How long before a copy of Carnivore leaks and gets mirrored for public consumption? I mean, presumably it has not only been used by several FBI agents, it also had to be coded. Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up. The only question is when.
Of course, I've wondered the same about other LEA and TLA net spying tools. All the other LEA used stuff, such as mirroring utils like Encase, are readily available if you know where to look. But I have yet to see any of the cool stuff, like Carnivore and the software that's being sold to police departments for remote computer break-ins (was mentioned on/. a while back, and got a lot of press about a year ago, but I can't find the link to the software publisher's site any more). Where are good leaks and whistleblowers when you need them.
The ATI video cards since the Rage 128 based units have had one thing sorely lacking in any other video cards even today: an integrated idct (inverse discrete cosine transform, if I recall) unit in the video hardware. Basically, the idct is the most intensive part of MPEG-2/DVD decoding, so doing it in hardware takes most of the work off the CPU. Granted, a full hardware MPEG-2 card takes almost all the burden off the processor, but there's something you obviously don't know.
Hardware isn't necessarily better than software, if the hardware takes shortcuts that the software doesn't and you have enough processing power to run the software. I myself have a Hollywood+ card which I have been very happy with--I used to laugh at those fools using PowerDVD or other software-based DVD players, when I had dedicated hardware that had higher image quality.
However, for analogue video capture as well as its TV tuner features--the best on the market, bar none--I got an ATI All-in-Wonder 128. On my old K6-2 400 machine it couldn't play DVDs well at all, which was fine since I got the Hollywood+ for that. Well, when I got my new KT7-RAID not too long ago, with a processor that'll o/c to 1GHz, I reformatted and reinstalled everything. I tried the ATI's DVD software, just to soo if it worked with the faster machine and all--and it did, surprisingly so. It has much better image quality than the Hollywood+ does. I hate to say it, since I championed the REALmagic card for so long, so smug that it was better than any other DVD solution. But, the fact is thatimages don't lie, and after comparing the output time and again from both cards--the Hollywood+ with its complete hardware MPEG-2 decoding, and the ATI with its hardware idct unit and the rest in software, I came to the reluctant realization that the ATI unit had a much clearer, more detailed image.
The key is that I think the Hollywood+ must be trying to do some edge enhancement or something, because when I examine the two streams on my 20 inch 1600x1200 display, the ATI looks extremely lifelike and the Hollywood+ seems to look duller, less sharp but with more prominent edges. To try to eliminate resolution as a factor, I dropped down to 800x600 and 1024x768 to see if it made a difference--but it didn't. The ATI was always clearer, crisper, than the H+. This was on a new install with the latest drivers and the latest VIA 4-in-1's and the latest BIOS, with a Pioneer 10x DVD drive, and everything seemed to be functioning perfectly.
Basically, I think the ATI's DVD software, based around the Cinemaster decoding engine, does a reference-quality job of decoding DVDs. The H+, on the other hand, seems to use some edge enhancement trick, or just doesn't decode as well. I think it's the former, because the H+ does in fact look better than the ATI when viewed on a standard television via the on-card TV Out. I think the H+'s decoding engine was designed around the idea of decoding DVDs for display on a standard TV, which doesn't benefit from a clear full-res picture but does benefit from a little bit of modest edge enhancement. Now, I could be totally off base with thisedge-enhancement theory, maybe the H+ doesn't do that, but the fact remains that its picture is not nearly as clear and pristine as that of the ATI at high resolutions or the native DVD res, though the H+ does look better than the ATI on a regular TV. The other area in which the H+ is superior is in its color: it has more vivid, rich colors and saturation than the ATI, but this is a function ATI and Cinemaster could easily improve in future software revisions--as it is, the ATI software offers little in the way of color/saturation/hue/brightness tweaking, while the H+ gives you total control.
And it could go without saying that the ATI needs more CPU time, but even with my little Duron cranked down to a paltry 700 it still only eats ~30 to ~50 percent of the CPU, with a few other processes in the background to boot. The H+ uses much less, but the tradeoff is in image quality. Disagree all you want, but as an owner of both I have compared performance and decided to use the ATI when viewing DVDs on my PC, but when playing them on my TV for other people I use the H+. At high res, the ATI wins hands-down.
Sorry, but real football is about a bunch of people who love to play the game, who'd be on the field playing it whether they were paid two million a year or twenty thousand a year. What you mentioned, that thing about getting bigger, faster, stronger guys--that's football as a business. That's why I'd prefer to watch a high school football game any day--the NFL is a business, and no one there cares about the game, except a few who are vastly outnumbered. Even college football is a business, if you're a big time college with a big time team--for the staff it's about bringing revenue into the school, and for the players it's usually about trying to get scouted or about using status as a football player to coast through school, make contacts, etc.
You never see real football there. You just see an entertainment business, in the end no different from any other TV show. It isn't a real sport. Real football--that was when I was at a small college, so tiny our football team had no chance of bringing the college any revenue and the players had no chance of getting scouted so they didn't even try. They trained as hard as anyone, and went out on the field not for money, not for a career, not for anything else but a love of the sport and a desire to kick the ass of the other team for the sake of pride and school spirit. No one was ever charged admission. People just came and sat in the bleachers or on the hillside enjoying themselves, drinking their own beer instead of $6.50 stadium brews. And the football team had fun playing heir sport, and we had fun watching them, the same way it was 104 years ago when our football team was founded. Now, that's *real* football, and most people will never appreciate it as much as NFL business BS.
No, I shouldn't expect an irrational, dangerous reaction to the proliferation of kooks who kill. You see, there is *no* proliferation of kooks who kill. Nothing is happening today that didn't happen fifty years ago, or a hundred for that matter. There is just a mistaken popular perception that violence is on the rise, when in fact it is on the decline. And the kooks--well, they were around way back when--they aren't new. Watching the History Channel recently, they were talking about a kook who made headlines in the late 40s by going into a school full of preteens and opening fire, killing several. There were disgruntled office workers back then, too. And children also went nuts and murdered other children for bizarre reasons--remember Leopold and Loeb, anyone? So, what's the difference between then and now? Well, now we have CNN, FoxNN, MSNBC, HNN, CNBC, and your local news all blaring about these incidents, presenting so-called experts who convince us that there must be something wrong with our society, that it's unprecedented when so and so kills such and such over whatever it is. Horseshit. Violence, random or otherwise, is nothing new, and no amount of ill informed backlash will diminish it. But I guarantee that all these measures we're putting in place to curb violence will only make it worse, because the worse you treat people, the more you take away their rights and sense of worth, the more likely it is that they'll explode and try to take as many overbearing bastards with them as they can. Example: a few unbalanced kids feel picked on and pressured by school admins and especially fellow students; taunted and made to feel worthless, they take their own lives after indiscriminately killing as many students and teachers as they can--except, curiosly, for the one boy one of the gunmen warned to stay away because he'd treated the gunman right in school. Example 2: a man watches the TV news day after day and is angered at the U.S. government's mishandling of an investigation into the leader of a religious community in Waco, Texas, during which they trample all of the suspect's rights one by one and try to villify him with false allegations of child abuse, which have no place in a raid which was actually based on the selling of a single sawed-off shotgun by the partner of a licensed gun dealer--in fact, it would have been a routine arrest and fine, except that when the ATF decided that their suspect's congregation was a "cult", ignoring the religious freedom which founded this country, they decided to "take him down" on live TV as a media stunt. The man watching this is so angered when ATF and FBI bungling first ignores rights and then kills people by accidentally starting a fire, that he and a friend decide to pay the government back in kind by bombing a large government building.
So, let me slightly amend what I said about there being no more kooks or violence now than there's ever been. If there are more kooks and violence now, it's a direct result of the media causing hysteria by constantly harping on the few incidents which do occur and will always occur by nature, causing the people and government to become vengeful idiots who strip away the fundamental rights of the people, some of whom are prone to react violently to having their rights and human dignity stripped away.
Well, rhetorical as it may be, I just had to answer this question with a story about a bunch of bored college kids and an all-night Wal-Mart. We didn't actually do this, mind you, but in our small college town there wasn't much to do on weeknights aside from renting movies or mindlessly roaming the Wal-Mart trying to pick up the few townies who were actually attractive and had all their teeth intact. But one night we were spitballing stuff to do and someone jokingly came up with a good way to freak out underpaid overworked teenage chack-out girls. Go with a bunch of guys to the Wal-Mart, or any such, and gather all the following, and anything else questionable when taken together: the biggest box of condoms, a length of nylon rope, some Polaroid film, duct tape, one of those sleeping masks, several pairs of junior-miss sized panties, whipped cream, K-Y, ski mask, some lollipops, some Lady Gillette razors and women's shaving gel, a couple issues of children's magazines like Nickelodeon Kids or Teen Beat or something, and anything else either sexual, related to youngsters, or with possible bondage uses. That poor, poor clerk wouldn't quite know what to make of all that stuff purchased together by a bunch of college boys--separately, it's entirely innocent; bought at once, it looks quite suspicious. Of course, I don't actually recommend purchasing all that stuff together, unless you're prepared to explain your sick joke to some authorities if the clerk really freaks out.
But, getting back on topic, those privacy-stealing store discount cards you mentioned are a real nuisance. So few people who have them realize that their shopping habits are being kept in databases, sold to marketers, and being put in a position to be used against them. I can't vouch for its truthfulness, but I did read an account that someone in a small town who was suspected of being the local marijuana and coke connection had had his shopping records used against him--the sheriff's office convinced a judge they had cause for a warrant on various other accounts, and subpoenad his purchase records to see if he bought unusual quantities of plastic baggies, straws, and other potential tools of the drug trade. Now, the story may well be spurious, like the old man-wakes-up-in-tub-of-ice-with-kidney-gone story, but it does illustrate the dangers here. Your purchasing records persist if you use such a card under your own name, and your buying habits could be used against you. In this case, it was a drug dealer who had his buying habits examined--but even discounting the popular opposition to this War-on-Drugs rhetoric bullshit, you can never know where this could lead. What if you're suspected of tax evasion, and the IRS decides your shopping records might show that you live above your reported means? Should they get your shopping records? What if they don't even need a subpoena, what if they can just buy your data on the open market, with no oversight? Background checks are now commonplace in job screenings and insurance applications--what if employers and insurance companies start looking at people's buying habits, to weed out people who buy too much alcohol or too many unhealthy foods? We live in an information society, and it's not at all extremist or unrealistic to think it's just a few steps from where we are now to a very Orwellian state of affairs...
As I was writing, you said you wanted to go on fact, not FUD. Well, those are the facts. Most of the advantages of Linux are irrelevent to the average end user, while most of Linux's shortcomings are in areas end users need to have strong, like program standardization and interoperability and in a clean and serviceable GUI that behaves predictably and has standard features adhered to by most apps.
When those issues are resolved--hopefully soon, with Ximian seeming to gain steam--Linux will be ready for most end users. That's when there needs to be a real push to get Linux into every school and university possible.
Now, with all my naysaying above and my tacit approval of Microsoft by virtue of using Windows, I have to throw this in as a counterweight: I do think that Linux will reach the stage where people like me, even us people who have been using certain software for years and don't want to have to switch to something new, will upgrade to Linux. It *will* happen--but how quickly depends on how quickly people start realizing that technological superiority means absolutely nothing against an entrenched marketplace in which the competition is *good enough* and easier to learn. End users used to MS and Apple aren't going to switch over in droves to something which asks them weird questions about whether to install emacs or xemacsor vi or slrn etc. etc. End users are not going to be happy with something in which the file menus and widgets are very different from app to app, and where not all apps can cut and paste between each other. This of course means standardization on a particular set of desktop components for end-user oriented distros, which seems a very contentious issue still.
