeky view of everything, but I think that the general consumer trend will follow it. Most likely, both BlueRay and HD-DVD will slowly replace DVDs, but only when the cost is comparable for both the movies and for combination devices. The *real* next-generation media is when there is no media at all.
There is a lot of perfectly usable hardware out there, which has the one reliability weakness with the hard drive. The latest IDE drives work great usually going back to some pretty old hardware, although you may be limited somewhat (depending on the MB and OS). The SATA drives break the compatibility, although you will probably be able to get SATA to IDE adapters for some time to come. Problem is, that will be for desktops only.
I have a small collection of some older Thinkpads. One thing that I have been using are notebook IDE (44-pin) to CompactFlash adapters. There are even some dual CF adapters available such as http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp. Twenty-two bucks. Since it is IDE, the bus still has a master and a slave for it, and you can have two drives essentially in that one notebook HD slot. I think everyone is waiting for solid state drives to arrive on the scene (affordable ones), but most of those will probably be SATA. So this lets you get two 16GB CF cards into the single IDE slot on a laptop, and it runs silently. It is also cooler, weighs less, uses less power, faster access (not necessarily transfer), and they are much more reliable and rugged (the limited writes isn't as much of an issue now). It seems like a good way to patch up old hardware's Achilles' heal.
It is probably a good thing to look into for the 3.5" desktop drives too. As CF cards continue to grow and fall in price, I expect in a few years all my modern SATA equipment will be using SSDs, and my older PATA equipment will have large cheap dual compactflash cards. Some of the hardware is so slow that all I really need is a 1GB CF card to store a minimal Linux distribution on it anyways.
I agree. It is also important to remember that removing Wii sports from the package doesn't really save Nintendo that much money at all. The cost to redesign the packaging may be more than the savings. Even if it did, the cost to manufacture something and the amount you can charge for it are both determined very differently. In fact there is pretty much no connection between the two, aside from the fact that a smart business will only make products where the latter is greater than the former.
As a guy who has only had one or two servers at any time, in his home, how does virtualization really help in the real world? I get the basic idea, you can run multiple "virtual" computers inside of one real one, some host. But when is this necessary? I see the basic argument being that, if you have 10 computers each only utilizing that machine 1% or so, just make them all virtual running on one machine. This cuts space and power requirements, and associated heat.
But what I don't understand is, why not just run all of those applications on one computer? So your ten servers are an apache server, a samba server, a dns, a dhcp... and so on. Just have one box doing all of that at the same time. It seems like a really kludgy way to do things, to have one computer emulate 10, each doing one thing. I would think that would have more overhead and unreliability than just having a nice stable system doing everything. How wrong am I there?
A better question would be, how big an organization or set of servers does it usually take before virtualization starts to make sense and be used. Sorry for the naivete, but I'm just lacking in experience here, and I'm curious.
Re:if wasn't this format, it would have been anoth
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How MP3 Was Born
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· Score: 1
I store all of my music as FLAC, and I will tell you why.
Once upon a time, mp3 was 1/10th to 1/5th the size of the original PCM audio off the CD. At this time, the benefits of the space savings were huge, while the loss in quality was negligible. My entire CD collection of roughly 200 CDs, is roughly 100GB as PCM, strait ripped off the CD. When a 14GB hard drive was considered huge, yeah, I was happier to have my audio as 128Kbps mp3 files.
Now things have changed. The sizes of new hard drives are more than I know how to fill up. (Others know how though... ) So now I can ask myself... I have 500GB of free space. Would I rather use up 50GB (FLAC seems to be roughly 50% the size of the original on average) of that space and have files that are identical to the original CD? Or save another 40GB at some loss? Both are marginal differences, but I would say that the cost of the extra 40GB on my drive being used is less of a concern for me than having compressed audio. I mean, the whole point of the big drive is to store stuff, not to be as unused as possible. With these "original" FLACs, you can do neat things.
