This is completely unsubstantiated. Netcraft hasn't even confirmed it.
This isn't going to happen, certainly not to XP.
If nothing else, making this sort of drastic after-the-fact change to the EULA is precisely the sort of thing that will get definitive court decisions handed down against MS. As someone else has already said, this has class action written all over it.
And that's ignoring the obvious problems of a) how you manage this in the first place, b) what your response is for people who are firewalled/not on the internet, and c) the potential of losing government security certifications.
It turns out that taking quality pictures - and I don't even mean "hang them in an art gallery" quality, just "easily recognizable and/or pleasant to look at" - is a non-trivial task. Trying to do it with an inferior device (mostly due to crappy lenses) only makes the job harder. Trying to do it quickly or, worse, while moving is yet another difficulty.
Add to all the technical difficulties you've already covered the fact that most people only have the vaguest notion how to effectively frame a shot, and this gadget only gets more useless.
(Note that when I say "useless," I don't mean "incapable of being used," I mean "making it easy for the user to perform uselessly")
I never really considered this as a thing to intentionally do. I've thought about it as a side-effect of orbiting solar arrays beaming power back to the surface, and contemplated what overall impact cutting down incident light would have on the planet......but only in terms of whether it's something we could live with, not whether it's something we should hope to accomplish.
Which implies that, turned around, power generation could be a side-effect of blotting out the sun. Although you'd have to exclude the energy you're beaming to the surface from your percent sunlight blocked calculations, of course.
Planting trees will not change the total amount of carbon currently participating in the carbon cycle. To do that, we'd have to re-sequester it underground, where we got it.
Which is a non-trivial task. Although perhaps less non-trivial than making the sun set...at three PM!
It is? These guys appear to be doing all right, as far as I've been able to find out. But I'm hardly an expert on currency, so perhaps I'm missing a subtle point in their operation.
It has everything to do with deciding what people can do with their internet connections. In this case, it's another example of limiting flow of information from the edge inwards.
Ehhh... not really. The idea Americans choose to be unhealthy is a bit untrue. We don't have that much of a fair or equal choice considering that our culture herds us towards unhealthy lifestyles. Why for example are so many suburban people so fat? Do they choose to be?
How is it not a choice? Losing weight is simple - expend more calories than you take in. There are, obviously, two ways of doing this: burn more calories (exercise) or take in fewer calories (diet). Since one of these choices involves doing less of something, it's an option that's available to everyone, all the time. Instead of eating the potato chip, don't.
While, admittedly, social pressures will tend to determine the behaviors of the population as a whole, blaming "culture" for any individual's choices is at best disingenuous, and at worst a complete cop-out.
It's very much akin to statistics: the probability that the outcome of a series of coin flips will be an exact 50% split tends towards unity as the number of trials increases. The probability that the outcome of the next coin flip is heads is always 50%. The fact that society encourages unhealthy lifestyles does not change the fact that individuals choose to live unhealthy lifestyles.
In fact, one could make a strong argument that you've got cause and effect backwards. Why does American society make it so easy to lead an unhealthly lifestyle? Because it's what people want to do, and therefore the market caters to it. Did Ray Kroc force people to be unhealthy, or did he recognize a demand for a certain type of food regardless of health consequences?
Not in the context of driving vs. trains anyways. We like to pretend we have more freedom in our car culture, but in reality we have less. They do have cars in Japan afterall, they make the best cars in the world. Their highways are better than ours too.
What they have that we don't have are bullet trains and a very good rapid transist system. They *chose* that.
Misleading. The options are different in Japan than in America. Given their real estate and population density situation, the cost of using personal vehicles as the primary mode of travel is far higher than it is in America. Parking alone dictates that. Meanwhile, given the distance between urban centers and the population density situatioin, the cost of implementing mass transit is higher in America than it is Japan (note I do not maintain that it's infeasible, just that the relative cost is higher).
I could just as easily claim that, when I leave work, I can go right to a golf course or a rifle range, because I have my clubs and a.22 in my car. These are infeasible to carry on mass transit, so I have a choice the Japanese commuter does not. This is, obviously, a wholly inadequate analysis of the situation; but it hangs together just as well as your assertion regarding choice.
