It's shameful to have anybody in the USA express such a position.
No, it would be shameful for someone in the USA to be unable to express such a position.
I can't say I completely disagree with him, either. With access to public airwaves comes public responsibilities. Should some half-assed radio station start spewing out false information, with thousands of people listening and believing them, they quite literally could cause a lot of harm. Proverbially shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
I have no idea if that is the case here, but discounting his argument because something similar has been used by bad people for bad things is pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, they have obviously missed the fact that much of their content could be done start to finish in Flash starting with Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Does Macromedia have a live, realtime streaming software for Flash? Does Macromedia have a program that will automatically convert (preferably in realtime) from video to Flash? No? Guess it's not a very good option for this task, then.
Besides, modern video codecs are very effecient at encoding animation to very low bitrates. They could be streaming cartoons at 100K and almost nobody would notice the difference (I would know because I've done it).
For much of their lineup, 30fps video is massive overkill.
Most newer codecs support variable FPS, so where the content needs 30fps for the motion to be smooth, it can use it, and still only use 0.1fps where everything is still.
Besides, do you really think the only thing they will be streaming is the animation? You don't think they're going to have some (live-action) commercials mixed in there with the animation?
Heck, some of it could be sent out as a flip-book without losing anything and quite possibly improving on
I look forward to hearing your explanation as to how a flip book could POSSIBLY be an improvement over video.
I really hate/. moderations lately. IMHO you deserve perhaps a "-1 Banal" or "-1 Uninsightful" rating for this.
You used to be a Mac only person (making some guesses here...) but now you are a Solaris user.
No, I think he's talking about Sun making dtrace open source, which might turn him into a FreeBSD user, or perhaps allow him to use OS X exclusively (not likely with the kernel changes needed, but maybe Apple will see the light.)
So, sacrificing your value-added product to the public domain seems to be entirely altruistic AFAICT. With something like NFS, they stood to gain directly by allowing others to use it, but that doesn't appear to be the case with dtrace.
Perhaps it's not altruism. Perhaps it's an attempt to improve all Unix systems, to get people to switch away from Windows. That would be very benefitial to Sun.
Forget about your rights, technology has made them obsolete.
To be fair, there is a huge difference between the two.
Privacy rights are not an artifical government construct, designed to help companies profit, because the profit motive to companies would directly benefit the public at large.
If the detrimental effects of copyright become greater than the benefits of copyright to the public, it would be only right for the government to eliminate copyright. Not that I'm suggesting we are anywhere near that extreme.
We still need a port at the mouth of the Missisippi and the people who work at the port will need housing, grocery stores, etc...
And what would be wrong with bringing in large volumes of dirt to fill-in the bowl (putting it above sea-level) before constructing builtings? Sections of New Orleans already above sea level survived quite well.
you could get that much space from 3 dual layer DVDs
Yes, and people would be happy to swap discs 3 times...
seriously, who is dissatisfied by the visual quality of DVDs?
Every single person with an HDTV.
people consider DVDs to have the best picture quality around
What? Who are these people, and what were they comparing? DVDs to VHS? Not a lot of debate there...
TV isn't really worth watching anymore,
Here's the entire crux of your argument, yet you didn't bother to argue this point at all. If people think TV is worth watching, they can completely disregard your post as nonsense.
or buy a $3000 TV for marginal picture improvement.
It's not 'marginal' by any stretch. You get 6X the resolution with HD that you had with normal res TV/DVDs.
you'd have to be pretty blind not to be somewhat satisfied by standard picture quality. you can see what's going on, can't you? then why does it matter?
You could see what was going on with VHS tapes couldn't you? Why then did everyone transition to DVDs? For that matter, why did everyone transition from black and white to color, since you could see what was going on with a B&W picture?
Your post does a very good job illustrating what is so very wrong with the current slashdot moderation system.
I have been affected by inability to play quicktime streams, which I suspect is an identical obfusticated playlist issue
No, it's a user error.
inability to save real streams to play in my car, which is a DRM problem and more than I've ever seen MS do
Again, user error. You simply don't know how to save them, because you haven't bothered to learn. The same could be said in reverse if someone had learned how to save Real streams, but not WMV streams.
