When I am deciding whether to buy a game or not, I'd rather try it out myself rather than relying on any 'video game' medium. From those that I read, most of these *always* give games good (better than average) ratings, questioning where their 'average' is. Once in a while they will ding a game very badly as not to look too biased (Diakiana or whatever that Romero project was), but games that, after trying them out in some fashion, I found lacking seem to get 8 out of 10s or similar ratings. For example, I remember several sites praising the tech in Red Faction (it's ability to modify the environment) but after playing the demo, I was very unimpressed.
If anything, having more critical reviews of games becomes necessary as game demo sizes continue to rise and/or more companies simply release movies of the gameplay without any interactivity. This is even worse when considering console games, some which you can try at the store, but typically you have to go on third-person experience. And with game prices easily edging $40-$50 a pop, I want to make sure I get the value for my money.
So I very much doubt a Video Game TV network would be anything 'great'. As the editoral on the writeup suggests, it could easily become simply informercials, with the game companies telling the network that, sure, they'll give out free copies of the game for review but only if the review garishes high marks from the staff.
I'd much rather see what the response is on USENET and other sites (Anyone know of a/.-like site for gamers?) and use any demos or similar to judge a game for purchase rather than relying on any single commercial reviewer.
I heard recently that currently on the UK's version of Popstars, the crowd favorite (and thus most likely to continue to the end and the guarenteed recording contract) is an unattractive, rather overweight person, who is a talented singer with a good sense of humor. This is worrying the producers of the show, because they're afraid to give this guy the contract because of his looks, so they are trying to find ways to either get this guy out of the audience's favorites list, or to get him to leave the show voluntarily. I very much doubt this will happen
When I listen to music, the *last* thing I care about is how the band looks; heck, even at concerts, if a band plays well and puts on a good show while their hypothetical flabs of blubber are dancing around on stage, I'd have no problem with that. I'm their for the music and overall visual effects, and not just the appearence of the band.
Re:Value added or just paying for bandwidth?
on
Ximian Adds Subscription
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's the same thing happening to the sites that offer large game demos and patches (GameSpot and Fileplanet, specifically).
While the content is all free, all you are paying for is faster/less conjested download. For example, in FP's case, you can spend the money on a 'personal server' that lets you download instantly, or wait in line for one of the FP mirrors to queue up.
In Gamespot's case, they provide the large downloads only if you pay them, but since these are mirrors of what's available on the gamemaker's site, they still offer the links to those.
Is this unreasonable? For the gaming sites, maybe, since there are probably some fanatic people that take a day off, click reload often until a demo is out so they can be the first to grab it and play it. For something like Ximian, I would rather see them divide the service into two parts: a 'critical' updates which should only be limited to security bugs that would be open and fast to all, and then the split servers for all other programs, ones for payed customers and ones for free downloads. Typically when you hear of a new bug, you want your patch ASAP, and this is not because your fanatic but because it's necessary; while probably waiting a short amount of time for the patch to come down the free-server side isn't a problem, security patches should be 'instantly' available regardless.
Looking at the chapter titles, and the bent that the reviewer gives the book, plus other commentary that I've seen on it, I would think that a book that appears to be trying to place the MS antitrust case in an historical, economical, political, and social light would appear to be biased against MS, which isn't a good thing if that was the intent of the book.
I'm certainly not a MS worshiper, but I would think that a reasonable debate on the MS antitrust case would also include looking at what consistitues the OS, applications, interoperability, innovation, etc., all key terms and phases that have been critical during the trial. Again, while I would not doubt that these aren't covered in the book partially, the chapter titles would see to have very little looking at these aspects from the MS side of things.
