You claim that Apple is not releasing innovative products. Let's look at the releases in the past year. As has been pointed out, there already is a video iPod. Great new server? Hmm... I guess you haven't heard of the Xserve clusters at Virginia Tech. New systems? How about the Quad Core systems released late last year? You aren't going to find those in the consumer line systems from Dell or any other manufacturer on the PC side right now... Software? What about Aperture, which can save a lot of time for photographers - and time is, as they say, money. Based on the releases of the past year, I think people have every right to expect something interesting and possibly even innovative to be announced at MacWorld this coming week.
So you're saying that Apple are at the forefront of innovation because they have released :
Servers that can be put in a cluster. A workstation with 2 Dual core processors. An app for handling RAW image files.
Do you not think those examples are a little weak? And you've made the classic Mac advocate's mistake of labelling something as high-end and innovative just because Dell doesn't make one. By calling Apples 4 core PowerMac "innovative" you're implying that it would be hard to buy (or build) an equivalent PC. And then you call the 4 core Power Mac "a consumer line system". Did you manage to keep a straight face when you wrote that? Or is that just what Apple charges for consumer line systems?
We have less games but we also have less crap games as a result. Next time you troll make sure you try a little harder.
Are you going to apologise to shut_up_man for that? Because any normal person can see that wasn't a troll. He was saying that Mac laptops don't meet his requirements at the moment but it looks like they will in future, so he may well buy one. That's all he said.
The trouble is you seem to be so blinded by love for your platform of choice that you're prepared to insult people that dosn't yet own one, but would like to. To me that seems pathetic, incredibly immature and totally counter-productive.
In summary, you are the main reason that myself and many others will never own a Mac. I bow before your advocacy skills.
One of the other reasons is that this post will be marked as flamebait, while your post which actually does insult somebody for no reason at all will get modded +5 Interesting. I really can't understand how Apple have failed to increase their market share with advocates like you lot on their side.
You are more than welcome to make fun of Slashdot. If you think that I believe otherwise I refer you to my username.
I just get annoyed with the amount of comments advocating Digg simply because it posts stories before Slashdot. As a link farm it's a great site but in terms of community and discussion I cannot even find the words to express its lameness.
I'm abit confused... In what way are those comments different from what is seen on/.?
The difference is that while both sites have a lot of crap and pointless comments, I have never seen an interesting, insightful or funny post on Digg. Most of the comments there average 1-4 words, with "Digg" being the most common closely followed by:), "teh" and "gay".
On Slashdot there are discussions, however flawed. Digg seems to be an attempt to prove the infinite monkeys theorem.
This story has been on digg TWICE already./.'s a little slow on the uptake here.
Yes it has hasn't it? And I am going to demonstrate the reason why most of us don't give a shit for your Digg advocacy by reposting some of the intelligent and insightful comments from the discussion :
Nick says, "lets not forget, He is a sociel engineing king, he knows how to say anything and wont say it unless he knows it will stick"
The rest of them are variation on Digg or No Digg. And the thing is I'm not even trying to make the users look retarded. Those were pretty much the best comments.
So yeah, Digg may well have posted this before. But how long did you spend reading the discussion? I am assuming it wasn't long because personally spending more than 5 minutes on Digg makes me want to exterminate the entire human race.
After all the jokes about WINE compatibility [google.co.uk]... it turns out that WINE is vulnerable, too!!
But to be fair, that's not what I would call a security hole in WINE. It's not a buffer overflow or any other kind of programming error on the WINE side is it? It's just that they copied incredibly insecure functionality from Microsoft.
..simplicity. Or, rather, I prefer simplicity in my browser. And every time I check, Firefox is getting worse.
Yeah, it's ridiculous isn't it? All those extra buttons and menus they keep adding and on top of that they force you to install all these extensions!
Oh sod it, I can't even be bothered to make fun of you. You're full of shit and you know it. If you really need to be "controversial" find something that is both controversial and true to write about. There's no shortage of issues.
I give it a life expectentcy of 3 days before the traffic causes it to choke, gag, and implode - consuming itself, anus first.
Ironically that's exactly what Bob said about the Internet 10 years ago. He doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from having to eat his words (literally).
People who can't be bothered to spend hours reading and re-reading the shitty GRUB documentation trying to work out how exactly they are supposed to refer to the second partition of their third SATA drive in fucking hex.
In general, people who dislike unecessary complexity and don't want it getting in the way of anything important e.g. the booting of their workstations/servers.
