The capacity of HD-DVD is not enough to hold movies and extras at 1080i.
So it seems to me if studios favor HD-DVD its because they want to sell us all the movies on HD-DVD, and sell us the movies again on HD-DVD mkII which will have more capacity.
From my narrow perspective, Blu-Ray would make a good medium for backup now that 300-500G hard drives are increasingly common.
Rumour spreadin' a-'round in that NASA town 'bout that point outside LaGrange And you know what I'm talkin' about. Just let me know if you wanna go To that point out of the solar system. They gotta lotta nice girls.
Have mercy. A haw, haw, haw, haw, a haw. A haw, haw, haw.
Well, I hear it's fine if you got the time And the G's to get yourself in. A hmm, hmm. And I hear it's tight most ev'ry night, But now I might be mistaken. Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.
Canon printers have individually replaced ink tanks and each tank is priced at under $10. While this may not be ultimately more painful, it sure feels better just replacing the black ink for $8 instead of the whole cartridge for $32.
Since the OS is very "simple", when you use anything that is network based, the system will often lock up or just sit there waiting for the network stack to do something.
I've had crashes so severe on my old Clie while I was browing the internet that it wiped out the entire machine. Fortunately, the Sync will get it back to the same state, so it wasn't the end of the world.
I find palm pretty robust, but the network implementation is bad, and the fact that 6.0 of the OS is only meant for phones means their PDA's will never be as robust as they should be.
On the other hand, I really do like my new Lifedrive, even if it is a tad big.
1) There was no benefit to making the registry a non-text file, except that MS wanted to make it more difficult for end-users to poke around and understand more clearly what's going on
2) Applications do have to use the OS to read/write/update (so far so good), but the OS *never tracks what the application puts there*. As a result, every developer puts their copy protection in obscure keys in the registry. Even worse, and unforgiveable, are applications that leave crap behind.
3) Keeping it all in one place (i.e. registry) sounds like a great idea... until you realize you can't readily *do* anything with it from a user's perspective because guess what... the OS won't let you do a simple "c:>copy registry to registry.backup".
This could be solved easily:
1) Make it impossible for an application to write to c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 or... you get the idea
2) Registry files should be stored locally in the directory the application was stored in, or better yet in "My Directory". The system would have its own registry stored in the system directory.
3) They should be text files that can be copied by the user easily using standard tools.
4) When a program is uninstalled, the OS would ensure all traces of the registry entry are deleted (this is easy because of #2)
5) The only thing allowed to alter a program's registry entry is that program. And every time its altered, a new version is kept. This would allow users to go back to old version if required.
6) A user could tell the OS to lock a registry so that nothing can alter it
7) The system registry could never be altered by any application. Requests to modify would require the root password entered by the user. Every time.
This is easy. But MS makes it hard and in the process makes registry damage fatal to the system. With no way to properly back it up. So they have goofy "restore points" that you can't explain readily what it does. So then they'll add more utilities instead of following the KISS principle.
I sometimes feel over at MS they have a bunch of brilliant programmers who have never set foot outside of Microsoft and don't understand the issues with their own product.
"NO REGISTRY! I've seen many a 3.4 Ghz P4 system cripled to the equivalent of a 300 mhz Celeron because their registry (an unbelievably stupid concept) was fscked."
The point of the registry is to hide (through obscurity) portions of the operations of the computer from the computer owner.
An amazing concept, but most copy protection in Windows appears to be done via obscure registry flags and codes hidden therein.
Before we go to such extreme measures, don't you think we should have a national debate on the right balance between citizens and copyright holders?
It looks to me that we're developing a hodge-podge of copyright/patent laws that has no policy thought and is simply a collection of knee-jerk reactions to what's news this week.
Because I download it once and update all 3 of my computers. If/when I reinstall windows, iTunes is a single file that is "the latest". I can go back to any version of iTunes I want in case Apple removes or reduces features.
