Because of this, Zune songs will actually be *more expensive* than songs from iTMS, because in order to buy just one, someone has to spend a full dollar. One of those points will go unused, sure, but what can you do with one point? Until you spend $79, you won't ever have actually paid $0.9875 for anything. With Apple, at least when you buy a song they only charge you for the price of the song.
I wonder how they plan to shield inflatable modules from radiation outside the atmosphere. "Inflatable" conjures up images of centimeter-thin latex in my mind, like a giant beach ball.
-Why do we need this? We have KDE/GNOME/CDE/lots of M$ look-a-likes already! -Why use a fast WM if my apps slow down? -It's really not that pretty. Compiz+XGL looks better.
Honestly, I think most of you simply missed the point. I've been using Crystal on my workstation for two years, and it's not a slow machine by anyone's standard. After about a year with KDE and another with GNOME, I realized that I just don't like the generic "windozey" look that most environments have. I've never liked the idea of a taskbar the way it's implemented, for example. I can remember having 8 windows of the same application open on a 1024x768 screen, and in the taskbar, I could never tell which was which because the names didn't fit in the buttons anymore.
FVWM (and Crystal by proxy) has allowed me to taylor my environment to exactly the way I use my machine, and because there's nothing particularly heavy about it in terms of system requirements, I can take my config with me to any other machine with FVWM. On my desktop and laptop, I start gnome-session in order to preload the libraries needed for gaim, firefox, gimp, et al., but I never had a problem with GNOME itself, only its assumptions about how I want to use my machine. Therefore, on a recent machine where using something lightweight isn't a strict necessity, Crystal is just as fast as GNOME.
To address the third point: XGL+Compiz are much prettier, yes, but they also require much more in terms of power just to draw your desktop. I'm not much a fan of "expensive" eye candy. Compositing is nice, and can definitely help productivity and even speed up the desktop's apparent latency, but wobbly windows? Eye candy is nice, but I prefer functionality if I have to choose. Crystal, by default, opens a terminal when I right-click the desktop, and I know exactly where to look in the config to change that. It simply can't be done with compiz, metacity, or kwin. As for real transparency, xcompmgr is good enough to run in the background for compositing, so I've solved that problem for my terminals, anyway.
It's really just about flexibility. FVWM-Crystal allows me to use my machines the way I want to and fix little problems that irk me about the environment, while at the same time being quite visually impressive compared to a stock GNOME/KDE/M$ setup.
Free from, err... what, again? Most loss of freedom comes about from government intrusion into private affairs. Thanks to our military, that could never happen in this country, right?
Sorry, no offense intended. I just can't stand the way people insist that the military is upholding "freedom" and "liberty" for those of us at home by fighting a war overseas in a country that has nothing to do with my freedom, while at the same time we keep hearing about government data mining and domestic spying on citizens.
If I hadn't posted already, I'd mod you insightful.
I agree with you about government control; I'm certainly not insinuating that I believe there should be more of it with my previous comment. These sorts of issues always come down to personal freedom, and while I believe the government should be permissive with harsh punishments for doing harm to another, I realize that I wouldn't be very happy to have been hurt by something that could have been prevented.
The problem is, people are in general very bad at deciding for themselves whether they're capable of doing something safely. To make matters worse, they tend to err on the side of recklessness.
"Real world" certainly seems to be relative to me. For those who do research, their work is as real as that coveted deskjob is to a corporate whore. Educational institutions and labs play as big a role in shaping the future of the world as some company like MS does, even if they're not as visible to the average Bill Businessman.
I'm a student in high energy physics and the sysadmin for our machines. Our entire research group at my university uses Linux exclusively for our servers and our desktops, aside from my advisor who's in love with Apple. When Linux newbies join our group, within a few months they've decided to install it on their laptops because for what we do, it's clearly superior.
Linux is no longer simply the domain of CS students and hobbyists. Anyone who suggests otherwise is avoiding the truth. It may not be ready for "mainstream" desktop use, but for specialists in many fields, it's the best choice. I can't imagine trying to do my work on a Windows box; we use Linux because it's free, it's powerful, and it works. There's also usually a hobbyist in groups like ours who can admin the machines, and in my experience, a Linux cluster takes a lot less work to keep running than a bunch of Windows machines.
