They didn't fix the problem you wanted to have fixed right away. That is saying they are supposed to act like your servants.
The two developers that I spoke with are official representatives of the gaim project, and they were complete dicks. You cannot excuse that with a mere, "well, that's better than Microsoft would give you.."
How friendly they were is completely besides the point. The point was, I'd much, much rather have rude people that actually FIX problems and LISTEN to complaints, rather than polite people that accomplish nothing, and really ignore what you've got to say.
You need to get over your ideological beliefs about FOSS and realise that the people in charge of gaim had no excuse for their attitudes towards me and their attitudes concerning the quality of their code.
You're just upset that your ego got bruised. That's all there is to this bullshit complaining of yours.
The second guy was even worse; he was in charge of file transfers and such, but outright told me that he didn't care if things didn't work in NAT'd environments and that things would probably never change.
How polite was Bill Gates the last time you contacted him about a bug in MSN Messenger?
If the developers of the defacto standard IM client for *nix don't care if it has issues and don't care to fix those issues, how in the hell do people honestly expect anyone to switch from windows to a FOSS *nix (ie. linux, freebsd, etc).
I don't think the GAIM developers are trying to convince anyone to switch to Linux/FreeBSD. They certainly aren't your personal servants, and free software, although often run by rude people, is (in ALL my experience) FAR, FAR, FAR more responsive to user requests than big commercial software companies. If you'd contacted Microsoft/AOL with a similar problem (or even an actual, serious bug) you'd have recieved a nice, polite form letter in response, telling you to try X, Y, Z unrelated nonsense, and then telling you that the problem you're having doesn't actually exist, and that your suggestion has been passed on to the developers. Maybe 10 versions later, the bug will be half-fixed as they introduce some other serious bugs.
Having bugs is one thing, but not even caring about those bugs? Psssh.
It's not a bug. They don't care that you are missing a minor feature you would like to have. Sounds pretty fair to me.
My roommate owns a Panasonic 50" LCD projection HDTV (which, by the way, is one of those sets that doesn't natively support 1080i), and its optimum viewing angle range is positively tiny- even when compared to my LCD.
I don't know what to tell you about that specific TV... But moder projection screens generally have a better viewing angle than even the best LCDs.
Also, comparing it to your 24" LCD isn't quite fair. The problems with viewing angles multiply as screen-size increases. So much so that at 50" or so, there might not be *any* angle where you can view the entire screen, undistorted. Admitedly, viewing angles for LCDs have increased recently, but not by any significant ammount.
First point me to a sub-$1000 50" HDTV that supports 1080i.
I'm quite sure I could find a few if I was willing to put some effort into researching them, just for you... Instead, I just found the cheapest one (51", $1,170) on bestbuy:
My personal opinion is that "HDTV" and "HD-DVD" or whatever are totally missing the point.
HDTV signals need a format standard, modulation scheme, etc. If they didn't write it well, recievers would be very, very expensive.
It is also very nice to have standard resolutions to aim for, otherwise everything would have completely arbitrary resolution, aspect, etc.
In particular, it's still very difficult to even decode HDTV in realtime on a brand-new PC. You certainly wouldn't have seen people getting HDTVs 5+ years ago, if not for custom-built electronics that had an HDTV standard to work off of.
There's no point in buying one of these "flat panel televisions" -- just go buy a computer monitor.
Point me to a 50" 16:9 computer monitor that can do at least 1920x1080 for under $1000.
Right now, my TV is mainly just an output device for my PC acting as a DVR, and an HDTV will have exactly the same purpose for me.
There's no point in getting hi-def content on a dead-plastic disc or from your dead mainstream media. It's all just going to be files on a computer.
Some of us want to watch good-quality HDTV movies in the near future, not 10+ years in the future. Even the largest, most expensive hard drives out now can only hold a dozen or so high-quality HDTV movies. People aren't going to pay $50 per movie for the storage space alone, so the discs, even just as a computer mass-storage device, are immensely useful.
So you denied an Xbox 360 to someone, who was likely standing in line outside that same Walmart all night as well, so you could make a few bucks on Ebay?