So, it'll happen--but how soon is enturely dependent on how soon the Linux community can resolve petty bickering over whether this or that is an acceptable inclusion with certain distros and such, and decide that taking control of the desktop away from Microsoft is more important than arguing ad nauseam over whether such-and0such should go into free or nonfree on the Debian CD or whether Gnome or KDE or Ximian should be the desktop shipped as standard on consumer oriented distros. Up to y'all...
Sorry, but you're making the all-too-common on/. mistake WRT Windows. Not that I blame those who make it, because you're already living with Linux, so you don't come from the same perspective as a Windows user or even a (shudder) Mac user.
So, here's your mistake: you think most end users care about stability and an overwhelming breadth of apps and the ability to make custom changes thanks to access to the source code. Well, sorry, but we don't care about any of that.
Here's why--but first, some background, so you can see where I come from. I've been using computers since my first day at college in 1995. I started out at the lab with a 20MHz 68k Mac running, I think, System 7 with a plethora of tools like Netscape 1, Fetch, and NCSA Telnet to grab my e-mail off the campus VAX. Being a Mac campus, and having no previous computer experience, I learned to use Macs and was happy with them--except that they always seemed to lock up every hour or so whenever I was doing more than one thing. OS 8 and PPC 7200 Macs in the lab changed that in coming years, and things were stable enough. When I graduated I needed my own computer, so I bought an old used WinBook XP laptop running Windows 95, because I couldn't afford a Mac. Soon after I started being actually interested in what the computer did, what settings I could tweak and why, etc. So, I became computer literate under Windows. I started collecting and using lots of apps. When the laptop dies of old age, I bought a brand-new k6-2 400, based in part on a dislike of Intel's P!!! ID number and its possible misuse if adopted, which I learned about by reading/. This was ~late 1998/early 99. I'd been reading/. based on the recommendation by a Linux-running friend. For more than two years now, I have known about Linux, and have dabbled in Linux, but never switched, even though I agree with much of the philosophy behind it and would on some levels like to switch. So, I just got my new computer, a KT7-RAID with a proc that easily overclocks to 1GHz without even getting as hot as my old k6-2 did at its measly 400MHz--in honor of the occasion I backed up all my data files onto the new HD and reformatted my two old small ones. What operating system did I choose to install as my main one? I had copies of Windows 98SE, Win2k, Win 2k Advanced Server (pirated, of course), and recent versions of Mandrake, Corel Linux, BeOS, and some other various stuff.
I installed Windows 98SE as my primary operating system, although I cheated a bit and used 98lite to allow me to install it without Internet Explorer and most of the other useless crap, and I use Powerdesk 4 as my file browser instead of Explorer/IE. But why would a partially-sane, fairly computer literate guy like me, who's played with all the operating systems I listed above on spare drives and what not, do such a thing?
Because, like most people, I don't need uptime measured in months, weeks, or even days--an uptime of 3 or 4 hours is more than sufficient, unless I'm leaving the computer on all night to download something huge in which case it isn't doing anything that will make it crash. I turn my computer off whenever not in use, as do most people. Giving the computer a minute to boot up isn't at all annoying to me or most people--press the button, go get a soda or take a wee-wee, and by the time you get back it's ready to go.
Now, even so, why on Earth would I install Win98SE, out of all the possible choices? Simple: It has all the apps I like to use, and is compatible with almost every bit of software and hardware I would like to use, without much fiddling about and such. End users don't care about having all the software that's available with Linux--we just want to use what's easy and familiar. Linux apps are usually neither. Every app I'm running on my machine, and almost every app I could possibly download for it, uses the same key combos, and most of them have a consistent and predictable UI, and consistent and predictable install options. We don't want to apt-get-make-etc-etc anything; we want to download it or browse to the CD that has it, and double-click. The vast majority of people never ever ever would want to compile something even if they knew how, so the source code is meaningless to almost all end users. And the breadth of software available to end users with Linux is also largely useless--most of it has incomprehensible names which are useful if you're a hacker typing all day on your CLI but a total hindrance if you're an end user who just wants to download and click on something intuitively-named, like "Media Player," or something whose name is common parlance like "WinAMP" or "Napster." There's no wondering, "uhh, what's slrn do?"
The most important part of all that is that end users value consistency, both amongUI features and shortcuts and the ability to cut and paste between apps and the like, and consistency with whatever software they're used to. Which gets me back to why I chose Win98 from among all possible worlds: It runs every app I have ever used. Win2k may be more stable, but it won't run all of my old games, even though most of the other apps I use will run or have versions for it. People don't like to throw out stuff they like, and that goes for software. I mean, I *could* change to an open-source or Linux-supporting word processor like Star Office or WordPerfect, but why give up the same Word97 I've been using for years? When in college even, I was using Word for the Mac. It's comfortable. I'm used to it, and everyone can read it, though if sending to a guy who uses Linux or is mindful of security I just save in.rtf or text. Likewise, betwen Media Player and RealPlayer I can open all the audio formatsI'm likely to run across--but even so, since I'm used to WinAMP and have used it since before it was bought by AOL, I still use the latest WinAMP to play mp3s. And even though any of the three players I just mentioned can now play audio CDs, I still install Virtuosa to play them for me, because it's what I've always used, I like it, and it works and is pretty while doing so. I use ACDSee to view image files, IrfanView to open weird formats that ACDSee can't decode, and have done so for years. I edit images with an older version of Photoshop, though I do use the Win32 port of GiMP for some of its special script-fu. I use Scramdisk for security and GetRight for managing downloads, WinZip and WinRAR to uncompress stuff. It's what I'm used to and I can operate any one of these apps without even thinking about it, andsince I'm just an end user who only needs a few hours at a time with his computer I haven't seen a single BSOD in over a year if you discount the few times I've put a badly damaged CD in the drive and ejected it while Windows was still trying to read it since it was taking too long to try. Even though I do video capture and use my PC as my DVD player, I still never have BSODs or conflicts or any other stereotypical Windows ills, except for that CD problem I mentioned. Now, with all this experience invested, why would I want to switch to Linux and have to pick out apps all over again, basically starting from scratch and throwing away all my former computer experience?
Like most end users, I wouldn't. There has to be a compelling reason to upgrade, to make me throw away all my beloved apps and go wandering around for new ones. Sure, I like reading/., and do it every day, for more than 2 years. Yes, I agree with most of the philosophy expressed here against the practices of certain patently unethical corporations. I don't buy Intel, beause I can just buy AMD and still run the apps I'm used to. I hate Disney, so I don't buy Disney stuff--I get other types of toys for the kids. I support the EFF monetarily. Etc. etc. But, even though I dislike the tactics used against Netscape and OS/2 and the other tresspasses of Microsoft, I still use Windows because it works, it's unified, standardized, and above all else it's what I'm used to and I don't have to throw out years worth of apps.
That's why end users aren't flocking to Linux and never will. End users don't flock--they just use what they're used to and what works. Windows works well enough. You're never going to woo most users with technical superiority. Lots of superior tech ends up in the dustbins of history. The only way to get most users is to get in touch with new computer users. Get into as many schools and universities as possible, and you'll indoctrinate fresh users who have no predisposition, and they'll probably use Linux for the rest of their lives. The only way to win over old users, people who already have used Windows or Mac for a long time and have a bunch of software they're happy with, is to have a very compelling reason to undergo the upheaval of change. Being able to run your PC rock-solid stable for a month without rebooting isn't a compelling reason, since Windows is stable *enough* and Mac OS X will probably be nearly as stable as Linux. You mentioned having to wait ages for tech support for Windows--also not a compelling reason, since most people either learn Windows or Mac in school, or have a knowledgeable friend to help them learn. The same can't be said about Linux--I have only 1 friend who uses it, and most people have none.
Steve Jobs can buy her out, as long as I get to eat her out.
Did you hear that? No, not that suspicious slurping sound. I meant the sound of karma being dragged-and-dropped into the "Trash" Icon on some moderator's OS X desktop.;-)
Sure, HDs fail. But in the case of a cheap gov't-sponsored machine like this one, it would be easy enough to take it to the local selling place and get a new, cheap small HD. Aside from which, the computer would still last a period of several years with no HD troubles--despite horror stories, I still have hard drives that are 5 years old working perfectly. I've gone through at least 5 on my own machines, and I've never had a HD failure (except the one I caused with Partition Magic 5, which wasn't a physical failure, just a fucked up filesystem, and that one time my laptop's HD managed to come loose from the connector--btw, Lost and Found 1.06 recovered all the files Partition Magic fucked with, and then I just reformatted).
Sure, every couple years a HD will possibly crash. On a stock PC like this one, it should be easy enough to swap out. Meanwhile, look at the advantages of a hard disk even for those who just use e-mail and a word processor:
You can save all your e-mails with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
You can save all your documents for review, reprinting, and updating with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
You can save informative web pages and other documents with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
Even if this thing has a floppy drive, you know very well that floppies are terrible for long-term storage. They spoil very easily and relatively quickly. They may make a reasonable backup medium o save an e-mail directory or small saved files to on a cheap PC like the one envisioned, in case a HD fails, but it's not reasonable to expct such things to live long on floppies alone.
So, I do take issue with your statement that email, writing, and web browsing don't require a HD. If you want to save any of your work and found documents, without the easy decay of floppies, then they do require a HD and occasional backing up.
The mother of my cousin's wife recently upgraded to a shiny new Gateway box. Pity she didn't ask me to build one for her, since like most/.ers I could have built a better box for 2/3 of the price or less. But anyway, she wanted to give her old computer to her grandkids to play with. they're 10 year old boys.
Guess what the previous computer was? a POS Packard-Bell P60 from 1994. Aargh! And to make matters worse, it had some bizarro integrated Aztech soundcard/14.4 modem combo on slots which went the wrong way, vertically across the bottom of the machine--I never opened it up, so I don't know if it was some secondary board wired tothe mainboard or what, it was just weird to see the slots going that way.
The boys like to play video games on my PC, so I hooked up the old P60 with as many games as it could handle. Older stuff like Quake, Doom and Doom 2, Battle Chess, all 6 Commander Keens, Carmageddon, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and the sequel Spear of Destiny, Tomb Raider , and a bunch of other stuff, worked flawlessly although the bizarro soundcard thingy had some weird IRQs and base addresses to work out. Surprisingly, even the arcade emulator Retrocade played all the supported games I had at native speed on this old 1994 P60, and DOS emulators for the Nintendo and Genesis consoles ran full speed from within Windoze (I forget their names, but they're both by "Bloodlust Software"--great, fast coding).
And all of these ran at full speed under 98lite using the option to install Windows 98 cleanly without Internet Explorer and most of the unneeded options, on the setting which allowed it to install the Windows 95 first edition shell GUI on top of a fully functional Win98 with its better drivers and support. And DX8 installed over that, with Netscape 3.04 as an admittedly rudimentary but fast web broswer, and Office 97 for all word processing needs.