It's neither more freedom nor less, it's simply different. I, having used my car to get to work, can leave at any time, make any number of stops, run any number of errands, go anywhere I choose. The very nature of mass transit dictates that the mass-transit commuter does not have as much flexibility. That is one aspect of "freedom," and it's the one Americans focus on when saying that cars grant freedom. The Japanese commuter can take mass transit, and avoid the costs of gasoline, insurance, and maintenance (or at least, take advantage of economies of scale in those regards), whereas I, living in America, do not have that option. That is another aspect of "freedom," and it's one that America, as a society, has not so far chosen to value.
We have an extensive road network and a society built around the assumption that adults are able to get wherever they need to be whenever they need to be there. That's the freedom cars grant. We *chose* this.
Our car culture is really unhealthy because people just aren't designed to live like that.
This is true.
I don't know if it's relevant. If this rationale is valid, then there are several other things that are just as unhealthy. Most notably, abundant food. All our biological evolution occurred in an evironment of scarce calories; it is only in the last ~100 years, and then only in specific societies, that food is abundant (I use "abundant" to mean, in this case, that the average person can literally eat as much as he or she wants).
This is the root cause of the obesity problem that exists in most societies with "first world" standards of living. We are genetically programmed to want high calorie intake and low calorie expenditure. In other words, people are lazy.
Is this unhealthy? Yes, it is. On the other hand, do we want the alternative of scarce food, with the attendant starvation, violence, and all the other neat things that go on amongst animals facing scarce food?
The fundamental problem is that, given the choice, lots of people will choose to do that which is less healthy. The only solution is to not give them the choice. This, however, is a completely unpalatable solution to people brought up revering individual liberty.
Freedom may mean being able to say "2 + 2 = 4", but it also means being able to say "2 + 2 = 6".
*shrug*
Liberty may or may not be a worthwhile goal, but if it's going to be a goal, then the attendant consequences (people choosing to do the wrong things) are unavoidable, and these include living unhealthy lifestyles.
The easy fix to this is to have bids received within X time units of auction close extend the bidding period by y time units; pick your units and values to taste.
Of course, this is open to abuse in a way a similar system in live auctions is not: bidding could be extended indefinitely. And I have no reason to believe it's particularly difficult to skip out on owed bids with impunity. It would be easier and more effective to move to a closed bidding process. No one finds out if their bid has won until the auction has ended.
On the other hand, this is so obvious that I suspect the system is deliberately set up the way it is. The problem, then, isn't sniping, the problem is perceiving sniping as a problem that eBay wants to solve.
It's terrifying that, after work, I want to just go home without having to stop for groceries? It's frightful that, instead of adding the overhead of a trip to the store four times a week, I choose to incur that overhead once every two? Public transportation or not, I fail to see how making eight independent trips is somehow more efficient than making one larger trip.
Explain to me why I'd want to go to some bakery every other day for bread rather than just making my own bread at home out of supplies I've stockpiled. Explain to me why it's better for me to completely depend on remote locations for my food on a daily basis, rather than being independent (relatively speaking, of course). So when the power goes out, or there's an earthquake, or a hurricane, or a major fire, or even just transportation gridlock, I'm out luck for food?
I'm unconvinced.
I'll keep stockpiling, thanks, and make bread when I want to, pick vegetables from my garden when I want to, and retrieve venison from the freezer when I want to.
When driving through look for the bypass (generally prefixed by a number, making it a three-digit highway number, for example, 894 for I-94). The bypass will take you around or through a city with a minimal number of offramps.
Uh...are you talking about the 894 that runs from the Marquette out to Hwy 45? 'Cause if you are, I think your idea of a "minimal number of offramps" and mine differ - at least, in effect. 894 is just as torpid as 94 come rush hour.
Of course, some of this might have to do with a "bypass" that is only five miles from the interstate (on the same side of the airport, no less) and runs through just as urban an area as the main corridor. Or with the (relative) lack of high-speed east-west arterials north of 94. But either way, 894 through Milwaukee isn't exactly a good example of a smoothly-functioning bypass.
Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?
What is this "Gee Pee You" of which you speak? My DX4/100 has a video card with a rasterizer on it, and there is a CPU on the motherboard...and I can run a display in 16-bit color!
