Joe Average doesn't go to Apple.com to watch Steve Jobs's keynote in streaming Quicktime. Joe Average watches primetime TV, where he sees the new Mac ads that do in fact take aim directly at Windows Vista.
Excel 2007 finally increased the row and column limits. Instead of 65535 rows by 256 columns, it's 1048576 rows by 16384 columns. I don't see any good reason why the limit shouldn't be 2^64 in both directions, but at least they've done something.
Well, I must say that is impressive. Flash is improving, but it still has a long way to go. A consistent, high framerate for full-screen updates is something that still seems out of reach, and CPU use is still through the roof. Flash really needs to start making use of 3D hardware to fix these problems. Firefox may be moving toward hardware acceleration itself; being based on Cairo now it could fairly easily switch to using OpenGL for all rendering. Additionally, an OpenGL API for Javascript (as a set of functions on the new Canvas tag) is an idea the Firefox developers have been tossing around for a while. If that ever makes it into a release, Flash graphics would look silly compared to the feats Javascript would be capable of inside Firefox.
Yes, obviously the orbit wouldn't be stable, but the question is how unstable would it be? It might be just stable enough to last for more one complete revolution or more, which would give a tug a lot more time to match orbit and dock. Suppose you launch at noon; the atmosphere above you might be warmer and thus extend farther, giving you more control as you launch, and the next time you pass the Earth you will be on the opposite side from the sun and the atmosphere will be cooler and smaller, helping you get around to complete your first rev. Of course this is all wild speculation; I don't know how to calculate this stuff and I don't have any good intuition about it either.
On its way out of the atmosphere, the projectile is being slowed, which has the effect of making its orbit more circular. It can also affect its own trajectory using only aerodynamics. Supposing you could build a guided projectile that could withstand the incredible heating effect of traveling at orbital velocity in the lower atmosphere; it might possibly be able to guide itself into an orbit that would last a few revs before decaying. From there perhaps a space-based tug could dock and pull it up.
I think it's you who's not familiar with recent versions of Flash. It's not the code that's slow; it's the graphics. Flash is horribly inefficient at drawing on the screen; probably due to the fact that it must play nice with the rendering engine of whatever browser it happens to be embedded in. For a good example, compare the speed of Google Maps with Yahoo Maps Beta. By all rights Flash should be far faster than a Javascript hack; in fact it's somewhat slower. It's only recently that computers have gotten fast enough for playing a video in Flash to work at all, and the framerate still suffers in full screen. Flash basically ignores your computer's high-powered video card, doing almost all its work on the CPU; that's why it's slow and why it can quite easily cause 100% CPU usage.
The standard is needed now, and could be used now. Graphics cards are already at the limits of PCI-E 1. It's not a problem the ordinary user sees because released games and applications are carefully built around the PCI-E bottleneck, but for game developers and people doing physics or scientific calculations on graphics cards it's a big issue.
Are people actually recording the output of an upconverting DVD player in 720p or 1080i and sharing that? Is that what you're talking about? If so, that's the stupidest thing I've heard this week. Here's a clue: the highest possible quality DVD rip would be at the native resolution encoded on the DVD (480 vertical lines); encoding at any other resolution higher or lower can only *reduce* the quality. A 720p rip of a standard DVD is nothing more than a waste of space and en/decoding time.
HD-DVD, OTOH, is natively 720p or 1080i/p and thus does in fact include "something" not on the regular DVD; namely extra picture information for a sharper, more detailed picture. That information is what takes up the extra 15 GB. (High resolution picture data is large because of geometry: doubling the size of a rectangle quadruples the area and thus a picture twice the size needs quadruple the amount of storage.)
Apple didn't put HSDPA in because Cingular sucks. HSDPA isn't available most places and is expanding slowly. To me, it's obvious that Apple should have gone with Sprint for the iPhone. The iPhone without decent Internet access is pointless (it's 1/3 an "internet communications device" after all), so I'm not even going to consider buying one until I can get it on Sprint's 3G network, and here's why:
Sprint's EV-DO is practically ubiquitous now, unlike Cingular's HSDPA, and it provides a very good web browsing experience. I'm making this post over Sprint EV-DO; it's my only Internet service. I routinely get real-world download speeds of 1 Mbps (~140 KB/s). The biggest problem with 3G isn't download speed anymore, it's latency. Ping times can easily be 500ms, like the bad old days of 56k modems. EV-DO rev. A should help and is currently being deployed by Sprint. Rev. A also helps with upload speed. Sprint also has WiMAX on the roadmap starting this year; the other carriers aren't going to be rolling it out for years.
