As for the drivers, I'm pretty sure that was because Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers couldn't get on the same page until very, very late into the game.
They had the same issue with XP when it came out. But I agree, Creative released Sound Blaster drivers for Vista RC1, then they changed how drivers would work with RC2.
Most software works fine for me, even stuff that is not supposed to work, like Filemaker Pro 5.5 (a very old version indeed). I have gotten a few other programs to work by running in Compatability mode. The couple of programs I cannot get to work are because they install some weird driver with the program (usually some networking driver or something). For the one or two programs I must have, I installed Suns VirtualBox, and installed an XP installation in there.
Have you used IE7 in XP? Works exactly the same way.
Turn off the Allow/Deny by going to Control Panel, User Accounts, then Turn User Account Control On or Off.
IE7 options can be set by going to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Custom Level, and on the Advanced Tab.
Make sure you have java installed, www.java.com
As for the translucent windows, if it really bugs you, Right Click on Desktop, goto Personalize, Window Color and Appearence, Open Classic Appearance, and under Color Schemes, choose Windows Classic.
Also, you may have some spyware. Goto Spybot.info and download, install, and run Spybot. Make sure to turn off the Tea Timer.
Also, make sure you have your Windows Updates installed.
The real thing I've noticed is that Windows Explorer no longer accepts custom columns, which is a major pain for a shop that uses TortoiseSVN. That is an interface issue that I resent. That and the much more subtle (than in XP) difference between active and inactive title bars.
You mean, right clicking on the desktop, going to Personalize, Windows Color and Appearence, Open Classic Appearence, Advanced does not work for you? Works just fine for me.
Sorry if this appears twice, but 10 minutes later, its not showing that I posted anything.
The first article shows absolutely no facts that there is a decline in sales. In fact, it simply states it, and then offers an editorial about it. Hardly hard evidence to make a statement that Blu-Ray is in trouble.
The second seemed to show that sales have taken a dive this week compaired to last week. Gasp! How horrid! Sales drop one week, the end of the format is in sight!
Yet the exact same article also shows that sales of Blu-Ray counted for 8% of movie sales last week. That is a failure? If owning 8% of the market is a failure, then Apple should have gave up a long time ago.
Just Google Blu-Ray adoption rate. Blu-Ray adoption is almost 6 times greater in the UK than DVD was a decade ago, and 3 times that in the us (I actually had the URL in the original post I tried submitting, now I cannot find it to save my life). Memorex is releasing a $269 player in November, and Amazon is clearing out some of the older Sony models now for under $200.
Two years after its introduction, I have friends whom we lend Blu-Ray movies to, I can rent them off of any rental site, buy them at Wal-Mart, and find that the majority of people I talk to at least know what it is. I could not say the same two years after DVD's introduction. Two years after its introduction, most video stores were still VHS only, Netflix was a startup company, a DVD READER for your computer cost over $200, you then had to buy an adittional software or hardware card to decode them, writers were incredibly expensive, and most of the movies I had I had to buy online, or at special stores at the mall (ie Suncost).
Yeah, but I cannot read Chinese, so I really did not know what I was looking at.
Truthfully, what is wrong with the Vista interface? I thought the main thing people were complaining about was bad software compatability (which is a crock), poor drivers (the hardware developers have largely resolved this), the UAE (which can be turned off),and high resource hog (sadly, I have no comeback for this). Out of all the people that we have given Vista to in our company, not a single person has complained about the interface. In fact, the only two complaints we got was of a software bug (it exists in XP as well in this program package, but people natually blaimed Vista, even though they had it for years), and that their 15 year old printer suddenly does not work.
This seems to be just for video rentals and purchases. Movie rentals annoyingly stay on your HD, even after the rental period is over - you have to manually delete them. I am assuming though if you rent the movie again in the future, it will let you have another download, or just reactivate it on the HD if you already have it downloaded. Have not really tried - $4.50 for a 24 hour download just seemed really high, and I only tried it to see one movie that they have yet to release on Blu-Ray.
The article makes it clear that this is just for movie purchaces. I have yet to make any, as HD stuff is only available for rental.
Trailers and gameplay videos seem to allow you unlimited downloads.
I have had one PS3 brick on me with the 2.42 firmware, and the one they replaced it with is starting to go out, and it looks like I may be replacing it as well before too long. However, GAMES and add-ons I have purchased seem to have let me have more than 2 downloads, as I keep so much on my PS3 I delete whatever I am not playing at the time, and redownload when I want to play again. Has always worked quite well.