Fermilab even hosts its own distribution called Fermi Linux. It's Red Hat Enterprise with some changes, essentially.
In my opinion, Linux doesn't have to overtake MS or Apple to accomplish something in the world. Market share is silly to talk about with free software because the word "market" means something completely different. I don't care if Joe User runs Linux; I just care that I can. Joe User can't contribute anything back, so he's really almost irrelevant from a point of view that ignores marketspeak. If I can run Linux myself, then so can others, and there are enough like-minded people in the world who will help me write software for it and give it away for free. Therefore, if Linux so much as exists, it has accomplished quite a bit.
IIRC, Best Buy is one of the stores attempting to sell consumer stereo components by hyping the speakers and ignoring the importance of a proper amp and cabling. I don't follow.
I write from experience when I say that speakers are not nearly as important to good sound as salesmen in particular tend to pretend they are. I had an audiophile physics professor a couple of years ago who demonstrated that fact to me with two $12 speakers, some good cables (you know, the kind Best Buy won't sell), and a $300 amp with a few caps bigger than my fist added to it. The sound was amazing; I didn't believe this guy when he told me that those speakers could ever sound the way they did until I heard the result for myself.
I like your idea, but I'm a linux user, so DRM = unplayable until someone cracks it. I'd been hoping to see solid state media become more popular for a long time, but after a bad experience with a SD card mp3 player and mandatory DRM that wasn't mentioned on the box, I'm not too eager to see familiar old CDs and DVDs go away any time soon.
In fact, cables are more important than speakers. Shitty speakers can sound amazing with good cables and a modified amp with a couple of huge capacitors added. The emphasis on speakers as somehow the most important component of a system is quite wrong.
I agree. If I understand things correctly, in order to get any sort of real benefit from either of the new HD media, one also requires a HDTV, and a Hollywood-friendly, DRM-infected one at that. I don't have one, and I hardly have money to feed my computer addiction, so I won't be making a purchase like that until they're either cheaper than normal TVs or all I can get. I'm also quite happy with my DVDs and have no desire to re-purchase them all.
I suspect many people will only buy into the HD-craze when prices match DVD or DVD starts to disappear. Hollywood can't stand to lose a dime of profit, so I doubt the latter will happen anytime soon while people are still willing to purchase them.
Odd. We're having a very cool summer where I live, compared to the last few years. If anything, I would've labeled last year "the hottest year since XXXX."
No, they'd mandate that women do corporate America's laundry. Oh, and blacks, hispanics, and non-Christians have to do their laundry by hand. Wearing day-old clothes will subsequently be made illegal under some churchy morality law.
I was waiting for someone to comment to that effect. Actually, I'm one of the few who says it "the wrong way": "Jobs company" instead of "Jobses company." Then again, I tend to always write "Jobs'."
More seriously, I wonder what sort of restrictions Hollywood will talk him into placing on movies. You're allowed to watch it once, and you can only burn it as a VCD (to plug the "analog hole" they keep whining about)?
You make a very good point. Copyright is supposed to be temporary, and although Big Entertainment seems to feel otherwise, it's certainly easier for them to convince Congress to pass "anti-piracy" laws that close off the means of making copies legally than to get a perpetual copyright bill passed. They can make their arguments under the guise of the protectors of creativity by pushing DRM, but perpetual copyright seems a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
I searched this page for the word "douche" after reading the tags, hoping that somebody had commented about them./. tags are so much more fun than most places.
Irrelevant. The United States is currently not participating in any war of such enormous scale that the use of nuclear weapons could ever be a good idea.
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped for fairly good reason. This can be debated, because Japan was in shambles at this point, but you're right -- it ended the war. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, on the other hand, was entirely unnecessary. It served only to show off to Russia, since Japan had already decided to surrender.
My point is that nuclear weapons may have had their place in history, but now they serve only as an intimidation device. They're no longer a mysterious unknown, so nobody can claim ignorance after using one. The bombs dropped in 1945 pale in comparison to most of the monsters in the current arsenal. What about that is okay? Is it necessary for the US to possess so much destructive power?
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Because of this, Zune songs will actually be *more expensive* than songs from iTMS, because in order to buy just one, someone has to spend a full dollar. One of those points will go unused, sure, but what can you do with one point? Until you spend $79, you won't ever have actually paid $0.9875 for anything. With Apple, at least when you buy a song they only charge you for the price of the song.