And you're completely wrong. WM actually encrypts streams with DRM by default. You won't notice if you're just playing them on your local machine, but if you send them to another machine using MPlayer/Xine, you'll see nothing but a green window with noise, and only hear blips. THAT is what Microsoft does, and they are the ONLY COMPANY doing that. Now, the DRM enabled by default is something you can disable fairly easily if you know it's there and know you NEED to disable it, but Microsoft is being very sneaky about it.
I'm sick of the whole "we didn't include a DTS track to the lack of space" argument.
Okay then: "We didn't include a DTS track because normal-bitrate AC3 sounds just as good, unless it was mastered by a DTS stock-holder who intentionally sabotaged it."
I hope you don't think that the "no space" argument is made-up. It's quite true that just about any DVD with a DTS track has terrible-looking video.
All HD discs should contain stereo, DD, and DTS tracks for both the video, and all extras.
Screw that. One or the other. And besides, with the extra space available on HD discs, you can expect to see lossless audio tracks soon, which should very effectively kill off DTS for good.
These new things don't offer anything over DVD other than theoretically better picture (only with the right kind of HDTV),
No, not with "the right kind of HDTV"... With ANY KIND of HDTV, you'll have a better picture than DVDs can offer.
while being way more expensive and with confusion over competing formats to boot.
DVD was "way more expensive" than VHS too, but that didn't slow it down. I'd bet VHS was more expensive than film at the time, too. High-speed broadband: more expensive than dial-up. Microwave ovens: more expensive than conventional ovens.
double-layer DVD blanks are still hideously expensive.
And your point? How does this have to do with anything?
By the time they come down to a reasonable price, Fry's will be selling 800 gig hard drives for $50.
I'm sure your numbers are off, but never the less, CDs were far cheaper than DVDs (per GB) until quite recently. Did that stop DVDs?
Besides, the old argument of Discs vs. Disks has gone on for a long time now, and you declaring that one or the other is a clear winner is ridiculous enough to dismiss outright. While hard drives are always getting cheaper, CDs/DVDs generally still cost about half as much per GB, and have greater flexibility. So even if the price situation was reversed, I doubt discs would be replaced by HDDs for most purposes.
Looks a bit blocky, but compresses incredibly well
I've used just about every codec out there, and WMV isn't all that good... I'd say it's just slightly better than MPEG-4. Other codecs like H.264 are much better, and can be played NATIVELY on absolutely any system (no need for propritary DLLs that only work on x86).
ogg theora and dirac just aren't ready for primetime yet)
VP3 (upon which Theora is based) was ready about 6 years ago. Mature, open source, patent free, etc.
Also, I've found it the easiest of the main video formats [...] to get working in linux - just dump the dlls in the right format and both xine and mplayer can play them flawlessly, even as streams from websites (just install gxine or kaffeine).
This is completely ridiculous. The WMV DLLs don't work any better than the Real DLLs, or the Quicktime libs. I can't even guess where you got some crazy idea like this. PEBKAC
So I'm all in favour of requiring windows media player to view videos
No you aren't. MPlayer and Xine aren't Windows Media Player, so you obviously don't want WMP to be required, even though you say so. MPlayer and Xine can't handle these obfusticated playlist files yet, nor the DRM, or many of the other idiotic things Microsoft does.
At least Real and Apple (quicktime) haven't sent cease and desist letters to open source projects, claiming their file format is protected by patents, and demanding support be removed (see VirtualDub).
Excuse me, but I don't have to provide any evidence that it wasn't me. THEY - the accuser has to PROVE that it is/was me!
That is absolutely ridiculous. It is not up to the accuser to provide incontrovertable proof, as you are insisting. It's up to them to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and an IP address is that, just as a license number is. Just as an eyewitness is. None of these is incontrovertable, but it is reasonable proof. And once they've provided that much, it is up to you to discredit/disprove their evidence, and their case.
By the way - IANAL, but I am an expert witness who's testified in cases about the unreliability of IP's as evidence...
We kid ourselves thinking the US is "special" and above this all. It might just be human nature.