Yeah, because we all know how much New Mexico has sub-zero temps.:-)
Truthfully, along those reasonings, you could eliminate tons of things. I lived in Salzburg from January-May of 2001. Didn't have a refrigerator - in the colder months of January - March, I kept cheese, sodas, and sometimes even milk just sitting on the ledge outside my bedroom window. Too bad the cost of heating oil was so high. More than canceled out the savings.
Nah, what you need is a place with fairly consistant summer / winter temps and dry air. Since no place really exists in the temperature range we are looking at, we need something that is not too hot in the summer, but not too freakin cold in the winter. I am thinking Flagstaff, Arizona.
Sadly, it will probably come prebundled with the Symantic AntiSpyware crap, Norton Antivirus (it would make too much sense to go with just one vendor), AOL (which takes 15 minutes to uninstall), then the AOL Security Suite, then the Yahoo Security Suite, have BigFix preinstalled, and several 60 minute demos from PopCap games, and a 90 day trial of MS Office 2007. You will think it will be faster to uninstall rather than remove all the software, but first you have to call up Cray and ask them to send you the disc. Once you finally get the system wiped and Windows Preinstalled, you will find out that Cray has proprietary hardware, so you will have to go download the network drivers and chipset drivers on another computer, burn to a CD (USB does not work yet), and then install on the Cray (you see, you had the drivers already, but they were on another partition of the HD, which you did not even bother to look at before you wiped the partion table). Once that is up and working, you can then download all the other drivers. Now you are ready to download Windows Updates, or so you thought. You now have to move the benches around the C of the Cray to try to figure out where they put your Windows Key Code sticker. Ah, there it is, on the floor on the inside of the C. Darn it, Activation failed, gotto call Microsoft and try to explain to the guy in India what a Cray is, and why you are trying to reactivate a Windows instalation that has already been activated before. Oh, wait, I was an idiot, I got on the internet and downloaded drivers before I put on an Antivirus. Sadly, AVG and Avast do not have a version that will work with this hardware configuration, so you have to hack something together that you pray is working after searching Google. Great, now we can download Windows Updates. Grrr, have to reboot first, as I did not do so after installing the Antivirus. Do you know how long it takes to reboot a Cray? So, we finally get into Windows Updates, and download, have to reboot again. Upon Reboot, Windows starts downloading yet more updates on its own, and asks you to reboot again, and a third time, and a fourth. Finally, you have the updates installed, and now you got to start installing your apps. Oh, but first, you have to download Java, and Flash, and Shockwave, and Install.Net and Silverlight and then the updates to all of these, then find a compiled version of the Microsoft C Visual Runtime or whatever the freak it is called. Now, because Flash is not compatable with the optimized stuff you have on your system, you now get to run everything in 32-bit emulation mode. Now to install Crysis and Bioshock and Spore. Oh wait, I have to download the pre-release video card drivers from Nvidia to get this thing to work. Of course, this does not work out of the box, so you reboot into safe mode, uninstall the NVidia drivers. Great, now it bluescreens every time it restarts. Boot back into safe mode, install NVidia drivers, boot into safe mode again, associate video card with NVidia drivers. Boot into Windows, and end up calling the software companies because you have installed the games too many times. Beg and pled, and they unlock them. Oh great, now you have to download updates for the games. But the sound is not working right - you idiot, you setup your SoundBlaster in 5.1 channel mode, and did not realize that you have to have both your front and rear speakers hooked up to the reciever. After cursing at Creative for their idiocy, you then set the thing to ProLogic. Still no sound. Searching the forums, you find out that Creative has not released drivers for this OS yet. So, you download the XP drivers, unzip them using WinRar, then manually go in and associate the soundcard with these drivers. Finally! You can now play Crysis and Bioshock. Spore has quit working because construction crews in the area has cut your fiber internet connection, and it cannot call home.
I totally agree. Current games installed on my system - Bioshock, Alice (released in 2000 or 2001), Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup (released around 2004 I think) and King's Quest 6 (released around 1992 I think). Bioshock alone has been reinstalled about 4 times, and I have had it less than a year. This is due to me effing up Windows, and not an issue with Windows itself. I love to Eff around, trying to see what works and what doesn't, and this requires me to have more reinstallations than other people sometimes.
Alice has been reinstalled easily over 10 times. Harry Potter Quidditch probably arouond 6 or 7. I do not even want to think about how many times I have reinstalled King's Quest, although I will admit I am having to currently run it in an emulator.
Don't even ask how many hacks I have had to download over the years to get Duke Nukem 3D to work in different OSes, but I can imagine that I have had probably over 20 installs of that.
