Jesus dude what Linux zealotry planet did you come from? Because people don't think Linux is the greatest thing is the world doesn't mean they give a flying fuck about Microsoft. Banter about Linux being friendly is just ridiculous. How can you say that with a straight face? APIs that are confusing to talented developers? Where the hell does that come from. Do you know what the fuck an API is? You're hedging something on AOLs marketing? AOL thinks marketing is buying things or mass mailing things. That is not marketing. That is monopolizing and spamming. Take a hard look at the periphrial hardware business. Companies like nVidia can afford short lifetimes on their products. Most companies can't. Look at all the graphics companies that went out of business because of competition from nVidia. The guys with market percentages measured to the nearest hundreth aren't going to take a dime out of their profits to develop drivers for some other OS. Fuck man pay attention. If they aren't going to make drivers for MacOS what makes you think they're going to make drivers for someone with even less market share. It doesn't matter if AOL buys every Linux company in the country. If.25% of PC users are using Linux how profitable is it for a company to support it when they have a much better chance of getting money supporting somebody with 90% of the market. If Linux by some miracle had 90% of the PC market hardware vendors would support it and not Microsoft. In a business where prices and tactics are cutthroat you aim for the biggest target you can find.
The best online bargain out there is how cheap information is. If I decide I want to spent a bit of money on something it's a bargain if I get something worth the money I'm spending. Five years ago there wasn't nearly as much information on the web as there is now to assist in purchase descisions. Ten years ago there was no information there at all. I even use the web to find prices for low ball stuff like CDs and DVDs. I hate paying retail because I know I'm getting shafted by a good margin or else the retailer wouldn't be selling me said item. The lower price I get something for the less I'm being shafted. As for buying shit off the web it is caveat emptor like anything else. You win some you lose some but hopefully you've come out saving a bit off the retail price. Even if you're only saving 5 bucks per DVD (shipping marginalized on each DVD) you're still getting a deal with the more DVDs you can fit into a box. People who scour meatspace auctions and swap meets are the same ones who find the massive deals on the internet.
You may or may not know this but Digital 8 camcorders record in DV format but just use Hi-8 cassettes rather than miniDV ones. IIRC the DCR-TRV130 from Sony is way under 1000$ (in the 600$ range) and has plenty of features. You can pick one up at WalMart for that price and some places online a bit cheaper than that. The TRV140 which I haven't found at retail shops lately has both i.Link and USB connections so can be used as a webcame and regular DV cam. It also uses The difference between the Digital 8 and normal MiniDV cams is about 30 lines of horizontal resolution which if you're going to edit the video anyhow doesn't make alot of difference because you can hide the lack of those extra 30 lines pretty easily.
The first time I saw Invader Zim I instantly recognized it as Vasquezian artwork and humor. I loved JTHM way back when and liked every episode of Zim I managed to catch. I think to really like Zim you need to have liked JTHM as well. Both have a crazy protagonist at odds with absolutely everything around them. The fact Nick feels the need to cancel it goes to show how inept their fucking program managers are. They're trying to grab the 12-16 audience between the hours of 8-10pm. The problem is their shows appeal to the 18-24 audience who have other things to do besides sit at home watching TV reverently on a Friday night. Then to make it worse they don't reair it on Sundays with any sort of consistancy so you can only possibly catch a couple episodes if you have ANYTHING in life you life to do besides wait for the damn show to air.
I watch cartoons more now than I did when I was 10 but I don't have the luxery to sit around with one thumb up my ass and the other on a remote control flipping back and forth between Nickeodeon and the TV Guide channel hoping to maybe catch an episode of Invader Zim. If Nickelodeon wanted an audience for their shows they wouldn't have a website which insulted the intelligence of people over the age of 10 using it trying to find when a fucking cartoon aired. Nick's website is worse than a majority of the tripe they air. If the website says the show is on on Sunday I shouldn't need to drop candle wax into a bucket of water to predict whether or not it actually WILL be on on Sunday or not. I really liked Zim and it blows that I thought it already had been canceled because I couldn't find out when the hell it was airing on a-day-other-then-Friday to catch what I missed. Fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses. Oh yeah, Scifi.com had a little piece about Invader Zim and how nobody would miss it when it's gone. I always missed it when it was airing, I'm going to miss it alot more once it isn't aired. Guess I need to download Real Player now.
Ratings don't come from my cable box reporting my viewing habits back to the cable company. They come from Neilsen families that have little boxes people get paid to have in their house. IIRC there's about 100,000 Neilsen families and their viewing habits get extrapolated to the rest of the country. Ever wonder how practically everyone on slashdot can watch a TV show yet it is cancled for low ratings. If it isn't watched by Neilsen families it gets shitty ratings. Are any slashdotters proud members of Neilsen families? I don't make my own art for my own sake. I wouldn't make a movie myself only to watch it 20 times. I know how it is going to fucking end. Independant films aren't exactly art forms either. For every good film in the entire world made there's a thousand more piece of shit made independant or not.
AOL wants to buy mindshare. Just like they did with Winamp. They figure it is the most popular Linux platform and people will continue to use it no matter who owns it. AOL isn't and can't buy fucking source code. Have you ever built your own system from scratch? Most of the important tools work by stin and stout. There isn't a whole lot of "making stuff work together" required. Red Hat doesn't make Linux fucking friendly. It is still a bitch to maintain unless your sole purpose in life is to maintain it. AOL buying mindshare isn't going to get anything accomplished in the world of Linux. They can either 1) keep up RH's support of all the OS projects they fund for the small fee of advertising and including some AOL software in their distro or 2) nix all of RH's "money wasting" projects and force them to become an AOL distro. Hardware vendors also will not give a fuck. They make shit margins on their products. They aren't going to spend beaucoup cash to increase their patronage by a fraction of.24% by making Linux drivers. They won't spend the money to increase their patronage by a fraction of 10% to write Mac drivers for their hardware. Even if all AOL users were Linux users there'd be few drivers for all the hardware because first and foremost the users are AOLites. AOLites only need enough hardware functionality to use AOL's software. Most AOL users do not need a full fledged computer for using AOL yet have one just in case they need to type something up or AOL upgrades their software. The majority of periphrials available anywhere are not needed by these folk and thus would be avoided by most periphrial manufacturers for surer markets.
