1) Downloading opens people to things they would not know about, causing them to buy more. So, downloading should be allowed as advertisement. 2) The people who download are the most fervent fans. So, downloading should be allowed as a means to not drive them away.
Any others?/I was a a 1) when I stopped downloading, and consuming, all RIAA media.
The most pirated shows are the most watched shows on TV, and also the shows with the best DVD sales.
If you want an example, take shows like Battlestar and Doctor Who - they were released overseas earlier than in North America, then pirated millions of times, and then had an even bigger following here when they came to regular TV.
I just wish the MPAA/RIAA/etc. would get their heads out of their asses and realize that possible revenue != lost revenue, and also that possible revenue goes up with free evangelical advertising.
Your dream is only doable with highly optimized BIOS code. I'd look to LinuxBIOS/Coreboot/OpenBIOS for the answers. You might also investigate what makes VIA boards and many laptops POST way quicker.
My "enthusiast" board posts in 22 seconds, and boots the OS in 35; that's another 13s. My VIA slow-as-shit board boots to the desktop in 14-15 seconds. I think POSTing only takes about 4-5. It's already past detecting drives(and letting you enter the BIOS) by the time the monitor flicks on.
One interesting thing that slows down booting is Sound Drivers. Realtek sound drivers, in particular. I noticed a 7 second drop in boot times by disabling sound in the device manager, on boards with Realtek HD integrated audio. With the VIA board, there was no drop at all from disabling sound.
I have heard that some operating systems can remember device configurations, to speed up booting. By default this is disabled in most linux distros, and enabled in windows, which is why swapping motherboards is a PITA for WinXP and down, and usually requires a repair install unless you prepare for it.;) It's also why an unclogged WinXP is one of the fastest booting OS's out there.
But I bet your Physiatrist charged more to your insurance company.:P
An X-ray, injection, pre-visit medical history, and a 1 hour visit. The way doctors bill around here, that's got to be at least $1000. It may have been cheaper to just get 10-15 chiropractic visits.;)
It's economics. Many people seeking alternative healthcare don't have insurance. They go that route because it's the cheaper solution.
Not even games require a great CPU, anymore. Some of the most innovative ones(Like World of Goo or Left4Dead) will run on old systems, like a 2ghz Athlon XP from 2002/2003.:P Faster CPUs are for... bragging rights? Encoding stuff?
More memory is for multitasking - you can never have enough memory! I'm amazed that I can hit 1GB memory usage when my OS and background software only consumes ~150MB. A year ago that wasn't the case, but now I just have more stuff running...
I think the next must have computer hardware will be high performance SSDs. That'll boost responsiveness more than a faster CPU can. People will become accustomed to their games loading instantly, and not having lag spikes. It's already been proven that a high end SSD can take the min FPS in a game like Crysis from the low 10's to the high 20's - that's more than the jump from Dual-core to Quad-core, or 8800GTX to GTX260.
I don't really like OpenID. I have a lot of email accounts that are separate for a reason. It annoys me when I go to a random site, and one of them is pre-entered into a login box.
I use KeePass to manage usernames/passwords. Having a single ID/password isn't any more convenient.
The BBC's Series 4 FAQ suggests that now the Time Lord social order has been destroyed, the Doctor may be able to circumvent the limit on regenerations; it says: "Now that his people are gone, who knows? Time Lords used to have 13 lives.
In "The Sound of Drums" (2007) the Master is revealed to have been granted a new body by the Time Lords during the Time War with at least one new regeneration. Non-Gallifreyans are also seen to regenerate in Underworld (1978) and Mawdryn Undead (1983), but with adverse side effects.
Sounds to me like regeneration is a socially-imposed limit to keep them from living forever.;)
But they aren't immortal... found this interesting tidbit:
In The Mind of Evil the Master points a conventional firearm at the Doctor and threatens to "put a bullet through both your hearts", while in "Forest of the Dead", Professor Song warns that an impending electrocution would stop both the Time Lord's hearts, killing him. From these, it is apparent that a Time Lord can die if both his hearts stop.
