"What does it do that I can't do with....." It locks you into a closed Microsoft system. From Microsft's point of view what could be better than that? Open Standards are very bad fo Microsoft's bussines model.
You have to rememebr bussines don't release product to help YOU, they might help you but that's only a byproduct
You need to diversify, Spread out, learn abut not-Microsoft stuff. The last thing you want to be is a the guy who was skilled at maintaining coal fires in steam locamotives. Being SO specialized makes you very volerable to shifts in "technology of the decade". Your emplyer has ZERO motazation to keep you up to date. It's easier to simply fire you and hire someone else.
What do you do what you are NOT being paid for your time? I hope it's
"messing with computers" because that's what you _like_ to do. If you
don't actually _like_ this stuff find something else that you do.
I got into
this field in the 8th grade, back in the early 1970's and now I get paid
for my hobby. (Yes I have other interrests but sailing, scuba, and photography didn't pay as well.)
The email server keeps a list of addresses it has SENT mail to. When email comes in from one of those addresses it is most likely not spam. Well, this works if you can be sure the from address is not faked. With more effort the email server could keep a list of to/from pairs that it sent and accept emails with the to/from reversed. I don't want to write a book here but the basic idea is called "White listing". The trick here is how to automatically build a white list as mail is sent.
"I mean, honestly, suppose Benjamin Franklin was around today. In his time, he was a learned man in many fields"
You picked a poor example with Franklin. The man was a writer and a publisher and he was smart. He'd write a book about what it's like to wake up after 200 years and it would be a run away best seller. Also what do you think people would pay to hear him speak?
A better example would have been "some average Joe Blacksmaith" from the late 1700's Some guy who went to shool for 'till he was about eight then dropped out of the 3rd grade, and never left his home town. Prety common backthen.
Anyone who is an artist, be it with paint, words or music could do well in any age.
"Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900(according to [theinquirer.net] market research firm iSuppli) to them. A markup of around 45% in a ultra-competitive market like PC hardware!"
What markup do you think Dell charges? I'm betting about the same.
Yes the $1300 iMac has $900 worth of parts inside. But they also have to
assemble the parts andthen do some quality control. Apple actually _tests_ their computers. And then they need to write the software. Programmers don't work in China. They live in California and make upper middle class salery. What does that cost? and they have to ship the iMacs from China and someone has to work in the store and take your order and answer the phone when you have a question. I'm actually quite impressed that they can do all of this on a 40% markup.
It's almost like when you go out to eat and pay $25 for dinner. You culd have bought all the parts (raw steak, raw potato,...) for about $6.00 so what is that a 400% markup
The test show two things:
1) Steve Jobs' comment about "the disks, bus and memory are not faster" was importent. Listen to the talk again carfully. He DOES say this clearly although not as many times nor as loudly as the "4X" number was said.
2) That it is hard to test a multi-CPU system. The tests that they ran were ran mostly on just one of the two CPUs. A better test of a multi-core system would be to run all the benchmarks at one, all eight or ten of them and publish the total wall-clock time from start to the time the last test finished. A multi-core system would then show it's advantage.
In the next couple years we will have eight-core systems available. Sun is already shiping 8-core SPARC chips, Intel will follow. With four or eight cores, relistic testing will be even harder and simple XCPU benchmarks even more meaningless.
But is this the way users use systems? Do they actually transcode video in the background while they surf the web and listen to iTunes all at once? I do this but I might be in the minority.
I worked on launch, didn't know it going to Pluto
on
Pluto Probe Launches
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Funny thing. I was working on the Atlas V av010 launch and up until last week I had not connected av010 with the New Horizons pluto mission. I read on CNN that "New Horizons" was on an Atlas at the cape waiting for launch. I figured that had to be "our" Atlas which was at the cape getting ready to be launched. I work with the telemetry from the Atlas V. I guess I'm like a truck driver. When you ask him what's he hauling he says "A trailor, what else?" Then you ask what's in the trailor and he says "a bunch of boxes I guess, I never look.". I guess if you'd ask one of the people who work on the science instruments on the payload about what was used to launch the spacecraft they say "A rocket of some kind I assume." and they wouldn't even know that the RD180 main engine on the Altas V 1st stage is made in Russia by NPO Energomash in Khimky.