Probably no one will respond, and will probably get no points as I am posting this 3 days after the story came out, but I truthfully do not think its that big of an issue. Last big game I bought was Bioshock. I had to type in the serial number during install, and then it activated once on the internet. *Gasps* Oh no, its evil, it has DRM! Seriously, I have had to reinstall Windows a couple of times, cause I am always effing with stuff on my computer and not because of Windows issues, and never had any issue reinstalling it.
I bought Half-Life 2 through Steam. I am sure there are some DRM issues there as well.
And if I do not like having to insert the disc to play, I just head over to GameCopyWorld and download the NoDisc patch.
Of course, I am not much of a PC gamer anymore. I can pay hundreds of dollars to keep my system up and running, trying to find the right wireless keyboard and mouse combo, and the right settings for exporting to my HDTV without killing framerate, or I can just buy the game on my PS3, XBox 360 or my Wii. Especially with the PS3, I tend to get as good, if not better graphics, than the PC and not have to worry about the drop in framerates (unless it was just crappily coded, I have seen a couple of those).
I have been thinking of picking up Spore. Those I know who have picked it up are claiming its not that bad on the DRM side. Yes, it activates over the internet, and only has three installs, but everyone I know who has picked it up claims that is three installs in 10 days. After ten days, it resets itself, and you can do another three installs in the next ten days, or whatever. Whether or not that is true, I do not know, but this makes sense.
DRM has never kept me from buying a game, and quite frankly, I like it MUCH better than the old ways of copy protection. I used to hate it in the early 90s when I get halfway through a game, then have to go digging through my filing cabinets and such to try to find the instruciton manual for a game to look up something for a copy protection scheme, hoping that I did not throw away the manual. There were quite a few games I never completed because of that. I am still wanting to know whatever happened to Roger Wilco.
This case has been going on for months. The issue was not with the Harry Potter Lexicon, or other fan fiction sites, which she highly endorses on her personal website. The issue was with one of the sites deciding to publish a book of the fan stories for profit, without holding licensing rights. In fact, in the summery itself, it says Warner Bros vs RDR Books. Warner paid huge licensing fees to have exclusive licensing rights to the material, and they were suing to protect those rights.
Remember, fair use is only fair use if you 1) are not profiting and 2) are not affecting the value of the original subject (very badly paraphrased).
Also, JK Rowling / WB was not suing to recover damages, she was suing to prevent the books publication. The judge awarded the money.
So I will need to turn off my wireless and nic, turn off the backlight, goto monochrome, and power down my harddrive and any other moving part? Actually, why not, I am just doing word processing, who needs more power than that?
Actually, e-mail is largely wordprocessing too. We could just fire up the wireless / nic for a few seconds to send recieve e-mail every 5-10 minutes, and turn it back off.
Well, Fiber to the neighborhood does not sound too teribly expensive, and people in the US would LOVE to get 30 Mbps to the house. In fact, that is the speed of fiber-to-the-house for a lot of people in the US. So, converting the entire country of Brittian to fiber to the neighhborhood, offering 30Mbps at a minimal to all homes in a country for, what, under 6 billion pounds, does not sound that bad to me. They probably spent more than that on some failing government program. I mean, while gigabit to the home sounds great, can the infastructure actually handele that? Somewhere there was a graph showing bandwidth on the internet backbones in different part of the world, and I am pretty sure the biggest line between any two points was only along the lines of 400 meg a second (someone will look this up, I know). So, lets say that Britian has three different lines to different parts o the globe, the entire country is less than 1.5 gigabits, right? Does someone want to post exactly how much the entire coutnry has?
I am curious as to how much this roleover would cost in the US. I mean, we have long stretches of nothing that are are probably bigger than most European countries. That is not ment to be flamebait, just simple geographics. I mean, for real, how much is it going to cost to run fiber to the rancher out in western Montana, while at the same time replacing the wiring in every single residential building in New York City? I am sure we are talking about hundreds of Billions, if not millions.
Of course, I am in an AT&T Uverse area, and am supposed to be able to get fiber to the home within two years, so I really do not care what the rancher gets, just what I get.
I thought there was a federal law that all prisions were required to provide cable TV. They do not have to provide all the channels, just provide cable. I would assume that those would be fine.
Those who do have protable tvs, well, all tvs sold for about the past 2 years have had digital tuners. So, those affected would be long-term inmates, and those who have bought used TVs, and are not hooked up to the prision cable network.
This is clearly just for this market. In the DFW market, with analog, if your antenna was not pointed directly at Cedar Hill, your picture was fuzzy at best. Add to this the local PBC station ghosting because it was being reflected off of watertowers in the area. As for the number of stations, I have way MORE with digital than I did with analog.
Analog Stations: 2,4,5,8,11,13,21,23,25(not sure if this was from our area or not), 27, 29, 33, 39,47 (very weak, maybe not our market), 49, 52, 55 (another very weak station), 58, and 68, so if I can add right, that is 19 over the air analog channels.
