Stop being so elitist. Why should someone who likes KDE for other reasons be told to use GNOME simply because KDE developers and certain recalcitrant users can't or won't admit how confusing and complicated the configuration system is and won't do anything about it. If your attitude were representative (and I surely hope it isn't) then KDE is doomed to failure simply other desktops actively address obvious usability issues while KDE just appears more interested in Kewl Eye Kandy rather than fixing the fundamentals.
You claiming that it takes power away from you is utterly absurd. There is nothing to stop KDE supporting a normal and advanced mode and keeping everybody happy.
And then I heard Sony was using their licensing agreements to prevent such a device. Sony just refuses to do what is best for the consumer, be it root kits, memory card interoperability, or licensing rules like this.
Think for a second what would happen to Blu-Ray if all or a substantial percentage of Blu-Ray players played HD-DVD too. Answer - BLU-RAY WOULD LOSE. Who would buy Blu-Ray if discs fell back to HD-DVD? Therefore it is no surprise that Sony might be blocking dual format players. Because if they didn't, all those billions of dollars developing the format with partners may as well be pissed down the toilet. Of course they're not going to willfully dilute their own technology and it's rather silly to expect them to do so. I expect Toshiba is just as protective of their own tech.
Lots of companies are branded evil and get over it. IBM was evil in its day. Microsoft seems to be inherently evil. Apple & Google are increasingly seen as evil. Sony is sort of in the middle of its evilness but apparently trying to shed the image with mixed results.
I don't think every game needs more space since obviously they won't. However it will be the epics which will strain the content to its very last byte. It's just a fact that when all the graphics in the game need at least 4x as much space, FMV requires 10x as much that a DVD-9 isn't going to be enough for some titles. Even games which render cutscenes with the game engine may not have enough space. After all GTA: SA used the game engine for cutscenes and was busting out of a DVD-4.7 disc.
Anyway the PS3 needs more capacity over the 360 simply virtue that games are region free. That means games will increasingly appear in more than one language on the same disk and this will push more over that DVD-9 limit. Just another reason why Blu-Ray has uses besides movie content.
1) How is HDMI raising the bar? The 360 can already do 1080p now without it.
Because HDMI is the standard for high definition TV. All televisions bearing an HD Ready logo in Europe require it (or DVI-D) and no doubt it's defacto standard in US and Japan, as well as the fact it offers better picture quality.
2) Blu-Ray support is equivilent to HD-DVD support. The 360 wins here since you have the option of buying it or not.
Yes, you have the option of buy some strap-on requiring its own power supply or not for a price which exceeds a PS3. Great choice.
3) HD by default is also advantage-360. Many people buy consoles without the need of downloading large amounts of movies/music/demos.
I don't even know what you are talking about here. Hobbling the 360 so that an harddrive may or may not be present does not do games or consumers any favours. Besides, not having an HD means you don't get any downloadable content, online gameplay, patches or backwards compatibility since software emulation requires a harddrive. Also note that the PS3 harddrive is a standard 2.5 inch SATA making it cheap and easy to expand if you wish unlike the ludicrously expensive 20Gb drive in a proprietary casing for the 360.
PS3 games over Wifi are horrible. There is a noticable lag difference vs ethernet.
Evidence for this? I expect that if you have an 801.11g router that the performance is perfectly acceptable. And if by some miracle you provide evidence that says otherwise, well... the PS3 has a gigabit ethernet support which is also another way it is better than a 360.
5) Dual layer DVD's can hold near 10 gigs. PC games have been outputting at "1080p" like resolutions for years without requiring 10 gigs. If Gears of War can fit on a 10 gig disc, then any game in this generation of consoles can.
Most games will fit on DVD, some won't, especially those of the GTA / Final Fantasy / Blue Dragon scale. Look forward to more and more that don't. Of course the 360 has one saving grace - its games are region locked so there is little reason to ship a single disc localised for many countries. Quite a double edged sword really.
The PS3 raised the bar by including HDMI, blu-ray support, a hard disk by default, wi-fi and some other bits and pieces. Microsoft have to update the XBox 360 to compete with that. What remains to be seen is whether the thing will include HD-DVD or would that cause MS to find themselves having to hike their prices to PS3 levels.