The problem with saying that something is just "human nature" takes all responsibility out of the loop.
"Sure, I decided to kill a bunch of people, thinking I could get away with it, but hey, that's just human nature, right? I can't be expected to act in a socially acceptable manner and obey laws if nobody is around to force me to do so..."
The counter to your arguement would be the large numbers of people who AREN'T looting, who AREN'T raping and murdering others.
why was the evacuation order given only 24 hours in advance?
Probably because hurricanes don't always go where you expected them to go, several days earlier... And false-positives serve to make people ignore all warnings in the future.
why did Bush wait two days to curtail his cozy vacation to respond to the crisis?
Do you really believe the president makes that big of a difference? Him cutting his vacation short is just a show for the public. This actually worked out nicely for him, because it gets the news media off of the protesters and gives him some OTHER excuse to give-up on his PR disaster of a vacation.
What happens if someone has a wireless router in their apartment and the neighbor downloads music using it?
Well, the RIAA, not being psychic, call you in to court, where you have every opportunity to offer evidence that it wasn't you.
If your car is used in a crime, you'll also probably get dragged into court, and released just as soon as you explain it was stolen a few days earlier.
Both are commercial, proprietary, closed-source apps. Similar situation, similar story. Totally different attitude.
Since when did the license of a program become the ONLY important issue?
Post a story about two vastly different programs that both happen to be GPLd, and you'll also get two vastly different attitudes.
I also haven't seen any of these complaints about this being a slashvertisment that you are claiming. Most of them seem to be along the lines of "How are they still in business, and why should I care?" At the very least, Opera runs on Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/Symbian/etc., not just Windows, so there's some justification for posting a story about it on/.
Speaking of TV cards, a bit over 2 years ago I set up a PVR-style computer (mini-ITX motherboard, Hauppage PVR250, and a couple big hard drives).
I did the same thing on Linux about 2 years ago as well. No doubt my setup took longer to get working smoothly, but mostly because I insisted on having my system do everything I could possibly want... I'd be very interested to know how quickly you can re-encode captured videos, edit out the commercials, make a CD image and burn it to disc on your Windows machine, using only the Hauppage remote control.
None of this required fiddling around or re-doing installs.
You got very lucky.
I don't intend to move the tuner to another computer so I'm not interested in repeat-installability.
The instant something stop working for absolutely no reason (Windows), you'll be interested.
In the 24+ months this computer has been in constant operation, it has crashed maybe a dozen times, and usually from me trying to do too many things at once on it
Well at least you're honest about it crashing. However, there is absolutely no reason a computer should crash from doing "too many things at once". I'm almost constantly doing dozens of things at once on my multimedia system, and not only has it never crashed, it's always quite responsive. Even with a couple videos being re-encoded using up 100% of the CPU, large files being copied over the network via SSH, while I'm editing a video, there's really almost no slowdown.
(editing, recording and copying large video files simultaneously tends to be a bit much for the 1Ghz Via processor).
Okay, then it should be slower, and possibly less responsive. Crashing is NOT a valid response.
That computer was built for a specific purpose, which Windows handles remarkably well
The only problem with Windows is that it tries to be everything to everybody, and with such broadness comes the vast increase in opportunity for instability, not to mention increases in resources required to simply install and run the OS.
Being everything to everyone does not cause instability. There's absolutely no reason for it. Increased resources can certainly be a side-effect, however I suggest you compare the newest versions of Windows with much older version with lower requirements, and tell me what features the old version is lacking, which makes newer versions so slow. I'm sure you'll be hard-pressed to find anything of the sort. Windows is bloated and slow for the sake of being bloated and slow, I'm afraid.
However, since it is so widespread, it usually has almost universal support from vendors most average consumers are going to deal with.
You act like that's a good thing. One of the great advantages of using Linux/BSD is the open-source drivers made by 3rd parties who own the hardware and want to get the most out of it. I can't tell you the number of times I've had hardware with some terrible limitations on Windows, where the Unix drivers for the same hardware had no such limitations.
I'm sure that was a bit confusing, so a few examples: Printers that can print at double the resolution using open source drivers. Video cards that support a larger number of modes with open source drivers. Chipsets that have far better performance with open source drivers. And many, many more similar situations.
most of the products offered for sale at retail stores don't have native support for these operating systems.
