I think Apple's hope was that other UNIX-ish systems might like the launchd concept and replace init with it, but I'm not sure that the faster boot times will really be worth the retraining costs for systems that aren't booted up often.
One big advantage to launchd, especially as far as improving boot time, is that it can launch services in parallel.
I'm not sure about other distros, but I know gentoo has Initng and runit, both of which can start services in parallel to improve boot time.
In the past Microsoft have commented that they have completely ditched the code Windows was written with and re-written from ground up, to try to address myriad flaws. That's pretty drastic. I've done it with small projects which simply grew too large and unwieldy because they were never expected to scale to newer demands* Microsoft is effectively doing this with Vista and yet... there still appear to be security flaws. Something wrong with that picture.
If you really wanted to give the whole picture, you'd mention that the code that was "rewritten from the ground up" was when they updated Vista to use the Windows Server 2003 code. You could call that porting updates from the server edition to the consumer edition, if you wanted to be totally honest. And that strategy worked pretty darn well for XP.
The catch is this : I don't see what role google can have in this. They might be able to develop the technology for delivering the video cheaply and reliably using google OS and commodity PC hardware, like the rest of their systems work. This would make the back end at the cable and telecom tv providers cheaper. They could also develop the mechanism for choosing commercials ('searches' based on a users demographics) and evaluating success.
Google would be doing the latter: helping advertisers choose the best time to air their commercial.
Google's forte is not delivering broadcast-quality video, and it's definitely not making commercials. Google is best at sifting through content and demographics and effectively targeting ads. So that will probably be their only role in TV advertising.
> the outcome will also be decided by which one can show porn the best.
That just isn't so. The super-high-end TV market is driven by the sports fanatics. For every one wall-sized unit sold to a movie nut, ten are sold to (American) football nuts.
Bah, that's just because all the football nuts saw some titties at the Superbowl.
I looked at lots and lots of TVs, and I switched them in the stores to standard def broadcasts instead of leaving them on the hi-def channel the retailer wanted to show. Of course standard def content looks worse on a big-screen TV than on a small TV, but the static and artifact pixels were far more visible with LCD than with plasma.
If they looked about the same with HDTV, yet plasma looked better with SDTV, it sounds like it's not because of the display technology. The plasma probably had a better scaler, or better noise reduction filters.
Writely has been available for almost a year. The only news is that they've finished sending invitations to the waiting list and reopened public registration.
As someone who makes money from using open source products in web design, as well as putting creative effort into those products without getting paid for it, I don't have much compassion for "artists" who feel they are being wronged.
That unpaid creative effort put into open source products (content) is repaid by my ability to provide better web design (services). So how does that relate to the model of producing music?
Well, the musician's content is the music. Their service isn't distributing music (that's not even their forte). Their service is performing music. They could look at free distribution and advertising of their music as a good thing, much like open source, allowing them to better provide the service of performing music (shows).
Just imagine for a moment if you spent $1000 in the studio, and next to nothing on distribution, yet every person in the US had a copy. You could play shows at $50/hour every day of the week. You could do what many musicians would love to do: quit your day job.
Incidentally, I wonder how many musicians pirate software, or even use free open source software. That would be a little hypocritical to value your content so much, yet not paying the software developers for theirs, wouldn't it? Yet I bet it happens all the time.
The real kicker? They're replacing all the PCs in the campus labs with ones without floppy drives. So even those poor kids with only a few hundred KB of data will have to use a flash drive, and us student assistants will have to support them.
What's so hard about opening Gmail and emailing yourself?
2.7 GB of space accessible from anywhere. Nothing to lose, drop, break. A couple hundred KB would be almost instant to email on a college network.
How is Theora more open than the MPEG-4 container? Are you referring to patents, DRM, or something else?
As far as I know, there are several tools (Quicktime, Nero, mp4box, etc.) for encoding into an mp4 container. What would make Theora preferable to that?
Now the only direct grievance I have with them is them illegimately trying to claim to represnet all musicians, lying through their teeth when claiming to care about said musicians (as is evidenced by their contracts), and the money they make off first stated claim (like a % of blank CD sales in some countries, etc)
Under the AHRA, royalties collected by the Copyright Office on digital recording devices and digital recording media are divided into two separate funds, the Musical Works Fund and the Sound Recordings Fund. One third of the royalties goes to the Musical Works Fund, which splits its cut 50/50 between writers (distributed by ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC) and music publishers (distributed by Harry Fox). These parties receive royalties according to the extent to which their recordings were distributed or broadcast.