As long as Apple doesn't have a problem with the bandwidth, I certainly don't and its more convenient.
It does work with exchange, but you have to add more "stuff" to exchange to make it work.
Ideally, the blackberry should look like every other email user in the world out there.
In other words, the middleware (the toll bridge) that blackberry has built is, in my opinion, superfluous. It forces the infrastructure to treat users differently based on the type of end device.
What I'd rather see is the blackberry use existing protocols (Secure IMAP? POP via secure tunnel?)
I'm not blaming blackberry I like their business plan or saying their technology is bad it isn't. The stuff seems to work.
I have seen it a fair amount in the Washington DC area.
I mean, the technology is interesting, but from an enterprise standpoint, I have a problem with it being "yet another system to set up and maintain". Since the whole thing is proprietary, its not like you can run it from either open sourced stuff or even popular stuff like MS Exchange.
From an end user standpoint, it appears to me like 2-way paging, except that it acts like e-mail. Maybe it resonates with users because it is like a pager. Personally, I can't see typing much on those little keyboards.
But in the end, it seems standards based email over Verizon EV-DO (and other 3G type wireless products) is better just because it doesn't require you do anything special. It doesn't require a proprietary infrastructure, it doesn't require special devices. I think the reason this hasn't happened yet has to do with the wireless carriers unwillingness to really open their network and roll it out everywhere. But that will slowly happen over the next few years. That's why I think the carriers and handset manufacturers have embraced RIM; its convenient, and it can be replaced easily.
I could be wrong, but then, that's the fun part about speculation on/.
"DoubleClick's pop-up graphical banner ads are like a tanker truck that burns 100 gallons of gas to deliver 50 - inefficient."
Not from slashdot's point of view; its the consumer/viewer who pays the bandwidth. Slashdot only has the link, so from their viewpoint, its pretty efficient.
" if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web."
I would call that *at best* speculation.
I'm not sure if its true or false, but I can also speculate that if banner ads are blocked or removed, that people are smart enough to come up with something else that will manage to make money.
But I'd also point out that the web existed before banner ads. And that the growth of ecommerce is not dependant on banner ads.
He's right in what he's saying, but its a trivial and obvious point.
If not for bad people and bad thing happening, life on the entire planet would be better for people.
Yeah..but so what? He's arguing that there shouldn't be rude, inconsiderate people? What can I do with that thought? How does that insight help the human race in any conceivable way?
I'd give him the "Captain Obvious" hat, but I respect the guy too much.
Well, the cookie wasn't invented as a way to invade your privacy; its simply a way of making an inherently stateless protocol stateful.
I find that cookies are abused by advertisers (but then, most things are abused if there is sufficient money to be made). Big deal. An ad that pops up...does anybody pay attention to ads on the internet anymore? The banners ads are ignored, and firefox gets rid of 97% of the pop-ups, so I feel pretty ad-free
As I said in a previous post, its possible to save all this information on the server, but things like AOL tend to break a lot of those mechanisms, particularly when you set up a website with a load balancer.
There's nothing wrong with session cookies. Its the persistant cookies that can be annoying, particularly when you didn't ask for them. I shop a lot at Amazon and they put cookies on my disk. Great. It lets me get a targetted environment that more often than not points me to things that I find interesting and will buy. Good for Amazon, good for me (I guess...my credit card thinks otherwise!).
If you want more information on cookies, a good book is "Cookies" by Simon St. Laurent published by McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070504989. It covers the technical issues as well as the privacy issues associated with cookies.
Cookies are not the problem; advertisers who abuse them are.
Its commonly done in travel sites to maintain statefulness between page renders.
Statefulness matters because unlike store inventory, there's not really the concept of a shopping cart. You want to travel between point A->B, but your choices from page to page will depend entirely on what happens with inventory completely separate from the web site itself (I realize in re-reading this paragraph that this is almost incomprehensible, but still...).