The title of the book itself suggests that bias further. Despite all that they may have done to this point, Microsoft, while the biggest computer-related company out there, does not yet have control of the entire sandbox thanks to their faulty prediction of the impact of the internet; I'd argue that even with the latest XP and Office XP releases, the internet connectivity/interoperability is still an addition onto their system. As long as you follow standards (most of the time), the internet doesn't care what you run, and thus, Microsoft's powerplays on the OS and other fields are relatively meaningless. If there is a so called WW3, that will be when.NET and Passport are fully realized; they may cause a splintering of the internet where you have MS-blessed clients and services, and otherwise old-time clients and servers. And because that rubs against the entire concept of what the Internet means to most computer techs, that will cause an even bigger tussle than anything that MS could do on the OS side.
Of course, it could end up that.NET and Passport barely make a blip on the Internet radar at all, or actually play fair with the rest of the Internet community, and thus there will be no so-called WW3. And while it's faults during this latest anti-trust trial will have been made public and condemned by antitrust law, those are continually nullified by the openness of the Internet.
Re:Does it fix the problems with VIA chipsets?
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Live! cards & VIA set combos are also known for 'crackling' during games that heavily use EAX (Half-Life, NOLF, etc), which is damn annoying. (This on a Abit KT7A-RAID board w/ Live! Gamer).
It's outside spam (from only US companies, it appears) to WA state residents (and inside spam from WA to WA, of course). The examples list one guy suing a FL spammer, and the case that challenged the law was from a company in either Colorado or Montana, but I can't remember which.
The WA state law is NOT to prevent spammers from spamming, but to use truthful information in their spam as to whom they are, how they can be contacted, or how one can be removed from their spam lists, all which is consider consumer fraud (and thus why this bill has survived judcial scurtinity). If anything, this will simply force spammers to actually identify themselves and make it easier for people to remove themselves from their lists.
Also, from what I've read of the various cases, if you sue the spammers and they don't send anyone to court, that's contempt of court and can be considered jail time. So instead they send out someone, weakly plead their case, and lose, and write the $500 check. To them, that's chicken feed, but only because a bare handful of WA state citizens are using the process. If only 100 or 1,000 residents did this, the spammers might actually consider changing their methods instead of blinding accepting the penalty. As far as I've read, only one spam corp has fought this, and that was the case that validated the law's constitutionality.
A good example is the Princess Bride or MP & The Holy Grail. Both had 1999-2000 DVD releases that were 'barebones' in special features, but in 2001, both had rereleased versions with added features. In the case of tPB, it was commentary and other features, in the case of HG, it was a slew of stuff on the second disk. I didn't realize at the time that tPB would have had a new version, else I would have put off buying the original version, while I was well informed and waited on the enhanced HG version.
They also do a rather annoying habit in some cases (Universal as an example) of releasing two different packagings for a widescreen and a fullscreen version. I went to pick up "The Mummy Returns" from a display in Best Buy when it was first out. One side of the display was full screen, the other wide. The full screen was the one side that you saw as you walked in from the store to the DVD section, so without thinking (I usually do check this) I grabbed the first one I saw, checked out, opened the packing, put the disk in, and was annoyed that there was only full screen, no wide screen options. And like most stores, you cannot return an open DVD disk save for damaged goods, so that was $18 down the tubes.
(There is no reason that you cannot put both full and wide on the same disk (Toy Story 1/2) or even on different disks (ala Shrek) ; the cost of the DVD medium is sufficient cheap to include both )
From now on, I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming DVD releases to make sure that, particularly for films that I *want*, there isn't special versions in the pipeline over the straight forward versions without extra features. However, now that adding features is generally a requirement for new DVDs, I don't expect to see many duplicated efforts in the near future.
The/. writeup and previous comments suggest that DVDs may be solely released in a WMP or other format other than MPEG-2 compression currently used. I don't think that's what MS is aiming for (they want DVD players with WMP playback, just as there are DVD players with MP3 playback (*)), but the question of compability is still there.
This is a serious question. DVD has certainly taken off, and people expect that DVD players and movies to be the hot item on the Christmas shoppers' lists this year; I've read that up to now, about 5 million homes have DVD players; now that they've surprassed the $100 market, they expect to see upwards of 10 million homes to have them. That number could easily double in the next year alone.