This quote also further supports it:
The TARDIS appears to assist in the regenerative process. In addition to the second Doctor's explicit statement to this effect shortly after regenerating from the first, regenerating outside the TARDIS has never been shown to go particularly well. Of the four occasions on which this has happened, one is forced on him by the Time Lords (The War Games), one requires a Time Lord to give the Doctor's cells a "little push" to start the process (Planet of the Spiders), one needs the TARDIS's "Zero Room", a chamber sealed from all outside forces, to help him recover (Castrovalva) and the last occurs a few hours after he has actually "died" (The 1996 television movie). That last regeneration remains the only one that takes place significantly far away from the TARDIS, without any obvious interaction from other Time Lords, though it may be noted that in The Doctor's Daughter, Jenny - a woman created from the Tenth Doctor's DNA - dies and later reanimates in a process that has some apparent similarities to a regeneration, some time after the TARDIS leaves her planet.
All these + more indicate that the limit may not be a physical one.
Another:
In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master and the Doctor demonstrate that regeneration is not an automatic process (or the process is automatic but the Time Lord undergoing it can halt the regeneration at will) as, despite the Doctor's pleas for him to regenerate, the Master instead chooses to die after being shot by Lucy Saxon
It's quite possible that it's a socially imposed limit - that is, multiple timelords can collectively decide whether you get to regenerate or not.
Most of the "doom and gloom" PC game sales figures are for retail outlets, and fail to factor in the tens of millions(?) of sales done online, through services like Steam, Stardock, Direct2Drive, etc.
There's lots of articles out there stating that 2008 was a good year for gaming.
PC gaming has been increasing - not declining. However, the growth rate was slowing/stagnating for a few years there, while at the same time it was going up massively for consoles.
That was partly due to the lackluster games being shoved at us, favouring graphics over gameplay and stability. After all, pushing bleeding edge graphics is the most important factor - who cares if the game crashes every 30-80 mins!
It's also partly due to the expensive Vista/DX10 upgrades required to play new games. Most people required whole new systems, so before they could buy "new" games, they needed to spend $1000 getting up to date hardware.
But now that people have their new hardware(which will stick around for 5 years, just like a console), they're ready to buy games again - and they're in luck, since the past half-year has been great for quality games.
I predict in ~3-4 years we'll have another "death of PC gaming" era. It's a cycle
That looks like it may only disable autoplay for CD/DVD drives. Does it also work for USB drives?
I believe it does, but I can't say for certain.
On my computer autorun for USB devices is disabled too, and I believe it was that tweak that did it, but it was years ago that I applied these tweaks, and my memory isn't perfect.:P
If you want to test it, I suggest throwing an Autorun.inf onto a USB stick, and have it open Notepad.;)
REG_DWORD "Autorun" - set it to 0 Note: Must be logged on as an admin.
This disables autorun at the driver level, rather than explorer policy level. It may take a reboot to take effect. It should disable all autorun handlers/hooks, effectively turning drives into regular folders. (they just "open")
Autorun.inf files will not automatically run or prompt you to run - actually, on my Win2k box, the right-click autorun option completely vanished!
Note: It doesn't seem to "spin-up" CDs anymore on my computer, until I go into My Computer. It gives it a nasty delay loading that folder, but I figure this is a good thing. It means it isn't accessing the CD or device at all until I tell it to.
Unfortunately, advanced packers can detect this and can unpack differently if they are being unpacked by a virus scanner. Part of the point of using a packer for a virus is its ability to disguise the signature, so looking for a signature without unpacking is pointless.
If the virus can detect the antivirus, then your antivirus fails at sandboxing.
But what resolution H.264 can you play on a PSP? The link says resolutions like 480x160 - quite tiny.