One certainty is that whether the XBox 360 does include HD-DVD, the games are going to be stuck on DVD. Seeing the massive strains placed on DVD by having FMV, higher textures & polys etc., this is going to be a thorn in their side for the lifetime of the 360.
There is also the question of what happens to the current models. My guess is that the "core" will go the way of the dodo, the existing premium will become core until stocks run out and then this one will take over but keeping the elevated price point.
Just because you like every setting under the sun in your face doesn't mean everyone or even a significant minority of other people do. Basic everyday settings should not be buried in amongst uncommon rarely used (if at all) settings. This is usability 101. There is no excuse for KDE being the way it is even taking into account people like yourself since it could implement an advanced mode or supplementary "power tools" if necessary.
As for my desktop preference - I really don't care what desktop I use. I just want the damned thing to be reasonably simple to configure, have sensible defaults and let me do what I want to do with a lot of extraneous noise and hubris. So at present I use GNOME because it does those things but I wish for the day when Linux users neither have to know nor care what their desktop or widgets are running on since it is an irrelevance to regular users.
I have never hand edited a.gtkrc file in my life so I really don't understand your sarcasm. But if I did have to do it, you've shown how easy it is to do even in the remote likelihood that I would ever want to.
I don't really give a damn about the deskop. To my mind, the desktop should be something which is easy to configure, let's me organise files'n'stuff and run apps. It should do this with the minimum of fuss. I might want to set it up with some applets, change the locale, mouse speed and a few other bits and pieces, but other than that it really should sink into the background. Every second I waste trying to configure it, is a second lost doing what I bought my computer for. Every second I waste changing weird default behaviour is a second lost doing something productive.
A classic example from KDE - A while back I installed SUSE 10 and it defaulted to that stupid "single-click-launches-apps" behaviour - a behaviour so roundly savaged back in 1996 when MS introduced it that they promptly dropped it but still apparently favoured by KDE. So I spent the next 30 minutes trying to disable it since I knew there must be a way. After rooting around a morass of settings under desktop, themes and various others places I EVENTUALLY discovered that single-click behaviour was under the mouse panel. WTF? I wasted 30 minutes to disable a broken click behaviour which shouldn't even have been turned on in the first place.
It's not just the desktop. The same laissez faire attitude affects Konq and KMail where there can be up to six menu items all starting with "Configure" under one menu item. If Firefox can manage a single "Options..." with context sensitive "Customize..." for toolbars I fail to see why Konq needs to inflict pain and suffering on all those who choose to configure it.
It's just sloppy and probably the reason that KDE is losing mindshare to GNOME. KDE apps are arguably nicer to use than GNOME apps in various ways. QT is arguably more sophisticated than GTK. But GNOME is putting serious effort into usability and it is paying off in spades. I occasionally hear people bemoan GNOME being favoured over KDE in enterprise. I expect that usability has a hell of a lot to do with it.
If there is indeed an app in GNOME which says that, it sounds like a bug that you should be reporting. I strongly doubt that the HIG requires apps to report "Application Failed to Load" when a more helpful, descriptive message might say what the issue is.
Re:Less of the kitchen sink would make KDE better
on
A Sneak Preview of KDE 4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Please, Gnome is a slim pick up and go desktop for new users, KDE is a customisable and flexible desktop for power, business or techie users. I like it this way, it gives everyone a desktop that they are comfortable with. As a techie, I want KDE to stay the way it is, please don't try to change it to something it is not.
No it doesn't give everyone a desktop they're comfortable with. If you put twice as many options in a user's face than they would reasonably expect or ever require they are going to get confused. They'll be scared of even opening prefs or menus for fear of trashing their app or desktop. As I said, if somebody in the minority absolutely needs all those options, create some tool for them to get at them or implement an advanced mode that shows them. For example, I can type about:config into Firefox and fiddle with all the options, without inflicting them on regular users. And Windows has TweakUI and regedit.
There is a very good reason that the likes of Apple, and to a lesser extent Windows & GNOME hide options - it makes the desktop more accessible, more productive and easier to use for everybody. Expecting the vast majority to wade through crap makes for a terrible user experience. Regardless of what advantages KDE might offer over GNOME in other ways I know which side my money would be on in a usability lab.