Lets say FLAC is improved, or FLAC2 comes out. I could convert my entire library from one to the other, lossless to lossless, but pick up any new features or better compression. Once you have your ogg/mp3/aac, you should really stick with it, and not reencode to something else. I could set up a media player to transcode to mp3 on the fly when I need, and as mp3 itself improves, I can always have the best of the best there.
Now, it fits my needs because the only music I have are from CDs that I buy, and I don't use a media player. I can stow my CD collection away and not have to deal with it, or worry about having to rerip it one day into the latest. I've done it twice, first with 100 or so CDs (into some VBR 160 format ages ago, slowly upping that bitrate as time went on), and after setting up this 500GB monstrocity, did it again with 200 CDs or so to FLAC. It isn't fun and so long as I am a good backer upper, never again. If you must have a media player that plays FLAC, they exist, or there exists an alt firmware to your player to do it. Recoding on the fly isn't too bad I hear, but certainly slows it down. Either way, 500GB on a media player is inevitable, so lossy audio has little purpose going into the future. Even bandwidth wise, FLAC seems to stream fine over a LAN, and I don't use it beyond that.
For other uses, including music piracy, or streaming across low bandwidth links, or non-music purposes, mp3 will always have its uses, but they are shrinking.
This makes all the sense in the world.
A couple of years ago I kind of decided that a computer should either be a laptop or in a rack somewhere, and every computer in the house is a squeeky green used laptop that is only on when used, and hibernating when not.
Of course, the rackmount server in the closet is much harder to be green, so I make sure to buy my annual carbon credits to ease the guilt.
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I wanted to add that I buy a lot of my music via amazon mp3. Buying a single is a simple link to a .mp3 file. Buying an album gets you a .amz file, a more or less proprietary text file that is understood by the amazon downloader program to get the entire album. It is usable on Linux via a few options, but it would be so nice if one could just buy an album on Amazon and be offered a zip of goodies.
I like the format that Nine Inch Nails offered.
Register for free on the site, get emailed a url where you can download the latest album for free.
Three choices, lame mp3, flac, or 24 bit pcm. You get a single zip file, with a subdirectory with all the music. Named clearly in numerical order, tagged appropriately. id3 for mp3, flac tags for flac. Includes another subdirectory with an assortment of imagery, as well as some background images in common resolutions. I believe a brief information file was included too. A standardized cover.jpg which plays in many media players is included.
Past releases included AAC and maybe apple lossless, which allowed for embedding images into the files. NIN chose to embed images into these files.
Seriously, a single file album format sounds good. But it doesn't have to be over engineered. A good option can emerge without a major record company effort.
If the record companies are going to create a format that includes binaries, drm, or proprietary data formats, choose to charge more than the standard online $9.99, and disallow individual track purchases, then damn them to hell. But if they keep single tracks as an option, but just try to make the $9.99 album buy a little more attractive by offering something like what I described NIN doing above, then I'm for it. Offering a .bz2 w/ matroska, flac, png images, lyrics, information and more would certainly be a value add for me. But that sounds unlikely.
Music is still going strong. The great cohesive albums still exist.
You just have to find them in different places than we used to. We cannot look to radio or to TV. Every year, a new crop of excellent musicians comes out, with excellent albums. Internet radio, music review web sites, and this modern field of annual music festivals is an excellent place to find it all.
If you look to the old places to find new music, you will fail. But I'm tired of hearing that there is no more good music. The technology to create music has advanced and matured beyond what anyone expected, and costs have plummeted to obviate the need for recording studios. There is a higher quality back catalog out there to inspire new musicians. More people have the opportunity to dive in to making music than ever before, and a lot of it is excellent. I firmly believe that the best musicians to ever exist are alive today.
Piracy is the perfect excuse. Poor sales? Blame piracy, no one gets fired and they keep doing what they've been doing. The PSP is a neat system, which had a botched launch and poor support since. I had it and enjoyed it for a while, but it couldn't hold up to my DS. Why?