This is the perfect example of how old PCs are still very useful. a stock 1994 P60 with a measly 16MB RAM became a solid gaming rig for older games, with a solid minimal win98se OS coutesy of 98lite (try it for all your un-bloating of Windoze needs, http://www.98lite.net ), and Net acces via the old NIC--perfect for the kids or for Granny to use e-mail.
You do *not* own your image. You have no legal expectation of privacy in public, meaning anything you do can be photographed and used by, for example, a photographer who wants to put a picture of you sittin on a park bench at just the perfect angle and weather to make it look artistic, in his new book. There is nothing illegal about that.
You can, however, sue him for various reasons if he does this, which is why he'll probably ask you to sign a no-fee miodeling contract that prevents him from being sued for any reason. Possible reasons for suing him include emotional distress for having your picture appear in a book containing other images which are offensive, etc., but not just publishing the photo. Also, the photo cannot be used in an ad, suggesting that you endorse the product. It also cannot be published along with your phone number or address without your permission, because since you are not a public person this is an unwarranted invasion of your privacy and it also causes emotional distress.
However, you have no legal righht over your image. You're just wrong on that issue. If you disagree, I suggest you consult any introductory text about photography that has a section about legal issues. It will confirm what I have said.
So, why was the video of the clothed young girls illegal? Because it focused on the genital areas, it was child pornography. Case law in the U.S. has clearly established that clothed images of children can still be considered child pornography, if the intent of the photographer was lascivious, as demonstrated by focusing on the genitals or posing the models in suggestive ways.People have been arrested and successfully convicted of producing child pornography for all of the following: taking video or stills of minors at the beach, focusing on genital areas and suggestive poses; taking clothed images of minors modeling who have been instructed by the photographer to pose in suggestive ways; taking pictures of minors wearing suggestive adult lingerie; taking candid images and video of high school cheerleaders focusing on genital areas; taking candid video of minors in changing rooms, even if they only strip to underwear; concealing cameras in locations to view up the skirts of minors.
So, the photos in question were illegal because they were child pornography in the U.S., not because of any property rights the girls had over their images. If the videos had not focused on the genitals, but had just been videos of little girls playing at the beach, they would have been perfectly legal to distribute and sell because they would not have been child pornography. That's all, folks...
Not to mention the fact that it seems kind of brain-dead to put a ROM filesystem on the thing when old-school 8.4 gig or less HDs are getting so cheap. What's the use of browsing the Net if you can save absolutely nothing? Also, with a 500MHz CPU, these things sure could use any word processing program out there, plenty of which are 100% free--but if you have no space to save your files, what's the point? Using anything in the way of a Sandisk or something similar is just silly. If you don't want the user to muck up the system, just don't give him root and keep his user account from touching anything touchy--but don't go to a ROM filesystem just for this. A few extra dollars are worth it for getting a small HD, it makes the system so much more useful. And since they're considering lengthy payment plans, it doesn't even come out to that much more a month.
I'm pissed off at all sites that don't use standard HTML or scripting when possible. I know that ASP gets much more complicated, but the same principle applies that it isn't too difficult to do standard stuff that can work in most browsers.
One of the most annoying things I saw lately was that, when I went to eBay to complain about being spammed, I decided to take a quick look at their privacy policy. So, I clicked on the link, and it gave me a mostly-blank page. There were a couple of lines about their regs, but that was it. So I clicked on links for their policy from all over the site--same page. Come to realize, from looking at the source. that the page used such badly formatted BS that if wasn't rendering properly. I mean, it was a simple page, they could have used plain old HTML for the whole damned thing, but no, they had to go and muck around. And sadly enough, I was using IE 4.0 at the time, and it wasn't displaying the policy, just the couple of lines intro mentioning the policy which I had no idea was hidden on the page. If you can't even make text that will render on IE 4.0, of all things, then there's something wrong with you. There was nothing there that couldn't have been done in plain HTML.
Naturally, I complained to them. I hope they've fixed something as important as their privacy policy, so that every user can see it. But somehow I doubt it. More and more pages are doing BS like this. For example, the Wired article referenced in the Steve Jobs story below wouldn't render very well, because it wanted me to download an ActiveX object that my security settings wouldn't allow. Maybe on non-IE browsers it doesn't try to slip in the ActiveX, I don't know, but it's annoying that they were using it in the first place...
The encoding problems aside, there is one great advantage to USENET's kooky distribution model: data cannot be effectively blocked. It propagates like a virus, entering one server and then getting copied to nearby servers until it propagates all over the world. Now, hopefully systems like Freenet can handle that sort of problem, since they throw a technical solution at creating an uncensorable network without having to have the Rube Goldberg solution of distributing the data to every server, and provide a measure of anonymity and untraceability for both the posters and for the place(s) where the data are located. This sounds like a great solution for storing texts, but on the other hand it could never provide the the discussion qualities of USENET.
You might be surprised at how many fairly knowledgeable chums still poke around USENET. For example, if you want privacy and anonymity resources, there's no better place to go than USENET--the only things on the Web that can compare are those that rip off the FAQs and resources built up in some USENET groups.
The problem is certainly the binaries, though. Broadband connections have inspired too many twits to post hundreds of large files a day, which kills retention not just in binaries groups but in text groups as well since they're all typically stored in the same server pool. There are now binaries groups which were created specifically *for* broadband users, with no daily posting limits. Too many of these people fail to realize that what's posted in one group affects retention in all the others.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be binaries groups--I think there are some binaries groups in USENET which are great, because they're conversational and interactive, which you can't get from a Website or a Napster-type program. Some of them are very like the old BBS days, and it's nice to see "communities" not just file repositories.
For all the good stuff in some of the alt.security.* and comp.* and even occasionally in the alt.binaries.* hierarchies, I worry that a relative few people with broadband who are mostly posting stuff that would fit better elsewhere are going to drive USENET into the ground. It would be sad if USENET goes the way of BBSes--it'll go on, just like there are still a few BBSes here and there, but only as a shadow of its former self, catering mostly to nostalgics. That wouldn't be good.
Well, I was referencing the files themselves. not the compression format itself. Getting music for free is great, even if the *format* isn't GNU/FSF/Debian sort of "free." In my own case, the best thing about it is downloading all sorts of crummy Britney Spears and N*SYSNC stuff for my young cousins and burning them CDs, so that I can effectively prevent the sale of crappy consumerized marketroid-driven artificial teeny-muzak. Wow, that was a mouthful...;-)
I grow weary of people who always complain about such-and-such compression format being lossy. Well, boo-hoo, whine and complain, lossless compression is the exception not the rule. Almost all data in the world around us is compressed, and not losslessly, like CDs, TV, films, you name it. From your remark you seem to be one of those people who laments that CDs don't sound as good as vinyl. Well, maybe one person in a thousand can tell the bloody difference, so who cares/ Even the vinyl isn't going to sound as good as the live studio session, because even vinyl doesn't capture 100% of the audio data. Even vinyl--even the master tapes--are compressed, lossily, because they don't capture perfectly every audio nuance. But hey, that doesn't matter much anyway, because tracks aren't laid down live altogether in a studio any more--usually, separate instruments or effects are mixed in. So, there is no "100% lossless" experience to capture anyway. Same's true op even HDTV and DVD, much less plain old NTSC or PAL. Short of putting tiny actors inside your television set, you are always going to have a lossily compressed picture. Same's true for film--fowever many lines of resolution a 35mm or even 70mm print has, real life has more. So, does that mean that everything should be performed live on stage, with real-time real-life special effects? Sounds silly, eh? Well so does your complaint. The new standard is being made to get comparable qualities into smaller file sizes. But before people yet again whine about mp3 being lossy and bah-bah-bah, I'll point out something people who complain usually don't think about. Sure, a 12bkbps mp3 sounds worse than a tape dub. So what? download a 320kbps file, listen to it for any popping or encoding errors, then when you're satisfied with its quality, keep it. If it doesn't live up to your standards, throw it into the bitbucket of history. Just don't keep making the same old tired boring useless complaints that everyone here has read fifty billion times, mmmkay? If you're one of the very small pecentage of the population who can hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 file and a CD, or vinyl for that matter, then don't download mp3s. Fine. Just DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT FREE STUFF. If you want to make perfect reproductions of your CDs, then rip them to WAVs and then tar.gz or.rar or.zip them. Short of that, you're not getting a lossless digital copy of a CD track, much less a quality better than CD. As I said, anyway, all daa in the real world are lossily compressed, so get over it.
The Klipsch are THX certified, which means either of 2 things depending on your opinion:
a) THX certification is a sham. Ya pay the cert costs, and they give you the right to use their logo.
b) THX certification means that the speakers have passed a rigorous test regime to ensure that they have accurate audio fidelity.
I tend to agree with point b. There *are* tests that are done, and not everything passes THX certification without having to go back to the drawing board.
There's 1 great thing I can say about the Klipsch Promedia, and about *ALL* other Klipsch speakers: they are crafted, not stamped-out-en-masse consumer BS, and have extremely high audio fidelity. That's what Klipsch is known for. If you're looking for power that will piss your neighbors off all the time, Klipsch isn't your brand. They make exacting and elegant instruments, which generally have less power than other speakers in the same price range, but have far better audio quality and at any rate can fill a room to any reasonable sound levels with *no* distortion. Klipsch are especially known for being one of very few audio companies which still use real horns for producing high-pitched sounds. Horns have been replaced over the years by cheaper parts which usually aren't as accurate--but not on Klipsch speakers.
I'm not sure the ProMedia speakers by Klipsch would be the best bet for a home theater system--they're just the most well known by computer guys like us. I'm sure they'd perform as well as speakers costing twice as much, if you paired them with a decent center channel speaker and a good Dolby Digital/DTS decoder. However, I'm also sure that, for the budgeted $1500, you could afford some Klipsch speakers particularly designed for a home theater system. At any rate, they are a top-quality brand, and when it comes to audio fidelity the only way you're going to get better speakers is by spending three times as much. They have audio *fidelity*, unlike Bose and other consumer products which distort the audio range in a way which is pleasing to the ears of a non-audiophile, but which annoys the Hell out of anyone who wants to hear audio exactly like it was layed down. These days, studios spend millions of dollars to have their soundtracks layed down in exacting detail by audio professionals at places like the Skywalker Ranch--why mess that up with speakers which *think* they can do a better job than millions of dollars worth of audio equipment and some very trained ears?
Many people use it on Windows instead of PGPdisk. I don't know about you, but after that ADK fiasco, I have serious doubts about NAI's ability to review and ponder their own code. It seems to me that, being the #1 encryption software provider on the planet, they'd be a big target for tempting offers from certain 3-letter agencies to munge a piece of code here or there.
Scramdisk, on the other hand, is worked on by only a few core people, not dozens, giving less of a chance for deliberate tampering. Just an opinion, but it seems that having a few trusted people close to the project working on the code is better in a security product than delegating its creation and upkeep to dozens. And of course, the source code is completely open. Grab it and compile it if you're uber-paranoid.
It also has advantages PGPDisk doesn't, such as support not only for Win9x and WinNT/2k, but a Linux port is in the works. It's freeware for Win9x and Linux, payware for NT/2k.
It also has better algorithm choices than PGPDisk. You get your choice of 9 algorithms, including Twofish, and more are on their way.
Might be worth trying. Scramdisk also has some support for steganography in WAV files, and better yet, for entire encrypted partitions, not just container files. It's very respected, particularly in security-oriented groups on USENET.