Less of the kitchen sink would make KDE better
on
A Sneak Preview of KDE 4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
KDE is a very slick desktop, but it doesn't seem to know when "less is more". The control center is probably the worst, most confusing configuration application of any desktop I've ever seen simply because the options that 99% need to get at regularly are mixed in with options that only 1% / nobody ever needs to touch. Then you have various K apps such as Konq or KMail where you might have up to SIX different preferences menu items to choose from to configure the app.
I wish they'd follow GNOME or Firefox and realise that overloading the senses with tabs, buttons and checkboxes does not make for a pleasant desktop experience. I'd be happy if all KDE 4 consisted of was a rationalisation of the menus and prefs to slash out most of the crap, or at least move it into an advanced mode where only masochists could see it.
Read the article. The kid posted the video just before he and his family moved to Canada, out of the reach of British law and the school's disciplinary procedures. The teacher is more upset about the video than the broken window, because it makes the teacher look like a fool and there is nothing he/she can do about it.
Kids who break windows, video themselves doing it and then move country doesn't seem like much of a case to institute censorship. Besides, if it bothers the teacher that much that the child went unpunished, they could do several things - a) have the video yanked since I'm sure YouTube will take down content showing criminal behaviour, b) complain to their new school and have them take measures, c) file a criminal complaint in the UK and wait for the kid to travel back to the UK in 10 years and find it still on record. I expect all of these things could be done within any existing system without the need to censor anything.
First of all, the teachers should be thankful that these twits happened to place their video on Youtube. This made their detective work in figuring out who were the perpetrators were much easier, giving them a huge smoking gun. Talk about shooting the messenger, sheesh.
Same with all these stories decrying the internet for paedophiles. While the internet probably makes it much easier to find such material, it surely doesn't affect a human if they weren't already inclined that way to begin with. And of course by using the internet to access the material, the perpetrators leave a long trail of clues leading right back to their door. It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds if not thousands of paedophiles had been caught because logfiles showed they had perused a site, given their credit card details, attempted to groom a "kid" (undercover officer) or whatever. In the real world these people would still be at large.
Sorry, I hate to be the one to bring this up. But you mentioned "Windows ONLY" websites. The sites don't work with anything but that one OS, and the downloads are infected with DRM on top of that. Until any of the sites mentioned WORK, then I will not use them.
Which is a fair point if you want to own a movie, but not if you just want to rent one to watch. You have to implement some kind of DRM or the rental model simply can't work for downloadable content. While it would be nice to implement a cross-platform way to do this, I expect it is hard enough to do it for one platform let alone all of them. So instead I expect that most companies will target Windows for the time being, and if that succeeds they'll move onto the Mac, and possibly in the dim and distant future onto Linux. Probably someone like Real is the best candidate to do something for Linux, assuming there was an audience for the model.
As well as this I expect Sony & Microsoft will do something for their respective consoles. Personally I believe Sony is in an excellent position to deliver a downloadable movie system which is actually easy to use and trustworthy. But only for rentals unless you trust Sony to let you keep your movies forever. Which I don't.
I expect the mighty weight of Microsoft's legal staff will ignore him totally unless he is stupid enough to file suit. At which point he will be squashed like a gnat and left with ruinous legal bill.
Government is rarely the answer and usually the problem.
But in the case of environmentalism it has to be. You could run informational adverts and voluntary schemes until you are blue in the face and the vast majority of people would never bother to separate glass & plastic, or recycle, or choose CFL over filament, unless you make them. Why? Because people take the path of least resistance - a 30 cent bulb might cost $30 more in energyover a $5 CFL one but people see the shelf price and go with filament. You could spend your life attempting to educate them (even on the basis of how much money they'd save) and they'd still do it. Because the perceived cost of filament bulbs is less.
Either you subsidize the more energy efficient solution or you tax the less efficient one. Ireland stuck a 15c tariff on disposable plastic bags. Now every one reuses their bags. The tax simply funds the scheme and keeps it running but the impact of the scheme on most people has been low since they takes bags when they shop. Naturally you might get caught for a bag some day and have to pay but if you abide by the scheme you never pay the tax. There are also intangible benefits by virtue of not having hundreds of millions of plastic bags annually ending up in landfill, or caught in trees.
