Interesting, though, how much power Apple suddenly appears to have in the music industry. They are in a position to say to the entire industry "If you don't play nice with us, nobody hears your music."
But by providing the methods to beat the encryption themselves upon request, it seems to me that they are (at least) waiving their legal rights in the issue or (at worst) violating the DMCA themselves... (IMHO, IANAL, YMMV, GTGTPAWA, etc)
I also prefer the scroll wheel over my R3000 scroll pad (nice computer otherwise, though, eh?). Not for sensitivity, but because it can't be used as a 3rd button. I love being able to click a link with the scroll wheel/3rd button and have it open in a new tab.
Even then, though, do his motives really matter in this case? If the worst case scenarios are true, and he's only proposing this to draw attention from some scandal or another, then we're still on the moon.
I guess this comes back to the initial point of "so what"?. Besides the cool factor, how does this justify the expense and effort?
The engineering has already been done (on computers with that had a tiny fraction of the processing power of your sound card), we've analyzed the rocks and discovered that they really are not made of blue cheese, and a long dead president already fulfilled his promise of being the first to land there. What, besides headlines, is left to be gained from going back?
Disclaimer: I'm not american so take this for what it's worth.
It's a tough question. First, I must simply brush aside your specific examples with a quick "It ain't gunna happen so there's no point getting all heated over hypotheticals."
At the heart of the matter -- you may be partly right. I don't trust Bush and I don't trust the people behind him. No matter what positive things he announces, I am going to question his motives more than I would if someone I supported more announced them (however, even there, I still question motives and everyone should). On the other side, I give him full credit for things like pushing the recent talks on African debt relief past the point that the British were initially willing to go.
Back on topic, I can't say I'm one of the people "begging to go back into space." The original space race was (going back to my initial point) a political game during the cold war. Exploration of space for the sake of scientific discovery can be a good thing. But if we're just doing this so that someone can say they did it (or for more nefarious reasons), then maybe the money can be better spent doing something about the fact that I can't see out my window because the air is too thick or some other possibly more important issues.
While I am hugely dissapointed that I'm not currently living on the lunar colony that was promised to me when I was 8, I really don't see the point in this.
This whole "To the moon" thing reeks of nothing more than a plan by our good buddy Jr. Bush to:
a) Distract everybody from the fact that his economy is crumbling and he's not doing so well in a very unpopular war, and
b) Develop an excuse to justify the weaponization of space.
Mod me flamebait, but all political discussions are flame wars and this announcement is way more about politics than it is about science.
The ability to fill multiple purposes is obviously a feature that makes one OS better than another and should factor into a decision. i.e. Do I have a few racks full of servers, each of which performs a specific set of tasks? Or do I have a single whitebox tower that does everything?
Had you RTFA, you would have noticed that the good at everything vs great at one thing distinction is the only difference between Linux and BSD that Linus points out. If your server is going to do a little bit of everything -- use Linux; if you want a good firewall and nothing else -- use OpenBSD; if you want to manage the software on 200 Windows PCs -- use Windows Server and AD; if you are a journalist or a small child -- use OSX.
Do these phantom magic binaries exist? What are the performance hits? More importantly, is everybody who's interested in developing for the Mac expected to build and test on both platforms? For how long?
Sure Photoshop and Office will work fine on both but there are a lot of apps that are not made by multinational corporations with unlimited developer pools.
Call me chicken little, but I see no reason to buy end of line hardware based on the promise that everybody will be generous and keep supporting it.
Sure, that's fine for two years from now, but who in their right mind - besides collectors - would buy a PPC Mac between then and now?
If I buy a shiny G4 iBook today it had better be at 1/2 the price it was yesterday because I'll have to be running new software through an emulator tomorrow.
The issue at hand is immediate purchase. Why buy something with question marks around it? It's possible that the rumoured Mac with the rumoured Intel chip will be a superior machine with a superior OS, but that does absolutely no good to anyone buying a G4 iBook today.
I really don't see this cutting into existing sales. "if" they switch chips, i'm sure the new machines won't run as well as the PPCs available today or next year, so everyone will have something to complain about+
It already has. I was counciling someone on a new laptop purchase and this rumour was the deciding factor to go with an x86 based laptop over an iBook. Who wants to deal with emulators and fat binaries and other migration issues when you can just have your apps run natively? Running end of line hardware makes sense only if you get a sweet-assed fire sale deal on it -- something our friends at Apple are not known for.
Is Linux still suffering from incompatible hardware in computers these days?
Yes, and it will continue to suffer as long as companies like Broadcom exist. The wireless card in my Presario only works with ndiswrappers. While I appreciate a good product like ndiswrappers, I would appreciate native drivers even more.
But if that's the case and there have been no real improvements to Office since 1997, why have there been 4 product releases selling for several hundred dollars each in that time? What have I been buying if not bloat?