The only part of MS Office I use is Word. I don't make spreadsheets, and I don't need accounting software, and I'm definitely not going to put a big "Hey crackers, I'm bent over, fuck me in the ass" sign on my PC by installing Outlook or Outlook Express. I need and use newer versions of Word because it provides 100% compatibility with most of the documents people send me. I myself use the beautiful and elegantly simple ClarisWorks 5.0 for Windows when I write, and save it as text if I need to send it to other people instead of printing it out--after all, the first computers I used were Macs, and Claris was a staple. But, most other people use various versions of Word, and to keep up I use the latest version I can get.
So, I thought I'd get MS Works, just for Word 2000. There I am in CompUSA, it's on sale for $79, but reading the box tells me that "MS Works is an upgrade product. You must already have installed, or have the installation media for, one of the following products..." Sonofabitch! I'm not going to keep around a pile of musty old install disks for Encarta 97 or whateverthehell, just so I can install/reinstall the Word 200 from the MS Works package. Bullshit. And I feel bad for anyone who didn't read the side panel closely enough to realize that the new version of Works is useless unless you already own a piece of shit outdated copy of something else. What a scam. They know perfectly well that people aren't going to keep track of a pile of old CDs they don't use anymore, and that eventually someone will lose something and have to go out and buy another MS product just to get functionality on something else they bought. I really wish some consumer protection agencies would take the stick from out their asses and move on abuses like this.
I haven't bought a crappy OEM PC with a restore CD, but I've dealt with a few for relatives. You know how it is, knowing a few things about computers is kinda like being a doctor--at social functions, people are always trying to get a free diagnosis--"So, when I try to play a video clip I get an error that says "mmsystem somethingorother gobbledygook--what do I do?" And of course, I get invited to come over to family members' houses to help them fix/setup/etc. their PCs. This being/., I'm sure most of us have had to do this at some point...
Anyway, my aunt's Compaq, which is a couple years old so I don't know if they do it differently now, has a partition with an executable which copies over/restores some directories with special drivers, programs, etc., and also has all the Windows cabfiles there and pointed to in the Registry so that it doesn't have to ask for a Windows CD whenever new hardware is detected. Not that bad, since you can still install new hardware, and conceivably since it has all the Windows cabs the drive could even be moved to another PC if need be, although it would cause a big messy Windows install instead of a nice small one. The partition is a standard FAT32 partition, not hidden or anything.
Meanwhile, another PC I encountered (forget whether it's a Dell or HP or whatever, been so long) has a bootable CD for system restore, that won't install to anything but the original hardware. Cabs for drivers for new hardware in case you add a device, but I think it's hard-coded to that type of motherboard or something, so that you can only use it on the PCs from that manufacturer. I didn't want to deal with the BS, so I just installed Win98SE from a regular Windows CD I brought with me, and then copied over some special drivers that were on the Restore CD. Then I made him a copy of the real Win98SE CD with my burner, so he wouldn't have to deal with any BS in the future.
Just what little experience I've had with sytem resore crap.
Umm, yes, hard drive capacity is definitely going to be needed, and lots of it. I don't think, like someone above mentioned, that games themselves are going to get installed to the drive like current Windows games are--I think just basic config info and saved games are going to be put on the hard disk, and the games themselves will be run from the game CDs and DVDs.
Why do I think this? Because if the games installed much to the 8GB drive, it'd be eaten up very quickly and people would have to uninstall stuff and reinstall it a lot. Gamers, esp. kids, won't want to do this. I mean, have you installed a recent title lately? I just installed American McGee's Alice, and the install took 525MB of my hard drive space. Only ~15 games could be installed at a time if the install were anything like current Windows games, which is why I say the games will be run from the media and only install basic config info and use the HD for saved games.
Now, this still takes a large amount of HD space, since MS doesn't want users to have to worry about uninstalling things from something as simple to use as a set-top game console. Consoles are supposed to be truly "plug-and-play," with no configuration needed beyond inserting a game and choosing easily understood game settings. And I say a large HD is necessary because new games will have to use more and more space for saved game data. My new American McGee's Alice install I mentioned--well, I have only 3 saved games, and they take up almost 8MB of disk space. The more complex maps and character placements and options get, the more space needed to save a game to disk. Hence, an 8GB hard drive just for saved games and a few config options is NOT overkill. In fact, I guarantee that HD upgrades will be available.
Also, the Xbox isn't just for gaming. It'll have internet access, and presumably a special MSN/WebTV type of service. As such, a hard drive will also store web cache and probably allow saving of downloaded material. MS isn't stupid. They aren't using a 733MHz Intel CPU just for its gaming potential. The Xbox will be Microsoft's proprietary replacement for the PC. People will be able to get a subscription to the.NET service which will include running word processing and other apps. Don't underestimate the role of the Xbox in.NET--MS is secretly hoping to replace the PC with something they own, which won't run anyone else's software unless it's licensed, and which will require an eternal service contract with the.NET service in order to keep using apps. MS is clever. There's a damn fine reason MS is making this thing over-powered just for console gaming. It's a new type of MS-controlled PC.
That's a reasonable list, as far as it goes. But I'd have to add another game or two, based on one type of game that's omitted. None of the games listed were pioneers in creating characters that people truly love, characters for which they play and continue to play the game(s), time and again. By and large, computer games have nameless non-individuals for the player to live through--a grunt, a soldier, an alien, etc. Tomb Raider is on the list and has Lara Croft, sure, but people didn't play the game because of her character's personality or alluring history--she's just a hot CG chick with large polygons, no one actually cares about her life and character traits that much.
So, there are two games I'd include on the list, for pioneering memorable characters whose lives are important to the game. *The* pioneer here would be the young Commander Keen, 8-year-old boy wonder who built a rocketship out of old soup cans and dons his football helmet to become Commander Keen, defender of Earth and galactic hero. Much of the allure of the Keen games is the character's personality--he's the kid in all of us, and the uber-geek to boot, in a game that's full of his kitschy and quirky predicaments. Without Keen and his character as revealed in numerous text screens, the Keen games wouldn't be as likable and successful. They were clearly character-driven.
Second would be an all-time favourite, Duke Nukem 3D. An immersive 3D world, but inhabited by 2D characters and sprites, the game is technically inferior to many of its contemporaries, including of course the original Quake. Resolutions are low, adding to the game's technical inferiority. And yet, many people continue to play Duke Nukem 3D to this day, and new mods, user levels, and total conversions continue to be made all the time. There are arguably more mods, user levels, and TCs floating around for Duke Nukem 3D than there are for Quake. Why? Because Duke Nukem is an awesome character. Just as Commander Keen is the kid, and the uber-geek, in all of us, Duke Nukem is the swaggering and macho male in all of us. Babes in bikinis, strippers, and posters for adult films litter every Duke level, and Duke is heard to say "shake it, baby!" and give strippers wads of cash. The user mods and TCs have become an integral part of the Duke Nukem community, allowing Duke's macho lewdness to be taken further than the game company itself could, even though the mods are hosted on their servers. Basic mods for DN3D take the clothes off the strippers, while more advanced and very popular TCs like the Vixens and Vixens 2 packages add more female characters, more sexist scenarios, and the ability to screw the strippers for health points instead of just giving them cash to "shake it." Penthouse Magazine commissioned and sponsored a special map. Some user levels are almost insanely elaborate, and impossible to play without using cheat codes there are so many enemies--such as the 666 TC. Whether you love Duke's sexist machismo for the playfulness it really is, or whether you hate it because you take it too seriously, Duke Nukem is a very character-driven game which has remained popular solely on the strength of its character and the user community's support of him through mods and TCs to a technically inferior game. Its publisher has largely abandoned the PC for creating console Duke Nukem games, and stated that Duke Nukem 3D will never benefit from the enhancements made to its textures and sprites for the console versions. But many PC gamers have yet to abandon Duke Nukem 3D, because of Duke's character.
I think those are the two best examples of character driven games, games whose attractive main personalities have earned them a place in gaming history. Just MHO.
I got it as a Christmas gift many moons ago. I was disappointed tho, because I wanted a nice still camera. But I remember having fun with the PXL-2000 once I started using it. I thought it was sooo cool that it used audio cassettes to record the video stream, and it was so compact. Eventually I took it apart and hid the internals in my sister's room, because she had a really hot friend I wanted to see a little more of, who'd come over and change after cheerleading practice. Lucky for my perverted little 12 year old ass, I never got caught with it. But, the PKL-2000 is still upstairs in a closet, its internals and casing never reassembled, tucked away in a plastic bag. If there's really a market on eBay for these things, I'll probably get to work on assembling it and, if it works, selling it...
I agree that this is a crappy price point for a crappy toy. You can actually get a decent (not great, but decent) real digital camera for $299 (an HP model with a 2.1 megapixel res), or a real S-VHS-C or Hi8 video camera for around $400-$500 when Best Buy has a sale. S-VHS and Hi-8 actually have comparable quality to digital camcorders, the downside of course being that, since they're analog, there will be some minor quality loss once you digitize them with a PC video capture device. In fact, most news cameras in use today at smaller stations are S-VHS, though it's the full-size S-VHS and not the small S-VHS-C. Now, this is several times the $79 for this unit, but it's worth saving for. You get 2.1 million pixels resolution in the digital still camera, or 520 lines of video resolution with a Hi8 or S-VHS-C video camera.
If you're really on a tight budget and want such a gadget, get a real webcam from Logitech or Intel or Creative or such, and if you want to be able to use it away from the PC get something like the Creative webcam which can be untethered and used as a low-res digital camera, for about $129. Heck, HP offers a 1.3 megapixel digital camera for just $199. The only good use I can see for devices like this are for a low-res home surveillance security system, where higher priced components wouldn't be worth the extra cost.
Oh come now--he was making a valid generalization. There was no need to get defensive. It's clear that he was talking about the majority of published authors, not about every author everywhere. Why do I even bother to respond? Because we have lost sight of common sense in our society today, in many respects. People now hurl the word "generalization" about as if it were an insult to have made one. It isn't. By its very definition, a generalization applies to the majority of a given group, not to every single one of its members. In that respect, a generalization can be absolutely true and valid, so far as it goes. The implicit part of a generalization is that it doesn't apply to all members of a category, just to the majority. Generalizations are necessary and reasonable part of everyday life, without which we would be unable to make a comment about any group of people, but just about individuals. If I am informing someone about religions, for example, and say, "Jewish people attend synagogues or temples," I have made a true generalization. Jewish people do indeed go to synagogues or temples, rather than churches or mosques. Many Jewish people don't go to services at all; that's understood and implicit. But it is still a valid generalization, without which I wouldn't be able to impart some basic information without resorting to cumbersome and useless "ifs" and "excepts" and "unlesses."
The fact that generalizations are valid is borne out by the existence of the word "overgeneralization"--a generalization which is untrue, because it does not apply to the majority of the group being generalized about. Why make a big deal out of it? Because to shun generalizations as a concept is part of the PC movement to make all speech politically correct, even at the cost of common sense and personal freedom. While you weren't impinging a freedom in your attack against this one generalization, you *were* losing sight of common sense, and the implicit part of a generalization. The gentleman didn't say anything which is contradicted by your many paragraphs--they were unneeded, as was the attack on his valid generalization. He wasn't talking about every single author, just a majority of the authors represented by groups who are making these complaints.