The same could apply to lightbulbs, tax the most inefficient kinds and suddenly and miraculously everyone will start using CFL or LED ones instead. Increased demand for CFL also leads to their prices dropping to a point where there is no reason to use filament except in special cases such as dimmer switches.
Considering that most governments have made commitments to lower greenhouse gases, it seems like a no-brainer that they should be looking at ways like this to lower energy consumption. The savings of most people switching to CFL (or LED) would be absolutely enormous. Walmart could pay lip service to environmentalism by selling CFL bulbs but its impact would be pretty minimal to say the least.
Governments should slap a tax on products when there are alternatives which a demonstrably more energy efficient.
In the UK & Ireland, there is a common "bayonet" style bulb and compact CFL bulbs which fit that kind of socket. I imagine that even a 50p tax on a conventional bulb would be enough to convert people over. The energy savings to the individual and to countries trying to meet Kyoto targets would be enormous. Better yet if LED bulbs were to take off.
The PSP is a great handheld but its been dogged by shoddy PS2 ports and unoptimized content which takes too long to load. Thankfully its had a lot of great titles appear in the last 12 months (LocoRock, Tekken, MGS: Portable Ops etc.) and finally looks like its shaken off these issues. It also makes for a great multimedia device and I often rip movies, music & shows to watch on it. Even so, the justification for the built-in UMD is rather tenuous, especially with near zero-interest in UMD videos, thanks in part to their rip-off prices.
Where I think the future lies for the PSP is in downloadable content and Sony shows signs of thinking that too. Recent versions of the firmware allow the PSP to play downloaded demos from memory stick, and emulated PS1 titles too. I expect that soon enough we'll see a Sony store on the cross bar selling downloadable games, movies and music for the PSP. It wouldn't even surprise me if / when a PSP Mk2 appears that the UMD drive is an optional external add-on and that games can be played from a large chunk of internal memory and managed via firmware, PC / PS3 or downloaded directly from the store to be played.
on video games. She and her family won't buy a new console for at least the first six months that it's out because they want to see what actually comes out for it, what others think, how many bugs it has, etc. I'm not surprised in the least now because the PS3 is very expensive, said to be rushed in a number of areas, and well, wasn't quite worth the hype.
Which is smart advice. It is UTTERLY POINTLESS to buy a new console for 6 months because there nothing to play on it. That goes for the 360, PS3 or Wii. Having said that, I see nothing about the PS3 which makes it seemed rushed. The PS3 launch has been relatively uneventful especially when compared to the heat problems with the 360 or busted straps and broken TVs of the Wii. Still, with no real choice until at least the European launch, it seems bizarre that anyonewould hysterically fork out $4000 on eBay to get one. Lots of idiots out there.
There are so many good games for XBox/XBox 360 and Playstation 2 that only hardcore gamers need to really go out and buy a PS3. I'm going back now and buying all of the games I missed when I was busy graduating from college last year and... there's no reason for a guy like me to buy a PS3 for at least a year and a half.
The same goes for the Wii. Really, what of its launch games justify forking out for it? The Gamecube version of Zelda is virtually identical to the Wii version. Perhaps that's why Nintendo engaged in a spot of product sabotage. Other than that, it's a mixed bunch of mostly meh titles. If you already own the GC there is zero reason apart from hype to pick up a Wii for christmas.
Having said that, both the GC and XBox are dying or on their last legs, and the PS2 seems the only moderately healthy last-gen console. Give it 12 months and that will be probably on the way out too.
The reason the list is decidedly anorak-ish is because those are who the early adopters are. They are technophiles who absolutely must absolutely new gadgets even if it costs 3 times as much to buy 1st gen bugged hardware. While these people have very questionable judgement skills, the likes of Sony, Toshiba etc. still want to attract them to their platform in the hopes that Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will win more converts. Hence the reason for all of the crappy discs released so far.
Normal people wait for the prices to drop to reasonable levels. I expect players will cost half as much in 6 months. Once HD players enter the mainstream you might even see a broader selection of titles come out.
Of course the DRM is on a completely different level. Does that mean it's uncrackable though? The problem faced by all DRM is that the key used for decryption has to be stored somewhere locally and the player still has to output video and audio so people can see / hear it. Which means that no DRM will ever prevent content from being stolen. Somebody will either find a weakly protected key, or produce an HDMI dongle that sits between the player and TV and rips the content on its way through. My understanding is that HDCP has already been cracked so that last option is already feasible if you want to back them up (or pirate them).