Somewhere I have an old Toshiba 486 laptop running a pre 2.0 kernel. It had no NIC and the floppy drive wasn't properly supported. I installed Linux on it using a custom boot disk with PLIP (IP over parallel port) support which I used to pull down the rest of the packages. And yet I cannot get my head round Grub. Perhaps I lack the required experience and initiative?
Are there any marketing students out there who can contribute to OSS projects by coming up with product names that aren't (in my opinion) the types of things businesses are going to immediately disregard because they sound retarded.
Divx may be an ok codec, but naming it after someone else's failed technology on a lark hardly seems like a good idea.
Dude, do you not think that including a perfect example of a commercial non-OSS project with an awful name rather detracts from your point about OSS projects having terrible names? Or did you think that DivX is a free software project?
The OSS version is called XviD, which is a much better name. It doesn't mean anything at all and it includes a big "X". That probably means it's "Xtreme" and as we all know, you can't get much better than that. In fact I doubt you will find a better example of 21st Century corporate naming than "XviD". Just introducing a counter-example.
"Sure, it can play zillions of games but you have to download them from warez sites." So while this might hold some interest for the/. hacker crowd capable of doing this, this is hardly practical for kids (as suggested by some posters) or the general public.
Good point. I certainly can't imagine kids or the general public doing anything of dubious legality.
Seriously dude, I'm going to track you down and slap you repeatedly in the face with the real World. I suggest you brace yourself, because I think it's going to be a shock.
- Double Standards New Product - Penis Patch Body Wrap - Lose 6-20 inches in one hour
Someone has to try using both of these products at the same time. Let them fight it out and see which one is most effective. We could place bets on whether it ends up longer or shorter.
Many thanks for your defense of our company and products on the evil Linux site Slashdot. We rely on people like you, as we are unable to afford our own marketing department. As a token of our thanks, please accept this summons for unauthorised use of our trademark "Windows" in your comment.
If you were trying to be sarcastic and/or facetious, you failed.
Let me ask you a question - HOW MUCH MORE OBVIOUS COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE MADE IT?
Do you completely lack a sense of humour, or for that matter even the most basic of social skills? I contend that you do and there's not a great deal of point in you arguing about it since you have already provided ample evidence.
I think in basic terms, your problem is that you are physically unable to pass up an opportunity to try and show how clever and knowledgable you are. I have met many people like you and the thing that connects them all is a (usually well founded) lack of confidence in their own intellectual abilities. Hence the need to continually try and prove otherwise no matter how stupid, pompous and humourless it makes them look.
And yes thanks, I am an EE and I also have some experience of switched mode power supply design. Feel free to ask questions when you've stopped foaming at the mouth.
Does a power supply necessarily use it's rated power output all the time, or is that just the rated maximum wattage output?
Of course it does! That is why you must never, ever power up a PSU with nothing connected to it. If you did, that whole 1kW would have to be dissipated in the PSU leading to instant meltdown and you having to pick pieces of red hot metal out of your face.
It's the same with power plants - if demand for power suddenly dropped far enough, every power plant in the country would explode with untapped potential.
I think it was rather irresponsible of you to raise such a dangerous subject on Slashdot. Please report to your nearest DHS reception centre for re-conditioning.
rotating your screen is very difficult. and you can't have accelleration when you do.
I suspect that's at least partially because most desktop hardware doesn't support it. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that rotation of the whole screen would be quite hard. I think you'd have to draw everything normally and then rotate it before writing it to the framebuffer. Logically the hardware would be designed & optimised to draw lines from left to right and changing that is probably not as easy as you think. Unless it's a laptop / portable chipset it's probably a very uncommon use case anyway.
So how long will it take us to get nVidia to support this with their evil, closed source drivers?
It's working fine for me. Only a slight stench of evil.
Seriously, the latest 81.74 drivers and XOrg 7.0RC3 are working great for me. The composite support seems a lot faster and more stable. Previously I would get slight lag when moving big transparent windows around but now it's very fast and smooth. Of course I turn them off again after 30 seconds due to the almost total lack of usefulness, but it's nice to know they're there.
Anyway, closed source and evil they may be, but my cheap-ass Geforce 5700 is probably faster under Linux than any card from another manufacturer. Maybe ATI's 1800XT with their proprietary drivers would beat it, assuming that their Linux drivers even support the latest cards yet. I'm pretty sure it would be less stable even if it did. Sadly, I don't think that any card using OSS drivers would even come close.
Did you ever try to build XFree from source? Well, did you?
I still suffer from a slight nervous tick as a direct result of my last attempt. You may think that autotools are hell, but that is only because you have never experienced the inner-most circles of darkness.