Piracy on the DS is much more fun. A flashcart with memory card can be had for under ten bucks. They do everything out the box, getting data on them is a cinch. If it truly is piracy that has killed the PSP, then the DS should have been gone and buried. It is not fun nor easy to play homebrew or emulators on most PSPs, especially the more recent. Yet the DSi has a $10 fix.
Perhaps one day Sony will stop making excuses and make systems and games that I want to buy.
I've been using Linux on my desktops and laptops for close to a decade, and I'm happy - why should I want more than that? I see this desire to have every desktop in the world use Linux, is that necessarily a good thing? So long as Linux and free software continues to improve, and no one is restricted from using it, I think that should be good enough. What is wrong with there being other users that choose other operating systems? I believe many users can benefit from a switch to Linux, but I don't see how that switch helps the whole. Desktop Linux is pretty good today and only improving. I can try picture a world where every desktop is Linux, and I don't see our lives being very different. Is global tux domination a worthwhile goal?
In regards to the article, I didn't interpret it to be that Red Hat actually believes the desktop is doomed or that there is no benefit to Linux on the desktop - just the point being made was that there was no economic case to be made for it and that there are adoption barriers. I think that is a perfectly accurate statement.
I can certainly understand the desire to let the OS "not handle" stuff, because there are plenty of OS's that do a bad job... "handling" stuff, to be sure.
But that's its job. It multiplexes your CPU to handle hundreds of threads at the same time, making each one think it has the entire CPU to itself. That's a pretty big job, and we trust the OS to handle it. Sure, there is a need for a good interface, a good point for what has to be abstracted and handled by the disk, what has to be handled by the OS - but SSDs seem different enough that exposing the black box a little more to the operating system could have advantages.
Here is what Theodore Tso, big-time kernel developer thinks about the issue. He links to a good discussion and counterpoint from Linus.
I worked at Circuit City from 2000 to 2003, and this was not the case for us.
I cannot speak for CC nationwide, as I was in a store in the northeast, but we had a "price match plus" policy. If you found a lower price from a brick and mortar store, and you or we could verify it, we matched the price and beat it by 10% of the difference. Perhaps this was not the case before or after I was there, or in different regions.
To the best of my knowledge, prices were also identical to the competition. Every weekend a small group of us would comb through every newspaper they brought in, and would familiarize ourselves with what the competition was advertising in their flyers. We were usually the ones to announce to customers that a certain item was on a price match sale, and managers were supportive in helping us get them that lower price. We would call or go online to verify a better price if needed. Only very rarely did a customer find a lower price elsewhere and bring it to our attention.
Now, I also think this was the "best" time for customers with CC. They had come out of a DivX salesman era, which stained the companies opinions in many peoples minds. The company started to revise its checkout system, and brighten up stores, as well as introduced a completely new layout for the new stores. But it was still playing catchup to the other guys. The same poor management was running the show. Any progress here was lost with the changes to the payment structure which lost a lot of good will with loyal employees, which were later outright laid off. Then they were just slow with keeping up with the competition with Firedog, and never had the kind of HDTV showcasing that Best Buy was able to foster.
The rise of Best Buy and Walmart did the company in, with superior selection, store layout, and even colors. Seriously, Blue and White or Blue and Yellow, just flat out beat Red and Black. Our stores were dark, dated, they felt old, the store was like the weird used car salesman of electronics. While the "we don't have checkout counters" idea was an interesting experiment, it was a failed one that the company never truly fixed. A poorly run company can survive in the absence of great competition, and I think CC was floundering for the past decade. Semi-competent (at least more competent than Circuit City) competition and a recession is all it took.
More realistically, there is this interesting Linux distribution, Webconverger:
http://webconverger.com/
I've used it for a few web-only systems. Boots up fast enough. Use it as a starting point to tweak. Basically, firefox becomes your operating system and UI. Neat idea.
Has netcraft confirmed this?
I think an important thing to mention to those that are not NIN fans is how this release was announced.
It wasn't.