The Pandora has a very powerful processor backed by a very powerful co-processor. I suspect 480p H.264 - perhaps even 720p - should be feasible. Those Arm Cortex processors are approaching netbook speeds.
But you're right about availability. The Pandora is constantly being pushed back. I wanted to buy one last year, and I still do - but I'll have to keep waiting.:P
Games? Anyone. There's a few professional devs, and a whole lot of hobbyists trying their hand at making stuff. Most games are pretty lackluster, but every once and a while there's a great one.
Within a year there'll probably be a few dozen good quality games, which should let you have a couple hundred hours of enjoyment.;)
Touchscreens can be useful for certain tasks, such as... note taking during a lecture, or drawing something in a paint program. They're also handy on smaller handhelds where keyboards aren't feasible.
They're already super popular in cell phones. I don't see why they wouldn't be viable in a netbook, although I fully agree that there's basically no market for them on full size laptops.
How about they lower it to $0.10/hr, and give me the PC for free?
8 cores?...pssh... I only need an atom for word processing and light photo work.
I don't know about you, but when I'm doing work, I feel like *I* should be the one getting paid - not the other way around. Watching dollars go up in smoke while I sit in front of my PC thinking is not very endearing.
If they end up moving to this business model, I think I'll just donate $10 to OOo and use OpenOffice. Although if they offered 1-user(*user - not PC) windows licenses for $60/yr, I'd be all over that.
I think a service like Hulu could compete quite successfully. "Pay" services(Hulu is actually ad-supported) usually have better quality video than free services, and earlier access to content.
You can always torrent high-quality vids, but I don't see that feature making it into the official firmware. Free ad-supported 480p streams is the next best thing.
And besides, many people don't mind paying a bit for the convenience these services bring, especially if they have good steaming quality.
I imagine if they had something like Hulu available on the Wii, then it'd be really popular. It certainly beats youtube when it comes to quality and availability of copyrighted content.
It makes me think of an interesting theory proposed by scientists - that intelligence is partly social.
We learn off other people, so if you're surrounded by people smarter than you, then you're likely exposed to more concepts, and thus can better understand how those concepts relate to the world and other concepts.
What I wonder is, if you could train a small community of animals to think in a more intelligent way, would their children be smarter? Would you kickstart an evolutionary boost to their intelligence?
If you taught an entire colony of parrots to count to 10, would that become knowledge that future generations would retain?
I'm curious where the limits of intelligence are for such a tiny brain - and I wonder how far intellect could be pushed for a larger animal, such as an elephant.
If you think this is because customers like XP over Vista, you're fooling yourself.
This is because Netbooks have become a very valuable commodity. Vista runs horribly on netbooks; Microsoft would rather keep selling XP than risk losing that market share to an OS like Ubuntu.
Once their newer, more responsive Windows comes out, and dual-core Atoms are available, they'll stop selling XP immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Downloading opens people to things they would not know about, causing them to buy more. So, downloading should be allowed as advertisement.
2) The people who download are the most fervent fans. So, downloading should be allowed as a means to not drive them away.
Any others? /I was a a 1) when I stopped downloading, and consuming, all RIAA media.
The most pirated shows are the most watched shows on TV, and also the shows with the best DVD sales.
If you want an example, take shows like Battlestar and Doctor Who - they were released overseas earlier than in North America, then pirated millions of times, and then had an even bigger following here when they came to regular TV.
I just wish the MPAA/RIAA/etc. would get their heads out of their asses and realize that possible revenue != lost revenue, and also that possible revenue goes up with free evangelical advertising.
Your dream is only doable with highly optimized BIOS code. I'd look to LinuxBIOS/Coreboot/OpenBIOS for the answers. You might also investigate what makes VIA boards and many laptops POST way quicker.
My "enthusiast" board posts in 22 seconds, and boots the OS in 35; that's another 13s. My VIA slow-as-shit board boots to the desktop in 14-15 seconds. I think POSTing only takes about 4-5. It's already past detecting drives(and letting you enter the BIOS) by the time the monitor flicks on.