Slashdot Mirror
How long before a copy of Carnivore leaks and gets mirrored for public consumption? I mean, presumably it has not only been used by several FBI agents, it also had to be coded. Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up. The only question is when.
/. a while back, and got a lot of press about a year ago, but I can't find the link to the software publisher's site any more). Where are good leaks and whistleblowers when you need them.
Of course, I've wondered the same about other LEA and TLA net spying tools. All the other LEA used stuff, such as mirroring utils like Encase, are readily available if you know where to look. But I have yet to see any of the cool stuff, like Carnivore and the software that's being sold to police departments for remote computer break-ins (was mentioned on
The ATI video cards since the Rage 128 based units have had one thing sorely lacking in any other video cards even today: an integrated idct (inverse discrete cosine transform, if I recall) unit in the video hardware. Basically, the idct is the most intensive part of MPEG-2/DVD decoding, so doing it in hardware takes most of the work off the CPU. Granted, a full hardware MPEG-2 card takes almost all the burden off the processor, but there's something you obviously don't know.
Hardware isn't necessarily better than software, if the hardware takes shortcuts that the software doesn't and you have enough processing power to run the software. I myself have a Hollywood+ card which I have been very happy with--I used to laugh at those fools using PowerDVD or other software-based DVD players, when I had dedicated hardware that had higher image quality.
However, for analogue video capture as well as its TV tuner features--the best on the market, bar none--I got an ATI All-in-Wonder 128. On my old K6-2 400 machine it couldn't play DVDs well at all, which was fine since I got the Hollywood+ for that. Well, when I got my new KT7-RAID not too long ago, with a processor that'll o/c to 1GHz, I reformatted and reinstalled everything. I tried the ATI's DVD software, just to soo if it worked with the faster machine and all--and it did, surprisingly so. It has much better image quality than the Hollywood+ does. I hate to say it, since I championed the REALmagic card for so long, so smug that it was better than any other DVD solution. But, the fact is thatimages don't lie, and after comparing the output time and again from both cards--the Hollywood+ with its complete hardware MPEG-2 decoding, and the ATI with its hardware idct unit and the rest in software, I came to the reluctant realization that the ATI unit had a much clearer, more detailed image.
The key is that I think the Hollywood+ must be trying to do some edge enhancement or something, because when I examine the two streams on my 20 inch 1600x1200 display, the ATI looks extremely lifelike and the Hollywood+ seems to look duller, less sharp but with more prominent edges. To try to eliminate resolution as a factor, I dropped down to 800x600 and 1024x768 to see if it made a difference--but it didn't. The ATI was always clearer, crisper, than the H+. This was on a new install with the latest drivers and the latest VIA 4-in-1's and the latest BIOS, with a Pioneer 10x DVD drive, and everything seemed to be functioning perfectly.
Basically, I think the ATI's DVD software, based around the Cinemaster decoding engine, does a reference-quality job of decoding DVDs. The H+, on the other hand, seems to use some edge enhancement trick, or just doesn't decode as well. I think it's the former, because the H+ does in fact look better than the ATI when viewed on a standard television via the on-card TV Out. I think the H+'s decoding engine was designed around the idea of decoding DVDs for display on a standard TV, which doesn't benefit from a clear full-res picture but does benefit from a little bit of modest edge enhancement. Now, I could be totally off base with thisedge-enhancement theory, maybe the H+ doesn't do that, but the fact remains that its picture is not nearly as clear and pristine as that of the ATI at high resolutions or the native DVD res, though the H+ does look better than the ATI on a regular TV. The other area in which the H+ is superior is in its color: it has more vivid, rich colors and saturation than the ATI, but this is a function ATI and Cinemaster could easily improve in future software revisions--as it is, the ATI software offers little in the way of color/saturation/hue/brightness tweaking, while the H+ gives you total control.
And it could go without saying that the ATI needs more CPU time, but even with my little Duron cranked down to a paltry 700 it still only eats ~30 to ~50 percent of the CPU, with a few other processes in the background to boot. The H+ uses much less, but the tradeoff is in image quality. Disagree all you want, but as an owner of both I have compared performance and decided to use the ATI when viewing DVDs on my PC, but when playing them on my TV for other people I use the H+. At high res, the ATI wins hands-down.
Sorry, but real football is about a bunch of people who love to play the game, who'd be on the field playing it whether they were paid two million a year or twenty thousand a year. What you mentioned, that thing about getting bigger, faster, stronger guys--that's football as a business. That's why I'd prefer to watch a high school football game any day--the NFL is a business, and no one there cares about the game, except a few who are vastly outnumbered. Even college football is a business, if you're a big time college with a big time team--for the staff it's about bringing revenue into the school, and for the players it's usually about trying to get scouted or about using status as a football player to coast through school, make contacts, etc.
You never see real football there. You just see an entertainment business, in the end no different from any other TV show. It isn't a real sport. Real football--that was when I was at a small college, so tiny our football team had no chance of bringing the college any revenue and the players had no chance of getting scouted so they didn't even try. They trained as hard as anyone, and went out on the field not for money, not for a career, not for anything else but a love of the sport and a desire to kick the ass of the other team for the sake of pride and school spirit. No one was ever charged admission. People just came and sat in the bleachers or on the hillside enjoying themselves, drinking their own beer instead of $6.50 stadium brews. And the football team had fun playing heir sport, and we had fun watching them, the same way it was 104 years ago when our football team was founded. Now, that's *real* football, and most people will never appreciate it as much as NFL business BS.
No, I shouldn't expect an irrational, dangerous reaction to the proliferation of kooks who kill. You see, there is *no* proliferation of kooks who kill. Nothing is happening today that didn't happen fifty years ago, or a hundred for that matter. There is just a mistaken popular perception that violence is on the rise, when in fact it is on the decline. And the kooks--well, they were around way back when--they aren't new. Watching the History Channel recently, they were talking about a kook who made headlines in the late 40s by going into a school full of preteens and opening fire, killing several. There were disgruntled office workers back then, too. And children also went nuts and murdered other children for bizarre reasons--remember Leopold and Loeb, anyone? So, what's the difference between then and now? Well, now we have CNN, FoxNN, MSNBC, HNN, CNBC, and your local news all blaring about these incidents, presenting so-called experts who convince us that there must be something wrong with our society, that it's unprecedented when so and so kills such and such over whatever it is. Horseshit. Violence, random or otherwise, is nothing new, and no amount of ill informed backlash will diminish it. But I guarantee that all these measures we're putting in place to curb violence will only make it worse, because the worse you treat people, the more you take away their rights and sense of worth, the more likely it is that they'll explode and try to take as many overbearing bastards with them as they can. Example: a few unbalanced kids feel picked on and pressured by school admins and especially fellow students; taunted and made to feel worthless, they take their own lives after indiscriminately killing as many students and teachers as they can--except, curiosly, for the one boy one of the gunmen warned to stay away because he'd treated the gunman right in school. Example 2: a man watches the TV news day after day and is angered at the U.S. government's mishandling of an investigation into the leader of a religious community in Waco, Texas, during which they trample all of the suspect's rights one by one and try to villify him with false allegations of child abuse, which have no place in a raid which was actually based on the selling of a single sawed-off shotgun by the partner of a licensed gun dealer--in fact, it would have been a routine arrest and fine, except that when the ATF decided that their suspect's congregation was a "cult", ignoring the religious freedom which founded this country, they decided to "take him down" on live TV as a media stunt. The man watching this is so angered when ATF and FBI bungling first ignores rights and then kills people by accidentally starting a fire, that he and a friend decide to pay the government back in kind by bombing a large government building.
So, let me slightly amend what I said about there being no more kooks or violence now than there's ever been. If there are more kooks and violence now, it's a direct result of the media causing hysteria by constantly harping on the few incidents which do occur and will always occur by nature, causing the people and government to become vengeful idiots who strip away the fundamental rights of the people, some of whom are prone to react violently to having their rights and human dignity stripped away.
Well, rhetorical as it may be, I just had to answer this question with a story about a bunch of bored college kids and an all-night Wal-Mart. We didn't actually do this, mind you, but in our small college town there wasn't much to do on weeknights aside from renting movies or mindlessly roaming the Wal-Mart trying to pick up the few townies who were actually attractive and had all their teeth intact. But one night we were spitballing stuff to do and someone jokingly came up with a good way to freak out underpaid overworked teenage chack-out girls. Go with a bunch of guys to the Wal-Mart, or any such, and gather all the following, and anything else questionable when taken together: the biggest box of condoms, a length of nylon rope, some Polaroid film, duct tape, one of those sleeping masks, several pairs of junior-miss sized panties, whipped cream, K-Y, ski mask, some lollipops, some Lady Gillette razors and women's shaving gel, a couple issues of children's magazines like Nickelodeon Kids or Teen Beat or something, and anything else either sexual, related to youngsters, or with possible bondage uses. That poor, poor clerk wouldn't quite know what to make of all that stuff purchased together by a bunch of college boys--separately, it's entirely innocent; bought at once, it looks quite suspicious. Of course, I don't actually recommend purchasing all that stuff together, unless you're prepared to explain your sick joke to some authorities if the clerk really freaks out.
But, getting back on topic, those privacy-stealing store discount cards you mentioned are a real nuisance. So few people who have them realize that their shopping habits are being kept in databases, sold to marketers, and being put in a position to be used against them. I can't vouch for its truthfulness, but I did read an account that someone in a small town who was suspected of being the local marijuana and coke connection had had his shopping records used against him--the sheriff's office convinced a judge they had cause for a warrant on various other accounts, and subpoenad his purchase records to see if he bought unusual quantities of plastic baggies, straws, and other potential tools of the drug trade. Now, the story may well be spurious, like the old man-wakes-up-in-tub-of-ice-with-kidney-gone story, but it does illustrate the dangers here. Your purchasing records persist if you use such a card under your own name, and your buying habits could be used against you. In this case, it was a drug dealer who had his buying habits examined--but even discounting the popular opposition to this War-on-Drugs rhetoric bullshit, you can never know where this could lead. What if you're suspected of tax evasion, and the IRS decides your shopping records might show that you live above your reported means? Should they get your shopping records? What if they don't even need a subpoena, what if they can just buy your data on the open market, with no oversight? Background checks are now commonplace in job screenings and insurance applications--what if employers and insurance companies start looking at people's buying habits, to weed out people who buy too much alcohol or too many unhealthy foods? We live in an information society, and it's not at all extremist or unrealistic to think it's just a few steps from where we are now to a very Orwellian state of affairs...
As I was writing, you said you wanted to go on fact, not FUD. Well, those are the facts. Most of the advantages of Linux are irrelevent to the average end user, while most of Linux's shortcomings are in areas end users need to have strong, like program standardization and interoperability and in a clean and serviceable GUI that behaves predictably and has standard features adhered to by most apps.
When those issues are resolved--hopefully soon, with Ximian seeming to gain steam--Linux will be ready for most end users. That's when there needs to be a real push to get Linux into every school and university possible.
Now, with all my naysaying above and my tacit approval of Microsoft by virtue of using Windows, I have to throw this in as a counterweight: I do think that Linux will reach the stage where people like me, even us people who have been using certain software for years and don't want to have to switch to something new, will upgrade to Linux. It *will* happen--but how quickly depends on how quickly people start realizing that technological superiority means absolutely nothing against an entrenched marketplace in which the competition is *good enough* and easier to learn. End users used to MS and Apple aren't going to switch over in droves to something which asks them weird questions about whether to install emacs or xemacsor vi or slrn etc. etc. End users are not going to be happy with something in which the file menus and widgets are very different from app to app, and where not all apps can cut and paste between each other. This of course means standardization on a particular set of desktop components for end-user oriented distros, which seems a very contentious issue still.