The remaining two thirds of the royalties are placed in the Sound Recordings Fund. Four percent of these funds are taken off the top for nonfeatured musicians and vocalists (distributed by AFM and AFTRA), what remains is split 60/40 between two sets of "interested copyright parties." Interested copyright parties, a heretofore unknown category in copyright law, is defined by the act as featured artists(40%), and the owners of the right to reproduce sound recordings (60%). These parties receive royalties through the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies according to the extent to which their recordings were distributed.
The inclusion of this last group, reproduction rights holders, is unprecedented in copyright law. ALmost thirty-nine percent of the royalties collected under the AHRA go not to songwriters and musicians, but to the record labels who own the right to copy and distribute their recordings. The justification for this cross subsidy is that the copying enabled by the digital technology is a loss of profits for the recording industry, and that they should be compensated for this loss.
(I didn't realize they collected royalties on blank media in the US until a recent Slashdot article got me researching it)
But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.
They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.
He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.
"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.
And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.
Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years. One official conceded that these pre-Gulf War weapons did not pose a threat to the U.S. military before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were not maintained or part of any organized program run by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
There is no evidence that insurgents have found the chemical munitions. But one official said that insurgents have improvised conventional weapons, so they could apply similar creativity with the vintage weapons.
1. These weapons were no longer lethal. 2. These weapons were not maintained by Saddam Hussein. 3. These weapons have not been discovered by Iraqi insurgents.
Early indications suggest that two chemical components in the shell, which are designed to combine and create sarin during flight, did not mix properly or completely upon detonation, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Kimmitt, however, said a small amount of the nerve agent was released
Field-test results could be in error Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and more analysis needed to be done. "We have to be careful," he told an audience in Washington Monday afternoon.
Rumsfeld said it may take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was.
Two former weapons inspectors -- Hans Blix and David Kay -- said the shell was likely a stray weapon that had been scavenged by militants and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles of such weapons.
Kimmitt said he believed that insurgents who planted the explosive didn't know it contained the nerve agent.
Everything after that is speculation about "What if there's more WMDs?!?", based on the premise that it actually was Sarin gas. It would be interesting to know whether it turned out to be Sarin or not, but that article sure doesn't say for certain.
Also note that even if it was Sarin, the analyst in the video with that article said it was from the Iran-Iraq war. Blix said it was scavenged by insurgents, who likely had it stored away for over 2 decades, and also, the analysts said the insurgents likely didn't even know they had a Sarin-loaded weapon.
Not trying to burn Digg, but every time I've had any discussions there, I always assumed I was talking to HS kids. The mental picture I have of every poster there is some under-16 Apple/Xbox 360 fanboy or Linux/Windows newbie. If there are more mature people there, I haven't been able to tell from their posts.
The mod system is pretty sad there too. If you post in a topic about Apple, XBox, or any other popular "community", and your post is even neutral (not fanboyish), it will be modded down instantly. That's probably why/. limits the number of mod points that are given out, so people don't just mod everything until there's a picture perfect promotion of a popular product.
Here's an idea: instead of constantly attacking me, how about you tell me WHAT YOU'RE DOING, and WHAT YOUR OPINION IS.
Cause right now, I think you just judge others without paying any real attention to them. The "I'm right, and you're wrong" type.
So far, you don't haven't expressed a coherent opinion on this topic in any of your posts. To be honest, you're so hostile and convoluted that I'm tired of reading it.
Do you really believe there's any rational people out there who WANT war?
Absolutely. A large portion of the "military-industrial complex", as Eisenhower put it so well, wants war. As do investors in those companies. There is a lot of money to be made in times of war, as is happening right now with the current conflicts.
The RIAA is not a record company, but they are a representative of the major record companies. That's the entity that I'm treating them as. So when I say I don't buy RIAA, it means I don't buy very much music from the major record labels. If you realize that the radio stations operate on payola funneled through independent "record promoters", you know that their entire lineup is fixed by the major record companies. So is MTV.
So if you want to avoid giving money to the RIAA, you have to give up making music purchases based on what you hear on the radio and MTV. I used to buy all major label stuff, as recently as 3 years ago. Then I downloaded everything for a while. Now I do neither, and just buy an album when I know I'll like the whole thing. It's usually an independent or local band anyway, so the RIAA gets zero from that. I'm far less interested in the greedy, completely out-of-control, disgusting music industry, and spend far more time with other media.