With that well-established market, will the movie companies and electronics markets shoot themselves in the foot by releasing DVDs that solely use the 'new' format and thus completely blocking off 5 million players from watching it? I don't think they're that stupid. There's parallels to the copyright scheme used by the RIAA studios to prevent CDs from being copies or ripped on computers, but RIAA understands that only a "small minority" (from 0 to 50% of the consumers) would be affected by this, and in most cases, these affected consumers have another option in which to listen to the music (stereo rack or portable CD player). Here, we're talking about complete unplayability of the disk without going out to buy a second DVD player.
(Note that there are specific cases of some DVDs being incompatible with certain players. However, these tend to be isolated cases; a single DVD may fail to work on a certain model of player, and rarely does the entire line of DVDs from a specific studio fail on a specific player if one DVD doesn't. In many cases, this are fixed with firmware updates by the makers or similar deals.)
At least, I can't see this forced upgrade happening in the next 5 years. Consumers would backlash harshly against it, with complacency with the VHS format in which all new tapes continue to work with the oldest players. However, we have the HDTV switch looming in 2006; while this might be delayed, it's going to happen at some point, and with studios and stations fighting for encryption of the signal from reciever to screen, the DVD market players may start pushing this forced upgrade as to remove the older DVD players from the market. But if they try to do this at the same time that people are forced to buy $100 converter boxes or $1000+ TV sets, they're going to find even more consumer backlash.
Instead, I expect that maybe we'll have a decade before "DVD Enhanced" movies are released, forcing those older players to be removed, and thus getting the market saturated with players tha support this WMP encoding in addition to any other changed the DVD spec may offer. This is not necessarily unreasonable, but again, given that VHS systems from 1990 are still usable today, this might be taken poorly by the consumer. Of course, by that point, the DVD-recordable models may be predominate and sufficiently low cost (less than $200) as to make it attractive to upgrade anyway.
(*) I beleive that this move is more an attempt to capture the market that Apple has with the ease-of-use video editing and DVD burning that it has built into the MacOS system. If MS can offer a similar path through intergration with XP and WMP, and avoid the encryption via MPEG-2 (a licensing nightmare), they'd have a low cost opponent against Apple's dominance in this area.
I tried one of their same pages using O6 (final, winXX), and it appears to work as well.
These really aren't anything new per se; I swear I saw ads that used DHTML on Yahoo before (the one set I remember had birds flying from a small box ad on the lower part of the page up to the top banner ad shortly after loading. I bet that the yahoo ones didn't use sound, of course.
Apparently Dennis Quaid finally reached the controls of the reactor.
Expect blue skies on Mars in less than an hour!
<joke>
Re:I don't exist--but I have free Internet access.
on
Broadband Bermuda Triangle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a very good and overlooked point. Follow threads at DSLReports, and you'll find more than enough examples of residental users that can easily navigate through the maze of tech support, but when it comes to dealing with billing, unsubscribing, or other bookkeeping issues, pull out their hair due to the ineptitude of the ISP. People cannot be found in the database, billing cannot keep track of when people were billing, and subscribed (aside from technical issues) needs 3 copies of your birth certificant and your firstborn son to complete it.
I've seen more than enough people leave a otherwise technically competent ISP due to impossible service through their customer service department.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
If you are *are* going to set up an ISP, get the bookkeeping down first before you buy any of the connectivity equipment. Getting technical help to your customers first is a priority, but knowning whom your customers are is more important than that!
It's a little early to be suing under this rule. It's only been passed by the House; the Senate needs to pass the same, then they need to resolve any differences, then they need the Prez' signature to get it into law.
At least, as a good thing, I would figure this would easily pass a Democrate Senate, and already has the blessing of the Republican House (which I would think would be more friendly to telemarkers than the Senate).
To be more specific: the 6000 flags, as well as one large American flag mostly in one piece that was found in the wreckage of the WTC, will spend one 'cycle' (5 months, based on the next crew change) on the ISS, not just through the week+ shuttle mission. The 6000 small flags will be redistributed to members of families affected by 9-11, the large flag possibly going to some historical archive (Smithsonian, most likely).
