I read that interview too, and it just confused me. Playsforsure is the solution for techies and the build-your-own-computer crowd, and Zune is the solution for the turnkey, buy-from-Dell crowd. As if the build-your-own-computer people would ever bother buying lossy DRM'ed music. I could understand if Microsoft wants to simplify the interface for Zune with just one media player and one music store. There will be more complexity when you partner with different music stores for content. Maybe that was too much for newbies to deal with.
Those are really two different things. When Allard says MPEG-4 or H.264 he's talking about the codec, not the container file or the DRM wrapper around it. He's saying if you happen to "find" an unprotected video file encoded with one of the popular codecs, Zune will play it. No questions asked. Even when you encode to the proprietary WMA and WMV formats, you can make the files unprotected so they'll play on any device that supports it.
Offshore accounts are too risky these days. There's plenty of ways to hide money in plain sight: personal PACs, sham non-profit foundations, etc. California's former Insurance Commissioner set up a sham charity (California Research and Assistance Fund) that received millions from insurance companies in exchange for him waiving billions in claims and penalties related to the 1994 Northridge quake. That's what I call a return on investment.
Well that's not really a safe assumption. Almost every single fan on retail video cards I've seen is a cheap POS with cheap bearings. I've had to RMA brand new video cards with a buzzy, rattling bearing. It's very rare to find one that lasts more than two years before the bearing starts rattling and dying. I know computer cases can get dusty, but case fans and CPU fans don't fail at nearly the same rate.
About those CPU fans, the heatsinks bundled with retail CPUs tend to me skimpy, but they do have decent quality fans that last for the life of the 3 year warranty. I know some video card makes advertise lifetime warranties now, so maybe that'll be an incentive to spec some decent quality fans.
Not true. Check out this review of the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. The PCI Express Slot is limited to 4X, and it underperforms other PCI-E motherboards by as much as 10%, but it's usually closer. AGP performance is actually slightly better. It's one of the most affordable Core 2 Duo motherboards out there, and it can even use your old DDR400 RAM.
How about spare parts and supplies? Floppy drives and keyboard switches will wear out. How reliable are those 20 year old floppy disks? You can't exactly pop over to Office Depot for single density 5 1/4 floppies.
In reality, the sooner we can switch over to fully electric vehicles that get their initial energy supply from wind, hydro, or nuclear power, the better off we're going to be. The hydrocarbons remaining underground are far too precious as materials feedstocks to be wasted burning them in our cars.
You're right about that. We can't just find one magic fuel to replace oil and continue on our merry way, but we could make it with a combination of efforts. Right now, most energy for transportation comes from liquid fuels, and energy for electrical generation comes from everything else (coal, nuclear, hydro and natural gas). We need to electrify as much transportation as we can. That means rail, light rail and electric cars/scooters. Electric cars today are not even close to ready for the mass market, but we need to work towards them long term. Either electric cars will improve or the price of oil will catch up with the inconvenience of electric cars.
I know electrical generation has its own problems with fuel supplies and CO2 emissions, but we have more options there for clean, sustainable energy.
they have a rebate from the utilities companies. And if you have a farm you can get them free.
That's something to check. I don't even have to bother with a rebate. I can buy them for less than a dollar each in the stores, and there's a sticker saying part of the price is subsidized by the local electric utility.
The Canon i960 uses an optical sensor with a prism to detect low ink. It's cheap, simple and it works without lying about low ink when there's still plenty in the tank. If you're lucky enough to have one of the old Canons that use the BCI-6 cartridge, you're set for life with cheap refill ink. They finally went to chipped ink tanks about a year ago.
Playing a song on the radio is considered a public performance, and the composer gets a royalty for that usually collected by ASCAP or BMI, but I don't think the performer gets a royalty.
I installed AOL 9.0 on a virtual machine to see for myself, and it is a seriously annoying piece of software. It takes an extra section of the taskbar for itself (about 1/5 the width of a 1024 screen). It adds an autostart tray icon and about five desktop shortcuts. I launched the program to see if I could log in with my AIM account. I got to a screen where I could log in with an existing account or register a new account, but that screen had no back or cancel. I could only kill it with task manager.
It's obviously made for newbies who need lots of handholding, and it's good that they're bundling free antivirus with AOL 9.0 because that demographic really needs it. If you want to try out free AOL 9.0 over broadband, do yourself a favor and install it in a VM. MS Virtual PC and VMWare Player are both free (beer). QEMU is Free, but you need the KQEMU module to get decent speed, and it's free (beer).
All fashion gets recycled. Five years ago the vest came back (the early 80's Back to the Future style vest). Two years ago trucker hats came back. I think the late 80's ripped jeans are coming back this year.
