My local DVD store now rents overnighters for $2.50. Thats cheap enough for me that its not worth the effort of downloading. I can browse the whole selection, grab it and watch it. (Ok and maybe H264 it a little if its good).
I'm phx in the rage-quit lineup. We're in the top 5 teams in Australias main amateur CS ladder. I use a 24" Dell 2405FPW LCD with an "unacceptable" grey to grey of around 18ms. The majority of our lineup use LCDs.
Competetive team gameplay like CS is about team prediction and buy strategies. Being able to shoot straight, quickly, and handle individual prediction is a minimum requirement.
Seems a lot like the static methods provided by the Debugger class in.net System.Diagnostics namespace:
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() - Signals a breakpoint to the attached debugger. System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached - bool, obvious System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch() - Pops up the windows start JIT debugging box
Its a simple formula. You take the cost per day of developing and pimping DRM (DEV), the fat wads of cash you make per a day (FATCASH), the daily % of sales lost to piracy when a high def release is out (OHNOES), the number of days that your shitty DRM delays a release (PWNTIME) the amount of money lost because geeks are angry at your DRM (RMS), the incidental benefits of making money selling people the same shit twice (JSIXPK) and the amount of extra daily profit needed to get your annual executive bonus (GOAL).
(JSIXPK + (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME) - DEV - RMS. If this is more than GOAL then you win!
I submit to you that FATCASH is extremely large, and OHNOES is very small. PWNTIME is probably in the order of a week. JSIXPACK is a fairly substantial bonus. DEV is tiny compared to (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME. RMS is insignificant compared to JSIXPK.
Sounds like hitting GOAL would be a trivial task which would imply you win FERRARI and HOOKERS.
So yes, they know what they are doing. They know the game quite well, they have run the numbers. They also know the numbers, (the real ones, not the "we lost more than the GDP of the US on piracy") - and I humbly suggest that if you don't know the numbers you should perhaps STFU. DRM is a delaying tactic, and I'm very sure the content holders know it.
I have personally downloaded several recent releases for PC, which were multi DVD and in the 8 gig range (mainly because I was too lazy to get the demo).
C&C3 for example. That lasted no further than one skirmish before I deleted it due to frustrations with the shitty camera. 10 gig is a download you can start one morning and have done by the next afternoon, using bittorrent. Using newsbin you can have that down in a few hours on ADSL2+.
> I used to be able to pop-up IE right away and surf but now if I do that, I get the error page for site not found for about 1 minute before things start working normally.
Hrmmm. I have always had that on my work Dell. Assumed it was something to do with the domain.
Pain in the arse when Outlook pops up a connection dialog, messenger and groove cant connect and VS cant hit team foundation server. I blame realtek, those guys suck.
Yes, I am also sick of SL. Makes me cry everytime I see some story about a corporation having virtual headquarters in it. Considering at a rough estimate 96% of the user created content is furry skins and genitalia (yes I found a wang with a/spoo command), I would suggest the entire gameworld is basically furrys (87%), IBM employees (8%) and other people with no life (5%).
Oh and people that love trolling. IBM showing people around their center.
http://www.mancer.org/ibm.jpg (_definitely not safe for work_) Photo taken just as a whole bunch of people started arriving on some tour.
It is cool though, letting your link your annotated map into your blog/photos on Live Spaces. Almost easy enough for your grandma to use though - no coding!
Also, as I'm sure everyone here is a huge fan of IE and ActiveX *grin* you can install the 3D renderer, and I was suprised to see all my annotations working. While you are there, get the Live Local plugin for Outlook if you have it, it does route finding between your appointments and adds travel time.:P
Before we gear up all the jokes, the C-A-D key combo is known as the Secure Attention Sequence. By pressing this key combination you can guarantee that the logon box that pops up is from the OS and not from some random crapware.
All the UMPC (UltraMobile PCs) - the MS Origami formfactor provide a button like this for logon. Similarily devices by OQO include on.
Pretty much anyone experienced with making these ultraportables includes this button, because doing it manually on a small keyboard is a pain. Lesson learned.
BTW the 5" OQO Model 02 is now my sex object... powerful enough to run a full OS in the palm of your hand. Noice.
When the *IAA sues they are generally not going after your for *downloading*. Downloading has very little to no damages. They are usually after you for uploading to other people, they are after you for creating and distributing copies of their shit and depriving them of customers.
The effect is real. Its similar to running a printing press, and knocking out copies of books for anyone that asks. The *IAA and the law are definitely in the right to try and stop this. HOWEVER...