Try switching to port 1720, the standard VoIP port. It works with Rogers Cable in Canada. They don't run packet shapers on any traffic on that port, for fear of lagging VoIP calls.
Of course, all that bulk data transfer is going to ruin the latency for anyone trying to make a VoIP call in a way that even traffic shaping can't.
But there's no need to worry as long as you're getting your mp3 fix, right?
Although I've no doubt that you've selflessly restricted your BT client's upload to 1kb/sec to reduce the impact.
Why not make keystroke loggers useless? I love this software. Just copy and paste passwords;)
What? Do you really think it's difficult to modify a keylogger to capture the contents of the clipboard too?
It's been done before. And while I'm not a programmer, I'd be surpised if there wasn't a Win32 API for doing exactly that.
If your system is compromised by a worm then you have to assume that it is completely compromised. Have a look at the Metasploit vulnerability scanner - one of its most interesting features is a VNC server that can be used as a payload to an exploit. It wouldn't be hard to build that into a worm - no password saving app is going to help you if the attacker can see your desktop and clipboard contents.
ULi also appears to be the only company other than ATI making chipsets that support CrossFire (ATI's multi-GPU solution, competing with Nvidia's SLI, for the one person who doesnt know but cares) in the form of the ULi M1575. I cant imagine Nvidia will let that continue.
That's terrible! Now ATI will have to rapidly start producing their own products to replace the ULi chipsets.
If ATI aren't careful, they might end up rushing out an unstable product with inadequate driver support. I know it sounds unbelievable.......
The thing even detects a Commodore 64 with ethernet cartridge as a recognized operating system!
Are you sure it doesn't just connect to the Contiki web server on Port 80 and print the banner? That seems ever so much more likely than them having an OS fingerprint for the C64 listed.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware Device Content Protection. Downsamples to DVD. Bad. Bad. Bad. Do Not Buy.
Don't you have that entirely backwards? I thought that HD got downsampled to DVD res if the display didn't support HDCP. Since this does it won't.
You claim that Apple is not releasing innovative products. Let's look at the releases in the past year. As has been pointed out, there already is a video iPod. Great new server? Hmm... I guess you haven't heard of the Xserve clusters at Virginia Tech. New systems? How about the Quad Core systems released late last year? You aren't going to find those in the consumer line systems from Dell or any other manufacturer on the PC side right now... Software? What about Aperture, which can save a lot of time for photographers - and time is, as they say, money. Based on the releases of the past year, I think people have every right to expect something interesting and possibly even innovative to be announced at MacWorld this coming week.
So you're saying that Apple are at the forefront of innovation because they have released :
Servers that can be put in a cluster.
A workstation with 2 Dual core processors.
An app for handling RAW image files.
Do you not think those examples are a little weak? And you've made the classic Mac advocate's mistake of labelling something as high-end and innovative just because Dell doesn't make one. By calling Apples 4 core PowerMac "innovative" you're implying that it would be hard to buy (or build) an equivalent PC. And then you call the 4 core Power Mac "a consumer line system". Did you manage to keep a straight face when you wrote that? Or is that just what Apple charges for consumer line systems?
We have less games but we also have less crap games as a result. Next time you troll make sure you try a little harder.
Are you going to apologise to shut_up_man for that? Because any normal person can see that wasn't a troll. He was saying that Mac laptops don't meet his requirements at the moment but it looks like they will in future, so he may well buy one. That's all he said.
The trouble is you seem to be so blinded by love for your platform of choice that you're prepared to insult people that dosn't yet own one, but would like to. To me that seems pathetic, incredibly immature and totally counter-productive.
In summary, you are the main reason that myself and many others will never own a Mac. I bow before your advocacy skills.
One of the other reasons is that this post will be marked as flamebait, while your post which actually does insult somebody for no reason at all will get modded +5 Interesting. I really can't understand how Apple have failed to increase their market share with advocates like you lot on their side.
Ummm.... Ok apparently I can't make fun :-) of /.
You are more than welcome to make fun of Slashdot. If you think that I believe otherwise I refer you to my username.
I just get annoyed with the amount of comments advocating Digg simply because it posts stories before Slashdot. As a link farm it's a great site but in terms of community and discussion I cannot even find the words to express its lameness.
I'm abit confused... In what way are those comments different from what is seen on /.?
:), "teh" and "gay".