Two hours before this album was released online, there was an ominous "Two hours..." message posted at nin.com
Then, BAM, new album. Even the most die-hard NIN fan had no clue it was coming. Where as before the marketing procedure took months, and there were many slow leaks in the process, this time Trent was in control.
Make an album, make artwork, set up servers, release online. Its a good setup. Do you have any idea about the kind of label BS that you have to go through with an album? The promotion, the radio samplers, the flyers, posters, it is a lot of time and effort - there is like a 3 month window for it all. Here, Trent took his 10 weeks to make it, and then pretty much put it on his website.
You can bet the next album has an even shorter window, and again he is in control of its secrecy. I've never before seen someone announce *and* release an album on the same day, and with Trent's history, he was the last person I expected it from.
I agree with you mostly, you bring up interesting points, as a fellow thinkpad lover, this would be my devil's advocacy.
I agree, the x61 already is impressive. I looked at widescreen as a gimmick for a few years, but after using one for a while, it truly is amazing. Its matched with our eyes and for a screen that may actually be physically smaller, the widescreen gives this psychological effect of being larger. I now prefer them. 1440x900 at that size isn't something I would demand, but I wouldn't turn it down either. Its about time that dot pitch on screens took a big improvement. More pixels are good, but we don't always want 30" screens. In the short term, the only downside is small fonts. Properly designed systems use the extra pixels to provide more detail on those fonts, and widgets, and icons. I think that with 22" screens becoming cheap, the monitor frontier will be dot pitch some time soon.
Regarding the touch pads, I prefer the trackpad myself. But for others, this is a deal breaker. For first time thinkpad owners, you want to be able to just jump on board and touch a pad. Also, when using my thinkpad on the go, I like having both. I alternate between them as I fatigue in different ways. The r60e omits the touchpad as a cost cutting measure. Who knows if there would be an x300e (I doubt).
DVI is the one last rediculous holdout and I hate it. I want a DVI thinkpad out without needing a dock. I trust that Lenovo is smarter than I am, and they do tons of market research. The official Lenovo blog site has discussed this. As best I recall, the home user would want DVI, but business users use that port for one thing - projectors. Lots and lots of projectors everywhere, almost all of them accept VGA. A DVI to VGA adapter is cheap and small, but having to remember it is enough of a burden for some people. Leaving that at home could mean your presentation doesn't get presented, and you lose your job. An x300 with DVI is pretty much my perfect laptop.
Are you sure that most disk access is sequential? I was sure it was the other way around. Video editing, loading games, perhaps large audio or image work - sequential. But most usage, booting, running programs, internet use, programming even. Lots and lots of itty bitty files. An SSD effectively lets all of those files load as if it were one large one. The random access is so good, we can take a hit on sequential and it will still be better. Plus, modern SSDs have sequential access roughly that of a good hard disk. (Reading.... write is closing in too.)They ARE also lighter. In time, if something like a 1.8" format takes over (because the size of the SSD has no impact on the speed, unlike an HD), we can have such incredible weight and power savings if the entire computer is designed from the ground up to expect the thermal and shock tolerances of an SSD.
Agreed. I have an S30 myself. The footprint, size, keyboard, screen, and upgraded wireless and ssd are perfect for me.
A subtle update consisting of a new cpu/chipset/memory, and perhaps replace the cf/pcmcia with an expresscard/34, and we have the perfect laptop.
Perhaps 5 years ago I got off of floppies. (Sounds like a drug habit, no?)
Now, I am in the process of doing the same with discs. Ripped my last CD, and Amazon Mp3 ensures that I need not buy another one ever.
I use free software, all of it a download.
Backup to a paid rsync server. Most people could use cheap external HD.
Movies more and more on demand, or pc-free dvd playing. A few years from now, online movie download stores will be as common as music.
When I realized that my one and ONLY use for my CD drive was for burning ISOs for OPERATING SYSTEMS (emphasized because this is not something the average consumer plays with), I restricted my OS-play to ones I could use from my thumb-drive, and network boot.