With Digital, I have 2-1, 4-1, 4-2, 5-1, 5-2, 5-3, 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, 11-1, 11-2, 13-1, 21-1, 23-1, 27-1, 29-1, 33-1, 33-2, 29-1, 47-1, 49-1, 52-1, 58-1, 58-2, 58-3, 58-4, 58-5, 68-1, 68-2, 68-3, and 68-4, for a total of 31 channels, if I can add correctly. I am talking about 12 additonal channels with digital. The others that I am not getting were so weak, I hardly watched them anyways, and they were low-powered religious and Spanish channels.
Your lack of channels are probably either due to the fact that you are in a smaller market (of course, on February 17th, all your channels will be required to change), or the fact that they are currently broadcasting at a lower power. Many DTV channels across the us have this issue right now - with broadcasting of both analog and digital, the spectrum is practically saturated, and they are having to broadcast at lower powers to avoid bleeding into other markets. The engineers at the different stations that I have called have assured me that they are increasing the power of their signal after the February 17th deadline, as then they will not be competing with the analog channels in surrounding areas.
If I was not too lazy to dig through 10 years of Slashdot archives, I could probably tell you. I just know it was in early beta (possibly alpha) when I started using it, and I was so thrilled by it, I stopped using altavista, the only halfway decent search engine before then (okay, lets start the fight, yahoo, webcrawler, excite). So, yeah, I am sure I have easily been using it for 10 years. The page at archive.org said that they had 25 million webpages being crawled. I am pretty sure it was not quite that big when I started using them - I am thinking they had only indexed 10 million when I started. We were also pretty big Linux freaks, so Google's server farms and clusters really fascinated us. I was a 2nd year CS student at this time, and we ate this up.
Most users seem to know how to download a video file using BitTorrent, so why not use that standard?
You are kidding, right? You obviously do not work in IT. We have 1500 users here in this building, about 15 of whom know how to use BitTorrent, or about 1%. Then we block BitTorrent ports to all floors except IT, because then those 15 users will want to use the entire 40-meg fiber line for themselves.
Shoot, I see people install the Ask Toolbar, have 5 different instant messanger programs running, embed smiles from Smiley Central in their e-mails and are completely confused when their IT department throws a fit about it, will actually click on popups saying "Your computer might be infected", does not understand the difference between spam and a virus, and complains that they cannot e-mail a 150 meg Powerpoint presentation, and you expect these people to know how to go out, find a BitTorrent client that they can understand amiss the many clients out there, and then actually understand why they are only getting 20k a second downloads because its only being seeded by one person? I am sure glad I do not live in your world, because as a Desktop tech, I would be out of a job.
Now if you upload in AVI or MPEG, youtube and myspace tend to recompress them, giving you visual crap. Use Canopus Procoder or the Helix Encoder and encode in Real Video, and get your quality how you want it. Then upload to one of these sites. My experience is that then the sites tend not to reencode, and just wrap the video in a Flash container. So while the real video may not look quite as good as your divx before your upload, it looks a heck of a lot better after the upload.
Second thought is to go with online hosting, either pay, or get a fileden account or something. I actually do this. I have the lower quality myspace / youtube videos embeded on my site, then you can download higher quality MPEG, DIVX, or Quicktime videos.
MPEG is probably your best bet if you do not want your people to have to download special software. MPEG will also run on lower end Pentiums and Pentium 2s without much trouble. You will not get as good as a compression, or as good of video quality, but its like a universal playable format. If its a geek video and you are wanting people with Linux, BSD and other alternative OSes to be able to view it, MPEG is your best bet. Just make sure you do not compress in MPEG-2.
So, yeah, my recommendation is to convert to both MPEG and Real Video, and upload the Real Video to YouTube or Myspace, embed the flash link, and offer the MPEG for people who cannot view flash videos.
Also, remember that the PS3 and the iPhone support YouTube, but not the other sites.
This is so much easier than in the old days. I would have to create a 26k Real Video Stream, a 56k Real Video Stream, a 100k Real video Stream (ISDN), a 300k Real Video Stream, then do the same thing with Windows Media Player, then offer MPEG, DivX and Intel Indeo 5 videos
Slashdot Mirror
As for the drivers, I'm pretty sure that was because Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers couldn't get on the same page until very, very late into the game.
They had the same issue with XP when it came out. But I agree, Creative released Sound Blaster drivers for Vista RC1, then they changed how drivers would work with RC2.