By saying "they have the source code" like it is some super secret just makes you look like a fucking moron. Red Hat takes a bunch of software other people wrote that they don't own the rights to (yet are allowed to do this because of the license) and package it behind a cute and cudly installation program and call it Red Hat. With GPL code, EVERYONE can "have the source code" for the price of the media transmitted over. If AOL did buy Red Hat they wouldn't by some magical means get a bunch of drivers written for shit. Even if anything you babbled about came to pass instead of Microsoft on your dartboard it would be AOL. Do you think them buying the rights to a Linux distributor is somehow going to make them cool dudes and not be out for every fucking dollar in the world? They'd be worse than any Microsoft you could come up with because they would own all media channels into everyone's homes. Microsoft has a bunch of people using its OS on IBM compatible PCs. Big fucking whoop. Fifty percent of people have computers but ninety eight percent of them have TVs. Market domination is market domination and it don't fucking matter if it is using Linux or not. It is about getting dollars out of a consumers wallet into yours.
Why oh why must technology companies be run into the ground like this? Carly is just a bad manager and bad leader but her failures ride on the coat tails of Lew Platt's failures. I don't give a shit that Carly is a woman CEO, for all the hubbub made over that it doesn't really matter in one way or the other. What does matter is how shitty of a CEO she is. She knows her antics would have gotten her tossed out of her position so she made the entire company's upper management sign an agreement never to disagree with anything she proposed. If they didn't want to sign this agreement they were shitca...offered early retirement with a fat check for maintaining their integrity.
Any crap about HP getting out of the PC business is just boardroom antic crap to light a fire under board members. If they don't agree to vote on [proposal] the company will have to drop [product or service]. That is entry level business class crap. The problem is Fiorina sees the Compaq merger as her brainchild and as the future path HP must take. Compaq and HP if merged would form the biggest retail PC maker in the industry. Theoretically they could leverage their systems anywhere. Between them they have inlets to all of the major retail outlets in the country. Theoretically.
The reality of it is the merger would only make one big company to lose money. Maybe she ought to really go through with getting out of the PC business. The market is saturated as it is, people who want PCs have them and aren't going to buy new ones as long as what they have does what they want. People want to get on the internet and type stuff up and play the occasional game. PCs are so fucking overpowered that a two year old PC is still way above what even current software needs to run properly. It would be pretty hard for you to find any consumer program that didn't run just fine on a three year old 500MHz P3 with a TNT2 video card.
This is all such crap. First of all broadcasters under legal statute cannot prevent people from recording broadcasts for personal use. They also under FCC rules can't obfuscate their content. They can however legally add flags to digital streams saying "this is copyrighted material". MP3s have a little known copyright bit but people don't bother to pay any attention to it. The C|Net aricle is flawed to say that broadcasters can somehow alter their content as to be unwatchable by certain people. The FCC would have a broadcaster's ass if they sent out an encoded signal.
As for file trading, the argument is sort of ridiculous. It goes something like "the latest ER is available on [sharing service] therefore EVERYONE MUST HAVE A COPY OF IT OH FUCK". The reality of it is too few people have both the ability and motivation to find and download every episode of some TV show. I think the fears of this are temporally misplaced by about ten years. Maybe in 2012 when 70% of households have 10+mbps connections to the UltraNet there would actually be a measurable drop in broadcast programming viewers. By this time however broadcast video would be a twilight technology since most of your content would be on demand anyways. The percentage of people who hop online to grab the latest episode of some show compared to the percentage of people who just turn their TV to that fucking station is is pretty steep.
The problem with broadcasters is they have been lying with statistics for so long they don't know what reality is anymore. They have convinced themselves that they can use Neilson boxes to guage the number of people with reasonable tolerances who watched some show and thus its commercials. I'm not allowed to handle a remote anymore because as soon as a show gets boring or FTB (fades to black) I flip to cartoons. I don't know anybody who doesn't wander the dial during commercial breaks. Thinking that in the short term their billion dollar industry is going to be threatened by people trading digital broadcasts being pirated is jackassery. Then again, this is slashdot. Most of the TV and movie piracy in the world is conducted by its readers. Go ahead and pirate away dipshits. It'll just mean you need to decrypt HDTV signals with your fucking DNA in five years.
It's too bad there isn't a slashbox to filter out these whiny fucking threads. Think about it for a second, way back when there were three television broadcasters! You didn't get to pick shit that was on television. You were damn lucky if the TV had anything for your lazy ass to watch or you just watched what was cool. Then came cable and satellite. You had even more choices of what to plop your lazy ass in front of as long as you were willing to pay for it. VCRs also came about which allowed you to record stuff to watch later (held up by court statute known as time shifting). The you could program your VCR to record shit even if you weren't around to press buttons. Broadcasters even worked with the VCRPlus folks to give channel guides codes that would let people even more easily program their VCRs to record shit they weren't around to watch. Now in the transition to digital broadcasters want to break all of this because people can make exact copies of what was broadcast.
The problem lies in the fact that they make money from the potential eyes of viewers. Ratings allow broadcasters to charge more money for the time they sell to advertisers. They make their money in this fashion. However if they are broadcasting digital information rather than analog exact digital copies would be made. Big deal you say but it IS a big deal. It requires a bit of effort to filter commercials out of analog signals on a VCR (they look for a fade to black and stop recording until the video fades back in). The percentage of VCRs and people who take the time to do this is small so broadcasters don't bitch much about it. With a digital signal it is fairly trivial to scan a datastream for a pattern or flag denoting the transition to a commercial and since this is trivial a PVR or equivilent can easily nix the commercial from the recorded video. Since the only difference between a PVR and digital signal decoder is a storage device to record the video stream this had broadcasters a bit worried. If a majority of people with digital receivers can both time shift and remove commercials from video feeds the broadcasters can't make didly squat. Their traditional metrics become useless and advertisers can't be assured their advertisements will even be seen.