More likely, he denide an Xbox 360 to someone who WASN'T standing in line.
That's life... Him, the company he bought his Xbox360 from, the guy he sold it to, etc., are all out to get the best deal for themselves, within the rules of the game. When the rules are "limit 2" you can't complain that somebody bought 1 more than needed, especially since this isn't some life-or-death thing, like medication, food, shelter, etc. Society at large has long since left behind any sense of courtesy or charity.
It would also help to use a wrist exercise equipment, such as a physiotherapy ball/gel, or even some sports grip equipment (often a spring with two handles), to strenghten up your wrist by exercise,
In my experience, that one is the most important step of all. From what I've seen, muscle mass and strength seem to be directly related to RSI. It also explains why women are more predisposed to RSI than men.
And an unknown college dropout named Bill Gates, together with his partner Paul Allen, wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair, forming a company called Micro-Soft in the process. He would later drop the hyphen and the capital S, and make billions of dollars.
Dammit Slashdot! If you would just drop the capital S, you could be making billions of dollars too!
So? There's no reason PCs couldn't have operated with linear power supplies. They are even cheaper than SMPS. Effeciency and size wasn't much of an issue at the time.
Storage technology involved huge platters or huge tapes.
Although slow, cassette tapes were a real option back then. Large floppy disks from IBM were also starting to appear at the time, although expensive.
RAM was damn expensive.
Everything was expensive. That doesn't mean there wasn't a market for low-spec'd, expensive machines (still far smaller and far less expensive than minicomputers).
So what did they think Intel should have done? Released a "PC" in 1971 that [...] had 4k RAM
Sure, why not? Even with 4K of RAM, people would definately have found uses for them.
The technology indeed wasn't ready. The PC came when it did because technology allowed it to come, not because of lack of vision.
Only if you redefine "PC" in some very specific way. Practical PCs could have come about years before they did.
I'd like to see the car you drive. No transmission? No accessory belt? Mine goes gasoline->motion->motion->motion->motion, etc., and those mechanical losses really add-up.
Engine efficiency comes from small engines running at constant speeds. That's already accomplished with the hybrids.
Not even close. They've attacked the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, and improved things only where gasoline engines are at their very worst. They could still stand to be improved by a tremendous ammount.
The whole point of the hybrid design is that it turns off the gasoline engine periodically, when it's not needed.
It would mean you'd get LESS of an ADVANTAGE out of it, but that doesn't eliminate it's usefulness.
Just think... Right now, if regenerative braking isn't enough power generation, the gas engine has to start up to charge the batteries. With this, the gas engine could be charging the batteries all the time, without directly spending any gasoline to do so. Almost like turbcharging for your hybrid.
The only question I have: is steam is the best way to go about this? There are other heat-engines which don't need much warm-up period before they start to produce power, unlike steam.
That is the most trite post I've seen modded up in quite a while.
Did anybody here NOT know that heat from exhaust and braking is a significant waste? Did anybody not know that several cars now include regenerative braking?
Does anybody not know, or not agree that: "It will be interesting to see [...] the future"
I've found modern VIA chipsets to be fine. Great linux support, does everything I need it to. What're your problems with them?
You must not have tried very many of them...
They do commonly have poor support for Linux, particularly IDE without DMA, or something like that. In the past few years, their northbridges have been getting hotter and hotter very very quickly, and yet motherboard makers rarely put a fan on them. Besides serious power consumption problems, that leads to real instability unless your system has terribly good airflow.
Somewhat higher capacity but not as much as initially promised
It's not "somewhat higher capacity", it's at least 2.7X the capacity as dual-layer DVDs, likely being double that very soon after launch.
New and Improved Onerous DRM
Compared to DVDs, or compared to HD-DVD? HD-DVD certainly isn't any better in this department. I would certainly suggest everyone hold-off on buying high-def discs of any kind until the DRM is cracked wide-open.
Ancient encoding schema
Yeah, I never understood why Sony included "chiseled clay tablet encoding" into the Blu-Ray standard. Seriously though, WTF?
