To make your long post short, the bottom line is that being conservative does not necesarily mean you are a Republican, and just because you are a Republican, does not mean that you are a conservative.
It's also fairly well known that the Republican party TODAY bears little resemblance to the party 20 years ago. I can say the same thing about the democratic party. Both parties have been highjacked by fringe groups that don't represent the majority of Americans and have been subverted by lobbyists weilding big dollars.
It's odd to many Americans too, as is "SMS speak" on non-SMS media, writing without punctuation or capitalization, etc. I'm far from perfect, but at least I make an effort to write coherently.
Because even though the phones are fairly small, they are not THAT small - especially when you have the larger "exteneded time" battery. They are also a little too heavy for a shirt pocket. Frankly, I don't like the super small phones anyway - too hard to hold and use when you have big hands.
I found that ALL cell phones - flip or not, tend to suck. I've had belt-clip phones of several different models. It is inevitable that at some point, you bump it and the phone pops out, dropping 3 feet onto the ground, and the battery cover pops off and you scramble for 6 o 7 different parts that are spread over a 15' diameter area.
Now I finally have a heavy-duty nylon holster with a sturdy velcro flap. The only negative is that the belt clip is still plastic (although thicker) instead of metal. If it breaks, I'll get a metal clip and retrofit myself.
The larger problem is the Walmart syndrome. Walmart demands lower prices from manufacturers, who make up for it in reduced quality. Now, because of walmart, you can't get a good quality product from ANY store that carries that manufacturers goods since they are all made to the walmart spec. Walmart, for example, demanded that Matel lower costs by 20% one year or they wouldn't carry their products at Walmart which forced Matel to shut down all US plants and drop quality. Remember when Tonka toys were sturdy? No longer. The quality of toys for kids these days is horrible. Nothing lasts more than a year - many things are broken in shipping before they even get to the store.
I can do a "ditto" with snow shovels. Walmart, Kmart, Lowes, and Home Depot all carry the same shitty chinese shovels. My local hardware store (which just closed this past summer due to competition from Lowes and Home Depot that moved in) carried shovels made in Canada, which are awesome. Now I will have to travel 30 miles to the next dealer just to get a fucking snow shovel that works (when the canadian one wears out in a few years.)
By the way - did you know that if you buy a DeWalt drill at Lowes or Home depot they come with PLASTIC gears? If you go to a contractor tool store, you get the metal gear models for only a few dollars more.
I've had enough of the big-box stores. I buy local / regional whenever possible, then mailorder, and if all else fails, will finally try a big box store as a last resort.
It uses a bright bulb to project an image onto the back of the screen. It matters not that the image gets there by reflecting off of the actual display circuit, or by passing though a translucent mini-panel. Quibble all you want, but it's even listed on Sony's web site as a rear-projection unit.
Um, why is it nuts to want to put all that extra equipment, which is fairly ugly, out of sight? It doesn't take THAT much effort to put wires in the walls. I just made a wiring chase from the area behind the TV down to the basement. All my equipment is in the basement below the living room, and all you see in the living room is the tiny little Xantech IR receiver. A myth box and a 400 disk DVD changer eliminate the need to ever physically touch the equipment for normal usage. If I rent a movie (which is rare,) I rip it via a laptop (which is upstairs) first, sending the output to the myth box in the basement. A typical movie only takes 20 mins to rip... I usually delete the copy anyway, as most modern movies are not worth watching twice. If I really like it, I'll buy it.
Other bonus is that I can use noisy fans and hard disks and I don't hear them. They don't take up any space in the living room, which means the wife gets more room for her decor (she was Very happy to get a 36U rack's worth of equiment out of the living room.)
From what I have seen, the viewing angles of rear projection is much worse than either LCD flat panel or plasma. Plasma generally has much better viewing angles than any type of LCD (other than front-projection.)
For a 100" projection, you'd need about 7.5 ft x 4.5 ft of blank wall space and a wide enough room to put the projecter 12+ ft away with no obstructions between.