Broadcasters don't care about the small fraction of people who would go to all the trouble to trade copies of video over the internet. Most people won't bother even if they have the bandwidth. It's scores easier to flip on your TV at a certain time of tell a PVR or VCR to record something than it is to first find it and then second download it to your computer. Broadcasters will however be taken to court if they break compliance with statutes saying people have the right to record video for personal use. To keep from getting legally fucked in the ass this way you're going to see non-linear break commercials. Characters will drink a Pepsi and wear Reeboks and chase a bad guy through the Gap end will hang out at a Starbucks. Advertising will be like it was depicted in The Truman show where they broadcast constantly. Everyday items would be product placement and actors would be spokespeople during the shows they performed on. The crap acting you see in commercials now is going to take place inside your favourite drama or sci-fi adventure. Also expect more of those fucking tickers at the bottom, top, and sides of your screen.
What is it with ESR and coming up with the dumbest fucking arguments about practically everything? Does he enjoy running up hill with ankle weights pulling a Eurovan by a rope between his teeth?
"Hey I know...I'll pitch my kernel autoconf to people by saying it is so easy their aunt can use it, I'm a fucking genius!"
An automagically config for kernel compiling would be a really nice thing to have but not becsause my extended family is going to fucking use it. It also isn't going to do anything to make Linux more popular. Joe Sixpack doesn't know what the hell a kernel is let alone what compiling one would do. Linux users naysay stuff like Wizards because they feel it takes away from their freedom somehow which is an entertaining thought because anything done with a wizard can be done by hand if you want. However having something that knew what it was doing but let you pick some parameters would be a good thing for something complex...like compiling a kernel. ESR's shit about Aunt Tillie doing kernel compilations is entirely moot and too damn stupid to even discuss. The point of discussion is ought an autoconf be included in the stardard kernel package. I think so but if not distros can always add it anyhow as they fucking should. Most distros pack a system configuration utility to pick what software packages you want installed by the same token they ought to have their own (or a standardized) kernel config utility that does most of the picking and choosing for the users.
Websites with some simple scripting can also track you with cookies and static IP adresses. Neither of these methods needs any more software than your a browser on the client's end. Besides that, a GUID for Media Player has little effect other than to allow tracking of the computer it is installed on. Getting the GUID from WMP isn't going to get anyone access to any of your personal fucking information like a SS number is.
I read an article written by the quality journalists at the Register and I know from experience that I should believe everything they have said. I would like yo suggest you read the Register for all of your news because it is the finest newspaper in all the world. I must tidy up this letter so I can go pee my pants and fume because I think Microsoft is taking over the world when in reality the Register doesn't say fucking shit about Microsoft buying anything more than "rights" to some of SGI's IP which doesn't specify if they bought patents of licenses.
But in order to fucking get on Napster's network you have to pay money. People who are going to rip Napster off are not going to pay money to use their fucking network. Nobody who carried a blue box put a quarter in before they called just so they could not totally rip off the phone company.
I think the real problem solver in terms of broadband will eventually be municipalities. What if the streets in your city were privately controlled? Rather than streets that went everywhere you'd only have streets leading to businesses and housing tracts whose owners have some affiliation with the street's ownership. Weird sort of like Snow Crash. Municipalities though can put fiber anywhere they want cheaper than private organizations because they don't have to pay the same sort of fees because they'd only be paying it to themselves. Once the fiber is layed they can lease it out to whomever wants to put some equipment on it and do some data transfer. The local muni can also form an agency to handle data services and offer service as a utility. There is plenty of room for competition because each city can lease their fiber to whoever they want. The second benefit of municipally owned fiber is responsibility on the part of the leasee. They can't gouge their customers on lines leased to them by the muni, any attempt to do so would result in their lease being revoked and they'd be screwed. Additionally since it is a muni to muni situation, people in one city aren't paying the marginalized cost of high bandwdith being added in another city like what happens when your ILEC or cable company operates over a broad area. They get to pay for what they get.
This provides plenty of bandwidth in a city or county and since it probably wouldn't be too difficult to get these fiber networked hooked up to MAEs or NAPs they'd be on the internet with everybody else. I don't think it would be a violation of any of the telcom acts of the past 20 years since the ILECs can still provide their access and all with their own lines, but they can also lease the city's lines to provide their services. They could say "you could use our regular services using the city's lines OR you could use out dedicated high speed high QoS privately owned lines". This saves ILECs beaucoup cash running lines used by the public at large.
How come nobody seems to be getting it. The problem isn't DCC sends between clients. The problem is high bandwidth data payloads using a signaling protocol rather than a regular transfer protocol. This stems from the oversight in the SIP protocol saying it can carry any sort of data over either TCP or UDP. So if you've got a ton of users all logging on at the same time sending UDP SIP packets over your network (MP3s and Divx movies for instance) it is going to fuck you up hardcore. Same if IM clients add stuff like voice and video as attachments sent over said SIP protocol. All it takes it one jackass to make an IM client that does all of its data transfer through the SIP protocol to make everyone have a bad day. It isn't just AOLs problem since they're using the same network infrastructure everybody else is using for everything else they use it for. So now the IETF is trying to get a better data transfer protocol to go along with SIP so some jackass doesn't take down a MAE because a bunch of people behind it sent a terabyte of UDP packets.
The overhead for switching from IP to some other protocol is expensive (don't bother pointing out IP being wrapped in another protocol like ATM because I don't see ATM equipment being cheap or easy on the processing power). Besides which the headend links where IP is converted to some other addressing scheme are still going to be swamped with traffic flowing in and out of them. The problem isn't IP the problem is not enough bandwidth on the local end to meet the demand generated at the local end.
What is it about the slashdot crowd that wants everything at the cost of nothing. Maybe they get it from using Linux far too long. You can either get efficiency or you can get scalability with a very small range between the two. For efficiency look at gaming consoles, they sacrifice the ability to scale in order to have a tight nit efficient system. Another entrant into this catagory is/was Cyrix's Media GX chip and Intel's 810 chipset. The cost and waste of the system is lowered by putting more components in the same packaging. On the side of scalability look at the Mac 9600 with it's 12 memory sockets and 6 PCI slots. Of course just about any PC or workstation class system falls into the scalable classification, the 9600 is just an example of sheer expandibility. The marrige of these two is something like the G4 Cube which is hated in many circles. It was small and fairly efficient yet had the ability to be upgraded a little bit. However it came at the cost of not being able to use widely abvailable standard sized expansion card (a video card upgrade costs beaucoup cash because you can only get it from Apple). Slashdot folks want something that can fit a half dozen components into off the shelf yet be compact and efficient. It isn't going to happen unless somebody releases a system with a "computer on a chip" plugs directly into a backplane that links it to other components. Even then people would bitch because the COC components weren't up to their expectations.