You'd be surprised. If you don't happen to be using the latest version of Windows, you might find that many new devices won't work for you. You also might find that your new device requires a newer version of some software (eg. DirectX) but some older devices you have won't
I want something that works the way it says it will on the box, not something that I have to scour the web for in vain hopes someone else already wrote the drivers for it, or dig into the details trying to piecemeal my own together to get it to do what it says on the box.
That's pretty ridiculous, for two reasons.
First off, because Windows never "just works". I've tried, extensively, but Windows always screws-up for no particular reason. Install the drivers, reboot, drivers aren't installed, the installation silently failed. Woohoo! I sure am glad Windows "just works", aren't you?
After extensive work, I figure out why it failed... Maybe a directory with the same name already existed in %TEMP%. Maybe installation was interrupted the first time, and it refuses to overwrite the old partial install and I have to go in there and delete everything manually. Maybe the files are being read by some other program, so we have a sharing violation, and everything gets screwed up. Maybe I installed windows to \WIN2k instead of \WINNT and a several apps still have that value hardcoded. Maybe Windows is just being the unstable POS it always is, and the driver installer that works perfectly on other systems with exactly the same configuration, mysteriously crashes in the same place, over and over again...
Crazy crap like this is exactly what I always had to put up with when using Windows. It's no wonder people look upon their computers as a mysterous magic box, because Windows is so incredibly inconsistent and unstable.
Linux/FreeBSD actually work. It may take a bit longer to look-up the software you need to use, and perhaps an option or command you have to set, but it's a case of a stitch in time. You can either spend a tiny extra bit of time up-front, or you can spend a load of time later on, when Windows just decides to stop working with your hardware for absolutely no reason. With anything other than Windows, you have consistency... Doing the same thing twice yeilds the same results. If you got your hardware to work with Linux on your machine, you can do the exact same thing to get it to work on another machine. With Linux, it's a complete crapshoot.
You talk about TV cards... Well, with Linux, you have to spend a little time setting everything up, but then you have a very, very powerful environment, where you can do more than some professional studios. Doing the basic stuff doesn't take long either. A little bit of time up-front, and you'll have something that will work perfectly for years to come, while Windows will be up-and-running quickly, and you'll spend years trying to get it to do what you actually want it to do, rather than the default options that don't work for you. And there's always the whole "stop working at random times for no reason" thing you have to put up with. Let's reboot again!
I've given up on downloading years ago. I just don't care enough to wait days for downloads to complete and find out how to a) uncompress the shitty, obscure compression format du jour
You must not try hard at all. There are numerous free programs (like XAce extractor) that will uncompress just about any format there is. No need to search, get one program and you can handle them all.
and b) how to convert the shitty, obscure codec du jour junk to something usable (or even just *play* it).
Try MPlayer (Windows/Linux/BSD/Unix/Mac) and grab the codecs pack. Play 99.9% of videos out there without any extra effort.
Plus, if you factor in all associated cost like DSL and flat rate fees and electricity, that makes for a whole bunch of DVDs you can rent or CDs you can buy.
Well that all depends on whether you'll need to have DSL whether or not you download movies. If so, then it's effectively free. If you also need to have at least one computer operating all the time, then there's no extra cost for the electricity either.
You can't legally drive a car 200 MP/H, yet you can buy ones which will go that fast.
It's illegal to drive a car 200MPH ON PUBLIC ROADS in most countries, but that doesn't make it illegal to drive a car 200MPH.
Just as it's illegal to walk around in public with a gun (most places), but that doesn't make it illegal to own a gun.
Back to the car analogy... I would like to see someone try to make a car that can't go more than the speed limit, but CAN go the full speed-limit up steep hills, in hurricane-force headwinds. Even more fun is trying to make a car that can't exceed the speed limit, but can accelerate to the full speed limit (75MPH) from a complete stop in a few seconds.
