I can buy gasoline in most countries, getting hold of sand in small quantities are legal as well. So is buy a coke in a bottle. It is not legal to add those and a rag and walking with it in public.
The whole thing about changing the phone is bollocks. There are no reasons to change the number OTHER THAN BEING ILLEGAL. But if you do it to your own phone, and then don't use it (since you damn well don't own the network), nobody will know, and nobody will care.
I am a software engineer, I work with computers all day in and day out, given enough time I could code my own GUI (done part of that for a commercial company already) and my own browser. Heck, I could make my own OS etc.
But I don't want to, I want to dubble click the installation icon when I install an app, answer some silly questions, and be done with it. I don't want any extra GUIs, I want it to look and feel 100% like the style guide for that platform. I don't want to see any code, I never want to touch any configuration text files, I care little of whatever XUL can do for me. I won't use up a single second on something like that, and I never should have to.
MaxVlast has got it right, and so has the majority of the web browsing population. They care about browsing, not software politics or technical merits.
Besides, if it was so darn easy to fix with XUL, couldn't the developers fix that from day one so an installation is 100% like the native system it runs on? The two browsers I use does this perfectly (a virtual pat on the back for those who can guess which ones I use;)).
It was a general statement that a codec that is "less good" at the same bitrates can outshine the other if given a huge bitrate advantage. I am sure OGG will still outshine MP3s if both do have 192kbps, but I suspect that I will have a heard time hearing the difference.
I simply wanted to reverse the question somewhat. Instead of "how good at bitrate X" I wanted to know "how high bitrate do I need for quality X". The reason a lossy scheme is used in the first place is space. A 24bit/196khz PCM really kicks ass, but it would burn disk space like nothing else.
The reason for this line of questioning is, if I would go rip my CD collection, how much harddisk do I need to buy to encode it without me hearing that it is no longer the original CDs?
Well, sounding like the original means "I won't hear that it is encoded". I am not an audiophile, but I can hear a distinctive difference between my stationary DVD player and my computer playing WAVE files (through the digital out, I have no idea how this can sound worse), but I can't heard the difference between an 160kbps ogg and the wavefile comming from the computer.
64kbps are more interesting when it comes to streaming music, obviously, so the test is valid for that purpose. I would love to get internet radio at something better than 64kbps 22khz, mono mp3s that doesn't eat bandwidth.
But most importanatly, at which kbps does the codecs become equal? MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps. The music won't be better with one format over the other, as long as the "I can't belive it is lossy" barrier has been reached. Which format will make the music sound as the original (all the others can be discarded now thank you), and of those, which does it at the lowest bitrate?
This is obviously an infected issue, by far, and it needs to be resolve to the satisfaction of the american tech workers, in one way or another. Just ignoring it is dumb and will lead to even more problems in the future.
But I would like to point out a different scenario than many of the posters here have pointed out. I am not living in a poor country, and I won't work for a low wage. If I would get a job it would be because of what I know and what I can do.
I am also not interested in comming to america and bringing my 20 people family with me, nor am I interested in working the states for a few years and then leave. Nor I am trying to make my fortune.
So why would I like to come to the states then? Simply because I have happen to fall in love with an American girl. Jupp, good old "does not compute" love. I would blend in in american society, everyone would think that I am from Minnesota (like my GF) for various reasons which I leave up to the reader. I have no ill intent and would simply like to spend my life with the one I love, and for that I need a job to stay in the states.
As it has happened, the economy is still fscking/dev/.com and/dev/chapter11 so jobs are tight and I have a good job here. My girlfriend is in the process of getting over here instead (with all what that means) and I don't want to give up a very good chance I have here to make some good money. After a few years we would like to move to the states.
I am aware of the fact that I can apply for an alien spouse visa after we are married, so I would have a fairly good chance of getting to work in the states if there would be a job comming up.
I do like anime myself, and I own a few DVDs (and japanese LDs). I did buy Mononoke Hime (twice;) LD/DVD) and I think it is interesting that American movie companies are getting their eyes up for anime.