Why charge 50$ a season when you can charge 100$ for a season by your logic. Releasing DVD collections of highly sought after syndicated shows makes you lose money. How many people are going to watch FX every day (theoretically making FX money being subjected to their advertisements) to see their favourite X-Files episode when they can go out and buy it on DVD. The theoretical shrinking of the syndication market by releasing DVD or VHS copies of an entire season needs to be made up for in the eyes of the executives. It is unfair but that is why they do it.
Steve Jobs have mignons? Man I want to go to his house for dinner! As for Apple they have been going with the digital hub concept for a while and I think it has been fleshing out pretty well. You can go from MP3 collection to audio CD or portable MP3 player pretty easily or from digital camera (still or motion) to website, VCD, DVD, or whatever. The digital hub is all about styling content creation. An MTV labeled computer is merely for content absorbtion. How often do you see shows on MTV all about making music yourself? MTV viewers are asymmetric media nodes. They suck down all the crap they are fed and produce next to nothing themselves.
A good portion of the posts by students are their tales of woe about not being able to share gigs of porn and MP3s. Big fucking deal. The fees for your semester's worth of internet access isn't higher than what I pay in the same period for a cable modem. Stop being whiny bitches. I think legitimate uses also fall short of downloading a new Linux ISO every day. No matter what you think you need, you don't REALLY need a new Linux ISO every day. There's also a good chance your school's got a mirror on their internal network somewhere of all the ISOs you could want. If you need an update use apt-get or some other installer program with FTP support for fetching new RPMs. You might talk to some network admins to see if they would provide a mirror for said FTP so you wouldn't have to go outside the network to keep your system up to date. Browsing the web and playing counter strike or Quake all day long is easily legitimate because it isn't going to put you over any quotas. As for admins, put mirrors of stuff like Linux ISOs and FTPs on boxes in the internal network and advertise them to students so they know they don't have to tax your internet connection to get them. Also set up HTTP caching proxies at the head end the dorms or library or whatever hooks up to. It will offload stress on your outgoing connection to the net by a good deal.
I saw one of these at Fry's a couple weeks ago and thought it looked pretty cool. For the complaining Frank does about the video chip it is a pretty keen little box and may very well be the start of a trend if it becomes popular. Consumer systems didn't always used to be two and a half foot metal and plastic monstrocities. I really like the look of the old SparcStations or the Quadra 610 and at times even the LCII/III. Why do PCs have to be so damn big and bulky. It wouldn't kill anybody to have a full fledged PC the size of a Playstation. I would have gotten a much smaller case for my PCs had they been available. I want something I can easily tuck under my desk, next to my monitor, or under my router.
Nymia is on fucking drugs. That is the only way I can seem to figure out the mental mechanations behind this crap. His quotes are retarded, using a quote saying "imagine an America with compitent teachers and boutiful access to information". Yeah well I can imagine it and there would be no digital divide if teachers knew what the fuck they were teaching and had more skills then what is required to currently teach high school and elementary students. There are only a small percentage of teachers who teach a subject they actually have any actual training in. Math and science teachers come from the PE department and English teachers haven't read a book with any more depth than a Danielle Steel novel.
Secondly the statistics are complete crap. The conclusion is that 10% of people without internet access actually want it. Man some divide, ten percent is little more than a margin or error. Some old computer with Linux hacked onto it is not an easier or cheaper way to get someone on the internet. Linux doesn't have a lower cost than any other OS in the realm of computers. Because you can download the source code doesn't mean shit. A good 99% of people with computers don't even know what the hell source code is, it is of no use at all to them. Complex software requires training. Not equating the cost of support is irresponcible and unconvincing. It is further irresponsible to say that there are X number of users of a piece of software therefore someone has X number of resources for help. That is just retarded. If I use a piece of software I'm not going to write down my phone number so some jackass who doesn't know a microchip from a potato chip can call me and ask me how to defragment his monitor.
Crap about subsidizing the cost and minimizing the cost of parts and all that is just bad accounting. I hope this guy never hopes to be an MBA. Besides the obvious fact nothing is free, not even putting Linux on a discarded 386 PC clone from yesteryear internet access isn't free. The concept of a free ISP died out because it wasn't economically viable. Even if all somebody had to do was subsidize the cost of ISP service and software support giving free computers to everybody would STILL be uneconomical jackassery. Why should somebody get for free something I have to pay for? If some welfare kid gets a free PC and internet access for doing nothing I want a free PC and internet access for doing nothing. Slashdot needs a story moderating system. I'd rate this -1 Editor of crack.
Making a game available to a certain strata of computer users makes your game less popular. If you had to wait until you could afford a new PC in order to play a game you'd buy something with much lower requirements. I don't want to shell out a thousand bucks to play a computer game. Another thing to worry about is compatibility. UT runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Not a whole slew of people went out and bought a new Athlon XP just to run Linux on. A majority of Mac owners don't have brand spanking new Quicksilver systems with GeForce 3s in them. Shit most Windows users don't have a card more powerful than a TNT2. If the developers wanted to ignore the majority of their userbase they could push the envelope but then who would buy it.
Word is an open format in that it is heavily documented. I wish I still had the ISBN for the Word/Excel97 files published by Microsoft press. If it is a burden to not use non-free software why does Stallman keep advocating it as a better model than free software? With non-free software I don't have to worry about opening Word or Excel files. Whining about the closed nature of a file format and how you can't read it isn't a very convincing argument to switch from non-free software to free software. At least not to me. Switching licensing schemes so I can view some source code I'm never going to mess with doesn't mean shit to me, I want/need to get work done.
