The U.S. Internet Gambling laws were only passed because British companies were dominating the market.
If it the law was passed for moral reasons as its proponents (and much of the press) reported, then why not shut down Las Vegas too?
It shows how one sided the U.S. is when it comes to trade.
Britain is a loyal (sickeningly loyal) friend of the U.S., and look how they get treated.
With friends and enemies alike, the U.S. like thugs and wonders why it's become so unpopular.
BTW U.S. = government and big business. Not talking about your average Joe, who is as much a victim as everyone else.
> they hate everything non-white non-catholic non-french
Ask them about French Blue Cheese and watch their minds self-destruct.
> FN is a right-wing ultra-nationalist party,
A French Nazi Party. Oh the irony!
> Wikipedia makes them look like a sort of "wind back the clock" party.
Maybe Europe is annoyed at the U.S. muscling in on their "starting wars" monopoly and attempting to reclaim it? Not a problem, because this is easily solved:
Create a bogus Secondlife filled with Eliza-bots. Hack the French DNS servers to divert there. Hopefully they'll never catch on!;-)
"The official Adobe Linux Flash blog has announced... rejoice and no longer feel like a second rate citizen."
Congratulations, my Linux bretheren, and welcome to the exciting world of Flash!
Take a look at the exciting new multimedia experience before you.
Note how the banners and advertisments blink for your attention.
Wow! It's just like being at Las Vegas!
I'm certainly not trollng, though maybe tsvk was?
I thought his post was pretty curt and dismissive,
and I really don't think he looked at those links.
He was very quick to blame the customer.
To follow your car analogy, the motor is seizing in many cars and the manufacturer won't do anything about it.
This is a close-source driver, so it's not like the driver can crank open the hood.
And this is somehow the customer's fault?
Well the symptons are the same: a BSOD warning an infinite loop in the device driver, or a system hang.
As I said, this problem has been around for several years and it's a sore point for people that suffer from it.
Is it the same problem or a different problems?
The drivers are proprietary. nVidia are the only ones who can say for sure, but they're no telling.
As in, completely silent.
A feedback form of a major corporation still 'under construction'.
Anything about this in the nVidia forums is ignored.
No contact e-mail for them, and if you use the corporate ones they open it (you can tell with readnotify.com) but they don't reply.
Doesn't that seem kind of extreme?
I can't say for sure that the BSOD/lockups all have the asme cause, but I can say that nVidia is ignoring all reports of it.
Their web site FAQ says 'upgrade your device drivers'.
Yes! We've done that. I must have upgraded 5 times, and it's done nothing!
So, yeah, I'm frustrated. I have a problem that many other people are reporting, and nVidia is uncontable and unmoved.
When tsvk basically says "dumb user", yeah, me and everyone else who has hit to sit through a hundred reboots (I'm serious)
gets kind of annoyed.
BTW what I was suggesting is that: Since nVidia fobs support issues onto the OEM (even when it's driver related), Apple might sick of this and that could by why Apple deleted the post. (An explanation would have been far better).
Yes. I am getting a new ATI card to replace the nVidia. Point is, the card wasn't cheap and nVidia should support it. They don't. that's my bone.
A central file in the nVidia display driver for Windows is named nv4_disp.dll.
Well, Duh.
> Googling for nv4_disp and noting the large amount of search results does not
> prove the existence of a single, unfixed widespread nVidia "nv4_disp bug".
Why do you think people are posting about it? You think we're appreciating it as modern art?
> "nv4_disp bug".
Read those damn posts! What are the people talking about? Lock ups and blue screens of death. Suggest you check your facts before you shoot off your mouth.
And when my nv4_disp crashes and the BSOD reports a device driver error and forces a reboot, that's a bug, without the inverted commas.:-|
There's been something fishy going on at nVidia for a while.