Most software works fine for me, even stuff that is not supposed to work, like Filemaker Pro 5.5 (a very old version indeed). I have gotten a few other programs to work by running in Compatability mode. The couple of programs I cannot get to work are because they install some weird driver with the program (usually some networking driver or something). For the one or two programs I must have, I installed Suns VirtualBox, and installed an XP installation in there.
Have you used IE7 in XP? Works exactly the same way.
Turn off the Allow/Deny by going to Control Panel, User Accounts, then Turn User Account Control On or Off.
IE7 options can be set by going to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Custom Level, and on the Advanced Tab.
Make sure you have java installed, www.java.com
As for the translucent windows, if it really bugs you, Right Click on Desktop, goto Personalize, Window Color and Appearence, Open Classic Appearance, and under Color Schemes, choose Windows Classic.
Also, you may have some spyware. Goto Spybot.info and download, install, and run Spybot. Make sure to turn off the Tea Timer.
Also, make sure you have your Windows Updates installed.
Anything else I can help you with?
Now if it would return the XP Windows Explorer....
Right click desktop, Personalize, Windows Color and Appearence, Open Classic Appearence, Color Scheme, Windows Classic.
Anything Else?
You can turn off the user account controls by going to Control Pannel, User Accounts, Turn User Account Control on or Off.
http://www.netzero.net/free
Provides 10 hours of free dialup a month.
The real thing I've noticed is that Windows Explorer no longer accepts custom columns, which is a major pain for a shop that uses TortoiseSVN. That is an interface issue that I resent. That and the much more subtle (than in XP) difference between active and inactive title bars.
You mean, right clicking on the desktop, going to Personalize, Windows Color and Appearence, Open Classic Appearence, Advanced does not work for you? Works just fine for me.
Sorry if this appears twice, but 10 minutes later, its not showing that I posted anything.
The first article shows absolutely no facts that there is a decline in sales. In fact, it simply states it, and then offers an editorial about it. Hardly hard evidence to make a statement that Blu-Ray is in trouble.
The second seemed to show that sales have taken a dive this week compaired to last week. Gasp! How horrid! Sales drop one week, the end of the format is in sight!
Yet the exact same article also shows that sales of Blu-Ray counted for 8% of movie sales last week. That is a failure? If owning 8% of the market is a failure, then Apple should have gave up a long time ago.
Just Google Blu-Ray adoption rate. Blu-Ray adoption is almost 6 times greater in the UK than DVD was a decade ago, and 3 times that in the us (I actually had the URL in the original post I tried submitting, now I cannot find it to save my life). Memorex is releasing a $269 player in November, and Amazon is clearing out some of the older Sony models now for under $200.
Two years after its introduction, I have friends whom we lend Blu-Ray movies to, I can rent them off of any rental site, buy them at Wal-Mart, and find that the majority of people I talk to at least know what it is. I could not say the same two years after DVD's introduction. Two years after its introduction, most video stores were still VHS only, Netflix was a startup company, a DVD READER for your computer cost over $200, you then had to buy an adittional software or hardware card to decode them, writers were incredibly expensive, and most of the movies I had I had to buy online, or at special stores at the mall (ie Suncost).
Yes, Blu-Ray is in so much trouble!
Yeah, but I cannot read Chinese, so I really did not know what I was looking at.
Truthfully, what is wrong with the Vista interface? I thought the main thing people were complaining about was bad software compatability (which is a crock), poor drivers (the hardware developers have largely resolved this), the UAE (which can be turned off),and high resource hog (sadly, I have no comeback for this). Out of all the people that we have given Vista to in our company, not a single person has complained about the interface. In fact, the only two complaints we got was of a software bug (it exists in XP as well in this program package, but people natually blaimed Vista, even though they had it for years), and that their 15 year old printer suddenly does not work.
This seems to be just for video rentals and purchases. Movie rentals annoyingly stay on your HD, even after the rental period is over - you have to manually delete them. I am assuming though if you rent the movie again in the future, it will let you have another download, or just reactivate it on the HD if you already have it downloaded. Have not really tried - $4.50 for a 24 hour download just seemed really high, and I only tried it to see one movie that they have yet to release on Blu-Ray.
The article makes it clear that this is just for movie purchaces. I have yet to make any, as HD stuff is only available for rental.
Trailers and gameplay videos seem to allow you unlimited downloads.
I have had one PS3 brick on me with the 2.42 firmware, and the one they replaced it with is starting to go out, and it looks like I may be replacing it as well before too long. However, GAMES and add-ons I have purchased seem to have let me have more than 2 downloads, as I keep so much on my PS3 I delete whatever I am not playing at the time, and redownload when I want to play again. Has always worked quite well.
