Understood, and for a lot of people you definitely have a point. Luckily, there's none of those silly games with us - I already sit around our house in my boxers!
And exactly what do I, the neighbor who actually didn't have his stereo turned up but who you just don't like, or maybe whose property you want to seize so you can build a new wing onto you mansion, do when you hire criminals to come over and "aggress" me? How do I counter the testimony and faked recordings of your private police who are willing to lie for you because the pay is good? And lets not kid ourselves, there will ALWAYS be people willing to commit a crime when the pay is good enough.
Should I just always have hired guards to be ready for sneak attacks? Do I need to shell out for 24 hour video and audio surveillance recorded off-site recording with hardened links to prevent your stormtroopers from jamming/interrupting it before they storm in? And if even a court ruling saying I am right does not result in the government taking action against you if they don't want to, and their minds are swayed based on your wealth and power, how am I supposed to ever win against you.
If everything I can do to protect myself and everything you can do to "agress" me is strictly a function of how rich you are, how exactly is that not far more unjust than the society we have now? Money and power will always help you to be more above the law no matter what the societal construct, but at least in ours we DO take down the rich and powerful criminal from time to time when solid evidence shows that they have broken a law.
You're not the only one I've seen with similar reports. I think you're onto something when you talk about different users having different needs. The user that tends to have the most problems is the fullscreen running media center user with remote downloading files from bittorrent. The formats/codecs are much more heterogeneous than just about any other type of user. And the UI needs to be at a whole different level for couch-friendliness.
From what I heard, it sounds like VLC on Mac is a lot better than VLC on Windows. Partly because of differences in the actual program/UI on the different platforms. The other reason is because there are more competitive apps on Windows than there are on Mac, so the whole "best media player" tag is more likely to draw in Windows users to the comments so they can disagree with it.
Disclaimer: This is all what I've gathered reading the thread. Luckily, I don't have a Mac.
VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic. [lots of features snipped]
Simply having more features is not the same thing as being superior. I have used VLC (Windows). It is not superior in user interface or in being able to play the various video files I run across. This is an opinion, as is every other posting of one player being vaguely "better" than another. It's only not just an opinion when the original player is a broken piece of crap.
First off, there's a difference between fiance and fiance. One I know, but still that's a typo up there. Should be fiancee. And in either case, it's theoretical since even though my fiancee may not be an actual computer geek, she has a computer geek mindset and doesn't expect everything to "just work" when it comes to computers.
Actually, when you know the rules, they are. It can't be considered an "error of ignorance" if you are not ignorant of the rules. I often type the wrong word, then glance back over my post and immediately fix it. I have similar problems accidentally typing "an" instead of "and." I see it as my fingers working a bit too independently of my mind.
I've finally settled on a Windows combination that has both significant geek appeal and even more significant wife-acceptance-factor (though really, that's not much of an issue since my fiance has a geek mindset, too):
Pre-built PC with a combo BR/HDDVD drive, HDMI out to plasma. great bluetooth keyboard and mouse came with it, along with a very nice windows media center remote.
Vista (no, really! It came with the PC and was fine once I got SuperFetch turned off)
SageTV Media Center + SageMC UI + SageTVLauncher (kill off stupid Windows Media Center annoyances) + LM Remote Keymap (take full control of what I want my non-learning remote to do)
Media Player Classic - for the <1% of videos that for some reason won't play in SageTV
SMPlayer - for the <0.1% of videos that for some reason won't play in SageTV and won't play well in MPC
All of this for really not that much cash. The PC was almost a grand a year ago when I bought it but of course you could get the same specs for much cheaper now. I wanted a dedicated machine because I knew I was much less likely to mess that up than my primary machine. SageTV was $80. I donated $20 to the LM Remote Keymap people because it was such a useful tool. I just wanted something that would work and could play blu-ray/hd-dvd (that was before BR won). And one that I wouldn't have to spend hours on due to quirky hardware problems because I'd built it myself.
I also needed something beefy enough to handle HD mkvs and whatever else might come out in the next few years. My old repurposed machine started to skip a bit on the HD.