One is nVidia's policy that *they* don't support nVidia techology; the OEMs do. They tell you if you have problems to contact your OEM. Now Apple is a big company and could conceivably do this, but many nVidia cards are made by small OEMs who slap electronics on a board and sell it. Are they going to help you with a crashing nVidia driver. And when you follow the link on the nVidia to their OEM "support partners", this is what you get:
nVidia has gone so far to shut down the feedback page on their website: It says "This module is still under construction." You really believe nobody at nVidia knows how to make a web feedback page?
There's a long running bug in nVidia drivers known as the nv4_disp bug. You'll be typing away on your PC, then suddenly your monitor goes blank. A few seconds later, your PC power down. This was happening to me and I though it was some perculiarity with my PC. It turns out, this is affecting a lot of people, and it has been around for many years. nVidia know about it (they mention it in passing on one of their forums), but haven't fixed it. Windows BSOD diagnoses it as an infinite loop "device driver programming error." Independently some skilled owners worked out it was a timing problem with how nVidia writes to an I/O register. If you're lucky this bug will hit you only once a week. If you're unlucky, several times a day. THIS HAS BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS, yet nVidia won't fix this damned thing!
Want to see how widespread the problem is? Google for nv4_disp. The owner of this web page says he's amazed how many hits this page gets, and theorises a lot of people are affected:
The most frustating thing is that nVidia do everything they can to put you off. A "under construcion" feedback page. The fob-off to their partners, with a support page that doesn't even exist. Ignored e-mail. Ignored forum questions.
One solution is of course to buy an ATI card, but if you're paid hundreds of bucks for an nVidia card, what do you do? Does anyone know how we can make nVidia fix this damned thing?
If this checks out, Youch! Everyone was wondering what was behind Apple so brazenly using the iPhone trademark. Cringely wrote a whole piece on it http://pbs.org/cringely
but no one guessed something as simple as this!
> Either that, or all of this is a pure scam to fleece some 3rd world governments.
> It certainly is beginning to sound that way to me more and more all of the time.
Interesting you should say that, Check out this from the Australia Sydney Morning Herald. The Australians are looking at this laptop for Aborginals: few employment prospects, alcoholism, sexual abuse, violence, racism. Recently in Australia an Aboriginal man was beaten to death in his prison cell by policemen (the coroner found this!), yet the justice department responsible refused to charge him. These people are as disadvantaged as any third world country, yet...
One million laptops at once? Not that many aboriginals in Australia. What about small pacific countries. And while the laptop might have the feel of a charity, the company that makes them won't be doing it for free. At those quantities even on small margin, someone somewhere will be getting rich. The project in principle is a good idea. Lets keep an eye on it to make sure the less fortunate aren't being taken by a ride.
Entirely understand. Jackson did manage to take a fantasy epic and turn it into something slackjaws and fanboys alike weeped to with joy. If I had to trust anyone with Evangelion, it would be him.
But Jackson and Taylor know each other. I'd wager money it's been discussed at least casually, and for whatever reason Jackson didn't take it on. His choice of projects since LOTR has been remakes of old movies that were childhood favourites of his, and Halo which is, lets face it, a kiss-of-death assignment for any director. Choosing Halo (now postponed) ahead of Evangelion seems like bad judgement IMHO.
Is Peter a Slashdotter? Is anybody who works with him a Slashdotter? Then please pass this on:
"Peter, Sorry you won't be doing another Hobbit movie, but Lord of the Rings would be pretty hard to top anyway. I won't be seeing the Hobbit movie if you're not directing it. This isn't a boycott threat. I'm just not going to see it, period. I don't care what Newline does, and neither will most of your fans.
Instead, walk across the hall and see your good friend and LOTR visual effects supervisor, Richard Taylor. He's been pushing the idea of doing a Live Action NEON GENESIS EVANGELION movie. This is every bit as deserving a franchise as Lord of the Rings. And because it's barely been tapped outside of Japan, it's got incredible potential. I can't stress that enough. This is one of the most phenomenal stories ever to be told. Evangelion may be underground in the West, but it has a huge cult following; Robin Williams even voiced the promo for the live action because he's a huge Evangelion fan.