So explain to me again how I'm a "tool" for the record industry?
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do. The Slashdot editor who posted this submission is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. The Slashbot who submitted the article is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. You... quite honestly, the RIAA doesn't give a crap whether you think they're greedy or not, but they are glad you're commenting on the case, and they are very glad you're suggesting they're ruthless.
It's a matter of getting the right publicity. When you're trying to stop ordinary people from doing something that hurts you, and you've reached a point that you have no options left but to create penalties for doing it, the wrong publicity is the right publicity.
Did you forget that their primary business is selling music? It's not to prevent me and you from committing a crime. If the publicity that they acheive from this lawsuit is bad enough to make Joe Downloader never want to give them money again, they hurt their primary business by focusing too much on their...erm...secondary business.
Of course, that's assuming people are smart enough not to buy from businesses they don't support. But maybe that's giving them too much credit.
The load time and UI responsiveness is so poor in Sony Vegas. I'd rather use any other product besides that bloated POS, personally. It also inserted something in the codec registry that causes an error everytime I load up certain files with ffdshow, saying I need to login as Administrator to register a codec I'm not even using. Nice DRM Sony. Too bad it breaks other products.
As other posters have said, DVD Shrink requires an external CSS decrypter, such as DVD Decrypter, DVD43, or AnyDVD. It's the exact same scenario as Nero Recode.
Also, quality-wise, I think a lot of Slashdotters need to give Recode more credit.
This was just mentioned in the article about WWDC. Apple gained something like 1/4 of 1% (0.0025%) in a quarter recently. That was after consistently losing marketshare for the years prior. Overall, including that quarter, they've still lost marketshare if you look at any period bigger than 3 months.
Slashdot Mirror
One big advantage to launchd, especially as far as improving boot time, is that it can launch services in parallel.
I'm not sure about other distros, but I know gentoo has Initng and runit, both of which can start services in parallel to improve boot time.
If you really wanted to give the whole picture, you'd mention that the code that was "rewritten from the ground up" was when they updated Vista to use the Windows Server 2003 code. You could call that porting updates from the server edition to the consumer edition, if you wanted to be totally honest. And that strategy worked pretty darn well for XP.
I assume you use CD Baby, since it says 91% in their Sell your CD section. It's a good deal. A friend's band uses them.
Of course, it's really only about 50% or so after Apple's cut, but still good.
Google would be doing the latter: helping advertisers choose the best time to air their commercial.
Google's forte is not delivering broadcast-quality video, and it's definitely not making commercials. Google is best at sifting through content and demographics and effectively targeting ads. So that will probably be their only role in TV advertising.
Bah, that's just because all the football nuts saw some titties at the Superbowl.
Are you serious? They actually stretch the 4:3 signal to 16:9? Wow, just wow. That puts the whole HDTV craze in a whole new light.
If they looked about the same with HDTV, yet plasma looked better with SDTV, it sounds like it's not because of the display technology. The plasma probably had a better scaler, or better noise reduction filters.
Writely has been available for almost a year. The only news is that they've finished sending invitations to the waiting list and reopened public registration.
As someone who makes money from using open source products in web design, as well as putting creative effort into those products without getting paid for it, I don't have much compassion for "artists" who feel they are being wronged.
That unpaid creative effort put into open source products (content) is repaid by my ability to provide better web design (services). So how does that relate to the model of producing music?
Well, the musician's content is the music. Their service isn't distributing music (that's not even their forte). Their service is performing music. They could look at free distribution and advertising of their music as a good thing, much like open source, allowing them to better provide the service of performing music (shows).
Just imagine for a moment if you spent $1000 in the studio, and next to nothing on distribution, yet every person in the US had a copy. You could play shows at $50/hour every day of the week. You could do what many musicians would love to do: quit your day job.
Incidentally, I wonder how many musicians pirate software, or even use free open source software. That would be a little hypocritical to value your content so much, yet not paying the software developers for theirs, wouldn't it? Yet I bet it happens all the time.
What's so hard about opening Gmail and emailing yourself?
2.7 GB of space accessible from anywhere. Nothing to lose, drop, break. A couple hundred KB would be almost instant to email on a college network.