(This based on an article from this week's USN&WR, on the failures of the NASA program and the ISS particularly).
I agree: $40 or $50/month for what many broadband providers were trying to offer is undercutting themselves too much and the number of people that have. Expenses are on the order of log(N) (the number of subscribes), revenues linear to that. At some N, revenues will exceed expenses, but N will vary and may be quite high. For dialup ISPs, $20/mth is undercutting themselves for small numbers, but in AOL numbers, that easily turns a profit. However, no broadband provider has yet to reach that N where they make a profit, or a least a large amount of profit.
I would have no problem paying up to $100/month for at least 786 SDSL with at least a staic IP, no contract, and no server restriction (I have something similar now, but it's not SDSL, and it's only $50/month). However, I had this before through Telocity at $50/month (however, due to Rhythms going down and having to go ADSL, it's not as great anymore). Speakeasy and a few other isolated DSL carriers apparently understand that running high speed lines with servers and the like are necessarily equated with more expensive monthly fees. I expect that at some point I will have to switch, as $50/month now is not going to work for my current ISP.
Pshaw, I don't believe it! and I bet that others don't believe this as well either! I'm just going to keep reloading this page until the moderation proves you otherwise, there! That'll show ya!
Even if there is only one resolution organization, you'll have different people involved in that organization that may have different attitudes on trademarks and the like. IIRC, a statistical summary of DNS rulings from about 6 to 10 months ago certainly indicated that 2 resolution organizations were trademark-friendly, but even more so, certain people in those organizations were more opt to go with trademark owners than others. Now, sure, just like most US courts, the selection of exactly whom is on the resolution committee is random from a pool from that organization, but there's no way to iron out the biases of individaul members.
Except as of (checking) right now, the XFree port is not part of the cygwin distribution (it's mostly all command line tools). They may include it at some point, but right now, it's not there.
Right now, Cygwin has a working version of XFree for win32 that now works on all Win9x/NT/2K/XP playforms. This is great news as it's also very much free (as in beer) compared with other X server solutions for Win32.
However, Cygwin's default install method is that you have to download about 20 files from their site, extract them, then use a script to get everything installed right. Not impossible nor difficult to follow, but is mind-numbing. (The split of packages is similar to that for XFree in other distros; the engine, the fonts, the programs, the libraries, etc. Cygwin just tends to trim packages down to the floppy 1.44M level so some of the packages have multiple parts).
Having dpkg available, with cygwin as the sources, will allows them to distribute the XFree files as a single task, making the job of installing them that much easier as well as keeping them up-to-date. Two commands (update and upgrade), and one can be set!
I don't remember where I read it (here or elsewhere), but one possible solution is that the users, when they rent the song, will download a significantly large fraction of it (99%), which will be unwatermarked and common for all users. However, this will be the 'bottom' part of the song; in order to play it, you'd have to download the 'top' other 1%, which can include watermarking information. Assuming that this is 1% of a 5meg file, and with 1,000,000 song out on rent, you'd only need 50gigs to store those small pieces.
Rent?? I want to *test* or *buy*, but not rent
on
Rent Music Over the Net
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
While we all agree that RIAA is being very slow to catch up to the net, I think they're also slow to catch up to the way people buy music. I would love a service that offered *crappy* encoded MP3s (say, 64kbit/s encoding, mono channel even) of every song on every album, so that I can at least judge the quality of the album before I purchase it. If I don't like the entire album but only one or two songs, I'd rather pay a reasonably small (no more than $0.50/track) price for those tracks as high quality MP3s.
Nearly every major music store, as well as Best Buy and friends, have music listening stations in which most stores will be happy to let you listen to any CD they have in stock for a test run. If RIAA would simply extend this concept to the net, and again, use rather poor MP3 encodings to do it, they'd be finding a lot more friends among audiophiles.