I have to agree. The BIGEST group of Christians by far are the Roman Catholics There are almost three times more Roman Catholics in the world then there are people living in the USA. All of these Christians plus many more believe that that is and can be no conflict between religion and science. It's only a very few "ideot christians" that are making all the racket. They are a minority even within hier own group.
FOr the same reason history and mathmatics can never be inconflit. For example: No historic fact can ever invalidate the Prime Factorization Theorom.
It does not matter what gneral led what Greek Army in 512BC, each integer can still be represented as a unique set of prime factors. Most Christions sects
teach the that the same is true of science That Faith and Empirical Observation can not be in conflict.
Just think how bad it would be (for religio) if a conflict _could_
exist. Then, the possibility would exist of a controled experiment
that could test Faith. Most are NOT ideots and do NOT set up tier
rligion in such a way that it cam make testable predictions.
You know it's always been that way. First it was the Cotton 'Gin. Put a lot of hard working black slaves out of a job and then came the tractor and just one farmmer could plow a large field all be him self. ANd those ower looms killed an entire industry of weavers and spinning wheel operators. ANd thing of all the auoto worker who would have jobs if Henry Ford had not started is assembly line.
Seriously now. The per capita gross national product defines the average standard of living and this depends on productivity. Basically the more "stuff" each of us can make the more stuff we can each have. Cotton Gins and tractors help in the long run.
I like the part abouit "rich people need cops and civil servents." From my experiance poor people tend to use the service of cops and civil servent more. People with more money mostly just wish the government would go away
Don't want to spend $2k? That's reasonable not everyone has the cash. If you like Mac OSX but want to save some money Apple sells refubished Mac Minis. I bought one for $380. It works as advertized and carries the same warenty as new Apple computers. The G4 powered mini is fast enough for running the included iLife apps. And, this is the best part: Mac OSX comes with X11 and so it makes a perfect display for running Linux. I pulled the CRT and the Nvidia graphic card out of the Linux box and run from the Mac's display. One could do the same with Windows too. Keep the old PC and run VNC to export the old PC screen to the new Mac desktop.
Most people don't need such powerfull desktop. You are right. But some do. Try editing digitized film or even HD video. New and upcomming digital cineima cameras shoot images with the resolution and color depth of current digital SLR but at 24 frames per second. Things like color space conversion at 24fps is a huge computational task. Heck doing _anything_ with 4000x3000 pixel frames at 24 frames per second is a big task. Film editors really do want to be able to work in faster than real time. With current computers that means reduced resolution and skipping frames. Beleive me there is a large market for Mac OSX on Sunfire but you are right it would be a sily waste of money if all you used it for was web browsing and email.
People are buying Apple macs with quad core Power PC inside and loading them up with 16GB ram. Some buyer may be rich geeks but most are going to studios.
Yes they are different. A merger gains nothing if the two companies are the same except they get to fire some managers and save some money. You gain in a merger when each company has what the other needs.
Can you imagine how nice running Mac OSX on an eight core T2000 Sun box? The box has 8 CPU cores and each core can run four threads. Or if you don't like SPARC Sun will sell you a dual or quad Optreron system. And there are what Sun calls "low end" severs E25K.
On the other side, Sun's "desktop" is primitive at best. I know I'm typing this on a Solaris 10 system.
Replacing Darwin with "Open Solaris" would be a great move. Solaris really is the best OS Kernel on the planet bar none. And the what about Sun's ZFS file system and Dtrace. Sun's software is Open Source. Apple would not even have to buy it
Simply make a rule that any link submitted with a story must be "on topic".
In other words if you can trim off an introduction like "Hi my name is Bob I live in Canada and read/. every day here is a story you might like...." Why can't you trim off a link that adds nothing but "noise"? In other words aply a _uniform_ editorial rule for both text and links.
"But there are also those who believe as I do. Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?"
Exactly. In fact the largest group of Christian by far is the Roman Catholic Church. They teach that there can be no clonflict because science and theology do not address the same questions. SO your stament is the manstream viwpoint shared by many
The problem is that to many uneducated people Science _IS_ faith. They don't understand what science is. They think is is just a bunch of random stuff that scientist say that most be taken on faith. It's hard foe many of us to imagine someone being so dumb but then some large fraction of the population can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map of the world.
