You don't need ot go out and buy the lateest and greatest graphcis card to run a game. I have played games on a PC which was 5 years older than the game. There was a 3 year gap between the xbox and the xbox 360. There was a 6 year gap between the ps2 and ps3. So PC's are not incomparable to consoles with upgrade timespans. With PC's you get the advantage of being able to have a game look better with newer hardware when it still runs on older hardware whereas with consoles there is fixed hardware which is released with long intervals in between.
The thing that would be nice which you mentioned is that it can be hard to work out whether a game will run or not on PC hardware. Some games overstate the requirements and others can be unclear.
I agree that a balanced program is needed but I would argue that scanning a photograph would come under fair use. The violation would be distributing the scanned image to someone else. To be honest though I would probably look for a photographer who would give me the copyright to the images taken to use as I like. I would be paying them to take photographs for me. I have never looked at this so I have no idea whether I could find a reasonably priced photographer who would do this.
I find firefox 3.5 is perfectly stable. I in fact had a strange problem with hotmail and firefox 3 on linux where it would just crash after using hotmail within clicking about 5 links. So I find firefox 3.5 is more stable than 3 because I don't recall ever having it crash.
In case you hadn't noticed they did publish it. They even went to the lengths of making it the main feature of their website just to make it obvious that they really were publishing it.
You don't seem to have got this quite right. Outside of the US you will find that if the other companies can see your invention then it has become unpatentable because it quoting the UK Intellectual Property Office "We cannot grant a patent, if your invention is public,". So unless the patent troll does some corporate espionage they won't know about your invention until it is public and hence cannot be patented.
I know someone who was the same. Well it was because of his Dad mainly so he followed and generally liked the whole idea. Then he got a sony vaio PC (where it is all one unit attached to the screen) this broke in just over a year. They sent it back to Sony for a repair and got it sent back in the same condition except the back panel was not attached. They complained and got a good deal out of it getting a new PC which was a better model. Within 6 months the new one was dead. The next PC he bought was a Dell, with a normal tower since he actually looked at the performance and figured that perhaps getting a PC with a laptop graphics card and processor is a waste of money (Sony do this because it was stuck to the monitor so they have a unit hardly bigger than a laptop). The Dell has lasted 2.5 years and he is happy with it thought he is now looking at getting an upgrade because of the performance. I have another friend who had a vaio laptop which had a motherboard die after 2 years. I only know of one other person with a vaio so a failure rate of 2/3 is pretty shocking. This is why I would recommend against sony vaios' because the quality is not so good, even the build quality doesn't feel special, unlike Dell's which I find are very good.
But remember that when you watch a videotaped pirated version of the film you might have it wrecked by somebody walking in front of the camera at the wrong moment. This never happens when you are at the cinema of course so the experience is so much better.
An important point that you have missed is that there is a separation between the government and the BBC. The license fee which is collected independently from the government by the BBC is set 5 years in advance (the maximum length between elections is 5 years) so this means that the government cannot push their agenda through the BBC by threatening to reduce funding without an election in which they would get very bad press for trying to restrict the freedoms of the BBC.
Flash fails for me with dual monitor on an ATI card with the open source ATI drivers. ATI and dual monitor on linux is not pretty though, the closed source ATI drivers are hell to set up for dual monitor because ATI has a separate config from xorg.conf so in combination they can get messy. It was working two days ago though and nothing has changed since so I have no idea what is happening. Also I am using a 64 bit system just to make sure that there is no possible way to get it works stably. Thinking about it 64 bit along with ATI must be one of the worst possible options for flash on Linux.
Since nvidia had to rewrite so much of the OS in their huge binary blob I now understand the reason why the 120mb Vista driver is almost 5 times the size of the 21mb Ubuntu driver.
As the first paragraph of the article says "[Ogg Theora] now works in over 24% of the world's web browsers". From the context it is obvious that this is why they are saying it is becoming a big deal. So maybe it won't ever catch on in other places but it does have a large portion of the browser market by being included in the second most popular browser.
I think hard drives would probably be highly reliable for storing data. I personally have never had a piece of electronics go bad on me because I left it for years in dry storage conditions. I think you are making an error because you are considering failure rates of hard drives which are powered up. With a backup system you power it up rarely maybe once a month for a home user, this means the drive does not wear in the same way so the failure chance is smaller.
The keyboard and mouse do just seem to work better than a gamepad. At a LAN one of my friends who has a 360 (and thrashes everybody else when playing on it) tried using a 360 controller to play halo 1 on the PC. It did not take long for him to go back to the mouse because it was significantly inferior and this is with a player who spent most of his time playing with a 360. I am surprised that they have not been able to make a controller which works better. If you think about a mouse it was never designed for playing games, even gaming mice are just a better version of a standard mouse, they have exactly the same principle they are just more accurate and tend to have more buttons.