Richard has been working on this for several years. WETA have done conceptual art. AD who own the rights backed off making it as an Americanized version. This has huge potential. Talk to Richard. He can give you the animated Boxset. Why do Halo or remakes of old movies, when you can do this?
In the good ole days hardware makers would bend over backwards to attract programmers to their platforms. Now many of them (Hi Steve) are intent on locking us out.
One reason Microsoft got soooo big was they made it easy to get the Windows+DirectX+whatever-else SDK and didn't charge use the usual license fees or royalties that the (commercially unsuccessful) vendors did. This is one difference between Jobs and Gates.
The mission here is to give the 3rd world easy access to laptops. While it'd be cool for we well-off to have yet another cheap consumer electronics device, that's not the point and would distract resources and attention away from their mission.
Since quantities would eventually be limited, even the one-for-me-one-for-third-world-kiddy idea would mean fewer where they are needed. Longer term, that's a nice idea, but for now best get them where they're needed. You could make an argument that underclasses in rich countries need them too, but if they're at Frys something has gone wrong.
I'm on a low income, but even I have 5 working laptops and 2 working desktops. I don't need another PC and probably neither do you!:-)
Cringely points out that the original Jobs MacIntosh bombed because he locked out third-party hardware vendors. Now Jobs is doing the same with the iPhone, but this time locking out third-party software vendors. The only real question here is "Will this stop people from buying the iPhone?" Won't worry Grandma or little Bobby, but would it bother your tech savy user? Jobs is betting it won't.
Cringely also predicts it'll be renamed the 'Apple Phone', and says Apple was negotiating with Cisco over the iPhone name before the announcement so it's not like they didn't know. He suggests its a publicity play.
Could be fun to watch how Anime distributors in the US respond (Hi, A.D.)
They string out a 13 or 26 part series into as many DVDs as possible. The first DVD in the series fits 5 x 30 min episodes. But towards the end they can only fit 2 x 30 minute episodes. Ripoff is the only word I can use. I stopped my Neon Genesis Platinum set halfway through. I was going to pay $180 for the thing anyway. When they stretched it out to over $200, well, enough is enough.
If they could fit an entire series on a single disk (and assuming everyone else does), this little ploy would be less effective. TV shows are sold an entire season at a time: Box sets. Anime distributors are the only ones thay break it up.
Before Phantom my g/f and I were in a shopping center where they had just rolled out the merchandising. Around it wasn't a single kid. It was all 30-something fanboys. The genre belongs to us. Kids have their own stuff, and dare I say, better stuff. Its the memories that make it great.
George was a great storyteller but not a great director, from which he uses heavy editing as a fallback. He needs to take a step back, but have you seen the ROTS making-of web movies (DVD #2)? He's absolutely clear in what he wants, and no one can second guess him. The production crew in the making-of web movies, while technically very good, are all yes-men-and-women. No one has the balls to say 'George, this is crap'. He's had three goes to get it right in the prequels and none was great, but he won't step down.
If he stuck to the basic story telling and left the directing to people who are better directors, the franchise could still be saved. Only takes one good movie to turn it around.
Reminds me of that line in _A Few Good Men_ where Tom Cruise has a client arrested for buying orgeano, thinking it was marijuana. "Being a moron isn't a crime".
If the movies uploaded by the MPAA are fake, then there is no crime. If the are real, then what is the MPAA doing giving them away for free? Hells bells. A defendant could even say he 'thought the movie was being distributed by the MPAA, so the download was legal'
Someone asked about Ritek's media quality. There is a huge variance in quality of recordable media. Usually you don't find out until you lose an archive:-o. Ritek aren't the worst, but they're not the best either. Check this link:
51 Gbs is better, but still far short of my 320Gb HDDs for backup (and I've got 1Tb of disks). A losing battle. Maybe Blockbuster will just give up and fill the ailes with Seagates to rent by the evening?
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. Internet Gambling laws were only passed because British companies were dominating the market. If it the law was passed for moral reasons as its proponents (and much of the press) reported, then why not shut down Las Vegas too?