Are there workarounds? Yes, but they're ugly, complicated, and unreliable, and require huge application servers, particularly when you have people coming from a mega-proxy like AOL.
And these cookies are typically gone when you leave the site. They're simply used to track where you are in the purchasing process. Its nothing personal.
Plus, I do find it handy that certain sites remember me, but that's more of a convenience factor.
Cookies are useful and necessary in many cases (or perhaps they avoid ugly workarounds for statefulness).
But here's what everybody should do:
1) Go to the W3C 2) Come up with a "standard" cookie 3) This standard would have plainly understandable fields that tell you *exactly* what is in that cookie 4) The browser makers and MS would make cookies easily visible and browsable 5) Users could then decide to keep a cookie based on (a) Who its from (b) its content 6) Cookies that don't adhere to the standard could be deleted by browsers without comment.
Can this be abused? Of course. But the answer to this isn't more marketing jargon, its to make the process more transparent so people understand what's going on.
This is simple stuff. Why do we have to make it so hard?
What I remember about the concorde though was that there was a resonance that you could just hear. Its not that it was loud (it was), its that it had the right pitch that it would make its presence felt for a long time.
It wasn't annoying (an FA-18 flying overhead is annoyingly loud), its just that it was there and couldn't be ignored.
I remember in the 80's and early 90's when they would regularly fly in and out of Dulles airport. I lived between DC and Baltimore and you could hear those things coming for minutes before they got there and minutes after they left. It was very distinctive.
The only thing louder is/was when military fighter craft were patrolling right on and after 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you compared the feature list of Fords and Ferraris, you'd expect people to want the Ferrari more "
Since most people since to prefer SUV's and pickups, I think Ford just might win that comparo...
"I don't think Sony is about to repeat their Beta experience."
They certainly haven't learned from their ATRAC experience.
The capacity of HD-DVD is not enough to hold movies and extras at 1080i.
So it seems to me if studios favor HD-DVD its because they want to sell us all the movies on HD-DVD, and sell us the movies again on HD-DVD mkII which will have more capacity.
From my narrow perspective, Blu-Ray would make a good medium for backup now that 300-500G hard drives are increasingly common.
You do realize that you're taking issue with a 10 year old, right?
Rumour spreadin' a-'round in that NASA town
'bout that point outside LaGrange
And you know what I'm talkin' about.
Just let me know if you wanna go
To that point out of the solar system.
They gotta lotta nice girls.
Have mercy.
A haw, haw, haw, haw, a haw.
A haw, haw, haw.
Well, I hear it's fine if you got the time
And the G's to get yourself in.
A hmm, hmm.
And I hear it's tight most ev'ry night,
But now I might be mistaken.
Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.
Have mercy.
Canon printers have individually replaced ink tanks and each tank is priced at under $10. While this may not be ultimately more painful, it sure feels better just replacing the black ink for $8 instead of the whole cartridge for $32.
Since the OS is very "simple", when you use anything that is network based, the system will often lock up or just sit there waiting for the network stack to do something.
I've had crashes so severe on my old Clie while I was browing the internet that it wiped out the entire machine. Fortunately, the Sync will get it back to the same state, so it wasn't the end of the world.
I find palm pretty robust, but the network implementation is bad, and the fact that 6.0 of the OS is only meant for phones means their PDA's will never be as robust as they should be.
On the other hand, I really do like my new Lifedrive, even if it is a tad big.
http://www.webroot.com/
Read the comments by the proponents of software patents. They view this as a minor setback in their quest for software patents.
This will be back for consideration, and sooner than most people realize.
1) There was no benefit to making the registry a non-text file, except that MS wanted to make it more difficult for end-users to poke around and understand more clearly what's going on
2) Applications do have to use the OS to read/write/update (so far so good), but the OS *never tracks what the application puts there*. As a result, every developer puts their copy protection in obscure keys in the registry. Even worse, and unforgiveable, are applications that leave crap behind.