So there you have if, whether you cared to know or not. Just posting this because it might help someone else who has gotten really sick and tired of trying to cobble together various apps and front-ends and wireless keyboards and mice and just want something that works reliably and smoothly while they're sitting on the couch with a remote.
Wow, lecturing me on needing to learn economics and finance, yet you try to make a piece of software purchased from a website to be equivalent to a piece of stock or a futures contract? That just ridiculous. It couldn't be more of an apples and oranges comparison. The only thing that might somehow justify your comparison is if this story wasn't actually false, which it is.
Retail stores actually have options on whether they buy products from wholesalers at lower prices in return for little to no credit for returns, or higher prices with the option to return the unsold/defective products for higher credit. I'd love to see you find some actual examples where a wholesaler was stupid enough to sell their products at a wholesale price to a retailer with the condition that they would accept returns and actually repay the retailer more than they got for the product originally.
Do you honestly believe that Apple's software store is more like the stock exchange than amazon.com? If you do, you're hopeless.
In other words, the pirates' copies will have been already cracked to not require a serial key, or will come with a serial key generator.
Well, considering they said it will work like Sims 2, I believe what they really mean is that it will have a serial key and require the CD/DVD to be in the drive. Even with a legit copy of Sims 2, I hunted around for a crack for it because I didn't like the hassle of always having the CD in the drive. I never could find a good crack. They always only worked with certain version of the games that had bugs that you'd really want patched with later updates, or they screwed up the game in weird and crazy ways.
Never had any luck trying to image the disc and use subst or any of the other old standby tricks.
So, sadly, the whole CD in drive was very effective for them.
Your post just shows how much of a reality-denying fanboy you are. Try some intellectual honesty here. Can you name any other mass-market product that is sold that works the same way? I buy a shirt from target, then take it back because it's defective. They do not then charge the manufacturer full retail for the defective product.
I'm not surprised that the story would be proven false, because it would be total insanity if it were true.
Wikipedia puts the oldest surviving gun at 1288 in China. Oldest depiction go back to the 1100s (again, China). These were also all military weapons.
It really only makes sense that guns came from a military. Until fairly recently in history, guns have been quite unreliable. And I don't just mean they were likely to miss your target or not fire. I mean they were likely to do things like explode and blow your hand off. This really only make sense if the user of the weapon is somewhat expendable. But they were also likely to miss, so again they only make sense in terms of a number of gun users firing at a number of targets.
None of this in any way makes a gun very practical for typical hunting. I have no idea where the OP got that from.
I'm in a similar position. But the thing you have to ask yourself is why, beyond cost of living increases, your salary SHOULD keep going up and up and up? Are you increasing company profits every year? Assuming zero inflation, if you get $125K this year and bring them in $250K, then next year you bring in $250K, should you get more than $125K? An additional problem is skyrocketing health insurance costs. I don't know how much your employer covers, but mine covers 100% for the employee and a percentage of spouses and dependents. Their insurance bill has went up 40, 60, 80% every year. They've never passed on any of the cost to me. That in and of itself is just a hidden salary increase.
The real key to increasing your salary may be in changing jobs or going into business for yourself. As I was getting at before, your "worth" as an employee in purely financial terms is based on the money you bring into the company. At a smaller company or a startup, you may bring a lot more to the table that this company needs.
At some point, it does make sense for pay to stabilize (as long as you get cost of living increases). Once you get a certain amount of experience and expertise in a specific position, you reach the limit of your productivity.
Get your own domain, already. It can never go out of business as long as you pay for it. Plenty of registrars in the sub-$15/year range. For less than $10/year more, you can even have your registration information hidden behind a proxy. Then you can point that domain at any number of free or pay webmail providers. I currently like Google Apps (gmail) for Domains, but if something happened all I'd need to do is change a few DNS records and I'm on to greener pastures.
I did this over a decade ago, and I wasn't anywhere near ahead of the curve at that time. Just about anyone posting to slashdot shouldn't have this problem if they didn't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Understood, and for a lot of people you definitely have a point. Luckily, there's none of those silly games with us - I already sit around our house in my boxers!
