I sense you constructing a straw man. Parent post said nothing about Apple's tech, or their profits. He commented on what they are attempting to do to the industry as a whole. I assume he was talking about things like the anti-competitive suits they've been filing across the globe in recent years - trying to block their competitors from releasing tablets with rounded corners, for example.
Apple had an early jump on the smart phone and tablet markets, and I won't deny that many of their products are of great quality. But trying to shut out other companies from the market is anti-competitive behavior, and thus a "set back [to the] industry", which is what the parent said.
Indeed - DVD quality is limited by its reliance on MPEG-2 video codecs. I haven't done any testing, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could compress Blu-Ray movies down to 5 GB or less with no noticeable loss in quality, considering (1) the higher efficiency of modern MPEG-4 codecs, and (2) the high quality of the source material (your 50 gig Blu-Ray).
Now, you'd still want to keep the plastic circle around, just as a backup. You could have your 5 GB encodes on some type of media server, and just play them off that. You'll be able to get 400 movies on a 2 TB disk.
Ripping and transcoding the movies will take a while if you have a large collection, though. Personally, I don't watch enough movies for the 60 seconds it takes to load a disc to bother me... but if you absolutely must have all your movies "on demand", there's really no other option besides putting them on a media server.
I can think of several things:
Nuclear (or conventional) war,
Coordinated terrorist attacks across multiple states (like 9/11),
Threats from outer space (asteroids, gamma ray bursts, etc.),
The Large Hadron Collider causing a resonance cascade,
High-frequency trading machines develop sentience and take all our money,
The Republicans nominate a black man for the presidency.
I'm sure that IP blacklists (such as the ipfilter.dat for uTorrent) haven't been useful in a decade. It'd be no trouble for the plaintiffs in these torrent cases to secure a hitherto-unknown IP address (residential or business service) for a month or two for their purposes. The amount of money they extort from just one of the 23,000 downloaders would pay for a few weeks of internet service.
While a P4-era machine will certainly feel sluggish compared to a new one, I don't think it's a bad sign for the company that they give one to an intern. Simply popping an extra stick of RAM in it should make it suitable for common office tasks: Spreadsheets, web, email. Hell, even videoconferencing should work. My netbook, which sports a 1.6 gHz Atom (benchmarking almost exactly the same as my P4 2.0), 1 GB of memory, and Intel integrated graphics, worked fine for all those things. Skype worked. I even used Firefox on it, although opening multiple tabs or JS-heavy pages would feel sluggishly. In fact, I'd still be using it at school and at home today if I hadn't cracked the screen.
From a corporate perspective, providing this intern who may only be there a few months with a computer capable of launching Word a few seconds faster, makes no sense. If they didn't have any new machines on hand, it would be an expense of several hundred dollars, for no significant productivity increase. The prudent business decision would be exactly what they did: Get more use out of the old equipment that's just lying around.
Now, the extra ram is pretty much necessary to keep the machine usable for more modern apps (Office 2007, Firefox 3/4). But he just needs to ask the IT department about that. There's no logical reason why they'd refuse to let him put another stick in there. The only thing I can think of is that they have rules so stiff that they do not allow ANY modification of the hardware, even one that won't screw up their system images or present a security risk. That kind of inflexibility would bode much worse for the company than deciding to re-use old, but working, parts.
Of course, this is all assuming he's just going to be using an office suite and a web browser, maybe a few other low-profile apps. If they want him to do CAD, or software development, or image editing, something like that - then yes, they need him to get a new PC.
(By the way: Windows 7 won't even install on a machine with 512 MB. I don't think Vista will either, but I haven't had much experience with it. So I doubt they have those on the P4 box. I also doubt he's doing any computationally-intensive things either, those would run so slow on the machine as to make it completely unusable.)
I don't believe the supreme court judges are affiliated with any party. I know they are often classified as either "conservative" or "liberal", but that's just another false dichotomy. As for the elected officials, one house of our Congress is not controlled by the Republicans, nor is the office of the president. So, I do not believe it is fair to lay the blame for anything wrong with our country solely on one party. Expressing that sort of blind partisanship makes you no better than those demanding of Obama multiple birth certificates, college transcripts, and Certificates of Non-Muslimity.