Of course, this has the distinct disadvantage that not all websites have as logical of a layout as Slashdot, but the same idea holds
This is basically the point that I didn't make very clearly initially. Each application (website) has its own data and each application can have its own way of finding its data. Some will be better than others and you have to hope that those ones are the ones that survive.
On your home PC next year? not likely. In a large scale content management system? Why not?
iTunes is bad for all of the same reasons the iPod is great. The iPod interface is brilliant because it is simple. They {decided|found|lucked out and hit} exactly the features that people need in their pockets and delivered it beautifully.
Then they decided that people needed nothing more than that on their desktops. iTunes gives you no control over your library -- especially when you put it beside Winamp or even WMP. Plugins? Who would ever want to extend an application?
And while I'm ranting about iTunes, why the hell does my media player feel the need to install several services unrelated to anything? I needed quicktime on my work PC and now I have an iPodService running? wtf? (the previous wtf can be applied to either the unneccessary services or to the fact that quicktime cannot be installed without iTunes.)
I'm not sure if it was the exact same trackball, but I had a very similar one about 10 years ago. It worked great for games where you needed to move the cursor very far very fast (Secret Weapons of the Luftwafe comes to mind). IIRC the ball needed to be spun with the middle finger and was pretty heavy which tended to cause pain after a while.
The Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It's big enough that you can comfortably set your palm on it and the forward/backward browsing buttons mean you never even have to move your hands. No need to RTFA, this puppy's the winner and it's 5 years old. I cannot use another mouse -- especially one of those archaic ones with the stupid balls that do nothing more than collect cat fur.
It's a simple decision -- Spend some time in a burn unit knowing that IF you make it out you'll be covered in disfiguring scars. Or admit you lined up to see the steaming pint of piss known as RoTS.
I will pay subscription fees to whoever will take the money so that I can download Six Feet Under or Lost or whatever else within minutes of broadcast without having to go looking for a torrent. Even more important, I want to be able to get series that I missed (Firefly, Sopranos).... The nature of most P2P services (esp bittorrent) is that this older stuff is harder to come by.
I don't really care if I can keep the episodes forever. I do now, but I never rewatch any of them an only keep them around so I have a big enough share to get into the good Direct Connect channels.
Hopefully the test goes well and it's introduced in other markets soon.
Am I missing something completely obvious? Why are you not using group policy to push out whatever software you want?
Group Policies do not have to be 100% MS.
As was hinted at above (WRT54G), I cannot recommend enough getting a hackable appliance running an embedded linux.
Check out the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. It has a couple USB ports, a Netword adapter, a 266MHz ARM processor, 32MB RAM and an active community porting apps to it.
A website running on this obviusly couldn't stand up to a slashdotting, but it will work for a personal site and does a good job of streaming media around the house (aside from its primary function as a Samba server)
The thing draws next to no power and could easliy replace many of the space heaters wasting power in the average geek's basement.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, though, how much power Apple suddenly appears to have in the music industry. They are in a position to say to the entire industry "If you don't play nice with us, nobody hears your music."
But by providing the methods to beat the encryption themselves upon request, it seems to me that they are (at least) waiving their legal rights in the issue or (at worst) violating the DMCA themselves... (IMHO, IANAL, YMMV, GTGTPAWA, etc)
I also prefer the scroll wheel over my R3000 scroll pad (nice computer otherwise, though, eh?). Not for sensitivity, but because it can't be used as a 3rd button. I love being able to click a link with the scroll wheel/3rd button and have it open in a new tab.
I guess this comes back to the initial point of "so what"?. Besides the cool factor, how does this justify the expense and effort?
The engineering has already been done (on computers with that had a tiny fraction of the processing power of your sound card), we've analyzed the rocks and discovered that they really are not made of blue cheese, and a long dead president already fulfilled his promise of being the first to land there. What, besides headlines, is left to be gained from going back?
It's a tough question. First, I must simply brush aside your specific examples with a quick "It ain't gunna happen so there's no point getting all heated over hypotheticals."
At the heart of the matter -- you may be partly right. I don't trust Bush and I don't trust the people behind him. No matter what positive things he announces, I am going to question his motives more than I would if someone I supported more announced them (however, even there, I still question motives and everyone should). On the other side, I give him full credit for things like pushing the recent talks on African debt relief past the point that the British were initially willing to go.
Back on topic, I can't say I'm one of the people "begging to go back into space." The original space race was (going back to my initial point) a political game during the cold war. Exploration of space for the sake of scientific discovery can be a good thing. But if we're just doing this so that someone can say they did it (or for more nefarious reasons), then maybe the money can be better spent doing something about the fact that I can't see out my window because the air is too thick or some other possibly more important issues.
This whole "To the moon" thing reeks of nothing more than a plan by our good buddy Jr. Bush to:
a) Distract everybody from the fact that his economy is crumbling and he's not doing so well in a very unpopular war, and
b) Develop an excuse to justify the weaponization of space.