Sprint wins again when you look at the Terms of Service; Verizon and Cingular both have absolutely draconian policies that forbid sharing, VoIP, watching video, playing games, even viewing webcams. Basically anyone who seriously uses their connection is going to violate the ToS multiple times per day, which Verizon/Cingular of course don't enforce directly but use as a club to keep you in line. You can flagrantly violate the ToS all day long with no repercussions until you happen to download more than 10 GB in a month. 10 GB is the invisible cap and your "unlimited" connection will be axed for "ToS violation". This happened to me personally and if you look at some 3G web forums you'll see it all over the place. Sprint does no such thing and their ToS, though not perfect, is a billion times more reasonable.
Once you've experienced 3G, you'll never want to go back to Wi-Fi. You never have to worry about finding a hotspot, or being out of range. It just works, whether you're sitting in your house, at some random airport, in a car on the freeway, whatever! It would probably even work on a plane if the FAA let you turn it on. The iPhone with 3G will be amazing. But the iPhone on Cingular sucks. Apple made a big mistake. Sprint is the only carrier that cares about the Internet; it shows in their coverage, their roadmap, and their policies.
I maintain that encryption without authentication is a stupid idea even on intranets. There's nothing special about intranets that makes MITM attacks impossible. In fact they're easy with an ARP spoofing tool.
Encryption without authentication only defends against people who can eavesdrop but not perform MITM. Unless you have set up static ARP records throughout your network, anyone who can eavesdrop can also perform MITM and trivially break your encryption. Who then is encryption going to defend against? Nobody. It's a waste of processor cycles, and worse, it's a false sense of security.
Well, if the hackers can keep breaking players, key revocation could start to become impractical. There is the possibility of a consumer backlash. Imagine the outcry if one of those $1000 players was cracked and revoked! The PR would be worse than Sony's. Meanwhile, most of the HD releases will be on BitTorrent; after all they only need to be broken once. A *single* crack of *one* player allows *every disk* released before the crack to be decrypted, and probably most disks for a period of at least a few months afterwards. Furthermore, if a clever hacker keeps his hack secret, he can release disk keys forever, and without knowing which player is cracked, the AACS people will be powerless to even fix the vulnerability, much less revoke the player key. They would have to resort to constantly changing the disk keys to make the released keys less universally useful, and it still wouldn't stop the movies from ending up on BitTorrent.
Encryption without authentication is and always has been a stupid idea. What's to stop anyone from self-signing their own certificate claiming to be Amazon.com? Nothing, that's what.
In order for an unauthenticated connection to actually be secure, you have to trust *every* *single* router your packets cross, because *any* of them can trivially break your encryption. Do you trust your ISP? Your ISP's ISP? Every other ISP between you and Amazon? Do you trust the coffee shop wireless access point? The free hotel Internet? With SSL, you don't have to. You could plug your Ethernet cord directly into a router owned by your worst enemy, and still feel completely secure in your HTTPS connection to Amazon. If browsers didn't warn about self-signed certificates, that security would be gone. The certificate authorities, obnoxious as they can be, are necessary to provide that security.
I think the real innovation in the iPhone that creates the non-suckiness is not the advanced features, or the integration, or even the touchscreen. The real innovation wasn't even mentioned by Steve Jobs in his entire keynote. It's the integrated *graphics acceleration*. This thing does graphics like a PSP. Did you see the spinning, the perspective, the alpha blending, the zooming, all at 30+ FPS? That thing has got to have a chip from ATI or NVIDIA in it, or maybe Apple has created their own.
The smooth graphics are *not* just eye candy either; they are what enable the user interface innovations like the zooming web browser and the smooth scrolling lists. Did you see the little graphical touches like the "bump" indicating you've reached the end of a scrolling list? The animated spinning transition from portrait to landscape? I'd argue that these graphics are even more important than the touchscreen in making this device usable. You can easily navigate a smooth scrolling menu with buttons, but a sluggish UI is painful to use even with a touchscreen.