And exactly what do I, the neighbor who actually didn't have his stereo turned up but who you just don't like, or maybe whose property you want to seize so you can build a new wing onto you mansion, do when you hire criminals to come over and "aggress" me? How do I counter the testimony and faked recordings of your private police who are willing to lie for you because the pay is good? And lets not kid ourselves, there will ALWAYS be people willing to commit a crime when the pay is good enough.
Should I just always have hired guards to be ready for sneak attacks? Do I need to shell out for 24 hour video and audio surveillance recorded off-site recording with hardened links to prevent your stormtroopers from jamming/interrupting it before they storm in? And if even a court ruling saying I am right does not result in the government taking action against you if they don't want to, and their minds are swayed based on your wealth and power, how am I supposed to ever win against you.
If everything I can do to protect myself and everything you can do to "agress" me is strictly a function of how rich you are, how exactly is that not far more unjust than the society we have now? Money and power will always help you to be more above the law no matter what the societal construct, but at least in ours we DO take down the rich and powerful criminal from time to time when solid evidence shows that they have broken a law.
Good luck with the pirates!
You're not the only one I've seen with similar reports. I think you're onto something when you talk about different users having different needs. The user that tends to have the most problems is the fullscreen running media center user with remote downloading files from bittorrent. The formats/codecs are much more heterogeneous than just about any other type of user. And the UI needs to be at a whole different level for couch-friendliness.
We'll overcome it by RTFA. It's not in international waters.
Funny reference. But no, not international waters.
Where in the article does it say they'd be in international waters?
Nope, just human.
From what I heard, it sounds like VLC on Mac is a lot better than VLC on Windows. Partly because of differences in the actual program/UI on the different platforms. The other reason is because there are more competitive apps on Windows than there are on Mac, so the whole "best media player" tag is more likely to draw in Windows users to the comments so they can disagree with it.
Disclaimer: This is all what I've gathered reading the thread. Luckily, I don't have a Mac.
VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic. [lots of features snipped]
Simply having more features is not the same thing as being superior. I have used VLC (Windows). It is not superior in user interface or in being able to play the various video files I run across. This is an opinion, as is every other posting of one player being vaguely "better" than another. It's only not just an opinion when the original player is a broken piece of crap.
First off, there's a difference between fiance and fiance. One I know, but still that's a typo up there. Should be fiancee. And in either case, it's theoretical since even though my fiancee may not be an actual computer geek, she has a computer geek mindset and doesn't expect everything to "just work" when it comes to computers.
Actually, when you know the rules, they are. It can't be considered an "error of ignorance" if you are not ignorant of the rules. I often type the wrong word, then glance back over my post and immediately fix it. I have similar problems accidentally typing "an" instead of "and." I see it as my fingers working a bit too independently of my mind.
Not really. You certainly don't speak for the part of the community that knows the grammar rules but still makes a typo now and then.
I've finally settled on a Windows combination that has both significant geek appeal and even more significant wife-acceptance-factor (though really, that's not much of an issue since my fiance has a geek mindset, too):
All of this for really not that much cash. The PC was almost a grand a year ago when I bought it but of course you could get the same specs for much cheaper now. I wanted a dedicated machine because I knew I was much less likely to mess that up than my primary machine. SageTV was $80. I donated $20 to the LM Remote Keymap people because it was such a useful tool. I just wanted something that would work and could play blu-ray/hd-dvd (that was before BR won). And one that I wouldn't have to spend hours on due to quirky hardware problems because I'd built it myself.
I also needed something beefy enough to handle HD mkvs and whatever else might come out in the next few years. My old repurposed machine started to skip a bit on the HD.
So there you have if, whether you cared to know or not. Just posting this because it might help someone else who has gotten really sick and tired of trying to cobble together various apps and front-ends and wireless keyboards and mice and just want something that works reliably and smoothly while they're sitting on the couch with a remote.
You're confusing advertising with evangelism. Slashdot has ALWAYS been heavy into the tech evangelism.