THe argument "Science can't explain how a bee flies so can it explain how people got here" works for many people (maybe the ones who can't find the Pacific?) But I'll bet a logically equivalent argument would not. "Science can not cure cancer so why should be beleive "Hook's Law"?" (Hook's law explains spings)
The argument is invalid because it confuses the word "science" with the concept it represents. So the argument "works" on people who fail to notice this.
People who are asking if the new Intel Macs can boot windows are not asking for enough.
Dual bootting is never a good option. What I want to to be able to run Mac OS and simply double click on a Window application icon and it "just works". In other words something like Wine for Mac or "Virtual PC" for Intel Mac or maybe even "VMWare Player" for the Intel Mac. Heck all three of these options may become available by the end of next year.
OSX can run OS9 apps. It should be able to handle Windows XP apps in a like manner. I'll bet some third party will make this happen. BTW I expect one would need a copy of Windows, just like the current Virtual PC does.
Currently, today, I can run QEMU on my Linux system and have Linux, Windows XP and the Power PC version of Apple's Darwin all runing onthe same desktop at the same time. I see no reason for this not to be possable on the Intel iMac I plan to buy ASAP.
Yes tape is better. I actually still have a few reels of computer data tape from the 1970's it's 1/2 inch tape recored at 6250BPI. It's on a 10 inch reel. Who really knows if thedata are still readable, I'd have to find 1/2 reel to reel tape drive to find out. In my collection I also haver an 8 inch floppy drive. These were common in the late 70's also. It holds 160MB of data. A what about the paper tape. Yes I still have some. It is 100% readable too at least by eye. I've not seen o used a teletype machine with paper tape reader in years. So, so much for media stability. That's not the issue the problem is the long term availability of readers
OK, here are my rules for keepping data...
1) To be safe three copies of the data must exist at all times
2) The data must exist at two or more diffent geographical locations
in case of fire, flood, Earthquake
3) Every few years you have to make another copy of the data on the
"best" meadia type that is in wide use.
I just finished copying stacks of old analog video tape to digital and
now I'm slowly doing rough edits (culling the crud) and saving the digial
files to DVD.
In the long run I expect that people will use incremental backups ofver the Internet to some on-line backup/archive provider will be the best option for most home users. Unless you shoot more than an hour of video per week even DSL is fast enough
No, digital photography is NOT simple and painless. All the parts are there but the physical effort involved to view, tag, correct and edit 500 images after a day or weekend of shooting is enough to make you want to put it off but you can't because the backlog of unprocessed digital image files just backs up. Programs like this do NOT compete with Photoshop or Gimp. PS and Gimp are _editors_ These new programs are "workflow" organizers. They help you sort through a big stack of photos, find the best ones and do simple types of image corrections, file the images and make a selection of the best images for a client to view. Of course you can do that job with Gimp but just try it with 500 images some day.
The work around you describe is the simplist one. There is software which will disable Apple's DRM too. Look for hymn or jhymn on Google. Also if you use Apple's iMovie to import a song from your iTunes library and then if you save it the song is unprotected.
One other tip: When you use ITunes to rip CDs there is a setting in iTunes where you get
to specify the file format. It's good to select "MP3" and choose a high bit rate Then your
ripped songs are more generally usable. I'm slowly riping a CD collection of about 1,000
Rock, Jazz and clasical CDs. Next come a few hundred vinyl LPs. The encoder in iTunes is
quite good. They did not write it they licensed it.
"can't listen to the 200+ songs I've purchased through I-Tunes because of his DRM practices" What??? Describe the problem you have in some detail. Me or others will tell you what to do about it. There should be no problem with either the purchaced songs or the ones you riped from CD both should play on almost any portable device.
"No, the reason so much software is buggy is economics. Proprietary software vendors have to compete against other proprietary software vendors."
No, that's not it either. Bugs happen because the people who buy the software do not demand bug free code. I do write software for a living. When the customer demends bug-free software he gets it.
I've been around the building bussines too. when I see por work there, say badly set tile, I don't blame the tile setter so much as the full ideot who paid the tilesetter after looking at his poor work.