This really depends on the projector. Mine has adjustable zoom and can easily create a larger image being only 8' away. The projector is mounted on the ceiling... I don't know about your room, but I generally don't have many obstructions hanging from the ceiling between the seating area and projection wall. Due to limited bulb life (and the expense of replacements) however, I use a pull down screen with a normal TV behind it and only use the projector for movies.
Also, there is nothing saying that you need to project a 100" image. Most consumer projectors are not 1080p either, being the lower 1280x720. Many modern high-end LCD flat panel TV's are full 1080p. Personally, 1280x720 is quite enough for me anyway.
I would be VERY surprised if anyone already has burn-in from playing games on a Wii.
Lots of different games wouldn't cause any burn-in. Playing the SAME game on a dedicated "gaming" plasma for many months on end would be a whole different story.
Um, your TV is a rear projection type. Non-projection LCD's are the same thickness as plasma. Totally different. An example of a sony flat panel is the KDL-52XBR3 which runs around $6500 for a 52".
I see no reason why a selfrespecting Windows sysadmin would not do the same.
Maybe because MS has gone out of their way to make automation Very difficult, instead pushing the pointy clicky interface for everything, and hiding all useful information in binary blobs inside the registry. Command line interfaces are klunky at best, and usually poorly documented. Yes, you can write applications to munge the registry, but it is a PITA. You don't bother writing automation applications unless you have a LOT of servers.
*nix automation is trivial. Small, simple scripts can do a lot. The information you need is right there, your script just parses what you see, and regurgitates what you would do manually.
The big difference is that the manual interface on Windows is gui, and the manual interface on *nix is command line (which is easy to script.)
Moreover, there's no fundamental reason why future DRM can't include a system which automatically disables DRM upon copyright expiration.
I'd like to see how that would work. Is the media itself going to have a built-in Atomic clock time receiver? Or does the media need to trust the date that is set on the hardware reading it? Anything that relies on an outside system won't last the length of the copyright term (such as a phone-home type system.)
Just because someone asks you for personal identification, doesn't mean you need to provide it every time. A number of retailers I have visited this past year have asked for a phone number or email address (I never give it).
Oh, I give them all the information they ask for - just not MY information.
For example: billg@msn.com, or 408-911-0922, or 90210 for the zip.
Stickers work over the barcodes too - like a hard to remove address label. Other option is a bunch of random extra dots and lines with a sharpie - voila, no more scanning!
Firefox with noscript doesn't have any such problem. No automatic printing, and I get a one-page article on one page instead of artificially spread over 3.
Let's be very clear here. You are not buying a complete license of OS X. You are buying an upgrade for your existing Apple hardware. This is why you can't legally run it on non-apple harware. Apple does not sell OS X like MS sells Windows. They do not offer "OEM" or "Retail Full Versions" - Only upgrades for existing Apple operating systems.
But you have to remember: You are not buying a complete OS X for generic hardware, you are buying an UPGRADE for APPLE hardware. The license restricts you to that, and Apple is VERY clear about it. It really doesn't matter what you want to do - Apple does not sell a license for toasters. If you however want to shread your copy of OS X, you are free to do so.
The bottom line is that you can't compare OS X with Vista in this way because the two companies have very different business models. One is a software company that sells some hardware, the other a hardware company that sells some software for that hardware. With Apple, it's very clear that you are buying the Apple experience from top to bottom. You don't get that with Microsoft.
See, we TOLD you that stem cells were bad! Stem cell research kills babies and now we find out that stem cells cause cancer!!!! What more do you need? It's time to ban all stem cells now.
I know I'm being anal here, but you don't make iron from ore, you extract it.
But to your other point, let's look at the Amazon one-click patent. It doesn't matter how you code a one-click solution, it would still violate the patent. The patent is on the process, not the specific implementation. Specific implementation would be more of a copyright issue where you can recode so it doesn't violate copyright.
Another counter example is the g729 codec for voice compression. g729 implements compression in a very specific way, so the open source solution is to not use g729, but to use alternates like gsm and iLBC.
So I guess it totally depends on the patent. Is it very broad where there is no workaround like one-click, or is it very focused where you can use alternate technology to accomplish the same goal?