As much as I want to go further into this, I won't. There are sure to be political articles on Slashdot where this discussion won't be completely off-topic.
I'm pretty sure their early singles (chronicled on the aptly-named The Early Singles and the 3-CD remaster of Piper at the Gates of Dawn) were released on 45s, as that was what everyone did back then. Being that it was 1966/1967, they even had mono mixes made in addition to the stereo. So, I can't imagine these singles having been put out on anything but 7-inch records that spun at 45 rpm.
But, when most people say "Pink Floyd" they mean "post-Barrett Pink Floyd". I dunno about their singles that came after. I think it's possible that they were radio-only singles, that is, no vinyl copies were ever mass-produced. That would be congruent with the fact that they've only just now caved in to individual digital downloads.
Youtube comments are appreciably complex - You can type in a timecode and it appears in the comment as a link that directs the Flash to jump the specified point in the stream, for just one example. So the code that processes the comments is more complex than simply taking user input, scrubbing it, and writing it at the specified point in the HTML. As a developer, you should know that as the complexity of code increases, the potential for ever more weirdly complex bugs also increases. I don't know if we'll ever hear an explanation from Google about the specifics of the bugged code, but I wouldn't be so quick to deem whoever (or rather, whichever team) wrote it as totally incompetent and worthy of a pink slip.
I, too, have long wondered about the frailty of optical discs. When Laserdiscs and CDs were developed in the 70s, I can understand them maybe not anticipating how important it would be to protect the media itself. Vinyl records were the standard then, and they get scratched very easily, and get damaged just by being left out of their sleeves (dust in the grooves). But there was fuck-all you could do to improve on that design. There was also an "Ohh, shiny!" factor. Optical discs were new, space-age technology. They were read by lasers. They had rainbows coming off of them in the light. People might have actually been impressed by the appearance of the disc itself, and they were used to walking on pins & needles handling their media, carefully holding it by the edges, and having it degrade with each play.
But what I can't understand is why now, 30 years later, we're still fucking around with bare optical discs. We're expected to keep carefully placing them in and out of their trays, but in the real world that often doesn't happen. They get put into those CD binders, they float around peoples' cars, people leave them lying on desks. They get scratched, it's a fact of life. And it could all be avoided with a simple plastic casing with a sliding door, built as a standard part of the medium, like you had on floppy disks. If not for simply the amount of time that discs have been around, DVDs and Blue-Rays pack way more bytes into a square inch. So they're much more susceptible to the scratches that occur when they come in contact with, well, any surface at all. And yet we still don't have protection.
I'd even go so far as to speculate that it may be intentional on the part of the companies that developed these standards. No casing on the disc means lower production costs (though, interesting thought: the casing and the "box" could become one). It also means more damaged discs. And a damaged disc is one that can't be re-sold. If the stuff on it is good enough, the consumer may even buy a new disc to replace it. Even better, he might buy the deluxe director's cut reissue on SACD -- another bare optical disc.
Woah, you think Apple laptops are the only ones with multitouch? Let me introduce you to my EeePC from nearly 2 years ago. Running XP, no less. Granted, it's not as large as Apple's pad. But it does get quadruple the battery life.
I'd hope that their algorithm is heavily weighted towards accuracy versus speed. Given that Google seems to know what they're doing most of the time, the speed of a site is probably only important enough to move it up or down a few places within a page of search results. I can't remember the last time I had to click past the first page of a Google result, anyway.
Of course, there's no way to tell just how much it matters, since they keep the inner workings of PageRank secret.
If apps were "coded like console games"...
*Every application would need to include device drivers for every piece of hardware on the system. For every system you want your app to run on. So that boils down to coding (or getting from the manufacturer) drivers for every computer device in existence.
*There would be no multi-tasking. Let's say you are working on something in Microsoft Office. In order to look up something on Google real quick, you'd need to save your work, unload Office, load up Firefox, look up whatever you needed to, unload Firefox, re-load Office, and open your file back up.