My ONE external DVD-burner is collecting dust. I'm done with optical, like floppy magnetic before it. 5-10 years, magnetic disks are gone too, and we live in a solid-state, networked world.
About a week ago someone pointed me to Amazon Mp3. I vaguely remember hearing about it a few months ago. I cared for the news then about as much as I do about every other online music service -- not at all. But this really is different. I am all for some of the high quality independent musicians out there, and all the ways to get good free music. But unless I am horribly inept in my searches, I think there is something to say for the quality of record-label backed music. Higher production values, more time and money to work on the music, I don't know what it is. While I would love Flac online, that is an unrealistic expectation, and 256Kbps VBR mp3 files are pretty damn good. I can say that I am now, finally, done with CDs. All the artists I could think of, with few tiny exceptions, are available on Amazon. Those few were probably with Sony. Just like I exorcised floppies from my life 5 years ago, I think I can do the same with CDs soon. The music is great quality, cheap, no restrictions, and just oh so easy to buy. (Yay 1-click patents!). As for using it in Linux, as some may be interested in. Individual tracks are a normal browser .mp3 download. Downloading an entire album downloads a .amz file, a tracklist more or less, that is opened by an amazon proprietary downloader, that queues and resumes files. While I would prefer a zip (or better), this is reasonable given that they want tighter integration to people's wmp and itunes organizations, and less disk space usage on their ends (storing an album twice - either that or zipping on the fly). The windows Amazon Mp3 Downloader works under WINE, mostly. It will D/L the album if you don't touch it, just let it do its thing. The program crashes if you try to operate it, but that isn't needed. The FAQ says that a Linux downloader is in development. I wish they just gave specs on the .amz file instead. Someone would have made a nice Amazon Mp3 downloader and it would be in my distribution repos by now. (I haven't looked at the .amz files myself yet, it can't be that complicated.) But still... this is great. My CD collection was fun when it was small, but it has become a large piece of furniture over the years. This is finally some real progress.
The article itself isn't as bad as the summary may appear.
/. articles. Some intelligent person makes a mildly controversial statement, more or less quietly but public to his/her audience. But when that same article is posted on a giant news aggregation site, it appears like he/she is making this grand soapbox statement to the world with the intent to piss it off.
Jaron Lanier, the author, is a friend of Richard Stallman, and he makes a simple and clear argument. It isn't a fear-mongering piece against free software, but rather a loving criticism from a passionate believer in it.
I see this a lot with
I've experienced this myself. I may write a post about what I feel is wrong with UI design currently, in some situations, and it may be well reasoned and fair. But if that same post were put in front of millions, my point appears skewed to sound as if I were some kind of expert, and the world was wrong and foolish for not understanding me.
But my point here would be that Jaron is no Dvorak. Flatly avoiding reading a person's point of view, but then deriding the person for that point of view, seems kind of disingenuous to me.
A few years ago I set up an incredible sound system with a diy subwoofer I built, and was very disappointed with the quality of music played through it as mp3 when compared with CD. Even the insane 320kbps lame preset, the low end just didn't sound quite right. It was garbage, actually.
I assumed that I could clearly tell the difference between mp3 (on cd) and the original cds, it wasn't even a question. The effect was so noticeable that everyone who listened could tell a difference.
I was disappointed, but eventually I had the idea to take the same mp3s, and decode them back to pcm and burn CDs from them on my pc, and play these CDs through the system. They sounded wonderful.
So the perceived difference between mp3 and pcm wasn't due to mp3 itself, but the low quality mp3 decoding hardware built into my cd player. I think this is worth mentioning as something to rule out of any testing. mp3 may be excellent, but not all decoders are as good as the latest software player on our pcs. Some are cheap 30 cent chips that do not represent the same amount of audiophile grade sound effort that some software devs put in. Now, I just stream music from a pc as a jukebox via spdif. Older albums are 320 mp3, newer ones flac (Because disk space is too cheap to care now.)