I can't imagine that wikipedia would be better for this than wordnet
You must not have a very good imagination. Wikipedia articles are far larger than wordnet definitions, with much more potential to hold useful information. Wikipedia has a much larger scope than wordnet, including huge amounts of cultural, historical, and scientific data that wordnet ignores. Wikipedia has a larger team of contributors. Wikipedia has data in several other languages besides English. Wikipedia is constantly updated with the latest information in all of its articles.
Wordnet is more structured and carefully maintained, but that is its sole advantage over Wikipedia as far as I can see. And IMHO, that's not really an advantage when talking about real-world AI problems like detecting spam. Spam is not structured or carefully maintained. A successful real-world AI needs to deal with unstructured, ambiguous, even malicious data. An AI that can't tolerate these things will undoubtedly fail.
This computer is heavy because it is a tablet (with a reinforced screen and hinge). The non-tablet X60s is thinner and lighter (2.7 lbs). Not the lightest on the market but the lightest with a keyboard I'd want to use for any length of time. Those tiny Sony things are atrocious.
It means that they're making the graphics of AJAX apps faster to better compete with Flash. That way the kinds of things that used to require Flash can move back to HTML + SVG + JavaScript. In the future we should see a lot more Google Maps style interactive HTML applications, where it becomes meaningful to talk about the "frame rate" of your web page. Firefox will achieve high frame rates using hardware graphics acceleration provided by Cairo. Today, your GeForce 8800 with X hundred million transistors and X MB of video RAM is almost totally ignored while drawing web pages on the screen; Cairo could change that.
I don't see why anyone would want experience developing a SNES game, it wouldn't transfer well to modern consoles. If you just want to know how the SNES works, an open-source emulator is the ultimate documentation. If you want to develop an indie game, it's a no-brainer to do it on PC. A top-of-the-line PC is already far better than any console including PS3, and if the game is good enough to be released on a console, porting it will be cake compared to building it in the first place.
My comment was intended to cover the "big picture" over the long run, not individual cases in the short term. For specific limited problems in controlled situations, QoS can help. But your "couple hours labor" isn't negligible, especially when you consider that most people would have to spend a lot more time than that. At a reasonable hourly rate, the cost of an average person setting this stuff up is going to be about the same cost as several months of more bandwidth. Plus buying more bandwidth gives you faster downloads and QoS doesn't.
And you're going to need to maintain your QoS system, you can't treat it as a one-time cost. I'll bet you'll spend an hour a month on average on issues relating to it and the hardware it runs on. (not one hour every month, but perhaps nothing for six months and then a problem that takes six hours to fix) That cost won't go down much because QoS isn't getting less complex. However, bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time.
KDE has supported Mac-style menus since forever, courtesy of QT, which also offers an Aqua theme that is pretty darn good (only on the mac though, not for Linux). Not sure how well the menus could possibly integrate with the Mac's menu bar when running under QT/X11, but when KDE is ported to QT/Mac, it will work beautifully. This is on the plan for KDE 4 along with the port to native QT/Windows.
My point is exactly that it is *not* a conscious decision to omit other services, any more than it was a conscious decision to include other services in Google Search results. Google didn't benevolently decide to include competitors in Google Search results any more than they maliciously decided to omit them from GMail. It was merely happenstance that decided both and had little to do with Google's "do no evil" attitude.
Re:summary of ted stevens' bill?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm sorry, QoS inside the network is and has always been a bad idea. The Internet is a dumb network. It was designed that way and that is why it thrives. QoS can and should be done at the edges of the network, by the nodes which are actually doing the communicating. If your VoIP traffic is delayed by the HTTP download you're doing, throttle it! It's not as if your computer has no control over the rate people are sending it data.
Now, if your VoIP traffic is being delayed by the HTTP download *someone else* is doing, you don't have control over it. However, the correct solution here is NOT QoS. The correct solution to this problem is more bandwidth inside the network at the congested node. Adding more bandwidth is cheap, probably just as cheap as adding QoS, yet more bandwidth solves all of the problems QoS does, plus it increases the utility of the network for *everyone*, not just those using latency-sensitive applications. Furthermore, it keeps the network neutral to everyone, and doesn't introduce the possibility of QoS discrimination between classes of users.
they have upconversion from composite and s-video to component and analog to digital hdmi
My recommendation is to stay far, far away from HDMI. I'm not one of those guys who's paranoid about HDCP and DRM, but I am not a big fan of buying a $600 piece of A/V equipment and having it not work perfectly. The HDMI upconversion in these units is a disaster of picture artifacts and incompatibilities.