You can also watch the Outfoxed interviews on Google Video.
They're unedited, but they were licensed with CC-Sampling+, so I thought they were worth uploading.
How is Theora more open than the MPEG-4 container? Are you referring to patents, DRM, or something else?
As far as I know, there are several tools (Quicktime, Nero, mp4box, etc.) for encoding into an mp4 container. What would make Theora preferable to that?
You mean like the USA?
(I didn't realize they collected royalties on blank media in the US until a recent Slashdot article got me researching it)
1. These weapons were no longer lethal.
2. These weapons were not maintained by Saddam Hussein.
3. These weapons have not been discovered by Iraqi insurgents.
Everything after that is speculation about "What if there's more WMDs?!?", based on the premise that it actually was Sarin gas. It would be interesting to know whether it turned out to be Sarin or not, but that article sure doesn't say for certain.
Also note that even if it was Sarin, the analyst in the video with that article said it was from the Iran-Iraq war. Blix said it was scavenged by insurgents, who likely had it stored away for over 2 decades, and also, the analysts said the insurgents likely didn't even know they had a Sarin-loaded weapon.
...until he comes up with a link...or any proof of his claims at all...
Not trying to burn Digg, but every time I've had any discussions there, I always assumed I was talking to HS kids. The mental picture I have of every poster there is some under-16 Apple/Xbox 360 fanboy or Linux/Windows newbie. If there are more mature people there, I haven't been able to tell from their posts.
/. limits the number of mod points that are given out, so people don't just mod everything until there's a picture perfect promotion of a popular product.
The mod system is pretty sad there too. If you post in a topic about Apple, XBox, or any other popular "community", and your post is even neutral (not fanboyish), it will be modded down instantly. That's probably why
Here's an idea: instead of constantly attacking me, how about you tell me WHAT YOU'RE DOING, and WHAT YOUR OPINION IS.
Cause right now, I think you just judge others without paying any real attention to them. The "I'm right, and you're wrong" type.
So far, you don't haven't expressed a coherent opinion on this topic in any of your posts. To be honest, you're so hostile and convoluted that I'm tired of reading it.
Absolutely. A large portion of the "military-industrial complex", as Eisenhower put it so well, wants war. As do investors in those companies. There is a lot of money to be made in times of war, as is happening right now with the current conflicts.
The RIAA is not a record company, but they are a representative of the major record companies. That's the entity that I'm treating them as. So when I say I don't buy RIAA, it means I don't buy very much music from the major record labels. If you realize that the radio stations operate on payola funneled through independent "record promoters", you know that their entire lineup is fixed by the major record companies. So is MTV.
So if you want to avoid giving money to the RIAA, you have to give up making music purchases based on what you hear on the radio and MTV. I used to buy all major label stuff, as recently as 3 years ago. Then I downloaded everything for a while. Now I do neither, and just buy an album when I know I'll like the whole thing. It's usually an independent or local band anyway, so the RIAA gets zero from that. I'm far less interested in the greedy, completely out-of-control, disgusting music industry, and spend far more time with other media.
So explain to me again how I'm a "tool" for the record industry?
So the BBC is like PBS. I wonder why BBC is so good, while PBS is so boring and insignificant.
Did you forget that their primary business is selling music? It's not to prevent me and you from committing a crime. If the publicity that they acheive from this lawsuit is bad enough to make Joe Downloader never want to give them money again, they hurt their primary business by focusing too much on their...erm...secondary business.
Of course, that's assuming people are smart enough not to buy from businesses they don't support. But maybe that's giving them too much credit.
The load time and UI responsiveness is so poor in Sony Vegas. I'd rather use any other product besides that bloated POS, personally. It also inserted something in the codec registry that causes an error everytime I load up certain files with ffdshow, saying I need to login as Administrator to register a codec I'm not even using. Nice DRM Sony. Too bad it breaks other products.
As other posters have said, DVD Shrink requires an external CSS decrypter, such as DVD Decrypter, DVD43, or AnyDVD. It's the exact same scenario as Nero Recode.
Also, quality-wise, I think a lot of Slashdotters need to give Recode more credit.
This was just mentioned in the article about WWDC. Apple gained something like 1/4 of 1% (0.0025%) in a quarter recently. That was after consistently losing marketshare for the years prior. Overall, including that quarter, they've still lost marketshare if you look at any period bigger than 3 months.