While the effect on the industry is the same as the guy with the printing press, the problem I have with the large statuatory damages is the _intent_. Someone setting up a printing press and knocking out copies of books can at best argue an ignorance of the law. File sharing programs are very dangerous - in that a noob can click a "Free Music" banner, and be completely unaware that this "Bazza's Kazza" prog is actually uploading files to people. They can be ignorant of the fact that they are uploading, and not even suspect they are getting something for nothing - hey its got ads everywhere and most stuff on the net is free. Unfortuately (copyright infringement in aus is a strict liability offence) it means they are equally as liable as the bloke with the printing press.
The *IAA is on the ball here with their "Dont copy the strange mans floppy" ads they are tacking on the front of everything. Ask yourself if your grandma would suspect anything wrong with using Kazza - but you can be damn sure if you had a printing press runnign in your lounge and you offered her a bestseller, she might raise an eyebrow;)
You mean the Taiwan that the old Chinese Government ran to after being chucked out by the commies, so the US, in its traditional manner of sticking its goddamn nose into other peoples business decided to offer it's support. The legitimate Chinese governement, in deciding not to rock the boat too much, has declared it an independantly admin'd region, still part of China. Anyone that recognises its existance as a country will greatly offend China, and countries that do tend to lose diplomatic ties with China.
So Taiwan is not a country unless China allows it to seceed (I spelt that wrong).
Note: This is a brief summary, and my Authoritarian Chinese Girlfriend demanded I post the correction, otherwise she would cut off bedroom diplomatic relations with the sm^H^Hlarge independantly admin'd state of my penis.:(
ROI is pretty meaningless for things that don't give a return but are still business critical.
Whats the ROI on your backup system (without giving me the probability of disaster * cost of rebuild crap)? Theres no return.
You might want to compare say a $500 tape drive inc reusable media, vs a $200 dvd burner + $20 a week in write-once media over a variety of periods. ($AUD, im aussie).
Or, preference issues aside, the $0 linux desktop + (cost of sufficiently competent linux geek / num pcs) vs $200 windows desktop + (cost of sufficiently competent windows geek / num pcs).
I submit that a windows geek thats good enough to keep a small office of 20 PCs running along would cost say 20% of the time of some bloke on a $40k salary. ($400 per pc per year).
Linux geeks are rarer. I imagine to keep a linux geek good enough to keep those 20 PCs running smoothly you would need to pay more. Say around $50k. ($500 per pc per year).
Picking a time period that fits, say the 5 year upgrade cycle for buying a new OS from MS, that gives a TCO per pc, windows $2200, linux $2500.
Yes its just the OS, yes you probably buy Office for the windows pc, yes these figures came straight out my arse, but hopefully you get the point. The licence costs for the OS are a fairly insignificant part of the entire investment.
If linux wants to replace windows on the desktop its not going to do it because its free/Free.
They make DirectX 10 specific to Vista, and are bashed for not backporting it to XP.
Which in itself is ridiculous. DirectX 10 relies on a variety of new features in Vistas new driver model, such as GPU context switching.
It would be a massive pain in the arse to backport it to XP. I'm not saying its technically impossible - but it's definitely not an economic decision. Its on par with making everything else in Vista free...
Vista has some new things under the hood that won't be backported. They're the upgrade, and thats what you choose or not choose to pay for. Theres also some other tech coming out (.net 3 / cardspace / workflow / wpf) that will be backported, generally because they can, and these are core developer technologies that they want devs to target.
I know 10 or so people who I've occasionally played online with on Windows using XP/2k, and don't know a single Live subscriber. I don't have much incentive to get Windows Live, do I? YMMV, of course.
This may be due to the fact that you play on Windows, and that Live, as in TFA, not being released until May. YMMV, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
It is Odd the way they approach this.
My local DVD store now rents overnighters for $2.50. Thats cheap enough for me that its not worth the effort of downloading. I can browse the whole selection, grab it and watch it. (Ok and maybe H264 it a little if its good).
The economy will readjust - it just takes time.
Tell that to my mate who caught Hep-C from blood that got thru screening in au...
Bullshit.
I'm phx in the rage-quit lineup. We're in the top 5 teams in Australias main amateur CS ladder. I use a 24" Dell 2405FPW LCD with an "unacceptable" grey to grey of around 18ms. The majority of our lineup use LCDs.
Competetive team gameplay like CS is about team prediction and buy strategies. Being able to shoot straight, quickly, and handle individual prediction is a minimum requirement.
Seems a lot like the static methods provided by the Debugger class in .net System.Diagnostics namespace:
i agnostics.debugger_members.aspx
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() - Signals a breakpoint to the attached debugger.