But it will not be easy, most of the target audience will not show up for an anime in theaters in the states. I just couldn't stand the horrible dub work for Mononoke myself, and the US audiences is not known for "reading" movies like some of us Europeans. The fact that it is !Disney and that it is animated will turn off a lot of people, making them go "I can watch cartoons on Cartoon Network, ok? I want to see ".
One of the biggest reasons is that anime is not family movies in the states (like most of the Studio Ghibli movies are in Japan for example) and thus won't draw the important child+partent audience. And it is not "serious" enough for an older audience. Not because anime can't be good childrens movies or can not deal with very serious themes. Just because this is the view of it in the states.
One very successful anime on the other hand is ghost in the shell, which is loaded with action and fits in well with the fairly young target audience. This is also an anime with a very good dub (I could watch the whole movie without wincing when actors sounded completely out of character the whole time). When (if?) they get around to do it, GITS2 could be a hit in the west as well.
If anime wants to succeed it needs a few "flagships". Movies people remember and like, a TV series or two that they remember was good. My suggestion for this is to _not_ buy a movie/tvseries after it has premiered in Japan and is old.
Dreamworks (etc) need to be a full partner and produce it together with the Japanese production team. Grab the American voice actors (for those seiyuu that can't speak English well enough) and send them to work side by side with the Japanese ones. Make the sequences that would be too culturally hard to understand into two sequences, one for US, one for JP (and use multi angles for something else than pr0n;)).
For example, the new GITS TV series. Do what I suggest above and send it on prime time television and promote it. This would open up for anime and give subsequent TV series a better chance.
(I would also like to see Dreamworks buy the rights for Studio Ghiblis movies, send them to THX for remastering, make real quality dubs, and put them out in out big blacing box. I would buy that for $250 on the day of the launch without a second thought (Except JIPPIE!). But I think that will remain a personal dream of mine since it is very unlikely that Disney will do anything good at all with them right now, since they own the rights in the west. I think that Miyazaki is unhappy about the situation, which is a shame because he is a very nice person and him and his team has made some of the most incredible movies of all times).
Those who would criticise you must be pretty stupid. You simply tell your experience with win2k. I have found it to be a very stable OS as well, and any problems have more usually been a case of bad hardware/drivers in my experience.
Windows XP has also been really stable for me (and others). I have 10 days of uptime right now, without a problem. I only reboot for updates, and I do that at convienient times. The server 10 feet away only boots when need to fiddle with its hardware (behind a firewall after all). Win2k is just as stable as the two debian machines besides it.
Stop thinking that all windowses are as stable as Win9x, it is just not true. It would be like saying MacOS X is crashing all the time because MacOS 7.x did. Lying after all doesn't give good arguments in the long run. Let it be sufficient to say that Linux is stable and leave it at that, don't make such a point out of it being more stable than Win9x, nobody is speaking about how well Linux 1.2 does these days do they?
That said, I just installed Gentoo 1.3b at home, all the other distros are now 0wned;)
I think it is about time they merge and get more done instead of wasted efforts. I am not saying "make one Linux distro", but that there are many that are pretty much alike, and they would be stronger from either cooperating or merging. It was save some people that could do better stuff (write documentation is no 1 on my list any day).
*smile* I know how frustrating it can be with industry secrets and not being able to tell everyone. But it is pretty much neccessary.
I wasn't so much interested in being able to rip the movies off, more like being able to legally buy something that plays them at the same quality in my home.
I wish that the zones would go away as well, that is just a pain considering all the region 1 DVDs I buy livining in Sweden (region 2).
Then it is not a technical problem, but the problem that DRM tries to screw their customers over, just as RIAA/MPAA tries to screw their paying customers over (if you pirate you won't have any problems really).
I for sure would drag my sorry ass over to the screens much more often if the quality of the theater rises (and the audience shuts up!). They do need to make good movies as well though.
Don't forget about the decay of the prints. One showing and the quality goes down. And then add all the mecanical problems of running at twice the speed. 24fps is enough to screw the projector over several times if you don't put a lot of time into calibrating it and making sure it doesn't move around.