Anyway, as you mention Linux, remember that very few commercial DVD players exist on Linux and it took years for DVD support to arrive. But it's here, in spite of any official support. Who's to say that sooner or later the same won't happen with HD movie content?
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You claiming that it takes power away from you is utterly absurd. There is nothing to stop KDE supporting a normal and advanced mode and keeping everybody happy.
Think for a second what would happen to Blu-Ray if all or a substantial percentage of Blu-Ray players played HD-DVD too. Answer - BLU-RAY WOULD LOSE. Who would buy Blu-Ray if discs fell back to HD-DVD? Therefore it is no surprise that Sony might be blocking dual format players. Because if they didn't, all those billions of dollars developing the format with partners may as well be pissed down the toilet. Of course they're not going to willfully dilute their own technology and it's rather silly to expect them to do so. I expect Toshiba is just as protective of their own tech.
Lots of companies are branded evil and get over it. IBM was evil in its day. Microsoft seems to be inherently evil. Apple & Google are increasingly seen as evil. Sony is sort of in the middle of its evilness but apparently trying to shed the image with mixed results.
Anyway the PS3 needs more capacity over the 360 simply virtue that games are region free. That means games will increasingly appear in more than one language on the same disk and this will push more over that DVD-9 limit. Just another reason why Blu-Ray has uses besides movie content.
Because HDMI is the standard for high definition TV. All televisions bearing an HD Ready logo in Europe require it (or DVI-D) and no doubt it's defacto standard in US and Japan, as well as the fact it offers better picture quality.
2) Blu-Ray support is equivilent to HD-DVD support. The 360 wins here since you have the option of buying it or not.
Yes, you have the option of buy some strap-on requiring its own power supply or not for a price which exceeds a PS3. Great choice.
3) HD by default is also advantage-360. Many people buy consoles without the need of downloading large amounts of movies/music/demos.
I don't even know what you are talking about here. Hobbling the 360 so that an harddrive may or may not be present does not do games or consumers any favours. Besides, not having an HD means you don't get any downloadable content, online gameplay, patches or backwards compatibility since software emulation requires a harddrive. Also note that the PS3 harddrive is a standard 2.5 inch SATA making it cheap and easy to expand if you wish unlike the ludicrously expensive 20Gb drive in a proprietary casing for the 360.
PS3 games over Wifi are horrible. There is a noticable lag difference vs ethernet.
Evidence for this? I expect that if you have an 801.11g router that the performance is perfectly acceptable. And if by some miracle you provide evidence that says otherwise, well... the PS3 has a gigabit ethernet support which is also another way it is better than a 360.
5) Dual layer DVD's can hold near 10 gigs. PC games have been outputting at "1080p" like resolutions for years without requiring 10 gigs. If Gears of War can fit on a 10 gig disc, then any game in this generation of consoles can.
Most games will fit on DVD, some won't, especially those of the GTA / Final Fantasy / Blue Dragon scale. Look forward to more and more that don't. Of course the 360 has one saving grace - its games are region locked so there is little reason to ship a single disc localised for many countries. Quite a double edged sword really.
One certainty is that whether the XBox 360 does include HD-DVD, the games are going to be stuck on DVD. Seeing the massive strains placed on DVD by having FMV, higher textures & polys etc., this is going to be a thorn in their side for the lifetime of the 360.
There is also the question of what happens to the current models. My guess is that the "core" will go the way of the dodo, the existing premium will become core until stocks run out and then this one will take over but keeping the elevated price point.
As for my desktop preference - I really don't care what desktop I use. I just want the damned thing to be reasonably simple to configure, have sensible defaults and let me do what I want to do with a lot of extraneous noise and hubris. So at present I use GNOME because it does those things but I wish for the day when Linux users neither have to know nor care what their desktop or widgets are running on since it is an irrelevance to regular users.
I have never hand edited a .gtkrc file in my life so I really don't understand your sarcasm. But if I did have to do it, you've shown how easy it is to do even in the remote likelihood that I would ever want to.
I'm not saying KDE should be like GNOME. My original message said I'd be happy if they only thing changed in KDE4 was to simplify it.