3) Keeping it all in one place (i.e. registry) sounds like a great idea... until you realize you can't readily *do* anything with it from a user's perspective because guess what... the OS won't let you do a simple "c:>copy registry to registry.backup".
This could be solved easily:
1) Make it impossible for an application to write to c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 or... you get the idea
2) Registry files should be stored locally in the directory the application was stored in, or better yet in "My Directory". The system would have its own registry stored in the system directory.
3) They should be text files that can be copied by the user easily using standard tools.
4) When a program is uninstalled, the OS would ensure all traces of the registry entry are deleted (this is easy because of #2)
5) The only thing allowed to alter a program's registry entry is that program. And every time its altered, a new version is kept. This would allow users to go back to old version if required.
6) A user could tell the OS to lock a registry so that nothing can alter it
7) The system registry could never be altered by any application. Requests to modify would require the root password entered by the user. Every time.
This is easy. But MS makes it hard and in the process makes registry damage fatal to the system. With no way to properly back it up. So they have goofy "restore points" that you can't explain readily what it does. So then they'll add more utilities instead of following the KISS principle.
I sometimes feel over at MS they have a bunch of brilliant programmers who have never set foot outside of Microsoft and don't understand the issues with their own product.
"NO REGISTRY! I've seen many a 3.4 Ghz P4 system cripled to the equivalent of a 300 mhz Celeron because their registry (an unbelievably stupid concept) was fscked."
The point of the registry is to hide (through obscurity) portions of the operations of the computer from the computer owner.
An amazing concept, but most copy protection in Windows appears to be done via obscure registry flags and codes hidden therein.
Before we go to such extreme measures, don't you think we should have a national debate on the right balance between citizens and copyright holders?
It looks to me that we're developing a hodge-podge of copyright/patent laws that has no policy thought and is simply a collection of knee-jerk reactions to what's news this week.
Because I download it once and update all 3 of my computers. If/when I reinstall windows, iTunes is a single file that is "the latest". I can go back to any version of iTunes I want in case Apple removes or reduces features.
As long as Apple doesn't have a problem with the bandwidth, I certainly don't and its more convenient.
It does work with exchange, but you have to add more "stuff" to exchange to make it work.
Ideally, the blackberry should look like every other email user in the world out there.
In other words, the middleware (the toll bridge) that blackberry has built is, in my opinion, superfluous. It forces the infrastructure to treat users differently based on the type of end device.
What I'd rather see is the blackberry use existing protocols (Secure IMAP? POP via secure tunnel?)
I'm not blaming blackberry I like their business plan or saying their technology is bad it isn't. The stuff seems to work.
I think the entire device is superfluous.
I have seen it a fair amount in the Washington DC area.
/.
I mean, the technology is interesting, but from an enterprise standpoint, I have a problem with it being "yet another system to set up and maintain". Since the whole thing is proprietary, its not like you can run it from either open sourced stuff or even popular stuff like MS Exchange.
From an end user standpoint, it appears to me like 2-way paging, except that it acts like e-mail. Maybe it resonates with users because it is like a pager. Personally, I can't see typing much on those little keyboards.
But in the end, it seems standards based email over Verizon EV-DO (and other 3G type wireless products) is better just because it doesn't require you do anything special. It doesn't require a proprietary infrastructure, it doesn't require special devices. I think the reason this hasn't happened yet has to do with the wireless carriers unwillingness to really open their network and roll it out everywhere. But that will slowly happen over the next few years. That's why I think the carriers and handset manufacturers have embraced RIM; its convenient, and it can be replaced easily.
I could be wrong, but then, that's the fun part about speculation on
"DoubleClick's pop-up graphical banner ads are like a tanker truck that burns 100 gallons of gas to deliver 50 - inefficient."
Not from slashdot's point of view; its the consumer/viewer who pays the bandwidth. Slashdot only has the link, so from their viewpoint, its pretty efficient.