I know because I recently bought several upconverting receivers in a quest to find a decent one (two Onkyo tx-sr674, one JVC RX-D401). One made everything purple when upconverting from composite/S-Video. One refused to accept 480p signals and pass them through to my TV. One added a bright yellow line to the side of the screen when upconverting XBox 360 signals. All of them messed up the resolution selection options in Windows when hooked up between my PC and my TV (via a DVI->HDMI cable). All of them were victims of crappy software, both on the receiver and in my TV's HDMI implementation, resulting in a terrible user experience in general (long picture sync times, occasional lockups, onscreen menus totally sucking, latency issues).
In short, HDMI as implemented out in the wild sucks. Overall quality is extremely low despite prices trending in the opposite direction, and compatibility testing is nonexistent. I recommend buying a much cheaper receiver with upconversion to component; you will be happier and less broke. Incidentally, if your TV has a decent number of inputs this should solve your connection problem. Most receivers have enough inputs to connect three or four systems, and your TV can connect directly to the rest. (Really though, build a home theater PC, buy the soon-to-be-released XBox 360 wireless controller USB adapter, and play your NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 games there. Nestopia, ZSNES, Kega, and Project64 are in many ways better than playing the original consoles, and the home theater PC has other uses as well).
In any case, if you plan on buying A/V receivers, definitely buy them first from Circuit City or somewhere else with a "no questions asked" return policy, even if you plan on getting them online eventually. You can get a receiver from the store, try it out, and return it in a few hours when it doesn't work or meet your standards. Once you find one you like, you can return it and buy it online. Or not, when you figure out that you'll only save $30 and you'll have to wait a week.
They only do that because they used to before Google Maps was around. I'd be willing to bet that if they added this feature today, Google Maps would be the only option.
And here's the proof: after Google Maps was created, they added a feature to GMail to map addresses that appear in your emails. Google Maps is the only option there.
They only do that because they used to before Google Maps was around. I'd be willing to bet that if they added this feature today, Google Maps would be the only option.
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Joe Average doesn't go to Apple.com to watch Steve Jobs's keynote in streaming Quicktime. Joe Average watches primetime TV, where he sees the new Mac ads that do in fact take aim directly at Windows Vista.
Excel 2007 finally increased the row and column limits. Instead of 65535 rows by 256 columns, it's 1048576 rows by 16384 columns. I don't see any good reason why the limit shouldn't be 2^64 in both directions, but at least they've done something.
Well, I must say that is impressive. Flash is improving, but it still has a long way to go. A consistent, high framerate for full-screen updates is something that still seems out of reach, and CPU use is still through the roof. Flash really needs to start making use of 3D hardware to fix these problems. Firefox may be moving toward hardware acceleration itself; being based on Cairo now it could fairly easily switch to using OpenGL for all rendering. Additionally, an OpenGL API for Javascript (as a set of functions on the new Canvas tag) is an idea the Firefox developers have been tossing around for a while. If that ever makes it into a release, Flash graphics would look silly compared to the feats Javascript would be capable of inside Firefox.
Yes, obviously the orbit wouldn't be stable, but the question is how unstable would it be? It might be just stable enough to last for more one complete revolution or more, which would give a tug a lot more time to match orbit and dock. Suppose you launch at noon; the atmosphere above you might be warmer and thus extend farther, giving you more control as you launch, and the next time you pass the Earth you will be on the opposite side from the sun and the atmosphere will be cooler and smaller, helping you get around to complete your first rev. Of course this is all wild speculation; I don't know how to calculate this stuff and I don't have any good intuition about it either.
On its way out of the atmosphere, the projectile is being slowed, which has the effect of making its orbit more circular. It can also affect its own trajectory using only aerodynamics. Supposing you could build a guided projectile that could withstand the incredible heating effect of traveling at orbital velocity in the lower atmosphere; it might possibly be able to guide itself into an orbit that would last a few revs before decaying. From there perhaps a space-based tug could dock and pull it up.