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Jesus dude what Linux zealotry planet did you come from? Because people don't think Linux is the greatest thing is the world doesn't mean they give a flying fuck about Microsoft. Banter about Linux being friendly is just ridiculous. How can you say that with a straight face? APIs that are confusing to talented developers? Where the hell does that come from. Do you know what the fuck an API is? You're hedging something on AOLs marketing? AOL thinks marketing is buying things or mass mailing things. That is not marketing. That is monopolizing and spamming. Take a hard look at the periphrial hardware business. Companies like nVidia can afford short lifetimes on their products. Most companies can't. Look at all the graphics companies that went out of business because of competition from nVidia. The guys with market percentages measured to the nearest hundreth aren't going to take a dime out of their profits to develop drivers for some other OS. Fuck man pay attention. If they aren't going to make drivers for MacOS what makes you think they're going to make drivers for someone with even less market share. It doesn't matter if AOL buys every Linux company in the country. If .25% of PC users are using Linux how profitable is it for a company to support it when they have a much better chance of getting money supporting somebody with 90% of the market. If Linux by some miracle had 90% of the PC market hardware vendors would support it and not Microsoft. In a business where prices and tactics are cutthroat you aim for the biggest target you can find.
The best online bargain out there is how cheap information is. If I decide I want to spent a bit of money on something it's a bargain if I get something worth the money I'm spending. Five years ago there wasn't nearly as much information on the web as there is now to assist in purchase descisions. Ten years ago there was no information there at all. I even use the web to find prices for low ball stuff like CDs and DVDs. I hate paying retail because I know I'm getting shafted by a good margin or else the retailer wouldn't be selling me said item. The lower price I get something for the less I'm being shafted. As for buying shit off the web it is caveat emptor like anything else. You win some you lose some but hopefully you've come out saving a bit off the retail price. Even if you're only saving 5 bucks per DVD (shipping marginalized on each DVD) you're still getting a deal with the more DVDs you can fit into a box. People who scour meatspace auctions and swap meets are the same ones who find the massive deals on the internet.
You may or may not know this but Digital 8 camcorders record in DV format but just use Hi-8 cassettes rather than miniDV ones. IIRC the DCR-TRV130 from Sony is way under 1000$ (in the 600$ range) and has plenty of features. You can pick one up at WalMart for that price and some places online a bit cheaper than that. The TRV140 which I haven't found at retail shops lately has both i.Link and USB connections so can be used as a webcame and regular DV cam. It also uses The difference between the Digital 8 and normal MiniDV cams is about 30 lines of horizontal resolution which if you're going to edit the video anyhow doesn't make alot of difference because you can hide the lack of those extra 30 lines pretty easily.
The first time I saw Invader Zim I instantly recognized it as Vasquezian artwork and humor. I loved JTHM way back when and liked every episode of Zim I managed to catch. I think to really like Zim you need to have liked JTHM as well. Both have a crazy protagonist at odds with absolutely everything around them. The fact Nick feels the need to cancel it goes to show how inept their fucking program managers are. They're trying to grab the 12-16 audience between the hours of 8-10pm. The problem is their shows appeal to the 18-24 audience who have other things to do besides sit at home watching TV reverently on a Friday night. Then to make it worse they don't reair it on Sundays with any sort of consistancy so you can only possibly catch a couple episodes if you have ANYTHING in life you life to do besides wait for the damn show to air.
I watch cartoons more now than I did when I was 10 but I don't have the luxery to sit around with one thumb up my ass and the other on a remote control flipping back and forth between Nickeodeon and the TV Guide channel hoping to maybe catch an episode of Invader Zim. If Nickelodeon wanted an audience for their shows they wouldn't have a website which insulted the intelligence of people over the age of 10 using it trying to find when a fucking cartoon aired. Nick's website is worse than a majority of the tripe they air. If the website says the show is on on Sunday I shouldn't need to drop candle wax into a bucket of water to predict whether or not it actually WILL be on on Sunday or not. I really liked Zim and it blows that I thought it already had been canceled because I couldn't find out when the hell it was airing on a-day-other-then-Friday to catch what I missed. Fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses. Oh yeah, Scifi.com had a little piece about Invader Zim and how nobody would miss it when it's gone. I always missed it when it was airing, I'm going to miss it alot more once it isn't aired. Guess I need to download Real Player now.
Ratings don't come from my cable box reporting my viewing habits back to the cable company. They come from Neilsen families that have little boxes people get paid to have in their house. IIRC there's about 100,000 Neilsen families and their viewing habits get extrapolated to the rest of the country. Ever wonder how practically everyone on slashdot can watch a TV show yet it is cancled for low ratings. If it isn't watched by Neilsen families it gets shitty ratings. Are any slashdotters proud members of Neilsen families? I don't make my own art for my own sake. I wouldn't make a movie myself only to watch it 20 times. I know how it is going to fucking end. Independant films aren't exactly art forms either. For every good film in the entire world made there's a thousand more piece of shit made independant or not.
AOL wants to buy mindshare. Just like they did with Winamp. They figure it is the most popular Linux platform and people will continue to use it no matter who owns it. AOL isn't and can't buy fucking source code. Have you ever built your own system from scratch? Most of the important tools work by stin and stout. There isn't a whole lot of "making stuff work together" required. Red Hat doesn't make Linux fucking friendly. It is still a bitch to maintain unless your sole purpose in life is to maintain it. AOL buying mindshare isn't going to get anything accomplished in the world of Linux. They can either 1) keep up RH's support of all the OS projects they fund for the small fee of advertising and including some AOL software in their distro or 2) nix all of RH's "money wasting" projects and force them to become an AOL distro. Hardware vendors also will not give a fuck. They make shit margins on their products. They aren't going to spend beaucoup cash to increase their patronage by a fraction of .24% by making Linux drivers. They won't spend the money to increase their patronage by a fraction of 10% to write Mac drivers for their hardware. Even if all AOL users were Linux users there'd be few drivers for all the hardware because first and foremost the users are AOLites. AOLites only need enough hardware functionality to use AOL's software. Most AOL users do not need a full fledged computer for using AOL yet have one just in case they need to type something up or AOL upgrades their software. The majority of periphrials available anywhere are not needed by these folk and thus would be avoided by most periphrial manufacturers for surer markets.
