"One player per PC" probably because you don't typically keep PCs in your living room, they are rather easily networked and tend to have smaller (that's physical size, not resolution) screens than TVs. Also, pre-Windows machines more often had multiplayer support (remember the Amiga? Later on many (keyboard-controlled) DOS games, too), just like older turn-based strategy games tended to have a "Hotseat" mode.
We have a Wii, but I don't have a spare TV to replace one that others might break.
C'mon, those few "crashed" Wiimotes were isolated and rare accidents. The risk of somebody (after a glass or two) tripping over a GC controller's wire onto your TV isn't that much smaller than a player losing grip in the exact right moment. And even if it should be: Live life dangerously. Killing your TV will not only help save your country's economy (do not take into account the broken window fallacy. It takes all the fun out of this argument.) but also provide you with a few tv-free days and get you a shiny new TV in the end. For a li'l bit of money.
I have no idea what you or the kids at a family party might like. For the linux gaming part, Wine's AppDB or your package manager's "Games" category are good starting points. For the family aspect I'd consider playing PC games a bad idea anyways. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Yay for Serious Sam, but slaughtering kamikaze zombies with 12 year olds mightn't make their parents happy), it's one player per comp, thus boring for everybody else. Get a wii, maybe even an X-Box and have multiplayer fun.
And remember, if all else fails, there's always Wintendo to play around with;)
The Nokia 6250, while being quite a brick, tends to easily survive six foot drops onto concrete. Mine actually did survive some thirty-or-so foot drops onto grass and stone ground. Even being throwing it at people wouldn't hurt it. What finally killed it was playing half an hour of water cell (didn't have a ball handy) with it's rear cover not properly fixed.
Luckily lots of the points you're mentioning are about to or have been steadily changing. I spent christmas at a little LAN-party with a few friends and could run most of the games we played through wine or even native (UT2004, Serious Sam: First and Second Encounter, Serious Sam II work natively, Soldat, Diablo II, Jedi Academy, Battlefield 1942, CS:S and HL2 with some wine magic). My wireless card (Intel 4965AGN, pretty common) works about as bad with Vista (no WPA at all, frequent interruptions) as Ubuntu Gutsy (WPA, frequent interruptions, sometimes crashes NetworkManager or needs to be un- and re-modprobed). My desktop's nVidia graphics card allows me to watch hardware-accelerated movies and even games over my two 20" screens which, IIRC, it won't with Windows. I'm too lazy to go check right now but I seem to recall 32 bpp working just fine; no guarantee on that one, though.
What I'm trying to say is the technology's there. It's still rough-edged in many parts and completely unsuited for grandma who just wants to check her e-mail once in a while (Vista sucks equally bad there, yay for the XO approach), but that polish can and will be done. It'll take months, maybe even a few years, but with Ubuntu and co. going strong, simple solutions to common problems are being completed almost daily and mainstream-quality ease of use is right around the corner.
What's even funnier: Sony BMG is (through the RIAA of which it is a major member) accusing Sony Corp of facilitating a crime on a mass scale (IIRC both Sony hardware like e.g. MiniDisc-Enabled stereos and software like SonicStage offered simple one-button methods to copy copyrighted music from CDs)
The quality of content in p2p networks is rapidly becoming better. "Classic" single- and dual-disc XviD DVDRips still are the most common format due to ease of use and quality/space ratio, but the share of DVD-Rs (direct copies of DVDs' MPEG streams) has been growing over the past months and are currently being superseded by a (now stabilizing) slew of HD formats (after different approaches by different groups, x264 720p and 1080i in mkv containers at some 4.4 and 7.9 GiB per film seems to be the way of choice to deliver HD).
About the blind tests: I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but do think of me as quite able to tell the difference between HD and SD content. A few days ago I had the opportunity of comparing three levels of quality (2-CD DVDRip, actual DVD, 720p HD) and while I could hardly tell the former two apart on an HD screen, the 720p version looked way better in a side-by-side comparison. The difference wasn't as extreme as manufacturers' demos make it seem (in a Sony Qualia home theatre even SD would look gorgeous), but very very visible.