" if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web."
I would call that *at best* speculation.
I'm not sure if its true or false, but I can also speculate that if banner ads are blocked or removed, that people are smart enough to come up with something else that will manage to make money.
But I'd also point out that the web existed before banner ads. And that the growth of ecommerce is not dependant on banner ads.
He's right in what he's saying, but its a trivial and obvious point.
If not for bad people and bad thing happening, life on the entire planet would be better for people.
Yeah..but so what? He's arguing that there shouldn't be rude, inconsiderate people? What can I do with that thought? How does that insight help the human race in any conceivable way?
I'd give him the "Captain Obvious" hat, but I respect the guy too much.
Well, the cookie wasn't invented as a way to invade your privacy; its simply a way of making an inherently stateless protocol stateful.
I find that cookies are abused by advertisers (but then, most things are abused if there is sufficient money to be made). Big deal. An ad that pops up...does anybody pay attention to ads on the internet anymore? The banners ads are ignored, and firefox gets rid of 97% of the pop-ups, so I feel pretty ad-free
As I said in a previous post, its possible to save all this information on the server, but things like AOL tend to break a lot of those mechanisms, particularly when you set up a website with a load balancer.
There's nothing wrong with session cookies. Its the persistant cookies that can be annoying, particularly when you didn't ask for them. I shop a lot at Amazon and they put cookies on my disk. Great. It lets me get a targetted environment that more often than not points me to things that I find interesting and will buy. Good for Amazon, good for me (I guess...my credit card thinks otherwise!).
If you want more information on cookies, a good book is "Cookies" by Simon St. Laurent published by McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070504989. It covers the technical issues as well as the privacy issues associated with cookies.
Cookies are not the problem; advertisers who abuse them are.
Its commonly done in travel sites to maintain statefulness between page renders.
Statefulness matters because unlike store inventory, there's not really the concept of a shopping cart. You want to travel between point A->B, but your choices from page to page will depend entirely on what happens with inventory completely separate from the web site itself (I realize in re-reading this paragraph that this is almost incomprehensible, but still...).
Are there workarounds? Yes, but they're ugly, complicated, and unreliable, and require huge application servers, particularly when you have people coming from a mega-proxy like AOL.
And these cookies are typically gone when you leave the site. They're simply used to track where you are in the purchasing process. Its nothing personal.
Plus, I do find it handy that certain sites remember me, but that's more of a convenience factor.
I'm sure there are many other reasons.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en /flashplayer/help/help02.html#117157
Cookies are useful and necessary in many cases (or perhaps they avoid ugly workarounds for statefulness).
But here's what everybody should do:
1) Go to the W3C
2) Come up with a "standard" cookie
3) This standard would have plainly understandable fields that tell you *exactly* what is in that cookie
4) The browser makers and MS would make cookies easily visible and browsable
5) Users could then decide to keep a cookie based on (a) Who its from (b) its content
6) Cookies that don't adhere to the standard could be deleted by browsers without comment.
Can this be abused? Of course. But the answer to this isn't more marketing jargon, its to make the process more transparent so people understand what's going on.
This is simple stuff. Why do we have to make it so hard?
yeah, no doubt those military craft were loud.
What I remember about the concorde though was that there was a resonance that you could just hear. Its not that it was loud (it was), its that it had the right pitch that it would make its presence felt for a long time.
It wasn't annoying (an FA-18 flying overhead is annoyingly loud), its just that it was there and couldn't be ignored.
I remember in the 80's and early 90's when they would regularly fly in and out of Dulles airport. I lived between DC and Baltimore and you could hear those things coming for minutes before they got there and minutes after they left. It was very distinctive.
The only thing louder is/was when military fighter craft were patrolling right on and after 9/11.
The Concorde was *loud*.
"I personally use a Canon 10D"
What do you think of the 20D? It looks appealing. The new Rebel XT is tempting as well.