Macrovision Region encoding Prohibited user operations
Same things you get with standard DVDs, HD-DVDs, or Blu-Ray. No advantage, no disadvantage. Par for the course.
Sony dropped a bombshell on it's partners when they stated that the 50gb discs wont be available at launch, and probably not for a while.
Dual-layer Blu-Ray discs are going to be available at launch. Just try to find Sony's press release that says otherwise.
Sony also said that they're sticking with Mpeg2 to encode. This isn't good, because using Mpeg2 at a high bitrate most of the disc is taken up by the movie and it doesn't leave much space for the extras.
Doesn't matter at all. Sony can use whatever they want, and it doesn't force other studios to do the same. The players will still support H.264, even though Sony has decided not to use it in their initial Blu-Ray discs.
HD-DVD will use VC1 or Mpeg4 which will give the same quality picture and using a lot less space.
Blu-Ray players will ship capable of playing the same codecs as HD-DVD. So this "advantage" of yours is just pure bullshit. HD-DVDs can be made with MPEG-2 if you wish to do so, and Blu-Ray discs can be made with H.264 or VC-1 if you wish to do so. It's up to each of the studios.
So even though on paper, BluRay has better specs, in real life HD-DVD will allow more stuff on a disc.
The story lists many good reasons I really don't watch any new shows, as well as several reasons I stopped going to the theatre, mostly stopped buying DVDs, etc.
A few new shows I started watching like The Dead Zone and Monk started off pretty well... Then the in-show advertising got too distracting for me, and I stopped watching. Occasionally, I'll catch one of the shows again, and marvel at how incredibly crappy it has become. Maybe it's just coincidence, but the rise is product placement and pop-up ads, seems to ALWAY coincide with the show getting real crappy, real fast. Same goes for older shows, like Law and Order... As the writing got worse, the in-show ads got bigger and flashier.
Movies have had the same problem. Is it coincidence that the downfall of Hollywood has coincided with the rise of product-placement in movies? If T-3 had been made a few years earlier, would it have been as good as T-2?
Now, to my point... Having used a DVR for a great many years now, I can safely say that ads are underrated. I would love to be able to watch a select few ads again, but it's not worth watching ALL of them to see a few interesting ones. Unfortunately, skipping throw commercials often leaves you watching the middle of the next commercial, rather than the beginning. Stations could use Tivos to their own advantage, by including a certain signal in the video to let DVRs know when a commercial begins/ends. Then, you have instant push-button access to skip to the end of the current commercial (if it is loud, flashy, repetitive, or otherwise uninteresting) and start at the beginning of the next. That would give advertisers a real chance to make their sales pitch to DVR users, and put the burden on the advertisers where it belongs, instead of the networks. I know I would certainly watch more commercials for things I'm likely to buy, as well as shows I'd be interested in, local events, etc.
And before I end this rant, I'd like to say how ironic it is that advertising is going backwards now. It started as live, in-show endorsements, progressed to completely unreleated commercials in-between segments of the show, and now is being put *back* into the show. Perhaps they made a wrong-turn somewhere?
That approach will probably serve them quite well within their own borders, but I don't see how they can hope to impose their own standards on the rest of the world.
Quite easily, actually. They just have to INCLUDE support for that standard. In DVD players, they include SVCD support, people use it, and shortly thereafter, non-Chinese manufacturers are forced to include support for SVCDs in their players as well.
All they have to do is make their own standard a little bit cheaper, a little bit better, etc., and once they've pushed out the hardware, everyone will use it.
I can think of numerous ways the same would work quite well for TVs, phones, etc. They could even patent those features, and charge a small fee for anyone who wants to use them, to make it even more profitable for them.
Companies like GM, Ford, boeing are all being overtaken by European and Asian counterparts such as Airbus, Mercedes (who of course, recently took over Chrysler), Toyota and so on.
That's funny, because last I heard Airbus is way behind schedule with their A380, costing them dearly, and Boeing's more fuel-effecient 747 is seeing a huge increase in orders thanks to both Airbus' mistakes, and balloning petroleum costs.