I could go on, but I don't feel like doing so in a reply to an AC. Simply put, there's a good reason that operating systems to exist. They act as an abstraction to the hardware, making development of applications *way* easier since you only have to code your program to interface with the APIs of an operating system, which in turn has drivers installed to work with whatever particular hardware is on a machine that you are trying to run your app on.
I'm pretty sure all the game consoles developed in the past decade have their own pseudo-OS, to let Xbox Live etc. run concurrently with all the games. Or maybe they just have libraries for that stuff that they give to the developers to include in their games. Either way, it works because all PS2s/Xboxen/Wii are the same. That is not true of personal computers.
It would be easier and more cost-effective to just put a small amount of flash memory onto every motherboard. It could come pre-loaded with diagnostic tools, or if it didn't, you could just as easily add your own. Hell, maybe they could even just put a little SD card reader, so you could swap different cards in and out as you pleased.
So true. It was very sad for me to see Rio go under. I had a 20 GB Rio Karma and it was the best MP3 player I've had. It ended up dying after many, many falls onto concrete and stuff (disk drives tend not to like that).
Coincidentally, I bought my Karma from Circuit City...
I didn't find the design of Oblivion to be "amazingly competent". It would be a lie to say that I didn't enjoy playing it (with re-balancing mods). But Morrowind was balanced so much better. And I suppose the Fallout games, though I've never played them. Which I probably should.
Your weather.com systray icon isn't cloud computing, because it only shows the temperature. If it could display the radar maps showing cloud cover, THAT would be true cloud computing.
Slashdot Mirror
I sense you constructing a straw man. Parent post said nothing about Apple's tech, or their profits. He commented on what they are attempting to do to the industry as a whole. I assume he was talking about things like the anti-competitive suits they've been filing across the globe in recent years - trying to block their competitors from releasing tablets with rounded corners, for example.
Apple had an early jump on the smart phone and tablet markets, and I won't deny that many of their products are of great quality. But trying to shut out other companies from the market is anti-competitive behavior, and thus a "set back [to the] industry", which is what the parent said.
To me, it looks more like a Rolls-Royce Phantom. To compare:
http://www.worldcarsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Rolls-Royce-Phantom.jpg
http://chryforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Black-300.jpg
The front of the car, especially. This particular comparison was immortalized in Katt Williams' "The Pimp Chronicles".
... and the length of the program (21 minutes) is exactly the same on "Tivo" (read: digital video recorder).
Indeed - DVD quality is limited by its reliance on MPEG-2 video codecs. I haven't done any testing, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could compress Blu-Ray movies down to 5 GB or less with no noticeable loss in quality, considering (1) the higher efficiency of modern MPEG-4 codecs, and (2) the high quality of the source material (your 50 gig Blu-Ray).
Now, you'd still want to keep the plastic circle around, just as a backup. You could have your 5 GB encodes on some type of media server, and just play them off that. You'll be able to get 400 movies on a 2 TB disk.
Ripping and transcoding the movies will take a while if you have a large collection, though. Personally, I don't watch enough movies for the 60 seconds it takes to load a disc to bother me... but if you absolutely must have all your movies "on demand", there's really no other option besides putting them on a media server.
I can think of several things:
Nuclear (or conventional) war,
Coordinated terrorist attacks across multiple states (like 9/11),
Threats from outer space (asteroids, gamma ray bursts, etc.),
The Large Hadron Collider causing a resonance cascade,
High-frequency trading machines develop sentience and take all our money,
The Republicans nominate a black man for the presidency.
I'm sure that IP blacklists (such as the ipfilter.dat for uTorrent) haven't been useful in a decade. It'd be no trouble for the plaintiffs in these torrent cases to secure a hitherto-unknown IP address (residential or business service) for a month or two for their purposes. The amount of money they extort from just one of the 23,000 downloaders would pay for a few weeks of internet service.