One interesting thing that slows down booting is Sound Drivers. Realtek sound drivers, in particular. I noticed a 7 second drop in boot times by disabling sound in the device manager, on boards with Realtek HD integrated audio. With the VIA board, there was no drop at all from disabling sound.
I have heard that some operating systems can remember device configurations, to speed up booting. By default this is disabled in most linux distros, and enabled in windows, which is why swapping motherboards is a PITA for WinXP and down, and usually requires a repair install unless you prepare for it. ;) It's also why an unclogged WinXP is one of the fastest booting OS's out there.
http://www.skycarexpedition.com/about_skycar.php
Because...
-It's cheaper.
-It's cooler.
-It's a dunebuggy.
All good reasons IMO!
I'm trying to download it, but whenever I click "Download Now" it reloads the page.
It's been doing this for hours. I may have to torrent it?
But I bet your Physiatrist charged more to your insurance company. :P
An X-ray, injection, pre-visit medical history, and a 1 hour visit. The way doctors bill around here, that's got to be at least $1000. It may have been cheaper to just get 10-15 chiropractic visits. ;)
It's economics. Many people seeking alternative healthcare don't have insurance. They go that route because it's the cheaper solution.
Sounds like you've been burned.
Chiropractic is just like any profession - people practise it with with varying skill levels and varying additional knowledge.
Some certified IT guys are total morons, and the same goes for Medical Doctors and Chiropractors.
Find a good one or don't bother with them at all.
Not even games require a great CPU, anymore. Some of the most innovative ones(Like World of Goo or Left4Dead) will run on old systems, like a 2ghz Athlon XP from 2002/2003. :P Faster CPUs are for... bragging rights? Encoding stuff?
More memory is for multitasking - you can never have enough memory! I'm amazed that I can hit 1GB memory usage when my OS and background software only consumes ~150MB. A year ago that wasn't the case, but now I just have more stuff running...
I think the next must have computer hardware will be high performance SSDs. That'll boost responsiveness more than a faster CPU can. People will become accustomed to their games loading instantly, and not having lag spikes. It's already been proven that a high end SSD can take the min FPS in a game like Crysis from the low 10's to the high 20's - that's more than the jump from Dual-core to Quad-core, or 8800GTX to GTX260.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14
We already have an abundance of CPU power. The next jumps will definitely be in IO/storage performance, power consumption, and size.
It makes me wonder if ARM can wedge its way into the netbook market - power consumption is not a strength of x86.
I don't really like OpenID. I have a lot of email accounts that are separate for a reason. It annoys me when I go to a random site, and one of them is pre-entered into a login box.
I use KeePass to manage usernames/passwords. Having a single ID/password isn't any more convenient.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(Doctor_Who)#In_the_series
The BBC's Series 4 FAQ suggests that now the Time Lord social order has been destroyed, the Doctor may be able to circumvent the limit on regenerations; it says: "Now that his people are gone, who knows? Time Lords used to have 13 lives.
In "The Sound of Drums" (2007) the Master is revealed to have been granted a new body by the Time Lords during the Time War with at least one new regeneration. Non-Gallifreyans are also seen to regenerate in Underworld (1978) and Mawdryn Undead (1983), but with adverse side effects.
Sounds to me like regeneration is a socially-imposed limit to keep them from living forever. ;)
But they aren't immortal... found this interesting tidbit:
In The Mind of Evil the Master points a conventional firearm at the Doctor and threatens to "put a bullet through both your hearts", while in "Forest of the Dead", Professor Song warns that an impending electrocution would stop both the Time Lord's hearts, killing him. From these, it is apparent that a Time Lord can die if both his hearts stop.