A classic example from KDE - A while back I installed SUSE 10 and it defaulted to that stupid "single-click-launches-apps" behaviour - a behaviour so roundly savaged back in 1996 when MS introduced it that they promptly dropped it but still apparently favoured by KDE. So I spent the next 30 minutes trying to disable it since I knew there must be a way. After rooting around a morass of settings under desktop, themes and various others places I EVENTUALLY discovered that single-click behaviour was under the mouse panel. WTF? I wasted 30 minutes to disable a broken click behaviour which shouldn't even have been turned on in the first place.
It's not just the desktop. The same laissez faire attitude affects Konq and KMail where there can be up to six menu items all starting with "Configure" under one menu item. If Firefox can manage a single "Options..." with context sensitive "Customize..." for toolbars I fail to see why Konq needs to inflict pain and suffering on all those who choose to configure it.
It's just sloppy and probably the reason that KDE is losing mindshare to GNOME. KDE apps are arguably nicer to use than GNOME apps in various ways. QT is arguably more sophisticated than GTK. But GNOME is putting serious effort into usability and it is paying off in spades. I occasionally hear people bemoan GNOME being favoured over KDE in enterprise. I expect that usability has a hell of a lot to do with it.
If there is indeed an app in GNOME which says that, it sounds like a bug that you should be reporting. I strongly doubt that the HIG requires apps to report "Application Failed to Load" when a more helpful, descriptive message might say what the issue is.
No it doesn't give everyone a desktop they're comfortable with. If you put twice as many options in a user's face than they would reasonably expect or ever require they are going to get confused. They'll be scared of even opening prefs or menus for fear of trashing their app or desktop. As I said, if somebody in the minority absolutely needs all those options, create some tool for them to get at them or implement an advanced mode that shows them. For example, I can type about:config into Firefox and fiddle with all the options, without inflicting them on regular users. And Windows has TweakUI and regedit.
There is a very good reason that the likes of Apple, and to a lesser extent Windows & GNOME hide options - it makes the desktop more accessible, more productive and easier to use for everybody. Expecting the vast majority to wade through crap makes for a terrible user experience. Regardless of what advantages KDE might offer over GNOME in other ways I know which side my money would be on in a usability lab.
I wish they'd follow GNOME or Firefox and realise that overloading the senses with tabs, buttons and checkboxes does not make for a pleasant desktop experience. I'd be happy if all KDE 4 consisted of was a rationalisation of the menus and prefs to slash out most of the crap, or at least move it into an advanced mode where only masochists could see it.
Even if it were true, how would it be arrogant? It's exactly what the likes of Dell, Apple, Compaq etc. do.
Kids who break windows, video themselves doing it and then move country doesn't seem like much of a case to institute censorship. Besides, if it bothers the teacher that much that the child went unpunished, they could do several things - a) have the video yanked since I'm sure YouTube will take down content showing criminal behaviour, b) complain to their new school and have them take measures, c) file a criminal complaint in the UK and wait for the kid to travel back to the UK in 10 years and find it still on record. I expect all of these things could be done within any existing system without the need to censor anything.
Same with all these stories decrying the internet for paedophiles. While the internet probably makes it much easier to find such material, it surely doesn't affect a human if they weren't already inclined that way to begin with. And of course by using the internet to access the material, the perpetrators leave a long trail of clues leading right back to their door. It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds if not thousands of paedophiles had been caught because logfiles showed they had perused a site, given their credit card details, attempted to groom a "kid" (undercover officer) or whatever. In the real world these people would still be at large.
Which is a fair point if you want to own a movie, but not if you just want to rent one to watch. You have to implement some kind of DRM or the rental model simply can't work for downloadable content. While it would be nice to implement a cross-platform way to do this, I expect it is hard enough to do it for one platform let alone all of them. So instead I expect that most companies will target Windows for the time being, and if that succeeds they'll move onto the Mac, and possibly in the dim and distant future onto Linux. Probably someone like Real is the best candidate to do something for Linux, assuming there was an audience for the model.
As well as this I expect Sony & Microsoft will do something for their respective consoles. Personally I believe Sony is in an excellent position to deliver a downloadable movie system which is actually easy to use and trustworthy. But only for rentals unless you trust Sony to let you keep your movies forever. Which I don't.