I think it's you who's not familiar with recent versions of Flash. It's not the code that's slow; it's the graphics. Flash is horribly inefficient at drawing on the screen; probably due to the fact that it must play nice with the rendering engine of whatever browser it happens to be embedded in. For a good example, compare the speed of Google Maps with Yahoo Maps Beta. By all rights Flash should be far faster than a Javascript hack; in fact it's somewhat slower. It's only recently that computers have gotten fast enough for playing a video in Flash to work at all, and the framerate still suffers in full screen. Flash basically ignores your computer's high-powered video card, doing almost all its work on the CPU; that's why it's slow and why it can quite easily cause 100% CPU usage.
The standard is needed now, and could be used now. Graphics cards are already at the limits of PCI-E 1. It's not a problem the ordinary user sees because released games and applications are carefully built around the PCI-E bottleneck, but for game developers and people doing physics or scientific calculations on graphics cards it's a big issue.
Are people actually recording the output of an upconverting DVD player in 720p or 1080i and sharing that? Is that what you're talking about? If so, that's the stupidest thing I've heard this week. Here's a clue: the highest possible quality DVD rip would be at the native resolution encoded on the DVD (480 vertical lines); encoding at any other resolution higher or lower can only *reduce* the quality. A 720p rip of a standard DVD is nothing more than a waste of space and en/decoding time.
HD-DVD, OTOH, is natively 720p or 1080i/p and thus does in fact include "something" not on the regular DVD; namely extra picture information for a sharper, more detailed picture. That information is what takes up the extra 15 GB. (High resolution picture data is large because of geometry: doubling the size of a rectangle quadruples the area and thus a picture twice the size needs quadruple the amount of storage.)
Apple didn't put HSDPA in because Cingular sucks. HSDPA isn't available most places and is expanding slowly. To me, it's obvious that Apple should have gone with Sprint for the iPhone. The iPhone without decent Internet access is pointless (it's 1/3 an "internet communications device" after all), so I'm not even going to consider buying one until I can get it on Sprint's 3G network, and here's why:
Sprint's EV-DO is practically ubiquitous now, unlike Cingular's HSDPA, and it provides a very good web browsing experience. I'm making this post over Sprint EV-DO; it's my only Internet service. I routinely get real-world download speeds of 1 Mbps (~140 KB/s). The biggest problem with 3G isn't download speed anymore, it's latency. Ping times can easily be 500ms, like the bad old days of 56k modems. EV-DO rev. A should help and is currently being deployed by Sprint. Rev. A also helps with upload speed. Sprint also has WiMAX on the roadmap starting this year; the other carriers aren't going to be rolling it out for years.
Sprint wins again when you look at the Terms of Service; Verizon and Cingular both have absolutely draconian policies that forbid sharing, VoIP, watching video, playing games, even viewing webcams. Basically anyone who seriously uses their connection is going to violate the ToS multiple times per day, which Verizon/Cingular of course don't enforce directly but use as a club to keep you in line. You can flagrantly violate the ToS all day long with no repercussions until you happen to download more than 10 GB in a month. 10 GB is the invisible cap and your "unlimited" connection will be axed for "ToS violation". This happened to me personally and if you look at some 3G web forums you'll see it all over the place. Sprint does no such thing and their ToS, though not perfect, is a billion times more reasonable.
Once you've experienced 3G, you'll never want to go back to Wi-Fi. You never have to worry about finding a hotspot, or being out of range. It just works, whether you're sitting in your house, at some random airport, in a car on the freeway, whatever! It would probably even work on a plane if the FAA let you turn it on. The iPhone with 3G will be amazing. But the iPhone on Cingular sucks. Apple made a big mistake. Sprint is the only carrier that cares about the Internet; it shows in their coverage, their roadmap, and their policies.
I maintain that encryption without authentication is a stupid idea even on intranets. There's nothing special about intranets that makes MITM attacks impossible. In fact they're easy with an ARP spoofing tool.
Encryption without authentication only defends against people who can eavesdrop but not perform MITM. Unless you have set up static ARP records throughout your network, anyone who can eavesdrop can also perform MITM and trivially break your encryption. Who then is encryption going to defend against? Nobody. It's a waste of processor cycles, and worse, it's a false sense of security.