That's a bit of some old 80's modem humor. People dialed into a BBS or serial terminal with a VT emulator in those days. If you were disconnected because of some line noise you'd see garbled characters and then the NO CARRIER message from your own modem.
That may be true, but Karl Rove and his spinmeisters also have nearly unlimited access to media outlets that repeat talking points with no critical analysis, thus allowing them to minimize the story. You've heard the excuses. This is a "terrorist surveillance program" targeted at a few dozen suspects. This is "hot pursuit" of terrorist communications. Oops did I say few dozen? I meant phone records of tens of millions of American citizens. We're doing this for your own good to keep you safe. You can't handle the truth. blah blah blah
Even now, people who disagree with spying on Americans get painted with the "Howard Dean fringe-left" label. Explain how spying on Americans is a moderate position.
We've had a lot of problems with certain Dell Optiplex models, like leaking motherboard capacitors and bad hard drives. Dell never acknowledged a defect with them even after every single computer from one order died with the same problem. However, they were fast about shipping out new parts or an on-site service tech next day when we did have a problem. So no problem getting hardware warranty support. Don't bother calling for any software support, though.
but to come down on them for using "posh English accents" is pretty silly - they are English!
English accents might all sound snobby and posh to us Americans, but there are posh English accents and then there are low class English accents. Accents are very much an indicator of class in England.
Actually, I don't see this as an Open Source issue at all. I see this as bad coding, plain and simple.
Not just that. It's more a matter of signing a bad contract. Why did the city sign a contract for subscription software licensing? Did the vendor not offer a perpetual license plus maintenance and support? You know if the software stops working, the whole garage becomes a useless pile of junk, right?
Let's compare this to a more mature but similar product, elevators. Elevators are controlled by computers too, but do you see people trapped in elevators over a contract dispute about software licensing?
The way that different search queries are linked to a unique user are with browser cookies. So clear your cookies from all the search engine domains, or refuse cookies from them. And for god's sake, don't be logged in to your Gmail while you're searching on Google in the same browser. They're the same cookie! The same goes for Yahoo mail and Yahoo search, AOL Webmail and AOL search, etc.
My suggestion is run both Firefox and Opera. Use one for webmail, the other for search.
Slashdot Mirror
I read that interview too, and it just confused me. Playsforsure is the solution for techies and the build-your-own-computer crowd, and Zune is the solution for the turnkey, buy-from-Dell crowd. As if the build-your-own-computer people would ever bother buying lossy DRM'ed music. I could understand if Microsoft wants to simplify the interface for Zune with just one media player and one music store. There will be more complexity when you partner with different music stores for content. Maybe that was too much for newbies to deal with.
Those are really two different things. When Allard says MPEG-4 or H.264 he's talking about the codec, not the container file or the DRM wrapper around it. He's saying if you happen to "find" an unprotected video file encoded with one of the popular codecs, Zune will play it. No questions asked. Even when you encode to the proprietary WMA and WMV formats, you can make the files unprotected so they'll play on any device that supports it.
Offshore accounts are too risky these days. There's plenty of ways to hide money in plain sight: personal PACs, sham non-profit foundations, etc. California's former Insurance Commissioner set up a sham charity (California Research and Assistance Fund) that received millions from insurance companies in exchange for him waiving billions in claims and penalties related to the 1994 Northridge quake. That's what I call a return on investment.
Wikipedia entry for Chuck Quackenbush
Timeline of scandal
Well that's not really a safe assumption. Almost every single fan on retail video cards I've seen is a cheap POS with cheap bearings. I've had to RMA brand new video cards with a buzzy, rattling bearing. It's very rare to find one that lasts more than two years before the bearing starts rattling and dying. I know computer cases can get dusty, but case fans and CPU fans don't fail at nearly the same rate.
About those CPU fans, the heatsinks bundled with retail CPUs tend to me skimpy, but they do have decent quality fans that last for the life of the 3 year warranty. I know some video card makes advertise lifetime warranties now, so maybe that'll be an incentive to spec some decent quality fans.
Actually it does support both DDR and DDR2. Here's an earlier article comparing memory performance between the two. Almost no difference.
Why is the submitter only pimping the HotHardware review? Here's more (in no particular order):
HardOCP
Guru3D
Anandtech
Bjorn3D
PCPerspective
nV News
Not true. Check out this review of the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. The PCI Express Slot is limited to 4X, and it underperforms other PCI-E motherboards by as much as 10%, but it's usually closer. AGP performance is actually slightly better. It's one of the most affordable Core 2 Duo motherboards out there, and it can even use your old DDR400 RAM.
How about spare parts and supplies? Floppy drives and keyboard switches will wear out. How reliable are those 20 year old floppy disks? You can't exactly pop over to Office Depot for single density 5 1/4 floppies.