I expect the mighty weight of Microsoft's legal staff will ignore him totally unless he is stupid enough to file suit. At which point he will be squashed like a gnat and left with ruinous legal bill.
But in the case of environmentalism it has to be. You could run informational adverts and voluntary schemes until you are blue in the face and the vast majority of people would never bother to separate glass & plastic, or recycle, or choose CFL over filament, unless you make them. Why? Because people take the path of least resistance - a 30 cent bulb might cost $30 more in energyover a $5 CFL one but people see the shelf price and go with filament. You could spend your life attempting to educate them (even on the basis of how much money they'd save) and they'd still do it. Because the perceived cost of filament bulbs is less.
Either you subsidize the more energy efficient solution or you tax the less efficient one. Ireland stuck a 15c tariff on disposable plastic bags. Now every one reuses their bags. The tax simply funds the scheme and keeps it running but the impact of the scheme on most people has been low since they takes bags when they shop. Naturally you might get caught for a bag some day and have to pay but if you abide by the scheme you never pay the tax. There are also intangible benefits by virtue of not having hundreds of millions of plastic bags annually ending up in landfill, or caught in trees.
The same could apply to lightbulbs, tax the most inefficient kinds and suddenly and miraculously everyone will start using CFL or LED ones instead. Increased demand for CFL also leads to their prices dropping to a point where there is no reason to use filament except in special cases such as dimmer switches.
Considering that most governments have made commitments to lower greenhouse gases, it seems like a no-brainer that they should be looking at ways like this to lower energy consumption. The savings of most people switching to CFL (or LED) would be absolutely enormous. Walmart could pay lip service to environmentalism by selling CFL bulbs but its impact would be pretty minimal to say the least.
In the UK & Ireland, there is a common "bayonet" style bulb and compact CFL bulbs which fit that kind of socket. I imagine that even a 50p tax on a conventional bulb would be enough to convert people over. The energy savings to the individual and to countries trying to meet Kyoto targets would be enormous. Better yet if LED bulbs were to take off.
Where I think the future lies for the PSP is in downloadable content and Sony shows signs of thinking that too. Recent versions of the firmware allow the PSP to play downloaded demos from memory stick, and emulated PS1 titles too. I expect that soon enough we'll see a Sony store on the cross bar selling downloadable games, movies and music for the PSP. It wouldn't even surprise me if / when a PSP Mk2 appears that the UMD drive is an optional external add-on and that games can be played from a large chunk of internal memory and managed via firmware, PC / PS3 or downloaded directly from the store to be played.
Which is smart advice. It is UTTERLY POINTLESS to buy a new console for 6 months because there nothing to play on it. That goes for the 360, PS3 or Wii. Having said that, I see nothing about the PS3 which makes it seemed rushed. The PS3 launch has been relatively uneventful especially when compared to the heat problems with the 360 or busted straps and broken TVs of the Wii. Still, with no real choice until at least the European launch, it seems bizarre that anyonewould hysterically fork out $4000 on eBay to get one. Lots of idiots out there.
There are so many good games for XBox/XBox 360 and Playstation 2 that only hardcore gamers need to really go out and buy a PS3. I'm going back now and buying all of the games I missed when I was busy graduating from college last year and... there's no reason for a guy like me to buy a PS3 for at least a year and a half.
The same goes for the Wii. Really, what of its launch games justify forking out for it? The Gamecube version of Zelda is virtually identical to the Wii version. Perhaps that's why Nintendo engaged in a spot of product sabotage. Other than that, it's a mixed bunch of mostly meh titles. If you already own the GC there is zero reason apart from hype to pick up a Wii for christmas.
Having said that, both the GC and XBox are dying or on their last legs, and the PS2 seems the only moderately healthy last-gen console. Give it 12 months and that will be probably on the way out too.
Normal people wait for the prices to drop to reasonable levels. I expect players will cost half as much in 6 months. Once HD players enter the mainstream you might even see a broader selection of titles come out.
File a bug. The pressure should have triggered him to flush his cache.
Anyway, as you mention Linux, remember that very few commercial DVD players exist on Linux and it took years for DVD support to arrive. But it's here, in spite of any official support. Who's to say that sooner or later the same won't happen with HD movie content?