Wouldn't it be funny if AI came about accidentally by companies just trying to make search engines work better?
Funny? Not particularly. Realistic? Absolutely. Likely? I think so.
Not to wander too far off track, I often think that some of the Cyberpunk crowd has it right: the most probable way for us to develop true AI is for it to spontaneously emerge from/as the internet. In my particularly paranoid/flight-of-fancy moments, I wonder if it hasn't already happened. After all, there's no particular reason to think that a "brain" made up of millions of PC "neurons" would be at all interested in (or even aware of) the soft & damp bits attached to the ends of the neurons. From its point of view, for one thing, we would be operating in geological time. Odds are good that we wouldn't be recognized as anything other than "features of the landscape," as it were.
(Most of the time, to be sure, I'm much more rational/grounded/empirical of mind)
If I had mod points right now, yours would be the first +1 funny I'd ever handed out. I can't remember the last time something on/. had me literally laughing out loud.
Anyone not obliged to use Windows or IE that still chooses them clearly isn't aware of the issues or alternatives.
This is a common mistake made by both me and an awful lot of technologically-savvy people. That statement is completely false. There are plenty of people who are aware, but simply don't care. There are even more people who aren't aware, but if they were, they still wouldn't care.
The things that seem like monumentally important issues to enthusiasts often are all but completely irrelevant to non-enthusiasts.
This is hardly limited to computers, of course. For example, I could talk your ear off about the obvious advantages of JHP vs. FMJ in 9mm, but you probably don't care.
Yup, they're really raking in the dough by selling their browser... wait. I mean, they're really squashing Mozilla and preventing them from selling their browser... er, hold on. Ah... I get it... you're secretly arguing about who makes money off of the ads in search engines, MSN or Google, right? So MS's "monopoly" is crushing poor Google. Not! They've got a bigger share of search than MS does of desktops. Maybe you were making some other point entirely? Where's the abuse, exactly?
I'm not all that offended by MS bundling IE, but that paragraph is more than slightly disingenuous. If there wasn't a market advantage to be had by bundling IE, MS would neither expend the developer time to create it, nor risk exposing themselves to further litigation by bundling it. If there was no market advantage to bundling the browser, they wouldn't have fought tooth and nail in court to demonstrate that it wasn't unbundle-able.
*shrug*
Not that I really care, though, I admit. I've always found the attacks on the bundling to be a bit ridiculous, myself. In my mind, why should IE be a special case? Why not complain about Paint, and Notepad, and Calc, and Hyperterminal, and, hell, Explorer itself? There are replacements for all of those (Photoshop, Notetab, TeleMate, LiteStep) that are far superior, and I'm sure would love to have better market penetration. But the fact of the matter is that asking MS to sell only the strictly-defined OS would be ridiculous.
As far as I'm concerned, IE is just a utility like Notepad. At this point, a web browser is as fundamental to making the computer a useful device as a text editor - and arguably moreso.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Now you're just mocking me, aren't you? It's not my fault there's a new 10/22 that's been sitting in my trunk for three whole days and I still haven't had the chance to use it. I've been busy, you insensitive clod!
And even if you did break the moon apart somehow, it wouldn't fall to Earth. Its orbit would change to compensate for whatever net vector (probably near zero) you introduced to its total mass, and the majority (probably well over 90%) of the pieces would fall back together. You'd end up with a roughly spherical object orbiting the planet roughly once a month.
How sure of that are you? Not that I can be arsed to check, but I'm reasonably certain the last DOE stats I saw indicated that roughly half of US oil consumption is accounted for my burning gasoline/diesel. But half of the US' oil consumption is a far cry from half of the US' fossil fuel consumption, which would include the enormous quantities of coal devoted to generating power, the not insignificant amount of natural gas devoted to heating buildings, as well as the oil used for non-combustion purposes. There are other notable places that fossil fuels get used, but I'd guess those are the big ones.
Anyway, the point is, I'm pretty sure the gasoline/diesel we burn in this country isn't anywhere close to accounting for half our total fossil fuel usage.
It's also better for video games as it allows more storage - it allows for larger demo discs with more playable games. It allows for more extras in games like directory commentary and making of videos. Even if you don't care a whit for HD Pixar movies it's still better for me, as a gamer.