I just use the blocklists they provide, run my scripts to convert them all into net/subnet notation (eg. 10.34.18.0/255.255.0.0) and add them to my P2P program's blacklist. For gtk-gnutella, that's 'hostiles.txt'. For Gnucleus (Win32) there's a blacklist section in the options.
If you only change your firewall rules, then you still see all the faked search results from all of these hosts, making the noise from fake results too much to allow you to find legit files.
Slashdot Mirror
I vote for "horse show judge" as the new euphamism for any incompetent unexperienced individual.
No, it would be shameful for someone in the USA to be unable to express such a position.
I can't say I completely disagree with him, either. With access to public airwaves comes public responsibilities. Should some half-assed radio station start spewing out false information, with thousands of people listening and believing them, they quite literally could cause a lot of harm. Proverbially shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
I have no idea if that is the case here, but discounting his argument because something similar has been used by bad people for bad things is pretty ridiculous.
Does Macromedia have a live, realtime streaming software for Flash? Does Macromedia have a program that will automatically convert (preferably in realtime) from video to Flash? No? Guess it's not a very good option for this task, then.
Besides, modern video codecs are very effecient at encoding animation to very low bitrates. They could be streaming cartoons at 100K and almost nobody would notice the difference (I would know because I've done it).
Most newer codecs support variable FPS, so where the content needs 30fps for the motion to be smooth, it can use it, and still only use 0.1fps where everything is still.
Besides, do you really think the only thing they will be streaming is the animation? You don't think they're going to have some (live-action) commercials mixed in there with the animation?
I look forward to hearing your explanation as to how a flip book could POSSIBLY be an improvement over video.
I really hate
No, your premise is completely wrong. This unit does NOT weigh 44 lbs, or anywhere near that.
No, I think he's talking about Sun making dtrace open source, which might turn him into a FreeBSD user, or perhaps allow him to use OS X exclusively (not likely with the kernel changes needed, but maybe Apple will see the light.)
So, sacrificing your value-added product to the public domain seems to be entirely altruistic AFAICT. With something like NFS, they stood to gain directly by allowing others to use it, but that doesn't appear to be the case with dtrace.
Perhaps it's not altruism. Perhaps it's an attempt to improve all Unix systems, to get people to switch away from Windows. That would be very benefitial to Sun.
As opposed to the Dodo fish, the Dodo plant, and the Dodo subatomic particle.
To be fair, there is a huge difference between the two.
Privacy rights are not an artifical government construct, designed to help companies profit, because the profit motive to companies would directly benefit the public at large.
If the detrimental effects of copyright become greater than the benefits of copyright to the public, it would be only right for the government to eliminate copyright. Not that I'm suggesting we are anywhere near that extreme.
And what would be wrong with bringing in large volumes of dirt to fill-in the bowl (putting it above sea-level) before constructing builtings? Sections of New Orleans already above sea level survived quite well.
Yes, and people would be happy to swap discs 3 times...
Every single person with an HDTV.
What? Who are these people, and what were they comparing? DVDs to VHS? Not a lot of debate there...
Here's the entire crux of your argument, yet you didn't bother to argue this point at all. If people think TV is worth watching, they can completely disregard your post as nonsense.
It's not 'marginal' by any stretch. You get 6X the resolution with HD that you had with normal res TV/DVDs.
You could see what was going on with VHS tapes couldn't you? Why then did everyone transition to DVDs? For that matter, why did everyone transition from black and white to color, since you could see what was going on with a B&W picture?
Your post does a very good job illustrating what is so very wrong with the current slashdot moderation system.
Yes, you just did.
No, it's a user error.
Again, user error. You simply don't know how to save them, because you haven't bothered to learn. The same could be said in reverse if someone had learned how to save Real streams, but not WMV streams.
And you're completely wrong. WM actually encrypts streams with DRM by default. You won't notice if you're just playing them on your local machine, but if you send them to another machine using MPlayer/Xine, you'll see nothing but a green window with noise, and only hear blips. THAT is what Microsoft does, and they are the ONLY COMPANY doing that. Now, the DRM enabled by default is something you can disable fairly easily if you know it's there and know you NEED to disable it, but Microsoft is being very sneaky about it.