These problems are solved by digital projectors. I just wish that they could improve in resolution and frame rates. 24fps (double exposed so 48 updates / second) is not enough when panning for example.
I am just hoping that they could install a digital projector somewhere in Sweden, I will take a little trip then for sure;)
ptomblin: You say that you work on these systems. What are the chances that I as a consumer would be able to legally get hold of the movies in this kind of format? I would love to have a great projector at home for my home cinema, but playing DVDs on large screens are not nearly as fun as it could be.
And do you have any spiffy links? I am sure I am not the only one who are interested in these kinds of things (and in my case not to break it and get a parrot on my shoulder).
I agree, Perforce is a very solid product indeed. And all the commandline tools are there for Linux, and so are the servers. I've used it both on Windows and Linux (both servers and clients) and it works like a charm.
And in case you don't like their fortcomming linux GUI (I hadn't heard about that before, thanks WPIDalamar) they do provide you with an API so you can make one of your own (KPerforce ^_^), which shouldn't take that long really.
The pricing seems very high for an individual, but their pricing is real cheap for this kind of software (for companies) and you can use it without a license but then with max two client specifications. They also have good support (something that is not common unfortunatly).
http://www.perforce.com -- go there and check it out. If you hate paying and want to make your own set of tools you can learn a lot from Perforce.
And I agree, source safe is icky, and so is CVS and source offsite. I haven't had a reason to try out BitKeeper so I unfortunatly don't know how it stacks compared to Perforce.
I would just simply not watch a show with commercials on at the same time. There are just so few shows worth seeing these days that I will just revert to watching DVDs. But then again, they will probably fuck that up too and have commercials on there as well. Already happened on my The Fast and the Furious DVD (which pissed me off to no end).
I must start wondering if commercials don't work anymore or something. I atleast start to really *HATE* the irritating companies behind the commercials.
I would guess more and more people are using 2k or XP instead of older versions of Windows. Things are improving in Windows, and a unix machine are just more interesting to have hacked into. In fact, it is not even hard to break into a computer that isn't patched quickly when an exploit is released.
I'd say that all OSes needs to become more safe, because it is going to affect people in negative ways when their computers are compromised. That is way more important than arguing over which OS is the best.
The GSM protocol can sync your mobile phone for you. No more setting the time, no more incorrect time. But do you think they actually put it there in all networks? No... We lack it here in Sweden, the country where GSM was invented. Pretty bad I'd say.
I still speak about horsepowers when I speak cars, and I still use Centigrate instead of Kelvin. People are hard to change, regardless of the change.
Funny thing about the am/pm clock. My girlfriend who is american now uses the 24h clock instead of am/pm, and I didn't even suggest anything. It was just easier she said. So I think that children should learn both meter and feet/inches in school, and after having to convert volumes back and fort from cubic feet to cubic yards and cubic inches they will see how much easier that is done with meter. They will become lazy and prefer meters ^_^
Another interesting piece of history. Celsius was a Swedish scientist who came up with the 100 grade scale (centi == 100), but he put the boiling point at zero and the freezing point at 100. Am I serious? Yes I am. Another Swede who lived at the time, Carl von Linné (a.k.a. Carl von Linneaus (sp?), the man behind the latin name for species), who knew Celius suggested that he should reverse it. That is why I prefer to use centigrade instead of Celsius, but I don't think that is official. Both names means the same and we should abandon it for Kelvin.
And don't forget that they have to sell this to someone, and those someone seems eager to buy (not necessarily the end consumers). It is not about "killing the GPL", it is about seeing a need and filling it.
What scares me is not that M$ makes this piece of software, but that they had a reason not to dismiss it as something that wouldn't ever give revenue. It could just as well have been Sun or IBM doing this.
I agree with this. Who cares if you can send it by pigeon and get full frame rate, or if it is free or not (free for me is that I personally don't have to pay, I care little for the source). What matters is quality.
I am looking forward to Tarkin, but this VP3 business is just one more damn format that I have to somehow get support for on my computer. I wasn't to happy when DivX 5.0 came, and this is much the same (without the price tag of the pro version, at least not yet).