The American auto industry certainly has screwed-up lately, but this is a short-term issue that may be completely reversed in a couple years. People like to make a huge deal out of it when foreign companies outsell (or buy) American companies, but hardly ever when the opposite happens (much, much more frequently). Why is that?
Dr. von Braun is a good example, for instance. As I would hope you're aware, he was German. If it were not for him, America and the Soviet Union would not have had space programs.
And if not for Goddard (American), you wouldn't have heard of Von Braun.
Without either, the space race likely would have been decades off, but we'd still have gotten there by now.
Guglielmo Marconi was Italian.
And his work was largely stolen from Tesla (proven in court), who was an American.
Your examples are not very good. Never the less, you have a point. Though you seem to be attributing a large ammout of arrogance to Americans where none really exists. Every kid that has grown-up in the USA knows that many of our celebrated historical figures (including inventors) were foreign by birth. Everyone knows Einstein came over here to escape warn-torn Europe. etc. The pride lies in the fact that the USA was the country that EVERYONE WANTED to go to. It's been said many times that "America is an idea", not just a country. Having an economy that encourages innovation, inventors, and appropriately rewards the best ideas (rather than those who are part of some class) helps.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't fix the problem you wanted to have fixed right away. That is saying they are supposed to act like your servants.
How friendly they were is completely besides the point. The point was, I'd much, much rather have rude people that actually FIX problems and LISTEN to complaints, rather than polite people that accomplish nothing, and really ignore what you've got to say.
You're just upset that your ego got bruised. That's all there is to this bullshit complaining of yours.
How polite was Bill Gates the last time you contacted him about a bug in MSN Messenger?
I don't think the GAIM developers are trying to convince anyone to switch to Linux/FreeBSD. They certainly aren't your personal servants, and free software, although often run by rude people, is (in ALL my experience) FAR, FAR, FAR more responsive to user requests than big commercial software companies. If you'd contacted Microsoft/AOL with a similar problem (or even an actual, serious bug) you'd have recieved a nice, polite form letter in response, telling you to try X, Y, Z unrelated nonsense, and then telling you that the problem you're having doesn't actually exist, and that your suggestion has been passed on to the developers. Maybe 10 versions later, the bug will be half-fixed as they introduce some other serious bugs.
It's not a bug. They don't care that you are missing a minor feature you would like to have. Sounds pretty fair to me.
I don't know what to tell you about that specific TV... But moder projection screens generally have a better viewing angle than even the best LCDs.
Also, comparing it to your 24" LCD isn't quite fair. The problems with viewing angles multiply as screen-size increases. So much so that at 50" or so, there might not be *any* angle where you can view the entire screen, undistorted. Admitedly, viewing angles for LCDs have increased recently, but not by any significant ammount.
I'm quite sure I could find a few if I was willing to put some effort into researching them, just for you... Instead, I just found the cheapest one (51", $1,170) on bestbuy:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=707
Now you can point me to the 51" sub-$1,170 computer monitors.
Okay, then you could have at least listed some 50" sub $1000 computer monitors that can do 1280x720. I would be interested in seeing them as well.
As opposed to what? LCDs with their universal viewing angles??? Ha!
I suspect your problems with rear-projection displays are just hold-overs from early sets, before those issues were largely resolved.
Ah, yes, the old "Linux.Schwartz.Worm" written by 406UR7.
A fan of Spaceballs on
A cold war. Accumulating allies before the first shots are fired.
When they're competing on price, features, marketing, content, players, how "open" their DRM is, etc., then it will be a format war.
HDTV signals need a format standard, modulation scheme, etc. If they didn't write it well, recievers would be very, very expensive.
It is also very nice to have standard resolutions to aim for, otherwise everything would have completely arbitrary resolution, aspect, etc.
In particular, it's still very difficult to even decode HDTV in realtime on a brand-new PC. You certainly wouldn't have seen people getting HDTVs 5+ years ago, if not for custom-built electronics that had an HDTV standard to work off of.