Well, for some things I'm sure they do, but I haven't heard of a case where they even went after an individual that pirated Windows for personal use. It may have happened, but I haven't heard about it because it's not widespread despite the fact that piracy of Windows is very widespread.
The reason is very simple - it does cost a fair amount of time and effort to go after individuals, and the reward is small (ability to pay and all that...) Businesses are a whole different ball game.
Sun's deal included cross licensing from what I recall, so I don't know if they would have any ability to do anything anyway. Apple is in a position where they too are potentially violating many MS patents, and MS may (probably does) have a larger patent war-chest than Apple. Certainly MS has enough dollars in the bank so that a long-term legal fight would drive Apple into the ground. Most likely, Apple would not join this fight.
IBM is probably in the best position to step in and put a stop to it, and has a vested interest in doing so (since they have been pushing Linux hard to their customers.)
Most likely, if MS DOES decide to fight Linux this way, they are going to pull an SCO and go after businesses that use Linux (like SCO went after Autozone) and not go directly after Redhat / Debian / IBM.
Oh I don't know, Linux is used heavily for server tasks in the enterprise. It has done some serious damage to MS. Desktop is a whole different ballgame however, but this isn't due to MS as much as it is to all the other software that enterprises run that is only available to Windows. Some of the plugins that blend Excel or Word etc. within another application are quite advanced. Porting to Linux would be Very expensive. Ditto for those nasty active-X controls in enterprise web applications.
Oh, I believe that Linux (especially when you look at an entire distribution) DOES infringe on some MS patents. Wasn't it a year or so ago where 20 some odd MS patents were dug up by Linux proponents as a concern?
I think a couple of things have been holding MS back however. IBM and THEIR patent war-chest, and the EU / DOJ with the anti-trust / abusive monopoly issue.
MS wouldn't go after individuals in any case, they would go after businesses.
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Well, yeah. Fox watching the hen house. It will be no surprise when they release their findings.
To make your long post short, the bottom line is that being conservative does not necesarily mean you are a Republican, and just because you are a Republican, does not mean that you are a conservative.
It's also fairly well known that the Republican party TODAY bears little resemblance to the party 20 years ago. I can say the same thing about the democratic party. Both parties have been highjacked by fringe groups that don't represent the majority of Americans and have been subverted by lobbyists weilding big dollars.
It's odd to many Americans too, as is "SMS speak" on non-SMS media, writing without punctuation or capitalization, etc. I'm far from perfect, but at least I make an effort to write coherently.
Because even though the phones are fairly small, they are not THAT small - especially when you have the larger "exteneded time" battery. They are also a little too heavy for a shirt pocket. Frankly, I don't like the super small phones anyway - too hard to hold and use when you have big hands.
It gets worse with a PDA phone.
I found that ALL cell phones - flip or not, tend to suck. I've had belt-clip phones of several different models. It is inevitable that at some point, you bump it and the phone pops out, dropping 3 feet onto the ground, and the battery cover pops off and you scramble for 6 o 7 different parts that are spread over a 15' diameter area.
Now I finally have a heavy-duty nylon holster with a sturdy velcro flap. The only negative is that the belt clip is still plastic (although thicker) instead of metal. If it breaks, I'll get a metal clip and retrofit myself.
The larger problem is the Walmart syndrome. Walmart demands lower prices from manufacturers, who make up for it in reduced quality. Now, because of walmart, you can't get a good quality product from ANY store that carries that manufacturers goods since they are all made to the walmart spec. Walmart, for example, demanded that Matel lower costs by 20% one year or they wouldn't carry their products at Walmart which forced Matel to shut down all US plants and drop quality. Remember when Tonka toys were sturdy? No longer. The quality of toys for kids these days is horrible. Nothing lasts more than a year - many things are broken in shipping before they even get to the store.
I can do a "ditto" with snow shovels. Walmart, Kmart, Lowes, and Home Depot all carry the same shitty chinese shovels. My local hardware store (which just closed this past summer due to competition from Lowes and Home Depot that moved in) carried shovels made in Canada, which are awesome. Now I will have to travel 30 miles to the next dealer just to get a fucking snow shovel that works (when the canadian one wears out in a few years.)