Ditto. For those few times when MPC won't play something or has a problem playing it smoothly, I fire up SMPlayer.
Please do name these "any large retailer" you claim, and whether you have actually worked for them. Because I simply don't believe it.
Wow, lecturing me on needing to learn economics and finance, yet you try to make a piece of software purchased from a website to be equivalent to a piece of stock or a futures contract? That just ridiculous. It couldn't be more of an apples and oranges comparison. The only thing that might somehow justify your comparison is if this story wasn't actually false, which it is.
Retail stores actually have options on whether they buy products from wholesalers at lower prices in return for little to no credit for returns, or higher prices with the option to return the unsold/defective products for higher credit. I'd love to see you find some actual examples where a wholesaler was stupid enough to sell their products at a wholesale price to a retailer with the condition that they would accept returns and actually repay the retailer more than they got for the product originally.
Do you honestly believe that Apple's software store is more like the stock exchange than amazon.com? If you do, you're hopeless.
In other words, the pirates' copies will have been already cracked to not require a serial key, or will come with a serial key generator.
Well, considering they said it will work like Sims 2, I believe what they really mean is that it will have a serial key and require the CD/DVD to be in the drive. Even with a legit copy of Sims 2, I hunted around for a crack for it because I didn't like the hassle of always having the CD in the drive. I never could find a good crack. They always only worked with certain version of the games that had bugs that you'd really want patched with later updates, or they screwed up the game in weird and crazy ways.
Never had any luck trying to image the disc and use subst or any of the other old standby tricks.
So, sadly, the whole CD in drive was very effective for them.
Your post just shows how much of a reality-denying fanboy you are. Try some intellectual honesty here. Can you name any other mass-market product that is sold that works the same way? I buy a shirt from target, then take it back because it's defective. They do not then charge the manufacturer full retail for the defective product.
I'm not surprised that the story would be proven false, because it would be total insanity if it were true.
Wikipedia puts the oldest surviving gun at 1288 in China. Oldest depiction go back to the 1100s (again, China). These were also all military weapons.
It really only makes sense that guns came from a military. Until fairly recently in history, guns have been quite unreliable. And I don't just mean they were likely to miss your target or not fire. I mean they were likely to do things like explode and blow your hand off. This really only make sense if the user of the weapon is somewhat expendable. But they were also likely to miss, so again they only make sense in terms of a number of gun users firing at a number of targets.
None of this in any way makes a gun very practical for typical hunting. I have no idea where the OP got that from.
I'm in a similar position. But the thing you have to ask yourself is why, beyond cost of living increases, your salary SHOULD keep going up and up and up? Are you increasing company profits every year? Assuming zero inflation, if you get $125K this year and bring them in $250K, then next year you bring in $250K, should you get more than $125K? An additional problem is skyrocketing health insurance costs. I don't know how much your employer covers, but mine covers 100% for the employee and a percentage of spouses and dependents. Their insurance bill has went up 40, 60, 80% every year. They've never passed on any of the cost to me. That in and of itself is just a hidden salary increase.
The real key to increasing your salary may be in changing jobs or going into business for yourself. As I was getting at before, your "worth" as an employee in purely financial terms is based on the money you bring into the company. At a smaller company or a startup, you may bring a lot more to the table that this company needs.
At some point, it does make sense for pay to stabilize (as long as you get cost of living increases). Once you get a certain amount of experience and expertise in a specific position, you reach the limit of your productivity.
Get your own domain, already. It can never go out of business as long as you pay for it. Plenty of registrars in the sub-$15/year range. For less than $10/year more, you can even have your registration information hidden behind a proxy. Then you can point that domain at any number of free or pay webmail providers. I currently like Google Apps (gmail) for Domains, but if something happened all I'd need to do is change a few DNS records and I'm on to greener pastures.
I did this over a decade ago, and I wasn't anywhere near ahead of the curve at that time. Just about anyone posting to slashdot shouldn't have this problem if they didn't want to.
If they did this in a movie a couple of years ago, I would have called bullshit on them.