Okay then: "We didn't include a DTS track because normal-bitrate AC3 sounds just as good, unless it was mastered by a DTS stock-holder who intentionally sabotaged it."
I hope you don't think that the "no space" argument is made-up. It's quite true that just about any DVD with a DTS track has terrible-looking video.
Screw that. One or the other. And besides, with the extra space available on HD discs, you can expect to see lossless audio tracks soon, which should very effectively kill off DTS for good.
No, not with "the right kind of HDTV"... With ANY KIND of HDTV, you'll have a better picture than DVDs can offer.
DVD was "way more expensive" than VHS too, but that didn't slow it down. I'd bet VHS was more expensive than film at the time, too. High-speed broadband: more expensive than dial-up. Microwave ovens: more expensive than conventional ovens.
And your point? How does this have to do with anything?
I'm sure your numbers are off, but never the less, CDs were far cheaper than DVDs (per GB) until quite recently. Did that stop DVDs?
Besides, the old argument of Discs vs. Disks has gone on for a long time now, and you declaring that one or the other is a clear winner is ridiculous enough to dismiss outright. While hard drives are always getting cheaper, CDs/DVDs generally still cost about half as much per GB, and have greater flexibility. So even if the price situation was reversed, I doubt discs would be replaced by HDDs for most purposes.
I've used just about every codec out there, and WMV isn't all that good... I'd say it's just slightly better than MPEG-4. Other codecs like H.264 are much better, and can be played NATIVELY on absolutely any system (no need for propritary DLLs that only work on x86).
VP3 (upon which Theora is based) was ready about 6 years ago. Mature, open source, patent free, etc.
This is completely ridiculous. The WMV DLLs don't work any better than the Real DLLs, or the Quicktime libs. I can't even guess where you got some crazy idea like this. PEBKAC
No you aren't. MPlayer and Xine aren't Windows Media Player, so you obviously don't want WMP to be required, even though you say so. MPlayer and Xine can't handle these obfusticated playlist files yet, nor the DRM, or many of the other idiotic things Microsoft does.
At least Real and Apple (quicktime) haven't sent cease and desist letters to open source projects, claiming their file format is protected by patents, and demanding support be removed (see VirtualDub).
That is absolutely ridiculous. It is not up to the accuser to provide incontrovertable proof, as you are insisting. It's up to them to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and an IP address is that, just as a license number is. Just as an eyewitness is. None of these is incontrovertable, but it is reasonable proof. And once they've provided that much, it is up to you to discredit/disprove their evidence, and their case.
I don't believe that for a second.
The problem with saying that something is just "human nature" takes all responsibility out of the loop.
"Sure, I decided to kill a bunch of people, thinking I could get away with it, but hey, that's just human nature, right? I can't be expected to act in a socially acceptable manner and obey laws if nobody is around to force me to do so..."
The counter to your arguement would be the large numbers of people who AREN'T looting, who AREN'T raping and murdering others.
Well, he's maried... So no.
Wow. The trolls aren't even trying anymore.
Probably because hurricanes don't always go where you expected them to go, several days earlier... And false-positives serve to make people ignore all warnings in the future.
Do you really believe the president makes that big of a difference? Him cutting his vacation short is just a show for the public. This actually worked out nicely for him, because it gets the news media off of the protesters and gives him some OTHER excuse to give-up on his PR disaster of a vacation.
Well, the RIAA, not being psychic, call you in to court, where you have every opportunity to offer evidence that it wasn't you.
If your car is used in a crime, you'll also probably get dragged into court, and released just as soon as you explain it was stolen a few days earlier.
I think I've just found one...
Since when did the license of a program become the ONLY important issue?
Post a story about two vastly different programs that both happen to be GPLd, and you'll also get two vastly different attitudes.
I also haven't seen any of these complaints about this being a slashvertisment that you are claiming. Most of them seem to be along the lines of "How are they still in business, and why should I care?" At the very least, Opera runs on Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/Symbian/etc., not just Windows, so there's some justification for posting a story about it on
I did the same thing on Linux about 2 years ago as well. No doubt my setup took longer to get working smoothly, but mostly because I insisted on having my system do everything I could possibly want... I'd be very interested to know how quickly you can re-encode captured videos, edit out the commercials, make a CD image and burn it to disc on your Windows machine, using only the Hauppage remote control.