I've heard rumors to the effect that this is the last planned TNG movie, at least based on the fact that Patrick Stewart no longer wants to be in that role (not that he doesn't dislike it, but he wants to return to stage work). Same rumors suggest that this isn't necessarily the end of the Trek series of movies, and future movies may either take place in the mid-series of DS9 or Voyager, or possibly an aglomeration of plots that would occur after Voyager returns.
Anyone else heard similar? They *are* just internet rumors, after all...
I disagree; Futurama's better than the Simpsons currently, but as others pointed out, there's a lot of Simpsons rehashing going on too, and some of the plots are just boring.
IMO, the best animated cartoon as made in the states currently is 'Samurai Jack', on Cartoon Network; it's created by Genny T. of Dexter's Lab and Powerpuff Girls fame, but his focus on this show is on the style and feel, and not the jokes. It is very visual, and the music in the background is very important; neither of the main characters speak much, and dialog is only subsidary to make the visual elements work well.
If you haven't caught this yet, definitely set aside time to do so: it's on at least at Mondays at 9pm EST, with repeats on Saturaday and possibly Sunday.
Given that Futurama (and by collarary, the Simpsons) are much watched shows at Slashdot, why not arrange for an interview with him? He's probably much more accessable and net-savvy than Groenig, and as they should be in the final editing process for this season of Futurama, probably has a sufficient amount of free time to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, having more critical reviews of games becomes necessary as game demo sizes continue to rise and/or more companies simply release movies of the gameplay without any interactivity. This is even worse when considering console games, some which you can try at the store, but typically you have to go on third-person experience. And with game prices easily edging $40-$50 a pop, I want to make sure I get the value for my money.
So I very much doubt a Video Game TV network would be anything 'great'. As the editoral on the writeup suggests, it could easily become simply informercials, with the game companies telling the network that, sure, they'll give out free copies of the game for review but only if the review garishes high marks from the staff.
I'd much rather see what the response is on USENET and other sites (Anyone know of a /.-like site for gamers?) and use any demos or similar to judge a game for purchase rather than relying on any single commercial reviewer.
"Real Linux users use only the console text mode!"
When I listen to music, the *last* thing I care about is how the band looks; heck, even at concerts, if a band plays well and puts on a good show while their hypothetical flabs of blubber are dancing around on stage, I'd have no problem with that. I'm their for the music and overall visual effects, and not just the appearence of the band.
While the content is all free, all you are paying for is faster/less conjested download. For example, in FP's case, you can spend the money on a 'personal server' that lets you download instantly, or wait in line for one of the FP mirrors to queue up.
In Gamespot's case, they provide the large downloads only if you pay them, but since these are mirrors of what's available on the gamemaker's site, they still offer the links to those.
Is this unreasonable? For the gaming sites, maybe, since there are probably some fanatic people that take a day off, click reload often until a demo is out so they can be the first to grab it and play it. For something like Ximian, I would rather see them divide the service into two parts: a 'critical' updates which should only be limited to security bugs that would be open and fast to all, and then the split servers for all other programs, ones for payed customers and ones for free downloads. Typically when you hear of a new bug, you want your patch ASAP, and this is not because your fanatic but because it's necessary; while probably waiting a short amount of time for the patch to come down the free-server side isn't a problem, security patches should be 'instantly' available regardless.
I'm certainly not a MS worshiper, but I would think that a reasonable debate on the MS antitrust case would also include looking at what consistitues the OS, applications, interoperability, innovation, etc., all key terms and phases that have been critical during the trial. Again, while I would not doubt that these aren't covered in the book partially, the chapter titles would see to have very little looking at these aspects from the MS side of things.
The title of the book itself suggests that bias further. Despite all that they may have done to this point, Microsoft, while the biggest computer-related company out there, does not yet have control of the entire sandbox thanks to their faulty prediction of the impact of the internet; I'd argue that even with the latest XP and Office XP releases, the internet connectivity/interoperability is still an addition onto their system. As long as you follow standards (most of the time), the internet doesn't care what you run, and thus, Microsoft's powerplays on the OS and other fields are relatively meaningless. If there is a so called WW3, that will be when .NET and Passport are fully realized; they may cause a splintering of the internet where you have MS-blessed clients and services, and otherwise old-time clients and servers. And because that rubs against the entire concept of what the Internet means to most computer techs, that will cause an even bigger tussle than anything that MS could do on the OS side.