What if this has real consequences, such as this information gets sent to your work supervisor, to all your friends, to your university?
Short-term and limited to few single occurrences I agree this to be disasterous. I can't imagine anything better than such stuff happening all the time, though. Being presented with tons of contradicting information from sources of different credibility would force the public to actually begin rating their sources and stop accepting random, unauthorative data as truths.
Since that's far too realistic to be done anytime soon, some libel/slander legislation remains necessary.
Just like MSFT doesn't need to restrict their Software to only run on a certain vendor's hardware, Google doesn't need to create a special browser for their content. Microsoft's core business may be Office, but Windows still is one hell of a cash cow. The ubiquity of the latter allows them to limit the former to it (with that nice little Mac exception). Google's main (sole?) income source is advertising in line with their content. Just like it's great for Microsoft to run Windows anywhere, Google can only win from exposing their product to the broadest audience possible. Both, of course, will watch their budgets. Windows doesn't run on Alpha anymore 'cause the development costs outweigh the projected income (i.e. x86 is everywhere); Google Apps may not run in Konq (hypothetical example) because 99% of their audience uses MSIE, Opera, Safari or Firefox.
The keyboard cable. The keyboard (it's not that hard to bug a keyboard). The mobo (add a PS/2 or USB bug to the mobo's respective port or solder it to the south bridges connectors). The software. The network (unless you're going to use secure comms exclusively). That thing may be inconspicuous, it's the legal proof of concept. Given enough demand, an inconspicuous version would or will be built.
Open software is fine and all, but would you mind finally giving up the "I can look inside, so it's secure" bull?
In theory it works, but it's not practically employable. Most mainstream distros install binary packages. Even if source packages are available, did you check each and every changed line after each and every security update? Simple answer: Either you don't or your software's very outdated and thus probably vulnerable.
Even given the benefit of the doubt (imagining you've got a whole team of people following the development process of every single program you use, closely monitoring each and every code check-in and the state of your respective distro's packages) your solution's not as secure as it may seem. Remember SquirrelMail?
Way less than 5 mW directly. Your average green handheld laser will emit some 75-125 mW, models in the 300+ mW range sell for some $2k (e.g. WickedLaser's Spyder II GX).
Typical beam divergence is some 1 mRad (+1 mm radius per meter distance), leaving you with a 30 cm circle (some 700 sq. cm) after a quarter mile. Even for an extremely powerful 350 mW unit, that's only 0.5 mW per sq. cm. A heavily dilated pupil might have a diameter of some.7 cm (0.38 sq. cm), resulting in some.2 mW of emission per eye. This ought to be enough to disorient and potentially blind him for (very) few seconds, but that's about it. Looking directly into the sun would be about five times as bright and doesn't really cause harm if your blink reflex is in working order.
Concerts are the product most bands want you to buy, not advertising.
CDs are the product the bands' labels want you to buy and not that cheap to produce.
Merchandising is relatively pricy to produce and tends not to work as an advertisement (tour dates are in the past; you don't hear what the band sounds like).
Playing single songs on the radio, however, is an extremely cheap way to advertise. Listeners get to hear what one song of the respective band sounds like but the listening stays more or less limited to a one-time experience. Forgetting about everything after right before the tape recorder, listening to the song that just played on the radio does require you to buy the record (or, of course, download the mp3). Distribution costs on the artist's side are ridiculously small - postage for and a cd should, given either good quality or mainstream appeal, cover it.
Your scale seems to be quite a bit off.
Your standard water heater is limited to what its supply supplies, and that's usually some 2.3 kW (Europe, 10A at 230V. Old installations may have 6A, new ones 16A breakers.) or 1.4 kW (U.S., 12A at 120V seems common, newer installations up to 16 or 20A.). The same goes for anything else that plugs into standard wall warts.
Stoves, Ovens and other power-consuming stuff that's usually hooked up by professionals often gets the nice three-phase 380V treatment, but even those tend to consume (way) below the 5 kW line.
Apparently my Core 2 Duo can, in ideal circumstances, run 2 + 8 (two 128-bit SSE floating point ops equal 8 single precision 32-bit ops) = 10 instructions per clock (I think). 2 Cores at 1.6 GHz would then process 32000 MIPS and use up about 10 watts (in a Lenovo X61t with some power-saving settings (e.g. no Bluetooth or WiFi, low display brightness) fully usable. If I didn't mess up something, that'd be 3200 MIPS/W.
During actual processor load and WiFi, usage of the chipset's 3D capabilities and high display brightness power use typically rises to some 17 watts, can't recall it reaching 20. Either this is pretty damn awesome or I got the numbers wrong.
(Yeah, a notebook with a power-efficient processor might not really be what most people call a typical home PC, but differently from a C7 or the SC648, it's something (some) end-users can and actually do have.)
Are dsl Routers really useless until grandma logs in and sets it up?
Most routers I know are. Usually you'll just have to provide a username and password and the rest is done automagically, though some contracts or routers require more work.
Perhaps they should come with port 80 open out of the box?
They do. Unfortunately, just like 99.9% (probably more), Grandma does not know how to use telnet to send a few lines of HTTP to 'em. Remember, this is about removing web browsing functionality from mainstream OSs.
Code-Wise, Server 2008 is built on Vista is built on 2003 is built on XP is built on 2000 is built on NT. Of course Vista and XP will lack some of the preceding servers' features, just like the servers won't typically run Aero or hardware-accelerated Direct3D.
Marketing-Wise, GP has the path summed up pretty much perfectly.
While I really like Opera and find it to be by far the best browser available, this seems more like the opposite to me. Quality software, especially when tailored to the needs of more advanced users, tends to grow its market share without such cheap methods. Take Real Player vs. VLC, for example. Real Networks is suing Microsoft to be included in Windows and managed to force Microsoft to release Windows N(ot with Media Player). VideoLAN isn't advertising, doesn't require to imagine own standards yet is incredibly wide-spread with seasoned users.
Currently, Opera seems to be in somewhat of a transition from the absolute market leader in browsing speed (rendering as well as user interaction) to a (still nice but way slower) Firefox alternative leaving many long-time users standing in the rain. This suit seems perfectly in order with their current behaviour in other areas.
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C'mon, those few "crashed" Wiimotes were isolated and rare accidents. The risk of somebody (after a glass or two) tripping over a GC controller's wire onto your TV isn't that much smaller than a player losing grip in the exact right moment. And even if it should be: Live life dangerously. Killing your TV will not only help save your country's economy (do not take into account the broken window fallacy. It takes all the fun out of this argument.) but also provide you with a few tv-free days and get you a shiny new TV in the end. For a li'l bit of money.
I have no idea what you or the kids at a family party might like. For the linux gaming part, Wine's AppDB or your package manager's "Games" category are good starting points. For the family aspect I'd consider playing PC games a bad idea anyways. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Yay for Serious Sam, but slaughtering kamikaze zombies with 12 year olds mightn't make their parents happy), it's one player per comp, thus boring for everybody else. Get a wii, maybe even an X-Box and have multiplayer fun.
;)
And remember, if all else fails, there's always Wintendo to play around with
The Nokia 6250, while being quite a brick, tends to easily survive six foot drops onto concrete. Mine actually did survive some thirty-or-so foot drops onto grass and stone ground. Even being throwing it at people wouldn't hurt it. What finally killed it was playing half an hour of water cell (didn't have a ball handy) with it's rear cover not properly fixed.
Luckily lots of the points you're mentioning are about to or have been steadily changing. I spent christmas at a little LAN-party with a few friends and could run most of the games we played through wine or even native (UT2004, Serious Sam: First and Second Encounter, Serious Sam II work natively, Soldat, Diablo II, Jedi Academy, Battlefield 1942, CS:S and HL2 with some wine magic). My wireless card (Intel 4965AGN, pretty common) works about as bad with Vista (no WPA at all, frequent interruptions) as Ubuntu Gutsy (WPA, frequent interruptions, sometimes crashes NetworkManager or needs to be un- and re-modprobed). My desktop's nVidia graphics card allows me to watch hardware-accelerated movies and even games over my two 20" screens which, IIRC, it won't with Windows. I'm too lazy to go check right now but I seem to recall 32 bpp working just fine; no guarantee on that one, though.
What I'm trying to say is the technology's there. It's still rough-edged in many parts and completely unsuited for grandma who just wants to check her e-mail once in a while (Vista sucks equally bad there, yay for the XO approach), but that polish can and will be done. It'll take months, maybe even a few years, but with Ubuntu and co. going strong, simple solutions to common problems are being completed almost daily and mainstream-quality ease of use is right around the corner.
Nah. CD ripped to hd for personal use: unauthorized, legal under fair use doctrine. CD ripped and shared: unauthorize, illegaly redistributed.
What's even funnier: Sony BMG is (through the RIAA of which it is a major member) accusing Sony Corp of facilitating a crime on a mass scale (IIRC both Sony hardware like e.g. MiniDisc-Enabled stereos and software like SonicStage offered simple one-button methods to copy copyrighted music from CDs)
The quality of content in p2p networks is rapidly becoming better. "Classic" single- and dual-disc XviD DVDRips still are the most common format due to ease of use and quality/space ratio, but the share of DVD-Rs (direct copies of DVDs' MPEG streams) has been growing over the past months and are currently being superseded by a (now stabilizing) slew of HD formats (after different approaches by different groups, x264 720p and 1080i in mkv containers at some 4.4 and 7.9 GiB per film seems to be the way of choice to deliver HD).
About the blind tests: I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but do think of me as quite able to tell the difference between HD and SD content. A few days ago I had the opportunity of comparing three levels of quality (2-CD DVDRip, actual DVD, 720p HD) and while I could hardly tell the former two apart on an HD screen, the 720p version looked way better in a side-by-side comparison. The difference wasn't as extreme as manufacturers' demos make it seem (in a Sony Qualia home theatre even SD would look gorgeous), but very very visible.
Since that's far too realistic to be done anytime soon, some libel/slander legislation remains necessary.
Try pure fat. 9 kcal per gram equals some 4 Mcal per pound. Alcohol (3.2 Mcal/lb) would work, too.
Just like MSFT doesn't need to restrict their Software to only run on a certain vendor's hardware, Google doesn't need to create a special browser for their content.
Microsoft's core business may be Office, but Windows still is one hell of a cash cow. The ubiquity of the latter allows them to limit the former to it (with that nice little Mac exception). Google's main (sole?) income source is advertising in line with their content. Just like it's great for Microsoft to run Windows anywhere, Google can only win from exposing their product to the broadest audience possible. Both, of course, will watch their budgets. Windows doesn't run on Alpha anymore 'cause the development costs outweigh the projected income (i.e. x86 is everywhere); Google Apps may not run in Konq (hypothetical example) because 99% of their audience uses MSIE, Opera, Safari or Firefox.
The keyboard cable. The keyboard (it's not that hard to bug a keyboard). The mobo (add a PS/2 or USB bug to the mobo's respective port or solder it to the south bridges connectors). The software. The network (unless you're going to use secure comms exclusively).
That thing may be inconspicuous, it's the legal proof of concept. Given enough demand, an inconspicuous version would or will be built.
# pkg_add -r some_ev0l_keylogger, perhaps?
That'd help.
Unless somebody really wants your data
Use Windows, only allow the programs* needed to be run (via GPO), case closed ..
* An execution white- or blacklist can be created with hashes or executable file names. Obviously don't use the latter possibility.
Open software is fine and all, but would you mind finally giving up the "I can look inside, so it's secure" bull?
In theory it works, but it's not practically employable. Most mainstream distros install binary packages. Even if source packages are available, did you check each and every changed line after each and every security update? Simple answer: Either you don't or your software's very outdated and thus probably vulnerable.
Even given the benefit of the doubt (imagining you've got a whole team of people following the development process of every single program you use, closely monitoring each and every code check-in and the state of your respective distro's packages) your solution's not as secure as it may seem. Remember SquirrelMail?
Murder is the unlawful killing of a human person with malice aforethought. Criminal negligence may apply, but since there was no actual harm done, charges for (attempted) terrorism, treason and insufficient love for the homeland are more likely.
Laser-guided targeting systems, I guess.
Way less than 5 mW directly. Your average green handheld laser will emit some 75-125 mW, models in the 300+ mW range sell for some $2k (e.g. WickedLaser's Spyder II GX). .7 cm (0.38 sq. cm), resulting in some .2 mW of emission per eye. This ought to be enough to disorient and potentially blind him for (very) few seconds, but that's about it. Looking directly into the sun would be about five times as bright and doesn't really cause harm if your blink reflex is in working order.
Typical beam divergence is some 1 mRad (+1 mm radius per meter distance), leaving you with a 30 cm circle (some 700 sq. cm) after a quarter mile. Even for an extremely powerful 350 mW unit, that's only 0.5 mW per sq. cm. A heavily dilated pupil might have a diameter of some
My bad. I mixed up water kettles and heatersnp. Another thing learnt, thanks and sorry for the confusion :)
Concerts are the product most bands want you to buy, not advertising.
CDs are the product the bands' labels want you to buy and not that cheap to produce.
Merchandising is relatively pricy to produce and tends not to work as an advertisement (tour dates are in the past; you don't hear what the band sounds like).
Playing single songs on the radio, however, is an extremely cheap way to advertise. Listeners get to hear what one song of the respective band sounds like but the listening stays more or less limited to a one-time experience. Forgetting about everything after right before the tape recorder, listening to the song that just played on the radio does require you to buy the record (or, of course, download the mp3). Distribution costs on the artist's side are ridiculously small - postage for and a cd should, given either good quality or mainstream appeal, cover it.
Your scale seems to be quite a bit off.
Your standard water heater is limited to what its supply supplies, and that's usually some 2.3 kW (Europe, 10A at 230V. Old installations may have 6A, new ones 16A breakers.) or 1.4 kW (U.S., 12A at 120V seems common, newer installations up to 16 or 20A.). The same goes for anything else that plugs into standard wall warts.
Stoves, Ovens and other power-consuming stuff that's usually hooked up by professionals often gets the nice three-phase 380V treatment, but even those tend to consume (way) below the 5 kW line.
Apparently my Core 2 Duo can, in ideal circumstances, run 2 + 8 (two 128-bit SSE floating point ops equal 8 single precision 32-bit ops) = 10 instructions per clock (I think). 2 Cores at 1.6 GHz would then process 32000 MIPS and use up about 10 watts (in a Lenovo X61t with some power-saving settings (e.g. no Bluetooth or WiFi, low display brightness) fully usable. If I didn't mess up something, that'd be 3200 MIPS/W.
During actual processor load and WiFi, usage of the chipset's 3D capabilities and high display brightness power use typically rises to some 17 watts, can't recall it reaching 20. Either this is pretty damn awesome or I got the numbers wrong.
(Yeah, a notebook with a power-efficient processor might not really be what most people call a typical home PC, but differently from a C7 or the SC648, it's something (some) end-users can and actually do have.)
Code-Wise, Server 2008 is built on Vista is built on 2003 is built on XP is built on 2000 is built on NT. Of course Vista and XP will lack some of the preceding servers' features, just like the servers won't typically run Aero or hardware-accelerated Direct3D.
Marketing-Wise, GP has the path summed up pretty much perfectly.
While I really like Opera and find it to be by far the best browser available, this seems more like the opposite to me. Quality software, especially when tailored to the needs of more advanced users, tends to grow its market share without such cheap methods. Take Real Player vs. VLC, for example. Real Networks is suing Microsoft to be included in Windows and managed to force Microsoft to release Windows N(ot with Media Player). VideoLAN isn't advertising, doesn't require to imagine own standards yet is incredibly wide-spread with seasoned users.
Currently, Opera seems to be in somewhat of a transition from the absolute market leader in browsing speed (rendering as well as user interaction) to a (still nice but way slower) Firefox alternative leaving many long-time users standing in the rain. This suit seems perfectly in order with their current behaviour in other areas.