It shows how one sided the U.S. is when it comes to trade. Britain is a loyal (sickeningly loyal) friend of the U.S., and look how they get treated. With friends and enemies alike, the U.S. like thugs and wonders why it's become so unpopular.
BTW U.S. = government and big business. Not talking about your average Joe, who is as much a victim as everyone else.
> they hate everything non-white non-catholic non-french Ask them about French Blue Cheese and watch their minds self-destruct. > FN is a right-wing ultra-nationalist party, A French Nazi Party. Oh the irony!
Oh Lordy! I crack me up! :)
Do Seagulls get bird flu?
> Wikipedia makes them look like a sort of "wind back the clock" party.
Maybe Europe is annoyed at the U.S. muscling in on their "starting wars" monopoly and attempting to reclaim it? Not a problem, because this is easily solved:
Create a bogus Secondlife filled with Eliza-bots. Hack the French DNS servers to divert there. Hopefully they'll never catch on!
"The official Adobe Linux Flash blog has announced ... rejoice and no longer feel like a second rate citizen."
Congratulations, my Linux bretheren, and welcome to the exciting world of Flash! Take a look at the exciting new multimedia experience before you. Note how the banners and advertisments blink for your attention. Wow! It's just like being at Las Vegas!
Now, head to http://flashblock.mozdev.org/index.html and get Flashblock. Soon, it'll all seem like it was just a bad dream!
You must be cursing the day you accepted a scholarship at Microsoft University. :-)
I'm certainly not trollng, though maybe tsvk was? I thought his post was pretty curt and dismissive, and I really don't think he looked at those links. He was very quick to blame the customer.
To follow your car analogy, the motor is seizing in many cars and the manufacturer won't do anything about it. This is a close-source driver, so it's not like the driver can crank open the hood. And this is somehow the customer's fault?
Well the symptons are the same: a BSOD warning an infinite loop in the device driver, or a system hang. As I said, this problem has been around for several years and it's a sore point for people that suffer from it. Is it the same problem or a different problems? The drivers are proprietary. nVidia are the only ones who can say for sure, but they're no telling. As in, completely silent. A feedback form of a major corporation still 'under construction'. Anything about this in the nVidia forums is ignored. No contact e-mail for them, and if you use the corporate ones they open it (you can tell with readnotify.com) but they don't reply. Doesn't that seem kind of extreme?
I can't say for sure that the BSOD/lockups all have the asme cause, but I can say that nVidia is ignoring all reports of it. Their web site FAQ says 'upgrade your device drivers'. Yes! We've done that. I must have upgraded 5 times, and it's done nothing!
So, yeah, I'm frustrated. I have a problem that many other people are reporting, and nVidia is uncontable and unmoved. When tsvk basically says "dumb user", yeah, me and everyone else who has hit to sit through a hundred reboots (I'm serious) gets kind of annoyed.
BTW what I was suggesting is that: Since nVidia fobs support issues onto the OEM (even when it's driver related), Apple might sick of this and that could by why Apple deleted the post. (An explanation would have been far better).
Yes. I am getting a new ATI card to replace the nVidia. Point is, the card wasn't cheap and nVidia should support it. They don't. that's my bone.
A central file in the nVidia display driver for Windows is named nv4_disp.dll.
Well, Duh.
> Googling for nv4_disp and noting the large amount of search results does not
Why do you think people are posting about it? You think we're appreciating it as modern art?> prove the existence of a single, unfixed widespread nVidia "nv4_disp bug".
> "nv4_disp bug".
Read those damn posts! What are the people talking about? Lock ups and blue screens of death. Suggest you check your facts before you shoot off your mouth.
And when my nv4_disp crashes and the BSOD reports a device driver error and forces a reboot, that's a bug, without the inverted commas. :-|
There's been something fishy going on at nVidia for a while.