So, it'll happen--but how soon is enturely dependent on how soon the Linux community can resolve petty bickering over whether this or that is an acceptable inclusion with certain distros and such, and decide that taking control of the desktop away from Microsoft is more important than arguing ad nauseam over whether such-and0such should go into free or nonfree on the Debian CD or whether Gnome or KDE or Ximian should be the desktop shipped as standard on consumer oriented distros. Up to y'all...
Sorry, but you're making the all-too-common on /. mistake WRT Windows. Not that I blame those who make it, because you're already living with Linux, so you don't come from the same perspective as a Windows user or even a (shudder) Mac user.
/. This was ~late 1998/early 99. I'd been reading /. based on the recommendation by a Linux-running friend. For more than two years now, I have known about Linux, and have dabbled in Linux, but never switched, even though I agree with much of the philosophy behind it and would on some levels like to switch. So, I just got my new computer, a KT7-RAID with a proc that easily overclocks to 1GHz without even getting as hot as my old k6-2 did at its measly 400MHz--in honor of the occasion I backed up all my data files onto the new HD and reformatted my two old small ones. What operating system did I choose to install as my main one? I had copies of Windows 98SE, Win2k, Win 2k Advanced Server (pirated, of course), and recent versions of Mandrake, Corel Linux, BeOS, and some other various stuff.
.rtf or text. Likewise, betwen Media Player and RealPlayer I can open all the audio formatsI'm likely to run across--but even so, since I'm used to WinAMP and have used it since before it was bought by AOL, I still use the latest WinAMP to play mp3s. And even though any of the three players I just mentioned can now play audio CDs, I still install Virtuosa to play them for me, because it's what I've always used, I like it, and it works and is pretty while doing so. I use ACDSee to view image files, IrfanView to open weird formats that ACDSee can't decode, and have done so for years. I edit images with an older version of Photoshop, though I do use the Win32 port of GiMP for some of its special script-fu. I use Scramdisk for security and GetRight for managing downloads, WinZip and WinRAR to uncompress stuff. It's what I'm used to and I can operate any one of these apps without even thinking about it, andsince I'm just an end user who only needs a few hours at a time with his computer I haven't seen a single BSOD in over a year if you discount the few times I've put a badly damaged CD in the drive and ejected it while Windows was still trying to read it since it was taking too long to try. Even though I do video capture and use my PC as my DVD player, I still never have BSODs or conflicts or any other stereotypical Windows ills, except for that CD problem I mentioned. Now, with all this experience invested, why would I want to switch to Linux and have to pick out apps all over again, basically starting from scratch and throwing away all my former computer experience?
/., and do it every day, for more than 2 years. Yes, I agree with most of the philosophy expressed here against the practices of certain patently unethical corporations. I don't buy Intel, beause I can just buy AMD and still run the apps I'm used to. I hate Disney, so I don't buy Disney stuff--I get other types of toys for the kids. I support the EFF monetarily. Etc. etc. But, even though I dislike the tactics used against Netscape and OS/2 and the other tresspasses of Microsoft, I still use Windows because it works, it's unified, standardized, and above all else it's what I'm used to and I don't have to throw out years worth of apps.
So, here's your mistake: you think most end users care about stability and an overwhelming breadth of apps and the ability to make custom changes thanks to access to the source code. Well, sorry, but we don't care about any of that.
Here's why--but first, some background, so you can see where I come from. I've been using computers since my first day at college in 1995. I started out at the lab with a 20MHz 68k Mac running, I think, System 7 with a plethora of tools like Netscape 1, Fetch, and NCSA Telnet to grab my e-mail off the campus VAX. Being a Mac campus, and having no previous computer experience, I learned to use Macs and was happy with them--except that they always seemed to lock up every hour or so whenever I was doing more than one thing. OS 8 and PPC 7200 Macs in the lab changed that in coming years, and things were stable enough. When I graduated I needed my own computer, so I bought an old used WinBook XP laptop running Windows 95, because I couldn't afford a Mac. Soon after I started being actually interested in what the computer did, what settings I could tweak and why, etc. So, I became computer literate under Windows. I started collecting and using lots of apps. When the laptop dies of old age, I bought a brand-new k6-2 400, based in part on a dislike of Intel's P!!! ID number and its possible misuse if adopted, which I learned about by reading
I installed Windows 98SE as my primary operating system, although I cheated a bit and used 98lite to allow me to install it without Internet Explorer and most of the other useless crap, and I use Powerdesk 4 as my file browser instead of Explorer/IE. But why would a partially-sane, fairly computer literate guy like me, who's played with all the operating systems I listed above on spare drives and what not, do such a thing?
Because, like most people, I don't need uptime measured in months, weeks, or even days--an uptime of 3 or 4 hours is more than sufficient, unless I'm leaving the computer on all night to download something huge in which case it isn't doing anything that will make it crash. I turn my computer off whenever not in use, as do most people. Giving the computer a minute to boot up isn't at all annoying to me or most people--press the button, go get a soda or take a wee-wee, and by the time you get back it's ready to go.
Now, even so, why on Earth would I install Win98SE, out of all the possible choices? Simple: It has all the apps I like to use, and is compatible with almost every bit of software and hardware I would like to use, without much fiddling about and such. End users don't care about having all the software that's available with Linux--we just want to use what's easy and familiar. Linux apps are usually neither. Every app I'm running on my machine, and almost every app I could possibly download for it, uses the same key combos, and most of them have a consistent and predictable UI, and consistent and predictable install options. We don't want to apt-get-make-etc-etc anything; we want to download it or browse to the CD that has it, and double-click. The vast majority of people never ever ever would want to compile something even if they knew how, so the source code is meaningless to almost all end users. And the breadth of software available to end users with Linux is also largely useless--most of it has incomprehensible names which are useful if you're a hacker typing all day on your CLI but a total hindrance if you're an end user who just wants to download and click on something intuitively-named, like "Media Player," or something whose name is common parlance like "WinAMP" or "Napster." There's no wondering, "uhh, what's slrn do?"
The most important part of all that is that end users value consistency, both amongUI features and shortcuts and the ability to cut and paste between apps and the like, and consistency with whatever software they're used to. Which gets me back to why I chose Win98 from among all possible worlds: It runs every app I have ever used. Win2k may be more stable, but it won't run all of my old games, even though most of the other apps I use will run or have versions for it. People don't like to throw out stuff they like, and that goes for software. I mean, I *could* change to an open-source or Linux-supporting word processor like Star Office or WordPerfect, but why give up the same Word97 I've been using for years? When in college even, I was using Word for the Mac. It's comfortable. I'm used to it, and everyone can read it, though if sending to a guy who uses Linux or is mindful of security I just save in
Like most end users, I wouldn't. There has to be a compelling reason to upgrade, to make me throw away all my beloved apps and go wandering around for new ones. Sure, I like reading
That's why end users aren't flocking to Linux and never will. End users don't flock--they just use what they're used to and what works. Windows works well enough. You're never going to woo most users with technical superiority. Lots of superior tech ends up in the dustbins of history. The only way to get most users is to get in touch with new computer users. Get into as many schools and universities as possible, and you'll indoctrinate fresh users who have no predisposition, and they'll probably use Linux for the rest of their lives. The only way to win over old users, people who already have used Windows or Mac for a long time and have a bunch of software they're happy with, is to have a very compelling reason to undergo the upheaval of change. Being able to run your PC rock-solid stable for a month without rebooting isn't a compelling reason, since Windows is stable *enough* and Mac OS X will probably be nearly as stable as Linux. You mentioned having to wait ages for tech support for Windows--also not a compelling reason, since most people either learn Windows or Mac in school, or have a knowledgeable friend to help them learn. The same can't be said about Linux--I have only 1 friend who uses it, and most people have none.
Steve Jobs can buy her out, as long as I get to eat her out.
;-)
Did you hear that? No, not that suspicious slurping sound. I meant the sound of karma being dragged-and-dropped into the "Trash" Icon on some moderator's OS X desktop.
Sure, HDs fail. But in the case of a cheap gov't-sponsored machine like this one, it would be easy enough to take it to the local selling place and get a new, cheap small HD. Aside from which, the computer would still last a period of several years with no HD troubles--despite horror stories, I still have hard drives that are 5 years old working perfectly. I've gone through at least 5 on my own machines, and I've never had a HD failure (except the one I caused with Partition Magic 5, which wasn't a physical failure, just a fucked up filesystem, and that one time my laptop's HD managed to come loose from the connector--btw, Lost and Found 1.06 recovered all the files Partition Magic fucked with, and then I just reformatted).
Sure, every couple years a HD will possibly crash. On a stock PC like this one, it should be easy enough to swap out. Meanwhile, look at the advantages of a hard disk even for those who just use e-mail and a word processor:
You can save all your e-mails with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
You can save all your documents for review, reprinting, and updating with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
You can save informative web pages and other documents with a HD, but not with a 16MB ROM.
Even if this thing has a floppy drive, you know very well that floppies are terrible for long-term storage. They spoil very easily and relatively quickly. They may make a reasonable backup medium o save an e-mail directory or small saved files to on a cheap PC like the one envisioned, in case a HD fails, but it's not reasonable to expct such things to live long on floppies alone.
So, I do take issue with your statement that email, writing, and web browsing don't require a HD. If you want to save any of your work and found documents, without the easy decay of floppies, then they do require a HD and occasional backing up.
The mother of my cousin's wife recently upgraded to a shiny new Gateway box. Pity she didn't ask me to build one for her, since like most /.ers I could have built a better box for 2/3 of the price or less. But anyway, she wanted to give her old computer to her grandkids to play with. they're 10 year old boys.
Guess what the previous computer was? a POS Packard-Bell P60 from 1994. Aargh! And to make matters worse, it had some bizarro integrated Aztech soundcard/14.4 modem combo on slots which went the wrong way, vertically across the bottom of the machine--I never opened it up, so I don't know if it was some secondary board wired tothe mainboard or what, it was just weird to see the slots going that way.
The boys like to play video games on my PC, so I hooked up the old P60 with as many games as it could handle. Older stuff like Quake, Doom and Doom 2, Battle Chess, all 6 Commander Keens, Carmageddon, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and the sequel Spear of Destiny, Tomb Raider , and a bunch of other stuff, worked flawlessly although the bizarro soundcard thingy had some weird IRQs and base addresses to work out. Surprisingly, even the arcade emulator Retrocade played all the supported games I had at native speed on this old 1994 P60, and DOS emulators for the Nintendo and Genesis consoles ran full speed from within Windoze (I forget their names, but they're both by "Bloodlust Software"--great, fast coding).
And all of these ran at full speed under 98lite using the option to install Windows 98 cleanly without Internet Explorer and most of the unneeded options, on the setting which allowed it to install the Windows 95 first edition shell GUI on top of a fully functional Win98 with its better drivers and support. And DX8 installed over that, with Netscape 3.04 as an admittedly rudimentary but fast web broswer, and Office 97 for all word processing needs.