Well, if the hackers can keep breaking players, key revocation could start to become impractical. There is the possibility of a consumer backlash. Imagine the outcry if one of those $1000 players was cracked and revoked! The PR would be worse than Sony's. Meanwhile, most of the HD releases will be on BitTorrent; after all they only need to be broken once. A *single* crack of *one* player allows *every disk* released before the crack to be decrypted, and probably most disks for a period of at least a few months afterwards. Furthermore, if a clever hacker keeps his hack secret, he can release disk keys forever, and without knowing which player is cracked, the AACS people will be powerless to even fix the vulnerability, much less revoke the player key. They would have to resort to constantly changing the disk keys to make the released keys less universally useful, and it still wouldn't stop the movies from ending up on BitTorrent.
Basically, AACS is screwed.
Encryption without authentication is and always has been a stupid idea. What's to stop anyone from self-signing their own certificate claiming to be Amazon.com? Nothing, that's what.
In order for an unauthenticated connection to actually be secure, you have to trust *every* *single* router your packets cross, because *any* of them can trivially break your encryption. Do you trust your ISP? Your ISP's ISP? Every other ISP between you and Amazon? Do you trust the coffee shop wireless access point? The free hotel Internet? With SSL, you don't have to. You could plug your Ethernet cord directly into a router owned by your worst enemy, and still feel completely secure in your HTTPS connection to Amazon. If browsers didn't warn about self-signed certificates, that security would be gone. The certificate authorities, obnoxious as they can be, are necessary to provide that security.
*applause*
Where can I vote for you for Congress?
I think the real innovation in the iPhone that creates the non-suckiness is not the advanced features, or the integration, or even the touchscreen. The real innovation wasn't even mentioned by Steve Jobs in his entire keynote. It's the integrated *graphics acceleration*. This thing does graphics like a PSP. Did you see the spinning, the perspective, the alpha blending, the zooming, all at 30+ FPS? That thing has got to have a chip from ATI or NVIDIA in it, or maybe Apple has created their own.
The smooth graphics are *not* just eye candy either; they are what enable the user interface innovations like the zooming web browser and the smooth scrolling lists. Did you see the little graphical touches like the "bump" indicating you've reached the end of a scrolling list? The animated spinning transition from portrait to landscape? I'd argue that these graphics are even more important than the touchscreen in making this device usable. You can easily navigate a smooth scrolling menu with buttons, but a sluggish UI is painful to use even with a touchscreen.
I can't imagine that wikipedia would be better for this than wordnet
You must not have a very good imagination. Wikipedia articles are far larger than wordnet definitions, with much more potential to hold useful information. Wikipedia has a much larger scope than wordnet, including huge amounts of cultural, historical, and scientific data that wordnet ignores. Wikipedia has a larger team of contributors. Wikipedia has data in several other languages besides English. Wikipedia is constantly updated with the latest information in all of its articles.
Wordnet is more structured and carefully maintained, but that is its sole advantage over Wikipedia as far as I can see. And IMHO, that's not really an advantage when talking about real-world AI problems like detecting spam. Spam is not structured or carefully maintained. A successful real-world AI needs to deal with unstructured, ambiguous, even malicious data. An AI that can't tolerate these things will undoubtedly fail.
This computer is heavy because it is a tablet (with a reinforced screen and hinge). The non-tablet X60s is thinner and lighter (2.7 lbs). Not the lightest on the market but the lightest with a keyboard I'd want to use for any length of time. Those tiny Sony things are atrocious.
It means that they're making the graphics of AJAX apps faster to better compete with Flash. That way the kinds of things that used to require Flash can move back to HTML + SVG + JavaScript. In the future we should see a lot more Google Maps style interactive HTML applications, where it becomes meaningful to talk about the "frame rate" of your web page. Firefox will achieve high frame rates using hardware graphics acceleration provided by Cairo. Today, your GeForce 8800 with X hundred million transistors and X MB of video RAM is almost totally ignored while drawing web pages on the screen; Cairo could change that.