You're right about that. We can't just find one magic fuel to replace oil and continue on our merry way, but we could make it with a combination of efforts. Right now, most energy for transportation comes from liquid fuels, and energy for electrical generation comes from everything else (coal, nuclear, hydro and natural gas). We need to electrify as much transportation as we can. That means rail, light rail and electric cars/scooters. Electric cars today are not even close to ready for the mass market, but we need to work towards them long term. Either electric cars will improve or the price of oil will catch up with the inconvenience of electric cars.
I know electrical generation has its own problems with fuel supplies and CO2 emissions, but we have more options there for clean, sustainable energy.
That's something to check. I don't even have to bother with a rebate. I can buy them for less than a dollar each in the stores, and there's a sticker saying part of the price is subsidized by the local electric utility.
The Canon i960 uses an optical sensor with a prism to detect low ink. It's cheap, simple and it works without lying about low ink when there's still plenty in the tank. If you're lucky enough to have one of the old Canons that use the BCI-6 cartridge, you're set for life with cheap refill ink. They finally went to chipped ink tanks about a year ago.
Playing a song on the radio is considered a public performance, and the composer gets a royalty for that usually collected by ASCAP or BMI, but I don't think the performer gets a royalty.
I installed AOL 9.0 on a virtual machine to see for myself, and it is a seriously annoying piece of software. It takes an extra section of the taskbar for itself (about 1/5 the width of a 1024 screen). It adds an autostart tray icon and about five desktop shortcuts. I launched the program to see if I could log in with my AIM account. I got to a screen where I could log in with an existing account or register a new account, but that screen had no back or cancel. I could only kill it with task manager.
It's obviously made for newbies who need lots of handholding, and it's good that they're bundling free antivirus with AOL 9.0 because that demographic really needs it. If you want to try out free AOL 9.0 over broadband, do yourself a favor and install it in a VM. MS Virtual PC and VMWare Player are both free (beer). QEMU is Free, but you need the KQEMU module to get decent speed, and it's free (beer).
Apple doesn't run ITMS as a profit maker. The ITMS just about breaks even. It's more a traffic generator to drive iPod sales.
Oops, make that three seashells.
100+ comments and nobody's mentioned Demolition Man and the four seashells.
All fashion gets recycled. Five years ago the vest came back (the early 80's Back to the Future style vest). Two years ago trucker hats came back. I think the late 80's ripped jeans are coming back this year.
That's a bit of some old 80's modem humor. People dialed into a BBS or serial terminal with a VT emulator in those days. If you were disconnected because of some line noise you'd see garbled characters and then the NO CARRIER message from your own modem.
As the OEM, they're responsible for supporting all the OEM bundled software like Windows, Office, etc.
That may be true, but Karl Rove and his spinmeisters also have nearly unlimited access to media outlets that repeat talking points with no critical analysis, thus allowing them to minimize the story. You've heard the excuses. This is a "terrorist surveillance program" targeted at a few dozen suspects. This is "hot pursuit" of terrorist communications. Oops did I say few dozen? I meant phone records of tens of millions of American citizens. We're doing this for your own good to keep you safe. You can't handle the truth. blah blah blah
Even now, people who disagree with spying on Americans get painted with the "Howard Dean fringe-left" label. Explain how spying on Americans is a moderate position.
We've had a lot of problems with certain Dell Optiplex models, like leaking motherboard capacitors and bad hard drives. Dell never acknowledged a defect with them even after every single computer from one order died with the same problem. However, they were fast about shipping out new parts or an on-site service tech next day when we did have a problem. So no problem getting hardware warranty support. Don't bother calling for any software support, though.
English accents might all sound snobby and posh to us Americans, but there are posh English accents and then there are low class English accents. Accents are very much an indicator of class in England.
Not just that. It's more a matter of signing a bad contract. Why did the city sign a contract for subscription software licensing? Did the vendor not offer a perpetual license plus maintenance and support? You know if the software stops working, the whole garage becomes a useless pile of junk, right?
Let's compare this to a more mature but similar product, elevators. Elevators are controlled by computers too, but do you see people trapped in elevators over a contract dispute about software licensing?
You said it yourself: copy protection. How about shut down your OS if they suspect that it's non-genuine? See Microsoft and wgatray.exe.
The way that different search queries are linked to a unique user are with browser cookies. So clear your cookies from all the search engine domains, or refuse cookies from them. And for god's sake, don't be logged in to your Gmail while you're searching on Google in the same browser. They're the same cookie! The same goes for Yahoo mail and Yahoo search, AOL Webmail and AOL search, etc.
My suggestion is run both Firefox and Opera. Use one for webmail, the other for search.