This quote also further supports it:
The TARDIS appears to assist in the regenerative process. In addition to the second Doctor's explicit statement to this effect shortly after regenerating from the first, regenerating outside the TARDIS has never been shown to go particularly well. Of the four occasions on which this has happened, one is forced on him by the Time Lords (The War Games), one requires a Time Lord to give the Doctor's cells a "little push" to start the process (Planet of the Spiders), one needs the TARDIS's "Zero Room", a chamber sealed from all outside forces, to help him recover (Castrovalva) and the last occurs a few hours after he has actually "died" (The 1996 television movie). That last regeneration remains the only one that takes place significantly far away from the TARDIS, without any obvious interaction from other Time Lords, though it may be noted that in The Doctor's Daughter, Jenny - a woman created from the Tenth Doctor's DNA - dies and later reanimates in a process that has some apparent similarities to a regeneration, some time after the TARDIS leaves her planet.
All these + more indicate that the limit may not be a physical one.
Another:
In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master and the Doctor demonstrate that regeneration is not an automatic process (or the process is automatic but the Time Lord undergoing it can halt the regeneration at will) as, despite the Doctor's pleas for him to regenerate, the Master instead chooses to die after being shot by Lucy Saxon
It's quite possible that it's a socially imposed limit - that is, multiple timelords can collectively decide whether you get to regenerate or not.
I need citation? The other guy didn't give any.
Go read a report like this one:
http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1911800&g=1
Or articles like this (more aimed at consoles):
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081223.wgtyearinreview1222/BNStory/PersonalTech/home?cid=al_gam_mostview
Or read Gamasutra.
Most of the "doom and gloom" PC game sales figures are for retail outlets, and fail to factor in the tens of millions(?) of sales done online, through services like Steam, Stardock, Direct2Drive, etc.
There's lots of articles out there stating that 2008 was a good year for gaming.
PC gaming has been increasing - not declining. However, the growth rate was slowing/stagnating for a few years there, while at the same time it was going up massively for consoles.
That was partly due to the lackluster games being shoved at us, favouring graphics over gameplay and stability. After all, pushing bleeding edge graphics is the most important factor - who cares if the game crashes every 30-80 mins!
It's also partly due to the expensive Vista/DX10 upgrades required to play new games. Most people required whole new systems, so before they could buy "new" games, they needed to spend $1000 getting up to date hardware.
But now that people have their new hardware(which will stick around for 5 years, just like a console), they're ready to buy games again - and they're in luck, since the past half-year has been great for quality games.
I predict in ~3-4 years we'll have another "death of PC gaming" era. It's a cycle
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom]
That looks like it may only disable autoplay for CD/DVD drives. Does it also work for USB drives?
I believe it does, but I can't say for certain.
On my computer autorun for USB devices is disabled too, and I believe it was that tweak that did it, but it was years ago that I applied these tweaks, and my memory isn't perfect. :P
If you want to test it, I suggest throwing an Autorun.inf onto a USB stick, and have it open Notepad. ;)
Ahh, a fellow autoplay hater!
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1074953&cid=26256453
^
My post on how to disable it in the driver. Haven't tested it on Vista, since I don't have Vista.
It's pretty reliably disabled on Win2k/XP, though. ;)
If you're really worried, you should disable it at the driver level rather than the explorer policy level.
For Win2k/XP (maybe Vista), open up regedit and find this key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom]
REG_DWORD "Autorun" - set it to 0
Note: Must be logged on as an admin.
This disables autorun at the driver level, rather than explorer policy level. It may take a reboot to take effect. It should disable all autorun handlers/hooks, effectively turning drives into regular folders. (they just "open")
Autorun.inf files will not automatically run or prompt you to run - actually, on my Win2k box, the right-click autorun option completely vanished!
Note: It doesn't seem to "spin-up" CDs anymore on my computer, until I go into My Computer. It gives it a nasty delay loading that folder, but I figure this is a good thing. It means it isn't accessing the CD or device at all until I tell it to.
Such is the price of security, I suppose!