By the way - did you know that if you buy a DeWalt drill at Lowes or Home depot they come with PLASTIC gears? If you go to a contractor tool store, you get the metal gear models for only a few dollars more.
I've had enough of the big-box stores. I buy local / regional whenever possible, then mailorder, and if all else fails, will finally try a big box store as a last resort.
It uses a bright bulb to project an image onto the back of the screen. It matters not that the image gets there by reflecting off of the actual display circuit, or by passing though a translucent mini-panel. Quibble all you want, but it's even listed on Sony's web site as a rear-projection unit.
Um, why is it nuts to want to put all that extra equipment, which is fairly ugly, out of sight? It doesn't take THAT much effort to put wires in the walls. I just made a wiring chase from the area behind the TV down to the basement. All my equipment is in the basement below the living room, and all you see in the living room is the tiny little Xantech IR receiver. A myth box and a 400 disk DVD changer eliminate the need to ever physically touch the equipment for normal usage. If I rent a movie (which is rare,) I rip it via a laptop (which is upstairs) first, sending the output to the myth box in the basement. A typical movie only takes 20 mins to rip... I usually delete the copy anyway, as most modern movies are not worth watching twice. If I really like it, I'll buy it.
Other bonus is that I can use noisy fans and hard disks and I don't hear them. They don't take up any space in the living room, which means the wife gets more room for her decor (she was Very happy to get a 36U rack's worth of equiment out of the living room.)
From what I have seen, the viewing angles of rear projection is much worse than either LCD flat panel or plasma. Plasma generally has much better viewing angles than any type of LCD (other than front-projection.)
For a 100" projection, you'd need about 7.5 ft x 4.5 ft of blank wall space and a wide enough room to put the projecter 12+ ft away with no obstructions between.
This really depends on the projector. Mine has adjustable zoom and can easily create a larger image being only 8' away. The projector is mounted on the ceiling... I don't know about your room, but I generally don't have many obstructions hanging from the ceiling between the seating area and projection wall. Due to limited bulb life (and the expense of replacements) however, I use a pull down screen with a normal TV behind it and only use the projector for movies.
Also, there is nothing saying that you need to project a 100" image. Most consumer projectors are not 1080p either, being the lower 1280x720. Many modern high-end LCD flat panel TV's are full 1080p. Personally, 1280x720 is quite enough for me anyway.
I even play a lot of games (Xbox, 360, PS2, Wii)
I would be VERY surprised if anyone already has burn-in from playing games on a Wii.
Lots of different games wouldn't cause any burn-in. Playing the SAME game on a dedicated "gaming" plasma for many months on end would be a whole different story.
Um, your TV is a rear projection type. Non-projection LCD's are the same thickness as plasma. Totally different. An example of a sony flat panel is the KDL-52XBR3 which runs around $6500 for a 52".
I see no reason why a selfrespecting Windows sysadmin would not do the same.
Maybe because MS has gone out of their way to make automation Very difficult, instead pushing the pointy clicky interface for everything, and hiding all useful information in binary blobs inside the registry. Command line interfaces are klunky at best, and usually poorly documented. Yes, you can write applications to munge the registry, but it is a PITA. You don't bother writing automation applications unless you have a LOT of servers.
*nix automation is trivial. Small, simple scripts can do a lot. The information you need is right there, your script just parses what you see, and regurgitates what you would do manually.
The big difference is that the manual interface on Windows is gui, and the manual interface on *nix is command line (which is easy to script.)
Moreover, there's no fundamental reason why future DRM can't include a system which automatically disables DRM upon copyright expiration.
I'd like to see how that would work. Is the media itself going to have a built-in Atomic clock time receiver? Or does the media need to trust the date that is set on the hardware reading it? Anything that relies on an outside system won't last the length of the copyright term (such as a phone-home type system.)
Just because someone asks you for personal identification, doesn't mean you need to provide it every time. A number of retailers I have visited this past year have asked for a phone number or email address (I never give it).
Oh, I give them all the information they ask for - just not MY information.