The difference is that while both sites have a lot of crap and pointless comments, I have never seen an interesting, insightful or funny post on Digg. Most of the comments there average 1-4 words, with "Digg" being the most common closely followed by
On Slashdot there are discussions, however flawed. Digg seems to be an attempt to prove the infinite monkeys theorem.
This story has been on digg TWICE already. /.'s a little slow on the uptake here.
Yes it has hasn't it? And I am going to demonstrate the reason why most of us don't give a shit for your Digg advocacy by reposting some of the intelligent and insightful comments from the discussion :
Nick says, "lets not forget, He is a sociel engineing king, he knows how to say anything and wont say it unless he knows it will stick"
Matthew says, "I posted this yesterday: http://digg.com/apple/Behind_the_magic_curtain"
Dickyducky says, "God!"
Fudgebrown says, ":-("
The rest of them are variation on Digg or No Digg. And the thing is I'm not even trying to make the users look retarded. Those were pretty much the best comments.
So yeah, Digg may well have posted this before. But how long did you spend reading the discussion? I am assuming it wasn't long because personally spending more than 5 minutes on Digg makes me want to exterminate the entire human race.
After all the jokes about WINE compatibility [google.co.uk]... it turns out that WINE is vulnerable, too!!
But to be fair, that's not what I would call a security hole in WINE. It's not a buffer overflow or any other kind of programming error on the WINE side is it? It's just that they copied incredibly insecure functionality from Microsoft.
..simplicity. Or, rather, I prefer simplicity in my browser. And every time I check, Firefox is getting worse.
Yeah, it's ridiculous isn't it? All those extra buttons and menus they keep adding and on top of that they force you to install all these extensions!
Oh sod it, I can't even be bothered to make fun of you. You're full of shit and you know it. If you really need to be "controversial" find something that is both controversial and true to write about. There's no shortage of issues.
I give it a life expectentcy of 3 days before the traffic causes it to choke, gag, and implode - consuming itself, anus first.
Ironically that's exactly what Bob said about the Internet 10 years ago. He doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from having to eat his words (literally).
Who still uses lilo anymore?
People who can't be bothered to spend hours reading and re-reading the shitty GRUB documentation trying to work out how exactly they are supposed to refer to the second partition of their third SATA drive in fucking hex.
In general, people who dislike unecessary complexity and don't want it getting in the way of anything important e.g. the booting of their workstations/servers.
Somewhere I have an old Toshiba 486 laptop running a pre 2.0 kernel. It had no NIC and the floppy drive wasn't properly supported. I installed Linux on it using a custom boot disk with PLIP (IP over parallel port) support which I used to pull down the rest of the packages. And yet I cannot get my head round Grub. Perhaps I lack the required experience and initiative?
please type the word in this image: concrete
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
Oh man, you shouldn't have done that. Now all the spammers and crap-flooders know today's secret word. We're going to be swamped!
Are there any marketing students out there who can contribute to OSS projects by coming up with product names that aren't (in my opinion) the types of things businesses are going to immediately disregard because they sound retarded.
Divx may be an ok codec, but naming it after someone else's failed technology on a lark hardly seems like a good idea.
Dude, do you not think that including a perfect example of a commercial non-OSS project with an awful name rather detracts from your point about OSS projects having terrible names? Or did you think that DivX is a free software project?
The OSS version is called XviD, which is a much better name. It doesn't mean anything at all and it includes a big "X". That probably means it's "Xtreme" and as we all know, you can't get much better than that. In fact I doubt you will find a better example of 21st Century corporate naming than "XviD". Just introducing a counter-example.
"Sure, it can play zillions of games but you have to download them from warez sites." So while this might hold some interest for the /. hacker crowd capable of doing this, this is hardly practical for kids (as suggested by some posters) or the general public.
Good point. I certainly can't imagine kids or the general public doing anything of dubious legality.
Seriously dude, I'm going to track you down and slap you repeatedly in the face with the real World. I suggest you brace yourself, because I think it's going to be a shock.
- Double Standards New Product - Penis Patch Body Wrap
- Lose 6-20 inches in one hour
Someone has to try using both of these products at the same time. Let them fight it out and see which one is most effective. We could place bets on whether it ends up longer or shorter.
Dear I'm Don Giovanni,
Many thanks for your defense of our company and products on the evil Linux site Slashdot. We rely on people like you, as we are unable to afford our own marketing department. As a token of our thanks, please accept this summons for unauthorised use of our trademark "Windows" in your comment.
Thanks again,
Microsoft
If you were trying to be sarcastic and/or facetious, you failed.
Let me ask you a question - HOW MUCH MORE OBVIOUS COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE MADE IT?