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached - bool, obvious
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch() - Pops up the windows start JIT debugging box
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsLogging - bool, obvious
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Log(int level, string category, string message)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.d
I for one welcome our new Ancient Lubricant Formula bearing overlords!
Seconded. You can take an existing page, wrap a few regions in UpdatePanels and the whole thing just works without code changes.
And it works in firefox. Whee.
This is how an ajax framework should be done.
I dont know how that could have happened!
i terary_work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_MacLeish#L
This is news for nerds.
Not just news for rabid GNU/Hippies.
Its a simple formula. You take the cost per day of developing and pimping DRM (DEV), the fat wads of cash you make per a day (FATCASH), the daily % of sales lost to piracy when a high def release is out (OHNOES), the number of days that your shitty DRM delays a release (PWNTIME) the amount of money lost because geeks are angry at your DRM (RMS), the incidental benefits of making money selling people the same shit twice (JSIXPK) and the amount of extra daily profit needed to get your annual executive bonus (GOAL).
(JSIXPK + (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME) - DEV - RMS. If this is more than GOAL then you win!
I submit to you that FATCASH is extremely large, and OHNOES is very small. PWNTIME is probably in the order of a week. JSIXPACK is a fairly substantial bonus. DEV is tiny compared to (FATCASH / OHNOES) * PWNTIME. RMS is insignificant compared to JSIXPK.
Sounds like hitting GOAL would be a trivial task which would imply you win FERRARI and HOOKERS.
So yes, they know what they are doing. They know the game quite well, they have run the numbers. They also know the numbers, (the real ones, not the "we lost more than the GDP of the US on piracy") - and I humbly suggest that if you don't know the numbers you should perhaps STFU. DRM is a delaying tactic, and I'm very sure the content holders know it.
>> "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."
> So now, consumers will be providing beta testing services for the hardware, in addition to the software.
So what the parent is basically saying:
"Look out for the new EA Console(tm), coming soon to a store near you! Runs* all your favourite games!"
Bullshit.
I have personally downloaded several recent releases for PC, which were multi DVD and in the 8 gig range (mainly because I was too lazy to get the demo).
C&C3 for example. That lasted no further than one skirmish before I deleted it due to frustrations with the shitty camera. 10 gig is a download you can start one morning and have done by the next afternoon, using bittorrent. Using newsbin you can have that down in a few hours on ADSL2+.
> I used to be able to pop-up IE right away and surf but now if I do that, I get the error page for site not found for about 1 minute before things start working normally.
Hrmmm. I have always had that on my work Dell. Assumed it was something to do with the domain.
Pain in the arse when Outlook pops up a connection dialog, messenger and groove cant connect and VS cant hit team foundation server. I blame realtek, those guys suck.
Yes, I am also sick of SL. Makes me cry everytime I see some story about a corporation having virtual headquarters in it. Considering at a rough estimate 96% of the user created content is furry skins and genitalia (yes I found a wang with a /spoo command), I would suggest the entire gameworld is basically furrys (87%), IBM employees (8%) and other people with no life (5%).
Oh and people that love trolling. IBM showing people around their center.
http://www.mancer.org/ibm.jpg (_definitely not safe for work_) Photo taken just as a whole bunch of people started arriving on some tour.
Unfortunately it means you need a live account.
5 2
:P
It is cool though, letting your link your annotated map into your blog/photos on Live Spaces. Almost easy enough for your grandma to use though - no coding!
Heres my (documentation unfinished) trip to China: http://local.live.com/?v=2&cid=3DBF6F7940B0F681!2
Also, as I'm sure everyone here is a huge fan of IE and ActiveX *grin* you can install the 3D renderer, and I was suprised to see all my annotations working. While you are there, get the Live Local plugin for Outlook if you have it, it does route finding between your appointments and adds travel time.
iirc vnc can generate it and send it to the remote pc, but the client app doesnt capture it.
same as vmware... there is a "Send Ctrl-Alt-Del menu item".
Before we gear up all the jokes, the C-A-D key combo is known as the Secure Attention Sequence. By pressing this key combination you can guarantee that the logon box that pops up is from the OS and not from some random crapware.
All the UMPC (UltraMobile PCs) - the MS Origami formfactor provide a button like this for logon. Similarily devices by OQO include on.
Pretty much anyone experienced with making these ultraportables includes this button, because doing it manually on a small keyboard is a pain. Lesson learned.
BTW the 5" OQO Model 02 is now my sex object... powerful enough to run a full OS in the palm of your hand. Noice.
How about you go and have a think?