If there comes along something with higer quality that I can use, I will choose that. If there are two that are equal, I will choose the free one. If there is an SVCD version and an DivX version, I go for SVCD every day.
I agree with the above and think that there need to be published a few serious comparisons before we can agree on if this is a good or a bad thing (looks like a bad thing right now).
I think that it really hit the nail. I am sure the slashdot community will bitch their asses off because what Joel wrote, or try to make fun of him and thus making him go away. I was very impressed what with he wrote, and it makes a lot of sense.
Secretly replace one workers harddisk with a new one (empty), and watch the panic. Step in and say what you did, and tell everyone that tomorrow this could be reality for any of them. How about we make back ups?
Maybe it is not strikly neccesary to replace a disk, but the idea still stands;)
Will there be some form of initiative to work together on online documentation for both end users and developers? For instance making sure that there is up to date information on all applications and APIs in a common format (for example XML, that can be used to genereate.info, man pages, html, etc)?
I personally don't think the distributions as a whole are well documented enough, and I think it would be one area where everybody would gain from co-operating.
Who said I liked the rules to begin with? I sure didn't. I don't like the way business is conducted in the world today, it hurts human beings. I don't like the way the major countries are run, they hurt their people. I dislike the legal systems of all major countries, they are corrupt and doesn't protect the individual from the superior force of large companies and goverments.
I am over 20, yes. Could you ever have a clue about who I am, what kind of capacity I have for empathy or not? I do know how to look at things from other perspectives, but I tend to write from just one at a time, as I would be percived as having split personalities otherwise.
Why would I ever cheat while playing networked games? I'm sorry, but you trying to make a funny point failed.
To say it again, don't blame Microsoft for acting like many other companies does today. Feel free to blame the whole thing, but don't single one company out. They are not NSDAP.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yes.
I can buy gasoline in most countries, getting hold of sand in small quantities are legal as well. So is buy a coke in a bottle. It is not legal to add those and a rag and walking with it in public.
The whole thing about changing the phone is bollocks. There are no reasons to change the number OTHER THAN BEING ILLEGAL. But if you do it to your own phone, and then don't use it (since you damn well don't own the network), nobody will know, and nobody will care.
I am a software engineer, I work with computers all day in and day out, given enough time I could code my own GUI (done part of that for a commercial company already) and my own browser. Heck, I could make my own OS etc.
But I don't want to, I want to dubble click the installation icon when I install an app, answer some silly questions, and be done with it. I don't want any extra GUIs, I want it to look and feel 100% like the style guide for that platform. I don't want to see any code, I never want to touch any configuration text files, I care little of whatever XUL can do for me. I won't use up a single second on something like that, and I never should have to.
MaxVlast has got it right, and so has the majority of the web browsing population. They care about browsing, not software politics or technical merits.
Besides, if it was so darn easy to fix with XUL, couldn't the developers fix that from day one so an installation is 100% like the native system it runs on? The two browsers I use does this perfectly (a virtual pat on the back for those who can guess which ones I use;)).
I want an MD drive instead of a stupid floppy. They would be far more useful.
It was a general statement that a codec that is "less good" at the same bitrates can outshine the other if given a huge bitrate advantage. I am sure OGG will still outshine MP3s if both do have 192kbps, but I suspect that I will have a heard time hearing the difference.
I simply wanted to reverse the question somewhat. Instead of "how good at bitrate X" I wanted to know "how high bitrate do I need for quality X". The reason a lossy scheme is used in the first place is space. A 24bit/196khz PCM really kicks ass, but it would burn disk space like nothing else.
The reason for this line of questioning is, if I would go rip my CD collection, how much harddisk do I need to buy to encode it without me hearing that it is no longer the original CDs?
Well, sounding like the original means "I won't hear that it is encoded". I am not an audiophile, but I can hear a distinctive difference between my stationary DVD player and my computer playing WAVE files (through the digital out, I have no idea how this can sound worse), but I can't heard the difference between an 160kbps ogg and the wavefile comming from the computer.