Regarding the possible extras, granted. I wouldn't mind seeing making of documentaries and such, and 25 GB does open that possibility. I still don't think it's worth the extra expense, but at least it's something that does appeal to me as a gamer. Larger demo discs...well, sure, I suppose that would be nice, but I'm not about to start making console purchasing decisions based on how much content they can cram on a demo disc.
Well, they did actually do sort of well with a little something called the PS2. You may have heard of it. The Sony games group does have the capability for good design.
Don't confuse the PS2 with Sony Online. Sony Online is the organization responsible for such majestic hits as Star Wars Galaxies, and it's the only place Sony has to pull from if they want experience in managing an online games service. Sure, they could be starting from scratch, but then you're back to the first iteration problem. Either way, I'll only be convinced they managed something decent this time when I've seen it. Being able to borrow ideas from Apple didn't make Windows 3.x better than System 7.
Actually I point that out because so many people seem to focus on what the $500 model lacks whcih is how they justify saying the "real" PS3 is $600... but if you note that the lowest priced PS3 at $500 has everything the most expensive 360 offers, that changes the pricing equation. You aren't being shorted by buying the $500 model, you are just getting more for the $600 one.
All well and good, but it's still more expensive than the $400 360, and it will be by a wider margin than $100 when the PS3 comes out.
Except that it will take many years before enough people have HDMI equipment much less players so they could even turn the flag on if they wanted - at which point you just buy a $100 player and keep playing Blu-Ray discs on that. How are you "screwed" exactly when you can still play the movies you have? Seems to me you're a bit more "screwed" if you actually pay $200 for an HD-DVD player on the 360 which can't even help store game content.
You and I may have to agree to disagree on this one. You're willing to place your faith in the movie industry to behave with enlightened self interest, and recognize that alienating potential customers is ultimately self-defeating. You're saying they won't turn it on, and that's good enough for you. From my point of view, based on everything I've seen out of the entertainment industry over the past couple decades, I know that they can turn it on, and that's bad enough for me.
Same sort of reasoning that makes me want the FBI to need warrants to wiretap or search my home.
*shrug*
Anyway, you're right, I would be screwed to pay $200 for the HD-DVD add-on to the 360. Which is why I won't. Sony's not giving me that option, because they're irreversibly welded to the idea of getting a Blu-Ray player in as many living rooms as possible.
Wow, that was a really well-reasoned argument. I've completely changed my mind. I should have realized that in the mystical and inscrutable world of console development, hard drives are orders of magnitude slower in throughput than they are in PCs, while optical drives are orders of magnitude faster than they are in PCs.
I am a dummy. I'd better collect a few thousand dollars to pay for the privilege of coding for a console, so I can stop being a dummy.
Do you have a fucking clue what an idiot you look like foaming at the mouth ranting
Er. Mr. Kettle, I'd like you to meet Mr. Pot. Moving on:
When developers themselves are right there on record stating their games are already taking 20+ gigs of storage!
I'll believe that this is a current, pressing problem when I start buying PC games that span more than one DVD. The PC has no such limitation, be it 4.5 GB, 9 GB, or 25 GB, so if all these developers are straining at the leash imposed by a DVD-ROM, why aren't I seeing all the new PC games coming on multiple DVDs?
I'm sure that games will eventually be big enough to fill 25 GB with useful content (no, FMV doesn't count, even if it's in 1080p). I'm also sure that I'll buy the next generation of consoles. My money is on the former happening after the latter.
But hey, I could be wrong.
Oh, and just to make a point of information: the original poster made a claim about it being a Blu-Ray player, and I specifically explained I don't want a Blu-Ray player. Had the argument been about the game storage capacity of the discs, I would have used a different rebuttal, which probably would have gone something like what I just posted to you.
In any event, I now return you to your unseen Anonymous Cowardice. I'm obviously not going to drop mod points in this thread anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is completely unsubstantiated. Netcraft hasn't even confirmed it.
This isn't going to happen, certainly not to XP.
If nothing else, making this sort of drastic after-the-fact change to the EULA is precisely the sort of thing that will get definitive court decisions handed down against MS. As someone else has already said, this has class action written all over it.