I don't see why anyone would want experience developing a SNES game, it wouldn't transfer well to modern consoles. If you just want to know how the SNES works, an open-source emulator is the ultimate documentation. If you want to develop an indie game, it's a no-brainer to do it on PC. A top-of-the-line PC is already far better than any console including PS3, and if the game is good enough to be released on a console, porting it will be cake compared to building it in the first place.
My comment was intended to cover the "big picture" over the long run, not individual cases in the short term. For specific limited problems in controlled situations, QoS can help. But your "couple hours labor" isn't negligible, especially when you consider that most people would have to spend a lot more time than that. At a reasonable hourly rate, the cost of an average person setting this stuff up is going to be about the same cost as several months of more bandwidth. Plus buying more bandwidth gives you faster downloads and QoS doesn't.
And you're going to need to maintain your QoS system, you can't treat it as a one-time cost. I'll bet you'll spend an hour a month on average on issues relating to it and the hardware it runs on. (not one hour every month, but perhaps nothing for six months and then a problem that takes six hours to fix) That cost won't go down much because QoS isn't getting less complex. However, bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time.
KDE has supported Mac-style menus since forever, courtesy of QT, which also offers an Aqua theme that is pretty darn good (only on the mac though, not for Linux). Not sure how well the menus could possibly integrate with the Mac's menu bar when running under QT/X11, but when KDE is ported to QT/Mac, it will work beautifully. This is on the plan for KDE 4 along with the port to native QT/Windows.
My point is exactly that it is *not* a conscious decision to omit other services, any more than it was a conscious decision to include other services in Google Search results. Google didn't benevolently decide to include competitors in Google Search results any more than they maliciously decided to omit them from GMail. It was merely happenstance that decided both and had little to do with Google's "do no evil" attitude.
I'm sorry, QoS inside the network is and has always been a bad idea. The Internet is a dumb network. It was designed that way and that is why it thrives. QoS can and should be done at the edges of the network, by the nodes which are actually doing the communicating. If your VoIP traffic is delayed by the HTTP download you're doing, throttle it! It's not as if your computer has no control over the rate people are sending it data.
Now, if your VoIP traffic is being delayed by the HTTP download *someone else* is doing, you don't have control over it. However, the correct solution here is NOT QoS. The correct solution to this problem is more bandwidth inside the network at the congested node. Adding more bandwidth is cheap, probably just as cheap as adding QoS, yet more bandwidth solves all of the problems QoS does, plus it increases the utility of the network for *everyone*, not just those using latency-sensitive applications. Furthermore, it keeps the network neutral to everyone, and doesn't introduce the possibility of QoS discrimination between classes of users.
I know because I recently bought several upconverting receivers in a quest to find a decent one (two Onkyo tx-sr674, one JVC RX-D401). One made everything purple when upconverting from composite/S-Video. One refused to accept 480p signals and pass them through to my TV. One added a bright yellow line to the side of the screen when upconverting XBox 360 signals. All of them messed up the resolution selection options in Windows when hooked up between my PC and my TV (via a DVI->HDMI cable). All of them were victims of crappy software, both on the receiver and in my TV's HDMI implementation, resulting in a terrible user experience in general (long picture sync times, occasional lockups, onscreen menus totally sucking, latency issues).
In short, HDMI as implemented out in the wild sucks. Overall quality is extremely low despite prices trending in the opposite direction, and compatibility testing is nonexistent. I recommend buying a much cheaper receiver with upconversion to component; you will be happier and less broke. Incidentally, if your TV has a decent number of inputs this should solve your connection problem. Most receivers have enough inputs to connect three or four systems, and your TV can connect directly to the rest. (Really though, build a home theater PC, buy the soon-to-be-released XBox 360 wireless controller USB adapter, and play your NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 games there. Nestopia, ZSNES, Kega, and Project64 are in many ways better than playing the original consoles, and the home theater PC has other uses as well).
In any case, if you plan on buying A/V receivers, definitely buy them first from Circuit City or somewhere else with a "no questions asked" return policy, even if you plan on getting them online eventually. You can get a receiver from the store, try it out, and return it in a few hours when it doesn't work or meet your standards. Once you find one you like, you can return it and buy it online. Or not, when you figure out that you'll only save $30 and you'll have to wait a week.
They only do that because they used to before Google Maps was around. I'd be willing to bet that if they added this feature today, Google Maps would be the only option.