This is the perfect example of how old PCs are still very useful. a stock 1994 P60 with a measly 16MB RAM became a solid gaming rig for older games, with a solid minimal win98se OS coutesy of 98lite (try it for all your un-bloating of Windoze needs, http://www.98lite.net ), and Net acces via the old NIC--perfect for the kids or for Granny to use e-mail.
You do *not* own your image. You have no legal expectation of privacy in public, meaning anything you do can be photographed and used by, for example, a photographer who wants to put a picture of you sittin on a park bench at just the perfect angle and weather to make it look artistic, in his new book. There is nothing illegal about that.
You can, however, sue him for various reasons if he does this, which is why he'll probably ask you to sign a no-fee miodeling contract that prevents him from being sued for any reason. Possible reasons for suing him include emotional distress for having your picture appear in a book containing other images which are offensive, etc., but not just publishing the photo. Also, the photo cannot be used in an ad, suggesting that you endorse the product. It also cannot be published along with your phone number or address without your permission, because since you are not a public person this is an unwarranted invasion of your privacy and it also causes emotional distress.
However, you have no legal righht over your image. You're just wrong on that issue. If you disagree, I suggest you consult any introductory text about photography that has a section about legal issues. It will confirm what I have said.
So, why was the video of the clothed young girls illegal? Because it focused on the genital areas, it was child pornography. Case law in the U.S. has clearly established that clothed images of children can still be considered child pornography, if the intent of the photographer was lascivious, as demonstrated by focusing on the genitals or posing the models in suggestive ways.People have been arrested and successfully convicted of producing child pornography for all of the following: taking video or stills of minors at the beach, focusing on genital areas and suggestive poses; taking clothed images of minors modeling who have been instructed by the photographer to pose in suggestive ways; taking pictures of minors wearing suggestive adult lingerie; taking candid images and video of high school cheerleaders focusing on genital areas; taking candid video of minors in changing rooms, even if they only strip to underwear; concealing cameras in locations to view up the skirts of minors.
So, the photos in question were illegal because they were child pornography in the U.S., not because of any property rights the girls had over their images. If the videos had not focused on the genitals, but had just been videos of little girls playing at the beach, they would have been perfectly legal to distribute and sell because they would not have been child pornography. That's all, folks...
Not to mention the fact that it seems kind of brain-dead to put a ROM filesystem on the thing when old-school 8.4 gig or less HDs are getting so cheap. What's the use of browsing the Net if you can save absolutely nothing? Also, with a 500MHz CPU, these things sure could use any word processing program out there, plenty of which are 100% free--but if you have no space to save your files, what's the point? Using anything in the way of a Sandisk or something similar is just silly. If you don't want the user to muck up the system, just don't give him root and keep his user account from touching anything touchy--but don't go to a ROM filesystem just for this. A few extra dollars are worth it for getting a small HD, it makes the system so much more useful. And since they're considering lengthy payment plans, it doesn't even come out to that much more a month.
I'm pissed off at all sites that don't use standard HTML or scripting when possible. I know that ASP gets much more complicated, but the same principle applies that it isn't too difficult to do standard stuff that can work in most browsers.
One of the most annoying things I saw lately was that, when I went to eBay to complain about being spammed, I decided to take a quick look at their privacy policy. So, I clicked on the link, and it gave me a mostly-blank page. There were a couple of lines about their regs, but that was it. So I clicked on links for their policy from all over the site--same page. Come to realize, from looking at the source. that the page used such badly formatted BS that if wasn't rendering properly. I mean, it was a simple page, they could have used plain old HTML for the whole damned thing, but no, they had to go and muck around. And sadly enough, I was using IE 4.0 at the time, and it wasn't displaying the policy, just the couple of lines intro mentioning the policy which I had no idea was hidden on the page. If you can't even make text that will render on IE 4.0, of all things, then there's something wrong with you. There was nothing there that couldn't have been done in plain HTML.
Naturally, I complained to them. I hope they've fixed something as important as their privacy policy, so that every user can see it. But somehow I doubt it. More and more pages are doing BS like this. For example, the Wired article referenced in the Steve Jobs story below wouldn't render very well, because it wanted me to download an ActiveX object that my security settings wouldn't allow. Maybe on non-IE browsers it doesn't try to slip in the ActiveX, I don't know, but it's annoying that they were using it in the first place...
The encoding problems aside, there is one great advantage to USENET's kooky distribution model: data cannot be effectively blocked. It propagates like a virus, entering one server and then getting copied to nearby servers until it propagates all over the world. Now, hopefully systems like Freenet can handle that sort of problem, since they throw a technical solution at creating an uncensorable network without having to have the Rube Goldberg solution of distributing the data to every server, and provide a measure of anonymity and untraceability for both the posters and for the place(s) where the data are located. This sounds like a great solution for storing texts, but on the other hand it could never provide the the discussion qualities of USENET.
You might be surprised at how many fairly knowledgeable chums still poke around USENET. For example, if you want privacy and anonymity resources, there's no better place to go than USENET--the only things on the Web that can compare are those that rip off the FAQs and resources built up in some USENET groups.
The problem is certainly the binaries, though. Broadband connections have inspired too many twits to post hundreds of large files a day, which kills retention not just in binaries groups but in text groups as well since they're all typically stored in the same server pool. There are now binaries groups which were created specifically *for* broadband users, with no daily posting limits. Too many of these people fail to realize that what's posted in one group affects retention in all the others.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be binaries groups--I think there are some binaries groups in USENET which are great, because they're conversational and interactive, which you can't get from a Website or a Napster-type program. Some of them are very like the old BBS days, and it's nice to see "communities" not just file repositories.
For all the good stuff in some of the alt.security.* and comp.* and even occasionally in the alt.binaries.* hierarchies, I worry that a relative few people with broadband who are mostly posting stuff that would fit better elsewhere are going to drive USENET into the ground. It would be sad if USENET goes the way of BBSes--it'll go on, just like there are still a few BBSes here and there, but only as a shadow of its former self, catering mostly to nostalgics. That wouldn't be good.
Well, I was referencing the files themselves. not the compression format itself. Getting music for free is great, even if the *format* isn't GNU/FSF/Debian sort of "free." In my own case, the best thing about it is downloading all sorts of crummy Britney Spears and N*SYSNC stuff for my young cousins and burning them CDs, so that I can effectively prevent the sale of crappy consumerized marketroid-driven artificial teeny-muzak. Wow, that was a mouthful... ;-)
I grow weary of people who always complain about such-and-such compression format being lossy. Well, boo-hoo, whine and complain, lossless compression is the exception not the rule. Almost all data in the world around us is compressed, and not losslessly, like CDs, TV, films, you name it. From your remark you seem to be one of those people who laments that CDs don't sound as good as vinyl. Well, maybe one person in a thousand can tell the bloody difference, so who cares/ Even the vinyl isn't going to sound as good as the live studio session, because even vinyl doesn't capture 100% of the audio data. Even vinyl--even the master tapes--are compressed, lossily, because they don't capture perfectly every audio nuance. But hey, that doesn't matter much anyway, because tracks aren't laid down live altogether in a studio any more--usually, separate instruments or effects are mixed in. So, there is no "100% lossless" experience to capture anyway. Same's true op even HDTV and DVD, much less plain old NTSC or PAL. Short of putting tiny actors inside your television set, you are always going to have a lossily compressed picture. Same's true for film--fowever many lines of resolution a 35mm or even 70mm print has, real life has more. So, does that mean that everything should be performed live on stage, with real-time real-life special effects? Sounds silly, eh? Well so does your complaint. The new standard is being made to get comparable qualities into smaller file sizes. But before people yet again whine about mp3 being lossy and bah-bah-bah, I'll point out something people who complain usually don't think about. Sure, a 12bkbps mp3 sounds worse than a tape dub. So what? download a 320kbps file, listen to it for any popping or encoding errors, then when you're satisfied with its quality, keep it. If it doesn't live up to your standards, throw it into the bitbucket of history. Just don't keep making the same old tired boring useless complaints that everyone here has read fifty billion times, mmmkay? If you're one of the very small pecentage of the population who can hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 file and a CD, or vinyl for that matter, then don't download mp3s. Fine. Just DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT FREE STUFF. If you want to make perfect reproductions of your CDs, then rip them to WAVs and then tar.gz or .rar or .zip them. Short of that, you're not getting a lossless digital copy of a CD track, much less a quality better than CD. As I said, anyway, all daa in the real world are lossily compressed, so get over it.
The Klipsch are THX certified, which means either of 2 things depending on your opinion:
a) THX certification is a sham. Ya pay the cert costs, and they give you the right to use their logo.
b) THX certification means that the speakers have passed a rigorous test regime to ensure that they have accurate audio fidelity.
I tend to agree with point b. There *are* tests that are done, and not everything passes THX certification without having to go back to the drawing board.
There's 1 great thing I can say about the Klipsch Promedia, and about *ALL* other Klipsch speakers: they are crafted, not stamped-out-en-masse consumer BS, and have extremely high audio fidelity. That's what Klipsch is known for. If you're looking for power that will piss your neighbors off all the time, Klipsch isn't your brand. They make exacting and elegant instruments, which generally have less power than other speakers in the same price range, but have far better audio quality and at any rate can fill a room to any reasonable sound levels with *no* distortion. Klipsch are especially known for being one of very few audio companies which still use real horns for producing high-pitched sounds. Horns have been replaced over the years by cheaper parts which usually aren't as accurate--but not on Klipsch speakers.
I'm not sure the ProMedia speakers by Klipsch would be the best bet for a home theater system--they're just the most well known by computer guys like us. I'm sure they'd perform as well as speakers costing twice as much, if you paired them with a decent center channel speaker and a good Dolby Digital/DTS decoder. However, I'm also sure that, for the budgeted $1500, you could afford some Klipsch speakers particularly designed for a home theater system. At any rate, they are a top-quality brand, and when it comes to audio fidelity the only way you're going to get better speakers is by spending three times as much. They have audio *fidelity*, unlike Bose and other consumer products which distort the audio range in a way which is pleasing to the ears of a non-audiophile, but which annoys the Hell out of anyone who wants to hear audio exactly like it was layed down. These days, studios spend millions of dollars to have their soundtracks layed down in exacting detail by audio professionals at places like the Skywalker Ranch--why mess that up with speakers which *think* they can do a better job than millions of dollars worth of audio equipment and some very trained ears?
Just my 2 pence.
http://www.scramdisk.clara.net
Many people use it on Windows instead of PGPdisk. I don't know about you, but after that ADK fiasco, I have serious doubts about NAI's ability to review and ponder their own code. It seems to me that, being the #1 encryption software provider on the planet, they'd be a big target for tempting offers from certain 3-letter agencies to munge a piece of code here or there.
Scramdisk, on the other hand, is worked on by only a few core people, not dozens, giving less of a chance for deliberate tampering. Just an opinion, but it seems that having a few trusted people close to the project working on the code is better in a security product than delegating its creation and upkeep to dozens. And of course, the source code is completely open. Grab it and compile it if you're uber-paranoid.
It also has advantages PGPDisk doesn't, such as support not only for Win9x and WinNT/2k, but a Linux port is in the works. It's freeware for Win9x and Linux, payware for NT/2k.
It also has better algorithm choices than PGPDisk. You get your choice of 9 algorithms, including Twofish, and more are on their way.
Might be worth trying. Scramdisk also has some support for steganography in WAV files, and better yet, for entire encrypted partitions, not just container files. It's very respected, particularly in security-oriented groups on USENET.