And that's ignoring the obvious problems of a) how you manage this in the first place, b) what your response is for people who are firewalled/not on the internet, and c) the potential of losing government security certifications.
Yes, yes, and again, yes.
It turns out that taking quality pictures - and I don't even mean "hang them in an art gallery" quality, just "easily recognizable and/or pleasant to look at" - is a non-trivial task. Trying to do it with an inferior device (mostly due to crappy lenses) only makes the job harder. Trying to do it quickly or, worse, while moving is yet another difficulty.
Add to all the technical difficulties you've already covered the fact that most people only have the vaguest notion how to effectively frame a shot, and this gadget only gets more useless.
(Note that when I say "useless," I don't mean "incapable of being used," I mean "making it easy for the user to perform uselessly")
I never really considered this as a thing to intentionally do. I've thought about it as a side-effect of orbiting solar arrays beaming power back to the surface, and contemplated what overall impact cutting down incident light would have on the planet... ...but only in terms of whether it's something we could live with, not whether it's something we should hope to accomplish.
Which implies that, turned around, power generation could be a side-effect of blotting out the sun. Although you'd have to exclude the energy you're beaming to the surface from your percent sunlight blocked calculations, of course.
Planting trees will not change the total amount of carbon currently participating in the carbon cycle. To do that, we'd have to re-sequester it underground, where we got it.
Which is a non-trivial task. Although perhaps less non-trivial than making the sun set...at three PM!
crap
That link is supposed to point to libertydollar.org.
Of course this is actually illegal in the US.
It is? These guys appear to be doing all right, as far as I've been able to find out. But I'm hardly an expert on currency, so perhaps I'm missing a subtle point in their operation.
You've been beaten to the punch.
I don't know how it's doing now, but it was very much a going concern a couple years ago.
It has everything to do with deciding what people can do with their internet connections. In this case, it's another example of limiting flow of information from the edge inwards.
The rationale really doesn't matter.
...away from the internet as a network for data exchange, and towards the internet as a one-way pipe by which to push content your way.
Ehhh... not really. The idea Americans choose to be unhealthy is a bit untrue. We don't have that much of a fair or equal choice considering that our culture herds us towards unhealthy lifestyles. Why for example are so many suburban people so fat? Do they choose to be?
.22 in my car. These are infeasible to carry on mass transit, so I have a choice the Japanese commuter does not. This is, obviously, a wholly inadequate analysis of the situation; but it hangs together just as well as your assertion regarding choice.
How is it not a choice? Losing weight is simple - expend more calories than you take in. There are, obviously, two ways of doing this: burn more calories (exercise) or take in fewer calories (diet). Since one of these choices involves doing less of something, it's an option that's available to everyone, all the time. Instead of eating the potato chip, don't.
While, admittedly, social pressures will tend to determine the behaviors of the population as a whole, blaming "culture" for any individual's choices is at best disingenuous, and at worst a complete cop-out.
It's very much akin to statistics: the probability that the outcome of a series of coin flips will be an exact 50% split tends towards unity as the number of trials increases. The probability that the outcome of the next coin flip is heads is always 50%. The fact that society encourages unhealthy lifestyles does not change the fact that individuals choose to live unhealthy lifestyles.
In fact, one could make a strong argument that you've got cause and effect backwards. Why does American society make it so easy to lead an unhealthly lifestyle? Because it's what people want to do, and therefore the market caters to it. Did Ray Kroc force people to be unhealthy, or did he recognize a demand for a certain type of food regardless of health consequences?
Not in the context of driving vs. trains anyways. We like to pretend we have more freedom in our car culture, but in reality we have less. They do have cars in Japan afterall, they make the best cars in the world. Their highways are better than ours too.
What they have that we don't have are bullet trains and a very good rapid transist system. They *chose* that.
Misleading. The options are different in Japan than in America. Given their real estate and population density situation, the cost of using personal vehicles as the primary mode of travel is far higher than it is in America. Parking alone dictates that. Meanwhile, given the distance between urban centers and the population density situatioin, the cost of implementing mass transit is higher in America than it is Japan (note I do not maintain that it's infeasible, just that the relative cost is higher).