64kbps are more interesting when it comes to streaming music, obviously, so the test is valid for that purpose. I would love to get internet radio at something better than 64kbps 22khz, mono mp3s that doesn't eat bandwidth.
But most importanatly, at which kbps does the codecs become equal? MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps. The music won't be better with one format over the other, as long as the "I can't belive it is lossy" barrier has been reached. Which format will make the music sound as the original (all the others can be discarded now thank you), and of those, which does it at the lowest bitrate?
This is obviously an infected issue, by far, and it needs to be resolve to the satisfaction of the american tech workers, in one way or another. Just ignoring it is dumb and will lead to even more problems in the future.
/dev/.com and /dev/chapter11 so jobs are tight and I have a good job here. My girlfriend is in the process of getting over here instead (with all what that means) and I don't want to give up a very good chance I have here to make some good money. After a few years we would like to move to the states.
But I would like to point out a different scenario than many of the posters here have pointed out. I am not living in a poor country, and I won't work for a low wage. If I would get a job it would be because of what I know and what I can do.
I am also not interested in comming to america and bringing my 20 people family with me, nor am I interested in working the states for a few years and then leave. Nor I am trying to make my fortune.
So why would I like to come to the states then? Simply because I have happen to fall in love with an American girl. Jupp, good old "does not compute" love. I would blend in in american society, everyone would think that I am from Minnesota (like my GF) for various reasons which I leave up to the reader. I have no ill intent and would simply like to spend my life with the one I love, and for that I need a job to stay in the states.
As it has happened, the economy is still fscking
I am aware of the fact that I can apply for an alien spouse visa after we are married, so I would have a fairly good chance of getting to work in the states if there would be a job comming up.
I just wanted to show a different side to it all.
I do like anime myself, and I own a few DVDs (and japanese LDs). I did buy Mononoke Hime (twice;) LD/DVD) and I think it is interesting that American movie companies are getting their eyes up for anime.
But it will not be easy, most of the target audience will not show up for an anime in theaters in the states. I just couldn't stand the horrible dub work for Mononoke myself, and the US audiences is not known for "reading" movies like some of us Europeans. The fact that it is !Disney and that it is animated will turn off a lot of people, making them go "I can watch cartoons on Cartoon Network, ok? I want to see ".
One of the biggest reasons is that anime is not family movies in the states (like most of the Studio Ghibli movies are in Japan for example) and thus won't draw the important child+partent audience. And it is not "serious" enough for an older audience. Not because anime can't be good childrens movies or can not deal with very serious themes. Just because this is the view of it in the states.
One very successful anime on the other hand is ghost in the shell, which is loaded with action and fits in well with the fairly young target audience. This is also an anime with a very good dub (I could watch the whole movie without wincing when actors sounded completely out of character the whole time). When (if?) they get around to do it, GITS2 could be a hit in the west as well.
If anime wants to succeed it needs a few "flagships". Movies people remember and like, a TV series or two that they remember was good. My suggestion for this is to _not_ buy a movie/tvseries after it has premiered in Japan and is old.
Dreamworks (etc) need to be a full partner and produce it together with the Japanese production team. Grab the American voice actors (for those seiyuu that can't speak English well enough) and send them to work side by side with the Japanese ones. Make the sequences that would be too culturally hard to understand into two sequences, one for US, one for JP (and use multi angles for something else than pr0n;)).
For example, the new GITS TV series. Do what I suggest above and send it on prime time television and promote it. This would open up for anime and give subsequent TV series a better chance.
(I would also like to see Dreamworks buy the rights for Studio Ghiblis movies, send them to THX for remastering, make real quality dubs, and put them out in out big blacing box. I would buy that for $250 on the day of the launch without a second thought (Except JIPPIE!). But I think that will remain a personal dream of mine since it is very unlikely that Disney will do anything good at all with them right now, since they own the rights in the west. I think that Miyazaki is unhappy about the situation, which is a shame because he is a very nice person and him and his team has made some of the most incredible movies of all times).
Those who would criticise you must be pretty stupid. You simply tell your experience with win2k. I have found it to be a very stable OS as well, and any problems have more usually been a case of bad hardware/drivers in my experience.