Do you completely lack a sense of humour, or for that matter even the most basic of social skills? I contend that you do and there's not a great deal of point in you arguing about it since you have already provided ample evidence.
I think in basic terms, your problem is that you are physically unable to pass up an opportunity to try and show how clever and knowledgable you are. I have met many people like you and the thing that connects them all is a (usually well founded) lack of confidence in their own intellectual abilities. Hence the need to continually try and prove otherwise no matter how stupid, pompous and humourless it makes them look.
And yes thanks, I am an EE and I also have some experience of switched mode power supply design. Feel free to ask questions when you've stopped foaming at the mouth.
Does a power supply necessarily use it's rated power output all the time, or is that just the rated maximum wattage output?
Of course it does! That is why you must never, ever power up a PSU with nothing connected to it. If you did, that whole 1kW would have to be dissipated in the PSU leading to instant meltdown and you having to pick pieces of red hot metal out of your face.
It's the same with power plants - if demand for power suddenly dropped far enough, every power plant in the country would explode with untapped potential.
I think it was rather irresponsible of you to raise such a dangerous subject on Slashdot. Please report to your nearest DHS reception centre for re-conditioning.
rotating your screen is very difficult. and you can't have accelleration when you do.
I suspect that's at least partially because most desktop hardware doesn't support it. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that rotation of the whole screen would be quite hard. I think you'd have to draw everything normally and then rotate it before writing it to the framebuffer. Logically the hardware would be designed & optimised to draw lines from left to right and changing that is probably not as easy as you think. Unless it's a laptop / portable chipset it's probably a very uncommon use case anyway.
So how long will it take us to get nVidia to support this with their evil, closed source drivers?
It's working fine for me. Only a slight stench of evil.
Seriously, the latest 81.74 drivers and XOrg 7.0RC3 are working great for me. The composite support seems a lot faster and more stable. Previously I would get slight lag when moving big transparent windows around but now it's very fast and smooth. Of course I turn them off again after 30 seconds due to the almost total lack of usefulness, but it's nice to know they're there.
Anyway, closed source and evil they may be, but my cheap-ass Geforce 5700 is probably faster under Linux than any card from another manufacturer. Maybe ATI's 1800XT with their proprietary drivers would beat it, assuming that their Linux drivers even support the latest cards yet. I'm pretty sure it would be less stable even if it did. Sadly, I don't think that any card using OSS drivers would even come close.
more autotool hell, woohoo.
Did you ever try to build XFree from source? Well, did you?
I still suffer from a slight nervous tick as a direct result of my last attempt.
You may think that autotools are hell, but that is only because you have never experienced the inner-most circles of darkness.
Try switching to port 1720, the standard VoIP port. It works with Rogers Cable in Canada. They don't run packet shapers on any traffic on that port, for fear of lagging VoIP calls.
Of course, all that bulk data transfer is going to ruin the latency for anyone trying to make a VoIP call in a way that even traffic shaping can't.
But there's no need to worry as long as you're getting your mp3 fix, right?
Although I've no doubt that you've selflessly restricted your BT client's upload to 1kb/sec to reduce the impact.
http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html
;)
Why not make keystroke loggers useless? I love this software. Just copy and paste passwords
What? Do you really think it's difficult to modify a keylogger to capture the contents of the clipboard too?
It's been done before. And while I'm not a programmer, I'd be surpised if there wasn't a Win32 API for doing exactly that.
If your system is compromised by a worm then you have to assume that it is completely compromised. Have a look at the Metasploit vulnerability scanner - one of its most interesting features is a VNC server that can be used as a payload to an exploit. It wouldn't be hard to build that into a worm - no password saving app is going to help you if the attacker can see your desktop and clipboard contents.
ULi also appears to be the only company other than ATI making chipsets that support CrossFire (ATI's multi-GPU solution, competing with Nvidia's SLI, for the one person who doesnt know but cares) in the form of the ULi M1575. I cant imagine Nvidia will let that continue.
That's terrible! Now ATI will have to rapidly start producing their own products to replace the ULi chipsets.
If ATI aren't careful, they might end up rushing out an unstable product with inadequate driver support. I know it sounds unbelievable.......
/The last time I read over a 1,000 pages from one author, it wasn't worth it.
That's a shame. I quite enjoyed the Baroque Cycle.
The thing even detects a Commodore 64 with ethernet cartridge as a recognized operating system!
Are you sure it doesn't just connect to the Contiki web server on Port 80 and print the banner? That seems ever so much more likely than them having an OS fingerprint for the C64 listed.