I could just as easily claim that, when I leave work, I can go right to a golf course or a rifle range, because I have my clubs and a
It's neither more freedom nor less, it's simply different. I, having used my car to get to work, can leave at any time, make any number of stops, run any number of errands, go anywhere I choose. The very nature of mass transit dictates that the mass-transit commuter does not have as much flexibility. That is one aspect of "freedom," and it's the one Americans focus on when saying that cars grant freedom. The Japanese commuter can take mass transit, and avoid the costs of gasoline, insurance, and maintenance (or at least, take advantage of economies of scale in those regards), whereas I, living in America, do not have that option. That is another aspect of "freedom," and it's one that America, as a society, has not so far chosen to value.
We have an extensive road network and a society built around the assumption that adults are able to get wherever they need to be whenever they need to be there. That's the freedom cars grant. We *chose* this.
Our car culture is really unhealthy because people just aren't designed to live like that.
This is true.
I don't know if it's relevant. If this rationale is valid, then there are several other things that are just as unhealthy. Most notably, abundant food. All our biological evolution occurred in an evironment of scarce calories; it is only in the last ~100 years, and then only in specific societies, that food is abundant (I use "abundant" to mean, in this case, that the average person can literally eat as much as he or she wants).
This is the root cause of the obesity problem that exists in most societies with "first world" standards of living. We are genetically programmed to want high calorie intake and low calorie expenditure. In other words, people are lazy.
Is this unhealthy? Yes, it is. On the other hand, do we want the alternative of scarce food, with the attendant starvation, violence, and all the other neat things that go on amongst animals facing scarce food?
The fundamental problem is that, given the choice, lots of people will choose to do that which is less healthy. The only solution is to not give them the choice. This, however, is a completely unpalatable solution to people brought up revering individual liberty.
Freedom may mean being able to say "2 + 2 = 4", but it also means being able to say "2 + 2 = 6".
*shrug*
Liberty may or may not be a worthwhile goal, but if it's going to be a goal, then the attendant consequences (people choosing to do the wrong things) are unavoidable, and these include living unhealthy lifestyles.
The easy fix to this is to have bids received within X time units of auction close extend the bidding period by y time units; pick your units and values to taste.
Of course, this is open to abuse in a way a similar system in live auctions is not: bidding could be extended indefinitely. And I have no reason to believe it's particularly difficult to skip out on owed bids with impunity. It would be easier and more effective to move to a closed bidding process. No one finds out if their bid has won until the auction has ended.
On the other hand, this is so obvious that I suspect the system is deliberately set up the way it is. The problem, then, isn't sniping, the problem is perceiving sniping as a problem that eBay wants to solve.
It's terrifying that, after work, I want to just go home without having to stop for groceries? It's frightful that, instead of adding the overhead of a trip to the store four times a week, I choose to incur that overhead once every two? Public transportation or not, I fail to see how making eight independent trips is somehow more efficient than making one larger trip.
Explain to me why I'd want to go to some bakery every other day for bread rather than just making my own bread at home out of supplies I've stockpiled. Explain to me why it's better for me to completely depend on remote locations for my food on a daily basis, rather than being independent (relatively speaking, of course). So when the power goes out, or there's an earthquake, or a hurricane, or a major fire, or even just transportation gridlock, I'm out luck for food?
I'm unconvinced.
I'll keep stockpiling, thanks, and make bread when I want to, pick vegetables from my garden when I want to, and retrieve venison from the freezer when I want to.
When driving through look for the bypass (generally prefixed by a number, making it a three-digit highway number, for example, 894 for I-94). The bypass will take you around or through a city with a minimal number of offramps.
Uh...are you talking about the 894 that runs from the Marquette out to Hwy 45? 'Cause if you are, I think your idea of a "minimal number of offramps" and mine differ - at least, in effect. 894 is just as torpid as 94 come rush hour.
Of course, some of this might have to do with a "bypass" that is only five miles from the interstate (on the same side of the airport, no less) and runs through just as urban an area as the main corridor. Or with the (relative) lack of high-speed east-west arterials north of 94. But either way, 894 through Milwaukee isn't exactly a good example of a smoothly-functioning bypass.
Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?
