chia_monkey - Slashdot User

Comment Get What Works Best For You (Score 0) 993

by chia_monkey on Thursday April 16, 2009 @09:58AM (#27596975) Attached to: "Apple Tax" Report Backfires On Microsoft

Sometimes these arguments just get old. Other times they're funny as hell. I do get tired of seeing the same damn "justifications" that I've seen over the past decade though (ie, "Macs don't get viruses because nobody uses Macs" or "Macs are just more expensive").

I've done tech support on both Macs and PCs. Each has its place. For my trusty "I just need to get sh*t done" machine I use a Mac. After work I just want to come home, turn on the computer, use it, and be done for my next thing (eating? drinking?). However, a cheap PC and its plethora of available surplus parts can come in handy. I've got one that I'm using as a home theater PC (granted, the damn thing crapped out on me and I don't know what its deal is yet).

Keep on fighting fanboys...just make sure you back it up with some factual justifications instead of "oh yeah? You're just a dumb poopyhead".

Journal Journal: Best OS for Apple PowerBook G3 (Lombard)? 1

Journal by chia_monkey on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @05:13PM

I just inherited an Apple Powerbook G3 (Lombard) and am trying to figure out how to get the best use out of it. Initially I thought I'd cram Mac OS 10.4 on there but then realized that poor machine would be about as fast as a herd of turtles trampling through molasses. Then I pondered Linux and from what I read in my searches Xubuntu may be the best fit.

Hardware:
G3 PowerBook (Lombard)
333 MHz
4 GB HD
512K RAM

Torvalds "Pretty Pleased" With Latest GPLv3 295

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 29, 2007 @10:26AM from the with-sugar-on-top dept.

Novus Ordo Seclorum writes "According to CNet, Linus Torvalds is 'pretty pleased' with the current GPL v3 draft. He said, 'Unlike the earlier drafts, it at least seems to not sully the good name of the GPL any more.' After his earlier criticism, some had questioned whether such controversies would lead to rifts in the community, especially if the kernel ended up under a different license than the GNU tools. But with the latest revisions, Linus will entertain moving the kernel over to the GPL v3."

Submission + - Cuban v. EFF lawyer on YouTube, DMCA

Submitted by hamtaro on Thursday March 29, 2007 @10:15AM

hamtaro writes: Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, exchanged some words with an EFF lawyer at this year's EFF "Pioneer Awards" this week. What about? YouTube. Apparently Cuban feels that "everyone knows" that YouTube is host to tons of infringing content and therefore it should be exempt from DMCA protections. You read that right: the EFF, defending the DMCA against Mark Cuban.

Cuban is an interesting spokesman for copyright concerns since he has a broad perspective; as the owner of HDNet, he worries about having his content given away for free without his consent, but he's also someone who has funded EFF campaigns in the past, especially when the group defended Grokster's claim to legality.
...
One of the strangest aspects of the debate was seeing an EFF lawyer defend the DMCA, which usually comes in for a drubbing due to its anticircumvention provision. But von Lohmann told Ars Technica after the debate that the safe harbor section has actually allowed plenty of businesses to flourish that might otherwise have been mired in legal problems, and that it has generally worked well.

Submission + - Does DRM Enable Online Music Innovation?

Submitted by chia_monkey on Thursday March 29, 2007 @10:07AM

chia_monkey writes: Here's an interesting article on "Does DRM Enable Online Music Innovation?" from Tech Law Forum that looks "at the range of legitimate online music distributors to see just how much the presence or lack of DRM affected business models." It's a rather interesting read as the author breaks down seven online music stores (iTunes, Napster, Yahoo! Music, Zune, eMusic, Amie Street, and Magnatune...four of which use DRM and three that don't). The article mainly focuses on the ownership and "renting" of the music (which can be seen with the "buy the condo downtown" and "rent a mansion in the slums" analogies) and how it applies to innovation and perceived business models.

The numbers don't lie...price-per-download is the clean winner while DRM-based models also take the lead. Will the market shift toward subscription based models in the future or DRM go the way of the dodo bird (as Steve Jobs has already proclaimed his preference for)?

Submission + - TJX: biggest data breach ever

Submitted by jcatcw on Thursday March 29, 2007 @09:56AM

jcatcw writes: Jaikumar Vijayan says that TJX is finally offering more details about the extent of the compromise, which at 45.6M cards,is the biggest ever. He's has been following the story for Computerworld since it started. The systems that were broken into processed payment card, check and returns for customers of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods and A.J Wright stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and customers of Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada and T.K. Maxx in the U.K. Customer names and addresses were not included in the stolen data. So far the company has so far spent about $5 million in connection with the breach, and several lawsuits that have been filed against it. It was sued recently by the Arkansas Carpenters Pension Fund, one of its shareholders, for failure to divulge more details about the breach.

Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral 203

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 29, 2007 @09:47AM from the bits-is-bits-man dept.

eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."

Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU 307

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 29, 2007 @09:07AM from the mmmm-threads dept.

Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.

Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43% 223

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 29, 2007 @08:29AM from the price-to-pay dept.

czei writes "This just-released research report, Load Testing a Virtual Web Application, looks at the effects of virtualization on a typical ASP Web application, using VMWare on Linux to host a Windows OS and IIS web server. While virtualizing the server made it easier to manage, the number of users the virtualized Web app could handle dropped by 43%. The article also shows interesting graphs of how hyper-threading affected the performance of IIS." The report urges readers to take this research as a data point. No optimization was done on host or guest OS parameters.

Submission + - Terahertz spectrum for wireless communication

Submitted by holy_calamity on Thursday March 29, 2007 @08:24AM

holy_calamity writes: A first step to allowing wireless data transfer over a currently unused part of the electromagnetic spectrum are reported in New Scientist. Terahertz radiation exists between radio and infrared. A new filter created at the University of Utah can filter out particular frequencies, a prerequisite for using it for data. The abstract of the paper in the journal Nature is freely available.

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