Windows XP has also been really stable for me (and others). I have 10 days of uptime right now, without a problem. I only reboot for updates, and I do that at convienient times. The server 10 feet away only boots when need to fiddle with its hardware (behind a firewall after all). Win2k is just as stable as the two debian machines besides it.
Stop thinking that all windowses are as stable as Win9x, it is just not true. It would be like saying MacOS X is crashing all the time because MacOS 7.x did. Lying after all doesn't give good arguments in the long run. Let it be sufficient to say that Linux is stable and leave it at that, don't make such a point out of it being more stable than Win9x, nobody is speaking about how well Linux 1.2 does these days do they?
That said, I just installed Gentoo 1.3b at home, all the other distros are now 0wned;)
I think it is about time they merge and get more done instead of wasted efforts. I am not saying "make one Linux distro", but that there are many that are pretty much alike, and they would be stronger from either cooperating or merging. It was save some people that could do better stuff (write documentation is no 1 on my list any day).
Wasn't that supposed to be BitKeepers big feature? I have never had any use for it, but I can see that a different strategy would be neccessary then,
*smile* I know how frustrating it can be with industry secrets and not being able to tell everyone. But it is pretty much neccessary.
I wasn't so much interested in being able to rip the movies off, more like being able to legally buy something that plays them at the same quality in my home.
I wish that the zones would go away as well, that is just a pain considering all the region 1 DVDs I buy livining in Sweden (region 2).
Then it is not a technical problem, but the problem that DRM tries to screw their customers over, just as RIAA/MPAA tries to screw their paying customers over (if you pirate you won't have any problems really).
I for sure would drag my sorry ass over to the screens much more often if the quality of the theater rises (and the audience shuts up!). They do need to make good movies as well though.
Don't forget about the decay of the prints. One showing and the quality goes down. And then add all the mecanical problems of running at twice the speed. 24fps is enough to screw the projector over several times if you don't put a lot of time into calibrating it and making sure it doesn't move around.
These problems are solved by digital projectors. I just wish that they could improve in resolution and frame rates. 24fps (double exposed so 48 updates / second) is not enough when panning for example.
I am just hoping that they could install a digital projector somewhere in Sweden, I will take a little trip then for sure;)
ptomblin: You say that you work on these systems. What are the chances that I as a consumer would be able to legally get hold of the movies in this kind of format? I would love to have a great projector at home for my home cinema, but playing DVDs on large screens are not nearly as fun as it could be.
And do you have any spiffy links? I am sure I am not the only one who are interested in these kinds of things (and in my case not to break it and get a parrot on my shoulder).
I agree, Perforce is a very solid product indeed. And all the commandline tools are there for Linux, and so are the servers. I've used it both on Windows and Linux (both servers and clients) and it works like a charm.
And in case you don't like their fortcomming linux GUI (I hadn't heard about that before, thanks WPIDalamar) they do provide you with an API so you can make one of your own (KPerforce ^_^), which shouldn't take that long really.
The pricing seems very high for an individual, but their pricing is real cheap for this kind of software (for companies) and you can use it without a license but then with max two client specifications. They also have good support (something that is not common unfortunatly).
http://www.perforce.com -- go there and check it out. If you hate paying and want to make your own set of tools you can learn a lot from Perforce.
And I agree, source safe is icky, and so is CVS and source offsite. I haven't had a reason to try out BitKeeper so I unfortunatly don't know how it stacks compared to Perforce.
I would just simply not watch a show with commercials on at the same time. There are just so few shows worth seeing these days that I will just revert to watching DVDs. But then again, they will probably fuck that up too and have commercials on there as well. Already happened on my The Fast and the Furious DVD (which pissed me off to no end).
I must start wondering if commercials don't work anymore or something. I atleast start to really *HATE* the irritating companies behind the commercials.
I would guess more and more people are using 2k or XP instead of older versions of Windows. Things are improving in Windows, and a unix machine are just more interesting to have hacked into. In fact, it is not even hard to break into a computer that isn't patched quickly when an exploit is released.