What is this "Gee Pee You" of which you speak? My DX4/100 has a video card with a rasterizer on it, and there is a CPU on the motherboard...and I can run a display in 16-bit color!
Wouldn't it be funny if AI came about accidentally by companies just trying to make search engines work better?
Funny? Not particularly. Realistic? Absolutely. Likely? I think so.
Not to wander too far off track, I often think that some of the Cyberpunk crowd has it right: the most probable way for us to develop true AI is for it to spontaneously emerge from/as the internet. In my particularly paranoid/flight-of-fancy moments, I wonder if it hasn't already happened. After all, there's no particular reason to think that a "brain" made up of millions of PC "neurons" would be at all interested in (or even aware of) the soft & damp bits attached to the ends of the neurons. From its point of view, for one thing, we would be operating in geological time. Odds are good that we wouldn't be recognized as anything other than "features of the landscape," as it were.
(Most of the time, to be sure, I'm much more rational/grounded/empirical of mind)
If I had mod points right now, yours would be the first +1 funny I'd ever handed out. I can't remember the last time something on /. had me literally laughing out loud.
Anyone not obliged to use Windows or IE that still chooses them clearly isn't aware of the issues or alternatives.
This is a common mistake made by both me and an awful lot of technologically-savvy people. That statement is completely false. There are plenty of people who are aware, but simply don't care. There are even more people who aren't aware, but if they were, they still wouldn't care.
The things that seem like monumentally important issues to enthusiasts often are all but completely irrelevant to non-enthusiasts.
This is hardly limited to computers, of course. For example, I could talk your ear off about the obvious advantages of JHP vs. FMJ in 9mm, but you probably don't care.
Yup, they're really raking in the dough by selling their browser... wait. I mean, they're really squashing Mozilla and preventing them from selling their browser... er, hold on. Ah... I get it... you're secretly arguing about who makes money off of the ads in search engines, MSN or Google, right? So MS's "monopoly" is crushing poor Google. Not! They've got a bigger share of search than MS does of desktops. Maybe you were making some other point entirely? Where's the abuse, exactly?
I'm not all that offended by MS bundling IE, but that paragraph is more than slightly disingenuous. If there wasn't a market advantage to be had by bundling IE, MS would neither expend the developer time to create it, nor risk exposing themselves to further litigation by bundling it. If there was no market advantage to bundling the browser, they wouldn't have fought tooth and nail in court to demonstrate that it wasn't unbundle-able.
*shrug*
Not that I really care, though, I admit. I've always found the attacks on the bundling to be a bit ridiculous, myself. In my mind, why should IE be a special case? Why not complain about Paint, and Notepad, and Calc, and Hyperterminal, and, hell, Explorer itself? There are replacements for all of those (Photoshop, Notetab, TeleMate, LiteStep) that are far superior, and I'm sure would love to have better market penetration. But the fact of the matter is that asking MS to sell only the strictly-defined OS would be ridiculous.
As far as I'm concerned, IE is just a utility like Notepad. At this point, a web browser is as fundamental to making the computer a useful device as a text editor - and arguably moreso.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Now you're just mocking me, aren't you? It's not my fault there's a new 10/22 that's been sitting in my trunk for three whole days and I still haven't had the chance to use it. I've been busy, you insensitive clod!
And even if you did break the moon apart somehow, it wouldn't fall to Earth. Its orbit would change to compensate for whatever net vector (probably near zero) you introduced to its total mass, and the majority (probably well over 90%) of the pieces would fall back together. You'd end up with a roughly spherical object orbiting the planet roughly once a month.
Which sounds vaguely familiar, somehow...
How sure of that are you? Not that I can be arsed to check, but I'm reasonably certain the last DOE stats I saw indicated that roughly half of US oil consumption is accounted for my burning gasoline/diesel. But half of the US' oil consumption is a far cry from half of the US' fossil fuel consumption, which would include the enormous quantities of coal devoted to generating power, the not insignificant amount of natural gas devoted to heating buildings, as well as the oil used for non-combustion purposes. There are other notable places that fossil fuels get used, but I'd guess those are the big ones.
Anyway, the point is, I'm pretty sure the gasoline/diesel we burn in this country isn't anywhere close to accounting for half our total fossil fuel usage.