Point me to a 50" 16:9 computer monitor that can do at least 1920x1080 for under $1000.
Right now, my TV is mainly just an output device for my PC acting as a DVR, and an HDTV will have exactly the same purpose for me.
Some of us want to watch good-quality HDTV movies in the near future, not 10+ years in the future. Even the largest, most expensive hard drives out now can only hold a dozen or so high-quality HDTV movies. People aren't going to pay $50 per movie for the storage space alone, so the discs, even just as a computer mass-storage device, are immensely useful.
Dyslexics of the world, Untie!
More likely, he denide an Xbox 360 to someone who WASN'T standing in line.
That's life... Him, the company he bought his Xbox360 from, the guy he sold it to, etc., are all out to get the best deal for themselves, within the rules of the game. When the rules are "limit 2" you can't complain that somebody bought 1 more than needed, especially since this isn't some life-or-death thing, like medication, food, shelter, etc. Society at large has long since left behind any sense of courtesy or charity.
In my experience, that one is the most important step of all. From what I've seen, muscle mass and strength seem to be directly related to RSI. It also explains why women are more predisposed to RSI than men.
Dammit Slashdot! If you would just drop the capital S, you could be making billions of dollars too!
So? There's no reason PCs couldn't have operated with linear power supplies. They are even cheaper than SMPS. Effeciency and size wasn't much of an issue at the time.
Although slow, cassette tapes were a real option back then. Large floppy disks from IBM were also starting to appear at the time, although expensive.
Everything was expensive. That doesn't mean there wasn't a market for low-spec'd, expensive machines (still far smaller and far less expensive than minicomputers).
Sure, why not? Even with 4K of RAM, people would definately have found uses for them.
Only if you redefine "PC" in some very specific way. Practical PCs could have come about years before they did.
I'd like to see the car you drive. No transmission? No accessory belt? Mine goes gasoline->motion->motion->motion->motion, etc., and those mechanical losses really add-up.
Not even close. They've attacked the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, and improved things only where gasoline engines are at their very worst. They could still stand to be improved by a tremendous ammount.
It would mean you'd get LESS of an ADVANTAGE out of it, but that doesn't eliminate it's usefulness.
Just think... Right now, if regenerative braking isn't enough power generation, the gas engine has to start up to charge the batteries. With this, the gas engine could be charging the batteries all the time, without directly spending any gasoline to do so. Almost like turbcharging for your hybrid.
The only question I have: is steam is the best way to go about this? There are other heat-engines which don't need much warm-up period before they start to produce power, unlike steam.
That is the most trite post I've seen modded up in quite a while.
Did anybody here NOT know that heat from exhaust and braking is a significant waste? Did anybody not know that several cars now include regenerative braking?
Does anybody not know, or not agree that: "It will be interesting to see [...] the future"
You must not have tried very many of them...
They do commonly have poor support for Linux, particularly IDE without DMA, or something like that. In the past few years, their northbridges have been getting hotter and hotter very very quickly, and yet motherboard makers rarely put a fan on them. Besides serious power consumption problems, that leads to real instability unless your system has terribly good airflow.
I'll admit, I didn't even notice to whom I was replying...
If you had bothered to read the few few sentences of the article, you would know the answer:
[...] long considered threats to the U.S.' status as a technological superpower, [...]
No, it is nothing like that at all.
It's not "somewhat higher capacity", it's at least 2.7X the capacity as dual-layer DVDs, likely being double that very soon after launch.
Compared to DVDs, or compared to HD-DVD? HD-DVD certainly isn't any better in this department. I would certainly suggest everyone hold-off on buying high-def discs of any kind until the DRM is cracked wide-open.
Yeah, I never understood why Sony included "chiseled clay tablet encoding" into the Blu-Ray standard. Seriously though, WTF?
Same things you get with standard DVDs, HD-DVDs, or Blu-Ray. No advantage, no disadvantage. Par for the course.
Dual-layer Blu-Ray discs are going to be available at launch. Just try to find Sony's press release that says otherwise.