One is nVidia's policy that *they* don't support nVidia techology; the OEMs do. They tell you if you have problems to contact your OEM. Now Apple is a big company and could conceivably do this, but many nVidia cards are made by small OEMs who slap electronics on a board and sell it. Are they going to help you with a crashing nVidia driver. And when you follow the link on the nVidia to their OEM "support partners", this is what you get:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_support.html "Page not found"
nVidia has gone so far to shut down the feedback page on their website: It says "This module is still under construction." You really believe nobody at nVidia knows how to make a web feedback page?
There's a long running bug in nVidia drivers known as the nv4_disp bug. You'll be typing away on your PC, then suddenly your monitor goes blank. A few seconds later, your PC power down. This was happening to me and I though it was some perculiarity with my PC. It turns out, this is affecting a lot of people, and it has been around for many years. nVidia know about it (they mention it in passing on one of their forums), but haven't fixed it. Windows BSOD diagnoses it as an infinite loop "device driver programming error." Independently some skilled owners worked out it was a timing problem with how nVidia writes to an I/O register. If you're lucky this bug will hit you only once a week. If you're unlucky, several times a day. THIS HAS BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS, yet nVidia won't fix this damned thing!
Want to see how widespread the problem is? Google for nv4_disp. The owner of this web page says he's amazed how many hits this page gets, and theorises a lot of people are affected:
http://s13.invisionfree.com/nv4_disp/index.php?sho wtopic=10 0 /stupid_windows_.html 9 55.html v 4disp-problem/ . html
http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2005/1
http://www.computing.net/drivers/wwwboard/forum/4
http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/nvidia-n
http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread27150-1.html
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread18930
The most frustating thing is that nVidia do everything they can to put you off. A "under construcion" feedback page. The fob-off to their partners, with a support page that doesn't even exist. Ignored e-mail. Ignored forum questions.
One solution is of course to buy an ATI card, but if you're paid hundreds of bucks for an nVidia card, what do you do? Does anyone know how we can make nVidia fix this damned thing?
A sore winner maybe, but never a loser! :-)
A cheat? Steve Jobs: "Good Artists Copy. Great Artists Steal" That's a quote from Cringely's "Revenge of the Nerds"
If this checks out, Youch! Everyone was wondering what was behind Apple so brazenly using the iPhone trademark. Cringely wrote a whole piece on it http://pbs.org/cringely but no one guessed something as simple as this!
Memo to self: Don't play Poker with Steve Jobs.
I've got the byline for it: "If you thought DOOM the Movie was great, wait till you see Halo!"
Good luck there, PJ :-)
> Either that, or all of this is a pure scam to fleece some 3rd world governments.
> It certainly is beginning to sound that way to me more and more all of the time.
Interesting you should say that, Check out this from the Australia Sydney Morning Herald. The Australians are looking at this laptop for Aborginals: few employment prospects, alcoholism, sexual abuse, violence, racism. Recently in Australia an Aboriginal man was beaten to death in his prison cell by policemen (the coroner found this!), yet the justice department responsible refused to charge him. These people are as disadvantaged as any third world country, yet...
! In order to produce them for $US150 - the goal is to bring this price down to $US85 by 2010 - ! countries would need to order the laptops in one million unit batches. This poses difficulties ! for countries with smaller population sizes, such as Australia. http://www.smh.com.au/news/laptops--desktops/austr alia-trials-lowcost-laptop/2007/01/12/116810515350 0.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
One million laptops at once? Not that many aboriginals in Australia. What about small pacific countries. And while the laptop might have the feel of a charity, the company that makes them won't be doing it for free. At those quantities even on small margin, someone somewhere will be getting rich. The project in principle is a good idea. Lets keep an eye on it to make sure the less fortunate aren't being taken by a ride.
Entirely understand. Jackson did manage to take a fantasy epic and turn it into something slackjaws and fanboys alike weeped to with joy. If I had to trust anyone with Evangelion, it would be him.