This stuff is still important. Yes the big computers we have on our desks can do high precision floating point. but there are still some very small 4-bit and 8-bit micro controllers that controll battery chargers, control motors that move antenna on spacecraft and the control fins on air to air missles. And then there are those low-end DSP chips inside TV sets and digital cameras and camcorders.... These controllers need to do complex math using short integers and how round off errors accumulate still does matter. Remember: Not all software runs on PCs in fact _most_ software does not.
They did. Many of the 14 inch drives I remember using had lexan covers. 14 inch removable platters where the industry standard for many years in the 1970's and 80's. Specs where like 3600 RPM, 10MB to 200MB. Early drives used hydrualic head motors and later ones linear voice coils. Computers typically had a dozen or more of there devices the filled an area of a room. Smalled mini-computers would have maybe one 20MB drive. Each drive looking like a home type washing machine with clear or smoked platic lid to raised to access the platters. 14 head drives where not uncommon
Later when small 8 inch drives came out just before the PC era some did have plastic covers but I don't thing they where for sale, just used by the sales people toshow the drive off.
So yes they've had platic covers for as long as there have been disks.
So slowly C++ will become Ada? Are there really any substanive differences in Ada and C++0X other then using "{ }" vs. using "begin end" and simalar trivia?
Ada, BTW is still very much in use but that use is restrited to a small range of applications. mostly to applications where people will die if there is a software bug like airplane flight control, guidance systems for cruise missles, nuclear power plants and so on. Not many web browsers are written in Ada.
I think what kiled Ada for general use is a lack of a huge set of _standard_ libraries. C, C++ and Java and the other hand are populare because of thier libraries
Not really. People who lived near oceans could see ships and boats go over the horizon. As the ship comes in first you see it's top then as it gets closer you can see move of it. You only have to go 10 to 20 miles for this effect to happen. From the ship as you can in you can first see only to tops of the hills. I have a small sailboat and the Earth's cervature is easy to see in only a half day (four or five hours) under sail.
In Columbus' log he says that his intent is to find a new route to the East, there was no question that the world was round butthere was a hughe question of wetter a wind powered ship that cruises at four miles per hour could sail to China with with no maps or charts before eventhe sextent was invented.
Is performance realy an issue? If your database has less then about ten million rows and you are exapecting only a couple hundred transactions per hour almost anything would work. You need to define the scope of the project. How much code or how many kinds of interactive web pages. What's the volume. Do you have a budget? Wo will write the software and what do they have experiance using?
Anyone who hands out advice without knowing the answers to these questions, well... thier advice is worth maybe less than what you paid for it.
Slashdot Mirror
"What does it do that I can't do with....." It locks you into a closed Microsoft system. From Microsft's point of view what could be better than that? Open Standards are very bad fo Microsoft's bussines model. You have to rememebr bussines don't release product to help YOU, they might help you but that's only a byproduct
You need to diversify, Spread out, learn abut not-Microsoft stuff. The last thing you want to be is a the guy who was skilled at maintaining coal fires in steam locamotives. Being SO specialized makes you very volerable to shifts in "technology of the decade". Your emplyer has ZERO motazation to keep you up to date. It's easier to simply fire you and hire someone else. What do you do what you are NOT being paid for your time? I hope it's "messing with computers" because that's what you _like_ to do. If you don't actually _like_ this stuff find something else that you do. I got into this field in the 8th grade, back in the early 1970's and now I get paid for my hobby. (Yes I have other interrests but sailing, scuba, and photography didn't pay as well.)
The email server keeps a list of addresses it has SENT mail to. When email comes in from one of those addresses it is most likely not spam. Well, this works if you can be sure the from address is not faked. With more effort the email server could keep a list of to/from pairs that it sent and accept emails with the to/from reversed. I don't want to write a book here but the basic idea is called "White listing". The trick here is how to automatically build a white list as mail is sent.
You picked a poor example with Franklin. The man was a writer and a publisher and he was smart. He'd write a book about what it's like to wake up after 200 years and it would be a run away best seller. Also what do you think people would pay to hear him speak? A better example would have been "some average Joe Blacksmaith" from the late 1700's Some guy who went to shool for 'till he was about eight then dropped out of the 3rd grade, and never left his home town. Prety common backthen. Anyone who is an artist, be it with paint, words or music could do well in any age.
"Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900(according to [theinquirer.net] market research firm iSuppli) to them. A markup of around 45% in a ultra-competitive market like PC hardware!" What markup do you think Dell charges? I'm betting about the same. Yes the $1300 iMac has $900 worth of parts inside. But they also have to assemble the parts andthen do some quality control. Apple actually _tests_ their computers. And then they need to write the software. Programmers don't work in China. They live in California and make upper middle class salery. What does that cost? and they have to ship the iMacs from China and someone has to work in the store and take your order and answer the phone when you have a question. I'm actually quite impressed that they can do all of this on a 40% markup. It's almost like when you go out to eat and pay $25 for dinner. You culd have bought all the parts (raw steak, raw potato, ...) for about $6.00 so what is that a 400% markup
The test show two things: 1) Steve Jobs' comment about "the disks, bus and memory are not faster" was importent. Listen to the talk again carfully. He DOES say this clearly although not as many times nor as loudly as the "4X" number was said. 2) That it is hard to test a multi-CPU system. The tests that they ran were ran mostly on just one of the two CPUs. A better test of a multi-core system would be to run all the benchmarks at one, all eight or ten of them and publish the total wall-clock time from start to the time the last test finished. A multi-core system would then show it's advantage. In the next couple years we will have eight-core systems available. Sun is already shiping 8-core SPARC chips, Intel will follow. With four or eight cores, relistic testing will be even harder and simple XCPU benchmarks even more meaningless. But is this the way users use systems? Do they actually transcode video in the background while they surf the web and listen to iTunes all at once? I do this but I might be in the minority.
Funny thing. I was working on the Atlas V av010 launch and up until last week I had not connected av010 with the New Horizons pluto mission. I read on CNN that "New Horizons" was on an Atlas at the cape waiting for launch. I figured that had to be "our" Atlas which was at the cape getting ready to be launched. I work with the telemetry from the Atlas V. I guess I'm like a truck driver. When you ask him what's he hauling he says "A trailor, what else?" Then you ask what's in the trailor and he says "a bunch of boxes I guess, I never look.". I guess if you'd ask one of the people who work on the science instruments on the payload about what was used to launch the spacecraft they say "A rocket of some kind I assume." and they wouldn't even know that the RD180 main engine on the Altas V 1st stage is made in Russia by NPO Energomash in Khimky.
I have to agree. The BIGEST group of Christians by far are the Roman Catholics There are almost three times more Roman Catholics in the world then there are people living in the USA. All of these Christians plus many more believe that that is and can be no conflict between religion and science. It's only a very few "ideot christians" that are making all the racket. They are a minority even within hier own group. FOr the same reason history and mathmatics can never be inconflit. For example: No historic fact can ever invalidate the Prime Factorization Theorom. It does not matter what gneral led what Greek Army in 512BC, each integer can still be represented as a unique set of prime factors. Most Christions sects teach the that the same is true of science That Faith and Empirical Observation can not be in conflict. Just think how bad it would be (for religio) if a conflict _could_ exist. Then, the possibility would exist of a controled experiment that could test Faith. Most are NOT ideots and do NOT set up tier rligion in such a way that it cam make testable predictions.
You know it's always been that way. First it was the Cotton 'Gin. Put a lot of hard working black slaves out of a job and then came the tractor and just one farmmer could plow a large field all be him self. ANd those ower looms killed an entire industry of weavers and spinning wheel operators. ANd thing of all the auoto worker who would have jobs if Henry Ford had not started is assembly line. Seriously now. The per capita gross national product defines the average standard of living and this depends on productivity. Basically the more "stuff" each of us can make the more stuff we can each have. Cotton Gins and tractors help in the long run. I like the part abouit "rich people need cops and civil servents." From my experiance poor people tend to use the service of cops and civil servent more. People with more money mostly just wish the government would go away
Don't want to spend $2k? That's reasonable not everyone has the cash. If you like Mac OSX but want to save some money Apple sells refubished Mac Minis. I bought one for $380. It works as advertized and carries the same warenty as new Apple computers. The G4 powered mini is fast enough for running the included iLife apps. And, this is the best part: Mac OSX comes with X11 and so it makes a perfect display for running Linux. I pulled the CRT and the Nvidia graphic card out of the Linux box and run from the Mac's display. One could do the same with Windows too. Keep the old PC and run VNC to export the old PC screen to the new Mac desktop.