Doesn't matter at all. Sony can use whatever they want, and it doesn't force other studios to do the same. The players will still support H.264, even though Sony has decided not to use it in their initial Blu-Ray discs.
Blu-Ray players will ship capable of playing the same codecs as HD-DVD. So this "advantage" of yours is just pure bullshit. HD-DVDs can be made with MPEG-2 if you wish to do so, and Blu-Ray discs can be made with H.264 or VC-1 if you wish to do so. It's up to each of the studios.
Not at all.
You didn't even actually READ my post, did you? Try starting a few sentence before "T-3".
The story lists many good reasons I really don't watch any new shows, as well as several reasons I stopped going to the theatre, mostly stopped buying DVDs, etc.
A few new shows I started watching like The Dead Zone and Monk started off pretty well... Then the in-show advertising got too distracting for me, and I stopped watching. Occasionally, I'll catch one of the shows again, and marvel at how incredibly crappy it has become. Maybe it's just coincidence, but the rise is product placement and pop-up ads, seems to ALWAY coincide with the show getting real crappy, real fast. Same goes for older shows, like Law and Order... As the writing got worse, the in-show ads got bigger and flashier.
Movies have had the same problem. Is it coincidence that the downfall of Hollywood has coincided with the rise of product-placement in movies? If T-3 had been made a few years earlier, would it have been as good as T-2?
Now, to my point... Having used a DVR for a great many years now, I can safely say that ads are underrated. I would love to be able to watch a select few ads again, but it's not worth watching ALL of them to see a few interesting ones. Unfortunately, skipping throw commercials often leaves you watching the middle of the next commercial, rather than the beginning. Stations could use Tivos to their own advantage, by including a certain signal in the video to let DVRs know when a commercial begins/ends. Then, you have instant push-button access to skip to the end of the current commercial (if it is loud, flashy, repetitive, or otherwise uninteresting) and start at the beginning of the next. That would give advertisers a real chance to make their sales pitch to DVR users, and put the burden on the advertisers where it belongs, instead of the networks. I know I would certainly watch more commercials for things I'm likely to buy, as well as shows I'd be interested in, local events, etc.
And before I end this rant, I'd like to say how ironic it is that advertising is going backwards now. It started as live, in-show endorsements, progressed to completely unreleated commercials in-between segments of the show, and now is being put *back* into the show. Perhaps they made a wrong-turn somewhere?
Quite easily, actually. They just have to INCLUDE support for that standard. In DVD players, they include SVCD support, people use it, and shortly thereafter, non-Chinese manufacturers are forced to include support for SVCDs in their players as well.
All they have to do is make their own standard a little bit cheaper, a little bit better, etc., and once they've pushed out the hardware, everyone will use it.
I can think of numerous ways the same would work quite well for TVs, phones, etc. They could even patent those features, and charge a small fee for anyone who wants to use them, to make it even more profitable for them.
That's funny, because last I heard Airbus is way behind schedule with their A380, costing them dearly, and Boeing's more fuel-effecient 747 is seeing a huge increase in orders thanks to both Airbus' mistakes, and balloning petroleum costs.
The American auto industry certainly has screwed-up lately, but this is a short-term issue that may be completely reversed in a couple years. People like to make a huge deal out of it when foreign companies outsell (or buy) American companies, but hardly ever when the opposite happens (much, much more frequently). Why is that?
And if not for Goddard (American), you wouldn't have heard of Von Braun.
Without either, the space race likely would have been decades off, but we'd still have gotten there by now.
And his work was largely stolen from Tesla (proven in court), who was an American.
Your examples are not very good. Never the less, you have a point. Though you seem to be attributing a large ammout of arrogance to Americans where none really exists. Every kid that has grown-up in the USA knows that many of our celebrated historical figures (including inventors) were foreign by birth. Everyone knows Einstein came over here to escape warn-torn Europe. etc. The pride lies in the fact that the USA was the country that EVERYONE WANTED to go to. It's been said many times that "America is an idea", not just a country. Having an economy that encourages innovation, inventors, and appropriately rewards the best ideas (rather than those who are part of some class) helps.