It does feel more relaxed but the problem is that you have to move your hand away from the normal typing position. With the current layout I can type stuff in all caps relatively easily because my hands are still in the correct position even holding the shift key. With your proposed layout I would have to type with my thumbs which is more awkward. Try typing something while holding F1, you will find it is much harder.
No the tables they are selling on those disks would not cope with a 10 character password. They have a 12 character table listed but that is for pure numeric, the rest have a maximum of 9 characters. Using the calculator http://www.insidepro.com/rainbow.php you can see that to get tables for a 16 character password (which is still a lot less that a password + 20 character salt) you would need more hard disk space than you could expect to be able to buy (several orders of magnitude more). So that leaves the possibility of generating your own tables for that salt and with a proper setup with a unique salt for each password hash then using a rainbow table would not help you since every single password would need a new set of rainbow tables.
That would be true but with something like a 20 character salt the required rainbow tables to cut down the time to a reasonable level would take a ridiculous amount of storage. You could of course compile a set of rainbow tables for that specific salt but then you may as well give up on rainbow tables.
The summary is misleading. The EU hasn't told Microsoft to do anything. They are still investigating but Microsoft decided to remove IE perhaps in the hope that the EU will be pressured into asking them to do that. But so far the EU has not asked them to do anything.
Your argument would be valid if the file picker did not remember than you clicked browse for other folders. But it does remember, at least on my current Ubuntu 9.04 system. So it is one extra click once which is rather insignificant since I seem to have used the file picker hundreds of times since then. I personally find I much prefer it to the windows file picker which makes it hard to jump to a different location with that annoying dropdown menu.
If you had read the summary you might have worked out that the story is about a new agreement on fees. This means that your wikipedia article on what the fees have previously been is completely irrelevant. If you had then RTFA you would find that the summary is correct.
I tried it just the other day. It seemed fairly nice but I was editing some options and it crashed on me, I had to kill it from the command line. I had only been using it for about 20 minutes. I have never had gnome crash on me at all. It did look fairly nice though once I had configured it a bit. I find gnome works really well though and the only minor gripe I have with it is the odd obsession with making everything look huge.
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You don't need ot go out and buy the lateest and greatest graphcis card to run a game. I have played games on a PC which was 5 years older than the game. There was a 3 year gap between the xbox and the xbox 360. There was a 6 year gap between the ps2 and ps3. So PC's are not incomparable to consoles with upgrade timespans. With PC's you get the advantage of being able to have a game look better with newer hardware when it still runs on older hardware whereas with consoles there is fixed hardware which is released with long intervals in between.
The thing that would be nice which you mentioned is that it can be hard to work out whether a game will run or not on PC hardware. Some games overstate the requirements and others can be unclear.
Interestingly Nominium was one of the organisations which created BIND9 the leading open source DNS server.
I agree that a balanced program is needed but I would argue that scanning a photograph would come under fair use. The violation would be distributing the scanned image to someone else. To be honest though I would probably look for a photographer who would give me the copyright to the images taken to use as I like. I would be paying them to take photographs for me. I have never looked at this so I have no idea whether I could find a reasonably priced photographer who would do this.
Probably because then they would need to modify the engine.
I find firefox 3.5 is perfectly stable. I in fact had a strange problem with hotmail and firefox 3 on linux where it would just crash after using hotmail within clicking about 5 links. So I find firefox 3.5 is more stable than 3 because I don't recall ever having it crash.
In case you hadn't noticed they did publish it. They even went to the lengths of making it the main feature of their website just to make it obvious that they really were publishing it.
You don't seem to have got this quite right. Outside of the US you will find that if the other companies can see your invention then it has become unpatentable because it quoting the UK Intellectual Property Office "We cannot grant a patent, if your invention is public,". So unless the patent troll does some corporate espionage they won't know about your invention until it is public and hence cannot be patented.
Later versions of IE aren't fully backwards compatible. This is why companies are still using IE6.
I know someone who was the same. Well it was because of his Dad mainly so he followed and generally liked the whole idea. Then he got a sony vaio PC (where it is all one unit attached to the screen) this broke in just over a year. They sent it back to Sony for a repair and got it sent back in the same condition except the back panel was not attached. They complained and got a good deal out of it getting a new PC which was a better model. Within 6 months the new one was dead. The next PC he bought was a Dell, with a normal tower since he actually looked at the performance and figured that perhaps getting a PC with a laptop graphics card and processor is a waste of money (Sony do this because it was stuck to the monitor so they have a unit hardly bigger than a laptop). The Dell has lasted 2.5 years and he is happy with it thought he is now looking at getting an upgrade because of the performance. I have another friend who had a vaio laptop which had a motherboard die after 2 years. I only know of one other person with a vaio so a failure rate of 2/3 is pretty shocking. This is why I would recommend against sony vaios' because the quality is not so good, even the build quality doesn't feel special, unlike Dell's which I find are very good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YVSXRETml4
But remember that when you watch a videotaped pirated version of the film you might have it wrecked by somebody walking in front of the camera at the wrong moment. This never happens when you are at the cinema of course so the experience is so much better.