While a P4-era machine will certainly feel sluggish compared to a new one, I don't think it's a bad sign for the company that they give one to an intern. Simply popping an extra stick of RAM in it should make it suitable for common office tasks: Spreadsheets, web, email. Hell, even videoconferencing should work. My netbook, which sports a 1.6 gHz Atom (benchmarking almost exactly the same as my P4 2.0), 1 GB of memory, and Intel integrated graphics, worked fine for all those things. Skype worked. I even used Firefox on it, although opening multiple tabs or JS-heavy pages would feel sluggishly. In fact, I'd still be using it at school and at home today if I hadn't cracked the screen.
From a corporate perspective, providing this intern who may only be there a few months with a computer capable of launching Word a few seconds faster, makes no sense. If they didn't have any new machines on hand, it would be an expense of several hundred dollars, for no significant productivity increase. The prudent business decision would be exactly what they did: Get more use out of the old equipment that's just lying around.
Now, the extra ram is pretty much necessary to keep the machine usable for more modern apps (Office 2007, Firefox 3/4). But he just needs to ask the IT department about that. There's no logical reason why they'd refuse to let him put another stick in there. The only thing I can think of is that they have rules so stiff that they do not allow ANY modification of the hardware, even one that won't screw up their system images or present a security risk. That kind of inflexibility would bode much worse for the company than deciding to re-use old, but working, parts.
Of course, this is all assuming he's just going to be using an office suite and a web browser, maybe a few other low-profile apps. If they want him to do CAD, or software development, or image editing, something like that - then yes, they need him to get a new PC.
(By the way: Windows 7 won't even install on a machine with 512 MB. I don't think Vista will either, but I haven't had much experience with it. So I doubt they have those on the P4 box. I also doubt he's doing any computationally-intensive things either, those would run so slow on the machine as to make it completely unusable.)
I don't believe the supreme court judges are affiliated with any party. I know they are often classified as either "conservative" or "liberal", but that's just another false dichotomy. As for the elected officials, one house of our Congress is not controlled by the Republicans, nor is the office of the president. So, I do not believe it is fair to lay the blame for anything wrong with our country solely on one party. Expressing that sort of blind partisanship makes you no better than those demanding of Obama multiple birth certificates, college transcripts, and Certificates of Non-Muslimity. As much as I want to go further into this, I won't. There are sure to be political articles on Slashdot where this discussion won't be completely off-topic.
Possibly also plentiful LSD. (Lameness filter: LSD-25,
Well, after actually listening past the intro, it's apparent that the record I linked to isn't the original Pink Floyd version, but a cover.
The question still stands!
I'm pretty sure their early singles (chronicled on the aptly-named The Early Singles and the 3-CD remaster of Piper at the Gates of Dawn) were released on 45s, as that was what everyone did back then. Being that it was 1966/1967, they even had mono mixes made in addition to the stereo. So, I can't imagine these singles having been put out on anything but 7-inch records that spun at 45 rpm.
Hm, I just Youtubed it, and I found a video of an only half-working copy of See Emily Play, and it's definitely a 45.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOEpAmg2NAI
But, when most people say "Pink Floyd" they mean "post-Barrett Pink Floyd". I dunno about their singles that came after. I think it's possible that they were radio-only singles, that is, no vinyl copies were ever mass-produced. That would be congruent with the fact that they've only just now caved in to individual digital downloads.
Youtube comments are appreciably complex - You can type in a timecode and it appears in the comment as a link that directs the Flash to jump the specified point in the stream, for just one example. So the code that processes the comments is more complex than simply taking user input, scrubbing it, and writing it at the specified point in the HTML. As a developer, you should know that as the complexity of code increases, the potential for ever more weirdly complex bugs also increases. I don't know if we'll ever hear an explanation from Google about the specifics of the bugged code, but I wouldn't be so quick to deem whoever (or rather, whichever team) wrote it as totally incompetent and worthy of a pink slip.
I, too, have long wondered about the frailty of optical discs. When Laserdiscs and CDs were developed in the 70s, I can understand them maybe not anticipating how important it would be to protect the media itself. Vinyl records were the standard then, and they get scratched very easily, and get damaged just by being left out of their sleeves (dust in the grooves). But there was fuck-all you could do to improve on that design. There was also an "Ohh, shiny!" factor. Optical discs were new, space-age technology. They were read by lasers. They had rainbows coming off of them in the light. People might have actually been impressed by the appearance of the disc itself, and they were used to walking on pins & needles handling their media, carefully holding it by the edges, and having it degrade with each play.