Yeah, because we all know how much New Mexico has sub-zero temps. :-)
Truthfully, along those reasonings, you could eliminate tons of things. I lived in Salzburg from January-May of 2001. Didn't have a refrigerator - in the colder months of January - March, I kept cheese, sodas, and sometimes even milk just sitting on the ledge outside my bedroom window. Too bad the cost of heating oil was so high. More than canceled out the savings.
Nah, what you need is a place with fairly consistant summer / winter temps and dry air. Since no place really exists in the temperature range we are looking at, we need something that is not too hot in the summer, but not too freakin cold in the winter. I am thinking Flagstaff, Arizona.
Are you refering to the Disney movie that Doglas Adams wrote the screenplay for?
Um, that was kind of the point.
:-) You were paying attention. Yes, I know. It was ment to be a pun.
Sadly, it will probably come prebundled with the Symantic AntiSpyware crap, Norton Antivirus (it would make too much sense to go with just one vendor), AOL (which takes 15 minutes to uninstall), then the AOL Security Suite, then the Yahoo Security Suite, have BigFix preinstalled, and several 60 minute demos from PopCap games, and a 90 day trial of MS Office 2007. You will think it will be faster to uninstall rather than remove all the software, but first you have to call up Cray and ask them to send you the disc. Once you finally get the system wiped and Windows Preinstalled, you will find out that Cray has proprietary hardware, so you will have to go download the network drivers and chipset drivers on another computer, burn to a CD (USB does not work yet), and then install on the Cray (you see, you had the drivers already, but they were on another partition of the HD, which you did not even bother to look at before you wiped the partion table). Once that is up and working, you can then download all the other drivers. Now you are ready to download Windows Updates, or so you thought. You now have to move the benches around the C of the Cray to try to figure out where they put your Windows Key Code sticker. Ah, there it is, on the floor on the inside of the C. Darn it, Activation failed, gotto call Microsoft and try to explain to the guy in India what a Cray is, and why you are trying to reactivate a Windows instalation that has already been activated before. Oh, wait, I was an idiot, I got on the internet and downloaded drivers before I put on an Antivirus. Sadly, AVG and Avast do not have a version that will work with this hardware configuration, so you have to hack something together that you pray is working after searching Google. Great, now we can download Windows Updates. Grrr, have to reboot first, as I did not do so after installing the Antivirus. Do you know how long it takes to reboot a Cray? So, we finally get into Windows Updates, and download, have to reboot again. Upon Reboot, Windows starts downloading yet more updates on its own, and asks you to reboot again, and a third time, and a fourth. Finally, you have the updates installed, and now you got to start installing your apps. Oh, but first, you have to download Java, and Flash, and Shockwave, and Install .Net and Silverlight and then the updates to all of these, then find a compiled version of the Microsoft C Visual Runtime or whatever the freak it is called. Now, because Flash is not compatable with the optimized stuff you have on your system, you now get to run everything in 32-bit emulation mode. Now to install Crysis and Bioshock and Spore. Oh wait, I have to download the pre-release video card drivers from Nvidia to get this thing to work. Of course, this does not work out of the box, so you reboot into safe mode, uninstall the NVidia drivers. Great, now it bluescreens every time it restarts. Boot back into safe mode, install NVidia drivers, boot into safe mode again, associate video card with NVidia drivers. Boot into Windows, and end up calling the software companies because you have installed the games too many times. Beg and pled, and they unlock them. Oh great, now you have to download updates for the games. But the sound is not working right - you idiot, you setup your SoundBlaster in 5.1 channel mode, and did not realize that you have to have both your front and rear speakers hooked up to the reciever. After cursing at Creative for their idiocy, you then set the thing to ProLogic. Still no sound. Searching the forums, you find out that Creative has not released drivers for this OS yet. So, you download the XP drivers, unzip them using WinRar, then manually go in and associate the soundcard with these drivers. Finally! You can now play Crysis and Bioshock. Spore has quit working because construction crews in the area has cut your fiber internet connection, and it cannot call home.
I totally agree. Current games installed on my system - Bioshock, Alice (released in 2000 or 2001), Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup (released around 2004 I think) and King's Quest 6 (released around 1992 I think). Bioshock alone has been reinstalled about 4 times, and I have had it less than a year. This is due to me effing up Windows, and not an issue with Windows itself. I love to Eff around, trying to see what works and what doesn't, and this requires me to have more reinstallations than other people sometimes.
Alice has been reinstalled easily over 10 times. Harry Potter Quidditch probably arouond 6 or 7. I do not even want to think about how many times I have reinstalled King's Quest, although I will admit I am having to currently run it in an emulator.