There are a number of devices that I feel are incomplete and are not in the consumer's best interest, but once they are tweaked or reconfigured they can be interesting tools and toys.
I am conflicted however on whether or not these should be companies that I give money too. The iPhone, certain Linksys routers, the PSP, game consoles, gee any number of interesting devices that are encumbered. I want the tech, but want to avoid giving money to ideas I disagree with.
I sometimes wonder why companies take this route. If they find enthusiasm in their product, why continue to restrict or regulate its use? Are those that want unencumbered devices a minority? Warranty issues? Are there other avenues of revenue from partnered companies with a their own motivations?
I like how TI handled this with their calculators. Some high end graphing calculators (I think the TI-85 and TI-92) had no native way to run assembly, just basic. People found flaws in the system to get assembly running and there grew a healthy homebrew scene for us. Instead of trying to quelch this interest, they revised the next calculators to run assembly natively. (I think the TI-86 and TI-92Plus) Why isn't it always the best business case to go "oh people like our product for $FOO, lets make it easier for them to $FOO"?
More power to those out there that edit wikis religiously, blog daily, use and create mashups, get their news through an RSS reader, can name their favorite 10 podcasts, share their Google calendars with their friends, have a FlickR and Delicious account, use 100 firefox plugins, and have an application-loaded Facebook among their many social networking sites - these can be some great tools with great utility to people.
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know. I'm a Computer Science Masters student, and my friends work in industry. Am I backwards? Antiquated? Should I be mashing it up? I do it like I have for years - an xterm, an email app, an IM app, and a tabbed-to-the-hilt browser.
I am not looking to continue buying movies on plastic discs. Having movies sent through the mail or having to drive to a store should be unnecessary now. There are already a few internet on demand services for movies, and plenty of cable/satellite on demand services. Ownership services ala iTunes is probably around the corner. DRM-free would be ideal, so really whichever gets around to that first wins in my opinion. Not happening any time soon, but really not an issue in the debate. HD, Blueray, and iTunes all have it. With regards to pornography, I expect the industry will continue moving into the online direction. I suspect they will continue to be pioneers in the area actually.
8 years ago I purged floppies from my life, ripping them out of every device I had, and saving all of that data to newer disc. Around 2 years ago I pretty much purged CD/DVD from everything, sans a single portable USB DVD-RW drive I can use for anything. Magnetic and optical medium had its time. Flash drives/cards, solid state disk drives, and networks should be everything. Of course, the transition is slow, but that's why I took a stand. I don't buy software, I install new OS' from the network or an existing partition. The DVDRW drive is a read once and rip solution for music CDs, and periodic DVD backup aside from rsync. Movies I use cable on demand services, DVR, and theaters.
About the only reason why I would care for any next-generation disc medium would be for a viable backup solution. Not many available, nor cost effective at the moment. This is a pretty geeky view of everything, but I think that the general consumer trend will follow it. Most likely, both BlueRay and HD-DVD will slowly replace DVDs, but only when the cost is comparable for both the movies and for combination devices. The *real* next-generation media is when there is no media at all.
I have a small collection of some older Thinkpads. One thing that I have been using are notebook IDE (44-pin) to CompactFlash adapters. There are even some dual CF adapters available such as http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp. Twenty-two bucks. Since it is IDE, the bus still has a master and a slave for it, and you can have two drives essentially in that one notebook HD slot. I think everyone is waiting for solid state drives to arrive on the scene (affordable ones), but most of those will probably be SATA. So this lets you get two 16GB CF cards into the single IDE slot on a laptop, and it runs silently. It is also cooler, weighs less, uses less power, faster access (not necessarily transfer), and they are much more reliable and rugged (the limited writes isn't as much of an issue now). It seems like a good way to patch up old hardware's Achilles' heal.
It is probably a good thing to look into for the 3.5" desktop drives too. As CF cards continue to grow and fall in price, I expect in a few years all my modern SATA equipment will be using SSDs, and my older PATA equipment will have large cheap dual compactflash cards. Some of the hardware is so slow that all I really need is a 1GB CF card to store a minimal Linux distribution on it anyways.