Of course, it could end up that .NET and Passport barely make a blip on the Internet radar at all, or actually play fair with the rest of the Internet community, and thus there will be no so-called WW3. And while it's faults during this latest anti-trust trial will have been made public and condemned by antitrust law, those are continually nullified by the openness of the Internet.
Also, from what I've read of the various cases, if you sue the spammers and they don't send anyone to court, that's contempt of court and can be considered jail time. So instead they send out someone, weakly plead their case, and lose, and write the $500 check. To them, that's chicken feed, but only because a bare handful of WA state citizens are using the process. If only 100 or 1,000 residents did this, the spammers might actually consider changing their methods instead of blinding accepting the penalty. As far as I've read, only one spam corp has fought this, and that was the case that validated the law's constitutionality.
A good example is the Princess Bride or MP & The Holy Grail. Both had 1999-2000 DVD releases that were 'barebones' in special features, but in 2001, both had rereleased versions with added features. In the case of tPB, it was commentary and other features, in the case of HG, it was a slew of stuff on the second disk. I didn't realize at the time that tPB would have had a new version, else I would have put off buying the original version, while I was well informed and waited on the enhanced HG version.
They also do a rather annoying habit in some cases (Universal as an example) of releasing two different packagings for a widescreen and a fullscreen version. I went to pick up "The Mummy Returns" from a display in Best Buy when it was first out. One side of the display was full screen, the other wide. The full screen was the one side that you saw as you walked in from the store to the DVD section, so without thinking (I usually do check this) I grabbed the first one I saw, checked out, opened the packing, put the disk in, and was annoyed that there was only full screen, no wide screen options. And like most stores, you cannot return an open DVD disk save for damaged goods, so that was $18 down the tubes. (There is no reason that you cannot put both full and wide on the same disk (Toy Story 1/2) or even on different disks (ala Shrek) ; the cost of the DVD medium is sufficient cheap to include both )
From now on, I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming DVD releases to make sure that, particularly for films that I *want*, there isn't special versions in the pipeline over the straight forward versions without extra features. However, now that adding features is generally a requirement for new DVDs, I don't expect to see many duplicated efforts in the near future.
This is a serious question. DVD has certainly taken off, and people expect that DVD players and movies to be the hot item on the Christmas shoppers' lists this year; I've read that up to now, about 5 million homes have DVD players; now that they've surprassed the $100 market, they expect to see upwards of 10 million homes to have them. That number could easily double in the next year alone.
With that well-established market, will the movie companies and electronics markets shoot themselves in the foot by releasing DVDs that solely use the 'new' format and thus completely blocking off 5 million players from watching it? I don't think they're that stupid. There's parallels to the copyright scheme used by the RIAA studios to prevent CDs from being copies or ripped on computers, but RIAA understands that only a "small minority" (from 0 to 50% of the consumers) would be affected by this, and in most cases, these affected consumers have another option in which to listen to the music (stereo rack or portable CD player). Here, we're talking about complete unplayability of the disk without going out to buy a second DVD player.
(Note that there are specific cases of some DVDs being incompatible with certain players. However, these tend to be isolated cases; a single DVD may fail to work on a certain model of player, and rarely does the entire line of DVDs from a specific studio fail on a specific player if one DVD doesn't. In many cases, this are fixed with firmware updates by the makers or similar deals.)
At least, I can't see this forced upgrade happening in the next 5 years. Consumers would backlash harshly against it, with complacency with the VHS format in which all new tapes continue to work with the oldest players. However, we have the HDTV switch looming in 2006; while this might be delayed, it's going to happen at some point, and with studios and stations fighting for encryption of the signal from reciever to screen, the DVD market players may start pushing this forced upgrade as to remove the older DVD players from the market. But if they try to do this at the same time that people are forced to buy $100 converter boxes or $1000+ TV sets, they're going to find even more consumer backlash.