It's also better for video games as it allows more storage - it allows for larger demo discs with more playable games. It allows for more extras in games like directory commentary and making of videos. Even if you don't care a whit for HD Pixar movies it's still better for me, as a gamer.
Regarding the possible extras, granted. I wouldn't mind seeing making of documentaries and such, and 25 GB does open that possibility. I still don't think it's worth the extra expense, but at least it's something that does appeal to me as a gamer. Larger demo discs...well, sure, I suppose that would be nice, but I'm not about to start making console purchasing decisions based on how much content they can cram on a demo disc.
Well, they did actually do sort of well with a little something called the PS2. You may have heard of it. The Sony games group does have the capability for good design.
Don't confuse the PS2 with Sony Online. Sony Online is the organization responsible for such majestic hits as Star Wars Galaxies, and it's the only place Sony has to pull from if they want experience in managing an online games service. Sure, they could be starting from scratch, but then you're back to the first iteration problem. Either way, I'll only be convinced they managed something decent this time when I've seen it. Being able to borrow ideas from Apple didn't make Windows 3.x better than System 7.
Actually I point that out because so many people seem to focus on what the $500 model lacks whcih is how they justify saying the "real" PS3 is $600... but if you note that the lowest priced PS3 at $500 has everything the most expensive 360 offers, that changes the pricing equation. You aren't being shorted by buying the $500 model, you are just getting more for the $600 one.
All well and good, but it's still more expensive than the $400 360, and it will be by a wider margin than $100 when the PS3 comes out.
Except that it will take many years before enough people have HDMI equipment much less players so they could even turn the flag on if they wanted - at which point you just buy a $100 player and keep playing Blu-Ray discs on that. How are you "screwed" exactly when you can still play the movies you have? Seems to me you're a bit more "screwed" if you actually pay $200 for an HD-DVD player on the 360 which can't even help store game content.
You and I may have to agree to disagree on this one. You're willing to place your faith in the movie industry to behave with enlightened self interest, and recognize that alienating potential customers is ultimately self-defeating. You're saying they won't turn it on, and that's good enough for you. From my point of view, based on everything I've seen out of the entertainment industry over the past couple decades, I know that they can turn it on, and that's bad enough for me.
Same sort of reasoning that makes me want the FBI to need warrants to wiretap or search my home.
*shrug*
Anyway, you're right, I would be screwed to pay $200 for the HD-DVD add-on to the 360. Which is why I won't. Sony's not giving me that option, because they're irreversibly welded to the idea of getting a Blu-Ray player in as many living rooms as possible.
Wow, that was a really well-reasoned argument. I've completely changed my mind. I should have realized that in the mystical and inscrutable world of console development, hard drives are orders of magnitude slower in throughput than they are in PCs, while optical drives are orders of magnitude faster than they are in PCs.
I am a dummy. I'd better collect a few thousand dollars to pay for the privilege of coding for a console, so I can stop being a dummy.
Now that would be a hell of a good use for an online service that's somewhat centralized, all downloads could be swarming.
I'd love to see that happen.
Do you have a fucking clue what an idiot you look like foaming at the mouth ranting
Er. Mr. Kettle, I'd like you to meet Mr. Pot. Moving on:
When developers themselves are right there on record stating their games are already taking 20+ gigs of storage!
I'll believe that this is a current, pressing problem when I start buying PC games that span more than one DVD. The PC has no such limitation, be it 4.5 GB, 9 GB, or 25 GB, so if all these developers are straining at the leash imposed by a DVD-ROM, why aren't I seeing all the new PC games coming on multiple DVDs?
I'm sure that games will eventually be big enough to fill 25 GB with useful content (no, FMV doesn't count, even if it's in 1080p). I'm also sure that I'll buy the next generation of consoles. My money is on the former happening after the latter.
But hey, I could be wrong.
Oh, and just to make a point of information: the original poster made a claim about it being a Blu-Ray player, and I specifically explained I don't want a Blu-Ray player. Had the argument been about the game storage capacity of the discs, I would have used a different rebuttal, which probably would have gone something like what I just posted to you.
In any event, I now return you to your unseen Anonymous Cowardice. I'm obviously not going to drop mod points in this thread anyway.