But what I can't understand is why now, 30 years later, we're still fucking around with bare optical discs. We're expected to keep carefully placing them in and out of their trays, but in the real world that often doesn't happen. They get put into those CD binders, they float around peoples' cars, people leave them lying on desks. They get scratched, it's a fact of life. And it could all be avoided with a simple plastic casing with a sliding door, built as a standard part of the medium, like you had on floppy disks. If not for simply the amount of time that discs have been around, DVDs and Blue-Rays pack way more bytes into a square inch. So they're much more susceptible to the scratches that occur when they come in contact with, well, any surface at all. And yet we still don't have protection.
I'd even go so far as to speculate that it may be intentional on the part of the companies that developed these standards. No casing on the disc means lower production costs (though, interesting thought: the casing and the "box" could become one). It also means more damaged discs. And a damaged disc is one that can't be re-sold. If the stuff on it is good enough, the consumer may even buy a new disc to replace it. Even better, he might buy the deluxe director's cut reissue on SACD -- another bare optical disc.
Woah, you think Apple laptops are the only ones with multitouch? Let me introduce you to my EeePC from nearly 2 years ago. Running XP, no less. Granted, it's not as large as Apple's pad. But it does get quadruple the battery life.
Pish-posh. Only the truly rotten Apples would say anything like that.
I'd hope that their algorithm is heavily weighted towards accuracy versus speed. Given that Google seems to know what they're doing most of the time, the speed of a site is probably only important enough to move it up or down a few places within a page of search results. I can't remember the last time I had to click past the first page of a Google result, anyway. Of course, there's no way to tell just how much it matters, since they keep the inner workings of PageRank secret.
Well, I don't think it was unnecessary to tell us that. Women are known to bleed periodically.
Just the thought of it makes me wince...
If apps were "coded like console games"... *Every application would need to include device drivers for every piece of hardware on the system. For every system you want your app to run on. So that boils down to coding (or getting from the manufacturer) drivers for every computer device in existence. *There would be no multi-tasking. Let's say you are working on something in Microsoft Office. In order to look up something on Google real quick, you'd need to save your work, unload Office, load up Firefox, look up whatever you needed to, unload Firefox, re-load Office, and open your file back up. I could go on, but I don't feel like doing so in a reply to an AC. Simply put, there's a good reason that operating systems to exist. They act as an abstraction to the hardware, making development of applications *way* easier since you only have to code your program to interface with the APIs of an operating system, which in turn has drivers installed to work with whatever particular hardware is on a machine that you are trying to run your app on. I'm pretty sure all the game consoles developed in the past decade have their own pseudo-OS, to let Xbox Live etc. run concurrently with all the games. Or maybe they just have libraries for that stuff that they give to the developers to include in their games. Either way, it works because all PS2s/Xboxen/Wii are the same. That is not true of personal computers.
I am certain that the energy expended in mining and transporting that salt is orders of magnitude higher that what you could gain in doing that.
It would be easier and more cost-effective to just put a small amount of flash memory onto every motherboard. It could come pre-loaded with diagnostic tools, or if it didn't, you could just as easily add your own. Hell, maybe they could even just put a little SD card reader, so you could swap different cards in and out as you pleased.
So true. It was very sad for me to see Rio go under. I had a 20 GB Rio Karma and it was the best MP3 player I've had. It ended up dying after many, many falls onto concrete and stuff (disk drives tend not to like that). Coincidentally, I bought my Karma from Circuit City...
I didn't find the design of Oblivion to be "amazingly competent". It would be a lie to say that I didn't enjoy playing it (with re-balancing mods). But Morrowind was balanced so much better. And I suppose the Fallout games, though I've never played them. Which I probably should.
Your weather.com systray icon isn't cloud computing, because it only shows the temperature. If it could display the radar maps showing cloud cover, THAT would be true cloud computing.
"HIV/AIDS" is like "GNU/Linux". Simply unnecessary specificity.