Very sneaky of them.
I wonder how they plan to shield inflatable modules from radiation outside the atmosphere. "Inflatable" conjures up images of centimeter-thin latex in my mind, like a giant beach ball.
Happy birthday! :)
Of the comments I've read, I see a few trends:
-Why do we need this? We have KDE/GNOME/CDE/lots of M$ look-a-likes already!
-Why use a fast WM if my apps slow down?
-It's really not that pretty. Compiz+XGL looks better.
Honestly, I think most of you simply missed the point. I've been using Crystal on my workstation for two years, and it's not a slow machine by anyone's standard. After about a year with KDE and another with GNOME, I realized that I just don't like the generic "windozey" look that most environments have. I've never liked the idea of a taskbar the way it's implemented, for example. I can remember having 8 windows of the same application open on a 1024x768 screen, and in the taskbar, I could never tell which was which because the names didn't fit in the buttons anymore.
FVWM (and Crystal by proxy) has allowed me to taylor my environment to exactly the way I use my machine, and because there's nothing particularly heavy about it in terms of system requirements, I can take my config with me to any other machine with FVWM. On my desktop and laptop, I start gnome-session in order to preload the libraries needed for gaim, firefox, gimp, et al., but I never had a problem with GNOME itself, only its assumptions about how I want to use my machine. Therefore, on a recent machine where using something lightweight isn't a strict necessity, Crystal is just as fast as GNOME.
To address the third point: XGL+Compiz are much prettier, yes, but they also require much more in terms of power just to draw your desktop. I'm not much a fan of "expensive" eye candy. Compositing is nice, and can definitely help productivity and even speed up the desktop's apparent latency, but wobbly windows? Eye candy is nice, but I prefer functionality if I have to choose. Crystal, by default, opens a terminal when I right-click the desktop, and I know exactly where to look in the config to change that. It simply can't be done with compiz, metacity, or kwin. As for real transparency, xcompmgr is good enough to run in the background for compositing, so I've solved that problem for my terminals, anyway.
It's really just about flexibility. FVWM-Crystal allows me to use my machines the way I want to and fix little problems that irk me about the environment, while at the same time being quite visually impressive compared to a stock GNOME/KDE/M$ setup.
Bicycling is also safer than "Living," and by quite a significant margin. Hmm. Perhaps that's the health benefit you mentioned?
I did. This is ./ after all, so it seemed the right thing to say at the time. :)
Does it run Linux?
Free from, err... what, again? Most loss of freedom comes about from government intrusion into private affairs. Thanks to our military, that could never happen in this country, right?
Sorry, no offense intended. I just can't stand the way people insist that the military is upholding "freedom" and "liberty" for those of us at home by fighting a war overseas in a country that has nothing to do with my freedom, while at the same time we keep hearing about government data mining and domestic spying on citizens.
If I hadn't posted already, I'd mod you insightful.
I agree with you about government control; I'm certainly not insinuating that I believe there should be more of it with my previous comment. These sorts of issues always come down to personal freedom, and while I believe the government should be permissive with harsh punishments for doing harm to another, I realize that I wouldn't be very happy to have been hurt by something that could have been prevented.
It's a tough topic.
The problem is, people are in general very bad at deciding for themselves whether they're capable of doing something safely. To make matters worse, they tend to err on the side of recklessness.
"Real world" certainly seems to be relative to me. For those who do research, their work is as real as that coveted deskjob is to a corporate whore. Educational institutions and labs play as big a role in shaping the future of the world as some company like MS does, even if they're not as visible to the average Bill Businessman.
I'm a student in high energy physics and the sysadmin for our machines. Our entire research group at my university uses Linux exclusively for our servers and our desktops, aside from my advisor who's in love with Apple. When Linux newbies join our group, within a few months they've decided to install it on their laptops because for what we do, it's clearly superior.
Linux is no longer simply the domain of CS students and hobbyists. Anyone who suggests otherwise is avoiding the truth. It may not be ready for "mainstream" desktop use, but for specialists in many fields, it's the best choice. I can't imagine trying to do my work on a Windows box; we use Linux because it's free, it's powerful, and it works. There's also usually a hobbyist in groups like ours who can admin the machines, and in my experience, a Linux cluster takes a lot less work to keep running than a bunch of Windows machines.