Most people don't need such powerfull desktop. You are right. But some do. Try editing digitized film or even HD video. New and upcomming digital cineima cameras shoot images with the resolution and color depth of current digital SLR but at 24 frames per second. Things like color space conversion at 24fps is a huge computational task. Heck doing _anything_ with 4000x3000 pixel frames at 24 frames per second is a big task. Film editors really do want to be able to work in faster than real time. With current computers that means reduced resolution and skipping frames. Beleive me there is a large market for Mac OSX on Sunfire but you are right it would be a sily waste of money if all you used it for was web browsing and email. People are buying Apple macs with quad core Power PC inside and loading them up with 16GB ram. Some buyer may be rich geeks but most are going to studios.
Yes they are different. A merger gains nothing if the two companies are the same except they get to fire some managers and save some money. You gain in a merger when each company has what the other needs. Can you imagine how nice running Mac OSX on an eight core T2000 Sun box? The box has 8 CPU cores and each core can run four threads. Or if you don't like SPARC Sun will sell you a dual or quad Optreron system. And there are what Sun calls "low end" severs E25K. On the other side, Sun's "desktop" is primitive at best. I know I'm typing this on a Solaris 10 system. Replacing Darwin with "Open Solaris" would be a great move. Solaris really is the best OS Kernel on the planet bar none. And the what about Sun's ZFS file system and Dtrace. Sun's software is Open Source. Apple would not even have to buy it
In other words if you can trim off an introduction like "Hi my name is Bob I live in Canada and read /. every day here is a story you might like...." Why can't you trim off a link that adds nothing but "noise"? In other words aply a _uniform_ editorial rule for both text and links.
"But there are also those who believe as I do. Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?" Exactly. In fact the largest group of Christian by far is the Roman Catholic Church. They teach that there can be no clonflict because science and theology do not address the same questions. SO your stament is the manstream viwpoint shared by many The problem is that to many uneducated people Science _IS_ faith. They don't understand what science is. They think is is just a bunch of random stuff that scientist say that most be taken on faith. It's hard foe many of us to imagine someone being so dumb but then some large fraction of the population can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map of the world. THe argument "Science can't explain how a bee flies so can it explain how people got here" works for many people (maybe the ones who can't find the Pacific?) But I'll bet a logically equivalent argument would not. "Science can not cure cancer so why should be beleive "Hook's Law"?" (Hook's law explains spings) The argument is invalid because it confuses the word "science" with the concept it represents. So the argument "works" on people who fail to notice this.
People who are asking if the new Intel Macs can boot windows are not asking for enough. Dual bootting is never a good option. What I want to to be able to run Mac OS and simply double click on a Window application icon and it "just works". In other words something like Wine for Mac or "Virtual PC" for Intel Mac or maybe even "VMWare Player" for the Intel Mac. Heck all three of these options may become available by the end of next year. OSX can run OS9 apps. It should be able to handle Windows XP apps in a like manner. I'll bet some third party will make this happen. BTW I expect one would need a copy of Windows, just like the current Virtual PC does. Currently, today, I can run QEMU on my Linux system and have Linux, Windows XP and the Power PC version of Apple's Darwin all runing onthe same desktop at the same time. I see no reason for this not to be possable on the Intel iMac I plan to buy ASAP.
Yes tape is better. I actually still have a few reels of computer data tape from the 1970's it's 1/2 inch tape recored at 6250BPI. It's on a 10 inch reel. Who really knows if thedata are still readable, I'd have to find 1/2 reel to reel tape drive to find out. In my collection I also haver an 8 inch floppy drive. These were common in the late 70's also. It holds 160MB of data. A what about the paper tape. Yes I still have some. It is 100% readable too at least by eye. I've not seen o used a teletype machine with paper tape reader in years. So, so much for media stability. That's not the issue the problem is the long term availability of readers OK, here are my rules for keepping data ...
1) To be safe three copies of the data must exist at all times
2) The data must exist at two or more diffent geographical locations
in case of fire, flood, Earthquake
3) Every few years you have to make another copy of the data on the
"best" meadia type that is in wide use.