Unfortunately, advanced packers can detect this and can unpack differently if they are being unpacked by a virus scanner. Part of the point of using a packer for a virus is its ability to disguise the signature, so looking for a signature without unpacking is pointless.
If the virus can detect the antivirus, then your antivirus fails at sandboxing.
But what resolution H.264 can you play on a PSP? The link says resolutions like 480x160 - quite tiny.
The Pandora has a very powerful processor backed by a very powerful co-processor. I suspect 480p H.264 - perhaps even 720p - should be feasible. Those Arm Cortex processors are approaching netbook speeds.
But you're right about availability. The Pandora is constantly being pushed back. I wanted to buy one last year, and I still do - but I'll have to keep waiting. :P
Games? Anyone. There's a few professional devs, and a whole lot of hobbyists trying their hand at making stuff. Most games are pretty lackluster, but every once and a while there's a great one.
Within a year there'll probably be a few dozen good quality games, which should let you have a couple hundred hours of enjoyment. ;)
While I see what you mean, I partly disagree.
Touchscreens can be useful for certain tasks, such as... note taking during a lecture, or drawing something in a paint program. They're also handy on smaller handhelds where keyboards aren't feasible.
They're already super popular in cell phones. I don't see why they wouldn't be viable in a netbook, although I fully agree that there's basically no market for them on full size laptops.
How about they lower it to $0.10/hr, and give me the PC for free?
8 cores?...pssh... I only need an atom for word processing and light photo work.
I don't know about you, but when I'm doing work, I feel like *I* should be the one getting paid - not the other way around. Watching dollars go up in smoke while I sit in front of my PC thinking is not very endearing.
If they end up moving to this business model, I think I'll just donate $10 to OOo and use OpenOffice. Although if they offered 1-user(*user - not PC) windows licenses for $60/yr, I'd be all over that.
I think a service like Hulu could compete quite successfully. "Pay" services(Hulu is actually ad-supported) usually have better quality video than free services, and earlier access to content.
You can always torrent high-quality vids, but I don't see that feature making it into the official firmware. Free ad-supported 480p streams is the next best thing.
And besides, many people don't mind paying a bit for the convenience these services bring, especially if they have good steaming quality.
I imagine if they had something like Hulu available on the Wii, then it'd be really popular. It certainly beats youtube when it comes to quality and availability of copyrighted content.
Brain Plasticity - his subconscious is figuring out how to make use of some form of input, to give him a sense that something is there.
Alright, then. How about you suggest an experiment that would isolate the correct variable.
Stop coming up with excuses. If you can't suggest a better experiment, don't complain.
No thanks. Someone would just prove it wrong in 5 years, anyway. :P
I wasn't complaining. Seems that all these theories have common roots.
Brain Plasticity - his subconscious is figuring out how to make use of some form of input, to give him a sense that something is there.
I bet if he did it over and over, he'd get better at it. It'd strengthen the connections.
That's really neat.
It makes me think of an interesting theory proposed by scientists - that intelligence is partly social.
We learn off other people, so if you're surrounded by people smarter than you, then you're likely exposed to more concepts, and thus can better understand how those concepts relate to the world and other concepts.
What I wonder is, if you could train a small community of animals to think in a more intelligent way, would their children be smarter? Would you kickstart an evolutionary boost to their intelligence?
If you taught an entire colony of parrots to count to 10, would that become knowledge that future generations would retain?
I'm curious where the limits of intelligence are for such a tiny brain - and I wonder how far intellect could be pushed for a larger animal, such as an elephant.
They do say elephants never forget...
If you think this is because customers like XP over Vista, you're fooling yourself. This is because Netbooks have become a very valuable commodity. Vista runs horribly on netbooks; Microsoft would rather keep selling XP than risk losing that market share to an OS like Ubuntu. Once their newer, more responsive Windows comes out, and dual-core Atoms are available, they'll stop selling XP immediately.