By saying "they have the source code" like it is some super secret just makes you look like a fucking moron. Red Hat takes a bunch of software other people wrote that they don't own the rights to (yet are allowed to do this because of the license) and package it behind a cute and cudly installation program and call it Red Hat. With GPL code, EVERYONE can "have the source code" for the price of the media transmitted over. If AOL did buy Red Hat they wouldn't by some magical means get a bunch of drivers written for shit. Even if anything you babbled about came to pass instead of Microsoft on your dartboard it would be AOL. Do you think them buying the rights to a Linux distributor is somehow going to make them cool dudes and not be out for every fucking dollar in the world? They'd be worse than any Microsoft you could come up with because they would own all media channels into everyone's homes. Microsoft has a bunch of people using its OS on IBM compatible PCs. Big fucking whoop. Fifty percent of people have computers but ninety eight percent of them have TVs. Market domination is market domination and it don't fucking matter if it is using Linux or not. It is about getting dollars out of a consumers wallet into yours.
Why oh why must technology companies be run into the ground like this? Carly is just a bad manager and bad leader but her failures ride on the coat tails of Lew Platt's failures. I don't give a shit that Carly is a woman CEO, for all the hubbub made over that it doesn't really matter in one way or the other. What does matter is how shitty of a CEO she is. She knows her antics would have gotten her tossed out of her position so she made the entire company's upper management sign an agreement never to disagree with anything she proposed. If they didn't want to sign this agreement they were shitca...offered early retirement with a fat check for maintaining their integrity.
Any crap about HP getting out of the PC business is just boardroom antic crap to light a fire under board members. If they don't agree to vote on [proposal] the company will have to drop [product or service]. That is entry level business class crap. The problem is Fiorina sees the Compaq merger as her brainchild and as the future path HP must take. Compaq and HP if merged would form the biggest retail PC maker in the industry. Theoretically they could leverage their systems anywhere. Between them they have inlets to all of the major retail outlets in the country. Theoretically.
The reality of it is the merger would only make one big company to lose money. Maybe she ought to really go through with getting out of the PC business. The market is saturated as it is, people who want PCs have them and aren't going to buy new ones as long as what they have does what they want. People want to get on the internet and type stuff up and play the occasional game. PCs are so fucking overpowered that a two year old PC is still way above what even current software needs to run properly. It would be pretty hard for you to find any consumer program that didn't run just fine on a three year old 500MHz P3 with a TNT2 video card.
This is all such crap. First of all broadcasters under legal statute cannot prevent people from recording broadcasts for personal use. They also under FCC rules can't obfuscate their content. They can however legally add flags to digital streams saying "this is copyrighted material". MP3s have a little known copyright bit but people don't bother to pay any attention to it. The C|Net aricle is flawed to say that broadcasters can somehow alter their content as to be unwatchable by certain people. The FCC would have a broadcaster's ass if they sent out an encoded signal.
As for file trading, the argument is sort of ridiculous. It goes something like "the latest ER is available on [sharing service] therefore EVERYONE MUST HAVE A COPY OF IT OH FUCK". The reality of it is too few people have both the ability and motivation to find and download every episode of some TV show. I think the fears of this are temporally misplaced by about ten years. Maybe in 2012 when 70% of households have 10+mbps connections to the UltraNet there would actually be a measurable drop in broadcast programming viewers. By this time however broadcast video would be a twilight technology since most of your content would be on demand anyways. The percentage of people who hop online to grab the latest episode of some show compared to the percentage of people who just turn their TV to that fucking station is is pretty steep.
The problem with broadcasters is they have been lying with statistics for so long they don't know what reality is anymore. They have convinced themselves that they can use Neilson boxes to guage the number of people with reasonable tolerances who watched some show and thus its commercials. I'm not allowed to handle a remote anymore because as soon as a show gets boring or FTB (fades to black) I flip to cartoons. I don't know anybody who doesn't wander the dial during commercial breaks. Thinking that in the short term their billion dollar industry is going to be threatened by people trading digital broadcasts being pirated is jackassery. Then again, this is slashdot. Most of the TV and movie piracy in the world is conducted by its readers. Go ahead and pirate away dipshits. It'll just mean you need to decrypt HDTV signals with your fucking DNA in five years.
It's too bad there isn't a slashbox to filter out these whiny fucking threads. Think about it for a second, way back when there were three television broadcasters! You didn't get to pick shit that was on television. You were damn lucky if the TV had anything for your lazy ass to watch or you just watched what was cool. Then came cable and satellite. You had even more choices of what to plop your lazy ass in front of as long as you were willing to pay for it. VCRs also came about which allowed you to record stuff to watch later (held up by court statute known as time shifting). The you could program your VCR to record shit even if you weren't around to press buttons. Broadcasters even worked with the VCRPlus folks to give channel guides codes that would let people even more easily program their VCRs to record shit they weren't around to watch. Now in the transition to digital broadcasters want to break all of this because people can make exact copies of what was broadcast.
The problem lies in the fact that they make money from the potential eyes of viewers. Ratings allow broadcasters to charge more money for the time they sell to advertisers. They make their money in this fashion. However if they are broadcasting digital information rather than analog exact digital copies would be made. Big deal you say but it IS a big deal. It requires a bit of effort to filter commercials out of analog signals on a VCR (they look for a fade to black and stop recording until the video fades back in). The percentage of VCRs and people who take the time to do this is small so broadcasters don't bitch much about it. With a digital signal it is fairly trivial to scan a datastream for a pattern or flag denoting the transition to a commercial and since this is trivial a PVR or equivilent can easily nix the commercial from the recorded video. Since the only difference between a PVR and digital signal decoder is a storage device to record the video stream this had broadcasters a bit worried. If a majority of people with digital receivers can both time shift and remove commercials from video feeds the broadcasters can't make didly squat. Their traditional metrics become useless and advertisers can't be assured their advertisements will even be seen.