I'd say that all OSes needs to become more safe, because it is going to affect people in negative ways when their computers are compromised. That is way more important than arguing over which OS is the best.
The GSM protocol can sync your mobile phone for you. No more setting the time, no more incorrect time. But do you think they actually put it there in all networks? No... We lack it here in Sweden, the country where GSM was invented. Pretty bad I'd say.
I still speak about horsepowers when I speak cars, and I still use Centigrate instead of Kelvin. People are hard to change, regardless of the change.
Funny thing about the am/pm clock. My girlfriend who is american now uses the 24h clock instead of am/pm, and I didn't even suggest anything. It was just easier she said. So I think that children should learn both meter and feet/inches in school, and after having to convert volumes back and fort from cubic feet to cubic yards and cubic inches they will see how much easier that is done with meter. They will become lazy and prefer meters ^_^
Another interesting piece of history. Celsius was a Swedish scientist who came up with the 100 grade scale (centi == 100), but he put the boiling point at zero and the freezing point at 100. Am I serious? Yes I am. Another Swede who lived at the time, Carl von Linné (a.k.a. Carl von Linneaus (sp?), the man behind the latin name for species), who knew Celius suggested that he should reverse it. That is why I prefer to use centigrade instead of Celsius, but I don't think that is official. Both names means the same and we should abandon it for Kelvin.
And don't forget that they have to sell this to someone, and those someone seems eager to buy (not necessarily the end consumers). It is not about "killing the GPL", it is about seeing a need and filling it.
What scares me is not that M$ makes this piece of software, but that they had a reason not to dismiss it as something that wouldn't ever give revenue. It could just as well have been Sun or IBM doing this.
When you do need medical attention, let's say an operation, will it be out on EBay so doctors can bid on who should do it?
And no, they would not big higher than the previous one, but lower... ^_~
I agree with this. Who cares if you can send it by pigeon and get full frame rate, or if it is free or not (free for me is that I personally don't have to pay, I care little for the source). What matters is quality.
I am looking forward to Tarkin, but this VP3 business is just one more damn format that I have to somehow get support for on my computer. I wasn't to happy when DivX 5.0 came, and this is much the same (without the price tag of the pro version, at least not yet).
If there comes along something with higer quality that I can use, I will choose that. If there are two that are equal, I will choose the free one. If there is an SVCD version and an DivX version, I go for SVCD every day.
I agree with the above and think that there need to be published a few serious comparisons before we can agree on if this is a good or a bad thing (looks like a bad thing right now).
I think that it really hit the nail. I am sure the slashdot community will bitch their asses off because what Joel wrote, or try to make fun of him and thus making him go away. I was very impressed what with he wrote, and it makes a lot of sense.
Secretly replace one workers harddisk with a new one (empty), and watch the panic. Step in and say what you did, and tell everyone that tomorrow this could be reality for any of them. How about we make back ups?
;)
Maybe it is not strikly neccesary to replace a disk, but the idea still stands
Will there be some form of initiative to work together on online documentation for both end users and developers? For instance making sure that there is up to date information on all applications and APIs in a common format (for example XML, that can be used to genereate .info, man pages, html, etc)?
I personally don't think the distributions as a whole are well documented enough, and I think it would be one area where everybody would gain from co-operating.
Who said I liked the rules to begin with? I sure didn't. I don't like the way business is conducted in the world today, it hurts human beings. I don't like the way the major countries are run, they hurt their people. I dislike the legal systems of all major countries, they are corrupt and doesn't protect the individual from the superior force of large companies and goverments.
I am over 20, yes. Could you ever have a clue about who I am, what kind of capacity I have for empathy or not? I do know how to look at things from other perspectives, but I tend to write from just one at a time, as I would be percived as having split personalities otherwise.
Why would I ever cheat while playing networked games? I'm sorry, but you trying to make a funny point failed.
To say it again, don't blame Microsoft for acting like many other companies does today. Feel free to blame the whole thing, but don't single one company out. They are not NSDAP.
I have no solution I'm afraid.