For example: billg@msn.com, or 408-911-0922, or 90210 for the zip.
Plus you don't HAVE to have the phonebook listing with YOUR name on it. I know my town has an extra Harold Peters.
Stickers work over the barcodes too - like a hard to remove address label. Other option is a bunch of random extra dots and lines with a sharpie - voila, no more scanning!
Firefox with noscript doesn't have any such problem. No automatic printing, and I get a one-page article on one page instead of artificially spread over 3.
Let's be very clear here. You are not buying a complete license of OS X. You are buying an upgrade for your existing Apple hardware. This is why you can't legally run it on non-apple harware. Apple does not sell OS X like MS sells Windows. They do not offer "OEM" or "Retail Full Versions" - Only upgrades for existing Apple operating systems.
But you have to remember: You are not buying a complete OS X for generic hardware, you are buying an UPGRADE for APPLE hardware. The license restricts you to that, and Apple is VERY clear about it. It really doesn't matter what you want to do - Apple does not sell a license for toasters. If you however want to shread your copy of OS X, you are free to do so.
The bottom line is that you can't compare OS X with Vista in this way because the two companies have very different business models. One is a software company that sells some hardware, the other a hardware company that sells some software for that hardware. With Apple, it's very clear that you are buying the Apple experience from top to bottom. You don't get that with Microsoft.
See, we TOLD you that stem cells were bad! Stem cell research kills babies and now we find out that stem cells cause cancer!!!! What more do you need? It's time to ban all stem cells now.
- W
Just get yourself a Security Bit Set (search google) and those silly screws won't cause you any more problems.
I know I'm being anal here, but you don't make iron from ore, you extract it.
But to your other point, let's look at the Amazon one-click patent. It doesn't matter how you code a one-click solution, it would still violate the patent. The patent is on the process, not the specific implementation. Specific implementation would be more of a copyright issue where you can recode so it doesn't violate copyright.
Another counter example is the g729 codec for voice compression. g729 implements compression in a very specific way, so the open source solution is to not use g729, but to use alternates like gsm and iLBC.
So I guess it totally depends on the patent. Is it very broad where there is no workaround like one-click, or is it very focused where you can use alternate technology to accomplish the same goal?
First, MS does go after individuals.
Well, for some things I'm sure they do, but I haven't heard of a case where they even went after an individual that pirated Windows for personal use. It may have happened, but I haven't heard about it because it's not widespread despite the fact that piracy of Windows is very widespread.
The reason is very simple - it does cost a fair amount of time and effort to go after individuals, and the reward is small (ability to pay and all that...) Businesses are a whole different ball game.
Sun's deal included cross licensing from what I recall, so I don't know if they would have any ability to do anything anyway. Apple is in a position where they too are potentially violating many MS patents, and MS may (probably does) have a larger patent war-chest than Apple. Certainly MS has enough dollars in the bank so that a long-term legal fight would drive Apple into the ground. Most likely, Apple would not join this fight.
IBM is probably in the best position to step in and put a stop to it, and has a vested interest in doing so (since they have been pushing Linux hard to their customers.)
Most likely, if MS DOES decide to fight Linux this way, they are going to pull an SCO and go after businesses that use Linux (like SCO went after Autozone) and not go directly after Redhat / Debian / IBM.
Oh I don't know, Linux is used heavily for server tasks in the enterprise. It has done some serious damage to MS. Desktop is a whole different ballgame however, but this isn't due to MS as much as it is to all the other software that enterprises run that is only available to Windows. Some of the plugins that blend Excel or Word etc. within another application are quite advanced. Porting to Linux would be Very expensive. Ditto for those nasty active-X controls in enterprise web applications.
Oh, I believe that Linux (especially when you look at an entire distribution) DOES infringe on some MS patents. Wasn't it a year or so ago where 20 some odd MS patents were dug up by Linux proponents as a concern?
I think a couple of things have been holding MS back however. IBM and THEIR patent war-chest, and the EU / DOJ with the anti-trust / abusive monopoly issue.
MS wouldn't go after individuals in any case, they would go after businesses.
We shall see!