Broadcasters don't care about the small fraction of people who would go to all the trouble to trade copies of video over the internet. Most people won't bother even if they have the bandwidth. It's scores easier to flip on your TV at a certain time of tell a PVR or VCR to record something than it is to first find it and then second download it to your computer. Broadcasters will however be taken to court if they break compliance with statutes saying people have the right to record video for personal use. To keep from getting legally fucked in the ass this way you're going to see non-linear break commercials. Characters will drink a Pepsi and wear Reeboks and chase a bad guy through the Gap end will hang out at a Starbucks. Advertising will be like it was depicted in The Truman show where they broadcast constantly. Everyday items would be product placement and actors would be spokespeople during the shows they performed on. The crap acting you see in commercials now is going to take place inside your favourite drama or sci-fi adventure. Also expect more of those fucking tickers at the bottom, top, and sides of your screen.
What is it with ESR and coming up with the dumbest fucking arguments about practically everything? Does he enjoy running up hill with ankle weights pulling a Eurovan by a rope between his teeth?
"Hey I know...I'll pitch my kernel autoconf to people by saying it is so easy their aunt can use it, I'm a fucking genius!"
An automagically config for kernel compiling would be a really nice thing to have but not becsause my extended family is going to fucking use it. It also isn't going to do anything to make Linux more popular. Joe Sixpack doesn't know what the hell a kernel is let alone what compiling one would do. Linux users naysay stuff like Wizards because they feel it takes away from their freedom somehow which is an entertaining thought because anything done with a wizard can be done by hand if you want. However having something that knew what it was doing but let you pick some parameters would be a good thing for something complex...like compiling a kernel. ESR's shit about Aunt Tillie doing kernel compilations is entirely moot and too damn stupid to even discuss. The point of discussion is ought an autoconf be included in the stardard kernel package. I think so but if not distros can always add it anyhow as they fucking should. Most distros pack a system configuration utility to pick what software packages you want installed by the same token they ought to have their own (or a standardized) kernel config utility that does most of the picking and choosing for the users.
Websites with some simple scripting can also track you with cookies and static IP adresses. Neither of these methods needs any more software than your a browser on the client's end. Besides that, a GUID for Media Player has little effect other than to allow tracking of the computer it is installed on. Getting the GUID from WMP isn't going to get anyone access to any of your personal fucking information like a SS number is.
Honorables,
I read an article written by the quality journalists at the Register and I know from experience that I should believe everything they have said. I would like yo suggest you read the Register for all of your news because it is the finest newspaper in all the world. I must tidy up this letter so I can go pee my pants and fume because I think Microsoft is taking over the world when in reality the Register doesn't say fucking shit about Microsoft buying anything more than "rights" to some of SGI's IP which doesn't specify if they bought patents of licenses.
Thank you,
Jason Asbahr
Game Developer
But in order to fucking get on Napster's network you have to pay money. People who are going to rip Napster off are not going to pay money to use their fucking network. Nobody who carried a blue box put a quarter in before they called just so they could not totally rip off the phone company.
I think the real problem solver in terms of broadband will eventually be municipalities. What if the streets in your city were privately controlled? Rather than streets that went everywhere you'd only have streets leading to businesses and housing tracts whose owners have some affiliation with the street's ownership. Weird sort of like Snow Crash. Municipalities though can put fiber anywhere they want cheaper than private organizations because they don't have to pay the same sort of fees because they'd only be paying it to themselves. Once the fiber is layed they can lease it out to whomever wants to put some equipment on it and do some data transfer. The local muni can also form an agency to handle data services and offer service as a utility. There is plenty of room for competition because each city can lease their fiber to whoever they want. The second benefit of municipally owned fiber is responsibility on the part of the leasee. They can't gouge their customers on lines leased to them by the muni, any attempt to do so would result in their lease being revoked and they'd be screwed. Additionally since it is a muni to muni situation, people in one city aren't paying the marginalized cost of high bandwdith being added in another city like what happens when your ILEC or cable company operates over a broad area. They get to pay for what they get.
This provides plenty of bandwidth in a city or county and since it probably wouldn't be too difficult to get these fiber networked hooked up to MAEs or NAPs they'd be on the internet with everybody else. I don't think it would be a violation of any of the telcom acts of the past 20 years since the ILECs can still provide their access and all with their own lines, but they can also lease the city's lines to provide their services. They could say "you could use our regular services using the city's lines OR you could use out dedicated high speed high QoS privately owned lines". This saves ILECs beaucoup cash running lines used by the public at large.
How come nobody seems to be getting it. The problem isn't DCC sends between clients. The problem is high bandwidth data payloads using a signaling protocol rather than a regular transfer protocol. This stems from the oversight in the SIP protocol saying it can carry any sort of data over either TCP or UDP. So if you've got a ton of users all logging on at the same time sending UDP SIP packets over your network (MP3s and Divx movies for instance) it is going to fuck you up hardcore. Same if IM clients add stuff like voice and video as attachments sent over said SIP protocol. All it takes it one jackass to make an IM client that does all of its data transfer through the SIP protocol to make everyone have a bad day. It isn't just AOLs problem since they're using the same network infrastructure everybody else is using for everything else they use it for. So now the IETF is trying to get a better data transfer protocol to go along with SIP so some jackass doesn't take down a MAE because a bunch of people behind it sent a terabyte of UDP packets.
The overhead for switching from IP to some other protocol is expensive (don't bother pointing out IP being wrapped in another protocol like ATM because I don't see ATM equipment being cheap or easy on the processing power). Besides which the headend links where IP is converted to some other addressing scheme are still going to be swamped with traffic flowing in and out of them. The problem isn't IP the problem is not enough bandwidth on the local end to meet the demand generated at the local end.