I agree. It is also important to remember that removing Wii sports from the package doesn't really save Nintendo that much money at all. The cost to redesign the packaging may be more than the savings. Even if it did, the cost to manufacture something and the amount you can charge for it are both determined very differently. In fact there is pretty much no connection between the two, aside from the fact that a smart business will only make products where the latter is greater than the former.
As a guy who has only had one or two servers at any time, in his home, how does virtualization really help in the real world? I get the basic idea, you can run multiple "virtual" computers inside of one real one, some host. But when is this necessary? I see the basic argument being that, if you have 10 computers each only utilizing that machine 1% or so, just make them all virtual running on one machine. This cuts space and power requirements, and associated heat.
But what I don't understand is, why not just run all of those applications on one computer? So your ten servers are an apache server, a samba server, a dns, a dhcp... and so on. Just have one box doing all of that at the same time. It seems like a really kludgy way to do things, to have one computer emulate 10, each doing one thing. I would think that would have more overhead and unreliability than just having a nice stable system doing everything. How wrong am I there?
A better question would be, how big an organization or set of servers does it usually take before virtualization starts to make sense and be used. Sorry for the naivete, but I'm just lacking in experience here, and I'm curious.
Once upon a time, mp3 was 1/10th to 1/5th the size of the original PCM audio off the CD. At this time, the benefits of the space savings were huge, while the loss in quality was negligible. My entire CD collection of roughly 200 CDs, is roughly 100GB as PCM, strait ripped off the CD. When a 14GB hard drive was considered huge, yeah, I was happier to have my audio as 128Kbps mp3 files.
Now things have changed. The sizes of new hard drives are more than I know how to fill up. (Others know how though... ) So now I can ask myself... I have 500GB of free space. Would I rather use up 50GB (FLAC seems to be roughly 50% the size of the original on average) of that space and have files that are identical to the original CD? Or save another 40GB at some loss? Both are marginal differences, but I would say that the cost of the extra 40GB on my drive being used is less of a concern for me than having compressed audio. I mean, the whole point of the big drive is to store stuff, not to be as unused as possible. With these "original" FLACs, you can do neat things.
Lets say FLAC is improved, or FLAC2 comes out. I could convert my entire library from one to the other, lossless to lossless, but pick up any new features or better compression. Once you have your ogg/mp3/aac, you should really stick with it, and not reencode to something else. I could set up a media player to transcode to mp3 on the fly when I need, and as mp3 itself improves, I can always have the best of the best there.
Now, it fits my needs because the only music I have are from CDs that I buy, and I don't use a media player. I can stow my CD collection away and not have to deal with it, or worry about having to rerip it one day into the latest. I've done it twice, first with 100 or so CDs (into some VBR 160 format ages ago, slowly upping that bitrate as time went on), and after setting up this 500GB monstrocity, did it again with 200 CDs or so to FLAC. It isn't fun and so long as I am a good backer upper, never again. If you must have a media player that plays FLAC, they exist, or there exists an alt firmware to your player to do it. Recoding on the fly isn't too bad I hear, but certainly slows it down. Either way, 500GB on a media player is inevitable, so lossy audio has little purpose going into the future. Even bandwidth wise, FLAC seems to stream fine over a LAN, and I don't use it beyond that.
For other uses, including music piracy, or streaming across low bandwidth links, or non-music purposes, mp3 will always have its uses, but they are shrinking.
This makes all the sense in the world. A couple of years ago I kind of decided that a computer should either be a laptop or in a rack somewhere, and every computer in the house is a squeeky green used laptop that is only on when used, and hibernating when not. Of course, the rackmount server in the closet is much harder to be green, so I make sure to buy my annual carbon credits to ease the guilt.
To clear up the confusion, the notation for binary, as in 2^20 bytes was developed. That would be a Mebibyte.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte