I always suspected Blu Ray would win (partly because I wanted it to win, partly because of the PS3), but it took far longer than I thought it would. For the most part when corporations compete for the consumers business, the consumers win because they get a better product. In the case of the Next-Gen DVD format, neither the corporations nor the consumers won (or maybe they both won but it was a phyrric (sp?) victory). The products a few years ago are barely any different than what they are now (albeit significantly cheaper), so all that resulted in this conflict was consumer confusion and lost sales from people waiting out on a "winner".
I must say though I'm glad that Blu Ray won given that the only end user noticeable difference is storage and price, and Blu Ray win's on storage space, and will eventually get equal in price.
He writes about how it's such a miserable year, but half the stuff he writes about is about companies being uber-successful. Google, Apple and the Wii come to mind.
They've done a lot of the work towards the FOSS drivers for the ATI cards, including recently releasing V1.10 of the RadeonHD adding support for the 3850 and 3870, as well as release 10.3 of OpenSuse, and (AFAIK) have continued business as usual since the MSFT agreement.
Novell at the moment may not be the most faithful to the GNU ideals at the moment, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that Novell "can no longer be trusted".
Not to mention as a geek toy it sold 350,000 units, including one to my house as a christmas gift to my dad. He loves it, and so does my sister, both of whom are far from what I would even remotely consider geeks.
I hate to break it to you (i'd love to see linux hit the mainstream too), but Apple sales are probably going to be at or near 2 million Mac's a quarter next year, putting their total sales at maybe 7-8 million.
That being said, I got an EEE PC for my father, and he (and my sister, surprisingly to me) love it. He spent something like 2 or 3 hours playing with it christmas night after we got back from all the festivities. I was glad he enjoyed it because I was worried at first it's small size would be hard for him, but it seems to be perfect. The fact that it's linux doesn't bother him at all either, as he already knows how to use firefox, and most of the reasons he wanted something like the EEE was to be able to look up things on the internet when out and about. Overall it was a great success, and I would recommend it to (most) anyone as a gift.
Someone's not been paying attention to the point of LTS - the point is that since there is no addition of major features, there's less risk involved, making it a better choice for those seeking stability.
That is not necessarily true. Ubuntu 8.04 will be using kernel 2.6.24 (which still hasn't had a final release), and as always they use the newest Gnome (2.22 I believe) and X.org (7.3). On top of that they will be using the new PulseAudio sound server, integrating the Policykit framework, rewriting the restricted driver manager for easier cross-desktop-environment-iness, and tossing out the old "Human" theme for a completely new one. And of course working on getting Tracker and Compiz Fusion (and everything else, but those two in particular (hopefully)) less buggy and more useful.
Considering that this is supposed to be an LTS release, their still keeping Ubuntu on top of things in terms of the latest and greatest.
I base my purchasing choice on 'value added'. If I walk into a shop and they actually know what they're talking about, help me look at different options and come to a reasonable decision about what to buy, then I will happily pay 10-15% on top of the best online price.
So true. I have the luck (as you will see) of having 3 GameStop's within 2-3 miles of my house, and I only shop at one because it earned my business.
So I used to always shop at GameStop #1 because it was the closest to my house (by a few blocks). I've never had any problems at GS1, but the salespeople there were less than ideal. When Guitar Hero 3 came out, the only store which was having a midnight launch was GameStop #2. So I went, won a "contest" (beat a song on expert and win a $20 dollar gift card), bought the game, and overall it was a good experience. That is, until I tried to play the game. Turns out I was given a defective guitar, so I just figured I would take it back. When I got to GS2 there were 2 people in the store, but they claimed that they had "shut the system down" and that they didn't have any units but reserved units (which was complete bullshit, the guy who was in line in front of me when I bought the game had no reservation and they gave him a unit without issue).
Soooo I went back and struggled with the guitar for like 10 minutes and got it to work, sortof (it worked fine at times, poorly other times, and not at all sometimes). I continued to struggle with it for the next week and a half, before finally deciding to return it. GS2 wouldn't take the unit back because the game warranty is 10 days (it had been around 12). I asked how much it would cost to sell it back and buy a new unit, and the resell value for (a two week old game that moved $100 million dollars in sales the first week or something) Guitar Hero 3 was only $50, meaning it would cost me $50 dollars just to get a working guitar.
So I decided to try GS1 to see if they will take it back, and the guy there says to try some debugging or whatever (to check if it would connect to the 360, which wasn't the problem). Then he checked to see if they had any units for the 360, but they had none, and that is when he sent me to GameStop #3. The guy at GS3 was useful beyond belief. While dealing with another customer he explained to me the warranty for games is 10 days, but for accessories is 30 days, and since Guitar Hero is somewhat both, he would take it back under the accessory warranty. Then he explained to me that I could get the game covered by a 1 year warranty, at which point (thinking that he was trying to sell me an overpriced warranty I barely needed) I asked how much the warranty cost. Surprisingly it was only $3, so I bought it (thinking why didn't I know about this earlier???). And I left, a happy customer with a new unit, a 1 year warranty, and a new GameStop to shop at.
I could order all my games off of Newegg (which I am a big fan of), and in some cases I could get them cheaper than I would at my GameStop, but I feel like this Gamestop earned my business by being more customer friendly and informative than any of the 3 I could choose from.
My Dad was asking for something he could take everywhere and access the internet with, so I managed to convince my mom to get him an EEE PC.
Needless to say when it came and I was getting the batteries charged and making sure we got a working unit so it would be ready for Christmas day, I started to want one myself.
I can't wait until the day that Barbra Streisand denies there being such a thing as the Streisand effect, and the world enters an infinite loop and esplodes.
Thank the stars for a little thing called "acceleration".
The fuel costs for an instantaneous acceleration border somewhere along the lines of infinite, so we don't really need to worry about that any time soon.
Your looking in all the wrong places. He probably either just keeps his porn in a hidden file like the rest of us, or streams it all to avoid you finding it while he's not "using" it.
No point doing extra work you don't have to. Smart kid.
I saw the midnight showing of Snakes on a Plane with like 10 of my friends the weekend before half of them went off to college last year.
It was fucking awesome. Doubly so because everyone that showed up to the midnight showing knew what the movie was supposed to be (not serious).
Everyone who I've talked to since then about the movie (who wasn't at that showing) says it sucked and was stupid, and they all have in common that they tried to watch it by themselves or with only one or two other people.
Even the decent games still come with serious flaws due to the rushed timetables.
Guitar Hero 3 would be a great example of that. When the game came out the online was workable, as in it wasn't bad, but was far from good. The quickmatch selections simply don't work, but if you choose a custom match or create your own you have a decent chance of getting matched with someone.
If you used the unlock all songs or unlock all everything cheats to check out the content when the game first came out, the game would still save, so you would continue to have everything unlocked even though you might not have the cheat on. As a result if you used either of the unlock cheats you ended up with a bunch of achievements. TBH, theirs no way Activision/Neversoft could have made that mistake if they tested the cheats more than once.
There's a bug that can allow you to cheat in online play, but you can end up being the one using it on accident.
If you go to the career store and look to shop for DLC, it clears all your existing DLC scores. Buying DLC through the online menu or at the XBL dashboard will not.
And on top of those the game freezes every once in a while for no reason. If you do voice chatting with someone, it freezes way more often. If you do voice chatting while doing online play (like if you were playing with a friend over and over), it's hard to make it through more than one or two matches without either of your games freezing.
All of these are issues that shouldn't have happened because they are just normal use scenarios. But they did. So Activision/Neversoft has issued a patch, right? Not yet, but they will release one Soon®. The game has been out for a month now, and it seems like its been forever without a patch, but for all I know that could be on par with how long the Orange Box cake... errr patch took to be released.
Can someone explain to me why Quicktime is so fucked up? I'm dead serious, and I ask this as a mac user.
It seems like all the time there are new exploits for all different types of services (firefox exploits, myspace exploits, this, etc.) with one thing in common: It's not [necessarily] the services fault, it's Quicktime's. Is there something about the architecture of Quicktime that makes it particularly exploit friendly? Or does it not do enough checking to see if the file is malicious? Is Quicktime crack-friendly on both platforms or is it a shitty port like iTunes for windows and thus mostly windows only exploits?
I tend not to use Quicktime because it takes to long to load movies, (unlike VLC, which "streams" them and so it begins playing them almost immediately), but if any more exploits begin showing up for Quicktime, I may seriously consider not using it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Two oblig python links:
Python @ xkcd
and
Python @ Bash.org
HHSSSHSHSSS
Finally!
I always suspected Blu Ray would win (partly because I wanted it to win, partly because of the PS3), but it took far longer than I thought it would. For the most part when corporations compete for the consumers business, the consumers win because they get a better product. In the case of the Next-Gen DVD format, neither the corporations nor the consumers won (or maybe they both won but it was a phyrric (sp?) victory). The products a few years ago are barely any different than what they are now (albeit significantly cheaper), so all that resulted in this conflict was consumer confusion and lost sales from people waiting out on a "winner".
I must say though I'm glad that Blu Ray won given that the only end user noticeable difference is storage and price, and Blu Ray win's on storage space, and will eventually get equal in price.
That's one of the major problems with Window's. The default security settings of a Microsoft product aren't even what Microsoft recommends.
It's times like this I'm glad I have a Mac, as I can continue to stalk people that barely know me without risk of getting a virus. =P
He writes about how it's such a miserable year, but half the stuff he writes about is about companies being uber-successful. Google, Apple and the Wii come to mind.
Honestly, why does Dvorak still have a job?
They've done a lot of the work towards the FOSS drivers for the ATI cards, including recently releasing V1.10 of the RadeonHD adding support for the 3850 and 3870, as well as release 10.3 of OpenSuse, and (AFAIK) have continued business as usual since the MSFT agreement.
Novell at the moment may not be the most faithful to the GNU ideals at the moment, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that Novell "can no longer be trusted".
Pop? No. Beer? Yes.
Thank god it was still under the warranty, or I would've had the awkward task of presenting my drunkass cousin's with the bill.
Not to mention as a geek toy it sold 350,000 units, including one to my house as a christmas gift to my dad. He loves it, and so does my sister, both of whom are far from what I would even remotely consider geeks.
I hate to break it to you (i'd love to see linux hit the mainstream too), but Apple sales are probably going to be at or near 2 million Mac's a quarter next year, putting their total sales at maybe 7-8 million.
That being said, I got an EEE PC for my father, and he (and my sister, surprisingly to me) love it. He spent something like 2 or 3 hours playing with it christmas night after we got back from all the festivities. I was glad he enjoyed it because I was worried at first it's small size would be hard for him, but it seems to be perfect. The fact that it's linux doesn't bother him at all either, as he already knows how to use firefox, and most of the reasons he wanted something like the EEE was to be able to look up things on the internet when out and about. Overall it was a great success, and I would recommend it to (most) anyone as a gift.
That is not necessarily true. Ubuntu 8.04 will be using kernel 2.6.24 (which still hasn't had a final release), and as always they use the newest Gnome (2.22 I believe) and X.org (7.3). On top of that they will be using the new PulseAudio sound server, integrating the Policykit framework, rewriting the restricted driver manager for easier cross-desktop-environment-iness, and tossing out the old "Human" theme for a completely new one. And of course working on getting Tracker and Compiz Fusion (and everything else, but those two in particular (hopefully)) less buggy and more useful.
Considering that this is supposed to be an LTS release, their still keeping Ubuntu on top of things in terms of the latest and greatest.
Woops, forgot to throw a little / before that second blockquote>. Shouldve used preview.
So true. I have the luck (as you will see) of having 3 GameStop's within 2-3 miles of my house, and I only shop at one because it earned my business.
So I used to always shop at GameStop #1 because it was the closest to my house (by a few blocks). I've never had any problems at GS1, but the salespeople there were less than ideal. When Guitar Hero 3 came out, the only store which was having a midnight launch was GameStop #2. So I went, won a "contest" (beat a song on expert and win a $20 dollar gift card), bought the game, and overall it was a good experience. That is, until I tried to play the game. Turns out I was given a defective guitar, so I just figured I would take it back. When I got to GS2 there were 2 people in the store, but they claimed that they had "shut the system down" and that they didn't have any units but reserved units (which was complete bullshit, the guy who was in line in front of me when I bought the game had no reservation and they gave him a unit without issue).
Soooo I went back and struggled with the guitar for like 10 minutes and got it to work, sortof (it worked fine at times, poorly other times, and not at all sometimes). I continued to struggle with it for the next week and a half, before finally deciding to return it. GS2 wouldn't take the unit back because the game warranty is 10 days (it had been around 12). I asked how much it would cost to sell it back and buy a new unit, and the resell value for (a two week old game that moved $100 million dollars in sales the first week or something) Guitar Hero 3 was only $50, meaning it would cost me $50 dollars just to get a working guitar.