Fermilab even hosts its own distribution called Fermi Linux. It's Red Hat Enterprise with some changes, essentially.
In my opinion, Linux doesn't have to overtake MS or Apple to accomplish something in the world. Market share is silly to talk about with free software because the word "market" means something completely different. I don't care if Joe User runs Linux; I just care that I can. Joe User can't contribute anything back, so he's really almost irrelevant from a point of view that ignores marketspeak. If I can run Linux myself, then so can others, and there are enough like-minded people in the world who will help me write software for it and give it away for free. Therefore, if Linux so much as exists, it has accomplished quite a bit.
IIRC, Best Buy is one of the stores attempting to sell consumer stereo components by hyping the speakers and ignoring the importance of a proper amp and cabling. I don't follow.
I write from experience when I say that speakers are not nearly as important to good sound as salesmen in particular tend to pretend they are. I had an audiophile physics professor a couple of years ago who demonstrated that fact to me with two $12 speakers, some good cables (you know, the kind Best Buy won't sell), and a $300 amp with a few caps bigger than my fist added to it. The sound was amazing; I didn't believe this guy when he told me that those speakers could ever sound the way they did until I heard the result for myself.
I like your idea, but I'm a linux user, so DRM = unplayable until someone cracks it. I'd been hoping to see solid state media become more popular for a long time, but after a bad experience with a SD card mp3 player and mandatory DRM that wasn't mentioned on the box, I'm not too eager to see familiar old CDs and DVDs go away any time soon.
In fact, cables are more important than speakers. Shitty speakers can sound amazing with good cables and a modified amp with a couple of huge capacitors added. The emphasis on speakers as somehow the most important component of a system is quite wrong.
I agree. If I understand things correctly, in order to get any sort of real benefit from either of the new HD media, one also requires a HDTV, and a Hollywood-friendly, DRM-infected one at that. I don't have one, and I hardly have money to feed my computer addiction, so I won't be making a purchase like that until they're either cheaper than normal TVs or all I can get. I'm also quite happy with my DVDs and have no desire to re-purchase them all.
I suspect many people will only buy into the HD-craze when prices match DVD or DVD starts to disappear. Hollywood can't stand to lose a dime of profit, so I doubt the latter will happen anytime soon while people are still willing to purchase them.
This isn't a troll. If I had mod points, I'd mod the parent post insightful.
Odd. We're having a very cool summer where I live, compared to the last few years. If anything, I would've labeled last year "the hottest year since XXXX."
No, they'd mandate that women do corporate America's laundry. Oh, and blacks, hispanics, and non-Christians have to do their laundry by hand. Wearing day-old clothes will subsequently be made illegal under some churchy morality law.
I was waiting for someone to comment to that effect. Actually, I'm one of the few who says it "the wrong way": "Jobs company" instead of "Jobses company." Then again, I tend to always write "Jobs'."
"Reasonable DRM?" What's that?
More seriously, I wonder what sort of restrictions Hollywood will talk him into placing on movies. You're allowed to watch it once, and you can only burn it as a VCD (to plug the "analog hole" they keep whining about)?
You make a very good point. Copyright is supposed to be temporary, and although Big Entertainment seems to feel otherwise, it's certainly easier for them to convince Congress to pass "anti-piracy" laws that close off the means of making copies legally than to get a perpetual copyright bill passed. They can make their arguments under the guise of the protectors of creativity by pushing DRM, but perpetual copyright seems a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
I searched this page for the word "douche" after reading the tags, hoping that somebody had commented about them. /. tags are so much more fun than most places.
Unless we build them out of explosion-proof Unobtainium, and I hear that stuff is in short supply. Oh, you've just made my night! :)
Irrelevant. The United States is currently not participating in any war of such enormous scale that the use of nuclear weapons could ever be a good idea.
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped for fairly good reason. This can be debated, because Japan was in shambles at this point, but you're right -- it ended the war. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, on the other hand, was entirely unnecessary. It served only to show off to Russia, since Japan had already decided to surrender.
My point is that nuclear weapons may have had their place in history, but now they serve only as an intimidation device. They're no longer a mysterious unknown, so nobody can claim ignorance after using one. The bombs dropped in 1945 pale in comparison to most of the monsters in the current arsenal. What about that is okay? Is it necessary for the US to possess so much destructive power?