Don't even ask how many hacks I have had to download over the years to get Duke Nukem 3D to work in different OSes, but I can imagine that I have had probably over 20 installs of that.
Probably no one will respond, and will probably get no points as I am posting this 3 days after the story came out, but I truthfully do not think its that big of an issue. Last big game I bought was Bioshock. I had to type in the serial number during install, and then it activated once on the internet. *Gasps* Oh no, its evil, it has DRM! Seriously, I have had to reinstall Windows a couple of times, cause I am always effing with stuff on my computer and not because of Windows issues, and never had any issue reinstalling it.
I bought Half-Life 2 through Steam. I am sure there are some DRM issues there as well.
And if I do not like having to insert the disc to play, I just head over to GameCopyWorld and download the NoDisc patch.
Of course, I am not much of a PC gamer anymore. I can pay hundreds of dollars to keep my system up and running, trying to find the right wireless keyboard and mouse combo, and the right settings for exporting to my HDTV without killing framerate, or I can just buy the game on my PS3, XBox 360 or my Wii. Especially with the PS3, I tend to get as good, if not better graphics, than the PC and not have to worry about the drop in framerates (unless it was just crappily coded, I have seen a couple of those).
I have been thinking of picking up Spore. Those I know who have picked it up are claiming its not that bad on the DRM side. Yes, it activates over the internet, and only has three installs, but everyone I know who has picked it up claims that is three installs in 10 days. After ten days, it resets itself, and you can do another three installs in the next ten days, or whatever. Whether or not that is true, I do not know, but this makes sense.
DRM has never kept me from buying a game, and quite frankly, I like it MUCH better than the old ways of copy protection. I used to hate it in the early 90s when I get halfway through a game, then have to go digging through my filing cabinets and such to try to find the instruciton manual for a game to look up something for a copy protection scheme, hoping that I did not throw away the manual. There were quite a few games I never completed because of that. I am still wanting to know whatever happened to Roger Wilco.
For those of you who do not get the joke
This case has been going on for months. The issue was not with the Harry Potter Lexicon, or other fan fiction sites, which she highly endorses on her personal website. The issue was with one of the sites deciding to publish a book of the fan stories for profit, without holding licensing rights. In fact, in the summery itself, it says Warner Bros vs RDR Books. Warner paid huge licensing fees to have exclusive licensing rights to the material, and they were suing to protect those rights.
Remember, fair use is only fair use if you 1) are not profiting and 2) are not affecting the value of the original subject (very badly paraphrased).
Also, JK Rowling / WB was not suing to recover damages, she was suing to prevent the books publication. The judge awarded the money.
So I will need to turn off my wireless and nic, turn off the backlight, goto monochrome, and power down my harddrive and any other moving part? Actually, why not, I am just doing word processing, who needs more power than that?
Actually, e-mail is largely wordprocessing too. We could just fire up the wireless / nic for a few seconds to send recieve e-mail every 5-10 minutes, and turn it back off.
Well, Fiber to the neighborhood does not sound too teribly expensive, and people in the US would LOVE to get 30 Mbps to the house. In fact, that is the speed of fiber-to-the-house for a lot of people in the US. So, converting the entire country of Brittian to fiber to the neighhborhood, offering 30Mbps at a minimal to all homes in a country for, what, under 6 billion pounds, does not sound that bad to me. They probably spent more than that on some failing government program. I mean, while gigabit to the home sounds great, can the infastructure actually handele that? Somewhere there was a graph showing bandwidth on the internet backbones in different part of the world, and I am pretty sure the biggest line between any two points was only along the lines of 400 meg a second (someone will look this up, I know). So, lets say that Britian has three different lines to different parts o the globe, the entire country is less than 1.5 gigabits, right? Does someone want to post exactly how much the entire coutnry has?
I am curious as to how much this roleover would cost in the US. I mean, we have long stretches of nothing that are are probably bigger than most European countries. That is not ment to be flamebait, just simple geographics. I mean, for real, how much is it going to cost to run fiber to the rancher out in western Montana, while at the same time replacing the wiring in every single residential building in New York City? I am sure we are talking about hundreds of Billions, if not millions.
Of course, I am in an AT&T Uverse area, and am supposed to be able to get fiber to the home within two years, so I really do not care what the rancher gets, just what I get.
The site is slashdotted. Same content available here
I thought there was a federal law that all prisions were required to provide cable TV. They do not have to provide all the channels, just provide cable. I would assume that those would be fine.
Those who do have protable tvs, well, all tvs sold for about the past 2 years have had digital tuners. So, those affected would be long-term inmates, and those who have bought used TVs, and are not hooked up to the prision cable network.