So I decided to try GS1 to see if they will take it back, and the guy there says to try some debugging or whatever (to check if it would connect to the 360, which wasn't the problem). Then he checked to see if they had any units for the 360, but they had none, and that is when he sent me to GameStop #3. The guy at GS3 was useful beyond belief. While dealing with another customer he explained to me the warranty for games is 10 days, but for accessories is 30 days, and since Guitar Hero is somewhat both, he would take it back under the accessory warranty. Then he explained to me that I could get the game covered by a 1 year warranty, at which point (thinking that he was trying to sell me an overpriced warranty I barely needed) I asked how much the warranty cost. Surprisingly it was only $3, so I bought it (thinking why didn't I know about this earlier???). And I left, a happy customer with a new unit, a 1 year warranty, and a new GameStop to shop at.
I could order all my games off of Newegg (which I am a big fan of), and in some cases I could get them cheaper than I would at my GameStop, but I feel like this Gamestop earned my business by being more customer friendly and informative than any of the 3 I could choose from.
Isn't the universe always running out of time?
EEE PC. nuff said
My Dad was asking for something he could take everywhere and access the internet with, so I managed to convince my mom to get him an EEE PC.
Needless to say when it came and I was getting the batteries charged and making sure we got a working unit so it would be ready for Christmas day, I started to want one myself.
I can't wait until the day that Barbra Streisand denies there being such a thing as the Streisand effect, and the world enters an infinite loop and esplodes.
Thank the stars for a little thing called "acceleration". The fuel costs for an instantaneous acceleration border somewhere along the lines of infinite, so we don't really need to worry about that any time soon.
Your looking in all the wrong places. He probably either just keeps his porn in a hidden file like the rest of us, or streams it all to avoid you finding it while he's not "using" it.
No point doing extra work you don't have to. Smart kid.
I saw the midnight showing of Snakes on a Plane with like 10 of my friends the weekend before half of them went off to college last year.
It was fucking awesome. Doubly so because everyone that showed up to the midnight showing knew what the movie was supposed to be (not serious).
Everyone who I've talked to since then about the movie (who wasn't at that showing) says it sucked and was stupid, and they all have in common that they tried to watch it by themselves or with only one or two other people.
Head scientist: What is all this shit?
Scientist: Yes.
HS: What?
S: It's all shit.
HS: What the hell are you babbling about?
S: You asked me what all this was.
HS: And what is it?
S: Shit.
HS: ???
S: OHHH.... shit.... I thought you asked: "What is all this, shit?" My mistake.
At first I thought your title read "Disk death by bear" and I thought to myself WHOA this'll be interesting.
I thought they were called Tubes?
/mode #slashdot +M /mode ShieldW0lf -v
Ahhhh... peace and quiet. Poor AC won't be able to post now though. Is that a bad thing?
Guitar Hero 3 would be a great example of that. When the game came out the online was workable, as in it wasn't bad, but was far from good. The quickmatch selections simply don't work, but if you choose a custom match or create your own you have a decent chance of getting matched with someone.
If you used the unlock all songs or unlock all everything cheats to check out the content when the game first came out, the game would still save, so you would continue to have everything unlocked even though you might not have the cheat on. As a result if you used either of the unlock cheats you ended up with a bunch of achievements. TBH, theirs no way Activision/Neversoft could have made that mistake if they tested the cheats more than once.
There's a bug that can allow you to cheat in online play, but you can end up being the one using it on accident.
If you go to the career store and look to shop for DLC, it clears all your existing DLC scores. Buying DLC through the online menu or at the XBL dashboard will not.
And on top of those the game freezes every once in a while for no reason. If you do voice chatting with someone, it freezes way more often. If you do voice chatting while doing online play (like if you were playing with a friend over and over), it's hard to make it through more than one or two matches without either of your games freezing.
All of these are issues that shouldn't have happened because they are just normal use scenarios. But they did. So Activision/Neversoft has issued a patch, right? Not yet, but they will release one Soon®. The game has been out for a month now, and it seems like its been forever without a patch, but for all I know that could be on par with how long the Orange Box cake... errr patch took to be released.
Ummmmmmm...
Can someone explain to me why Quicktime is so fucked up? I'm dead serious, and I ask this as a mac user.
It seems like all the time there are new exploits for all different types of services (firefox exploits, myspace exploits, this, etc.) with one thing in common: It's not [necessarily] the services fault, it's Quicktime's. Is there something about the architecture of Quicktime that makes it particularly exploit friendly? Or does it not do enough checking to see if the file is malicious? Is Quicktime crack-friendly on both platforms or is it a shitty port like iTunes for windows and thus mostly windows only exploits?
I tend not to use Quicktime because it takes to long to load movies, (unlike VLC, which "streams" them and so it begins playing them almost immediately), but if any more exploits begin showing up for Quicktime, I may seriously consider not using it at all.