What is it about the slashdot crowd that wants everything at the cost of nothing. Maybe they get it from using Linux far too long. You can either get efficiency or you can get scalability with a very small range between the two. For efficiency look at gaming consoles, they sacrifice the ability to scale in order to have a tight nit efficient system. Another entrant into this catagory is/was Cyrix's Media GX chip and Intel's 810 chipset. The cost and waste of the system is lowered by putting more components in the same packaging. On the side of scalability look at the Mac 9600 with it's 12 memory sockets and 6 PCI slots. Of course just about any PC or workstation class system falls into the scalable classification, the 9600 is just an example of sheer expandibility. The marrige of these two is something like the G4 Cube which is hated in many circles. It was small and fairly efficient yet had the ability to be upgraded a little bit. However it came at the cost of not being able to use widely abvailable standard sized expansion card (a video card upgrade costs beaucoup cash because you can only get it from Apple). Slashdot folks want something that can fit a half dozen components into off the shelf yet be compact and efficient. It isn't going to happen unless somebody releases a system with a "computer on a chip" plugs directly into a backplane that links it to other components. Even then people would bitch because the COC components weren't up to their expectations.
Why charge 50$ a season when you can charge 100$ for a season by your logic. Releasing DVD collections of highly sought after syndicated shows makes you lose money. How many people are going to watch FX every day (theoretically making FX money being subjected to their advertisements) to see their favourite X-Files episode when they can go out and buy it on DVD. The theoretical shrinking of the syndication market by releasing DVD or VHS copies of an entire season needs to be made up for in the eyes of the executives. It is unfair but that is why they do it.
Steve Jobs have mignons? Man I want to go to his house for dinner! As for Apple they have been going with the digital hub concept for a while and I think it has been fleshing out pretty well. You can go from MP3 collection to audio CD or portable MP3 player pretty easily or from digital camera (still or motion) to website, VCD, DVD, or whatever. The digital hub is all about styling content creation. An MTV labeled computer is merely for content absorbtion. How often do you see shows on MTV all about making music yourself? MTV viewers are asymmetric media nodes. They suck down all the crap they are fed and produce next to nothing themselves.
A good portion of the posts by students are their tales of woe about not being able to share gigs of porn and MP3s. Big fucking deal. The fees for your semester's worth of internet access isn't higher than what I pay in the same period for a cable modem. Stop being whiny bitches. I think legitimate uses also fall short of downloading a new Linux ISO every day. No matter what you think you need, you don't REALLY need a new Linux ISO every day. There's also a good chance your school's got a mirror on their internal network somewhere of all the ISOs you could want. If you need an update use apt-get or some other installer program with FTP support for fetching new RPMs. You might talk to some network admins to see if they would provide a mirror for said FTP so you wouldn't have to go outside the network to keep your system up to date. Browsing the web and playing counter strike or Quake all day long is easily legitimate because it isn't going to put you over any quotas. As for admins, put mirrors of stuff like Linux ISOs and FTPs on boxes in the internal network and advertise them to students so they know they don't have to tax your internet connection to get them. Also set up HTTP caching proxies at the head end the dorms or library or whatever hooks up to. It will offload stress on your outgoing connection to the net by a good deal.
I saw one of these at Fry's a couple weeks ago and thought it looked pretty cool. For the complaining Frank does about the video chip it is a pretty keen little box and may very well be the start of a trend if it becomes popular. Consumer systems didn't always used to be two and a half foot metal and plastic monstrocities. I really like the look of the old SparcStations or the Quadra 610 and at times even the LCII/III. Why do PCs have to be so damn big and bulky. It wouldn't kill anybody to have a full fledged PC the size of a Playstation. I would have gotten a much smaller case for my PCs had they been available. I want something I can easily tuck under my desk, next to my monitor, or under my router.
Nymia is on fucking drugs. That is the only way I can seem to figure out the mental mechanations behind this crap. His quotes are retarded, using a quote saying "imagine an America with compitent teachers and boutiful access to information". Yeah well I can imagine it and there would be no digital divide if teachers knew what the fuck they were teaching and had more skills then what is required to currently teach high school and elementary students. There are only a small percentage of teachers who teach a subject they actually have any actual training in. Math and science teachers come from the PE department and English teachers haven't read a book with any more depth than a Danielle Steel novel.
Secondly the statistics are complete crap. The conclusion is that 10% of people without internet access actually want it. Man some divide, ten percent is little more than a margin or error. Some old computer with Linux hacked onto it is not an easier or cheaper way to get someone on the internet. Linux doesn't have a lower cost than any other OS in the realm of computers. Because you can download the source code doesn't mean shit. A good 99% of people with computers don't even know what the hell source code is, it is of no use at all to them. Complex software requires training. Not equating the cost of support is irresponcible and unconvincing. It is further irresponsible to say that there are X number of users of a piece of software therefore someone has X number of resources for help. That is just retarded. If I use a piece of software I'm not going to write down my phone number so some jackass who doesn't know a microchip from a potato chip can call me and ask me how to defragment his monitor.
Crap about subsidizing the cost and minimizing the cost of parts and all that is just bad accounting. I hope this guy never hopes to be an MBA. Besides the obvious fact nothing is free, not even putting Linux on a discarded 386 PC clone from yesteryear internet access isn't free. The concept of a free ISP died out because it wasn't economically viable. Even if all somebody had to do was subsidize the cost of ISP service and software support giving free computers to everybody would STILL be uneconomical jackassery. Why should somebody get for free something I have to pay for? If some welfare kid gets a free PC and internet access for doing nothing I want a free PC and internet access for doing nothing. Slashdot needs a story moderating system. I'd rate this -1 Editor of crack.
Making a game available to a certain strata of computer users makes your game less popular. If you had to wait until you could afford a new PC in order to play a game you'd buy something with much lower requirements. I don't want to shell out a thousand bucks to play a computer game. Another thing to worry about is compatibility. UT runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Not a whole slew of people went out and bought a new Athlon XP just to run Linux on. A majority of Mac owners don't have brand spanking new Quicksilver systems with GeForce 3s in them. Shit most Windows users don't have a card more powerful than a TNT2. If the developers wanted to ignore the majority of their userbase they could push the envelope but then who would buy it.
Word is an open format in that it is heavily documented. I wish I still had the ISBN for the Word/Excel97 files published by Microsoft press. If it is a burden to not use non-free software why does Stallman keep advocating it as a better model than free software? With non-free software I don't have to worry about opening Word or Excel files. Whining about the closed nature of a file format and how you can't read it isn't a very convincing argument to switch from non-free software to free software. At least not to me. Switching licensing schemes so I can view some source code I'm never going to mess with doesn't mean shit to me, I want/need to get work done.