This is clearly just for this market. In the DFW market, with analog, if your antenna was not pointed directly at Cedar Hill, your picture was fuzzy at best. Add to this the local PBC station ghosting because it was being reflected off of watertowers in the area. As for the number of stations, I have way MORE with digital than I did with analog.
Analog Stations: 2,4,5,8,11,13,21,23,25(not sure if this was from our area or not), 27, 29, 33, 39,47 (very weak, maybe not our market), 49, 52, 55 (another very weak station), 58, and 68, so if I can add right, that is 19 over the air analog channels.
With Digital, I have 2-1, 4-1, 4-2, 5-1, 5-2, 5-3, 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, 11-1, 11-2, 13-1, 21-1, 23-1, 27-1, 29-1, 33-1, 33-2, 29-1, 47-1, 49-1, 52-1, 58-1, 58-2, 58-3, 58-4, 58-5, 68-1, 68-2, 68-3, and 68-4, for a total of 31 channels, if I can add correctly. I am talking about 12 additonal channels with digital. The others that I am not getting were so weak, I hardly watched them anyways, and they were low-powered religious and Spanish channels.
Your lack of channels are probably either due to the fact that you are in a smaller market (of course, on February 17th, all your channels will be required to change), or the fact that they are currently broadcasting at a lower power. Many DTV channels across the us have this issue right now - with broadcasting of both analog and digital, the spectrum is practically saturated, and they are having to broadcast at lower powers to avoid bleeding into other markets. The engineers at the different stations that I have called have assured me that they are increasing the power of their signal after the February 17th deadline, as then they will not be competing with the analog channels in surrounding areas.
When did you start using its search engine?
If I was not too lazy to dig through 10 years of Slashdot archives, I could probably tell you. I just know it was in early beta (possibly alpha) when I started using it, and I was so thrilled by it, I stopped using altavista, the only halfway decent search engine before then (okay, lets start the fight, yahoo, webcrawler, excite). So, yeah, I am sure I have easily been using it for 10 years. The page at archive.org said that they had 25 million webpages being crawled. I am pretty sure it was not quite that big when I started using them - I am thinking they had only indexed 10 million when I started. We were also pretty big Linux freaks, so Google's server farms and clusters really fascinated us. I was a 2nd year CS student at this time, and we ate this up.
Most users seem to know how to download a video file using BitTorrent, so why not use that standard?
You are kidding, right? You obviously do not work in IT. We have 1500 users here in this building, about 15 of whom know how to use BitTorrent, or about 1%. Then we block BitTorrent ports to all floors except IT, because then those 15 users will want to use the entire 40-meg fiber line for themselves.
Shoot, I see people install the Ask Toolbar, have 5 different instant messanger programs running, embed smiles from Smiley Central in their e-mails and are completely confused when their IT department throws a fit about it, will actually click on popups saying "Your computer might be infected", does not understand the difference between spam and a virus, and complains that they cannot e-mail a 150 meg Powerpoint presentation, and you expect these people to know how to go out, find a BitTorrent client that they can understand amiss the many clients out there, and then actually understand why they are only getting 20k a second downloads because its only being seeded by one person? I am sure glad I do not live in your world, because as a Desktop tech, I would be out of a job.
Now if you upload in AVI or MPEG, youtube and myspace tend to recompress them, giving you visual crap. Use Canopus Procoder or the Helix Encoder and encode in Real Video, and get your quality how you want it. Then upload to one of these sites. My experience is that then the sites tend not to reencode, and just wrap the video in a Flash container. So while the real video may not look quite as good as your divx before your upload, it looks a heck of a lot better after the upload.
Second thought is to go with online hosting, either pay, or get a fileden account or something. I actually do this. I have the lower quality myspace / youtube videos embeded on my site, then you can download higher quality MPEG, DIVX, or Quicktime videos.
MPEG is probably your best bet if you do not want your people to have to download special software. MPEG will also run on lower end Pentiums and Pentium 2s without much trouble. You will not get as good as a compression, or as good of video quality, but its like a universal playable format. If its a geek video and you are wanting people with Linux, BSD and other alternative OSes to be able to view it, MPEG is your best bet. Just make sure you do not compress in MPEG-2.
So, yeah, my recommendation is to convert to both MPEG and Real Video, and upload the Real Video to YouTube or Myspace, embed the flash link, and offer the MPEG for people who cannot view flash videos.
Also, remember that the PS3 and the iPhone support YouTube, but not the other sites.
This is so much easier than in the old days. I would have to create a 26k Real Video Stream, a 56k Real Video Stream, a 100k Real video Stream (ISDN), a 300k Real Video Stream, then do the same thing with Windows Media Player, then offer MPEG, DivX and Intel Indeo 5 videos