An important point that you have missed is that there is a separation between the government and the BBC. The license fee which is collected independently from the government by the BBC is set 5 years in advance (the maximum length between elections is 5 years) so this means that the government cannot push their agenda through the BBC by threatening to reduce funding without an election in which they would get very bad press for trying to restrict the freedoms of the BBC.
Flash fails for me with dual monitor on an ATI card with the open source ATI drivers. ATI and dual monitor on linux is not pretty though, the closed source ATI drivers are hell to set up for dual monitor because ATI has a separate config from xorg.conf so in combination they can get messy. It was working two days ago though and nothing has changed since so I have no idea what is happening. Also I am using a 64 bit system just to make sure that there is no possible way to get it works stably. Thinking about it 64 bit along with ATI must be one of the worst possible options for flash on Linux.
5% of 917 is 45.85. You seem to have calculated 0.5%. So it is actually a lot more than you said.
Since nvidia had to rewrite so much of the OS in their huge binary blob I now understand the reason why the 120mb Vista driver is almost 5 times the size of the 21mb Ubuntu driver.
As the first paragraph of the article says "[Ogg Theora] now works in over 24% of the world's web browsers". From the context it is obvious that this is why they are saying it is becoming a big deal. So maybe it won't ever catch on in other places but it does have a large portion of the browser market by being included in the second most popular browser.
I think hard drives would probably be highly reliable for storing data. I personally have never had a piece of electronics go bad on me because I left it for years in dry storage conditions. I think you are making an error because you are considering failure rates of hard drives which are powered up. With a backup system you power it up rarely maybe once a month for a home user, this means the drive does not wear in the same way so the failure chance is smaller.
The keyboard and mouse do just seem to work better than a gamepad. At a LAN one of my friends who has a 360 (and thrashes everybody else when playing on it) tried using a 360 controller to play halo 1 on the PC. It did not take long for him to go back to the mouse because it was significantly inferior and this is with a player who spent most of his time playing with a 360. I am surprised that they have not been able to make a controller which works better. If you think about a mouse it was never designed for playing games, even gaming mice are just a better version of a standard mouse, they have exactly the same principle they are just more accurate and tend to have more buttons.
It does feel more relaxed but the problem is that you have to move your hand away from the normal typing position. With the current layout I can type stuff in all caps relatively easily because my hands are still in the correct position even holding the shift key. With your proposed layout I would have to type with my thumbs which is more awkward. Try typing something while holding F1, you will find it is much harder.
No the tables they are selling on those disks would not cope with a 10 character password. They have a 12 character table listed but that is for pure numeric, the rest have a maximum of 9 characters. Using the calculator http://www.insidepro.com/rainbow.php you can see that to get tables for a 16 character password (which is still a lot less that a password + 20 character salt) you would need more hard disk space than you could expect to be able to buy (several orders of magnitude more). So that leaves the possibility of generating your own tables for that salt and with a proper setup with a unique salt for each password hash then using a rainbow table would not help you since every single password would need a new set of rainbow tables.
That would be true but with something like a 20 character salt the required rainbow tables to cut down the time to a reasonable level would take a ridiculous amount of storage. You could of course compile a set of rainbow tables for that specific salt but then you may as well give up on rainbow tables.
The summary is misleading. The EU hasn't told Microsoft to do anything. They are still investigating but Microsoft decided to remove IE perhaps in the hope that the EU will be pressured into asking them to do that. But so far the EU has not asked them to do anything.
Your argument would be valid if the file picker did not remember than you clicked browse for other folders. But it does remember, at least on my current Ubuntu 9.04 system. So it is one extra click once which is rather insignificant since I seem to have used the file picker hundreds of times since then. I personally find I much prefer it to the windows file picker which makes it hard to jump to a different location with that annoying dropdown menu.
If you had read the summary you might have worked out that the story is about a new agreement on fees. This means that your wikipedia article on what the fees have previously been is completely irrelevant. If you had then RTFA you would find that the summary is correct.
I tried it just the other day. It seemed fairly nice but I was editing some options and it crashed on me, I had to kill it from the command line. I had only been using it for about 20 minutes. I have never had gnome crash on me at all. It did look fairly nice though once I had configured it a bit. I find gnome works really well though and the only minor gripe I have with it is the odd obsession with making everything look huge.