The only part of MS Office I use is Word. I don't make spreadsheets, and I don't need accounting software, and I'm definitely not going to put a big "Hey crackers, I'm bent over, fuck me in the ass" sign on my PC by installing Outlook or Outlook Express. I need and use newer versions of Word because it provides 100% compatibility with most of the documents people send me. I myself use the beautiful and elegantly simple ClarisWorks 5.0 for Windows when I write, and save it as text if I need to send it to other people instead of printing it out--after all, the first computers I used were Macs, and Claris was a staple. But, most other people use various versions of Word, and to keep up I use the latest version I can get.
So, I thought I'd get MS Works, just for Word 2000. There I am in CompUSA, it's on sale for $79, but reading the box tells me that "MS Works is an upgrade product. You must already have installed, or have the installation media for, one of the following products..." Sonofabitch! I'm not going to keep around a pile of musty old install disks for Encarta 97 or whateverthehell, just so I can install/reinstall the Word 200 from the MS Works package. Bullshit. And I feel bad for anyone who didn't read the side panel closely enough to realize that the new version of Works is useless unless you already own a piece of shit outdated copy of something else. What a scam. They know perfectly well that people aren't going to keep track of a pile of old CDs they don't use anymore, and that eventually someone will lose something and have to go out and buy another MS product just to get functionality on something else they bought. I really wish some consumer protection agencies would take the stick from out their asses and move on abuses like this.
I haven't bought a crappy OEM PC with a restore CD, but I've dealt with a few for relatives. You know how it is, knowing a few things about computers is kinda like being a doctor--at social functions, people are always trying to get a free diagnosis--"So, when I try to play a video clip I get an error that says "mmsystem somethingorother gobbledygook--what do I do?" And of course, I get invited to come over to family members' houses to help them fix/setup/etc. their PCs. This being /., I'm sure most of us have had to do this at some point...
Anyway, my aunt's Compaq, which is a couple years old so I don't know if they do it differently now, has a partition with an executable which copies over/restores some directories with special drivers, programs, etc., and also has all the Windows cabfiles there and pointed to in the Registry so that it doesn't have to ask for a Windows CD whenever new hardware is detected. Not that bad, since you can still install new hardware, and conceivably since it has all the Windows cabs the drive could even be moved to another PC if need be, although it would cause a big messy Windows install instead of a nice small one. The partition is a standard FAT32 partition, not hidden or anything.
Meanwhile, another PC I encountered (forget whether it's a Dell or HP or whatever, been so long) has a bootable CD for system restore, that won't install to anything but the original hardware. Cabs for drivers for new hardware in case you add a device, but I think it's hard-coded to that type of motherboard or something, so that you can only use it on the PCs from that manufacturer. I didn't want to deal with the BS, so I just installed Win98SE from a regular Windows CD I brought with me, and then copied over some special drivers that were on the Restore CD. Then I made him a copy of the real Win98SE CD with my burner, so he wouldn't have to deal with any BS in the future.
Just what little experience I've had with sytem resore crap.
Umm, yes, hard drive capacity is definitely going to be needed, and lots of it. I don't think, like someone above mentioned, that games themselves are going to get installed to the drive like current Windows games are--I think just basic config info and saved games are going to be put on the hard disk, and the games themselves will be run from the game CDs and DVDs.
.NET service which will include running word processing and other apps. Don't underestimate the role of the Xbox in .NET--MS is secretly hoping to replace the PC with something they own, which won't run anyone else's software unless it's licensed, and which will require an eternal service contract with the .NET service in order to keep using apps. MS is clever. There's a damn fine reason MS is making this thing over-powered just for console gaming. It's a new type of MS-controlled PC.
Why do I think this? Because if the games installed much to the 8GB drive, it'd be eaten up very quickly and people would have to uninstall stuff and reinstall it a lot. Gamers, esp. kids, won't want to do this. I mean, have you installed a recent title lately? I just installed American McGee's Alice, and the install took 525MB of my hard drive space. Only ~15 games could be installed at a time if the install were anything like current Windows games, which is why I say the games will be run from the media and only install basic config info and use the HD for saved games.
Now, this still takes a large amount of HD space, since MS doesn't want users to have to worry about uninstalling things from something as simple to use as a set-top game console. Consoles are supposed to be truly "plug-and-play," with no configuration needed beyond inserting a game and choosing easily understood game settings. And I say a large HD is necessary because new games will have to use more and more space for saved game data. My new American McGee's Alice install I mentioned--well, I have only 3 saved games, and they take up almost 8MB of disk space. The more complex maps and character placements and options get, the more space needed to save a game to disk. Hence, an 8GB hard drive just for saved games and a few config options is NOT overkill. In fact, I guarantee that HD upgrades will be available.
Also, the Xbox isn't just for gaming. It'll have internet access, and presumably a special MSN/WebTV type of service. As such, a hard drive will also store web cache and probably allow saving of downloaded material. MS isn't stupid. They aren't using a 733MHz Intel CPU just for its gaming potential. The Xbox will be Microsoft's proprietary replacement for the PC. People will be able to get a subscription to the
That's a reasonable list, as far as it goes. But I'd have to add another game or two, based on one type of game that's omitted. None of the games listed were pioneers in creating characters that people truly love, characters for which they play and continue to play the game(s), time and again. By and large, computer games have nameless non-individuals for the player to live through--a grunt, a soldier, an alien, etc. Tomb Raider is on the list and has Lara Croft, sure, but people didn't play the game because of her character's personality or alluring history--she's just a hot CG chick with large polygons, no one actually cares about her life and character traits that much.
So, there are two games I'd include on the list, for pioneering memorable characters whose lives are important to the game. *The* pioneer here would be the young Commander Keen, 8-year-old boy wonder who built a rocketship out of old soup cans and dons his football helmet to become Commander Keen, defender of Earth and galactic hero. Much of the allure of the Keen games is the character's personality--he's the kid in all of us, and the uber-geek to boot, in a game that's full of his kitschy and quirky predicaments. Without Keen and his character as revealed in numerous text screens, the Keen games wouldn't be as likable and successful. They were clearly character-driven.
Second would be an all-time favourite, Duke Nukem 3D. An immersive 3D world, but inhabited by 2D characters and sprites, the game is technically inferior to many of its contemporaries, including of course the original Quake. Resolutions are low, adding to the game's technical inferiority. And yet, many people continue to play Duke Nukem 3D to this day, and new mods, user levels, and total conversions continue to be made all the time. There are arguably more mods, user levels, and TCs floating around for Duke Nukem 3D than there are for Quake. Why? Because Duke Nukem is an awesome character. Just as Commander Keen is the kid, and the uber-geek, in all of us, Duke Nukem is the swaggering and macho male in all of us. Babes in bikinis, strippers, and posters for adult films litter every Duke level, and Duke is heard to say "shake it, baby!" and give strippers wads of cash. The user mods and TCs have become an integral part of the Duke Nukem community, allowing Duke's macho lewdness to be taken further than the game company itself could, even though the mods are hosted on their servers. Basic mods for DN3D take the clothes off the strippers, while more advanced and very popular TCs like the Vixens and Vixens 2 packages add more female characters, more sexist scenarios, and the ability to screw the strippers for health points instead of just giving them cash to "shake it." Penthouse Magazine commissioned and sponsored a special map. Some user levels are almost insanely elaborate, and impossible to play without using cheat codes there are so many enemies--such as the 666 TC. Whether you love Duke's sexist machismo for the playfulness it really is, or whether you hate it because you take it too seriously, Duke Nukem is a very character-driven game which has remained popular solely on the strength of its character and the user community's support of him through mods and TCs to a technically inferior game. Its publisher has largely abandoned the PC for creating console Duke Nukem games, and stated that Duke Nukem 3D will never benefit from the enhancements made to its textures and sprites for the console versions. But many PC gamers have yet to abandon Duke Nukem 3D, because of Duke's character.
I think those are the two best examples of character driven games, games whose attractive main personalities have earned them a place in gaming history. Just MHO.
I got it as a Christmas gift many moons ago. I was disappointed tho, because I wanted a nice still camera. But I remember having fun with the PXL-2000 once I started using it. I thought it was sooo cool that it used audio cassettes to record the video stream, and it was so compact. Eventually I took it apart and hid the internals in my sister's room, because she had a really hot friend I wanted to see a little more of, who'd come over and change after cheerleading practice. Lucky for my perverted little 12 year old ass, I never got caught with it. But, the PKL-2000 is still upstairs in a closet, its internals and casing never reassembled, tucked away in a plastic bag. If there's really a market on eBay for these things, I'll probably get to work on assembling it and, if it works, selling it...
I agree that this is a crappy price point for a crappy toy. You can actually get a decent (not great, but decent) real digital camera for $299 (an HP model with a 2.1 megapixel res), or a real S-VHS-C or Hi8 video camera for around $400-$500 when Best Buy has a sale. S-VHS and Hi-8 actually have comparable quality to digital camcorders, the downside of course being that, since they're analog, there will be some minor quality loss once you digitize them with a PC video capture device. In fact, most news cameras in use today at smaller stations are S-VHS, though it's the full-size S-VHS and not the small S-VHS-C. Now, this is several times the $79 for this unit, but it's worth saving for. You get 2.1 million pixels resolution in the digital still camera, or 520 lines of video resolution with a Hi8 or S-VHS-C video camera.
If you're really on a tight budget and want such a gadget, get a real webcam from Logitech or Intel or Creative or such, and if you want to be able to use it away from the PC get something like the Creative webcam which can be untethered and used as a low-res digital camera, for about $129. Heck, HP offers a 1.3 megapixel digital camera for just $199. The only good use I can see for devices like this are for a low-res home surveillance security system, where higher priced components wouldn't be worth the extra cost.
Oh come now--he was making a valid generalization. There was no need to get defensive. It's clear that he was talking about the majority of published authors, not about every author everywhere. Why do I even bother to respond? Because we have lost sight of common sense in our society today, in many respects. People now hurl the word "generalization" about as if it were an insult to have made one. It isn't. By its very definition, a generalization applies to the majority of a given group, not to every single one of its members. In that respect, a generalization can be absolutely true and valid, so far as it goes. The implicit part of a generalization is that it doesn't apply to all members of a category, just to the majority. Generalizations are necessary and reasonable part of everyday life, without which we would be unable to make a comment about any group of people, but just about individuals. If I am informing someone about religions, for example, and say, "Jewish people attend synagogues or temples," I have made a true generalization. Jewish people do indeed go to synagogues or temples, rather than churches or mosques. Many Jewish people don't go to services at all; that's understood and implicit. But it is still a valid generalization, without which I wouldn't be able to impart some basic information without resorting to cumbersome and useless "ifs" and "excepts" and "unlesses."
The fact that generalizations are valid is borne out by the existence of the word "overgeneralization"--a generalization which is untrue, because it does not apply to the majority of the group being generalized about. Why make a big deal out of it? Because to shun generalizations as a concept is part of the PC movement to make all speech politically correct, even at the cost of common sense and personal freedom. While you weren't impinging a freedom in your attack against this one generalization, you *were* losing sight of common sense, and the implicit part of a generalization. The gentleman didn't say anything which is contradicted by your many paragraphs--they were unneeded, as was the attack on his valid generalization. He wasn't talking about every single author, just a majority of the authors represented by groups who are making these complaints.