I just finished copying stacks of old analog video tape to digital and
now I'm slowly doing rough edits (culling the crud) and saving the digial
files to DVD.
In the long run I expect that people will use incremental backups ofver the Internet to some on-line backup/archive provider will be the best option for most home users. Unless you shoot more than an hour of video per week even DSL is fast enough
No, digital photography is NOT simple and painless. All the parts are there but the physical effort involved to view, tag, correct and edit 500 images after a day or weekend of shooting is enough to make you want to put it off but you can't because the backlog of unprocessed digital image files just backs up. Programs like this do NOT compete with Photoshop or Gimp. PS and Gimp are _editors_ These new programs are "workflow" organizers. They help you sort through a big stack of photos, find the best ones and do simple types of image corrections, file the images and make a selection of the best images for a client to view. Of course you can do that job with Gimp but just try it with 500 images some day.
The work around you describe is the simplist one. There is software which will disable Apple's DRM too. Look for hymn or jhymn on Google. Also if you use Apple's iMovie to import a song from your iTunes library and then if you save it the song is unprotected. One other tip: When you use ITunes to rip CDs there is a setting in iTunes where you get to specify the file format. It's good to select "MP3" and choose a high bit rate Then your ripped songs are more generally usable. I'm slowly riping a CD collection of about 1,000 Rock, Jazz and clasical CDs. Next come a few hundred vinyl LPs. The encoder in iTunes is quite good. They did not write it they licensed it.
"can't listen to the 200+ songs I've purchased through I-Tunes because of his DRM practices" What??? Describe the problem you have in some detail. Me or others will tell you what to do about it. There should be no problem with either the purchaced songs or the ones you riped from CD both should play on almost any portable device.
No, that's not it either. Bugs happen because the people who buy the software do not demand bug free code. I do write software for a living. When the customer demends bug-free software he gets it.
I've been around the building bussines too. when I see por work there, say badly set tile, I don't blame the tile setter so much as the full ideot who paid the tilesetter after looking at his poor work.
This stuff is still important. Yes the big computers we have on our desks can do high precision floating point. but there are still some very small 4-bit and 8-bit micro controllers that controll battery chargers, control motors that move antenna on spacecraft and the control fins on air to air missles. And then there are those low-end DSP chips inside TV sets and digital cameras and camcorders.... These controllers need to do complex math using short integers and how round off errors accumulate still does matter. Remember: Not all software runs on PCs in fact _most_ software does not.
They did. Many of the 14 inch drives I remember using had lexan covers. 14 inch removable platters where the industry standard for many years in the 1970's and 80's. Specs where like 3600 RPM, 10MB to 200MB. Early drives used hydrualic head motors and later ones linear voice coils. Computers typically had a dozen or more of there devices the filled an area of a room. Smalled mini-computers would have maybe one 20MB drive. Each drive looking like a home type washing machine with clear or smoked platic lid to raised to access the platters. 14 head drives where not uncommon Later when small 8 inch drives came out just before the PC era some did have plastic covers but I don't thing they where for sale, just used by the sales people toshow the drive off. So yes they've had platic covers for as long as there have been disks.
So slowly C++ will become Ada? Are there really any substanive differences in Ada and C++0X other then using "{ }" vs. using "begin end" and simalar trivia? Ada, BTW is still very much in use but that use is restrited to a small range of applications. mostly to applications where people will die if there is a software bug like airplane flight control, guidance systems for cruise missles, nuclear power plants and so on. Not many web browsers are written in Ada. I think what kiled Ada for general use is a lack of a huge set of _standard_ libraries. C, C++ and Java and the other hand are populare because of thier libraries
In Columbus' log he says that his intent is to find a new route to the East, there was no question that the world was round butthere was a hughe question of wetter a wind powered ship that cruises at four miles per hour could sail to China with with no maps or charts before eventhe sextent was invented.
Is performance realy an issue? If your database has less then about ten million rows and you are exapecting only a couple hundred transactions per hour almost anything would work. You need to define the scope of the project. How much code or how many kinds of interactive web pages. What's the volume. Do you have a budget? Wo will write the software and what do they have experiance using? Anyone who hands out advice without knowing the answers to these questions, well... thier advice is worth maybe less than what you paid for it.