;)
When the *IAA sues they are generally not going after your for *downloading*. Downloading has very little to no damages. They are usually after you for uploading to other people, they are after you for creating and distributing copies of their shit and depriving them of customers.
The effect is real. Its similar to running a printing press, and knocking out copies of books for anyone that asks. The *IAA and the law are definitely in the right to try and stop this. HOWEVER...
While the effect on the industry is the same as the guy with the printing press, the problem I have with the large statuatory damages is the _intent_. Someone setting up a printing press and knocking out copies of books can at best argue an ignorance of the law. File sharing programs are very dangerous - in that a noob can click a "Free Music" banner, and be completely unaware that this "Bazza's Kazza" prog is actually uploading files to people. They can be ignorant of the fact that they are uploading, and not even suspect they are getting something for nothing - hey its got ads everywhere and most stuff on the net is free. Unfortuately (copyright infringement in aus is a strict liability offence) it means they are equally as liable as the bloke with the printing press.
The *IAA is on the ball here with their "Dont copy the strange mans floppy" ads they are tacking on the front of everything. Ask yourself if your grandma would suspect anything wrong with using Kazza - but you can be damn sure if you had a printing press runnign in your lounge and you offered her a bestseller, she might raise an eyebrow
Well you could try:
7175
or 455
or just 8008....
You mean the Taiwan that the old Chinese Government ran to after being chucked out by the commies, so the US, in its traditional manner of sticking its goddamn nose into other peoples business decided to offer it's support. The legitimate Chinese governement, in deciding not to rock the boat too much, has declared it an independantly admin'd region, still part of China. Anyone that recognises its existance as a country will greatly offend China, and countries that do tend to lose diplomatic ties with China.
:(
So Taiwan is not a country unless China allows it to seceed (I spelt that wrong).
Note: This is a brief summary, and my Authoritarian Chinese Girlfriend demanded I post the correction, otherwise she would cut off bedroom diplomatic relations with the sm^H^Hlarge independantly admin'd state of my penis.
TCO is ROI.
ROI is pretty meaningless for things that don't give a return but are still business critical.
Whats the ROI on your backup system (without giving me the probability of disaster * cost of rebuild crap)? Theres no return.
You might want to compare say a $500 tape drive inc reusable media, vs a $200 dvd burner + $20 a week in write-once media over a variety of periods. ($AUD, im aussie).
Or, preference issues aside, the $0 linux desktop + (cost of sufficiently competent linux geek / num pcs) vs $200 windows desktop + (cost of sufficiently competent windows geek / num pcs).
I submit that a windows geek thats good enough to keep a small office of 20 PCs running along would cost say 20% of the time of some bloke on a $40k salary. ($400 per pc per year).
Linux geeks are rarer. I imagine to keep a linux geek good enough to keep those 20 PCs running smoothly you would need to pay more. Say around $50k. ($500 per pc per year).
Picking a time period that fits, say the 5 year upgrade cycle for buying a new OS from MS, that gives a TCO per pc, windows $2200, linux $2500.
Yes its just the OS, yes you probably buy Office for the windows pc, yes these figures came straight out my arse, but hopefully you get the point. The licence costs for the OS are a fairly insignificant part of the entire investment.
If linux wants to replace windows on the desktop its not going to do it because its free/Free.
Yes I propose all you yanks should sign a Declaration of Loyalty every time you go and buy a Wiimote ;)
They make DirectX 10 specific to Vista, and are bashed for not backporting it to XP.
Which in itself is ridiculous. DirectX 10 relies on a variety of new features in Vistas new driver model, such as GPU context switching.
It would be a massive pain in the arse to backport it to XP. I'm not saying its technically impossible - but it's definitely not an economic decision. Its on par with making everything else in Vista free...
Vista has some new things under the hood that won't be backported. They're the upgrade, and thats what you choose or not choose to pay for. Theres also some other tech coming out (.net 3 / cardspace / workflow / wpf) that will be backported, generally because they can, and these are core developer technologies that they want devs to target.
I know 10 or so people who I've occasionally played online with on Windows using XP/2k, and don't know a single Live subscriber. I don't have much incentive to get Windows Live, do I? YMMV, of course.
This may be due to the fact that you play on Windows, and that Live, as in TFA, not being released until May. YMMV, of course.
Its at least twice as ugly as the OQO Model 02.
http://oqo.com/
Comes with 1.5ghz, gig ram, 30 gig drive and vista. 5" screen and a pen. Wifi, usb etc. None of this flipping open crap either.
Yes, because the first thing people are going to build is a lego house.
:(
Prepare mortals, to feast your eyes on Phallus Maximus, the largest creation in the land.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/06/13
I'm going to need more legos