You got very lucky.
The instant something stop working for absolutely no reason (Windows), you'll be interested.
Well at least you're honest about it crashing. However, there is absolutely no reason a computer should crash from doing "too many things at once". I'm almost constantly doing dozens of things at once on my multimedia system, and not only has it never crashed, it's always quite responsive. Even with a couple videos being re-encoded using up 100% of the CPU, large files being copied over the network via SSH, while I'm editing a video, there's really almost no slowdown.
Okay, then it should be slower, and possibly less responsive. Crashing is NOT a valid response.
That's pretty ridiculous, for two reasons.
First off, because Windows never "just works". I've tried, extensively, but Windows always screws-up for no particular reason. Install the drivers, reboot, drivers aren't installed, the installation silently failed. Woohoo! I sure am glad Windows "just works", aren't you?
After extensive work, I figure out why it failed... Maybe a directory with the same name already existed in %TEMP%. Maybe installation was interrupted the first time, and it refuses to overwrite the old partial install and I have to go in there and delete everything manually. Maybe the files are being read by some other program, so we have a sharing violation, and everything gets screwed up. Maybe I installed windows to \WIN2k instead of \WINNT and a several apps still have that value hardcoded. Maybe Windows is just being the unstable POS it always is, and the driver installer that works perfectly on other systems with exactly the same configuration, mysteriously crashes in the same place, over and over again...
Crazy crap like this is exactly what I always had to put up with when using Windows. It's no wonder people look upon their computers as a mysterous magic box, because Windows is so incredibly inconsistent and unstable.
Linux/FreeBSD actually work. It may take a bit longer to look-up the software you need to use, and perhaps an option or command you have to set, but it's a case of a stitch in time. You can either spend a tiny extra bit of time up-front, or you can spend a load of time later on, when Windows just decides to stop working with your hardware for absolutely no reason. With anything other than Windows, you have consistency... Doing the same thing twice yeilds the same results. If you got your hardware to work with Linux on your machine, you can do the exact same thing to get it to work on another machine. With Linux, it's a complete crapshoot.
You talk about TV cards... Well, with Linux, you have to spend a little time setting everything up, but then you have a very, very powerful environment, where you can do more than some professional studios. Doing the basic stuff doesn't take long either. A little bit of time up-front, and you'll have something that will work perfectly for years to come, while Windows will be up-and-running quickly, and you'll spend years trying to get it to do what you actually want it to do, rather than the default options that don't work for you. And there's always the whole "stop working at random times for no reason" thing you have to put up with. Let's reboot again!
You must not try hard at all. There are numerous free programs (like XAce extractor) that will uncompress just about any format there is. No need to search, get one program and you can handle them all.
Try MPlayer (Windows/Linux/BSD/Unix/Mac) and grab the codecs pack. Play 99.9% of videos out there without any extra effort.
Well that all depends on whether you'll need to have DSL whether or not you download movies. If so, then it's effectively free. If you also need to have at least one computer operating all the time, then there's no extra cost for the electricity either.
It's illegal to drive a car 200MPH ON PUBLIC ROADS in most countries, but that doesn't make it illegal to drive a car 200MPH.
Just as it's illegal to walk around in public with a gun (most places), but that doesn't make it illegal to own a gun.
Back to the car analogy... I would like to see someone try to make a car that can't go more than the speed limit, but CAN go the full speed-limit up steep hills, in hurricane-force headwinds. Even more fun is trying to make a car that can't exceed the speed limit, but can accelerate to the full speed limit (75MPH) from a complete stop in a few seconds.
People actually use the peerguardian app? Odd.
I just use the blocklists they provide, run my scripts to convert them all into net/subnet notation (eg. 10.34.18.0/255.255.0.0) and add them to my P2P program's blacklist. For gtk-gnutella, that's 'hostiles.txt'. For Gnucleus (Win32) there's a blacklist section in the options.
If you only change your firewall rules, then you still see all the faked search results from all of these hosts, making the noise from fake results too much to allow you to find legit files.