Instead, I expect that maybe we'll have a decade before "DVD Enhanced" movies are released, forcing those older players to be removed, and thus getting the market saturated with players tha support this WMP encoding in addition to any other changed the DVD spec may offer. This is not necessarily unreasonable, but again, given that VHS systems from 1990 are still usable today, this might be taken poorly by the consumer. Of course, by that point, the DVD-recordable models may be predominate and sufficiently low cost (less than $200) as to make it attractive to upgrade anyway.
(*) I beleive that this move is more an attempt to capture the market that Apple has with the ease-of-use video editing and DVD burning that it has built into the MacOS system. If MS can offer a similar path through intergration with XP and WMP, and avoid the encryption via MPEG-2 (a licensing nightmare), they'd have a low cost opponent against Apple's dominance in this area.
These really aren't anything new per se; I swear I saw ads that used DHTML on Yahoo before (the one set I remember had birds flying from a small box ad on the lower part of the page up to the top banner ad shortly after loading. I bet that the yahoo ones didn't use sound, of course.
Expect blue skies on Mars in less than an hour!
<joke>
I've seen more than enough people leave a otherwise technically competent ISP due to impossible service through their customer service department.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
If you are *are* going to set up an ISP, get the bookkeeping down first before you buy any of the connectivity equipment. Getting technical help to your customers first is a priority, but knowning whom your customers are is more important than that!
At least, as a good thing, I would figure this would easily pass a Democrate Senate, and already has the blessing of the Republican House (which I would think would be more friendly to telemarkers than the Senate).
(This based on an article from this week's USN&WR, on the failures of the NASA program and the ISS particularly).
I would have no problem paying up to $100/month for at least 786 SDSL with at least a staic IP, no contract, and no server restriction (I have something similar now, but it's not SDSL, and it's only $50/month). However, I had this before through Telocity at $50/month (however, due to Rhythms going down and having to go ADSL, it's not as great anymore). Speakeasy and a few other isolated DSL carriers apparently understand that running high speed lines with servers and the like are necessarily equated with more expensive monthly fees. I expect that at some point I will have to switch, as $50/month now is not going to work for my current ISP.
(</joke>, for those that can't see it)
However, Cygwin's default install method is that you have to download about 20 files from their site, extract them, then use a script to get everything installed right. Not impossible nor difficult to follow, but is mind-numbing. (The split of packages is similar to that for XFree in other distros; the engine, the fonts, the programs, the libraries, etc. Cygwin just tends to trim packages down to the floppy 1.44M level so some of the packages have multiple parts).
Having dpkg available, with cygwin as the sources, will allows them to distribute the XFree files as a single task, making the job of installing them that much easier as well as keeping them up-to-date. Two commands (update and upgrade), and one can be set!
Nearly every major music store, as well as Best Buy and friends, have music listening stations in which most stores will be happy to let you listen to any CD they have in stock for a test run. If RIAA would simply extend this concept to the net, and again, use rather poor MP3 encodings to do it, they'd be finding a lot more friends among audiophiles.
Anyone else heard similar? They *are* just internet rumors, after all...
IMO, the best animated cartoon as made in the states currently is 'Samurai Jack', on Cartoon Network; it's created by Genny T. of Dexter's Lab and Powerpuff Girls fame, but his focus on this show is on the style and feel, and not the jokes. It is very visual, and the music in the background is very important; neither of the main characters speak much, and dialog is only subsidary to make the visual elements work well. If you haven't caught this yet, definitely set aside time to do so: it's on at least at Mondays at 9pm EST, with repeats on Saturaday and possibly Sunday.
Given that Futurama (and by collarary, the Simpsons) are much watched shows at Slashdot, why not arrange for an interview with him? He's probably much more accessable and net-savvy than Groenig, and as they should be in the final editing process for this season of Futurama, probably has a sufficient amount of free time to do so.