Mod me flamebait, but all political discussions are flame wars and this announcement is way more about politics than it is about science.
Had you RTFA, you would have noticed that the good at everything vs great at one thing distinction is the only difference between Linux and BSD that Linus points out. If your server is going to do a little bit of everything -- use Linux; if you want a good firewall and nothing else -- use OpenBSD; if you want to manage the software on 200 Windows PCs -- use Windows Server and AD; if you are a journalist or a small child -- use OSX.
Sure Photoshop and Office will work fine on both but there are a lot of apps that are not made by multinational corporations with unlimited developer pools.
Call me chicken little, but I see no reason to buy end of line hardware based on the promise that everybody will be generous and keep supporting it.
If I buy a shiny G4 iBook today it had better be at 1/2 the price it was yesterday because I'll have to be running new software through an emulator tomorrow.
The issue at hand is immediate purchase. Why buy something with question marks around it? It's possible that the rumoured Mac with the rumoured Intel chip will be a superior machine with a superior OS, but that does absolutely no good to anyone buying a G4 iBook today.
It already has. I was counciling someone on a new laptop purchase and this rumour was the deciding factor to go with an x86 based laptop over an iBook. Who wants to deal with emulators and fat binaries and other migration issues when you can just have your apps run natively? Running end of line hardware makes sense only if you get a sweet-assed fire sale deal on it -- something our friends at Apple are not known for.
Yes, and it will continue to suffer as long as companies like Broadcom exist. The wireless card in my Presario only works with ndiswrappers. While I appreciate a good product like ndiswrappers, I would appreciate native drivers even more.
But if that's the case and there have been no real improvements to Office since 1997, why have there been 4 product releases selling for several hundred dollars each in that time? What have I been buying if not bloat?
A Dual core dupe?
This is basically the point that I didn't make very clearly initially. Each application (website) has its own data and each application can have its own way of finding its data. Some will be better than others and you have to hope that those ones are the ones that survive.
On your home PC next year? not likely. In a large scale content management system? Why not?
iTunes is bad for all of the same reasons the iPod is great. The iPod interface is brilliant because it is simple. They {decided|found|lucked out and hit} exactly the features that people need in their pockets and delivered it beautifully.
Then they decided that people needed nothing more than that on their desktops. iTunes gives you no control over your library -- especially when you put it beside Winamp or even WMP. Plugins? Who would ever want to extend an application?
And while I'm ranting about iTunes, why the hell does my media player feel the need to install several services unrelated to anything? I needed quicktime on my work PC and now I have an iPodService running? wtf? (the previous wtf can be applied to either the unneccessary services or to the fact that quicktime cannot be installed without iTunes.)
August perchance?
Or do you do one of:
a) use the browse system provided by the application?
b) use the search feature provided by the application?
c) search all of the data available on the entire system
A system like this would use different tools than current directory based systems in the same way that gmail uses different tools than Outlook.
I'm not sure if it was the exact same trackball, but I had a very similar one about 10 years ago. It worked great for games where you needed to move the cursor very far very fast (Secret Weapons of the Luftwafe comes to mind). IIRC the ball needed to be spun with the middle finger and was pretty heavy which tended to cause pain after a while.
The Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It's big enough that you can comfortably set your palm on it and the forward/backward browsing buttons mean you never even have to move your hands.
No need to RTFA, this puppy's the winner and it's 5 years old.
I cannot use another mouse -- especially one of those archaic ones with the stupid balls that do nothing more than collect cat fur.
It's a simple decision -- Spend some time in a burn unit knowing that IF you make it out you'll be covered in disfiguring scars. Or admit you lined up to see the steaming pint of piss known as RoTS.
Now where did I put that flourescent tube?
Um, didn't this exact same thing already allegedly happen in Ohio in the last federal election? Seems to me the response was a big "Oh well"
I will pay subscription fees to whoever will take the money so that I can download Six Feet Under or Lost or whatever else within minutes of broadcast without having to go looking for a torrent. Even more important, I want to be able to get series that I missed (Firefly, Sopranos) .... The nature of most P2P services (esp bittorrent) is that this older stuff is harder to come by.
I don't really care if I can keep the episodes forever. I do now, but I never rewatch any of them an only keep them around so I have a big enough share to get into the good Direct Connect channels.
Hopefully the test goes well and it's introduced in other markets soon.
Am I missing something completely obvious? Why are you not using group policy to push out whatever software you want? Group Policies do not have to be 100% MS.
Check out the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. It has a couple USB ports, a Netword adapter, a 266MHz ARM processor, 32MB RAM and an active community porting apps to it.
A website running on this obviusly couldn't stand up to a slashdotting, but it will work for a personal site and does a good job of streaming media around the house (aside from its primary function as a Samba server)
The thing draws next to no power and could easliy replace many of the space heaters wasting power in the average geek's basement.