But Jackson and Taylor know each other. I'd wager money it's been discussed at least casually, and for whatever reason Jackson didn't take it on. His choice of projects since LOTR has been remakes of old movies that were childhood favourites of his, and Halo which is, lets face it, a kiss-of-death assignment for any director. Choosing Halo (now postponed) ahead of Evangelion seems like bad judgement IMHO.
"Peter, Sorry you won't be doing another Hobbit movie, but Lord of the Rings would be pretty hard to top anyway. I won't be seeing the Hobbit movie if you're not directing it. This isn't a boycott threat. I'm just not going to see it, period. I don't care what Newline does, and neither will most of your fans.
Instead, walk across the hall and see your good friend and LOTR visual effects supervisor, Richard Taylor. He's been pushing the idea of doing a Live Action NEON GENESIS EVANGELION movie. This is every bit as deserving a franchise as Lord of the Rings. And because it's barely been tapped outside of Japan, it's got incredible potential. I can't stress that enough. This is one of the most phenomenal stories ever to be told. Evangelion may be underground in the West, but it has a huge cult following; Robin Williams even voiced the promo for the live action because he's a huge Evangelion fan.
Richard has been working on this for several years. WETA have done conceptual art. AD who own the rights backed off making it as an Americanized version. This has huge potential. Talk to Richard. He can give you the animated Boxset. Why do Halo or remakes of old movies, when you can do this?
Good luck! Talk to Richard and cllick here to learn more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelion
One reason Microsoft got soooo big was they made it easy to get the Windows+DirectX+whatever-else SDK and didn't charge use the usual license fees or royalties that the (commercially unsuccessful) vendors did. This is one difference between Jobs and Gates.
The mission here is to give the 3rd world easy access to laptops. While it'd be cool for we well-off to have yet another cheap consumer electronics device, that's not the point and would distract resources and attention away from their mission. Since quantities would eventually be limited, even the one-for-me-one-for-third-world-kiddy idea would mean fewer where they are needed. Longer term, that's a nice idea, but for now best get them where they're needed. You could make an argument that underclasses in rich countries need them too, but if they're at Frys something has gone wrong. I'm on a low income, but even I have 5 working laptops and 2 working desktops. I don't need another PC and probably neither do you! :-)
Cringely points out that the original Jobs MacIntosh bombed because he locked out third-party hardware vendors. Now Jobs is doing the same with the iPhone, but this time locking out third-party software vendors. The only real question here is "Will this stop people from buying the iPhone?" Won't worry Grandma or little Bobby, but would it bother your tech savy user? Jobs is betting it won't.
Cringely also predicts it'll be renamed the 'Apple Phone', and says Apple was negotiating with Cisco over the iPhone name before the announcement so it's not like they didn't know. He suggests its a publicity play.
They string out a 13 or 26 part series into as many DVDs as possible. The first DVD in the series fits 5 x 30 min episodes. But towards the end they can only fit 2 x 30 minute episodes. Ripoff is the only word I can use. I stopped my Neon Genesis Platinum set halfway through. I was going to pay $180 for the thing anyway. When they stretched it out to over $200, well, enough is enough.
If they could fit an entire series on a single disk (and assuming everyone else does), this little ploy would be less effective. TV shows are sold an entire season at a time: Box sets. Anime distributors are the only ones thay break it up.
Before Phantom my g/f and I were in a shopping center where they had just rolled out the merchandising. Around it wasn't a single kid. It was all 30-something fanboys. The genre belongs to us. Kids have their own stuff, and dare I say, better stuff. Its the memories that make it great.
If he stuck to the basic story telling and left the directing to people who are better directors, the franchise could still be saved. Only takes one good movie to turn it around.
If the movies uploaded by the MPAA are fake, then there is no crime. If the are real, then what is the MPAA doing giving them away for free? Hells bells. A defendant could even say he 'thought the movie was being distributed by the MPAA, so the download was legal'
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
51 Gbs is better, but still far short of my 320Gb HDDs for backup (and I've got 1Tb of disks). A losing battle. Maybe Blockbuster will just give up and fill the ailes with Seagates to rent by the evening?
or Michael Crichton for that matter.